The Pit

The Pit

I can't tell you how much I disagree with that wiki summary. Actually, I can tell you: I disagree with that summary more than I disagree with any of psioni's yammerings.

The Pit was beautiful to watch right from the start as people saw the 17-minute life of comments and realised the true anonymity it offered. This led to a brief period of no-consequences ranting held only slightly in check due to the fact that many here can be identified by their writing styles. That quickly became old hat and people tried to converse and it was terribly interesting watching the attempts of people to carry on conversations when it was impossible to tell who was actually speaking. I say that as the "victim" of an impersonation -- I understand someone was claiming to be me and went on talking about blowjobs for an hour during a time I could not have been in the Pit due to work barging in on my Net usage.

The limitation to one hour a day threw another spanner in the works and though I expected the cattiness to return, it instead followed a different course and any discussion was theme-based, generally around the only thing Toytowners really give a damn about: sex.

And then it was gone.

I miss it and I hope for a return. It was fun, funny, but more importantly to me, an incredible display of social interaction, a dissertation waiting to be written.

woof.

I agree with BD pretty much. When it was restricted to an hour there was no pettiness or abuse whatsoever, sure the discussion was all about sex.

The only difference to live chat is that I could access the pit during work hours but not live chat.

The anonymity is easily come by if you log in under a different user name. Oh, but your comments were associated with that user name so you can't provoke discussion by presenting opposing view points.

I'm still undecided about the Pit - I saw comments about a friend or two of mine in there that I felt were both unfair and untrue, and potentially very damaging, so with that in mind I think on balance we're better off without it - did board usage alter significantly is what I'd like to ask Bob.

How were they "damaging"? Firstly, all comments were gone after 17 minutes. Secondly, since everyone knew that it was totally anonymous there could be no expectation on the validity of any statement. there were people slagging themselves off to see if others would join in the assault or rush to defend -- and some were painfully obvious in doing that.

woof.

They were damaging because they alleged a number of affairs - which I know to be untrue. More than that I won't say.

And what was the damage caused exactly?

The POTENTIAL damage Kza.

BD's right, people aren't stupid enough to believe the stuff written in there.

I made the fallacious statement that I had contracted chlamydia from a Toytowner (I didn't specify who) which was (and still is) a complete lie. The comment generated a fair number of comical responses as it was intended to do. I assume most of the comments were made similarly in jest. I also noticed the people who tended to get named in a negative light were those who can give it as good as they get it (myself included).

Yep - Crawlie's right - it has a potential to cause people harm, who simply don't deserve it, because spiteful little cuntfucks can post what they want without having to stand by their remarks (which is what usually keeps people from being utter wankers - the fear of looking a twat or getting the shit kicked out of them). In this case I was worried that the rumours might end up getting back to the person's other half - quite what they'd have thought I don't know, but if you're going to assume that nothing in the Pit is worthy of any credence, what exactly is the point of the pit? Might as well write a script that just automatically tells a lie every five seconds and read that...

The point could have been to be able to discuss things that people are normally too shy to discuss without the anonymity. Which did actually start to happen at one point.

I think the name calling and the who wants to sleep with who would have gotten (and did get )tiresome very quickly.

'tis true I suppose. Didn't see any of that (at least not seriously), but I'm sure it could have been used for good as well as the dark side, but all I saw was comedy (not usually that funny) and nastiness - hence my statement above - on balance I think TT will be a happier place without it. If you wanna be anonymous you can register a fake ID like that guy with the kids and the girlfriend, whoever that was.

admittedly, i didn't get the pit at first. i couldn't think of anything witty to post, so i didn't bother. i also didn't know it was anonymous, but if that had made a difference...?

but as far as your comment jimbo:


if his (like i said, i ignored the pit thread) better half belives all the gossip, then there is something to be said about that better half. maybe it was a confirmation to what this better half had heard & the couple is on their way to therapy.
TT is no different than college life, except that you would hope we've grown up a bit. if you don't want anyone to gossip about you, then don't do anything to get noticed.

Thing is, this individual HASN'T done anything. Somebody just doesn't like him. Whatever though - I think things that encourage people to be nasty because they can hide behind a shield of anonymity are not to be encouraged - I just don't think the positives come close to outweighing the negatives.

@Jimbo Its probably the same gossip that is going around offline, and has probably even more potential for damage there than it does in the pit where noone believes it anyway and it only lasts for 17 minutes. At least the pit provides a way for people to know what gossip is out there about themselves and then they get a chance to minimize said damage, perhaps by warning their significant other(s) for example. You dont get that chance with offline gossip where everyone knows except the involved parties who the gossip never gets to.

I guess my point is why worry about the pit, when the "potential damage" caused by offline gossip is not only greater, its harder if not impossible to control. It just seems silly to me really, on such a gossip hungry community like TT (especially when TT goes offline and meets up in person) to worry about something as harmless as the pit.

Surely if people want to post spiteful and damaging comments they can just create an alternative login and post it anyway.

If people want to stir shit you aren't going to stop them by closing the pit. I found it all rather amusing myself.

It's not so much about believing it, it's that one person who doesn't even know you who seems out to get you, about everyone and their mother bringing it up or whispering it behind your back or, my favorite, those who desperately want you to know what's being said about you. Sure, it's nice to say ignore it all, but I have yet to meet anyone that can. And if they said they did, I'd call them a liar.


Agreed. Still haven't been in the Pit (nor adult chat for that matter). It's an anonymous chat forum already FFS (until you go to something and reveal your id). What's the point of having a second tier of anonymity. School ground shit.

Well good riddance to the Pit. Anonymity is a double edged sword, in that if you are falsely blamed for slagging someone off in there, you can't prove your innnocence of it.

I'll third that statement. I never used it. To me it just seemed like bored people hiding behind totally anonymity to stir up sh!t and and sling mud at the expense of other peoples feelings.

The Pit did nothing except reflect the members of TT but without any names. It was interesting to see the level to which some TT members would sink, given the chance.

The forum is hardly anonymous. Most people here know at least a few others and many of us meet up in large groups. OG and I get along pretty damned well in person in stark contrast to how we clash here on the board, especially a year ago.

What's wrong with school playground shit? What's the problem in letting off steam and screaming about some fuckwit user? Especially when -- unless you go to great measures to identify yourself -- there's no way to know who's writing and even then, little room for credibility. You can identify yourself in one line but there was no way to follow that the next time you hit the enter key. And if you used some sort of identifier (as I did), there's nothing to stop someone else from using it as well (which also happened to me). Only a writing style could give someone away and even then it was lost at the next comment.

What was becoming interesting for me as a spectator was watching as people stopped the initial sniping (much likew the karma shit last year) and started trying to communicate, bolder in their willingness to write certain statements and questions due to the anonymity, and yet work through the problems of carrying out communication through the veil of anonymity, and do so while others would jump in either mischieviously or maliciously.


You do realise that it could have been the same person doing both sides, right?


There's no proof of guilt. Since it was completely anonymous, there was absolutely no credibility in anything that was written in the Pit. None. I never discussed blowjobs in there. Whoever was impersonating me did a pretty good job because a couple people who know me in real life thought it was indeed me. All I said was that it wasn't and that was that.

OK, so it could have been. Who would know? Someone could sign up for an account here using a nick like BarkingMad and start ranting away, cutting and pasting from my posts and changing a few words here and there. If it was someone in my company anywhere in the world there's no way for the admins to know it wasn't me because everything from my company shows up from one IP proxy address.

Anonymity is an impressive concept which takes time to be explored and used well. Most people on TT are hardly Net Vets and I dare say a rather small percent here could tell me what Deja was. I can only think of three people who might have used IRC 12 years ago and I don't know if even one of them knows how nicknames originally worked.

Those of us who've been on for years do know about the ups and downs of anonymity and anonymous usage within familiar communities. The Pit was a very safe way of exposing others to it. From what I know of Invision and Net traffic, unless the Pit was intentionally logged in the background, it really offered true anonymity; matching comments to users would require considerable effort and it couldn't track anyone not logged in. The apparently arbitrary 17 minute time-to-live on all messages further helped the cause. What I saw happening in the Pit reminded me of CompuServe's first implementation of CB Simulator back around 1984.


That was part of what was so interesting about it. There was the intial clamour to let out some vitriol but then a sense of order started to form. The slagging died down pretty quickly because while you could say anything, no one knew if it was credible or not and it quickly became pointless. And it stopped. I tried to stir some shit using the name of someone I know who I'm pretty sure wouldn't have gotten upset and it was completely ignored despite a dozen other people being in the Pit at the time.

The Pit let you see a few sides to people without knowing which people they were. Researchers love that sort of thing. Spectators, too. People only scream "Kill the umpire" when they aren't personally acquainted with him.

woof.

my point was it's anonymous until you introduce yourself in person and reveal your identity. you can retain your anonymity if you don't do that (unless someone else really wants to play computer spygeek). the problem with schoolground shit is we are too old for it and yet people do get hurt, often very and always unnecessarily.

Absolutely - social experiment theories are all very well, but my view is simple (and very 'Don Riina'). If you've got something to fucking say, fucking well say it, and say to their face, otherwise shut the fuck up. Works just fine in real life in my experience.

I've said this before but nothing was said in the pit that doesn't get said IRL all the time. As Kza said, at least there was some chance to defend yourself or defend a friend if they weren't threre. Most of the time you don't even hear about it until it's made the rounds a few times.

Jimbo, the problem is most people won't say things to your face and will only say things behind your back. That's life.

As far as I know there is no such right as the right to not be offended. If anyone is honestly offended by anything here or in the pit or in the ladies or gents forums then they are a nancy and need to harden up. Its up to YOU as to whether you let something offend you or not, not the thing you let offend you.

I'm very much that way myself: there's nothing I've said on-line (as myself or as some persona) that I wouldn't say in public. This has led to some... interesting... results. But others aren't. I can guess the identities of about half the people who were in there on the Pit's last day. The subject quickly centered on Saan's sex life and people were throwing out strange questions, some ill-formed and clearly uncomfortable, but curious. There aren't many people as willing to talk about noj just sex in general but about their personal sex lives as Saan -- even I draw a line outside of specific circles -- but anonymity allows all to participate.

It wasn't just that Friday that talk was about sex. Toytown is positively seething with sex and curiosity about the subject. It's been the subject of choice in one way or another on the segregated forums. Sex turned up right away as the Pit was opened. So did slagging off others, but EB's initial post introducing the Pit (since deleted) was basically an invitation to do just that! "You have 17 minutes." After that whatever was written would be gone. And it was.

Karma was an interesting idea and was so thoroughly abused it never stood a chance. While a note from EB mentioning that mods could see who was hitting karma buttons and how often (and that some people claiming not to pay attention were the biggest clickers) did cool it down a bit, it never evolved into anything allowing serious rating based on quality. It remained a grade school popularity game. And it took months before it was finally killed off.

The Pit, on the other hand, not only started off as suggested but quickly started evolving and was killed off before there was any chance to see what it might evolve into. Wanton slagging of TT users had pretty much stopped in the course of the first day, even though that was a stated purpose of the function.

Bring it back, leave an hour or two time limit on it once or twice a day, and add a disclaimer at the top saying "Don't believe anything here. There's no way to know who's saying what and whether it's real or not. This is just a cesspool. Have fun swimming in the shit."

woof.

I happen to agree with both sides of the argument. The pit can be dangerous and allow people with no backbone to make spitefull and malicious comments about other people for whatever reason. One would think that, as adults, we are all above this chidishness, but unfortunately we are not. As already said, this shit goes on in real life behind people's backs.

That said, there really was a trend to be seen towads more constructive chats at the end and maybe it was killed off too quickly.

I think a future Pit could be done differently.

Each user accessing the Pit is given a user number. This number shows up with each post and the user keeps this same number for that session of the pit. This give annonymity whilst also making it possible to follow a decent conversation with someone.

I really can't believe people even give a shit. It's a web forum. There will always be a fair amount of bullshit merchants, cowards, rumor starters and gossips.

However it is just a Web Forum. It makes for an interesting read and can often be highly amusing and informative. However in my opinion only a complete muppet takes a web forum all that seriously.

Still if it makes people feel important/wanted then fair enough.

it's more than that, though, Wibbsy
it's a community, innit
our own little village, with everyone's flounces, love affairs, friendships and strops documented for all the world to see
it's quite good fun, really

oh, and don't forget that we've already seen the weddings of 2 couples who met through TT. That makes it more than just a web forum, surely?

as Topsy says, if it were ONLY a web forum, nobody would give a monkey's what people say. Trouble is, most active members know each other irl, some are friends, some are even in cliq...errr groups of likeminded people, so any shit being spread around really does effect people.

I thought it was more a soap opera, I live in constant fear that the twin brother, that I never knew I had, will turn up on my doorstep any day now.

I believe he'll be at the curry clique tonight.

Which one? There are three curry cliques now and four if you include 3 Lions secret one.
I think OG gave her one last night.

Apologies for one of the most feeble attempts at a joke of all time. ADMINHIDE-->

Can't we all just get along?!?!?!

you mean like you used to get along with IPJ?

Man, I feel like such a pussycat. All I ever used the pit for was to post absolutely random shit in to see what effect it would have on the overall conversation. Was interesting, for a while. Personally, I'm glad it's gone, but mostly because it was just another way for me to waste time.

Yikes, I actually skimmed all pages in this thread. I think this is untrue...


There are ways to severely limit that sort of stuff; like having verified email addresses as usernames, displayed in each post, and similar tricks. Of course it depends on what the admin wants to have in their community. I didn't like the premise of the pit, and don't really care for BadDoggie's 'social experiment' arguments - not here, not on this bboard. Cheers for removing it. Seems far too incestuous for this community, where the original hook that drove wide adoption was information.

oh shit, burned the lasagne. keep the threads shorter, eh

Sorry, but no.


Not a chance. Too many free and anonymous mail services to keep up with. And to make another all I have to do is get a free domain name with mail forwarding and point the DNS entry to something like mailinator. My primary personal address is GMail. Any domain I might have has SMTP off due to spam. I'm not the only one. YahooMail, GMail and Hotmail carry a considerable percentage of the world's mail accounts. It takes me a minute to set up another Yahoo mail account in order to make a quick joke account to post something to some board or another. Setting one up on GMail is even quicker. Disallowing them is a no-go.

IP-addresses? Anyone at my company -- worldwide -- will have the same IP as me due to our corporate proxy. Same goes for the EPO. I'm not even touching open proxies. And no, IPv6 doesn't help matters. So which other tricks would you suggest? The only method that could work is allowing only paying users to post/participate, and if such a policy was implemented it would be the end of TTM.


Fine. That's your opinion. But could you explain why "Seems far too incestuous for this community" is a bad thing? This place has always had an incestuous feel to it. There's more gossip here in a day (and night) than in the past 20 years of the shit spewed in the Sun and Das Bild together. Every event, every dinner, every TTT Drinks, everything ends back on the topic of who might be shagging whom. This is followed by "who slighted whom" and "$user/$topic pisses me off". That's it. Nothing more. It always comes back to meta-wankery and that's fine.

Sure, you can get information here. You can find out how to deal with the KVR or the MVV or where to go to find Branston Pickle, but that's not what people talk about all day. It's not the center of a long conversation. We're humans. We talk about ourselves and others. We tell stories and we listen to stories. It's what we do; we're wired for it. TTM gives us an outlet to do so in our Muvver Tongue. It's led to countless hook-ups and sex and so far, two marriages. You don't get that from the Yellow Pages (unless you count the escort services).

The Pit was interesting to watch and it changed drastically in the course of less than a week. You said you read this whole thread so you must have seen my mention of the crap Karma system and how it was left to fester for months despite never evolving from crap and abuse. The Pit did evolve... rapidly. It was interesting to watch. That people talked about others meant they cared enough about those others to talk about them! It was headed in a very interesting and positive direction before the plug was so ungraciously pulled.

I wish I'd logged it (yes, there are ways) so that I could paste examples. Maybe that would convince you that a couple hours a day of the Pit might not be so bad after all. Sometimes a low-down, dirty, mean-spirited, free-for-all brawl is good for cleansing the soul. So is finding out information about things you're too afraid to ask about in public.

Sorry about your lasagne. My catfish came out perfectly.

woof.

BadDoggie:

Yes, it is my opinion. I'm not arguing the merits of social experiments, just stating that I didn't care for that one, in this place. It seems like it was an experiment, the results were tallied, and the admin acted on it. End of story, and it so happens to be an end I liked. Goodie for me



I disagree. A community can (and should) be steered. I've seen it with much larger internet communities than this one. I don't think non-community values can be eliminated completely, but severly limited, yes. Email address are one thing, moderation to support the values are another. Recognition of community posters who exemplify the core values are another. Magnet content that supports the values is another (and I see the admin doing exactly this with the 'write informative articles, get a free subscription' deal). Specific, selective software features in the community is also a way to achieve the standards goal; as is the actual user interface design. There are proven ways to steer a community to incoporate whatever values an admin wants. If the content is compelling, those ways will work.

That's tricky to answer. I could say that when it began there was no events, no drink nights, and no gossip. Yet it was useful, and attracted new users. *Shrug*, I guess it's different now, but I wouldn't know, honestly. From a personal usage standpoint, in my view, it hasn't changed since it started...



Depends on what sort of person you're talking about. I would guess that the users of this website are based on a rotating ex-patriate population. If so, then attracting new users might be a big goal in keeping this place a going concern. I'd guess that new users don't give a flying f. about gossip on people they've never met. Maybe they'd want to know about procedures for moving to Munich, and establishing a life, however temporary, here. If that were true, you might see a lot of similar postings, like 'how do I get a driving license in Germany"? But maybe not. But if so, it might be pretty darn important to satisfy those people easily.

Where does an anonymous social experiment fit into that picture? I can't see it.

The picture could be wrong though. There is that possibility that there's an existing, not-temporary (or at least long-lived) group of people who need to have some more personable, firmly founded community in which to interact. How does an anonymous social experiment fit into their needs? By providing a platform to in which to not be held accountable for one's posts? By generating ill will in the community? Sorry, but I can't see it. Maybe it's there, but IMHO, The Pit wasn't it.

Really, an honest question:

Why can't you guys (Bluedave, Grinner & Ulysses) move on? Why do you feel the need to go on and on and on and on and on and on about something that does not directly involve any of you? You aren't the parties involved, you aren't deeply and intimately involved with either party either.

Stop posting the same old shit and post something useful. Tell us where the cheapest beer and best kebabs are within a 200m radius of Columbusplatz. Tell us how much fuzz is in your belly button and how long you estimate it would take to have enough to knit a new sweater. Tell us who you think will win EuroCup 2020. But drop this topic (as has been requested by one of the parties, probably both) and move on.

Topic closed by admin