First, I want to report that Mr. and Ms. sunnyheel have evacuated our St. Petersburg home for higher ground following a grueling exercise in storm prep anticipating the worst case scenario and with the wreckage of Helene fresh in our minds and mostly still in our neighborhoods.
This thread stirs a lot of memories and emotions over decades. The most important thing to recognize is the effort and obvious conscientiousness that Snoop exercised voluntarily on behalf of everyone in our Board community. Big thanks for your years of service and now your willingness to expose us to your inner workings.
That said, moderation was the impetus for my disillusionment with the old board but perhaps not in the way that most of the complainers describe. Their gripes are about what they view as unfair treatment due to partisan bias, but I perceived the problem as capriciousness.
We all know that enforcement of the “no personal attacks” was uneven and therefore perceived as random or, in the eyes of the perpetually aggrieved, motivated by that librul bias. In reality, the moderators heard so much rightist whinging about bias, they overcompensated at times by heavy-handed enforcement against liberals. Case in point: my posting was oftentimes inflected by provocation and rhetorical embellishment. I was warned not to use the term Uncle Tom as applied to Black politicians and pundits who traded in racist tropes (that would be easily recognized as such if published by a white author) in pursuit of career advancement or the approval of white racist audiences/benefactors. I felt that banning this term was a token gesture to assuage the whiners and not a real call out of any form of hate speech.
In search of an alternative to this verboten term that fully captured the essence of these players of the (self-hating) race card, I came upon the term kapo which is a reference to the Jews who were vilified by their cohorts for aiding Nazi persecution and genocide in order to draw the favor of their captors. Despite the effective obsolescence of this term and its lack of any bigoted connotation, the “hive” determined that this would be an opportune occasion to lay down the ban hammer, which I avoided by a promise of compliance.
This is just an example that remains clear to me, but we all know how sensitive the mods became to the aspersions of librul bias. Hasta la vista Ovshinsky and vojak.
The thing that agitated me the most, though, was the absolute refusal of moderation for violations of the clear prohibition on posting copyrighted material. Certain posters had developed the annoying habit of copying and pasting whole columns and essays from other publications. Without enforcement, the gruesome habit spread to “re-tweeting” twitter posts, and soon the board’s tone and content shifted to that of mainstream social media.
I kept visiting despite the downgrade and the non-responsiveness of moderation to my appeals until other factors prompted my decision to jump ship.
So I want to ask Snoop, who has been so earnest in defense of his dedication to the preservation of board standards, why this constant, arrant flouting of clear rules was allowed to persist.
Now I’m pretty sure Snoop was not the determining authority on this practice of non-enforcement, but I would like to know how it can be such a necessary burden to enforce some rules and contrariwise for others, all developed presumably as a setting of standards.
Finally I want to make clear that I favor a more free-wheeling experience (with the usual exceptions for hate speech, doxxing, and personal attacks) and give big kudos for the way Rock has set this place up. On this thread some of the posters who were penalized for their bad faith style have outed themselves for righteousness application of the super ignore hammer.
