OTC Thread Culture

Amongst the whole recent debate we've had surrounding Fighteer, it's been brought to attention that many OTC threads have amassed sharply critical, suspicious, and politically-charged attitudes when discussing their relevant topics. This often results in mudslinging and arguments with people who don't align with thread consensus, both in the thread and out. Please correct me if I misremembered any of the above.

What are your thoughts about this?

Edited by badtothebaritone on Jan 16th 2023 at 11:16:36 AM

Its a long standing issue that's had various appoaches over the years but the problems with culture aren't easy to fix

Not active in OTC culture but I know ~Silasw is, so paging them here.

In general, regardless of ideology or beliefs, there was a dominant culture of mudslinging, dogpiling, personal attacks, and generally pointless arguing where troper after troper went to bed angry. People didn't want to agree, they wanted to win, they wanted to vent their frustrations primarily.

There were only a few threads where I could go for civility, and they were generally filled with a small group of people who shared the same interest on a topic. For the longest time, I considered OTC a rotten cesspool of endless ego matches.

Exceptional threads that I consider good for general discussion are the Religion and Food threads.

Regarding ideology, I'm strongly left-wing and identify as socialist, and am admittedly hardly concerned with what the more conservative folks think, but I'd say it's not a comfortable place for anyone to be in right now regardless of politics. Everyone I've talked to, with differing political views, holds grudges against other users, complains about a lack of effective moderation, and feels that the place is a battleground not good for their mental health.

Yet it's a good place to catch up on world affairs and news regarding specific topics.

Edited by TheWildWestPyro on Jan 15th 2023 at 6:00:42 AM

People tend to get snarky and heated a lot, yes, some more than others. While I understand the temptation to get pissy like that and have probably indulged in it a bit myself, we have a lot of users who regularly make snide asides or ad hominems that suggest they're not here to really discuss in good faith but to popcorn at issues and start fights. And a lot of that is because the years of Fighteer acting as he did really normalized those attitudes.

Don't get me wrong, a lot of the userbase who post there don't do that either, and sometimes we've had regular news and discussion posts existing alongside Fighteer's snark without conflict. Sometimes the snark can feel cathartic, but it doesn't really engender a great environment either when it gets more serious.

Edited by AlleyOop on Jan 15th 2023 at 4:58:30 AM

I don't have too much to say since I tend to stay far away from OTC for this exact reason. But from what little I have been able to gather yeah the environment there seems really bad. The whole Fighteer drama is just one example I have seen of drama from that part of the forums.

It is unfortunately really hard to fix a culture problem like this though as I have experienced it multiple times on my time on the internet. I am not even fully sure what could be done short of just getting rid of the whole thing, which is an option I am pretty sure nobody would want.

It goes without saying that the nuclear option is thankfully not something that can be done

I think some people find it hard to try and branch out to OTC because there are a lot of regulars there and it can feel like a kind of cliquey place. It feels hard to post for the first time and get answers while the conversation moves on around you.

And if I may use an example, I remember posting in the War in Ukraine thread a source clarifying something the Pope said in a tweet about the war, and it seemed like some people still used it to criticize the Pope and ignore the context. Some did appreciate the context though.

I wanted to add context to a situation because I felt like there was more to the story and some people just seemed to ignore it and make their own snarky comments about it.

I want to add some more. The ideal purpose of the forums would be to leave happy and intellectually simulated, knowing you've had a productive and entertaining conversation. Yet it's turned into a place to start shit. Here's how it is. It's like the very atmosphere changes people when they enter. I've had conversations with people outside OTC and they're completely different, very personable. But when you enter, somehow people deploy their angriest barbs, their snidest opinions, stuff they know will piss other people off. Poisoned water, poisoned air.

I'll agree with AlleyOop that Fighteer had a lot to do with this, from his smug-sounding lecturing to his refusal to back down, to basically arguing with people and making them argue back at him. However, he was one part of the problem.

Edited by TheWildWestPyro on Jan 15th 2023 at 9:04:16 AM

So I’d actually disagree that the issues come down to if conservatives post, though that’s certainly a time they manifest. Fighteer has had a tendency to assume bad-faith and a general hatred for a specific subject/group, that’s then spilled into people who debate with Fighteer, and then spilled again into the rest of the forum. I also don’t think it’s about thread consensus, it’s about triggering a disagreement with the more passionate posters on a subject.

OTC naturally draws very passionate people to it, it also naturally draws people to topics where it’s easy to have miscommunication. There’s a reason that a lot of the OTC regulars have had at least one trip to Edit Banned about their attitude.

As for solutions? More active moderation would help, but if anything there’s no going to be less with Fighteer on extended break and with Septimus stepping back from that kind of mod duties. Plus the mod code of conduct will (rightly) mean that once a mod is part of an OTC debate/discussion they’ll not do any moderator stuff on it.

I still remain hopeful that attitudes can change now that the most frequent most that assumes bad faith has had action taken, plus I suspect that a lot of emotional states have been made worse by the Trump presidency and by COVID.

As far as moderation goes, it's probably going to be less active for a while as very few of us moderate OTC. I don't do much but lurk certain threads so I am mostly reliant on hollers. I try to moderate OTC like I do the rest of the forum but I don't think I would know how to moderate it according to the OTC guidelines because I am not involved in the debates that go in that subforum and some things requires knowledge I don't currently have.

So I don't know how much I can really lend here since I don't go to OTC in general. But I do want to take a step back to the infamous "Glass houses" comment from the Moderation thread.

No, not to re-litigate it or name and shame whoever's idea that was or anything like that. But, a bit later on in that thread, someone (I apologize for forgetting who) came up with a rephrasing that I think more closely reflected what the mod team was going for in terms of the idea of the post, which wasn't necessarily wrong even if that specific phrasing was terrible. I'm going to in turn telephone game that post, but that rephrasing was roughly

"Incidentally, we've observed that Fighteer isn't the only one making posts of the tone being complained about here. While this isn't meant to minimize his actions nor to shield him from consequences of those actions, those actions are one symptom of a broader culture problem with OTC, and while he's one contributor to that culture, he's not the only one. What we're reading here is that people want that culture to change; if that's the case, it has to change for everybody, not just Fighteer."

There are still some issues even with this rephrasing (For one, it ignore the power dynamic of Fighteer being a mod; for another, it punts the "Chicken and Egg" problem of "How much of that broader culture problem Fighteer is a symptom of came about because people in OTC modeled themselves after Fighteer and no one realized it"), but I think it more closely reflects the reality that even OTC regulars would probably agree with.

Getting back to OTC in general, if its culture is that out of line with the rest of the forums, it seems like the simple-but-not-easy solution is "More aggressive moderation to bring it in line with the rest of the forums". I know nuking it from orbit isn't a viable solution, but is there any reason why "Shape up or ship out" wouldn't work longer-term, even if it causes some short-term pain?

It is not just conservatives, it is also non-Americans who don't neatly fit into the Democratic party mould and feel no particular loyalty to that party, which clashes with an expectation that all posters on OTC are either Democratic or treat Democrats as sacred cows. There is an implicit demand that you join the Democratic tribe on any political issue.

I also note that a lot of people seem to go to certain OTC threads (especially politics ones) to vent anger and frustration, and any pushback will be taken as taking the target's side.

Even something as simple as adding nuance, or a willingness to hear the other side to a story, can be seen as inflammatory by some.

I mainly singled out Conservatives in the OP because most of the targeted individuals that were brought up in the moderation thread belonged to that group (mainly Elon Musk, though Mitch McConnell and a couple of other US congressmen were also mentioned). I've gone and removed that part from the OP to not give the impression they're the only ones the subforum subjects to that kind of rhetoric.

Edited by badtothebaritone on Jan 16th 2023 at 11:21:54 AM

The thing about understanding the other side is that there is a hard to see line between it and both sidesing, and some people can't tell in heated topics or heated exchanges.

On Conservatives, the thing is the far-right masqueading as conservatives control a disproportionate amount of the world, so they will absolutely get lambasted more.

Also, as we've seen with other topics on this site, things will get really hard to follow on very heated topics, and because a number of topics brought up in OTC can be heated, they need to be policed harder.

I admit, I don't go to those threads to have discussions or start shit. I go to read news, share news, and react to news. But that may be why these arguments happen: people go there for different reasons and that results in conflict reasons for argument.

I’d say this is actually two issues. There’s the general partisan nature of the US Politics Thread (by far the most active OTC thread) and assumption that everyone there is well informed on the political nuances of US Politics. Then there’s the We All Live in America attitude that turns up in general topics (COVID, E Vs, Sexism, etc…) where non-US posters are assumed to be talking about the issue in relation to the US and US political divides. We got this a lot with the COVID thread.

Edited by Silasw on Jan 16th 2023 at 7:24:35 PM

I don't use OTC myself. But I feel like a mod saying, "It has its own weird rules that make it hard to moderate, and most of us mods don't want do it anyway" is... not a tenable situation? Is there precedent for simply declaring part of the site moderation-free? Because I feel like it's either that, or the mods find a way to moderate it more strictly. It sounds like a lot of the problematic posts are fairly blatant and should easily break Rule #1 even when read out of context. This is the impression I'm getting from this specific thread, anyway.

No moderation would just make it worse.

If it's proving to be extremely difficult for the mods to moderate, and people are showing that they can't trusted to self-moderate... would getting rid of it really be so bad? While it's far from the only area of the forums with culture issues, unlike most of the other problematic sections OTC doesn't provide any kind of benefit to the site: people enjoy it, but we aren't a news site or a social media site. Providing a place to discuss these things is a bonus, not the site's purpose. And if otherwise civil and well-behaved people are acting like jerks on there to such an extent that well-behaved threads that don't dogpile disagreements are the exception rather than the rule, I think we should at least consider if we want to keep it around or not.

OTC tends to self-moderate most of the time, but that’s slipped of a bit. While it’s easy for the mod team to deal with threads getting off topic, it’s harder to enforce the “Don’t be a dick” rule in a protracted political discussion where people are expressing different viewpoints. To get a full understanding of what’s occurring you often need to be part of the discussion, which runs into the issue of moderating something you’re part of. There’s a reason that historically it’s been Septimus and Fighteer who do mod action in OTC.

We’re pretty clear of the really bad cases, despite the subjects we discuss we keep clear of actual trolls and fascists. Where we have a problem is reasonable people being unreasonable in inter-personal communication about complicated and contentious issues. It’s a more delicate thing to moderate than most.

Then there’s the fact that due to the size of the OTC regular community there’s a lot of inter-user history. A good chunk of conflicts come from people reading something atop assumptions they already have about a user due to something they said 4 years ago.

I think any discussion about binning OTC needs to work out what would happen to the conversations that currently happen in OTC. Would we ban discussions of news/current events? Would we ban political analysis of works? Or would we chuck it all into the rest of the forum where it would be even less managed/controllable?

Edited by Silasw on Jan 16th 2023 at 9:52:33 AM

It was never declared mod-free, but the IJBM forum was the most lax and rules light of all the subforums, which resulted in people constantly pushing the limits of what was acceptable discussion behavior. I can't recall if there was any effort to fix the culture. If there was it failed. Eventually Fast Eddie, the admin at the time, declared the whole thing unsalvageable after revealing IJBM regularly required more moderator interventions in a single day than the rest of the forum combined needed in a month.

So it was made mod free. And Troper free. Existence free, really. The entire subforum was "nuked" as we called it. Taking it down from the site entirely.

Yeah uh a "moderation-free" subforum like described would spell the end of that subforum in the future.

Perhaps an intermediary solution could be to limit OTC to topics that are on mission for TV Tropes itself, like topics about culture and fiction, while removing topics that don't really tie into that mission, like economics and politics (insofar as it doesn't relate to culture).

The mods we did have actively modding OTC won't be doing that for a while. There's not many active mods in general. There's about 10 (3 are busy/on break) of us right now.

We can't force mods who are uncomfortable with modding OTC to work there. Most mods has sections they are familiar with and sections they aren't (although I tend to mod in most areas of the site). I think the only way to get active moderation is to recruit new people which is something we thought about but haven't really discussed.

Edited by MacronNotes on Jan 16th 2023 at 6:24:54 AM