Can you explain this one a little? Or describe an example?
Regards,
Shodan
I don’t know that it can’t. But I REALLY don’t understand why so many people think that Mini-Rants SHOULD live in MPSIMS. From my perspective Mini-Rants have had a long happy life in the Pit and should get to keep that.
But mine is not the (only) vote that counts.
I pit the fucker who raped my daughter yesterday.*
That’s an MPSIMS topic, no matter how heated it is. There’s no possible opposition to that topic that wouldn’t be incredibly hurtful or dickish.
*Hypothetical. I am daughter-free. 
OK, I think I see what you mean. And yes, that belongs in MPSIMS. With the caveat that one reveals personal information on the boards at one’s own risk. I.e., if you say “I Pit my daughter’s rapist and I hope he gets ass-raped in prison” it is legitimate to say “I got ass-raped and I don’t think you should wish that on anyone”. Or even “it’s all Bush’s fault”.
You are to be both envied and pitied.
Regards,
Shodan
Not Pit-Worthy:
RO
MPSIMS crap in the Pit. If the subject of the OP is mundane, it belongs in MPSIMS, even if you add a big bad swear word at the end, or even throughout. Real examples of stuff that should never be in the Pit: I Pit my sandwich, I Pit my cat, I Pit myself. This includes posters who are self-aware enough to realize that their OP is “lame” or “weak” right there in the thread title, but post it in the Pit anyway.
Buckeyes are Ok.
Mini-rants. They are always lame, weak, and mundane. While I see the benefit of having a Mini-Rant thread to confine it to one thread people don’t have to click on, I think it leads new (and, often, not so new) posters to think that lame, weak, and mundane is Pitworthy to start with. It’s not.
Note that many political threads in the Pit are RO (and just aren’t labeled as such). Where should they be put?
Like Fenris, I’d like to see all Politics out of The Pit, except in Very limited circumstances of a genuine and serious event of National or International interest.
For example, if the Canadian Government decided that everyone in Canada had to speak English or GTFO, no exceptions, then I think a Pit Thread would be warranted. Similarly, if the UK Government decided that it would no longer offer Asylum to anyone not from the Commonwealth, I think that would also warrant a Pit Thread.
But the State Legislature of Iowa debates a motion to build an expensive bridge across a river when the state’s libraries are underfunded? Not pit-worthy.
Similarly, I think RO needs to go. No-one is seriously going to support the skinning of puppies for fur, or any of the other things that get RO posts here.
Mini-Rants are quite fun, though- I like those. Also, I think being able to call another Poster out on an issue is important, but if it’s clear the other poster isn’t going to respond, then I think they should be closed so it doesn’t turn into Everybody Hates Poster X.
Oh, also, I think that if someone wants to describe someone else as a “Cunt” in the Pit, then that should be fine and it should be taken as read that entering in the Pit means you’re going to hear lots of Naughty Words and Mean Things Being Said.
Yes. Unfortunately, the Stupid Rules have now been established, and Ed is unlikely to back down for fear of … I don’t know what. Being seen as reasonable, maybe?
I’ve been waiting until I had time to put a TLDR post together, but I’m not sure when that will happen, and so far this thread has been doing very well without me, so I think I’ll just add a few things here and there as time allows. First up: the “origin” of the Pit:
The Rules of Engagement - The BBQ Pit - Straight Dope Message Board
While the original description of the Pit doesn’t set its current uses or purposes in stone, I think the post anticipates many of the issues we’re still discussing:
- Pit as combat. Mainly for “verbal fistfights.”
- Pit as entertainment. “Selling tickets” “Pure evil and rants only if really entertaining.”
- Rules relaxed.
This third feature is significant to me. While I have no problem moving a thread from GQ to GD or one of the other non-Pit forums, moving a thread out of the Pit changes the rules. That can cause problems if the insults have already started to fly and it also can change the shape of the discourse. For one thing, the Pit has very loose relevancy standards. Not only do we permit personal attacks, but we permit them against anybody who happens to show up–even if they aren’t throwing any. It’s a lot like this:
This seems to be the paradigmatic Pit discourse arc. But other variations are also pretty common:
We’ve got the backfired ambush: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imuck-IAjM0&feature=PlayList&p=B5DA8A92E503E170&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=14
And the duel that didn’t go as expected: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWTNBRs7Ccs
And sometimes we get diatribes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKHKOh9pi5k
This last one raises some questions for me. It’s one sided, but it’s definitely a rant: Rant Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
Is it RO? What about this one? The Telemarketer Speaks. I Respond.
What about this one? Tampons Suck
At any rate, before I got distracted by the clip show I intended to point out:
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Moving a thread out of here changes the way it will develop, so predictions about how it might unfold are to some extent self-fulfilling.
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While some profanity is permitted in other forums, there’s more tolerance for it in the Pit.
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Other elements of the Pit aren’t mirrored in other forums.
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There are some threads that the other moderators don’t want in their forums. Those have to be closed instead of moved.
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To some extent the whole point of the board is to *have *threads and have them where they’ll get the most attention and participation.
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None of these points necessarily changes anything about what sorts of threads we ought to have in here. I’m just sayin’.
Please keep the comments coming.
Humor in the Pit is another recurring theme in this thread. The consensus seems to be that parody and satire are fine here. I agree with that. I’ve allowed several parody threads. I also agree that “joke” threads typically belong elsewhere.
I think you’ve drawn the right inferences, Gfactor. We like the Pit being funny, but funny only in the sense of clever snark and posts that are funny in the same way that B-rated movies about outter space from the late 1950s are funny. Like MST3K stuff. Or threads that tell a story but are funny in a pittish way, like the night-balloon OP (which I realize was stolen, but I just mean like that.)
But stuff that’s funny in the sense of silliness or joke telling or that kind of stuff does belong elsewhere, in my opion.
Of course, all of this is my opinion, which ain’t worth two cents.
On this point, here are the subjects on the first page of the August Mini-rants thread:
Sciatica
College sucks
Child raising sucks
Stolen tomatoes
Hives
Coworkers suck
Broken appliances
Tomatoes, again
India is loud
Toliet clogging stools
Road work
Lice
Roommates suck
Chocolate Chip Cookies
Texting
College sucks, Pt II
Message boards suck/no grocery store
Paying alimony sucks
Kitten Shit (biggest clue yet that it should be in MPSIMS, with the other 5 million kitty threads)
Husband sucks
Parents suck
I submit that each and every one of these posts are MUNDANE AND POINTLESS. Not a one was even vaguely close to “entertaining”, by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, a few of them had only an extra word or three beyond my summation above, i.e. “X is annoying”. That’s just whining.
If you won’t move Mini-Rants to MPSIMS, will you at least edit the title?
“August Whiners Club” is about right.
But it’s one thread–if mini-rants are one thread, who gives a damn?
My concern is that there’s something like (I didn’t count, just estimated) 19/25 top pit threads are unquestionably political.
Seriously G- why not force them into one single “Political rants” thread and give every other topic some breathing room?
As I already said, I think it’s good that Mini-Rants at least confines it to one thread. But then you get those who somehow think that their OP isn’t “Mini” enough, so to speak, and open a whole new Pit thread, and lameness ensues.
My examples are not far off. Some tool did Pit the sandwich they got for lunch, for the love of OG. Why is that bullshit in the PIT? There’s MPSIMS, there’s livejournal, and there’s STFU. Pick one.
If we add a Political Rants thread, what else would go in the Pit? The weekly pitting of Der Trihs? Between Mini-Rants and Political Rants, there’s almost nothing left.
Fen, I’m trying to grab onto your thought process here. Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that your statistics are correct: more than 75% of threads on the Pit front page are political in nature. Suppose further that, as you suggest, we consolidate all those threads into one.
Then the question I have is, where does the replacement material come from? There will automatically be 3/4 of the threads on the front page that are zombie threads (having heretofore fallen to page 2 — which might themselves also be political in nature). And even setting those aside, who will write the new non-political OPs? Are you thinking of it along the lines of F.A. von Hayek’s spontaneous order? That given the space and opportunity, people will begin opening these new and improved threads about — well, about satire I guess, or scathing rants?
Doesn’t it seem to you, upon review, that people are bitching about what pisses them off already, and that it just so happens to be politics at this time? I’m just not sure what might be superior. I mean, we have the Fred Phelps thread, but that is just a recurring theme, like the Chick tracts. Might it not be that, if 75% of all threads disappear that there could be a slacking off of Pit posting? Or are you counting on people rushing in to fill the void kind of thing.
Again, just trying to grasp the thought process.
There’s been a few times I’ve had ideas for Pit Threads, come in here to start them, seen that 75% of the threads are political, realised that no-one is going to read my thread (and those that do will just cause a pile-on), so I haven’t bothered. I’m sure others feel the same way.
Politics is BORING to most people. That’s just how it is. We (as a board) are the weird ones with a corps of politically active and interested posters. The remaining 98% of the posters here really, really don’t give a shit about politics.
But seeing as this is the Pit, I’m going to say something controversial:
I think the people who are objecting to a separate politics forum are doing so because they know that if it happens, they’ll be the only ones in there and then they can’t force their (ITHO) brilliant and insightful punditry or outrage on everyone else.
Sure, you can say “Don’t read politics threads if you don’t like them” (which is why I don’t read political threads), but that effectively amounts to “Don’t come into the Pit if you don’t like politics”. It’s bad enough GD is politics-exclusive for the most part, we don’t need The Pit that way as well.
That’s two freaking forums devoted almost exclusively to Politics. Surely it’s patently obvious they deserve their own forum?
But… but… your facts aren’t right, are they? Kids in restrooms has pages and pages of posts with thousands of views. Online shopping outside the US has 2 pages. Intelligent design has 4 pages. Hell, stealing focus has 2 pages. And Stoid’s bitch thread has 7. On what basis do you claim that no one would be interested in your ideas. What are they?
And by the way — quite honestly, I wouldn’t say that 2% forms a “core”. It seems like the 98% would be the core, and the 2% would be the fringe.
Depends on what I’m thinking about Pitting at the time. I’d like to Pit the State Government for being useless and massively upping the cost on electricity and car registration and wanting to sell off most of the State-run assets and enterprises, as well as making all the Toll Roads “prepay only”, but I’m not going to for two reasons:
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That’s a political thread and I don’t want to clutter The Pit up with more political stuff; and
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No-one outside Queensland cares, so why bother ranting about it on a predominantly US messageboard?
I recently did a Pit Thread about how hard it was to get an MP3 player that wasn’t an iPod and got piled on, despite explaining you can’t order them online because of prohibitive shipping costs (as outlined in the current thread about online shopping outside the US), and then got told iPod clearly weren’t monopolising the MP3 player market in Australia despite the near impossibility of obtaining an equivalent product from a competing brand here. You can see how that sort of thing makes me think “Is it really worth posting this rant?” now, and increasingly I find the answer is “No”.
I don’t see how one follows the other. Apparently it is just too much trouble to scroll past the thread titles that don’t interest you?
I suspect political threads actually interest you a lot, but you don’t like the feelings they arouse in you, which you would rather just avoid by not having to look. I don’t see why we should have to accomodate your lack of willpower.