I wish this board had a like button. SDMB started out as a fairly irreverent place. A joke in part of a flyer in the Chicago Reader. Lots of humor, snark, different opinions. The main rule was “don’t be a jerk” and that was loosly applied.
The rules became never ending because a few people had their comfort pushed aside a little. Now it is almost impossible to follow all the rules, but the moderators will jump right in to tell you.
Most of the interesting posters have gone, either got fed up or banned by moderators. Go against the grain of the board and they will just wait, biding their time until one day, “A Ha” we’ve got him now and they are banned, to protect the thin skinned people that probably shouldn’t even be here.
I don’t think this is what Ed Zotti had in mind. Want to take a bet how long it takes for a moderator to jump into this Pit thread and tell me 'moderator complaints go in ATMB?
I don’t think most of us care about what Zotti had in mind.
Some basic consideration is appreciated in general. But in The Pit it is not required. Personally I assess the place improved with a few less performative blowhards.
What frustrates me is that this has not translated into a more diverse group of members. You might think a more hospitable Dope would attract a legion of transgender posters, for example. Or prominent minority posters. Unfortunately, I don’t see that, especially when compared to the motley group of regulars that I can recall from years ago.
I have two comments related to this (and neither one of them is to direct you to ATMB).
First, people who think that the mods have it in for specific people and are just waiting for them to cross some line don’t have a clue about how we actually work and think. Sometimes I wish we could open up the mod loop and let people see what we really think, because it’s nothing like what you think it is.
Second, this is not a generic message board on the internet, as much as some people seem to believe it to be. This is a message board specifically to support Cecil Adams and the Straight Dope. It has a brand associated with it, and a public image to maintain. The idea that you should REQUIRE everyone who comes here to be thick skinned goes so far against that as to be laughable. Many people came here in the old days because they read the columns in the papers or online. And you think it’s perfectly fine to be complete assholes to those folks? No wonder this board has a reputation for being unkind to newbies.
No, thank you. I do not agree with that at all.
Cecil himself was always a bit snarky, and I do miss some of the snark. But I don’t miss the folks who carried it too far and made this place uncomfortable for a lot of good posters. Personally, if your board is driving away good and interesting conversation just so some folks can be assholes, I think you have a problem. There’s a big difference between some fun snark and being an asshole, and too many people did not understand that difference.
If you like a message board where everyone can be an asshole, that’s fine. But that’s not what this place was ever supposed to be. And if that’s what you want, there are places where you can go that are like that.
Whining that you can’t be a jerk in any forum except the Pit is forgetting that our number one rule is “don’t be a jerk”
That’s just that we’re not attracting many new people, period. It’s not good enough to make folks want to stay, if they never see us in the first place.
I think it has, actually. We had transgender members who left the board completely due to the way that they were treated. In more recent years, some of those have come back. We haven’t attracted a “legion of transgender posters”, but things are better here than they used to be.
Do we still have a long way to go? Yes, absolutely. But at least we’re moving in the right direction (IMHO).
I also think that this board is far too unwelcoming to newbies. And it has always been that way, at least as long as I have been here (since 2001). We are not going to attract legions of anyone as long as we keep driving away the few people that find us.
Other than that we haven’t attracted legions of anyone you might not know. Some posters share their gender status or other aspects of their identities, but quite a few do not. And if they do share that they are male or female, unless they specify how would we know if that is a cis- or trans- status of either.
Sure in a few threads it might be relevant information, but no one is obligated to share even then, if they chose to engage in those threads, and certainly not in other threads.
Yes, mods do indeed take deceptive misquoting very seriously. That’s why posters being misquoted would normally be highly motivated to report it. Especially a poster as easily offended as Stranger, who started this whole Pit thread over a trivially innocuous comment. Yet he didn’t report my alleged misquoting skulduggery (or if he did, of course no action resulted). Why not?
Of course I don’t expect you to wade through all the back-and-forth in this thread over this issue, but you might want to just look at the post that Stranger is responding to in his lengthy flounce. In it, I quote @DSeid asking the following question: “I’m reading the full post and the quoted section - what do you think is misrepresented or taken out of context in that post? I can’t see it.” Despite several thousand words of basically “fuck you” to the SDMB, that simple question was never answered.
Look, I’m not here to malign Stranger. I join with others in being genuinely sorry to see him go and hope he returns. But I don’t take kindly to being accused of dishonesty and posting in bad faith. Stranger may have a lot of knowledge about a lot of things, but I daresay I know more than the average person about the dynamics of climate change, and the statement he made about hydrogen vehicles contributing to global warming due to water vapor emissions was patently ridiculous. I did acknowledge in a post here that there may be second-order effects that are currently not well understood, such as the potential for hydrogen leakage into the stratosphere where it oxidizes into long-lived water vapor, but Stranger made no reference to any such nuance. I can only criticize the plain words that he wrote, which were wrong.
Also, Stranger’s reference in that last screed to the Hunga Tonga undersea eruption, which blasted enormous amounts of water vapor into the troposphere and stratosphere, was rather ironic. Because as it turned out, the event had no appreciable effects on climate at all, and in fact was associated with a small amount of cooling in the southern hemisphere, though that was within the normal range of climate variability.
+1 to this. Assuming the culture is basically the same as when I was a mod, it really is as impartial as you could reasonably expect from a group of human beings. We’d be so lucky to have a Supreme Court that balanced.
The people who got banned did so because they broke the rules repeatedly. Now I’ll allow, based on what I saw, a lot of people in the Pit intentionally provoked them into doing something to get themselves banned. I did it myself once, with a guy who kept derailing every Great Debate thread with virulent racism. No real loss there. That’s a diverse opinion we didn’t need.
But ultimately these folks who got banned made a choice to continue their behavior when they knew they were on thin ice. So I can’t even blame the Pit. Those folks took the bait.
As for being thin skinned, I started out here pretty thin skinned. I was 23 years old, I believe. Since I became a parent I have many fewer fucks to give. I agree that I miss the diverse viewpoints, but there were some really toxic elements of this board that I do not miss. I think there are some ways we’ve diversified, because while there have always been women here, I think women’s perspectives are more equally represented and taken more seriously than they were in the past. Are we softer? Yeah, probably so. Is that worse or better? I don’t know. Most of us live in a culture that celebrates cruelty so that is one potential way to set ourselves apart. Reason and kindness.
At the same time, I know change is hard, and it sucks when the thing that attracted you seems to be lacking. But I don’t think we could go backward even if we all wanted to.
Here’s an interesting (to me, anyway) study from a review of comments submitted to Swiss newspapers (all comments, not just what’s published), which found:
Specifically, our 2025 data show that 46% of all hate comments were written by just one percent of commenting users; 5% of users account for 78% of all hate speech produced. Meanwhile, over 70% of commenting users never write hateful posts at all. However, those who do write hate speech also produce many harmless posts — they are simply very active on the platforms overall.
They also found (separately published) that toxicity hasn’t gone up in the last year.
I mean, it’s the readers of Swiss newspapers, who may have different online behavior, but still.
Me too. Our previous policy of allowing equal time to all points of view allowed way to many disgusting characters (maybe some were trolling) to speak their minds here.
All that said - Stranger was not treated in any assholeish manner. Frankly in most fora he was treated well with few of us spending too much energy fact checking the times when he was … less accurate. It is true that he did not take to being fact checked well. And it really is not prudent to complain about someone else in The Pit if you are not going to be able to handle it bouncing back at you. The Pit does not exist to provide us with affirmations.
The Pit is a great place for creative invectives. For venting. For constructive criticism (even misplaced but intended as such). … And maybe we don’t have the greatest insult artists here anymore. But coming in and crying that folks are mean in The Pit is dumb. That said: keep it here.
I enjoyed a lot of his posts, particularly around space science, but any time he popped up in Tesla or autonomous vehicle discussions I expected it to be argumentative.
I only know of the Swiss as an extremely peaceful people who all have a semi-automatic in the gun safe, mandatory conscription, and a love of cheese and eidelweis flowers.
