Lootman wrote:Although I notice the theological debates and disagreements here, and deem it preferable that they don't happen excessively, I am in the camp of believing that they don't necessarily matter in the grand scheme of things. if people want to engage in expending a lot of energy debating some arcane aspect of the topic, then I am happy to let them. I don't feel an irresistable urge to intervene and join in, nor to try and get that discussion terminated or censored. Rather I find it trivially easy to ignore such excursions, and in fact the structure of TLF makes that easier than it was on TMF. It's not much different from the skills involved in ignoring any topic that doesn't interest me. I simply skate over it and move on.
I half-agree. They don't matter much if they occur in separate threads on the appropriate boards with a subject that indicates what they're about: as you indicate, they're trivially easy to ignore by unsubscribing/unbookmarking the thread (and probably other methods as well - I know there are other methods of trying to focus the reading time one has available for TLF on the material one finds most interesting besides my own, and know of some of them, but probably not all of them). What little they do matter is mainly the impression they're liable to give newcomers to the site - if someone comes here looking for practical investment advice, finds a board supposedly for practical advice about a particular investment strategy, then looks at the list of thread titles in it and finds they're mostly "theological debates", they're liable to think "what a load of useless *****s!" and give up on the site. And on TLF (unlike TMF) that's relatively easy to fix by moderators moving threads that are on an inappropriate board to an appropriate one - though it would be easier still all around if people took more care to post them to an appropriate board in the first place. (I admire the moderators for their self-control in moderator comments saying that they've moved a thread: I haven't yet seen one that adds "And for goodness sake stop creating this sort of work for me - put a
bit of thought into where you post!", and they must have been tempted...)
Where they matter much more IMHO is when they 'hijack' an existing thread, because they tend to kill discussion of the existing subject of the thread. Not always - sometimes that discussion has reached its natural end and so is basically dead anyway - but if readers who are interested in the original subject and not in the "theological debate" have to wade their way through a mixture of posts about one and posts about the other, or still worse, posts that are partly about one and partly about the other, they are liable at some point (which will vary a great deal between readers) to abandon the original discussion because following it is taking too much of their time for too few results. And that's a vicious circle: the more people abandon the original discussion, the fewer results its remaining participants get, making them in turn more likely to abandon it...
That too can be fixed by moderators (again, unlike on TMF): they can split the "theological debate" posts out into a separate thread, and I would guess that in principle, they can even deal with part-original-subject-part-theological-debate posts by making a copy in the separate thread, then editing each of the original post and the copy down to the stuff that's relevant to the thread it's on (a guess because I've never seen it done in practice - and I'm not surprised: it would be a
lot of work for the moderator relative to the amount of time & effort they are likely to have available for moderation).
But splitting the "theological debate" posts out into a separate thread also potentially involves quite a bit of work for the moderator. It appears to be quite easy for them to do so if the original subject was dead when the "theological debate" started - they just have to identify where the "theological debate" started and move all posts from there onwards into a separate thread. But if the original subject wasn't dead at that point, they need to wade through the subsequent posts to identify which ones need moving to do the job properly. And the longer the overlap period between the original subject and the "theological debate", the more work that will be - and the higher the chance that there will be some of the really awkward part-original-subject-part-theological-debate posts to deal with. For that reason, I reckon such situations are best reported as soon as it's clear that they're really happening.
And with regard to irresistible urges to get discussions terminated or censored, anyone who tries reporting posts for being off-topic to satisfy such urges really is living in the TMF past. It may have happened there (*), but here it's pretty clear by now that such attempts are doomed to fail: the usual moderator response to off-topic posts is not to terminate the discussion, but to move it to where it's on-topic.
(*) Though as far as I can tell, the people who confidently asserted that they knew it did lacked imagination about all the different motivations people could have for reporting posts: they simply came up with one idea that had the comforting property of putting themselves clearly in the right and their opponent clearly in the wrong and decided "that must be what happened".
Lootman wrote:So personally I don't see anything wrong with there being only a small number of Lemons who "seriously want to get rid of them" ...
Nor do I - I wasn't putting it forward as either something right or something wrong, just as a bit of reality (as far as I can tell) that anyone who does seriously want to get rid of them needs to face. Basically, I don't like them, especially when they end up killing a discussion that I do like. But I haven't bothered even trying to decide whether I seriously want to get rid of them because it seems clear to me that even if I decided that I did, any attempt to actually get rid of them would be beating my head against a brick wall...
Lootman wrote:... nor those who "fail to have sufficient willpower in the face of temptations to join such discussions". Indeed I feel that might be a sign of maturity and discrimination. As you said yourself in an earlier post: "Responding to them instead encourages them, even if the response is to complain about them".
Eh? Someone who fails to have sufficient willpower in the face of temptations to join such discussions is someone who gives in to those temptations, i.e. who joins the discussion. It's having the willpower that is the sign of maturity and discrimination - failing to have it is the opposite!
Gengulphus
