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Nothing wrong with being the 100th post on a subject. On the other hand,
It looks like you read a trashy article and then attached your own impression of the author’s politics. Please don’t leave it at that next time.
I can understand why you may have that impression, but I would suggest that a normal reading of this post is not complaining about the outgroup. The phrase "attached (my) own impression" is very dangerous, as a weasel phrase to me it sort of is a catch all for nearly all writing that isn't a technical drawing of a patent. The Wealth of Nations and Meditations and Persuasion are all the author's own impression. I think what I did was argue that the narrative structure of the article itself reveals something about the headspace and disposition of the author which is contrary to the apparent point being made.
Similarly, I think that a novel psychological breakdown of a historical figure through a new lens would be appropriate and engaging enough for this forum, even if all the thesis pointed to was "Yes, he is a bad guy." Perhaps you disagree.
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I will sound like a broken record, but a low-effort top post (and this isn't one!) should be fine as long as it sparks interesting discussion. Exempli gratia.
There is a genuine conflict of interest here between moderators and users of the forum. It is much easier to mod a forum like The Schism that has very low post volume but makes up for it(?) in post quality. This is what the current policy is pushing us towards and I'd posit it's one of the major reasons the weekly thread comment count is down to what? a thousand?
Bring back the link repository!
No.
No, there is a conflict of interest here between the moderators and what some users of the forum would like.
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I am also sounding like a broken record, but people often miss the point of the rule against bare links:
Interesting discussion is why we are here. Dictating the particular topic of discussion is a privilege and a benefit that we like see awarded to those who also bring interesting discussion.
Certain things can generate interesting discussions without actually being interesting discussions.
Low effort bare links are one of those things. Posting things that amount to "Can you believe what Those People did this week?" is another one of those things. Recruiting for a cause is one of those things. A brand new major news item is one of those things.
It is in fact not hard at all to generate interesting discussions when you try and make the main purpose of a forum be a place that allows for discussion. Getting other people to generate a discussion here is not hard. Writing quality stuff that other people want to read is hard. We are not trying to reward generating a discussion, we are trying to reward people that make the effort to write quality stuff.
One of the few levers we have for that is saying that 'only people that are trying to do the hard thing of writing quality stuff get to pick the topic for discussion'.
Or in cases where there is definitely going to be discussion about a major news item, but maybe only one threads worth, there is some value in being the first poster because you get to set the tone and focus of the discussion. We would again rather award someone with an effortful and thoughtful take on the issue than the first person to copy and paste the link from X.
I'd rather us die as TheMotte then live on to just become a crappy version of every other social media platform out there.
Often when some interesting news break, I check here to see what intelligent contrarians have to say about it. I see nothing, type out a quick top-level post, delete it, and go elsewhere to check on discussion not even half as interesting as it would have been here.
As I said, there is a genuine conflict of interest here. The mods have an interest in this place becoming more like The Schism, posters and lurkers benefit from more discussion. We have argued this point ad nauseam and the chances that I will convince you at this point are very, very small. But arguing that a Bare Link Repository wouldn't be Motte-like when this has been a feature of the Reddit thread for ages and was also commonly seen on the SSC comment section is not a valid argument.
Its news you find interesting. But if others find it boring or distracting then a conversation about it doesn't add to their enjoyment of the site. For example I am interested in tech news but very uninterested in foreign policy. The whole war in Gaza is less interesting to me than Amazon's return to office policy. If this thread was 10 times bigger with the same quality writing but all about foreign policy then it would be no better for me.
We don't have unlimited people producing unlimited content like X does. Every time I read your complaints that seems to be a built in assumption, that the lack of top level content holds people back from the total amount they post. I just don't see it personally. I'm limited in how much quality content I can write. Probably only a few good comments a day.
I would love to have more people here posting more quality content. If we as mods got overwhelmed with moderating we would add more moderators as we've done in the past. An unlimited amount of low quality content is useless.
I don't buy your point that it is a conflict of interest. As a user I also hate low quality content, because it's crap that I have to filter through to get to the good stuff. X and Facebook and YouTube are all unusable to me. Too much crap, not enough gold. And I'm only a user on those websites, not a moderator.
If we draw a line between The Schism and Facebook, there is a world of difference between the latter and where we are now. But if you want to get an idea of what The Motte would look like with less stringent top post requirements, you don't need to go to social media. You can just look at... The Motte back when it had less stringent top post requirements (and, not coincidentally, a lot more engagement).
Look, I know this is a lost cause. But I wish you guys would at least acknowledge the point about low effort top posts leading to high effort comments.
Lots of things were different back then. We were on reddit and the culture war was red hot and banned in a bunch of other places. And there are also places like culturewarroundup that allow bare links and they are far deader than theschism. If anything the comparison suggests theschism strategy is a better viable long-term option. Neither us or them can compete with X in terms of sheer content of bare links and subjects being discussed. But we can compete on enforcing some minimum quality standards.
I feel like I've never disagreed with this point. I might have even said somewhere that it is easy for bad quality comments to generate good discussion. But I also feel it suggests that you are entirely missing the point I am making.
I think our actual disagreement is on the effect of permissive top level comments. You seem to think it's positive sum. I think it is neutral sum, or possibly a little negative sum.
We are generally getting a similar number of high quality comments each month. And that amount is limited by the number of users.
The people that write quality comments have told me before that they like having their comments read and discussed. I also share that preference. Its rare for me to want to type out a quality comment that is just going to get buried and read by only one person.
The place where you get the most attention and discussion is at the top level. That attention is limited by how many top level comments are above you, and how recently that thing has been discussed. Bare links fill up the top comment slots and bury posts faster. And you can easily get your topic sniped before you finish writing a quality comment.
I don't even understand your mechanism for how permissive top comments increase the number of quality comments. I understand how it increases total comments, but that isn't something I care about.
We seem to have different models of how quality posts come about.
You seem to think that quality posters treat this as a publishing platform akin to Substack. They have a couple of quality posts in them over a given timeframe and they choose to publish them on The Motte. Your job is to prevent these posts from being dilluted by low effort posts and give them a more prominent position.
My model is a different one: quality posts happen because a poster gets inspired by an ongoing discussion. They see something that touches upon one of their areas of expertise and they get triggered into writing an effort post. But there needs to be a discussion happening in the first place! You don't get Socrates' take on the ideal city before Cephalus, Polemarchus, and even Thrasymachus had their say first. The more discussion, the higher the chances someone will read something they have something to write about.
No I think my model is pretty similar to yours.
Specifically:
My model is only different in that I strongly emphasize that last word. Bare links do not count as discussion. A story that amounts to "people I don't like did a bad thing" is not a discussion.
We specifically ask that top level posts start a discussion. It does not have to be a high quality post. It just has to start a discussion. I've said before and given examples that it is possible to start a discussion here in three sentences.
Context. Interpretation. Opinion.
We ask that people not clog up the board with non-discussion.
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If you look at Twitter, it has a vastly greater amount of content. The vast majority of it is low effort shit. Sometimes a low effort shitpost does produce a high quality discussion. Just like here.
What you are arguing is that since some percentage of shitty, low quality posts will produce good posts, if we allowed more shitty, low quality posts, the result would more good posts. In raw numbers, this is probably true. The price would be that you'd have to wade through a dramatically greater number of shitty, low quality posts.
That is the difference between what we want and what you want.
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Correct—this isn’t a low-effort top post. There was clearly effort put into adding commentary, and I actually think it’s rather well-written.
It is also a pure expression of “look what those people did!”
Effort is not enough. There is a separate failure mode where a low-charity top post sparks uninteresting discussion. On Reddit, this was called a circlejerk. I gave the OP a mild warning in hopes of avoiding our own little slice of hivemind.
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