On Board Decorum

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nycfan

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I posted a version of this on another thread but wanted to have a separate thread specific to the topic of board demeanor, which I think is getting more course and sophomoric in some instances in ways that undermine the general user experience.

Our goal here is to give adults room for wide ranging discussions, which can often lead to heated rhetoric. We’ve tried to leave space for that, too, and let people opt out with the various ignore functions. But overall I think we need to try to rein in insulting language that undermines threads and devalues conversations.

As a poster pointed out in another thread, allowing posters to self-police their experience has its limits if vulgar, needlessly personally insulting and similar childish behavior becomes a norm. The individual ignore functions make-your-own-experience structure still relies on a basic agreement on decorum among all posters — if the unfiltered conversations become a cesspool, then the filters will eventually isolate good will community members and eventually only the cess pool will remain.

Anyway, we’re pretty far from a cesspool even unfiltered at this point, more a problem of personal insults and name-calling for its own sake proliferating among some posters. In other words, I don’t think I am the only one here noting a sense of slippage of the overall decorum that I (perhaps naively) hope can be improved upon with a gentle nudge.

Thanks.
 
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the smartest guy in the universe wrote on these boards that I guzzled Bibi's spunk because he disagreed with my take on the IDF vs Hamas. Best thing about these boards is super ignore.
 
the smartest guy in the universe wrote on these boards that [etc]. Best thing about these boards is super ignore.
A lot of folks have gripes about uncalled for insults, especially lately. In the interests of moving forward, I echo the suggestion that we not use this thread to litigate those prior incidents, but as an impetus to quit behaving like vulgar middle schoolers when frustrated or (worse) as bait to spam or derail a thread.
 
Can't we just all get along?

Or at least not call each other names.

I agree with the position. I'll do my part. I tend to go back and delete post when I am overboard.
 
I have a high tolerance for intense rhetoric and have opposed bans unless the posts cross the line and sink into bigoted/racist/ homophobic rantings.

I have not seen posts that reach that level on this board . A bit of personal cheekiness directed my way now and then has not bothered me.

I think the board monitoring has been admirable and hope it continues to allow raucous to and fro between the enlightened and less enlightened ;)
 
I'm going to always have some issues with some of the poseurs on this board and their faux arguments. They don't deserve any respect. I'm not sure how to leave their motives and methods unquestioned or unchallenged without at least some disparagement. I'm not a member of the "If you don't have something nice to say" school.
 
I'm going to always have some issues with some of the poseurs on this board and their faux arguments. They don't deserve any respect. I'm not sure how to leave their motives and methods unquestioned or unchallenged without at least some disparagement. I'm not a member of the "If you don't have something nice to say" school.
The greater problem is that once a poster has shown that they either aren't participating in good faith or that they're just a shitty person who supports shitty things, there's no real room for discussion that isn't largely disparaging the poster. You can only point out so many times how someone is taking an illogical stance, or that they do not engage with ample evidence that refutes their arguments, or that what they support is just a terrible way to treat others without eventually skipping the song-and-dance just moving directly to disparaging them. It saves time and annoyance for everyone once a poster has shown they aren't worth the time to craft multiple in-depth responses that go unread or unaddressed.

At that point is where the ignore/super ignore feature should be best deployed, but not everyone will do that in all, or even most, cases.
 
The greater problem is that once a poster has shown that they either aren't participating in good faith or that they're just a shitty person who supports shitty things, there's no real room for discussion that isn't largely disparaging the poster. You can only point out so many times how someone is taking an illogical stance, or that they do not engage with ample evidence that refutes their arguments, or that what they support is just a terrible way to treat others without eventually skipping the song-and-dance just moving directly to disparaging them. It saves time and annoyance for everyone once a poster has shown they aren't worth the time to craft multiple in-depth responses that go unread or unaddressed.

At that point is where the ignore/super ignore feature should be best deployed, but not everyone will do that in all, or even most, cases.
I don't mind wasting the time. I don't mind poking holes in their BS. It's whether or not if I'm bothering whoever would pass for an innocent bystander. Course, they could always ignore me, I guess.
 
I'm going to always have some issues with some of the poseurs on this board and their faux arguments. They don't deserve any respect. I'm not sure how to leave their motives and methods unquestioned or unchallenged without at least some disparagement. I'm not a member of the "If you don't have something nice to say" school.

Your statement is your issues are with posters faux arguments and you are ok with being disrespectful to them but do you have the same belief if they strongly disagree with you? As long as you're ok with your remarks being challenged with the same fervor as your response there should be no issue. You dont have the market cornered on being outraged.
 
Your statement is your issues are with posters faux arguments and you are ok with being disrespectful to them but do you have the same belief if they strongly disagree with you? As long as you're ok with your remarks being challenged with the same fervor as your response there should be no issue. You dont have the market cornered on being outraged.
Let's be clear. It's not outrage. It's more disappointment that they are such amateurish shit stirrers. If I had no conscience , I could probably argue their side better. Anybody's welcome to say anything they want to me. Somebody's opinion has to matter to me for what they say to bother me in the slightest. That is not going to be an anonymous poster on a message board. Does that answer you well enough?
 
Your statement is your issues are with posters faux arguments and you are ok with being disrespectful to them but do you have the same belief if they strongly disagree with you? As long as you're ok with your remarks being challenged with the same fervor as your response there should be no issue. You dont have the market cornered on being outraged.
There could still be an issue. It's not like he's the only person that sees the boorish behavior. It's a public message board, not the private messaging feature.

With that said, while I would prefer the message board to be a bit more polite, it's not that big a deal.
 
So I have been debating and discussing on The Internets since 1991 (then called usenet), meaning back when a lot of you were nothing but random molecules spread all over. I debated creationists on Talk.Origins after that, and debated philosophy on other sites--where people can get really, really mean discussing stuff like truth and will and language. Through all that, decorum is something like the question of what is art (I know it when I emote it).

In all that participation I have used some insults in choice spots, and my personal view of the art of this kind of board debating is that there are in fact choice spots, but it must be part of an argument about what someone is not just ignorant about, but displaying a willful and obnoxious ignorance. Seeing an ongoing tactic to replace failed arguments with a "fix" to troll and annoy, and then I may respond by saying something about "the person, not the argument" in that case. This is viewed as wrong in academic debate of course. But I am telling you that among the highest of the highfalutin academics, it still happens, often with exquisite relish and flair, and in peer reviewed published stuff as well. Emotion motivates debate for people of all intelligence levels and skills at expressing themselves.

Do I think any debate on any level is better without personal invective? Yes, it can be, but it's also, in any debate of real importance, that emotion-free zone is something like a long speech in total monotone. Less of is better for the same reason: all personal invective all the time also loses all force and utility. To quote a brilliant Neil Peart lyric it's like "voices in a hurricane." So my idea of a moderator is that she has an impossible job leading and sorting, making impossible-to-be-consistent maddening decisions all over the place. Have fun.

But I do think, always, a post with nothing but stupid insults has no purpose and should be zapped into nothingness. That is what caused me to report one of those yesterday.
 
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last week the board decided to pile on me for some reasomn. i got exceedingly frustrated and broke fingers in my left hand punching a wall. i cant type well and voice recognition works poorly for me because i cant pronounce one letter correctly. i am adding this only because people are so eager to judge people they dont know. its all fund and games until someone gets hurt.

*here are some things that people maybe dont know about me, first, i am autistic but never diagnosed and have only come recently to that realization. its one reason prob that i miss a lot of social nuance. i also dont get memes involving faces or emojis though the latter are most often used to insult me so i dont pay much attention.

*my sociali development as a young child was set back by being abused by family, and being excluded from social activities due to being pushed ahead three grades. also the teachers used to openly mock me in class because they thought it was fun to boost their standing with kids by making fun of the same people the kids did.

*i am naturally inclined toward homosexuality. but i cant possibly be gay because i have no idea hoow to do that, esp when i was younger. i can barely navigate the most common social situations. plus ive seen from friends and family life as a gay man is full of pain and rejection and i cant take that. plus i am not very good looking but i can be charming with women. so i decided a while back that my best bet was to get so good at sex that no woman in her right mind would want to leave me. i have succeeded and its the only accomplishment i am proud of. i enjoy giving my wife hours of pleasure until she is pudding on the bed and cant really move, but i dont get much personal fulfillment. i have to take care of myself.

*i have been open about my mental health struggles. what people dont know is that psych meds often lose effectiveness over time. they dont just stop working,. they just do less and it is hard to notice. i thought i was super stressed and off kilter because of election. i now think my meds were also wearing off and i didnt realize it because i thought it was just fear of fascism. i have been in therapy, but there is only so much that can do.

*what people do know about me is that i am intelligent, whether threy want to admit it or not. my iq is in the 150s. that is an objective fact in the universe. i cant make that go away. for most people that is the end of the story, i am full of myself and thus deserving of scorn. for me it is just the beginning. it doesnt make me superior as a person to have this talent (and it pretty much my onlty one, unless you count inadvertently alienating people). i still have to get by in the world. it is both blessing and curse. i dont claim to manage it perfectly or even well. i do my best.

here is an example. when i was in geometry class, the teacher used to explain problems by making fun of me. explaining the concept of triangles having the same ratio of sides even if the side length is different, he said its like if [super] built a shrink ray and shrank everyones pizza slices. they would be less filling but they would all add up to a circle. i finallty got sick of it and said that he didnt have to bring me into every explanation. he said that i i got 100 on everything anyway so i should learn to have a sense of humor. i told him in these words that he was a fucking dickhead who liked other dicks. it was homophobic but i was 10 and i didnt care. i got sent to the principals office and then i did every day until finally the principal wanted to know what happened. it had happened with other teachers but this was the worst. i told him that i was going to do it every single day until they just gave me the final exam and let me get out of class in jan. i aced it. the teacher was fired over the summer. nobody ever apologized to me.

so i took it on myself not to let that happen to me anymore. the next fall and throughout hs, i made it a point near the beginning of every class to call out the teachers when they would make mistakes. there are teachers here. y'all dont know how many mistakes you make. at least mine didnt. and then i would tell them that if they tried to humiliate me like mr. f, then i would humiliate them in return by exposing how stupid they were. it worked. blessing and curse. it was not the best way to handle it maybe but i was 11 and was dealing with that bullshit by myself.

*my dad used to punish me as a young boy by driving me somewhere miles from home, making me get out of the car and driving away. find your own way home. it was usually in a police car. but when the cop asked me where i went to school and i referred to the middle school at age 8, his attitude changed. i didnt need much protection i guess because i was smart. he told my dad that it wasnt the right thing to do even though i would be able to find my way home. no charges though. so it was up to me. in the car i took some of my dads business cards and when i got out i started hurling rocks through every store window around, and then put my dads card inside. told him it was going to cost him all that money everytime he did that. he stopped doing it and reverted to plain ole physical violence. but he was slow and fat and most of the time he could not catch me. sometimes i got pummeled but i preferred it to being abandoned. blessing and curse.

*so in the end i guess i come across as arrogrant. enouigh people tell me that. i do the best i can. at some point it is too exhausting to try to be someone else -- for instance by getting Bs which was an unsuccessful strategy for dealing with my teachers, or pretending not to understand health economics. so i am me, the best version of me that i can be, i am actually a good person i think but i am a repressed gay (or maybe trans adjacent) autistic dude with a history of abuse and other incidents nobody wants to hear about. nobody wanted to hear the above stuff either but i have to pad my post somehow to get it to proper super length.

i am not planning on posting here. typing is a problem. so is the fact that i have no desire to hang out where so many people clearly loathe me. so i will solve your super ignore problems for you.

but for the sake of decency, people -- especially progressives or liberals -- need to stop punching down on others. that is my message here. stop punching down. and since you might not know who is up or down, if you dont know them or what formed them, maybe stop punching. and if you want to deflecty responsibility by saying that i do it too, i dont care. i dont pick fights but i react to them. maybe i do more than that and dont realize it. regardless whether or not i am a hypocrite does not make your behavior ok.
 
i am not planning on posting here. typing is a problem. so is the fact that i have no desire to hang out where so many people clearly loathe me. so i will solve your super ignore problems for you.
I hope you will reconsider but of course you have to do what is right for you. I've learned a lot from you...
 
Stick around. You add things.

I can empathize with your past a bit more than you might expect. At least my mom had a bad enough experience in skipping grades, I was spared that one.
 
i am not planning on posting here.
Resignation not accepted. I also hope you eventually decide to stick around and to return to the board, even if you have to take some time away beforehand. Count me among those who've learned much from you and see you as a net plus here. Sincere best wishes to you and a speedy recovery to your hand injury. Please reach out if you need an anonymous ear.
 
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