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.
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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.
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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.
This discussion would really benefit from some more charity towards my position. I am not arguing for The Motte to become Twitter, that is a strawman. Neither am I arguing for the roundup to be flooded with "low effort shit". I am arguing for two things 1) the relaxation of top post requirements, 2) a contained Bare Link Repository.
Neither of which would turn this place into Twitter. We know this because that was the standing policy before the current one was enacted. But also because The Motte isn't a mod team, it's a people. Discussion quality here is high because of the interesting people who frequent this place. That is not entirely disconnected from moderation policy and discussion norms, but to insinuate that we are one policy change away from the Twitter cesspool is disingenious. And a BLR wouldn't clutter up anything because it would be one click away from being minimized. No wading required.
Yes, I know that's not what you want. I am saying that IMO that is what your proposal would result in.
Here is my prediction of what would happen (because it's what happened when we had the BLR back on reddit):
I just have zero sympathy for people who want to post bare links, because our requirements to add something meaningful are not that stringent. Every person who claims we require MOAR WORDS or meaningless verbiage or a ChatGPT sensitivity pass is lying. All you have to do is add something like "Why is this interesting? What is your take? Why do you care? Why should we care? Why do you think it is worth bringing to our attention?" Add some commentary (doesn't have to be very much, does not have to be particularly insightful or long), just more than "Hey, look at what those fucking wokes did now!" It's not a high bar. It just fucking isn't. I am tired of people pretending that we put barriers in the way of their very interesting conversations that we do not.
And here's mine: it would look much like the weekly thread on r/blockedandreported, only better because the quality of commentators here is higher.
Dude, this whole discussion started because a "rather well-written" effort post received a warning. You are definitely setting the bar too high.
Or it would eventually look exactly like that thread or worse, because:
A well-written thing that is not a discussion is still not a discussion. The bar is not high. In this case they went and climbed at a neighboring gym and put in a bunch of effort, but the bar we were monitoring which is much easier to reach was left empty.
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See, you say this, but then I believe that @4doorsmorewhores easily cleared the bar you are claiming is the minimum expectation with this post, yet he still got modded for supposedly not putting enough effort into his commentary/contextualization.
To be perfectly honest, I wouldn't have modded that post, though it is a bit borderline, being not much more than "Boo outgroup" with MOAR WORDS. The mods are not a hivemind. I stand by my point that you don't have to put a lot of effort into your post, not everything has to be an effortpost, and the BLR would be a net negative. Will the other mods sometimes have a different opinion than me of what constitutes "enough" effort? Yes.
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