It seems like Patrick feels he has been pushed into a corner on this subject. Do you think these subjects should be banned? His argument is that the topics spread like wildfire and are unable to be moderated. This makes his site look bad and he doesn’t want that.
What do you think can happen to avoid banning these topics?
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Increased automod post removals
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User flags by members to remove posts
Any other ideas? It’s hard for me to believe some Buzzfeed guy lead us here, but Patrick’s concerns are valid.
Hate to see it. As long as things are not hateful or threatening violence, people should be able to debate any topic. Feels like every site these days is forgetting that they are a forum for discussion and wanting to be a moderator/publisher of the content produced.
Yeah exactly.
Agreed
Hateful is too generic a word, it's a label they can slap on any view they disagree with - just look at how everything that disagrees with a mainstream left position is immediately characterized as hateful, embedded in some sort of bigotry, or religious zealotry. Meanwhile anything associated with the left is inherently presented with positive connotations. The fucking clowns on Fox do it to on occasion but more often than not when I see some old neocon or mainstream conservative viewpoint presenting a caricature of the left it's more often than not one of ignorance/being naïve vs outright malicious and evil.
I'm saying this as a huge advocate against any steps being taken to crack down on censorship of discussion content (because there is ALWAYS dissenting voices presenting some thoughtful counter argument when it's someone being serious and not just some troll), only trolling/spammy or law-breaking behavior, but I totally understand why this is the case. It's much easier to monetize as the later rather than the former. By starting as the former and building a community first they have centralized a ton of valuable content which with some thoughtful editing can be commercialized as marketing material or be integrated with some of the actual training products they sell. Combine with the addition of the job board and BSchools the site can readily become its own self-sustaining monetization platform for a professional market with high discretionary income.
I still disagree with giving in to pathetic bottom-feeder publications like Buzzfeed, especially any division from the UK given their track record on free internet speech. But I can understand and respect why they're making the decisions. I would counter by acknowledging the people that read Buzzfeed are not and never will be your target audience as a website for finance professionals, but if that's who they feel they owe more allegiance to vs the community that came here because of the freedom to speak openly about various topics, that's their call.
This is not so much about monetization since most of the businesses we sell to rarely (if ever) bring up the off topic forum, but more about making sure we are staying true to our core missions. We can't help students and professionals from all walks of life if there is too much content on the site that makes them feel unwelcome.
Ok, how about if we are listening to the top members in WSO's history? Many (if not all) agreed we should be doing more...How about instead of complaining about freedom you become part of the solution? The only chance way we can continue to allow politics, religion, etc type discussions is if there is a cultural shift of MAJOR respect for differing opinions in those threads. An attempt to understand the opinions of others that disagree with you and discuss rather than debate. Try to fully understand the perspective of another and then agree to disagree. It would be a minor miracle if this happened, but maybe with some of the new tools we are building/working toward we can try to help tone stay on point...
-Patrick
That’s not what I use WSO for but if people want to exchange about these topics, I am not opposed.
Off topic should be limited to tenured members with 500 or 1000+ banana posts. Talk politics if you want, but you need to contribute to the finance side first. The hateful threads come from people with 0 posts on the rest of the website.
That said I generally don't think WSO is the place for political or religious debates - it's a financial forum, not Reddit. But I wouldn't be opposed if serious finance members were debating those topics (respectfully of course), it's just people who find this place off the street and bring in a lot of vitriol who are a challenge
Something that no one has brought up so far is that it can actually be quite tricky to separate finance, economics and politics because in many cases these concepts can all be intertwined.
For example there have been a lot of debates on the cause of the higher prices we are seeing. Politics certainly plays a role in these discussion as you have people arguing for/against stimulus checks, M&A regulation, and other rules. RE rent prices often tie to local or city politicos.
And then you have geo-political conflicts such as Russia/Ukraine that will have an impact on the financial markets and others such as China/Taiwan that could impact the markets in the future.
Apaet from this issues such as energy, taxes, etc. fall under politics but are finance topics as well.
And in terms of the NYC/ Wall Street lifestyle topics such as the homeless crisis, crime, policing, local taxes, and other city specific discussions I feel are important for those who live in the city to express opinions on and for future prospects to learn from so that they will be aware how things are when they move to the city.
Issues such as Roe V. Wade? Perhaps that’s irrelevant, but if say NYC banned abortion after 6 weeks, it would still be relevant for people to discuss who live in the city even if it crosses religion and politics.
What I think makes finance unique is that being a horizontal function that spans a every industry, many major events be it political, social or religious in nature have some direct quantifiable and indecent impact on the industry. Finance isn’t a defined vertical such as plumbing where “relevant politics” might be limited to LLC rules and select city ordinances.
There are definitely click bait political topics such as some politician tweeting about the rise of “communism” or “fascism” that isn’t constructive here and serves little purpose than to rile up the user base, but aside from those contrived examples I do believe with the right focus many controversial events are extremely relevant and belong on this forum. It really comes down to filtering out the racists who cannot engage in constructive debate and blame a problem on the Jews or gay people.
I do not think religion and politics should be banned but I totally get why it would be banned. I participate on a couple of websites in which these topics are banned. One is a finance website and the other one is focused on sports. I am not sure why but lots of people are not capable of acting respectfully towards each other when these topics are discussed. This is probably because bad behavior is tolerated here. I do not think there is anything in the forum rules that prohibit asshole like behavior.
What's wild is people have understood this for a long time haha, there's a reason politics, religion and sex are considered off-limits discussion in polite company. If we banned sex, though, Pizz would have an aneurism.
You afraid your name will be banned?
Nah
Another way to make this place better and more civilized is for the older monkeys to set an example for the college and high school crowd. If young people see the older people trash talking, you can't expect any better from the young people. A good rule of thumb to use would be if you would not say it to someone in the real world, you should not say it here. Some of the comments on here would lead to actual fist fights in the real world.
Definitely agree with your statements on this thread. The senior users should provide a better example to their juniors in how they act -- a perfect case of the old adage "monkey see, monkey do". With all due respect to the mods here, I don't think banning certain topics on the OT forum can really solve as much as we might hope. By doing this, it throws free speech, in addition to the ideas and feelings of people who aren't completely based, right out the window. Of course, I do agree that something needs to be done about the zeroes that post this rubbish on the OT, but I think there are other ways to keep from exacerbating these posts, many of which my fellow monkeys have provided in this thread.
Hopefully, there'll be an idea which can benefit everyone here soon enough.
I feel this is the right time to bring up when Isaiah threatened to beat me up irl because he thought I was calling him a pedo. (In his defense, it'd be a pretty awful accusation).
Bring it biatch
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