The Most Active Threads Over the Past Two Days

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.

The next most active thread was the thread about the poster who is not able to attend her husband's cousin's wedding that I discussed on Wednesday. That thread is showing surprising robustness given the rather mundane subject matter. I'll skip it and go to another thread in the "Political Discussion" forum. This one was titled, "Winning independent suburban women". If I had looked at this thread before now, I would have deleted it. The original poster engaged in one of the strangest behaviors I've encountered so far on DCUM. She started out saying that she has advice for politicians who want to win over independent suburban women whom she claims decide elections. She says that the advise is based on an article from 2015, but then doesn't say anything about the article or the advise. Instead, she promises to disclose this later. She then embarked on a series of 10 consecutive replies to her own post. She is not sock puppeting, but rather posting one line of what might be termed "advice" in each post. By the end of the first page, the original poster was responsible for all but two posts on the page. While the second page of the thread has more input from other posters, the original poster still authored 9 of the 15 posts on the page. When one poster responded by calling the thread "self-indulgent", the original poster gave some insight to her thinking by saying, "It's the internet. There is infinite space." While more or less true, that does not exactly justify this type of posting. Moreover, on this page the original poster did sock puppet by identifying herself as a "NP" or "new poster" in a response. The few responses by those other than the original poster mostly disagree with the advice she is offering. The original poster's advice is basically a convoluted effort to say that candidates should try to be the candidate with whom voters would most want to have a beer, but oriented towards Norman Rockwellesque suburban women. Eventually, the thread turned into a fairly run of the mill political discussion with posters bringing up everything from abortion to incandescent light bulbs and gas stoves. If you are confused about light bulbs and stoves, those were a conservative's examples of long-standing rights that have been taken away. Apparently they are supposed to be equal to the right to an abortion.

Next in line was the thread about President Joe Biden favoring a return to work. I discussed that thread some time ago, but it is still going strong. Since I already addressed that thread, I'll go to one titled, "The Georgia Mug Shots" which, again, is in the "Political Discussion" forum. I didn't look at this thread until just now, and strictly speaking, it violates our guidelines. Threads should start with discussion, not simply a link. This thread was started with nothing more than an embedded X (formally known as a tweet) showing John Eastman's mugshot. The original poster immediately followed that up with post containing a second embedded X showing the same mugshot along with one for John Hall. After some discussion about why Fox News is not showing the mugshots, additional examples were posted as they became available. Posters waited expectantly for former President Donald Trump's mugshot to become available. In the meantime, posters posted or composed jokes about about the photos with several transformed into memes. A fake version of Trump's mugshot was posted at one point and then quoted several times, creating a clean-up job for me. The media and social media users really played up the mugshots, attributing probably undeserved importance to them. As such, a thread like this is probably understandable. But, in a way, focusing on something inconsequential of this nature might take away from the seriousness of the allegations. When a good portion of the country believes the charges are purely politically-motivated and not legitimate, it is probably not a good idea to turn the whole thing into a joke. But, for the media — which has show great reluctance to providing honest assessments of the indictments (simply consider how many articles suggest that Trump is being punished for speech) — diverting attention to light-hearted coverage of mugshots is probably welcome. Later in the thread discussion turned to the reaction of Trump supporters to his mugshot which quickly became popular among them.

Finally escaping the political forum, the last thread at which I'll look today was posted in the "DC Public and Public Charter Schools" forum. titled, "2022-2023 PARCC Data Released", the thread addresses data from last school year's Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC exams. This is a two-part assessment used by the District of Columbia Public Schools. The scores showed improvement over last year but are still below pre-pandemic levels. There are a lot of aspects to this topic that are subject to discussion. Of course the decline in scores following the pandemic provoked criticism of school closures. In addition, some posters contested the validity of the data because they don't think the PARCC assessments accurately reflect ability. Others believe the data is too limited and, therefore, insufficient for careful analysis. There is an interesting contrast between those posters who appear to be making the most of the limited data and others who accept the data as valid for the purpose of drawing various conclusions. The first group hesitantly provides heavily-caveated conclusions while the second group confidently interprets the data with the results seemingly self-evident. One interesting development is that a poster who says that she was part of the group that developed the data weighed in to praise how the data was being addressed in the thread and promising to share the thread with other members of the group. Conceivably, the posters in this thread could have some influence over future data releases. But, while the thread is full of data nerds, not everyone was fluent in statistics. For instance, nearly an entire page was devoted to discussing what a list of schools with their average language scores was actually presenting. Was this the average score of students taking the test or the percentage of students who were proficient on the test? Most posters argued for the second explanation even though that didn't really involve averages. Despite the shortcomings some saw in the data and the struggles to interpet some of it, many posters were very pleased with the release of the data. The same cannot be said for what they believed the data demonstrated. Most posters were very disappointed by what they viewed as generally poor performance by DCPS students.