Is this place still better than Political Panic?

[Bill_in_Bethlehem]

[eynon81]

[Pebble]

[The Comrade]

contribute more original content then

[exploited]

I have made a number of essay-style posts... and I've seen some pretty amazing responses, from Sandman, Spider, Boris, etc.

But you are right, they are too few and far in between. I would certainly like to see this place engage in more debate, less bickering... but like I said before, we need more mods in order to do that. Online forums need to be guided, and you can't guide a group when two guys are off in the bush touching one another, another two guys are off trying to murder the other, etc. More moderation is what is needed. Crack down on shitty posts. Crack down on one-line responses. Crack down on the bickering.

If you build it, they will come.

[The Comrade]

the issue is not one line responses. i often open a discussion with a single line and often times the bloat of some of your (collective your) posts can be summed up and spat out in a single line. having written a fair amount in my time i'm pretty adept at knowing when something is just SAT word bloat and when something is substantive. lots of the long posts on here are just a single question rambling on, lost among a paragraph or two.

what needs to be cracked down on is when someone makes an outrageous claim outside of something fairly obvious and then destroy a debate by not backing it up. or when someone posts a link that does not back up a claim they've made. the latter is akin to plagiarism in the academic field and it should be shit on frequently.

and i think we need to encourage more original content. i don't know how to do that, and people seem to bitch a lot about it but don't actually try and create anything themselves, so it's kind of a non-starter.

[exploited]

Ultimately it comes down to needing more moderation.

I am as guilty as anyone of acting poorly on here at times. I need to be moderated, and for the most part, I am. Even when I bitch to ueber or NAB about it, I can still understand that I am behaving unreasonably, however justified I think I am for doing so.

More mods, less crappy posts, less bickering, more original content, and this place will grow.

Like I said, the goal should be having one moderator on at basically all times. When people know that the mod is watching their posting, they behave better. It encourages self-moderation, which in turn, encourages reasonable, productive debates.

[eynon81]

I'm going to take issue with the whole assertion.

The problem isn't us, it's the world. We used to have some pretty awesome debates, back in 2004 and 2005, so did the rest of the world...but since then the world*, and its' debate, have gone insane.

My challenge to ya'll is to find a medium that is currently having an informed, thoughtful, constructive debate...I submit to you that such medium does not exist.

*world can be construed to mean the United States in this context.
**the economist doesn't count because the economist is clearly having a discussion with itself, like a well informed schizophrenic.

[exploited]

[eynon81]