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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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Here is my prediction of what would happen

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.

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.

Dude, this whole discussion started because a "rather well-written" effort post received a warning. You are definitely setting the bar too high.

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.

Or it would eventually look exactly like that thread or worse, because:

  1. The higher quality of commentators would leave
  2. Everyone would put in less effort.
  3. And we don't have a popular podcast that draws in a stream of new and active users.

Dude, this whole discussion started because a "rather well-written" effort post received a warning. You are definitely setting the bar too high.

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.

The higher quality of commentators would leave

Quite a few of the high-quality commentators have already left and while I have no way to prove this, I'd posit this has something to do with the very limited number of topics that are discussed here nowadays.

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.

And yet an interesting discussion it spawned. Which is my entire point.

Let's drop it. I said my piece, I accept I'll never convince you. I'll bring it up again once we reach a weekly thread with less than a thousand comments.

They will often tell us why they have left, and none have given us that as a reason. Usually it's complaints about low quality comments that don't quite break the rules, but are bad enough to annoy them when aggragated together.

Im fine dropping this, I did feel like new things were coming up.