Here’s the deal. You twats stop needing moderation and I’ll stop writing long and boring posts about it. Deal?
I’ve just read this thread from the beginning to ensure that I have all the background - and they say modding on sotonians.com has no perks!
Shirty has been moved to guest status to give him a bit of time to reflect on some of the content posted last night.
I’ve not had a chance to chat my response to this through with pap, but here are my thoughts. Where I appear to be speaking for pap, you should assume that I am not speaking for pap.
Firstly, sotonians.com advocates free speech and this thread has a right to exist.
It was created, ostensibly, to debate a current news story. If it were not created or not allowed to be created, there would be a problem.
That it exists is not a problem, in, and of itself.
Barry is making nuanced points in this thread that have a right to be heard and debated. It can be seen that on a number of occasions, he tries to steer the thread away from ethnicity and religion to instead debate culture. Others are bringing baggage to the thread and making assumptions about Barry’s motivation. Perhaps they are right about his motivation. Perhaps they are not. I do not know. But there is no content in this thread that I can see that warrants the extreme reaction that Barry has received.
These are my views formed through my eyes with all the baggage I have to help me form those views. I may be wrong.
Several people have debated with Barry during the two weeks the thread has been running. They eventually stopped debating - presumably feeling they had made their point, won the argument, lost the argument or were wasting their time.
On reflection, this seems like a sound approach to me.
There is nothing that Barry has posted in this thread that makes me concerned that our defence of freedom of speech is ignoring sotonians.com’s responsibilities to protect the rights of others.
Therefore, if we are to defend freedom of speech, we have to defend Barry’s right to create threads like this and contribute similar content in other threads.
This is an absolute consequence of one of the central tenets of sotonians.com.
So, what to do about content that you don’t want to see on sotonians.com?
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If content here incites racial hatred or any other hate crime against a societal group, downvote it and report it immediately to pap or me via private message.
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If content here is not the sort of thing you, personally, want to see on sotonians.com, downvote it. This helps pap and myself moderate behind the scenes.
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Debate with the individual(s) involved and try to change the world by clearly communicating your views. If this starts to get too much for you, see 4) or 5) below.
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Ignore it and read / write something else.
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Fuck off. I really hope this is an absolute last resort.
Trolling on this thread and elsewhere on the site
pap previously made the point that having met Barry, much of what he writes is designed to provoke a reaction. Many on here, apparently Chertsey included, took that to mean that Barry believes little of what he writes and that he is solely trolling. I’m not sure that was what pap meant and I personally don’t believe that of Barry.
In any case, _ assuming _ that a poster spends most of his days trolling, the one way to ensure that poster _ wins _ the debate you are engaged in, is to resort to trolling yourself or to drop the p-bomb as we saw last night.
Certainly, pointing out that you believe you have proof that someone is trolling you is no excuse for trolling them back. Afterall, Bletch’s 45th law of forum diplomacy states that If you are certain that you are being trolled and you react, then you, my friend, are a dick.
Trolling is not absolute, it is a sliding scale. At one end of that scale, you can see trolling as simply being a poster’s schtick or how they engage in banter. At the other end of the scale, usually, when trolls band together, it becomes debilitating and kills forums.
I believe that we have a small number of posters for whom trolling has become their schtick. I’m personally comfortable with that at the moment*, but, obviously, we’ll be driven by the community and its reaction to it.
Debate or fuck off.
#DoFo
*I’m not comfortable** with the trolling I face from those who think it is funny to point out how easily I get drunk whenever I mention alcohol.
**Bletch is comfortable with this and was attempting to show how one man’s trolling is another man’s banter.
