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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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