Two Rants for the Price of One

[brookiki]

Ethical JournalismI found an interesting article on the internet while searching for something completely different. I don't want to go into specifics, because I worry that if I summarize the exact content of the article because I don't want the "issue" the article discussed to overshadow the issues I have with the article

Comments

[korichan]

I agree...comms are made to join people of a common interest, and one of the biggest rules is to always stay on topic. Most mods delete posts and threads that stray too much, and it's with good reason.

You can meet others and decide to continue conversations like that on each other's journals, but letting one person post about something completely un-related opens flood gates to all sorts of un-necessary spam that you hope to avoid.

A lot of people complain about mods that are "too strict," but I think in many comms today, especially the ones that have very biased people in them, or just a lot of people in general have to do that in order to keep things in control. If we wanted to see stuff like what you mentioned, we would either be in a comm for that or it would be coming from a friend's post.

[brookiki]

Exactly. And even if people agree with the original post, others are going to disagree strongly and it's probably going to get ugly. By the end, everyone is somehow upset.

Tightly modded comms can be a pain sometimes, but it's usually for the best. One comm I'm in absolutely refuses to allow you to edit or delete a post except to fix minor problems. It's great because everyone has to stand behind what they say.

[korichan]

Exactly, and at the point that mods do break in and stop the matter, people tend to still think that mod is only stopping it because they disagreed with one side in particular. When you only have words to go by, many people can't distinguish the emotions behind them and tend to take things a lot stronger than they should have...online debate is usually not a good thing in communities

[brookiki]

Which is why it's so much smarter to just have a zero-tolerance policy, rather than waiting to see how it goes. Hint: Almost always badly.

And yeah, I think we've reached the point where a lot of people see two options when someone disagrees: attack with all they have or backpedal as fast as possible. Sometimes both parties have valid points and not every issue has a magical right answer.