So there's a delusional take you see on twitter Etc. All the time. From both sides of almost any issue but especially anything related to Russia, elections, Etc. You see people who respond to normal criticism or an abundance of criticism (usually relatively earned by how bad their takes are) accusing their detractors or those who disagree of being bots or astroturfed Putin or Clinton agents... The implied premise being that only lumps of code or Chinese sweatshop workers employed by bad faith actors could hold views that disagree with the complainer. That only bots or paid shills could oppose Ukraine, or support Clinton over Bernie, or Biden over Trump... Etc.
I used to dismiss these complaints... but now I feel I might owe a general apology.
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I've noticed since TheMotte moved to its new Site that the Quality of a lot of Comments are just off. Not that the takes are bad or low quality or have odd opinions But that they're Bizarrely and Unnervingly detached from even the barest context of the discussion itself. Stuff completely out of character for even a bad rulebreaking poster on the motte.
Short comments that don't engage with any arguments presented, or even engage with the context of the discussion... but that Immediately tangent off on some culture war point utterly unrelated to the discussion, and then not engaging wit any replies (often with a single external link)... I've seen weird shit on twitter so I've dug into a few of these accounts... and all of their comments are like this, short snipes that never engage even 1 or 2 comments deep with anyone who replies. but that are slowly wracking up a history on the platform...
And then today I was hit by a smoking gun, this Comment:
“The Ukraine conflict is one of the clearest examples of good vs. evil in the past century"
You said it! Look at how despicable these people are!
Video: Ukraine Soldiers Sing Praises Of WW II Era Nazi: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4H-yMmNh5Cs
And now NPR is just casually rehabilitating the Nazis: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/03/1084113728/a-closer-look-at-the-volunteers-who-are-signing-up-to-fight-the-russians
Now the links are to real pieces of media, The Jimmy Dore Show and NPR... both respectable enough... and there'd be little to suggest this was a bot trying to manipulate the discussion... except for one thing:
No one had said the quote he was replying too...
Indeed I know where he got the quote. It was from a discussion/long take weeks before in relation to Ukraine, and would not even have fit the discussion in that piece, since it was a meta-discussion about how figures discuss Ukraine relative to other wars. I'd quoted it back then as an example of something we'd think was delusional and completely detached from intellectual rigor if said about Iraq 1991 or WW1...
Indeed another comment making the opposite argument used the same quote and drew other quotes from the same two week old discussion... except arguing the opposite way (pro-Ukraine)... And likewise replied not at all to having it pointed out that nothing they quoted was at all mentioned in the actual thread or discussion that was being had.
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This obviously killed the discussion in that thread... when half the thread becomes comments quoting things, points and arugments, that were never said, and the other half must become replies saying in effect WTF!?
Well you can't have a discussion any more. Any organic back and forth between actual mottizens was killed. And obviously none of these either schizos or bots responded to keep discussion going.
Now if this becomes the norm it will kill the space...
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But its also really unnerved me with regards to the rest of the internet.
The "Dead Internet Theory" doesn't feel like a theory anymore. The Motte is an obscure space with discussion levels high enough you notice if an actor isn't actually thinking or engaging with what's been said... and 2 out of 15 comments in that thread were Fairly undeniably bots....
On a site that's only been up a few months.
What the hell must it be like on other forums? Newspaper comments? YouTube comments?
Hell 4Chan had to implement Capchas for every comment to avoid the problem.
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Notes -
I think the quality has been going down, but I wouldn't peg bots. This might very well just be a personal opinion, just this morning, I was thinking about how increasing amount of subthreads are about trans stuff, a subject that, in the end, doesn't hold a great deal of interest to me. Not only that but it seems to be about endlessly relitigating a few particular facets of this particular culture war. Probably not something that it would be easy to write a bot for, though.
Trans stuff in general picked up steam in the mainstream, for instance with Tavistock - the largest "gender affirming clinic" in UK closing down in late July and now there is a lot of topics around it from both sides generating content outside of it. There is still tangential issue of the whole "Parental rights in education" AKA "Don't say gay" bill in Florida, that now has some real impact. So while you may be sick and tired of the topic, it is now resonating with mainstream people many of whom are are now really pondering it for the first time. And as just a last nugget, a few days ago Biden accepted to be interviewed by transgender person called Dylan Mulvaney
I guess even if there may not be any novel things for you - although I'd wager that you may not be aware of the scientific reasons for closing Tavistock - there is still the meta level where this picked up steam and is relevant for broader culture now that transgender topics filtered into the mainstream as more people are now forced to engange with the topic.
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Last week's dominating topic seems to have been race, and this week's topic is trans issues. I guess AI and AI art come in at a possible third place in terms of common-ness.
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Trans stuff is one of this forum's hobby horses and is one of the reasons it had to leave reddit. If anything, what gets endlessly regurgitated is people discussing the new LOTR show.
My subjective feeling is that the trans stuff occupies far more of this forum's time here than on Reddit.
Of course, one reason might be that during the last years there's been other topics occupying the forum's attention that do not do so the same way - the Covid is Over and Ukraine war clearly does not seem to exist the same way in American headspace as in the first half of the year (first month of war, arguably).
You're not wrong, and I think it's that there's no longer the feat that openly doing the trans debate would lead to a banhammer. Likewise I see HBD discussed a lot more than on Reddit, probably for the same reason.
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The trans stuff is a topic that is in itself practically optimal for incandescent heat and zero light, and the way the CW treats it only adds to that. And few if any mottizens are immune to the morbid charms of doing a little fighting the CW. A topic on which nothing of value can be said and on which everyone can very conveniently point out the errors of their enemies and which keeps pushing itself center stage will be too great a bait for most to resist.
I want for the world to ignore the entire topic as it deserves, and for the Motte to do likewise, but this is one of those pointless battles where nothing can be gained but everyone still needs to fight it just to stall and frustrate their enemies. It's the worst part of the CW but also one of the hottest, so we can't exactly pretend that it's not happening or that it is strategically irrelevant.
IMO a containment thread would be the best solution - if we had the numbers to split people's attention like that.
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I think the migration just failed, and I plan on doing some data scraping / analytics this weekend to demonstrate it.
What kind of analysis or "hypothesis's" do you want to test. I tried doing a causal text analysis before on a specific subreddit and data is tremendously noisy, don't expect to not be disappointed.
You can use my source code to speed up your process if you want. https://github.com/f3zinker/RedScare-Analysis
Hey, thanks for that. I liked going through the analysis.
Also, I found this pretty funny (hopefully the table looks alright):
EDIT: it doesn't look like anything!
It was one comment being "hell yeah dude" getting readability_qual = "college level"
That's actually a mistake on my part, I reread the code again.
The metric I used returned negative grades. "Hell yeah dude" got 'between grade -2 and grade -3'. When I binned them into real life grade values, I should have added
x < 4 -> "grade 4 and below"instead of0 < x < 4 -> "grade 4 and below". Or I planned to drop negative values when I was doing the analysis and forgot to do it.Just need to change one line of code, but I don't think it would really change anything all that much.
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Ah, well... Fuck. That covers every idea I had and more.
What did you have in mind? I wanna know how others would come up with ways to assess a forums change in "quality"
Not a direct measure of quality, but I would expect it to be correlated: the number of different users participating. My concern is that the long tail of normal people didn't make it in the migration, and only the insane people are left.
@Porean
I think "sanity" is on an axis that is orthogonal to quality. My definition of quality isn't to do with how out of norm ones political opinions is but the quality of their insights, how well defended their arguments are, how logically consistent is the text to itself and its subject, etc.
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The abundance of trans and race posting relative to all other CW issues has been a problem before the migration. But I would +1 to the quality going down.
There is a certain growing subgroup of users who just state their opinion (preferred policy) on the matter without any further analysis added to the discussion and call it a day.
Also I think the motte has reached an age where a lot of posts are just references/links to old posts users previously made. To be fair to them, there isn't much appeal to write out yet another 1000 word comment on trans or race issues, you can write out your opinions on that once and just cite it for eternity. Replying to yet another newbie entering the CW and going "does anyone else trans or race issuess??""
"SoMetHiNg neEDs To bE doNe" (BLR!!) to breathe new life to discussions here.
I think the quality of top level posts has gone up a bit
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One kind of sees now why the original decision to make a containment thread was made in the first place.
Separate threads for CW stuff and "normal politics" (economy, global politics, electoral horse race stuff etc.)? To be fair it's the latter that interests me more.
Or one specific dedicated thread for each of the done-to-death CW issues and keep the main thread clean for discussion of new topics.
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