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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29625 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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This got reported for low effort. And it kind of is. We'd like you to not make a thing where you just re-post about the same topic with slight additions to the content as a way of "bumping" the topic to the topic. That would be obnoxious, so if I think you are doing that again it will result in some mod action.

This is not a mod warning, but I'm going to distinguish the comment to hopefully give some guidance to people.

There were a lot of people upset about me saying a post last week was low effort. And they got worried that I have super strict standards for a top level comment. But I'd like to clarify that this post passes my personal standards for what is "low effort", and it does so while only being 8 sentences long. Here is a breakdown:

Yes, another top level comment about The Origins of Woke from me, in the same thread on the same week. But this is about something else. I had an epiphany while reading the book.

This is the context for the post. It could be replaced with a link to a story, or a link to the post. If they had stopped here it would be equivalent to just dropping a bare link. This is not nearly enough. If its someone that is maybe new I will give a warning, if its a longtime user I will give a ban.

I've wondered for many years why Marxism is more socially acceptable than racism when it's responsible for even more deaths than the Holocaust. It's because companies are (de facto) legally required to fire racists, but they're not required to fire Marxists. In fact, firing a Marxist for merely being Marxist would be illegal in California.

This is a spicy opinion part and an observation of the world. But its spicy in a way that doesn't actively insult anyone for believing the opposite of what the poster thinks. Adding this part with the previous part makes it an on the edge post of effort. I might have given a warning if they'd stopped here. Or if the spicyness was trying to insult people it might have been a ban.

California has a state law against firing people for their political beliefs, but it didn't protect James Damore, who was fired in compliance with the law against creating a hostile work environment for protected groups.

Here is an additional defense of the spicy take. And they've now cleared my "low effort" post standards.

It all adds up.

And this is a useless sentence, which means they could have gotten away with a 7 sentence top level post and it wouldn't be low effort.

So to summarize:

  1. Provide context for the discussion (a story, a personal thought, whatever).
  2. Provide an opinion or take on the context. Something personal that if another person chimes in and disagrees with you, then you are willing to have a discussion with them on why you think you are right. (this is perhaps the most important thing)
  3. Provide a defense of your take, or try to preempt a common counter argument. This shows that you've maybe thought about the thing for more than 30 seconds.

What I don't want to see is "here is a thing, please provide me with content about it!" You are the content here. Having a discussion is the content. When I ask people to start the discussion, that is what I am trying to get at. Ultimately we would like to reward our content creators, or people that start discussions, not those who request discussions.

So, tepidly in support of @Conservautism, but mostly in curiosity about rules and norms, where should we expect the line to be with regard to posting on the same subject? We have some great running series of posts, like the San Francisco housing issues, that I think pretty much no one objects to. On the flip side, we've had some posters in the past that were just incredibly annoying with their repetitive shit-stirring. Is the line less about whether someone is bringing up the same thing repeatedly and more about how annoying they are when doing it? Personally, I think reasonable updates and questions on a weekly basis for a topic of interest that really is interesting to the local audience would be basically fine, but I'm curious where you think the line should be.

"Don't be egregiously obnoxious" is kind of the guiding principle. Sorry there isn't anything more specific. If a bunch of people here found some behavior annoying we'd ask the poster to knock it off. Which has happened with some users that keep posting about Jewish people and the holocaust.

If people find a weekly update on a topic interesting and it generates discussion, then not only is it ok, it could be an AAQC, or turn into a weekly staple. The Transnational Thursdays thread was originally just some posts in the main culture war thread. People liked it a lot, and now its got its own thread.

I absolutely do not want the rules to get in the way of good discussion or good posting. Myself and the other mods will never try to follow the rules over a cliff.

We have some great running series of posts, like the San Francisco housing issues, that I think pretty much no one objects to.

Ah, but why do we not object? I would argue that we find it less bothersome because it's not an overwhelming topic here - you don't get people constantly talking about the failure to build and NIMBYs. It's also a less charged topic, economics generally tends to be.

In contrast, the OP's post touches on several topics far more incendiary, in the sense that you'll get a lot more people offering their own diagnoses of the issue, but often agreeing with the underlying premise. You can also find at least half a dozen posts by the week's end that make a similar sort of point of "progressives stupid/evil".

I don't have any concrete proposals, but one thing I would encourage people to keep in mind before they make a top-level comment is just how much insight they think they're adding to the overall conversation(s), doubly so if it's about race, gender, and sex. If you're a newcomer, lurk more.

Should I have edited the original post instead? Or should I have replied to it directly?

One followup comment a few days later is fine. Especially if the original comment has been knocked way below the waterline on visible comments. And if it starts a discussion in a new direction that is also fine.

If the original comment is still visible then a response comment, or an edit are both fine. Personally I'd do a response comment, but that isn't a mod rule, I just think it would more clearly mark that I have a separate discussion in mind, and people that respond to the response comment are clearly interested in the separate discussion, rather than the original discussion.

Its just two followup comments that would be bad. Which you haven't done (and probably wouldn't have done anyways?), so there is no warning here.

Your posts have to be manually approved the mods, because this alt's posts are being caught in the new user filter, as I'm pretty sure you are well aware.

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