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I’m going to ask the same thing I asked Amadan during the discussion about JQ-posting: are white nationalist discussions crowding out everything else? A quick perusal of discussion topics in this week’s CWR suggests precisely the opposite. There are still tons of discussions about all sorts of topics on this forum. If people don’t like the race/identity threads they can hide them, the same way I hide discussions about LLMs or macroeconomics or other issues I feel unqualified to assess or weigh in on.
Amadan and I see additional topics because we are moderators. Plenty of things get filtered out and never removed from the filter. Lately, almost all of that filtered stuff is white nationalist type rants, and sometimes just fully copy pasted articles like above. Since the inception of this website our worst content violations have been ... white nationalist might not be the right word, since I doubt you'd want to associate with them. But users like die[n-words]die, with accompanying images in their profile.
As moderators, we really can't just completely ignore the white nationalist threads. We still have to enforce the rules here. So when fights flare up I have to go read the relevant threads. And the race threads are either consistently causing problems, or common enough that there is a constant influx of reports from those threads.
Basically the white nationalist types are bad neighbors. They move in and cause all kinds of fights and problems. As soon as you allow any of them in you have to create a strict dividing line to keep out their worst elements. And then when you point out these problems we are asked to pretend that they are not coming a single group. That group has claimed that they receive unfair discrimination from just about everyone. Does any of this sound familiar? How would you suggest handling such a troublesome group?
So, this is useful and sobering information for me to have, and I appreciate you sharing it. Obviously without seeing the specific threads you’re talking about, and without observing the behavior of the specific users responsible for them, it’s difficult for me to assess how likely it is that the vast majority of them are trolls or similarly bad-faith users. I would strongly suspect that this is true of the “die[Ns]die” guys, but I recognize my biases as far as that’s concerned. Certainly the more unseemly parts of the racialist right have never had a shortage of thuggish atavistic types and edge-lords like that.
I’ve been honest from the start in saying that my overriding concern here is to stringently oppose attempts to limit my own ability to responsibly present my views in this forum. I believe that my record, insofar as I have never been banned for any length of time by the moderators here, speaks to the fact that such views can be dealt with in ways that are well within the bounds of acceptable discourse here. I acknowledge that topics of race and identity are bound to evoke stronger and more negative emotions than other topics, and I acknowledge that this does create extra work for you guys relative to what’s created by more anodyne discussion topics, but from my non-moderator perspective, that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
All that being said, the analogy you imply in your final paragraph is both clever and incisive. I’m pretty much forced to take it seriously. I’d be a massive hypocrite not to! So, I guess I should probably ask: what, if anything, do you suggest that I personally should do in order to help ameliorate the issue. Is @fuckduck9000 correct that I should be more vociferously calling out apparent bad-faith posters who purport to share some funhouse-mirror version of my views? Would that even help at all? It sounds like the vast majority of these posts are being caught by the filter and never even make it to the sub, so I can’t really do anything about any of those.
So, here, I'm gonna post this in the main thread, but I'll show it to you first (and I guess anyone else who checks my comment page, hi there!) Here's the current prototype for the single-issue-poster rule:
We occasionally have trouble with people who turn into single-issue posters, posting and commenting only on a single subject. We'd like to discourage this. If you find yourself posting constantly on a single subject, please make an effort to post on other subjects as well.
This doesn't mean you need to write megaposts! This can be as simple as going to the Friday Fun Thread once in a while and posting a few paragraphs about whatever video game you last played. But this community is fundamentally for people, and if a poster is acting more like a propaganda-bot than a person, we're going to start looking at them suspiciously.
This rule is going to be applied with delicacy; if I can find not-low-effort comments about three different subjects within your last two weeks or two pages of comments, you're fine.
Does that work?
Honestly I'd like it if everyone did that more often :V
I have no complaints with this. I think it’s both reasonable and salutary to encourage people here to act like humans with varied interests and to inculcate some level of social participation in the community.
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Or usually browses the global comments feed (www.themotte.org/comments) rather than specific posts...
How would this work with something that strongly influence your thoughts on a wide variety of subjects? Would commonly referencing it in your comments make you a single-issue-poster even where you are commenting on different subjects?
At some point this comes down to "mods' discretion, there's no way to formalize decisions like this, unfortunately".
I think it probably would, though, at least if it didn't feel pretty natural.
("Like most issues, this reminds me of THE BATTLE OF THERMOPYLAE, which I will now describe in vivid detail for the seventh time today")
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Its often impossible for us to tell whether they are trolls or sincere users. I'm of the opinion that it doesn't really matter. If someone posts low effort crap because they are dumb, or because they are smart and running a 4d chess trolling, the end result is the same: there is low effort crap to be cleaned up.
There is very little you can do as a user. The volunteer system is still a thing, and that does help us a bit. Acting as community police can sometimes backfire, because it starts fights rather than ends them. Also I wouldn't be a huge fan of white nationalists policing each other's views and getting into a purity spiral on here.
If you want this forum to stay interesting and healthy I would suggest you cultivate other interests that are relevant here on the culture war threads. Then whenever you come to the culture war thread if you see that a race based topic has already been started you should post about your other interest instead. If you implement this advice and suddenly start to think "hey some idiot wasted my chance to have interesting discussion on the race topic by posting some low quality crap" then you will understand why we try to moderate low effort posts.
I've found that most people that have a single topic of interest have a real blind spot to other people's level of toleration for that topic. If you only like that one topic, you might be fine with 90% of the conversation being around that topic. If you hate that topic then you might feel that even 10% of the conversation spent on that topic is too much. And having interesting conversations with people is the limiting resource on this forum, so don't be surprised when even non-moderators complain about you stinking up the commons. Whatever your preferred amount of discussion about race is, everyone else who doesn't want to talk about it thinks that number is way too high.
I was a moderator over at slatestarcodex when we did the topic ban on race discussions. I recommended against it then, and I'd recommend against any topic bans right now. Based on my general sense from the other mods we are very very unlikely to ever to do a topic ban. The exception to that will probably be if encounter legal issues. But we also aren't going to ban people from saying 'jeez this topic is talked about way too much, we're really beating a dead horse here'. There is a certain amount of community policing that tends to arise on its own for over-done topics. And as I mentioned above, community policing often creates more fights than it ends. This is why I suggest having other interests. If the community heat level on the race topics starts getting too high, switch to your other interest. Without that ability to switch you just become part of a feedback loop.
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