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.
Getting back to the task at hand I will put up my thoughts on this so that anyone interested may have a little more information to judge my ability to mod.
I personally think this thread and replies are what Theymos is talking about when he says:
Politics & Society is trash. People go there, look at a headline, and post a few sentences of their first gut reaction without reading any of the other replies.
There doesn't seem to be any actual discussion taking place. It has the lowest amount of effort possible to start a thread, OP is extremely vague "How do we move on from something". Its easy for some hard for others. Ok we got all the bases covered now!
The OP has not been back to the thread, none of the other posters have returned to discuss posts etc. Only 2 or 3 posts were actual replies to other posts (which you might consider discussion) the rest were just quoting and or answering the OP over and over.
I just don't see anyone getting anything out of a thread like that, expect post count. I don't see how removing a thread like that could be considered censoring free speech either as the OP doesn't have a point about "something" nor an opinion since he covered all his bases already.
These kinds of threads are the spam problem IMO, so I would trash can that thread (or at least lock it not sure which is better). Leaving this type of thread open just allows more people to try to pad their post count and increase's the mods work load.
Completely agree and just wanted to add that the reason why I'm asking is because it almost seems like 90% of the threads there are like this. Ofc this is the reason Theymos started this thread in the first place.
(President Trump Is More Smart Than Before - So What He Will Do Next ? ) --> Granted, this is actually on topic, but again very low effort. Though deleting this might be seen as censorship?
Might have been better to find out which topics are actually good, that list would have been shorter... Most of these topics are obviously from people who have a poor understanding of English, but where do you draw the line?
If it's poor english + generally low effort, it should be removed.
Low effort also means just copy pasting an article, even if they add the source. If there's no personal commentary in that case, should be removed.