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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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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

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.

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.

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 you have an alternate suggestions, propose it.

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...

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.

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.

Was it bad enough to warrant a permanent modfilter?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

No, most people don't even remember a post from months ago. I don't even remember you.

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.

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.

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).

You just haven't posted enough.

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.