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@Patron received ca. 1100 likes from 1300 posts. I’m referring to total likes and not likes per post, as I’m trying to point out the total impact of @Patron 's content, not the average quality. But having around 1 like per 1 post is not terrible, it’s about average.
EDIT
It was not my intention to create an echo chamber or ban anyone. In fact, my post does not mention banning anyone rather asking people to intervene and keep comments on topic. And views to be articulated with supporting arguments (no simply I don’t like x or y comment with no substantiated reason)
One example on the real world. You are a speaking with a friend over a beer, another jumps in with a different topic or side discussions. It’s ok once or twice, you may go back to your topic or change it. If this is done hundreds of times over an evening, I guess it would annoy you and your friend about this third person always derailing discussion.
What I am saying is that for people online is so easy to write whatever they want and just press ‘reply’ button. It would be nicer (not sure if possible though) to have higher quality discussions rather than endless ping pongs with uncertain 
outcome on whatever topic was even meant to be discussed. And ideally, people using supporting evidence (many do), it’s easy to throw on the walls whatever passes through one’s mind, but did you spend at least 5 seconds to ask yourself whether what I am writing makes sense, or what I am writing is just ‘gut feeling’ or something you researched and you have evidence for.
(Maybe fork to a different thread, we’re off topic there)
FWIW, you probably have a right to delete your data (even if we don’t have the full GDPR protection, Switzerland does have some), maybe ask the forum owner?
That’s when we would need “dislike” button. There would be probably 500+ from me alone.
Huh, what did I do? It seems like your negative attitude towards me screws with your memory 
Or maybe I’m getting old. Don’t remember publicly disclosing anything.
What questionable behavior do I display? I’m like a doctor, first rule: do not harm. I’d rather do too little than too much. You can’t blame me for being inactive, for not taking action, because someone else could step in and volunteer to do that. And you’re surely not criticizing me for being too heavy-handed with my mod rights, because I’m not.
I don’t think you did something wrong. From what I remember, I was the moderator he was not happy with last year because I had disclosed that he had asked me to ban another user.
And now he is still not happy because I have actually banned a user. But on this one I’ll stand firm. Even if there is a [Coffee] tag on the thread, it is still not ok to say that you’ll do whatever is possible to make sure that X part of the population does not have the same rights/opportunities as you do.
I believe our forum is a great resource that works best when people help and advise each other on FIRE topics.
At the time I thought it was an ok solution to put exchange of political opinions and other topics under “Coffee”. On reflection the tone of the discussion is usually not constructive and is something akin to email war which is off-putting for me and for potential new contributors
Someone mentioned English forum: In my pov it used to contain helfpul discussion on finance topics but has become toxic and contributors have have left. It would be a shame if the same happened to our little forum!
I personally find it a shame that it has come to this. Not only here, in general we as a society seem to have become incapable about discussing valid but wildly different opinions in a constructive, civil manner.
And I feel at least some of those political topics have a place here, since those and financial topics are often closely related. Companies are moving ever more into value marketing, so whether you find those “values” and the way they are presented appealing or not is a valid product feature to discuss.
Or consider ESG investing. That entire product category wouldn’t exist if people were not motivated by political considerations. How to even discuss the pros and cons of ESG, if political arguments are not allowed?
Maybe move Coffee topics of the main page, have them not featured in the latest posts and at the same time strictly enforce politeness? Newcomers wouldn’t see the Coffee topics without actively looking for them and discussions would need to be kept civil or they would end. And / or make sure they are actually related to financial products? I.e. it’s ok to discuss the pros and cons of ESG investing, but not simply brawl about climate change?
I don’t want the forum to turn into a kind of Facebook, where everyone posts sterile, worthless, meaningless and thoughtless content, with the sole purpose of cultivating and feeding hate.
I would like the discussions to be about finance, with tips and tricks about the FIRE movement, optimizing expenses and income. I would like the forum to return to what I joined it for; a place where we can exchange ideas on a common theme, namely money in its broadest sense.
Everything else does not interest me. For that, there is Facebook and other “social” networks.
Human beings are attracted enough to negative content, it is called addiction to suffering. The problem is that this content tends to take up a lot of mental space and override the quality content.
Therefore, I would like to suggest creating a discord or another platform for “coffee blah blah” type discussions, where everyone is free to join in as they wish. I don’t like to see low quality or questionable content mixed in with information that I consider important and beneficial to everyone, and this against my will.
Hence my proposal to separate the content, because I also believe that everyone is free to express themselves as they wish. It is only necessary to create dedicated spaces for that.
Upon reflection, my opinion had changed. I was affected (not insulted but irritated and annoyed) and P should have been banned long time ago.
I remember encountering P first approximately 1 year ago in the thread about September 2021 vote. I was rather surprised by aggressive statements but decided to let it slide. Then I and other forum members were trying to discuss with him, but I don’t remember seeing a reasonable discussion and approaching from his side. Instead it was always a wall of text repeating the same arguments and lumping everything together over and over again. Honestly I am not completely sure if this is a real person writing those discussion posts or P/someone is using a bot to generate those responses.
Then I tried not to answer P’s post, but I still followed them like most posts in this forum. But I was very often irritated and have replied, even though I thought it was quite useless. At the same time I do believe in tolerance and freedom to express opinions, so I didn’t react on administrative level. Especially since P keeps saying that we are extreme lefts and are silencing everyone who dares to express a different opinion. So this is a logical trap I personally have fallen into.
I think I did learn something from this story and I hope we can move forward.
You just continue being mean and complain without offering clear solutions. You didn’t even grace me with an answer to my question in my previous post. Just because you write in a polite way, doesn’t mean the behavior you’re displaying isn’t toxic. It’s passive aggressive. FYI it’s not only me and @Julianek, @Dr.PI also has the ability to moderate content. And many other trusted regulars have the option to gain the “leader” trust level, but I don’t see a line of volunteers.
BTW moderators are the law enforcement pillar. Nothing stops you or other users to propose a functional policy that would improve the quality of the forum experience that we could then approve and apply. There were only some vague complaints but no clean-cut solutions.
And I agree that to have few more members with upgraded capabilities would be advantageous.
I just saw an option to unlist a topic. I tried it out on one of the coffee topics:
So if we see that a topic gets too much off the rails, we can unlist it. Existing users will stop seeing this thread, it will also stop being indexed by google, so a random search won’t point you to our forum. But the discussion by the active parties will still be possible, thus preventing total censorship. What do you think? Could this be a tool worth applying to some of the more controversial topics?
Not sure if you meant it to come across like this but that comment must be quite demotivating for the volunteers who are doing their best in their spare time
Would you have a constructive proposal how to improve it?
Since I challenged @teacup my proposal would be: all discussions should link back to personal finance and FIRE.
For me that means topics I would expect to find in the “Personal Finance” section of the FT
Discussions about whether to abolish taxes and redistribution of wealth or vaccines would be in the “opinion” or “politics” section, for example
I don’t mind if we keep separate sections for these but the potential moderation effort seems huge in comparison. Also if I was MP I would be concerned that it negatively influences the image of his blog
I think it’s natural to start with discussing FIRE, but then expand to discussing anything that might improve the quality of your life, which is not necessarily limited to finance. So for example if you’re looking for tips to get the best quality of education for your children, I think such a topic belongs into this forum. But if you start discussing why the quality differs between places, and what has to be done to change it, or should education be financed by the state, that might be interesting for some, but it starts to go off-topic.
You might argue that the changes in taxation, politics and society have a deep long-term impact on personal finance, but the tips given in these discussions are theoretical and rarely actionable. Personally, I like to delve into such considerations of “what it right” and “how should things be”, they allow me to plan my life for the future. But I see now that such discussions often touch upon controversial topics and get toxic, which is what puts others off.
So we’re looking at a difficult trade-off here.
While it’s a potentially interesting approach, I fear moderators would very soon run into impossible cases. Let’s say people are discussing ESG ETFs, even if some aspects of the discussion can be relevant to personal finances, I don’t see how the topic wouldn’t, at one point or another, include strong political statements in the discussion.
I would lean this direction. I am quite convinced that there are relatively few topics that are, by themselves, toxic. I’m sure there are many examples in your personal life where you can discuss tricky political topics with people you disagree with, all the while remaining civil. The issue is rather about the toxic contributors (in general or in specific contexts) that force a binary choice on the others:
From what I saw in the last few topics that degenerated into toxic discussions there are punctual contributors, giving a shot at discussing the matter, and the “barflies”, using this to simple explain, re-explain, re-re-explain the same position, without any semblance of exchange. Unfortunately, those usually also display fairly aggressive language, making the whole experience very unpleasant for the rest of the members.
You will always get accusation of censorship and so on, but ultimately it’s an executive decision to be made on a) how much a few contributors can legitimately worsen everyone else’s experience of the platform and b) what image the forum wants to display to newcomers.
If we were to agree the focus is personal Finance the following comment would be acceptable:
“Personally I don’t believe in ESG investing I think it is a load of rubbish because of x, y, z but that is a much bigger discussion and I don’t want to divert the thread away from personal finance so I don’t have anything to add”
Here is a discussion that digresses into politics and should be brought back on track:
I am not so convinced about formulating strict rules and expecting users to know them. It’s bureaucratic. In the end, whatever the written rules might be, moderation comes at the discretion of the moderator, who is a human being. I’m not a lawyer, but I guess some lawyers could say if what I’m saying makes sense.
I think the rules don’t have to be written. If we see that someone is demonstrating harmful behavior, we can punish that, and those involved will see that he crossed the line, and over the time will learn that this is not acceptable. I think it’s much more practical to have it like this, than to try to formulate written rules.
I would like to reiterate that I would prefer to define the mission of the forum as personal improvement or quality of life, which includes personal finance, but is not limited to it. If someone wants tips on workout routines (something that MMM himself was passionate about), work-life balance, tips on having / not having kids, do we want to ban these, because they’re not strictly finance/investing related? I think not.
I can explain this easily. Yes, Patron is a very controversial user. But he has been smart about it. His walls of text are a constant repetition straight out ouf Atlas Shrugged and nothing seems to change his opinion. But I cannot point to any particular message where he crossed the line and said something similar to Chrad (“I’ll make sure that 50% of the population (i.e women) have less rights than I do”).
But to be fair, i have to confess that I haven’t read all of Patron’s messages (who did?), so maybe he did cross the line. If you can find any such message, please forward them to me and I’ll apply the same punishment.
Patron’s behavior was an issue, not because of one particular message, but because of his overall behavior. This translated into a slow grind of the quality of the content in the forum, because people are not willing to contribute anymore, as I said above. Hence my post above saying we should stop coffee threads and politics.
