LogFAQs > #984114995

JTilly posted...

ads

Skill issue. I haven't seen an ad on this site since at least 2011.



ItIsSoOver posted...

gamefaqs was right to ban political discussion here

This, 1000%.

Most political discussion on this site was the perfect example of one of the worst flaws of social media culture as a whole - just because you have opinions doesn't mean you have the moral obligation to broadcast them to the world as if they were objectively correct, and it's your duty to evangelize everyone you meet.

There's a reason why people always used to avoid topics like politics and religion in real life conversations. All it really does is cause fights, and it's never going to have a positive outcome. Most of the time all you really accomplish is convincing other people that you're an asshole, and making the people you disagree with believe the things they believe even harder.

Social media has basically trained everyone to believe that their opinions are an intrinsic aspect of their self-identity, therefore the moment someone disagrees with you they're attacking your self-worth and are literally worse than Hitler. And the more passionately someone feels about something, the worse their response is when someone else doesn't feel the same way.

The problem is that having opinions doesn't mean your opinions are informed, educated, accurate, or justified in any way. So incredibly ignorant people (on every given side of any argument) will always be some of the loudest voices screaming into the void, with the end result being that discourse becomes more and more terrible, everyone starts to polarize to the worst extreme positions possible, and then we wonder why half the country seems to loathe the other half and wring our hands asking ourselves how things go this way.

Political arguments on GameFAQs are basically the metaphorical equivalent of kindergartners arguing about nuclear physics on a playground while slapfighting and throwing feces at each other. It adds nothing of value, accomplishes nothing, and guarantees no one on the outside looking in will ever see this as a community they'd ever want to be part of.



CyborgSage00x0 posted...

They really didn't, though. There's numerous topics on this board right now of and relating to politics. Really, unless the topic is overtly political in nature it's way too easy to circumnavigate the bans.

This is mostly only a problem because of how many users are basically petulant children, who upon being told they can't do something, go out of their way to circumvent that ban twice as hard in the most unsubtle and immature ways while giggling to themselves how clever they are.

There will always be people who go out of their ways to do things they're not supposed to, and then whine about how terrible the mods are when they finally get caught and punished for it. That's been the case on GameFAQs almost since the very beginning, and "politics" isn't the only thing that prompts it. It's just the most blatant these days because it's a politically charged time and social media has more or less convinced everyone that they're defined by their political stance and that it's a moral obligation to broadcast it as loudly as possible as often as possible.

The sad thing is, that immaturity was at least somewhat understandable when the majority of users on the site were antisocial teenagers or young 20-somethings, but now a lot of us are old enough to be parents (or older), and still acting like children.

Ultimately, there's very little you can do to fix a problem when people are determined to do everything in their power to keep it broken.



CyborgSage00x0 posted...

If the new GFaqs overlords wanted to make any sort of sense, they should have banned ALL social boards. Anything not related to video games being ban worthy would be at least logically consistent. General social boards like this are inevitably going to garner political discussion.

There's a distinct possibility that this will be the ultimate outcome. If nothing else we might see the can get kicked down the road eventually with boards like PotD or RI getting the same lockdown that CE had, or we could get a full-bore shutdown of all social boards as the people running things come to the conclusion that they'll never be able to clean up the site as a whole without strict topicality and draconian moderation because the users cannot be trusted to behave.

I think the only reason we're safe for now is because the attempts to fix things have been incredibly tentative and apathetic. They probably won't have the motivation to try and lock things down harder unless the constant political chatter keeps getting worse. Their hope is probably that people are still doing it now because they're in the habit of constantly bringing it up, but that given enough time people will eventually get tired of trying to constantly circumvent the ban and will just settle down and stop. If things just stay at the level they're at now, it'll probably be at least a few years before they decide their plan isn't working and they need to go further - or before the corporate higher-ups start to wonder why GameFAQs keeps losing relevance and revenue, start asking why it isn't being fixed and monetized, and the middle management people running things panic and decide they have to do another grand gesture to "prove" that they're absolutely fixing things.