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Yeah, no, I'm not buying it. I've seen you use this line on far too many good people.
I think all you're optimizing for is getting rid of "witchiness" as sneakily as you can without making people too upset about it.
Sorry to say this publicly, but you and sscreader are two of four regular posters who I completely discount, and would rather not see at all if blocking didn't disrupt the site experience so much.
If you want to call mentioning being the victim of a crime "dropping a steaming turd", go ahead. But I think people are sick enough of that reddit-mod manipulation tactic that it won't work.
You may (given your pm to me) not believe this, but I do find many of your posts useful and interesting, I just think you let your emotions get the better of you a bit and have a little too much open boo outgroup in some of them and I think they would, and this space would, be better without those elements.
Having said that given you just said you don't like blocking people because it degrades the user experience, asking me in pm to block you is a little bit of a dick move. So its ok for my user experience to be degraded because you don't want to see my posts, but you're not willing to take one for the team, when you are the one with the problem? Not cool, man.
Suffice it say, if you don't want to see my posts, either bite the bullet and block me, or just ignore me. I won't take offense, I promise.
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No you haven't. You've seen me use this line on lots of people just like you who think the rules shouldn't be applied to you when you want to shit on people you think deserve it, and who think we should let unfiltered venom be normal discourse.
There are "witches" who've been posting here for years. There are "witches" who have rarely or never been modded, because they are actually capable of presenting their most extreme arguments in a civil fashion.
If we wanted to get rid of witches, we could have done that.
Are my feelings supposed to be hurt? Most of our worst actors, unsurprisingly, nurture a deep resentment towards the mods who mod them most frequently.
You know perfectly well that it was not "mentioning being a victim of a crime" that I was referring to as "dropping a steaming turd." (Truth be told, I probably wouldn't even modded your OP. I thought the venting was borderline, but mostly generalized. @naraburns thought otherwise.)
This is the sort of disingenuous argumentation that causes me to discount what certain people say. Since we're being "sorry to say this publicly" and all - there are people who complain about our moderation who make well-reasoned points about how they think moderation should work and what would be best for the site, and they simply differ with us on the best policies, and have a different vision than Zorba does or a different interpretation of the rules than naraburns or netstack or I do. And that's fine, if unfortunate that sometimes it causes resentment.
Then there are people like you, who want to drop steaming turds and are constantly infuriated that you're not allowed to.
Remember, we also see the reports you write to the mod queue. Especially when you're seething about being banned. You write reports like "Why is it allowed to talk?" and calling us quokkas because we don't ban someone for... posting a perfectly polite, left-wing opinion.
When you make a principled argument, you will be taken seriously. When you just go off about how very angry you are, enjoy the updoots but it doesn't mean anything.
...Okay, fuck it, the direct approach it is.
While we're on the topic of steaming turds, have you considered that your flair text is one? Every time someone reads one of your posts there's a threat to horribly maim them right above it. I don't know for sure if SteveKirk's threatened to hurt anyone - I haven't read all of his posts and don't have his mod history in front of me - but he sure as hell hasn't made generalised threats against the entire Motte literally hundreds of times.
Seriously, there's an explicit rule here that we shouldn't be more antagonistic than necessary. I find it hard to conceive of a more unnecessary and egregious form of antagonism than your flair text; most Mottizens have never done anything to you and there is no need to antagonise them at all, let alone threaten to gouge their eyes out. You would whack anyone who tried anything remotely close to that - heck, you have - and rightly so; it's corrosive to the board.
I get that you are burnt out from modding a politics board. I used to be a forum mod myself* and got burnt out; in some ways it was good for my sanity when the forum got nuked from orbit by our host. But there are healthier ways to deal with that than firing scattershot threats into the crowd. If all else fails you could even just take a sabbatical; you're not the only mod here and, while you do add value with your modding, the place isn't going to immediately implode without you.
*It wasn't a politics board; it was a stalker board. Among the more interesting modposts I had to make were "please do not urge other members of the board to commit phishing attacks" and "please do not swap advice on how to get away with murder".
EDIT: I've been made aware that this is a quote from someone you banned. Leaving this up, because there's still some merit in the "corrosive" issue and because I'm not in the habit of hiding my mistakes, but I'm significantly less pissed off now.
I've been using things people have said to me as my flair since before we left reddit, and I'm quite surprised that all this time you were reading it as me saying I wanted to a put a screwdriver through someone's eyeballs and never said anything. I figured at least the quotation marks would make it obvious they weren't my words. (That said, I probably need a new flair, but no one has been quite that... colorful in a while. No, this is not a request.)
As for being burnt out, now and then I feel a little sick of this shit, but if I were really burnt out, I would quit.
You may or may not remember, but I joined after theMotte left Reddit (I have a "no major social media platforms" rule, with the exception of my pre-existing YouTube account, which meant I couldn't join earlier).
Like I implied, I just wasn't taking the direct approach, because 1) you and I don't know each other that well, 2) I figured that if you were that far gone into misanthropy and given #1, I wouldn't achieve anything besides starting a shitfight, and 3) (until I lost my temper) I didn't particularly want to start a shitfight, because as noted I sympathise with mod burnout (and because theMotte is supposed to not be about shitfights). I PMed Zorba about it nearly a year ago, but his response didn't mention the backstory.
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Pretty sure that flair is a direct quote from one of the paranoid leftist-hater people. Could be communicated more clearly, sure.
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That was a threat Amadan received, not one he made.
Shit, whoops. I looked, but not in the right places.
To be fair, it's not like the flair itself has a hyperlink. In context it's a weird cross between a justifiable brag and a plausibly deniable cry for help, but out of context it does look hostile.
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The funny thing is that you almost always end up eventually banning the trolls I report (like Tomato), despite taking my reports as an anti-recommendation. It must be terribly frustrating.
This is kind of rude sir. Kind of rude indeed.
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You and the people you get in the dirt with usually spend lots of time reporting each other and eventually getting banned. What's frustrating is that none of you think anything applies to you. You crow when your enemies get banned; you shriek indignantly when you get banned, and fail to recognize the pattern.
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If that's what they were going for they'd either get too frustrated by now and just start banning people, or just throw in the towel. The amount of "witchiness" sure isn't decreasing, and they don't seem all that upset with it.
I get some of your frustrations, but people you're upset with fall well within normal (as in: not setting out to manipulate anyone) human behavior, and conduct themselves better than 99% of the Internet.
Nah, I've seen this kind of thing before. Community sentiment keeps drifting, part of the mod clique goes fully adversarial. Eventually there's some big drama flareup, a mod purge aided by someone with admin permissions, and a crackdown based on "reinterpreting" an existing rule.
It starts with a few mods seeing the community itself as a problem to be solved, and that's where Amadan first tripped my reddit mod alarm.
The broad sneering at large sections of the community, the snarky, sarcastic mod notes right out of 2016 reddit. You can see the same old story unfolding.
Yes, I've seen it too, but splitting off from /r/ssc and then Reddit itself is hell of a way to do it.
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