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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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