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I don't know what to tell you - we mod people for "boo outgrouping" every day. Yes, this is generally not a friendly environment for those on the left (and don't I know it, as someone nominally on the left), but the exact degree to which we calibrate how much we let people badmouth their ideological opponents is never going to satisfy everyone. Too much moderation and we're suppressing basically any degree of heat or emotion; not enough and the people being talked about feel like it's open season on them. We have had these arguments (and internal mod discussions) since the reddit days, and whenever someone proposes a "solution" that will achieve perfect balance, it turns out that solution maps precisely to "moderate exactly to the degree that would make this place conform to my preferred state."
Also, bluntly, I think you are wrong about causes. Leftists who come in hot are mostly not new posters but people arriving with a grudge because we exist and haven't changed the rules to their liking. Or someone who got linked here, takes a quick gander, is shocked and appalled at what we allow to be posted, and decides some corrective mocking is necessary.
I'm not sure exactly which post you are referring to, but I know another recent post that asserted that got modded.
That one was borderline, and got some pushback from a mod (albeit without modhat on). My own opinion is that the claim was not entirely offbase factually (my understanding is that the only reason prep is needed is because gay men don't wish to refrain from activities that spread AIDS), but reducing it down to "gay orgies" was rather inflammatory. Was it a particularly nice thing to say? No. Was it a defensible claim to make, even if it hurts feelings? With a bit more effort, yes.
It depends on what you said. If you just come in calling everyone who voted for Trump a fascist, no. If you made an argument that Trump is a fascist, you'd probably be downvoted a lot, unfortunately, but you would not be modded if you were civil about it. What else is it you want to say that you think you wouldn't be allowed to say here? There is a difference between "The mods will let you say it" and "Many people will argue with you, perhaps not very nicely, and downvote you."
Then they are wrong and they don't actually look at our mod log.
This is incorrect. Every week I mod multiple people for "dunking on leftists" (and predictably get bitching and downvotes for it).
I am claiming if I make an argument that Trump is a fascist, I agree, I’ll be downvoted (but like idc), and yes, I won’t be modded if I keep it civil, but also virtually all of the replies will be so riddled with logical fallacies, not to mention subtle boo outgrouping, that not only do I have no desire to continue debating in good faith but I’m at risk of losing my cool in a sea of what seems to me to be absolutely laughable debating bizarrely not getting modded and then definitely getting myself modded. I’m also claiming that my reaction is likely a common reaction most other leftists are having and therefore is the explanation for why the leftist population is nonexistent here without the other explanation being “the mods are secretly fucking elephants and flipping off liberals while they do it.”
Edit: to address directly your question of “What else is it you want to say that you think you wouldn't be allowed to say here?”, I believe it is, “I literally can’t argue with this trashy argument because it doesn’t even fit the definition of the argument. Do you even know how to have a conversation, random_Motte_user, much less want to? Like how am I expected to work with this? Mods where are you guys isn’t this supposed to be a debate club? Why are all the users absolutely shit at debating.” Or something less inflammatory.
You're right, a lot of people argue with fallacious logic and straw men. We have a few rules against things like weakmanning and boo-outgroup, but generally speaking we don't mod on the quality of someone's arguments, let alone whether we think they are factually correct (or even truthful). That's the whole point of this place; moderating on tone, not content. I realize a lot of people dislike "You can make ridiculous and absurd claims as long as you're polite about it," but yes, that's how it works. That's where the "test your shady thinking" part of the Motte comes from. People can make ridiculous and absurd claims, and hopefully someone else will call them out on it.
I sympathize-I really do-that being in a distinct minority means you will get a lot of shit flung at you, and if you respond in a heated fashion you risk getting modded yourself. All I can say is that I think that lefties have gotten entirely too comfortable with everywhere else on the Internet being for them, and what you want is pretty close to demanding that we be like everywhere else, where you won't have to read people being mean to your opinions.
You could say that (maybe not calling everyone shit at debating). You can certainly tell someone you think their argument is bad. Like, you have gone off on how you think "Prep is to enable gay orgies" is a bad argument (and you even had mods agreeing with you!). You wrote a thoughtful post about why you think that argument is wrong.
If you interpret what I’m suggesting as “pretty close to demanding that we be like everywhere else, where you won't have to read people being mean to your opinions”, then I don’t know what to tell you. I feel I have said repeatedly the problem is not that right-wingers are saying mean things about left-wingers, it’s that bad debate etiquette is so pervasive here that it’s impossible to have a discussion.
Like kinda right now. I am scratching my brain on how, despite what I interpret as carefully wording my response to be as clear as possible about my opinions, you walked away with “justawoman doesn’t like reading mean things about her political beliefs like all the other leftists online”. I literally do not care if I get downvoted a lot, I don’t care if I get vitriol thrown at me, and can you show me which part of my responses implied I don’t want to read mean opinions?
To reiterate my position once more; I do not care if I read bad opinions here. But if I can’t debate the bad opinions because my opponent won’t respond to what I am saying, then yeah, something needs to change because none of us can test our shady thinking on here if we aren’t actually doing debate.
Yeah, but you still haven't told me what concretely you think we should do, other than be stricter. Maybe "@justawoman doesn't want to read mean things about her political beliefs" is not fair, but all your examples are basically people making bad arguments - and many of them are bad arguments! - which you want us to mod. We don't mod people for making bad arguments here! We mod people for making rude/uncharitable arguments or being insulting.
If your opponent won't respond to what you're saying, what do you want us to do about it? And again, I disagree with you, because from what I have seen, some of your opponents might go off on tangents about how much leftists suck, but most of your opponents are responding to what you're saying. Here, @07mk responded to your complaint about posts claiming leftists don't care about child rape. Here and downthread people steelman the "Prep is for gay orgies" argument. Are they good arguments, or arguments you agree with? Maybe not. And your response to @7mk was basically "I think your argument is bad, ergo the Motte sucks." What do you want us, as mods, to do about this?
You are not the first person to write about how you think the Motte has gone downhill (or was always bad) and that the problem is the users and we don't enforce quality standards enough. Some people have a long list of rules they think should be enforced that would prevent people from bad-posting. They all tend to be some combination of (a) a lot more work for the mods, who would basically be delegated as editors and proofreaders for all posts, and (b) banning more posters who fail to meet the complainant's quality standards. Which effectively does boil down to "bad people who make arguments I don't like."
I can certainly envision ways we could implement this. Back on reddit, when the discourse had been turning particularly sour and low-quality for a while, we would institute periodic "reigns of terror" wherein we would become far more trigger-happy about banning people for low-effort and disparaging comments. It's not clear to me if these were particularly effective long-term; short-term, people mostly buttoned up a bit and toned down their vitriol, but of course we got all the usual whining about how we banned Suzy but we didn't ban Jane. We probably could decide we're going to start getting much harsher about modding dunks and cheap shots and low effort comments, and the result would be to force people to write longer posts with more effort, but it would also suppress a lot of discourse. Would it be for the better, or would it drive more people off-site? We already get a lot of complaining that moderation is driven by word-count, or that too much moderation makes everyone afraid to post and thus kills conversations.
So what concretely do you want us to do that isn't demanding a shitload more work from us and also isn't heavily biased towards making the Motte exactly the place you would like it to be, but not necessarily what everyone else wants it to be?
I replied downthread the proposed solution and went into detail. I genuinely am asking if you have read it? The one about statistics and me collecting a data pool? I feel like it has answers already to these questions on it, and no! It's not going ban crazy, and it's not using up all your energy to proof-read.
Otherwise, concretely, I want you guys to be able to identify the debate fallacies going on and tell the users who are utilizing them to knock it off so that legitimate debate can be had and you're not driving off the leftists that you want. In your first example with 07mk, is a great one; no, I think he did not respond to what I said. I first posited a) their claim about leftists' attitude on child rape couldn't be substantiated with just anecdotal evidence and b) did they have any evidence other than anecdotal. Neither of those points were addressed in their response. To me, appropriate mod action would be something along the lines of "07mk, you cannot expect justawoman to continue the conversation if you don't continue it appropriately. Please respond to her two claims a) Do you think such a claim can be substantive on anecdotal evidence and b) do you have evidence other than anecdotal, then move on to the next claim." I said in my response earlier I would be happy to document these things privately so that I had data to back my claims and also to point out these general trends and condense them into a sentence or two so that the small mod team here has concrete examples to look out for.
I read it. You are welcome to collect data and send us your conclusions, but I'll be honest: what I see is a proposal for you to send your subjective opinion about our moderation. Everyone's welcome to do that, but while we might agree here and there (for example, both @netstack and I agree that the post about prep was borderline and could have been modded), we're not going to agree with all your examples.
Case in point: I think @07mk responded to what you said. You think he didn't. I am not saying his response was good or persuasive (I agree that anecdotal evidence about one's own personal experiences does not qualify one to speak for all leftists), but when you say:
You're literally demanding we play referee in every argument. If someone asks a question, and the poster they are arguing with does not answer the question (or doesn't answer it completely, or not directly), you want the mods to step in and say "You may not continue this conversation until you answer @justawoman's question"? No. Hell no. Not doing that. We have enough work to do just telling people to stop the cheap insults and weakmanning and trolling, we're not going to adjudicate every interpersonal spat every time someone summons us and demands "Make him answer my question!"
You're already playing defense and saying you can't longhouse the users because you don't have the time. The next step is them offering to "help" you with that job, and you'll have to make an awkward excuse why you don't want help with the thing you just said you don't have time to do.
All their little tricks are so clever.
No, I'm saying we won't longhouse the users because we don't want to.
No, they make proposals and we consider and either accept or reject them (mostly reject).
Just like you make proposals, and we consider and either accept or reject them.
Are you suggesting @justawoman is part of some entryist conspiracy to take over the Motte, and not just a leftie with some opinions? Why is the difference between someone playing "little tricks" and someone (you, for example) advocating for your preferred norms?
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SteveKirk, why do you keep making unnecessary little zingers like "all their little tricks are so clever"? I could also do a little zinger along the lines of, "watch out, they're trying to make you gargle sand again", but that is escalation and devolves the conversation and this isn't the place for that. I don't understand what you want out of the forum if, seemingly, all you want to do is make little barbs at leftists that piss them off and goad them into stinging you and derail the conversation.
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Yes, it is my subjective opinion on moderation. I am trying to prove said subjective opinion in the most objective way I can think of. I write the report, I send it to my boss, and I've done my job. What you and the mods do with said report is not in my metaphorical pay grade to be concerned about. I'll gather my data and write some paragraphs trying to summarize it and if ya'll think it's bogus, uh. Idk, you're asking me for proof, I'm gonna whip up the proof, and if it just comes down to plain "I think this, you think that", like, that's fine. It just means the moderation on this site isn't for me.
And no, oh my Lord, I do not expect you guys to add all that extra work. I feel like I am saying these things and they're not being heard. I literally acknowledged and will do so again that ya'll are a small mod team and cannot afford extra work, so if I am going to propose a solution, it needs to be concise, factor in labor effort, and be achievable with the small team ya'll have. With your example, yes, I would like for the mods to say something like that, but no, it's not feasible to do with every single disagreement, so it should only be used when it's really necessary so as not to eat up mods' time, so there needs to be some kind of colloquially agreed upon terminology that is easily identifiable.
You think @07mk responded to what I said. I think he didn't, and also that a lot of other people just generally don't on this site in general. I would like to gather my evidence to convince you he-and-they didn't. Then after that if you still think he responded to what I said, that's totally fair. Sometimes it just does come down to "I don't agree". But at least I did my part in trying to put my money where my mouth is.
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You are both mischaracterizing my comments, which is something I find ironic given the topic of discussion. I didn't ever claim or even imply that I spoke for all leftists, nor did I make any sort of argument that my anecdotal evidence was some sort of proof that the question should be answered with "No." Perhaps I'm guilty of breaking the rules against writing clearly, though I'm not sure where in what I wrote contained the argument "[my anecdotal evidence] ergo [leftists don't care about child rape]." My anecdote wasn't even meant as evidence, just context for why, as a leftist, I personally find that question entirely reasonable and also believe that answering the question with "No" is entirely reasonable.
I'm not suggesting you broke any rules. I'm just saying I can understand why @justawoman might have found your response unsatisfactory. And this is exactly why I am saying we aren't going to wade into adjudicating "how good" someone's response is.
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The really funny part is banning people for describing the exact perspective of this user in terms he would agree with himself, re.
There needs to be some discussion about this. I'd be happy with a rule requiring all claims of "this is what leftists believe" to be backed up by quotes. But there needs to be some way to say "look, they openly say they have no intention of communicating with you, let alone coexisting with you" without breaking the rules, especially when literally everyone involved on all sides agrees it's true.
I’m at the laundromat for context as to why I haven’t responded to other comments yet, since my main mode of using this site is lurking on my phone in-between things. Anyway, just to clarify, I am verily not a man. I’m just a woman.
Additionally, I try to be clear about putting subjective opinions as “I think” or “I believe” in the spirit of debate. Yes, I still believe not only subjectively but objectively social conservatism should be rejected by civilized society. But since I don’t have nor want to find the evidence suitable for making such a claim that “it’s not just my opinion, objectively social conservatism is social cancer and everyone here who believes it has drunk the Koolaid” here, and therefore can’t, I try to keep everything within the realm of what I personally think. It is just my opinion.
That is to say, a long winded way of saying I can’t represent all of leftism, anymore than I think you represent all of, uh, I dunno. Everything else? I don’t know you sincerely. I’ve lurked on here for years since reddit times and I only remember Walterodim because of the cheeky Witcher reference and Amadan because of the big red color on their name.
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If you want to have a good faith discussion of this, I will be happy to discuss it with you. I just have low expectations because all previous attempts have resulted in you accusing us of running cover for leftists, being hypocrites, etc.
The key point you are missing is that what one person says is not representative of an entire group, and that's why we have an entire paragraph in the rules about being specific about who you're talking about:
So when you say "look, they openly say they have no intention of communicating with you, let alone coexisting with you" - who is they? Because it's certainly not "leftists." It is definitely some leftists. Every bad thing you have ever said about leftists - everything you've ever been modded for for saying about leftists - if you said "There exist leftists who say and think this," I would agree with you. And if you said "That person who's posting is openly saying he has no intention of communicating with us," you would not be modded for that.
But when you take that person as an example and say "He's a leftist, therefore he proves that leftists are blahblahblah..." I mean, do you even see the distinction I am making here, or am I talking to air? You think we're ignoring the behavior of individual bad actors, when those bad actors usually get modded. But because those bad actors exist, you want us to treat every leftist as being the same, and then get mad that we don't ban leftists on sight.
And if someone comes rolling in with "Right-wingers are a bunch of racist, sexist, anti-semitic homophobes" - well, some people in this forum wear all those labels proudly! And yet it is clearly not true of all rightists, such generalizations are clearly intended to be derogatory, and we would mod someone who said that. And you'd be angry at us if we didn't mod someone for saying that.
I don't know why it is so hard for you to distinguish between "What this jerk says" and "This jerk is speaking for everyone who votes like him and thus they can all be treated as interchangeable."
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"User driven moderation" or whatever you call it was a bad idea and a very good way to overmoderate any users in the minority. The only thing that makes sense is rules-based moderation...
Perhaps. But here's my take: first of all, we mostly do use rules-based moderation, but it mostly doesn't satisfy the complainers (because they think we are applying the rules unequally). To the degree that "Moderation is very much driven by user sentiment, I think you are taking that too literally. It does not mean that we moderate according to who gets upvoted or downvoted, nor does it mean anyone who gets reported gets modded. It's right there in that section in that part of the rules:
Now, it is a known problem we've commented on before that someone who's really unpopular (or just posting unpopular opinions) gets reported a lot, and even though we are aware of this and try to factor it in, anyone who's both unpopular and getting reported a lot is probably having lots of arguments and thus sooner or later is probably going to say something uncivil and is more likely to be noticed doing it. Other than using our best judgment and talking amongst ourselves when we see this kind of thing happening, I do not know what a better alternative would be, because inherently we rely mostly on user reports to draw our attention to bad behavior. We don't get paid enough to be responsible for reading every single post and not letting anything slip our notice.
I'm not saying you're not trying, but honestly it's not just a minor problem. If the goal was really to engage with people you don't agree with, this website is a failure. I only come here when I want to know what a specific part of the right thinks.
A good starting point would be to drastically improve the quality of the so-called quality contributions. They should be held to the highest standard, so people can go there and see what's expected of them. What I got from doing that is that your message should be long, written in good english and be right wing. That will garantee you a place there with a 50% probability. Following the rules in their letter and spirit is obviously optionnal.
It's not just a minor problem, no, but I don't think it's solvable.
You're not completely wrong here (I personally don't like that AAQCs are mostly determined by who gets a lot of AAQC "applause" from other members, and a long-winded but superficially polite polemic about how My Enemies Are Scum or Those People Are An Existential Threat will always get tons), but the alternative requires the mods being much more personally and directly involved in deciding what we consider to be a quality post. Is that what you are asking for? And are you sure our selections would be more satisfactory?
A first step is to just do a posteriori control, you eliminate the post that don't follow the rules strictly. However my feeling is that not much quality contributions would remain.
And the user driven evaluation could be more rules-based, instead of voting on a scale bad/good you could ask whether it's charitable, whether you agree or oppose the content, whether it is nice.
I have other ideas if you are interested, like categories for quality contribution: best left/right wing contribution...
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Yes, I am interested in what you consider to be quality posts.
Maybe you could have two different sections of quality contributions; ones that got a lot of AAQCs (and didn't break any rules and weren't too egregious, like how you choose them now), and a separate "Mod's Choice" section. In particular, there's a lot of awesome life advice I see in Wellness Wednesdays, and I remember being disappointed one didn't make it. But I've never been one to nominate them myself much, anyway.
I seriously think "Mod's Choice" AAQC is a really great idea. It shows what the moderators of the site are looking for while giving out that sweet internet recognition that encourages people to make more posts like the AAQC. Or people can just ignore it and go for the mass-approval AAQCs and still feel satisfied their contributions are being recognized.
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YES. You guys are the mods! You set the tone of the entire site! You guys should have a personal standard of what is quality post and measure it against the popular post.
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That is also why I come to this website, mostly to find out what the far-but-smart part of the right thinks. I have to say I would quite like it if smart parts of the left would come here and participate more often though – I feel that the essence of the moderation approach could potentially make for more interesting and productively adversarial debate if more ideologically diverse voices joined in. It's not always enjoyable to be a lone outspoken voice in this environment however, so I think something special may be required to get past that participation hurdle and get larger numbers of left contributors involved.
An idea would be to start an opposition day every week, a thread to specifically highlight topics or opinions that are not in the website consensus. There would still be an overwhelming crowd to harass you, but perhaps you would feel less alone.
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I think you missed the other possibility: that many people who come out hot are trolls deliberately trying to rile people up. I’ve seen people clearly trying to do this with both left and right wing personae. We have a strange overlap with rdrama, after all. I don’t get it, but some people love that kind of thing.
I don’t doubt some are sincere, but I doubt most ever intend to engage on any level other than useless mockery and I would argue that engaging with them as though they have pro social intentions is a waste of everyone’s time and feeds the trolls, like trying to deter violent assaults with a counseling session. There are new posters who have the ability to make a good argument but just need a little guidance in following the rules, but posters like OP clearly aren’t that.
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