OBX John
Autonomous Driving Enthusiast
I totally agree with the OP. It's not the content or disagreements that have cut my visits here down 90%. It's the tone and personal insults.
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Degradation of the Community...
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.. and the incessant, repetitive nature of the disagreement with the intent to derail threads.
OBX John
Autonomous Driving Enthusiast
Yes, when people start start going back and forth, defining terms for each other and getting increasingly pedantic, it can ruin an informative thread.
I guess I should make more liberal use of the ignore user feature.
Also agree with OP. It has devolved. Hard for me to accept "that's how it is on the internet." We forget that widespread use of forums on internet is really only 10 years old. Must we give up on it and agree that entropy of any interaction is towards negativity? I hope when the medium is several decades old we will figure out. Meanwhile, I wish we allowed each member a "member moderated " thread. Some of them would be tres Interesting, and it would be fun to see which ones get the most eyes.
TaoJones
Beyond Driven
[Completely irrelevant content removed by moderator... post continues]
As far as the community kumbayah goes, if the core clique ratchets down the snark, there would be a lot less need for "moderation" by the "moderators". There's no danger of an echo chamber for either extreme.
Spend some time at Tesla.com's forums and note the decidedly higher signal to noise ratio there - with almost no moderation.
Given the higher traffic, TMC occasionally has more information than does TM (Tesla.com), and there are certainly some erudite, world class members who contribute mightily at TMC (almost none of whom are part of the aforementioned core clique d' snark).
In the main, it's the core of TM regulars, not TMC regulars, that I'd rather have an ale with. No offense intended - I'm sure the feeling is mutual and that's just fine. There's plenty of ale for everybody, and neither site is in danger of doing anything but growing.
Lighter moderation and greater community involvement (rating system enhancements) would be my $0.02 for the next 5 years of growth.
As far as the community kumbayah goes, if the core clique ratchets down the snark, there would be a lot less need for "moderation" by the "moderators". There's no danger of an echo chamber for either extreme.
Spend some time at Tesla.com's forums and note the decidedly higher signal to noise ratio there - with almost no moderation.
Given the higher traffic, TMC occasionally has more information than does TM (Tesla.com), and there are certainly some erudite, world class members who contribute mightily at TMC (almost none of whom are part of the aforementioned core clique d' snark).
In the main, it's the core of TM regulars, not TMC regulars, that I'd rather have an ale with. No offense intended - I'm sure the feeling is mutual and that's just fine. There's plenty of ale for everybody, and neither site is in danger of doing anything but growing.
Lighter moderation and greater community involvement (rating system enhancements) would be my $0.02 for the next 5 years of growth.
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Tin foil hat conspiracy crowd? LOL... That's all I can do is laugh. I'm not going to rehash that thread here. I do take serious offense to your suggestion that people who question outlandish claims are the problem.
Jeff
Was that necessary? Not only the comment but the screen shot? Since you felt both your comment and screen grab were I'll respond in kind. I get dislikes by specific members no matter what I post. That's just the way it is. That again is also part of my point but that apparently got lost somewhere along the way. I no longer pay any attention to that metric since it's been so completely skewed by a small, but consistent, contingent of members here.
Jeff
Really? I moved away from Tesla's forums years ago, when the noise-to-signal ratio got so high that it was a complete waste of my time. And I stopped going altogether when the spam got utterly out of hand. Unless Tesla's forums have dramatically changed somehow in the recent past, TMC is a far better forum. Despite a few individuals who like to stir the pot.
I'm not aware of a "core clique". Huge numbers of people participate daily. There are some people who spend an awful lot of time here saying negative things. I wish they would make a more positive contribution.
Moderation is already necessarily "lighter", because it's pretty much impossible to keep up with the traffic level here these days.
From what I can see, for the most part, a small number of individuals are causing the majority of the nastiness.
It's probably against the TOU, but it might be a fun project to write a bot that tags "aggressive" and "negative tone" posts in some way. And maybe another output would be a rolling monthly tally of the top offenders.
bonnie
I play a nice person on twitter.
I can think of an appropriate prize for the *winners*.And some would consider badge of honor and compete to win at that.
Canuck
Well-Known Member
You can't be serious? It's not "occasionally" but always, at least in my view. TMC has been quoted in a number of EV articles since Tesla news often breaks here first and then is picked up by the media. Has that ever happened at TM? Plus, Tesla seems more invested in this place than their own forum. One recent example:
Then this was picked up by Tesla now lets owners escalate issues directly to executives in order to improve communications
Does that ever happen at TM? I tried to search to see if there's a similar post over there by JonMc but it's difficult to search and not very user friendly overall, again in my view only.
Agreed. I read over there occasionally and it still happens. In fact, they have a current thread called "Don't feed the trolls."
We just need to tighten things up here and hopefully this thread will help in doing that. Thanks again @jeffro01 for starting this thread.
anticitizen13.7
Not posting at TMC after 9/17/2018
There really needs to be a crackdown on repeat offenders, like @bro1999
A concrete example is this thread: 60 mph; excellent road markings and AP2 tried to throw the car at the median
It's a perfectly legitimate discussion that describes a potentially serious incident with Tesla's Autopilot 2. Then in post #24 of that thread, @bro1999 makes a completely irrelevant post with a video about GM's system: 60 mph; excellent road markings and AP2 tried to throw the car at the median There's no reason to do that. It's of no help to the OP in that thread, and it only serves to advertise GM product and/or taunt the OP for having a Tesla product that suffered an error.
Another example: Tesla Model 3 vs Model S comparison slides
This is a thread discussing Tesla's marketing materials for educating customers on the difference between Model S and Model 3. @bro1999 again brings in an irrelevant topic (the Chevy Bolt's interior) and then proceeds to insult and belittle another forum member after being called out for it. Bro calls the forum member a "B[itch]" and "whining like a little baby".
Both examples (and there are more examples in Bro's post history) violate the courtesy rule: Forum Rules. The first example is a "thread crap" (making a useless post solely to drag others down), to use the terminology of AnandTech forums, and the second goes from thread crapping to name calling.
Finally, Bro flagrantly advertises his own blog in his signature, in clear violation of the prohibition on linking to competing sites. As I recall, the former member Julian Cox was banned (for the second and permanent time) for doing exactly this (In his case promoting his investment website on clean energy).
When bad behavior like the above examples is tolerated for a long time, it sets the tenor for the forum.
As I've warned in years prior to the Model 3 launch, if TMC didn't get stuff like this under control, the community would go downhill. While the situation isn't dire, the trends I'm seeing aren't good. I believe the owners of TMC need to decide if what's going on reflects the kind of community they want to maintain.
How much time did you spend looking up these posts in your attempt to character assassinate me? Which you failed, btw.
I brought up Super Cruise because people were talking about the shortcomings of AP2, so I brought up Super Cruise (since OTHER TMC members have brought it up in comparison to Autopilot in other threads) and pondered how it would perform in comparison. Mentioning a competing autonomous technology is somehow trolling? Get real. I didn't even say anything bad about AP2 (enough was said by actual owners).
And for thread #2, someone FIRST posted a Chevy interior saying it was crap, so then in response I posted the Bolt's interior and asked what was wrong with it. And I never actually called anyone a quote/unquote B!tch, but merely a baby. Nice attempt at distorting the truth though.
As for my sig, a mod actually pointed it out previously, so I told the mod they are free to remove the link if they thought it violated any forum rules. My sig is still there, so they must have decided there were bigger fish to fry. But if the link to my blog (only people making any money by clicking on it is Google btw) bothers you so much, please report it to the mods if it strokes your fragile ego and makes you feel like a big man behind the computer.
Degradation of the community? Look no further than the post above. It's people like "anticitizen" (appropriate name) that are the problem here, along with people such as OP, wanting to make a forum like this nothing more than an echo chamber of pro-Tesla only posts and suppressing any and all critiques.
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Canuck
Well-Known Member
That's nice of you to assign work to the mods who volunteer their time to try to get people to abide by the rules. Do you tell a police officer to repair a burnt out light on your vehicle when he gives you a violation? Why would you do that to a mod? Sorry, but I don't accept your explanation at all.
It wasn't "character assassination". It was reporting facts. As to whether he failed, I respectfully say it's the readers, and not you, who will make that determination. He certainly made his point with me.
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I deleted it. Happy now? Though your analogy is completely invalid, as my signature does not constitute a safety hazard like a broken taillight does.
It's funny that the guy that started this thread about all the "trolls" ruining TMC has almost the exact same like/dislike ratio as me, who some people accuse me of being a troll.
edit: since anticitizen has decided to be the signature police, I will now go ahead and report every single member I see that has a link to a 3rd party site in their sig. Have to be consistent, right?
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Can't we all just get along?
Canuck
Well-Known Member
I do need to remind myself of that -- as I'm sure many would agree -- and by my presence in the snippiness thread. I've also got a couple of PM's from the mods about my bad behaviour which I deserved. So I'll try to be better. But at the same time, I don't think we want this place to turn into a kumbaya fest, as someone said. I think a lot of us come here not only to learn and find out what's new, but also to debate issues. One of the best debaters of our time, at least in my view and many others, is the late Christopher Hitchens. I can watch his many debates on Youtube over and over and never get bored. It's so sad we lost him at 62. I'd love to hear what would have said about Trump especially since he wrote such a scathing book on the Clintons called "No One Left to Lie To".
Another of his books was called "Letters to a Young Contrarian" and as Wikipedia says he "explores a range of "contrarian," radical, independent or "dissident" positions, and advocating the attitudes best suited to cultivating and to holding them." He doesn't agree that we always need to be polite. It's not natural nor does it always move a debate forward. I'll never forgot watching him on Fox telling Sean Hannity that if you gave Jerry Falwell an enema you could bury him in a matchbox. I nearly fell off of my chair.
Long story short, I like spirited debate and I hope we don't get too thin of skins. But I will try to be more civil, and more polite than Hitchens.
Hopefully this isn't too off topic and some people find it interesting. It seems this thread has served its purpose so I didn't see derailing it as a concern, but if it is, please remove it.
