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 -
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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