I have to echo what others have said in the thread up to now. The problems of A&N aren't unique to A&N; they're just more concentrated. Bar the more blatant fedposting (which I report when I see it, because fuck that), everything that gets said in A&N is also spoken elsewhere on the site, by people with join dates of every era.
I think I've figured out the difference. A&N is unique for its rapid turnover of posts, as new articles are posted all the time that cover intellectually similar ground. This leads to a constant churn of the same replies over and over again. Repetition of the same ideas concentrates and refines them into ever more extreme versions, rather like breeding cows until they're overweight, docile milk factories.
The few megathreads that stand out as the exception even demonstrate the theory, I think.
Take this:
As for the Biden thread, it does kind of dance on the line between actual news discussion and going off on the guy. And that DM thing was weird looking back, but compared the rest to the Dome, that thread is pretty chill and doesn’t have as much postings like they came from refugees from other sites.
Compare the Biden megathread thread to other parts of the site. Like a cow thread, or one of the topic threads in Multimedia or Technology, it's got longevity; it sticks around and generates conversation, rather than only hanging on long enough to get the stock replies before it disappears past page 3. The
Meghan Markle and the Soulless Wonder thread has the same character; a lot of conversation and discussion, a fairly chill atmosphere, and regular inputs of news and information about the topic.
The high signal to noise ratio of these topics is what's missing in the rest of A&N.
The hypothesis faces some challenge with the Ukraine war megathreads, which have devolved into two opposing wank factories, but I suspect that's because of the speed of conversation within them, as well as the highly charged nature of the topic. Other Happenings threads got retarded when they were moving fast as well.
A&N has become a dumping ground for random news articles, without any coherent or unifying purpose other than "talk about the stupid thing a journalist said this time". Some have suggested megathreads, but that alone doesn't solve the problem, as we can see. Others have suggested rate limiting, or forcing some sort of posting ratio, but again that probably won't solve the problem, and might only lead to frustration and even more extreme autism.
I personally think that some level of topic focus might be the best solution.
To that end my skeletal thoughts are a board that contains:
1)
Broad topic threads. Details to be determined, but something that could follow the model of the Biden and Meghan threads.
2) some sort of "stupid journalistic takes" thread. Not a whole board, otherwise it ends up being A&N mk2
3) Discourage reporting for disagreement
4) Encourage better ops. Most of A&N's ops are god-damn awful. Though this might be obviated somewhat, if the broad topic threads idea takes hold
5) Ban the naming of the Hibernian
5) A regularly rotated general news thread. Something like a news megathread, which soaks up all the random articles that people post, like the interesting clickbait thread but with a broader scope. Close it and post a new one every 200 pages or something.
6) Rename the board to "News and Political Content"
I'd also suggest keeping a tighter lid on the Happenings board, which currently gets a fair number of poorly disguised "this article is stupid and I want to complain about jews/niggers/democrats/republicans" threads.
I've not thought about Deep Thoughts in this. It's got its own little microsubculture, even inside the thunderdome, so I think it would need to remain separate.
