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You were told, repeatedly, that you were on your last chance, and yet your last several warnings were mod-noted with "Permaban next time." Yet you weren't, because, well, you seemed to be making a good faith effort to dial it down... for a while. But your comments remain mostly low effort and shitty. So much so that after being here for months, we still have to manually approve your posts because you can't get out of the new user filter. This isn't because you have some brave iconoclastic point of view that's too much for the Motte; there are other edgy, lefty posters who establish themselves as decent posters.
This post is just another crappy low effort post. I've specifically told you to stop writing posts whose entire content is just "Your beliefs are stupid."
It's also the last straw. I will not miss fishing your posts out of the queue and having to decide which of the dozen posts you wrote during a drunk-posting spree need to be modded. This was a dumb hill to die on, but so mote it be. Good bye.
While I've had my fair share of sometimes heated arguments with Frenchie and agree that the comment you're responding to is a low-effort contentless flame which at best will lead to nothing at all, the next part of your argumentation is just bad.
This is simply wrong. The new user filter feature is fundamentally chilling effect on views that go against the local mainstream and has a very predictable endpoint, already visible here. Fundamentally, low-effort "hot takes" like this (to name something you have encountered most recently) are not going away, but alternative viewpoints that go against that sort of content - most likely are.
The problem you're not seeing is that it's not the absence of a "variety of hot takes", it's that relying on the upvote/downvote mechanism for user absorption is guaranteed to fossilize a consensus based on some side of the very culture war this thread is about. I've had that argument with your colleagues on the site's telegram a number of times, and, as far as I can tell, there really isn't a counter-argument to present. Even if you're okay with having that particular kind of opinion dominate, you are still going to face a fall in quality of content, as is always the case in all echo-chambers that face no pushback.
Since I'm never going to be able to climb out of the new user filter you seem to laud, I doubt this comment will actually appear in the thread. But hopefully you'll at least see it...
I reject the characterization of my comment as a low-effort hot take. Considered in isolation, perhaps, but when seen in the context of a long conversation in which I also made a number of high-effort, sophisticated arguments in favor of my position, I don’t think it’s fair to characterize one particular comment that way. I’m extremely willing to defend my positions at length, which you can see, since you picked out a comment that was deep into a thread where I was doing so.
That's fine. If you believe that "Anyone affiliated with the Innocence Project deserves prison time" is a sophisticated, nuanced argument in favour of a certain position - it is your right to do so. I disagree and not simply with the position itself, but also with the prospects of such a comment leading to a reasoned discussion that could arrive at some interesting conclusion.
Here's a counter-example: "Executing all landlords in the world would be a good way to solve the housing crisis". It's a position that's a little juvenile and rather facile, but I am absolutely capable of writing a number of high-effort, good(ish) faith arguments for it by using utilitarian principles.
Do you think that the discussion writing something like this would lead to is going to be high level?
Look at the rest of the thread and my participation in it. Do you believe that I contributed nothing of intellectual value to it? Again, I’m not pretending that the particular comment you picked on was high-effort; however, I’m clearly quite capable of offering much higher-effort expansions of my position, which I did, in numerous parts of that same comment thread. That is the difference between me and someone who contributes nothing but low-effort swipes. If your belief is simply that no commenter, no matter how long-standing and high-quality-on-average, should ever be able to get away with posting anything low-effort, that’s fine, but it is not my position, nor does it appear to be the mods’ position.
Yes, absolutely! We see very high-effort and interesting threads branch off from arguments like that frequently here. I agree that you would also probably incite a lot of low-effort and/or uncharitable replies as well, but that doesn’t mean the post itself wouldn’t ultimately be worth it. If you genuinely do hold that belief, why not make an effortful post about it?
It very explicitly is not my belief, you misunderstood me. My point was that upvote/downvote system is bad at weeding out low-effort postings in general, because vast majority of people will not downvote a low-effort inflammatory statement that they agree with. I am with you as far as the idea that low-effort posting only becomes a serious concern when it dominates over higher-effort posting, and that is usually caused by people who pretty much exclusively post low-effort, ideologically-motivated comments.
I've done the very thing you suggested once 🫠. That's why I'm never going to be able to climbe out of a premoderation hole, lol
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The comment does appear in the thread after we approve it, which I have.
Look, I don't love the new user filter mechanism myself, and I have noticed that yes, liberals have a harder time climbing out of it because they get downvoted so heavily. That said, those who actually post reasonable and good faith arguments eventually get enough upvotes that they aren't being filtered, and it really doesn't take that much. The only people I can recall recently who posted regularly yet stayed in the new user filter persistently for months were AahTheFrench and Darwin/guesswho. Both of whom mostly engaged in trolling and shitposting.
Without a new user filter, we mods would wake up to a ton of "Kill All Niggers! Death to Kikes and Faggots!" posts spamming the board which we would then have to clean up. (This is not speculative on my part; you should see how very determined and noxious some of our long-term trolls are.)
If you have an alternate suggestions, propose it. Zorba has limited time to fix things and add features, but no one is under the illusion that our current setup is perfect. It's just the best we have managed so far.
A one-time manual approval flag.
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Well, here's another example for you. Me 😊. I have zero chance of ever climbing out of the karma hole here. I'm not super worried about it, but, for the record, the reason for it is one (intentionally provocative) thread that did lead to a discussion challenging the standard beliefs. Was it super-valuable? Of course not, and your comment on that thread summed it up pretty well. Was it bad enough to warrant a permanent modfilter? I'd argue that it wasn't and there is plenty of examples of far worse things adding nothing but vitriol towards the outgroup.
While being upvoted.
New user filter as it exists certainly helps with that to an extent, but its primary effect is completely different. It was trivial for me to find an example perfectly illustrating my point from just scrolling through the modlog. Here you go, the comment is essentially saying "people vote for communists because they just want to kill niggers." Votes on it are +3/-1, the -1 probably coming from the moderator who ended up handing out a tempban (no complaint here, it was a right choice). Voters had no problem with it. Is that how the system is supposed to work?
If the goal is to avoid the things you mentioned, adjusting the filter to deal with that would be trivial. Simply adjust the filter to be 7 days + 50 comments (or some similar number) which will still filter random incoming trolls, without enforcing the echo-chamber and punishing going against the circlejerk. From my experience of working with coders on the same codebase motte is written on, something like that can be written and implemented in minutes. The question is only about what you want your system to accomplish...
No, most people don't even remember a post from months ago. I don't even remember you. The reason you haven't accumulated enough "karma" is that you've posted a few times today, and last time was a couple of posts 4 months ago, and before that, a couple of posts a year ago.
You are misunderstanding how the filtering works. We don't put a "permanent modfilter" on you because you make a bad post. All new users automatically have to have their posts manually approved. After a certain number of upvotes (I don't know what the algorithm is, only Zorba does) you come out of the "new user" filter. Now if you have acquired a reputation for being an asshole, so that a lot of people downvote you as soon as they see you post, yes, it will be harder to get out of that filter. As far as I know, you aren't one of those people. You just haven't posted enough.
Yes. The new user filter is only to keep out low effort trolls. Once you are no longer being filtered, it's the job of reports and mods to handle people who make bad posts. As you noted, that post resulted in a tempban. I would not get so upset about upvotes and downvotes. There are people who will upvote any post that talks about how much Jews or blacks or leftists suck, especially if the poster uses language the upvoter knows better than to use. We don't mod according to the popularity of a post.
Maybe @ZorbaTHut has thoughts on why we should/shouldn't do that. Though I will note that if the threshold were 50 comments, you would still be in the new user filter.
Fair enough, my apologies. I'm originally from /r/drama, just came here in passing a while back due to being friendly with a number of motte regulars. My example is not that interesting, what's valuable in it is how it illustrates the drawbacks of the system.
Pretty sure that it is not the case. Can't conclusively disprove it, but I am almost certain that it is, in fact, upvotes minus downvotes threshold, not just a number of upvotes. If it only counted upvotes, my original post would have been enough to clear it (while horribly received, it did accumulate some positive reaction).
But this is the very effect I am complaining about. The disincentive towards posting while knowing that it will take up to 12 hours for the comment to appear in a thread that is having an active discussion is huge. If that wasn't the case, I'd absolutely post more, and I assure you that I am not alone in that regard.
The question is whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. If discouraging people like me from posting is the system working as designed - then that's fine, I just think that it goes against the stated goals of the platform.
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I feel like that should have been "so Motte it be."
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Wow, such eloquent savagery. Well deserved. Thanks for the good work.
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