Re: Moderated group voting procedure

On 24 July, 22:39, Tom Crispin <kije.rem...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Fri, 24 Jul 2009 13:31:15 -0700 (PDT), Simon Brooke



<still...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 24 July, 18:19, Tom Crispin <kije.rem...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Fri, 24 Jul 2009 09:44:40 -0700 (PDT), Simon Brooke

<still...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
But it's you who have put the boot in.

Are you implying that I should not be able to express my opinion
unless it broadly matches the opinion of the moderator team.

Absolutely not. I'm not opposing anyone expressing any opinion.

But, you pointed to a thread which contained a lively discussion
between people who are no longer here. Why are they no longer here,
Tom?

They're no longer here (in many cases) because the group has been made
too unpleasant to be worth contributing to. You're not responsible for
that. But you are responsible for trying to prevent us from creating a
new, separate group which may be congenial to the old regulars of
uk.rec.cycling. You can't keep them here, Tom - they've already voted
with their feet and left. The new group is not threat to u.r.c - it
will continue to exist, and will continue to have, as it does now,
assorted posts by Ed Dolan, Commandante Banana, Nuxxy, Judith, one-off
socks like Luitenant Verkramp, and the rest of the cooks.

Face it, this group has had precisely two on-topic threads today:
'Removing Campagnolo cranks' and 'Kenyans invent bike phone charger'.
Threads started by the trolls outnumber them three to one. U.r.c isn't
merely pining for the fjords, it's actively putrescent. By voting for
a new group, we're taking nothing away from you because what you
valued has already gone. But you are deliberately seeking to take
something away from those who want to rescue discussion of cycling on
Usenet.

How can I be deliberately trying to take away something that doesn't
even exist?

I have voted against urcm.  I do not expect those voting against the
new group will even outnumber the number of moderators selected by Ian
Jackson.  If formed, I hope the new group succeeds.  I do not expect
that it will, but I will be delighted to be proven wrong.  If formed I
will subscribe to both groups; I expect the new group will hasten the
demise of the old; I expect the new group will also fail, but at a
somewhat slower pace; I expect that some of those who have left the
old group will return to the new group, but that their return will be
temporary.

To be honest I too expect both groups will fail, although I'll do my
best to see that urcm does not. It's too late for urc; that has
laready failed.

But you only have to look at half a dozen of Britain's cycling web
forums to see that they are all better subscribed, more active, and
have livelier and more constructive debate than we have here. Why?
Well, partly because new Internet users are familiar with the web and
are not familiar with Usenet. But also significantly because on the /
successful/ ones, trolling isn't tolerated, and where trolling is
tolerated users vote with their feet and move to another. And because
these sites are privatised and to some extent profit driven, someone
is actually concerned to keep them alive, and so to exclude the anti-
socials.

If we fail to control the anti-socials here, non anti-social people
will continue to drift away to those privatised gated communities
where the anti-socials are controlled. And so the whole of Usenet
will, ultimately die. Because not enough people care enough to fix it,
and because as the good people leave, the ratio of bad people to good
people increases.

Personally if I was all powerful my moderation policy would simply be
to require every person who contributed to discussion to publish a
verifiably correct real world home address where they actually lived,
and then let them get on with the debate. The reason why people feel
that it's OK to be so poisonously rude on Usenet is because they hide
behind pseudonyms and know that there are no real world consequences
to anything they say.
.

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