I'll do my part in reporting some posts in Politics & Society, but it is pretty difficult to decide what gets reported and what not.
Sticking with the obvious spam for now, but ideally, I'd also want to report some of the more 'gray-area' posts as well.
Just one example of what I see as a gray-area:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3142740.0 (how do we move on from something?)
To some people it might be easy, and it might be hard to others. How do we exactly move on from something?
I guess this might be a legit question, but on the other hand it's clearly very low effort. Should be in off-topic perhaps or just removed? I don't know.
I'd vote for it to go in the trash. It's just another one of those lazy one-liner threads attempting to masquerade as something meaningful, but it's so vague and pointless and the replies are equally so. I really think we should just make Politics and Society and Off topic like Serious Discussion and then these sorts of threads would stop because 99% of the threads in those two boards are only made for the activity/post count. In fact, I doubt we even really need Politics now we have got Serious Discussion.
This example is vague because "something" isn't really defined in the topic (so this I'd probably say is worth trashing), but as a slightly revised example, if the thread title was "How do we move on from breaking up with a girlfriend/boyfriend", would this then be acceptable?
It would be hard to distinguish whether a forum member is actually posting about this or just picking some random thing a person would need to move on from. The threads I've looked through so far
appear to be started for the intent of padding post counts (which I believe merit may be slowing down) but when theymos says "without hampering the free exchange of ideas", I'm not sure there would be any choice but to leave a thread like the one I've mentioned. The replies may be easier to scrutinize, especially when there is an extreme repetition of the same idea/thought repeated by various accounts... but then do you go with the first poster who had a particular idea as sort of a first-come-first-serve basis of ideas towards the thread topic? Or do they get left as the N
th example of "Take some time after your break-up, meet new people, and enjoy who you have in life." <- which could be seen as useful idea to the OP... but when it is repeated multiple times in various ways, it becomes painful to the reader.