I think it would be cool if users could rate on a daily basis the threads in The Pit, taking into account how excoriating the OP was, the heatedness and rancor contained in the replies, etc. Then the title of each thread would be colored accordingly, ranging from bright, bolded blood red down to avocado green for those lame grammar rants. Wouldn’t that be fun?
(Yeah, I know it’ll never happen.)
Personally, I think allowing other posters to attack one another in the BBQ PIT is a mistake this board shoudl have rectified a long time ago. The board would be more civil, less questions aboyt what’s “being a jerk”. etc. In other words- other than rants against “the machine” the government, your job, etc- I think the PIT should be mostly gotten rid of, not enhanced.
On the contrary I HATE people commenting on the level of your Pit thread. I don’t use it to pit other people on the SDMB. To me it’s basically a MPSIMS with fire. I need to vent about something. I don’t really care if others like it or not.
But i wouldn’t want it to be gone, entirely. It’s easy enough not to visit, if it annoys you. And besides, where else would you get rid of anger against another subscriber?
As you said, there are good reasons for a rant, bitch & whine forum. I agree. But one of them doesn’t have to be lashing out against another member. It only breeds hard feeling, and does not relieve tensions.
“Where else would you get rid of anger against another subscriber?”- Try “getting over it, it’s just a message board”. 
But the point is- it doesn’t “get rid of anger”. It just makes things worse 9 times out of ten.
You haven’t been around much, have you?
No. It gives the things that are going to happen a place to happen, instead of having roving arguments back and forth for months that end up way, way out of hand.
The fact is, every place like this has arguments. Different cultures can deal with them in different ways, from mass bannings to all-out free-for-alls. Giving the inevitable disagreements a single place to be yelled about and fought over gives everyone (even the combatants) many more fora to relax and act like normal human beings, to whatever approximation of normal is in operation in that realm.
An SDMB without a BBQ Pit isn’t a place I’d willingly hang out, and it certainly isn’t a place I’d spend money to support.
I like to think that part of what makes this board the great community that it is the breadth of choice – you can pick and choose what you like to look at and ignore that which you don’t care for.
Not sure there’s something for absolutely everybody, but I think we get most of the spectrum somewhere on the site.
If something offends you, look elsewhere on this site for something you like better and leave what you don’t care to participate in to those that do.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Any kind of scoring for threads immediately makes it a competition among the more “competitive” (to use a nice word for them 
) posters. So you’d get a rash of threads purely designed to be the day’s/months/years deepest red.
It would be the equivalent of MPSIMS post-count padding threads and just encourage pointless and heated arguments.
Yeah, probably so. I suppose the current system is more egalitarian as well as avoiding scripted posts written with a specific effect in mind.