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HAPPENING NOW: ISRAEL LAUNCHES MASSIVE ATTACK AGAINST IRANESE NUCLEAR FACILITIES—AIR RAID SIRENS HEARD ALL ACROSS ISRAEL—MASSIVE AIR ACTIVITY OVER IRAQ-SYRIA BORDER—MULTIPLE EXPLOSIONS CONFIRMED IN TEHRAN INCLUDING COLLAPSED BUILDING—IRANIAN FIGHTER JETS SEEN TAKING OFF FROM AIRSTRIPS NEAR TEHRAN—BALLISTIC MISSILE LAUNCHES REPORTED IN IRAN—REPORTS OF EXPLOSIONS AT US BASES IN IRAQ—MULTIPLE EXPLOSIONS HEARD NEAR IRAN’S NATANZ NUCLEAR FACILITY—VIDEO FOOTAGE SHOWING NATANZ NUCLEAR FACILITY BURNING—UNCONFIRMED REPORTS THAT THE CHIEF OF STAFF OF THE IRANIAN MILITARY HAS BEEN KILLED IN A TARGETED STRIKE
—Inb4 source
—Inb4 “low effort post ban” Additional facts and my thoughts will be added as the situation develops
You know, without this passive-aggressive snidery, I would have just warned you and pointed out why we don't want people to rush to post "BREAKING NEWS" just to be the first person to post about it.
But since you clearly did it knowing the rules, and really did just want to be FIRST! Banned for three days, so this discussion will be happening without you.
Great!
There is a place where news junkies can get unsourced, low effort news reports in close to real time. That place is twitter. The thing which makes the motte useful is that it is not twitter.
I'm a bit of a dissenter on this one. I get the point; I really do. I don't want to be bombarded by every single little thing that happens. That said, from an objective perspective, I think there is a 100% chance that TheMotte will discuss a story that is this impactful and this close to the culture war. There is a 0% chance that it will not be discussed. This is not some random little news story that, if it's just not posted with a low effort comment, it'll skate by and never take up precious Motte real estate (which is the fate that I hope for with most of the random little news stories that the rules are trying to filter out). I felt the same way about the (main) Trump assassination attempt. (I will note that this is not some pet topic of mine; I almost never comment on Israel matters and would actually prefer less of them in general; I have not otherwise commented in this one, either. But this is truly a "C'mon" one.)
Thus, in my mind, the only question is how such 100% stories make it to the Motte. Speaking personally, it feels almost impossible to write a 'quality' top-level comment on it. There's not some ultra-unique take I'm going to have that provides an independent reason why I'm bringing it to your attention. What is the actual bar to clear? I don't actually know. Just fluff it up a bit, like you're re-reporting from a few sources? Seems weak to me. If we actually deleted these low-effort comments rather than just temp banning them, what would we get? Would this story just never get discussed? I doubt it. At worst, it'll end up in one of the links posts that are (allowed!) in the Transnational Thursday Thread, and then the entire discussion will blow up there.
Right now, the equilibrium is that somebody (or their alt account) is willing to take a ban to just do the thing that needs to be done.
An alternate solution that has sufficed from time to time is a megathread. You can see how that works with, e.g., US election results. There's little point in making someone have to come up with the gumption to think that they're going to have some 'quality' TLC for the discussion to happen. Everyone knows there's a 100% chance that discussion is going to happen. It just happens to be that the mods know in advance that that's the case, so we don't have to have someone eat a ban in the process. They don't know that in advance for a major Israeli attack on Iran or a presidential assassination attempt. The dream would be to have some mechanism by which a topic is so obviously a 100% topic that it prompts the mods to say, "C'mon, this is obviously a 100% topic; just click this button, and it'll make a megathread, so no one has to eat a ban." Yes yes, this is not a trivial mechanism to design.
To not leave this comment without at least some suggestion that might be plausible, I'll at least try one. IF the community were to embrace some version of this "100% topic" terminology, we could just include an additional reporting option. We could report low-effort comments like this one with the report, "Low-effort, but c'mon, this is a 100% topic." If enough people report [EDIT: and it actually meets the mod-declared standards for 100% topics], the mods could then respond with, "Approved on grounds of being a 100% topic," rather than a ban. Paired with this, to discourage low-effort comments that only might be a 100% topic, I would also support locking/deleting the entire chain of comments that follow a low-effort TLC that doesn't get approved as a 100% topic. I think the resulting equilibrium would be a lot better than just having to have someone eat a ban every time for no real reason.
EDIT: Concerning the "first" incentive, why does that exist? I'd maybe guess it's because people think that whoever posts it first will get upvotes for whatever reason. Right now, I guess they trade that off with bans or something? We could develop a norm of just downvoting them. Make the report option say, "I have downvoted this low-effort comment, but c'mon, it's a 100% topic." Since the incentive to be "first" is so minor, this disincentive to be "first" will also be minor. At least, it'll be less harsh than eating a ban. You can do the needful, eat a -50, then actually participate in this and other discussion. And if you're wrong about it being a 100% topic, you eat the downvotes, eat the ban, and your topic disappears.
The requirements for a top level post in the CW thread are notably lower than the requirements for a doctorate in international affairs. Original thought is fine, but so is paraphrasing/citing/linking takes of others.
We do not require a Scott-Alexander-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know 40 hour full depth investigation.
Ideally, you would wait until reputable (in a bounded-distrust sense) media report the facts, then quote or paraphrase them. If it is big news, it will be reported by everyone, so you can check multiple sources, from the New York fucking Times to Al-Jazeera. Provide a few links. Some of the reported facts will be contested by comments, some may even turn out to be wrong. This is ok, but it is still useful to have a shared base of claims or (ideally) agreed-upon facts before the arguments start. If the top level comment for Oct-7 is "BREAKING: HAMAS KILLED A BUNCH OF ISRAELIS. LIKE A LOT. MORE DETAILS TO FOLLOW", then the comments will have to establish what actually happened.
The competitive advantage of the motte is not that it can report what is true faster than twitter, nor that it is better at reporting facts than the news media. The advantage is that it offers takes from a broad spectrum, at least some of which are typically interesting. But good takes can only appear once the facts are half-way settled. Sure, any idiot with a twitter account can reply to "BREAKING: IDF BOMBING IRAN" with either "Fucking Jews are trying to start World War 3 again" or "Bloody camel-fucking antisemites had it coming". But all the interesting takes, like "This was mostly theater for the benefit of Netanyahu's domestic audience, and here is why ..." or "The nuclear weapons angle is a distraction, by taking out a few military leaders Israel managed to reshape the landscape of Iranian politics, as ..." or "Actually, this is a direct consequence of a recent development of the Ukraine war, where ..." will only happen after the facts are in and the posters have had a day to think on them and how they tie into their world view.
A decent current news top level post is basically providing a canvas for takes.
Another low-hanging fruit is reports of reactions by relevant parties. What did Trump say about it? Did Putin react? Again, this is typically widely reported.
Then, you might want to link this to culture war topics. What takes are trending in the cesspits of social media? Are the wokes condemning it as colonialist violence or something? Is the anti-nuclear crowd celebrating?
Then, you might already offer some takes of your own, or link to takes from elsewhere you found interesting, but personally I consider this optional for top level posts on news topics which are sure to spark discussion.
I confess that I do not track which news stories are skipped by the motte because nobody can be arsed to spend a quarter of an hour to write a decent top level post on them. My suspicion is that we would not have skipped the attacks on Iran, but feel free to point out such news stories, or instances of people having gotten a warning/ban after making a low effort post (say, a link to the Guardian, plus a one paragraph quote, plus a two sentence take) for stuff which sparked a lot of discussion.
I see this as a coordination problem. We do not have a system to assign news items to posters, so you will only want to tackle news items when you are confident that you are not preempting another user who is in the middle of a more detailed writeup. I would propose a system of sliding standards. In the first 24h of a news item being reported, I would expect someone putting in a solid twenty minutes of citing multiple news sources. After 36h, if it is an important CW news item (e.g. the first Trump tariff story, not the tenth), I propose top level posters should get away with a low effort post (source+quote+two sentences).
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I am genuinely shaking my head in amazement that you wrote such a long wall of text to defend such an absurd argument and expect it to be taken seriously.
What are you even talking about? How many times has someone been banned for this? Any guesses? You talk like this is how it usually goes down, that when a big breaking news event happens, everyone wants to talk about it and someone has "take one for the team" and post a thread-starter they will get banned for.
Of course when big events happen, there will inevitably be a thread about it. Because someone will write about it. And they will, hopefully, write at least a measly paragraph or two that is something beyond just "HEY GUYS SOMETHING BIG IS HAPPENING I WANT TO BE THE FIRST TO START A THREAD SO MY THREAD WILL THE THREAD ABOUT IT!"
Our standards are not high. They are not unreasonable. You do not have to write an essay, a flowery effortpost, or come up with some wildly innovative idea. You just have to not look like an attention whore on Twitter.
There is a very simple solution for a major event worthy of discussion: write something about it. If it's too low effort, we'll probably clear our throats and say "Low effort, don't do this." Sometimes we will create a mega thread, like for elections and other predictable events. If next week, World War III has started, we will probably create a mega thread for it (you know, if we're alive and the Internet is still up and stuff).
@ABigGuy4U ate a ban because he was so blatant, so deliberate, so "Tee hee ain't I clever guys!" about it. I explained this. Normally if someone rushed to be FIRST! we'd just warn them not to do it again (as I said!) and let the thread continue. But someone who goes out of his way to be obnoxious about it, yeah, he's going to eat a ban. Don't tell us "I'm breaking the rules on purpose because the rules are stupid and I want attention." Of course I'm going to be inclined to respond harshly to that.
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Yeah man, hovering over this forum waiting for someone to do a flowery effortpost about how the moon just exploded (or whatever) so we can talk about it is kinda dumb.
What are the rules about just starting a new random thread on the front page? Can we just post a moon explosion thread whenever we want and post any kind of trash in it?
Nobody says you have to make a flowery effortpost. There are plenty of topics that get posted where someone has two or three sentences saying what they think about the topic. That's all you need.
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Isn't that the general precedent? Top-level big thread, keep it out of CW thread? My $0.02 = no reason for a ban.
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