Ways To Improve Going Forward: Your thoughts on the matter.

[Lamia]

I decided to take a break from posting about three months ago, but have continued to check in to read now and then. When I saw that the future of the SDMB was uncertain and that Charter Memberships were becoming available again, I thought very seriously about renewing my (long lapsed) membership.

I decided against it because of this:

@Bone

I don’t think we are bad at detecting trolling. I think we are reluctant to act on it. There’s lots of regular posters who I believe do this. From newbies it’s easy to see, but I’m not sure you or I want to go down the path where the moderation is much more heavy handed. Because that’s what it would take - we’d need to intercede more often, in more edge cases, and we’d get some wrong too.

The positive impact of interceding more are a board with less crap to deal with. The negative impact is that posters that may add value will get caught in that net and we’d lose them.

I don’t want to lose people and ignoring crap is trivially easy. As a result it seems the optimal choice is to err on the side of caution and exercise forbearance. The ones who have no redeeming value too the board make themselves apparent in time.

I actually don’t find it easy to ignore thread after thread about the inferiority of the Negro race, what disgusting freaks transgender people are, how victims of sexual assault must have been asking for it, etc. I have often been frustrated by the willingness of the Mods to let trolls troll away, for years in some cases, but I was willing to believe it was just too hard for them to stay on top of everything. Now I know better.

Here’s what I do find easy: hanging onto my money. It’s very, very easy for me to refrain from paying to provide trolls with a platform where no one is allowed to call them trolls. Over the past few months I’ve also found it easier than I expected to go without posting here. I’m about to flounce off again for a while, but since TubaDiva asked, my suggestion for improving the SDMB would be to think very carefully about whether it’s really worth protecting trolls. The SDMB is going to lose people either way, it’s just a question of who. I don’t flatter myself that my absence is a great loss to the board, but you’ve already lost more valuable posters (Una Persson, for instance) due to the reluctance of the Mods to take action against trolls.