Why nothing's going to change (from the "Bad Precedent" thread)

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1

Granted–I do see more reversals, but I also see more capricious decisions that take longer and longer to reverse. And on bigger stuff, it’s impossible for users to effect a change. Change at this board on anything larger than an individual decision or a minor tweak of a rule comes from fiat from the top down and never from the bottom up.

I deleted a post that Sam was referring to. It dealt with a politics forum. We need one and from about…oh…mid-June through January 2011, we’re going to be inundated with politics. American politics. The Pit will be drowned out with political threads, GD will be swamped with them, they’ll creep into C/S and IMHO. After lobbying for a politics forum since about 2003, I finally got an actual response last time I made the effort (“No. Asked and answered. Thread closed” doesn’t count). And while I appreciated the hell out of Dex (IIRC) taking the time to actually explain the reasoning (I don’t agree with his reasoning, but at least he just didn’t say “No. End of topic.”) it also convinced me that there’s really no interest in listening to users on larger topics. I can’t think of one major change (possibly except the game room…I don’t remember it’s origin) that posters have pushed for that’s occurred. Not once in 10 years.

It really is Ed’s sandbox and the crack Ed made about “If you don’t like it, just leave” (close paraphrase) from “Cunt-gate” really is how he feels. Posters are a necessary content and revenue generating inconvenience to him. If we’re not, why isn’t there any serious mechanism for posters to change things? Currently it’s:

  1. Post your concern or request in ATMB

  2. Have people agree or disagree with you.

  3. Have a very few mindless sychophants hijack the thread saying “Oh god! ANOTHER complaint thread. Why don’t you stop your self-important whining and stop treating every mod decision like it was the end of the world.” (and I note that their hijacks don’t get modded even though they’ve shifted the topic from the specific complaint to the complainant’s behavior)

  4. Have your thread closed because of the hijack (the recent one that Tuba closed was a perfect example) or the “asked and answered” closure and your point lied about (the “all the complainers want is to say Cunt” lie for one) or my personal favorite “I don’t see any point to this thread” closure and your point ignored. (Approximately 25% of the last 80 threads discussing board issues, poster issues or mod discussions were closed by mod fiat. And approximately 0% of them actually effected any change).

If the users want a new forum what can they do? Appeal to the top and get rejected. There’s no way if a majority of posters want something to get it other than mod whim. There’s no mechanism for posters to say “Y’know, we don’t like this or that rule. We want to change it or abolish it” other than to toss out an ATMB appeal and hope that it’s not rejected out of hand and hope you’re not labeled a “troublemaker” for daring to post about it (think wring who got labeled a troublemaker for arguing against a mod decision).

So…yeah. The board is what it is and there’s no way for user to change it beyond appealing to the mods and hope they grant your plea by fiat.

2

I’m actually very surprised it has taken the warning this long to be rescinded from Twickster.

I don’t think Twickster should have to resign we all make mistakes but the fact she came in stuck her nose up in the air and walked out was a dick move on top of the mistake.

Possibly the reason it is taking so long is that there are big changes coming?

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<snip>

I’ve heard that joke far too many times to believe it.

4

The Game Room, Cafe Society, and IMHO were all initiated at user requests. That is a 142% increase in fora due to user requests.

5

This is insulting to me, and I await your retrospective warning.

6

If the army boots that I can’t say your mother might wear fits…

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I’m reporting this thread because the misspelled title is driving me loopy.

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Reported.

9

Vote Fenris! For Precident! :slight_smile:

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I do have to agree with the mods that, sometimes, there are some people that come off as just being complainers. The difference I see is that where the mods tend to see troublemakers. I see it as people who are just extremely dissatisfied. I think that, if the mods dealt with the underlying concern, instead of getting all defensive, they would find that this would happen less often.

Stonewalling may work in the short term, but all that does is leave a little bit of resentment in the tank. The more resentment, the larger number and hostility present in future complaints. Stonewall again, and you just create more resentment. It’s an endless loop.

Now, you may say that they should have to change, too. And you’re right. But the thing is, not matter how much power you have, you cannot make another human being do what you want. Ultimately, you only have power over yourself.

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For what purpose does Tom continue to mention the small group of repeat complainers? Are his comments meant to intimidate? Are they suggesting that it is a bad thing to post our objections?

And some of us do commend him when he has done something unusually well. I’ve done that myself within the last couple of months. Maybe he just doesn’t notice or doesn’t happen to be reading everything we post. He needs to keep that in mind.

The comment about our “celebrating” and Twickster’s cold comment were two of the most childish things I’ve seen posted by mods. There is no celebration when something has insulted the regular users as much as that thread has.

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Zoe said everything I might’ve said.

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Me too. I must say, I loves me some Tom. I could read his posts in GD all day. But yeah…post 11.

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Fixed. [It was spelled “precident.”]

I’m wondering how you would like to see this work. I see what’s bothering you but I don’t know what you think should be done about it. Should users be able to create their own forums? Reverse or overturn mod decisions or make new rules? Help me out here.

Eh. We had a constant debate on health care from early last year until about a month ago. You’re not going to see much difference between that and election season. I’ve argued in favor of setting up a politics forum in the past (I don’t have a strong feeling about it either way) but most of the staff doesn’t support that idea.

Tomndebb came up with several examples. And I think the custom title and restored charter member title idea also came from posters and not staff.

This is poisoning the well and pretty much begs for a hijack. You’re doing the same thing you’re complaining about, just aimed in the opposite direction. This discussion will go better if everybody sticks to the issues instead of taking potshots at each other.

And I think we need to cut back on that. Closings rarely resolve the discussion and usually they inspire a new complaint.

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Replying to Marley: Tom’s “several examples” don’t really impress much. IMHO is almost exactly ten years old and Cafe society is eight. Meanwhile, the top down forum ideas came pretty fast and furious more recently so it’s easy to see why posters would have a slanted view on this issue.

I think I’ve said before that a temporary forum for American elections would be a good idea. Unlike the (mainly) single issue health care debate there are large number of individual elections plus all those ballot initiatives to argue about. Just turn the forum into an archive one week after the last recount. A lot of people get election fever and would probably enjoy having a forum dedicated and a lot of people who HATE election fever could still enjoy GD in the mean time.

On the more main issue of the OP, I agree that the staff shouldn’t be in such a rush to close complaint threads. Most especially when they simultaneously say “Start a new thread if you want to discuss this side issue” and “God, you same people are always starting complaint threads!”

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Do you have any mods or admins that are not US American? That might give you more perspective on how unbelievably tedious constant interjections of American politics into thread after thread after thread are for your non-American posters. And yes, I know this board is headquartered in the United States, but the internet is international; I would hope that management values its posters from outside the borders of the US for making this place a global, more interesting place.

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xash is from India but now lives in the States, and Gukumatz is in Norway. Over the years I think there’s usually been at least one staffer outside the US. Arnold Winkelried and Coldfire come to mind. And those of us in the US can get annoyed at the US politics threads too, thank you very much. :stuck_out_tongue:

18

I don’t know. Some kind of vote, maybe.

We’ve got polling here, what about a twice a year “Do you want a new forum? What forum do you want?” set of polls? (You can’t combine them–if you have choices: Forum A, Forum B, Forum C, No new ones or the concentrated interests will overwhelm the diffuse interests)

And the biggest thing that bothers me about it is that there’s literally no harm in trying. Everyone votes for a “Pictures of your puppies and kittens” forum for a 6 month test and it bombs, so what? Either lock it and toss it into a “Discarded forums” section or merge it back with MPSIMS. Either way, it’s literally a click of a button in vB.

Yeah–and that’s the problem. Calls for a politics forum have gone back to at least 2003 or further. The “standard” objections (“how do you determine what’s political and what’s not?”, “Who’ll mod it?”, “we don’t want to create another subject-based fora”) are either legit concerns that many, MANY other boards have dealt with or they’re bookkeeping/definitional ones. These aren’t unsolvable problems, but bluntly, the staff has a 100% veto and the posters have little-to-no way to force the issue.

I agree with you 100%

In addition, the “Open a new thread on the same topic” almost inevitably kills the topic. Except for the Diablo 2 and the World of Warcraft threads, I can’t think of any topic-driven thread (as opposed to the “Ask the Gay Guy” which was driven by an individual poster) that’s survived a transition to a new thread. For whatever reason, starting over kills all momentum.

PS: Thanks for the title fix. :slight_smile:

19

Excellent post and I agree completely with both it and Fenris’ post as well.

I’ve long been an outspoken proponent for a US Politics Forum, simply because there’s so much of it on the boards, and I don’t think the average US poster here realises it (or- and this is my personal feeling- they’re so caught up in that they like having most of boards given over to it at times), but the fact is that whenever anything important politcally happens in the US, at least two forums (GD and The Pit) turn into “US Politics Ahoy!”

Now, the thing with healthcare is that people internationally can contribute- places like the UK, Canada, and Australia have Universal Health Care and people in those places can explain the benefits, dispel the untruths, and generally engage in an intelligent, involved debate on the subject. But US Politics are highly “Foreigner-Exclusive”; we’ve generally got no idea who many of the people involved are or why Senator Smith’s statement/proposal/views are an unacceptable affront to right-thinking people.

The really insulting thing, though- after literally years of being told that it’s just not possible (for various vague and ill-defined reasons) to establish a Politics Forum- was to suddenly have several (IMHO) useless forums added to the boards (all of them, combined, have less than 400 threads and 300 posts).

If we can have four ghost-forums here, then we can add a US Politics one and it shouldn’t be any skin off anyone’s nose. If it works, great, it means that the politics are in one place and everyone knows where it is if they want to talk politics. If it doesn’t work, it’s not going to be any different from the existing forums that lie fallow, and there don’t seem to be any problems just letting them sit there and do nothing most of the time.

There is, as far as I can see, absolutely no legitimate reason not to put a Politics forum in, and if you were clever you could make some money off it and maybe getting some of the candidates (or their underlings) to sign up and explain viewpoints, policies, etc. It doesn’t just have to be somewhere to put “Sarah Palin Is A [Unflattering Noun], Take 4,387” or “George W. Bush Is a War Criminal Super Turbo Alpha Edition” threads.

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Is the problem that no one wants to mod such a forum?