PoetPhilosopher
Veteran Member
There is a certain very popular website which has a positive and negative rating system. It's like what we have here on RF in the rate system, kind of, but in addition to positive ratings, there is a negative rating system which takes away points. In addition, some boards can't be accessed without a certain threshold of positive over negative ratings. Get rated down too much and you lose priviledges.
In a perfect world, the negative ratings feature for members would work. A person would see a really R-rated post without content warnings and rate it down.
In reality, there are constant situations like this:
Person A calls person B an idiot and doesn't get rated down.
Person B says "I am not an idiot"
Person B gets rated down some 17-20 times based on the audience giving Person A a benefit of a doubt. All because Person B got called a name.
Person B will continue to get rated down in any responses to the accusation of being an idiot, unless those responses are concrete proof he is NOT an idiot. Then he won't get rated down in those responses.
HOWEVER, suppose Person B does prove he's not an idiot. The 17+ negative ratings on his account still exist for each post in which he said anything but provide concrete proof.
And I was on such a site in which people were making jokes involving the body and about vegetarians and saying how by liking people's bodies in the bedroom, vegetarians like meat. I said, maybe they need the vegetarian version of a human being. It was a dumb comment, but it got several positive ratings. Then three vegetarians got offended by the posts and made long speeches about how the thread was wrong and how people who made such jokes should be punished. I didn't start the thread, but everyone who made jokes about vegetarians then got rated down. I went from several positive ratings to many negative ones.
So my whole argument? Trigger warnings, a subject brought up by someone on the forum, is a valid subject, but still, there are greater issues like what happens when you don't make people accountable for their actions. In this case, the accountable party in question being the audience who neg-rate posts anonymously.
In a perfect world, the negative ratings feature for members would work. A person would see a really R-rated post without content warnings and rate it down.
In reality, there are constant situations like this:
Person A calls person B an idiot and doesn't get rated down.
Person B says "I am not an idiot"
Person B gets rated down some 17-20 times based on the audience giving Person A a benefit of a doubt. All because Person B got called a name.
Person B will continue to get rated down in any responses to the accusation of being an idiot, unless those responses are concrete proof he is NOT an idiot. Then he won't get rated down in those responses.
HOWEVER, suppose Person B does prove he's not an idiot. The 17+ negative ratings on his account still exist for each post in which he said anything but provide concrete proof.
And I was on such a site in which people were making jokes involving the body and about vegetarians and saying how by liking people's bodies in the bedroom, vegetarians like meat. I said, maybe they need the vegetarian version of a human being. It was a dumb comment, but it got several positive ratings. Then three vegetarians got offended by the posts and made long speeches about how the thread was wrong and how people who made such jokes should be punished. I didn't start the thread, but everyone who made jokes about vegetarians then got rated down. I went from several positive ratings to many negative ones.
So my whole argument? Trigger warnings, a subject brought up by someone on the forum, is a valid subject, but still, there are greater issues like what happens when you don't make people accountable for their actions. In this case, the accountable party in question being the audience who neg-rate posts anonymously.
