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:
-
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:
-
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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It looks like a developer finally got around to hiding scores for 24 hours on this site (Thanks, FatherInire). I'm curious if people thought that the scores being shown immediately changed how they interacted with or saw the forum. For me it made things feel a lot more confrontational and higher-stakes, I'm glad we're hiding scores again. Immediately visible scores encourages dog-piling and "ratio-ing" in my opinion which goes against the goal of this forum.
I don't know. Concretely against your points, I don't see how ratioing, which I would've thought of as a downvote substitute for forums that only have upvote equivalents, is relevant in our setting, and vote-based dogpiling in the CW thread would also require people to explicitly have a thought process like "this comment is already very low, I want to make it lower", which would surprise me especially in our contrarian setting.
Concretely, for me, I just scrolled through the thread a bit and found that the hiding of vote counts changed my interaction for the worse. I've been concerned by the optics and implicit consensus building by [outgroup I perceive as being overwhelmingly represented]'s propensity to use downvotes as a disagree button, resulting in posts that are perfectly fine contributions to the discussion but insult their sensibilities or aesthetic preferences sitting in the negative numbers, for a while now. To correct what seemed to me as a misvaluation of posts, I'd upvote posts that were _under_valued and downvote posts that were _over_valued for what in many cases would just be the actions of [outgroup]; if a post were already sitting at its proper score, I'd do nothing. (I often enough do actually withdraw my vote if I come back to a part of the thread later and see that the tides have turned and a post I upvoted is now overvalued.) Now that I have to vote blind, all I can do is instead guess if this is the sort of post that made [outgroup] seethe or rejoice resulting in votes over- or undervaluing it; the urge then is to vote based on this guess, which for all means and purposes would just turn me into [outgroup]'s toxoplasmotic mirror image. (Whenever they feel strongly about a topic, they vote based on agreement; whenever I expect they feel strongly about a topic, I vote based on my expectation of their disagreement.)
But see, that's the popularity contest element! You're not upvoting because "I think this is a good comment", you're upvoting because "Uh-oh, the other lot downvoted it, I need to restore balance".
No, you don't need to do this. What you need to do is write a comment about "hey, stop dogpiling this guy for partisan reasons".
And what is the proper score? You think it should be A positive to B negative, someone else thinks it is right as it is, another person thinks it is too positive. Nobody made you the arbiter of what is and is not the 'correct' proportion of upvotes or downvotes, and that kind of well-intentioned meddling just results in people cross-voting to settle what they view as 'unbalanced' voting, so we don't actually in the end have "this is good/this is bad" results on comments so we can judge what are and are not within the spirit of this site when it comes to 'tough but fair' argument, we have "I upvoted/downvoted for political reasons".
I would prefer to do away with voting altogether, since this kind of "I must carefully comb through the thread and make sure to upvote X and downvote Y" activity is breaking the entire system.
I tend to give out upvote subsidies when there are visible scores to try to preserve a friendly atmosphere here. I don't believe that anyone engaging politely according to the rules should get a scarlet letter fixed to their post saying "We all hate you. We think your ideas are stupid". I'll do this even when the comment isn't particularly logical or insightful.
IMO a large part of the reason social media platforms outmoded message boards is that they provided lurkers and semi-lurkers a "no effort" way of showing content creators that people were seeing and appreciating them. There are obvious downsides but messing with the DNA is dangerous.
And that is what causes a problem for me; we have vpn upthread saying "I know I will be less keen to read content here if I cannot selectively consume higher-quality (per upvotes) content and skip over the lower-quality ones". If he and others are using upvotes as a marker for "this is good content", then your upvoting for "let's be nice, even if the comment is bad" ruins the measurement. Now he is reading bad content that got upvoted and is scoring highly, and what conclusion can he draw from that other than "this place has gone to the dogs if bad content like this is getting upvoted" and then leave?
You're trying to be nice. I don't think niceness per se is the function of this place; no, we should not be abusive assholes, but the idea is to have good content that provokes debate, is informative, and backed up by some kind of argument. An upvoted series of "you're great" "no, you're great" for whatever side - conservative, progressive, right-wing, left-wing, up or down or side-to-side - is going to be rubbish.
Be nice - but if the person's comment is poor, then we should be able to respond as to why it's poor. Refraining because it's shooting fish in a barrel is the better way to deal with really bad content where the person is not being provocative for the sake of it. But refraining because 'this is outgroup bait', or even worse, upvoting as a pat on the head is the equivalent of "here's a gold star for little Timmy because he's so special (in the special needs sense) and won't get anything on merit, so let's patronise him".
I feel you've missed my point. I'm taking -5 posts up to -4. These posts are no worse than right-wing comments that are scored +10. In fact, the downvoted posts may be better, and I only think they're illogical or uninsightful because of my bias.
No one is bringing a bad post up to +50 as a participation trophy. My intent is only to balance out the obvious bias of our electorate.
VPN wants quality, and quality will go away in proportion to this forum becoming a pure right-wing crank self-congratulation society.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link