All of these ideas are good, but at the very least can links require commentary? It would actually help them. I’m actually more likely to play a YouTube link or read a twit if I have context. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

the other suggestions by HRH Punk and myself would be icing on the cake.

if I wanted to read a deluge of twits and such I’d be on there, more so than here.

one caveat, I’d probably say the rule shouldn’t apply to threads such as political shot posting, as that is what the thread is designed for.

a second caveat, my POV is only viewing the JCC, no idea if it’s going on beyond that particular board.

a third. I am certain I have posted YouTube links without comment. I was wrong.

 

The problem with only viewing JCC is that you'll never see this thread again.

 

As much as I would like more commentary, no one will follow the policy and no one will (or should) enforce it. Are we going to have mods ban people for posting links without comment? Will mods have to keep track of everyone's daily twitter post count?

We wanted a more casual Senate and we got it. If we try to enforce stricter standards, people will either ignore it and keep spamming links, or just stop posting. We'd only see a drop off in activity.

We can either have a dead Senate for Serious Posting or a live Senate with a lot of casual posting. This was always the choice. We chose a Senate where people actually post.

Twitter posts are just due to Twitter's outsized influence. Social media dominating everything is just reality now. To have a message board that doesn't talk about what happens on Twitter, you'd have to have a population of users that aren't on Twitter. That doesn't describe our userbase.

The solution is always the same. We have to start our own forum.

 

I don't think a concrete policy needs to be created or enforced, but a general guideline can be instituted and followed. There's one person in particular who constantly makes twitter link-only posts. That I don't need to name said person indicates how obvious it is. I don't think the community is served by this. It's not too much to ask for some kind of contribution beyond a twitter link. Now, many of us have made twitter link-only posts (myself very much included), but I like to think I keep it to a minimum, and when I've done it, it has more commonly been for humor than for informational purposes. If you're doing it all the time and are known for it, you've gone too far.

I get where @Darth Punk is coming from-- there's a soullessness to what I think he's talking about, and that seeps into the larger community.

 

@Jabba-wocky

 

I hear you, Punk. I don't like it either (following a link only to run into a paywall is happening more often and is getting particularly annoying). I think of it as me falling behind the times.

I guess we could try the guidelines but I wouldn't expect anyone to follow them. Coronavirus has inspired a lot of extra empty news posting. Add the US general election and the (admittedly more interesting imo) protests and the temptation to post the latest update is just too high right now.

One thing we can do is personally take the time to ask someone to elaborate. Try to bring people out of their shells/laziness. I've tried this myself. The vast majority of the time I get no response, which is demoralizing, but maybe this is because I'm an abrasive jackass and people are less likely to risk posting their thoughts/opinions to me. When I get a response and it's actually worth reading, it feels good. It's just hard to keep it up by myself when the success rate is so low.

All of us regulars should make a point to try to ask people to elaborate. If at least one of us is doing it every day, we might be able to establish an expectation for commentary that people are happy to meet, if it results in gratifying discussion.

In the meantime, I recommend using the ignore function on any individuals who seem to mostly just spam twitter links.

 

The ignore function shouldn't be promoted. It's exactly the thing that will make people harp on without any notion of opposition.

I toyed with it but now I've only got Luke and Satele Novelist on ignore because nobody replies to their posts anyway.

 

It's really just one person who needs to tone it down. I try to always include commentary whenever I post a link, but I don't mind people who post tweets without commentary once in a while. It wasn't a problem until a few months ago. I don't think we should have another Ender we construct new policies around.

 

Yeah, it's not a single user though. There's a bunch of people who will just post the news and then expect everyone to be impressed by them posting the news. The level of discourse has just gone down overall.

 

With some people, I don't think peer pressure will help. They'll just decide to leave the boards.

I don't know if we should even put that pressure on them. They are who they are. They post how they like. Presumably, they're getting something out of it, or they wouldn't do it. Who are we to pressure them to change? It's not really hurting anyone.

I could go on a rant right now about certain spam threads. I had the post typed up. Maybe I should just leave it alone and learn to accept it.

A bit of hope: I've seen users grow and evolve. Become so much more than they once were. There are a few in the JCC right now. It takes time.

I don't think it's childish to ignore someone you find tedious on the internet. You don't know her and she's not even trying to talk to you. All you're doing is just removing posts that weren't meant for you anyway. Don't let some arbitrary standard of adulthood dissuade you from using a convenient button to save yourself some energy. There's no shame in it.

She has the option to carry on as she has. She's not actually breaking any rules.

 

I agree with CT that I don't want them gone necessarily, I just don't want them to drown out more intelligent debate.

 

Tina is like Trump. Symptomatic. An expression of the problem.

"I don't want Trump killed! Didn't mean to suggest that!"

 

Like I said before, if you don’t have to name someone and most people know who you’re talking about, you stand out. In this case, that’s not a good thing.

People have different motivations for posting here, though expecting positive feedback for sharing news does seem to be one of them. There’s a subtle sense of entitlement to this, in the sense that they should be allowed to post whatever they want and everyone else should just deal with it.

Ignore function aside though, no one is completely isolated here. Posting walls of texts (news articles) or making nearly empty posts on a regular basis affects the overall discussion and community. In that sense, it becomes everyone’s business.

 

I don't think this is about one poster.

I heavily favored the Senate merger as a way to allow serious discussion in the main forums. When I think f what I hoped for then, it seems like both a success and failure. Without making a broad discussion out of my feelings, I do think we should try things that encourage discourse. As much now as ever, simply re-posting news stories or--just as problematic in the present day, Twitter comments--does the opposite. I would support a requirement, or at least an advisory encouragement, that people share a few of their own thoughts when posting a link. Stipulating, of course, that something like "This is disgusting" isn't really a meaningful contribution.

 

To be clear, I did not make this thread about any single poster.

 

I agree with KW that we probably don't need to put a concrete policy in place. It's really just a matter of setting expectations which is how I've always felt about this going back to when Senate merged with JCC.

The Community Rules & Policy thread states this:

I guess a question for the mods would be whether or not they feel Senate threads are currently being held to a higher standard. Or perhaps we need to clearly define what "slightly higher standards" are since that's also kind of ambiguous.

 

I have a feeling that the end product of such a discussion probably would not deem "twitter link posts with one sentence of commentary" as meeting a "slightly higher standard."

I find those posts irritating for sure, but one of my longtime pet peeves is posting complete news articles in walls of text, often with no additional commentary. At the very least, put those articles in quotes, because doing so makes them significantly smaller. I think it's much better for everyone to just post excerpts-- it's certainly better for the originating sites (paywalls aside).

 

I agree in a general sense with the OP and this problem of just posting an article or tweet without any comment. However, if anything is done regarding this, will it be a JCC-only thing, or apply to all the boards? A lot of the posts in the Literature section are like this, including all the posts Ancient Whills has made, which are most of our "new" threads opening discussions on new books or comics. I swear that guy must have a Reddit news feed open in one tab and Lit in the other 24/7 where he posts news whenever it arrives. But he's not the only one, and I don't see him as a spammer at all. I think we've sort of come to depend on him as the news guy, although he rarely posts his opinions when he does this.

So for Lit, I would argue that even though we've got this issue, it seems to have built itself into the system so it would be weird if it didn't happen. I don't post in the movie threads, but I assume they have something similar -- some people are just really quick about finding news articles and reposting them, but they don't say much else. We could fault them, but they contribute to the boards in their own way.

Context might be part of the issue. There's a point where someone's reposting news that advances the discussion, and a point where it's just spammy "look at this article/tweet/video I found". We had about 2 guys I can think of off the top of my head who just kept posting Youtube videos in Lit for a while with nothing else but "hey look at this video". It took years, but they improved after a while on their own and are now pretty cool with lots of stuff to say.

So it might be worth having some sort of clause in the rules saying "please try to avoid only reposting information (e.g., tweets, Youtube videos, gifs, news articles ad verbatim, etc) if you are not otherwise contributing to the conversation" or something like that. I dunno. It could be added to the current spam policy, which says: "3. No spamming threads. If you have nothing to contribute with your post, please find another thread." That statement is pretty broad, so it could use some type of addendum. Mods within forums can determine if people who are doing this are being spammy or not, especially because they should be familiar with their own forum's behavior.