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 -
I can't discern him breaking any rules, or you explicitly accusing of breaking him of any rules, apart from the subjective "wildcard rule" about obnoxiousness. It's fine to have a wildcard rule that essentially says "don't do things we don't like", but to then try to pin the "breaking the rules" label on someone who only ran afoul of that rule is somewhere between a case of the noncentral fallacy and plain self-aggrandizement, where you expect other people to treat your taste with the same reverence as a written rule.
I think hounding other posters for evidence and forcing them to produce more evidence in a more legible way is an unalloyed good, actually. I'd love for you to prove me wrong, and show me an instance where someone is doing the same thing for a position that I agree with or user that I like where I think that it would be appropriate to moderate the pursuers. The closest example I can remember is where back in the Reddit era, people were piling up on darwin2000 (might have gotten the number part wrong) over not taking responsibility for boldly wrong predictions (in contexts such as the Smollett case). I was rather fond of him as a user and thought that he was an asset by virtue of putting out some overly welcoming hearths by merely existing, but was absolutely in favour of him being held accountable in the way he was.
I initially didn't want to make an argument based on accusations of bias, but looking through your posting history it seems plainly evident that you are deeply aligned with Dean on the Israel/Palestine question, and back the Israeli side in a way that can't be described as dispassionate. Are you sure that you are not letting your animus towards a side blind you to the fact that you are just using the rule that basically says "excuse to be deployed in edge cases" as an excuse in a case that is not particularly on edge? It's not like not being candid about this, or mostly avoiding engagement on substance (easy when an "excellent poster" is around to make your case for you anyway), magically makes you neutral. The least you could have done to not make this look as bad would have been to recuse yourself and let this be handled by another moderator who can express his views of the object-level issue with fewer expletives than this.
Well, forget about him. Can you explain to me, or anyone else, why he was being moderated? My current understanding is that you like Dean's posts in general and are moreover extremely unsympathetic to the anti-Israel position, and therefore perceive any persistent attempt to impose a tax on Dean's pro-Israel posting in its present shape as something that needs to be suppressed using the wildcard rule. Is this accurate?
The clause doesn't have to be parsed as "(more extreme) posts" for the cycle to hold; it is absolutely sufficient for it to be "more (extreme posts)". Plenty of completely normal posts these days would have been moderated 5 years ago - and the way in which they are bad was originally trailblazed by "quality posters" who evidently were so favoured that unless someone took one for the team and raised a stink out in the open, you wouldn't even know that reports were just being redirected into the trash due to their standing, as opposed to nobody seeing a problem at all to begin with. Once the prolific and beloved posters all do it, the nobodies are free to follow suit.
Is this a belief that's based on a concrete observation of bad things that happened when you "worried too much", or just rationalising the easy option of going with your gut?
One does not make up for the other. People can still make good posts and interesting conversation away from a welcoming hearth, but by definition they won't after they had to bear their final straw. You can run a good version of this forum while being a welcoming hearth to nobody, but you can't run one while putting the final straw on too many, especially if you selectively do so on just about everyone except those having a particular gamut of opinion.
Do you imagine there is any argument or evidence at all that could persuade you to change your current approach to moderation, or is it a matter of either having to take your ride to wherever it leads or getting off?
Are you not reading carefully, or are you just reading selectively? Look at my mod comment again. I first said
That's the wildcard rule, applied not for what he said, but for grumping about what someone else said--so you mischaracterized my criticism in exactly the same way that coffee_enjoyer mischaracterized it, by suggesting it is about my "taste" rather than about coffee_enjoyer's insistence on his own taste being the proper determinant of quality. So right from the starting gate, you have demonstrated that you don't know what you're talking about.
Then you said
but this is clearly an unforced error. In my very first mod comment I also wrote:
"Be charitable" is a very clear rule. Coffee-enjoyer broke it, as I demonstrated by mentioning how he broke it, and I said all of that quite clearly. So the rest of your comment fails to land entirely; I'm sure you can think of some other reason to criticize my moderation, and yet at this point it seems that your real goal is just that--to criticize my moderation, regardless of anything I have actually said or done. By your own logic, at this point it seems like you should probably just recuse yourself from criticizing my moderation approach.
I will address your parting question anyway:
I imagine there are many such arguments and evidence; I hardly imagine myself to be a paragon of human judgment. But as you have not presented any such arguments or evidence--as you indeed failed to even notice the rather explicit rule breaking I spelled out in my initial post--what is it you expect me to change?
That is, is there some specific change you have in mind? You mention recusal but actually the whole mod team does recusals pretty often, calling for others to come in and handle stuff they don't think they can be impartial about. However it's basically never about topics, because the whole mod team has opinions on just about everything. If we recused ourselves from topics we happen to know and care about, none of us could moderate anything! Rather, usually mods will recuse themselves from dealing users who get under our skin (or are just particularly under our skin on a given day). You mentioned darwin; back in the day, I recused myself from moderating him a lot.
So beyond that, what "argument or evidence" do you think you have in mind, that you think should change moderation policies here? Sometimes you write as if you think people should be moderated more ("Plenty of completely normal posts these days would have been moderated 5 years ago...") but your argument in this case is that coffee_enjoyer, at least, should be moderated less. As far as I can tell, you are engaged in the same special pleading that nearly all rules-lawyers and mod-critics bring to us, as if we'd never seen it before: "why don't you moderate my enemies more, and my friends less?"
And once it is recognized that that is the substance of the question being asked, well, it kind of answers itself, doesn't it?
Fair point, I overlooked this part. Sorry.
(I would however counterclaim that your moderation on charity is selective enough to border on the anarcho-tyrannical. I don't recall seeing many instances of people getting modhatted for the very regular sport of slightly shifting the interlocutor's categories for the sake of argument, and to begin with your own insinuation that I am only motivated by personal animosity or tribalism is hardly charitable either.)
How is it a mischaracterisation of your criticism to describe it as being about your taste, when the very first thing you say is that his post is "obnoxious", which is clearly a judgement of taste?
To begin with, he is not the moderator, nor the AAQC compiler. I would have no objection to the essence of what you said if you had said it with your modhat off. How can you treat taste-based opinion posting as analogous to taste-based moderation?
The change I would prefer would be to make shutting down consensus a goal that is at least equal in weight to enforcing post quality. The dominant consensus on many topics has become sufficiently overwhelming that there are hardly any users left that are willing to put in the time to argue cogently against it, and that includes topics on which I agree (such as categorical opposition to wokeism, or favouring market economy over socialism). A forum which produces a stream of quality posts for just one side is a partisan thinktank, not whatever I thought TheMotte was supposed to be; and either way without real opposition the quality of the monoculture is bound to decline eventually. Ideally, this would involve subjecting posts that exhibit the pattern of being highly-upvoted while no post disagreeing manages to breach positive double digits to an extremely stringent interpretation of the rules ("moderate more"); but at the very least, being extremely lenient with anyone willing to oppose them and argue back ("moderate less") seems like a step that you can take notwithstanding the usual "well, we can't moderate posts nobody reports!" excuse. (I have reported a fair number of posts throughout the years, but it seems like only a small fraction of those elicited any visible mod reaction.)
Therefore, "moderate people who get lots of upvotes more, and those who get fewer upvotes less" is more like it. I might find it hard to dispel the accusation that this amounts to "moderate my enemies more", since I am on the balance unhappy with the Overton window here and therefore naturally am an "enemy" of the majority of highly-upvoted positions; but this does not mean that I am "friends" with most of the downvoted ones, unhappy families all being different and what-not. I have no idea where coffee_destroyer stands on other topics, and even on Israel/Palestine he is only directionally on my side since my position is closer to "they both deserve each other, and I resent being asked to help either". I would also like tankies, SJWs, actual neonazis and actual "white genocide now"ers to be given much more leeway to nitpick and be obnoxious towards popular positions, even though I dislike all of these groups.
Well, as I noted somewhere upthread, we already do engage in a fair bit of "affirmative action" moderating. Which is maybe not quite what you're asking for but sounds pretty close to me. We tend to go easier on people who are bringing underrepresented or heterodox viewpoints into play.
(In this particular case, uh... I have to say that coffee_enjoyer's position on Israel is not one that strikes me as underrepresented or heterodox, here. I understand that probably everyone feels dogpiled at some point or other, but no, I'm much more likely to cut slack to a rule-breaking Wokist than I am to cut slack to a rule-breaking Israel critic, simply because we could probably use more of the former, but I can't imagine us ever running short of the latter.)
Well, "friends" in the loose sense that you have identified a common "enemy" (me!). My impression of your follow-up is that, yes: you want more moderation for your enemies, and less for your friends. But now you've made two suggestions that, actually, the mod team already follows, more or less--if not, perhaps, to the degree you would prefer. So you're not wrong, exactly, you just seem to think that your prescriptions will yield results that, actually, we can say from experience they do not especially yield. None of this is terribly surprising, the mod team really does think about and discuss this stuff amongst ourselves a fair bit, so it would be pretty surprising if you were to say something original about the project we've got going here. But you're always welcome to try, provided you do so within the bounds of the rules we've established over the life of the community.
Wasn't this strenuously denied for years and claims of it were met with accusations of being paranoid conspiracy theorists?
My inclination is to say "no" but on reflection I have vague memories of this being something the mod team was maybe disunified about for a while (maybe still is). It's also possible I'm giving the wrong impression with the phrase "affirmative action." It's possible different moderators have had, and expressed, different ideas of what amounts to "affirmative action" in various cases. Zorba has always made it our top priority to make this a
which necessarily involves having people who don't all share the same biases. So we've always tried to moderate in ways that would encourage the development of such a community.
On the other hand, the mod team is accused somewhat regularly of going too easy/too hard on red tribe/blue tribe posts, and we have often cited this fact as evidence that moderation is not actually especially biased in one direction or the other; everyone always feels like their ox is the one being gored. Thumbing the scales a bit in favor of including heterodox views does not rise to the level of nuking the rules, any more than QCs do. And I don't think we've ever thumbed the scales for tribal reasons (either pro or con)--just for specific users in specific cases, where it was, say, understandable that someone might get a little hot under the collar.
So I would suggest that the way to parse all of this is that moderation is a qualitative and adaptive process in a reputation economy. We do go easier on new users, generally. We go easier on people who make QCs or otherwise contribute to the health of the community (e.g. by expressing heterodox views), for the most part. We go harder on people who habitually make bad posts, or express unwillingness to abide by the rules. We moderate tone rather than content. What that amounts to, in the end, is... what we have here. If you're getting moderated occasionally, it's probably nothing to worry much about. If you're getting moderated a lot, it's definitely because you're breaking the rules and showing no inclination to even try doing better.
In the process, do we have our biases or pet issues or whatever? Sure, we're just people. Do I think we do a pretty good job at impartiality and fairness anyway? Yeah, I do. Are we perfect? No, I can't imagine. Are we better than basically every other message board moderation team on the Internet? Yeah, I think we actually are. Are we going to change? Sure, over time that's bound to happen.
Has anything in this thread come anywhere near identifying a real identifiable problem with moderation in our community, and suggesting novel but plausible ways to address said problem? Well... not yet! Which makes the amount of effort I've put into it so far pretty wasted, and probably reduces the likelihood of my bothering to respond effortfully to similar complaints in the future. The people most inclined to complain about the rules are basically never the ones who are consciously and positively contributing to the effectuation of the foundation.
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