Aye, one of the best 2+2 experiments.

I don't think there should be any regrets.

Here for the morphine

My dad just had back surgery and he's on dilaudid and hydracodone for like 6 weeks. I plan to call him every other day because I love him and the new conversations we have.

I would agree with this, but if I recall correctly, a couple of the posters I believe quite capable of making good posts were going to debate/discuss valuation of human lives and got side-tracked by a poo-flinging contest. That might be in agreement with what you said. Not completely sure.

It wasn't a failure. Not by a long shot.

Well-written post, btw. "Passed" not "past," but I can find no fault in the sentiment; I can find no fault in the thoughtfulness; I can find no fault in the clarity. If someone else can find fault, **** 'em. They are an *******.

Time doesn't work as a "limited resource" in the way I was talking about. First, people are quite 'happy' (willing?) to spend time posting crap. Speaking for myself I clearly have an urge to spend time arguing with people I think are wrong even if the post doesn't really improve the quality of the forum. The act of telling someone being stupid that they're stupid seems to have intrinsic value to a lot of us here even if the ending post doesn't add anything.

More importantly, time doesn't have a few necessary qualities like the ability to save or trade it. Maybe if you instituted something like an allotted amount of posting time per day to people and they could save that or trade or use it to negate someone else's posting time you might be able to do something cool. Not sure.

Matt getting all emo up in this thread.

FREE PU!

I'm raising my glass to Mat, and again to all the posters.

The day comes soon to pour one out for unchained, today is not yet that day.

Fwiw I enjoyed PU, thanks for creating it. Curses to those who trashed the place.

Can't say I am sorry to see it go.

I thought there would be political discourse that wasn't neutered. But idiots used it as a place to spam.

Matt's been threatening to shut down PU for months, who knows if he really means it this time. If this really is the end, I just want to tell spanky to shut the **** up one last time. Seriously, you're a ****ty person and you should feel bad.

The solution just hit me.

If there is a market for ideas (as academics love to say - and which makes sense), let's take that analogy further.

Surely the poo flinging can be likened to inferior goods, and decent political discourse can be likened to normal goods.

Censorship can be thought of as a cost of production for posts. So as censorship is reduced, costs of production decrease, post quality goes to ****. But censorship defeats the purpose of the forum.

But what about the income effect? Isn't "intellectual wealth" a factor?

And don't a particular type of high quality goods - Giffen Goods - actually have increased demand as income increases? Isn't quality discussion a sort of Giffen good, where increased "intellectual income" is the most important determinant of quality discussion.

If people who want to be intellectual have a place to do so freely, income effects suggest that quality discussion will increase supply and demand in equilibrium as income increases.

So logic suggests that a sort of "political awareness or political intelligence" test as a way of screening entry to unchained would work.

Then again, literacy tests for participation haven't had the best history as a political participation screen, at least in the USA.

First, if the point of unchained is to let every speak their minds and not silence minority opinions, then no sort of point system or cancellation protocol will produce the desired results.

Second, the minority opinions are bad because they're so poorly formed. Their owners defer to poo flinging to cover this fact up (see the anarchy thread) and given the freedom of this forum there's nothing to stop the majority opinion posters from responding in kind.

The outcome of this forum is the only possible outcome.

Not true. It's just a matter of balancing costs. Imagine a simplistic system where everybody can post 5 times a day. But you can trade 2 of your posts to take away 1 post from someone else.

You might easily end up with a system where many non-offensive minority opinions aren't worth censoring but the truly horrible stuff is.

For example, I'd trade 1 of my posts to silence an idiot like mark####. I could probably find 9 other people that agree with me. But I wouldn't bother spending any of my posts to silence someone like Spanks.

Would anyone pay money to keep PU open? If so, how much?

One time.

Literacy tests and admission fees. Let's put the U in PU

Money for temp-bans/post deletions would also be pretty awesome (aka, I could buy the right to delete someone's post for $0.50, and to temp-ban them for $10/day)!*

I actually considered at one point building forum software that would let you do a bunch of these things. But then my real job got in the way.

Edit: Just for the record, I think this would be a fun experiment and would end up with what anarchy would look like - the rich imposing their moral/ethical beliefs on the poor.

I think silencing people is exactly what we don't want though. And all this idea does is allow majority opinions to effectively silence minority opinions by sheer volume.

Also, mark2468 is a horrible example because he doesn't advance ideas so much as spew a general hatred of women everywhere he posts.

I disagree. Silencing is exactly the thing we want. PU would be awesome if we could silence all the moronic poo-flinging and extreme offensive material (sexism, racism, etc.). So all you have to do is figure out how to balance incentives against moronic poo-flinging and towards high quality posts.

I think silencing spank, MD, and Alex would have an incredibly positive effect on PU.

It would be politics chained if we did that.

The Mocking Silencers