naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
The OP was about a man arrested because the cops thought his bulge was a gun. Both cops and guns are live culture war issues in the US. If the man in question was Black, the CW-ness of the case increases further.
Indeed. As the man once said--
Under Moloch, everyone is irresistibly incentivized to ignore the things that unite us in favor of forever picking at the things that divide us in exactly the way that is most likely to make them more divisive.
CW issues will always lurk around the edges. One way to conceptualize what we're saying here is that if you can more or less keep them at the edges, you'll be fine. Or, if you want to foreground the CW issues, then go to the CW thread.
The mod team is a reasonable bunch. We're asking the userbase to also be reasonable, while noting that in fact the userbase is, overwhelmingly and in almost every case, appropriately reasonable.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
That is, would RoyGBivensAction's root comment be considered prohibited "sex and sexuality" under this ruling?
No--which is why that post was not moderated.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
"all posts have to be appropriate for kids to see" - particularly when using standards of "appropriate" that are not mine but rather those of actual Anglospheric media-rating boards
No, that's definitely not the standard here.
Honestly, the precise legal status of the Motte raises interesting questions, perhaps especially in connection with Australia, since as far as I know we don't have any age-gating, not even nominally. Is this a "social media" website? Fortunately, I am not in a position to be responsible for any of that, as I am just a moderator--and fortunately for us all, Zorba seems to me unusually brave for a website owner/operator. Almost certainly, we continue to exist in part by dint of just not being a very big website. But it wouldn't surprise me to learn that we are already banned in some geographic locations, or if not, that we would be banned, if only anyone there were to notice us.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
Well, two of those are CW thread, so, meaningfully different in that regard (as well as being closer to discussion than to exhibition).
The Friday Fun one you specifically leave everything behind a link, which is itself accompanied by unambiguous content warnings... this looks more like discussion than exhibition, to me.
"Hard cases make bad law" should probably be kept carefully in mind, here. This is an edge case of limited precedential value, with a user who seems to be gradually escalating along an increasingly problematic axis.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
It is impossible to please everyone.
True, but I don't think anything is changing in this instance. We're just clarifying a question of permissible practice on a somewhat novel edge case.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
The Pedro Pascal joke stood on its own. It didn't need the CW chaser:
At least they got the skin color right.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
Either way this appears to be a declaration of RIP TheMotte.
Welcome to the Motte, an actively dying community since 2019!
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
As in, the one about "lack of redeeming value", or just the one about "I know it when I see it"?
In the moderator discussion on this, I leaned toward "I know it when I see it" but probably "lack of redeeming value" is not a bad question to bear in mind, either. Netstack actually got input from several mods on this and, as usual, there was not total agreement on how to handle things, but there was relatively broad accord.
Essentially, I'm asking whether you're declaring this to be the kiddy pool (I was kinda under the impression it wasn't, given the 18+ tag exists), or just forbidding random horny drops. ('Cause, y'know, people's sexual preferences do get questioned occasionally in CW-relevant contexts.)
I guess this depends on what you mean by "kiddy pool"--but I as far as I know we did not implement the 18+ tag, it's just part of the codebase we inherited. Rather, the examples you cite are fine, discussions about e.g. the appropriate age of consent fall squarely within the ambit of the foundation. Actually, in moderator discussion @netstack made another point that isn't in the modpost, that there is a something akin to the "use/reference" distinction here, maybe we can call it the "discussion/exhibition" distinction. We don't ban users for referencing racial slurs, but we will certainly ban users for using them, i.e. for calling one another names (though a lot of unnecessary "referencing" would quickly become obnoxious). Likewise it is permissible to discuss adult topics, certainly. Sex and sexuality are big culture war items! But (say) posting your AI-generated erotica seems more like exhibitionism. It's not the sort of engagement the foundation exists to facilitate.
And really, I wouldn't worry too much about it. As far as I can recall, ToaKraka is literally the only (non-spambot) user who has been a problem in this regard. There is one user (many accounts) who runs afoul of the single-issue posting rule on age-of-consent discussion but it's ToaKraka--who seems to for the most part be a good and even valuable poster--who has been testing boundaries in the Friday Fun thread for a while. People should understand that of course a thread on Culture War is going to sometimes contain discussions of sex and sexuality, including sexual violence, because those are extremely common CW issues. But the Friday Fun thread explicitly forbids those.
I was not actively involved in the discussion the last time this came up, and I think there was some confusion because people were arguing about whether e.g. topics of sexual violence belonged in a "fun" thread, even tangentially, and it became a whole de gustibus non est disputandum thing. But this is actually beside the point. What I want to avoid here is either the substance or appearance of banning topics because some people find them (for want of a better word here...) "triggering." We aren't explicitly kicking this out of the Fun Thread because it's creepy or disturbing or of questionable legality in some jurisdictions. We're kicking it out of the Fun Thread because it's CW.
(But also, yeah, even in the CW thread, a random horny drop would get removed. Perhaps surprisingly, so far I don't think it has ever been tried, modulo again the occasional spambot.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
Keep the culture war out of the Friday Fun thread, please.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
Thanks for the suggestions, none seem unreasonable. In case it helps you understand anything you don't already understand, here are some of the thoughts I had while reading them.
when untangling heated situations where you are going to punish multiple people who attacked each other, moderate in chronological order
I did not actually set out to "untangle" anything. The mod queue is chronological, and the posts at the top are the newest, while older posts spill onto other pages. So when I go into the mod queue, I see the newest complaints first. Sometimes I go down to the bottom and work my way up, but most of the time I do not do that, instead moderating from the top down, because that is the most natural way to navigate the queue. Design flaw? Maybe!
if a post was reported but the mod response is delayed because of internal discussion or nobody having time, have some way to flag "we received reports and are currently deciding how to proceed" to distinguish this state from "we consider this post good and won't do anything about it"
We do actually do this when there is internal discussion going on. But most of the time, mod response is slow because there's just no one watching the queue. The only really plausible solution to this would be professional moderators. Sadly, every single one of us has other things to do.
if moderation was slow to respond, consider the delay a mitigating circumstance for "vigilante justice" posts that offended back against the initial offender
We actually not only encourage community policing, but sometimes make positive mod notes on the accounts of users who do it properly. But "vigilante justice" is not the proper way to do it. There are ways to suggest that others are abusing the rules without breaking the rules yourself. It does seem like most people would rather do it the "mob justice" way than the "patient patrician" way! But in general I think the foundation calls for the latter and forbids the former.
link to related moderator action, so it doesn't wrongly appear one-sided if one side's punishment is prominent while the other's is buried (i.e. your modhat post against stoatherd should have linked to the modhat post against magicalkittycat)
This makes more sense to me if I'm trying to "untangle" things, but in most cases that's some combination of difficult, annoying, and pointless. The more effort we have to put into moderation, sadly, the less happy we are to do it! It's much more straightforward to moderate on a case-by-case basis, and when people start into "but he said--" we can just drop "your bad behavior is not excused by the bad behavior of others."
This is also why serial boundary testers are such a heavy drain on the community. You tell someone to "fuck off," we ban you. Easy peasy! But if you carefully write a rule-abiding post where the subtext is "fuck off," probably we won't ban you, at least not the first time. The problem is that when we do eventually decide that, yes, on balance, this poster is up to no good and the community needs a break from their shenanigans, we have to knit together a post linking to multiple semi-infractions and explaining that, no, generally we're not going to ban this level of fisticuffs, but the user has become egregiously obnoxious and therefore...
Well, hopefully you get the idea. You're right: the mod team could probably do better. Hopefully no one is surprised to hear that! But the level of effort it would take to deliver on these suggestions is, I suggest, extremely unlikely to manifest, at least in most cases. It's not a question of approach, it's a question of resources--specifically, time and attention.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3d ago
amplified by the additional anger over him getting away with the initial offense thanks to jannie cover
I'm not sure if this is what you are referring to as "the initial offense," but magicalkittycat was banned for it. What is "jannie cover?"
I don't think prohibiting this kind of response is actually improving discussion quality. There are few things as infuriating as hypocrisy, where people seek to reap the discourse benefits of having principles when it is convenient, but refuse to pay the tax of being bound by them.
It's not strictly that call-outs that are banned, I would say, so much as heated ones. Posters who are aggravatingly hypocritical can certainly have that spelled out, but it still has to be within the context of a rule-abiding post--more light than heat, ample charity, etc. We do actually mod people when it seems like they are baiting others deliberately, but that doesn't mean we're going to refrain from moderating people who snap at the bait. As always, bad behavior is not excusable by other people's bad behavior.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3d ago
naraburns
nihil supernum
3d ago
This is the most hilarious nitpick I've ever seen.
Does the word "hilarious" here add light, or heat, would you say?
Truly incredible.
Speak plainly. Sarcasm (much like humor) is a tough line to draw, because it's not always an unreasonable rhetorical technique. But when it is clearly being employed to needle someone, that is not conducive to productive conversation.
This is how you act anytime someone points out verifiable facts that go against you
Pots and kettles, all the way down. I've given stoatherd a two day ban for rising to your bait elsewhere, but please don't imagine that this means it's okay to go around baiting people.
it triggers you
Straightforward antagonism. You were somewhat recently banned for "boo outgroup." You tend to press the boundaries on that a lot, but you get some grace because you often take up issues that get you dog-piled, and I think we all know how frustrating that can be. You've even managed to get an AAQC recently!
But here you've allowed your contempt for your outgroup to pour over into disdain for your fellow users. That, we cannot allow.
Three day ban.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3d ago
Too much heat. You've actually eaten a previous ban for letting this user get to you before, and this response is moddable on its own. Relitigating grudges in every thread does not make for quality discussion.
I'm making it a two day ban this time, in hopes that you get the idea.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4d ago
Congratulations! I'm sorry to have missed your announcement, so I'm glad you brought it up again here. I have seen enough people take the opposite trajectory from yours that I find it comforting to read about people making good choices and improving their lot.
I had never heard of "magnum opus dissonance" previously, and it does seem to fit many people's reactions to the reception of their own work here.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5d ago
The advantages to behaving like a lady are so great, I don't understand why more men and women don't try to give their daughters this advantage. Do they just not know? Do they think this behavior is incompatible with also being intelligent, educated, and highly-paid? Do they think it's just too hard?
It has been my experience that many of them think it is oppressive. The idea of having and maintaining behavioral standards that might sometimes (or worse, often) conflict with one's immediate impulses is routinely presented to young people as evidence of sexism or even racism. The replacement of "no sex before marriage, sex after marriage even sometimes when you're not in the mood" with "sex whenever you want, and only when you want" is an example of this shift in expectation development. Everyone reacts to these developments in their own way, but broadly speaking I would say it has resulted mostly in a great deal of hurt and confusion among young people today.
I honestly cannot tell if this is sarcasm, trolling, "boo outgroup," or what--but a quick glance through your posting history has me more surprised that you've managed to drop so many low effort hot takes without accumulating so much as a single mod note. My first impression mental model of your decision to respond directly to a badge-on moderator is that you feel your efforts at shitting in the pool have not generated the level of attention you crave.
So this is me, giving you the attention and its attendant warning: you have successfully gotten our attention.
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