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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   4977 thread views

[META] A Whole Host of Minor Changes

There's a pretty big set of changes coming down the pipe. These shouldn't have much impact on users - it's all internal bookkeeping - but there's a lot of it, and if there's bugs, it might cause issues. Let me know if anything weird happens! Weird, in this case, is probably "comments you can see that you think you shouldn't be able to", or "comments you can't see that you think you should be able to", or anything else strange that goes on. As an example, at one point in development reply notifications stopped working. So keep your eyes out for that. I'm probably pushing this in a day or two, I just wanted to warn people first.

EDIT: PUSH COMPLETE, let me know if anything goes wrong

Are you a software developer? Do you want to help? We can pretty much always use people who want to get their hands dirty with our ridiculous list of stuff to work on. The codebase is in Python, and while I'm not gonna claim it's the cleanest thing ever, it's also not the worst and we are absolutely up for refactoring and improvements. Hop over to our discord server and join in. (This is also a good place to report issues, especially if part of the issue is "I can't make comments anymore.")

Are you somewhat experienced in Python but have never worked on a big codebase? Come help anyway! We'll point you at some easy stuff.

Are you not experienced in Python whatsoever? We can always use testers, to be honest, and if you want to learn Python, go do a tutorial, once you know the basics, come join us and work on stuff.

(if you're experienced in, like, any other language, you'll have no trouble)

Alt Accounts: Let's talk about 'em. We are consistently having trouble with people making alt accounts to avoid bans, which is against the rules, or making alt accounts to respond to their own stuff, which isn't technically against the rules, and so forth. I'm considering a general note in the rules that alt accounts are strongly discouraged, but if you feel the need for an alt, contact us; we're probably okay with it if there's a good reason. (Example: We've had a few people ask to make effortposts that aren't associated with their main account for various reasons. We're fine with this.) If you want to avoid talking to us about it, it probably isn't a good reason.

Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is not set in stone.

Single-Issue Posting: Similarly, we're having trouble with people who want to post about one specific topic. "But wait, Zorba, why is that a problem" well, check out the Foundation:

The purpose of this community is to be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs. It is to be a place for people to examine the beliefs of others as well as their own beliefs; it is to be a place where strange or abnormal opinions and ideas can be generated and discussed fairly, with consideration and insight instead of kneejerk responses.

If someone's posting about one subject, repeatedly, over and over, then it isn't really a discussion that's being had, it's prosletyzing. I acknowledge there's some value lost in removing this kind of behavior, but I think there's a lot of value lost in having it; letting the community be dominated by this behavior seems to lead to Bad Outcomes.

Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is also not set in stone.

Private Profiles: When we picked up the codebase, it included functionality for private profiles, which prevents users from seeing your profile. I probably would have removed this if I'd had a lot more development time, but I didn't. So it exists.

I'm thinking of removing it anyway, though. I'm not sure if it provides significant benefit; I think there's a good argument that anything posted on the site is, in some sense, fair game to be looked over.

On the other hand . . . removing it certainly does encourage ad hominem arguments, doesn't it? Ad hominems are kind of useless and crappy and poison discourse. We don't want people to be arguing about the other person's previously-stated beliefs all the time, we want people to be responding to recent comments, in general.

But on the gripping hand . . .

. . . well, I just went to get a list of the ten most prolific users with hidden profiles. One of them has a few quality contributions! (Thanks!) Two of them are neutral. And seven of them have repeated antagonism, with many of those getting banned or permabanned.

If there's a tool mostly used by people who are fucking with the community, maybe that's a good argument for removing the tool.

On the, uh, other gripping hand, keep in mind that private profiles don't even work against the admins. We can see right through them (accompanied by a note that says "this profile is private"). So this feature change isn't for the sake of us, it's for the sake of you. Is that worth it? I dunno.

Feedback wanted! Again!

The Volunteer System is actually working and doing useful stuff at this point. It doesn't yet have write access, so to speak, all it's doing is providing info to the mods. But it's providing useful info. Fun fact: some of our absolute most reliable and trustworthy volunteers don't comment. In some cases "much", in some cases "at all". Keep it up, lurkers! This is useful! I seriously encourage everyone to click that banner once a day and spend a few minutes at it. Or even just bookmark the page and mash the bookmark once in a while - I've personally got it on my bookmark bar.

The big refactor mentioned at the top is actually for the sake of improving the volunteer system, this is part of what will let it turn into write access and let us solve stuff like filtered-comments-in-limbo, while taking a lot of load off the mods' backs and maybe even making our moderation more consistent. As a sort of ironic counterpart to this, it also means that the bar might show up less often.

At some point I want to set up better incentives for long-time volunteers, but that takes a lot of code effort. Asking people to volunteer more often doesn't, so that's what I'm doing.

(Feedback wanted on this also.)

I want your feedback on things, as if that wasn't clear. These threads basically behave like a big metadiscussion thread, so . . . what's your thoughts on this whole adventure? How's it going? Want some tweaks? Found a bug? Let me know! I don't promise to agree but I promise to listen.

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Hmm. You could be right. I'll toss this into the list of stuff to check.

Might just be that the symbols should remain the same size but the hit area should be boosted.

This is all kind of awkward for me to test because I hate browsing on mobile devices, so I may not be the best judge here :V

Just noting, something in the last day or so broke that collapse/uncollapse functionality on this waterfox classic browser (both the +/- signs and the vertical bars)

I hate to say it, but I'm not sure working on ancient obscure browsers is a good use of dev time. If you can find the issue I'd happily take a pull request, or even a solid diagnostic, but I'm not gonna direct anyone to work on it.

Yep I get it, and I'm resigned to using different browsers for a few sites that break over time. Just seems crazy that simple things can be incompatible, but I don't know my way around javascript or github to spot how after working forever, now onclick "collapse_comment" reference could be not defined for me starting ~2 days ago. edit: I think a version update will fix it on my end, so all good

not sure btw why this would be happening unless something is incredibly strange. are you blocking JS by any chance? we load the collapse_comment function from comments.js so if you're using any extension that's blocking that script, blocking it will make some things break.

otherwise if you have a devtools screenshot i can take a quick second and take a look

Strange yes, although I realized it was very similar to how the stackexchange sites broke backward compatibility with older browsers 1-2 years ago for comment collapsing/uncollapsing. And I knew that was fixed for waterfox in a later update. So I just tested it and found the release was 2022.06 where they said "Web compatibility improvements to fix breakages across a variety of websites". In waterfox v2022.04 comment collapsing is broken on stackoverflow and in the new motte as of a few days ago, but both working fine in v2022.06. Just unfortunate for me because that's all after the 2021.09 version update which made their whole browser way slower, which kind of defeats half the purpose of using an older nonstandard browser.

okay sent in a fix: https://github.com/themotte/rDrama/pull/654

thanks for the report

Awesome, thanks! Interesting to hear what that compatibility issue was (sounds like a handy operator). I probably do need to jump to Basilisk or just finally give up on XUL addons and go back to Firefox, but you may have given me a final stay of execution

More comments

hmm. yeah, the weird thing i think is from what you're saying it was working before. we didn't really change anything except to fix an issue with the the unread indicators (although that was in a separate function, so not sure why it'd affect it other than maybe parsing?

okay i'm able to reproduce this on Waterfox Classic 2022.04. will dig into it a little bit.

Even while logged in I am able to read posts (not comments) of users I blocked, and up or down vote them. Is this intended behaviour?

Hey, request for more info!

Were you seeing that post in the post list, or had you specifically gone to that post's URL to look at it? We're supposed to block it in listings, but if you're explicitly going to look at the post, we currently just sort of shrug and say "up to you, man".

I saw a comment (by an unblocked user) in /comments, clicked "Context" and was able to read and vote on the post. I expected it would be like comments, where even if I go to a comment by a blocked user I only see its author.

But I suppose it comes to dev preferences which is better. Thank you for taking the time.

Ah, yeah, we might be adding a "you have blocked this poster, click to view" overlay. But it's low priority right now, I think.

Whoops, that probably got lost in the big refactor. Will take a look at it soon.

Notifications list no longer shows the post you made along with the new reply. I think this is probably negative value since you basically have to click "context" to know what's going on (yes, you can see what thread it is, but since that's highly likely to be "culture war roundup for X week" that doesn't help much).

This was honestly an intentional change; the previous format had a bunch of weird issues that could cause responses to be hidden, and it was very unfamiliar for Reddit users. We may at some point add more customization or context, but right now, this works, at least, without weird issues.

Bug report: If you load more comments on a subthread while having new comments marked by "new", all those comments get a second "new" attached to them, like so: "newnew". This continues each time you load more comments on a subthread, such that you can eventually have "newnewnewnew" or worse.

EDIT: Markdown is interpreting the tildes as strikethroughs and I cannot escape them. You know what I mean.

I believe this should now be fixed.

Looks like it is, yeah.

Got it in our bug list :) I suspect someone will solve it soon, though, it's mostly just kinda annoying.

Hi, long time lurker, but I have a few questions regarding the Vault. The Vault is near and dear to me because it was some random High Quality contribution crosspost, idk bestof or something, that brought my attention to TheMotte years ago. I like the Vault because it gives me a full list right away of writing to checkout/read. But I do have a few concerns.

  1. Is it updated every month? or is it like a yearly thing because currently I'm seeing HQC from July 2022 and not June 2023 on the Vault. Maybe I missed a detail somewhere that says that.
  2. Is there a way to capture and display the context surrounding a HQC? I think the quality contribution is best read in-context. If it's a reply, it's the dialogue/interplay that really highlights the quality of a HQC. Even if it's a top-level comment, the replies/inspirations/counter-arguments that spawn off the HQC are worth noting because a HQC already made me, the reader, keep wanting to read more on that topic. Maybe a) only direct replies to the HQC, b) only parents up to 3 levels of the HQC, c) any children threads of the HQC that includes replies from the HQC's author.

Have you considered looking at the monthly AAQCs?

It's updated inconsistently, I'm afraid. I was pushing on it back when we were on Reddit because I wanted to try it as a way to attract new users. It hasn't really accomplished that, and so I haven't put more time into updating it; unfortunately right now it takes manual work.

I've been thinking about setting things up so it can get automatic updates from the best of this site, and am actually working towards that, but that's going to be a lot of work.

The threading was always an issue, unfortunately, and I didn't have a good way to manage that. Still don't! I'll get back to that at some point.

Why are the four (maybe five?) most recent posts in the culture war thread two sentences long or low-effort? Just bad luck?

I believe it’s 4. I reported what I assume is the fifth as low effort yesterday but, while mods have modded a more recent top level comment as low-effort, they have not modded that one, so I’m guessing it’s fine.

Yeah, just bad luck. I'm thinking that we really do need to do a mod recruitment round, which requires some annoying infrastructure work first.

Is account creation currently disabled? I had a friend attempt to create an account and it returns "Unable to verify CAPTCHA" which I've been able to replicate.

Huh. Nope, that's broken. Looking into it.

Edit: Looks like our Captcha provider was malfunctioning.

It's a bit concerning that the most upvoted post in the current CW thread (at +53!) is what is essentially a bare link - especially considering that @Amadan just rejected the idea of a bare links thread further down the page.

I like that the CW thread is a place where deeper analysis is expected in top level posts and it would be a shame to see the community start slipping on those standards.

Agreed in this case. I do think exceptions can be made for genuinely major breaking news of huge significance (like a major terrorist attack, a JFK/MLK level assassination, the Ukraine invasion happening etc) but the mods already tolerate this.

The threshold should be drawn higher than a federal court decision, though. Like, “Trump dies suddenly of heart attack” would be major breaking news, “Trump charged with more crimes by NY prosecutor’s office” isn’t.

With the volunteer mod thing, I would like it if there was a way to see the context of a post. Often I'll get a two line post show up, and it's difficult to know if it's a good one or not without seeing the conversation that it's a part of.

I approve of the single-issue posting rule. I don't care one way or the other about alts and private profiles.

Yeah, it's honestly just "click the context link". This is not a great solution; better solutions will take a lot of coding work.

(open it in a new window otherwise you might not be able to get back to the volunteer page)

Oh I'm dumb, I didn't see that button. Never mind me then.

There's a link to the context right below the comment. I read the context on almost every comment I janny. (Make sure to open it in a new tab.)

At some point I want to set up better incentives for long-time volunteers

Please don't. I janny because this is a one-of-a-kind place on the Internet and it needs support if it's to survive. I'm sure other jannies feel the same way. The people who would janny for external validation are exactly the people you don't want doing the job.

Are you having a hard time recruiting jannies? That's the only scenerio where I think any kind of incentives might be a good idea. Are you willing to share numbers?

On a related issue, you mentioned that you are tracking how closely the jannies' ratings match the mods'. Would it be possible to give the jannies periodic feedback on how good of a job they're doing, such as when a moderator rates the same post? Personally, I want to become better at it, and the surest way is with frequent feedback.

Yeah, you definitely have a point there, but it's also a balance. If we have a choice between "one person diligently volunteering, everyone else has forgotten about it" versus "fifty people diligently volunteering, forty of them care about it and kinda like the shinies they earn, ten are just doing it for the shinies", the latter option is probably better. This does not extend indefinitely - if it was "40 people just doing it for the shinies" then something's gone wrong - but while it takes a delicate touch, it doesn't necessarily demand no touch.

The people who would janny for external validation are exactly the people you don't want doing the job.

I janny occasionally for internal validation, did it more often in the past, and then largely stopped because I didn't see it make any obvious difference!

I'd like to think that I could be at least an ok mod, so I'm not sure your argument works if minimal effort is spent on checking whether the new volunteers are doing an ok job. N=1 and all that.

Reading Sotomayors and Jackson’s dissents all I can think is: “this is an excellent example of why affirmative action needs to be banned”

link

A post that is 100% culture warring, and booing outgroup scores (+44/-5) and has no mod action. If the majority of readers here want to read posts that dunk on leftists, then they should expect to run out of leftists to dunk on.

Either we all need to spontaneously coordinate and suppress our base instincts, the mods need to start cracking down on culture warring (as distinct from analysis, which is what the Culture War thread is purportedly for), or we all need to make peace with the fact that our community has exactly the amount of ideological diversity that we deserve.

Edit: previous discussion

Coincidentally, I just banned him (but before I saw this post) because I just saw the report, which as far as I can tell, is the first time it was reported in the six days since it was posted. He was banned not for saying mean things about Sotomayor and Jackson, but for posting a low effort dunk that was pure culture war (and because he now has a pattern of that kind of crappy commenting).

Takeaways for you:

We don't always catch every single post, and if you want our attention drawn to a post, reporting it is a better strategy than complaining again about why we do not conduct moderation according to your precise specifications and timetable.

I just saw the report, which as far as I can tell, is the first time it was reported in the six days since it was posted.

IIRC, almost the same thing happened on the old site: Someone made a bad comment, there was a public complaint about it, and a mod replied that there were zero reports filed about the bad comment (including by the complainant, obviously).

I'm not sure if it's universal or just Motte-like, but I definitely sympathize with the urge to talk about an issue rather than acting on it (and clicking on the Report button is "acting on it"). I'm also not sure if it's a good predilection or not, but I try to fight against my instincts while I'm here.

Yeah, this happens all the time.

And meanwhile there are a few people who keep reporting stuff just because they disagree with it. Welp.

Strongly recommend using the Report button when you think it's deserved!

I'm quite sparing in my reports, at least in non-egregious cases, because it always makes me feel mildly like a tattletale.

I report constantly. Especially aaqc. Seems valuable to bring it to people's attention.

Oh I definitely make AAQCs all the time, I just didn't mentally think of them as the same kind of report!

Nah, clicking the Report button isn't "acting on it", not here. It might effectively be acting in places with rubber-stamp mods that ban anything with a lot of reports, but these mods aren't a rubber-stamp. I could report your post here 100 times, and all that would happen is I'd get banned for spamming reports.

It is true that not all reported comments get acted upon, but it is also true that virtually no unreported comments get acted upon. If you think a comment deserves mod intervention, report it.

The entire split between "words" and "actions" is false, but that doesn't mean people (including me) feel that way. Composing a comment evokes different emotions than clicking a button, even if the results are identical.

The point is you can't reasonably expect for a comment to get modded, if no one reports it. In that sense reporting is acting.

I guess I assumed at least one mod had seen a 6-day old, second level comment and the 10th highest comment of the week. If I was wrong, mea culpa.

I assumed one of you had seen it, but, given your policy of not banning people for saying mean things about politicians, chose not to ban a comment that was merely insulting a politician.

I can only be grateful at what must be the best possible outcome for me. Moderation certainly seems less insane than my past conversations with mods has made it seem. It kind of seems like the real disagreement wasn’t with banning such comments, it was whether to ban them as “boo outgroup” or “uncharitable/unkind”. I will only be reporting such comments as “boo outgroup” going forward.

(Though to be clear, is “Trump is a venal fascist clown” a violation of the “boo outgroup” rule?)

Fortunately I’m not particularly interested in arguing for a specific rule, since fundamentally the reason these comments are harmful is they make productive and diverse discussion more difficult.

I guess I assumed at least one mod had seen a 6-day old, second level comment and the 10th highest comment of the week. If I was wrong, mea culpa.

I can't speak for the other mods, but when I'm reading over comments I'm often not thinking about them with mod-brain, if that makes sense. There's been times I've browsed recent comments, gone to look at the mod queue, and said "oh shit, yeah, that comment I literally read a minute ago was awful, wasn't it".

Reports absolutely help, and reporting it for the right thing is also important, but if it's ambiguous, don't stress too much about it - choose a report reason that's defensible and you're in the right ballpark.

(Every once in a while someone reports a twenty-paragraph megapost for "low effort" and I tend to just sort of approve those after a quick skim to make sure it's not the word "cheese" repeated a thousand times, so if someone is being antagonistic in a megapost, and you report it for "low effort", that might be a wasted report; don't do that. "Not reporting megaposts as low-effort" is basically the bar of report-quality that I ask :V)

I guess I assumed at least one mod had seen a 6-day old, second level comment and the 10th highest comment of the week. If I was wrong, mea culpa.

Maybe someone did. Maybe I skimmed past it the first time I saw it. I don't always read through the latest threads looking for things to mod.

I assumed one of you had seen it, but, given your policy of not banning people for saying mean things about politicians

That isn't really an accurate description of our policy. You can certainly say "mean things about politicians" that will get you banned, but that alone isn't likely to. It depends on context and what you are saying.

I will only be reporting such comments as “boo outgroup” going forward.

Do as you please, but if someone criticizes a politician (even using mean language) and you report it as "boo outgroup," we're still not going to mod that comment just because they weren't nice to Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.

But you will mod it as boo outgroup, correct? If not, what is the difference between

Trump is a venal fascist clown”

And

Reading Sotomayors and Jackson’s dissents all I can think is: “this is an excellent example of why affirmative action needs to be banned”

Those don't sound similar. The latter is based on things that Sotomayor and Jackson actually did. The former just calls Trump names; if it is based on something he did, it certainly doesn't say so.

But you will mod it as boo outgroup, correct?

Not necessarily. It depends.

That post shouldn't be alllowed by a neutral application of the rules imo

I'm actually interested in the object-level question of 'to what extent are sotomayor's and jackson's opinions actually lower-quality than the other justice's', but it's hard to separate that from the 'everyone i dislike is dumb' effect

@ZorbaTHut Apologies if I'm exhausting your patience or making too many demands on the time of the volunteers keeping this running. I can only assume that this thread being so high up means it's still relevant.

This time, I would like to request a feature I've seen in our sister site rdrama (man, adversity makes for weird bedfellows), namely the ability to create or register to specific interest groups.

I believe it looks !programmers or !geopolitics, and anyone who has signed up for those gets a ping.

(I'm not going to reproduce the versions used on rdrama, though they're a hoot)

I assume the code for that is already open source, and of course a lot of the code base is carried over already. It would serve as a sort of tag for those interested, I know I'd use it for top level posts quite a bit.

I'll leave it to you to decide who gets to make them.

I sorta like that idea but I'm not sure I like that implementation :V

I'm also . . . not totally sold on the idea, honestly. One of the things that I think makes this work is a lack of headlines; you can't just skim the recent posts to see which one is your personal bugbear that you get angry about, you have to actually read things. (Fun fact: I came up with that theory when moderating The Motte, which imported the Culture War Thread from the Slate Star Codex subreddit. I later found out that this was actually an intentional design decision when the SSC subreddit mods created the original Culture War Thread.)

Setting up pings kind of turns this on its head, and I'd be worried about this making things a lot more toxic.

I sort of had a similar design philosophy when setting up the Vault categories; you'll note there's intentionally no Culture War category, no [Political Group] Behaving Badly category. They're all categories, but none of them is a category that you can click with the intent of getting mad about.

I think if I were going to do this, I'd want to use the Vault categories or similar, and I'm not sure anyone would actually use the feature then, which sort of defeats the point :V

I'm not seeing how that's the case? I've usually seen pings put at the very bottom of the post, or as a separate comment entirely where the entire point is to just ping and draw attention to a post itself.

I see it as primarily drawing attention from those who've opted in, and not having any effect on those who haven't.

So:

Topic X

...Wall of Text...

!transhumanists

It doesn't seem obvious to me that this has any pertinent drawbacks!

After all, you can already use markdown to make headlines

And I don't see any injunction against it, even if it's rarely used

I'm not seeing how that's the case? I've usually seen pings put at the very bottom of the post, or as a separate comment entirely where the entire point is to just ping and draw attention to a post itself.

The whole "notifies people that it's happened" thing is the problem. I could, say, add a ping for !lgbt, then show up to every single lgbt-related thread to get angry about it. Whereas right now, you kinda have to read the culture war thread to find the LGBT-related posts, which acts as a damper on that whole behavior.

I see it as primarily drawing attention from those who've opted in, and not having any effect on those who haven't.

Part of the duty of an admin is figuring out how to tweak the community culture, because personal behavior feeds back into the culture which then feeds right back into personal behavior. If every LGBT thread is filled with the same half a dozen people who specifically want to get angry about LGBT subjects, that hurts the community for everyone.

After all, you can already use markdown to make headlines

And I don't see any injunction against it, even if it's rarely used

Quite honestly, you don't see any injunction against it because it's rarely used. Rules have costs, and this issue seems to be mostly not a big issue right now . . . but if it became trendy to make big post titles for controversial stuff, I might honestly start cracking down on it.

And yes, I recognize "the war against headlines" sounds ridiculous :)

Private profiles- It is perfectly possible for people to look at one another's profiles to understand the views of that user and their development over time in a constructive way, rather than for ad homonym attacks.

I know that is what I would try to use it for.

However, this is theory, if people using it primarily for ad homonym attacks is what happens, then that is an issue. I think there is value to be had here. But it has to be weighed against how it is actually used and the moderation's ability to handle antagonistic use.

As others have pointed out, private profiles only constitute an inconvenience, the motte can still be scraped and user's posts aggregated, but inconveniences are real, and will affect the behavior of most people.

"Ad homonym" means "to the same word", and more accurately "to a word which is either spelled the same or pronounced the same as a different word".

"Ad hominem" means "to the man". Arguing that someone is wrong because he is evil is arguing "to the man", and this is what Zorba was talking about.

bare links thread

/r/culturewarroundup

My vote is no. It's too easy to abuse, spam, and suck up all the oxygen.

Agreed. It destroys debate and will quickly become the most popular thread on the forum. Minimal standards of effort for top level posts are a good baseline, with some exceptions (that already tacitly exist) like major breaking news stories.

I support this, but the mods should just delete 'bad posts' per their judgement because there isn't an effort-filter

I support this. There really are times when I only want to dump a link without a lot of comment, not because I'm doing "can you believe what That Lot did?" but "here's an odd, quirkly or interesting thing I saw in the news or online".

If it’s not CW, wouldn’t that be fair game for Fridays?

If it is, how odd or quirky can it be?

I’d also expect some people to abuse this. Even if the single-issue posters don’t, it kind of legitimizes substack spam.

I very much welcome the policy on single-issue posting. It has been keeping me from engaging with the site more.

My profile is private because I am in a position where I would be fired if any of my disagreement with woke orthodoxy came to be known. On reddit I practice opsec by purging my comment history every few months and registering a new username. I haven't done that here but I would if you got rid of the function.

My profile is private because I am in a position where I would be fired if any of my disagreement with woke orthodoxy came to be known. On reddit I practice opsec by purging my comment history every few months and registering a new username. I haven't done that here but I would if you got rid of the function.

I support private profiles as a defense against malicious outsiders and a respect for anonymity. If a fellow user has a desire to understand someone else's views, there is always the option of messaging that user or asking for said user to elaborate his or her thinking in an ongoing conversation.

I understand the inability to read posting history might be inconvenient for some, but with how small and active this community is, Adam, a frequent reader, has a high chance of bumping into Bob, Charlie, and David, also frequent users, and learning their interests and views.

Well, that's probably the first good argument I've heard against it :V

Hrm. So, hypothetically, if we'd made it a thing that admins could apply on request - or made it a button you can hit to request privacy - and we'd approve the privacy flag if you weren't spamming/etc, would you have requested it instead of just deleting stuff?

(edit: all that said I have no idea how someone would trace you from your post history to your job, but not from your username to your job)

Hrm. So, hypothetically, if we'd made it a thing that admins could apply on request - or made it a button you can hit to request privacy - and we'd approve the privacy flag if you weren't spamming/etc, would you have requested it instead of just deleting stuff?

I would have requested it for sure, and it would have made me less likely to nuke everything. But I don't want to promise that I still won't. I am rather paranoid.

(edit: all that said I have no idea how someone would trace you from your post history to your job, but not from your username to your job)

My username is a generic ratsphere pun that I don't use anywhere else. And it is surprising how much you can learn about contributors just by getting some bits and pieces of information from them here and there. For example, I am 90% certain that one of my former colleagues used to be a prolific poster here.

I am not saying that my fear is completely rational, but the admittedly rather far-fetched threats I have in mind are:

  1. One of my rants pisses off the wrong person and they start playing internet detective.

  2. Future AI scraping tools use style detection to create profiles on every internet commenter, everywhere.

Having a private profile helps a little bit against both.

Future AI scraping tools use style detection to create profiles on every internet commenter, everywhere.

I'll note one thing to keep in mind when dealing with this sort of fear. Specifically, AI is getting better at a lot of things, including directly reading minds via microexpressions and/or straight-up van-Eck phreaking. If HR is that concerned with ideological conformity and they get around to deploying that, you lose anyway.

That is both terrifying and comforting.

Right. A lot of the work in prepping, at least if you're trying to do it efficiently, is to work out when X won't be useful because in the situations where you need X you are screwed anyway for other reasons. I'm scared of nuclear war, but I haven't stockpiled food. This is because I live in a city (though not one big enough to be nuked, for this exact reason), which means that if society breaks down for long enough for me to starve, hungry mobs will take any stockpiles anyway. I do have two 10L water bottles, because thirst is much faster (so thirsty mobs taking it are less likely to find me before dying, and even if they do I'd still get use out of it) and because water supplies could end up intact but contaminated by fallout (circumventing the thirsty mob entirely, as without some kind of tipoff they'd just drink the tap water and be poisoned rather than searching for preppers).

My username is a generic ratsphere pun that I don't use anywhere else.

Off topic, but I have to say it's a brilliant pun and makes me smile whenever I see it.

Thanks! Appreciate that.

I share your fears about a sufficiently powerful AI easily de-anonymizing me, but at this point my prior infosec was poor enough that there's no real hope of going back without shedding all the online personas I'm attached to.

I don't think the private feature will do anything to help though, since anything that scrapes the Motte as a whole intentionally or incidentally will already be able to view all of your comments, with your pseudonym already attached to it.

As such, I have to disagree and would prefer the private feature to be removed since the annoyance it causes me outweighs any marginal decrease in risk of being outed.

I don't think the private feature will do anything to help though

Some inconveniences for the scrapers is better than none. The most extreme action would be making The Motte accessible to only registered users, which, in my opinion, should be the standard for all forums.

Code push complete! Let me know if anything seems amiss.

(aside from the unexpectedly long downtime, sigh)

Is there a changelog anywhere? I checked the Git but it wasn't obvious to me where to find it.

I've actually never sat down and done changelogs; it's timeconsuming and I think you're the first person who's asked about it :) You can see the changes made in the commit history, though this doesn't tell you which version we were on and what version we're now on.

The big change this time around was that we used to have three ways in which comments could be removed, "self-deletion", "filter/approval system", and "mod removal". This is now consolidated into two ("self-deletion" and "filter/approval/mod") with more consistent behavior, and also, the ability to unremove stuff, which we actually couldn't do before.

Setting up as part of your build pipeline the generation of Automated Release Notes is pretty awesome. There's the primary benefit of course, but an additional "silver lining" in that it encourages/requires great issue naming conventions and processes for the automation to work well. I've implemented systems in Azure DevOps that use some community tasks that generate .md files and automatically push to a project wiki, and this looks like the (overengineered) equivalent of step `:

https://github.com/marketplace/actions/release-notes-generator

Once you generate that .md file, it can be prepended on a "root" one that is the source for a Release Notes page.

I like the idea, it's just never really been a priority. That said I'm also hesitant to put more barriers in terms of contribution, I don't want to require perfectly formatted git commit messages; I think that would be a net minus overall.

Let users assign tags to other users viewable only to themselves (the tagging user, not the tagged user).

Would make it easier to more quickly thought-terminate my reading early on with friend vs enemy tags. No I don’t remember usernames, I’m from the anon image boards over the hill.

Mostly kidding on the above but you should absolutely not prevent users from autistically focusing on their own hobby horse and sharing continuous updates with us, even if it’s just beating the (now dead) hobby horse. I’ll collapse the comment section if it’s tiring.

Another small UI/UX suggestion while we're all here:

Consider reversing the positions of the posts and comments button when viewing a profile. Most people have precisely zero posts, so you pretty much always have to click on the comments button to get to what you're likely looking for.

In other words, have comments the default and posts what you can choose to open if you need to.

Yeah, fair point; I think this is just a relic of the rDrama site that we never thought about changing. Task made!

Mostly, I agree with moderation decisions recently. But I think the bans on longstanding members like Count and Hkynka are overboard.

Or at least, I think the mods should consider that regulars are afforded the privilege of another option for bans, namely a short time-out ban of a day or two to calm down if the mods think discussion is getting too heated or people are trolling too hard or being too uncharitable or whatever, which can be implemented repeatedly without putting a user on the ‘ban track’.

Do count and hlynka occasionally need to be told to calm down and take a day off? Sure. But threatening them with long-term or permanent bans for this is ridiculous. The forum would be a worse place for their absence.

I wonder if it would help to create a mechanism/policy that did something like:

[Mod comment] This comment is too antagonistic/snarky/uncharitable/whatever. It is now hidden from public view. You may either edit it to be less [whatever] and submit it to be approved to show again, or delete it yourself.

We have considered requesting people to change their comments in the past. The response has been highly negative by some users. Like on the level where they would rather eat permanent bans than be asked to change what they wrote.

Sort of the inverse of a shadowban? I love it.

Yeah, this is always a gnarly one.

The core issue is that I don't want people who are malicious/antagonistic/angry and immune from reprisal. Yes, we'd be worse off without Hlynka et al, but at the same time, it doesn't take a lot more antagonism for that to not be the case anymore. Hlynka is on kind of a fine line.

I would like to integrate this all better and provide better stats so we can make more sensible objective judgements about whether someone is a net benefit or a net negative. This all requires a much better sense of what posts people are making that are valuable and what posts aren't. This is sort of what the volunteer system is starting, but it's a long way to get there from here and in the meantime it's all painfully subjective and arbitrary.

tl;dr: I think it is reasonable that bans, in general, Look Bad in a long-term sense, but I also think it would be reasonable if they "wore off"; the problem is that the way they "wear off" should be "by making other good posts" and we don't have a usable metric for that. I think this is currently the least-bad of a lot of admittedly bad options.

I actually agree that ‘post something good’ could be a condition of avoiding or limiting a ban.

I actually agree that ‘post something good’ could be a condition of avoiding or limiting a ban.

This is the back-end function of the AAQCs. One drawback is that some users (notably, yourself) opt out of that in various ways, so we still often have to rely on a vague sense of reputation instead of specific "here are good posts" metrics. But AAQCs are noted on user accounts, and having AAQCs gets you moderated more lightly--for a while. The hardest cases have always been the "lots of AAQCs, but also lots of antagonism" users. Partly because even if we turn a blind eye to the occasional torching of community capital by someone who has accrued a lot of it, their negative behavior emboldens negative behavior from others who have not accrued such capital.

But, partly to keep the AAQC reports to a reasonable length, not every good post gets recognized every time. This is a conversation the mod team has been having for as long as I've been moderating, and I'd guess it goes back even farther than that. The most clearly-functioning tool we have is the banhammer, but especially in communities like this one, we actually want to be using it as little as reasonably possible (e.g., on spambots, link farmers, etc.). The AAQC report is a functional carrot to the banhammer's stick, but I just flat-out can't get it done on better than a monthly basis, it's too selective to include every good post, and ultimately it only adds an account notation that doesn't always capture the larger picture.

(Incidentally, there is a lot of money out there being directed toward finding ways to encourage fruitful discussion between people who disagree. As far as I can tell, most of it is being given to humanities scholars to write essays congratulating themselves on being open-minded while still excusing hatred for all the right targets. I think the Motte has already succeeded far beyond what most of the professionals examining these issues ever manage to achieve. So I'm very interested in @ZorbaTHut's continued development of technological approaches to the problem, on a present budget of about $225 per month.)

continued development of technological approaches to the problem, on a present budget of about $225 per month.

I wasn't even aware that The Motte had a Patreon, I thought the link to support the Motte in the sidebar used some other mechanism.

Would it be possible to change the link to "Support The Motte (Patreon)"?

I hardly have the discretionary income to contribute right now, but I commit myself to doing so when I end up abroad and more financially stable. That's a lot coming from me, because I'm a incorrigible cheapskate most of the time.

I'm impressed that you guys can keep it all going on a shoestring budget, even if we're less taxing than most websites!

Would it be possible to change the link to "Support The Motte (Patreon)"?

Might be too wide, but I'll give it a shot :)

So I'm very interested in @ZorbaTHut's continued development of technological approaches to the problem

I'm actually going to give a shot at implementing some of the backend behind Twitter's community notes system. I'd come up with similar ideas before, but had never figured out how to implement the juicy part. They figured out how to implement the juicy part, and if it scales well enough to run on the Motte's setup under our budget - which I'm pretty sure it will - then it might turn out to be a great way to handle moderation both in the positive and negative directions.

Annoyingly, it might obsolete a good chunk of the volunteer algorithm that I wrote, but at least the UI for that should still function.

. . . also, man, I should've plugged the Patreon, shouldn't I. I keep forgetting to do that.

still feels weird

Both of them, and other longstanding members, have received a lot more slack than someone with less history would get. But they can't be effectively immune to consequences no matter how often they're told to chill out.

This is ironic. I enjoyed the op, it made me feel a sense of community and camaraderie, so I did my duty. And through the volunteer system I just watched @Amadan ban @Nantafiria for a week for getting upset at a mod note Amadan wrote accusing them of trying to be as annoying as possible. I would find this whole affair objectionable even if I didn't consider the possibility that Nantafiria wasn't trying to be as annoying as possible, but through that lens it's a fucking clown show. Basically Amadan put on his mod hat so he could fling shit at regulars and then ban them if they dared respond in kind.

I was given the option of reporting it as deserving a warning or deserving a ban, and I went with deserving a warning because I thought to myself 'mods aren't going to get banned anyway so what's the point in going for that?' But as I was reading more of this thread I was reminded of this post by Amadan yesterday -

Feel free to report my moderation as "uncharitable." As is always the case, when someone reports one of my posts, I will let another mod judge.

And I realised there is no point to any of it. Never mind a ban, no one is going to warn him, mods don't get bans or warnings, they get to occasionally walk back their most egregious offences after the fact - that's why he can throw the idea in @AvocadoPanic's face and then put his mod hat on for no other reason than to mock Nanta and @TheNybbler and tell them to "write gooder" - a joke designed to look silly and fun from the outside while slapping the targets in the face with hypocrisy. In other words, maximally antagonistic. And then Nanta naturally responds in shock and outrage, and Amadan acts like he has no choice but to ban him for it. What a fucking joke. Why are mods even in the system?

While you might be right about how he feelsl the structure of @The_Nybbler's post was actually bipartisan and accurately so. We might guess from history which side he favours, but the comment itself doesn't dunk on the outgroup, it dunks on the two screens nature of modern democracy. The very fact that everyone here reads it as a potshot at the left is the joke (although one which strengthens your argument about our heavy right wing lean), because if you wrote that exact post in a heavily leftist forum everyone would think you were dunking on the right.

Would you have found the warning satisfactory if @Amadan had been more professional towards nanta?

Nybbler was assuming his usual conclusions. Nanta was playing armchair mod. Everyone else sort of picked sides based on who they thought was more annoying. I kind of see the appeal of a big group warning. It should be designed to warn off anyone thinking about joining in…but I think that might actually be conveyed better by multiple messages.

So, proposed alternative: avoid group mod notes. Warn nybbler for this comment per its reports. Warn nanta under his “no u” reply. I’d expect this to go over more like prima’s warning and actually generate some polite disagreement.

I would, but I don't think mods should be strictly professional. It's the power balance that gets me here, and while the mods are usually quite good about it, I am not the only one to notice the sassiness which has recently been creeping into amadan's mod notes. And while I obviously love sassiness, it is possible to bring it to a post at a level that wouldn't get a user banned, and he should stick to that in mod notes, or accept that the additional heat he is adding will receive a commensurate response.

Also it still seems pointless to me to see mods in the volunteer queue.

I am not the only one to notice the sassiness which has recently been creeping into amadan's mod notes

Sass? Sass? Oh no.

or accept that the additional heat he is adding will receive a commensurate response.

I always accept that putting heat (or sass) in my mod notes will probably piss some people off.

I still reject your claim that I rope-a-doped Nantafaria into getting banned. That was neither my intention, nor a predictable outcome; it was nothing more than him losing his shit because I (correctly) pointed out that he's been going out of his way to be antagonistic and court bans for quite a while.

Also it still seems pointless to me to see mods in the volunteer queue.

Well, on the one hand, virtually all reports on mod notes are because someone (usually the moddee) is pissed off about it. Or because the mod was too "sassy." But a bunch of volunteers agreeing "Hey, this post is actually pretty bad" could in fact be useful information for us.

Sass? Sass? Oh no.

Did you read the next sentence? The one where I say "I obviously love sassiness"? One might get the impression I didn't think this was the worst thing in the world. That I thought you behaved spectacularly shitty towards Nanta but that it was an understandable mistake borne of a power imbalance that has previously gone unnoticed because your level of sass was too low to add heat. And that now your level of sass is rising, it has become noticeable and resulted in you accidentally overstepping the line, because you are in an elevated position of respect and users can't respond with equivalent sass.

I still reject your claim that I rope-a-doped Nantafaria into getting banned.

Well of course. I don't mean because of what you have written, I knew you would reject the idea before I even posted my op. It doesn't bother me mind you, don't think I'm complaining about it, it's just a fact. I hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that Amadan will reject anything I say regardless of what it is. If I said water is wet you would reject it.

Well, on the one hand, virtually all reports on mod notes are because someone (usually the moddee) is pissed off about it. Or because the mod was too "sassy." But a bunch of volunteers agreeing "Hey, this post is actually pretty bad" could in fact be useful information for us.

So you reject the idea that mod notes shouldn't be in the mod queue because mod notes get reported almost entirely out of spite, but could be useful information on very rare occasions (rarer occasions than this presumably)?

Dude, when you rage at me for being mildly "sassy" and accuse me of abusing my power against anyone who shows sass to me (even though you are doing it right here), I don't know what kind of dialog you are looking for. Addressing what you say doesn't mean I am obligated to agree with you, nor does it mean I'm "rejecting anything you say regardless of what it is."

Is this a bit? I said it's not a big deal, you read that as me raging at you. I said it was an understandable error, you read me accusing you of abusing your power against anyone who sasses you. You rejected my explanation so hard you can't even read it. Why would I want any kind of dialog with you? Addressing what I say doesn't obligate you to agree with me, I agree. It kind of does obligate you to address what I say though, don't you think?

Lol I know, you don't think it does because I just defended eating babies or whatever you decide this post is saying.

Reading previous posts of moded users is one of the few times I use the profiles screen.

@Amadan ban @BurdensomeCount seemed to be in this instance directed at a specific word choice in the post, combined with his 'history'. Evidence for the history claim would have been nice, but then so would a more charitable reading of the post in this instance. After scrolling through a month or so of their posts he didn't seem to me to be excessively inflamitory. Reviewing his posts; I had engaged with several via the ⬇️ button. That we didn't immediately appear to be overly ideologically aligned, reinforced my belief that he had been modded unfairly.

Is there an easy way to filter for modded comments by a specific user? The mod log doesn't appear to be filterable by user.

I understand the desire to bring more light than heat. Sometimes the modding seems to stamp out the ember before there's evidence that anyone other than non-contributing snitches or mods has actually been inflamed. My preference would be for at least some heat before it's stamped out as inflamitory.

Myself upon reading something inflamitory to me often like to pause to see I can understand why I'm having an emotional response. That I'm then able to challenge or put inquires to the poster helps me understand their position and my emotional response. Part of the reason I come here is to be inflamed by people that are more accessible and responsive than is generally elsewhere. I find this helps me generally be less inflammable and parse the arguments of others.

Being rude to the mods is rude. A ban for:

That's not why I'm here, but fuck you and the horse you rode in on, too? The fuck?

…replied to a mod is reasonable. Jannies are owed some respect for their free labor. Broadly speaking, the mods do a good job compared to their equivalents elsewhere on the internet. Though Amadan’s behavior was immature, that wasn’t the appropriate response.

mods don't get bans or warnings

False. A mod getting banned would probably mean that mod being removed, which has happened once. We do, occasionally, warn each other, though usually (but not always) we talk to each other directly rather than doing a public redhat on each other.

they get to occasionally walk back their most egregious offences after the fact

True. We are human beings and volunteers and sometimes we'll recognize when we lost patience and back down.

In other words, maximally antagonistic. And then Nanta naturally responds in shock and outrage, and Amadan acts like he has no choice but to ban him for it. What a fucking joke. Why are mods even in the system?

Despite my avatar, mods are not required to be robots and we do not have to write warnings or mod notes in bland language that cannot possibly upset anyone (especially those being admonished to chill out). Whether or not you appreciate my tone, responding with "fuck you and the horse you rode in on" has never been acceptable.

@Nantafiria's ban also factored in the fact that he has a long history of being "maximally antagonistic" - he has one of the longer rap sheets among repeat offenders. I didn't slap him with a week ban just for mouthing off this one time.

False. A mod getting banned would probably mean that mod being removed, which has happened once.

Why were they removed? Do you recall?

Whether or not you appreciate my tone, responding with "fuck you and the horse you rode in on" has never been acceptable.

Neither has accusing someone of trying to be so annoying they get banned. And I don't care about his history, you provoked him. That's banana republic shit. No he shouldn't have replied that way, but he wouldn't have had the chance if you hadn't put your mod hat on to throw zingers at him. Or am I crazy, and nobody else here would find it upsetting to be accused of being so fucking annoying it looks like a deliberate ploy to get banned?

I don't expect mods to be robots. But when you wear your mod hat I do expect you to behave the way you want others to, because that's the freaking job. Be better, give us a model to live by instead of demanding we do as you say, not as you do. I don't think I'm asking for the moon here, you can write interesting mod notes without resorting to mud slinging can't you?

Or am I crazy, and nobody else here would find it upsetting to be accused of being so fucking annoying it looks like a deliberate ploy to get banned?

It's not that you're crazy, it's just... is it your first time?

Insisting the mods live up to their station is my favourite windmill.

Who was the mod who got banned/removed?

Hlynka.

It was quite a while ago.

I thought so too, I recall that happening before the migration, but I wasn't sure if someone else had flamed out in the interim.

At some point I want to set up better incentives for long-time volunteers...

Giving people better incentives to volunteer goes against the idea of volunteering. Perverse incentives. Volunteers volunteer because they enjoy volunteering. There is no need to add janny-lite badges next to their names.

Yeah, this is actually a concern as well. I have to make sure the incentives are minor enough that the only people volunteering are those who actually want to do it.

It's a tough balance.

What? What on earth are the perverse incentives here?

If you want more people to volunteer, then you give them incentives to do so. Adding more volunteers is good if, as this post presumably hints, there aren't enough of them already, and since there's no vetting system, you can't even claim that people attracted this way are going to do a worse job.

Those who volunteer simply enjoy volunteering. But incentives go against the spirit of volunteering. There is a gain. You gain something, even if that something is so minor "that only people volunteering" would want it.

I like critiquing. I write detailed critiques and analyses of people's creative writing on anonymous message boards. There is no other incentive beyond the act of critiquing itself. No updoots. No badges. No awards. There is no gain.

The volunteering system on The Motte is good. It's really satisfying. Essentially, you are critiquing other people's posts, judging their writing based on set rules of this community, and you are limited to only a few response options. It's simple. I don't need anything else, and neither does any other volunteer.

since there's no vetting system, you can't even claim that people attracted this way are going to do a worse job.

Sure you can, if you think the populations selected by either will be different. You don't need vetting; effort acts as a filter as well.

Thank you for calling out the people doing the volunteer moderating! I mostly browse the Motte before bed, and am rarely in the mood to make an effort post (or generally argue on the internet) and don’t want to post a ‘+1’ to avoid consensus building. It’s nice to know there’s something I can do as a lurker.

I know there are a million ‘to-do’ things- but might it be possible to show how much a volunteer’s thoughts reflect the mod’s, perhaps with some sort of (private?) “percent agreement”? I wonder if that might be a useful way to help people get better at it, and thereby take effort off the mods over time.

don’t want to post a ‘+1’ to avoid consensus building

FWIW I don't think the mods consider that consensus building.

The issue is that "how close your thoughts reflect the mods" is, more or less, how we're determining whether your votes are influential or not. And I sorta don't want to expose that number in detail, because then that's a great metric for people to use maliciously (i.e. "I'm going to vote accurately until I reach Regularly Matches The Mods' Opinions, but then if I find something spewing hatred at Discordians, I'm going to vote it highly because I hate those people").

I've been thinking about some kind of feedback system that pops up once in a while ("thanks! you helped approve 12 comments! no we're not telling you which ones"), maybe associated with medals that show up permanently on your profile.

Or like, cosmetic hats that you can put on your usericon.

I am actually not joking about that.

I see the potential attack vector, and both of those solutions seem like good ways around them. Medals and cosmetic hats both are great ways to encourage helping mod! Although if you do do hats, perhaps gate them to the number of comments successfully approved, rather than the total amount of modding done? I think that little bit of mystery would help to interest people all the more in modding properly.

Anyways, thank you for making this community possible! I’ve left Reddit entirely with the new third-party-app debacle, and this is now my only source of online debate.

Mod decision prediction market when (only half-joking)

If we had some sensible currency we could use I'd honestly be interested in it.

But I also suspect it wouldn't move fast enough; we need responses pretty fast, on a huge number of small markets. Not really suitable for a decision market.

Could that make it a little closer to a game, and increase how much people do it?

On the volunteer system, is it possible to have the link always redirect into a new window? One of my biggest annoyances is losing my new since last read markings on all the new posts when I open the volunteer link and then am get back to the page I clicked on the link.

We've got a task open for this but it hasn't really percolated up to the top. Victim of a lack of volunteers, really :/

I've asked for this before, in the meantime just remember to middle click on the link or long press and open in a new tab.

Holding the control key and right-clicking opens the link in a new tab, too.

Agreed! New tab preferably.

The variety of topics discussed tends to be pretty slim, it will be nice to enforce some variety by reducing the number of single-issue comments.

I'm not sure that would work, and might just reduce the total number of comments without changing the quality. I can't say it's really a problem for me, since I can simply minimize threads.

Agreed, I'd love to see a wider variety of comments here.

Single-Issue Posting: Similarly, we're having trouble with people who want to post about one specific topic. "But wait, Zorba, why is that a problem" well, check out the Foundation:

The purpose of this community is to be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs. It is to be a place for people to examine the beliefs of others as well as their own beliefs; it is to be a place where strange or abnormal opinions and ideas can be generated and discussed fairly, with consideration and insight instead of kneejerk responses.

If someone's posting about one subject, repeatedly, over and over, then it isn't really a discussion that's being had, it's prosletyzing. I acknowledge there's some value lost in removing this kind of behavior, but I think there's a lot of value lost in having it; letting the community be dominated by this behavior seems to lead to Bad Outcomes.

For clarity, is this 'posting' is as in starting a topic, 'posting' as in 'turns every topic about their pet topic,' or 'posting' as in 'replies consistently about a topic they are interested in when it comes up, but mostly lurks otherwise'?

There's a spectrum of single-topic interest, and while I assume you mean the more obnoxious one-topic posters who hijack/drone out/etc., that's not quite how the point is framed.

The first two are definitely more of a problem than the third. If I noticed the third, I might kind of laugh about it, but I'm unlikely to consider it a problem unless it's, like, every time it comes up and they have a pre-canned copy-pasted spiel or something.

I've seen that kind of behavior on Reddit, though, so that's a thing that can happen!

So e.g. somebody who mostly only gets involved in Ukraine war threads, but does so in a sense of "trying to figure out what is going on" as opposed to "kill Putin now!!1!" copypasted 100 times, would be fine?

I'm not a single-issue poster of either sort myself, obviously, but if I were of the former sort then what you put in the OP might have chilled me.

I personally never look into people's profiles and don't see much reason to.

Not here, but I once shared a dataset (on /r/datasets) and one of the comments was promoting a website offering a related dataset (for money). When I looked at the account I noticed they had made 2 comments ever, both promoting the same website. I reported to the mods (who I doubt would have noticed) who warned the user.

That is to say: individuals can notice patterns that mods can't simply because there are more of us. If a mod notices that a user is a problem, there's a good chance the user has been poisoning the well for a while.

Coming from the other side of this, I’ve been arrested several times for stalking and trespassing so it’s mostly a reflexive habit.

I’ve been arrested several times for stalking and trespassing so it’s mostly a reflexive habit.

Please elaborate.

Say what? Is that a euphemism?

Similarly, we're having trouble with people who want to post about one specific topic.

Can you make your point clearer about what you mean by "one specific topic?" Mods here frequently sneer at discussion surrounding "Da Joos", and that hurts their credibility in my view when it comes to vaguely hinting at something they don't like. If you have a specific complaint in mind, why not just say it and be clear? I can see @Amadan confirm the complaint is directed at me, so I ask for clarification on what you want me to stop doing.

I can't seem to find an easy way to filter for top-level comments, but browsing my history for the past 6 months suggests that most of my top-level comments are not related to "one specific topic". My top-level comments include the most upvoted top-level comment in this community so far. My second-most upvoted top-level comment is indeed about Da Joos in that it was about the ADL's propaganda campaign intended to pressure Congress for more federal DHS funding.

Would you consider that post about the ADL and my recent posts about Superman/Captain America to be posting about "one specific topic"? I don't think so, any more than posting about some propaganda campaign by a BLM organization and then analyzing the cultural influence of Rap in another post would be posting about "one specific topic." By the way, anybody interested can compare my analysis there of Superman to this coincidentally-timed Rolling Stone article about the first Jewish actor to be cast as superman- I thought about posting a top-level comment in order to elaborate on my thinking surrounding the connection between cultural myth-making and collective moral consciousness, but I decided not to due to the growing complaints from the mods directed at me, so you can count me as at least partially-chilled even before you made this post.

Lastly, the complaints about "Da Joos" are begging the question. If I'm right about the things I post about, then they are clearly worth frequent discussion in a community dedicated to the Culture War. By saying the topic appears too much is asserting that it isn't a topic worth the weight it is currently given in community discussion, which like Hoffmeister said is not overwhelming by any means.

Mods here frequently sneer at discussion surrounding "Da Joos", and that hurts their credibility in my view when it comes to vaguely hinting at something they don't like.

I'm bemused that you think this is "vaguely hinting."

Lastly, the complaints about "Da Joos" are begging the question. If I'm right about the things I post about, then they are clearly worth frequent discussion in a community dedicated to the Culture War.

Well, first of all, if you were actually discussing whether or not you were right, it might be more legitimate, but I have observed you get absolutely shredded over and over again by people willing to engage with you point by point, and your tactic is to simply do a quiet fade and then come back a few days or a week later with a slightly altered version of the same argument.

Secondly, you have admitted that your purpose here is recruitment (boasting about all the people DMing you for more info) and not actual engagement beyond sticking to the same talking points.

As for "being right", that can still be annoying enough to reach "egregiously obnoxious" levels. Let's take the famous 13/52 statistic. Everyone knows it's basically true. You don't get modded for referring to it or using it in an argument. But in the past we had a couple of people whose entire reason for being here was to grind their racial grievances, and they did nothing but post about black criminality. They got told to knock it off, and not because the mods don't like racism or because we were trying to hide "the truth" about black criminality.

To use the same example offered to Zorba, yes, if someone was doing nothing but posting about AI safety, particularly in the tones of a crusader with an agenda, and just coming back with the same talking points over and over, they would eventually reach a point of "enough is enough." The fact that we don't censor topics doesn't mean everyone gets to go on about anything they want as much as they want any way they want forever because the rules don't say you can't neener neener. The fact that your particular obsession touches hot buttons and that you are coy about your true, unfiltered agenda makes you a bit more annoying that most single-issue posters, but you aren't the only Jew-baiter here and no one is proposing anything like "You can't criticize Jews" or even "You can't question the Holocaust." But contra Hoffmeister, no, this place is not your (or anyone else's) personal soapbox to use as you see fit.

I'm a bit careful of this argument:

Well, first of all, if you were actually discussing whether or not you were right, it might be more legitimate, but I have observed you get absolutely shredded over and over again by people willing to engage with you point by point, and your tactic is to simply do a quiet fade and then come back a few days or a week later with a slightly altered version of the same argument.

Do I think that I, among many others, have shredded SecureSignals in the past? Yes, of course. I think the weak and arbitrary nature of his argumentation is pretty evident. He's assembled a massive theory from the tiniest collection of fragments, and whenever challenged on any one point, he changes the subject and jumps to some other fragment, and eventually either he or the other person gets tired and fade out, and then a week later the whole song and dance happens again. This is tiresome and obnoxious.

However, it's really hard to maintain and enforce a norm that effectively punishes someone for refusing to be persuaded. In this case the position that he's holding is indefensible, but how does that logic apply to other cases? Can or should we ban people for being persistently wrong?

This isn't a plea to not ban SecureSignals. There might be reasons to do that. It's just that the basis of such a ban probably shouldn't be stubbornly refusing to admit that he was wrong. That's very common behaviour. It's how one conducts oneself in the instance of disagreement that matters.

You're allowed to not be persuaded. You just can't post the same topic over and over again. This has to be sensible at some point (leaving aside the question of whether any particular user has reached that point), or you have to live with the fact that your devotion to free speech means 50% of the Culture War threads are going to be me waxing poetic about paperclips.

I'm bemused that you think this is "vaguely hinting."

It is, because you won't put into words what you are actually complaining about.

Well, first of all, if you were actually discussing whether or not you were right, it might be more legitimate, but I have observed you get absolutely shredded over and over again by people willing to engage with you point by point, and your tactic is to simply do a quiet fade and then come back a few days or a week later with a slightly altered version of the same argument.

Can you cite any examples? I get a lot of replies, and I reply to a lot of them. Sometimes I let people get the last word if the conversation has gone on. I do not think I've gotten "shredded" on any of the topics I've talked about, and if you can point to a thread we can use as a reference for what you are talking about, that would be helpful for everyone.

Secondly, you have admitted that your purpose here is recruitment (boasting about all the people DMing you for more info)

Again, can you point to anything I have said where I admitted that my purpose here is recruitment? If you are accusing me of something like this you should provide some sort of proof. I think I mentioned people DMing me once to point out that my own experience- receiving a bunch of comment replies and messages about a topic, seemed to stand against the "nobody wants to talk about this" narrative which was being pushed to chill discussion on Holocaust Revisionism. It seems a lot of people wanted to talk about it, and that was my point, no such nonsense about recruitment.

These accusations are not fair without specific examples of this behavior you are accusing me of.

You also ignored my question to you, which is what is "one specific topic" you are talking about? Are my posts about the ADL press campaign, and the other post about Superman both "one specific topic" within the context of your complaint? If so, why?

Can you cite any examples?

This seemed pretty forceful, and your response inadequate.

My falsifiable claim is that there is no evidence those 4.8 million people were murdered by the Germans during the war. The database is a collection of names and documents with no evidence, investigation, or verification of murder. This is not a legitimate database of murder victims, as any database of murder victims would require some sort of investigation and verification that the entries are people who were actually murdered.

Is an adequate response. It is not a database of murder victims as there has been no investigation that names registered to this database are actually real, unique names of individuals who were murdered in WWII. A name and a passport is not proof that someone was murdered in a gas chamber. Likewise, taking a transport list and assuming that all the people on the transport were murdered and adding them to a database of murder victims, and then later citing the database as evidence that the people on the transports were murdered, is circular reasoning that is void of evidence.

When it came to OP's concrete claim that 70,000 Jews were sent from Lodz to Auschwitz in 1944 to be exterminated, I showed there was no evidence for that, there is in fact substantial evidence disproving that, and he did not respond to that challenge. "Here's a bunch of names and passports in a database" is very different than justifying an assertion like "70,000 Jews were sent from Lodz to Auschwitz in 1944 to be exterminated" and OP ran off right when I challenged him on this point.

In what other world could you just say "70,000 people were sent here and killed" with no expectation of actually having evidence for that claim? It's only in this topic where you can get away with making claims like these with no evidence, and then you just point at a passport in a database when pressed for evidence.

His appeal to the Yad Vashem database also allowed him to conveniently sidestep the primary sources I was citing to disprove his claims about the extermination of Lodz Jews, while he was citing a database where any name can be added to it with no actual proof that they were murdered. Reading that I don't see this thread as evidence for what Amadan is complaining about.

Oh, FFS... are you really going to do Holocaust revisionism in a meta thread?

If I'm being accused of something, I'm going to explain why the accusation doesn't hold. If they want to say I didn't respond adequately, I'm going to point out- yes, I did, I cited primary sources to argue a specific point that was completely ignored in favor of a baseless appeal to emotion.

Funny enough I'm being accused by Amadan of "quietly fading away" when pressed, so yes I will talk about Holocaust revisionism in this thread to show that charge, also, is not true- if I'm pressed on the topic.

Yeah, that will really show them you're not a one trick pony.

Hey, be fair. He didn't start it, others brought it up, and were saying he argued inadequately. That's a totally reasonable thing to respond to.

More comments

You're correct that his evidence isn't very strong towards "these were real people who were murdered in this specific way," but it is much better towards "these were real people who died." You don't really address what happened to them aside from "not murder" even after he specifically emphasized the question of what you thought happened to these people.

You are correct that a name and a passport is not proof that someone was murdered. But, assuming that it is a legitimate passport, it is evidence that the person exists. And if we find no later evidence that the person exists, given the amount of record keeping going on, it's reasonable to assume that there's some reason they don't appear—either a name change, or they're somewhere where they wouldn't be producing records we'd find, or yes, maybe they're dead. Especially when there's much more evidence that those who were listed as survivors continued to exist. (I will note that this argument isn't perfect, as evidence of their still being alive is much of why people are classified as survivors in the first place—perhaps the proper way to measure would be to look at how much people who were not involved in the databases show up in later data.)

@faul_sname offered you a couple of ways that it could be shown that his analysis was bad.

You will note that I am making specific, concrete predictions of things I will not see. Thus, if you want to convince me, you could try to show

  • There has been a massive effort to create millions of falsified documents from before the war. Note that this effort would have either been recent or made mistakes that are easily detectable by modern techniques.
  • If you select 10 people at random from the Yad Vashem list, there are a substantial number of records that Yad Vashem claims are different people but in fact share the same names / birth dates / origins (if your claim is that the actual Jewish death toll was 1.4 million, you would need over 20 duplicate people from your sample of 10).
  • If you select 10 people documented as "murdered" at random from the Yad Vashem list, a significant fraction of those actually survived, and documents showing their survival (genealogical records, obituaries, etc) will exist, because we don't live in the dark ages.

You didn't give any idea if any of those were the case, or any other suggestion as to what's going on in those lists.

Do you think those people never existed? That they existed and survived, and there's data many of them, and people just didn't dig to find it? That they existed and survived and there's not much subsequent data for them for some reason? That they died, due to other causes? It can be a mix of causes, of course, but what's the modal way that people wrongly ended up in those databases? I still don't know what your hypothesis is, aside from "a name and a passport is not proof."

Here is Yad Vashem's description of the origin of the Victim's Database:

On May 8th 1999, under the auspices of President Ezer Weizman, Yad Vashem initiated a well publicized world wide media campaign to collect Pages of Testimony. The public response was overwhelming: a call center with 20 phone lines and 90 staff members working double shifts was established to handle the large volume of incoming inquiries in real time. During the months of April and May alone some 147,000 Pages of Testimony were received, amounting to a total of about 380,000 by the end of 1999. The aftermath of the campaign was felt in 2000 as well; an additional 70,000 Pages of Testimony were collected. Although the names collection campaign was targeted also to Jewish communities around the world, around 85% of the Pages of Testimony collected had been submitted in Israel. Surprisingly, more than 80% of all incoming pages actually contained names of victims that were not previously recorded at the Hall of Names. This statistic reinforced the great significance of the campaign at that point in time.

By the year 2000, the initial computerization project and media campaign resulted in the creation of a database containing close to 2.5 million names of Holocaust victims at the Hall of Names. Founded on a sophisticated technological platform the names database was updated and upgraded. Advanced search capabilities including soundex and synonym searches were developed in order to enhance retrieval possibilities. On November 22nd 2004, the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names was launched and uploaded to the Yad Vashem website offering the general public full and free accessibility to close to three million victims' names in English and Hebrew. In 2007, the option to consult the names database in Russian (Cyrillic characters) was also made available.

Does a call center collecting names from over-the-phone testimonies to add to their database, 60 years after the fact, seem to you a scientific way to build a database of murder victims? In any other context, building a database of murder victims containing no evidence that the people you are adding to the database were murdered would get you laughed out of the room. Of course, in building a database like that, proving the person existed with a document is not the most important part- providing some sort of evidence that the people in your database were murdered in the way you are saying they were murdered would be expected in any other context except the Holocaust, where an Israeli calling a hotline and giving a testimony listing names of people he lost contact with 60 years later is good enough to prove a series of murders with absolutely no physical or documentary evidence that such murders actually happened.

This is not a scientific source, it's a cultural and propaganda project.

I still don't know what your hypothesis is, aside from "a name and a passport is not proof."

My hypothesis is that this isn't a scientific source, it's not a database of murder victims. It's a post-2000s propaganda campaign meant to fill the gap in the physical and documentary record with a crowd-sourcing approach of uncritically collecting testimonies and names 60 years after the fact.

Okay, it has lower sourcing standards than is normal. Sure. Based on that, I can totally believe that there are many people who are in there who shouldn't be. But that still doesn't address how unreliable it is, which was what @faul_sname was trying to do.

My hypothesis is that this isn't a scientific source, it's not a database of murder victims. It's a post-2000s propaganda campaign meant to fill the gap in the physical and documentary record with a crowd-sourcing approach of uncritically collecting testimonies and names 60 years after the fact.

That's not an answer. You gave a non-answer before, and you just did so again. I don't get it. All you have to say is "I think a bunch of the purported people never existed (either mistakenly or deliberately)" or "a bunch are still around, they just never checked their data, and they probably left subsequent records" or "a bunch are still around, they just didn't leave records in places we can find them" or "they died around that time, but from other causes."

Our standard for asserting that people were probably murdered doesn't have to be that we actually witnessed it, or dug up graves that are definitively there. A whole lot of people vanishing is itself evidence. (It is not, of course, evidence for the method of their death, and does allow for their deaths being incidental rather than intentional—e.g. if they all died from being overworked, that would still explain the "people vanished.")

To be clear, I don't actually myself know how extensive genealogical databases (for example) are, but you haven't actually attempted to answer the question that faul_sname was posing to you. My complaint isn't so much that I'm sure he's right on this, because I don't have the time to figure out how best to verify and assess that. But he clearly put in some effort as to seeing whether the database results were consistent with what they were described as, out of a random sample they seemed to be, and you have not been willing to give any account of your own about what we should find if we tried to investigate the people in the database, nor what actually happened. Once again, the reason that I bring this up is not because I think there's no way you could prove him wrong. It's that he provided evidence and effort to an extent that, if you could not respond to it, it seemed fair to say that you got shredded, as Amadan so delicately put it, made it pretty clear what sorts of things would be relevant responses and what he was actually arguing, and you didn't respond in a way that addressed his arguments, even when repeated more emphatically. That felt like it was a relevant example, and it still feels so.

I would think that the names should be verifiable. If I have a name, I can cross-reference it against other databases. If you have a guy who up until date X (which in this case is at minimum a deportation), is working, paying taxes, buying things on credit, etc., than afterwards simply drops out of all records, it’s pretty simple to assume that they died during that deportation. Do that with enough samples and honestly you could reasonably establish that said group of people were likely to have been killed deliberately.

But contra Hoffmeister, no, this place is not your (or anyone else's) personal soapbox to use as you see fit.

It would be reasonable to accuse SecureSignals of using this forum as a “personal soapbox” if he simply blasted his opinions out as top-level comments and then did not respond or participate in dialogue about the views contained therein. This does not describe SecureSignals’ behavior in this forum.

You yourself acknowledge that he actively argues his case; your entirely subjective assessment that he gets “shredded” when he does so is irrelevant. (Frankly I think it’s a dicey look to have a mod weighing in this aggressively on whether or not a particular user “won” or “lost” a particular argument.)

your tactic is to simply do a quiet fade and then come back a few days or a week later with a slightly altered version of the same argument.

I can think of a particular ex-mod who fits this description to a tee, but I’m not campaigning for him to get banned or modded when he does so. I see no reason why somebody on this forum should be punished by mods for posting things that I personally find annoying, tedious, or repetitive. Again, my proposed punishment for bad takes is to be downvoted and argued with vociferously by other users. Especially because my personal view on what makes a take “bad” very obviously is not shared by the community as a whole. Yours isn’t either, and just because you’re a mod doesn’t mean you should get to bring the mod hammer down on people who post things that you find annoying.

I see no reason why somebody on this forum should be punished by mods for posting things that I personally find annoying, tedious, or repetitive.

Well, it's not about what you, or I, or any one person, finds annoying or doesn't. That you keep accusing me of wanting to "bring the mod hammer down" on people I find annoying shows you just aren't really paying attention. I assure you, the number of people I find annoying is vastly greatly than the number of people I mod.

I’m referring specifically to this proposed policy. I’m not saying that you have displayed a pattern of capricious modding up to this point. I’m saying that this specific policy - I don’t know to what extent you personally are responsible for conceiving of it and proposing it - is the equivalent of dangling a mod hammer over something that seems to be nothing worse than something that annoys you (and Zorba) personally, but which does not harm the overall epistemic health of the community.

I just used the volunteer system again and found it rather funny that every single one was someone reporting the mods who banned them. Not related, I know, but I don't think I've ever seen an enforcement comment there before, let alone all three.

Feel free to report my moderation as "uncharitable." As is always the case, when someone reports one of my posts, I will let another mod judge.

Happens all the time :V

I'm not sure how exactly you plan to enforce a ban on alt accounts but it might be worth noting that millions of people can be sharing the same public IP adress.

I know. But for hopefully obvious reasons, I'm not going to go into the details on how it works (or may work in the future.)

prolific users with hidden profiles. One of them has a few quality contributions! (Thanks!) Two of them are neutral. And seven of them have repeated antagonism, with many of those getting banned or permabanned.

That's why private accounts became my number one tool for troll-spotting. Pedofash guy is the highest value private account I can think of.

Actually, could this be a compelling reason to keep the option around? It immediately labels people who select into it as somewhat more suspect, allowing for faster filtering?

Absolutely, in my personal experience private profiles == trolls.

Oh, I'm not at all saying they're the same (hence why I'm talking to someone with a private profile right now). I'm saying that it's one possible indicator, and getting that one extra data point could be helpful.

My account is private. I don't comment much, and I will never come into quality contributions territory. However, I will always choose the most privacy-heavy way of joining I can (easily) find. Take it away if you must. It's unlikely to change my behavior, but I would like to keep it as is.

I would support getting rid of private profiles. It doesn't stop someone from keeping their own list of comments from users they might find convenient to bring up in a later argument, or just remembering. It does make it more difficult to track down comments that might be interesting or helpful.

Making alts to avoid bans seems like a no-brainer immediate long ban to me. Replying to yourself on alts also serves no purpose except to mislead other others; I would modhat and ban aggressively if you know for a fact this is happening.

I want your feedback on things, as if that wasn't clear. These threads basically behave like a big metadiscussion thread, so . . . what's your thoughts on this whole adventure? How's it going? Want some tweaks? Found a bug? Let me know! I don't promise to agree but I promise to listen.

There's a rule on the sidebar, "proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be." (emphasis mine). I think this rule is a great idea, as it supersedes meandering arguments about burden of proof that would otherwise consist of "no you" back and forth. It also encourages users to, well, do as it says, and provide evidence for things! But, that's only if the rule is enforced. This might be the rule with the highest ratio of violators to modhat comments, in my opinion. Sometimes it feels like I must be crazy, and have to scroll down the sidebar to make sure it still exists, because it feels like no one else knows it's there. Either that, or my idea of what is proportional here is entirely out of calibration with everyone else. I think it would improve the forum greatly, and help cut down on low-effort vagueposting, to more vigorously enforce this rule.

Basically no discussion board on the Internet actually asks its members to "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be" -- the onus is always on whomever disagrees with your claim to hold you to account. TheMotte and /r/slatestarcodex, according to their own rules, should be the exceptions. But I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually seen that rule enforced.

Then you aren't very good at counting, because we enforce that rule all the time (even though almost no one ever thinks that their claim was partisan or inflammatory or required evidence).

Amadan disagrees with you

Amadan can disagree, but I don't think I have seen a modhat comment explicitly invoke that rule in a long time. Since the migration off of reddit, at least. If they have receipts, I would be happy to see them. @ZorbaTHut, since this is a meta-thread do you mind if I tag them in this thread (or you can let them know or whatever you think is best) to ask for specific examples?

Cjet at least a couple times. Zorba too. Amadan used to more, but not recently, afaik. Same for nara.

I suspect things which might be labeled inflammatory usually get modded for booing. Especially since only the latter is a report option!

Thanks, and I feel especially bad now since I upvoted one of those! (It is old, to be fair to me). I do feel like the standard here is pretty low, and is more along the lines of "discourage the worst posts" rather than "encourage a high standard of discussion" but I'll take what I can get.

Especially since only the latter is a report option!

I meant to mention this fact originally; since several rules are not listed on the report default, I assumed this was either a technical limitation or to prevent decision paralysis.

I think it would improve the forum greatly, and help cut down on low-effort vagueposting, to more vigorously enforce this rule.

One problem we've got, that I'm having trouble solving, is that we could use more mod time to aim at issues like this. Unfortunately, the way we last got mods, through the Doge system, is very difficult right now because it relied on a working on-site chat system. Which we currently don't have.

And some of this gets kinda obsoleted if I get the volunteer system in place. So maybe I should work on that? Or maybe I shouldn't, maybe I should take a break from that to solve the doge/new-mod problem.

I'll look into this a bit more, at least.

I just wanted to say that you and the other volunteers are doing great work with the site.

Seconded, as well as the mods doing God's work, as ever.

Thanks to you both :) It is very appreciated!

Thank you for all your hard work.

I’ll register my disagreement with the crackdown on single-issue posters. Frankly, I just don’t see why people have a problem with it; it definitely does not feel like the Culture War thread is bogged down by too much discussion of one particular topic, and if there’s a thread I’m not interested in I can just hide it and move on.

It seems to me that it’s the particular topic that certain accused “single-topic posters” have chosen that is getting people’s hackles up. If there was a user who only wanted to post about, say, AI safety, or some other issue that doesn’t carry significant emotional valence for other users here, I think that people would readily see the value of just tolerating that poster and hiding his threads if they don’t care about the issue in question.

I suspect that the mods have one particular user in mind - one whose supposed “single-issue focus” is the JQ - with this policy. Maybe I’m being uncharitable and there are other prominent users who rub people the wrong way by flogging specific hobby-horses, but the fact that I can’t think of any illustrates, in my opinion, that this is not in fact a widespread problem that needs addressing.

Can I say that I think you're right, but

I consider myself very liberal and open-minded when it comes to discussion topics. I know I can hide it and move on. But I still just have a reflexive distaste for this same topic over and over again, for multiple reasons. The JQ just seems simplistic and juvenile. Everyone's first red pill is noticing the same last names in positions of power. Despite legislating the problem over and over again, the only "solution" that seems possible is implicitly prepended with "final".

I'm not interested in anything remotely approaching that (and I doubt many others are either), so why bother hammering the topic over and over again? I don't think it's emotional valence, I'm just sick of hearing about problems without a real path forward to discuss as well. It just comes across as bitching.

Maybe I’m being uncharitable and there are other prominent users who rub people the wrong way by flogging specific hobby-horses, but the fact that I can’t think of any illustrates, in my opinion, that this is not in fact a widespread problem that needs addressing.

Or you are too focused on your particular hobby horse to notice the other ones.

The one that immediately came to mind for me was the guy that kept posting about pedophilia. Marxbro is an example that other people brought up. A decade ago I would have said 9/11 conspiracy theorists often tended to be single track.

Pedofascist guy hasn’t posted in many months; I think he either got permabanned or just stopped posting. And MarxBro has been gone for a long time. So those guys are not active issues that need to be dealt with.

He was perma banned. There was a different guy that I was thinking of that always posted about children's rights. He was either perma banned for always posting about the same thing, or warned enough to stop doing it.

Just because one person causing an issue has been banned does not mean that type of mod situation has been put to bed.

Euphoric Baseball.

JB was banned for alt abuse, no? Sock puppets plus ban evasion.

I forget the specific details, but we were losing patience with him for multiple reasons. One of which was being a single issue poster.

I would have thought there are at least two prominent anti-semites here? Three if you count Foreverlurker?

The specific issue does make a difference. There are enough of these posts that a casual scroll through the CW round-up on any given day is likely to run into at least one of them, and the regular presence of narratives about how the perfidious Jews are plotting to destroy Western civilisation is something that's going to make a lot of people uncomfortable, or contribute to the perception that the Motte is a 'Nazi forum' or somesuch. Heck, the top post in the roundup thread right now is one directly engaging with anti-semitic conspiracy content, and it isn't even by any of the 2/3 regular anti-semites we have.

I can very much understand people not wanting this garbage on their doorstep. If nothing else, it makes it much, much harder to recommend anything here to outsiders.

"Oh, the Motte, that's the site with the Nazis" - that's not a reaction one particularly wants to deal with, is it?

"Oh, the Motte, that's the site with the Nazis" - that's not a reaction one particularly wants to deal with, is it?

I think, in my ideal world, it would be "The Motte, that's the site where no position is censored for being outside the Overton window, not even literal holocaust denial, as long as you can be civil and support your arguments. And somehow the quality of discourse is still better than pretty much any other political discussion forum".

But it's a very fine line between that and "The Motte, that's the newest fsr right echo chamber, like Gab / Voat before it. It's where all the witches and bigots and crazy people go when all of the normal person platforms have banned them. Sad, but what else could you possibly expect from a forum that doesn't even ban literal Nazis".

Right, exactly. I'm really not trying to say that we should just ban all the bad people. It's more - how can we get on and stay on the right side of that fine line?

I can very much understand people not wanting this garbage on their doorstep. If nothing else, it makes it much, much harder to recommend anything here to outsiders.

"Oh, the Motte, that's the site with the Nazis" - that's not a reaction one particularly wants to deal with, is it?

If “Jewish Question”-type threads are keeping such outsiders away, then those threads are features, not bugs, and kings like SecureSignals are doing God’s work in helping to keep pearl-clutching scolds away.

I don't think one has to be a pearl-clutching scold in order to simply not want to hang out in the place with the anti-semites and the Holocaust deniers.

What does anti-Semite or white nationalist even mean?

I can be called an anti-Semite for saying Jews have higher average IQ or the Jews control Hollywood. Both are basically factually correct. Many would call me a white nationalist for saying western culture is better. Which I do believe. A white nationalist today can mean anything from a literal KKK member to someone who thinks advanced math should be taught in schools.

Certainly, and I would never advocate for the mere accusation of anti-semitism or racism to be a superweapon. We can all agree that definitions of those words that are so broad as to include even people who just state obvious facts are ridiculous and should not be heeded.

However, I'd argue that there are minimalist definitions of anti-semitism, racism, white nationalism, etc., that are much more defensible - and which some posters here definitely meet. A relatively high average IQ among Ashkenazim or overrepresentation of Jewish people in Hollywood are just facts, and being aware of them does not make one anti-semitic. However, when one starts talking about believing that all Jews have an inherent racial tendency to parasitise upon other cultures and subvert them for Jewish benefit, then I think one can plausibly argue that's anti-semitic. The fact that accusations of anti-semitism are sometimes thrown around promiscuously does not mean that, say, Hitler wasn't anti-semitic, and it seems possible to plot people on a spectrum from not-at-all-anti-semitic on the one end to 'literally Hitler' on the other end.

Ok so this is fair. You get my point that people will try and label anyone as “literally Hitler” to get a group banned. The issue I see with banning people is you can’t ban people for being an anti-Semite or white nationalist (I’m probably a white nationalist for 20-30% of the population) you have to ban them for a very specific belief. You can’t ban someone for being a holocaust denier but you could because they deny that over 5 million Jews died in the holocaust. It would be a legitimate headache though to list the beliefs that we believe are agreed upon bad.

If their presence would make you uncomfortable independent of the factual correctness of their claims, and also your response to that discomfort is to call for them to be banned (rather than leaving yourself), I think you would fall into the "pearl clutching scold" category by the ideals of this space.

I don't think that actually describes you, but it does describe a particular type of poster that I have run into numerous times, and I worry that it would describe the friends you are hesitant to introduce to this space.

I did just say explicitly that I don't support banning SecureSignals just because he's wrong and makes bad arguments. I think the question here is not whether he's wrong (he is) or whether being wrong should be a bannable offense (it shouldn't be), but about whether the recurrence of radioactive subjects like this is a bad thing for the Motte, or otherwise obnoxious, and if so, what if anything we might want to do about it.

I do appreciate all the concerns about freedom to express controversial positions, and I'm on your side most of the time, but I also don't want the Motte to go further down the road to Witchville, as I put it.

Yeah, I do get the desire to avoid becoming witchville. In my ideal world that's accomplished by moderating heavily for effortposting and high quality engagement and discussion, rather than by moderating more heavily for some subjects than others (which means "wrong and makes bad arguments and refuses to change their mind and refuses to change the subject" would be a bannable offense).

This could result in us becoming witchville anyway, at least by some standards, if a factually correct position ends up being far outside the Overton window. But in that case I think it would be better to become witchville-with-high-quality- discussion than another-high-quality-debate-forum-with-bannable-positions.

Right. Just like one doesn't have to be a pearl-clutching scold in order to simply not want to hang out in the place with the various 'ists and 'phobes.

That’s precisely the mindset I’m accusing the mods of having; I think that they see this particular issue as radioactive in a way that other issues aren’t, and are keen to prevent this community from becoming the “den of witches” which, ironically, Scott Alexander wanted to avoid his forum from becoming, sparking the creation/exodus of this forum in the first place.

I’m not hiding the fact that I have a special interest in wanting this community to remain an open forum for witches to participate as members in good standing; white identitarian ideas aren’t quite as radioactive as antisemitism, but they’re not far behind. (And certainly the two memeplexes are often intimately linked.) I don’t want the mods to start cracking down on topics that are likely to scare away normies, because I would fear that my own ideas would quickly find their way into the chopping block.

If that means that this is a forum which will remain repellent to outsiders, that is a price that I am willing to pay, but of course I would say that. Again, I’m not hiding the skin that I have in the game. I think that to some extent the mods probably are, and I’m trying to draw that out.

That’s precisely the mindset I’m accusing the mods of having; I think that they see this particular issue as radioactive in a way that other issues aren’t, and are keen to prevent this community from becoming the “den of witches” which, ironically, Scott Alexander wanted to avoid his forum from becoming, sparking the creation/exodus of this forum in the first place.

You're not entirely wrong, and you're not entirely right.

Speaking for myself (no other mods), I do want Holocaust deniers and white supremacists to be allowed to speak here. I don't want to ban you or @SecureSignals even though I find your views noxious. (Unironically, I really do appreciate both of you for your useful articulations of these positions.) However, no, I don't want this place to become Scott Alexander's den of witches either. He accurately identified the problem, and never identified a solution, and neither have we, but (you) witches are the only ones who don't see a problem with becoming a den of witches. Yes, I understand, from your point of view, you are the good guys and that you are seen as bad guys is the entire problem which you want to change. Unfortunately for you, you're fighting the world, and we are of the world.

If we ever get to the point where this place is overrun by white supremacists and Holocaust deniers and most of my mod time is spent fielding reports about Da Joos Da Joos Da Joos, I will concede victory to the witches and you can celebrate my departure.

Well, to be blunt, I think the Motte is indeed at the Seven Zillion Witches stage of subculture evolution, and unfortunately once you reach that point you fall off the side of the cliff and eventually only get witches.

There's some sort of balance that has to be found. You don't want to be so committed to what's 'normal' or popular that any or all dissenting opinions are frozen out. At the same time, if you're radically open, you become a den of witches. Both Normieland and Witchville are bad places to have conversations. I understand and agree with not wanting to become Normieland, but at the same time the Motte is getting much too far into Witchville territory for my liking.

I can very much understand people not wanting this garbage on their doorstep. If nothing else, it makes it much, much harder to recommend anything here to outsiders.

"Oh, the Motte, that's the site with the Nazis" - that's not a reaction one particularly wants to deal with, is it.

And this is where you lose me. "Oh, I'd love to recommend this place to my lovely friends, who are going to throw a tantrum and storm out at the slightest whiff of wrongthink, but alas, I cannot, for there are too many Nazis here". Oh, what a great loss.

I would say it's possible to talk about degrees? I think this conversation is happening now because we're talking about rather more than a 'whiff' of wrongthink.

Doesn't change the fact that the kind of person giving you hard time for this place being "full of Nazis" is likely to make further demands, if given an inch.

I'm uncomfortable about posting in a place that, judging from likes, contains significant support for explicit anti-semitism, and the hypothesis of a Jewish racial consciousness that leads them to seek to destroy the white race.

How do you think I would feel about telling someone else that there was a great post here that I thought made a good point? Even if that point is totally unrelated?

Do not invite them. I won’t speak for the whole forum and say “we don’t want them,” but I will say very forcefully that I do not want your normie friends here, I do not want their sensibilities to have any influence whatsoever on the direction of discourse norms on this sub, and I hope that this place stays icky enough that you remain unwilling to recommend it to them.

Do you think I like the fact that when I make what I think is a really good post here, I can’t go and brag about it or show it off to some of my smarter normie friends? If we lived in a better world, my ideas would have much wider acceptance and a place firmly inside the Overton Window, and I could show this place to people I respect, or at least acknowledge the existence of the forum and the fact that I post here. But we live in the shitty timeline, so I have to conceal the existence of The Motte, and of my profile in particular, to anyone who would be interested. This is ultimately a good thing for the forum. It should remain a hidden sanctuary, spoken of only in a vague and evasive manner, so that us witches can continue to practice our witchcraft in peace.

I think it's more of a gradient or a spectrum, really, and no one is either totally normie or radical, but I think you misunderstand the context. I might be talking to a bright, right-curious, burned ex-liberal type who tells me that he's really keen to find a place where he can discuss controversial political topics openly. Should I suggest he visit the Motte?

(I have recommended the Motte in its Reddit form to people before in exactly this situation.)

At the moment, I don't think I would, and a big part of that is because of the preponderance of certain positions, particularly those obsessed with the Jews. Heck, do you think I'd recommend the Motte to a bright young controversialist who happens to be Jewish? Heck no.

Heck, do you think I'd recommend the Motte to a bright young controversialist who happens to be Jewish? Heck no.

If cis white males have to tolerate the persistent hatred from the rest of the internet then everyone else can have a little bit of thicker skin here. Hell, if your friend is jewish, they're statistically more likely to be smart enough to understand why.

Heck, do you think I'd recommend the Motte to a bright young controversialist who happens to be Jewish? Heck no.

You do know we have lots of Jewish posters here, right?

More comments

As uncomfortable as you are with this place, you're able to compartmentalize - "there's some bad dudes here, but every once in a while someone makes an interesting point about something". By saying we should sanitize this place in order for you to feel comfortable inviting your friends here, you're implying they would be unable to compartmentalize in a similar way, and all potential issues with giving inches / taking miles aside, I am not particularly interested in hanging out with people like that. If I was, I'd still be on Reddit.

I dislike single issue posters (and I think there have been quite a few around a few different topics over the years, I’d say more were incels than antisemites honestly) because I see this space as a kind of ‘intellectual community’, and when there’s one guy in the corner who only ever wants to discuss one thing that kind of damages the vibe.

Back on /r/SSC and /r/TheMotte we had a single issue Marxist called MarxBro. In theory, everything you said applied to him, it's not like either subreddit was a Marxism hub, and yet... goddamn was that dude annoying. Then, one time, something compelled him to write a comment on some unrelated topic, and for that very short moment he seemed like an actual human being that I'd like to get to know a little better, and not GPT 2.0 trained on Das Kapital.

You can claim it's on us to tolerate a person like that, or ignore them, but I don't see how it's not easier for one guy to write a comment on another topic every once in a while, then it is for everyone else to tolerate a one-issue bot.

Marxbro was a troll by the way. At one point we had a discussion about the Labor Theory of Value, I tried my best to steer it away from theorizing and keep to a concrete example of some guys on an island exchanging fishes for pots etc, and eventually he had enough and basically said that no, he didn't want to explain this or that, he was doing it to get a rise out of people like me. Or at least that's how I remember it, it was, what, five years ago? But yeah, my impression was that he let the mask slip.

Of course, in words of a Chinese poet, if you pretend to be insane and tear your clothes and run into the garden, are you actually pretending, which also applies to single-mindedly "trolling" an internet forum for years.

They could just block him if it was really that onerous?

Actual MarxBro was also pretty aggressive and rude at times, as I recall -- which got him banned pretty much everywhere.

But we could imagine a platonic MarxBro who was unfailingly polite and still could be a problem.

Maybe, but wouldn't it be a lot more fun if mods started writing warnings like "Post something about anime, or get banned!"?

As long as you have other things you want to talk about, it gives the impression of being a legitimate person as opposed to an appendage of some opinion-forming group.

Why is it a bad thing to be an appendage of an opinion-forming group?

In some sense, we are all opinion-forming groups of one, and every time we post, we are acting as ambassadors of that group of which we are the sole member.

I’m not trying to be cheeky. I really just don’t see why it would matter.

If you are arguing with a person who is taking a position that they personally endorse, you can in theory change their mind in the way that they could in theory change yours. If they are instead operating under the process of "try to respond with what my ideological group, which is correct, would probably say", then you are not meaningfully having a discourse where both parties can change their mind (because one of the sides is a mental model of a position rather than an actual position).

Concretely, if you're arguing with a person who personally has concluded that a position is correct, you can search for places where you each predict different things about what the world looks like, and then hopefully you can actually go out and look at the world and resolve your argument. If you're arguing with someone who is operating as an appendage of an ideological group, and you attempt that, you will get a vague taking point and a change of subject, at best, because to them, it's not about what position actually reflects reality, it's about which position is supported by their social group.

I think it's bad to be arguing with people who are paid to spread ideas online. They're not going to deal with your ideas in good faith, they'll misrepresent and use all kinds of verbal judo tricks to undermine opposition. They might as well be a GPT-bot, programmed to leap to the defence of their corporate or political masters.

Some search algorithm picks up wrongthink and in come the tenacious guardians of orthodoxy...

I agree that it seems bad to argue with people who are getting paid to do it. Although I think that's mainly due to the fact that they would be incentivized to not care about the quality of their arguments, rather than the fact that they're self-consciously recruiting for a cause per se.

He's not the only one, and that's not the only topic, but yes, you are correct that this is the central example.

There are other reasons for telling someone to knock it off (for example, blatantly using the forum as a soapbox for recruitment). And Holocaust deniers going on about the JQ are not the only ones we've ever asked to give it a rest with their single-issue axe-grinding.

Given that you are accusing the mods of wanting to crack down on an issue because we don't like it, you will surely not consider it uncharitable of me to observe that you are more willing to defend obsessive axe-grinders who happen to be aligned with you. If there was a leftist constantly going on about how white nationalists are Nazis who should be deplatformed and disenfrachised - but always managed to write it long form posts that don't break the rules - can you honestly say there would not come a point where you would be asking us to tell him to give it a rest?

I can answer honestly: yes, if someone who was saying things I liked, or at least constantly annoying people I don't like, was doing this, I would still tell them to knock it off if their pet topic was all they ever posted about, in constant, long-winded JAQ style. As Zorba said, this place is for discussing things, not just nailing your thesis to the door over and over and over again. The "particular user" never participates in any discussions except when there's a chance to dunk on Jews.

there was a leftist constantly going on about how white nationalists are Nazis who should be deplatformed and disenfrachised - but always managed to write it long form posts that don't break the rules - can you honestly say there would not come a point where you would be asking us to tell him to give it a rest?

There already are, and there have certainly been significantly more in the past. Remember JeanStealers? I make liberal use of the report function if I feel that a post is uncharitable, if its central thesis is “outgroup bad”, or if I feel that ot contributes nothing of intellectual value. Obviously I’m far more likely to do so if I find the post in question ideologically unpleasant; I’m a human being, susceptible to normal human failures and perceptual blindspots, and I’m more likely to notice the flaws and shortcomings of a post I disagree with.

What you have failed to adequately explain is why single-issue posting is inherently bad for this forum. Why can’t I just hide threads on topics I don’t find interesting or worth engaging with? The whole “recruiting for a cause” thing has always been massively ill-defined. Does it mean “trying to get people to enroll in, or give money to, a specific organization”? If so, the user in question has, to my knowledge, never done so. Or does it mean the far more nebulous “trying to convince people that a specific issue or ideology is important and worth subscribing to”? If so, that describes roughly every single post here.

Also, for what it’s worth, the poster in question does, in fact, engage with other topics. He has replied to a number of my comments about non-Jew-related posts, which is how I know that to be the case.

The whole “recruiting for a cause” thing has always been massively ill-defined.

There is value in not allowing a community to become a free-for-all for traveling preachers to lecture to its membership.

What you have failed to adequately explain is why single-issue posting is inherently bad for this forum. Why can’t I just hide threads on topics I don’t find interesting or worth engaging with?

It's the Community Pool theory of community development. Every action kind of influences everyone to a small degree; if everyone's wading through a dozen posts of "the Jews did this" to get to the meat, it's going to drive away people who aren't interested in that, and simultaneously encourage people to jew-post. This both makes the problem worse and removes the mitigating factor.

But are people wading through a dozen Jew-posts every time they visit this forum? The answer seems to be a definitive no. SecureSignals does not post all that often, and few other posters comment very often on the issue either. That particular topic does not come close to outweighing discussion of other topics.

It seems like something is happening here where each JQ post is considered so inflammatory that it “weighs as much as” some larger number of an equivalent post on a different topic, such that you’re treating each individual post like it’s a dozen posts.

I could understand if the JQ was genuinely a massively frequent topic of discussion here relevant to other topics, but the numbers don’t seem to bear that out at all, so I hope you can understand why I suspect that is not the full explanation. Perhaps that you consider any significant amount of discussion on that particular topic to be a potential vector by which this sub becomes a true “den of witches”. If that’s the concern, then I have my own concerns about what that could mean for future crackdowns on certain topics if they fail the mods’ “annoying” filter.

Again, as I said above, I think it’s transparently the case that you would not be treating this as a serious issue if we had a prominent poster whose sole area of interest was something anodyne like AI safety. Everyone would readily recognize the value of tolerating that poster and hiding his posts whenever they popped up, if that’s not a topic they’re interested in. It’s only because SecureSignals’ primary focus is an inflammatory topic that this is becoming an issue.

But are people wading through a dozen Jew-posts every time they visit this forum? The answer seems to be a definitive no.

The problem is that this pushing-the-general-community-tone behavior happens, to some extent, proportional to how often this sort of post shows up. And if we're not getting anything out of the posts - and I think at this point we arguably aren't - then it's a net loss.

Perhaps that you consider any significant amount of discussion on that particular topic to be a potential vector by which this sub becomes a true “den of witches”. If that’s the concern, then I have my own concerns about what that could mean for future crackdowns on certain topics if they fail the mods’ “annoying” filter.

Note that I'm not saying that any specific topic should be banned, I'm talking about people who seem to be here only to push a single topic. It's the "ugh, this guy again" subject.

Again, as I said above, I think it’s transparently the case that you would not be treating this as a serious issue if we had a prominent poster whose sole area of interest was something anodyne like AI safety.

Actually, if someone brought it up to me, I probably would.

Yeah, @SecureSignals is less bothersome to me than Foreverlurker was, just because, despite being fairly focused on Jews and holocaust, he talks about it at a frequency that is more reasonable.

Or does it mean the far more nebulous “trying to convince people that a specific issue or ideology is important and worth subscribing to”?

Just so we're clear, you guys are done with the line that he was a simple centrist worried about antisemitism and the rise of the far right, like he claimed? He should have been banned on bad faith alone.

Huh? Has anybody claimed that about SecureSignals? I certainly never have. I don’t think he ever has. Do you have evidence of such a claim? He has always come off as a sincere right-wing antisemite, since I’ve been aware of his posting.

I'm talking about foreverlurker and his alts.

My problem with foreverlurker is that his posts were low effort, not that they were all centered on a particular topic.

Oh. Yeah, that’s not who I was talking about.

I thought with the OP focus on alt accounts, private accounts, and single issue posting, they, and therefore you, meant FL, who did that. Else, SS ban, burdensomecount ban, hlynka ban, darwin ban, most bans, I oppose on general free speech grounds, but I don't want to pester the mods too often. When I did hamster duty, I usually clicked neutral or good, but I realized janitor nullification wasn't what zorba had in mind and I'm grateful to the guy, so it seemed pointless.

There already are, and there have certainly been significantly more in the past. Remember JeanStealers?

He was banned, IIRC (not just for being a one-note poster, but for being consistently antagonistic).

I make liberal use of the report function if I feel that a post is uncharitable, if its central thesis is “outgroup bad”, or if I feel that ot contributes nothing of intellectual value.

Yes, you and a number of others largely report posts you object to ideologically.

What you have failed to adequately explain is why single-issue posting is inherently bad for this forum.

I think Zorba and I have explained that. Being a one-note drummer is annoying, and this is not your (or anyone else's) personal soapbox. People are allowed to have their causes and their hobbyhorses, but they are also expected to participate here in good faith, not just use it as a platform for grinding an axe.

Yes, you and a number of others largely report posts you object to ideologically.

Is this something you keep track of much?

Yes, you and a number of others largely report posts you object to ideologically.

Interesting, can the mods see who reported a post?

Yup.

I've thought about turning it off, but if I do, it'll happen after a more thorough melding of the report system and the volunteer system.

can the mods see who reported a post?

yes, it looks like this

https://i.imgur.com/nFVD1iq.png

He was banned, IIRC (not just for being a one-note poster, but for being consistently antagonistic).

For being antagonistic to other users. Is SecureSignals consistently insulting other specific posters, calling their posts stupid, being uncharitable toward them in particular? I don’t perceive him as doing so. What I see him doing is effortful replies with interesting citations from primary sources. JeanStealers never did anything remotely close to that.

Being a one-note drummer is annoying, and this is not your (or anyone else's) personal soapbox.

I mean… yes, it is. This place is a soapbox for all of us to weigh in on the things we think are important, and to cast our opinions out to the public to be judged and heard. If we do a good job, they are received well, and might change people’s minds. If we do poorly, we get downvoted, and if we do poorly in certain specifics ways, we get modded. As far as I’m aware, being annoying is not against the rules. If you want to make it part of the rules, then fine, but that’s what I’m disagreeing with. I don’t see how having strong opinions on one particular issue, and seeing a variety of other issues through a lens of how they connect to that issue, is “not in good faith”. If your posts are effortful, and consistently introduce new supporting information and arguments in response to specific criticisms and questions - all of which, I believe, is true of SecureSignals’ posting - then you should be free to continue to do so, and let the chips fall where they may.

SecureSignals consistently insulting other specific posters, calling their posts stupid, being uncharitable toward them in particular?

At times notably so, yeah (see footnotes section of that comment for examples). Though also that entire thread was a shitshow.


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