>>174146What were we supposed to do?
The thread was at the time a dumpster fire. Boomer would make some claim, someone would respond to it, Boomer would reply to that response with a complete non-response, and very many people got angry. It became a cesspool of drama and flames that would dominate the home page and add up to very many non-productive posts every day. While Boomer had maybe one or two supporters, there were far more who were fed up with his behavior on the site in general and this thread in particular. They complained here in the thread, on /qa/, and on the Teatime server.
The bump limit on /vx/, which was set to an arbitrarily high number, was especially a concern. Some user started just spamming the thread, hoping to trigger the bump limit. The spam was deleted
probably. I don’t recall and a reasonable
ish bump limit was set on /vx/ to stop it from happening again. It was apparent if nothing was done that users would start breaking rules to try to stop the thread from filling up the overboard, and likely they’d eventually just leave. Everyone was tired of the drama by this point, except Boomer and I guess you.
I was tired of the flat-earth drama filling up the home page constantly.
So what were we supposed to do? The main problem with the flat earth thread was that people would make arguments against flat-earth that they thought were cogent, and that they certainly put a lot of effort into, and Boomer would just dismiss these arguments, which made him seem insincere, or at least completely incompetent. So we tried to improve his posting. For a year. It didn’t work. Boomer himself even refered to his flat earth thread as “shitposting.” No. That’s not what this thread is. This thread is presented as a venue to take the concept of flat earth seriously. Not
shit posting.
It would have been best, I thought, if people would just stop replying. They couldn’t, because the thing kept getting bumped on the overboard and shoved in their faces. When the thread stopped bumping, people slowly stopped replying to the flame bait.
Many people - and
most of the moderation staff - thought that Boomer should just be banned. I thought that was heavy handed and incorrect, as Boomer
seemed to be in good faith.
So I did the best thing that could be done. Boomer is free to post whatever he wants in the thread, and other users are free to reply to it (within the rules). But the arbitrarily high bump limit of /vx/ was not coming back, and no new thread would be made.
Again, pray tell,
what were we supposed to do?