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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2853 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 23, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Had I seen the vote count sooner I would have deleted it. I feel bad about having posted it and regret it.

I agree with everyone saying you shouldn't do that, so please add my bullying to the campaign against you succumbing to bullying.

As for internally visible comment scores, I agree with @Primaprimaprima that the current system virtually guarantees I visit the motte the day after I make a comment. That's good slot machine design. However, when I make a comment on reddit, I still typically check back several times to see how the score plays out, so I'm not sure that benefit justifies the current approach.

The best argument against making self-scores visible is that it would change the behavior of posters themselves in a hot conversation. When underwater scorewise, one tends to adopt the embattled, passive-aggressive stance of a martyr being inquisitored. The people you're talking to respond in kind. I don't like that dynamic on reddit and wouldn't like it here.

It can get especially bad on Reddit when you're in a back-and-forth conversation with someone that goes enough layers deep that probably nobody else is reading your comments except the responder, and you can see when they're downvoting each reply you make.

I always liked that, frankly. Someone gets to a point like "All prime numbers are odd; what are you, stupid?!", and the part of my brain that evaluates logic is still overriding the part of my brain that evaluates people so I reply with the obvious counterexample anyway, but then the downvote comes and it wakes me up and I drop the thread.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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