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@bsh1
Your logic here proceeds from a mistaken paradigm. A tied debate, in theory, only injures the debater who ought to have one; yet, it injures them less than if they had unjustly lost. An unjust loss, therefore, is worse than a tied debate. While voting moderation is not about policing votes to ensure the "correct" decision, it does establish minimum standards of acceptability for votes in order to minimize unjust losses, given that better voting practices likely leads to better voting decisions. The notion, then, that non-voting is the ill we should be attempting most stridently to avoid is incorrect; rather, bad voting is the ill we should be attempting most stridently to avoid, because it inflicts the greatest injury. If maximizing votes is the goal, should voters be able to vote a particular way for any reason whatsoever?
Your logic that non-voting is worse than bad voting proceeds from a mistaken paradigm. Ties and (arguably even) unjust losses are part of the process, but it's a different issue entirely when nobody is reading the debate. As a debater, I might ask myself "Why am I typing all of this out again?" Tell me which scenario you'd rather be in: Scenario A) You pour 5 10k character rounds of your life into a debate and lose after a great and wide range of feedback/voting/discussion/interest from the voters/readers or Scenario B) You pour 5 10k character rounds of your life into a debate and see a tie as a result of not a single soul voting/reading. Winning can be great, sure, but people come to this site to socialize which is why the forum utterly curb-stomps the debate section in terms of activity and participation. You say better voting practices likely leads to better voting decisions, but all I've seen is people being less interested in voting. Seldom do I see someone take the time to go back and correct their vote after it has been modded and I think the reason speaks for itself.
As to whether one should be able to vote a particular way for any reason whatsoever, I would not encourage that without some serious modifications to DART. For example, separate one's win/loss column into Judged Debates and Amateur Debates. Judged Debates could follow the current system you have here (with the addition of allowing the option to select the judge or judges) and Amateur Debates could follow the classic system that was on DDO back in the olden days (back when it was called debate.com) where you didn't need to present an RFD (although mods could still intervene to deal with trolling/spamming). Otherwise, no. As I've expressed on DDO in the past, I feel there are several steps that would need to be taken to make the debate section community a lot more active and allowing people to vote for any reason whatsoever (e.g. I vote PRO on this abortion debate because CON does not like cheeseburgers!) is not one of them. Anyways, that's my two cents.
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@bsh1
The problem with this analysis is that you would essentially be endorsing allowing the mods to apply different standards to different votes. Drafterman ardently objects to moderator discretion, yet you're suggesting that moderation should use its discretion to make exceptions to the voting policy when it is clear that the debaters have read and comprehended the debate. That (a) puts moderation between a rock and a hard place, (b) leads to unequal voting policy enforcement, and (c) opens spaces for the appearance of moderator favoritism. I cannot agree that such use of discretion is wise.
Correction: What I would be endorsing is allowing mods to apply different standards in determining whether a vote violates the rules. As to drafterman, I don't speak for him and would reject any position that would require mods to disregard anything outside of an RFD. I would also reject any notion that mods aren't already modding in their discretion. As to your three concerns:
A) Rock and a hard place comes with the job of being a mod. No matter what you do, you're going to piss somebody off and there will always be suspicions that you are corrupt and/or doing people favors. What really puts one between a rock and a hard place is the decision to continue doing debates while simultaneously having the ability to delete votes. That's a major conflict of interest, but one the community is able to put aside based on their trust in your standing as a member here. A trust that I see no reason cannot equally be applied simply to read a couple of comments in the comment section or do some other brief and transparent investigation.
B) Any egregious mod action should be appealable to a mod/admin of higher rank. Anything else is something that inherently falls in with the task of being a human moderator and can be applied to anyone in the world who is in any position of authority.
C) See A.
Besides, your argument here kind of misses the point. The vote itself should demonstrate comprehension of the debate, and not the arguments in the comments. It is the former that is being examined, the later comes after the examination, and may not always even occur.
If the arguments in the comment section are indicative of the debate having been read and comprehended, what exactly is the issue here? What is the overall policy goal for that matter? Suppose we have a situation where Type1 votes on a debate and gives an RFD all three mods here agree is airtight. Suppose that Type1 then turns around and brags in the comment section about his vote only being a troll vote and that he really only voted against PRO because he thinks PRO is a "cunt breathed weasel" or whatever. Is it your position that no mod action ought to be taken against Type1's vote because his RFD was "valid?"
If we were talking about the task of a formal debate judge or a court of law, it'd be a different story. But we have to be realistic here. DART is neither a formal debate competition or a court of law. You have tons of people who don't want to read or vote on debates. And for the few people who decide to vote on the debates (many of whom do it just because they're asked either in private or in the voting thread), a great many of them decide to say "screw it" when their vote gets taken down (despite having the means of simply modifying their vote). That, my friend, is something mods should strive to prevent.
Finally, whether the mods know that a voter read and understood the debate is no replacement for weighing analysis. Let me repeat: "Suppose, for a moment, that I read an entire debate about whether vaccines should be compulsory, and I decided to cast a non-troll vote. Suppose I voted based on one argument made in the first round, which was never discussed again in the debate and which had little to do with the topic at hand. In such a case, a voter is cherry-picking rather than weighing, and that's problematic for a host of reasons, not the least of which is that such a voting style fails to appreciate the debate as a whole."
I agree that cherry-picking should be discouraged, but if you turn around and see that the cherry picker had some extensive comments in the comment section illustrating that he was not a cherry picker and that he had a fully fleshed out understanding of the dynamics of the debate, mod action is not the appropriate course of action IMO.
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@bsh1
@Tejretics
Bsh1, I'm going to address your comment and a comment from Tejretics consecutively, since they both weigh into a much broader issue that I've noticed since coming back to this site. Your comments will be used as a foil for a much broader point. Moreover, my response should in no way be construed as an indictment against any one moderator. I've witnessed multiple examples of the problems I'm talking about from every mod here.
So to start, lets address your above post, bsh1: In principle, there's nothing wrong with requiring all voters to conduct a weighing analysis due to the concerns you just raised (e.g. cherry picking a random issue), but as my well beloved Assassin's Creed 3 antagonist, Haytham Kenway once said, principle and practice are two very different beast! I think drafterman's vote on your Jury Nullification debate is a perfect case of why rigidly requesting a weighing analysis on every debate is not a good idea. I won't get too deep into what was discussed on the comment section there (due to your concern about addressing specific instances of moderation action in private), but it goes without saying that drafterman clearly read and understood the debate based on the lengthy arguments he was making while disputing the mod action in the comment section, but his vote was still denied. He then passive aggressively turned around and voted against you. I'd say the lesson to be learned there is that (1) a mod doesn't need to go solely by what is presented in an RFD to determine whether a vote is sufficient (e.g. conduct an independent investigation, be it looking at the comments in the comment section or directly questioning the voter in private) and (2) hell hath no fury like a voter's scorn!
It's no secret that one of the fundamental problems with DDO and DART is the lack of voting on debates. That's why there is a thread with people asking other users to vote on their debates. That's why people regularly message other users asking that they vote on their debates. In general, people don't read or vote on debates. Reading these debates can be both a chore and very time consuming (especially if it's in regards to a topic you have zero interest in, which appears to be the case for most of the debates here). In that sense, voting is not merely a means to voice one's opinion, but is instead a gracious and unrewarded effort to help the DART community. And so from that standpoint, mods should be very reluctant to do anything that might alienate otherwise legitimate voters from voting. If I feel like my vote might get removed anyway , my thought process is "Oh well. Time to go do something else." DART needs voters a heck of a lot more than voters need DART and this shows quite painfully on a daily basis. The mere fact that very few people go back and modify their votes upon seeing them get removed is clear indication of this.
In light of the reluctance people here have in reading and voting on, mods should be equally reluctant to bring down the mod hammer. One thing I've noticed is that in your efforts to uphold the CoC, youguys are way too quick to take mod action, even if it means splitting hairs on a very small technicality and that kind of modding is not a good practice to maintain on this kind of website. Instead, instant mod action should only be taken when a violation is overtly egregious (i.e. dealing with a overt spammer/troll) and the spirit of the CoC should always take precedent over the strict letter of it.
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Which brings me to my response to Tejretics. This is in response to the comment you made on imabench's Assassin's Creed Debate ( https://www.debateart.com/debates/160 ). I hope you don't take any offense to criticisms here of your decision on this debate. None is intended and you're welcome to disagree, but I feel that if I don't voice these objections, no one else will.
You said: "Votes don't need to have an issue with every point they award to be removed. They can be removed if their explanation for one point is insufficient. I'd suggest simply (a) recasting the vote and awarding just arguments, or (b) referencing the specific conduct from Pro that you thought warranted awarding the conduct points to Con. This is true even when the conduct violations are "clear," just as it is true when the argument points are "clear" or spelling and grammar is "clear."
1) Any vote that doesn't violate the rules should never be removed. I can somewhat understand if there's currently a programming deficiency that prevents you from modifying single parts of one's vote (i.e. removing conduct without removing arguments as well), but that's more of an issue in regards to the limitations of this website than anything else and a voter should not be punished accordingly. We already have the issue with alienating voters as described above and this makes said alienation a lot more likely to happen IMHO.
2) A mod's chief concern when assessing one's vote should be whether they read the debate and whether they gave an actual basis for their vote. Here, you appear to agree that I read the debate, but penalized my vote on the grounds that I didn't add an additional comment explaining the difference between CON and PRO's conduct. There was no need. PRO clearly sent the debate down the path of personal attacks. CON merely retorted. In my mind, that automatically makes PRO's conduct worse than CON's. I'm not the only voter who made this observation. Whether my explanation constitutes a comparative analysis or not is grossly splitting hairs, which is the last thing a mod should do when making any sort of decision.
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@Tejretics
Interesting. I haven't done it since highschool. Is spreading still a thing?
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@RationalMadman
@Vader
Debating is a waste of life anyway, only do it as a hobby not a serious thing anyone cares about. Humans are too stupid to comprehend complex arguments on average.
Agree with the first part. Don't agree with the second. The allegedly complex arguments are generallysh-t no one cares about. Unless you're really big into the hobby of debating or discussing the topic in question, there's really no intrinsic value in well . . . anything that gets debated either on a debate team or on a website.
It gets you into a good college and helps you in becoming a lawyer.
To a certain extent maybe, but formal debate is bogged down by too many rules that don't exist anywhere else in life. "Dropped" and "extended" arguments is a great example. Just because the other party does not address every single thing you just said doesn't mean they concede to the parts they didn't address and judges/juries understand that.
Lawyers are rarely skilled debaters, they're usually extenely close to salespeople in their skillset.
Most of us are far better at making deals than "debating." But not every litigated case is going to end in a "deal" and so those debate /public-speaking skills you picked up in highschool/college can and do come in handy provided you can forget 40% of what you learned either on the debate team or arguing on the Internet.
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Time stone is all you need in life. No matter how bad you f*ck something up, you can always get a do-over.
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As long as personal attacks and ridicule is simply done for presentation purposes, I don't have a problem with it. I think we can insult each others' mothers throughout a debate and then go drinking together afterwards rather easily!
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I get the intentions of moderating votes in the fashion which I've seen, but I can't say I really agree with it. In my mind, a vote is only bad if there is indication that the person didn't read the debate, is trolling, is voting for some reason other than the debate itself or any other questionable practice. Otherwise, we get into a territory that can easily result in otherwise legitimate votes not being counted and possibly discouraging votes altogether.
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@Outplayz
@sadolite
Not to offend this website (as it's a fine website), but I don't see it generating the kind of money that would make it worth even paying the upfront retainer fee (much less funding discovery, pre-trial motions and the trial itself) anytime soon. Not to mention collecting the judgment after DDA has long declared bankruptcy and transferred its assets elsewhere. No way!
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@sadolite
Copyright and intellectual property rights suits cost money. Money Juggle apparently can't even spare to fix basic forum message board bugs.
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It sucks. I currently have a "debate" open that my opponent forfeited his round and the debate is permanently set as forfeited. That site has gone to hell.
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