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The thread about the Gaza war has been the most active thread every day since Hamas launched its attack on Israel. On Friday that thread reached 1,000 pages so I locked it and started a part 2. Despite being locked Friday evening, the thread was still tied as the third most active thread over the weekend. The new thread, titled "Gaza War, Part 2", and, of course, posted in the "Political Discussion" forum, was easily the most active. The thread has already grown to more than 150 pages. There is no way that I can keep up with a thread that is growing at that rate and, as a result, I have read very little of the new thread. Rather than discuss the thread itself, I thought I would provide some of my observations of the two threads. The first thing to understand is that the majority of the participants are pro-Israel. "Pro-Israel" does not mean "Jews". Not all of the pro-Israel posters are Jewish and not all of the Jewish posters are necessarily pro-Israel. Moreover, "pro-Israel" describes a fairly wide spectrum and these posters are not always in agreement with their opinions. For instance, some of these posters are very quick to label almost any criticism of Israel as "anti-Semitism" while others are more measured and less likely to make such accusations. One result of this is constant complaints about criticism of Israel being called "anti-Semitic" and equally common responses by pro-Israel posters saying that they do no such thing. Based on what I've seen, both claims appear to be true. There are quite a few questionable accusations of anti-Semitism and most pro-Israel posters are not cavalierly tossing around the term. My second observation is that some of the pro-Israel posters have been posting incessantly. I noticed one poster who had posted over 200 times in a 24 hour period. That comes out to one post approximately every 7 minutes, but since the poster presumably took breaks, posts were not spread equally over the day. We have mechanisms in place to alert to potential bots that occasionally plague the site and multiple posters have triggered those alerts. They are posting faster than we expect humans to be able to do. Consequently, these posters simply don't have time to read carefully, consider their replies, or compose thoughtful responses. This results in responses that often are simply repeated talking points that generally do a poor job of addressing the post to which they are responding. Moreover, the original post is often misrepresented or distorted. My experience when posting messages that didn't align with pro-Israel views was a bit like dropping chum into a shark tank. There was an immediate onslaught of responses and by the time I had replied to one of those, several more had been added. While some of those responses were serious and clearly were posted in good faith, many were little more than knee jerk reactions that demonstrated little thought and did nothing to further a serious discussion. I was frustrated to see even some of the serious posters take my posts out of context or purposefully ignore the nuances that I had purposely included. I also acquired my own personal troll who followed me from thread to thread posting misrepresentations of my posts in completely unrelated threads. Obviously, many of these same things are happening to the pro-Israel posters, but that just reinforces my criticism of these threads. Posters are prioritizing quantity over the quality of their posts. It seems that a sensible process of "read, think, respond" has been replaced by simply "respond".