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Sorry for the 100th "Feminism is corrupting the youth" post on this website, but this short article was really something
https://www.elle.com/life-love/a62231356/best-friend-from-polyamory/
Written by a woman to extol the value of female friendship as better than the fickle and emotionally damaging heterosexual relationships to which so many of us are accustomed.
The article begins deftly (or dishonestly, depending on your disposition) with the author drizzling her thoughts and emotions onto the page after discovering her man cheating. Only after this framing of hurt emotions does she reveal that they were in an open relationship.
She reveals that after spending her 20s working in journalism she wanted to move to South America to find herself or achieve inner peace. He wanted to stay in the USA (presumably to avoid becoming a professional hobo, more on that later). As a compromise (?) he suggested they open their relationship. She agrees seemingly without objection, but adds the caveat that they share a don't ask don't tell policy.
The framing doesn't even have the sensible presentation of "I didn't want to be in an open relationship, but I was afraid of losing him and he forced me" or something, she is even convinced by progressive literature.
The author further reveals not raising concerns to her boyfriend, but instead the depths of her anxiety and worry. She begins online stalking him (Obsessing might be more appropriate), checking his social media profiles for any change, and eventually finds him interacting and posting photos with the "other woman" Ari.
There are then some rah-rah girl power moments touched upon:
She also has a sit down chat with Ari about her now ex boyfriend
It's not laid out, but you can imagine the dialogue where they spend an afternoon talking about how terrible he was, and the psycic toll he inflicted upon the author. The phrasing “totally cool with everything” is obviously meant to remind a reader of the shitty boyfriend they had that would give half truths and lie about these types of things. However in this situation he is being truthful, as far as he knew they were in a working open relationship. I don't want to paint with too wide a brush, but it's shocking how people allow themselves to become caricatures. As far as I can tell she is fitting the crazy ex girlfriend to a tee. She was upset with their arrangement, didn't tell him about the problems she had, and then would tell anyone who will listen how about how he cheated infront of her or something, and holds him responsible for not reading her mind. From his perspective it's unlikely he did anything wrong (Deciding to open up your relationship could reasonably fit here in and of itself, but it's very likely that he and his entire social circle consider that action acceptable or even laudable), and he's presented as an abuser or liar.
The most obvious irony here is how she wrote an entire article to tell us about how the girl friendship is more meaningful than her old boyfriend and her's, but it's clear to anyone who read it that she had much more thought and feeling for Him than for Her. Even the ending misses the point:
This gets at the heart of the point I'm trying to make. The progressive argument here is one where a person enterered into a bad situation entirely of their own choosing, has deluded themselves about how they really feel, and is now lashing out at the closest "Fucking White Male." Even the pictures the editor chose oozes this belief, kitschy 1930s and 1940s domestic life shots that are often used to hint at a rebellious or sinister undertones for the women involved, is entirely contrived. The last sentence has this attempted-catharsis of silencing the man and letting the women speak (Louder for those in the back queen), but in this entire article we don't get anything from his viewpoint except for 1 sentence in scare quotes. The person calling JD Vance weird for being married with kids and a steady job is deeply unhappy, anxious, contradictory, and packed into a 13 person house in San Fransisco while they hop from job to continent to relationship. They believe that this is ideal and empowering, and something the man has done in this situation has created the ills in their life.
Nothing wrong with being the 100th post on a subject. On the other hand,
It looks like you read a trashy article and then attached your own impression of the author’s politics. Please don’t leave it at that next time.
I will sound like a broken record, but a low-effort top post (and this isn't one!) should be fine as long as it sparks interesting discussion. Exempli gratia.
There is a genuine conflict of interest here between moderators and users of the forum. It is much easier to mod a forum like The Schism that has very low post volume but makes up for it(?) in post quality. This is what the current policy is pushing us towards and I'd posit it's one of the major reasons the weekly thread comment count is down to what? a thousand?
Bring back the link repository!
I am also sounding like a broken record, but people often miss the point of the rule against bare links:
Interesting discussion is why we are here. Dictating the particular topic of discussion is a privilege and a benefit that we like see awarded to those who also bring interesting discussion.
Certain things can generate interesting discussions without actually being interesting discussions.
Low effort bare links are one of those things. Posting things that amount to "Can you believe what Those People did this week?" is another one of those things. Recruiting for a cause is one of those things. A brand new major news item is one of those things.
It is in fact not hard at all to generate interesting discussions when you try and make the main purpose of a forum be a place that allows for discussion. Getting other people to generate a discussion here is not hard. Writing quality stuff that other people want to read is hard. We are not trying to reward generating a discussion, we are trying to reward people that make the effort to write quality stuff.
One of the few levers we have for that is saying that 'only people that are trying to do the hard thing of writing quality stuff get to pick the topic for discussion'.
Or in cases where there is definitely going to be discussion about a major news item, but maybe only one threads worth, there is some value in being the first poster because you get to set the tone and focus of the discussion. We would again rather award someone with an effortful and thoughtful take on the issue than the first person to copy and paste the link from X.
I'd rather us die as TheMotte then live on to just become a crappy version of every other social media platform out there.
Often when some interesting news break, I check here to see what intelligent contrarians have to say about it. I see nothing, type out a quick top-level post, delete it, and go elsewhere to check on discussion not even half as interesting as it would have been here.
As I said, there is a genuine conflict of interest here. The mods have an interest in this place becoming more like The Schism, posters and lurkers benefit from more discussion. We have argued this point ad nauseam and the chances that I will convince you at this point are very, very small. But arguing that a Bare Link Repository wouldn't be Motte-like when this has been a feature of the Reddit thread for ages and was also commonly seen on the SSC comment section is not a valid argument.
Its news you find interesting. But if others find it boring or distracting then a conversation about it doesn't add to their enjoyment of the site. For example I am interested in tech news but very uninterested in foreign policy. The whole war in Gaza is less interesting to me than Amazon's return to office policy. If this thread was 10 times bigger with the same quality writing but all about foreign policy then it would be no better for me.
We don't have unlimited people producing unlimited content like X does. Every time I read your complaints that seems to be a built in assumption, that the lack of top level content holds people back from the total amount they post. I just don't see it personally. I'm limited in how much quality content I can write. Probably only a few good comments a day.
I would love to have more people here posting more quality content. If we as mods got overwhelmed with moderating we would add more moderators as we've done in the past. An unlimited amount of low quality content is useless.
I don't buy your point that it is a conflict of interest. As a user I also hate low quality content, because it's crap that I have to filter through to get to the good stuff. X and Facebook and YouTube are all unusable to me. Too much crap, not enough gold. And I'm only a user on those websites, not a moderator.
If we draw a line between The Schism and Facebook, there is a world of difference between the latter and where we are now. But if you want to get an idea of what The Motte would look like with less stringent top post requirements, you don't need to go to social media. You can just look at... The Motte back when it had less stringent top post requirements (and, not coincidentally, a lot more engagement).
Look, I know this is a lost cause. But I wish you guys would at least acknowledge the point about low effort top posts leading to high effort comments.
Lots of things were different back then. We were on reddit and the culture war was red hot and banned in a bunch of other places. And there are also places like culturewarroundup that allow bare links and they are far deader than theschism. If anything the comparison suggests theschism strategy is a better viable long-term option. Neither us or them can compete with X in terms of sheer content of bare links and subjects being discussed. But we can compete on enforcing some minimum quality standards.
I feel like I've never disagreed with this point. I might have even said somewhere that it is easy for bad quality comments to generate good discussion. But I also feel it suggests that you are entirely missing the point I am making.
I think our actual disagreement is on the effect of permissive top level comments. You seem to think it's positive sum. I think it is neutral sum, or possibly a little negative sum.
We are generally getting a similar number of high quality comments each month. And that amount is limited by the number of users.
The people that write quality comments have told me before that they like having their comments read and discussed. I also share that preference. Its rare for me to want to type out a quality comment that is just going to get buried and read by only one person.
The place where you get the most attention and discussion is at the top level. That attention is limited by how many top level comments are above you, and how recently that thing has been discussed. Bare links fill up the top comment slots and bury posts faster. And you can easily get your topic sniped before you finish writing a quality comment.
I don't even understand your mechanism for how permissive top comments increase the number of quality comments. I understand how it increases total comments, but that isn't something I care about.
We seem to have different models of how quality posts come about.
You seem to think that quality posters treat this as a publishing platform akin to Substack. They have a couple of quality posts in them over a given timeframe and they choose to publish them on The Motte. Your job is to prevent these posts from being dilluted by low effort posts and give them a more prominent position.
My model is a different one: quality posts happen because a poster gets inspired by an ongoing discussion. They see something that touches upon one of their areas of expertise and they get triggered into writing an effort post. But there needs to be a discussion happening in the first place! You don't get Socrates' take on the ideal city before Cephalus, Polemarchus, and even Thrasymachus had their say first. The more discussion, the higher the chances someone will read something they have something to write about.
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