An in depth proposal for how Elon can brute force the Problem of Identity to make 10s of billions off of Twitter Verifications.
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
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Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
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Recruiting for a cause.
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Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
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Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Since the Great Recession, the Fed has transformed itself into an entity more and more responsible for asset prices. This was the stated goal since 2009 as the Fed adopted a new philosophy called the "Wealth Effect." The thinking behind it was simple: growth in asset prices would translate to an increase in consumer spending and hence demand itself. It was a 'trickle down' economic philosophy an increasingly financialized economy.
This backdrop has defined our post-2009 era which stirred certain pathologies that were reflected in the greater culture and politics. It was the time when 'finance became a culture' and actual-productivity plummeted across most developed economies, especially the United States. But somehow in spite of the accumulating dysfunction across most key areas, everything kept trudging along, partly thanks to investors being satiated with record returns.
While the near-zero interest rate regime may now be ending, it is worth considering how much of the water we were all swimming in excused poor state capacity, distorted economic fundamentals, and how it even kept a lid on the dysfunction potentially blowing up in our faces. Now that we have to reckon with these realities, it may be wise to ask how many worldviews were simply products of the the cheap money regime - which is now, in a shock to many, coming to a close. Whether or not it will easily be let go, however, is another matter.
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.
Submission statement for Southkraut: Bret Deveraux discusses everything The Rings of Power creators did wrong other than the culture war stuff. TLDR: they understand neither geography nor economics nor anthropology. Also, they are racist towards the Irish.
Many widely used models amount to an elaborate means of making up numbers—but once a number has been produced, it tends to be taken seriously and its source (the model) is rarely examined carefully. Many widely used models have little connection to the real-world phenomena they purport to explain. Common steps in modeling to support policy decisions, such as putting disparate things on the same scale, may conflict with reality. Not all costs and benefits can be put on the same scale, not all uncertainties can be expressed as probabilities, and not all model parameters measure what they purport to measure. These ideas are illustrated with examples from seismology, wind-turbine bird deaths, soccer penalty cards, gender bias in academia, and climate policy.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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Shaming.
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Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
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Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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.
In Germany, the current outbreak of mass social media-induced illness is initiated by a ‘virtual’ index case, who is the second most successful YouTube creator in Germany and enjoys enormous popularity among young people. Affected teenagers present with similar or identical functional ‘Tourette-like’ behaviours, which can be clearly differentiated from tics in Tourette syndrome.
Another choice quote
patients often reported to be unable to perform unpleasant tasks because of their symptoms resulting in release from obligations at school and home, while symptoms temporarily completely disappear while conducting favourite activities.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Ok, there was supposed to be text in the top near the link, there isn't, some I'm pasting the summary of the linked post here.
Peter Watts, the Canadian SF writer known for writing endearingly depressing SF books and promoting the idea consciousness is not essential to sentience has been forced to re-evaluate this position of his following a recent experiment by proponents of the Free Energy Model of consciousness.
Now it appears, at least to him, there may be an intrinsic link between subjective experience and problem solving by intelligent systems.
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
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Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
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Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
I have been bouncing around a theory for a while about the whole UFO discussion of the last... five years? It's interesting how it has ebbed and flowed in US, even getting a fair amount of discussion (and true believers announcing themselves) on the predecessor forums to this forum. I think the most important and interesting thing is not the phenomenon - how many times are people going to get excited about hazy videos that may or may not show small specks moving in unnatural ways, but the discussion itself - and I think there's a specific reason why the system might foster this discussion.
We certainly know that the US government takes a great interest in social media and has done so since the beginning, as demonstrated by articles like this one. The effective voluntary surveillance abilities offered by Facebook and other security-state-connected social media means that there can now be what amounts to a voluntary distributed vast civilian surveillance operation by the security state.
If media successfully rekindles interest in UFOs, there's going to be photos all over social media, and they might be of some use, as there's timestamps and location data, and you can use rapidly advancing machine learning abilities to, for instance, give credence to pilot sightings by checking if there's relevant civilian sightings, or photographs.
By stoking interest in UFOs, having people photograph or otherwise talk about whatever strange lights in the sky they have seen, they will receive data that they can now categorize and utilize – true open-source intelligence. They can then figure out whether there is a cause for further interest and concern.
Such civilians might not do this just voluntarily. Indeed, many of them are exactly of the suspicious type that would actively refrain from watching the skies if the government directly told them to do so. And it is not just Americans. A successful operation would provoke sightings all around the world, even in enemy countries (as far as those allow the penetration of American social media). And as automatic data analysis capabilities improve, so would the capabilities to use that data.
More in the link.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
I've got a new feature almost ready to go. I'm pretty stoked about this one because I've been wanting it for quite literally years, but it was never possible on Reddit.
Hey, guess what? We're not on Reddit!
But before I continue, I want to temper expectations. This is a prototype of a first revision of an experimental feature. It is not going to look impressive; it is not going to be impressive. There's a lot of work left to do.
The feature is currently live on our perpetually-running dev site. Log in, click any thread, and go look below the Comment Preview. You'll see a quokka in a suit asking you for help. (His name is Quincy.) Click the cute li'l guy and you'll be asked to rate three comments. Do so, and click Submit. Thank you! Your reward is another picture of Quincy and a sense of satisfaction.
So, uh . . . . what?
Okay, lemme explain.
This is the first part of a feature that I'm calling Volunteering. Once in a while, the site is going to prompt you to help out, and if you volunteer, it'll give you a few minutes of work to do. Right now this is going to be "read some comments and say if they're good or not". Later this might include stuff like "compare two comments and tell me if one of them is better", or "read a comment, then try to come up with a catchy headline for it".
These are intentionally small, and they're entirely optional. You can ignore it altogether if you like.
I'm hoping these can end up being the backbone of a new improved moderation system.
Isn't this just voting, but fancy?
You'd think so! But there are critical differences.
First, you do not choose the things to judge. The system chooses the things it wants you to judge. You are not presented with thousands of comments and asked to vote on the ones you think are important, no, you are given (at the moment) three specific comments and information is requested of you.
This means that I don't need to worry about disproportionate votecount on popular comments. Nor do I need to worry about any kind of vote-brigading, or people deciding to downvote everything that a user has posted. The system gets only the feedback it asks for. This is a pull system; the system pulls information from the userbase in exactly the quantities it wants instead of the userbase shoving possibly-unwanted information at the scoring systems.
Second, you can be only as influential as the system lets you. On the dev site you can volunteer as often as you want for testing purposes, but on the live site, you're going to - for now - be limited to once every 20 hours. I'll probably change this a lot, but nevertheless, if the system decides you've contributed enough, it'll thank you kindly and then cut you off. Do you want to spend all day volunteering in order to influence the community deeply? Too bad! Not allowed.
But this goes deeper than it sounds. Part of having the system prompt you is that not all prompts will be the system attempting to get actionable info from you. Some of the prompts will be the system trying to compare your choices against a reference, and the system will then use this comparison to figure out how much to trust your decisions.
That reference, of course, is the mods.
I've previously referred to this as the Megaphone system or the Amplifier system. One of our devs called it a "force multiplier". I think this gets across the core of what I'm aiming for. The goal here is not majority-rules, it's not fully decentralized moderation. It's finding people who generally agree with the mods and then quietly harnessing them to handle the easy moderation cases.
(We have a lot of easy moderation cases.)
There's another important point here. The mods are only human and we make mistakes. My hope is that we can get enough volunteer help to provide significantly more individual decisions than the mods can, and my hope is that the combined efforts of several people who don't quite agree with the mods in all cases is still going to be more reliable than any single mod. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if there's people out there who are better at judging posts than our mods are! It's just hard to find you; some of you may not even comment, and you're pretty undiscoverable right now, but you will certainly get a chance to volunteer!
Also, this will hopefully improve turnaround time a lot. I'm tired of filtered comments taking hours to get approved! I'm tired of really bad comments sticking around for half a day! There are many people constantly commenting and voting, and if I can get a few minutes of help from people now and then, we can handle those rapidly instead of having to wait for a mod to be around.
Wow! You get all of this, with absolutely no downsides or concerns!
Well, hold on.
The big concern here is that virtually nobody has ever done this before. The closest model I have is Slashdot's metamoderation system. Besides that, I'm flying blind.
I also have to make sure this isn't exploitable. The worst-case scenario is people being able to use this to let specific bad comments through. I really want to avoid that, and I've got ideas on how to avoid it, but it's going to take work on my part to sort out the details.
And there's probably issues that I'm not even thinking of. Again: flying blind. If you think of issues, bring 'em up; if you see issues, definitely bring 'em up.
Oh man! So, all this stuff is going to be running real soon, right?
Nope.
First I need some data to work off. Full disclosure: all the current system does is collect data, then ignore it.
But it is collecting data, and as soon as I've got some data, I'll be working on the next segment.
This is the first step towards having a platform that's actually better-moderated than the current brand of highly-centralized sites. I don't know if it'll work, but I think it will.
Please go test it out on the dev site, report issues, and when it shows up here (probably in a few days) click the button roughly daily and spend a few minutes on it. Your time will not be wasted.
Blocking
Right now this site's block feature works much the same as Reddit's. But I want to change that, because it sucks.
My current proposal is:
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If you block someone, you will no longer see their comments, receive PMs from them, or be notified if they reply to your comments.
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This does not stop them from seeing your comments, nor does it stop them from replying to your comments.
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If they attempt to reply to your comment, it will include the note "This user has blocked you. You are still welcome to reply, but your replies will be held to a stricter standard of civility."
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This note is accurate and we will do so.
That's the entire proposed feature. Feedback welcome!
User Flair and Usernames
We're going to start cracking down a bit on hyperpartisan or antagonistic user flair. Basically, if we'd hit you with a warning for putting it in a comment, we'll hit you with a warning for putting it in your flair. If anyone has a really good reason for us to not do this, now's the time to mention it!
Same goes for usernames. On this site, you can actually change your display username, and we're just leaving that in place. So we'll tell you to change your name if we have to. Extra for usernames: don't use a misleading or easily-confused username, okay? If it looks like you're masquerading as an existing well-known user, just stop it.
I'm currently assuming that both of these fall under our existing ruleset and don't need new rules applied. If you disagree strongly, let me know.
The Usual Stuff
Give feedback! Tell me how you're doing? Do you have questions? Do you have comments? This is the place for them!
Are you a coder and want to help out? We have a lot of work to do - come join the dev discord.
I remember back in 2015 the Balsamic vinegar from Scott's recommendations went over well.
Headlamps (Petzl Tikka Headlamp) and Marino wools socks (Smartwool Men's Classic Cushion Socks) have been my go to gifts for over a decade and never had anyone disappointed. Another one of either is always nice to have in my opinion.
The Leatherman Skeletool is a folding knife I've been giving out as gifts lately. It's not the ultimate pocket knife but it fills a niche (ultra-light) that I think a lot of people appreciate and would probably be hesitant to buy for themselves. I've seen a couple people carrying it 6 months after I gave it to them.
I've had a Stanley car jump starter air compressor combo for years and any time I need it I'm just so happy to have it.
If you like trick taking card game Crew is a collaborative spin and has been a lot of fun.
If you're looking for tools I find the YouTube channel Project Farm to have good tool reviews and he has 10 suggestion for the year.
Top 10 Tools 2022? Let’s find out! Gift Ideas!
GearWrench Ratchet: https://amzn.to/3OjrHS5
DeWalt String Trimmer: https://amzn.to/3AuwScm
Ryobi Stapler: https://amzn.to/3AQDyBV
Craftsman Tap & Die Set: https://amzn.to/3Elt6mK
S-K Ratcheting Combination Wrench: https://amzn.to/3Gtz8Eo
Cle-Line: homedepot.sjv.io/jW6ND6
Benchmade Knife: https://amzn.to/3EFOCD1
Snap On Torque Wrench: Available Online at the Snap On Store
Daytona Floor Jack: Available at Harbor Freight
Milwaukee Grinder: Available at Home Depot
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.
For all those who are new since the site move, or simply missed it the first time around, I wanted to point out a charming piece of Motte history, a process which made me pay attention to this ragtag community and eventually join. The Doge process, while controversial at the time with many nay-sayers, has aged quite well I'd argue. Well enough to have us survive through a full site move, at the least.
I'll just be copying @ZorbaTHut's post from this reddit link. Everything below is his writing. Please enjoy.
We did this crazy thing to pick some new mods. Tl;dr: right now, we're thinking it was extremely successful. Strongly recommended for anyone running their own community.
Please welcome (in the order that they happened to accept invitations) /u/ymeskhout
, and /u/Gen_McMuster
as new moderators! I think many of you have already seen them step into the weird arena that is this community, with roughly the expected amount of success ("a lot, but some weird gotchas") and I'm hoping they stick around for a while.
Note that we may be recruiting up to three more mods, but they didn't answer the original message, so I'll pester them again in a day or two; don't be surprised if a few more people show up. (My goal here is to end up overstaffed for once.)
The Doge Process
Because I know some people will be very interested in the details . . . (non-doge stuff below this, scroll down if you don't care about the mod process)
Here's the message I sent out to the second-round people (which I think was the best-written and still included the weird meta-picking content).
Greetings, nominee! You have been recruited by /r/TheMotte to elect new moderators to maintain and improve the community!
You may or may not have seen our most recent meta post. The short version is that we are planning to recruit new moderators and trying to find a good way to do it. Our current plan is a series of nomination rounds, where people in each round nominate the people in the next round, ending with a group of potential new moderators.
Existing Mods
Round 1
Round 2 <-- YOU ARE HERE
Round 3
New Mods
And you have been chosen to help!
The eventual goal is to recruit mods who will be good at implementing TheMotte's foundation, which I will reproduce here:
The purpose of this community is to be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs. It is to be a place for people to examine the beliefs of others as well as their own beliefs; it is to be a place where strange or abnormal opinions and ideas can be generated and discussed fairly, with consideration and insight instead of kneejerk responses.
Your goal is to nominate people who will be good at nominating the aforementioned new mods.
I can't force you to choose people based on this, but I'd ask you to keep it in mind, regardless of whether you (or your nominees) agree with it. That said, you're welcome to use whatever reasoning you like for your choice.
Send nominations to me as a private message (such as a response to this message). Please nominate between two and four people. If you can't think of that many, feel free to nominate fewer. If you really want to nominate more, you're welcome to give it a shot; include your best justification for why you need to nominate more and I'll handle it in whatever way I consider reasonable.
Loose deadline is in 72 hours from when this message was sent.
Some notes:
You're not required to help with this! If you're uninterested in participating, in either this round, upcoming nomination rounds, and/or the potential mod position itself, let me know and I won't bother you again. If you merely think you're not suitable for it, please give it your best anyway.
Nominees must have posted on /r/TheMotte, not currently be banned from it, and be somewhat active on Reddit. You aren't allowed to nominate yourself. You are allowed to nominate people from previous or even current rounds. Being active in this round does not guarantee inclusion in future rounds; every round is separate. Similarly, if you've done this before, that's OK! You got nominated again. Welcome back.
"Good at choosing mods" and "good at being a mod" are probably different skillsets, correlated but not directly linked.
Note that there are a fixed number of slots available for the next round and it's significantly less than the number of nominations available. Nominations will be evaluated in order of popularity, so if you know someone is nominating your #1 pick, you should also nominate them to push them up the choice order. More votes for someone is a useful signal.
As soon as I've finished sending these, I'll add everyone in this round to a Reddit chat group so you can discuss as you see fit. You're not required to use it and you can leave at any time. If you're a jerk in it, I'll kick you; this does not remove your ability to nominate people, but if you're too much of a jerk, you might end up banned from /r/TheMotte. Please don't do that. If you rejected the invite, but have now changed your mind, let me know and I'll re-invite you.
The results of this aren't binding and I have reserve full right to tweak nominations as I see fit, up to and including cancelling the entire thing, but I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think it was promising.
So:
Have at it!
For each round, I was targeting 20 people, and asked people to send in 2 to 4 nominees (except for the very first mod-only round; because we have so few mods, I asked people for between 4 and 10 nominees.) My plan was to order nominees strictly by vote count and accepted every vote-count group that didn't put us over the 20-person target, then fill any remaining slots with a random sample of whichever people were left over. In each case, we had about ten people with two votes or more, and about twenty people with exactly one vote, so practically speaking this meant each nomination was roughly an additive-stacking 50% chance to show up in the next round.
Each round we had about four people who didn't respond or participate in any way. Annoyingly, exactly one person bothered to send me a message asking to be withdrawn, the rest just ignored it. C'mon, people. This did lead to one weird quirk, which is that someone didn't respond in the first round but also weren't using Reddit at the time; they got nominated for the second round, and I decided to give them an "extra" space, totaling 21 people in that round, just in case they came back to Reddit.
They did come back to Reddit! They also didn't participate at all. Welp.
I left us room to override the public's decision, and I ran each round past the mods before starting it. There were a few times we were dubious about a choice, but we never actually used the override power; also I'm pretty sure none of the people we were uncertain about actually ended up participating.
Here's anonymized info on how many people got nominated for which set of rounds:
Rounds 1, 2, and 3: 6
Rounds 1 and 2: 4
Rounds 1 and 3: 2
Rounds 2 and 3: 3
Round 1 only: 8
Round 2 only: 9
Round 3 only: 9
I tried to make a Sankey diagram out of this and couldn't come up with something that looked good. YMMV.
I had a bunch of worst-case scenarios in mind, for example:
Nobody bothers to reply
People just troll the chat
A few people collude to stack votes so they can get their favored candidate chosen
It turns into a simple popularity contest, no real information is gained
Absolutely none of these happened. Chat was fantastic and several people asked me if this could be made a long-term thing. Unfortunately, Reddit's chat interface is absolutely terrible for large groups; also, none of us have the bandwidth to manage a Discord server. Luckily there's an existing unofficial-but-affiliated Discord server and if you'd like to talk to similar-minded people in realtime, you should go there, it's a good group of people. (Note: This is affiliated with this subreddit but not managed by us, nor does it share our exact ruleset; read the rules and get a feel for the community before dropping controversial knowledge bombs or you're going to get banned super-fast and the admin will get annoyed at me and I will then get annoyed at you. Also I ran this paragraph past the admin before posting it so he knows you're coming. He awaits.)
With a little bit of prompting, the last round turned into a bunch of people proposing candidates, looking them over, and discussing them; some people were nominated who were in the chat and they wrote up little summaries of why they think they would be a good or a bad choice. It was all pretty great.
The tl;dr is that if you have a community that is anything like this one, I strongly recommend using this system, or one derived from it, for mod recruitment. I think we ended up with a set of people which are better choices than we would have come up with on our own. It took a lot of time on my behalf but I think it's worthwhile.
You are welcome to steal parts of the note I posted above; if you've got any questions, feel free to ask!
The Experimental Bare Link Repository
Hey, you know the Experimental Bare Link Repository? The one that's been experimental for like eight months now?
Yeah, sorry. Kinda dropped the ball on that one. It is no longer the Experimental Bare Link Repository and is now just the Bare Link Repository.
Locking Your Own Posts
We've had a few people make really long multipart posts and grumble that people are responding to the first half and not the second half, which then bumps the second half down in New sorting and is overall just a big pain. We've got a fix! A really hacky fix!
Write your entire post series in Notepad or some other offsite medium. Make sure that they're long; comment limit is 10000 characters, if your comments are less than half that length you should probably not be making it a multipost series.
Post it rapidly in response to yourself like you would normally.
For each post except the last one, go back and edit it to include the trigger phrase automod_multipart_lockme.
This will cause AutoModerator to lock the post.
You can then edit it to remove that phrase and it'll stay locked. This means that you cannot unlock your post on your own, so make sure you do this after you've posted your entire series. Also, don't lock the last one or people can't respond to you. Also, this gets reported to the mods, so don't abuse it or we'll either boot you or just lock you out of the feature; this is specifically for organization of multipart megaposts.
I wish there was a better way to do this, but we'll see how this works.
I'll add it to the thread starter in a few weeks in the hopes that someone tries it out before then (uh, if I haven't, someone remind me.)
That's All, Folks
Standard meta thread stuff: say hi and ask how we're doing! Chat with the new mods! Order beer! Don't get Coronavirus! If you do, talk to a researcher to figure out how it managed to transmit itself across the Internet!
This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
Quality Contributions in Culture Peace
Contributions for the week of October 24, 2022
Contributions for the week of October 31, 2022
@self_made_human:
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"Back in September a commenter here on the TheMotte posted an argument about fertility trends claiming that among rich countries fertility actually increases with feminism.... so I wanted to make an effort post explaining why I don't believe the claim."
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"Forming a bond with someone who is bad for you is very damaging."
Contributions for the week of November 7, 2022
@problem_redditor:
Contributions for the week of November 14, 2022
@YE_GUILTY:
@Supah_Schmendrick:
about a topic that is obscure even in Finland – Sámi issues."
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"A few weeks ago I wrote ... a post about the link between feminism and declining fertility rates, I used Saudi Arabia as an example."
@aaa:
Contributions for the week of November 21, 2022
@Supah_Schmendrick:
Contributions for the week of November 28, 2022
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).