https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=21501444#post21501444
Yes, we have done the 22nd Amendment debate before, but instead of having it again,the mod steps in and kills it. The answer to the OP’s question is “no” but as another poster in the thread suggested, a rehashing of the 22nd Amendment debate could have led to an explanation as to why.
Are the servers too slow to handle yet another such debate?
I thought the ‘did I stutter’ part was nice.
?? That thread is not closed.
No, but it effectively killed it.
Do you actually have some new point or insight to make on the topic?
Nothing earth shattering, but neither does anyone else on threads about UHC, gun control, or Trump, but we allow those.
Perhaps you should open a new thread. Then you can argue the issue to your heart’s content.
Mods shouldn’t be gatekeepers, deciding whether the conversation is of sufficient novelty and quality to continue.
Mods should be guides, helping folks have threads with conversations the posters therein find helpful.
It doesn’t especially matter whether that topic had been covered before. If folks were covering it, what’s the harm? The thread manifestly wasn’t going anywhere else, so it’s not like it was stifling conversation. It’s not like it was one of over a dozen threads on the same topic cluttering up the forum.
I’m not seeing the benefit to modding it.
I actually received a report, asking to have the thread redirected because someone thought it was a hijack and hoped for the thread to be on the OP’s topic instead. I decided that I agreed with the report and did some redirection.
And, as Colibri says, if you want another discussion on the 22nd, you can always feel free to start a new thread on it.
When the last post in a thread is a moderator telling people to stop discussing the thing they want to discuss, it’s hard for me to see how that’s successful moderation. I understand the intent, but nobody picked up the original meat of the thread, so the effect was to kill the only discussion anyone wanted to participate in within that thread.
If you’re that interested, and all the other dozens of threads about that issue haven’t satisfied you, start another thread.
Did the person who made the report post again in that thread?
You seem to be having a different conversation than LHOD. LHOD is arguing about moderation style and best practices, claiming that the current moderation choice was not one. Telling him that he could start another thread doesn’t at all address his point.
His argument is that mods should not shut down a “hijack” if that hijack is the actual thing people are interested in discussing. There are two ways to deal with something being off topic: you can do what JC did, or you can just change the title so that now the current conversation is on topic.
LHOD is saying that doing the latter would fix the problem much better, with less interruption. Making people make a new thread is not a good choice for that. It shuts down the conversation, and cuts off participation.
If a mod restriction causes a thread to die, then he argues that your moderation choice was poor. Ideally, you want to be able to achieve proper moderation while also keeping conversations going.
He does seem to provide an exception: if the comments were actually breaking the rules, it makes sense to prioritize stopping the rule violation instead of keeping the thread going. But that is not the case here: the issue was just that we’d had this conversation before.
The funny thing is, I actually wind up thinking JC made the right choice, just for different reasons. So there is a pretty good argument for what he did. But “you can start another thread” is basically a thought terminating cliche in ATMB.
Yes, we can make a new thread. How does that address the topic of not shutting down ongoing conversations?
I’m gonna trust you not to just copy my reasoning, and give my counterargument to LHOD:
[spoiler]There is value in making sure that people feel like they can start threads on a particular topic and not have it hijacked into becoming about a perennial topic. In the short term, enforcing the rules like JC did may shut down conversation, but, in the long term, it can make people more willing to discuss various topics, knowing they won’t be hijacked. Even if this particular topic at this particular time doesn’t garner much interest, other similar topics at different times may.
There are definitely topics I have wanted to discuss that I don’t bother bringing up here because I know they will turn into a hijack. And I’ve seen many posters say the same. People will even say that they tried to discuss something and the thread got hijacked.
JC made the right call. I just wish he used more reasoning and less “I felt like he was right” in making decisions. Sometimes it leads to absurdities, like his ruling that some new rules being proposed for baseball count as one of the “ongoing great discussions of our time” and shouldn’t go to the Game Room where the sports people congregate.[/spoiler]
Not exactly. There’s a third option, which is to do nothing and let the conversation continue organically.
I would like to ask a factual question in that thread about thew effect of a different clause in the constitution. May I do so?
Why bother having topics at all, if people don’t have to pay attention to them anyway?
Is there an easy way to tell the difference between an “organic” change and a hijack?
Clearly, it’s difficult, especially given the number of reports about ‘end this hijack’ (including by LHoD) we see each week.
I’m not saying it’s not difficult. I’m just saying that if a thread doesn’t continue past “end this hijack,” it turns out in retrospect to have been a bad move. It’s worth paying attention to the occasions in which the last post in a thread is a moderator instruction, and figuring out why the instruction killed the thread, and whether it was really worth doing.
Thread drift happens. But it’s ridiculous to think that it should be tolerated in the first few posts.