Bothsidesism…

Say there’s a person who makes some weird claims about the Amiga graphics system, like saying the Amiga doesn’t have any ‘400-line modes’, and it’s only low quality TV-resolution…

Another person then says the Amiga in fact does have a 480-line mode in NTSC and a 512-line mode in PAL, it’s just that they are interlaced, to be compatible with NTSC/PAL standard equipment, but they can be deinterlaced and promoted to 31 kHz signals using a device known as a ‘flicker fixer‘.

Then this person also points out that the IBM PC also started out based on NTSC signals, given that the CGA card was designed to output NTSC-compatible composite signal, and also has a header for an RF-modulator to connect it to a TV.

Now, these are facts that should be easy to verify, one would think. The Amiga specs are well-known, and it may not be THAT well-known that CGA has an RF header, but it is documented in the CGA manual, and early IBM PC ads also specifically mention that the PC “hooks up to your home TV”.

So you’d think that the first person would accept these facts as facts. But instead, this person starts making personal attacks at the other person, and denies these facts, simply because this person is the one presenting them, framing this person as having some kind of irrational, emotional motive to lie about these machines.

This person then goes into a posting frenzy, sometimes posting up to 5 times in a row, with various unhinged lies, accusations and random distortions of the truth (not unlike ‘Cloeren Jackson’ and another sockpuppet from the same person that has previously done the same in the comments on this blog and on some Amiga-related YouTube video).

So the other person gets fed up and calls him out for trolling, because well, at this point that is exactly what it is: being argumentative and attacking someone personally, instead of sticking to the actual subject and facts presented. And in fact, ‘troll’ is actually a very friendly, euphemistic way to describe the actual behaviour.

Now a moderator steps in and tries to make this into a ‘both sides’ thing… Oh no, that person wasn’t allowed to call someone who appears to obviously be trolling a troll. And no mention of the first person’s behaviour whatsoever, including some very nasty attempts at character assassination.

It doesn’t work that way. Whoever made that person a moderator was as poor a judge of character as that moderator. Both sides aren’t always equally guilty when a discussion gets derailed. Sometimes one person is just actively derailing it, sometimes over a period of months. When moderators allow such things to fester for that long, they should also expect that eventually a spade will be called a spade, and a troll derailing a thread will be called a troll. There’s a huge difference between false accusations and stating facts. Just as there is a huge difference between actively derailing a thread repeatedly, and someone who has always tried to remain on-topic (and has a good track-record of many years in the community of friendly, constructive discussions), but who is running into a wall with some person who just will not stop derailing discussions, and moderators facilitating this behaviour.