- Joined
- Apr 24, 2017
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I'm not here to call for his banning, either temporarily or permanently-- I am only here to support Justin's argument that refusing to address trolls personally, censuring people for responding to their bullshit, and closing down discussions they've disrupted is rewarding their behavior, particular that last one when shutting down any and all discussion of topics they don't like is the motivation for their behavior.
Allowing people to disrupt conversations with impunity until everyone leaves or you shut the whole thread down isn't anti-censorship; it's just delegating the act of censorship to your least reasonable members.
My concern here-- and you're right, I'm not privy to what's going on backstage-- is that a person or a group of people who do not like certain topics within the gaming community, such as safety tools or optimization or the moral content of certain settings, will be able to effectively shut those conversations down by consistently showing up loud and angry (or "angry") and turning them into clusterfucks that you then shut down. More or less with impunity, because of your admirable desire to moderate with as light a hand as possible.
I mean, come on. Fate has elements about it that make it harder to grok than GURPS (or Traveller or any game not so strongly and abstractly narrative. THIS is controversial. That is where they’re going to the mattresses, the hill they’re gonna die on, despite Fate being famous for the number of people that don’t get it (all new players, god I still can’t even fathom that one). At a local FLGS, Fate’s literally known as ”the game no one gets”. Shit, at this point, it seems like they object no matter how ridiculous because they can, and they know it will stick. Just keep repeating the same lie until it becomes the truth.
Politics is a de jur ban, but there are other emerging, effective, de facto topic bans here. If they were in the open, that would be one thing. That they’re hidden, however, is increasingly hard to take. Outnumbered, eh no worries. Outnumbered and outgunned, that’s Tuesday. Tilt the Rules of Engagement to favor those...maybe I’m getting too old.
A lot of people have expressed this concern over the last few months, and I'm not going to hunt down every quote, but I think it's time we discussed the problem thoroughly.
The TL;DR for folks is the belief that certain topcs at The Pub are consistently "shut down" by certain posters showing up and causing drama or otherwise derailing the conversation any time those topics come up, effectively creating a form of crowd-driven censorship.
The question is: how do the Mods address that? Is this a valid concern or is it just something one has to put up with in regards to free speech?