Hey all. I have some good memories here. I signed up for webdip a looong time ago. obiwan-since-oh-before-you-were-born.gif. I (and my brothers) have brought a variety of people to the site to sign up and play games. I like that the people who gather here tend to be a bit more cerebral, strategic, even open to philosophical discussions and the like. There's something about that habit of mind that I find a kind of commonality with, even if the commonality is in a struggle. Inasmuch as my 2 cents is valuable feedback, you're welcome to keep reading.
Thank you Kestas and Zultar for making this site a possibility. Also farewell to Zultar I guess. Sad to see you go.
Lots of good insights on here already. Here's a couple thoughts I didn't see posted yet:
:: The lack of images is a feature, not a bug.
Believe it or not, the no-images policy (and the old forum lol) is why I played diplomacy at webdip. It drove the discussion toward the verbal, the long-form "verbal era" communication that was of course the norm in 1901. It's a feature because... there is no shortage of places nowadays to post memes. There is a decided shortage of places where the mode of communication requires facility with words. In the same vein, I like that there is a forum at all, regardless of how outdated it might look. Discord/live-chat is great, but in my mind there's a place/space for forum speed conversation as well.
:: Godwyn's Law
Jamiet99uk wrote: ↑Fri Mar 10, 2023 11:05 pm
Since we're all writing essays.
I was banned from the site for saying it's ok to violently stand up to Nazis.
My position was clear: You're a an outright Nazi, you give up the right to be treated sensibly and without violence. People have the right to kill you because you are a fucking Nazi.
Wanna ban me again?
Not that anyone cares what I think, but statements like this are why I haven't bothered to log on in 2+ years, and why I stopped trying to get people to come play diplomacy here. It's a call for physical violence, coupled with a high degree of politically convenient equivocation about the meaning of the term. There are real neo-national-socialists, yet there are far more intellectually lazy people using pejorative terms in contemporary political discourse to marginalize their perceived opposition. I choose to think that Jamie's smart enough to see why it's an unjust equivocation of terms, so it's hard not to get a whiff of malice under statements like his. Either way, calls for violence like that are in the same class as actual neo-nazis themselves calling for violence. If statements like these won't/can't be moderated, then the forum is already 4chan-adjacent, and it's just not worth it to spend the time here. Like many fora for discussion, people are
going to disagree on the content of all the propositions. That's probably half the fun. We'd be better off for having a robust civil discussion on it anyway. But in my decision making matrix, discussion in a high-pejorative context is pretty low-value. Perhaps that's a reflection of my own thin skin, idk. But that's the feedback.
:: I'd rather have a tone police than a proposition police.
Let someone make a ridiculous assertion, but demand that they do it civilly. I've moderated discussions in a variety of non-webdip places, and I've noticed that the line for 'drama' tends to be when these boundaries aren't respected: Ad hominemns, Fallacies of composition ("anyone who doesn't agree with my political position is a {insert omnimalificent boogeyman}"), mischaracterization, and low-context emotion-posting. Don't post when you're hungry, horny, or angry, or drunk enough to appear like the above. I wonder how moderation policies would play out if enacted along the lines of "these forms of argument/assertion are illegal" rather than "this propositional content is illegal."
:: Alt accounts reduce accountability, ironically.
An unintended consequence of alt accounts might be a higher volume of low-accountability posts, which solves for toxicity. I don't spend a lot of time on 4chan, but my impression was that it's the premier place for anons to be anon. Look how that ended up. When people's reputation are on the line, they're more likely to moderate themselves. When alts are the norm, there's a temptation to ignore the consequences of our speech and actions. People already say stuff to each other online that they wouldn't in real life. How much worse would it be when someone's character and reputation is even *less* impacted by poor self-discipline?
Accountability doesn't have to mean silencing. A major ban could be inability to post on the forum. Minor 'warning' bans might include things like "limit on posting rate per day" or "if you continue these ad-hominems or fallacies of composition, it's gonna affect your %RR."
:: ChaqaGPT
Chaqa wrote: ↑Sat Mar 11, 2023 12:18 am
We should put ChatGPT in charge of moderating the forum
This is a fascinating idea! I'm very curious to see how this would play out. Also curious to see if chatGPT could analyze a block of rhetoric, reliably to determine the forms of argument employed, and how fair it'd really be.