Glass Fort MacLeod wrote:The senate wasn't intended to be totally serious ever though, it just became serious because.. the rest of the board is. I dont knwo where or why the seriousness crept in (N&P would be my personal guess, because POLITICS AND NEWS AND ADULT TOPICS ARE SERIOUS BUSINESS, and spaceships exploding isn't.) When it was just a fiction board, it was easy not to take it serious. When it moves into 'non-fiction' stuff, it started growing more serious (but not more adult because of the mindsets.) and it pretty much infected the rest of the board. I mean, for how long had the fiction side of things been dead as N&P and the nonfiction stuff grew?
I'm also just going to say it even though I've sorta kept quiet about it. I don't get the whole LOLOLOL TROLL SDN PEOPLE. Its precisely like Gandalf said in the HPCA thread, at some point it stops being funny, and thus the only reaosn to do it is some bizarre reason to justify your own sense of self superiority. Which to me is precisely the sort of attitudes you left SDN to get away from.
in theory if you do it with socratic irony it as least can help people to recognize the faults of their thinking, but beyond a certain point actively engaging reduces any potential humor- when you're deliberately trying to piss people off, it's not as funny when it works as when they say ridiculous things straight off the bat, which is why that dragon-furry-thing thread had its funniest posts in the first couple pages when people were talking about how they would subordinate their sexual behavior to the hypothetical needs of some dragon society, because the insanity was unprovoked
of course, i only advocate trolling when the person is question is a massive asshole and you can let off steam by messing with them a little bit. in any case, trolling eventually develops into meta-trolling where everything you do becomes suspect and carefully assumed to be ironic or sarcastic in some fashion, which renders things unworkable for people who want to post sincerely and diminishes any impact, so yeah.
Starglider wrote:Aaron wrote:Surprised you signed up.
The original testingstan board was created around when that clusterfuck with the 'house of commons' / stark in the senate / shutdown of the senate / mods going on about 'testing being out of control, must be purged' etc was happening. I was somewhat involved with that so I joined (in 2009) and was around for a couple of months or so. I confess I have read the current board from time to time e.g. I missed that mass-banning last summer so looked here to see what happened and if there was another side to it.
i must admit to appreciating you more and more as time goes by