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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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Is there a reason you're modding a post made by one of the few consistently left-leaning posters, while not modding posts...

Amadan has given you sufficient explanation, but let me add to it. First, nobody reported those posts, I hadn't seen them before you linked them. Second, every single one of those links is to a user with recent AAQCs. You yourself enjoy the benefit of the doubt in that you have accumulated 3 AAQCs and just one warning over the course of at least three years of activity.

By comparison, in four months, Turok has accumulated eight warnings from three different moderators, including our most left-wing moderator!

Can you see why we might be starting to think that this is not a person who posts in good faith?

(And yes, we do also get right wing posters who match this pattern, and yes, they do get banned. One thing I will say for them, typically the most vocal radical leftist trolls take their ban as a badge of pride and go brag about it to credulous strivers in other communities who imagine this place to be somehow "alt-right." That is a pleasant change from the alt-right trolls, who often proceed to wage DM campaigns throwing every accusation and epithet imaginable in our direction. I don't know why it shakes out this way, but it does!)

It's fine to use AAQCs as giving a higher threshold to ban someone, but it shouldn't give them a higher threshold for warnings. If a person is breaking the rules (or is close enough to it) they should get dinged no matter what their past history is. This helps good-faith posters stay within the lines and helps build a sense of consistency in what types of actions are rule-breaking. Right now it strains credulity to see a leftist get dinged for:

conservatism is increasingly the ideology of uneducated people and those who went to third-rate universities

While I can scroll down a bit and find this type of post not receiving such treatment, thus implicitly being seen as fine enough:

The modal chick’s interests and hobbies consist of consooming, painting her face, taking selfies, and teeheeing around in skimpy outfits


we do also get right wing posters who match this pattern, and yes, they do get banned

For the record, I'm not saying you guys never ban right wing posters

If a person is breaking the rules (or is close enough to it) they should get dinged no matter what their past history is.

There is just not enough moderator time in the day for that. If someone's comment doesn't get reported, it is very unlikely to get moderated (that would require one of us to just happen across the comment). Of the comments that do get reported, probably a majority of them are plausibly rule breaking, but I'd be shocked if we actually moderated even one of those in ten. I cannot tell you how many times I've thought, "Yeah, I agree that's a bit low effort/antagonistic/whatever, but it's six replies deep and seems approximately within community norms and the metamoderation is low-certainty and it's not part of a pattern of bad behavior, it's not worth the effort." Or--"Oh, this is also a pretty bad comment, but I just moderated this user for the same thing in a different thread, do I need to say more here? Nah, I'll catch them next time."

And yeah--"oh, this is a super quality poster, I'm just gonna let it slide this time" is definitely on the list of time saving excuses. But never fear! We have in the past banned quality posters eventually. It's just a much more protracted and painful process.

It is certainly possible for a comment to be sufficiently bad that I will ban a user on sight, first offense, no questions asked, no matter how many AAQCs they have. But barring those egregious violations of the rules, we are actually almost always moderating with an eye toward patterns of behavior more than we are moderating for precise adherence to the rules in specific cases. Indeed, the rules themselves are only in service of the foundation. This is not a sport where we are calling balls and strikes based on high-precision measurements; this is the messy work of curating a community dedicated to the practice of disagreement!

So when you say--

Right now it strains credulity to see a leftist get dinged for...

--and then you provide a direct quote, you've already missed the mark. That user is getting dinged, not for any particular statement, but for an increasingly established pattern of behavior.