You made an anecdotal claim that some unnamed person who is very successful was banned for an unspecified reason. This isn't sufficient information for me to comment. Can you be more specific what your points is? I am also unsure what "straight jacket for excellence" means.

No, I was talking about users in general, not mods. While a proactive mod could ban problematic posters on his own initiative I believe it's the community that should self-police. Instead of engaging trolls they should be put on ignore. One might think that something positive has been achieved when responding over and over again to a dense poster not interested in genuine discourse if only to not let the questionable posts stand unchallenged. I disagree. What happened is that the thread just became unreadable.


Agreed.

Signal-to-noise ration combined with volume. A user who rarely posts but is always terrible is less of a problem than a frequent poster who has often terrible.

This site has more than a hundred (I believe?) unpaid volunteer mods that don't exactly go through extreme vetting. Not everyone will be happy with what those mods do and some mods might be downright terrible.
Again self-policing of the community. Mods shouldn't act unilaterally (non-obvious cases) and respond to feedback (while avoiding a tyranny of the majority). If enough posters reasonably(*) complain about a poster the mod should act. If enough posters reasonably complain about a mod Mat Sklansky should act.

(*) there will always be judgement calls.

So more infractions leading up to bannings as I suggested?

Ok, what's the question. Because I don't see one here:

I don't know why you keep bringing up the success or wealth of a poster as if this had any influence on how they should be treated. I don't understand poster number 1 and poster number 2 and 3 should be discouraged from posting in this manner.

I would certainly hope after all these years no one needs to use the term "anecdotal claim" about my posts. In real life I'm used to my words being sufficient on their own based on reputation.

Well I have been reading about world order a bit, specifically World order by Henry Kissinger and the grand chessboard by zbinew brezinski. I think we are at a very very critical moment in politics not unlike 80 years ago. In short it is very very difficult to build consensus, it can't be bottled or in this day and age contained. zbinew once said that for thousands of years it was much easier to control a million people than to kill a million people but that now it is much easier to kill a million people than to control a million people. So in my mind I don't think you can create excellence by constraint anymore....
applying some political stuff I read to this conversation is probably a stretch.



we can agree to disagree. I know from my own experience I have been considered unsaveable by a lot of people, a lost cause and eventually I understood things that seemed impossible to others for me to get. I'm a pretty big black sheep. In wils case and in a few others cases what I have seen happen is that a group of posters on your social forums continually manipulates people who just want to talk into seeming like trolls for whatever it is they get out of it. I have noticed you have 20 posters who are willing to pile onto someone who says something we will just say politically incorrect for now, but hardly any of those posters seem interested to me in discussing the larger problems that we have today. I personally changed my opinion on TPP, I was against it but now I'm for it. No one really wanted to discuss the tpp despite that being the most important piece of legislation in years.


makes sense to me

I understand. I wouldn't have said anything if I wasn't reading this at the right time and my main point was I think wil and some others like him are lumped in with just actual trolls and that's lazy. wil acts like a normal human being when he is talked to normally. people give up on relationships too easily. No one needs to lawyer up or anything. No person of understanding is going to go full hate at this site. but if you make enough bad judgement calls the mediocre posters and trolls will spend a lot of time complaining and the people in the cat bird seats will just walk away. I never walk away from things because I don't have anything to lose.


Ive always thought the mods here were pretty decent I don't see a problem with this system. I just see a problem with judgement.




The thing is that a lot of talented people have never been treated like that before. If you don't see what's wrong with the example I gave then we aren't going to see eye to eye on a lot of things. not a big deal. I have never brought up anyone's wealth outside of this thread when discussing moderating decisions.

I do not know who you are (in real life) and your posting history has nothing to do with me using "anecdotal claim". I didn't mean to imply that I don't believe you but was referring to your sample size of 1.

...ok?

You talked about one poster who has banned. I don't know why he was banned because you did not mention the reason. I don't have enough information to form an opinion about this incident. Adding that he is a highly successful person doesn't change that.
Can you help me understand what my take away from this situation should have been?

The thing is that I'm not trying to convince you of anything. We had a good conversation and I'm leaving it on good terms. based on your last two posts I don't think it has been as productive as I would have liked. I understand that (and disagree) that a posters success does not change your modding decisions and have already stated that previously. You have made it abundantly clear from your 4 posts where you state success has nothing to do with moderating decisions so I'm not sure why you keep bringing it up.

Your take away should be that you have to be careful when deciding who is and isn't a problem poster. How you make your exact decisions and what works for you isn't up to me or of my concern.

Mat mentioned just closing politics altogether which is probably what I would do
Although you might find things are about to be a lot more political as consensus unravels.

That consensus im talking about has nothing to do with poker or anything im just talking about international norms. I don't know whats going to happen in the future so I don't know why I would bring that up.

I guess I think getting rid of the politics forum would be esy but I mean with trump and brexit and le pen and the ukranian situation and syria, I don't think people realize how serious the political situation is right now. You could close it down and then find out you want to open it back up later.

I don't take disagreement personal. Parting on good terms was never in jeopardy. (don't know how to phrase this better)

Did the mod in question knew who he was banning? I assumed he did not know. If we had a known high caliber posters like Phil Ivey, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Salman Rushdie etc. who hypothetically behave like dicks I think they should get a little bit more leeway (up to a point) than a regular joe because they bring more to the table.
Not banning an anonymous poster on the tiny chance they might fall into that category isn't practical though.
Ok, that was post number 5. Agree to disagree. Have a nice day.

When the people running the henhouse get overthrown, they call that a coop d'état.

Thanks!

Meh, if I were Mat, I'd strongly consider moving politics to the Lounge, and having one politics forum rule them all with almost no modding.

The problem in politics threads is one man's trolling is the next woman's worthwhile content. And the answer has always been the same. Put the poster you don't like on ignore and don't feed them if you think they're a troll.

But somehow the people who are whining just have to put the "troll" straight.

This does not prevent others from engaging the troll from here to eternity.

Plus ignore doesn't work on Tapatalk.

The double-standard is ****ing hilarious on P7 and P. Einbert is a hard core dem, therefore complete pass. Any idiot SMPer can see that, almost any apparently.

Lounge w little to no moderation that caters to no one and attracts non voters is better than moderation that cater to half the voters.

Meh, I am using the lounge more instead of PP7

Grunching, OP is still posting here, so clearly self-regulation is a failure

This is demonstrably wrong. Trump supporters are not interested in discussion, only in making unsupported statements that are wrong more often than not. If you can't support your assertions you should get the ban hammer.