This a post that started in response to the question posed by @Amadan in regards to what should be done about Hylnka, and my thoughts in regards to the parent post about the state of the Motte.
The state of the Motte
So I'm a relative newcomer to the space and only lurked on /r/themotte occasionally, so I don't have a strong opinion on Hlynka one way or the other. I don't like him, I don't hate him, because I don't really know him.
But if you believe banning Hlynka is a net negative, that goes to reason that maybe there are some aspects of the rules that need consideration taken into account. I'm going to give my naive take since I haven't seen anyone else really answer the question recently regarding what should be done.
Perhaps there is an optimal ratio of good posts to bad posts that get some leeway. Or put another way, you get a pass for every "x" amount of good posts. Let's start with an extreme example. If someone makes 100 AAQC contributions to 1 ban-worthy post, I personally would rather want them to be allowed to keep posting even if they make 50 ban-worthy posts. I think to a certain extent, the mods already do this by gut feeling, which is why they have been lenient with Hylnka for so long. But because the rules don't allow for this, they don't have a good enough justification to allow for it. In the end, they became a slave to the rules. That being said in my opinion, the rules are actually really lenient and flexible, and I have seen the mods be plenty lenient. A place like Reddit nowadays will just perma ban you, most bans here are for a day or a week.
The more often you post, the more likely it is that one of your posts will be inflammatory or say something that people don't like and report you for. It's not ideal for people to just post and then not respond to people's responses, otherwise it's not that different from posting an article from an outside source. The controversial ideas are the most exciting. It's why the culture war stuff is the most popular. But controversial ideas are the ones that generate the most heat. The person proposing or defending the controversial idea will have many, many people piling on them. It's not easy being on the defending on, even if you deserve it.
Conversations on forums and the internet are weird. Human beings don't engage in conversation like this in the real world. Expecting people to be civil 100% of the time is an unrealistic expectation, especially in a place where your ideas are constantly attacked and challenged. People argue politics with their own family all the time, and these discussions can get heated, but at the end of the day, they still get together to eat at the same table. If someone garners enough goodwill in the community and makes good contributions, does it not stand to reason that they should be given more leeway? Even in our courts, where no man is above the law, the punishment is often adjusted based on the circumstances of the crime. At the same time, a forum means you can take the time to formulate your thoughts before hitting "post". I've seen some posts where people say they wrote this long post, it somehow got deleted, and then they realized how angry/inappropriate/inflammatory they were being and thus were able to write something of higher quality instead.
Are man made for rules, or rules made for man? Do the rules today really serve both sides of the ideas proposed by this place? To optimize for light, and to minimize heat? The common sentiment I see is that currently the enforcing of the rules minimizes heat, but doesn't optimize for light.
How do the people who wanted Hylnka banned feel now that he's gone from space? Do they feel the motte better now or worse for it? Do you genuinely want to see all these long-time posters banned? Why? Is it because you think they are bad for the community? Why do you think that? Are you using the rules for a personal vendetta, or are you genuinely trying to help make the Motte a place where people with opposing viewpoints can come together to discuss ideas to seek the truth? If all the people with opposing viewpoints are banned, how can you achieve that?
You aren't obligated to respond to someone. If they attack you in the comments just block them so you don't have to read it. Should the average user really be concerned with how others might interpret someone's statement? If the concern is how other potential newcomers may feel about the community, is that a valid concern today? When @Armin asked about the state of the Motte, most people agreed it's stagnant or decaying. The newcomers are not really coming.
Where are the people with counterpoints?
For the time I have spent here, I don't think I got any serious challenge from someone across the political aisle from me. I have gotten a few people challenging my ideas which I am immensely grateful for since they helped find the flaws in my thinking, but if I look back on them those don't tackle my core set of beliefs and were over relatively minor things. The one person who I did challenge @guesswho never responded to my response to his ideas almost 4 months ago and he's been gone for a month now. In other words, I have yet to be challenged on my core fundamental beliefs. To be honest, part of me is scared to even have that debate. It's uncomfortable. I'm fairly certain I will take it personally. Maybe the rules make more sense in that kind of environment. But my feeling, and based on reading what a lot of other people have posted, is that environment is long gone. The rules were built for different populations.
Every once in a while you get people from the opposite side of the political aisle, call everyone here nazis/far-right in an inflammatory manner and they get banned. I think their general sentiment is correct, though - this place is currently filled with moderates and people on the right political, and very few on the left. When I make a low-effort comment that would align with the red-tribe, I get tons of upvotes. When I see someone from the opposite side make a high-effort comment, it gets many downvotes. Now upvotes and downvotes don't mean much regarding the truth or quality of the post, but they do reveal the general user sentiment response to it.
Every community is composed of several groups - the mods, the prolific posters, people who post occasionally, people who mostly just upvote/downvote, and the lurkers. Forget about the lurkers, their opinions don't matter. In my opinion, smaller communities like the Motte can exist mainly due to the relationship between the mods and the prolific posters. I don't mean to sound rude but the prolific posters are abnormal. Most users post only occasionally. Most of us only respond to top-level posts and rarely make any ourselves. But the prolific posters have an insane output rate. Many of them have an insane high-quality output rate. Because their output is so high, they tend to be able to dictate the general flow of ideas. In other words, they're the ones that form the core of the community. They're the ones that make most of the AAQC posts. They're the ones whose ideas people will recall and remember the most.
As many others have said, each time a prolific user is banned, you lose a small piece of the community. To maintain or grow a community, you need more such people to come in to fill in the gap. But these people, because they're so abnormal, are rare to come by. For the people who have been here a very, very long time, has the void been filled? As much as the vision and the rules help shape a place, it's ultimately the people that form a community.
Solutions - What should we do?
Having said all that, I do agree with the mod's vision that the rules are what have helped make the Motte into this unique space on the internet. I don't believe in making big sweeping changes to existing communities because once you make those big changes it's no longer the same community. I think people have mentioned how other offshoots from the culture war communities from the SSC days have failed to survive to the degree the Motte has. That indicates to me the rule does have value in them.
My proposal
Here's my modest proposal: Once a month (or longer, maybe twice a year) users on the forum are allowed to propose unbanning someone. Maybe limit who can make these proposals so not just anyone can propose and abuse the system. Then the community can vote to allow someone back in. If a certain threshold is met (for example 60%), then the user is unbanned. If for example, 90% of the community would rather want someone to keep posting even if they make the occasional inflammatory comment, should they deserve to be permanently banned? After all, they said were mean words, they didn't kill anyone, they didn't incite violence, they didn't harass people.
This is an extremely minor change that I think could be implemented. Maybe it's a dumb idea and won't result in anything. Maybe it'll make things worse. The person likely won't come back. But maybe it could be the start of stopping the motte from stagnating.
Of course, like I said, I'm naive in this. I don't really know the history, or the people who have come and gone. I can read and read about but I will never truly understand it. Some of you guys have been around this space for over a decade. Maybe all this has already been discussed and thought about and tried by people multiple times. But this community is still new and exciting stuff to me, and I wish I could get to experience even a little bit of that magic of the past. If I think this place is better than many other places online now, just how much better was the Motte in the past for people to lament the state it is in today?
Criticizing is easy. Pointing out problems is easy. Complaining is easy. Coming up with solutions is hard. Coming up with good solutions is almost impossible. I'm sure the mods have thought about this plenty, and people on the forum too, but I don't really see the full discussions. There's got to be at least 1 person in this place that would have a good idea.
Solutions from other people
Some other ideas I've seen other people propose:
- Just don't ban long-time high-quality posters. They get a free pass for being here so long and continuing to contribute to the community.
- Have a separate, no modding no rules thread.
- Stop (or minimize) tone policing. If there is an argument, in line with the tone policing, then that gets a free pass.
My dumb solutions
To help generate more discussion, I'm just going to throw whatever comes to my head here in this list, whether they are good or bad or feasible or not:
- If you get banned for inflammatory comments but have made good contributions before, you are limited to just posting top-level comments for a period of time, but you are not allowed to respond. If you break the rules to try to continue a previous conversation you get banned.
- If a conversation gets inflammatory it gets pushed into a black-box so nobody else can see it, or it auto collapses and you have to opt in to see it
- Allow users that would have been banned to keep communicating, but users must opt-in into an "I want to see everything" option and they no longer have the rights to request moderation once opted in. All conversations starting from these banned users and subsequent child posts get hidden unless you opt in.
- If you are banned, you must steelman your opposition point of view to an acceptable level to the person you were being antagonist against in order to get unbanned ahead of the ban timer
- Every 1 AAQC counters 1 bannable offense
- A converse to the community unban option - a decision of whether or not to ban of a prolific high-value contributor gets pushed to the community.
Let's have a discussion.
What do you, fellow Mottizens, think? I see a lot of complaining and only a few people have provided some ideas for a solution. This discussion about the moderation and state of this site has been popping up across multiple threads every week. How about the community actually get together and discuss the merits of actual proposed solutions, as well as provide their own solutions, instead of having fights with the mods every time someone gets moderated? Worst case scenario, at least all the discussion is now centralized for a place to reference for the future.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Treating stuff with extra decorum is kind of our thing.
I don't think telling someone they are going to be tortured for all eternity or denied eternal life because they don't believe the same fiction as you do is very decorious. To be fair the last guy damning unbelievers to hell was modhatted, but not for saying that in particular.
I feel obliged to note that I specifically said nothing of the sort, and I object to the idea that any given theist should be on the hook for anything said by any other theist.
What do you think happens to people who don't believe in our lord and savior jesus christ?
Personally, I believe it's unwise and probably impious for humans to speculate too confidently on the fate of individual souls. I don't know the final disposition of every soul. Fortunately, I don't believe I need to. That is a matter that I am quite happy to leave up to God.
However, while I don't know specifics, I trust that whatever God intends is both just and merciful, since that is his nature, and in that spirit I hope earnestly for the salvation and eternal wellbeing of all, including those non-Christians whom I love, and those whom I ought to love (for there are many I should love, and yet struggle to).
Scripturally, I find the idea that salvation is restricted only to those who have confessed Christ explicitly to be difficult to justify - obviously people before Jesus were saved (e.g. in Luke 16:19-31, Jesus speaks of Abraham in heaven, and the cloud of witnesses in Hebrews 11-12 seems suggestive), and the New Testament holds out explicit hope for others (e.g. 1 Cor 7:12-16 seems to suggest that an unbeliever married to a believer might be 'made holy' through the believing partner, and even be saved through them). So in that sense, if I think about those I love who don't believe, whether they be family or friends or romantic partners, I hope and pray that, should it be necessary, my faith might cover them as well.
Maybe that sounds a bit sappy, but I don't feel ashamed in any way. Why would I not hope for the salvation of many? You might suggest that some of those I hope for don't deserve salvation, but then, none of us deserve salvation. God offers it to us anyway. That grace - unearned, unmerited, yet overwhelming in its love - is what I'm responding to in my faith. And that gives me hope for everyone.
Isn't all of religion impous speculation by that metric? Your scripture quoting here seems like a very pick and chose kind of way to go about a world view. I see this a lot with the religious, the bible says so many contradictory things you can build your own belief system™ to back anything that comes into your head.
Well, to an extent, yes - we can only speculate about God with fear and trembling. The parable of Augustine and the seashell is an appropriate one, and it's not for nothing that the seashell is a symbol of theology.
There might be an amount we can discern about God from nature alone - and that way lies a conversation about deism or natural theology - but most religious traditions supplement this with the idea that God has revealed himself or self-disclosed in some way. For Christians, there may have been many such disclosures, but the fullest and most definitive revelation is in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. The upshot is that we can know some things about God because God has revealed them to us.
As for my use of scripture - I notice you didn't make any actual argument against my use of scripture. So I will continue to hope for the welfare and salvation of many.
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Why do you care? You are convinced the afterlife is entirely fictional. How can claims about fictions harm you or anyone else? Why is anyone's belief about the existence or non-existence of an afterlife, or any details of that belief, something you feel the need to make and enforce rules about? And if we grant that expressions of belief related to the afterlife deserve to have rules made about them, why is it your preferred rules that should be enforced?
This is not supposed to be a topic of debate in Western culture. The rule was supposed to be that people having metaphysical beliefs different from your own neither broke your leg nor picked your pocket. If mutual tolerance is not good enough for you any more, however, I for one am entirely happy to go right back to enforcing specific beliefs through force of law, and further fighting over which beliefs get enforced. Would that please you better?
Pretty aggressive stance here FC! The founding fathers were certainly a mix of live and let live deists, atheists and believers. They seemed to have concluded that religion was best left to personal conscience, and I agree. Keep it where it belongs, in your heart.
Don't proselytize for it and belittle those that believe differently or not at all, don't propose it as a solution to poorly understood problems of modernity. If you do those things then no one will push back with upsetting comments like " it is all make pretend".
Don't bring it up and neither will I. But people always bring it up here, and it makes them look silly for believing in fiction, and I am not out of line for pointing that out.
I think it's just about the right level of aggression, actually. You're staking out a position where you get to decide what beliefs and opinions people get to express. I wouldn't expect others to defer to my views of which beliefs and opinions people should be allowed to express, and so I won't defer to your views. If you were able to convince enough other people to go along with implementing your preferences, the correct response is to fight you.
No founding father I'm aware of ever expressed anything even close to that philosophy. On the other hand, your views sound indistinguishable from the Soviet maxim "Pray as much as you like, so long as God alone can hear".
All humans have a right to model the world as best they're able, and to share that model with those who are willing to listen. If I can tolerate the models I don't like and have zero respect for, so can you.
Claiming that sin, divine judgement and punishment in the afterlife exist is not belittling anyone at all. Believing that some actions are right and other actions are wrong is not belittling anyone either, even the people who you claim are doing wrong. The rigor of your statement is so isolated we'd need a radio telescope to detect it. Everyone, absolutely every last goddamn human alive on earth, has a model of right and wrong and judges themselves and the people around them accordingly. We have a system whereby this is a problem if that judgement results in serious material harm to people, and otherwise is none of your goddamn business. It's a good model, and we should have stuck by it better.
Me believing in sin and hell, and stating that belief in relevant conversations, again, neither breaks your leg nor picks your pocket, any more than your belief that I'm a deluded idiot wasting my time praying to a make-believe sky-daddy breaks mine. As for the rules here, there's ways to express both those beliefs that cause no problems, and there's ways to express them that cause a lot of problems. I and most of the other people you're complaining about consistently confine ourselves to the former. You consistently fall back on the latter.
The basic problem is that you don't understand or don't care how the rules here actually work. Consider the following two phrases:
"It seems obvious to me that God doesn't exist, and I'm mystified how others could draw any other conclusion on any rational basis."
"God doesn't exist and if you think he does you're irrational."
The former is a reasonable attempt at starting a conversation. The latter is a pretty clear attempt at stopping one. This place exists to facilitate conversations, so the latter is antithetical to its purpose, and those who make a habit of communicating in this way draw mod attention rapidly.
When materialists are freaking out over how serious and intractable those problems are, while believers are doing significantly better by the standards the materialists themselves propose, it behooves an inquisitive person to ask why.
Honestly, it's like you aren't even paying attention to the conversations your in, but rather are running off some cached script. No one you're talking to is objecting to you expressing your non-belief. The only person trying to stop people from expressing their beliefs here is you. I'm happy to discuss the conflict between your atheistic worldview and my theistic worldview, and I'm even happy to overlook significant and entirely moddable rudeness on your part to do it. Only, last time we dug into it in detail, you're the one that begged off, not me, and I'm happy to continue the conversation whenever time permits. Only we won't be able to do that if you continue to break the rules on a routine basis, because sooner or later you will be banned.
The rules are not hard to follow, and if you are willing to follow them there is no practical limit to the opinions you can express here. The fucking nazis are able to figure this out. Why can't you?
No one is asking you not to bring it up. Both I and others are happy to discuss it with you. But there are rules here, we all have to follow them, and that includes you. I have zero respect for anyone who actually supports communism or fascism or, indeed, most variants of Enlightenment ideology. I still have to simulate respect for them in my communications here. If I can do it, you can do it.
Don't you want to shoot people?
Often. How is that relevant to the discussion?
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We have a thing called freedom of speech (which the founders also believed in). Religious people are allowed to proselytize, so long as no one is forced to listen to them. You and I may find being preached at annoying, but so long as I can walk away, they are not doing you harm. As for people proposing religion as a solution here, they are allowed to do that, and you are expected to respond the same way you would respond to any other ideas people propose, whether or not you find them silly.
You are not out of line for saying "I think religion is nonsense and not a realistic solution to anything." You are out of line for being antagonistic about it.
Stop telling people "not to bring things up" that you don't like, and then claiming that their bringing it up entitles you to insult them.
If people find the fact that religion is make believe insulting that is on them; I am not insulting them by pointing out that fact. Every shred of proof lies in the my direction yet I'm the one being insulting by pointing out that religions are not based on anything but fictional stories.
I'm not saying don't talk about it. I'm saying don't bring up religion as a serious topic unless you want it pointed out that all religions are just fictional stories created by man, and there is zero proof otherwise, that is all.
You're stating as fact the thing that is disputed. You are the kind of atheist I despise, the kind who convinced me that "atheist gatherings" and atheist orgs are mostly time-wasting circle jerks. The smugness, the sneering, the self-righteous certitude, the dripping condescension, the sheer joy in pushing buttons by "just stating reality" and then playing the wide-eyed affronted innocent when people take offense at being directly insulted.
I am very confident in my lack of belief. I have no impulse at all to seek religious solutions, nor any sympathy for those beliefs per se. I too think they are mostly fiction and cope for people who need that in their lives, for whatever reason.
What I don't feel is a need to go rub their noses in it or make sure that every time they bring it up, I do not let the opportunity pass to let them know just how much contempt and disrespect I feel for them. People believe a lot of things I disagree with, even things for which I feel contempt. They believe them for lots of reasons. Some people probably really do "need" religion in their lives. But that's neither here nor there.
What I am telling you is to stop being an obnoxious prick. You get reported regularly because you keep doing this. If you genuinely and sincerely want to debate religion or discuss whether it's a good thing to have in society, do so by engaging people in good faith, not by saying "You know your beliefs are stupid and make believe, right?" Because you don't for one second believe that will result in a productive conversation, and you certainly aren't going to convince anyone that way. Therefore you are doing it solely and intentionally to be offensive. When you deliberately choose an offensive tactic because you want to offend, and the people you set out to offend are offended, that's not on them- that's on you.
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