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Welcome to The Motte! We've got cookies--
Oh.
You seem like a nice person. You've politely framed your discomfort and concern without flaming out, which is more than can be said about some of our longtime users with plenty of AAQCs. Some of them even come back whistling away, hoping nobody remembers their peformative crash out.
I think I can speak for the other moderators when I say that we'd like to have you around. Everything that follows is an attempt at an explanation for why The Motte is the way it is:
Look, no forum is perfect. The Motte tries to find a delicate and hazy balance between freedom of expression, politeness and avoiding the FBI raiding Zorba's home.
There's no other place like it. Believe me, I've looked. You can drop the restrictions on politeness and most pretenses of moderation, and you end up with 4chan or Kiwifarms. You can tighten the screws, and end up with a nicely mowed lawn like Scott's substack comment section, but at the cost of killing a whole swathe of politically incorrect worldviews. (Though he has slightly warmed on the whole no discussion of CW thing, but you can't really run a community off substack comments, the layout sucks).
This is what motivates me to stay, and to take on the occasional unpleasant task of mowing the lawn myself. With a light touch; one man's weed is another man's wildflower. There's no other place like us, and what we have is worth expending the negentropy to keep going. Yes, even if it's herding cats, and often cats with rabies.
Our forum, like any place that does more than just pay lip service to freedom of speech, has one principled libertarian and a zillion witches.
I'd call myself the principled libertarian, but I think there's a mugshot of mine next to a stall selling signed copies of the Malleus Maleficarum. Perhaps it's a rotating, honorary position.
What we succeed at, mostly, is getting the witches to temporarily LARP as "principled libertarians", sometimes with the same disgruntled attitude as a rambunctious boy forced to sit through Mass, when they'd rather be calling people slurs or setting houses on fire. If you can be polite and not break the rules, then the candy you get is access to a rather thoughtful and discerning user base willing to seriously engage with just about any topic under the sun.
(Sometimes, if they do this long enough, the mask sticks)
@SecureSignals is our resident antisemite. Yet he mostly behaves. Not always, he's been rapped on the knuckles often enough, and banned for significant amounts of time. These days, he even talks about things other than the Jews, because we were quite clear that this forum isn't his personal hobby-horse, and he needs to figure out some other way to pay rent.
That is why you see SS. What you don't see are the dozens of people who can't keep it in their pants at all, who DM insults to people like @2rafa. They get caught in the filter, and are swiftly banned.
Keep in mind the very important distinction between the moderators tolerating something, and the denizens of this forum doing so. We don't control upvotes, we can't compel people to engage with tracts they hate. We choose what gets rounded up as an AAQC, but the initial reports as such? All you guys.
Yet, more often than not, articulate and reasoned claims get their due.
Us mods take such claims seriously. We would appreciate examples, and if it became clear that we were egregiously biased, we would seek to correct ourselves.
We're not monolithic. There are significant differences in personal opinion, though we aim at consensus.
We are also not omniscient. If one side is consistently getting their rage-bait reported, and the other isn't, the odds of us noticing decline dramatically. There was once a point where I could claim to ready every single comment posted on this site, but alas, due to gainful employment, that's no longer feasible. The other mods probably have even less free time. We also impose significant costs on ourselves by seeking to explain ourselves in warnings and ban messages, instead of just firing them off from on-high.
That being said, there are probably hundreds or thousands of kind, well-spoken people who we would have loved to keep around, but who were scared off by the topics (and less commonly, the tone) of what's discussed here. That sucks, but to an extent, that's a price we have to pay to keep The Motte open for most, if not all. We also keep away a whole lot of witches so vile that they're not tolerated by us witch-adjacenf folk. You really can't please everyone, not even nice people with reasonable desires. But we've kept the lights on, and us mods have a vested interest in preventing this from becoming a dead and desolate place racking up unjustified AWS bills.
We would hate to see you go, and I hope you can find reason to stay.
I've long thought that one simple additional mod rule would improve the moderation, and particularly complaints about moderation here significantly: The most user visibly active mod or two at the time (say for the last month or two) doesn't get to make or participate in any decisions about good but controversial contributors. Zorba banning the legendary TrannyPorno? Regrettable but kosher. Someone like HLynka doing the same? Not kosher (I hope I recall who was the most active mod at the time correctly).
From ordinary user perspective there seems to always be one or two mods who are way too trigger happy in non-obvious janitorial duties. This rule would IMO help quite a bit against that.
Please tell me more, I tried to look up their account but it 404'd so I can't even see the context.
I actually tried to find which mod made the announcement back when the forum was on reddit but couldn’t. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Zorba tho (which was my point).
TrannyPornO was one of the best and most interessting contributors The Motte ever had. He also had a tendency to sometimes use rather colorful language. The mods had a policy of escalating bans based on previous bans and their own internal notes and an overactive mod or two who give such notes very easily. This meant that unless you toed the imaginary line of that specific mod, you were more or less guaranteed to end up on the mods’ shitlist with every previous ban being used to justify you getting even deeper on that list.
Thus my suggestion that the most active mods not be allowed to moderate a small specific subset of users.
Ohhhh he was on Reddit, cheers
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I'm not sure how feasible that would be. We don't have many mods, and activity varies widely depending on availability.
I can, however, tell you that we do our best to voluntarily recuse ourselves from moderation decisions where we have a conflict of interest. Usually because someone had exhausted our patience.
Case in point, when Hlynka flamed out, I chose to refrain from actively encouraging his ban. Never liked the guy, didn't see what others saw in him. He got banned by his fellow moderators (as an ex-mod himself), which I can't complain about. I know the others have similar stories.
At the end of the day, mods have a great deal of autonomy, should they choose to exercise it. Controversial decisions are hashed out behind closed doors.
It's those "one or two mods" who actively hold down the fort. For example, I go long periods between officially donning the mod hat, even if I'm quietly doing spring cleaning and admin work in the background. We really don't have manpower to spare, and before you ask, during the last round of recruitment, we had lots of other candidates who turned down the offer because they simply didn't want to take on the burden. Jannies do this for free! That's a miracle! Give us money!
I love your writing and read most things you write and didn't know you were a mod until now
You make it sound like I'm an upstanding civic contributor who coincidentally has HIV haha. Jokes aside, thank you, I appreciate it!
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Ywah I (as alluded to) know that being a mod is hard work and a shit job (unpaid forced interaction with the most annoying and worst parts of the forum you love enough to be modding)
And I accept that the balance is not just hard but imo impossible to hit.
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