Vanessa's Tranny AMA Blog Thread

Bandwagon said:

Since I was the one that stated I think the grown up forum would have been a better place for this thread if you wanted less trolling in it, I guess it's about time to clarify how I envisioned this going down. This is my opinion, by the way, not a reading of the forum rules or a consensus from Amod following some reports.

First off, I view the title of this thread as inflammatory bait. Maybe that was intentional, maybe it wasn't, but that's the way it comes across. It sounds patronizing and a little revisionist. It's your decision, but that seems like a really bad way to try to start this thing off on a fresh foot.

I don't think that I was clear in explaining my opinion on how moderation should take place in this thread. It definitely wasn't supposed to be active enforcement or "babysitting" the thread with us steering posts into an honest discussion, and I don't think that would work very well considering the posts made here from those people anyways. The point I was trying to make was that when a post is REPORTED in this thread, the fact that this thread resides in the grown up forum would carry weight when the amod team is arguing/discussing/debating how to respond to the report. The fact that you seem to be proud of the whole "zero reports from me in this thread" statistic confounds me because that's your primary means to keep this thread on track. Yes, this could potentially go too far and be more than the mods' patience can handle, but I still think that is the right way to handle this. I don't like taking action unless I see a report, or notice an egregious action that violates the forum rules. I was relying on you ping a post when you feel it steps over the line of what you consider reasonable discourse in this thread, and then the rest of the mod team gets to discuss it from there.

I've actually thought a lot about this thread, especially because I've spent over 20 hours driving in the last 6 days and listened to some podcasts that were focusing on censorship, discourse and free speech. On one hand, I strongly feel that a thread like this can/should exist on this forum and in this subforum and that we can enforce good-faith debate in it (again, by way of reports....not babysitting). On the other hand, this topic is a lightning rod for strong opinions that have been repeated ad nauseam for years now, and I'm not optimistic that you're going to see reasonable discussion on it at this time. Maybe that's because of this community specifically, maybe it's because of you, or maybe it's just because everyone's life is saturated with the topic right now and you're the easiest person to lash out at. I don't really know.

Tl;dr
Option 1: Start over (again) and do some work to keep your own thread on-topic by way of reports. We don't have a problem thread banning people from your thread in the grown up forum if needed, but you need to report them and give a reason to start the process. (Other mods have pointed out that the thread would essentially be empty if we removed all of the troll posts & insults, as an observation).

Option 2: Recognize that you're working against fatigue regarding current events, pop culture and your own personal reputation as a one-topic poster here. Give the topic a rest, engage in others, ignore the trolls instead of responding with walls of text, and try again in the future. People's minds are pretty much made up at this point. If you want to re-start the discussion with a blank slate, I'm becoming more convinced that it's not possible unless you give the topic some time out of the spotlight first.

edit: Again, this is all my own opinion about the topic and what I think is our responsibility as mods, of which I am the only one that hasn't served before.

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