Let me take your comments in earnest, and in turn, once, and that will be my final say on the matter:
(12-02-2019, 08:37 PM)cardcrimson Wrote: I assume you're referring to me. So let me say this, please spare me the condescending old snowflake crap. I don't need a safe space, never have, and I've never shied away from debate.
I was not referring to you specifically, but to someone who called me a millennial "safe spaces" warrior for arguing that there were too many negative threads about football. I honestly have no idea how old you are IRL, but I do think, candidly, that you've whined pretty excessively about this issue. At some point, perhaps deferring to those who put time in to maintaining this space may, for decorum reasons alone, be the prudent course of action. Even if you think you're right, and we're wrong, you've made your point. Over. And over. And over. Maybe it's time to just let it go?
(12-02-2019, 08:37 PM)cardcrimson Wrote: Throughout my life, I've never tried to suppress views opposite of mine or to avoid them. In fact, I've relished them and sought them out. Views different than my own, always improve my own thinking and decision making; they prove my thoughts wrong, validate them, or in most cases tweak them to make my thinking stronger.
That's great, me too. I'm sure most Stanford fans are also fans of freedom of speech. And using that speech, some posters have set out thoughtful, concise, and precise critiques of Shaw. They're great contributions, but as far as I'm concerned, I actually don't care about what they have to say, because I don't actually care all that much about football. On some level, I think a sport so directly tied to CTE is fundamentally at odds with the core values of a university, least of all Stanford. My issues is rather that the constant repetitious hectoring about Shaw and the football team in many different new threads gets tiresome, and when it shows up in thread after thread, it starts to dilute the value of the rest of the board.
As a matter of process and not of content, I will confess that there have been recent ongoing discussions about several posters who have perhaps been creating too many repetitive threads that don't warrant or need a thread of their own, given similar topics that already have their own threads. Sometimes that means looking down a page or two for a common-theme thread and resuscitating it, rather than just deciding apropos of nothing to make a new one all of your own. One way to self-police this is to examine the percentage of new threads one creates and compare it both to the percentage of posts ones makes, and compare it to the percentage of threads the average Cardboarder creates. A well-named thread can go a long way, as the recent WBB Victoria Invitational thread shows. I think that one is up to over 100 posts? Most of the recruiting threads get similarly long mileage from a single origin thread.
To this end, part of diversity of ideas is ensuring there is room for that marketplace of ideas to flourish - when one poster, or one leitmotif, starts to crowd out the rest, it's our job as mods to discuss whether to intervene to ensure such diversity of ideas doesn't get lost in the shuffle.
(12-02-2019, 08:37 PM)cardcrimson Wrote: Now to the merged thread in question, a lot of threads were buried together and it's irrelevant who the OP was. They cluttered the board with the same thing you claimed--negativity towards the football program. Help me understand how a thread about the press corp, a thread about the running game, a thread about injuries / strength and conditioning, a thread about offensive creativity, a thread our coach's resistance to change, etc. are all about the same thing. To me, they are all separate issues and warrant separate discussions.
As I really hope you know by now, I had nothing to do with any aspect of these thread mergers. I had perhaps inspired it with my facetious and performatively over-the-top invitation to dump all hatred of Shaw et al. in a single thread, but I had nothing to do with the decision to merge threads, nor what got merged.
(12-02-2019, 08:37 PM)cardcrimson Wrote: To you, they are all issues to be feared, as they doesn't fit with your narrative that all is well with Stanford athletics, except for a minor blip with the football program. What a bummer it must be to live in a cardinal colored shell.
Fear?! Respectfully, I have to laugh at that. Nothing that takes places on this board strikes fear in my heart. This is my escape from a much more stressful day job as part of a much more stressful, publicly accountable career. And as to the substance of your critique, let me say once again, football is not even among the top 5 sports I care most about, so I'm not sure I even have a coherent narrative about the state of our football team. To the degree I do, it's that my class (2006) was the first to lose all four of our big games since I think(?) the 1950s, and the year after I graduated we had the ignominy to finish the season with 1 win and 11 losses. Maybe my standards are too low as a result, but I give David Shaw a lot of credit for maintaining a consistently winning program while doing it in all the right ways. And believe me, David Shaw's football teams have been anything but a "bummer" for me - our Rose Bowl win against Iowa was one of my best days as a Stanford Cardinal fan
ever. If I am lucky enough to attend my 50th reunion, I am sure I will still savor the fact that the state of Iowa threatened sanctions because our band had the audacity to be funny while Our Guys were busy humiliating the Hawkeyes all over the field.
So if there's a tl;dr, it's this: it's not so much
what any member posts, but how frequently, repetitiously, and in how many different places. When one poster has created half the threads on the front page of the board, or when one topic gets regurgitated in thread after thread after thread, it begins to feel a little unfair to everyone else, many of whom come here precisely because this is one of the few places that provides high-quality, in-depth coverage of all our other sports. That's the origin story of the Cardboard, and the chief reason why I've invested as much time into it as I have.