Maybe it’s slow season for real estate, I notice recently there has been a spike in political discussions on forum. As I am writing this post I count 5 politics threads out of the latest 10.
This forum was founded to facilitate discussion on real estate. One can make a case stocks, investment and other economic topics are related to RE. We even have pretty lively discussions on burgers and Chinese food. Fine. I always imagine we are a bunch of guests in a big party, freely talking about whatever topics that interest us.
But politics is somewhat different given its divisive nature. Emotions run high on both sides. And it may drive newcomers away who landed on this site thinking this site is mostly about real estate.
Going forward, I will hide threads in the “Politics” category from the main “Latest” page. They are still there, but users would need to specifically go to the Politics category to read the posts.
Question is whether you can stop regular discussions from turning into political ones. Sometimes it’s a necessary and logical progression, but a certain person seems to feel the need to throw politically charged comments in on every single thread.
We have the regular flagging mechanism to deal with that. I think in general there’s a stronger case for censoring actions on political posts in non-political threads.
Ok then. I will start to flag posts, but I feel like calling him on it when I see it in the future. Does he even understand what he’s doing wrong? I’ve tried to be patient–but I feel like it’s really gotten out of hand. I absolutely can see some leeway on a political thread, but I object to the political jabs just being inserted randomly into every post. I know he’s capable of different behavior–he never acted this way on the RF 1.0 forums… I get the current administration is stressful, but I don’t think it’s acceptable to insert tangential random insults into posts where people weren’t really discussing politics in the first place.
That would be too much censoring work for me… Sometimes politics is hard to avoid, like rent control. There’s a fair bit of politics involved, but very relevant to real estate.
Let’s see if the new policy will lower the temperature a little bit.
Thanks for the hard work, manch. It’s not easy being a moderator let alone for free.
Fwiw, communities I’ve seen flourish often have mechanisms where each member has some # of dislikes before the account gets suspended for x days. You keep up the dislikes, and you get suspended forever. You may contest the dislikes to moderator, but otherwise the dislikes are given anonymously by the community members (which means moderator can suspend the user and just blame it on other community members
Finally, realization coming to this forum…Politics, esp dirty politics, no way helping any one except the ego part of individuals.
Rent control is a business impact, tariff is also a business impact, member must limit their discussion within the lines of business impact.
Do not ask personal wealth and do not display personal wealth (as lot of predatory scammers around the world).
The one request I make to this community members to focus on their personal growth and share the knowledge/help benefit fellow members.
If each members trust their neighbors, by sharing their exceptional experience , knowledge (Like elt1, ptiemann, LJ… and notably few others), that helps grow this forum.
I rarely come to this blog due to many of my unavoidable personal issues. I thought this topic “Too Much Politics” worth responding.
Good Luck to you all.
BTW: Many asked me “Are you having crystal ball? Where is your crystal ball?”. That was nagging me for a long time, finally I made one considerably reliable and running my life with it and find no time to spend in any blogs. I really thank you all for asking such question to me, esp WQJ (looks like he also left this blog). I will not be responding any question on this crystal ball what I have.
The Bay Area definitely is. Some leaders have even started to point it out. There was a thread here on those leaders calling it out. One perspective is tolerated and anything else is unacceptable. That’s going to kill the innovation.
I agree politics are hand in hand with real estate, and I’m not asking for censorship. Maybe just a spanking for people who feel the need to throw in ad hominem attacks. I generally have no problems with the majority of the disagreements we have on political issues nor the manner in which most people have them.
I don’t agree with this treatment in this particular case if we are talking about the same member some people have issues with. For the most part he’s talking to himself (with occasional personal attack to another member which I agree is worth flagging and calling out). However for the other more controversial posts, if you don’t like them, don’t read them, it’s that simple. The fact that people get so worked up just brings more attention to his posts (and as I said before, readership goes up, at least for me).
The members here are sophisticated enough to decide what to believe in and what to read, but in general I don’t agree with ganging up on a member, especially when he has been mostly harmless.
Censorship is a communist tool. Freedom of speech is better than censorship even though censorship is a legitimate tool. A mechanism of dislike and ignore can manage the disturbance. A ban or censorship based on some population’s viewpoint is counter productive. The real wisdom will never die from censorship.
There is no need to be afraid of other people’s speech. If it is correct, we want to hear. If it’s wrong, we want to hear and discuss and dispute. The worst is to lose the opportunity to hear than hearing uncomfortable news and viewpoints which may contradict our thoughts and belief. Censorship can cause huge problems and free speech only creates minor issues.
The danger of censorship is becoming greater now due to the small number of media channels. I think free speech will survive and find its venue.
If I have the right to censor, I may only approve the posts I like and suppress the posts I hate. I think many pepper will behave like this. Therefore, censorship will be disastrous.
