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Discussing A Bad Faith Debating Rule

making huge and extraordinary claims with no evidence (all progressives want white genocide),
The reality of the world is that you can't convince everyone of your way of thinking e especially on a message board. At one point in a debate we all just need to accept that our opponent isn't going to be convinced by our argument and accept their difference of opinion. You can't force people to conceded their arguments and in many ways thats what I see a bad faith debating rule as doing.


the use of known liars as sources (alex jones,
Alex Jones I might draw the line at,
Alex Johns is on record as stating under oath that he's just an entertainer playing a character for entertainment purposes. There isn't a need to draw an arbiter line between him and legitimate news sources.

Unless they're clearly laid out, it can be used to silence debate.
Or just unjustly punsh the ill-informed, ignorant, or just outright dumb members of our community.


Not just using it, but using it and then refusing to accept when other people dismiss it.
I'd recommend If they refuse to accept your dismissal you stop wasting your time debating them. To implement a rule as you describe Ravan would be to invest in me a modderator the Authority to dismiss one side of an argument based on my own personal interpretation of the text posted. Personally I find your refusal to accept youtube videos as sources when they're plainly presenting the relevent materal to be a purposeful and unreasonable obstruction of civil debate presumably because you've either exhausted legitimate counter arguments to your opponents points or you've given up serious debating and just seek to agitate your opponent.

Alex Jones speaks truth and is the defintion of a valid source.
Not the time or the place Sacrobite.

@Horton... at this point I think he's a Russian GRU agent whose only job is to be a Trump fanboy and try to peddle that sort of shit around...
I'm both flattered Putin finds this site important enough to despatch agents to troll it, and relieved their tactics are so ineffectual.

I should clarify that I'm not calling for people to be infracted for using vad sources. I'm calling for them to be infracted for creating a giant derail about how we have to pretend that those sources aren't known liars and dissect every single separate article, after which they just vanish instead of admitting they used bad sources. Until the next week or next thread when they do it again.
As indy said that is a derail and would be handled as seen fit.

When someone has made it clear that they are only there to troll and not to contribute anything of value, does it matter what their motives are? Or should they simply be removed?

Please note that I do not believe he is a paid GRU employee or any such nonsense
Sacrobite is THE reason the ignore function was invented, he's abrasive and lacks legitimate content to contribute, but he's ultimately harmless and I find your insistence he be banned to be disturbing.

You don't have to. If you actually enforce good faith debating, shitposters will purge themselves.
Ravan this is a friendly message board where people of common interests can gather and engage in friendly discuss and debate about nerd stuff and armchair politics.

What it is not is your own personal lounge of high minded intellectuals who all align with your political beliefs and tackle every discussion with the utmost seriousness.

You seem to be advicating for a much less causal environment that stifles enjoyable content that isn't up to your standards.

I know this sounds harsh and if im misconstruing you please correct me, but it just seems like your a very disagreeable person.
 
Oh and if I may add the report that prompted me to inform Ravan about our lack of a bad faith debating rule was about an obviously liberal poster supposedly debating in bad faith. His concern over conservatives and the alt-right having free range to troll and bait indiscriminately is currently unfounded. Why are we legislating new rules to deal with problems we don't have? That seems antithetical to the principles this site was founded on.
 
If the alt-right are welcome, noone else is. It's that simple. And YES, you should punish ill informed, ignorant and just plain dumb people if it's in a debate. That's how debating works.
 
Oh and if I may add the report that prompted me to inform Ravan about our lack of a bad faith debating rule was about an obviously liberal poster supposedly debating in bad faith. His concern over conservatives and the alt-right having free range to troll and bait indiscriminately is currently unfounded. Why are we legislating new rules to deal with problems we don't have? That seems antithetical to the principles this site was founded on.
I'd like to say this thread and your two posts here have kind of convinced me we don't have enough of a problem to need a no bad faith debating rule and I realize it's been abused too much on SV and SB.

I concede my arguments for having such a rule.
 
Alright. Good luck to you then
 
If the alt-right are welcome, noone else is. It's that simple. And YES, you should punish ill informed, ignorant and just plain dumb people if it's in a debate. That's how debating works.
Since when do moderators punish debaters for being stupid? It's not my job to show somone why their wrong. That's your duty as the opposing side. I'm here to facilitate your discussion and aid its productivity. You being unwilling to engage alt-righters is not my problem. It just sounds like you want a safe space, and if I know anything about Horton it's that he detests safe spaces.

Alright. Good luck to you then
Well I'm perfectly willing to revisit this subject later down the road Ravan, and I don't mean to come off sounding abrasive. I'm having to type out my responses at work on my breaks if it helps. I just respectfully disagree with your opinion and frankly I enjoy your content and would like it if you considered staying, if not I'd understand.

Sincerely,

Lord Inquisitor Adornable, Community Outreach Moderator
 
Oh boy, this is a hot topic. I think we need an organic response to things like this. That poster who did the drive-by gish-gallop hasn't come back to defend their statement. Either because they're no on FiC, they don't care enough to follow-up, or they're just full of crap. I've come to my own conclusion that it's a ranty opinion post. The constant "citation needed" post that bump the thread every day are frankly way more annoying than that post.

Real bad faith debating is the constant strawman that get used to make cheap shot points, or goal post shifting to prolong a discussion. I think posters should definitely try to be honorable in a political discussion, especially when we're on an online forum and any such 'victory' in a debate really has no meaning on our personal lives. Just a bit more internet cred.

In regards to posters like @Ravan trying to make sourcing media content he dislikes a punishable offense? There's two problems there:
1. It goes both ways. I'd rather we not bog down every discussion into contentions over 'muh sources' and 'muh fake news' unless that's the subject of the discussion to begin with.
2. It's unsporting. Any media rag, fake or not, ought to provide evidence. Even if their intention is to spin a narrative, if they have facts to back it up then address the facts. Don't try to pretend things don't happen and worse yet try to use the rules as a club against the person you're arguing with. If the rag has no evidence to back up their spin then it's settled.


We're on an online forum to kill time and talk about shit. IMO it's really sad that people act so high strung about this and then actively try to ruin each other's day.
 
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May I ask something? In light of the recent TLJ thread banning, I suggest that, although we should moderate threads that generate controversy, we should also try and not ban people/close threads on the virtue that they're covering a subject that the mods don't want to talk about.
 
May I ask something? In light of the recent TLJ thread banning, I suggest that, although we should moderate threads that generate controversy, we should also try and not ban people/close threads on the virtue that they're covering a subject that the mods don't want to talk about.
Wait what happened?!

Did the SB mods close a star wars thread AND BAN PEOPLE because they've grown tired of moderating it?

That's fucking absurd.
 
Wait what happened?!

Did the SB mods close a star wars thread AND BAN PEOPLE because they've grown tired of moderating it?

That's fucking absurd.
Eh, not as absurd as it is at first glance. If a certain topic is pretty much only generating grief for everyone then steps must be made to keep that grief from ruining everyone's day...
 
Frozen in Carbonite needs a constitution that outlines member rights and limits moderator powers.

We're going to grow by being a BETTER alternative to Spacebattles.
 
May I also suggest something? We tone down on aggression.


Yes, we can't have safe spaces. Safe spaces are the literal cancer of society. However, what's almost as bad is punishing people for showing emotion whilst making rude fuck nuggets the center of your community. Y'know who I'm talking about. *COUGHWHITERABBITCOUGH*.
 
May I also suggest something? We tone down on aggression.


Yes, we can't have safe spaces. Safe spaces are the literal cancer of society. However, what's almost as bad is punishing people for showing emotion whilst making rude fuck nuggets the center of your community. Y'know who I'm talking about. *COUGHWHITERABBITCOUGH*.
Moderators acting in that cacaptiy need to maintain a degree of respect and kindness I have seen a lack of during my years at SB. Giving a warning isn't an opportunity to be snarky or like farm, and the warning messages you receive shouldn't be littered with passive aggressive language.
 
Moderators acting in that cacaptiy need to maintain a degree of respect and kindness I have seen a lack of during my years at SB. Giving a warning isn't an opportunity to be snarky or like farm, and the warning messages you receive shouldn't be littered with passive aggressive language.


Agreed. Can I be honest about some of the amicuses? They're not that friendly. Yes, what I did in the Sci-Fi Tech Forums was annoying and immature. However, it does not justify Wetapunga acting like some kind of superior god. In general, he's also just an unpleasant person to be around.
 
Agreed. Can I be honest about some of the amicuses? They're not that friendly. Yes, what I did in the Sci-Fi Tech Forums was annoying and immature. However, it does not justify Wetapunga acting like some kind of superior god. In general, he's also just an unpleasant person to be around.
obviously amicuses have pretty low responsibilities, but they literally just need to be friendly. You'd think vetting for that would weed out the likes of Wetapunga, I don't think he's a bad guy nessisserally, but he's just not the kind of person you'd want in these kind of positions.
 
To get back on track, I believe that if this board has ambitions to grow in size, the decisions about rules and debate will have to be taken early with a larger size in mind, aka with the hypothesis that the moderation will be much more busy and will not benefit from having the broad knowledge of all ongoing activity. This means looking a bit at forums such as SB or AH and trying to understand what they do and which works so as to inspire oneself with it. Some fast and loose rules will work with a small volume of users and content, but will be open to extremely effective rule-lawyering in a larger community.

Therefore, this question should not be considered with the current state of things in mind but with the desired one. If I may suggest something, it would be to avoid the pit trap of considering threads as isolated islands. For bad faith debating, one of the most enraging elements is when the culprit's actions are pretty obvious and blatant when taken as a whole but somewhat legitimate when taken within the singular thread.

The problem is that it can lead to complete ad hominem derails when the argument becomes accusations about the poster's general behaviour and shit-flinging using old quotes and such. What I would suggest is, to avoid this, to encourage users to make much complete reports, allowing explicitely to use, in the reports, previous posts of the reported user in other threads, to show a pattern of posting that would be bad faith. If the same behaviour was observed many times and was already ruled upon negatively or was repeatedly left hanging by the accused when called on their arguments, this would make for a much stronger case for what would be otherwise an acceptable argument.

So, possibly help posters with establishing report templates, a check-list of things to add to the report for smoother handling. And perhaps even, from the staff, establishing a precedent database for mod rulings on highly-contested subjects. Such a database, a list of links to the relevant posts with a very short description, could be left accessible to all so they can refer to it when the same argument gets thrown for the n-th time by a poster.

It would add a bit of work to the staff but would probably save a lot later when a larger community is established. In short, having a mix of Code Law and Common Law.
 
Alex Johns is on record as stating under oath that he's just an entertainer playing a character for entertainment purposes. There isn't a need to draw an arbiter line between him and legitimate news sources.
Saying something under oath doesn't mean that you are telling the truth, thought.
you should punish ill informed, ignorant and just plain dumb people if it's in a debate.
You should inform them, teach them. Not punish them.
 
if someone is debating in bad faith it should be up to those challenging them to point it out, and they should then have to either defend their points or concede.
 
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