[crooked-v]

> If it’s a political forum we expect all civil exchanges to be treated equally.

The problem here is that bad actors intentionally take advantage of this by supplying an endless stream of 'civil' arguments for entirely abhorrent stuff. This includes usually feigning ignorance and claiming they're 'just asking questions'† when objections are raised, even though it's the tenth or fiftieth or five hundredth time the same thing has come up.

† https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions

[drdaeman]

> even though it's the tenth or fiftieth or five hundredth time the same thing has come up

Immediate thought: merging topics is drastically different from closing or deleting them.

Slightly off-topic below:

Generally speaking, I would love a technological solution for QA redundancy. Saw way too many long forum threads that have asked same/similar questions over and over. Not politics and not from bad actors, but e.g. reviews of new devices etc, where everyone and their dogs asks about, say, battery life, every 10 pages. StackOverflow-like QA platforms provide some structure to this, but are limited to objective answers. For example, there's no SO for book plot reviews/discussions and SO format isn't really appropriate there.

[archgoon]

Given that there will always be an influx of new people; and that most people will not be familiar with previous discussions, I'm not convinced that most forums are being assaulted by bad actors. This seems to be more of a Eternal September problem.

Of course bad actors can abuse this; though I've always felt it would be good for the derailing comments to be removed with a polite dm message explaining that the topic had been discussed previously with links to said discussion.

[crooked-v]

It's definitely an organized tactic among some groups. For example, there's a literal neo-Nazi handbook† that advises members of that group to disguise their sentiments in civility and/or 'jokes' in order to sneak it into mainstream discussion.

† https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/19/neo-na...

[mc32]

Any movement can use those tactics. I wouldn’t be surprised if they also read rules for radicals too. Any group looking for influence is going to use tried and true methods.

So while many vile groups like the nazis and others seeking power, there are many other groups who hold unpopular opinions even unpopular and illegal outcomes (as presently held by the public), I’m not sure we want to suppress that. Much of what we have today as acceptable discourse and so on is because we allowed those voices which were considered degenerate or unacceptable one way or another.

We don’t need a new dogma telling us the way to think correct.

[paulddraper]

Just because Nazis use rhetorical questions doesn't make rhetorical questions bad.