I’ve been home from travels for longer than usual, so I’ve had a little time to think about The Armory’s future.
I’ve started the occasional thread that is more on the technical side of things, but most of the threads of late have been political in nature. I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t started my fair share of arguments related to gun control and Libertarian views on rights and property in general here. I’m actually waiting for Wabbit to get mad enough at me to start dredging up my “stereotypical college kid liberal” posts from 12-15 years ago, but it hasn’t happened yet.
That said, my recent (proven empty) threat to temp ban him, mostly for being a smug shit, but also due to him making up statistics and posting images of spree killers in the armory got me thinking: why am I having this problem in the first place?
The reason is that I relaxed my long-standing policy on containing gun control debate to the one megathread in The Armory. And in some respects the subforum has become more active, as I had hoped. But instead of more technical topics with occasional political threads, it has heavily favored political threads. And it’s like the same 5 of us posting in them. That sounds dangerously close to the definition of an echo chamber to me. I really do not wish for The Armory to become one of those. On the other hand, I still want traffic. Unfortunately, there are like 3-5 shooters on Bullshido that post. I could start things like gear threads that MIGHT generate interest, but I am not really comfortable posting too much info about the gear I use for work. Maybe if we had hundreds of users posting, I’d feel okay sneaking it in every now and then.
I’m considering tightening my policy on political threads up a bit, but am not sure how to do that fairly or uniformly without dumping everything currently getting traffic into General BS.
I’d like to see armory just be tech and technique. I have probably let a lot of shit slide that should have been canned or moved to another area, so I take some of the blame.
That’s my line of thinking as well. I’ll give it a few more days for other mods and admins to post their thoughts, but right now I’m leaning toward the following actions:
Dump all political threads into General BS
Remove Anthony’s policy sticky and create a new one reiterating the preferred technical nature of the forum
I’ll commit to 3 technical threads a month myself. Can’t promise one a week or even active participation all the time, but I’ll do my best.
I’m inclined to leave the Gun Control megathread intact but am happy to put that in General BS if so requested.
Some others have suggested that I keep Rabbit from the Armory altogether. I’m mulling the idea, but thinking I’ll not do that.
Once we get the politics out we can take a more aggressive stance on moderating in there, again.
I’d put the mega in GenBS, too.
I like the Armory being about technical stuff and keeping all the political shit out of it. Just turns into derails every time. Ghost has a lot to offer in there but his repeated post about conspiracy shit is just as bad as the political stuff.
Wrabbit has basically nothing to add in the armory other than what he googles about guns, it seems. He may have shot a gun, but he sure a hell hasn’t worked on them.
My fault. To create content I would post gun related political stuff to get traffic. Good Idea making it technical only. Heck, maybe allow new or experimental guns to be posted as long as it sticks to specifics and doesn’t meander into “OMG MASS killings” territory.
Well this is what I was worried would happen. Posting has dropped off to nil. I’ll keep trying with new threads, but it might be time to merge armory into something else if nothing changes in 6-12 months.