A discussion on the rules.

Godge

Scofflaw wrote: »

Continuing in the face of good contradictory factual evidence is trolling/soapboxing, I agree. However, I'm seeing a pattern where posters don't provide such evidence, or attempt to argue, but simply assume their opponent is talking rubbish on the basis that "everyone knows x is false", and attempt to have the mods shut down discussion before it even happens.

It's been common, for example to assume that anything said by pro-Russian posters is false, and should be penalised/deleted by mods, without any attempt whatsoever to show that it is. That's not going to happen - first someone demonstrates its falsity, then a poster who continues to push the false line is actionable.

cordially,
Scofflaw

It is common enough on other issues too.

For example, there was a poster only today or yesterday posting that public service pay hadn't been cut.

There are also numerous examples on the Irish Water threads of debunked anti-water charges rhetoric being continually recycled every few days.

FreudianSlippers

Godge wrote: »

It is common enough on other issues too.

For example, there was a poster only today or yesterday posting that public service pay hadn't been cut.

There are also numerous examples on the Irish Water threads of debunked anti-water charges rhetoric being continually recycled every few days.

Not to mention the old Nice/Lisbon treaty re-vote conspiracy chestnut.

RecordStraight

K-9 wrote: »

There are a good few anti-shinnerbot posters to balance it out.

If you think it's balanced, fine. But I'm not posting things that contradict the Shinners anymore. It's not worth it.

FreudianSlippers

Scofflaw wrote: »

Continuing in the face of good contradictory factual evidence is trolling/soapboxing, I agree. However, I'm seeing a pattern where posters don't provide such evidence, or attempt to argue, but simply assume their opponent is talking rubbish on the basis that "everyone knows x is false", and attempt to have the mods shut down discussion before it even happens.

It's been common, for example to assume that anything said by pro-Russian posters is false, and should be penalised/deleted by mods, without any attempt whatsoever to show that it is. On the other side of the argument we've had posters reporting everything from official sources as false, and looking for exactly the same thing. That's not going to happen - first someone demonstrates falsity, then a poster who continues to push the false line is actionable.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Fair enough. Disagreement retracted (mainly)

Nodin

gandalf wrote: »

Exactly, also it should be very obvious from the first reported interaction that a poster is a sockpuppet and tbh the mods should deal with them there and then rather than allow them build a platform to derail a thread.

Rather than "ridicule" them and risk an infraction from the mods I will keep reporting them.

When it comes to matters Russian, I really lack the patience with what can come up. Rather than face a ban I tend to absent myself.

What's the story with talk of PIGS?

There seems to have been a decision in the major financial publications like the FT to drop the term, either because it is factually inappropriate, or because of ethnically offensive undertones aimed at Mediterranean Europeans.

Pigs has connotations of non-humans who cannot control their greed. It can seem pejorative even when unintended. Is there any intention to follow the lead of other outlets and have a rethink about this?

Scofflaw

A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »

What's the story with talk of PIGS?

There seems to have been a decision in the major financial publications like the FT to drop the term, either because it is factually inappropriate, or because of ethnically offensive undertones aimed at Mediterranean Europeans.

Pigs has connotations of non-humans who cannot control their greed. It can seem pejorative even when unintended. Is there any intention to follow the lead of other outlets and have a rethink about this?

I think it's dying its own death, really. Most people now seem to use the even more factually dubious "peripheral countries" or the yet worse "small countries", both of which carry their own freight of associations. PIGS/PIIGS at least had the advantage of stating exactly who one was talking about.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Sand

Scofflaw wrote: »

Please don't report posts simply because your opponent is making a ridiculous argument - if the argument is ridiculous, ridicule it yourself. It's a politics forum.

Given how closely some posters align their persona with their expressed views and opinions, where does the encouragement to ridicule the post stray into the undefined "Don't be a dick" or "uncivil" infraction minefield?

Scofflaw

Sand wrote: »

Given how closely some posters align their persona with their expressed views and opinions, where does the encouragement to ridicule the post stray into the undefined "Don't be a dick" or "uncivil" infraction minefield?

A fair question which isn't easy to answer, except by saying that the best form of ridicule for an argument is a demonstration of how ridiculous the argument is, rather than a statement that it's ridiculous.

"That's a stupid post" and "your stupidest post yet", which I've seen posters regard as "attacking the post not the poster" aren't OK, nor are variants thereof, because the implication that the poster is stupid is there in big letters.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Godge

Couple of questions.

1. How many times can a poster ignore evidence, accuse other posters of lying or spinning and maintain an objectively false position before getting banned as a troll?

2. How many times can a poster post stream of consciousness rubbish that adds nothing to a thread, serving only to inflame or drag a thread off-topic, before getting banned?

Scofflaw

It varies, in both cases, depending on the severity of the case, and in (1) on the efforts made by other posters to demonstrate the falsity of the position.

Would people prefer that I ban everyone who I catch maintaining 'objectively false positions' on matters where I've done sufficient research to know the facts, for example - fish, EU treaties, climate change, the banking crisis and the like? Or would you prefer I continue to try to refute their falsehoods?

cordially,
Scofflaw

Permabear

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Godge

Permabear wrote: »

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I agree.

There are always people new to the forum or new to a topic who will post up something that is objectively false. That is not the problem.

The problem is the repeat offenders who are corrected several times and persist in maintaining arguments and positions that are objectively false.

Scofflaw

Permabear wrote: »

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Well, personally I'm a big fan of doing exactly that, but, again, the problem is that above isn't always clear-cut, and much of what we've been asked to apply it to recently is pretty fuzzy.

To take a current example, we have pro-Russian posters at the moment, and they post claims derived from RT etc about the Ukraine, Russian involvement, etc - and these claims are clearly taken to be false by those arguing with them. But a consensus of opposed posters believing them to be false, and the claims having been shown to be false, seem to me to be two different things. The evidence of the latter is not as solid as I'd like, and I'm reluctant to make judgements about truth based on majority opinion.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Permabear

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Scofflaw

Permabear wrote: »

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True - the question then is whether we're seeing the clear-cut cases, and that's going to come down, to some extent, to how they're reported.

If I get a report saying "poster X continues to repeat false claim Y as in this post, which has been shown to be false in this post and this post, or has been contradicted by an authoritative source here" - then it's fundamentally just a case of saying "you're nicked, chummy".

If, on the other hand, I get a report which says "poster X is a lying liar who lies!!! He's lying again!!!", then a good deal of detective work lies in front of me, working out what the poster is supposed to be lying about, whether anyone has refuted their claims, whether the poster has had adequate attention drawn to the refutation of their claims, and so on.

Obviously, the first type of report is maybe a little much to hope for all the time, but the latter is far too frequent. Policing everywhere is a cooperative process unless about a third of the population are police.

So the clearer reports are about what untruth is being repeated, and where it has been shown to the poster that they're repeating an untruth, the better this particular part of the system will work.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Permabear

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Godge

Scofflaw wrote: »

True - the question then is whether we're seeing the clear-cut cases, and that's going to come down, to some extent, to how they're reported.

If I get a report saying "poster X continues to repeat false claim Y as in this post, which has been shown to be false in this post and this post, or has been contradicted by an authoritative source here" - then it's fundamentally just a case of saying "you're nicked, chummy".

If, on the other hand, I get a report which says "poster X is a lying liar who lies!!! He's lying again!!!", then a good deal of detective work lies in front of me, working out what the poster is supposed to be lying about, whether anyone has refuted their claims, whether the poster has had adequate attention drawn to the refutation of their claims, and so on.

Obviously, the first type of report is maybe a little much to hope for all the time, but the latter is far too frequent. Policing everywhere is a cooperative process unless about a third of the population are police.

So the clearer reports are about what untruth is being repeated, and where it has been shown to the poster that they're repeating an untruth, the better this particular part of the system will work.

cordially,
Scofflaw

True, but there are a few claims that are continually sprouted by the same users despite being objectively proven false on numerous occasions. Here are several:

(1) Public service pay was not cut during the crisis
(2) Irish Water is privately owned
(3) FG promised not to introduce water charges

These are complete rubbish and those posting them know full well they are false yet they continue to post them.

Chips Lovell

He's not saying that things haven't been repeatedly debunked, but rather the mods can't be expected to do all the work in demonstrating they have.

If something bothers you that much, it shouldn't be that onerous to put together a short boilerplate report including the relevant links to debunked claims and submit it whenever you see a repeated instance.

Permabear

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Chips Lovell

That's true. But the Water Charges thread was in the main forum for a long time (months?). At this stage I think every considered angle on the issue has been debated repeatedly, so you'd have to wonder what the point of pulling all of that trouble back into the main forum would be?

Permabear

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Chips Lovell

None of those topics have attracted anywhere near the same amount of posts and heat as water charges though. It's coming up to the point where a second thread will have to be locked after reaching the 10,000 post count limit.

Permabear

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Chips Lovell

If you have full time mods, maybe. But I reckon the job they did on it prior to its banishment to the Cafe was above and beyond the call of duty.

Permabear

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Chips Lovell

Amongst other things, i.e. that doesn't need to be sole purpose of the sub-forum. And only after the topic gets a decent airing in one of the more strictly moderated forums.

Scofflaw

Permabear wrote: »

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No, and the suggestion is rather resented. The reason for the thread's move to the Café is because there's a lot of people who want to discuss the topic who aren't going to stick to the stricter rules of the main forum.

We therefore have two basic options - (a) to let as many people as want to discuss it do so, and to accept that the resulting debate will be of lower quality than we would like in the main forum; (b) to retain the thread in the main forum with strict standards and exclude most posters as a result.

The Café exists to facilitate option (a), something which has long been a problem for us with popular and contentious topics - Lisbon, the bailout, etc.

There is nothing to prevent posters from having a higher-quality debate on Irish Water in the main forum, entirely separate from the Café thread. But personally I'm betting most posters will go slumming...

cordially,
Scofflaw

Permabear

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Scofflaw

Permabear wrote: »

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As far as I can see, that's because they're all more or less in the same vein. We don't appear to have anyone willing to start, say, an in-depth discussion of Irish Water's role as an off-balance sheet vehicle in the government meeting its deficit reduction targets.

I'm betting that too. Politics Café, with its nonexistent standards, is the future of the Politics forum. That's where most of the debate will take place, while the so-called "main forum" will become even more stagnant. Your own thread on the UK's future in the EU, started last night at 11 p.m., now has 6 posts, most of them one or two lines long.

I don't think you'd disagree if I said that it seems like a natural progression over the last several years. There's a lot of public interest in certain political topics, which means fast-running threads full of people new to political discussion, and little in others, which means slow threads with posters whose political positions are probably well-known, and whose response to something new is often "Ayup.".

cordially,
Scofflaw

Scofflaw

Scofflaw wrote: »

True - the question then is whether we're seeing the clear-cut cases, and that's going to come down, to some extent, to how they're reported.

If I get a report saying "poster X continues to repeat false claim Y as in this post, which has been shown to be false in this post and this post, or has been contradicted by an authoritative source here" - then it's fundamentally just a case of saying "you're nicked, chummy".

If, on the other hand, I get a report which says "poster X is a lying liar who lies!!! He's lying again!!!", then a good deal of detective work lies in front of me, working out what the poster is supposed to be lying about, whether anyone has refuted their claims, whether the poster has had adequate attention drawn to the refutation of their claims, and so on.

Obviously, the first type of report is maybe a little much to hope for all the time, but the latter is far too frequent. Policing everywhere is a cooperative process unless about a third of the population are police.

So the clearer reports are about what untruth is being repeated, and where it has been shown to the poster that they're repeating an untruth, the better this particular part of the system will work.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Believe it or not, this bears repeating already. I don't wish to name names, but I've just had a reported post of almost exactly the level of uselessness outlined here, coupled with a sneer at the mods, from a poster who is certainly long enough in the tooth to know a very good deal better.

If some posters want things moderated the way they claim, the least they can do is be helpful. Regrettably, I cannot infract post reports, otherwise in this instance I very much would do so.

moderately irritated,
Scofflaw

nesf

Permabear wrote: »

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This future was there long before the Politics Café was created. I remember discussing it with other mods in 2007. That we'd had our Eternal September and were facing a steady increase in the number of posters who do not know what debate is but love to "argue."

The Politics Café is a symptom not a cause of anything. It's an open forum. The site had a massive demographic change. Restricted access is about the only solution and it's not a good one.

Scofflaw

nesf wrote: »

This future was there long before the Politics Café was created. I remember discussing it with other mods in 2007. That we'd had our Eternal September and were facing a steady increase in the number of posters who do not know what debate is but love to "argue."

The Politics Café is a symptom not a cause of anything. It's an open forum. The site had a massive demographic change. Restricted access is about the only solution and it's not a good one.

Yup. Essentially we're trying to have the best of both worlds, by trying to run a permissive environment in the Café and a tighter one in the main forum - but, as I said, social apes as we are, most of us will go where most of us are.

Having said that, I started a thread somewhat after the Brixit one - so about two and a bit hours ago - on whether it's acceptable for the Min.Ag. to engage in blood sports, and that's now on its third page.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Nodin

The Café was supposedly for "light hearted" discussion, I thought.

Scofflaw

Nodin wrote: »

The Café was supposedly for "light hearted" discussion, I thought.

On non-serious subjects, as in? Originally, yes, but we kept getting future all over us and had to have somewhere for it to go.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Permabear

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K-9

Nodin wrote: »

The Café was supposedly for "light hearted" discussion, I thought.

Relaxed cafe like discussion would be the aim rather than late night drunken bar posts. In fairness the vast majority of the posters there are fine and seem to enjoy the freer style there, without abusing it.

Scofflaw

Permabear wrote: »

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If it seems inexplicable, perhaps you're trying to explain the wrong thing? Perhaps the forum isn't driven solely by its internal decisions, but also in large part by external drivers, and its evolution follows that of nearly every other discussion forum because it's a discussion forum, rather than because the mod team have made a series of uniquely bad decisions.

I refer you to nesf's answer here, which basically summarises the situation.

Every forum has a golden age, when there's an almost perfectly balanced mix of old hands and interested newbies, and every forum passes through it. They come out in one of two places - popular but noisier, or dead.

In a sense, the Politics forum is a microcosm of Boards, where nearly everything over the last few years has been losing ground at the expense of AH. You make the point that the Café has revived with the transfusion of political threads from AH - why do you think the political threads were in AH, while the Politics forum became quieter and quieter? And what set of good decisions would have reversed that trend?

As for the "anything goes" - well, we'll see. We're learning and adapting as we go.

I'm afraid you're a conservative, my friend.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Permabear

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Scofflaw

Permabear wrote: »

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That it follows almost exactly a standard evolutionary curve for discussion forums suggests that either those decisions are much less decisive than one might like to believe, or that the decisions are framed and answered similarly in every case by virtue of the external drivers.

Permabear wrote: »

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Why would anybody need to "declare defeat and give up" if there were nothing to be defeated by?

Permabear wrote: »

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Actually, AH had a policy of "no political threads", and they were transferred to the Politics forum.

Permabear wrote: »

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Of course - after all, we had Lisbon 1 and the Guarantee in 2008, Lisbon 2 and bank bailouts in 2009, IMF entry in 2010, a general election in 2011, the ongoing eurozone crisis, all good stuff. I recall logging on the night before the IMF entry to find 1500 posters in the forum, many of whom I subsequently shot. Happy days...

Obviously things have become quieter in some respects, but they haven't in others - last year we had the Euro elections and the locals, now we have Ukraine, Irish Water, Greece. We weren't getting that traffic at all, and however one looks at it, it does say "Politics" right over the door.

Permabear wrote: »

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Yes, renovation is needed there.

Permabear wrote: »

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Well, previously we lost posters to AH. So, not entirely sure where that will go.

cordially,
Scofflaw

nesf

Permabear wrote: »

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The sub forums were mostly created to try and address your problem of non-serious posting. Often the opposite happened to what was wanted. C'est la vie. Mod coverage will always be uneven because you have to tow the line between too small a mod team that can't cover everything and too large a mod team where decisions become inconsistent. Even with five mods it's tough having everyone on the same page.

Permabear wrote: »

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No, they used to be banned because they would get too rowdy. Thinking of pre-2005 years here, not sure about after that.

Permabear wrote: »

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I'm already ahead of you in this respect. Have you seen me posting much in here in recent years compared to four or five years ago? No, it's because as you say you lose patience with the nonsense. It's not the lack of charter enforcement (believe me, it does almost nothing "globally" there is too much noise for mod warnings and bans to be noticed by most of the members in here) it's that it's become really rare to see a new face on here and meet someone wanting to actually debate stuff instead of shout their opinion over and over.

The boards.ie that you joined is dead and buried. Sucks, but there's not much to do except adapt and make the best of it. Which I believe the mods are trying to do, though it doesn't always work.

FreudianSlippers

Scofflaw wrote: »

As far as I can see, that's because they're all more or less in the same vein. We don't appear to have anyone willing to start, say, an in-depth discussion of Irish Water's role as an off-balance sheet vehicle in the government meeting its deficit reduction targets.

When this is attempted, the usual suspects tend to drag any serious topic well into the territory of the Cafe - so rather than moderate a "politics"-standard thread, it's simply easier to mash it into the crap-fest that is the Cafe thread.

Permabear

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Scofflaw

FreudianSlippers wrote: »

When this is attempted, the usual suspects tend to drag any serious topic well into the territory of the Cafe - so rather than moderate a "politics"-standard thread, it's simply easier to mash it into the crap-fest that is the Cafe thread.

Hmm. Let me know next time it's attempted, and I'll see what I can do.

cordially,
Scofflaw

nesf

Permabear wrote: »

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I'm not arguing they're currently helping I'm explaining why they exist. It's definitely an area that needs to be looked at and the argument over it really comes down to the part of your post below, whether you think you think getting rid of the sub forum will change things.

Permabear wrote: »

Again, that's the mentality of defeatism that I'm objecting to here. Maybe this is just a difference in our mindsets, but I'm not someone who responds to any circumstance or challenge with "well, this sucks, but there's nothing I can do except make the best of it." It's always possible to change things. It just takes some imagination and effort.

I think our political differences comes down to this difference in our mindsets actually. It is not always possible to change things. Insisting they can be changed doesn't actually do anything (though it may be a smart move politically). You have to actually show they can be changed and really, I'm arguing both from a position of experience here and a position that has empirical backing, what's happening here isn't a new thing, it's been happening online for decades to communities that got big as Scofflaw mentioned. So I'm not overly swayed by you continuing to insist this could be fixed if we just had more active mods, because, eh, we tried that and weren't the only ones to do so either and it doesn't work, what works is closing off the community or restricting membership with a paywall or whatever and this only slows the process (see Something Awful forums).

Permabear

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gandalf

Permabear wrote: »

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It's unbelievable, that is basically a green light to trolls, people with agenda's who now know they have quite a bit of leeway before the mods engage with them. To be honest I am not surprised to see this.

K-9

Well if we missed the way some wanted we'd just have a few users back slapping each other about how great and right they are and no debate whatsoever. That would really be the death knell of the forum.

Permabear

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Permabear

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