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In fairness, people have been saying “the forum will die because you’re banning all the interesting people” for at least 5 years now.
On the other hand, we actually have banned some interesting people, and the forum is worse for their absence.
Okay buddy - you and @ABigGuy4U - I am calling your bluff. Who are the people we have permabanned who actually made the forum worse for their absence?
The only one I can think of is @HlynkaCG and he is extremely debatable - for every Hlynka-stan who misses him, there is someone who was screaming at us to ban him for years. And I've already written several times about how we did everything we could, short of just literally saying "The rules don't apply to Hlynka," to avoid having to permaban him.
Every other permaban I can think of might have been in some cases an "interesting" person, but they were interesting in the sense that they wrote high-effort screeds spitting high-effort venom, and the people upset that we banned them approved of the direction they were spitting.
Go on, tell me who on this list was a valuable contributor who you think should be granted amnesty?
We do not casually permaban people, and we let even the most belligerent and obnoxious people, if there is even a shred of redeeming quality in their posts, have multiple chances before we pull the trigger.
I personally don't find @BurdensomeCount's contributions very interesting, though I will say his trolling has gotten less blatant. I just skimmed the OP because it was the usual uninteresting BC sneering. He mostly gets away with it because he's toned down the celebratory triumphalism about enjoying the fruits of immigrating to the UK which he looks forward to being conquered by his people who will punish the white supremacist natives in good time. It was those kinds of posts that got him banned before.
"50% of the forum loves them and 50% hates their guts" is practically the definition of an interesting poster. If there's unanimous agreement that someone is a good contributor, then they may indeed be a "good" poster, but there's a cap on how interesting they can be.
My suggestion has always been that bans are capped at a length of one year, except in incredibly egregious cases (e.g. spam bots, or the person launched cyberattacks on the forum or something). I don't expect that this suggestion will ever actually be implemented, but it is a possibility nonetheless.
Hlynka is the primary example of course, also fuckduck9000, AhhhTheFrench, AlexanderTurok.
It's easy to be "interesting" (for some value of "interesting"). That's not the only criterion. The goal is not to be polarizing for its own sake. The guy going on about how having sex with your own prepubescent daughter should be legal was certainly interesting - and he wasn't even banned for expressing that opinion! He was banned for belligerently sneering at everyone who disagreed with him.
I wouldn't be against it, per se, I just predict with high confidence that those who take advantage of the opportunity to return after a one-year ban will get banned again in short order.
As I told @The_Nybbler, fuckduck wasn't that interesting. AhhhTheFrench was a one-trick pony ("Hurr hurr religious people are so dumb!"). Hlynka and Turok I'll grant were interesting. However, see above. If you can convince Zorba to grant them an amnesty, I wouldn't oppose it, but I am also fairly certain they will not change their posting styles, which means in short order we'd be back to "Okay, are they so interesting that we let them keep just ignoring the rules?"
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Looks like @fuckduck9000, banned for this, was banned for something far less inflammatory than stuff that barely merited a warning in this very thread.
I only vaguely remember @fuckduck9000. The ban was a year ago and it was @naraburns who banned him and I'm not going to read the entire thread to see if I agree with your summary, since your summaries are almost always disingenuous.
But let's look at @fuckduck9000's "valuable contributions": he had eight warnings and/or tempbans before he got permabanned. All of them were basically for petty shit-stirring and condescension, often by starting a "call-out" thread obviously intended to start a fight. He had zero AAQCs, and my recollection of him was basically just another sneering culture warrior (which fits your defense of him, he usually sneered at the people you like to sneer at) but he never did so in an interesting or effortful way.
So your example of someone who was a loss to the forum was an uninteresting, unmemorable snarler who was given many, many chances to improve. Try again.
If upvotes mean ‘more of this’ and (like most commenters) fuckduck was largely upvoted, shouldn’t there be a presumption of adding value to the forum, that cannot be annulled by you simply finding me annoying?
I admit, I’m not a high-effort, longform poster. More of a mid-effort reply guy. I get bored on the fourth paragraph describing an idea. I don’t have the impeccable prose of a rafa. But we can’t all be rock stars. I’m not a rock, I identify more as the glue, or cement, in a forum like this. I argue with everyone. Someone has to purge by fire all the crank theories and showerthoughts that make up the AAQC. This can come off as hostile ‘call-outs’, ‘shit-stirring’ and ‘condescension’, but I’d say it’s valuable – and I never tried to get anyone I argued with banned, hostile or not.
Mostly, I blame my vulgar name for how things turned out. I never had much problems with other alts before or since. Much like trannyporno, I fell victim to nominative determinism. Milgram’s experiment of sorts: first named as a villain, then treated as one, sooner or later I ended up as one.
Anyway, since I often defended trannyporno, darwin, hlynka, burdensomecount and almost everyone else who was slowly banned or chased away by heavy-handed moderation, I thought I might as well put in a kind word for myself. @The_Nybbler , @Primaprimaprima , thanks for the appeal.
No. People can reliably get lots of upvotes with a flaming hot "I hate my outgroup" post. We don't mod by upvotes.
If you're admitting to being fuckduck, consider yourself being given grace for not being given another ban for ban evasion.
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Depends on the point of view. Some people that I expect others to think were "interesting" really only had a few interesting ideas, ran out of them and got banned once their manner of conversation outweighed the reiteration of their ideas.
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What's interesting about posting try-hard "provocative" top level posts, and ignoring literally everyone who points that out several of the premises are wrong?
Three of the top level comments this week devolved into long threads that were entirely just navel-gazing about Motte rules and decorum. Then this one comes along and it just immediately turns into an inquisition about whether it’s bait with no actual substantive discussion of the topic. I don’t know much about James Watson and I would have liked some actual discussion about his life, work and pet theories regardless of who started the thread. If the “bait” is so fine grained that you need a fifty page analysis about it whether or not it’s bait, it’s effectively become a pointless distinction. Meanwhile the discussion gets slower and more sclerotic every week and there are fewer and fewer top level posts.
Whatever gave you that idea? Literally everything he posts in top level is bait. Watson was a subject of past culture war debate, and the rat-sphere was sympathetic to him, so he attacked him because he wanted to own the chuds. It's as simple as that. If you think that's uncharitable, then the fact that he refuses to adress responses that show he's just plain wrong, proves it.
I'm not here to serve as entertainment. Letting people rile others up for shits and giggles, because you find the conversations "sclerotic" would just shit this place up. You can literlly just go on over to rdrama if you're so bored.
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