Y'all must be trying to kill me. The sheer volume of quality contribution reports, combined with the outrageous volume of text you maniacs generate every week, made this an astonishing month to be sorting through the hopper. By far the busiest month for AAQCs since I took over the task. This made winnowing them down especially challenging, and some very good posts simply didn't make the cut simply because the competition was so fierce.
Good job, everyone.
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. Here we go:
Quality Contributions in Culture Peace
@problem_redditor:
Contributions for the week of September 26, 2022
Battle of the Sexes
@problem_redditor:
@Ben___Garrison:
Contributions for the week of October 3, 2022
Identity Politics
Contributions for the week of October 10, 2022
Battle of the Sexes
Identity Politics
Contributions for the week of October 17, 2022
Identity Politics
Contributions for the week of October 24, 2022
Battle of the Sexes
@cae_jones:
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Notes -
@urquan:
My apologies for never responding to your comments on politicized moderation. I think you’re absolutely correct about the conflation of slur-spamming and genuine right-wing posts. Most places aren’t the Motte, and I am keenly aware that our moderation is particularly unusual.
I was trying to argue apologetics for how this conflation comes about. It is popular on this board [citation needed] to assert leftists coordinate such takeovers. That’s obviously a thing that actually happens, I.e. the RPGnet example. The OP was specifically theorizing that leftist activism is memetically fit because it encourages takeovers.
That seemed less likely, to me, than a more organic approach. I think the initial impulse for hobbyist communities sliding left is usually “sane” moderation: banning obvious slurs. Insofar as the right wing is more likely to value free speech, this is more likely to cause evaporative cooling on the right. The runaway slide starts with a couple guys saying “xyz was a dick, but he didn’t deserve a ban...” and then leaving.
Now, lots of the responses gave examples of left-coded slurs. If these are being ignored from the start, then either they’re not as severe, or the moderation starts out captured—which would be evidence for the takeover theory. I’m not sure how common this is, or how commensurate those examples are to race-baiting or fedposting. I remember a guy on [small video game discord] deciding to monopolize the funny pictures channel for “America will never be tried for war crimes!1!!!” He got muted, not banned, and I’m not confident if it was leftist bias or just...less threatening.
Unrelated, but I encountered that multimc drama around the same time as you. I was picking a launcher to try out Valhelsia 5, which only released in mid-October. (It’s quite good, though.) The Val install guide hadn’t caught up to the news, so clicking through was a complete surprise. It was like looking out on the Mad Max wasteland, except with discarded commits.
I have to wonder if they ever decided where to fork.
For the precise example of RPGnet, I think it's kinda useful to look more precisely, because it doesn't really look like the sort of thing where this is a meaningful question that could be separated either direction.
I'll admit that I'm very far from an unbiased historian, but I was there for a lot of it, and while I was mostly a lurker during the self-described 'wild west' period, you didn't have to post to see it.
But I don't think 'coordinated' versus 'inorganic' is a useful way to think about it.
A big example of the end of the Wild West era came because the moderators were a lot more willing to ban posters who made "trap" jokes, for the understandable reason that a lot of trans posters considered it a slur whether discussing trans women, non-trans crossdressers, or even people (mostly femmy gay men) who self-identified as such. And, to be fair, there's an argument that this is a central example of "sane" moderation, even if the first four years or so didn't result in much evaporative cooling (there's a reason therpgsite devolved into something more depressed than either CWR, Data Secrets Lox, or TheSchism did for us), and even as left-coded slurs were (and remain) tolerated or encouraged.
I'm not gonna go through FCfromSSC's list here, not least of all because their 'working' search engine doesn't handle before the url changeover well and you'd need an account to see the ones inside Tangency Open proper, but the unwillingness to act on 'teabagger' was contemporaneously noteworthy by other posters; quite a lot of the relevant ones, and a number FCFromSSC wouldn't have cause to even imagine, were present.
And those, are frankly tame when it comes to undermining meaningful communication, compared to things like "Wealthy people are literally like bedbugs, with the wealthier, the more damaging." or "And in this case, all the arguments about "freedom" and "responsibility" really come down to "Fuck you, I got mine". And fuck those people." or "It's only defensible if severe mental incompetency is part of the defense.". There's ways to split the baby here, where insults against the left and slurs were meaningfully different than insults against the right and this sort of non-slur disruption, but the moderation team there didn't make that argument and frankly didn't even try very hard, and coincidentally self-serving doesn't actually look much better even if they had.
((And it's not like this was successful at improving the quality of political discussion, even among its internal population: is banning the Big Gulp good as a policy matter, dumbest thread ever, closed by moderators after 477 posts.))
And in some ways, despite the many faults, this was a success story even for a few years after my ban: for nearly eight years their "fuck Nazis" policy actually did make fine distinctions between actual fascists and the merely right-wing, as made evident by protecting UKIP and not the BNP... until late 2015 had that eaten from the inside out.
It's not like there wasn't a coordinated group meeting in a shadowy room (literally called "Backstage"), almost all of whom were selected in part for their ideological affiliation since the Curt and Davenport fiascos. But at the same time, it's also a bunch of people organically deciding that they wanted to have people they trust make decent moderation decisions on one of the biggest boards for their fandom, when there had (... and continued to be, cfe Duck Call Lass) a bunch of really bad history on a number of places they cared about. A few of the moderators got kicked out for other unrelated reasons, but a lot of them did get eaten by their own for Culture War reasons; no small number of 2010-era moderators-and-clique were believably stating they specifically didn't want to do the sort of further steps that 2015-era people implemented.
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Is “colonizer” a slur? It targets a specific culture, and regardless of any attempts at reclamation, is usually pretty damn derogatory. Users regularly using this word are strong signs that a certain group isn’t wanted. It’s obviously usable as a slur.
Now, is it as offensive as the usual suspects? I don’t think so. Whether rational or not, the average, politically-neutral American has a stronger response to “n-----“. That’s partly historical context and partly suspicion of trolls, who rally towards the most visible source of offense.
I think the same goes for most of the left-aligned slurs. They fit the criteria but lack the same emotional valence or history, even to a hypothetical neutral observer. All the “strongest” slurs are more taboo on the left than the right.
Fair enough. I certainly can’t endorse a particular acceptable/unacceptable split, nor can I claim that the proverbial normie is making a reasoned decision.
My contention boils down to a lack of strategy. I think certain slurs would end up right-coded even if no one involved was acting strategically. This is due to the existing coalitions and their stated differences on factors like personal responsibility, free speech, and the concept of taking offense.
The idea that leftist generate/treadmill more low-grade slurs is interesting. It strikes me as intuitively correct, and I’d read it as downstream of those same coalitions. A norm that taking offense is valid would be expected to do so?
Maybe my wording wasn’t clear.
Given that leftists tend to consider “taking offense” a valid response, not to be strictly scrutinized, I’d expect more offense to be taken. That seems like it might generate new reasons on its own.
The converse is that right-wingers are more likely to disparage such reactions, self-limiting the number they actually generate.
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the multimc fork is https://github.com/PrismLauncher/PrismLauncher i think
There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth over whether reverting to the Technic launcher was worthwhile.
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