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.

 

[Still Anonymous For This]

So... I have a slightly controversial opinion on this: A&H is absolutely a "Democrats are the real racists!" circlejerk yet it seems the cringiest post area is turning into a smaller circlejerk of its own.

What I mean by this is it feels like instead of usually engaging with each other, kiwis search out other like minded kiwis and stick to talking with them. As time goes on these circlejerks grow while they do their best to ignore the other circlejerks. Eventually, however, the circlejerks grow too large and start creating friction between each other, which I think is what the website is seeing now. I feel like the resent data leak is really bringing this low tension to a boil.

Now I might be completely wrong here, but that is my take on what is happening.

Edit: To expand on my thoughts further, I think a lot of people want A&H to remain 50/50 left/Right but I am not sure that is possible; It seems that on all forums politics eventually tilts one way or the other. On forum that somehow manage to maintain a balance, eventually some
internal drama weakens one of the sides and one political side starts dominating.

I think there's some truth to this. Even though I anecdotally don't see how bad A&H is from experience, I will be the first to admit that if there's a user I know who will have a differing opinion than me, but arguing that point will just be a trial in frustration and spergery, I won't respond.

At the same time, I've had some pretty cool disagreements with people in A&H. I would say that it's a mixture of your point about only staying in your own political "clique", but I think it has as much to do with staying in circles where people aren't cunts or who are at least funny when they are.

 

[HeyYou]

I'm already tired of this thread, so I guess the two pages remark was prescient. I say implement the two rules you proposed and see what happens.

 

[X Prime]

I'm already tired of this thread, so I guess the two pages remark was prescient. I say implement the two rules you proposed and see what happens.

Aren't those already rules?

 

[HeyYou]

Aren't those already rules?

You can't editorialize in the actual title of the thread, but I've seen flippant statements in the sub-title that are definitely giving an opinion on the matter. Same with polls. I'm not sure if that's being changed. The "you can't just cite a blog post as news" is definitely a stricter interpretation of the cite an article rule.

 

[not]

I've been lurking for years and haven fallen into using it as a news aggregate. It's convenient to glance at the thread list and see what's "trending." I don't pay too much mind to the comments, but personally don't see a problem with anyone's opinion (even the /pol/ spergs).

If making the discussion more diverse is your goal you could trial some small things, like disabling negative ratings in A&H and see if people are more likely to engage. It's easy to say "people need thicker skin" in regards to negative ratings, but this is the internet and the reality is people want their free dopamine hits, so a small change like that might have a positive affect. But that's just one example. Rate this post dumb if you disagree.

And don't take this the wrong way, but I do find it ironic that a free-speech advocate is upset with speech on his board. I know "free-speech" sites like Gab just fall into trash fires because the bad users push away the good ones (like what you're trying to prevent here), but like the saying goes you can't have your cake and eat it too.

 

[The Pink Panther]

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.

Personally I think it's just a load of faggotry.

I've lurked /pol/ and I truly think calling A&H /pol/ lite is an exaggeration for the most part. Only in certain cases does shit become bad on there, but that's with most boards.

Tbh, I think Deep Thoughts is the worst subforum. The amount of shitty threads made on there eclipse the good ones completely unlike A&H. A&H is literally lolcow for news, if biased to the right-wing.

 

[heyilikeyourmom]

1) I don't mod people who ask to be mods,
2) I don't mod people for A&H, period. It's hopeless.

I’ll do it.

 

[DumbDude42]

There should be a separate (sub)board for explicitly non-political new headlines. i.e. Tech news.

Hear me out:

We have a bunch of technically inclined people here who would probably like to discuss their non-politics related headlines/articles. But because A&H is such a mosh pit of political hot-takes and joke articles, Everything in A&H gets painted with that brush.

Eyes will never get drawn to the non-political/spergy stuff because people don't think that there is anything non-political/spergy.

Because very few people are actively looking in A&H for non-political shit, the stuff that isn't overtly political gets less interaction than the stuff that is simply because no-one knows that it exists or cares to dig.

_
Now I like A&H, and I don't want it to change, but perhaps a separate area for a specific set of non-political topics could be on the table.

(I will never suggest a Defense News board separated from political spergery because I do not think such a thing can exist)

That is just my humble opinion however.

how are you going to do that?
for example: is stallman being forced out of the FSF tech news or politics? some would say its politics, but is it really politics when nobody except hardcore tech nerds even know who this caveman looking neckbeard is or what his gnu autism is about?

i think that its almost impossible to draw a clear line between whats political and what isnt

 

[Nobunaga]

Just pull a reddit and ban whoever makes me mad and be done with it

 

[Rumpled Foreskin]

The IRA is the cause of all this.

 

[Scratch This Nut]

Climate change is real.

Trump is a shitty president.

I like pit bulls.

There is a gun in my mouth.

 

[X Prime]

There is a gun in my mouth.

Wait, you have-

I like pit bulls.

- bullets in the gun right?

 

[Pope Negro Joe the XIIIth]

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.)

And tbh it wasn't like there was a infestation of people trying to bring the Jews into everything, it was really a small collection of them. Mostly Everytime they'd post it was usually ignored and slammed with tons of dumb on it.

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.

Agreed, I think most of the posters have a understanding that either side is going to fuck you over somehow.

Jokes aside, I think the biggest issue with A&H is that it has a lower standard for new threads than say the Lolcow board. Anyone here can grab and archive a link and apply the minimum amount of commentary to it, whereas a thread in Lolcow needs to be refined and reworked multiple times. I don't necessarily know how to remedy that problem though.

What would that entail? Would they have to go research the story themselves, maybe follow the reporters path and check if everything's on the up and up? I'm not really sure what the staff at KIWI! P.I. is up to lately, but we should tell them they're taking over A&H.

 

[ConfederateIrishman]

I've been lurking for years and haven fallen into using it as a news aggregate. It's convenient to glance at the thread list and see what's "trending." I don't pay too much mind to the comments, but personally don't see a problem with anyone's opinion (even the /pol/ spergs).

If making the discussion more diverse is your goal you could trial some small things, like disabling negative ratings in A&H and see if people are more likely to engage. It's easy to say "people need thicker skin" in regards to negative ratings, but this is the internet and the reality is people want their free dopamine hits, so a small change like that might have a positive affect. But that's just one example. Rate this post dumb if you disagree.

And don't take this the wrong way, but I do find it ironic that a free-speech advocate is upset with speech on his board. I know "free-speech" sites like Gab just fall into trash fires because the bad users push away the good ones (like what you're trying to prevent here), but like the saying goes you can't have your cake and eat it too.

I argue that A&H is very similar to the current civnat boomer /pol/, which has become much like /b/, but almost not at all similar to pre-2016 election /pol/.

 

[Racist Trash]

When I read threads like this I always worry I am to blame in some form. Anyway A&H is probably my most active board probably due to it being fairly general rather than going looking for a certain subject in lolcows or subcatagories like Games. I just tend to gloss over or chuckle at the usual shitposting (Jews, 9/11, Soros, Hillary deathcount) and move on I understand the need to prevent the shit from getting clogged but I also worry that in an attempt to make it more balanced some erroneous culling may happen and while making it more factual may also have the side effect of making the board more dull.

Also I like the fact that Catparty threads somehow almost always have something linked to Gamergate.

 

[AJ 447]

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.

Most of us would be completely happy to not read A&H threads, and do, but A&H being so prominent has definitely led to an influx of a certain kind of user who takes their stupid political and social opinions outside of A&H and then starts inserting them into cow threads, where there's really no need. They also only tend to make threads on cows because of ideological differences, not just because the cow is a funny mess. This is a shift that is slowly happening site wide.

 

[Jump]

I enjoy this board because the subjects are normally things I know about or have heard about. I am to new to be interjecting in cow threads that go back years and 200 pages. There is nothing of value I could offer to those.
I lurk there and try and catch up but mainly only post here.

I think making this section only readable by logged in users would do a lot to keep low effort /pol/ and drive-by's away.

 

[kcbbq]

Most of us would be completely happy to not read A&H threads, and do, but A&H being so prominent has definitely led to an influx of a certain kind of user who takes their stupid political and social opinions outside of A&H and then starts inserting them into cow threads, where there's really no need. They also only tend to make threads on cows because of ideological differences, not just because the cow is a funny mess. This is a shift that is slowly happening site wide.

Yeah, pretty soon every thread on the site is going to have some sort of edgy (((echo))) non sequitur in it somewhere, or equivalent. Cancer is as cancer does. So much here flaunts the few rules that makes the Farms function.

Oddly, the only news discussion board that ever really worked was Current Events on SA until it got canned due to Fistgrrl getting butthurt that her boytoy was too low IQ to post there. The autistic level of self discipline in maintaining good dialog and debate was amazing, and that was 15+ years ago.

 

[Done]

I feel the OP basically laid out all the reasons this sub should be closed. It is essentially a right-wing version of ResetEra, where any attempt at making quality discussion and adding nuanced opinions is seen as you pissing in people's cornflakes.

The ratings system only makes the problem worse because it dissuades people from breaking out of the "norm" and creates an even more autistic circlejerk than people here complain about. IMO, if there is a 1st solution to be attempted, it should be disabling the ratings system on this sub.

Most of us would be completely happy to not read A&H threads, and do, but A&H being so prominent has definitely led to an influx of a certain kind of user who takes their stupid political and social opinions outside of A&H and then starts inserting them into cow threads, where there's really no need. They also only tend to make threads on cows because of ideological differences, not just because the cow is a funny mess. This is a shift that is slowly happening site wide.

Also this.

 

[Scratch This Nut]

Wait, you have-



- bullets in the gun right?

For you yes.