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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28890 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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In an unrelated note, since there's no better places to discuss this, instituting a more strict character count per comment would bring a breath of fresh air to the thread.

Reading the motte has become a dull slog, and many of these top-level comments consist of word soup with BIG TITLES pretending to say something meaningful without corresponding substance.

100% agree, I don't know some of you find the time to read every comment in this thread.

The reddit format doesn't help- small text on a white background with no images, every comment being indented further. Just put it on a blog and link to that, if you want to write a monograph.

I like long posts, but yeah, I think some of it is down to the mod rebukes about short posts and no more bare links - you have to make it substantive, which is often in reality "I could do this in two paragraphs but in case I get rapped over the knuckles I'm padding it out".

I've yet to see the mods knock an actually-good two-to-three paragraph post, so I'm dubious this is a report on the reality of the moderation's behaviors.

Seems self-evident that it's more difficult to moderate six+ paragraphs with five sentences each on each comment.

Many of my favorite posts here are long posts. It’s not really about the word count but about the quality. I’d rather read a 4000 word essay from one of our better writers than a 200 word comment from one of our worst.

I have nothing but applause for your constitution in being able to endure everything between those polar points.

The last time they changed the character limit they increased it!

Be the change you want to see. Write good posts.

Conciseness (or information density) and length are two different things. Someone can take a paragraph to say nothing or fill a dozen paragraphs with good insights.

I think a bigger problem is how often we all choose to make our own points, only tangentially related to the comments we're responding to, rather than actually responding. Instituting a word count would only make this problem worse.

instituting a more strict character count per comment would bring a breath of fresh air to the thread.

Brevity is wit, but for the rest of us it takes a long time to compose short letters, and those who tend to generate a lot of text are making the tradeoff to just get the comment out.

and many of these top-level comments consist of word soup with BIG TITTIES

I'm in favor of this; in fact, I think this would make any of the sex threads better. Come to think of it, I wonder if anyone's tried to use an LLM to /r9k/ these kinds of comments, where if you say the same thing too much it tempbans you?

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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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