This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris
Contributions for the week of September 30, 2024
Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris
Contributions for the week of October 7, 2024
Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris
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Notes -
And yet, has Motte moderating not moderated feuding in this very thread?
This thread has not, in fact, devolved into a personal antipathy feud despite the instigating callout via @username to ensure notification, the attempt to litigate new arguments not even raised in response to the original AAQC while using pejorative framings, and aggressive follow-ups trying to re-argue the topic with multiple people. The instigator of this round did not face punishment for disagreeing or disliking the person they were trying to incense.
Neither will you, despite adding yet another item to my list of memorable pejorative characterizations as a american-jewish-polish-anglo-slavic neocon-fascist-zionist-neoliberal man-bitch. (Yes, this is humorous to me. No, I am not insulted. I have not / do not / would not support any report against you for it.)
Instead, the mod-hat was invoked on grounds of... characterization of evidence (such as the ease of finding), and characterization of opposing arguments (whether a single opening paragraph in the opening of a three-phase argument is the core argument), and eventually moderation practice (when the instigator chose to escalate a minor pushback), rather than the characterization of character.
And this was in no small part because I was considering the moderation team's response when I declined to take the bait / rise to the offer.
It was certainly tempting to indulge- it was a quiet weekend, it would have been easy to play to a crowd, I even had a much longer post lined up and everything- but I declined and deleted a non-trivial amount of time's work and limited myself to a minor riposte and explicit disengagement because of the moderation team's past efforts to cultivate a climate where feuding is discouraged. Further, the restrained response came before moderator involvement occurred, and was maintained afterwards despite apparent moderator sympathy increasing the freedom to action in what one could get away with without significant censure.
Because it was discouraged, I declined. Because I declined, there was no back and forth between users. Because there was no back and forth between users, there was no mutual feuding. Because there was no mutual feuding, moderation could occur on content-neutral ground of how the feud attempt was approached rather than cleaning up the aftermath of one.
To reframe- a user credited even by a self-identified critic for single-minded determination and attention to detail restrained themselves from engaging in impassioned defense. The absolute level of feuding was visibly lowered by the absence of what easily could have been indulged in with those very traits. The user who invited feud was neither punished or threatened with punishment for character criticism, but the content-neutral approach they took to it and their response to that.
This should be what success in moderating feuding looks like. We are seeing the absence of feuding- twice even, thanks to you and I- between people are known to strongly disagree.
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