No politics rule v2 - would it work?

I still don't like that i had to put a no politics rule on this site.

We still have it because:
- certain individuals who have been warned a bazillion times like to play 'dance around the line' and dump fuel on a thread to get a flame war started.
- it used to be mostly Americans using this website to scream at their political opponents, but now we also have some Europeans acting the same way.
- most people ignore warnings about behavior and think that somehow, they should be able to violate forum rules just for this topic.
- the number of trouble makers still exceeds the number of peace makers.
- in discussions like these there are a lot of people who take the bait when someone wants to turn up the heat.
- flame wars are always the result of not controlling this behavior.

I chucked the worst of the right and left wing debatelords during last election, so the number of problematic individuals is small.

I'm thinking, why punish the whole class still? how about..
- all political discussions get dumped into offtopic.
- if someone repeatedly and intentionally agitates on political topics, they will be warned, and after ignoring the warnings, they are no longer able to post in off topic discussions.
- in general, we loosen up rules on politics talk so that people capable of talking to each other like civilized adults can enjoy the freedom to do so.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on this idea before i change anything.

I left the German Pedelecforum forum because a few trolls were cluttering up every thread with their far-right slogans.

The admins have now completely banned these few people and it's been quiet ever since.

It may be that someone interprets this as a restriction of freedom of expression. Unfortunately, we Germans know only too well from our history where right-wing extremism leads. Asking afterwards why you allowed this to happen doesn't help any of the victims.

Sounds fine to me.

Yeah I think moving into a off-topic and only banning those who go too far is ideal. Honestly I think constructive talking about politics by reasonable individuals who are debating in good faith is a good thing, honestly more of that would prevent the extreme side taking and echo chamber problems so common around the world. That type of discussion though does not need to fill up random threads about other topics.

Also I think at least recently political talk on this forum has been pretty reasonable, yes some strong opinions are around but haven't seen personal attacks and that type of stuff much so we are already far better than most places it seems. Maybe phrase some rules to remind people what reasonable and unreasonable political debate is and copy and paste those into the first post of any thread that gets moved or flagged as political, heck put [political] at the end of the thread title so people know what they are getting into and if it doesn't have that they should keep their political opinions to themselves in that thread. Maybe I have too much optimism about people being able to have a totally political thread in a reasonable manner.

We do have the ability to essentially cut parts of a discussion out and move them into another thread. One problem is that it can screw up cohesion of the thread sometimes. It's possible in most cases to slice off the side tangents.

I think the only problem is - what's reasonable and what's unreasonable?
That's a hard thing to 'spell it out autistically' or 'explain like i'm 5'.
There may be cultural differences that make it even tougher since we serve the world.

Because enforcement is murky, i think an OT ban would require a quorum of moderators who, on average, are centrist politically, to mostly agree that someone is being unreasonable. This would make it a hard ban to give, but it would be fairer than banning the account, fairer than punishing the whole class, and a lot easier on the moderator team in the long run.

I think we are already there but i'd like to double check before implementing something like this because the last thing i'd want to do is introduce a political bias into how we moderate this site.

neptronix said:

I think the only problem is - what's reasonable and what's unreasonable?
That's a hard thing to 'spell it out autistically' or 'explain like i'm 5'.
There may be cultural differences that make it even tougher since we serve the world.

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Yeah I was trying to think of what rules would make sense and I had some but it's hard. Some are easy and probably overlap with general rules, no personal attacks or general insults to any group in general. I feel like insulting politicians is impossible to stop, they just make it too easy.

Maybe just all posts must contain a logical argument ideally with evidence. So "this puppy based particle accelerator policy is stupid and it's going to kill puppies and cause and end to the universe" is just a statement with no logical argument vs "I think squirrels would work just as well based in this application and we should impose more safeguards by having at least 3 scientists operating it at any time." Ok that example was silly but maybe you see my point or maybe my point doesn't work, not sure. But even if you are just expressing an opinion you should try and explain why you feel that way. If you are saying someone is wrong you need to provide some reasoning or evidence. Most political talk I've seen here is actually pretty good in this respect but it seems a lot of the bad talk I've seen elsewhere is heavily based around simple statements, often just rhetoric repeated, jokes (I'm not against jokes but when you respond with only a joke and nothing else that's not a discussion), etc.

I feel bad starting that thread. Have been gone for almost two years and missed the last election and the action on here. I'm good with what everyone wants. I like to talk about things but not fight.

ZeroEm said:

I feel bad starting that thread. Have been gone for almost two years and missed the last election and the action on here. I'm good with what everyone wants. I like to talk about things but not fight.

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Starting a thread like that isn't an issue. That's not what's under discussion. You did nothing wrong.

Responding to your thread with unnecessarily inflammatory opinions just to stir up controversy is what certain member(s) did, and that's what we'd like to crack down on. Correct me if I'm wrong @neptronix

harrisonpatm said:

Starting a thread like that isn't an issue. That's not what's under discussion. You did nothing wrong.

Responding to your thread with unnecessarily inflammatory opinions just to stir up controversy is what certain member(s) did, and that's what we'd like to crack down on. Correct me if I'm wrong @neptronix

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Yep!

ZeroEm said:

I feel bad starting that thread. Have been gone for almost two years and missed the last election and the action on here. I'm good with what everyone wants. I like to talk about things but not fight.

Click to expand...

You shouldn't feel bad at all.
You started a low-spice level political thread, and it remained low spice for a longer period of time than i've seen in years.
I know coming from you that you don't have malicious or ideological intent.
This is the kind of political thread we'd be okay with if it wasn't for certain people who like to dial up the heat. So it got me thinking.


scianiac; I get what you're saying.

My thoughts is that drawing the line around the green mark here is reasonable. Anything below that gets more offensive and less useful the further you go.


I think we should also give a little slack for Nicobie's exception:
"if you're going to be an a-hole, at least be funny about it"

I blame it on neodymium magnets. In the days when we only used regular magnets, the intensity of the field was much lower.

Remember back to when you'd plan a holiday meal and invited over several friends, some meeting for the first time, you'd just let folks sit wherever they wanted to at the dinner table. Even with a diverse group, talk around the table was enjoyable, and sharing perspectives was enlightening. Now, it's best to do a careful analysis, which can be an extremely difficult puzzle, and use place cards in order to minimize interactions between various folks through seating. Even some couples will have different perspectives between each other, but that can be used as an advantage, when you seat them as a pair, you can decide whether one sits to the left or right (you do have to seat the couples together lol) and create a safe transition. Having a few singles helps a little, since they're easier to place and some can act as a buffer. You also don't want to create an "us vs them" seating arrangement, either, which would be obvious.
It's sad when the only way to ensure no volatile discussions take place is to only surround yourself with people that think and feel exactly the same way as you do. I don't think there's anything to be gained by that, but a whole lot to be lost. It's regrettable that there needs to be a rule, but what can you do?

I don't recall this being a problem back when we used normal magnets. It sort of happened right around when neodymium became the thing.

Anyway, I wish there was a toggle box at the subforum level to ignore a thread, so it just doesn't show up in my view. I think there's a way to ignore a user, but I haven't found a way to ignore a thread. I guess that info could be used as some sort of metric as well. To me, it's pretty easy to spot which way a thread is going, so give me a way to opt out, and I'm good. They can settle it out in the parking lot for all I care; I don't need to watch.

My strategy: don't ever talk about politics. Switch conversations. Divert.
Holy sheet does that get you out of a lot of potential trouble. I'll let other people hang themselves. To me, it's not worth it.

Don't get me started on my special interest though!


As a recovering political activist i learned i need to stay away from people who talk about politics all day. They are generally unhappy people who feel like they don't have the steering wheel in their life. It's nice to be understood but this is not a good peer group for me. My energy is better spent doing/making things rather than complaining about things.

'no politics at the dinner table' was a great rule and i think it would heal this nation if we returned to it.
But you'd need to cut the problem at the source: overpoliticization in the media. And it's really hard to get people off that sauce.. it's like a drug with how much it affects some people.

Yes, ugly things are happening around the world etc, it sucks etc, but dinner time should be about quality time with people. That's what it's original purpose is - what the hell are people thinking these days, getting into basically hot topics in what's an otherwise super casual setting?

Ah well.

Here's a few comments I'll save here for future use to save me typing. (sorry, wolves can't spell, so....) :

(AI Disclosure: created with a fair bit of hard work (yes, really) with the perchance.org image generator based on the other hard work I did to create the cover art for The Beaten Dog song)

neptronix said:

I'm thinking, why punish the whole class still? how about..
- all political discussions get dumped into offtopic.
- if someone repeatedly and intentionally agitates on political topics, they will be warned, and after ignoring the warnings, they are no longer able to post in off topic discussions.
- in general, we loosen up rules on politics talk so that people capable of talking to each other like civilized adults can enjoy the freedom to do so.

Click to expand...

I think this works for everything except topical political threads i.e. "will tariffs make ebike prices more expensive?" or "is the EV subsidy worth it?" Those are political by nature, and thus would either have an exemption to stay in the topical forums, or just be automatically moved to offtopic. I'd be on the side of "leave it in topical forums unless it gets bad."

^-- i'm in the same camp on your latter statement.

with this software, we can issue a thread specific ban if someone wants to substantially stink up a non-OT thread. Nice option to keep the peace. It would work.