Allow Political Content on Daily Puzzle Comments Under Certain Circumstances

poop

Dammit, I forgot a bag.

That's OK, they kick grass over it.

How manipulate of you. "I'm only trying to do good things for you, but Chess.com are the bad guys and won't let me!" If you really wanted to post puzzles for people's enjoyment, you could always put puzzles in the 'More Puzzles' forum. 

You knew the 'Daily Puzzle' has a big audience, so you used it to push your agenda. You planned all this, including the making of this thread.

Here are my responses to the three main kinds of comments I saw above.

The first kind of comment was people who just asserted that my position was wrong without refuting my argument.

The second kind of comment was the claim that one of the premises of my argument is wrong. I'm inclined to agree with this, although I note that most others' behavior suggest that they believe the presmise is correct, so my argument still stands unless they concede that the other worthless "first", "easy," "Hi ...", etc, comments that people post should also not be allowed.

The third kind of comment is that if Chess.com allowed some political content under the conditions I described, then eventually there would be a lot of political content and little to no more good chess content in the first page of the Daily Puzzle comments, thus meaning that no political content should be allowed. I agree this is a valid argument, but I disagree that it is true since I don't see any reason to believe that such an outcome would occur and instead think it's likely that there would be more and better chess content on the first page, for reasons I explain.

(1) A lot of people above said 'no politics, chess only' without responding to the argument that allowing some political content could be expected to lead to more and better chess content in the comments of the Daily Puzzle.

Currently it is very rare to find a good comment worth reading on the first page of comments of the Daily Puzzle, so it is difficult to imagine how allowing political content in those comments could make them worse. Look at today's first page of comments, for example:

• 9 hours ago · Quote · #2

  Ro_Ind 

  YEAH!

• 9 hours ago · Quote · #3

  mammoth64 

  Hello adriancook, dkcoolike, que-tip, and jordanszetho. Your move, adriancook.

• 9 hours ago · Quote · #4

  mohsenffff 

  [COMMENT DELETED]
• 9 hours ago · Quote · #5

  cshuenss  

  4

• 9 hours ago · Quote · #6

  valtzen  

  V-

• 9 hours ago · Quote · #7

  ThePerson777 

  fuk

• 9 hours ago · Quote · #8

  nonamegamer 

  easy, something we all need to know :)

• 9 hours ago · Quote · #9

  Antarmy1 

  easy

• 9 hours ago · Quote · #10

  willtheking 

  first

• 9 hours ago · Quote · #11

  Mifabe 

  ...

• 9 hours ago · Quote · #12

  cshuenss  

  clever

• 9 hours ago · Quote · #13

  KNIGHTHORSE6729 

  yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss 11111111111111111111111111111111111111

• 9 hours ago · Quote · #14

  YoungEngineer 

  Nice

• 9 hours ago · Quote · #15

  deansh 

  6. Qd1

• 9 hours ago · Quote · #16

  KNIGHTHORSE6729 

  coolllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllpuzzle

• 9 hours ago · Quote · #17

  spikestars 

  yay new puzzle

• 9 hours ago · Quote · #18

  captainray 

  Quite Nice.

• 9 hours ago · Quote · #19

  mohandisusa 

  very nice...

• 9 hours ago · Quote · #20

  Nanacc 

Wouldn't it be better if there were a comment in there with another chess puzzle or with an analysis or discussion of the Daily Puzzle even if that comment also contained a link to a political discussion? To those who say no, definitely not, why not: Why would a comment with better chess content than any other comment on the first page necessarily be worse to allow on the page than the other comments just because it contains some political content? The only good answer that I can think of is "Because the other comments on the first page already contain fairly good chess content," but this is clearly false, so although the counter-argument suggested by this answer against my position would be valid, it would not be sound.

(2) Note that n00less_cluebie said that the other poor comments should not be allowed either: "By the same token, most of those "First!" and "Easy" comments, should likewise be deleted  :-P"  My argument was based on the premise that if these other worthless comments are allowed, then comments with better content (chess content) should be allowed even if they also have some worthless political content. However, if n00less_cluebie is correct that the worthless comments that currently occupy the first page of the Daily Puzzle each day should not be allowed, then my argument for why political content should be allowed would appear to fall apart, since one of its premises would be false. I think I am inclined to agree with n00less_cluebie, but so long as people insist that it's okay to post the nonsensical comments that people currently post, then I would continue to argue that to be consistent you ought to believe it okay to post comments with valuable chess content even if they also contain some nonsensical political content.

(3) A couple other people, such as macer75, argued that allowing some poltical content under the conditions I have advocated would eventually lead to a comment section containing a lot of political content with little to no more good chess content that would be overall worse than the current comment section. I don't see any strong reasons to believe that this would be the case and I think it's more likely that we would see more good chess content on the first page of the Daily Puzzle if posting political content under the conditions I advocated was allowed, for the reasons I explained (such as the fact that it would make it so that some people who otherwise wouldn't be willing to make the effort to post chess content to the first page now would be willing to). However, if someone provided some reasons to believe that the downward spiral into a lot of political content without better chess content would occur, note that I think this is a lineor argument that could conceivably refute my argument. However, until those reasons are provided, my argument still stands and I thus still think that some political content should be allowed under the conditions I have described.

I might give you that point, PRA, but only if you can prove that you go to political sites and post about chess--in order to improve the content.

Disgruntled_Sheep wrote: "Think about how you might feel if out to dinner one night for a special evening with your partner and someone in the restaurant decides to sit down at your table and preach peace at you. [...]"

I don't think this is a valid analogy. The current first page Daily Puzzle comments are not a "dinner one night for a special evening with your partner" since that is good and the current comments are quite bad. A better analogy is you go out one evening to a chess club and everyone is talking gibberish. You're thinking that you're probably never going to come back again another night because nobody is talking about or playing chess. However, one person shows up who actually wants to play you in a casual game of chess. You play and analyze the moves allowed as you go since it's just a fun game and you get into some interesting positions. At one point the person brings up the subject of politics. You can choose to engage him in the subject or ignore him and focus on the game (this is analogous to ignoring the political content in the comments and only looking at the chess puzzles and chess analysis that people would post). Would you be glad that this person came to the chess club? You may not like the fact that he brought up politics at one point during your game, but presumably you're still happier that you got to play someone in chess rather than stand around with all of the people nonsensically saying "first!" "easy!", etc.

However, if someone provided some reasons to believe that the downward spiral into a lot of political content without better chess content would occur, note that I think this is a lineor argument that could conceivably refute my argument.

Have you not been paying attention to the increasing polarization of American politics for the past 10+ years and how unpleasant the public sphere has become with the constant insertion of politics into television, music, church, movies, interviews etc.?

And let's face it: the world doesn't lack for good chess puzzles. If you imagine you are bringing some amazing boon to chess.com with your particular puzzles you are sadly mistaken.

Oh.  I guess this date's not going nearly as well as I thought.

I don't do that. But if there was a political site (say a forum) in which it was very rare to see people posting any actual political content, and then you went posted some good political content for once, and mentioned the fact that you love chess--play me in a game on Chess.com--then your actions would be permissible. If it was the case that the discussions on this website had consistently good political content, then I would agree that your advertising of Chess would not be appropriate. But given that your comment has more good political content than nearly all other of the other comments (which are nearly all devoid of any political content) on the political website, I would argue that your Chess.com plug was permissible. It would be especially permissible if it were true that allowing the Chess.com plug provided the incentive necessary for you to continue posting good political content to the website.

That's not what I'm imagining. I'm imagining that the amount of quality chess content in the currently awful first page of comments on the Daily Puzzle (e.g. see today's Daily Puzzle) could be greatly increased.

...clean and devoid of quality chess content.

There is another way to refute my argument in favor of allowing some political content under certain conditions that nobody mentioned: Implement another solution that will lead to there being more quality chess content in the Daily Puzzle comments that does not involve allowing political content.

For example, perhaps a comment rating system in which users could "like" comments or give them a thumbs up or thumbs down could be used. This would likely be effective if the comments were listed in order of comment rating rather than in order of time posted, or if comments that a lot of people thumbed down were hidden from view (sort of like the policy on YouTube comments now). Some good suggestions are provided in this thread: Puzzle of the Day Comment Setup.

It's worth mentioning again, that while my argument for allowing some poltical content would fail if these suggestions were implemented to improve the Daily Puzzle comments, my argument still stands now: comments containing quality chess content and some political content should not be moderated so long as the rest of the comments that are nonsensical and devoid of chess content are allowed.

No one is interested in "refuting your argument". You just posted a lame idea and people thought it would just suck. That's all. In fact, the one thing that has become clear from all this is that comments should not be allowed in general in the daily puzzle, because all you get are a thousand worthless blips of nonsense.

I tried to find in your original what those conditions ur advocating are, but I couldn't find it. Anyway, that's not really important. The important thing is, by allowing some political content but not others, chess.com will be making a political statement, which I'm sure it doesn't want to do. And because people who use this site come from all over the world, favoritism toward virtually any kind of political content would offend some group of people who use this site and possibly make them leave, and chess.com definitely wouldn't want that.

Follow up to my comment above:

In post #35 you said that posts that contain some chess content and some political content should be ok, "so long as the rest of the comments that are [not] nonsensical." But then who gets to decide what is nonsensical and what isn't? Again, if some political content was labelled as nonsensical and others weren't, it would be a political statement on the part of chess.com.

Because I'm trying to figure out a way to improve the quality of the Daily Puzzle comments. Allowing political content when the comment also includes quality chess content is one way.

I understand a lot of people are irrational and aren't interested in having good reasons for holding beliefs. In fact, your comment is a good example of this. You argue that no comments should be allowed in general on the Daily Puzzle since the necessary result of allowing comments is a thousand worthless blips of nonsense. But this is clearly false since it's possible to allow comments and get quality ones rather than nonsense. The comments on the http://www.chessgames.com/ Daily Puzzle are a great example of this.

The only thing that will improve is that instead of comments like "first" or "easy" you will end up with more references to one's mother, the individual's preference of skin pigmentation, a question over one's sexual orientation, and ultimately Nazis.

This is probably the reason why Chess.com doesn't allow any political content on the Daily Puzzle currenty and likely won't in the near future, as I said in my original post. But, I would point out that it's possible for people to take offense to any statement and that this thus doesn't seem to be a sufficient reason not to allow political content to greatly improve the quality of the Daily Puzzle comments unless some other means is used to improve the quality of the comments instead. I do think that there are other ways of improving the quality of the comments, so ultimately I do agree that no political content should be allowed on the Daily Puzzle. However, until Chess.com employs one of these other means and the comment quality improves, then I think moderating the political content out of comments with more quality chess content than all of the other poor comments one finds on the first page of the Daily Puzzle is a poor policy. While it's true that it might prevent some people from being offended, it also results in less quality chess content on the Daily Puzzle which many users would miss.