Tone

Part of what attracts people to the board (IMO) is the specific combination of devotion to verifiable facts and sustainable logic plus the Cecil Adams attitude.

Yeah, that attitude. Sure of his brilliance. More than a little bit contemptuous of the world of cretins he must suffer, and of the foolishnesses that they utter. Blunt in his presentation of the answers —entertaining, perhaps, but not particularly disposed to understate them as possibly-relevant bits of info and opinions that folks just might want to take into account. Nope: here’s your answer, good thing you had the good sense to ask me instead of stumbing around in the dark as you’d otherwise be doing. Etc.

Should it come as surprise to anyone that the people who have been lured here by all this excellence like to behave in a similar fashion?

Most of us fancy ourselves intelligent and wise and we relish the opportunity to behave with confidence and arrogance. We don’t suffer fools cheerfully, at least not without informing them that they’re fools. And we have, or did have, a board culture where in return for the license to behave that way, we accepted others behaving towards us with that same gloves-off insouciance about offending anyone.

So… it’s my observation that the powers that be want to shift that. (Not without dissent, but that’s been the general thrust of the peremptory instructions to play nice, be less abrasive, mind our language, knock it off with the insulting, etc). OK, fine. Well, not so fine (I liked it the way it was) but it’s your board and all that. You don’t want us being arrogant and abrasively insulting to each other.

Instead of going at it via a never-ending sequence of rules and edicts (which the members then inspect like lawyers trying to decide exactly how close they can skate without being in violation, all the while trying to preserve the classic suffer-no-fools tone of our interactions), maybe it would be more productive to have a conversation about your intentions, what you’re trying to accomplish with this push towards a different tone of discourse, and why?

I mean, it’s got to be frustrating to be issuing new proclamations of what is no longer going to be tolerated around here and watching us all adhere (ever so carefully and legalistically) to the letter while doing nothing to embrace the spirit of these changes you’re hoping to see.

And it’s not like we enjoy the current process. It feels… I guess you could say infantilizing. Treating us more and more like children whose behavior has to be constrained with authoritarian rules because we can’t internalize a sense of good behavior and then hold ourselves to that standard using our own maturity and good judgment.

I’m sorry things have taken such a turn that you folks who run the board sometimes end up feeling like we’re willfully making the board difficult for you. It didn’t start out like this. When the board moved from AOL it felt like you had liberated us from the AOL nanny state and we could finally have free discourse. It wasn’t so “us and them” between members and admins & mods and TPTB. I don’t think it has to be that way now, but maybe you could try talking to us as if we were all part of a collective “us” with some shared interests that brought us here in the first place?

I admire your OP for its cogency; still, I would be interested if you could articulate an example of what you would like to see. What could they say that would meet your needs? It’s hard for me to imagine any set of statements that wouldn’t just be seen as more rule-mongering. “Be nicer to each other” or “less snark, please” don’t really seem to fill the bill.

I haven’t been here as long as you have and I was not around (even reading) in the AOL era, but frankly I don’t mind the changes that you describe. It’s true the Pit is not as entertaining as I seem to remember, but two things about that: 1) I suspect this is more about the inability of pitters to express themselves creatively; and 2) so what, I don’t care that much about missing interesting vitriol in the Pit when the other forums are better behaved. I don’t feel infantilized, the rules seem fairly clear and sensible to me, and I don’t have any particular interest in skating close to unapproved behavior.

Having said all that, if those in control do have a vision of a “new” SDMB that they care to publish to us, I would be happy to read and attempt to understand it.

Frankly, I’m rather mystified by exactly what the OP is talking about. There have been a few rule clarifications in the last year, but I don’t recall anything major.

We haven’t had any general discussion about changing the tone of the board in recent years. I’m not sure what the OP’s perceptions are based on. Some specifics would be helpful.

There are current threads pertaining to not posting political / religious jbas in MPSIMS, there’s a somewhat legalistic hair-splitting thingie about the permitted or non-permitted use of “lie” in GD, and someone last month was alleging that moderators were abusing their power, another thread of that ilk of more recent vintage was floating around.

But I’m really talking about the long story arc — it feels like this has been a trend for several years now and although relatively recent posts may have made me more conscious of it lately it’s been something I’ve been observing for a long time.

You may not have formed the same impression, though.

Possibly something along the lines of "Here is how we envision the culture and collective behavior as it would ideally take place on this board. We don’t really want you all to behave as if you’re auditioning to be the next Cecil Adams. We have the Perfect Master and he ain’t going anywhere and he has enough attitude to suffice for all. Don’t be arrogant — that’s not a rule, it’s a request for how you folks interact with each other, how you think of each other and of yourself as a participant. We actually do want you to be considerate of each other’s feelings, or to go to the trouble of creating the polite impression that you do. And here’s why we want things to be this way: advertisers or our corporate overlords or the Society for Making Nice are more supportive or less hostile to this ongoing project if it is not perceived as a hostile environment for newbies in particular, or as offensive to people who just happen to stumble on it. Or other reason. "

Or massively different than that — I can only infer in a clumsy inductive sort of way what they might say, since I’m not them. Me, if it were my board, I’d have different preferences and priorities. I might have my moderators going around zapping warnings on people for being abusive without replying to other folks’ content and ideas, but as long as people were addressing each other’s arguments or opinions or whatever, to use any language they want and to be as abrasively haughty as they feel like. That doesn’t appear to be how the powers that be want it, and I can adjust, but instead of abstracting what they want from interventions and warnings and rules and whatnot, I thought maybe we could just talk about their vision for this place.

That’s not new, that’s a clarification of existing rules.

Again, that’s a clarification rather than something new. And what’s Great Debates without hair-splitting?:wink:

We’ve probably had threads accusing moderators of abusing their powers every week or two every since I’ve been on the board.

I certainly haven’t. I can tell you that anything you may perceive is not due to a general change of policy on our part.

I can’t define it either, and I’m willing to accept Colibri’s statements at face value – there isn’t a deliberate change in policy.

But I do see what AHunter3 is saying. Maybe it’s more like ‘mission creep’ than ‘change’ but his OP title Tone says it all. I lurked for some years before my join date, and there has been an evolution in tone from the earliest days to now. That process does seem to be reflected in the constant rules lawyering. Some of us posters do enjoy the game of nit picking rules to death. But some amount of the commentary legitimately comes from posters who feel a change like a draft on the back of the neck, and are trying to suss it out in the ever-transmogrifying list of rule interpretations and applications.

So yeah, I too wouldn’t mind seeing something like a mission statement, maybe from Ed or maybe as a consensus of all the current staff. Just something that says “Our heads are here…” for our general illumination.

AHunter3 (can I call you** A**?) you and I have been on this board since it crawled out of the primordial soup. I like being contemptuous of cretins as much as the next guy and I love calling them out on it.

But the problem with unleashing my biting but incisive wit as that invites the next poster, whether in agreement or disagreement, to unleash another biting but incisive comment. Then the poster after that can be even more biting but somewhat less incisive. And at that point, the downward spiral begins.

The Board has a guiding principle for decorum and decency. It’s called “Don’t be a jerk.” And while you and I may be able to internalize a sense of good behavior and hold ourselves to that standard using our own maturity and good judgment, looking at posters who’ve been banned, and the threads that got them banned, I’m willing to bet that without* “a never-ending sequence of rules and edicts (which the members then inspect like lawyers trying to decide exactly how close they can skate without being in violation, all the while trying to preserve the classic suffer-no-fools tone of our interactions)”* this place would go to hell faster than you can say “YouTube comments have been disabled.”

I don’t disagree with that. Certainly the way manhattan moderated would not be tolerated today. (In fact, he insulted me in response to one of my first posts on the board, which made me consider whether I wanted to post in such an unfriendly place.:D) Likewise, I think that more snark between posters was tolerated.

However, I think most of that evolution happened more that a decade ago, especially driven (IMO) by PTP. I don’t see that much of a change over the last few years.

Der Trihs is an example. The mods let him do his thing spewing vitriol forever until Jonathan Chance became a mod and started cracking down on him.

My perception is it has to do with the mods and what their personal level of modding is and since mods change now and then the tone does too. Like the Der Trihs example above. tomndeb, and whoever was the mod before JC was, let Der spew his vitriol as long as he didn’t personally insult another poster. When JC took over he kept modding Der telling him to turn down the vitriol until eventually Der got suspended.

I think there are a few unstated factors that bear calling out before folks start talking past one another. IMO …

There is a distinct subculture to GQ. There is a different subculture to IMHO, MPSIMS, CS, and GR. Those 4 are close enough to each other IMO we can subsume them as one, but still they each differ slightly. There is yet another subculture in GD & a variant form of the same in Elections. And finally a different subculture yet in the Pit.

AHunter3’s generalities have differing levels of applicability to differing subcultures here. He might usefully tell us which subcultures he thinks he remembers from the Olden Dayes and ensure he’s not complaining in effect that MPISMS today is modded to be “nicer” than the Pit as he remembers it.

I’d also suggest that in the last 15+ years (!) since the AOL days online interaction has grown up. And become more mainstream, which is another way of saying the range or participants is far larger. We’re more diverse than we were, and even our center of mass is in a different place. As a single simple example, in 1997 the board was not mostly people in their 50s. It is now. The favored interaction style of 30-ish alternative-press-reading dudes is different from that of 60ish mainstream citizens. In 1997 the board was overwhelmingly Chicago residents. Now it’s barely overwhelmingly Americans. etc.

These things matter. One person’s mild snark is another’s grave insult because of their different expectations in tone (a well-chosen word by our OP). It’s easier to get the tone right when we’re all 30ish Chicago city residents poking fun at the rubes from Schaumberg. Once it’s Aussies and South Asian expats yakking with Texans & New Englanders the opportunities for offense out of proportion to intent skyrockets. As does the opportunity for simple mutual incomprehension.

  1. American society at least is sliding down a path of increasing uncivility. Folks are more willing to get angry and start flinging poo for ever less provocation. That stuff has, if anything, been amped *up *in my 12 years here, not down.

To avoid this place degrading into YouTube Comments (please Og, No!) in the face of that societal tendency may well require TPTB leaning against that wind. And at the same time even if they hold still, you (any you) embedded in our ever-angrier IRL society will feel as if this place is getting more locked down as it resembles less and less the amping crazy free-for-all out in society at large.

YMMV.

Dayum! Well said, LSLGuy.

Question: should I nominate this thread as my entry for “Most Pretentious Thing I’ve Done”?

I’m not oblivious; I do know I have arrogances of my own.

I am serious about this place though. SDMB has been a good place for me over the years. And I don’t like to see things as adversarial between mod/admin and member/guest as they’ve become. You (whoever you are) may not see any particular “trend” towards things getting worse (hi Jonathan Chance) but, even so, can there be anything undesirable about trying to unite a bit more as a community here, whether you perceive such a trend or not?

We used to assume good faith on each other’s behalf. Members believed moderators and admins were trying to keep the place in good condition and were trying to make the board the best it could be for us, that they had our interests at heart. The administrators and their team thought of the membership as “their people” and had, originally, a history of fighting against some other managing authority on behalf of the board as a whole and were pleased and proud to report back to us what things they had made possible for us.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the changes have been all on the admin-and-moderator side. They aren’t. An entire generation of posting folk have joined the board and mostly only think of the admins and mods as “the people who tell you what you can’t do, give you warnings, and might ban you”. And old-timers like me have often expressed dissatisfaction with the changes and pined for the less restrictive and less rule-centric modalities we remember. It’s not surprising if the folks who put in actual time and energy maintaining these forums don’t often feel like part of the board as any kind of integrated community and instead feel like they’re defending the board against badly behaving folks who are just trolling and roiling the waters and being self-immersed assholes causing as much trouble as we possibly can.

Yeesh, I sound like John fucking Lennon playing Kum Ba Ya or something.

But seriously, we who post here are here for a reason, and those of you who do a stint as mod or admin are here for a reason too, and at least some of those reasons probably overlap.

I’m concerned that we don’t do enough “who are we and why are we here” stuff. All that mission shit. Discussion of purpose and community. Fucking hell, now I sound like the goddam HR department. C’mon, you know what I mean.

Why are you here? Why do you consider this place good? Are there things we can do to keep it good and … yeah fuckit I wanna light a campfire and roast marshmallows and sing camp songs and stuff. Laugh if you want.

Our perceptions on this point are very different. I’ve been a moderator here for more than eight and a half years, and a poster for 15 years. My personal perception is that relations between the staff and posters are far less adversarial than they have been at other points in the past, and perhaps better than they’ve ever been.

??? Now why did i refer to you as Jonathan Chance in my post above, Colibri?

Quite odd. Well, I’ve never been very good at recognizing faces. Apologies to you both.

Just so I understand your position, you are in favor of stricter rules and edicts? I’m not busting you, I just can’t tell from your post.

My take is that overall we’ve recently had an uptick in newbies who are sorta tone-deaf. They don’t so much post “Tell me about X”, but rather “I think Y about X. Prove me wrong!”

I think most of these folks are simply importing the habits they’ve learned on other, less civilized, internet “communities.” They simply don’t know any better.

Some get the hang of our local style pretty quickly. Others seem to slowly amp up the anger or obstinancy until they get in a tussle with the mods. Once that starts, their ego-first, brain-second habits of thought preclude them backing down. So they get banned. Per the rules I shan’t name names but I think most of us can think of a quite recent example or two of this.

If you (any you) focus on the mods and what they’re talking about to whoever, then yes, you’ll see pervasive evidence of both crime and punishment. If you focus instead on what the other 99% are doing you won’t see any such thing. You’ll see folks getting along, joking, and occasionally sniping at each other without much real vitriol behind it. Or, if the Pit is your style, you’ll see folks hurling mighty bolts of Recreational Outrage at one another to no great effect.
I agree with the contention that it would be interesting to think and talk a bit about our “mission” for our community. I also think this is a conversation for the membership, not really for the management. We make this place what it is. They just provide the venue and maintain the roof enough so the rain doesn’t get in.

Having said that, I also think we’d not get very far before we discovered it’s a lot more like stone soup than it is a coherent community with any coherent goals or drives. Each of us brings what we do and takes what we want. The resulting random mix either tastes good to you, or you wander off. For any given value of “you”.

Here’s a thread from 10 years ago asking what I see as almost the same question. It might give us some hints. How representative is the SDMB? And how representative does it want to be? - Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share - Straight Dope Message Board

Both AHunter3 and I had things to say back then. 470,000 threads(!), 18,000,000 posts(!!), and a decade later not much has changed.

Here’s another thread from earlier this year which started in ATMB about something else and morphed into asking the question “Why are we (both SDMB and the user community) here?”: SDMB financial problems. - About This Message Board - Straight Dope Message Board