Well Named,

What differences, specifically, do you see between the proposed forum and the current politics forum? Unless I'm missing something it's just the current political forum but those who have been exiled will get a second/third/fourth/whatever the number is chance to post there with a clean slate - which they will inevitably ruin since stupid racist people in general don't turn into smart non-racist people. Am I missing something?

The old forum was shutdown because of those complaints. Well named has made it pretty clear that isn't something he will allow. I believe him.

Also, this thread is here to help him decide if he even wants to go forward. He may decide it's not worth doing.

Rep,


What is it that you think I’m confused about exactly?

It’s pretty clear what’s acceptable in the politics forum. That’s not the issue here. The issue here is why there’s a discussion about creating a new forum. If it’s simply for the reasons you’ve stated, then it seems absurd to create a new forum. I believe that’s a discussion worth having.

Mat,

Why do you think there’s a need for an additional politics forum?

It is possible that there are two different approaches and they don't mix.

What you describe is what I tried to do with Pv7.0 - I failed but the fact I failed does not mean it cannot be done.

P does not generally believe in civility - the prevailing view is an ideological opposition to civil discussion with those they disagree with politically.

Maybe there is a constructive compromise - I'm all for that but is that what people want?

cheezelawg,

In case you missed it, "those they disagree with politically" right now includes pedophiles and people who want poor people to starve to death. Maybe those people's ideas don’t deserve civility? Just a thought.

You guys have SMP or whatever ****hole Zeno comes from if you want to have beard stroking discussions about the genetic inferiority of the negro or wtf ever you SMP guys are so upset over.

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/5...-want-1695425/

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/5...reply-1694943/

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/5...-zeno-1694754/

Here, have a good ~3k posts to read about the topic

First one is probably most relevant to Mat specifically

Lol. This isn't true and it will never be true regardless how many times or how many various clowns say it. I'm an SEer and not a politicker but just lol at this. I never have any problems with civility when I post in P as an "outsider".

WN wants the forum because he likes to have long, drawn out arguments with people he disagrees with and he thinks (more or less correctly) there is too much noise in the main Politics forum for those discussions to work well.

The exiled posters want a new forum because they hope they will be allowed to post in it in the same way that got them exiled.

Some of the non-exiled Politics regs want the forum because they enjoy mocking the sorts of people who got themselves exiled.

Mat wants to appease as many people as possible because the site is hemorrhaging users.

This issue has been dominating ATF across multiple threads for weeks because everybody loves meta arguments and relitigating old grudges.

He doesn't, never said so. He listened to other asking for one and Well Named (whom he trusts) contemplate the idea of moderating it.

He wants very little to do with politics on 2+2. He just wants WN to handle things as he sees fit and have the complaints sent to him.

He can correct me if I'm wrong.

Loki,


That seems like a constructive way to engage with viewpoints that differ from yours.

For you, el D



We tried this. It got less than thirty posts.

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/4...t=high+content

I don't have any major problems with the current politics forum. And neither does well named. The mods of that forum read these threads, and probably make certain adjustments as a result. So the creation of a new forum isn't necessarily related to the current politics forum.

I am always interested in new forums that might be interesting to a fair number of people. It doesn't happen very often. But, very specifically for well named, i am happy to allow him to experiment.

In my mind, this is not so much the creation of a new politics forum, but a well named forum. The exiled posters who have been participating in atf do not impress me. Sorry, but you guys aren't the reason i support a new forum.

I'm not sure why Timmay disagrees. P is in general quite openly opposed to civility with those they disagree with.

Loki is pretty good in that regard compared to many of the regulars.

Mat,


Fair enough, then. I personally think more forum consolidation would be better for 2p2 traffic than more forum fragmentation, especially wrt non-poker forums. But that of course is a whole other discussion.

Let me expand on this. On August 3rd I announced in the P7 mod thread that I was going to be mostly unavailable until the 15th:

On August 13th, the Unite the Right rally and attack occurred in Charlottesville. I was out of the country. There was a bunch of really ugly posting that followed, which led to the complaints that finally got P7 closed. I was not reading the forums at all at this time, but I checked briefly on the 14th and saw some of the complaints in ATF. I wrote these posts:

But, the forum was closed before I got home, and before i had a chance to catch up. So, sure, it's factually correct to say that I was a mod of the forum when it was closed. But I think it's a little disingenuous to imply, as trolly did, that I intentionally allowed the posts that got the forum shut down. I hadn't even read them, except for one post quoted in ATF that I agreed should be moderated. I posted that opinion, from my phone, in the expectation that one of the other mods would do it. Since then I've agreed a number of times that the situation was handled poorly, but there was basically nothing I could do about it at the time.

Loki,

I didn’t say all viewpoints are necessarily deserving of a platform here.

An accurate summary imo.

Please show me where I said you did.

Loki,

Lol, please. You posted a ****ing cartoon directed at me with klansmen holding up a kill black people sign.

I don't think the politics forum is broken. I think it works well for the majority of its regular posters, and the results of the poll demonstrate that many of them are definitely opposed to changes to it, if you can read opposition to a new forum as a proxy for that.

On the other hand, I am sympathetic to some of the complaints related to the idea that the politics forum is excessively hostile to posters whose views don't fit in well with the regs. But, I'm also sympathetic to the rebuttal that a lot of the people who complain the loudest are bad posters, and that this is a problem.

So, my view, and the reason I asked to create this thread and solicit input from 2+2ers more broadly, is that I wanted to know if there were posters -- other than the usual set who complain in ATF threads -- who avoid the politics forum because they don't like its culture (for lack of a better word) and who might be interested in a separate forum that would try to cultivate a more diverse collection of viewpoints. If I were certain that this group of hypothetical 2+2ers existed, or if I thought that the main forum was just inexcusably badly moderated or broken, I would advocate for fixing it instead. But I don't know if there is much interest, and I do know there are a lot of posters who strongly oppose changes to the main forum, and so I think it's probably a mistake to try to change the main forum. It's not just about Mat being hands off with moderation, it's that the forum works for the people who post there (including me), is one of the highest traffic forums on the site, and the number of people who would be angry about it is clearly bigger than the number who would be happy about it.

Man, it's not as if everything was fine with P7 before you left the country and then the forum suddenly went full white nationalist dumpsterfire the moment your back was turned.

Yes, because you said

So, enlighten us. What is the constructive way to engage with those gentlemen on the left whose viewpoints might differ from mine?

Bump

And don’t forget bundy, whose sole purpose on these forums appears to be informing everyone that he thinks Muslims are all violent savage terrorists.

As I recall, I suggested a while back that you ought to consider providing more feedback on the proper interpretation of the site-wide rules, especially regarding "hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable" content.

The proposed rules in the OP of this thread represent my attempt to define what is acceptable in the context of a forum for debating politics and social issues. I think that, to some extent, outside of the politics forum the rules can and should be stricter, in part because it's reasonable to tell people to take posts on the relevant subjects to the appropriate forum.

My opinion is that moderation is about moderating posts, not posters, at least most of the time, up until the point where someone demonstrates they are incapable of posting constructively. I do think, in retrospect, the P7 approach to timeouts was too timid about culling some of the worst posters.

However, prior to the events in question I moderated plenty of posts for crossing lines related to objectionable content. Obviously I did so according to my standards, which are probably not exactly the same as yours. But there were not specific complaints that I was allowing posts that should have been disallowed. The same people who opposed the existence of the forum in general still opposed its existence, but it's not as if anyone is citing examples of egregious posts that I failed to moderate.