Making it Better: The future of WP

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Sly I know it takes a lot for you to post and you should continue posting. I am so happy to see you post after being so quiet. We are trying to keep politics out of this thread. I see now that political freedom is a big issue that you want fairly dealt with and this is what most of us are fighting for, for you and everyone else to be free to express who you are without prejudice. You are not alone in this fight.

Last edited by Teach51 on 22 Aug 2020, 3:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Thanks

Just now:




One might be inclined to call this an example.

With this many, unfortunately, it isn’t practical.

Too many posts, too little hands?

^ It's also not important and you can't expect the mods to go through so many posts, it's unreasonable.

And just as long as we all drop the political stuff in this thread, it's fine and we can all move on. It takes everyone to stop it by not responding back.

The problem is feeling inferior, mediocre and superior (inferiority complex) from tribal elitisms and transferring the unbefitting discomfort of them over to another topic quite resembling it (racism / politics in the current case), and believing that by resolving that scapegoat subject that it will resolve the actual problem itself ~ whilst the elitism becomes even more habituated and uncomfortable on account of reaching either a consensus, or a drift-weed barren silence, not to deal with the tribal elitism itself ~ as involves the habitual feeling of being inferior, mediocre and superior.

Last edited by Deepthought 7 on 22 Aug 2020, 4:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Basically. We can only remove posts from one page at a time. That’s hard enough. The really tricky thing is merging them afterwards - it’s very easy to accidentally merge the wrong thread, which can then be difficult to fix.

It’s great that we even have the option to split threads, but the UI is not great.

Yes, that’s a useful example. No condemnation here, but just for illustrative purposes, let’s imagine a 5-point scale:

1: non-political statement (“I like apples”)

2: non-critical political statement (“I will vote for Smith”)

3: critical political statement focused on an ideology, party, or public figure (“Democrats want to raise taxes”, “Trump is stupid”). These are explicitly allowed.

4: comment which merges aspects of 3 and 5 - perhaps a critique that is more objectionable, an outright attack on followers of a universally detested ideology (such as racists) without targeting individuals, an unwarranted generalisation.

5: outright attack on followers of a political ideology or other protected group (“leftists are dumb”, “reichwingers are evil”). These require mod action.

The comment you quoted probably isn’t one we would like to encourage. It is overly broad and certainly uncharitable. There are those on the right who do not believe the government should prevent discrimination, but few would frame their beliefs in quite that way. I think on the scale above, it’s a solid 4 leaning towards a 5.

What about “libertarians believe that tackling discrimination is best left to the free market”? This is still, technically speaking, a generalisation about a group, and arguably a negative one. There certainly are libertarians who think that, and they’ve posted as much on this site, but there are also some who are not. But I think demanding total precision at all times is not helpful. In that case, it would be better to leave it to the userbase to correct any generalisations. On that previous 5 point scale, this is probably a 3.5 or even a 3. It is more important that we allow people to state what the followers of an ideology believe, and maybe be a bit sloppy with their terms, than it is for us to remove it.

The difficulty lies in those 4/5 statements that are somewhere in-between “description of a belief, slightly sloppy” and “explicit, outright attack”. If someone says “libertarians believe stupid s**t like the free market solving all problems” then yes the criticism is aimed at the belief but it’s also indirectly criticising the holders of the belief. Is that OK?

And further complicating the matters - there is a wide range of verbal intelligence within our userbase. Some users might try to write an acceptable description of a belief but write it in a way that implies other things because they don’t have the ability to express themselves precisely. Others might know that they can say exactly this which will follow the rules but still be provocative.

And of course it cuts the other way too - perhaps someone is very careful to say “certain strands of libertarianism are somewhat complacent towards workplace discrimination, which I believe is tantamount to tolerating racism”, and someone else reads that as “you are a racist”.

There is a real trade off between allowing people to express themselves and preventing people from feeling attacked. The examples that cause the most trouble are the ones that fall in the middle, and you either end up punishing someone for a mundane comment or risk someone else feeling like the moderators won’t stick up for them. If you clamp down too much then people complain that they have to be a lawyer to say anything. Policing the boundary is tough!

I think it was relevant for people to see how the mudslinging occurs, and spills outward from PPR to other fora including News, The Haven, and now Admin.

I sincerely believe that the roundtable podcast which has now been posted twice (techstep and myself), puts much of our recurrent political discourse into perspective, and gives credence to intellectual opinions which may differ. The guests have varied opinions, but do not attack one another or use pejorative language to mock one another with condescending terms. Perhaps some members could benefit from the example of directed and constructive political conversation, using it as a springboard for collaboration rather than divisive speech.

Moving forward, it's imperative that no members are thrown under the bus for the sake of political expediency. That's what makes me so frustrated. Our autism support site has succumbed to the ugliness that is politics, and it began to abandon members simply because they didn't subscribe to leftist doctrine. I'm hopeful this won't continue.

I trust we can all use this as a stepping stone to treat each other with respect, now that some of the offensive posts are starting to be deleted by the moderation team.

the site should be running much more quickly. I've removed ads temporarily as i found that impacted things significantly but I will probably bring them back unless people are interested in paying an optional monthly fee to support no ads for everyone.

Thank you Alex.

I have a free ad blocker and don't see any ads at all. I don't think people would need to pay.

Will this reduce the number of CAPTCHAS too?

Off topic:
Miriam Webster says of ret*d
ret*d noun
re·​tard
Definition of ret*d (Entry 2 of 2)
1 \ ri-​ˈtärd \ : a holding back or slowing down : RETARDATION
2 \ ˈrē-​ˌtärd \ offensive : a person affected with mental retardation
3 \ ˈrē-​ˌtärd \ informal + usually offensive : a foolish or stupid person
Bolding=mine

Maybe not among the people you interact with but plenty of people limit the description of racism to belief in a superiority of a race and discrimination including people here on WP.

IMHO the a lot if not most people trying to change the definition of racism to a power dynamic these days are doing it to delegitimize people that do not agree with certain points of view.
Person 1: A major cause higher rates of crime amount black people is poor leadership.
Person 2: You are white thus racist so your opinion is illegitimate and does not matter. Check your privilege.

IMHO Similar thing with so many non racially based forms of bigotry being described as racism.


As far a “ret*d” goes when describing a person I have never heard it used in any other way but as an insult.

Back on Topic
On WP racism and racist statements are whatever Alex says they are

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 22 Aug 2020, 7:24 pm, edited 2 times in total.