Thread: Proposition 1123581321: Bring back AI

Originally Posted by Mr. E

The way things are now doesn't take moderation. There have been many threads in CI of an intellectual nature that functioned just fine. There is no point in creating another forum for this. This is the internet. A certain amount of douchebaggery is to be expected.

The issue is that a lot of these discussions were the result of a few people derailing the thread. "What would you do if you were president?" turned into the merits of privatized education. That's not the purpose of those threads, and it's unfair to the OP and the people who post in them to have to wade through a bunch of derailed nonsense.

The most recent example of this, I think, was when you asked me about advertising. If there had been an AI, I would have just linked to a thread in AI and anyone who was interested could read it there and anyone who wasn't could continue the thread as normal. As it was, I derailed the thread and then received a handful of "tl;dr" posts in the middle of an otherwise lively thread.

Long, off-topic discussions amidst other threads makes them difficult to approach, because once derailed it is frustratingly difficult to follow. You may recall this is why we hated MrDie.

Originally Posted by Atmosfear

The issue is that a lot of these discussions were the result of a few people derailing the thread. "What would you do if you were president?" turned into the merits of privatized education. That's not the purpose of those threads, and it's unfair to the OP and the people who post in them to have to wade through a bunch of derailed nonsense.

The most recent example of this, I think, was when you asked me about advertising. If there had been an AI, I would have just linked to a thread in AI and anyone who was interested could read it there and anyone who wasn't could continue the thread as normal. As it was, I derailed the thread and then received a handful of "tl;dr" posts in the middle of an otherwise lively thread.

Long, off-topic discussions amidst other threads makes them difficult to approach, because once derailed it is frustratingly difficult to follow. You may recall this is why we hated MrDie.

Well, there is merit to this argument, but in most cases it doesn't seem that the OP actually cares. The nature of a discussion forum is to discuss, and my discussions start one place and end someplace completely different all the time. In the end I don't really care though, were there an AI it wouldn't really bother me, just so long as a wave of intellectual and pseudo-intellectual posters don't show up and start acting like they are better than everyone else in places other than AI.