Hamlet

If you would like to do something about that, you have my email. If not... time for me to go.

@Mithrandir "I haven't done a ton of research on this." You could do something about that.

Literature is a cultural artifact--its very definition is political--so if you want to be a useable site about literature you need to learn to talk about politics in a rigorous way.

A story about a group of white men who descend into a wilderness filled with racialized others, kill all of the racialized others, and then return to marry white women and have white children has no politics in it, none at all!

I'm so sorry that I dragged politics into literature.

Anyway, I came here to finish deleting my Stack Exchange profiles and I've done that some time ago. Time for me to head out.

the exchange here is a pretty good summary of the problems this site faces

The fact that no one has read it says something.

heck, I've mentioned Playing in the Dark eleven times in this chat room.

And there is enough active people who read chat that the links I posted should have had some effect.

Telling people to post on the main site, not chat, is very good advice, except for the times when I've done that and gotten a less than ideal response.

When I get four downvotes for asking a simple question about the meaning of a Toni Morrison quote, I certainly am going to be very cautious about asking questions about her works.

I understand that posting main site content is usually better, but people haven't exactly made it easy to post main site content.

I don't expect people to read every link posted in the chat room. But it would be nice if, after people like BESW and I mention a concept several times in chat and reference some resources about it, one or two of the active people here would follow up on that.

Some of the same people who thanked me for correcting them with regard to concepts like authorial intent were people who fought the hardest when I tried to introduce other concepts.

There was an insistence that I needed to educate, but at the same time there were people who were working their hardest to create rules that made educating very difficult.

There is a ton of resources in this chat room that are actually quite interesting. But very few people seem to have put the effort to understand and learn from those resources, given how few of the ideas in those resources made their way into content in the main site.

To put it simply, the more people learned about literature, the less willing people were to continue learning. The link between performance and text is as fundamental as the concept of authorial intent is; the very same people who would thank me for teaching them about authorial intent would get mad at me for introducing the link between performance and text.

I thought it was obvious why I'm leaving, but then again, I thought the problems this site faces would be obvious.

@Randal'Thor you make people leaving sound like its a bad thing. but it really isnt. Thats what it means to be a curated resource: it means that the site isnt for everyone. I never set out to get people to leave, and i'm skeptical about how many people actually left because of me specifically. But people leaving is not a bad thing in of itself.

idk it would have been nice if people had said, hmmm, hamle was right those other times, lets suspend disbelief here.

@Randal'Thor tbh I appreciate you saying that you respect my knowledge, but I never got that impression sometimes, but othertimes I would say something and I would have to argue with people about it, only for people to start repeating it six months later.

Ah well, all of this can be found in my meta posts. see ya.

@Randal'Thor there's a lot that you've done that I appreciate, but you've also made a lot of stuff on this site harder than it needed to be. Of course it wasn't just you, but... IDK

Unfortunately, I won't miss this site, which is why I'm leaving.

My account is scheduled for deletion (finally), and I wouldn't post an answer anyway because I'm sick and tired of dealing with the comments my meta answers attract.

@Randal'Thor so I really doubt that advocating for these questions is impossible here.

@Bookworm oh look, exactly the same type of question. And it even got an upvote.

But I really doubt that a genre-classification question would be unpopular on a site that upvotes questions about whether music or comics count as literature.

@Randal'Thor I know that advocating for unpopular questions is a thankless task

@Randal'Thor I really did not claim that people were downvoting everything I post.

> As is common in literature, there appears to be more than one possible answer to your question, deriving from different but equally valid interpretations of the story.

heh

There really isn't much of a controversy about deleting this stuff.

What's unpopular about my answer is how people imagine I would overreach on that policy and use it to delete every answer I don't like. Which is ridiculous because I wouldn't be enforcing this policy--I stepped down as a moderator--you two would. But these unfounded fears are mostly related to my persona on the site. If you write your own answer to that meta post and explain what you want to do then I'm sure you'll have a lot more success.

I very much doubt that putting post notices/deleting answers is actually unpopular. Have there been any actual complaints about the post notices you've been adding to some answers lately?

My posts on meta have the tendency to attract knee-jerk downvotes.

@Zyerah @Mithrandir if you want a back it up rule to become policy, one or both of you should write a meta answer arguing that.

or ping me in that chat room and I can respond later

@Mithrandir I have to go in about 3 minutes, could you just tell me what you want to tell me here?

The other top voted answer is weird, but given that by "top voted" I mean has a score of 2...

@Zyerah ? Right now one of the two top voted answers says that you should implement the idea but add a "common knowledge" exception.

@Mithrandir .

@BESW Personally, I don't care about the identities of the authors I read, which is why the vast majority of the authors I read are white men.

It's been made clear to me by people on this site that reading diet of culturally identical authors in today's world is a phenomenon that is (1) normal, (2) good, and (3) completely explainable.

Sorry for ruining the fun community event. Given that the community event was created to diversity the works asked on this site, I would have thought that the best way to ruin the event was to claim that authors who are as culturally similar to this site as you can get represent diverse authors and using the community event to promote said authors. But I see that this is what the event is designed for.

people really should know better, but then again...