There comes a time in every discussion forum user's life that they espouse an unpopular opinion. Not something unpopular in a way that they have broken any rules. But unpopular in a way that many other users want to chime in with their disagreement.
Ratioed
On twitter it is called getting "ratioed" where the unpopular tweets have a higher than normal number of comments relative to likes and retweets. It is viewed as a negative thing to happen when you are on twitter, because saying unpopular things on twitter is seen as bad.
Here on themotte saying unpopular things is not bad. We are here to have discussions with people who have different points of view. If you say something unpopular but not against the rules then you are serving the purpose of themotte. Not only have you not done something bad, you have done something good. You have provided everyone else here with content. There might be some tribal instincts in the back of your head screaming warnings at you "oh no! you have said something unpopular. quick! defend yourself, moderate your position, attack your most aggressive detractors!" These instincts are wrong. Instead, by saying something unpopular you have become the bell of the ball. The star athlete that all the recruiters want. Etc etc. We all want to talk to you!
Death by a thousand cuts
Being the center of attention and wanted by everyone can be stressful, especially when it feels like a form of infamy. There is a common failure mode that we as the mods have to witness happen again and again. The person that is at the center of attention is getting minor attacks that don't rise to the level of moderation. Multiple people might say the equivalent of "I think you are wrong because you aren't smart", or other forms of implied insults. The person at the center of attention will eventually get worn down by all these small cuts and jabs, and they will lash out at someone making the jabs. The lash out often does rise to the level of moderation.
You are the solution
The mods have talked about this phenomenon and we have realized that there isn't a good way to solve this problem through moderation. But! That doesn't mean there is no good solution at all.
These are the strategies I have used when getting ratioed, they've kept me sane, kept me calm, and helped me enjoy my time far more:
-
Attitude - You are the popular one. Everyone wants to talk with you. Keep these in mind to avoid the tribal anxiety of 'everyone hates me I have to defend myself!'
-
Match Effort - There are lots of responses flying at you and these responses have varying levels of effort. If someone has a low effort comment I do not respond with a well researched and cited response, I will often try and avoid responding to low effort comments altogether. Remember, you are the bell of the ball, they need to come to you.
-
Prioritize the Best - Try and respond to your best disagreers first. The ones that bring up the best points, address all the things you said, or are just very polite about how they say it. You should be rewarding their effort, and hopefully signalling to other potential commentors that this is the type of comment you will respond to. This also helps with the next piece of advice:
-
Refer back to yourself - Don't get frustrated saying the same thing a bunch of times. If you find yourself having the same argument in two different places, then only have it in the place with the better disagreer, and then point the other people to those posts, or just extensively quote yourself. "I addressed your point while talking with [other user], see my comment here(link)".
-
Limit the back and forth - I will usually only give one response to most users. I will try and match their effort and address their points. I will try and have an extended discussion only with the best disagreers. So many instances of me moderating people happen ten or fifteen comments deep into a conversation, when almost everyone else has stopped reading. Both sides have already said the same thing multiple times, and they just become frustrated at each other "How can you resist the amazing logic and beauty of my arguments! Only a cretin and scum could fail to be convinced!" My suggestion is to just say your point and get out. You should expect to not have the last word when you are getting ratioed, so just embrace that reality up front.
-
Leave when you are done - Sometimes even with all these strategies you might reach the end of your patience. You just don't want to talk about it anymore. Try and be introspective and recognize when you have reached this point. Once it happens, thank your best disagreer for the good discussion, say you are done with this topic and leave the discussion. Do not feel obligated to respond to additional comments. Your further participation is only likely to get you in trouble. You will likely get more and more frustrated until you lash out.
I also have advice for when you see someone getting ratioed and you want to join in on the dogpile. But that advice is more of a charitable nature, like it would be helpful to the community as a whole, but probably not as much to you personally. If people are interested I'll add it.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I sometimes decide not to post just because I don't want to get Gish galloped or have to litigate my entire argument from first principles. Usually it has something to do with a belief based on Catholic theology which most people here don't have a background in and (more importantly) seem to look down on as inferior to modern materialism/atheism/utilitarianism (maybe we just all have PTSD from the Great Internet Atheism Wars).
It's not that I don't like explaining or getting pushback, it's mostly just the shitty, condescending, or dismissive tone people sometimes use when responding. Interestingly, the worst offenders are often members fellow right-wingers (edgy Nietzscheans, mostly) or centrist liberals. The leftists who post here are often really charitable and succeed in making me sympathetic to their views (shout-outs to @Hoffmeister25, @gemmaem, and @chrisprattalpharaptr).
As much as I like TheMotte, I'm really busy and responding to rude or derisive people on the internet just doesn't seem worth my time. If you pride yourself on "telling it like it is" or "being blunt" you're probably one of these people. Letting go of your righteous outrage and using a little tact and empathy goes a long way towards sparking good conversation and making this place more interesting and productive.
Forgive me for having a condescending attitude towards Catholic theology, which argues in favor of eternal punishment for finite sin, burning heretics at the stake, and claims that masturbation is worse than rape.
Not being a Catholic, I feel no need to forgive you, but being a mod, don't just post "Your religion is stupid" here.
Except my post was saying more than just that. I don't merely think that it is stupid because there is no reason or evidence which justifies its claims, but further that what it stands for is deeply immoral, incompatible with liberal morality, and dangerous for myself and most everyone outside of its grasp.
Yes, but your post also said that, and the way you said it is against the rules here. You are not the first, second, or fiftieth person to argue "What I said should be allowed because I'm right," but that's not how things work here, and if you've been here for any length of time, you know that. So follow the rules or you will lose your posting privileges.
Would the following comment receive a warning?: "Forgive me for having a condescending attitude toward woke ideology, which argues in favor of disordered sexuality, double standards that unfairly treat my race, and the violation of my property rights and freedom of association."
I doubt it, and I have a feeling it would be highly upvoted rather than sitting at -7.
Possibly. Depends on context. This is not a one-to-one equivalence, though.
Probably. We would prefer that up and downvoting not be used as "I agree/I disagree" buttons, but the reality is that that's how most people use them. However, your specific statement was deliberately antagonistic and deserved downvotes even from people like me who also have no fondness for the Catholic Church.
first of all, please update your quote to match my edited comment. second of all, i dont understand why you think my comment was more antagonistic than the example i gave, would you mind elaborating?
No. My quote reflects why you were modded.
Yes, I mind. "Please elaborate so I can continue to argue round and round and into the ground why I wasn't in the wrong" is a game I've played too many times, and I'm not in the mood for it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is the Motte. You may have noticed that there are quite a few people around here with ideas that are deeply immoral, incompatible with liberal morality, and dangerous. Nevertheless, we have norms against being deliberately unpleasant to people on that basis.
This place has never been free of unpleasantness, just look at how often innocent people get labeled as degenerate by right wing posters and no one bats an eye.
The poster was wondering why people do not approach his religion respectfully, and I explained why, yeah it was a bit snarky but nothing extraordinary for this forum. If a post with a similar tone was made against wokism or some other leftist ideology, I don't think it would be downvoted like this one and I don't think it would have been called out by a mod.
But maybe I am just hopelessly biased to see things accurately.
People do frequently post variations on "Wokes are degenerate groomers," and get modded for it, and the people who are modded for saying things like that use the same defense you are, that they were simply stating the obvious and defensible truth.
More options
Context Copy link
The left does get a lot of unpleasant rhetoric aimed at it, you're not wrong about that. Frankly, if the norms applied to the woke left were applied across the board, this place would be a lot less pleasant for everyone (Including the woke leftists, whom I think would promptly become subject to a yet worse standard, because some inequities are unavoidable. I say this as a long-since-resigned
woke leftistfeminist with intersectional influences. Frankly, as someone near the bottom of the congeniality ladder I would prefer that the median not slip further down).If this was a discussion about "Why do people not approach Catholicism respectfully?" then I think your post would be acceptable, because it would be on topic. Unpleasantness as a side effect of honest explanation is unavoidable, sometimes, around here. But this was, instead, a discussion about how to survive when your views are unpopular. Moreover, it was a discussion specifically instigated to try to help those people feel more at home and deal with it better. "Have different views" is not a good suggestion, in that context, particularly since breadth of viewpoints is something this forum is supposed to encourage.
I don't think his views are unpopular around here, just the opposite, alot of people here have a lot of sympathy for orthodox religions even if they are not themselves believers, and this shows from looking at comment ratings. If you look at his posting history, you will find that posts where he defends or promotes his religion usually garner plenty of upvotes on net. Meanwhile posts on this forum that are critical of religious orthodoxy usually are unable to get off the ground in terms of rating.
Also one of the reasons why it can be productive to say things in a tone that is more provocative than is necessary is because it increases the chance of drawing engagement, which can overall makeup for the unpleasantness of the post that sparked it.
Hm, but why does "drawing engagement" make up for the unpleasantness of reading a post defending religious orthodoxy, for you? To be clear, I'm not implying that I know the answer to this question, but I think it's worth examining. If, for example, you feel a serious sense of grievance towards organised religion, and engagement on that grievance is a way to have your feelings acknowledged, then I can see why you would want that engagement, but this may not be the best way to manage feelings of threat and injury from someone else's ideology. Alternatively, if drawing engagement makes you feel less threatened because it means you know you've succeeded in retaliating for the unpleasantness you experienced by reading them in the first place, then I think you should not give in to that desire for retaliation; don't treat this place like a battleground.
Another thing worth examining is what kind of engagement you want. After all, you're replying to someone who says that condescension makes them less likely to engage. Personally, I have found that I often get more engagement from writing in a more measured tone and/or from developing relationships with posters who then learn that I am likely to actually listen to their replies.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Thanks for the shout-out! The phenomenon you note is easily explained, of course. Most of the leftists on here who aren't deeply committed to charity have flamed out and left, already! Those of us who remain form a very specific subset.
I often feel an odd sense of fellow-sympathy with the honour-driven conservatives and religious traditionalists around here. It could be the shared virtue ethics, although Christian virtue ethics differs from the pseudo-Aristotelian kind in some pretty dramatic ways. But I think it's probably just that I, too, get tired of the edgy rightists and aloof centrists, and feel a certain solidarity with my ideologically-outnumbered fellows. You, too, are part of the ideological diversity of this place; every time you force the main flow of this place to deal with your more outsider-type views you're helping to establish that it's normal to encounter views on here that aren't perfectly aligned with local popular sentiment. And that means that when people encounter me they might be a little less likely to see me as an interloper to be resisted.
Perhaps some were sad to see that standard of charity dwindle to the point where further engagement couldn't be sustained.
A commitment to charity can't work when it isn't reciprocated.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
To be fair Catholic philosophy in particular seems particularly arcane to me. I've talked with Catholics before and while they're very intelligent it feels like we have to go back to first principles because lots of the words being used just have different meanings to me than they do to them.
That's a completely fair observation. I think there's a lot of philosophical "genetic distance" between mainstream beliefs and the Catholic Christian worldview.
I always imagine it like a tree of life diagram. Modern American liberals and conservatives are twigs at the end of one of the big branches. Socialists and ethnonationalists each exist on nearby, smaller branches jutting out from the same big branch. But Catholicism and its philosophy exist on a separate big branch entirely, one who separated from the first big branch way down on the trunk where the Enlightenment happened (oversimplifying a lot but you get the idea). And so we have to cover a lot of ground to have a fruitful discussion.
Another issue is simply exposure. I often think of linguistics fluency as a metaphor here. I grew up watching American TV, news, and movies in a mainstream conservative household while attending an unusual serious Catholic school. I gained some fluency in "American liberal" ideas from mass media, "American conservative" ideas from my dad shouting at the TV and from listening to Thanksgiving arguments, and in Catholic philosophy and social teaching from school. To be exposed to the first set of ideas is nearly guaranteed, exposure to the second is not too difficult to obtain, but exposure to the third requires some intentionality and self-sacrifice on the part of one's parents which is why almost nobody gets this exposure.
I think the best way to get around this issue is to simply grant things to your interlocutor for the sake of argument. I nearly always have to suspend my disbelief about stuff like the utilitarianism, philosophical materialism, teleology, the non-existence of natures/essences, etc. when reading posts on here because there are usually a ton of assumptions baked in to the "standard worldview" that most Mottizens seems to share. And because almost nobody wants to get dragged into discussing whether or not God or souls exist merely in order to discuss the lastest transgender bathroom outrage du jour.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
While I appreciate the shout-out, I’m very perplexed to see myself grouped in with the lefties. I’m a white identitarian and I’d classify most of my object-level political beliefs as “extremely right-wing”, though I did used to be a leftist and I feel like I do a pretty good job of steelmanning leftist positions when I make an effort to do so here. Apparently I passed the Ideological Turing Test on the occasions you happened to catch me doing so!
Fair point! You seem to pass the ITT to me, but I'm probably not the best judge of that. I'm not sure why I thought you were a leftist but your steelmanning efforts probably played a role. IIRC you also push back on some blanket statements from right-wingers in order to add some nuance. In any case, I enjoy reading your posts since I often disagree with what you have to say. Keep writing!
More options
Context Copy link
This has happened to me at least four times on reddit, it's funny to be accused of leftism and have to dig into the comment history to prove i'm rightwing
I haven’t had trouble remembering Hoff’s stances (though he has done some good steelmanning/Turing test posts!), but you do catch me every now and then.
More options
Context Copy link
I think it’s because you and I are both extremely easy to clock as Blue Tribe. I had this conversation on /r/CultureWarRoundup a while back, where regular users told me that I stuck out like a sore thumb, to the point where many openly accused or suspected me of being an infiltrator. Turns out that clues in my syntax, my approach to my arguments, and just all sorts of subtle clues gave me away as someone raised in a highly urban-coastal-liberal environment, which of course is entirely true. I always tell people that I’m “right-wing, but not conservative.” The same is clearly true of you as well, and is true of NrX and the extremely-online right more generally.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link