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The Most Active Threads Over the Past Two Days

by Jeff Steele last modified Aug 25, 2023 10:19 AM

The topics with the most engagement since my last post included the Republican presidential nominee debate, winning independent suburban women, mug shots, and DCPS PARCC data.

Since I didn't post yesterday, today I'll look at the most active threads during the past two days. The most active thread over those days was titled, "Republican Debate 8/23/23" and posted in the "Political Discussion" forum. This is currently a 28-page thread, most of which I haven't read. This thread demonstrates the limitation of a moderating system that depends almost entirely on one person and that person being me. I didn't watch the debate and wasn't reading this thread when it started Wednesday evening. But, as I prepared for bed that night, reports started coming in regarding inappropriate posts in the thread. Very shortly, my inbox was full of reports. Eventually the number was well over 50 I believe. Given the choice of reviewing the large number of  reports or sleeping, I chose sleep. Thursday morning was spent loading the car and heading off on a drive to take one of our sons to college. I decided that I wasn't going to be able to address the pile of reports still in my inbox and just deleted them. My feeling was that this thread would either be fairly short-lived or turn into a complete dumpster fire regardless of any efforts to save it and neither case made cleaning it up a priority. Arriving home in the early evening, I found my inbox filled a second time with another round of reports of posts in this thread. Again, I decided the reports were not worth my effort and deleted them. I'm sorry to those posters who took the time to report the posts. Generally I greatly appreciate your willingness to help moderate the site. But, there are times — hopefully few in number — when I'm just not available or have to prioritize my work. The result is that this thread is in what you might call a state of nature. If you are interested in what an unmoderated DCUM political thread looks like, here is an example. Based on the reports that I glanced at, there are many off-topic posts, several that are not factual, and a lot that are otherwise inappropriate. I also noticed from my very limited skimming of the thread that there are a lot of posts about Democrats which should be surprising in a thread about a debate in which no Democrats participated. But, it is not surprising since the favored tactic of conservative posters is to engage in "whataboutism", or replying to any criticism of conservatives by saying "what about" some unrelated Democrat. Recently, some conservative posters have even started arguing that "whataboutism" is a term that Democrats made up in order to stifle debate and shut down conservative speech. I can't think of any clearer acknowledgement of how wedded they are to this method of debate. But, it makes it completely unsurprising that the reaction of conservatives to criticism of the debate performance of Republican candidates was to criticize Jen Psaki.

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