December 30, 2009 06:53 PM UTC

Colorado Pols.com is Weird

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• by: MADCO

But mostly because we who post make it so.

A few days ago – a long time in CoPols.com land  – I promised to research some old posts and report back later this week. Then by happenstance sxp151 did a thing last night that got me looking even further into the past posts.

A few observations from a relative noob, in no particular order.

Some of you are quite brilliant and some of you can write really well. Not always the same posters and not always the ones I agree with. And, no, not all you know who you are.

The underlying architecture of the site is what it is.

Example- when you change your signature line, it changes on every post for that user name for all time. So all of a sudden that post from two years ago looks weird with some comment about balloon boy or triguardian.

Here’s something that surprised me: there is no way to close comments on a diary.  And there are a few posters that post well after the pack has moved on. Sure they get the last word, and their comments are recorded, but it just seems….dumb.   Find an old post getting no traffic and then post a response that makes it look like the lack of reply defeats the original. Touché, mon ombre. I haven’t looked back into old posts much and when I do, I don’t post.  Where’s the wisdom in  getting the last   word when no one is listening?

Why do some posters consistently fuck up the mechanics of the site?

Eg: huge, unnecessary white space between post and sig line?  Consistently posting replies to the wrong post? C&P quotes from other sources with no accompanying link?

The site architecture is what it is, but these kinds of netiquette failures are just us.   Sure they are minor compared to the auto loading audio we used to sometimes get, or the no warning autoload images that no one wants to see, but it’s our community.

SH, TFO and others calling for civiity and moderation in language- you are right on.

Some posters here have been complete a**holes- worse than pointless invective and name calling. Worse than pointless because it distracts and excludes. If political discussion is useful (it is) and the political process is valuable (it is) then distracting from the discussion in a exclusionary, mean spirited way is not funny, it’s just wrong.

In following the “volume poll” and my little research project for more recent posts, I was curious about my own potential obnoxiousness.  In 1755 posts I can recall calling one poster a “dickhead ” and another a “misinformed, arrogant nut job”.   I wish I could consistently engage in more useful discussion. Though both were accurate characterizations in context, neither was especially productive communication.  

I’ve been thinking about DT’s idea about candidates being able to “own the web.”   A site like this that provides a recorded memory of who said what when can be a part of that. That said, searching the past on this site is a painfully awkward process. And because real world identities are not always available and trolls, sockpuppets and other blogonalities are easy enough to manage and manipulate I don’t see sites like this really playing a major role.