The slow death of forums *see OP for Admin warning and update 28/02/18*

lets try an experiment/
I started a thread in ah on trump.
I'm hoping there can be a positive debate.
lets see

the_pen_turner wrote:

lets try an experiment/ I started a thread in ah on trump. I'm hoping there can be a positive debate. lets see

I've contributed. Hopefully I'll be challenged with evidence.

I expect the thread will be shut given the Donald has his own thread.

Tell me how wrote: »

I've contributed. Hopefully I'll be challenged with evidence.

I expect the thread will be shut given the Donald has his own thread.

so do i . but isn't that the point.
i hope that my thread can be left there as a positive thread and have the other be negative .

we will see.

Agreed entirely with the above. The policy itself is bullsh!t and it's particularly insidious because it's an unwritten policy. They don't have a specific rule they can cite, it's just the vague, ambiguous, ever-shifting paradigm of "this is getting out of hand", "I think we'll leave it there", "this thread won't end well" etc. If it were to be written into an actual rule in the TOS, it would probably say something like "Boards staff desire a certain tone, or a certain type of atmosphere, and we will try to force this to be in place even if the majority of the site's users just aren't that kind of person". That's what's really killed Boards. There was a time when people could act like your average Irish person - nothing was sacred, people took the piss out of everything (or occasionally blasted piss instead of taking it) and the general idea was "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen - if you can't hack our irreverent and 'don't give a bollocks' culture, then kindly f*ck off".

Somewhere along the line, somebody took the decision that Boards' atmosphere should be a curated rather than organic entity, and what they wanted to curate was something which simply didn't fit in with what Boards had organically become. Attempting to do this is no less ridiculous than attempting to force a bunch of inner city Dublin folk to talk with a Galway accent and use Galway humour, mannerisms, slang, etc - while punishing them for reverting to their Dublin lingo. Eventually they're just going to say "f*ck this bullsh!t" and leave. Those who are left are those who like the place enough to stay but still despair as to what it has become, because that curated atmosphere still isn't what it was ever supposed to be.

I do not hold individual moderators responsible for this. There's very obviously some unwritten rule which the users are not privy to, which essentially establishes an "overton window" on Boards (in other words, delineates a very narrow spectrum of acceptable viewpoints and 'tone') and which the mods must then enforce, even though the users don't know what that is. This overton window seems to establish certain sacred cows, but we're never told what they are.

To take one very simple example: bashing travellers and suggesting that their entire culture is laced in negativity is something which is allowed on Boards widely, however replace traveller with North African / Middle Eastern and it is no longer tolerated. You are free (as you should be) to state your opinion that traveller culture itself is inherently toxic, but you are not free to suggest that Islam or middle eastern social values are inherently toxic. That has never made much sense to me. If someone is of the opinion, for example, that only people from socially liberal cultures (and not those from repressively conservative cultures, such as countries which practise sharia law) should be allowed to immigrate to Ireland, I honestly don't see how that fits a definition of racism or why that should not allowed to be openly stated.

People have to dance around this issue because not doing so comes with a very real chance of being banned or getting a thread locked, but why? It's blindingly obvious that a massive number of Boardsies feel this way (that conservative muslim countries are countries we should not accept immigration from because of a potential risk to our own cultural integrity), and while I don't agree with the sentiment I cannot for the life of me understand who would regard it as racist, or somehow something which should not be allowed. I would be willing to bet that if someone wanted to say "we shouldn't allow too many Americans into this country because of how that might change our language and our cultural values", but replace that with Syrian, Afghan, Tunisian etc and suddenly it becomes a discussion which is moderated and micromanaged into the ground. And it is moderated against the obvious trend of how users feel, which is particularly ridiculous - it's like holding an open meeting with 100 people in it, 90 of whom are pro-life and 10 of whom are pro-choice, and then saying "there will be no discussion from a pro-life point of view in this room". That's ok, but then FFS don't scratch your head when you suddenly find that 90 people have left the room and there are only 10 remaining. If you genuinely cause a majority viewpoint to be silenced in this manner, the people who hold it are very rapidly going to disengage.

Again, this is just one example, but it does suggest at least to me that there's an unwritten overton window involved here, one which we the users are not privy to but which is very clearly enforced. There is no other explanation for the discrepancy, for instance between how far we can push the envelope with regard to travellers compared with how far we can't push the envelope with regard to Muslims.

The only logical conclusion is that somebody has defined a set of limits on discourse here and has not shared them with the user base. Whether that involves individual moderators or the administration is hard to say, but I genuinely cannot think of another explanation for the amount of "let's leave it there folks" style thread closures which never openly state a specific rule which is being broken, nor who is breaking it, not attempt to get rid of individual rule breakers with clear reasons for this instead of nuking the entire discussion. It suggests that Boards has a mandated "tone", and that threads which deviate from this "tone" are culled for that reason, rather than for any specific rule breaking.