Articles & Happening Meta Discussion

Articles & Happenings is the third attempt at a news board on the Kiwi Farms. It is a cursed place. Every moderator who has been assigned here has resigned within a year. During 2016, the political crossfire was so bad it spread to different boards and culminated in me banning American news discussion entirely for several months. It has been deleted in its entirety twice. There is no actual discussion here, it's people posting garbage. It leans much further right than the rest of the site and doesn't particularly conduct discussion because dissenting opinions are dogpiled by a thousand memelords posting shit they read on /pol/ without any critical analysis.

The only rules that can be enforced are empirical ones with boolean violation answers. New threads must cite a real source directly and must use the headline of the article as a thread title without any editorializing. Articles must be archived in some way and must link to the original article. Replies that are one word or a reaction images are automatic one-month bans from the board.

I'm creating this now because it seems like this place is here to stay and is one of the largest areas of the entire site. I might as well throw in bare minimum effort to improve it. I don't even try to find mods for here because they will quit, without exception. I've added new prefixes ("Business" and "Crime") just now.

Discuss.


New threads should be made like this.

 

[The Pink Panther]

Were you here for the Tarrant megathread? That thread single-handedly caused people to ask Null to consider one week wait times before posting.

I was, but I didnt really comment in that thread.

I mostly ignore the mass shooting threads because no matter what site you are, it will always turn out to be autistic. I saw the archives in Spergatory. Worst newfags ever.

 

[Unog]

God damn has it really gotten to the point that you made a fucking thread about this shit?

The whiny assholes who keep bitching about A&H are the exact kind of people who turned SA into the politcally correct hellscape it is today. It's a singular place on the site, which people can ignore. I don't go on at length endlessly bitching about how I'm sick and tired of the lukewarm takes catty bitches in the Beauty Parlor have on 7/10 average women who have mental issues, because I know that part of the site doesn't appeal to me and never will.

The people who bitch and moan and piss themselves endlessly over A&H are idiots who can't stop touching the hot stove. Nobody is compelling them to read past the first post so I don't understand why they should be entitled to have such a say that it becomes a thread when they can do like the rest of the site and fucking ignore it if they don't like it.

 

[Keystone]

That people don't like @CatParty or his posts here is an actual bit of news to me. Him and Ron (and Dyn, rest his cunt soul) keep things fun, and anyone who gets actually upset at them is a bigger faggot than someone who takes ratings seriously.

 

[X Prime]

The whiny assholes who keep bitching about A&H are the exact kind of people who turned SA into the politcally correct hellscape it is today.

I wouldn't quite go that far, but it is telling that when someone dissents and then gets challenged, even if the challenge is issued in a relatively articulate manner they often get upset and say something like "i'm not sure what I expected out of A&H."

This is why I say much of the complaints smell of political animus a lot of the time.

 

[Still Anonymous For This]

I like A&H. It gets spergy at times if Jews are mentioned, but otherwise it is generally pretty cordial. I would say most of the people who really stank it up the past few months are gone. (Again, RIP CDMP.)

Unfortunately after the site "hack", I've been lurking for a few weeks and don't see a lot of names I'm familiar with. I wonder how many had accounts so secure not even they could access them? Definitely not me.

 

[X Prime]

Unfortunately after the site "hack", I've been lurking for a few weeks and don't see a lot of names I'm familiar with. I wonder how many had accounts so secure not even they could access them? Definitely not me.

A couple of dudes, including I want to say Dynastia, straight up deleted their accounts.

 

[XYZpdq]

Yeah I don't think there's really that much to fix at the moment. It works good enough, maybe a bit of gimmick poster cleanup here and there.
As for the other stuff I think a case might be made for it being more of a "dumping on the modern USA democrats" circle jerk than a "liking modern USA GOP" circle jerk. Like any time I express my pessimism expecting the modern GOP to somehow piss away every gain they've made because they're just that good at fucking it up I've never gotten any particular dogpile.
The leaning I think is like the Vic Magaiewnainwonia thing, it's not that the farms has an inherent interest in rooting for Team Vic necessarily, it's just that Team NoVic is just such a spectacular pile of dummies.

 

[Spunt]

The whiny assholes who keep bitching about A&H are the exact kind of people who turned SA into the politcally correct hellscape it is today. It's a singular place on the site, which people can ignore. I don't go on at length endlessly bitching about how I'm sick and tired of the lukewarm takes catty bitches in the Beauty Parlor have on 7/10 average women who have mental issues, because I know that part of the site doesn't appeal to me and never will.

SA's problem was that for the longest time there was no board for news and current events, and it all ended up in their General Bullshit board, causing it to be clogged up with political sperging. The "Politics" board, Debate and Discussion, was a Communist Troon hugbox circlejerk so spastic that it makes our A&H look like the Oxford Union, so nobody sane wanted to talk about the news there. Eventually the D&D tards invaded GBS because those threads were full of wrongthink, and Lowtax responded by banning all news and political discussion from GBS. This meant that you were a sane and reasonable individual (left or right) you had three choices: join the madhouse in D&D and get banned immediately for having the wrong opinions, post about it in GBS anyway and get banned immediately, or just leave. The SA experience shows that the "News and Events" board should be kept separate from the "Serious Politics" board, the way it is here, otherwise the spergery infects the whole site.

SA have also tried multiple times to separate politics shitposting from the regular boards (through Laissez-Faires, then C-SPAM) but it would be the same posters circlejerking in both boards, except in C-SPAM they would post in all lowercase and with no punctuation to show how not triggered they were.

Don't underestimate A&H's value as a containment board is what I'm saying. It has a lot of problems, but getting rid of it will cause those problems to spill into the rest of the site.

 

[X Prime]

This meant that you were a sane and reasonable individual (left or right) you had three choices: join the madhouse in D&D and get banned immediately for having the wrong opinions, post about it in GBS anyway and get banned immediately, or just leave. The SA experience shows that the "News and Events" board should be kept separate from the "Serious Politics" board, the way it is here, otherwise the spergery infects the whole site.

This is not correct.

There is in fact a fourth choice: post political topics enough mods agree does not qualify as political, and they let it slide.

There are indeed political threads in GBS, usually after major events such as mass shootings. They just get locked and buried eventually when enough posters piss off the mods by posting against the grain.

 

[Spunt]

Well there wasn't that fourth choice when I left, maybe they were trying to fix their mistake. Either way I'm not going back there and the point stands that every forum attracts a minority of political extremists who will take over the entire site unless they are carefully contained.

 

[Unog]

-internet history post-

The point is that when you have a bunch of faggots whine about a section of a site that they don't ever have to see or interact with that works fine on it's own, don't fuck with it. Doing so only invites completely avoidable disaster.

 

[X Prime]

Well there wasn't that fourth choice when I left, maybe they were trying to fix their mistake. Either way I'm not going back there and the point stands that every forum attracts a minority of political extremists who will take over the entire site unless they are carefully contained.

Oh no, I am fundamentally agreeing with your point and showing an example of how trying to separate politics vs. non-politics just leads to infection and conveniently-interpreted rules.

 

[The Last Stand]

What and how would you define as left-wing vs. right wing in A&H standards? Is just criticizing Trump enough to be considered left-wing or "libtard"? I have heard that A&H is considered /pol/ lite by some users, but even the admin of Kiwi Farms thinks that AND makes an official post addressing it, there's a deep rooted problem with this section.

Removing ratings won't help matters; I think it'll worsen the problem. It would encourage more shitposting and one liners from its toxic community. Informative, for instance helps as you get feedback if your post has secondary information on what you're talking about. @Cosmos helps mix up A&H with environmental news articles, but not many people frequent them or try to be edgy.

The ratings also help with who likes what you have to say, even if they may disagree. Another inconsistency I've noticed with A&H is its stance on Muslims or Jews depending on the context of the article. It's a 40/60 split on which religious group is despised the most and here comes the rabbi and "religion of peace" jokes. You should be allowed to critique anybody regardless of religion, but when the word Muslim or Jew pops up, everybody loses their shit. There's little intelligent discussion with those subsets.

 

[JohnDoe]

I've always considered the relative dumpster-fire aesthetic of A&H to be a feature, not a bug. I don't even know if it's possible to "fix" A&H and that's kind of the appeal. News and politics has turned into an autistic cage match on every possible outlet, so that's not unique to the Farms. The trick that people ought to learn is to just pass over opinions that irk them and learn when it's no longer productive to keep reply-chaining each other because you're really not apt to change anyone's mind at this point.

I'm going to hard agree. This board helps people become a less triggered spergtard - partly because of the rating systems, partly because of the community. In the insane maelstrom of all social media this is a refuge where sanity is at least partly present. It'd be a shame if this release valve was deleted.

 

[Christ Cried]

Because that's stupid. People have to learn how to talk to each other. I'd encourage more dissenting opinions more than anything. Think Greta Thunberg is right? Go on. Say it. Dynastia was great at this.

Is it really us /pol/tards fault if the left wing segment of the site is too chickenshit to post?

 

[X Prime]

What and how would you define as left-wing vs. right wing in A&H standards? Is just criticizing Trump enough to be considered left-wing or "libtard"? I have heard that A&H is considered /pol/ lite by some users, but even the admin of Kiwi Farms thinks that AND makes an official post addressing it, there's a deep rooted problem with this section.

Removing ratings won't help matters; I think it'll worsen the problem. It would encourage more shitposting and one liners from its toxic community.

How is anyone supposed to respond to this in a constructive manner? You literally open with political bitching and follow it up with appeal to authority.

 

[Null]

Is it really us /pol/tards fault if the left wing segment of the site is too chickenshit to post?

It is if you're being hostile and smug to the point where no one actually wants to talk to you, yes.

 

[Christ Cried]

It is if you're being hostile and smug to the point where no one actually wants to talk to you, yes.

Fair enough

 

[The Last Stand]

How is anyone supposed to respond to this in a constructive manner? You literally open with political bitching and follow it up with appeal to authority.

I'm asking how is left and right wing defined in this context. I apologize if I steered anybody the wrong way. Left wing in America differs from left wing in Europe and vice versa.

 

[CharlesBarkley]

Is it really us /pol/tards fault if the left wing segment of the site is too chickenshit to post?

Sometimes it can be a bit boring like Reddit reversal where Orange Man X posts flood into everything. It's just replacing Trump with Jews.

Maybe we need a "Hot communist chicks" megathread or something where a fat dude wearing a horse hair wig and banana hammock can be the top model or something.