From Skeptic Overlord ATS

[Ninurta]

One thing that ATS has in common with so many other internet sites is arbitrariness.  In making rules, and enforcing them.

We complain today about censorship on the big social media networks, but in truth, the censorship on the net, and before that, on the dial-in bulletin boards, was always there.  And it always boiled down to how the owner's left toe felt that day.

In one way, I understand how it came to be that way.  If a site gave every poster the right of rebuttal, they would do nothing but deal with psycho tools who wasted their time endlessly.

The rub is that the sites take the lowest common denominator approach and apply the "no rebutting" rules to everyone.  Thus, they lose people who contribute usefully to the site.

ATS has to know they have a dedicated cadre of shills and trolls.  Yet, all users are required to refrain from calling others shills or trolls.  That does NOT contribute to useful discussion.  All it does is allow the well of the public discussion to be constantly poisoned by disinformation agents.  Clearly, the people running ATS are not dull ... which makes one wonder, "why do they tolerate this?"

To be fair, I have seen certain of the shills/trolls disappear for periods of time.  I suspect in those cases they got hit with temporary bans.  In other cases, I've seen some of the firebrands tone down their presentation considerably -- perhaps as a result of 'counseling' by ATS staff that they were heading for a permanent ban.  But without such punishment being made public, the rest of the users learn nothing from the exercise.  Someone gets banned: make it public, and explain why that individual was banned.  Like all internet venues, too much is done on the low-low.

This is one thing that is refreshing about RN3.  Yeah, there are mods, but their touch here is light.  Discussion is transparent, and often the site owner joins in.  And I don't get the sense of arbitrariness that hangs over so many other places on the internet.

Cheers

There is a difference between CALLING someone a shill, and pointing out their shilliness with specific examples. One is a only personal attack against the poster, the other is setting the record straight about the topic at hand.

Over there, I often "toned down" my rhetoric, but not out of any overabundance of caution or because of any mod counseling. it was just my normal modus operandi. I would go into a thread slinging shit like a mad woman slinging shit off a sock to throw my opponent off balance, and then tone it down as I brought them around to my way of thinking. No need to keep pounding them as they thought the logic through, y'know? It would have been counter-productive, and only serve to alienate them and cause them to dig in...

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