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.

 

[AJ 447]

My actual suggestions for improving A&H:

1. Disable all ratings. It will cut down on a lot of clutter where people always try to be the first person to make the same tired jokes, discourage dog-piling, and overall I think will foster better discussion.
2. Ban posting op-eds outside of the clickbait thread.
3. Ban users who post duplicate threads.
4. Ban users who post reaction images.
5. Make more megathreads.
6. Limit users to only posting a maximum of 2 threads a day.

 

[X Prime]

I am not sure about 3, it can easily be an innocent mistake in certain cases, if you mean it in terms of "didn't see it existed already."

Wouldn't 6 mainly affect, say, CatParty?

 

[Feline Darkmage]

Disable all ratings. It will cut down on a lot of clutter where people always try to be the first person to make the same tired jokes, discourage dog-piling, and overall I think will foster better discussion.

Potentially. I do think a lot of the joke repetition is definitely ratings farming. It could also help to be a bit more vigilant and leave reminders on posters/possible temp threadbans for people who just repeat the same memes constantly. Also add "If someone has already made the exact same post, you don't need to re-word it." to the No 1 word posts guideline. It's basically the exact same kind of problem: filler posting.

eta: the guideline explicitly says: If anyone could write your post, it doesn't need to be made.
And I believe that applies to a lot of interchangeable shallow "lol nigs"/dems bad/enviroment gay posting.

 

[AJ 447]

I am not sure about 3, it can easily be an innocent mistake in certain cases, if you mean it in terms of "didn't see it existed already."

Wouldn't 6 mainly affect, say, CatParty?

Most people are lazy and don't bother looking or searching to see if a story has already been posted.

 

[ConfederateIrishman]

My actual suggestions for improving A&H:

1. Disable all ratings. It will cut down on a lot of clutter where people always try to be the first person to make the same tired jokes, discourage dog-piling, and overall I think will foster better discussion.
2. Ban posting op-eds outside of the clickbait thread.
3. Ban users who post duplicate threads.
4. Ban users who post reaction images.
5. Make more megathreads.
6. Limit users to only posting a maximum of 2 threads a day.

I mostly like this list; Two questions if you're willing to indulge me:

1. Are reaction images a huge problem? I don't think I've seen many of the on A&H so I'm curious.
2. Out of curiosity, what makes megathreads so much better? Is it because when there is a cancerous topic you can contain it or something else?

 

[The Pink Panther]

My actual suggestions for improving A&H:

1. Disable all ratings. It will cut down on a lot of clutter where people always try to be the first person to make the same tired jokes, discourage dog-piling, and overall I think will foster better discussion.
2. Ban posting op-eds outside of the clickbait thread.
3. Ban users who post duplicate threads.
4. Ban users who post reaction images.
5. Make more megathreads.
6. Limit users to only posting a maximum of 2 threads a day.

I'm fine with all except 1.




I like rating people's posts.

 

[AJ 447]

I mostly like this list; Two questions if you're willing to indulge me:

1. Are reaction images a huge problem? I don't think I've seen many of the on A&H so I'm curious.
2. Out of curiosity, what makes megathreads so much better? Is it because when there is a cancerous topic you can contain it or something else?

Reaction images are a cancerous waste and becoming a more common occurrence. Its better to stamp out the habit. Megathreads are good for when a topic starts generating more individual threads. It actually also helps discussion for some things, because you can add information to a megathread that wouldn't be worth an individual thread on its own. Having megathreads for more hot button issues also tends to cut back on garbage posting, because a lot of the attention whores lose interest.

 

[AprilRains]

eta: the guideline explicitly says: If anyone could write your post, it doesn't need to be made.
And I believe that applies to a lot of interchangeable shallow "lol nigs"/dems bad/enviroment gay posting.

That's certainly how I expect it'll be enforced.

Can't wait to see people playing the ref on that one. Some of the objections will be valid, of course.

Eliminating ratings is just dumb. If people are caring about the stickers, they have bigger problems.

 

[AJ 447]

Eliminating ratings is just dumb. If people are caring about the stickers, they have bigger problems

If you don't care about stickers, you won't care if they're gone either.

 

[kcbbq]

4 - Do people actually care about neg ratings? I think it's funny to get a few every now and again.

The enraged summer children that think revenge negrating actually means something do. Kinda hilarious to log in to dozens of negrates on ancient posts because you gave some sped an autistic rating.

 

[Slap47]

1. Minimum word limit for posts to encourage good posts. Anything less than like 200 characters could probably be expressed with a rating.

My actual suggestions for improving A&H:

1. Disable all ratings. It will cut down on a lot of clutter where people always try to be the first person to make the same tired jokes, discourage dog-piling, and overall I think will foster better discussion.
2. Ban posting op-eds outside of the clickbait thread.
3. Ban users who post duplicate threads.
4. Ban users who post reaction images.
5. Make more megathreads.
6. Limit users to only posting a maximum of 2 threads a day.

1. The rating system exists to reduce bad posts. You know how people post "X to doubt"? We'd probably have less of those wasteful shitposts if there was an emote that represented that sentiment.

2. Modern journalism makes this a challenge and there is good discussion to be had from some op eds so its a bit much.

3. The search feature is borked and both users and the writers of the articles themselves use retarded and unintuitive titles. The mods discretion policy that seems to currently exist is probably the best option for this minor problem. There isn't really that many threads posted anyway so it should be obvious if somebody didn't search.

4. I was under the impression that this was a global rule. I think there is good laughs to be made from unique images that were specifically made for the article. Meme format posts should probably be singled out though.

5. This just seems like a way to kill discussion. Checking these threads is a pain as they either devolve into chat threads or become merge filled messes that are unreadable. They also take away attention from especially retarded or interesting things that should be seen on their own merit.

6. Is there an issue with users posting dozens of articles?

 

[AprilRains]

If you don't care about stickers, you won't care if they're gone either.

That bullshit sounds clever but isn't. Stickers amuse me. I don't get rekt over getting bad ones, but I don't want my toys taken away because of humorless butthurt.

 

[Feline Darkmage]

Can't wait to see people playing the ref on that one.

I can't wait until MULTIASS 2 electric boogaloo myself.

 

[Syaoran Li]

Not gonna lie, A&H is an insane asylum and it attracts a lot of /pol/ spergs like no other board on here.

Now, I admit that I like frequenting A&H precisely because it's a nuthouse but even then, I would definitely welcome a bit of improvement on the board, I doubt explicitly labeling it as a containment board would help, nor would deleting it.

I think the worst of A&H comes about when one of two things happen.

1. @CatParty posts a bait thread and enough people fall for it (I've been guilty of this one myself)

2. Someone mentions the Jews and cue the inevitable conspiracy sperging.

Honestly, I think we could use a few more megathreads on certain topics that generate a lot of sperging.

A&H would benefit greatly from a "Jews/Israel" megathread since it seems to a recurring topic and one of the biggest sources of thread derailment in A&H. We already have megathreads for things like North Korea, transgender news articles, and the ongoing clusterfuck in Venezuela, so there's already a precedent.

Also, I think we could use some more "board etiquette" rules for A&H like we have for other boards, especially when it comes to the Cat Party threads or obvious shitposts from your Dynastia and Ron /pol/ types.

 

[AprilRains]

I can't wait until MULTIASS 2 electric boogaloo myself.

Well, you did telegraph your intentions with your choice of examples. Makes me wish for a "disingenuous" rating.

 

[Gym Leader Elesa]

1. The rating system exists to reduce bad posts. You know how people post "X to doubt"? We'd probably have less of those wasteful shitposts if there was an emote that represented that sentiment.

We have so many goddamn ratings on this shithole I cannot imagine how this would help. This is like the EU making up new rights so they can say people are more "free."

Edit: Allow users on all forums to only rate things drink.

 

[AJ 447]

That bullshit sounds clever but isn't. Stickers amuse me. I don't get rekt over getting bad ones, but I don't want my toys taken away because of humorless butthurt.

I think being a boring contrarian amuses you more.

 

[Feline Darkmage]

Well, you did telegraph your intentions with your choice of examples. Makes me wish for a "disingenuous" rating.

TBH not really. That's just the most recent example of somebody trying to rules lawyer and ending up just annoying everyone. It's nothing personal against him. His posts genuinely were better than all the filler shit. Hell, I hardly even remember those posters names, but I remember his. Fillerposters will rise up and they'd be lucky to be remembered as anything other than randos, I'm just hoping one of them tries to be an inferior form of CDM.

 

[GS 281]

I think being a boring contrarian amuses you more.

Being a fat ball-busting bitch who stepped down from her position and is now actively trying to dictate how things should work when she could have done so when she had the role for months amuses you more.

 

[Dr. Dingo DVM]

I will admit to liking A&H for a shallow reason, I am totally free to express how I actually feel about the news. I live in the US capital of progressives and liberals where you get unpersoned for going against typical liberal opinions. It's nice to have somewhere to chime in without fear of irl backlash.

That said, a lot of your typical /pol/ posts really don't contribute much to discussion. Rehauling posting etiquette would be a good place to start, the general guidelines are reasonable but I think going through recent topics to find things that need improvement is in order.

Ratings I don't think is as big a problem as conspiracy sperging or saying men in dresses are mentally ill. It's not new and it doesn't really contribute.