Free Speech: Thank You Jacob

[prognastat]

@jacob

I definitely understand delegating, but at a certain point you do run the risk of losing control over the direction your forum takes. Not saying you let/are letting this happen of course, but I definitely feel this is something happened to the MMM forums. I think you can allow mods to edit/remove topics/responses, you might even be able to delegate temporary bans, but I would be hesitant to hand out the ability to perma ban members to mods as it is definitely something that can be abused easily by mods.

[jacob]

@prognastat - I used to be accused of not being retired because I still had a blog even if all the posts were just auto-recycled. That was BS. However, wrt the forum it's a legitimate point. While I'm sure I could leave the blog and the book for a few years and come back and find them to be more or less the same, this is definitely not the case with the forum. In that sense, the forum is work. Not regular work. More like running a fire station that only deals with a couple of incidences per year but nevertheless has to remain alert. With 50-100/posts per day, this is not a huge deal. You can somewhat compare it to active investing. Always has to be on my mind.

FWIW, there aren't really any de facto moderators left. Everybody can hit the "!" button on a post and report it (this makes my job easier). I make all post-delete and thread-lock decisions. In the history of the forum, only 1 (one!) person has ever been banned (after ignoring 1st and 2nd warnings) and that was temporary for 30 days. He didn't come back though.

[prognastat]

Well all I can say is that up to this point I am very happy with the way discussion is guided here. There is moderation to avoid trolling or other non productive actions, but healthy respectful dialog where both sides are posting with the intent to have a respectful discussion is allowed and I feel even encouraged. I wish this was easier to find these days, but with the polarising on the political front this seems much harder to find probably in part due to the reasons you discussed in that it makes it much harder to manage for the moderation/admin team.

[bryan]

Wow, so many banned MMM folks! I think the closest I came to being banned was being pro-gold, pro-Bitcoin, and mentioning how probability suggests over-confidence of the 100% S&P portfolios (or something). I don't go there much since it feels a bit too noob-friendly (i still visit the FI sub-reddit because it only takes about 5s to see if there is anything new or interesting). The one MMM meetup I went to was also very noob-friendly with also many over-confident people.

@Mikeallison, instance I am familiar with was Quinn Norton. Also Jesus Christ (couple thousand years ago..). I think it's more to do with what @jacob was getting at regarding "modern social media wonders": new variety of mob rule, bad information, bad analysis, social signal amplification, etc.

[Riggerjack]

Another case in point ... you've been around long enough to see what happens if I go on a laptop free vacation for more than a few days. The odds of some thread exploding in my absence is about 50/50.

Well,we have different ideas of what is acceptable. For instance, I just read thru the 15 pages of "white supremacy run amuck" and thought it went fairly well, considering the time and the subject. But coming back from vacation to find it would be different.

But as I said, I'm a free speech absolutist, with a very thick skin. My comfort zone shouldn't be where we are going. And I have looked around at sites that are as comfortable with offensive ideas as I am, and yet I post here. So I think Jacob has success behind his principals, and all I have are principals.

[BRUTE]

I definitely understand delegating, but at a certain point you do run the risk of losing control over the direction your forum takes.

humans don't scale. brute has not seen a working solution to overcome Dunbar's number. there are many attempts, but they all fail in various ways.

brute also had a bad experience with a MMM meetup. "over-confident noobs" nails it. just.. the vibe. brute didn't have to stay long to discover that community was not for him.

[prognastat]

brute also had a bad experience with a MMM meetup. "over-confident noobs" nails it. just.. the vibe. brute didn't have to stay long to discover that community was not for him.

I actually joined a local MMM/FI group that does meetups. Was planning on eventually going to one to see how it went. Hopefully my experience will be better than the two of you've had.

[Tyler9000]

The common theme that makes my handful of favorite forums so appealing is a sense of mutual respect. Disagreement is just fine, but the willingness to debate in good faith and ultimately let some differences go in the name of a more important common interest is what defines a healthy social group. That's a rare characteristic today that is virtually impossible to moderate, and we all deserve credit for the culture. So thank you Jacob for opening up your home, and thank you to everyone here for being good neighbors.

[bryan]

@BRUTE, prognastat, it's not a bad thing, just, as BRUTE put it, not particularly a good fit. I may check out the (bay area) MMM/FI meetup eventually since the previous one I went to was over a year ago.

[Mikeallison]

I got the boot for suggesting that the cost for entitlement spending should fall squarely upon the party who came up with the program, as well as whoever voted for those who came up with the idea.

Seemed innocuous and fair enough to me...

But hey, like I say, the guy is free to run his cult however he pleases. I'm not a kool-aid fan anyway.

[prognastat]

But hey, like I say, the guy is free to run his cult however he pleases. I'm not a kool-aid fan anyway.

Well I may be completely unfounded in this, but I don't think Pete(MMM) wants his blog and forum to be a political echo chamber. I just think he has abandoned his admin role on the forum and delegated all responsibility to his mods who have run with it and turned it into their own little echo chamber. What happened is Pete I believe is relatively open minded and reasonable, but is left wing and so attracted a larger percentage of left wing people in part due to his relatively large focus on the environmental impact of consumerism and FIRE so the odds of him picking left wing mods was more likely since they were and then it just continued where the left wing mods on average were less open minded about their politics and selected for this in the community and newer mods.

Maybe I'm completely wrong and Pete knows exactly what goes on in the forums and agreed with it all, but I'd rather assume better of him and the fact that he has virtually no presence on the forums gives him some plausible deniability.

[Mikeallison]

@prognastat

Not to keep beating a dead horse, but I was banned after the election of "he who must not be named". Before that my slightly right leaning postion was tolerated most the time, even after he started delegating mod work.

The country lost its collective mind after the election, and I've even caught myself being reactionary, and hositle to ideas on the left that before I simply disagreed with. I can see how that could translate into a mod treating quips about socialism as heresy against a progressive ideology that has moved into the realm of the sacrosanct. I see more tolerance over all on the right, but only in so far as not banning someone for their views, they prefer to drown them out with insults instead.

In short I don't blame MMM in particular, but rather the current state of things. I bear the guy no ill will, and wish him nothing but sucess, his goal is admirable, even if I don't agree with half the stuff he comes up with. There is a bit of a cult of personality surrounding the guy (mustachians is really shudder inducing, and he has the tone of a condescending 4th grade teacher) which I never cared for, but that is secondary to the over all message.

[prognastat]

@Mikeallison

At least in the time I was there from about 3 years ago until about a year ago when I got banned I saw a shift with the political shift, but some of the underlying problems were there before they just got exacerbated. Before the election season you still got moderated more for right wing beliefs and people got away with denigrating right wingers/right wing beliefs more, however it didn't appear people were getting banned without also breaking some of the actual rules until after the election season started and people got more polarised and people can get away with a lot more negativity towards non progressive beliefs and you get banned simply for sticking to other points of view even if you try to do so respectfully.

[Mikeallison]

@prognastat

Yep, that sounds about like how things went, and not only there but everywhere online. Even lloyd kahn, who is a cool old hippie I used to follow for his focus on alternative architecture, has gone political, and spends most his days ranting about Trump.

I'm getting to the point where im burnt out by it, Ive been spending more and more time outdoors with the family and away from the internet, much happier because of it. I like this place because it seems like I'm the most irrational one here, not the case elsewhere, keeps me grounded lol.

[jennypenny]

I'm getting to the point where im burnt out by it, Ive been spending more and more time outdoors with the family and away from the internet, much happier because of it.

+1

Edited to add: Nothing mentioned in this thread is unique to the MMM forums. Even on right wing forums, Trump has been quite divisive. A forum I used to moderate shut its doors because of the infighting.

This too shall pass ...

[Kriegsspiel]

Well I may be completely unfounded in this, but I don't think Pete(MMM) wants his blog and forum to be a political echo chamber. I just think he has abandoned his admin role on the forum and delegated all responsibility to his mods who have run with it and turned it into their own little echo chamber.

Maybe I'm completely wrong and Pete knows exactly what goes on in the forums and agreed with it all, but I'd rather assume better of him and the fact that he has virtually no presence on the forums gives him some plausible deniability.

I think he spends his time off the internet doing stuff he likes to do, which is the correct answer.

[prognastat]

Nothing mentioned in this thread is unique to the MMM forums.

No, I just hoped for a slightly better standard for discussion there, but I just ended up being disappointed.

I think he spends his time off the internet doing stuff he likes to do, which is the correct answer.

That's probably a smart course of action, but I don't really have anyone to discuss FIRE/ERE like topics offline so I end up returning XD.

[prognastat]

When I was younger, I had this idea that connecting people on the internet would let the whole world come together and share ideas without focusing on race gender etc. The more connected we are, the worse it will get is what's actually happened. Because the utopian idea is wrong, most people should not be listened to most of the time.

The problem is that at the same time we are more and less connected. We have more ability to connect to people online, but we create our own filter bubbles online and social media reinforces this. On top of that even if we actually attempt to not create our own filter bubble chances are enough other people are and thus you will still be filtered out of their bubbles if they disagree with you. An example being the people here who were on the MMM forums and despite political disagreements remained there only to end up being banned instead filtering them out from people that had opinions that disagreed with them. At the same time we spend more time online with people we agree with and less time with people in real life that we may disagree with.

So despite being more connected than ever before, we are actually more disconnected than ever from people that disagree with us.

[prognastat]

I'm not too sure how much I can agree with that. It seems to have gotten worse over time on the internet, but then again one could say that this might be due to in the early days everyone on the internet being a geek and having a lot more in common and nowadays the majority of people online aren't geeks. Or simply that the excitement over a new medium bridged differences at first. Pseudo anonymity definitely has it strengths and weaknesses of course. It definitely seems though that offline factors such as in this case the election were major factors. A lot of this I feel has been brewing for years though and the election was more like the final drop so to speak.

Another thing that has been a longer trend is the disparity between urban and rural areas as far as personality and politics go. Over time on average people with generally democratically inclined personalities flow from rural areas to urban areas and for those on the republican side the flow in reversed. Since politics is heavily influenced by someone's personality and personality is heritable to a degree when you combine the self segregation between urban and rural areas with the heritability the divide naturally grows. This leads to fewer and fewer people meeting people they disagree with.

[Campitor]

@Jacob

Your evenhandedness and consistency in moderating this forum is exemplary. I appreciate the efforts you undertake in providing a medium that not only allows us to express our opinions respectfully but allows us to gain insight into many interesting topics Thank you sincerely.