When a group of people meet for whatever reason the conversation ebbs and flows and changes direction. In a pub or other social gathering this is totally unmoderated (assuming no laws are broken) and self limiting by the time available and people’s tolerance to the views being stated.
In a business setting a meeting might be governed by an agenda, certainly by time available and overall a sense of being useful to the enterprise hosting the meeting.
A forum such as this really falls into a more social meeting as it is open to the public and usually hard fact is thin on the ground but opinions are rife.
I have opened this topic to review the part of the Community Code of Conduct that refers to avoiding derailling of threads. I agree deliberate and possibly malicious derailling is to be moderated but we seem to have excessive moderation and splitting/merging for the slightest digression from the thread topic.
I agree that we don’t want a hostile environment but at the moment I think we are in danger of stifling normal conversation.
I was having a discussion with somebody about it this morning,
This forum is starting to remind me of Hot Fuzz, or Wayward Pines.
(The whole emphasis on everything being positive is nuts, we should be allowed to feel negative, if we are feeling negative)
Agree with this so much. As soon as something is mentioned that could be seen as slightly negative, or something that the forum staff /monzo staff don’t like, it’s merged. And lost in a pool of other posts.
I think I’m starting to see why legacy banks don’t have forums. Haha.
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The other thing, whilst we are here. Is the passive aggressive attitude of certain staff / mods. Somebody has an opinion, and they are jumped on with comments like “well, other users don’t see it that way”
I actually saw a post earlier where a forum member actually stated that they didn’t like a post that somebody who is quite highly regarded wrote, and their reply was. Well if you don’t like it, ignore it"
To which they responded, how can I ignore something that I’ve already seen and was offended by.
I don’t find it to be that way tbh. I have a real tendency to go off on tangents but I don’t think that stuff gets moved, as you say it’s part of the ebb and flow
Given how often I am reading recent threads that get derailed, to the point that a new user commented:
I’m amazed at how unhelpful 90% of these replies were.
This was just 2 days after this thread discussing the issue. I’m fine for some hard moderation until people calm down when Apple Pay is launched and people accept that the app will change.
Otherwise
Conversation off-topic isn’t always stifled (example). More often than not as I see it, it’s new topics that are merged into existing ones. Sometimes though it might just be to reduce the number of posts in a thread and bring the topic back on point. Because, if you’re coming in late to a thread, are you going to read 250+ posts?
Yeah, I find things getting a bit unpleasant recently. There is one particular “leader” who recently went on a trolling spree in the Starling thread, just days after complaining about others derailing threads. It seems to me that this leader is trying to make the community their personal place where only their opinion gets promoted, and opposing opinions get heavily argued against until they are just shutting up, and that’s a shame.
There is such an imbalance on some things being heavily moderated, and other things being just left to go their way.
I agree that some moderation makes sense. But often it’s just excessive.
just to clarify, I wasn’t trolling here, I was simply sharing my opinion & having a discussion. You’re free to disagree with me (as people did) of course
I don’t want to make this personal, but I have to say that I’m consciously staying out of discussions that you are in, because you do not respect dissenting opinions and argue them to death (to translate a German idiom). That’s at least how it feels to me.
Possibly Certainly. But if a “leader” does that it’s particularly worrying. We are all humans. And we need to accept humans and humans’ short comings.
But if someone is given the privilege of “power” then we hold them to a different standard. I cannot see how it’s good that someone who’s supposed to enforce rules, who’s supposed to foster good discussion, doesn’t promote this through their own acts.
Also: If I “shout down others”, a leader can tell me off, ban me, whatever. But if a leader does that, then what?
Alex, this is your usual tactic of innocence, pleasantly disagreeing, asking for reference and generally not understanding that it is OK for people to have differing opinions to yourself.
just to clarify, I wasn’t trolling 
