you're in greeeeaaaat company....

i really think all the sick burns are ruining this forum. we need to address and mod that.

72off, did you edit in the /r so that everyone got the joke, or did kbfc ninja edit his post? Please be the latter

This just doesn't hold up to scrutiny at all.

To wit, right now there are a small handful of posters who have become bad caricatures of themselves posting poorly and in high volume across multiple sports and basically hijacking/trainwrecking nearly every discussion they enter for their own amusement. Using your philosophy they should be allowed to continue doing so unchecked because they ARE the forum, when in fact in their current state the forum would almost certainly be better if their posts weren't allowed to exist.

I agree that overmoderation sucks, but it's gone on so long that basically doing nothing is the worst thing right now. It's unfair to the average user who actually wants to discuss sports in SE - and hopefully have fun while doing it -and they are the ones that should be catered to.

I can't wait til I've been here for 4 years and get to reminisce on the good ol' days and how great things used to be. There's a psychological name for that phenomenon but since I didn't pay attention in psych, I don't remember it

no i suck, so it's definitely the former. too often my "subtle" "jokes" have gone unacknowledged, so i guess in this case i went ahead and explained it in a Karak-esque manner, so that even the dumbest SE reg couldn't miss what i was getting at. my analogies.

halycon days

I don't know who these people are who would otherwise be contributing good content, but I'm skeptical that they exist in any meaningful number. I think what you're seeing is a forum that hit a sweet-spot that was probably unsustainable, and has since gradually regressed to the mean a little bit due to all sorts of real-life influences that should be expected in any group of people in any context. No amount of legislating is going to change that; it's just the way life is.

And I think there's a 2nu2 metaphor in here somewhere!

has kbfc just been ignoring the accusations that he doesn't really know anything about the SE forums besides TZ, or is he just posting in spite of them?

either way, a falling tide lowers all boats. if the 'best' posters start posting like garbage, the rest of the forum will soon follow suit. it is really easy for a sports-based forum to become terrible. it's a credit to both the posters and the mods that this one has not.

I think its cyclical. Right now, because of the forum dynamic, it has become homogenized as posters have been encouraged to adopt certain standards. In return, you get a group of posters that mostly think the same way or, to seek acceptance, post the same way. The only outliers that are accepted are those with spectacular traits of bad, outrageous, controversy, etc.

Therefore, at the moment, the forum lacks grist for the mill; posters want to communicate; but there are few moderate dissenting opinions to drive interesting debate.

For example, it has been made quite clear to me that responding to legal questions from the perspective of a practising lawyer, even in threads where the topic concerns legal issues not raised or solicited by me, is considered "killing a thread." So, you won't see much of that from me and I quite happily crawl back in my hole located in the soccer threads.

So, as a result, in such threads, such issues are discussed superficially among people inclined to agree with each other.

The last 2 pages make me want to quit SE

A+

Let's start a 4 Loko forum.

Have you had the new formula yet?

it tastes similar but there's clearly something missing. I miss the caffeine

Daniel Tosh's new standup takes shots at Favre, Big Ben, and Mormons. Tosh confirmed SE poster.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but I didn't expect so much of the special to be what I saw in Chicago. Got pumped for a rerun

Maybe the "wannabe highbrows" read stuff like this and think, "Why do I even want to discuss anything with these pricks?"

I'm glad the NFL is in the offseason so that the ****tardery doesn't actually interfere with anything I want to read.

in before the sources of ****tardery come back with a meme, one-liner, or snarky comment about how they're glad people like me are posting less so they can be free to play in their own ****.

if i interpreted vic's posts correctly, it's the "wannabe highbrows" who act high and mighty about their sport, but don't provide any content, instead choosing to bitch, troll, and meme their way into jackassery.

yes that's clearly what he meant but he is incorrect. More to the point, the "wannabee highbrows" who supposedly don't contribute anything are annoyed that whenever they do or want to they have to wade through dozens of dumb memes in order to respond, or their post goes unnoticed.

i'll admit that i'm mostly in nba and nfl threads, so i don't know what's going on in baseball, soccer and hockey. but in the threads that i read/participate in, real content tends to be responded to, but there is far too much "lol @ u", "show your work" and "you don't know what you don't know" from people who used to provide content.

lol @ u, why don't u show ur work?

u must be s$d or m$d - irregardless you dont know what you dont know.

I probably shouldn't say anything, because I'll likely be woefully inarticulate, but oh well.

I'll use TZ, and NBA discussion since I read it the most. This probably happens in the MLB discussion, and maybe the soccer. It doesn't seem to happen as much in NFL.

The problem, imo, is that the good posters (and I'll reference Assani here) seem to always fall back on, "we've had this discussion for the last three years here. we're right, and you should just take our word for it." Or, there's an immediate accusation of "leveling." How does this encourage discussion? Yes, there are trolls who just like to get things started with Kobe is better than LeBron, etc. But not everyone who has the casual fan opinion is a troll. But they're treated like one.

I'm sure that doesn't make sense to anyone else but me. Oh well.