Amadan
I will be here longer than you
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
5d ago
I don't know that "marital rape" only happens when a soon-to-be-ex assaults his wife. You're right of course that in a healthy relationship, there is no need to be constantly negotiating "consent" and boundaries. But what about unhealthy ones, where the wife is never in the mood and the husband decides he's sick of taking no for an answer? If there is no such thing as marital rape, then all she can do is divorce him, I guess? (Which most tradcons who oppose marital rape laws also tend to think should not be an option.)
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
6d ago
I'm amazed at the effort some people still put into sockpuppets and trolling just here on the Motte.
I think some people get infested by brainworms once they've been balked, just once, and cannot let go of the idea that they have to "win" and "show them."
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
7d ago
It's rare that "they" will agree with all of those things. Most DEI true believers will not agree with any of them. I know lots of them. "They hate us but we deserve it and this is righteous retribution for historical oppression" is really not how most people rationalize or conceptualize it. You're just refusing to engage with the idea that they could possibly actually believe what they say they believe and not be cartoon baddies.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
7d ago
There's a difference between "Your policies mean you are hiring incompetent people who hate you" and "Your goal is to hire incompetent people who hate you because that's what you want."
This is iterated ad nauseum with every ideology people don't like here: DEI, feminism, semitism, socialism, environmentalism, what have you. "Your beliefs are bad and lead to X" is not the same as "You want X." Otherwise we could just reduce 90% of arguments here to "You hate truth and beauty and life because you're evil and stupid."
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
7d ago
You are operating under the assumption that a positive perspective towards the left and DEI is the ethical way to go and accurate.
I don't think you understand what steelmanning means.
It doesn't mean "Adopt a positive perspective of the other side's point of view."
It means "Try to understand why they think the way they do." Assume they act out of rational (to themselves) motives, even if it's purely self-interest. At the very least, you should be able to describe their motives in a way they would agree with.
Do you think anyone carrying out DEI policies would agree "My job is to hire incompetent people who hate me?" I suppose a very cynical person who actually hates DEI but just does it because it's their job might. But surely you can imagine what an actual believer would say that would make sense from their perspective.
It has nothing to do with believing that their perspective is accurate or ethical.
You can of course insist that the only reason your enemies do anything is that they are stupid and evil, and this may be a satisfying and self-gratifying thing to believe, but it's probably not accurate either.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
10d ago
So I banned his alt after about a day, while the self-professed right-wing troll got to hang around for a year, and your conclusion is still that we show favoritism to leftists.
I seem to be wasting time trying to talk to you like a person who can be reasoned with. Obviously nothing will change your viewpoint, nothing will adjust your priors, and you will continue saying and doing the same things. So be it. I've engaged with you mostly for the benefit of the audience so they can see how mod reasoning operates (and that I have bent over backwards to hear you out fairly).
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
10d ago
No one gave antifa extra leeway for being a leftist. I figured out who he was almost immediately, nonetheless extended a little benefit of the doubt (as I do to most sockpuppets) and told him to chill the fuck out. He of course did not, and barely lasted a day.
Most of that is that you moderate without the snarky comments amadan uses to bait out behavior he can ban people for
Oh, we're back to this false, disproven accusation again, are we?
In this latest round of you accusing mods of bad faith and manipulation, multiple mods have patiently explained your errors. And do you admit your error? No. You double down on the accusations.
Even if by "mods" you mean only me, I have repeatedly responded to your accusations by inviting you to post a link. You either whistle and exit, stage left, or you post a link that doesn't show what you say it does, and when this is explained to you, you whistle and exit, stage left.
One might say, this is manipulative and gaslighting behavior.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
10d ago
Oh, him. We didn't actually remove his posts, he was shadowbanned (which I realize does look the same to you). Usually we ban people when they finally wear out our patience, but when someone explicitly tells us he created an alt just to troll us, sometimes we shadowban instead. The "discussion" you are missing is him exhorting other users to also create alts and cycle them to troll us. And he'd been doing this for a while - his bad faith engagement goes back over a year and nine warnings and/or bans with that alt.
So in fact, antifa got banned much faster and with more prejudice than your right-winger.
I await your admission of error and apology.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
10d ago
Justawoman and a few others showed up after not posting for a year, right as impassionata made a trolling alt, and instantly jumped into the "discussion" to call for stricter moderation against evil fascist right wingers? That's obviously not a coincidence.
It is not obviously not a coincidence either. You really don't have the birds-eye view we do. Impassionata returns periodically (and sometimes we catch him and ban him before you even notice), and there are quite a few posters who only drop in every year or so, or who apparently spend 99% of their time lurking and every once in a while will post. It is possible that @justawoman is hanging out with Impassionata on some other forum and Impassionata said "Hey guys, let's go brigade the Motte!" But it does not fit the pattern we have seen in the past. Additionally, if you notice, I directly accused @justawoman myself of wanting "stricter moderation" and she explained what she does want (which I think is equally unfeasible, but it's not "stricter moderation for evil fascists").
Slow down, take a breath, actually read the words people type (all of them, not just the ones that trigger you) and while I know asking you to consider the possibility of a good faith interpretation is a bridge too far for you, at least try to steelman the argument as something other than "The worst possible motives @SteveKirk can attribute to this person @SteveKirk assumes is pure evil." Because really, you're acting the fool right now and you are on a streak.
Also I actually had to look through your post history to find the right wing guy you banned, because if it's the one I found you instantly deleted his posts and banned him to prevent discussion, so I didn't ever get to find out about him. I only found it because you left a typical snarky comment ban message! That's how different your reaction is, and if you'd done the same to "antifa" everything would be great!
Which right wing guy are you talking about? If you post a link, I will address it, but we very rarely delete messages except when it's a very obvious troll, so right now I am going to assume you are either making this up or taking an action that I'd have been happy to explain to you and spinning the most uncharitable and bad faith interpretation you can out of it, as you have an unfortunate habit of doing.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
10d ago
Literally a quote from naraburns two months ago saying you guys do affirmative action moderation for leftists already. If you know me as well as you claim, you know nothing offends me more than "it's not happening and it's a good thing it is, you're crazy for noticing" tactics.
I think @naraburns and I disagree on this issue, but it depends on what you mean by "affirmative action moderation for leftists." Personally, I have never (consciously) modded leftists differently than rightists. The thought has never crossed my mind "This person is a leftie, therefore I should go easier on him." The closest I might come to agreeing with this take is that leftists are observably downvoted and reported en masse, and so when I see someone is being dogpiled and everything he posts gets reported for left-leaning wrongthink, I am more likely to disregard all but the most egregious reports.
(It may surprise you to learn that this applies to some of our fringe right-posters too, such as @SecureSignals, who is reported constantly but only modded on a tiny fraction of the reports he draws.)
That's the level of good faith I expect from discussions about moderation here, which I suppose means I'm breaking my rule of not engaging with manipulation attempts
Well, you are very close to doing what you were warned not to do very recently, which is attacking the mods and accusing them of bad faith.You could have posted the above link and asked me "Don't you think this counts as running cover for leftists?" And I would have answered you reasonably and in good faith (as I did above). Instead you jumped straight to "You're a liar, hah caught you, you manipulator!" So now you got an answer, but you have also annoyed me and eroded the tiny sliver of charity I have left to extend to you.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
10d ago
Then it looks like the moderation on this site isn't for me.
That may be the case. Based on everything you said, it's unlikely we are going to change our moderation to suit you. Bear in mind, of course, that so far you have only been talking to me, and I can't say how many of the other mods are reading this thread. You can always ping them and try to get their feedback.
If your intent is for this site to be "a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases", then when two people are clearly not on the same page about what "shady thinking", much less what counts as "responding", is, the only person who had the authority to provide guidance is you.
Well, the thing is, the intent is for this to be a platform where people can do that, but we never said that our purpose is to be referees and try to enforce a particular kind of discourse, beyond generally pushing back against people who try to step out of bounds. It was never meant to be a formal "debate club" with judges blowing whistles. We aren't teachers, judges, or editors. If people post shitty arguments and no one argues back, or worse, gives them upvotes and AAQCs, well, that's what the community has decided it wants, and while we will continue to enforce some norms regardless of community sentiment, we're not going to take on the role that you seem to want us to.
By you not checking that 07mk is actually responding to what I'm saying, you're signaling that other users can get away with the same behavior I'm pointing out.
Yes, I am not going to check every time someone replies to you or anyone else and make sure that they are "actually responding" to you. If you think someone is breaking the rules and report the post, I will look and see if I think they are breaking the rules, but "Not answering my question, or going off on what I consider to be an irrelevant tangent," while annoying, is not a violation of the rules.
Nobody wants to argue with someone they think isn't listening to them, so all that you have left is an echochamber.
You can also be selective about who you engage with. Some people here are very low-quality posters and I pretty much ignore them except when they are being reported for being particularly shitty. Some people are worth talking to and some aren't. There are definitely some people who think that about me.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
10d ago
You're already playing defense and saying you can't longhouse the users because you don't have the time.
No, I'm saying we won't longhouse the users because we don't want to.
The next step is them offering to "help" you with that job, and you'll have to make an awkward excuse why you don't want help with the thing you just said you don't have time to do.
No, they make proposals and we consider and either accept or reject them (mostly reject).
Just like you make proposals, and we consider and either accept or reject them.
All their little tricks are so clever.
Are you suggesting @justawoman is part of some entryist conspiracy to take over the Motte, and not just a leftie with some opinions? Why is the difference between someone playing "little tricks" and someone (you, for example) advocating for your preferred norms?
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
10d ago
This is where I would like some type of mod action that is similar to debate moderators, in which a clear direction of, "07mk, you are talking about this, and justawoman, you are talking about that. Respond to eachother so this debate can be productive instead of a bunch of hot air."
And this is where I say no, no, and hell no.
At this point, reading through your entire post, it's "you responded and then I responded and then you responded and then..." and you want me to sort out "what proposition did @justawoman make, and did @07mk respond to that proposition or to another one, and was his response directly relevant," and we're supposed to referee this like a formal debate club?
No.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
10d ago
I'm not suggesting you broke any rules. I'm just saying I can understand why @justawoman might have found your response unsatisfactory. And this is exactly why I am saying we aren't going to wade into adjudicating "how good" someone's response is.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
10d ago
I read it. You are welcome to collect data and send us your conclusions, but I'll be honest: what I see is a proposal for you to send your subjective opinion about our moderation. Everyone's welcome to do that, but while we might agree here and there (for example, both @netstack and I agree that the post about prep was borderline and could have been modded), we're not going to agree with all your examples.
Case in point: I think @07mk responded to what you said. You think he didn't. I am not saying his response was good or persuasive (I agree that anecdotal evidence about one's own personal experiences does not qualify one to speak for all leftists), but when you say:
appropriate mod action would be something along the lines of "07mk, you cannot expect justawoman to continue the conversation if you don't continue it appropriately. Please respond to her two claims a) Do you think such a claim can be substantive on anecdotal evidence and b) do you have evidence other than anecdotal, then move on to the next claim."
You're literally demanding we play referee in every argument. If someone asks a question, and the poster they are arguing with does not answer the question (or doesn't answer it completely, or not directly), you want the mods to step in and say "You may not continue this conversation until you answer @justawoman's question"? No. Hell no. Not doing that. We have enough work to do just telling people to stop the cheap insults and weakmanning and trolling, we're not going to adjudicate every interpersonal spat every time someone summons us and demands "Make him answer my question!"
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
11d ago
If you interpret what I’m suggesting as “pretty close to demanding that we be like everywhere else, where you won't have to read people being mean to your opinions”, then I don’t know what to tell you. I feel I have said repeatedly the problem is not that right-wingers are saying mean things about left-wingers, it’s that bad debate etiquette is so pervasive here that it’s impossible to have a discussion.
Yeah, but you still haven't told me what concretely you think we should do, other than be stricter. Maybe "@justawoman doesn't want to read mean things about her political beliefs" is not fair, but all your examples are basically people making bad arguments - and many of them are bad arguments! - which you want us to mod. We don't mod people for making bad arguments here! We mod people for making rude/uncharitable arguments or being insulting.
But if I can’t debate the bad opinions because my opponent won’t respond to what I am saying
If your opponent won't respond to what you're saying, what do you want us to do about it? And again, I disagree with you, because from what I have seen, some of your opponents might go off on tangents about how much leftists suck, but most of your opponents are responding to what you're saying. Here, @07mk responded to your complaint about posts claiming leftists don't care about child rape. Here and downthread people steelman the "Prep is for gay orgies" argument. Are they good arguments, or arguments you agree with? Maybe not. And your response to @7mk was basically "I think your argument is bad, ergo the Motte sucks." What do you want us, as mods, to do about this?
You are not the first person to write about how you think the Motte has gone downhill (or was always bad) and that the problem is the users and we don't enforce quality standards enough. Some people have a long list of rules they think should be enforced that would prevent people from bad-posting. They all tend to be some combination of (a) a lot more work for the mods, who would basically be delegated as editors and proofreaders for all posts, and (b) banning more posters who fail to meet the complainant's quality standards. Which effectively does boil down to "bad people who make arguments I don't like."
I can certainly envision ways we could implement this. Back on reddit, when the discourse had been turning particularly sour and low-quality for a while, we would institute periodic "reigns of terror" wherein we would become far more trigger-happy about banning people for low-effort and disparaging comments. It's not clear to me if these were particularly effective long-term; short-term, people mostly buttoned up a bit and toned down their vitriol, but of course we got all the usual whining about how we banned Suzy but we didn't ban Jane. We probably could decide we're going to start getting much harsher about modding dunks and cheap shots and low effort comments, and the result would be to force people to write longer posts with more effort, but it would also suppress a lot of discourse. Would it be for the better, or would it drive more people off-site? We already get a lot of complaining that moderation is driven by word-count, or that too much moderation makes everyone afraid to post and thus kills conversations.
So what concretely do you want us to do that isn't demanding a shitload more work from us and also isn't heavily biased towards making the Motte exactly the place you would like it to be, but not necessarily what everyone else wants it to be?
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
11d ago
I am claiming if I make an argument that Trump is a fascist, I agree, I’ll be downvoted (but like idc), and yes, I won’t be modded if I keep it civil, but also virtually all of the replies will be so riddled with logical fallacies, not to mention subtle boo outgrouping, that not only do I have no desire to continue debating in good faith but I’m at risk of losing my cool in a sea of what seems to me to be absolutely laughable debating bizarrely not getting modded and then definitely getting myself modded.
You're right, a lot of people argue with fallacious logic and straw men. We have a few rules against things like weakmanning and boo-outgroup, but generally speaking we don't mod on the quality of someone's arguments, let alone whether we think they are factually correct (or even truthful). That's the whole point of this place; moderating on tone, not content. I realize a lot of people dislike "You can make ridiculous and absurd claims as long as you're polite about it," but yes, that's how it works. That's where the "test your shady thinking" part of the Motte comes from. People can make ridiculous and absurd claims, and hopefully someone else will call them out on it.
I sympathize-I really do-that being in a distinct minority means you will get a lot of shit flung at you, and if you respond in a heated fashion you risk getting modded yourself. All I can say is that I think that lefties have gotten entirely too comfortable with everywhere else on the Internet being for them, and what you want is pretty close to demanding that we be like everywhere else, where you won't have to read people being mean to your opinions.
“I literally can’t argue with this trashy argument because it doesn’t even fit the definition of the argument. Do you even know how to have a conversation, random_Motte_user, much less want to? Like how am I expected to work with this? Mods where are you guys isn’t this supposed to be a debate club? Why are all the users absolutely shit at debating.” Or something less inflammatory.
You could say that (maybe not calling everyone shit at debating). You can certainly tell someone you think their argument is bad. Like, you have gone off on how you think "Prep is to enable gay orgies" is a bad argument (and you even had mods agreeing with you!). You wrote a thoughtful post about why you think that argument is wrong.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
11d ago
It's not just a minor problem, no, but I don't think it's solvable.
A good starting point would be to drastically improve the quality of the so-called quality contributions. They should be held to the highest standard, so people can go there and see what's expected of them. What I got from doing that is that your message should be long, written in good english and be right wing. That will garantee you a place there with a 50% probability. Following the rules in their letter and spirit is obviously optionnal.
You're not completely wrong here (I personally don't like that AAQCs are mostly determined by who gets a lot of AAQC "applause" from other members, and a long-winded but superficially polite polemic about how My Enemies Are Scum or Those People Are An Existential Threat will always get tons), but the alternative requires the mods being much more personally and directly involved in deciding what we consider to be a quality post. Is that what you are asking for? And are you sure our selections would be more satisfactory?
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
11d ago
I don't say that, I say "ban people who are literally only here to disrupt discussion of any topic they consider 'problematic'."
We do that. I just did that. And that's not all you ask for; come on. This isn't our first rodeo.
But yes, a bunch of trolls organized by impassionata pouring out of the woodwork all at once?
Can you point at this "bunch of trolls"? @justawoman has been around for a while, and I don't think she's a troll. Coincidentally, right now we also have a bunch of alts being spun up by the guy who who was literally only here to disrupt discussion because he hates us, but he's on the right - why is he not setting off your troll alarms?
We really are open to suggestions about how to do things better, but we are pretty much stuck in the same old pattern: If everyone thinks we suck, then we're probably being fair. We aren't psychic and this isn't a job we get paid for, we're just trying really hard to provide a platform for open discussion even between people who hate each other (and us).
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
11d ago
I read a lot of books, albeit a lot of them are audiobooks. There is some debate among "serious readers" as to whether this counts as reading, but fuck em, if reading is a better use of your time than watching Netflix, listening to audiobooks is a better use of my commute than listening to music.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
11d ago
Okay. I agree there are a lot of shitty comments, and we don't get them all.
I'll ask you the same thing I ask @SteveKirk. He never answers (except with some version of "ban people who say things I don't like") and I don't expect you to either.
What solution do you propose?
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
11d ago
Thank you. And you're banned. Good-bye, Impassionata. And I deleted your long post which was the last straw and removed all doubt.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
11d ago
Perhaps. But here's my take: first of all, we mostly do use rules-based moderation, but it mostly doesn't satisfy the complainers (because they think we are applying the rules unequally). To the degree that "Moderation is very much driven by user sentiment, I think you are taking that too literally. It does not mean that we moderate according to who gets upvoted or downvoted, nor does it mean anyone who gets reported gets modded. It's right there in that section in that part of the rules:
Note that "driven by" does not mean "controlled by" or "dictated by". We override more than 90% of all reports, and we will sometimes go against the will of the community. This is not a democracy and does not pretend to be one. However, the stronger that will is, the better a justification we'll need to do so.
Now, it is a known problem we've commented on before that someone who's really unpopular (or just posting unpopular opinions) gets reported a lot, and even though we are aware of this and try to factor it in, anyone who's both unpopular and getting reported a lot is probably having lots of arguments and thus sooner or later is probably going to say something uncivil and is more likely to be noticed doing it. Other than using our best judgment and talking amongst ourselves when we see this kind of thing happening, I do not know what a better alternative would be, because inherently we rely mostly on user reports to draw our attention to bad behavior. We don't get paid enough to be responsible for reading every single post and not letting anything slip our notice.
Maybe a little, though as @naraburns says, there is a development discord and I think there are a lot of more urgent needs. The problem with filtered posts is that we (mods) can see all of them in the Filtered queue, but if we're reading the forum in normal mode, a filtered post appears like every other post to us (unless we happen to notice the little "approve" link at the bottom, so I guess having that appear in green or red to a mod might be of some use.
Nah. Impassionata has a very distinct style, and like most dedicated trolls, he's basically incapable of hiding it.
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