naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
And this is examining your anecdote in the most charitable way possible.
No, I'm afraid this is not sufficiently charitable. It's okay to express your doubt regarding the veracity of a story, but even then you would need to do so in a less antagonistic way. For example:
To be honest I find it difficult to believe anecdotes like this one. It seems like everywhere I look, people are doing their damnedest to pretend that a historically unpopular and utterly unaccomplished politician suddenly has incredible merit. I'm not saying you're lying, but maybe this is the real essence of a "vibe shift": people consenting to an artificial narrative (or propaganda) shift rather than (or even in opposition) to any relevant facts on the ground.
When you make the conversation about a person instead of about the ideas under discussion, you lower the quality of discourse. We're not here to hold referendums on one another's character, but rather to have civil discussions with people who don't always agree with us. Please keep that more closely in mind.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
This is low effort and unnecessarily antagonistic, please don't post like this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
Did you possibly post this in the wrong thread? This seems like a perfectly acceptable post for the CW thread, and while CW topics are not forbidden in the Smallscale Question Sunday thread... this doesn't appear to be a smallscale question.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
They appear to becoming more like performance art with time, which is likely the product of a growing audience.
This is absolutely my impression also.
naraburns
nihil supernum
22d ago
It appears that this forum is filled with city slickers in fancy German cars.
Really? I feel like last time someone asked for car buying advice, the answers were all Hondas and Toyotas. Although even with those, "expensive" is relative. I regard Hondas as "expensive" in that they cost more than a similarly-sized Ford or Subaru or the like. But in my experience it's difficult to go wrong with a Honda daily driver. Though my household currently hasn't got a single vehicle less than a decade old, so it's possible my impressions are out of date.
I would like to have an electric car for commuting, but I need the all-in price on a gently used electric car to be much closer to $15,000 than $50,000 before that can happen. Ten years ago, I really had hoped to have a full self-driving car by 2025. But as near as I can tell, for the foreseeable future I will be driving a standard transmission Honda.
I have driven the following cars.
This is a fascinating list because it is so short. I can't even tell you the models of all the cars I have driven, much less the years--too many rentals to count! I would be hard pressed to remember with accuracy the year of every car I have personally owned. I will say that the overall "feel" or "comfort" of consumer-model cars mostly scales linearly with price, but whether you're willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for "oh wow they really got those knob clicks dialed in, didn't they, and this steering wheel feels amazing" naturally depends a lot on how many dollars you have. And the linear comfort scaling does not apply to sports cars; cars built to go very fast are often quite uncomfortable to drive.
If I had infinity dollars right now, I would probably buy a Tesla S and keep a gas-fed Honda parked alongside it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
I'll second this. I'm enjoying the game. It offers up the feeling of the Final Fantasy 7 through 10 era of JRPGs without feeling derivative. I've always enjoyed Super Mario RPG style "quick time event" turn battles and am happy to see the mechanic again. The music is great, the visuals are great, the writing is great. I don't totally love the level design but it's not bad, just not my preferred style.
I am also enjoying everyone's attempts at naming the putative subgenre. My favorites so far are "Je RPG" and "Final Francetasy."
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
If anything is the Harvard of Canada it's the U of T, but perhaps you mean to suggest that's not saying much.
That was ever-so-slightly tongue-in-cheek bait for the enjoyment of McGill stans. Though my understanding is that they are close in many ways--U of T generally ranks higher in U.S. News, but McGill is both slightly older and generally held to have the finer medical school.
Either way, being this explicit about protecting a user from criticism on the basis of a long record of AAQCs is a new extreme for this system
I feel like you are confusing several separate issues. Nothing I've done in this thread is aimed at "protecting a user from criticism." Coffee_enjoyer was breaking the rules and obnoxiously axe-grinding. His interpretation of Dean's post was bad on a rule-breaking level, and additionally I was annoyed that he had brought that obnoxiousness to the AAQC thread, specifically. If anything, it is coffee_enjoyer whose AAQCs were operating to protect him, here.
Separately, everything I said about Dean being a good poster was in direct response to coffee-enjoyer's obnoxious, overwrought, and rhetorical "is this the kind of posting you want!?" The answer was "yes, that's the point of the AAQCs, these are the kinds of posts we want." I was trying to find a way to help coffee_enjoyer understand why he was being moderated. Ultimately, I seem to have failed to find such a way; coffee_enjoyer seems to me far more interested in being angry about the disagreement between him and Dean (and, by extension, my moderating him over his approach), than in understanding that the problem is not the substance, but in the uncharitable and antagonistic nature of his engagement.
Your complaints are not at that level, but your candor over your distaste for Dean suggests to me that you are making a similar mistake: allowing animus toward a user to blind you to the fact that this is not ultimately about the user, but about the rules. In your little chart:
n% of the community like this user -> user gets upvotes and AAQCs -> user gets away with more extreme posts -> some people who dislike this leave -> m% (m>n) of the community like this user
You've left out my quite explicit point that AAQCs are not a bar to banning. Users cannot get away with "more extreme posts" indefinitely. Some of our best users, along with our worst, have, eventually, eaten bans--always, after deciding that they no longer wished to follow the rules, even perfunctorily. That's genuinely a problem for us! It's something the mod team talks about with alarming regularity. It's really, really frustrating to take someone with years of quality contributions, including former community moderators, and hand them a 366 or a perma or whatever. We don't want to do that! If this was about picking favorites or even picking preferred positions, Hlynka wouldn't be banned. Certain alts still kicking around here probably would be banned. But ultimately, no matter what percentage of the community is on "your side," if you're not going to follow the rules, you're going to get banned.
If you were serious about wanting a space in which people with different politics talk to each other, you should if anything have done the opposite, and treated any tendency in "community sentiment" as indicative of a growth that needs to be pruned.
I can see why you might think that; it's not entirely wrong. But we do engage in a fair bit of "affirmative action." We cut people some slack when they get dogpiled and lash out. We try to give sufficient breathing room to heterodox views. Moderation is adaptive and qualitative. But like AAQCs, just having a minority view is not a perfect shield. The rules will still apply, if less quickly or harshly.
In the end, we can't maintain this space at all if we worry too much about what might or might not "drive users away." One person's final straw is someone else's welcoming hearth. I've been moderating the Motte for more than five years, and I honestly never believed it would last as long as it already has. So I'm afraid I find myself entirely unmoved by your concerns. My goal is not to build this space into anything in particular. I have no KPIs. I just serve the foundation to the best of my ability, until the time comes when that's no longer needed, or wanted, or necessary.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
I think that glazing an individual user in this fashion in a modhat comment is inappropriate and reflects badly on the moderation.
I think what you're saying here is that my explicit endorsement of Dean is a bad look and makes you feel like you might not get a fair shake at some future point should you disagree with the wrong person. If I have understood you correctly, then you have failed to understand the foundation, or the moderation system, or maybe both.
I am not an impartial arbiter tasked with tone-policing the forum. My task is to cultivate "a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases." To that end, I wield exactly one carrot: AAQCs. I have two sticks: warnings and bans. Community sentiment (via reports) drives both. The community also has a small carrot (upvotes) and a small stick (downvotes).
This is a reputation economy: the more carrots you have, the less likely you are to get the stick. As we often remind people: that does not mean carrots are a perfect defense against sticks! But for example a user with many carrots might get a warning where a user with no carrots would get a ban. People who contribute to the good of the community are deliberately favored. We have never made the slightest secret of this, but everyone has to learn it for the first time sometime, so maybe today is your day.
Yes, I will freely admit that this sentiment is coloured by the circumstance that I cannot stand this particular user.
I appreciate the candor, so in turn I will freely admit that your comparing moderation here to Putin's Russia gave me a good laugh. It also helped me to calibrate on your sense of proportionality, in a way that was probably not beneficial to your aims.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
The patsy was dead, and what about the other shooters?
More effort than this, please.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
Yeah, weird is nowhere near as bad a slur as w*man
It's not entirely clear to me what you mean by this; in the future, please put more effort toward speaking plainly.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
I looked over the rules just now. Was it my use of the word "tranny?" If so, I'll avoid using it. Not sure what else it could have been.
We don't really ban specific words per se, but we do ban things like weakmanning in order to show how bad a group is. In this particular case, you might respond "oh but I was just explaining a way to play the game under discussion" but... I guess what I want to say is that I might accept that excuse from a good poster with a long history in the sub, but I certainly wouldn't accept that excuse from a user with your posting history.
Frankly, if I were you and I wanted to continue posting on the Motte in good faith, the first thing I'd do is roll a new account without an openly antagonistic username. We are, I think, mostly tolerant of quirky usernames but, yours is a pretty bold declaration against, uh, the whole ethos of this site.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
Buddhist or Shinto or something - I don't know, and I assume the creators of the ad didn't know either
I would assume Jainism! They sweep the ground in front of themselves as they walk, and wear facemasks to avoid inhaling bugs. You beat me to it by about 15 minutes.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
You should link to wikipedia rather than a new site that's inaccessible from outside of the US.
Which link is inaccessible from outside the US? (How would I even know?)
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
Why is it egregorian and not just normal evolution?
Biological evolution gives us individuals. Egregores are (roughly) patterns of collective action. The latter is emergent from the former; this is not metaphysically uncontroversial, but I don't think reductionism is useful in this particular context. YMMV!
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
Just to add to @Amadan's take on this, it's hard for me to take you very seriously in a discussion about "good faith" when you link to that comment I made, without also referencing my direct reply to you in that thread where I elaborated:
...I have vague memories of this being something the mod team was maybe disunified about for a while (maybe still is). It's also possible I'm giving the wrong impression with the phrase "affirmative action." It's possible different moderators have had, and expressed, different ideas of what amounts to "affirmative action" in various cases. Zorba has always made it our top priority to make this a
place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases
which necessarily involves having people who don't all share the same biases. So we've always tried to moderate in ways that would encourage the development of such a community.
On the other hand, the mod team is accused somewhat regularly of going too easy/too hard on red tribe/blue tribe posts, and we have often cited this fact as evidence that moderation is not actually especially biased in one direction or the other; everyone always feels like their ox is the one being gored. Thumbing the scales a bit in favor of including heterodox views does not rise to the level of nuking the rules, any more than QCs do. And I don't think we've ever thumbed the scales for tribal reasons (either pro or con)--just for specific users in specific cases, where it was, say, understandable that someone might get a little hot under the collar.
So I would suggest that the way to parse all of this is that moderation is a qualitative and adaptive process in a reputation economy. We do go easier on new users, generally. We go easier on people who make QCs or otherwise contribute to the health of the community (e.g. by expressing heterodox views), for the most part. We go harder on people who habitually make bad posts, or express unwillingness to abide by the rules. We moderate tone rather than content. What that amounts to, in the end, is... what we have here. If you're getting moderated occasionally, it's probably nothing to worry much about. If you're getting moderated a lot, it's definitely because you're breaking the rules and showing no inclination to even try doing better.
(Emphasis added.) Your refusal to engage in open, honest, charitable discussion of these nuances is a far, far cry from us engaging in "manipulation attempts." When you ask a question and get an answer, then pop up months later writing as though you never read or understood that answer, like... I don't know what more I can possibly say to you about it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
Write like everyone is reading, and you want to include them in the conversation. As you've been reminded somewhat recently.
Yes, even Californians. Yes, even your outgroup. While your comment is not entirely devoid of substance, it brings far, far more heat than light. Let's see, last time I wrote:
You do your substantive position no favors by cranking the rhetoric to 11. Your occasional AAQCs only get you so much lenience. It has been a while since your last ban, after which you became a quality-content machine for a bit! But recently your warnings have been arriving with increasing frequency. Let's try another week-long ban.
Two weeks this time, I guess.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Also, and this is just an aside... but is the best line of my comment here really the part where I'm qualifying my point?
If you think there's a better single-sentence(ish) quote that should be there, feel free to say so. I'm happy to update.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
The charity failure in cartman's comment was that WhiningCoil argues that children consenting to sex acts is analogous to children consenting to treatment for reasons of sex or gender preferences, i.e. "if children can't consent to sex acts then children can't consent to puberty blockers, hormone treatments, or sex-altering surgeries, and if parental authority does not extend to vicarious consent for sex acts then it also does not extend to vicarious consent for puberty blockers, hormone treatments, or sex-altering surgeries."
People can argue about whether that analogy is a good one. But if one person builds their argument on the validity of the analogy and another person builds their response on the invalidity of the analogy, then they are not really talking to each other, they are just competing for who can make their take on the analogy into the consensus by being loud and insistent about it.
This is a complicated thing to moderate because we moderate on tone rather than substance, but like most informal fallacies, it's hard to recognize this one without some grasp of the substance of the argument.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Is Polymarket open to Americans?
No, though if you use a VPN and crypto they can't exactly stop you. This would be a violation of their terms of service and also the law, though the extent to which that violation would be on you versus them is not clear to me.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
I think there is a lot of truth to what you say, but that part of (say) Intel's or Boeing's problems seems less applicable to the question of what video game companies are doing.
More effort than this, please.
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