After hours no longer a safe place for irreverent humour.

When you have reams of man child posters running in the background to mods like schoolchildren and embarrassing themselves by announcing to the rest of the thread : "Post reported" .... What do you expect ? The likes of PigHead, Snyper, Flutterinbantim etc. wouldn't last too long here nowadays I reckon.

Mark Tapley wrote: »

I am ill educated but widely read. If my vocabulary offends you I could use terms like fùck off or you dumb cùnt if you would prefer.

Our present mileau would dictate that ones tone be a tad less haughty. Lest Paddy see through our charade.

I've been talking about this for years. AH used to be the place for pure banter and insanity, and if someone tried to ask for serious advice instead of their thread getting locked they'd just have the absolute piss taken out of them. Good times

I've made numerous threads on Feedback about this issue. One very recent one about the frequency of threads getting locked for no reason other than the hypothetical potential for trouble down the road resulted in a few admins saying that they would review the thread and consider making changes.

Since that time I seem to have noticed far fewer thread closures than usual. It's hard to tell whether this is because (a) fewer people are posting due to the recent issues and decline in users, or (b) because the mods have actually decided to lighten up on the nuking of discussions without any citation of clear rule violations. A (c) is also possible, wherein people have simply given up on trying to post certain things knowing that they'll be modded if they do.

I'd like to think it's the second reason.

To be honest, what's been happening on Boards is NOT unique to this site - all across the internet, websites where the left and right ideologies used to coexist and put up with each other have been becoming polarised in one direction or another. For instance, since Reddit's big user revolt last summer over new content restrictions, Reddit is now primarily a place for liberal ideologies and Voat has taken Reddit's former right wing users who have left in a mass exodus. It's an incredible divide when you actually look at both sites side by side - one is very sanitised and PC, the other is an absolute beast of controversial and radical discussion.

It's a real shame in my view that the internet is becoming divided in this way. And I really hope we don't see Boards being cloned the way Reddit has been (Hoardes? >_>), where all the right wingers will head over to a PC-free forum on a different site and both sites will end up being echo chambers. That's what's happened to Reddit and it really sucks - it isn't how the internet is supposed to work in my view. The earlier internet was about interaction and diversity, not about sandboxing people of different persuasions into pods where they can only interact with like minded people.

It's gone shíte tbh, seems to be very few amusing/funny threads these days. Usually now I login to AH, have a look around and just go 'meh'.

I'd say if it wasn't for the Soccer Forum I'd probably have closed my account.

Used to like AH but now I could take it or leave it, same people arguing over the same things.

Just face it its a fascist regime being run by egalitarians who think that the powers of moderation is cause for some sort of importance that we the people will never understand.

STRIKE

I had a whole long spiel this morning which I was quite relieved to get off my chest, but in the interests of not becoming target practice,I'll cut down my essay to a few points!

First - there's no point comparing Boards to Reddit or most other sites out there. It's an old-fashioned site in its structure, the whole forum thing. That has plus sides and minus sides. For instance, I personally think that it leads to more indepth and considered responses and conversation. On the minus side, it's very easy to derail, unlike Reddit, where a tangent onto ...oh, species of toads will nest in its own little subthread and doesn't derail the conversation on whether or not politicians are in fact secretly Toad People. Second plus side - some people find that easier to follow (myself included), but minus side, more moderation is generally needed to prevent any given thread freewheeling off into oblivion.

Mod Bias - The conspiracy theories are probably bull****. I know, that's a pretty usual thing to say, but it's also usually true. Mods are just ordinary posters attracted to X or Y forum for the same reasons as everyone else. I don't particularly give a flying who owns the site, it's the site itself I like and am grand with giving something back to. I suspect most other regulars feel the same way, else they'd take their protest clicks to another site!

One issue that does keep coming up is a small cadre of mild lunatics that keep reregging to be annoying. As it happens, they mostly tend to spout the same views, so it -does- look like right-wing views are being stomped on when you see reasonably innocuous right-wing posts with Banned beside the user name. It's why most of us I think would like a Rereg option along with Open, Closed and Banned. I can only think off the top of my head one lunatic reregger that spouts rabidly left-wing views (who's also been booted for being a nuisance and keeps returning like bad fish). There's probably more, they just get drowned in the mob of same old regular reregs. (If I was the suspicious sort, I'd wonder if they were doing it on purpose to feed into the whole "Boards is rabidly left-wing!" conspiracy. But I think I'd actually be crediting this particular batch with too much intelligence. I'm also absolutely grand with their buggering off to that site where the banned people go; if they want discourse to be reduced to calling each other cucks, okay, enjoy!)

Finally, AH was always meant to be the place things weren't taken seriously. However, people want to discuss the more serious stuff too - as seen in the types of threads that get started. But while things aren't been taken seriously, no-one is particularly offended by ribald commentary and wit. But when things -are- taken seriously, the insults get more vicious, the tone gets sharper and it becomes an argument rather than a chat. And that's where we are now. Topics and people and posters are more polarised, offence is more readily GIVEN as well as received (imo, don't give me that crap about mindfulness and how you can't give offence only take it, or I will suggest you go call the nearest black person a n***** and see how far you get with the "But but it's his fault for TAKING offence, I was just using the words of the wordy thing and words never hurt anyone!" excuse!)

And it's worth bearing in mind that the very range of views often espoused on boards covers the whole political spectrum, bar Legitimately Crazy (and we get some of them too, some of whom get to stick around if they're just Basic Crazy rather than Offensively Bat****), which is in itself a sign that Boards is anything but an echo chamber.

Fifth, sixth and to infinity and beyond, this is MY OPINION AS A POSTER (albeit also coloured by being a recent mod). Reflecting this onto the other mods unless they specifically comment on it is unfair and just results in people feeling less able to speak up, give other points of view and clarify things. So yell at me for MY opinions, but please please don't extrapolate them onto anyone else. My hive-mind is malfunctioning. Or maybe wasn't ever installed :P