Yes and no.
The fact of the matter is, there's a lot of reasons why people discuss things in other settings besides the thread. Notably, when people routinely feel like some users are continually present who don't make meaningful, reasonable debate but who nonetheless criticize, there's a lot of push towards
not dealing with those people.
Why post where there's stuff like that, when you could instead post somewhere where you'll still reach everyone you feel is important -- the other people who engage in debate -- without having to deal with the other garbage?
...
Due to the quest premise, it is desirable that all goings-on be conducted in-thread.
Due to the uninvolvement, negative involvement, and the perception that
only some users actually matter -- which, may I note, arises from the uninvolvement and the negative involvement! -- it
becomes desired to conduct
important goings-on
outside the thread.
There are times when conducting things outside the thread is
necessary for
other reasons. Particularly, during the metabomb, utilizing a private conversation -- essentially, a closed-doors meeting of the people who had large voting blocks -- allowed for calmer, more advanced, and
more intelligent decision-making.
But things
aren't that way much of the time.
The ideal here is that under normal conditions all business that can be conducted in-thread should, and users should be constructive, responsive, and willing to acknowledge
when they are simply being overruled -- because that
will happen.
A lot of what we've seen lately has been that, basically, Redshirt, Myself, and maybe a couple of other people actually have a goddamn thing to say about votes, and then people hop onto the votes and that's that.
What the discord server rather quickly revealed is that
a whole bunch more people than just those few actually
would like to be
involved in the votesmithing process, and were capable of
being involved, despite all the evidence to the contrary from thread and the ever-present anecdote that "Only special people make votes in PMAS."
This raised the question of why the hell that was the case. Why were these people participating over there, when they weren't before the discord went up.
And part of the answer to that is private conversations, and part of the answer to that is
they were apathetic about being involved until people plopped down in front of them and started line-by-line votesmithing in front of their faces.
Make no mistake, it's been possible to be involved in votecrafting without being in the PM circles.
@Sereg has shown us that. It's
harder because the PMs do exist. But it's
not fucking easy, with or without the PMs existing. Because PMAS is a hard quest, and it requires a lot of thinking. It's
easy to be involved in votecrafting on the discord because there's a very low minimum commitment, you can just hang around and watch as the usual suspects hammer away and then if you have something to add you can add it at the moment that it becomes relevant. The votes take shape over there over time rather than appearing in one big chunk. It makes it a lot easier to give input.
Whereas here, on SV, you votecraft a whole vote, you post it, then a bunch of people look at it and go "Uh... sure i guess" and wander away because it's hard to interject ideas into that. And then some guy inevitably frankenvotes the two initial leaders and usually the result gets pushed away. Nobody ever gets to see the reasoning the votecrafter puts into the vote unless the vote is questioned, and then it becomes arguing against the questioner's proposals instead of explaining the original reasoning, although that
does get worked in fairly often.
The problem of course is that, quest premise being that not merely votes but ALL THREAD POSTS play into Sabrina,
having these discussions elsewhere undermines the quest.
...
One potential thought would be to try a very large lockout after every post. To the degree that anyone who posts a vote of more than one line within two days of a story post is temp threadbanned for a week. That might encourage votesmithers to format things as thoughts, first, instead of votes, in a way more like what we've seen from the discord. Of course, the tradeoff would be that it would come
at cost to the people who actually make the fucking votes, which... We put in a
lot of fucking work. And it would come at cost to the quest, potentially, since there might be less time for votes to be scrutinized. But if the system could be made to work that way, to work more like things ran over at discord, that might lower the bar for involvement.
...
That said...
SV policy on violations is "Report it and move on." And that's how negative influences are supposed to be dealt with.
But, and this is going to be potentially controversial but I'm going to fucking say it, there can be and have been negative influences, in this thread, without the existence of violations.
They are what drove Ugolino to madness. They are a constant
nuisance, not a public disruption but a
nuisance to those most involved in the thread.
Stuff like "Let's witchbomb Mami," that's an extreme example, it's both a problem and at the same time
intrinsically not one because new users or users with ideas from outside the mainstream must be tolerated because
that's site policy, that's thread policy, because it's necessary to allow that sort of thing. Because otherwise you don't get a lot of the new ideas and users that you otherwise might.
But these are
by their very nature the things that drive experienced veteran users to PMs and outside settings. Because somebody who has sunk hours and hours into this quest and who has learned to look at things in it with a mature viewpoint and to respect the characters in the quest and who has seen, too god
damn many times these nuisances, they get sick of dealing with them. It's part of why we get giant block votes out of nowhere. Because people have seen that when they start trying to construct these things piece by piece, they get a lot of thoughtless questions and comments, a lot of nuisance posts, and if they succumb to the temptation to endlessly respond to the nuisance posts -- they get nowhere! If you go look at the metabomb discussion in this thread, that's the best example of that behavior. There was a constant effort on many parts to do a lot of vote discussion and building in-thread, partly because there were a bunch of users who weren't normally involved in things (and so were outside all the PMs, etc) who came in and had vote blocks and built votes. But every time somebody wandered into the thread, and didn't read anything, and posted "oh I think this," the people trying to build the votes got derailed from building the votes.
...
So, look. We can
make a community where all the votecrafting goes on in this thread, and potentially one where the votecrafting is done gradually, in thread, with active discussion from lots of participants. But doing that is going to require a lot of effort from everyone involved, at first. The nuisance posting has to be reduced somehow, both by new users and by people who are hanging around. The people who the veteran users view as just plain undesirables, and avoid using the thread because of them, something would have to be done about that, there's not a lot of those people, they're not doing anything infraction-worthy, but there
is a reason that Ugolino has been banned so many times, and it's
not because he's insane, it's because he's
highly moral and extremely vocal about it, but for that quality to get him banned
there were people to trigger that off. And the people who have constantly rejected the votes to take people to task, to do X violent thing, to do Y mean thing, to do Z crazy idiotic thing, blah blah blah,
they have some of Ugolino in them too and they tend to do a lot of votebuilding because
they're the ones who care.
... To cut out some of the ambiguity, on that topic: personal experience, I have since the metabomb
repeatedly found that I preferred to discuss votes in PMs with other people I respected because it meant not
dealing with... Well, for instance, with TheEyes. The PMs are a calmer environment, where I can expect to get reasoned and levelheaded feedback, at a consistently high level of detail, absent the various negative social pressures found in the thread.
So, and I guess if I haven't made this clear enough by now I should be shot, but, there's
two problems between us and a more involved style of votebuilding being conducted in this thread. Other people have to be willing to be more involved. And the
reasons that the usual suspects for building votes go to PMs to do it need to be addressed.
That was why discord worked so damn
attractively (as opposed to working
well -- the lack of archiving capability was a pain in the
ass) for votebuilding in the few days since it was set up. We got a whole bunch of veteran users on there, they talked, a bunch of other equally reasonable users got on, nobody was nuisance posting, and suddenly we had the votebuilding going on in an environment that the veteran users liked being in and the other users
were also there.
I guess I've written an essay at this point. And, you know, some people are going to disagree with it I guess. Some might be offended. I've certainly gone ahead and called kind of a whole nebulous group of people negative influences, which I guess is probably edging site rules. But there's simply no effective way for me to discuss this without raising that point. Because I'm trying to explain what I feel are the stimuli pushing me towards using PMs instead of the thread, and saying that that wasn't one would be lying. So if I'm to talk about the facts here... Then, well, yeah.
