Moving popular threads into Politics Cafe = thread death sentence

Hitman3000

Beasty wrote:

Just confirmed with the mod that this thread was moved from the main Politics Forum, and not AH

Never suggested it was, however if you look at the post count to now you will see my point and that of others.

ancapailldorcha

Hitman3000 wrote: »

Never suggested it was, however if you look at the post count to now you will see my point and that of others.

Seems to be doing alright there now.

Hitman3000

ancapailldorcha wrote:

Seems to be doing alright there now.

22 posts in 2 days about Sean Gallagher is doing alright? Maybe some of the comments are not visible to me. I'll defer to your judgement.

dudara

Boom_Bap wrote: »

From my experience in AH, it's the catalyst for the train-wreck when the 2 collide. The not so serious posts are for the most part not ignored.
In an ideal world, they should be able to live in harmony together on the same thread, but experience shows that they don't.

This post brings home for me, the dual nature of AH.

We have posters who want fun, "yore mama" and "blast them with..." posts. On the other hand, we have posters who'd like to have a more structured discussion on a topic. Depending on the circumstance, an individual poster may even play for both sides.

If we allow both "standards" (I use that loosely) to co-exist in AH, then posters in AH will need to allow that and tolerate it. Can the AH community live with that?

heres another angle:

a lot of us are using boards without reference to forums and subforums at all, and only see the most recent threads across the site as a whole. threads are just.....threads

continually hearkening back to a previous system, or (dunno the figures) a system some are using and some arent, and then *making moderation/usage assumptions on that system* is not a recipe for success

moderation varying wildly across the site is the problem, pretending that posters are going to change character once they pass through one link vs another is wishful thinking.

"dont be a dick" is a good rule and much more applicable in the various contexts than "specific behaviour x is allowed *here* but not *there*"

riffmongous

I wouldn't read anything into the Forum Requests thread, how many people even knew it existed? I can't even remember if I did or not. Why not just ask in AH and PC themselves (no poll).

I would also be against tags, I can just imagine checking in some days and seeing a wall of 'serious/politics/social' and leaving immediately

osarusan

When the Current Affairs forum was proposed, I posted at the time that (in my opinion at least) AH's problem is that it allows threads on serious topics to take place, but doesn't take any measures to try and ensure the thread itself contains serious discussion.

So, with the exception of insulting other posters, anybody can say pretty much whatever they like, make whatever claim they like about a topic, and there will not be any attempt made to moderate. Inevitably, those threads descend into shyte, and usually pretty quickly too.

It was bizarre, during that discussion on the proposed Current Affairs forum, to see it mentioned that there wouldn't be any insistence on posters providing links to back up a claim. To me at least, if you are allowing, or trying to facilitate, serious discussion, then people should be made to support their claims with links.

And Boards already has a couple of forums where people can have serious discussion and need to back up their claims and so on. Politics Cafe being the more casual of them. Removing the 'access request' entry into that forum and moving threads there with a redirect might solve the problem.

Or it might not, because, as I also mentioned in the discussion on the Current Affairs forum, I think there are a fair number of posters who don't want to have serious discussion on serious topics - they just want to talk crap and make wild claims, and not to have to back any of it up, and are not all that bothered about whether it is true or not.

I actually think that kind of poster is fairly central to the problems that AH has. We have all seen, probably every single day, posters who make claims that are conclusively proven wrong by other posters. But the number of times any of those posters will actually acknowledge they were wrong is virtually zero. You can always gauge the standard of debate by how willing people are to admit that they got something wrong - and in AH it basically never happens. People just disappear from a thread (to repeat the claim elsewhere), or endlessly move the goalposts, or simply ignore the post and just carry on, etc.

There is no accountability for claims, and without it , there won't ever be a decent basis for serious discussion. So, either stop/move the serious threads, or else introduce some kind of standard that is higher than now.

biko

Maybe it's just me but a lot of AH posters seems to be happy to give opinions and verdicts on things in AH, particularly on American politics, but they are not ready to meet the demands of the more serious forums like Politics.
That's why Politics Cafe was created (open to correction on this), but even this lower threshold forum is still too high-brow for many AH posters.

Beasty

I don't see the demands for political threads in AH as anything to do with "serious discussion". It's all to do with allowing discussion of "serious" topics in a much less than serious fashion.

The problem then is posters start demanding sources for posts that may have been made in jest.

You then of course have individuals from each side of the political divide looking to trip up posters on the "other" side, a bit like some of the tribalism we see in Soccer

osarusan

Beasty wrote: »

I don't see the demands for political threads in AH as anything to do with "serious discussion". It's all to do with allowing discussion of "serious" topics in a much less than serious fashion.

I don't agree. I think many of the threads in question have their fair share of serious discussion in them before they are redirected elsewhere. Posters want to continue that discussion, but the redirecting tends to end the discussion.

The problem is that as well as their fair share of serious discussion, they also have their fair share of absolute clowns out to disrupt, deflect, etc. People for whom anything and everything they dislike can be termed racist, cuck, bigot, snowflake, virtue signalling, phobe, feminazi, etc. And no matter how braindead those comments are, somebody will always bite, and the whole thing becomes a mess.

And as there aren't really any standards in AH and no rules against it, the mods are fairly powerless to stop it. Tbh I'd say they are just happy to get the chance to shunt those threads somewhere, anywhere else.

So, in my view at least, you either find a way to weed out the absolute clowns in AH, or move threads to a place which already has higher posting standards in place - which, as I understand it, was the idea of the Politics Cafe in the first place - with its higher standards and its access request system.

Or leave it as it is, and has been for quite some time now.

Beasty

I don't disagree they have some serious discussion, but AH is not the place to go for serious discussion, and expectations that any discussion will remain serious in that forum are unreasonable

Beasty

And just to add, if posters wish the discussion to be serious they need to comply with the requirements imposed in the Politics or indeed Politics Café forums

Timberrrrrrrr

osarusan wrote: »

I don't agree. I think many of the threads in question have their fair share of serious discussion in them before they are redirected elsewhere. Posters want to continue that discussion, but the redirecting tends to end the discussion.

The problem is that as well as their fair share of serious discussion, they also have their fair share of absolute clowns out to disrupt, deflect, etc. People for whom anything and everything they dislike can be termed racist, cuck, bigot, snowflake, virtue signalling, phobe, feminazi, etc. And no matter how braindead those comments are, somebody will always bite, and the whole thing becomes a mess.

And as there aren't really any standards in AH and no rules against it, the mods are fairly powerless to stop it. Tbh I'd say they are just happy to get the chance to shunt those threads somewhere, anywhere else.

So, in my view at least, you either find a way to weed out the absolute clowns in AH, or move threads to a place which already has higher posting standards in place - which, as I understand it, was the idea of the Politics Cafe in the first place - with its higher standards and its access request system.

Or leave it as it is, and has been for quite some time now.

If ever words needed to be banned!

kneemos

biko wrote: »

Maybe it's just me but a lot of AH posters seems to be happy to give opinions and verdicts on things in AH, particularly on American politics, but they are not ready to meet the demands of the more serious forums like Politics.
That's why Politics Cafe was created (open to correction on this), but even this lower threshold forum is still too high-brow for many AH posters.

Or maybe by moving the thread the flow is completely ruined. It's as good as closing it in fairness,and serves nothing except to piss people off.
No idea why PC exists anyway,nobody uses the cursed thing.