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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).
I think you have mistaken what my model was. I agree with this.
I think a pretty low-effort comment is sufficient to provide the canvas. It seems to me that you are asking for it to paint the canvas.
If the mods believe this, then they should simply impose a moratorium. No breaking news for 24hrs. That would be clear.
This seems like an unstable equilibrium. An individual actor can defect by putting in only 19min of work. Then the next individual actor can defect by putting in only 18min of work. Rinse and repeat. My proposal acknowledges that it is a useful service to provide a canvas, but only for a small subset of genuine 100% topics. Moreover, it says that this service is valued in that it will not be warned/banned, but in order to maintain incentives for the equilibrium, it will come with a shower of downvotes and significant penalties if you're wrong about it being a 100% topic.
This kind of thing is why I miss the low effort thread. News gets quick takes, “olds” get analysis, and bundling the twain gets a mad muddle.
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