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.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris
Contributions for the week of September 30, 2024
Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris
Contributions for the week of October 7, 2024
Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris
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Notes -
Re Dean’s highlighted comment for
Just for the record, @Dean was never able to provide any evidence that Hamas uses pre-teen child soldiers. In fact he refused to even supply a link. You can read the follow up exchange here where he writes —
— after someone noted that he refused to post a source. He actually made me go looking for his own unevidenced allegation, yet I could find zero evidence from any organization that Hamas utilized pre-teen child soldiers in the past decade. The closest was:
So I’m still waiting on Hamas’ “sordid history of child soldiers”. I’m surprised you can get a quality contribution for an empirical claim that you flatly refuse to supply evidence for.
You are welcome to respond to AAQCs, here or elsewhere, but grumping about someone else's award because their comment doesn't reinforce your preferred narrative is obnoxious at best.
This is a mod-hatted warning, and we generally don't dip into substance on that, but Google gave me this (PDF warning) pretty readily, and it was far from the only thing Google gave me on Hamas child soldiers. I have no particular opinion on the reliability of the sources etc. and I'm not going to get into it with you, but your emphasis on "pre-teen" and the way you referenced "the past decade" while quoting Dean referencing "the last few decades" suggest very strongly to my mind that you are not engaging charitably, or even just honestly.
You are uncharitably characterizing my comment here. What I have asserted is that Dean refused to provide a source for his claim, the very claim that is quoted in the quality contribution, when pressed on the claim and asked to provide a source (both of which I linked). There’s a rule that someone should “proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be”. The claim or implication that Hamas employs pre-teen child soldiers is partisan, and he didn’t even provide it when asked. Yet this earned him a quality contribution, which is surprising to me. (All of this you write off as “grumping because it doesn’t reinforce my preferred narrative”. Brother, I am writing on themotte in critique of Israel in the war, I am well aware that I won’t be finding much agreement. I have never cared about agreement here, but I do care if the standards for quality are reduced to rubble.)
You need to understand the context of the original thread in order to understand this qualification. The NYT specifies pre-teen children being shot in their reporting, so we were never concerned with teen soldiers. Teen soldiers were never part of the conversation. Our only interest is pre-teen child soldiers because the children who were shot were all in that age cohort. This is obvious in the original back and forth which is quoted in the beginning of Dean’s reply
That is the beginning of Dean’s comment. Now, it’s possible Dean simply misunderstood here, but 15-and-younger isn’t preteen. That would be 12 and under. The conflict may see 16yo plant IEDS, which is an example and not a limit case. In other words, because it may be that a 16yo plants IEDS, we look only total preteen dead. And it may even be that a 15yo plants an IED, or 14yo. Etc.
Dean goes on to make clear he really believes that Hamas employs pre-teen child soldiers in his original reply:
Dean implies two claims here: Hamas is employing those under the age of 10 to lob grenades; and Hamas is employing pre-teens as young as 6 in militarily-useful tasks. This is how it is read, surely, because Dean says the article doesn’t go into Hamas’ history of child soldiers. Now, the only reason to go into Hamas’ history of child soldiers is if there is some reason to believe they are currently in their employ, or recently in their employ. (Certainly, “Hamas used a child soldier once in 1988” would be an insane way to explain away why doctors in Gaza see dead preteen children daily). That is because we are talking about current dead preteen children, not any from decades ago.
— — —
Replying to the rest of your comment:
Again, we are focusing on preteen soldiers, the original subject matter. The only real evidence from this pdf is in the 2021 UN address where it is quoted
And if you read the 2021 report (pdf) it identifies only one “child” (that is, under 18 with no specification of preteen) being “recruited”. This appears to be in reference to their summer camps and not a military use (?), so in other words training, but I’m not entirely sure because it doesn’t specify. This does not provide evidence of preteen soldiers, indeed the age isn’t mentioned, neither is the role of the recruit mentioned.
Lmao of course. Well look, Dean provided an empirical claim, for which he received a quality contribution, which does not appear to be evidenced, which he flatly refused to provide evidence of. So, okay, don’t get into sources with me, but is this really the standard you want on themotte? You yourself googled it, and there’s no reference in it to preteen soldier in recent employ by Hamas, at least from my reading. So… yeah.
Hilarious. The heart of Dean’s claim is that there is reason to believe Hamas is employing preteen soldiers. It actually matters if the evidence is from this decade or two decades ago. Is there any evidence from this decade? Or even since 2005?
The PDF I provided explicitly mentions children under 15, and elsewhere distinguishes between "children" and "adolescents," both of which Hamas has recruited in its history, in some cases quite recently. But one of the reasons for me to not get into the substance with you is that you have shown no inclination to actually accept evidence when it is provided to you. I anticipated you would do that, and now you have done it, so there is evidently no reason to continue to attempt to meet your demands. You apparently will not accept any evidence even when it is provided to you (as an aside, you do not seem similarly inclined to demand precise evidence when Hamas makes dubious claims--interesting!).
I think that, at best, you have actually failed to understand what Dean's post was really about. What you identify as its "heart" seems non-central on my reading. I suspect that you are doing something worse, though: I suspect that you are demanding rigor in isolation, in order to excuse your own uncharitable engagement.
Well, you are under no obligation to like Dean's post, or to accept his or my evidence of anything. You are under no obligation to like or agree with any of this. What you are under some minimal obligation to do, is not to engage in ways that degrade discourse here. The way you have chosen to grouse about this particular AAQC does not meet that threshold.
Moreover, about a year ago, I warned you that your engagement on the topic of Israel was verging into "single-issue poster" territory. It's clearly something you care about a lot, for reasons I cannot fathom. I am hesitant to impose a topic ban on you, but I am pretty protective of the AAQC process, and the discussion we're having right now is doing a lot to persuade me that I should simply ban you from discussing Israel anymore.
Yes. Dean is an excellent poster with an absolutely stellar history of making quality contributions to the Motte. He is probably in the top 5 userbase favorites. You, too, have made some good posts in the past, which is one of the reasons I haven't banned you yet. But if you're gonna rain on the AAQC parade any time your ox gets gored, I'll count it against you.
I think that glazing an individual user in this fashion in a modhat comment is inappropriate and reflects badly on the moderation. Yes, I will freely admit that this sentiment is coloured by the circumstance that I cannot stand this particular user. (I could expound at length why I would consider him to be a single-issue poster - as I see it, he is here to produce impassioned defenses of US neoconservatism with the same single-minded determination, attention to detail and absolute lack of interest in countervailing evidence as our most notorious JQ posters - but you have made it clear that you would not want to hear) Personal antipathy and feuds between users are a pretty normal sight here, though. Normally one would expect mods to act as a, well, moderating force on them - yet this sort of statement fills me (and presumably anyone else who would disagree with him) with negative levels of confidence that in the event of an interaction gone sour I would get a fair hearing. That is only moderating in the way Putin's rule is moderating opposition in Russia, which is to say it channels resentment into other outlets rather than reducing it.
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.
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.
I'll take the point that I was being overly dramatic with the comparison, and that this did not help my case. I got somewhat drunk on spite there. However, I stand by the intended point, stripped of the drama: if you make it so that certain users or viewpoints can't be attacked, you might get some more people to like those users and viewpoints, but you'll make others quietly hate and resent you and the organisation that gave you the power.
I've been following the discussions about the moderation system for long enough that I'm quite familiar with these principles you explained; I just think they are bad and have done a lot of damage to the discourse, which you only don't see because you keep grading yourself on a curve and by deferring to the sentiment of the very community that you create by following this approach. If you drive away most people who disagree, you will naturally see agreement up until the point where you have evaporated down to a size such that sentiment shifts to "we have a great community, but somehow nobody wants to join and listen to our great points". /r/CWR, in its own "community sentiment", felt that it was doing great right down to the point of maybe getting 100 posts a week. 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.
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; we seem to be evolving from a soft loop along the lines of "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" to a harder loop where the penultimate step is "some people who dislike this get banned". In some alternative timeline that might have only differed from the current one by a handful of votes here and there at first, coffee_enjoyer would have been the "excellent poster with an absolutely stellar history", and Dean would be the one getting called a single-issue poster and told that he narrowly avoided a ban. I don't want to hide the bias that stems from the circumstance that I would mildly prefer that timeline over the current one (very mildly, though), but that callouts based on substance and discussion discipline get treated this way at all is bad, and that you have set up a system that amplifies small differences in initial conditions in such a fashion makes it seem unlikely that this was an intentional act of "gardening" as opposed to excuses being made for a yard full of weeds.
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:
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.
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.
Except for some times, when they don't even lash out, they just reply to many of the people who dogpiled them, then you ban them. Even acknowledging that one can't point to anything specific that was actually against the rules.
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