My thread was closed the other day. I don’t really care about the closure. But I do feel I have an obligation to say a couple of things about the message Jonathon Chance left when he closed the thread:
First,
implies that Jonathon is somehow doing me a favor by letting me post on SDMB.
Jonathon: the truth is the reverse. I provide content, for free, that in this case drew over 34K page views, before you closed the thread.
Those ads that appear on every page - they’re paying for page views. You’re not doing me a favor. I’m providing an unpaid service for SDMB, which in turn generates revenue for SDMB. If you don’t understand that, you’re doing a disservice to the owner(s) of SDMB.
Second - get it: there’s a clique on SDMB that hates seeing feminism criticized. They made their feelings abundantly clear. Jonathon, I don’t know if you’re friends with those people, or if you’re part of their clique.
But SMDB has a choice: does it want to be the kind of place where people with unpopular ideas are ostracized, personally attacked, and/or banned? Or does it want to be the kind of place where the rules are applied evenhandedly, to everyone?
And I’m going to suggest that if it makes the first choice, you’re only going to see an acceleration of SDMB’s decline. Because, frankly, a place that doesn’t allow controversy is boring.
Finally,
Sorry, that’s bullshit. “Many people” broke the rules, over and over and over, without consequences. I suppose a moderator could have said something, but they never did.
Okay, what about this part of the OP? From the responses so far, not to mention the entire Pit thread, it appears he’s called it exactly right, n’est-ce pas?
I’m not entirely sure what I’m allowed to say here, but here goes.
I started the Pit thread NOT because I don’t agree with the OP’s views (one of the things I like about the SDMB is the opportunity to discuss things with others with whom I might not agree). I started it because it came at “anti-feminism” obliquely. He asked for opinions and then ignored them. The thread in question had a confusing premise, and LinusK spent the next 25 pages ducking questions, using partial cites that did not say what he thought that they did, ducking corrections, and, in short, witnessing. If tempers were short by the end, there were reasons. No, I don’t think there is a secret cabal that is preventing the OP from discussing the problems with feminism, but he couldn’t define his terms. I think you can discuss anything here but you need to be able to do so with some level of intellectual honesty.
Jonathon was right to close the thread. The surprise was how long it went on.
Well, I think I’d rather err on the side of letting it go too long rather than pull the plug too quickly.
LinusK, I want to make something perfectly clear. I was not picking on you, nor was I supporting some shadowy cabal of feminists. But I am here to moderate Great Debates and Elections and, in that role, my job is to facilitate debate and prevent - to a certain extent - train wrecks.
That thread you started had gone on 25 pages and was accomplishing little new or noteworthy. I’d had reports from both side accusing the other of insulting. It wasn’t pretty. I intervened earlier with a note on 8/16 in an attempt to get people to refrain from the snide comments and such and to get back to debating. Following that mod note in post #1283 you obliquely accused other posters of lying following yourself being accused of lying - sort of - earlier in the thread. Following that post in post #1284 - four minutes later - you challenge the validity of the mod note.
It’s at that point I decided the thread would no longer accomplish anything and shut it down.
The thing is, I don’t think anything further would have helped. You’re free to start a new thread on the subject if you wish. No one will stop you unless it spirals out of control again (though I doubt it’d be allowed to go that long again). But you can’t go into a thread with a sense of ownership and expect to take a position and people will not challenge your position and expect you to respond. That what you sort of did - or did not do, depending on one’s point of view - in your thread.
The SDMB - and GD in particular - is about the sharing and discussion of ideas. Just because people push back against you doesn’t mean there’s a conspiracy. It may just mean you need to be firm in your positions to win them over - if that’s possible - or it may mean you’re demonstrably wrong. I take no particular position on your topic of anti-feminism. I’d prefer just to have people move forward and debate and discuss within the rules.
As for the subject of my doing a disservice by closing the thread and costing the owners of the SDMB money? It’s to Ed’s credit that I have never once had that sort of pressure placed upon me. I’m deeply grateful for that and for the opportunity given to me to help out on a message board that has been a part of my life for longer than I’m comfortable admitting.
We allow a great amount of controversy in Great Debates. I’m actually feeling a bit of pride that in one week I can be accused of both allowing and encouraging hate speech and racism as well as being accused of stifling any speech outside accepted parameters. We have allowed all manner of threads - including one from a professed pedophile, for heaven’s sake! It’s rich to believe that on this one subject we would stifle you with special intent. It’s simply not so.
Much as I hate to contradict you in public, Jonathan, looking at the Reported Posts and PMs forum, I see seventeen reports that were generated by that thread. Of them, only two are from posters who were vocal in their support of the OP, and only one of them is for an insult - the other was the poster reporting his own post for help with cleaning up some tags. (In full disclosure, the other report was about one of my posts.) The other fifteen reports were all against the OP, or people arguing his side of the issue.
Now, I’m not going to suggest that more reports from one side means worse behavior from the other side. But given that the OP claims that there were rule-breaking posts made in that thread, “over and over and over,” it’s interesting to me that he couldn’t be bothered to report a single one.
I’d also like to note that, if our goal is to quash opinions that we don’t like, we really need to get our shit together. There’s twenty five pages to that thread, including more than a hundred and eighty by the OP alone. He’s basically written a short novella on the subject, and we published it for him, free. If we’re engaged in an effort to mercilessly silence any dissent against our ordained orthodoxy, we clearly suck at it.
[ul]
[li]that “there’s a clique on SDMB that hates seeing feminism criticized,”[/li][li]that JC is either a friend to that clique or part of it, and that’s why the thrad was closed,[/li][li]that the OP is being attacked for his unpopular ideas alone, and[/li][li]that the rules are not being applied fairly in this case?[/li][/ul]
Is thread shitting especially allowed in the ATMB Forum? I would think that it would be especially discouraged. Maybe I don’t know what thread shitting is…or is generally ruled to be.
You need to scale that by the percentage of people in that thread who were his allies versus opponents. If the overwhelming majority of posters in that thread were his opponents, then it’s natural that they would do the majority of the complaining, even if the actual number of violations was more evenly distributed.
Well to be clear, the moderator who actually made the call (JC) suggested that there were faults on both sides. I was responding to a comment from Miller, who is not the moderator being criticized for actions in that thread.
But as a more general matter, what you say is appropriate for situations where the mod is being criticized for failing to moderate a specific post. In cases such as this one (though not this actual one, as above) the mod is making a characterization of the entire thread, and your point does not hold.
