When is my ban going to be lifted???

NuNativs said:

Beware those who post anything on the Republican side of the political persuasion, you will be banned stat. Best strategy, is to stay out of politics, focus only on musical topics. Think twice before posting if you want to remain. It's unfortunate, but it's the reality.

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If you're interested, you can read about Mike's thinking on the subject of VI-Control political discussions, in the following thread:

Did Mike kill the Political forum.....

I'm completely satisfied with the excellent moderation of this forum. Thanks to ALL. A modest proposal: How about a "timeout" room with a "wall of shame", where the offenders can frequently check their membership status? If this can be implemented, perhaps it could take a bit of strain off the mods?

Twitter is plenty capable of satisfying those who may be addicted to having their blood pressure elevated. Why bring that kind of crap in here? The occasional "frank discussion" is useful here and there because taste is a wild animal, but beyond that, I'd rather not have to deal with it. Especially politics!

kgdrum said:

It was people spreading uninformed/misinformed atagonistic anti-vax and Covid b.s.
From most peoples perspective it was not anti-Republican, the moderators do not want threads continually being derailed when people had a political agenda spreading misinformation with no factual basis or relevance to the threads.

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(Must bite tongue hard, ouch!)

I’m not sure who’s been banned recently or why, but I think the decision to try to minimize the damage to this forum seems to be working. I don’t notice many conversations or arguments that seem particularly abrasive or offensive.

In a perfect world, you’d have tons of time to evaluate each problem, but realistically what you’re doing seems to be working fine. And, since it appears you are willing to give people another shot, I don’t see any real problems.

This is a nice place on the internet. Kudos.

HCMarkus said:

Funny, I was just saying to myself that it seems some folks are getting a bit vitriolic in their posts these days. Completely get and respect your perspective and approach, Mike; it is entirely appropriate. Thanks for helping to keep things civil around here!

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Funny you should say that, because I've just been over at the GS forums, and good LORD has that place become even more of a hot dumpster fire than it ever was before.

The vast majority of new posts are literally a bunch of dudes arguing about aesthetical tastes in music (nothing new there), but 'vitriolic' is precisely the word I would use to describe a lot of the conversations now, about issues as dumb as one person's taste differing from anothers... it's as if everyone is waiting for — or even 'baiting out' a moment when they are personally attacked and are thus free to respond in kind; not just drama, but blatant toxicity towards fellow posters and shameless shit-posting.

There's a thread over there now called 'modern vs. out of date production' or some such, with loads of new posts, that had become an absolute garbage bin in terms of people yawping at each other or making incendiary jabs for one reason or another. Mods had to go through and purge dozens of ad-hominems (including one user who *allegedly* spent an inordinate amount of time with other guy's mothers), and it was the first time I literally saw someone banned in realtime (the same user) in a thread who was harassing (not discussing with) me and some others in that thread.

Invariably, and importantly, it is almost always people with very recent join dates ('20-'22) relative to their obscenely high post counts, and while you hate to have a reason to be suspicious of newer members, it does seem there is a clear correlation with the likelihood of such a user to be a repeat offender on a new account who is up to the same antics after a prior ban.


Maybe we are entering an age of musical angst and people are more ragey than ever? A result of COVID-era jadedness and projection? Dissatisfaction with the current state of the music industry distilled into resentment for those who are 'a part' of it? A byproduct of communities being infiltrated by non-musical normies who have even more free time on their hands than ever to pick fights based on little more than their personal opinions?

Who can say... just be careful if you decide to go over there — it's the 'rough' part of town now.

At the risk of risk of exhibiting favoritism, my general feeling is that this board is altogether a cut above in terms of the class displayed by its typical users, and I certainly hope it stays that way.

In other words, I feel that strong opinions should be allowed, and discussion encouraged, but personal attacks and toxicity should not.

Trash Panda said:

There's been lots of bannings lately? Is all the action in the forums that don't show up under the Latest Posts feed or something?

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This is mostly in the main forums. (Drama Zone and Political Section are mostly ghost towns.) The problematic posts generally get deleted, so there's not much to see afterwards.

PaulieDC said:

This post of yours reveals to us that the nice environment takes effort and time on your part, more than we probably realized. Thank you for that.

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It does take some time, but the forum mostly self-moderates, so it's not as much work as I might be implying. Plus the ad revenue more than compensates, so I'm in no position to complain.

PaulieDC said:

Oh, and there have been a few times where someone new hopped on here with a real self-elevated entitled attitude (usually using "Bruh" in their wording), and I've leaped on them like a Rat Terrier that hasn't eaten in three days. Respectfully of course. Hope that's ok...

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99% of the membership here knows what's cool and what isn't, so I have no worries at all about that. In fact, the danger in posting threads like this if that the 99% might think they could be part of a problem, which they most certainly are not. (For the 99%, being cursed with self-awareness means you can't help but question yourself, so thoughts like this are understandable.) To be clear, we don't want "the 99%" to change a single thing about what they're doing.

cuttime said:

A modest proposal: How about a "timeout" room with a "wall of shame", where the offenders can frequently check their membership status? If this can be implemented, perhaps it could take a bit of strain off the mods?

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I confess there would be an evil pleasure in having a "Wall of Shame," but doing things silently seems to be more effective. Less drama, so there's no fallout afterwards. Simply delete the posts, possibly ban (without announcement), done. No strain at all. Moderating the forum isn't as difficult as I may have been making it seem.

TonalDynamics said:

Invariably, and importantly, it is almost always people with very recent join dates ('20-'22) relative to their obscenely high post counts, and while you hate to have a reason to be suspicious of newer members, it does seem there is a clear correlation with the likelihood of such a user to be a repeat offender on a new account who is up to the same antics after a prior ban.

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We've been seeing the same thing here, which is why we give way less latitude to new/anonymous members.

NuNativs said:

Beware those who post anything on the Republican side of the political persuasion, you will be banned stat. Best strategy, is to stay out of politics, focus only on musical topics. Think twice before posting if you want to remain. It's unfortunate, but it's the reality.

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Aside from the word "unfortunate," this is excellent advice. I'll add, though, that posts on the Democrats' side don't fare well, either, and about 40% of the political posts we delete are left wing. That's admittedly less than 60% for right wing posts, but that's because things like Covid and Climate Change denial are uniquely right wing.

Getting banned for politics, though, leans heavily right wing. Not because of my own political biases, but rather because there's seems to be a martyr fantasy amongst some of these far right guys. I spell this out in this "Hey Right Wing People! Stop Getting Yourself Banned!" thread.

I mention that because you chose to say, "you will be banned stat." Given that all I did was delete a few of your climate change posts in the European Hot Summer thread, with no ban or even so much as a threat of a ban, that's an interesting choice of words. Laying the groundwork for martyrdom, perhaps? If that's what you want, I'll happily comply, but be aware that no one will remember you for it, so it seems kinda pointless to me. Why not just enjoy the forum and skip the politics? If you want to believe I'm unfair to the right, I'm fine with that, but complaining about my unfairness is where things get annoying, so please refrain from that.

jazzman7 said:

Twitter is plenty capable of satisfying those who may be addicted to having their blood pressure elevated. Why bring that kind of crap in here? The occasional "frank discussion" is useful here and there because taste is a wild animal, but beyond that, I'd rather not have to deal with it. Especially politics!

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Agreed, Twitter is very good if you follow the right people. And the level of the political discourse here is depressingly low - which is why I don't do it anymore.

But my question is if it's crap, why does it raise anyone's blood pressure?

Answer: because it's all too real!

The debate in America is much more existential than left/right policy at the moment. I hope everyone is paying attention and voting accordingly.

That aside, getting banned... Mike just answered that.

Here are some alternatives for those dying to discuss politics:
http://www.politicsforum.co.uk/forum/
You can make your political argument that much more sophisticated by not posting it in a virtual-instruments-hobbyist-forum

Mike Greene said:

Getting banned for politics, though, leans heavily right wing. Not because of my own political biases,

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I try to steer clear of political discussions here, mostly because I can't imagine why I'd be interested in discussing politics in a forum dedicated to music. Plenty of other places to do that, and I come here to do something productive.

That said, the argument you employed here has been employed by many people for centuries as a means to justify all manner of prejudice.

When I catch myself saying something along those lines ("everyone who is of [X] persuasion also is someone who deserves [whatever negative outcome I deem appropriate]") I try to treat it as rebuttable evidence that I am, in fact, biased. It's not a fun bit of introspection but it has saved me from treating people unfairly in the past.

That is all.

[ETA: I actually came into this thread b/c I thought it was going to be some joke thread about someone who was angry that he was banned and then started posting demanding to be reinstated. Second-best would've been someone who REALLY thought he was banned and posting, not realizing that he could post so therefore wasn't banned. Little bit of a letdown, TBH.... ]

I wouldn't permanently ban anyone. Instead I'd set the initial ban to two days, and increase that by a power of two. Repeated 'offenders' would be away for exponentially growing number of days.

LatinXCombo said:

That said, the argument you employed here has been employed by many people for centuries as a means to justify all manner of prejudice

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Mike is not using it here, and it's not prejudice.

LatinXCombo said:

That said, the argument you employed here has been employed by many people for centuries as a means to justify all manner of prejudice.

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I disagree.

Because I see it this way:

The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.

Paradox of tolerance - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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szczaw said:

I wouldn't permanently ban anyone. Instead I'd set the initial ban to two days, and increase that by a power of two. Repeated 'offenders' would be away for exponentially growing number of days.

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I think that's also too simplistic of an algorithm. For example, it doesn't cover the abuse of continually re-registering accounts all that well.

It's one of the fundamental problems with algorithms, including regulations and laws: They tend to fail in edge cases and/or when actively gamed by motivated parties.

I also don't know, if this forum software makes time based banning or ignoring easy.

On another forum, I've seen the concept of ignoring someone with a time frame - and I've used that liberally to give shorter "ignore" time frames to individuals, to facilitate someone maybe just having a bad day.

Nico5 said:

I disagree.

Because I see it this way: The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.

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Can you name an online music forum this has happened to?

Bman70 said:

Can you name an online music forum this has happened to?

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Can you name an online music forum that's tolerant without limit?

Nico5 said:

Can you name an online music forum that's tolerant without limit?

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I can't speak for what their limits are or aren't. Therefore the grave dangers of tolerance must remain hypothetical, which is perhaps where they are most persuasive.

Comparatively, however, several people have mentioned that other music sites are "free for alls" compared to this one, where abrasive threads have been allowed to go on and egoists wax unchecked. I haven't noticed, since I'm usually just reading the information I'm looking for and find it easy enough to stay out of distracting threads. I guess you could say I'm able to perform auto-censorship.

I have to admit I kind of miss the numerology guy who was going to be the next Andrew Lloyd Webber who had a secret melody database that was going to be his keys to success.

jazzman7 said:

Twitter is plenty capable of satisfying those who may be addicted to having their blood pressure elevated. Why bring that kind of crap in here? The occasional "frank discussion" is useful here and there because taste is a wild animal, but beyond that, I'd rather not have to deal with it. Especially politics!

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The thing is, heated political discussions are pointless, because whatever side you're on, you're sticking with that, and certainly not going convince your opponent. "I got in a heated argument the other day about these issues and the other person totally changed my stance" said no one ever!