This idea is either 3 days late, or just utterly fucking ridiculous (Do I have to pay a dollar now?)
There are plenty of places in the forums to discuss things without insults and “harsh language”. Feel free to use them. The pit doesn’t force you to read it, nor do threads magically move from there to, say, GQ, and expose everyone to the horrors of mild profanity and even milder insults.
I just don’t understand this drive to make everyone nice and friendly, especially when you have the quite easy option of avoiding almost all uncivil behavior. Plenty of people seem to like the pit fine, and a lot of them tend to be the most interesting posters. And when I say I don’t understand your motivation, I am serious – it’s the same sort of failure to comprehend that I get when faced by people who think the Earth is 4000 years old or that the moon landing was fake. What possible rational justification would adding yet another layer of rules and encouraging tattling serve? It’s a pipe dream to think that if everyone were just nicer, we’d get more done (like there is some sort of “goal” here).
Personally, I’d prefer to see a tax on contentless posts and people complaining to the moderators to make Billy play nice, which would hopefully drive out all of the posters who want to sing happy songs and hold hands as they all agree with each other, and consequently lower the quality of discussion.
Isn’t cussing currently allowed for everyone in the Pit? Isn’t that kind of the whole idea in the first place?
And I’m another person who isn’t a big fan of the Pit, which makes me very happy that we have it. People are going to flame and complain anyway, and by putting it all in one place, it’s really easy for those of us who don’t like it to avoid it.
I thought this was going to be a proposition to allow the use of the words in the Pit that are currently forbidden. It would be a nice way to point out the absurdity of banning certain words, to the point where they now have a lot more power.
I don’t know why we’ve gotten into a removal of the Pit hijack. I thought this thread was totally about making more money, not how to make the board more polite. If the powers that be wanted a polite board, they’d be handing out warnings a whole lot more often, as a lot of uncivil behavior does not require calling someone a name.
I’ve done it quite a few times. I marvel every day that I don’t have a bunch of warnings for my ATMB posts alone.
You’re missing my point: I don’t want to see cussing banned any more than lawmakers want to see smoking banned; it’s just too lucrative a revenue stream, and at present that revenue is going untapped. Any increased civility would merely be a harmless byproduct.
Oh, I get it. Your original complaint was that TPTB are greedy bastards, so you’re trying to come up with more ways for them to demonstrate their greedy bastardness by having more things for people to pay for. :smack:
Uh… cursing is already allowed in every forum. Outside of the Pit we might ask people to tone it down if they go crazy with it, but there’s no blanket prohibition on it. As far as I know that’s always been the case. You can’t curse out another poster, but that’s covered under our rules against insults and I think that’s widely understood.
I forgot I wanted to address this - I thought the new rules in the Pit were stupid, and I still think that. It seemed very much a case of, “It ain’t broke, but we’re fixing it anyway” to me. I’ve decided I can live with them, but I don’t think I’ll ever like them or agree with them.
An honest, if ultimately unresponsive reply. You could, on the other hand, answer as to why folks can buy elections but those of us who post in animated states cannot by some forgiveness.
