Should this site be more heavily moderated?

[gungo]

Originally Posted by Savanja

I've always thought that derailments of threads was more or less natural progression. A thread gets boring, people run out of things to say, so it goes places that it probably shouldn't.

If posters ignore random off topic comments, then they aren't really a problem. In everyday conversations with my own RL friends, random remarks happen in the convo flow. We don't all tell each other to STFU and stay on topic, we either address it or we don't.

You ever been at a party and some random person comes up to you and talking about nonsense. Yeah i have told that person to stfu before. That is spam.

[Calbiyum]

Free speech sir.

[Savanja]

Really? I've never actually had that happen before with strangers, but if it did, I imagine that I'd walk away and not say anything. Why would I even need to address randomness? Why would anyone need to here?

[Calbiyum]

Originally Posted by gungo

You ever been at a party and some random person comes up to you and talking about nonsense. Yeah i have told that person to stfu before. That is spam.

You really said stfu?

[Savanja]

Originally Posted by Calbiyum

You really said stfu?

Like..OMG WTF! I heard highschool students talking like that. I cried.

Whoops! Off-topic. My bad.

[Illuminator]

Originally Posted by Morara

NO! GET RID OF THE SPAM AND ANYTHING WHICH CONFLICTS WITH MY VIEWPOINT!

Getting closer and closer to the grand dilemma, which is that insecurity causes people to address every single contrary post and burn out, otherwise silence admits defeat, thus abandoning one's fan base and forever dooming oneself to becoming a wide-open laughingstock never to be taken seriously ever again. Right?

[Laodaron]

Originally Posted by Savanja

Like..OMG WTF! I heard highschool students talking like that. I cried.

Whoops! Off-topic. My bad.

My g/f says "O-M-G" and "W-T-H" lol. Like the acronyms/letters, not what they mean. Its the interwebs generation.

[Morara]

Originally Posted by Illuminator

Getting closer and closer to the grand dilemma, which is that insecurity causes people to address every single contrary post and burn out, otherwise silence admits defeat, thus abandoning one's fan base and forever dooming oneself to becoming a wide-open laughingstock never to be taken seriously ever again. Right?

The issue here is more that once you start moderating, where do you stop?

Look at what happened to Germany post-WW2 (not invoking Godwin here). They made Nazi sympathizing illegal, and banned the swastika and things like that. The people said "Fine. That stuff's bad." Then they started banning movies, tv shows, and video games that were "amoral" or had "excessive violence," and it gets worse every single day because they're already sliding down a slippery slope that ends in a punji pit.

Compare the US, which, for all its flaws, got the censorship laws right. We protect assholes like neo-Nazis and other hate groups because the logic goes "Hey, if that retard is allowed to speak his mind freely, there will be precedent when I have something important to say."

Once we start saying "OK, let's moderate people like Calbiyum, who post ridiculous off topic things," what's to stop us from going "Well, what about people who post a flame in a serious thread and reference another post out of the blue?" "What about people who post viewpoints contrary to the majority in the thread?" "What about people who are excessively negative?"

Where does it end?

[Ily]

NEVER!

[gungo]

Originally Posted by Calbiyum

You really said stfu?

Actually it was more like "who are you" and then we walked away.