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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.
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?
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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