Obama was a no-name senator in 2006. When it comes time to make your case, you've got 7k posts. Tell everyone your ideas about how a community should be regulated, your ban history (disqualifies me, heh), and why you'd be a good fit
I wanna do it too i've got 11k posts so that makes me extra experienced at being impartial
I'm not entirely opposed to trying it; actually sort of interested to see it in action. But echoing others, I feel like it's a big overengineered. I think a more efficient approach would be to simply have an existing mod or bring on a new mod to oversee polidicks and enforce the current ruleset with slightly more vigor. We could of course do both.
I'm genuinely flattered but if there is a nomination process I'd rather pull my name out. I don't really have the time to dedicate to FP as I used to and I feel like I have pretty obvious biases that would impact my ability to provide impartial input.
Surely it has nothing to do with whether your opinions are differing from the council, we are entering into thought police territory there, but more towards your posting ethics in general that might not amount to a ban?
This is a great way to think about it, really. Certain users (Tudd in particular) consistently made bad-faith arguments and rejected or flat-out ignored competing viewpoints. That isn't how this forum used to be a few years back. Hell, it used to get heated back when we just had SH - that's the reason PD got split off in the first place. SH a couple years back was a shithole, but buried way deep in that shit were some users creating solid discussion and changing each other's minds. That doesn't exist anymore, and it's part of why I spend way less time here than I used to.
Banning people for making bad-faith arguments and baiting people is totally fine. I've probably been banned for that before. The problem, in my view, is more that we've driven out more level-headed conservative-leaning posters. There are certain people, like sgman, who I remember having very productive arguments with - now I pretty often see him get roasted on here as a troll. There needs to be moderation against name-calling and user callouts. I can walk into a Brexit thread and immediately know the first ten posts are gonna be like "haha BOILRIG right guys." Just fuck off, it's annoying.
This has become a much more politically homogeneous forum than it used to be, and part of that is the harassment and name-calling that political-minority users face. Just add a rule banning callouts like that and I'm convinced the quality of discussion would be way better.
In the perfect world with perfect council members sure, they'd base their judgement (or the judgement they advocate for) purely off of the quality of your posts and not the views expressed. I'm a lil cynical though, I don't think people are perfect and I'm sure that at some point people's political views will cloud their judgement (as demonstrated by the comparison between ratings on those shitposts in the shooting in the UK thread).
With mods it's not such an issue because a mod can get demodded for letting their bias cloud their judgement, a council member loses something they'd lose in 2 months anyway and even if it's a mod doing the actual banning evidence can be presented in a misleading manner, excluding context and excluding the general tone of conversation prior to the offence.
sgman kind of started making some pretty weird posts so the responses to his recent posts have been justified IMO as much as I like the guy personally.
I think it's more that a lot of the level headed conservatives don't even look conservative anymore in comparison to the new "bar," I'm a deep south Confederate flag waving truck driving gun toting country boy and I've had people tell me they thought I was a liberal.
You do sound socially liberal, like people being free to do their thing without the gov sticking their nose in
It's more accurate to say that I don't think it's my business or the government's business what people do in their own lives. I have my way of living, other people have theirs, we can all get along. People who want to force people to conform to their lifestyles are extremists.
I doubt it would lead to such harm because remember, according to these rules anybody with the say to observe the discussions only has the say to observe, and everybody should take the responsibility to look into something independently before doing something instead of just saying "yeah i agree" when somebody else puts it forward. At the same time, the only power such as it is is to report trouble users and posts and recommend people for bans and probations from the forum, the final decisions are taken by the mod team and can be reversed by a senior mod if needed.
Have requirements for these positions been discussed yet? Like a certain level or activity or anything like that?
I don't think there should be any requirements other than someone being active and reasonable on the forum. But that's just me. Impose tighter restrictions on who can and cannot have a seat then the contest becomes very restricted.
As someone else said, sgman has chosen some very particular points to defend as of late, choosing the tiniest quibbles of a given report or story to try and completely discredit it. To me, and others, it comes across as somewhat disingenuous. I'd still nominate him for a position on any sort of Polidicks User Council because of his perspective and the fact that he is generally reasonable besides that time he said leftists want to destroy America.
Callout bans are fine as long as they are actual call out bans. "Answer the question Tudd/Boilrig!" in a thread they haven't even appeared in is dumb. What was happening with Tudd was that people were posting in the thread that he was also posting in and getting banned for call outs, which in part lead to the idea from many that the moderators were trying to protect him.
Regarding conservative/political-minority leaning users, I can't say I sympathize. There should be one ruleset and if it turns out that posters of a certain political stripe can't work under it then thems the breaks. We shouldn't let the bigotry of low expectations set the bar so low that everything short of outright flaming is kosher but then decry the lack of genuine conversation and debate. There has to be some standard.
I petition to change the title to the Facepunch Aldermen.
Sorry guys, we actually missed the biggest fault in this whole idea on the last page. This election is obviously going to be compromised by coin trading.
Money gets in the way of politics, no matter what. Diamond hoards will determine the discourse of Polidicks, I'm calling it now. You're going to see all the leftists with huge avatars suppressing everyone else.
I want to be the George Soros of Facepunch
I've been in a bit of a limbo recently when it comes to Mr. Sgman's posts, as you echoed. I don't know if it's a situation of Berenstein vs Berenstain where I'm remembering their posts as being better than they actually were. To me the guy always seemed fairly sensible and not what can I guess be called "somewhat insane" now.
A conspiracy of shitposters will bring back Tudd in his final form.
Donald J. Tudd.
From the top of my head, I will guess that people can write a short bit about why they want to be on the council, some campaign materials like an image or a video, then these are all included in a thread and we use ratings to vote.
Maybe instead of automatically triggering a new council, we can vote whether or not to elect a new council at the end of the term?
Mainly, but will also allow PD members to influence policy change (rules, subforums, etc) and give them a direct interface with the community team
The main issue that the council will address is self regulation. The very nature of PD is varying shades of grey, political opinion, etc. Someone mentioned earlier that their opinion of BDA was that he tried to compensate for his bias by letting certain things slide. I'd like to avoid that if at all possible.
The council will be able to influence and suggest policy. I'm normally the person who does this forum wide, but Polidicks is a very complex community which requires a level of engagement in here that I simply don't want or have the time for. Having a user council will help me in this regard, veteran posters who actually take part in these debates can fill me in on problems that I would normally identify browsing and posting in the rest of the forums.
I didn't even know what a strawman or ad-hominem argument was, for example, until recently.
That's why the balance will be across 5 people. Decisions will be discussed with everybody and it will be very easy to identify when somebody is acting with bias because there won't be any substance or weight to their arguments.
Conversely, the problem with putting a moderator in charge of these things is that they're solely responsible for their decision and therefore more vulnerable to impartiality or bias.
That would be a good idea. I'm easy on this, I understand that people have jobs and school, etc. I think discussions will be quite fluid on Discord but if need be, we can have set "meetings" where everybody tries to sit down at the same time to discuss matters. This could be like once a week.
Great, I'm going to have to fill out a 501(c)(4) form every time I rate someone on the council.
you thought it was Tudd, but it was me, Dio
low hanging fruit but I couldnt resist
IMO the political homogeneity is more to do with the world itself getting shifted more towards the right than anything else. There's plenty of sensible 'conservatives' on this forum, but in a situation where the ruling right wing party is so far off the deep end it's hard to even say "I'm left and Grenadiac is right" when we hold basically the same social values for the most part.
The people that are missing are what we might call the "Tuddposters" not conservatives.
sgman's posting quality has changed, that's not a matter of pushing out level headed right wingers.
Same with Brexit, it's such a universally ridiculous event that even now the left and right are mostly united in "Ok that wasn't such a good idea". Boilrig is an infamous example purely because of how often he's been shown to be absolutely wrong about absolutely everything and still keep saying the same stuff.
I'm going to have to change my name from proboardslol to ((proboardslol))
This is a good point, and something I've been thinking about recently. The overton window has been shifted so far to the right in recent years that that many posters who seem liberal are actually centrist moderates. There are a variety of topics that FP is center or even center-right on, and something I've mentioned before when talking about echo chambers is that I can't really think of another message-board-type website that has as much diversity of opinion as FP.
This isn't about short term problems or moderation. It's about the community having a voice.
Shitposting isn't even that huge a problem as far as I can see.
Personally my main concerns are with the quality of opinion pieces, as the line between "Opinion article" and "propaganda piece" can only really be drawn by properly researching the sources used, which most people don't do, anywhere on the political spectrum.
Also very much this. I'm not sure what he means by oscillating harder and harder either.
I would favor having actual mods, but if we were to do something like this, I think having a section in which banned members could defend themselves (like what we had in old punch) would be a good idea
If we do a council. I demand to be the centrist leader, because anyone who holds serious beliefs or convincitions are nerds.
I can't wait for the council to be all Tudd-types that drive away any and all real debate and discussion.
This is a terrible idea hezzy. Just pick a dedicated mod or two to watch this section. Why be so dramatic?
We had something like this in old punch, where users could contest their bans. I found it very useful or at the very least, humorous.
Any mods that were acting unfairly could be called out (which was not often, our mods were pretty good), or a mod could explain their reasoning for the ban in more words.
Or the banned user can be a complete buffoonand no one would take them seriously ever again
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