1968 shows us what an effective political tool murder is.

I really wish we had a sadsightful mod sometimes.

Just curious, do you ever have something negative to say about conservatives? Are they completely blameless in your world, or do you just avoid stating those negative things?

Again, just curious.

Fish doesn't tend to participate in constructive dialogue, sadly. just heckling.

Oh I’m aware, but I like to reach out every now and again so that he can’t accuse the community of refusing to talk to him fairly. Norok, Ussmak, and numbers try to make that complaint, but here I am, reaching out.

I have yet to see a conservative talking point last, what?, three replies?

I wish I could be more conservative than I am, seems like a simpler life.

Horse shit. You're not stupid, you have some degree of social skills, and you know how words work. If you were actually interested in engaging in serious discussions on this site you have all the tools you need to make that happen, or to at least make an effort towards doing so. Instead, you've just spent the last 3+ years yelling "YOU LIBTARDS ARE JERKS!" and "HELP, HELP, I'M BEING REPRESSED!" and received exactly the response you wanted for your efforts.

Well I guess it's true I don't "care" about you, but that shouldn't be taken as some disheartening thing. This is the internet, and really the limit of our relationship is posting things back and forth to each other. I'm never going to post constantly enough or deeply enough for you to want to take a bullet for me, or loan me money, or anything greater than getting a response back.

I do 'care' about your views in that I want to understand them. I don't share them, and some of them I find downright unappealing. However, the only way to remain unbiased is to constantly test your own viewpoints against those that do not agree. I think I and several others would have this discourse with you, but you seem to be coming at this with preemptive anger.

What I generally find unacceptable is that you do not pose a question, or a back and forth. Instead you come in, say some extremely harsh, negative, obviously partisan viewpoint and then run away. When people finally DO respond you generally attack back with another talking point and flee again. You don't ask questions except as rhetorical "what about when obama/hillary/bill did this" which never justify your own conservative viewpoint/candidate/argument and I think that's where the community finds you unacceptable.

You are free to have an opposing viewpoint here and can be successful. I have stated on several occasions my view on civil forfeiture, bitcoin, law enforcement's need to invade privacy from time to time, etc. These are EXTREMELY unpopular opinions of which I can almost guarantee you 70% of the people here are on the exact OPPOSITE side of the tracks as I am. I keep my dissent civil. I ask people fair questions about how they would deal with the situation. I give anecdotal, but personal, experience about how I think their way of thinking fits in with how the world actually works. I do not believe I have converted anyone or changed their minds, but I think I've given people information they might otherwise never hear about.

I will agree with you this is a generally liberal community. That's their right. They don't have to post a single conservative story and they are not WRONG for not doing so. Just like on Breitbart they generally don't post liberal stories. Good for them, that's their right too. Weirdly, if you would act civilly, you would be able to post here, but you seem to refuse out of a sense of pride.

Progressives abhor independent thought... once chastised they rarely speak out again.
I mean, isn't this exactly what you're doing? If people don't hold the conservative viewpoint they're wrong and not free-thinkers? Wouldn't this viewpoint REQUIRE you to hold some liberal ideas along with conservative viewpoints? Conservatives can't be 100% right. That would contradict your free-thought paradigm. What are your liberal views as a 'free-thinker'?

Norok and I have exchanged several civil discussions and I have spoken to him about how his ideas are not completely without merit but rather his delivery could come off partisan, prejudiced, and pretentious. He has had several discussions since without being down-modded into oblivion by the community and I think we're better for at least having to counter that differing viewpoint.

Numbers and I had one civil discourse where I clarified a statement, he thanked me for the clarification, and we walked away in peace. Progress?

I don't expect kindness or respect. As stated above, I reach out to you because you say no one here ever does. The most terrible thing you can give someone is everything they've ever wanted. They won't know what to do when they get it. Well, here you go. You're the only free thinker here, tell us something negative you think about conservatives.

I'm pretty sure a totalitarian or gulag camp guard wouldn't reach out to the opposing side in any fashion.

You keep bringing up breadcrumbs which is a comparison of you getting very little of some bigger thing. I gave you a simple response initially and I gave you "the wall of text" afterwards. I don't think there's a bigger piece of bread for you to get, but you keep implying you're not getting a fair shake. What is a full slice of bread to you?

In my last response I specifically said "don't toe the line". Have your opinion, and I'll have mine. I suggested you be civil in your discourse.

Heck, I would be fine if you just admitted you get a dopamine response from being angry on a liberal site. At least then you'd be honest. Instead, you keep comparing yourself to a Jewish prisoner here. You can leave OR participate in this community anytime you want. You appear to be the only one stopping yourself, and subsequently blaming everyone else.

Great quote I guess?

This doesn't apply to your discourse though. You aren't protecting liberty or defending freedom.

In fact, you're telling the community they shouldn't have the liberty or freedom of THEIR ideas. They should share and post YOUR ideas.

You still haven't answered what your end game is, other than being angry.

Your karma system does nothing to prevent trolls or those who would usurp your new religion.

LOL! Don't put this karma system on me. Day one of bringing the site online I started designing an upgraded, gamified version of the site with rpg elements and even an ongoing story. Then I received flak for changing "moderate/reply" to "mod/reply" and those dreams went right up on the shelf.

Right back at you.

You're gamified site does sound cool. I might be able to get the lurkers around here to actually post if it wasn't just commentary. :-)

One day. It's something I'm still working on in the background. My XP/metric system is constantly being upgraded with the idea of becoming something more when we have the resources to pull it off.

I already told you how to prevent trolling, but you refuse to do it.

With all due respect, your idea is wrong.

Case and point : Bernie Sanders Wants to Tell the Story That Corporate Media Fails To Tell

There are literally more troll posts then actual discussion posts. No one responded to the troll, they down-modded and moved on. Troll moved on to several posts afterwards. Troll's account has existed for almost 2 years.

You argument that ignoring them will make them go away is invalid.

It's not about making them go away. It's about lessening their exposure. Go ahead and open that link without being logged in. That's what search engines see. What potential users see. That is our actual site content that attracts and sells us to new users. The good stuff, the moderated content. That's how it's supposed to look. That's the system actually working. Would it be nice if we had more conversations on the post? Hell yeah! But I'd much rather see moderated conversations like that, with room for actual conversations to grow, than the typical flood of what you've got going on in this thread. People will converse more if they know that when trolls pop up they'll get smacked back down. As it stands now, I know for a fact that we have people that aren't coming around as often because they're tired of the trolls dictating the conversations. That also lowers our non-troll conversations. So not only do we get less of our regulars coming around, we also lose out on potential new users who will see less non-troll conversations from regulars, lose interest from the trolls, or worse, join in as one.

Specifically, I was responding to mechanical contrivance's view that his idea would "prevent trolling". It does not.

I understand your view on the website. I bow in deference that website moderation is not what I do, or have experience in.

Perhaps scaling restrictions? -1 can't post articles, -10 can't post images, -50 must wait x minutes between posts, -100 may only reply?

Heck, users ability to block specific user's posts from showing up at all (or have them be auto-minimized)

But it does reduce their exposure doesn't it? It keeps us from showing up in the sort of search results that would attract other trolls. And you may not be impressed by the number of comments in that post, but it's still more than when I posted about the last townhall. Fact of the matter is certain conversations just don't gain traction around here because we've had them a million times. One of the reasons I try to encourage reading related books.

I'm not a fan of individual blocking as a site feature, though scaling restrictions are something I may implement into individual comments. Image filtering below -1, that sort of thing, but that doesn't address any of the points I've made over why it's better to downmod and move on than to help them spread their shit all over my nice clean floors! :P

Image filtering would be nice.

I would love the ability to completely hide comments made by certain users and every comment under it.

Are these comments you think should be downmodded for the health of the community?

They're comments I don't want to see and never bother reading, anyway. While we're on the subject of downmodding, why is it that sometimes downmodded comments go below my threshold and sometimes they don't? It's not consistent behavior.

But should you have been downmodding them? Problem is I give everyone the ability to block people and suddenly those comments that should be getting downmodded don't get downmodded. Our moderated content, which I'm struggling to get moderated in the first place, goes to nill.

There's multuple factors to that. There's the personal threshold dictated by your profile settings. Then there's something like a 5 comment minimum on a post before the thresholds kick in. I may change the latter.

Next time I see a comment that should be below my threshold, I'll count the number of comments and see if it's below 5.

And yes, I thought of the automatically hidden comments not getting downmodded. I haven't thought of a solution for that.

I think it's 5, might be 6. I'll double check the code when i get the chance.

Ideally there should be enough moderation happening that the need to downmod would be spread out amongst the userbase, but because we're not the mass of activity we used to be, it doesn't happen like that anymore. We'll get there as we grow, but we're only going to grow if everyone pitches in.

Aight I just checked. It was greater than 5 comments, I changed it to greater than or equal to 5 comments for now.

Fine. Continue to feed the trolls.

No conservative ideas are posted here.

Well who the fuck is to blame for that? If you ever came to argue for anything I would be amazed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog