http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/ Interesting to see someone else's view on this. I think he doesn't give enough credit to that "egalitarian spirit", but I do wonder if the larger point is sound.
It probably is fairly sound. I think we all can recognize the corrosive effect of the fool. We've seen as much here, with certain posters poisoning the atmosphere. The problem for Wordforge in particular, is that our main topic is free speech. It is far easier for a board dedicated to knitting or model rail roads to get rid of the fool right away. Here, we really have to wait for some highly egregious behavior, even if it is long past obvious that a person is actively harming the community. To do otherwise would be fairly counter to the purpose of the board -- like the knitting board banning somebody for being too blatant with their stiches.
I used to be on a lot of knitting boards but every time I posted a photo of knitting needles people said they were a dangerous weapon and screamed that it was a threat.
If people don't like a conversation ignore it and it will sink. If you feel there are not threads you like then start threads you do like. Just don't complain that people with different views also get to voice their opinions. I am sure it is much easier to just complain and call other people fools though. That is what Volpone usually does.
I noticed Volpone making a similar argument recently over at Troll Kingdom. He claimed no one discussed anything intelligent here and instead just threw feces at each other. I disagree but would like to hear Order chaos thinks. Hopefully, he will take part in the conversation and not just drop the thread off and abandon it. For my part, I see a lot of people who follow ideologies and who think anyone who does not 100% hold the ideological line is a fool. This is immensely corrosive especially as it often leads such people to self segregate themselves into echo chambers where they never hear an ideologically impure thought. Much of right forge seems to have left for such a reason.
That is an idea that seems right, but it does not work in practice. I have seen a number of places and people try this sort of thing. There are a few problems that happen with well thought out posts. The first is well thought out posts which cover a lot of ground are tldr by nature. Whether you agree or disagree it does not matter when it is bland and long. Few people are really going to oppose it with a meaningful retort, because people work and they are really not there to do another project. This is why you see the passionate idiots and pompous morons there and no one else. Yes, of course I count myself in there. No one has the time or desire to rally get into it, and most do not have the intellect anyway. In the end the best most people hope for is to not look like a fool if they do respond. Then you have another problem. When you see a well thought out post that has gone over all the details there might not be more to say. This is why prolific idiots and trolls get much more attention. There is something more than good job to say to them. Arguments are where people have a desire to talk. If you do not agree with someone, you have something to say. Otherwise you are just doing a bunch of back patting and that leads to drama. Usenet fell for a reason. It was free speech and you have to be one of the best to be heard above the din. By the time you are shouting that loud you cannot hear the people you wanted to discuss things with anyway. You just have the high end troll speech to sift through. Trolls win because they are either too much to see through, or they are far more interesting than your normal person. This is why boards need mods, and mods need to cultivate their boards or else people go away. There was a lot of learning from the days of usenet wars.
Unfortunately I have technical reasons for not posting much atm. I think it'd be a grand experiment, if it were practical, to have a series of forums with the same topics but different levels of moderation, everything from the current RR rules to something more akin to other heavily-moderated boards out there. Unfortunately, we don't have the population (and I doubt we ever did) to support such an experiment. Absent that, another idea of questionable technical feasibility would be to have each post in a thread be tagged by mods on an N point scale as to appropriateness, as if we weren't on WF. Levels would be, eg. "Deliberate derailment/off-topic", "Red Room only", "Green Room appropriate", "Fine in TNZ", "Fine on SD.net" (or pick any particularly anal board), and "Mod's Choice" to actively promote a post as quality. Or color code them or something. Replies to those posts would by default have the same moderation rating as the parent/quoted post. Users would be able to select what level of moderation they want to see posts of, so "fools" and flame wars could be hidden on a per viewer basis, rather than outright censored, sort of an "I don't want to read this shit" button (well, slider or radio button, but you get what I mean). Of course, this being a free speech board, the defaults would be that new posts not replying to another are visible by everyone ("Fine on SD.net") by default and new users see everything by default, but we tell them explicitly how to change it. Eventually you could develop an even more individualized rating system, and combine it with Netflix-style machine learning so it would be able to guess which threads and quote chains would be of interest, but that's much more software-fiction than the above, which is probably not completely infeasible to implement as a plugin.
That sounds interesting but someone would have to do a lot of work rating and tagging every post. I am not sure how feasible that would be. I do know that at both Apolyton and at Civ Fanatics Center they have a "serious tag" for threads which any thread starter could select which means that thread is more heavily moderated. The idea is to promote discussion of serious issue so posters get warnings or even bannings for violating the rules wrt serious threads such as posting off topic or flaming, etc... Maybe something like that could be put in place here. As a passing mention, CFC, a forum which gets easily 10-100 times as many posts as this place ever got in a day, once tried to split their off topic forum into a more heavily moderated forum and a lightly moderated forum and the result was there were hardly any posts in the heavily model forum so they discontinued it quickly. The compromise was having all the posting activity on one forum but thread starters could specify if a thread was serious or not.
That has kind of always been the idea behind the Red Room vs. Green Room. But the latter has never really caught on as a place to discuss Red Room topics with moderation. I agree that it is likely a question of board population never having been high enough to support both rooms. As for your second idea, it's far too labor intensive, but I do like the set-up described by Dinner. We could probably implement that.
I agree that the board population issue has been part of it. But I also remember a few political threads posted in the Green Room throughout the years that were promptly relocated to the Red Room because the RR became the de facto politics room. I think that did a disservice to the board, by preventing one of our more popular subjects from staying on-topic. Sure, we had a short-lived debate room, but I remember it having really strict standards and thus leaning too much in the opposite direction.
In my opinion, both Red and Green should cover the same topics, just with a different style of interaction. If somebody starts a politics thread in the Green Room, I would leave it there and we would split away derp and derailment to keep it on topic. But so far we haven't had much success getting people to post any threads that aren't either sports related or light hearted. The most successful thread there recently was Forbin's class reunion thread, but it was definitely more of a community sharing type of topic than something that might have shown up in the Red Room. That was a good use of Green, but it isn't the only type of thread we should have there.
I'm glad you support the idea, but I think the split has become ingrained in our board culture (and the literal descriptions for each room). I would love to see more Green Room threads covering traditionally Red Room topics.
I say start some there, and if you still have off board contact with missing members that got sick of the rep wars and mod abuses and such,invite them back to join in those threads. Just as a start.
