[Discussion/Announcement] NSG's "Wing" Megathreads

[East Ute Eria Thurus]

I have been on this site on and off since 2010. Believe me, closing the Right-wing and Left-wing threads (along with all other megathreads) would in no way kill NSG. Prior to the introduction of the megathreads, NSG was very lively with a lot of diversity of opinion. Even since the megathreads were introduced in 2015, the forum has been slowly dying. The megathreads were created to make policing the forum easier for the mods (they will deny this, of course), but they quickly became echochambers dominated by a small number of posters and their existence led to a sharp decrease in the diversity of topics on the forum, less diversity of opinion, and overall less motivation for many people to participate.

[Asherahan]

Welp toodles I am going AWOL since I got nothing to do in this site anymore other than maintain my nation.

Good luck have fun and stuff. Though I would have preferred if you didn't do it by making me sad.

[Greater vakolicci haven]

Would the mods like to enlighten us as to why the authoritarian left/right threads were quickly locked despite having no problem content, despite the fact that in the post quoted below people were told that they would be permissible?

K, so could we open an Authoritarian Left discussion thread -- that's essentially what the RWDT was in practice and it is a much narrower category than "Right-Wing".

If it could stay on the topic of authoritarian leftism without succumbing to the off-topic social chatter that plagued RWDT, then in theory yes. If it simply turned into the new "sssh, nobody call the mods!" social clubhouse full of rulebreaking content like RWDT did, then odds are it would have to be shuttered as well.

[Santheres]

It is expected that players post with the intent of making the site a better, more enjoyable place to be - this is good faith posting.

In my third (fourth?) post, I outlined a specific set of suggestions as to how you could improve user-mod relations and avoid the situation that occurred in the RWDT, which would clearly improve the website. You removed the post. How does this square with this definition?

Please feel free to outline these suggestions in a post that doesn't contain a massively bad faith opening. You had some good ones.

[Juristonia]

Welp toodles I am going AWOL since I got nothing to do in this site anymore other than maintain my nation.

Good luck have fun and stuff. Though I would have preferred if you didn't do it by making me sad.

I don't mean this in a rude way, but if your entire purpose on this site was a single thread, why should anyone care or even notice?

[Katganistan]

A couple things worth keeping in mind:

1.) NS Moderation does not answer to any of us because while transparency is nice for a government, it is a terrible idea for a website's moderation team. It is their job to enforce the rules of this website, not to appease the the players that complain when they feel like a decision by the mods to end a thread riddled with toxicity is wrong because Player A liked the thread.

2.) It is very easy to criticize NS Moderation from your comfortable lack of responsibility on a website with several thousand users. So no, your criticism is nowhere near as valid as you think it is.

3.) With the previous two points in mind, if you don't like that then you are welcome to refrain from talking and go about your business or you are free to leave.

That being said, I have no opinion on the two megathreads in question. Can't say I've ever posted in NSG before (but I did catch wind of this anyways) but I know all too well the burden of moderating a place where tons of people are acting like children (or worse.) And another thing; to those who have the audacity to demand that the moderation team be replaced with new people, just stop right there. It's a horrible job and I can say from experience that anyone who wants it should not have it.

Actually, The Church of Satan, the thing to remember is that there aren't 'tons of people...acting like children or worse." The vast, vast majority of players never run afoul of the rules.

[Questarian New Yorkshire]

Do you know how exhausting it would be to create a thread every time you want to have a conversation? You have made literally 0 threads (maybe 1 if you're this poster too... excluding any you may have made on Jolt or outside of General). I have made dozens.

I've been posting on NS a lot longer than you. As far as I know I'm just one of a handful of users still posting on forums who remember the proprietary forums before jolt, even. There are likely still mods around who remember The Event in 2005. I didn't post a lot on NSG but I still read it.

How many of those topics would've been buried in megathreads? With their potential contributors busy having random chats with each other and their potential creators perhaps deciding to bring their "hey I had an idea to talk about X" ideas to their mates in the discussion threads? I can't see those thread titles since they don't exist. I'd have to go dive into the megathreads and see what's going on in those threads. They move quickly and I'd need to follow potentially pages long quote chains to see how a conversation started. It's hard work and it's exhausting.

I have a bit of sympathy for you. I understand that it must be frustrating for all the conversations you want to have to be buried in megathread. But that happens for a reason — it's more efficient. It's probably a natural process and it's quite normal that it started to happen on the site years ago.

There is a hypothetical observer, the lurker.

I used to post on a student website many years ago in which there were two very famous posters, one of whom was a die hard Rawlsian and the other a die hard Austrian, and they were pretty much untouchable by other users, but they utterly dominated the political and philosophy section. Of course they never convinced each other. As a fifteen-sixteen year old I found it quite inspiring. It made me read pol philosophy myself (and I have forgotten a lot of it).

Maybe there's 100s of those people on NS, lurking on threads reading the powerful arguments put forward by the users. But even if that's true (and you can't prove it — you don't need to, but it doesn't convince me and likely doesn't convince others), that doesn't preclude them from reading megathreads. But let's say they don't. Let's say there's no megathreads at all, as you want, and NSG is back to how it was in say, 2007. Let's say.

Any conversation with someone who doesn't care that they're not reading what I'm saying, that they're blithely responding to whatever they think I mean or are more interested in looking cool in front of their mates? That's not a conversation.

Then that's exactly what those people would be reading anyway.

You are making this assumption: that if we remove megathreads, the quality of the forum will increase, which will benefit all posters and even nonposters like lurkers. You might have a good reason for this, because maybe you think NS was perfect in 2012-2014, but let me tell you - the quality of this website is not a fixed thing. It very much depends on moments in time. You think that General will be a high quality place if we just eliminate the megathreads. The megathreads exist because General is not a high quality place. The megathreads exist because people want to be isolated from the other people on the forum.

Now in the final analysis, I actually do agree with you. If we can make NSG a high quality place, we can eliminate megathreads entirely. No problem. I'm on board, for all the reasons you listed, unironically. But you need a very serious mechanism in place to do that, and I haven't seen you propose it, although I don't exactly stalk your posts. If there's quality control, I'm on board with deleting the megathreads. By the way, I bet that most megathread posters would agree with me too.

All they've created is a culture of elitist snobbery about the megathreads

Here you go again with the bitterness. You can't keep doing that and then ding the little mod bell when I call you out on it. It's dishonest.

[Greater vakolicci haven]

It is expected that players post with the intent of making the site a better, more enjoyable place to be - this is good faith posting.

In my third (fourth?) post, I outlined a specific set of suggestions as to how you could improve user-mod relations and avoid the situation that occurred in the RWDT, which would clearly improve the website. You removed the post. How does this square with this definition?

Please feel free to outline these suggestions in a post that doesn't contain a massively bad faith opening. You had some good ones.

If they're that good, why not get rid of the bad opening with an edit reason, and discuss the suggestions?

[Asherahan]

Welp toodles I am going AWOL since I got nothing to do in this site anymore other than maintain my nation.

Good luck have fun and stuff. Though I would have preferred if you didn't do it by making me sad.

I don't mean this in a rude way, but if your entire purpose on this site was a single thread, why should anyone care or even notice?

Apparently reading is hard my main reason for to keep coming to this site is maintaining my nation which I will keep doing. LWTD and RWTD where I went I had some fun discussion that kept me coming back after I was done with the login and log out of maintain my nation.

Since I really do not have fun discussing inconsequential topics (to me because I live not there) like whats happening in America or Libya.

[The Church of Satan]

[
Actually, The Church of Satan, the thing to remember is that there aren't 'tons of people...acting like children or worse." The vast, vast majority of players never run afoul of the rules.

I mean, I'm sure even a small fraction of the players on NS still constitutes a fair number of people.

[Santheres]

Welp toodles I am going AWOL since I got nothing to do in this site anymore other than maintain my nation.

Good luck have fun and stuff. Though I would have preferred if you didn't do it by making me sad.

I don't mean this in a rude way, but if your entire purpose on this site was a single thread, why should anyone care or even notice?

It's rude whether you mean it to be or not. Please refrain.

Please feel free to outline these suggestions in a post that doesn't contain a massively bad faith opening. You had some good ones.

If they're that good, why not get rid of the bad opening with an edit reason, and discuss the suggestions?

Why not just post it in a manner which says you have ideas and would like to seriously sit down and discuss them? I'm not the one who removed them, so I can't give you an answer just like I didn't make the post so I can't answer my own question.

[Katganistan]

Do you know how exhausting it would be to create a thread every time you want to have a conversation? You have made literally 0 threads (maybe 1 if you're this poster too... excluding any you may have made on Jolt or outside of General). I have made dozens.

I've been posting on NS a lot longer than you. As far as I know I'm just one of a handful of users still posting on forums who remember the proprietary forums before jolt, even. There are likely still mods around who remember The Event in 2005. I didn't post a lot on NSG but I still read it.

How many of those topics would've been buried in megathreads? With their potential contributors busy having random chats with each other and their potential creators perhaps deciding to bring their "hey I had an idea to talk about X" ideas to their mates in the discussion threads? I can't see those thread titles since they don't exist. I'd have to go dive into the megathreads and see what's going on in those threads. They move quickly and I'd need to follow potentially pages long quote chains to see how a conversation started. It's hard work and it's exhausting.

I have a bit of sympathy for you. I understand that it must be frustrating for all the conversations you want to have to be buried in megathread. But that happens for a reason — it's more efficient. It's probably a natural process and it's quite normal that it started to happen on the site years ago.

There is a hypothetical observer, the lurker.

I used to post on a student website many years ago in which there were two very famous posters, one of whom was a die hard Rawlsian and the other a die hard Austrian, and they were pretty much untouchable by other users, but they utterly dominated the political and philosophy section. Of course they never convinced each other. As a fifteen-sixteen year old I found it quite inspiring. It made me read pol philosophy myself (and I have forgotten a lot of it).

Maybe there's 100s of those people on NS, lurking on threads reading the powerful arguments put forward by the users. But even if that's true (and you can't prove it — you don't need to, but it doesn't convince me and likely doesn't convince others), that doesn't preclude them from reading megathreads. But let's say they don't. Let's say there's no megathreads at all, as you want, and NSG is back to how it was in say, 2007. Let's say.

Any conversation with someone who doesn't care that they're not reading what I'm saying, that they're blithely responding to whatever they think I mean or are more interested in looking cool in front of their mates? That's not a conversation.

Then that's exactly what those people would be reading anyway.

You are making this assumption: that if we remove megathreads, the quality of the forum will increase, which will benefit all posters and even nonposters like lurkers. You might have a good reason for this, because maybe you think NS was perfect in 2012-2014, but let me tell you - the quality of this website is not a fixed thing. It very much depends on moments in time. You think that General will be a high quality place if we just eliminate the megathreads. The megathreads exist because General is not a high quality place. The megathreads exist because people want to be isolated from the other people on the forum.

Now in the final analysis, I actually do agree with you. If we can make NSG a high quality place, we can eliminate megathreads entirely. No problem. I'm on board, for all the reasons you listed, unironically. But you need a very serious mechanism in place to do that, and I haven't seen you propose it, although I don't exactly stalk your posts. If there's quality control, I'm on board with deleting the megathreads. By the way, I bet that most megathread posters would agree with me too.

All they've created is a culture of elitist snobbery about the megathreads

Here you go again with the bitterness. You can't keep doing that and then ding the little mod bell when I call you out on it. It's dishonest.

*** Since you did not stop with the personal attacks, have a day to think about it. 1 day ban ***

[Forsher]

That's less a problem with those two threads as others though. We have the trans thread which swallows up other tangentially related thread (the two genders thread being the most obvious example) and the magathread which eats up anything related to American politics that isn't directly related to the election. These two were more general discussion threads.

I wish we could get rid of megathreads, especially mod-enforced ones. I think the last thread asking to get rid of them was made by me: the two that were locked though were not the sort that are the problem.

Yeah, sure, there was a more organic process to the RWDT and LWDT but there were still threads locked due to overlap. And the chatty nature sucked up a lot of forum engagement time too. So I do think they were a big part of the problem. I mean, look at this thread... they're being held up as everything good and just in NSG. Even if that was true, the other megathreads grain credibility from their halos (and vice versa).

I don't pay much attention to the trans thread... I think the last time I posted in it was to ask about the song Lola (the cherry cola version is better than the coca cola original, fite me)... but I've been thinking about the Magathread. I mean, is there really that much more shit going on about Trump than there was in the Obama days? It doesn't really seem like it. I guess, though, NSG is still fairly leftwing so maybe people are a bit more hair trigger about Trump. I wasn't around (as in, on NSG) for the Bush years so maybe.

I do think the Olympic and US Election megathreads are useful. Election threads in general are suited to Twitter style posting since the political meat is really being hammered out everywhere else, right? And the Olympics is just a bunch of things no-one really cares about here unified into one competition (e.g. the various tennis threads and, hell, even the soccer thread these days). It's not even really worth calling a megathread, right? And the US Election threads... once you get to the actual Two Horse Race stage, were they even traditionally megathreads? I remember separate "predict the EC vote" threads for 2012 and possibly 2016. Would current moderation practice work that way? Unclear.

[The Marlborough]

I have been on this site on and off since 2010. Believe me, closing the Right-wing and Left-wing threads (along with all other megathreads) would in no way kill NSG. Prior to the introduction of the megathreads, NSG was very lively with a lot of diversity of opinion. Even since the megathreads were introduced in 2015, the forum has been slowly dying. The megathreads were created to make policing the forum easier for the mods (they will deny this, of course), but they quickly became echochambers dominated by a small number of posters and their existence led to a sharp decrease in the diversity of topics on the forum, less diversity of opinion, and overall less motivation for many people to participate.

That is not even remotely close to being true. Both left-wingers and right-wingers participated in both megathreads and things were discussed in both that usually would not have been before and done so in a far more relaxed manner. I think what is being missed is the link-brigading where every single thing being discussed had to come with some sort of academic article behind it in order for it to be "valid" which often discouraged people from talking about why they personally liked certain strains of communism or monarchism or other things. As Questers pointed out, they were often more conversations as opposed to formal debates, which some posters feel is apparently is a downgrade. However, in both threads numerous ideas that would have been quickly just dog piled in the past were allowed to exist and be discussed in depth with seriousness. You didn't constantly have people spamming "Source source source source" when someone stated their belief that they thought divine right of kings absolutism is preferable to democracy.

It seems the people gloating over this are the ones who expect(ed) NSG to be University Challenge and for moderation to be Jeremy Paxman.

[Greater vakolicci haven]

[
Actually, The Church of Satan, the thing to remember is that there aren't 'tons of people...acting like children or worse." The vast, vast majority of players never run afoul of the rules.

I mean, I'm sure even a small fraction of the players on NS still constitutes a fair number of people.

Why did you decide to come onto a moderation thread about a sub-forum you admit you don't participate in only to insult the posters in that sub-forum?

[Washington Resistance Army]

The insistence that the threads were hotbeds of "Nobody call the mods" seems to suggest the user base disagrees with moderation policy. Especially as they actively congregated into two large and popular threads where it is alleged this took place.

I'd question why moderators took this as a reason to crack down on the threads, rather than to review moderation policy and discuss which rules the users felt were not worth reporting over, and whether those rules really need to be enforced at all. I'd suggest to you that if people didn't want to have those rules enforced against their ideological allies, then the reason those rules were created is either that people lobbied for them to use moderators as weapons against enemies, in which case they should be scrapped, or they were created by moderation because they felt it was needed to make the site not a toxic place.

Have there been complaints about the toxicity of the threads? It seems there was actively the opposite. Certainly if there was a cliqueish attitude forming and new posters were complaining i'd see the concern.

I agree that the topics of discussion therein were too broad in an abstract sense, but they generated consistent activity. I'll reserve judgement and see if the closure of the threads results in more topics being started that generate comparable levels of discussion in a more focused manner, it's possible that part of the decision will turn out to be justified in the mods concerns and the forum will benefit. If on the other hand, we simply see a loss of overall activity as people don't start discussions that would otherwise be contained to these threads, would the moderators consider reversing this decision at a later date?

Pretty much a perfect response right here. Closing RWDT and LWDT isn't going to break up cliques or make people start actually calling the mods, it's just going to spread out even more and make moderation even harder because practically the only times people in General report things are when they've successfully baited someone they dislike into crossing the line.

[Aclion]

A couple things worth keeping in mind:

1.) NS Moderation does not answer to any of us because while transparency is nice for a government, it is a terrible idea for a website's moderation team. It is their job to enforce the rules of this website, not to appease the the players that complain when they feel like a decision by the mods to end a thread riddled with toxicity is wrong because Player A liked the thread.

2.) It is very easy to criticize NS Moderation from your comfortable lack of responsibility on a website with several thousand users. So no, your criticism is nowhere near as valid as you think it is.

3.) With the previous two points in mind, if you don't like that then you are welcome to refrain from talking and go about your business or you are free to leave.

That being said, I have no opinion on the two megathreads in question. Can't say I've ever posted in NSG before (but I did catch wind of this anyways) but I know all too well the burden of moderating a place where tons of people are acting like children (or worse.) And another thing; to those who have the audacity to demand that the moderation team be replaced with new people, just stop right there. It's a horrible job and I can say from experience that anyone who wants it should not have it.

Actually, The Church of Satan, the thing to remember is that there aren't 'tons of people...acting like children or worse." The vast, vast majority of players never run afoul of the rules.

only because they never do anything beyond answer issues >.>

[South Odreria 2]

Since you deleted the good megathreads can you at least get rid of the bad ones too? The feminism, gun control, and transgender threads are circlejerks that contribute nothing except eating other threads.

[The Church of Satan]

Why did you decide to come onto a moderation thread about a sub-forum you admit you don't participate in only to insult the posters in that sub-forum?

I'm sorry you took offense to it. I merely intended to bring up a perspective that hasn't been considered. A perspective that has been willfully ignored by the critics here.

Admittedly I only know this thread even exists because someone posted a link to it off-site. Nonetheless, here I am.

[Washington Resistance Army]

Yeah the trans thread is nothing more than a chat place for LGBT users and the gun control advocates on NSG have long since admitted defeat and given up any hint of debate so gun control threads are entirely one sided. Both should be closed.

[The Marlborough]

Also as a genuine inquiry, how is it okay for someone to continuously insinuate that the people who participated in these megathreads ruined NSG, are dishonest debaters, etc not actionable on the basis of baiting or flaming, but saying that person must be bitter is? I mean, both seem to be grounds for action according to the rules moderation has set.

[Valrifell]

The insistence that the threads were hotbeds of "Nobody call the mods" seems to suggest the user base disagrees with moderation policy. Especially as they actively congregated into two large and popular threads where it is alleged this took place.

I'd question why moderators took this as a reason to crack down on the threads, rather than to review moderation policy and discuss which rules the users felt were not worth reporting over, and whether those rules really need to be enforced at all. I'd suggest to you that if people didn't want to have those rules enforced against their ideological allies, then the reason those rules were created is either that people lobbied for them to use moderators as weapons against enemies, in which case they should be scrapped, or they were created by moderation because they felt it was needed to make the site not a toxic place.

Have there been complaints about the toxicity of the threads? It seems there was actively the opposite. Certainly if there was a cliqueish attitude forming and new posters were complaining i'd see the concern.

I agree that the topics of discussion therein were too broad in an abstract sense, but they generated consistent activity. I'll reserve judgement and see if the closure of the threads results in more topics being started that generate comparable levels of discussion in a more focused manner, it's possible that part of the decision will turn out to be justified in the mods concerns and the forum will benefit. If on the other hand, we simply see a loss of overall activity as people don't start discussions that would otherwise be contained to these threads, would the moderators consider reversing this decision at a later date?

Pretty much a perfect response right here. Closing RWDT and LWDT isn't going to break up cliques or make people start actually calling the mods, it's just going to spread out even more and make moderation even harder because practically the only times people in General report things are when they've successfully baited someone they dislike into crossing the line.

There's definitely something to be said with the way NSGers decide when and when not to report something. Most of the time (and perhaps this is personal experience) it seems to be "if I like you, it slides".

That might just be an inherent flaw with the kind of retroactive moderation that NS uses, though.

[Forsher]

Do you know how exhausting it would be to create a thread every time you want to have a conversation? You have made literally 0 threads (maybe 1 if you're this poster too... excluding any you may have made on Jolt or outside of General). I have made dozens.

I've been posting on NS a lot longer than you. As far as I know I'm just one of a handful of users still posting on forums who remember the proprietary forums before jolt, even. There are likely still mods around who remember The Event in 2005. I didn't post a lot on NSG but I still read it.

Am I talking about reading NSG? No. Hell, am I even talking about posting in NSG? Again, no.

I'm making a very, very specific point about writing OPs and creating the threads for people to have discussions. Nothing else. So, why do I see no commentary about that?

I have a bit of sympathy for you. I understand that it must be frustrating for all the conversations you want to have to be buried in megathread. But that happens for a reason — it's more efficient. It's probably a natural process and it's quite normal that it started to happen on the site years ago.

It is very much not more efficient. You have to expend far more time finding topics, reading threads and, after all that, you don't even know if everyone in the thread actually cares about the subject.

I doubt there is any definition by which this system is more efficient. And there are a lot of definitions of efficiency.

Topics of conversation are not natural monopolies.

Maybe there's 100s of those people on NS, lurking on threads reading the powerful arguments put forward by the users. But even if that's true (and you can't prove it — you don't need to, but it doesn't convince me and likely doesn't convince others), that doesn't preclude them from reading megathreads. But let's say they don't. Let's say there's no megathreads at all, as you want, and NSG is back to how it was in say, 2007. Let's say.

Nope. Try again. Not the context of the discussion. Here's the context:

You basically never took part in the RWDT.

Are they wrong?

This used to be bread and butter stuff in NSG. Now I'm seeing the same logical fallacies we used to call out everywhere. It's like being on fucking Reddit.

And, sure, maybe people screaming "strawman" wildly and expecting links and work behind posts, isn't actually better discussion, but it's more intellectually honest.

Being right was never enough, there was always almost always a crowd who had your back no matter what you did or said, but there was always that idea... buried in those superficial appeals to informal logical fallacies... that there was something more that we (a) knew and (b) cared about.

i.e. we're talking purely about the adequacy of a remark that didn't address the substance of an argument at all.

I mean, maybe, you can say that I'm starting to articulate a "we used to care about this stuff but then megathreads came along" argument, but that's not what that actually says. And even that isn't "lurkers get shut out of megathreads" (which I believe for the same reason posters do, too much thread).

For whatever reason you decided to take issue with the idea that we should and once did care about intellectual honesty, and did so by ignoring what I was saying so much that I had to start off with "not what I'm talking about but". Which is... exactly how you're following up to it?

Any conversation with someone who doesn't care that they're not reading what I'm saying, that they're blithely responding to whatever they think I mean or are more interested in looking cool in front of their mates? That's not a conversation.

Then that's exactly what those people would be reading anyway.

And? Again, this is some bullshit rabbit warren you've created by ignoring what I'm saying and trying to take things completely out of context. You wanna dive down this hole? Fine. But I'm not going with you.

What I am saying... all I am saying here... is this one simple truth: those kinds of conversation aren't conversations and they're not worth having. I'm not connecting it to the megathreads. I barely even laid the foundations to make that argument.

We. Are. Not. Having. A. Conversation.

We are currently demonstrating exactly what I was complaining about.

You are making this assumption: that if we remove megathreads, the quality of the forum will increase, which will benefit all posters and even nonposters like lurkers. You might have a good reason for this, because maybe you think NS was perfect in 2012-2014, but let me tell you - the quality of this website is not a fixed thing. It very much depends on moments in time. You think that General will be a high quality place if we just eliminate the megathreads. The megathreads exist because General is not a high quality place. The megathreads exist because people want to be isolated from the other people on the forum.

The argument I am making is that if we got rid of the megathreads, NSG would be better because it's more efficient. Because we wouldn't be suppressing conversations and hiding them away for our buddies in our favourite megathreads. I am not making the argument that the quality of the posts would increase. That ship has probably flown... remember when I said "Being right was never enough"? The benefit, in debate speak, that my position seeks is a free market of ideas because the megathread system suppresses... not depresses the quality of... ideas/topics for discussion.

Now in the final analysis, I actually do agree with you. If we can make NSG a high quality place, we can eliminate megathreads entirely. No problem. I'm on board, for all the reasons you listed, unironically. But you need a very serious mechanism in place to do that, and I haven't seen you propose it, although I don't exactly stalk your posts. If there's quality control, I'm on board with deleting the megathreads. By the way, I bet that most megathread posters would agree with me too.

Cool beans. Shame it's got nothing to do with my argument.

All they've created is a culture of elitist snobbery about the megathreads

Here you go again with the bitterness. You can't keep doing that and then ding the little mod bell when I call you out on it. It's dishonest.

"Because it's not only not personal but shouldn't be made personal either."

"I have long since given up on anyone who doesn't give as much a shit about doing things the right way as me."

It's not dishonest. It's the logical consequence of what I've actually been saying.

Also as a genuine inquiry, how is it okay for someone to continuously insinuate that the people who participated in these megathreads ruined NSG, are dishonest debaters, etc not actionable on the basis of baiting or flaming, but saying that person must be bitter is? I mean, both seem to be grounds for action according to the rules moderation has set.

Yeah, don't fall for the blatant strawmen.

Also, don't confuse "megathreads caused..." with "people who post in megathreads are..."

As an aside... are we seriously entertaining the idea that there's a problem with pointing out that a post is being misrepresented? That we can't complain about "people don't seem to care about the truth"? Because... seriously? I know people hate it when I say "that's not I wrote" but, you know, it is never what I wrote.

[Dresderstan]

Question: What about the Libertarian Megathread?

[Washington Resistance Army]

Question: What about the Libertarian Megathread?

It should also be closed tbh, it's pretty much a chat thread for libertarians.

Pretty much a perfect response right here. Closing RWDT and LWDT isn't going to break up cliques or make people start actually calling the mods, it's just going to spread out even more and make moderation even harder because practically the only times people in General report things are when they've successfully baited someone they dislike into crossing the line.

There's definitely something to be said with the way NSGers decide when and when not to report something. Most of the time (and perhaps this is personal experience) it seems to be "if I like you, it slides".

That might just be an inherent flaw with the kind of retroactive moderation that NS uses, though.

It's a more a flaw with the rules. Subtle trolling and baiting is perfectly acceptable on the forums and the past several years have seen normal discussion die in favor of those things to try and remove people you dislike and disagree with. No amount of moderator actions will change that unless the rules themselves are changed.