Modnote: Decision here.
You want to argue the pit needs to be changed or shutdown, start a different thread on it. No more in this thread. This thread concerns the subject of a very offensive post and the additional posts in one thread.
A decision will be made about that thread and the poster and the subject later tonight I believe, maybe tomorrow.
Modnote: Absolutely drop this now. No more. You are coming too close to insulting other posters in ATMB.
This topic was automatically opened after 20 minutes.
One accusation in the thread is that the poster is trolling. While the Pit tolerates more trolling than usual, there is still a limit. Remember Shodan? He got a Warning for trolling in the Pit. He used someone’s medical history as a means to attack them.
Both the hate speech rule and the trolling rule seem relevant to me.
No hate speech
If you say hateful and/or racist things, you may get warned or banned. Some slurs are likely to be viewed as hate speech when used as insults, some aren’t. No, we aren’t going to give you a list. Our goal is not to restrict any and all speech which could be viewed by someone as offensive, but simply keep a modicum of decency, even here.
No trolling
By trolling, we mean posting of inflammatory comments solely to get a rise out of people. If we feel your primary goal as a poster is to make people mad, you’ll quickly find yourself on the road to banning. On the flip side, the fact that a poster consistently makes you mad doesn’t automatically make them a troll.
These parts in bold are the parts that seem to fit, to me. Though, of course, those are just the written rules. The SDMB has always been moderated similar to courts, where precedent is relevant. Not every rule and nuance is actually written down.
And, yes, that last part is sometimes contentious, but let’s please not get into a debate about that in this thread, either.
I’m pretty sure you are misremembering the reason for the warning but it seems like quite a bit of relevant information has been scrubbed. It was an ex-post facto ruling based on popular outrage and Humpty-Dumpty level language abuse.
Agreed.
How? Every thread in the Pit attacking another poster is “hateful” and said to “get a rise out of people.”
Your only rule is “there is still a limit.” What that limit would be will certainly not be applied to disfavored groups.
If you don’t make an effort to understand the actual reasoning behind the warning, you are much more likely to repeat the same mistake and get yourself banned. Just a suggestion.
You seem to think this is a difference of degree. It isn’t. It’s a difference of kind.
Fyi, i expect Ed Zotti to post something tomorrow.
Most Pit threads are people posting because they are angry at someone. Said anger may result in saying hateful things, but they aren’t saying them specifically to piss the other person off. In general, what they want is for the other person to stop doing whatever it is that pissed them off. This is a difference in kind, not degree.
That said, there are some people who do post things to piss someone off. However, as I said in my post, some low level of trolling is allowed in the Pit. However, as the rules say, the mods reserve the right to decide that something has gone too far—that it is so beyond the pale that no reasonable person would say and not know that their posting privileges would be in jeopardy.
And there is no “disfavored group” involved here. I don’t even know what groups @split_p_j belongs to, other than that he appears to be a rape apologist.
And, as I said, there is precedent that rape apologia is moderatable. In the case I mentioned, it completely bypassed the “Warnings-Suspension-Banning” norm, because it was just that bad. And that wasn’t even directed at a poster.
I’m not sure I can overstate how bad what split_p_j said was. It’s definitely on par with other things we consider hate speech as well as that which clears the high bar to be considered moderatable trolling in the Pit. And the rules establish that the mods reserve the right to decide that both of these warrant moderator action, up to and including banning.
Yes, that was also my understanding, and I would have made this same thread if it had been some other forum or mod.
Wouldn’t it clearly have been modded as a personal attack in any other forum? It wasn’t a comment that women should be more careful or even that a woman bears some blame, there were a whole bunch of "you"s in that post.
Yes. I am disturbed this would actually be in question. If you had asked me before this happened I would think in any forum other than the Pit that would be at minimum a warning with maybe a topic ban.
What woman would post here if that behavior was allowed in Great Debates or MPSIMS? It’s hard to imagine a more personal insult.
No offence to ED–I read the SD columns every week and bought a couple of books–but shouldn’t these decisions be made by someone who participates on this board and understands its culture?
Hopefully whatever decision is made will be narrowly tailored to the specific incident in the OP, and not some over-broad ruling on the pit itself.
There’s a reason the same few people are routinely pitted and it isn’t because their names were drawn out of a hat.
Most of the mods weighed in on this decision. He is taking what we wrote in mind. So it is largely a consensus decision by the person that is in charge of us Mods and choosing us and instructing us in what to do and running the board.
Is there a decision somewhere I’ve missed, or is the announcement pending?
Still Pending or I missed it too.
OK, that’s good.