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If you're "required to take a bit of a leap" you'll often be better off just not. If you decide to take that leap anyway, then you need to come with the most charitable and steelmanned take you can muster. If someone else in the thread is giving a worse take, then take it up with them.
Really this a good illustration of why we have the rules that we have, and why in general the best approach to rule-breakers is to not respond to them. The comment you responded to really needed more, but taking "a bit of a leap" instead of just asking for more was actually a worse violation of the rules than the low effort comment itself. These things have a way of spiraling rather quickly out of control--one person keeps to the letter of the law, but violates the spirit, the next person crosses the bright line, but only slightly, this makes someone else feel like they are being good community police by slapping them down... and pretty soon we're 15 comments deep into a snarky back-and-forth.
Remember that the goal here is to engage with the best ideas of people with whom you disagree. If someone says something genuinely bad, there's a certain extent to which the mod team will interpret that as offering their own shady thinking up for examination and critique! But when you take it on yourself to impute a certain view to others, you need to do better than you managed this time.
I don't understand how that can be your genuine belief when the thread after the "rulebreaker" spawned like 6 well-written and detailed responses precisely agreeing with the thrust of the "low effort needing more" comment.
Let me be precise: I believe it seriously erodes the potential quality of discussion when your characterization (wearing the mod hat) of my question is an outlandish strawman yet there are half a dozen other people with high-effort replies saying to the effect "That's mostly true, and here is why its such a problem that lgbt-aligned people are acting that way."
If it's your intention to discourage people from giving viewpoints you disagree with that's fine, just say so. Otherwise it seems that the low-effort comment which I "should've ignored" was expressing a genuine sentiment that lots of people see reflected as true and impactful.
This is not my intent, and by suggesting that it is my intent, you are actually breaking the same rule I just warned you against breaking. This is the absolutely predictable refrain of people who do not want to accept that they have broken the rules: "Oh, the mod is just biased against my views." Don't do this; it's not just uncharitable, it's almost comically boring.
Then take it up with them. I don't know how to be clearer about this. You explicitly tagged the fact that you were making assumptions about what anti_dan meant by "the meme" and you also tagged your own assumptions as tracking "very outlandish." The way you responded tells me that you were being uncharitable, and further suggest that at some level you even knew that you were being uncharitable.
And the thing is--for all I know, anti_dan believes exactly what you said. The problem here is not about substance. It's about approach. Generally speaking, just don't put words in people's mouths. No, not even if you think it's necessary; better to shut your own mouth than put words into someone else's. But in those cases where it really does just seem unavoidable, well, then--you need to do a better job attributing beliefs to people in ways that do not strike you as outlandish. You need to steelman their position. If you're not going to do that, then you just don't get to put words in people's mouths.
As for any other people who might actually be taking outlandish positions explicitly, like--okay! They've painted the target on their own backs. So take it up with them.
Thank you. I was and will continue to do so
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