I didn’t want to post anymore on this topic, but it feels like I have to vent this one last time. Like I said before, if you don’t want to take feedback under consideration, that is fine. Just make it clear that it is not wanted. You keep telling users that you would consider it and then completely neglect it or ignore it.
The only way to increase higher quality posts/good contribution is to stop rewarding and encouraging users who abuse the current system, but you have decided that it is not what the forum needs. The tirade against a user you speak of is not even my main concern. I’ve already used Ignore option for him and I still see useless posts by him on the front page and ignore them anyway. A valid complaint, I feel, is low effort posts and rewarding them with stats/points, I don’t care if they get awards every day, I care that it encourages such behaviour and increases such posts, which imo is detrimental to this forum.
If voting is not feasible, I would prefer a complete block, more than what the current Ignore option provides. The other party should not be able to see anything a user posts and vice versa. The current Ignore is quite useless and half-baked.
Keeping this aside, what the OP suggests feels valid criticism. Is it really a tech forum in its current avatar? The forum feels entirely too negative to me, and I freely admit, if not for the marketplace, I would have said my farewell long back. Political debates devolve into personal attacks and character assassination frequently and regularly. Language/region wars often use derogatory terms for whole regions/groups. I even remember a few threads which were self-loathing as to how Indians in general are the worst people. Meme thread often is littered with misogynistic posts with outdated boomer humour. People sharing their personal lives with Too-Much-Information feels like reading cheap newspaper’s naughty columns. Again some people talk about women there like they are entirely living in a men’s world and have no mothers or sisters. Please don’t ask me for examples of the above, I can list them, but I would rather not. Half or even more of them are on my ignore list now. All of this is what we as a community decided is okay to share here. Some even enjoy them.
I often wonder how unwelcome women must feel in tech spaces like this. If you have a young child, boy or girl, aged 10-15, would you feel comfortable sharing this forum with them? I am not going to like the answers most probably, so consider it a hypothetical question. That was the age I and many others developed lifelong interest in tech. But maybe the forum needs its middle-aged men more than impressionable teens.
I would rather have a forum that keeps all this noise outside and focuses on the tech. I realise I must be a very small minority and henceforth will stop suggesting changes.
/end rant
I am out of this topic. Please don’t quote or tag me here anymore.
