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'Perhaps there's a simple reason for this anti-America deal. Two of the key players you mentioned, Alice and Bob are both radical leftists. You even mentioned that Bob harbors anti-America sentiment. Subversive radical leftists are trying to undermine America's power when the nation is weak and vulnerable. Biden, though not a radical leftist (I know, I know), fits the role of senile idiot here.
Since you're looking for possible explanations for this seemingly irrational behavior, I thought I would supply an explanation.'
Surely the above would just be Tuesday at the Motte rather than a banworthy post, no? I'm fairly confident I can find a number of comments like the above with minimal effort. Posts without any evidence to suggest a conspiracy, things that are inflammatory and boo-outgroup, etc.
The Jew-haters' brigade is right, tbh. Their comments mostly aren't treated the same. I just happen to think that's a good thing and think you should just ban anything that crosses the line to clear anti-semitism, while they don't.
Tongue-in-cheek suggestion: Replace janitorial duty with an AI that flips the political valency of a given comment before someone is asked to judge it. Bonus points if you can train the AI to learn a given user's ideology. If we manage to abstract reality enough, it's the first step towards black mirror!
Should we also ban anything that crosses the line to clear racism, misogyny, *phobia, etc.?
You should:
Yes. Safe space. I think we all know the failure mode of this one.
Double down on your commitment to free speech. Let the Jewposters have their say, and treat them like anyone else. If they're polite and they bring receipts, who are we to judge their speech any more than judge those who hate democrats or think that mandatory schooling is the greatest injustice of all time? You'd win my respect, although we probably also all know the failure mode of this option too.
Give me the satisfaction of admitting to ourselves that we're basically reddit with a rightward slant and that free speech maximalism is dumb. Moderation (heh) in all things.
No.
I disagree with you that we treat Jewposters differently.
No.
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Saying that groups are conspiring to do the thing that the group would describe themselves as doing is different from accusing them of an unrelated conspiracy. For instance, stating that groups of Jews are plotting to enjoy Passover is, I would hope, uncontroversial. Similarly, stating that groups of Communists are plotting to abolish the private ownership of capital is also uncontroversial. All accusations of conspiracy fall somewhere on this scale but accusing self-identified left-wing people of wanting to do left-wing things (even uncharitably) is definitely different from accusing Jews of wanting to do things unrelated to Judaism.
I assume this is the more detailed reasoning for why one claim is considered inflammatory without sufficient evidence, while the other wouldn't be.
I had said:
Radical leftists is usually a stand in for anyone who voted blue in the last election cycle, and I doubt that any significant number of democrats would describe themselves as being anti-Americans trying to undermine America's power.
Saying that 48% of the US electorate are "radical leftists" is more controversial a statement than saying radical leftists are anti-American.
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We definitely also mod stuff like that. The ceteris is never paribus, sure, but it’s still against the rules.
I recognize that we don’t see or choose to act on everything.
It would be helpful to understand sometimes why you don't mod particular posts, such as this one. Reporting, most of the time, just feels like a waste of clicks these days; raising a stink in a comment sometimes attracts a statement, but between poisoning the atmosphere (you can't really publicly call out a comment without it coming across as a personal attack) and most likely putting whatever moderator chooses to respond on the defensive from the outset, it's also not really a good way to go. Would it be possible for the mods to aim to make a public statement on every post that receives more than a certain number of reports, even if just to explain why they disagree with the reporters' view of it violating rules?
(I don't think "you are the only one who reported that particular post though" would be a slam-dunk retort; if you look further downthread, there were definitely more people who were unhappy with it, so if this didn't translate to reports that is just a sign that this part of the community has given up on the reporting mechanism)
I feel called out at the moment, so, first, my mea culpas.
@Amadan I am aware that being a rightist partisan is not very conducive to the kind of space that the moderates wish to nurture. I, myself, personally moderate spaces where I have to manage people being political. Knowing this makes my behaviour even more unacceptable, and for that I apologize. I don't really have an excuse for my rhetoric, for liking the heat instead of the light. But I am not a passing internet troll, or fishing for responses from outraged liberals. I have been here in one form or another, and I actually like being here.
Moving forward, I will try to not clog up your moderation queue with my hot takes. I'll try.
@4bpp I disagree with the notion of reports as an enforcement mechanism because it is trivially easy to game, if one is a motivated bad actor. If an individual post is bad, one can downvote it. If it annoys one sufficiently, one can rebut it (although I concede the effort may not be worth the squeeze in nearly all cases.) Reporting is the tool of last resort, when something is noisome and of no value whatsoever.
But you report so much that the lack of response feels like a waste of effort?
I can't recall the last time I reported anyone. That's how little I use the feature. Do you want to be a moderator? You have a thousand posts... a lot more than me. Obviously you have opinions on what the Motte should be. But the demos has an opinion, too. Expressed through upvotes. Metathoughts about the pernicious nature of such social media systems nonwithstanding, is that not the fairest way of determining the merit of what someone is saying?
(I admit that the proposition of 'being maximally evil in posture to EA people' is horrifying, but no more so than the people who constantly talk about 'race realism'.)
I am also aware that the Motte has problems with ideological diversity. But that isn't my fault, that those on the left evaporatively leave. It's not like I'm running around conspiratorially reporting the TracingWoodgrains of the world. They left. Cannot I talk to those of a similar ideological bent? It's not like I'm pretending to be objective or anything. Am I being asked to keep it down to make sure the last leftists don't just pull up stakes and leave, leaving the Motte a witch-chamber?
I've been on a hot streak of hot takes recently, so I'll probably take a step back for a while. But if you have a problem with my posts or you believe that I don't belong here, you can say so. You don't have to write me up in a post complaining about moderation. That's all I have to say.
We aren't trying to nurture a "moderate" space. I personally am a moderate, but many of the mods are not and being "moderate" is not the Motte's ethos. We have lots of rightist partisans here (and a few leftist ones). The problem is not being partisan; the problem is being antagonistic and inflammatory just to dunk on your enemies.
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In what way are reports an "enforcement mechanism"? They do not enforce anything - unlike votes and comments, they don't even leave a public record. Reports are a mechanism for drawing the attention of moderators, and nothing else.
I do not come here for a discussion that is curated solely or primarily by the demos, as defined by everyone who has an account and bothers to click arrows getting a vote. There are plenty of spaces like that all across the internet, many with bigger crowds, and they generally don't work, or at least they don't work to produce a space in which political discussion that is worth reading can be had. An internet forum, in its natural form, is an island in Scott's meta-libertarian archipelago, not a community of people who are chained together by birth and geography and are thus compelled to organise in a way that to them feels fair - it is easy to join, and fairly easy to leave. The appeal of the archipelago is that any island can offer whatever it wants, be it democracy or compulsory-two-buckets-of-shit-a-day Soviet hell; and if you don't like it, you can just leave for a different island, or go and create your own and hope that the customers will come. The Motte's pitch was not a democracy, but a carefully tended autocratic garden with a particular prominently stated set of rules. If it devolves into a democracy, and if these rules are being enforced selectively or not at all, then in the best case it is simply because its operators are inattentive, in which case reporting helps draw their attention to the right place. In a worse but more realistic case, they are failing the criteria they promised to uphold due to bias or the human fear of social censure, as hinted at by @Amadan in his parallel response, in which case reporting serves to convey my disapproval, thus levelling the social censure incentive landscape a little. In the worst case, they are simply committing sticker fraud. I cling to the hope that that is not the case, because exit, while cheap, is not free, and the archipelago is actually finite and shrouded in a fog of imperfect information.
On top of this, on the object level, the main signal that our demos sends by up- and downvoting is "we want more content that helps the right wing". I can see that from my own posting history easily enough - I generally make posts in a fairly narrow range of length, type and sophistication, and the only ones that reliably get over +20 upvotes are those that contain strong unhedged defenses and concurrences with right-wing talking points. Conversely, any attempt to directly argue against right-wing positions is capped at +10, and without careful hedging and gratuitous but-of-course-leftists-also-bad disclaimers it's easy to land in the negatives.
That's perfectly consistent with a scenario in which the community heavily leans towards your preferences, and you trust that the mods will take care of it when it doesn't even without your prodding.
At this point I am so exasperated with the moderation that the answer to that is "yes", which of course categorically disqualifies me. So, reinterpreting your question, the reason I am reporting is not that I want to be a moderator. If I were to aim to become one, what I did (picking fights with and getting myself personally loathed by most of the current staff, antagonizing the ideological core of the community and saying we actually need more of that, ...) would be among the dumber approaches - I should instead have made a point to defend the mods in public, posted solidly right-wing but slightly more thoughtfully and measuredly than everyone else, and perhaps helped Zorba with backend work at some juncture.
Of course it is also your fault. When you make posts that are actively unpleasant to a class of readers, such as ones that are pitched to rally your tribe to bring about their defeat or ones that say it's "always acceptable to [engage in the act of harassing, intimidating, or abusing them, especially habitually or from a perceived position of relative power]" (circumscription courtesy of dictionary.com) (here), you encourage them to leave. The obvious mirrored example is unfortunately not so effective because American online right-wingers have all grown a thick skin out of necessity, so maybe try to imagine how inclined you would feel to stay in a forum where a bunch of Mexicans are circlejerking each other about plans on how to illegally immigrate into the US and defraud dumb gringos out of their money, or Russian soldiers planning torture of American volunteers they caught in Ukraine if you want an even more colourful example.
Why do you think the current staff loathes you? I have no negative feelings about you. Your record is 2 AAQCs and no warnings! You're a good poster. You're just on the left which means you get downvoted a lot. Sorry about that, but that is how the community is, as you've observed.
Whether or not Zorba uses his "doge" mechanism next time he needs new mods, the way to become a mod is not by kissing our asses.
Well, the times I have butted heads with you and naraburns (and that's just the recent ones I remember) over moderation still stand out to me as the most hostile interactions I have had on here with anyone. Of course this could just be a consequence of everyone who is not a moderator routinely keeping their offense at me and others to themselves for fear of the mods above, so the level of anger I felt from your responses in those contexts was actually below the ambient SNR...?
Two AAQCs seems like something a monkey on a typewriter prompting ChatGPT should have outperformed in expectation over the course of >1000 posts. I'll take my "upstanding mediocrity" achievement, I guess.
Eh, that just makes it into a countersignalling game. The way to most any favour is to kiss ass in such a way that not even the target realises; as a system designer the duty falls on you to achieve alignment between your system's value function and easy entryways for ass-kissing ninjas.
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It doesn't disqualify you, and none of that would have helped you. If you want the job, I'll be more than happy to vote for you if I'm nominated for nominator the next time around.
Thanks for the sentiment, but - no, there's something to be said for "don't pick people who are too interested in the job" as a perfectly reasonable heuristic for any sort of policing/powertrippy occupations. Also, it seems far-fetched to not expect people to consider personal affinity and vibes in picking future colleagues, and their use as a criterion is easily steelmanned. Moderators are people too. Amadan all but stated that his modhat actions are constrained by his aversion to "getting flack" in public for unpopular decisions. It presumably wouldn't exactly help him moderate if he already had to engage with individuals he finds aversive at the backchannel stage that seems to precede every mod action.
Also, cities like NYC pick Chinese beat cops to deploy to Chinatown etc. for good reasons.
The Mottes moderation selection system is rather convoluted, where the moderators select nominators from the community, the nominators nominate and vote for nominators of the next round, for several rounds, until the final one, which is the actual moderator vote. All this to say the moderators aren't the only ones with a voice, which is how I got mine. I tried supporting as many left-wing as right-wing candidates.
You're right that vibes matter, but from the debates we were having during the voting process, the vibes in question were "is this dude going to sperg out", not their political views.
I too was actually invited to Zorba's wild ride once (for two non-consecutive iterations, no less). The discussions I remember taking place seemed to come down to something that amounted to "solidly right-wing, but demonstrated grace and level-headedness in interactions with the outgroup" - the specific mechanism was talking candidates up for instances where they demonstrated particularly impressive feats of tolerance, but because no particularly extreme left-wingers were in the running, this naturally favoured the extreme right as their room to impress was greater.
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Fuck no.
Well, maybe if someone else wants to do it. But no, we get enough flack when we do mod posts and people are unhappy about it; now you want an open forum for people to bitch every time we don't mod a post? Fuck if I'm going to explain myself for every post I mod or don't mod. (As for "a certain number of reports," it's pretty rare for a post to receive a large number of reports and not get modded. Usually those are unambiguously pretty bad.)
Look, I think we are pretty damn transparent. We usually explain ourselves, we let people argue with us, we engage civilly on threads where people are calling us shitty mods. Sometimes we are too transparent, because it just invites ankle-biting and rules-lawyering. I go through phases where I will patiently explain to someone why I modded them and let them argue with me for an entire thread, and phases where I just say "Banned, bye" because I feel like it's a waste of time explaining things to bad-faith grudge-holders who don't really care about our reasoning, only that we didn't mod the way they think we should.
We do read every single report. Including yours. I would guess we actually act on about 5% of all reports.
Why does any particular mod not mod a particular post? It might be because the mod thinks it's okay, it might be because it's borderline and the mod isn't sure whether they think it merits action. It might be because the mod thinks it merits action but doesn't want to be the one to make the call, for various reasons. I will frequently look at a mod queue full of "borderline" posts and think "I don't want to deal with these right now." Maybe I don't have time to think about them, or maybe I'm in a bad mood and am afraid I might be too trigger-happy, so I will hope some other mod makes the decision. Then maybe I see three days later no one has made the call and it's still in the queue, and I sigh and approve it because clearly no one felt strongly about it and I'm not going to come and ban them three days later.
As it happens, that particular post by @crushedoranges was discussed in the mod channel. It was definitely borderline. We were split about 50/50 between "It's a bad post but not a rules violation" and "This deserves a warning." In the end we defaulted to no action. On a different day, a different mod might have warned or banned him. @crushedoranges posts a lot of crappy comments like that so he's on thin ice, but this time he skated. Does that mean we are not always 100% consistent and that sometimes a much worse comment will pass while a less bad comment earns the poster a ban? Yes, yes it does mean that! Yes, that definitely happens!
So it goes.
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This is a false equivalence.
First of all, "Radical leftists want to undermine America" is itself a bit more Fox News than I think we normally go. I would probably say something more like "The left wants to weaken America's military, so of course they support closing overseas bases." I think a lot of leftists would actually agree with my framing, and would disagree that closing bases counts as 'undermining' America. They would probably say that America should spend its money on welfare rather than overseas bases, and that closing bases actually strengthens America in all the ways that count. Thus, they don't want to undermine America, they just want to close bases.
The Jewish conspiracy angle leaves a lot of unanswered questions. I do not actually accept the reasoning that Jewish people want to undermine the UK any more than I accept the reasoning that the American left wants to undermine America. I think that the thing you most need to justify when making that argument is the premise. Any time anyone posits a Jewish conspiracy, they never explain the alleged motivation of the alleged Jewish conspiracy. I believe that the American left wants to close military bases, because it makes sense according to their goals (spend less on military and more on welfare). I do not believe that British Jews want to 'undermine the UK’s geopolitical power when the nation is weak and vulnerable' out of sheer evil Jewishness, because that is not a real motivation.
I think if someone went around suggesting that the Vegans were the masterminds behind every Islamic terrorist plot, they would be banned in short order. The problem with the Jewposting isn't the form, it's the sheer nonsense of it. You can't post crazy gibberish and expect to be taken seriously.
Au contraire, I can promise you that we have some very elaborate explanations for the motivations of the Jewish conspiracies.
Paging @SecureSignals - What do you think?
I doubt that there is a 'Jewish Conspiracy', but if it exists, its motive is probably something along the lines of 'not being murdered or driven from their homes.'
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The mods are very clear that single or few-issue posters are treated much more harshly for completely reasonable reasons, namely that they end up using the community as their soapbox for their ONE thing. It happens that floating around right-leaning forums with lenient speech policies are a not insubstantial number of people for whom their One Issue is the Jews. The main reason treatment of secure signals actually improved recently is that he decided, in a welcome shift, to start discussing other things in addition to his single issue.
Unless this is someone's alt, doesn't look like they're a regular Jewposter.
Anyways, object level aside since obviously I don't like the people obsessed with Jews either, this is just a much less lofty expression of free speech ideals for a community to follow. What @self_made_human articulated was more or less reddit with a right-shifted Overton window, but not far right enough (yet) to tolerate regular Jewposting. What's the difference between 'we treat anti-semites more harshly because our userbase finds their opinions inflammatory' and 'we moderate conservative opinions much more harshly because they're just sealioning single-issue posters?' There's plenty of garbage posts here with nary a fact in them and packed chock-full of opinions I find plenty inflammatory (and even articulated in a much cruder and more inflammatory way than the Jewposter!), and the only difference between them is the opinions of the majority.
Sure, if the mods make enough unpopular decisions the community dies. Sure, nobody can reach some platonic ideal of objectivity or impartiality. But abandoning the pretense so easily is a bit of a letdown.
I will push back against this claim. The Motte isn't just reddit with a right-shifted Overton window.
Our Overton window is wider. Enormously so, though not as unique these days as Twitter competes in terms of permissivity if not quality.
There are very few topics that are outright verboten on this site. Most of them would be spam, harassment and the like. You can just about advocate for any viewpoint as long as you do it politely and with enough explanatory force behind the views you endorse.
Report them! Few of us mods have the time to read each and every comment posted on the site. I once did, when I was rather underemployed, but if something doesn't show up in the report queue, it is much less likely to be moderated, at least promptly.
It's inevitable that unpopular topics will get reported more often, and will thus be moderated more often, even while holding the quality of the comment equal.
For this particular one, the volunteer janny system flagged it as a bad comment, it had multiple reports to boot. We take that into account when making moderation decisions, but it certainly isn't the only thing that matters, our discretion overrides it if we deem a comment to be within the rules despite people (rarely) reporting on vibes rather than the merits of a comment. There are users so consistently downvoted that they'd never leave the filter queue if we didn't override it. This place isn't a majoritarian free-for-all, we do our best to accommodate unpopular viewpoints.
Cirrus had multiple warnings, and was hit with a ban for a single day. That's a slap on the wrist as punishments go, and he is welcome to reframe the same point as long as he meets our other guidelines.
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You're correct that that hypothetical comment wouldn't be moderated, even if it's not quite the level of quality we hope users aspire to.
If you had to ask for my rationale in not moderating it, my reasoning would be along the lines that it is a far less inflammatory claim. It doesn't take much effort to show a dozen examples of far-leftists strongly advocating for the death of the American Empire. I'm sure if we asked politely, we'd find a few on the site itself!
Our rules about inflammatory comments and evidence implicitly assume a subjective reference frame. That is sadly unavoidable. Someone advocating for the death penalty for pedophiles and rapists would be treated very differently from people saying that miscegantors and homosexuals should be put to death, in the former cases, the arguments being made draw on significantly more cultural consensus and common-knowledge (implicitly). We allow the latter class of argument, you can call for homesexuality and race-mixing to be made illegal, we demand additional explanation and rigour to your argument even if it bottoms out in subjective personal beliefs.
Speaking ill of the Jews is allowed, or else Secure Signals wouldn't be posting here. That he is, is a sign that he (usually) meets our standards of discourse.
It would be too much to expect that we can keep everyone happy when it comes to our judgement about what counts as inflammatory and needing justification versus what is a clear and self-evident Truth™, but that's unavoidable, and we try to find a balance.
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