Wow, where to begin.
For one thing, DrDeth, King’s master of Dipshittery and Defender of the Derp neglected to inform me that he pitted me. He didn’t post it in the GOT thread, he didn’t send me a PM. So I was unaware of this thread until someone pointed it out to me like an hour ago. While he was spamming to ask where I was and calling me a coward, he could’ve plainly saw that my little green dot indicating whether I’m online or not was dim all day. Calling out someone for being too cowardly to show up to a pitting that you didn’t even inform them of is particularly stupid.
Okay, so anyone who wasn’t around for the season 1 Game of Thrones threads doesn’t know what a complete trainwreck those were. We had all discussion locked up into one thread, with book spoilers boxed. Utter disaster. Probably a good 40% of the posts were dedicated to bickering.
The thing is - the harsh rules (which, by the way, were agreed upon as necessary and enforced by the moderators starting in season 2 - not just my own decree) were meant to prevent those trainwrecks. And in fact, actual spoilers were only perhaps 10-20% of the problem. The rest of it was people bickering over what constituted a spoiler. You’d have retarded arguments like someone saying “oh don’t get too attached to [character] wink” and someone else saying “wtf, that’s a spoiler” and then them saying “that’s not a spoiler! I didn’t tell you what happens!” These arguments became more and more of the threads.
And the arguments were often not even in good faith by the spoiling side. Because you had people like DrDeth. You see, anyone who didn’t read the books for whatever reason was a stupid illiterate peasant, and he was going to give them their medicine. So he would troll and deliberately spoil the show, and then when he was called out on it, and rules were set, he’d do everything he could to push the rules. He’d hint at spoilers, talk about stuff that wasn’t quite a spoiler, and whenever anyone would say quit threadshitting, he’d act like this - OH YOU ILLITERATES ARE TRYING TO OPPRESS ME. He’s an unambiguous asshole and troll on this issue, and it’s good to see that this thread entirely backfired on him because it was so obvious.
So season 2 rolls around and we decide we should solve the problem. It wasn’t just me, we had discussion about it in ATMB, and I talked to some moderators about it. I’m just a proactive person - I organized a lot of different stuff on these boards - I run the steam community group, 4 fantasy football leagues, other football related leagues, etc. So I was the one who was proactive about creating an understanding of the new rules. But it was done with moderator approval/blessing, and a lot of support from people who wanted to improve the quality of those threads.
It was liked by everyone except for the trolls who were extremely butthurt that someone dared not read some books they like, so they were determined to keep trolling. Quixotic was one of these and got banned (whee), DrDeth another.
Season 2 discussions were wild successes compared to Season 1 in terms of actual content of the threads and not just a bunch of bickering and flame wars. Anyone can plainly see that the new system works a lot better. In season 2, moderation was heavy and it went smoothly. In season 3, we were kind of in a groove and didn’t really need as heavy moderation, but I guess the lack of it is getting people to try to sneak in book discussion a little bit. Since everyone has seen that the zero tolerance policy has been very successful, every hint that someone is trying to violate it is met by several people telling them to stop. We want to stop that shit before it becomes an argument.
And here’s the thing. He’s whining about agreeing to not posting spoilers, but that it’s draconian to not let anyone discuss the books at all. Who determines what’s a spoiler? The troll who wants to give us illiterates our medicine? A relatively innocent person who posts something they don’t consider a spoiler but others do? Maybe the show has passed a certain part of the book story, so a person reveals what it was as background detail, but then the show actually just re-ordered the scene for dramatic purposes and now that background detail becomes a spoiler. We bickered a lot about what constitutes a spoiler and had a few people DELIBERATELY PUSHING THE LIMITS in order to troll.
So if you don’t want half the damn posts in the thread themselves being bickering about what’s a spoiler and isn’t, what the rules are, it’s simple. Lay out some clear, unmistakable policies. So that’s what we did. To avoid any discussion of what is or isn’t a spoiler or anything like that, those threads treated the show as if it were its own entity, the books didn’t exist, all book discussion is unwelcome.
Now DrButthurt claims that this is oppression, that we’re stifling his right to speak about the books and the show. Except that simultaneously with creating the book-free zones, we also created open spoiler threads which were completely fair game to discuss the show, books, comparisons between them, etc.
That’s the thing - the people who wanted to discuss the books and compare them to the show had a place to do so. So his goal wasn’t just to have a place of their own to discuss things. Their goal was to make sure that we, people who wanted book-free discussion, did not have our own place to discuss the books. That we should be punished for being so stupid as to possibly enjoy a great television series without reading their books first.
The irony here is that DrDeth is making a great case against himself, showing everyone why we were right not to cave into his assholish behavior. Massive pit backfire. “Crusade against knowledge” - I guess if the best knowledge you have comes from having read a story that other people haven’t, you have to proudly proclaim and defend it.
