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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29442 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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Meta suggestion: there should be room for this.

The reason why the community jettisoned the BLR was because it was too easy to have drive-by link dropping to dunk on the outgroup. Not having a BLR paired with a requirement to have a substantial top-level post effectively stopped this problem. However, there is some news that is so blatantly and obviously going to be the topic of water cooler talk, if only people could find where the water cooler is. It's the topic on the front of every news outlet, absolutely core ground to anything considered the culture war, at the highest levels of American government, which is the most powerful and influential institution on earth. It is going to be a topic here one way or another. Posts like this are just putting the water cooler out.

I think there is asymptotic precedent for this. Consider the limit of stories that were the story in the past. Elections. Riots. Those various things. Rather than declare that no one can say anything around the water cooler until one person has a lengthy, unique, insightful essay, this place will, in fact, just put a water cooler out in the form of a megathread. When the mods post a megathread, they're not generally pairing it with an interesting top-level comment - they're putting out the water cooler for the conversation that is going to happen.

There is a spectrum between "lazy drive-by dunks on the outgroup from obscure blog", "obvious water cooler topics that are on the front of every newspaper", and "obvious water cooler topics that are on the front of every newspaper and which would otherwise overwhelm the thread." I contend that megathreads are only used for the latter category, but their secondary function is extremely useful for the middle category, too.

Given the premise that it's just putting out the water cooler, I would actually prefer that the top-level comment be a short, completely neutral description of the major news item, like this comment. If we wait for an in-depth comment, then the entire following thread will be colored by the perspective of the OP. You'd need an additional top-level comment to start any offshoot perspectives on the main topic, which fractures the discussion, possibly having other topics sandwiched in between the top-level threads. This way, you can have multiple second-level comments that have more effort, but also allow for conversations with different focuses.

One concern is that loosening this rule opens up a "race to post". I don't see that that's much of a problem, practically. But even so, maybe we could have an in-between mod action that isn't quite opening a megathread, but is opening a "mini-megathread" on topics that are of this sort.

I really liked the old bare link repository. I like a newsfeed made by the sorts of people who post around here.

I get that it is inherently low effort and an obvious attractor to culture warriors. But it had clear value.

We have done topic specific posts on a case by case basis. They aren't needed too often.

And there are a few reasons why we have the rule. Much of it is related to people abusing bare link posting to wage culture war. Some of it is "race to post" problems. Otherwise it's to prevent the flooding of the culture war thread with single topics. If the requirement is to post a long thing about the topic then it is going to slow down the rate of new topics.

I'm in agreement. This specific news event justifies a bare link post.

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