I'm a former IC ZZL/P Mod = AMA

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gtyellowjacket said:
So why were you willing to let posters you agreed with break the rules for so long while "enjoying using the ban hammer", as you noted, for people you didn't agree with?

Did you consider yourself a good mod because you encouraged homogeneous viewpoints or did you really believe you were sanctioning posters you didn't agree with because they broke the rules more often?
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Lmao godalmighty have some damn pride for once in your life and quit your whining and crying about friggin' message board moderation. Jesus Christ, man.

Posters like WMHeel, WaynetheDrain, ZooView, and a handful of other liberal regulars were banned- sometimes multiple times- for violation of board rules. I got warned by PM multiple times that my next same offense would warrant a ban- and I deserved it every time.
 
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gtyellowjacket said:
So why were you willing to let posters you agreed with break the rules for so long while "enjoying using the ban hammer", as you noted, for people you didn't agree with?

Did you consider yourself a good mod because you encouraged homogeneous viewpoints or did you really believe you were sanctioning posters you didn't agree with because they broke the rules more often?
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What rules were they breaking?
 
UNCMSinLS said:
Snoop, how did your corporate overlords feel about you and others referring board members to this site during the last days of ZZLP?

Option 1: Get as much of that riff-raff out of here as possible;
Option 2: What are you doing ... those are/could be paying customers;
Option 3: Who cares ... the political board doesn't amount to a hill of beans; or
Option 4: None of the above.

Inquiring minds want to know.
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I didn't hear much directly from the PTB about the closing of the ZZLP nor referring folks to the new site.

It seemed that the PTB didn't want to appear to be "endorsing" this site in any way, so there wasn't an official "go over to that site" for all your political discussion post type thing.

But if you look at the IC ZZLP now, the first unpinned post at the top of the board is about this site. I don't think that's a coincidence.

I think that once IC made the decision that they weren't going to deal with political discussion any longer, they were generally ok with another place coming along to handle that discussion elsewhere. They weren't going to make it anything official, but they weren't going to fight it, either.

And if you think about it, if most of the highly political posters went somewhere else for that discussion, it lowered the likelihood that it kept popping up around IC.

Also, this is 3rd "breakaway" board I've been a part of related to IC. They've actually been decently cool about all 3 of them as long as the arguments or actions from those boards didn't spill back over onto IC.
 
LMFAO at being so sensitive and weak that you can be "personally insulted" by anything said by someone whom you don't know and have never and will never meet, from an anonymous online message board full of goobers with made-up usernames like SnoopRob and ZooView.

My god, some of y'all need to get out of your safe space a little more and join the real world.
 
2ManyBlueCups said:
Oh yeah, I reported it. I still have the screenshots.
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Interesting.

Without knowing all the details, it'd be hard for me to fully know what happened.

Typically, those kinds of offenses were straight-to-permaban. But it seems some kind of adjustment was made based on the specific details of that situation.
 
SnoopRob said:
I didn't hear much directly from the PTB about the closing of the ZZLP nor referring folks to the new site.

It seemed that the PTB didn't want to appear to be "endorsing" this site in any way, so there wasn't an official "go over to that site" for all your political discussion post type thing.

But if you look at the IC ZZLP now, the first unpinned post at the top of the board is about this site. I don't think that's a coincidence.

I think that once IC made the decision that they weren't going to deal with political discussion any longer, they were generally ok with another place coming along to handle that discussion elsewhere. They weren't going to make it anything official, but they weren't going to fight it, either.

And if you think about it, if most of the highly political posters went somewhere else for that discussion, it lowered the likelihood that it kept popping up around IC.

Also, this is 3rd "breakaway" board I've been a part of related to IC. They've actually been decently cool about all 3 of them as long as the arguments or actions from those boards didn't spill back over onto IC.
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Would be even better if the folks who still posted on ZZL and Heel Talk came here. This seems like a more active board than those and the board software is a lot better than the IC boards.
 
SnoopRob said:
I think any business model that relies on "insider knowledge" will have issues in the age of social media. There's just no way to keep that knowledge at all a secret for more than 20 seconds when it only takes a couple of folks to tweet it out to undo all the work.

The sites that make it (for any real length of time in the future) will be the ones who have built great communities that keep folks coming back not just for the info but also for the sense of belonging. I think IC has done that fairly well and so they should have some success.

The hard part is that sites like IC (and all of 247 and rivals and On3 and whomever else) is that without the lure of "insider knowledge", it's hard to get folks to join to begin with. From what I can tell, the IC userbase is aging and there aren't a lot of youngsters left. The subscription model can work as long as you've got living, breathing subscribers to pay the tab, but I imagine that it's tough when you aren't getting a lot of youngsters to join the site.

Note: I was never given access to any subscriber data for IC, so these are just my thoughts.
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I'll be honest, I was one that joined while on campus as an undergrad, was banned from ZZLP and thus canceled my membership. I have a friend who is also a subscriber and simply sends any decent info in a screenshot to out group text. I wouldn't have canceled if I wasn't banned. However, I understand Ben's need and desire to get rid of the ZZLP sideshow.
 
gtyellowjacket said:
So why were you willing to let posters you agreed with break the rules for so long while "enjoying using the ban hammer", as you noted, for people you didn't agree with?

Did you consider yourself a good mod because you encouraged homogeneous viewpoints or did you really believe you were sanctioning posters you didn't agree with because they broke the rules more often?
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I don't think we let posters consistently break the rules without getting bans (or at least warnings).

I know you're likely to bring up the "personal insult" rule, but that rule was announced as relaxed on the ZZLP when it was formed. (We can certainly have a discussion around whether that was a good idea or not, but it wasn't applied unfairly.) But "both sides" were allowed to make insults as long as they didn't break any other rules. (One issue that conservatives had is that their insults sometimes broke rules because they used bigoted slurs.)

We also tried to apply small bans and work up to bigger bans. We gave out small bans to folks all across the political spectrum. Some folks learned from those bans and some didn't.

Finally, we also tried to apply some standard of a ratio to posters in handing out bans. If someone comes on the board every day and engages in discussion in a decent way, they probably got a little latitude when it came to the occasional post that might be over the line (we'd clean it up and give then a warning PM to knock it off). If you have a different poster that only shows up occasionally and most of their posts seemed design to merely attract attention and disrupt discussion, then they're going to catch a ban more quickly after they'd been previously warned. If you post largely every day and you only occasionally have a questionable post, you likely add value to the board and you get a little leeway. If you only show up when there's a major political issue in the news and the majority of your posts on the board are problematic, you're likely going to get sanctioned by the mods. A lot of the conservatives banned were in the latter category.
 
SnoopRob said:
I don't think we let posters consistently break the rules without getting bans (or at least warnings).

I know you're likely to bring up the "personal insult" rule, but that rule was announced as relaxed on the ZZLP when it was formed. (We can certainly have a discussion around whether that was a good idea or not, but it wasn't applied unfairly.) But "both sides" were allowed to make insults as long as they didn't break any other rules. (One issue that conservatives had is that their insults sometimes broke rules because they used bigoted slurs.)

We also tried to apply small bans and work up to bigger bans. We gave out small bans to folks all across the political spectrum. Some folks learned from those bans and some didn't.

Finally, we also tried to apply some standard of a ratio to posters in handing out bans. If someone comes on the board every day and engages in discussion in a decent way, they probably got a little latitude when it came to the occasional post that might be over the line (we'd clean it up and give then a warning PM to knock it off). If you have a different poster that only shows up occasionally and most of their posts seemed design to merely attract attention and disrupt discussion, then they're going to catch a ban more quickly after they'd been previously warned. If you post largely every day and you only occasionally have a questionable post, you likely add value to the board and you get a little leeway. If you only show up when there's a major political issue in the news and the majority of your posts on the board are problematic, you're likely going to get sanctioned by the mods. A lot of the conservatives banned were in the latter category.
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That wasn't my experience. I was a member for over a decade and was given a permaban by you with no warning or temporary ban(s). I can't help wondering how many other folks got the same treatment.
The reasons you gave were trolling and contrarianism. Of course trolling was rife and certainly allowed for the posters you agreed with while contrarianism wasn't against the rules and really doesn't make a whole lot of sense on a discussion board assuming you wanted people to discuss things.

My question is why did did you apply the rules unevenly to people that you didn't agree with versus people that you did? Do you think that made you a good mod because it got rid of the minority that people didn't like or what?
 
nashcounty said:
Since Snoop said we could ask anything, why does my daughter insist on trying to wash my cast iron skillets? I mean, she's my little girl and I love her so very much, but she needs to leave my frying pans alone.
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When I was a kid, I took my Dad's cast iron skillet on a camping trip, with his permission. When I was cleaning it up on that last morning of the camping trip, I took it down to the creek bank and scrubbed it out with sand, soap, and running water. I scoured that thing down to the bright metal. I was so proud. When I got home and engaged in a show & tell about what I had done with my Dad, he didn't get mad, but he did explain to me in some detail the concept behind seasoning a pan and assured me that he'd have that pan back to where he wanted in no time flat.
 
05C40 said:
When I was a kid, I took my Dad's cast iron skillet on a camping trip, with his permission. When I was cleaning it up on that last morning of the camping trip, I took it down to the creek bank and scrubbed it out with sand, soap, and running water. I scoured that thing down to the bright metal. I was so proud. When I got home and engaged in a show & tell about what I had done with my Dad, he didn't get mad, but he did explain to me in some detail the concept behind seasoning a pan and assured me that he'd have that pan back to where he wanted in no time flat.
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I did the exact same thing! Once.
 
WBroylesH said:
I'm not a paid subscriber, so perhaps my presence means less. But I am a pair of eyeballs who saw the ads and (sometimes) was persuaded by them.

I haven't been on IC since they shut ZZLP down. I'll probably go back once basketball gets rolling, but I don't know that for sure. If the threads on here are good I might just read/post on here.

I think the IC people ought to know that, while they may be preserving their subscriber base, they're going to lose ad revenue.
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There’s nothing worth reading on the bball board…nothing.
 
Zoo_View said:
So, you got “insider” info 30-60 seconds before the rest of the world and the privilege of reading political opinions “disguised” as football commentary on The Tar Pit!
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How much 'insider' info do these site operators really share? Especially that isn't related to recruiting but what is currently going on in the locker room? You might get some good scuttlebutt on the message boards (hence their importance), but rarely is it the publisher sharing the good stuff about non-recruiting gossip/inside info. Or perhaps it's as you said, anything they share is also posted on 5 other fan sites/newspapers so it isn't viewed as inside info....
 
gtyellowjacket said:
That wasn't my experience. I was a member for over a decade and was given a permaban by you with no warning or temporary ban(s). I can't help wondering how many other folks got the same treatment.
The reasons you gave were trolling and contrarianism. Of course trolling was rife and certainly allowed for the posters you agreed with while contrarianism wasn't against the rules and really doesn't make a whole lot of sense on a discussion board assuming you wanted people to discuss things.

My question is why did did you apply the rules unevenly to people that you didn't agree with versus people that you did? Do you think that made you a good mod because it got rid of the minority that people didn't like or what?
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I'll take the last part first...we worked fairly hard to apply the rules evenly in nearly all situations. It certainly had a disparate impact between liberals and conservatives, but that has more to do with how folks self-select into each party than it does with how the rules were applied.

As far as your ban, you were outside the norm as I believe you got one of our "for the good of the board" bans reserved for folks who don't go to extremes but who consistent ride right on top of the line when it comes to trolling or other issues.

The crux of your issue is that you take a contrarian stance and you don't learn a damned thing from others in discussion with them. You'll stake out an opposing view from the majority and someone can spend pages presenting you with some of the best data and research on a topic and you'll just truck along ignoring every damned piece of it to simply restate your disagreement. You don't engage with their posts and the information you are presented in any meaningful way. The refusal to engage with said posts and information was the reason your posting style was deemed trolling.

You are correct that you never got a formal warning, although you had received some in-thread warnings throughout the years. If it makes you feel better, I initially thought that we should have given you a formal warning before putting in the ban for you and argued for a bit that was the better course of action. What eventually convinced me was that another mod pointed out that you pulled this same shit for years and, if you were suddenly able to change based on one warning, it was proof that you'd been knowingly trolling all that time. And if you weren't intentionally trolling by never engaging with others' posts presenting you with facts and research and it was just part of who you are as a real person, then a warning wasn't going to do any good. In short, either you'd trolled for years and had barely escaped formal warnings or you were just a regular poster whose style of posting comes off as a troll. And so we went ahead and banned you.
 
05C40 said:
When I was a kid, I took my Dad's cast iron skillet on a camping trip, with his permission. When I was cleaning it up on that last morning of the camping trip, I took it down to the creek bank and scrubbed it out with sand, soap, and running water. I scoured that thing down to the bright metal. I was so proud. When I got home and engaged in a show & tell about what I had done with my Dad, he didn't get mad, but he did explain to me in some detail the concept behind seasoning a pan and assured me that he'd have that pan back to where he wanted in no time flat.
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I've always only ever put a little bit of water (never soap of any kind) on the hot iron skillet after I'm finished cooking and let the scalding water do its thing...
 
CFordUNC said:
I think we need some IC reparations for this long-standing psychological trauma that Snoop's moderation reign of terror has imparted upon certain folks.
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Oh, the horror! Oh, the dilemma! Those wanting the reparations are the same who don't want to ever consider reparations. Perhaps the more appropriate restitution would be longer bootstraps.
 
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