This. The world isn’t neatly separated into past, present and future like that in the first place; they are all relevant to each other. Separating the discussion artificially like that encourages both “hijacks” and people not posting at all, because those are really the only two option. People who want to actually discuss the issue have to “hijack”; that’s why there’s so many “hijack” no matter how many times the moderators ding people.
If they do manage to get people to stop “hijacking”, then the threads will just die, instead.
I disagree. What the mods keep saying is "keep random trump bashing out since there are so many other threads on that. there are over 1000 posts in one thread (current ongoing news and events), and 238 post in the other (speculation as to trumps reasons), and 352 posts in the last which is consequences. Those threads make perfect sense.
The line for when something constitutes a hijack is blurry.
Especially earlier I definitely posted less on the Iran threads because most of the ideas that occurred to me to post were some kind of connection between at least 2 of those things (which may be a good thing because I’m addicted to this site).
At some point I’ve decided that in order to have any kind of discussion people have been bending those rules and id just post things i thought hopefully someone would want to read
This is the kind of thing that seems to happen all the time on p+e:
Lets say someone starts a thread questioning a decision for some tactical advance in a war. They mention how many soldiers’ lives it cost and whether the ground they gained actually has strategic value in terms of how defensible it is to a counterattack. Then someone replies saying that it was the most important decision in the war because it had propaganda value and convinced allies to up their support - the facts on the ground were largely irrelevant. Is this reply a hijack? I have no idea- depending on your perspective you might think the reply is entirely irrelevant. Probably most people who disagree with the reply will also think it’s a hijack and most people who agree with it will think without being allowed to discuss it its not possible to have a meaningful discussion.
There is rarely an obvious line to what is and isn’t a hijack
In terms of how the board handles moderation, there is an even more important distinction, IMHO. There is no GD topic that you aren’t allowed to post in a less formal way in another forum, where the rules are less strict. But the p&e forum is designed, in part, to keep politics out of other forums. It doesn’t work perfectly, but the idea is that people who aren’t up to dealing with politics right now can browse Cafe society or the game room, or even IMHO, and not be confronted with what hot-button political event is happening right now. That means that you can’t start a thread about about the Iran war in IMHO and trust that it will stay there, with lighter IMHO moderation.
(Although we do have a long-running IMHO thread on the war in Gaza. So sometimes it happens.)
I completely get that we are a neurodivergent crowd. Some of us have our own narrow interests and see that interest as relevant to every discussion, and others see every aside as a worthwhile distraction to rabbit hole dive into looking for the right potion that will let us through the door.
But it really isn’t so hard. There is a subject up for discussion. An aside off the subject is no problem, but if it is an aside that is interesting enough that it is will likely get some follow up, or starts to, then just make it its own linked discussion. Quickly before there is so much hijack context that it is messy to do so.
But but others might not find it an interesting subject beyond a post or so and the thread might just die! Yes. And? Threads are sometimes stillborn. Sad. But life goes on.
It was an attempt to be a little funny, failed clearly. Disagreeing with you superficially … but not really. Just “disagreeing” with the qualification of it only being borderline incoherent … yes we agree.
After the election I floated that idea and was told, pretty clearly, that’s not going to happen. Let me go dig up that thread:
(@puzzlegal I didn’t realize until I looked for the thread that it was you that said that, I promise that was a coincidence, not a gotcha)
When I wrote that thread, I was exhausted from following all the political threads and really just wanted them to disappear for a while hence my suggestion that all (for some definition of ‘all’) political threads go in one, mutable, forum. I got over it (again, I was just worked up at the moment) but my point is that these two quotes seem to contradict each other.
How about if i claimed that the existence of P&E reduces the amount of political content in the other forums?
Lots of topics cross boundaries. “I watched this movie with a political theme” probably will end up in Cafe Society. “My daughter is afraid because ICE raided her campus” will probably end up in MPSIMS, or the Pit. But “Trump fires attorney general Pam Bondi” will probably be started in P&E, and if it isn’t, it will likely be moved there.
I think it works OK in moderation (hah). I’ve seen attempts on other forums to mandate that all politics go in one forum though and it’s consistently a mess. It creates a lot of workload for the moderators, generates lots of infractions, makes the users angry and seems to make the politics subforum angrier and more extreme.
You basically end up with a subforum that has the rules of a politics forum, the behavior and attitude of the BBQ Pit, and posters that keep getting infracted or banned because they are too angry, afraid or self-righteous to care about those rules.
So anyone coming to this new thread is immediately told, “Hey, go check out this thousand post mega thread, before you read this one”?
Saying that having a link back to the original thread resolves the issue might be easy to say and sound reasonable in a vacuum, but that’s just not the reality of how it works.
Ultimately, if the “generate a new thread” feature worked, we wouldn’t be here.
Now, it’s possible that there’s no way to add a feature for side-topics. I’m not saying that anyone should go and add it to the website. But arguing that we’ve already got a solution is just not true. Creating new threads doesn’t make threads stay streamlined.
Any discussion can only hold so many participants. The only real solution, at some point, is sharding the website. Under that point, you’re looking at release valves. Maybe the “create reply as thread” feature does some amount of that, I’m not saying otherwise. But it’s not, “Hey, I just want you follow up on this one point with that one guy.” For that, having a side-thread may work and, more importantly, I’d be pretty confident that these smaller sorts of cases are 10x more prevalent and would be far more useful to keep the main thread on topic. People don’t want to pull a thread off onto a tangent but, given the choices between give up, create a whole other thread for a minor point, or say something that’s on-topic to the thread but not strictly the mainline subject, they’re generally going to go for options 1 or 3. Neither of those is the best.
When i just want to follow up this one point with one person, i send a DM. You can send a DM that’s linked to a post, too. I agree, that’s not public, the rest of the participants don’t see it. It’s not exactly what you are looking for. But it’s an option.
I think I’ve received like 2-3 DMs in 20 years of posting (excluding posts from mods responding to a flag I raised). I think most people feel like none of this should be so important that we’re directly going to each others doors to knock on for answers.
When I get a DM that should’ve been, IMO, a reply to a thread I feel like that’s how a teenager feels when they text someone and the person calls them back.
I don’t think so. I’ve had DMs from people who wanted to give me a little anecdote or bit of info about something in a thread that wasn’t really relevant to the thread, and it was a fun little side conversation. I’ve never minded that. Then again…
I checked, and I’ve had about a dozen DMs in just the past year. (And I’m not counting automated DMs from flags and such, but actual DMs from people.) It seems weird to have barely any for decades. I guess if that was the case, the idea of DMs might seem strange to me.
Anyone coming to the new thread will see a link to the old one. I doubt many people will read a thousand posts, but most people who hadn’t already been in the old one will probably read enough to get context. And the ones who won’t probably wouldn’t have read a pile of posts in the old thread, either, if the post you want to make had been made (or left) there.
People who were already posting in the originating thread will usually be notified of the new one; if you’re getting notifications of a thread and it develops a linked offshoot, you appear to get automatically subscribed to the offshoot.