Poll of the Day > This website sucks now

(+) Yeah! (+)

No political talk, ads, CE turned into LuE type shit, mods are crazy and biased

plz lord take me back to 2008

No ads is bad....it seems.

ItIsSoOver posted...

gamefaqs was right to ban political discussion here

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. What's the difference between politics and news, after all? And besides, it still requires someone to actually report the question. Which almost no one does.

Worse, they banned the Politics board, which basically isolated the greater whole of GFaqs from the more heavy political discussions. All it did was release those posting their to scatter among other boards. So now boards that saw little to no political discussions before have a noticeable uptick.

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.

wwinterj25 posted...

No ads is bad....it seems.

Awful

ItIsSoOver posted...

gamefaqs was right to ban political discussion here

And why is that? Because you cant talk about politics without getting triggered?

TimesUP. This is the new era, baby. Ain't no going back. We on some next lvl **** now.

*websight

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.

JTilly posted...

And why is that? Because you cant talk about politics without getting triggered?

I have yet to see any evidence that anyone on this site is mature enough to talk about politics on a regular basis without living their entire lives in a perpetual state of being triggered.

Pretty much every single discussion just turns into ad hominems and whining. Doesn't matter if you're Right, Left, Center, Upside-Down, or Chartreuse. Everyone just digs their own foxhole and starts taking shots at everything outside of their own narrow view.

That's not really a desirable environment for people who just want to show up and casually chat about life, media, or, you know, video games.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

That's not really a desirable environment for people who just want to show up and casually chat about life, media, or, you know, video games.

I could see the issue if political discussions were choking out everything else, but when the first page of topics covers a two-day period, it's not exactly difficult to find alternatives if they exist (and if they don't exist, they aren't going to start existing because of new policies because the site simply isn't attracting new users).

I didn't get put into purgatory for politics.

They probably won't have the motivation to try and lock things down harder unless the constant political chatter keeps getting worse.

Given that the majority of users are Americans, and America is going through, um, let's say "interesting times" at the moment, it's definitely going to get "worse."

"Worse" being in quotes there, because a good example of how silly it is to try to separate politics from, well, *anything* is the topic on the front page now, about a user who is likely losing his job. Which isn't a political topic in of itself, but it's *because* of current politics that he'll likely lose his job. So, is that a "political" topic? Thus highlighting how dumb the ban is to begin with: politics dominates and dictates everything in the daily lives of people in their countries of choice. Even video games used to be routinely in the news, due to some politicians wanting to ban or restrict video games back in the game.

And since the current administration is/will continue to have the normal mundane of politics and what politics affects become more forefront in the everyday lives of us all, discussion will naturally increase.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

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.

It'll be this one. Cracking down on non-video game discussions in order to attract more users is an idea that MIGHT have made sense 25 years ago, when competition for video game forums was more stiff. And even then, having a website have less features and accessibility isn't going to drive user numbers up, even in GFaqs' gold days.

Now? This husk of a website becoming more restrictive makes very little sense.

Or rather, a ban would have made more sense if they kept 261, and limited political discussions ONLY to that board. Lock up the riff-raff, so to speak.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

That's not really a desirable environment for people who just want to show up and casually chat about life, media, or, you know, video games.

Politics tends to permeates those mentioned things, though. Lesser so video games than the former two, but, as aforementioned, video games have a long history of intertwining with politics anyways.

I still appreciate my potd. Are you a ce transplant cause maybe that's why.

2008 was way more strict than we want to pretend. You couldn't say the words 'gay' or 'hitler' without being auto modded. Obviously context with those words is the most important key but nobody wants unwarranted mod attention. I'm not even sure where to find the rules on this site anymore.

Also a lot of the problematic people are long gone. So are a lot of my Internet homies. But it's not all terrible now in it's golden years here at gamefaqs. I still love yinz.
Well some yinz. As a concept.

BADoglick posted...

2008 was way more strict than we want to pretend. You couldn't say the words 'gay' or 'hitler' without being auto modded. Obviously context with those words is the most important key but nobody wants unwarranted mod attention. I'm not even sure where to find the rules on this site anymore.

I actually kind missing using "****" even for curse words. Felt it added a little decorum. Not that I was mad to see it removed, but it wasn't bad. But agreed that the auto-mod on certain words was annoying.

BADoglick posted...

Well some yinz.

From Pittsburgh, are we?

People have complained about mods being biased on here for decades. Just don't be annoying.

JTilly posted...

No political talk

JTilly posted...

mods are crazy and biased

Honestly I feel these two things don't work well together. With mods having their general political bias, it can be hard to have a opened political discussion without mods getting ban heavy on certain topics.

JTilly posted...

No political talk, ads, CE turned into LuE type s***, mods are crazy and biased

Politics I leave to politicians and waitresses, ads I mentally block out, CE I avoid, have not been moderated for many years, in fact, last time may have been when I was a mod.

No need to take me back to 2008, I've already had that year.

JTilly posted...

No political talk

I thought you were gonna list reasons why it sucks .

it's always fun to see someone get banned from ce and then come here to bitch about it, as if they weren't specifically the problem

FWIW you're not missing anything on CE. It's just politics now. There's a politics containment topic on b8 if you want to talk politics there.

Regardless, it's all part of fandom's plan to kill the message boards entirely. They're just bleeding it instead of killing it in one fell swoop (which would be more merciful). Start by closing politics, banning hornyposting, locking CE, and killing other boards like I think sex/religion and a few other specific ones that I don't remember. And finally, use the reduced traffic as justification to deal the killing blow to the boards entirely.

I would trade hornyposting to end political posting any day

Also it's funny how hornyposting became an official term used by the administrators lol

Was OP a mod in the past or am I thinking of someone else?

Cupcake2006 posted...

FWIW you're not missing anything on CE. It's just politics now. There's a politics containment topic on b8 if you want to talk politics there.

Regardless, it's all part of fandom's plan to kill the message boards entirely. They're just bleeding it instead of killing it in one fell swoop (which would be more merciful). Start by closing politics, banning hornyposting, locking CE, and killing other boards like I think sex/religion and a few other specific ones that I don't remember. And finally, use the reduced traffic as justification to deal the killing blow to the boards entirely.

if they wanted to close the boards they would literally just close them. saying they're trying to get people to stop posting so they can shut them down is fucking dumb as fuck.

there is no point in continually funding something you plan to get rid of lmfao

ConfusedTorchic posted...

it's always fun to see someone get banned from ce and then come here to bitch about it, as if they weren't specifically the problem

Nothing is ever my fault. I'm always the victim.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

if they wanted to close the boards they would literally just close them. saying they're trying to get people to stop posting so they can shut them down is fucking dumb as fuck.

there is no point in continually funding something you plan to get rid of lmfao

https://giphy.com/gifs/90s-baby-T3Vx6sVAXzuG4

Your image link is broken. try again.

This webiste sooo bad I forgot about this topic!

Dreepapult posted...

Was OP a mod in the past or am I thinking of someone else?

No, the mods are insane and crazy. To have me on their team would require intelligence and sensibility smh

Ok

Must be some mod that their name kinda sounds like yours then I guess lol

Dreepapult posted...

Ok

Must be some mod that their name kinda sounds like yours then I guess lol

Were they an asshole???

I don't remember lol

Not one of the worst ones

everything changes, its no big deal. after awhile you just come to expect it.

I really dislike how the average user's response is to accuse people that want to discuss politics as being racist .

flops

flops