disclaimer: I am a low-user, not reading / contributing much in this forum any more
i now make a bold claim that 99% of the forum users are indeed capable of a constructive, civil conversations, regardless of how opposing opinions are.
There are just very few users that produce 99% of what causes
i regard those few users as absolutely toxic to this forum and its community. however they seem to be able of decent conversations on certain other topics…
…this percieved toxicity does not stem from their usual opposing opinion to mine, as other more appreciated users have that, too.
Personally I don’t feel there has been a decline in quality, but then I don’t read the Coffee topics and I mostly skip anything opinion based. I am an avid user of the mute function. This has kept me sane on social media.
What worries me the most is that
existing users are feeling their contributions are not valued anymore.
new users don’t sign up because of the tone.
It’s time to stop Coffee topics and focus on the personal finance content again, to see how it goes.
I prefer this forum to be a place of evidence based discussion in a constructive spirit, and not of dogmatic bashing.
You guys are kind of not seeing the real issue, IMHO.
The forum software used here, discourse, is the real problem. It’s made to make you read everything. Compare with oldies (phbb and co) where it’s easier to filter. An example is EF .ch (I’m sure most of you know it). There you can easily avoid the parts that you don’t like…unlike here, where the new policy is to show twice when a post is “Coffee”.
Edit: I forgot the conclusion.
Conclusion:
There is nothing to do. Just don’t read the posts that aren’t interesting and flag answers that go offtopic. Moderators will then open a new “bar crawl” or other thread
„Single mothers that receive financial help from government are like parasites. They are only themselves to blame for having a child with a runaway father rather. And Government is acting in an immoral and tyrannical way“ when they „steal, coerce“ people to take taxes and provide social welfare.“
That was, in a nutshell, one of the most visible and hotly discussed threads this morning (and it wasn‘t the first case of such controversy).
I‘m not for denying people from having controversial opinions or preventing them from voicing them. I’m also not advocating banning political discussion.
But there is a point beyond which opinions aren‘t merely shared or opposed anymore. Beyond some point, they become so „fringe“, so outlandish and far removed from the moral fabric and commonly accepted values in our society that I‘m not surprised they alienate long-standing users and deter lurkers/new users from joining.
What happens in such situations?
They remain collectively ignored (rarely). Some may withdraw from the discussion or the forum.
They will, often inevitably, breed contention, heated discussion, people will get or take things „personal“, become insulting, etc.
They will be challenged in a more or less civilised and constructive manner. Which may actually do more harm than good over the long run, as it lends some acceptance. It reinforces the idea - especially to outsiders - that such opinions are within the realm of accepted ideas and ideology among forum users. If a discussion, topic or controversial idea, becomes prevalent, it will be attributed to the forum and its users as a whole rather than just one or two particular users.
If you have or strive to pursue a policy of non-censorship and not banning users as long as they present their ideas in an outwardly civilised way, it may become a real dilemma for any forum and its moderators.
I think this is the lesson learned. Voicing certain opinions, especially in a non-diplomatic manner, alienates a large portion of users and brings unrest to to the forum. In order to stop this, censorship seems to be the only way.
By the way, the views you see as fringe or outlandish might be shared by a larger part of the society than you think, but these people are shamed into silence, so they usually don’t publicly voice their opinions.
I think I remember some infuriated posts by @Grog and @nugget . I think it was not ok how they wrote it.
As much as I would like to preserve freedom of speech, I don’t like the current sentiment in the forum. I feel kind of responsible of maintaining the positive mood among users.
@Patron your ultra-libertarian views annoy the hell out of people and I think you see that you’re probably not convincing many of them, at some point this might be viewed as trolling (annoying people for the sake of it).
I’m personally sat to see @Patron leaving because even if I did not agree with many of his points he has expressed his opinion always in a polite manner and he did never indulge - as far as I can remember - in personal attacks (which on the opposite I’ve seen happening many times against him).
All this witch-hunting thing is imho a first step into the wrong direction but well - if this is the wish of the majority (is it ?)…
In personal attack maybe, that’s why he was tolerated for so long, but
This is just from this thread. Everyone that doesn’t agree with P, everything that doesn’t suit P is immoral, disgusting, unethical and want to steal his money.
You had enough time to formulate your vision of ideal society. Instead, when asked how your ideal society should work, it was another wall of text produced as a reply and the same sentences were repeated again. Trolling it is, maybe even with bot generated texts.
In comparison to the old times of usenet we have a lot of advanced features on these modern forums… ignore users, ignore threads and so on… dialogues need always (at least 2) parties
Yes, I have used “parasitic” once in the first post, and a second one in a milder way in a second, later post. So twice, which is by definition less then several but you had to make a point out of your gut feeling.
I did accept the critique and escalated back the wording. I did got carried away. But I can assure you I (and many other) do not blindly follow the “green party doctrine”. This is one of the problem discussing with you: you simply take one look, decide to put people in one basket, and never actually engage in fruitful conversation.
I have become much less active over the last year(s?) and sentences like this (not trying to pick on you, Patron, it’s just the most readily available example in this thread) are what pushes me away. I truly believe this sentiment is in direct opposition to the spirit of FIRE.
To me (I ultimately come from the Early Retirement Extreme school), FIRE is about squirreling away enough so I can live a good life, and being content with it. Then, it’s likely all about improving the community around myself (publicly know example would be MMM).
Many of the messages we’re discussing here are all pushing boundaries of morals, tolerance and legality. As described before, this does not align with my view of FIRE (getting to the position of being capable of being a better human) and therefore I see such messages as hostile to my ideals. With more and more such messages, I just feel less welcome overall. And the hard thing about such a feeling is that it’s just that – a feeling, and not something that could be put into rules.
This post is ultimately not actionable. But I hope I can put some words to my otherwise silent viewpoint.
I must have missed or not remember that other thread - but the double standard certainly isn’t lost on me.
That said, reiterating it half a dozen times over several posts isn’t just holding up the mirror. That’s adoption.
Absolutely. It’s the combination of what you said, how you phrased it (and, maybe, even who said it, to be honest). And the moral judgement you proclaimed. I’m at this point not giving any judgement myself - I am just stating how I believe it’s perceived by many people.
I stand by my opinion, if you take into account what he said, how he said it - and judged it.
“I think single mothers face a very difficult life and aren’t supported enough by society and the government. We should support them better financially”.
“I think you should only get kids if you can afford them. Single mothers on welfare don’t own up to their mistakes. We spent too much many on them - money that others have earned”
Yes, these are two differing opinions that might be shared by larger parts of society.
The radical way he stated, phrased it - and his own moral judgement on it? No. I refuse to believe that (though again, I’m withholding my own judgement here).
I definitely agree that to his credit he did not become personal or resort to personal attacks. That said, while not personally attacking an individual, comparing single mothers to parasites and accusing (holding up the mirror or not) and accusations of intolerance weren’t entirely “polite” either, IMO.
Y’all may try to find the right policy that balances all considerable aspects for another year, but by then the forum will be dead. The simple answer is that @Patron is killing this platform, not because he is doing something against the rule, or because of his extreme views as such, but because he relentlessly and unapologetically overshadows any and all discussion. The logical conclusion is to simply ask him to step away and ultimately ban him, rule violation or not.
To @Patron: I am impressed by your time and effort you put into your contribution here, especially as in everything I have ever seen no discussion amounted to anything much at all in the end (neither you nor the other side changed their view). And I applaud your own conclusion to leave this forum, hoping you follow through.
By the way: That is exactly why many forums ban political discussion. Discuss tax optimization? Sure. Discuss if taxes in general are theft and unjust? Nope.
I would say it’s not about the fringe but about the agressiveness. Qualifying of parasites people who are in a situation where luck may have had something to play, and who are just using the tools (social programs) that are offered by society (and as such, that are within their right to make use of, just as using tax optimization tactics is fair game for wealthier people to do) is taking it one step too far in my opinion.
In this specific example, I didn’t know how to respond to that. Ignoring it? It would somehow show some form of consent and that this kind of thinking can be considered normal, which isn’t an image I want to project. My feeling and consequent reaction has been to harden my own language to try and establish that a limit had been broken and that you can’t express verbal violence without being ready to deal with it yourself. Things can escalate from there and it becomes very hard to keep a friendly, if disagreeing, conversation going on from that point.
They may be not correct too, which is why we could benefit from some more moderation interference in these kinds of instance. I’m all for putting the right people in the right position (and you guys are the right people) and relying more on discretional judgment than hard rules, and there is a pannel of sanctions that can be applied before a ban (first would be a PM warning kindly but firmly that this isn’t welcome behavior). It takes a lot of time and mental energy to deal with the reclamations with this kind of moderating so I can totally understand a more loose policy with very limited moderational intervention as seems to have been applied up to now.
I am thankful for your (the moderators’) time and wouldn’t want you to start to have reluctance feelings when logging in so whatever adjustment may be made, it needs to be something you’d find acceptable to deal with in my opinion.
I think we have become somewhat numb to your direct and agressive discourse (it may be reciprocal, you may become numb to our own way to express ourselves) and have started to feel it is adequate to respond to it with verbal violence. It feels like it to me anyway and that is not ok, which is why I think we would gain from taking a few steps back and not deal with these kinds of topics for some time.
After sleeping a bit on my post, I think I identified a big part of what pushes me away: Statements of Absolute Truth. When an entire post asserts harsh opinions (or facts, it’s about the tone, not the actual content) and leaves no way to engage, it feels like I’m driving through town reading graffiti instead of participating in a conversation.
The (to me) nice posts are the ones where people show their viewpoints and ask for feedback, synthesize other posts into more actionable advice, recommend (not command) alternative options, share resources, and so on.
Yes, that’s just what happens, and while I think it’s commendable that you’re able to put up with so much, I don’t have the mental bandwidth to do so and just disengage if I don’t see the possibility of having my counterpart learn or adapt within a reasonable amount of conversation. In this case, I just end up leaving the discussion (explicit example here) and also won’t read on because I don’t consider their input to be valuable enough.
Here’s my input for a possible moderation policy:
Encourage engaging, productive and civil discussion.
Discourage posts that do not add information (just repeating previous posts)
Discourage posts that do not produce constructive conversations
Liberally use nudges to guide and educate people (or threads) towards better discussions
How about starting with 3 hour cooldowns for aggressive-turning threads or posters? This is strong enough to make it a good signal, but not bad enough that it interrupts normal conversation
Your proposals, while I like them, would require mods to read every thread top to bottom and evaluate if a certain wall of text brings added value, is productive or actionable. It’s not practically doable. It has to be crowd-sourced. What the community looks like is shaped by it’s most active members. You need to flag posts, or some of you need to apply for a leader badge and do part of the job.
All you have to do now is to ban Patron, who is obviously not leaving by himself despite of what had been said. I don’t see anyone else disturbing forum’s atmosphere to such extent.
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but you had to make a point out of your gut feeling.
are two differing opinions that might be shared by larger parts of society.