Open letter to the NS audience
Dear NS people,
Whatever you say on NS, someone will not agree and another will eventually get upset. Some will even call you a dumb fucker and few will even suggest to kill you for your philosophy, concept, argument or idea.
At such, almost every thread can be considered as trolling, since you always will upset at least one man, woman or a dog with a baseball cap.
NS changed a lot since the ‘Big Move’ from Jolt. The forum GUI is uglier and is less user-friendly, the audience changed (dropped in average age by instance) and the mods their attitude against trolling changed as well.
On Jolt you could discuss about the existence or non-existence of god(s) as long you were more or less polite and not victimizing certain groups. It was certainly possible to start a thread like “God doesn’t exist”, just because this one is polite and not victimizing people, at least the initial posting created by me. Maybe you don’t like the content or don’t share the idea, but it is in no way offending.
Today this is considered as trolling and as a consequence locked. If it is really trolling, which it probably is – who am I to disagree with the opinion of the mods, I’m not worthy - then we can’t debate about anything anymore.
Starting from today, forget debating about:
• Obama
• Bush
• America
• Europe
• China
• Iceland
• Atheism
• Religion
• Communism
• Capitalism
• Politics
• Abortion
• Euthanasia
• Ferrari vs Porsche
• Barcelona vs Real Madrid
• The rights of homosexuals
• Superman vs Spiderman
• Jews & Palestine
• The war in Iraq and Afghanistan
• Hot Lesbians
• …
All those topics have allies, enemies, believers, non-believers, people that simple agree and do not agree. Whatever line you’ll write, you certainly will upset someone and thus troll people.
It seems that debates are now forbidden at NS. Which is sad, because that was the reason I was on board.
I understand that the mods suffer a hard time. Their Moderation section is triggered more by the (new) users than ever before. It seems that everyone is flaming and trolling. If you disagree, go to the moderation section, yell ‘TROLLING’ and they will lock the thread. I understand that they have to adjust their way of working to the new audience which is clearly much younger than the dirty old men and women from Jolt. The new kids on the block are much easier upset, suffer from weak debating skills (yet), poor topic choice and have a lack of good manners.
I think I can speak in name of a significant share of ‘old’ regular Jolt people:
‘Mods, don’t fall into the trap of locking threads just because someone doesn’t like the content’.
By doing it, you’re undermining the initial concept of Nationstates and the General forum section in special: a place where you can debate about everything. This is including the idea of thinking aloud that God doesn’t exist.
By locking threads just to fulfil the desire of the young weak debaters you’ll result in an exodus of regular ones. The quality of the forum already dropped a lot and would continue dropping in the future. At a sudden point we only can talk 'bout the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees. I don’t think this is what the founding fathers & mothers of Nationstates had in mind. Stay at your core business: go for quality, not for number of posters. Else you’re just a forum like zillion other ones.
However, we always can talk about the weather.
In Antwerp (Belgium), it is cold for the time of the year, the sky is covered with clouds and the rain will fall any minute now.
How’s the weather in your place?
Yours sincerely,
I’m Hairless Kitten and you are not.
