DT was suspended for 6 warnings and modnotes about hijacking threads and rape fantasies, not posting stuff that most don’t like. Zoster is a completely different poster in that respect.
DT was given a lot of slack for a lot of years. ZS stays within out rules. We don’t moderate people for unpopular opinions. We do moderate for hijacks in P&E and GD.
Zoster has 2 warnings this year, and I think is banned from DEI/CRT talk. That dates back to 2021.
Fair enough. The lies he tells are so unambiguous and so geared toward riling people up, and he skirts so close to the line of insulting other posters, that it’s almost certainly trolling in my eyes.
It’s not “stuff that most don’t like” that’s the problem, it’s the deliberate and provocative lying.
Personally, I think equating “intentional bullshit artist/liar” with “having unpopular opinions” might be a mistake, but that is not my call to make.
We don’t really moderate for lies. You can calmly explain in thread why what he wrote is incorrect, but please don’t call him a liar either (outside of the pit). We encourage rebuttals.
Insults of members, we moderate for. But he seems to mainly be flagged for insulting politicians and “lying”. We are not mind readers, terrible opinions can look like lying.
I appreciate that. But I’m not talking about statements of opinion. I’m talking about statements of fact that are not only incorrect, they’re egregiously and indisputably incorrect, in a way that is implausible as a mistake.
Two recent examples:
On Harris: “She is an incoherent thinker and speaker who can’t complete a grammatical English sentence.” While the first part is opinion, the second part is a deliberate misstatement that feeds into racist stereotypes.
On Angie Nixon: “Single-issue anti-Israel obsessive Angie Nixon” Again, there is no conceivable world in which someone familiar enough with US politics to know Nixon’s name would honestly think she’s a single-issue candidate.
It’s the constant drumbeat of these deliberate falsehoods that make it clear he’s telling lies in order to rile people up.
His posts are chock full of examples like this. I don’t think it requires mind reading to realize that he’s lying like this to fuck with the board.
@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness, let me get a touch meta here. My personal feelings of ZS to the side, we are often between a rock and a hard place in trying to moderate content of a post.
There are plenty of posters, who while not free speech absolutists, want to defend the right to argue points, often to the level of pedantry. There are others who want to create a safer, unthreatening place. Both have valid points in their ideals, but making a community means some degree compromise. Which is why we DO have bright lines (the TOS/Individual Forum Rules), but generally pretty wide permissiveness as well.
With the mods having to do the job of passing between the Scylla and Charybdis above.
ATMB is full of arguments about “activist” mods. So, in general, I at least look to concrete things I can point at before I moderate more than a note. And even then, we often get disproportionate stress from even that.
Thus, and in keeping with the “fighting ignorance” motto of the board, we leave it to you good posters to eviscerate their arguments. Is it frustrating for nearly everyone? Sure is!
Best options? Depends on your personality. Ignoring posters you consider to be trolls or other flavors of bad-faith posters is often the easiest - you can still participate in the thread, share info and opinions, and let the system purge most of the malarky.
You can just scroll past it, or even skim it to see if they make good points in spite of themselves if you feel strongly about using ignore.
And as always, if you see them breaking the TOS, you can flag. We will not always agree, but the information lets us see patterns we might otherwise miss.
NOTE - I don’t want you to flag out of frustration, we have had past posters who flagged excessively out of a sense of retaliation, but things you feel are breaking the rules of the board/thread/moderator instructions are helpful, even if we take no official action.
I appreciate your response (and agree with your approach), but I think you’re missing @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness’s point: there comes a point where telling lies crosses into trolling behavior. While lying is not against the rules, trolling is.
I understand this is exceptionally difficult to moderate. It is difficult for us to flag for the same reason – there is no one post that crosses a line; it is the sum total of contributions across multiple posts and threads.
I don’t know the solution to this, but want to make sure we’re all talking about the same thing.
I agree with this, and everything above it–but it still doesn’t address the key point I’m trying to make here.
My key point is that, in rare cases, it’s clear that someone isn’t just making bad arguments. They’re deliberately lying. In the rare cases where that becomes clear, that should be treated differently from someone making bad arguments.
ITR Champion used to make a ton of bad arguments. I discovered that every time I looked up one of his cites, it said something very different from what he claimed it said. Sam_Stone used to do the same thing. But I don’t think that was evidence of lying, and I didn’t flag either of them for lying. They just made shit arguments, and I treated them as such.
ZS is different. He’s not making shit arguments. He’s telling provocative lies on purpose. And that’s a kind of trolling.
The standard for modding for that should be very high. I’m saying that he meets it.
Edit: or what @TroutMan said!
Ah, I see the difference in focus. I’m afraid I’ve been modding long enough that it has narrowed my vision a bit on what I see as a mod vs. what I’m seeing as a poster.
So you’re (both) seeing the problem, and trying to find a way to address the underlying behavior when you see the pattern but each individual element is just shy of the line.
Yeah, I get it.
My very limited advice without putting a thumb on the scales. What you and other posters have done in these threads is often helpful: multiquote specific instances in the same thread when they’ve returned to refuted points, doubled down, moved goalposts, or otherwise engaged in deceptive practices.
We often do this when we’re warning posters, but you guys doing the initial work makes it easier for us to backtrack the pattern. Still never going to promise anything, but being able to refer back to something like that is a heck of a lot easier than scrolling through dozens or hundreds of posts to establish a pattern.
Not a great answer, I grant you, but one that will help.
Bad faith posters are trolls. Sometimes it’s hard to tell, and I can appreciate caution. But IMO it’s more than clear that ZS is a bad faith poster. Individual posts may not be crossing any lines, but IMO there’s a clear pattern of bad faith arguments.
That sounds good. I’m not sure I’ll have the spoons to go back and make a record of how he’s been shitting the bed in the various P&E threads, but going forward I’ll record specific examples here. And if someone else wants to go back through his posts & quote his many just straight-up lies, that’d be keen.
I gave up on asking ZS for cites for his statements of “fact” in the Platner thread because he never responded to a single request.
If dropping unsupported factual claim turds in the P&E punchbowl isn’t against the rules there’s something wrong with the rules.
There has got to be a point where ZS becomes more trouble than they’re worth. Assuming that point hasn’t already been reached.
I think this, as much as anything else, supports @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness’s argument. I’ve also asked for cites for his flame-throwing nonsense, and I’ve seen many others do so, and I don’t recall a single time he complied.
Agreed. His lies used to really rile me up, because he doesn’t just lie about facts (though he does that all the time) but he also deliberately misrepresents what other people are arguing about. Yet, he does so in such a way that doesn’t run afoul of specific rules. You can argue that he violates “Don’t be a jerk” but that is such a subjective rule that it’s difficult to make a compelling case.
I found myself very early on having to put him on ignore for my own sake. Try to argue with him in a productive manner, and he twists my arguments and pisses me off, and now I’m risking a rules violation myself. So I just have him on ignore. I don’t have the capability of dealing with someone like that in a manner that conforms to our rules of conduct. I am just not a skilled enough troll to meet him at his level.
Sounds like a very weak attempt at concern trolling. Weak on the concern, strong on the trolling.
Which totally reminds me of Uzi, who (I think disengenuously) claims to not be a Trump supporter, despite his posting consistently showing otherwise. Really bad bingo card poster, constantly sealioning (minus the “politeness”) about points that have already been made clear to him, and presenting usually spurious media if he’s called upon to actually cite - a very reliable shitposter.
A clearcut case of Carney Derangement Syndrome.
Well, Uzi is not a Trump supporter, in the sense that he’s never voted for him. Or at least, I would certainly hope that he’s never voted for him.
Given his obvious genius and the reports of Kentuckians turned away at local polls trying to vote for NYC mayor, I’m not so sanguine about the odds he didn’t at least try