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Notes -
Something like the BLR, but maybe 'must give two-sentence summary' + 'mods can, and are expected to, delete bad posts if they have a vibe that they're bad posts even if they technically comply with the rules'?
Sure with the second part applied very rarely if at all. If you're going to have a lower-effort queue, let it be lower-effort.
It depends on the content, though. If the second part was rarely applied, we'd just get the same old BLR, which I mostly found annoying and the mods decided to nuke.
I specifically remember /u/greyuniwave, now suspended, posting a ton of shit in the BLR, usually about covid or conspiracy stuff. Quite a few of his posts were heavily upvoted despite me calling them shit, so my opinion is a minority - but BLR posts often were, and despite that the mods considered it low quality enough generally to be removed, so eh.
Picking a specific BLR thread ... the content just seems uninspiring? Half is awful, whether it's grayuniwave's 10 posts or others (this did get warned, but 45 points?)
But even most of the 'good posts' read like the second page of the NYT. "Matthew Yglesias Responds to Ross Douthat on CRT, the 1619 Project and Public School Curricula."? "On May 24, 2021 the United States State Department imposed a “Level 4: Do not travel” advisory on Japan, the highest level used to advise US travelers against traveling—in effect, a quarantine."? "French lesbians and single women to get IVF rights"? Who cares? (clearly, readers did).
Compare this to an ACX monthly linkspost, or the better parts of HN or /r/ssc, or our toplevel posts, which are just more interesting.
The toplevel effortpost restriction seems to serve as a content restriction preventing the worst of 'random news item that could be replaced with gpt-3 output' or 'JUST IN: corporate racist democrats hate christians.', even when the posters/readers still find the former interesting, and absent explicit content discrimination to balance out the lack of implicit discrimination, the BLR would just suck again.
A BLR without mods removing lots of stuff would still be fine, and I'd still speedskim it, but reluctantly.
If it's shit then you can always just not look at the BLR. Or you could have a mod-curated feed and an uncensored one.
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