It has to be something that would get the feds involved with the site.
While there are specific lines that should not be crossed, there is still such a thing as enticement, escalation, and provocation, and too many people in that thread were building up to an inevitability. The fact that the specific post in question wasn't from an A&H regular is almost moot because one of them was bound to take a step too far, eventually. Just because nothing has happened to those users
yet doesn't mean that nothing's going to happen in the future as a result of how closely they were walking to the line. That's not an indication either way, I genuinely mean that I don't know if something will happen.
There doesn't need to be a broad-sweeping purge to clean out the entire sub-forum and there doesn't need to be a massive lockdown on the sorts of topics that can be discussed, because there is actually an awful lot of middle-ground between becoming Stormfront and becoming Tumblr. There only needs to be a targeted response to the select few users who contribute little more than vitriol to every single discussion that they become a part of. The crux of the Farms is to have fun, and a lot of these people aren't having fun anymore. If someone isn't having fun,
they don't need to be here.
If anyone thinks they know who I'm talking about, you probably don't.
A&H is clearly my favorite sub-forum so I wear my bias on my sleeves, but I am more than willing to admit that the Farms is not a democracy, it is not our own, personal playground, and access to it is not an inalienable right. In that same regard, criticism of the user-base in A&H is not a personal attack, though regulars from the sub-forum often take it as one. This is not helped by the fact that it's
often framed as one, but it should not be difficult to admit that A&H has--much like every other sub-forum on this site--a small collection of users that ultimately contribute nothing and use it as little more than an extension of whatever community they came from prior to being here.
There's probably a
painfully ironic moral in there somewhere about refugees diluting and destroying the community that they migrate to, because they completely refuse to integrate in any meaningful way. I know what's going to happen to those sorts of posts and the users that make them moving forwards, but at the moment I'm really not sure if any of it is going to be applied retroactively.
I think that some of the reactions in this thread have been more hyperbolic than they really need to be, but I can also admit that over the past month
especially, some of the users in A&H have become
abnormally twitchy. Even if I take their concerns to an almost absurd extreme and I accept that this election was completely stolen, the system is corrupt from top-to-bottom and we're soon to be under the rule of the Communist overlords, I still have to ask: Is the Farms really the appropriate staging area for this? Do you
really expect Null to mantle the responsibility for your attempts to duct tape an armed revolution together? Is this perhaps not a
fairly ridiculous place to pretend you're Robespierre?
