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 -
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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