Because Will had explicitly threatened to use sockpuppets for various purposes, he could have used them to manipulate the poll, too. Therefore I vote by means of this comment. The vote: ban him. Reasons:
I find nothing entertaining in trolling or intentional obscurity, it’s pure noise.
WN’s behaviour threatens the credibility of others who engage him. (There isn’t much left of his own.) And he’s good at attracting attention.
Not banning him would help to establish a norm that trolling and other uncooperative conduct is accepted here.
First and foremost, I want LW be a haven of sanity in the stormy waters of the internet. Please don’t let seemingly sophisticated nonsense enter with a pretext of entertainment. I am afraid he could attract similarly crazy people; one Newsome is manageable, but ten of them would seriously damage the site.
By the way, this is the first time I endorse banning someone from an internet discussion forum.
Because Will had explicitly threatened to use sockpuppets for various purposes, he could have used them to manipulate the poll, too.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t, and I’ve never done similarly. I have three sockpuppets. One is a joke account I’ve never used. I made it recently. The other has my identity attached to it already—I’ve made about five comments with it. And the third is for completely anonymous comments. I rarely use the second or the third, and I never use them for voting.
I also haven’t voted on the poll with this account, and I only voted on one comment on this post. In general I just don’t vote much, mostly because I forget about the option.
one Newsome is manageable, but ten of them would seriously damage the site.
Which is a reason to treat me nicely—it’s not hard to multiply myself by ten. Luckily, I’m the only Will Newsome in the world currently, so I don’t think you have much to worry about.
Yes, and I’m sort of okay with being banned, but I’d like a month’s warning. During that month I’d make sure I’d deleted and edited various comments and so on.
But I haven’t thought through the question of banning carefully enough, and banning is hard to reverse.
As long as you aren’t producing too much noise in the 30-day period, I don’t see why the mods wouldn’t grant this request. A temporary ban could be another option worth considering.
There might also be a clever software solution. I know Louie who works with the code base. If I write up some Python they might implement it. Something that automatically hides or collapses my contributions for people who haven’t voted on my stuff an people who have more downvotes than upvotes. The same code could be used in future similar situations.
Wei Dai’s Power Reader script has features along these lines that I find useful during those brief periods when troll-feeding takes over the recent-comments list. Of course, the automatic part is important, admittedly.
For my own part, I don’t find your contributions less useful than the median.
Of course anybody with an ounce of self control can simply avoid a thread they don’t want to read anymore.
Motley Fool has an “ignore” feature to ignore the posts/comments of a particular user. I actually would not like to see that here. I’d rather have moderation. Even with the ignore feature, you still wind up seeing a lot of stuff related to the stuff you are ignoring as OTHER people quote it and comment on it. Of course Motley Fool boards aren’t as tree like as this group. But since this is so tree like, all I need to do is leave a particular discussion and never click on it again, I don’t need you or Louie to Python me into not realizing that that is what I am doing.
Because Will had explicitly threatened to use sockpuppets for various purposes, he could have used them to manipulate the poll, too. Therefore I vote by means of this comment. The vote: ban him. Reasons:
I find nothing entertaining in trolling or intentional obscurity, it’s pure noise.
WN’s behaviour threatens the credibility of others who engage him. (There isn’t much left of his own.) And he’s good at attracting attention.
Not banning him would help to establish a norm that trolling and other uncooperative conduct is accepted here.
First and foremost, I want LW be a haven of sanity in the stormy waters of the internet. Please don’t let seemingly sophisticated nonsense enter with a pretext of entertainment. I am afraid he could attract similarly crazy people; one Newsome is manageable, but ten of them would seriously damage the site.
By the way, this is the first time I endorse banning someone from an internet discussion forum.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t, and I’ve never done similarly. I have three sockpuppets. One is a joke account I’ve never used. I made it recently. The other has my identity attached to it already—I’ve made about five comments with it. And the third is for completely anonymous comments. I rarely use the second or the third, and I never use them for voting.
I also haven’t voted on the poll with this account, and I only voted on one comment on this post. In general I just don’t vote much, mostly because I forget about the option.
I disagree with a ban.
Which is a reason to treat me nicely—it’s not hard to multiply myself by ten. Luckily, I’m the only Will Newsome in the world currently, so I don’t think you have much to worry about.
Wouldn’t being banned help you with your goal of reducing your credibility?
Yes, and I’m sort of okay with being banned, but I’d like a month’s warning. During that month I’d make sure I’d deleted and edited various comments and so on.
But I haven’t thought through the question of banning carefully enough, and banning is hard to reverse.
As long as you aren’t producing too much noise in the 30-day period, I don’t see why the mods wouldn’t grant this request. A temporary ban could be another option worth considering.
There might also be a clever software solution. I know Louie who works with the code base. If I write up some Python they might implement it. Something that automatically hides or collapses my contributions for people who haven’t voted on my stuff an people who have more downvotes than upvotes. The same code could be used in future similar situations.
Wei Dai’s Power Reader script has features along these lines that I find useful during those brief periods when troll-feeding takes over the recent-comments list. Of course, the automatic part is important, admittedly.
For my own part, I don’t find your contributions less useful than the median.
Of course anybody with an ounce of self control can simply avoid a thread they don’t want to read anymore.
Motley Fool has an “ignore” feature to ignore the posts/comments of a particular user. I actually would not like to see that here. I’d rather have moderation. Even with the ignore feature, you still wind up seeing a lot of stuff related to the stuff you are ignoring as OTHER people quote it and comment on it. Of course Motley Fool boards aren’t as tree like as this group. But since this is so tree like, all I need to do is leave a particular discussion and never click on it again, I don’t need you or Louie to Python me into not realizing that that is what I am doing.
Yeah, and I wouldn’t sockpuppetly cause disruption during such a ban.