This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
Seconded. Just keep it as is, and let mods, if they think it suitable, approve users on a per-user instead of a per-post basis.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link