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Moderation Too Strict

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Firstly, there is no such thing as an "Intel thread" or an "AMD thread".
Oh?
There's a few for a start.. Not to mention the countless articles and reviews that are AMD/Intel/NVidia/Whoever-else specific.

This is a public forum, every thread is public, which means any and everyone can post in it. Don't like that? Don't start a thread here. It really is that simple!
While I whole-heartedly agree with you in principle, if I were to jump into the Ryzen thread and start bashing/nay-saying Ryzen CPU's and pushing Intel CPU's as a better option, not only would that be WILDLY inappropriate but it would be more than enough reason for the mods to take action. And they would be quite correct to do so. The same goes for front page articles and reviews when the Intel fanboi crowd jump in and dump on the AMD or NVidia product being discussed. Same with AMD fanboi and Nvidia fanboi crowds. It's shitposting of the worse kind and deserves proper actions.

that's a problem ... the ones posting incorrect information, not the people correcting it.
On this point you're spot-on.

I'm incredibly thankful for the "ignore" feature because it allows me to avoid having to interact with people
I've found it doesn't actually do any good. Causes more problems than it solves and, as implemented by Xenforo, is a waste of time and effort.
 
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Oh?
There's a few for a start.. Not to mention the countless articles and reviews that are AMD/Intel/NVidia/Whoever-else specific.


While I whole-heartedly agree with you in principle, if I were to jump into the Ryzen thread and start bashing/nay-saying Ryzen CPU's and pushing Intel CPU's as a better option, not only would that be WILDLY inappropriate but it would be more than enough reason for the mods to take action. And they would be quite correct to do so. The same goes for front page articles and reviews when the Intel fanboi crowd jump in and dump on the AMD or NVidia product being discussed. Same with AMD fanboi and Nvidia fanboi crowds. It's shitposting of the worse kind and deserves proper actions.


On this point you're spot-on.


I've found it doesn't actually do any good. Causes more problems than it solves and, as implemented by Xenforo, is waste of time and effort.
oof you missed one https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/asrock-deskmini-owners-club.311248/ although I have enabled inclusivity for both AMD and Intel particpants.
 
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Merry Xmas to W1zz and all mods. :toast:
 
And a happy new year! Well done to the entire TPU team this year.
 
Firstly, there is no such thing as an "Intel thread" or an "AMD thread". This is a public forum, every thread is public, which means any and everyone can post in it. Don't like that? Don't start a thread here. It really is that simple!

Secondly, your complaints about "trolling" and "negative content" are complete and utter rubbish. What's actually happening is that people are posting misleading and/or nonsensical information in those threads and getting called out/corrected on it, and for some reason you feel personally attacked when this happens. But here's the thing - that's a problem with you and the ones posting incorrect information, not the people correcting it.


I'm incredibly thankful for the "ignore" feature because it allows me to avoid having to interact with people who, when presented with objective truth that conflicts with their views, double down on their bulls**t - because to them being correct is more important than honesty. I have no time for such deranged and dangerous individuals, whose vile conduct consistently poisons attempted honest discourse. Given how terrible it is to interact with those people here, I have an incredible amount of sympathy for those who have to deal with them in real life.
I havent posted anything misleading and never said AMD cannot be mentioned, I even mentioned it myself, its just kiddie troll posts like "buy this instead its better" when its not on topic of the thread. We have a troll intel vs AMD thread already for those posts.
 
I got a 1 week ban and some points for absolutely destroying an internet stalker on another forum. I wont be going back, but I think we are pretty fair here :)
 
I got a 1 week ban and some points for absolutely destroying an internet stalker on another forum. I wont be going back, but I think we are pretty fair here :)
Do I have to guess where that was?

There is bad behaviour and then there is taking up for yourself too, and I know the lines between the two can blur with ease.
It's not like I haven't been trolled or even unloaded before myself so I guess going in, if you honestly have to stand up, be ready for what follows.
 
Do I have to guess where that was?

There is bad behaviour and then there is taking up for yourself too, and I know the lines between the two can blur with ease.
It's not like I haven't been trolled or even unloaded before myself so I guess going in, if you honestly have to stand up, be ready for what follows.
Lol no probably not.. I may have been a little over exuberant..

I may have been able to choose better words.. ahh well.

The hand came down hard, didn't even get a chance to say anything :oops:

So whatever I said, must have been succinct and to the point, as bluntly as possible :D
 
I'm on TPU since 2005 and in the past couple of years I noticed the moderation became extreme.

Like in real life discussion, it would be nice sometimes to make a joke, or even a tiny profanity, or even non-specific general insult. Some sense of humor.

But here the moderation over the years became worse even than government officials. Here you automatically get a warning even for bread crumbs.

God forbid if one makes a sexist joke, or post a funny GIF in response to a comment. Oh!!! "Only link or image posted".

@W1zzard

Maybe its time to do changes to the mod team.

OP, In my opinion your sentiment is naive or just outright mistaken in this case.

The simple fact of the matter is we live in a world where online communities are constantly under attack by a spectrum of bad actors. This has only gotten worse over time as it has become more economical to perform these attacks (Chat-GPT, google-ads/accurint profiles, karma brigading botnets & vote manipulations, etc).

Good moderation removes those threat actors from causing ongoing harm to the community.
This provides great benefit to the community by ensuring there will continue to be a community.

That harm may range from something as inconsequential as snarkiness (hurt feelings), but more often than not these days, there are more serious aspects that require moderation.

These may include misinformation, propaganda, resource draining, and/or more subtle attacks specifically on volunteers/contributors; attacks that are caustic to community such as subtle attacks on individual psychology (ericksonian identity), or crazy making trollish behavior intended to 'struggle' those volunteers.

For most... these aspects of moderation fly under the radar because people haven't received training to recognize it, and they don't have to deal with these things on a day to day basis.
This latter point is something to appreciate, and its understandable since general educational schooling (K-12) in this area is wholly insufficient (unless you graduated from a military academy as it was part of the curricula prior to the 90s iirc or have a professional specialty that touches on linguistics/communications.

Volunteer psychology is fairly predictable. Volunteers stop giving, when it costs them more than they wanted to give.
Value flows from contributors and volunteers to the community, with usually very minor and reasonable askances in return.

When community contributors are regularly targeted; as happens on most crowdsourced/unmoderated platforms such as Reddit, and other karma-based frameworks (HackerNews); pretty much anywhere the many accounts = moderator powers. Volunteers leave, value dries up, then the less active community members leave. Its mostly unnoticed until the last stage where participation falls off.

As far as I've seen, the mod team here has been doing an excellent job in preserving community. In fact I elected to join, though I've lurked for decades; primarily because of the reasonable level of moderation. Thank you mod team for what you do. Your efforts are greatly appreciated.

On a side note OP: If you are interested in learning a bit more about what I've mentioned; the more commonly referenced book in the area of study is by Robert Lifton who wrote a historic account (case study) of the tactics and structures used on political prisoners, and their direct experiences during Mao's first cultural revolution (1950s), this is the basis for quite a lot that comes after.

In the absence of formal training, it is a worthwhile read since these things can be quite subtle and are by nature non-alerting.
Most people have seen these tactics and structures and not even realized it.

For anyone that is interested, I have a more detailed reading list of academically credible books on the subject. They touch on a wide variety of things including moderation. If there is interest, please feel free to reach out.

Edit: Clarification
 
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For anyone that is interested, I have a more detailed reading list of academically credible books on the subject. They touch on a wide variety of things including moderation. If there is interest, please feel free to reach out.
Well, go on, post them.
 
Well, go on, post them.

Ok, Albeit OT.
* Mods, feel free to remove or edit if this is the wrong place.

For a well rounded view/starting point, these books are worthwhile:

* Robert Lifton, primarily his first work, which was Psychology of Totalism; he also did an excellent book on the psychology of genocide/the Nazi doctors.
* Robert Cialdini, "Influence" - covers psychological blindspots (termed levers of influence), and how they can be used/abused - his work was recognized recently by state department officials; he touches on some of the tactics mentioned in Lifton's work and boils down a lot of research in this area to first principles.
* Political Warfare by Kerry Gershanek has more recent/modern contemporary history regarding malign influence campaigns coming out of China (published by Marine Corp University Press, free as a pdf on their website as part of an outreach program).
* The Psychology of Language by Trevor Harley, is fairly decent and covers introductory material in cognitive psychology/psycholinguistics; whose field somewhat originated out of work done by Sapir-Whorf (linguistic relativity theory/sapir-whorf hypothesis; with caveats).

Tangentially, Ludwig von Mises, Socialism is a book containing a collection of essays he wrote in the 1950s examining fundamental structural failures/issues of any central structure (including why and how these structures fail regularly). This work also forms basis for the economic calculation problem which is described as a hysteresis problem (i.e. the impossibility of calculation, where action may be based on lagging indicators), the primary issues described are broadly recognized as unsolveable today. It ties in Carl Menger's Subjective Value Theorem..

Nearly all of the same issues mentioned broadly applies to most organizational structure, including bureaucracy regardless of the fact that its sole named focus was on Socialism; you see the same dynamics toward failure and mechanics in academia and government, as well as historic literature in many aspects of human action/economics. The structural elements referenced are also common to most modern forms of government. While focusing on structure (and not opinion); it does also touch in passing on other common issues which were used by groups of people supporting these systems; and some of the lengths they go to (with regards to deceit). Its also a useful work for getting a sense of context for the time period which was known for its generation as a time of hyper-rationalism where logic and reality/results prevailed.

Steven Hassan has written a number of papers and books on Cults, with focus on deprogramming. Many of the same elements are found in prior works (as referenced by Lifton and inirectly by others).

There are also some formal frameworks marketed towards gamification which are implementations of underlying principles (Octalysis Framework), these are often used in conjunction with UI that is more currently regarded as dark patterns, they overlap and are designed to remove agency or to manipulate users to act contrary to their preferences. Perceptual priming for dopamine based audio triggers (Call of Duty/Battlefield games) for headshots (cha-ching) as an example, or despair spirals in test taking software (i.e. combination of bright colors, and alerts requiring confirmation for every wrong answer while no alerts for right ones).

These are generally what I consider the safer starter materials.

There are a good number of other books, which while also academically relevant, require a certain level of maturity and discernment in evaluating credibility or identifying clever deceit/falsehoods mixed in.

I'm hesitant to recommend any of these other works as this is a common issue with subject matter or history that touches on Marxism/Fabianism; or subsequent iterations of groups; which may go by a myriad of other names. These groups tend to adopt whatever names suit their purpose, and when found out change their names often in an attempt to mask/deceive or hide the original source. Both in the past and present a significant amount of deceit is used in many of those works (such as published magazines around the turn of the century like the American Fabian, Communist Manifesto, material related to the recent reinvention of DEI (not the 1970s/80s one), etc).

Those groups often take advantage of an irrational linguistic dualism of (contradictory) meaning based in rhetoric, fallacies (taking related things in isolation/strawmanning), perceptual or associative priming (repeated stimuli in close proximity get linked unconsiously), and abuses of hegelian dialectic, or abuse of contrast principles, in non-sequitur way. Some formal education or background in logic is recommended to get the most out of the material.

On a side note also, much of the material is quite dark. I didn't include much history as the relevant histories are generally accepted by academics, but the sources may not necessarily be as solid or credible as the sources are limited. This is common during periods such as post-WW2 Russian history, The East German Stasi (fall of the berlin wall, Markus Wolfe), VC/Vietnam/Hue Massacre, and the rise of China (Mao 1st, 2nd Cultural Revolution, Xi Jinping's model). Potemkin villages as an appropriate example.

Overall, rather than recommend these other books; I'd reference a youtube channel, New Discourses, which seems to be covering much of the material I found relevant but in a more straightforward, and less deceitful way on that subject matter. I don't agree with everything there, but its not nearly so bad as having to parse every other sentence first for meaning, then a second or third time for truth/dualism/misleading content.

Also, you really can't speedreed these types of materials because speedreading can subtly internalize some of it.

edit: clarification
 
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