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"Pushing back" against the Darwins and the Juliuses never got anyone banned. Losing one's emotional equilibrium and going off on them did. I won't deny there is a failure mode here where someone very good at writing provocative posts that fall within the rules can result in some decent posters losing their shit when they can't take it any longer and getting themselves banned. On the other hand, someone who only does that once or twice doesn't get banned for very long, and Darwin and Julius both eventually got booted long-term. We have never had a great solution for getting rid of bad but effortful posters who poison the discourse without breaking the rules, and I have yet to hear proposals that don't amount to "Ban this hobby horse" or "Just admit that this person is terrible and ban them." (The latter we very occasionally do under the egregiously obnoxious wildcard rule, but every time we do it burns some of the membership's goodwill... remember, there are people who got on our case every time we modded Julius, and some of those people were not Julius's alts.)
I also do not think ymeshkout can fairly be compared to Darwin or Julius.
I am saying a large percentage of reports are "non-quality" as you put it - not people genuinely concerned about the tone and quality of arguments here, but simply seeking to punish their enemies.
Both, IMO. He writes long, effortful posts that are hard to take apart on the facts, as you'd expect when debating a lawyer, but he also criticizes Trump a lot, so a lot of people see "Long-winded criticism of Trump" which makes them angry, but they can't really muster a cogent response to explain why the criticism is wrong, but they also notice him taking a few pokes at his interlocutors, which triggers even more rage. No, I seriously do not think he would get this kind of pushback if he were writing similar posts about how corrupt Joe Biden is. (He'd get some, but not like this where you're trying to make him the new Darwin.)
Off topic, but I want to say that this post, unlike your direct comments on the issue, made me feel sorta bad about getting a rise out of people who in my opinion have made themselves fair game with bad faith rhetoric.
You're fully correct on the object level here. There's no case against @ymeskhout that wouldn't apply equally well or much better to an unreasonable proportion of discourse in the community. If people don't want to read detailed legal commentary of Trump being {bad, again}, they can just collapse the thread (highly recommended). If they take it upon themselves to correct people being wrong/mean about their favorite politician, but find the process too onerous, they may be advised to reconsider their priorities. Elevating this to mods via reporting is just lame.
@Dean's responses, for all their characteristic argumentative quality, don't amount in substance to anything more than "I don't like it when people make a hobby of criticizing Trump here, so I'll try to shoehorn my opposition to this practice into the well-recognized failure mode of moderation tolerating incorrigible high-effort provocateurs". His own litigative tactic here is more Julius-like, if anything. Actual failings of ymeskhout that are brought forth as evidence of the Julius pattern range from trivial (editing in and out some catty remarks), to highly contestable, to apparently disingenuous (everything about failures to engage with criticism in previous rounds).
The meta level of all this, i.e. the evaporative cooling thesis and long-term consequences of flogging some dead horse, is more interesting but vague and rather hopeless for obvious reasons, and not rigorously argued, not yet at least.
To clarify the last for you, I made a judgement call around 2020 that direct topic exchanges with ymeskhout were unwarranted due to his habit of misrepresenting other people's positions and ignoring previously provided arguments. The topics at the time were cases involving the 2020 election, but the behavioral trend was more general. In a thread where multiple examples were pointed to of past examples of this (including by other posters), I wrote a long-form post explaining why I found further engagement with him (providing more engaged arguments and sources) pointless due to the faith demonstrated, and would no longer provide that level of engagement going forward. This followed up with another effort post elaborating the point on the more abstract level, and have referred to it since as to why I don't engage with ymeskhout on his post subjects anymore, but limit myself to discussion of his conduct.
The disingenuous charge against me comes from ymeskhout accuses me of not explaining my refusal to engage with him. The disingenuous charge by me is that I refer ymeskhout back to the effort post thread where I explained what I found lacking and why I found him to be acting in bad faith... which then comes to the next cycle, when ymekshout will claim for the audience that I've never provided him the reasons why.
Given that the 2020 posting was a (multi-post) effort explanation why, with both concerete and abstract reasons, and ymeskhout has repeatedly linked back to the post since (but in a way that hides the object-level objection trend from the later follow-on), I find the the accusation of not providing prior explanations why disengenuous, and demonstrative of the dishonesty (of both mis-representing positions and and the existence/nature of prior engagements) I maintain my stance of. At this point I know he knows where to find the previous position, he knows I know he knows where the previous position... and every iteration of this, he will complain that I still have not provided him my position, and I will counter that he is demonstrating the reason why I will not engage.
Me being the disingenuous one is certainly a credible enough charge to those unaware, and why I consider his objections performative at this point as part of the charge of misrepresenting other people's previous positions for current arguments, but this is also why I openly accuse him of lying, and have not recanted it despite mod warnings to not do so lightly.
Take viewpoint bias for what it is, of course, but from my position I've always been frank to the point of risking mod censure on why I will not engage ynekshout in a counter-argument form anymore- because I find him habitually dishonest when representing other people's arguments, present and past, ranging from their stance to their existence (and effort-spent) in previous engagements.
The last time you accused me of lying about other people's positions, lying about other people not giving me arguments, lying about not being provided insight into specific concerns, I responded to you in detail. None of your claims about me lying held up. Anyone is welcome to follow the link and check themselves.
So, cards on the table. You claim that your persistent refusal to engage with the actual substance of my arguments is borne out of a commitment to principle. It's what you say but how would you convince someone that you're telling the truth? Because the only other times I've ever encountered anything close to the position you're claiming to adhere to is from online activists (typically leftwing) who respond with some variant of "It's not my job to educate you" when their positions are scrutinized. It's reasonable to surmise that anyone offering that response is using it as a deflection tactic to avoid having to defend their beliefs, most likely because they know their beliefs are too weak to stand up to adversarial scrutiny.
I can't prove this conclusively because I can't read your mind, but I strongly suspect that your refusal to provide arguments because I'm purportedly acting in bad faith is just a pretextual excuse (a lie) used by you as a dodge to avoid defending your beliefs or having them scrutinized. I suspect that anti-Trump arguments in particular make you upset, but because you are unable to construct a legitimate counter-argument, you resort to a dogged and persistent response campaign which compensates for the lack of substance with a heavy dose of vitriol.
One reason I believe this is because I can't think of any good explanation for you to be so persistently tight-lipped across several years all within a forum specifically dedicated to debate and discussion. If you have an argument, just please for the love of god say it. Your excuses make no sense in this context.
Another reason I believe this is because despite the wide-array of topics I write about, what consistently acts as a trigger for your grudge with me is almost exclusively when I write about either Trump or the 2020 stolen election theories. I suspect, given your scope of attention, that you have an emotional attachment to this topic which is why it reliably elicits a hostile and angry response from you. Those posts of mine are probably the ones most exhaustively sourced, which is inconsistent with why they would be the most likely to anger you.
Another reason I believe this is because while your refusal to engage would make sense in isolation, you replace this with significant efforts towards vague denunciation riddles with lengthy wordcounts. If your goal was to save yourself from wasting time, this is incongruent conduct. It's not clear what, if anything, you gain from this behavior.
Another reason I believe this is while I can understand why someone might want to avoid typing out a long response, you flatly and explicitly have refused to even link me to sources. Some of your responses to those requests include:
"I'm not particularly interested in trying to feed you sources to be judged by you on your standards on credibility to consistency standards you impose that helpfully weed out things other people might care about and could even be true."
"I am uninterested in providing you sources on other people's positions given your conduct on this topic."
"Can I? Sure. Will I? A waste of time when you are involved, given your pattern of conduct which has been noted repeatedly over the years even if you have also repeatedly denied the feedback."
This is a patently bewildering position to hold and I can't think of any scenario where it makes any sense, except one where you are concerned that I would eviscerate your sources (flattering, admitedly). Given the circumstances, I cannot fathom an explanation more charitable than this, you are literally the only person I've encountered in this forum with a self-imposed policy against linking sources. It's wild.
I've outlined the reasons for why I hold my suspicion, and it's a suspicion I believe is especially well-founded given the scope of time involved. Suspicions can be rebutted with evidence, and I will remain open to any arguments and heavily encourage anyone and everyone to point any faults with what I've outlined above. If I am wrong and my suspicion turns out to be misplaced, I will emphatically apologize. Unless there is some new developments, my hope is that this will by my last word on this (very tiresome) saga.
This showed up in the "TheMotte needs your help" poll.
I was forced to declare it "neutral" because "high standard of evidence while politely catfighting another poster; this entire thread should be nuked; what the fuck are the mods doing" was sadly not available.
I'm genuinely not sure how I'm supposed to rate comments like this. It's hostile speculation about another poster's state of mind, in a thread that seems entirely dedicated to fighting out Dean and ymeshkout's mutual antagonism by consent of a good fraction of the board. It's like everyone's decided "screw the rules, we're turning this thread into a fighting ring." I would say "deserves a warning", but nobody here doesn't, this comment included, and it doesn't particularly deserve a warning more.
I would like to request a "Nuke this entire thread from orbit" poll option. There's a level of mess where opping individual comments simply isn't viable.
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While I (assume I) disagree with you on Trump on a variety of issues, this kind of attempt at coordination while disagreeing is quite refreshing and useful.
While other sites have flamewars, we have campfires to warm ourselves nearby.
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I disagree with sentence one, and from that much of the rest. The nature of pushback vis-a-vis disagreement in a metaphor of equilibirum is that pushback is inherently destabilizing, and generally driven by emotional impetus to respond. Just as walking forward is a controlled fall due to off-balancing your center of balance, pushing back is inherently moving one's self due to motivation, and that is what got people increasingly banned as early phases of intellectual-only pushback died with evaporative cooling and bad faith, which led only the emotionally-driven pushback to remain... which, of course, is what is selected against with mod censure.
The crux of Darwin and Julius is that while both 'eventually' got booted long-term, it was only well after bad faith was widely recognized, and also well after repeated toleration by mods explitictly recognizing -bad thing- but also tolerating it. Darwin in particular received multiple warnings that were framed in terms of 'we're going easy on you because of past quality contributions' (selecting for past rather than current conduct) despite blatant trolling, and Julius had a number of sockpuppets for whom the mod response was 'we believe you as a sockpuppet, here's your warning but you can stay.' The actions that were bad were recognized as bad, and ban-worthy, but not banned until they were... and until they were, the punishment for months to years was that it wasn't ban-worthy to conduct the offenses one would be eventually banned for.
I cannot emphasize how much this discredits standards of moderation. You speak of burning membership good will for moderating, but you also burn good will when visibly not moderating by professed standards. This is why legitimacy, not popularity, is the crux of acceptable conduct codes, and why legitimacy depends on consistency, because people can accept unhappy things if viewed as legitimate and not arbitrary.
However, legitimacy derives from culture, and culture is set by the climate that enables it, and the moderator climate has regularly and consistently been that while consistent bad actors may eventually get the boot, the people they provoke into continuing engagement will get the boot much sooner for being the sort of people who would continue engaging well after the evaporative cooling process sets in.
The way to resolve this is not by banning pet topics, but by consistently enforcing the rules... but consistently enforcing the rules is secondary to the mod team's goals of trying to retain / grow membership, which is viewed as being compromised when enforcing rules.
That depends on what flaw you think links them, otherwise one might as well say that Darwin and Julius cannot be fairly be compared. The point of two extremely dissimilar people is to weaken comparison to either one of them.
The flaw I refer to is the mix of unchanging hobby horse and bad faith engagement with others that leads to evaporative cooling and the gradual forum disinterest of engaging in any intellectual push-and-pull because there is none to be had except from the more emotionally-driven.
And I am noting this is entirely expected and typical, without warranting a caveat or special notice. It's exactly what one would expect for any appeals process in a political dispute.
...which goes right back down the Nybbler's critique of the original post argument- that the criticism of pretext in the case of Trump is not people genuinely concerned about the quality of the legal case, but simply seeking to punish their political enemy in some way, which goes to the broader principle of lawfare, which is what the post covered in a condemnatory fashion. As a metaphor, pretty spot on, but probably not your intent.
What you call 'can't really muster a cogent response' is what I call 'evaporative cooling,' and is the point of recognizing the Motte's selection bias for people who disagree to disengage from addressing the arguments.
'They can't really muster a cogent response... triggers even more rage' places the onus for lack of good engagement on those still engaging, without noting that they are the primary source still willing to engage. Note that even most of the 'Well, I liked it well enough' posts were in response to people expressing dislike. The current exchange is entirely consistent with controvery attracting more engagement than the underlying thing itself.
The arguments that the lawfare against Trump are primarily pretextual by parties just as guilty or worse of the same sorts of sins is long, extensive, and literally years old at this point. ymeshkout was also a regular part of them, so regular that the old sparring partners have lost interest.
Alternatively, if he were a non-mod writing the same posts about how corrupt Joe Biden is and the same shots at left-leaning posters, he would get a different and stricter response from the mod group, who has discussed how political balance and forum management considerations shape their response.
This is the crux of the issue when in the past conduct concessions are made to people on the basis of overall political composition of the forum- everything starts to be seen as pretextual, by all parties.
I can tell you that the mod team, and I personally, have not intentionally chosen to prioritize retaining/growing membership over consistent rules enforcement. Believe me or do not, but I strive to be consistent and even-handed, and I believe the other mods do too. Maybe you think we're all terrible at it, but you are definitely mischaracterizing our motives.
I am kind of curious in what way you think we do not enforce the rules consistently, but I fear it will boil down to "Ban the people I think should be banned, and don't ban the people I don't think should be banned," because it always does.
There are people I think are bad faith actors and poisonous to the environment whom I would boot in a heartbeat if we took the more expeditious route you are suggesting. But I am fairly certain you'd find at least some of my choices objectionable.
Just to pick at this a bit, if I understand your argument here, it's basically that we let terrible people like Darwin and Julius (and ymeskhout, apparently) run amok until they drive good posters away. There may be some truth to this (in that I'm sure that all those individuals have driven some people away, some of whom might have been good posters). On the other hand, the people often mentioned as "good posters who were driven away" are people like trannyporn (on one end of the spectrum) or Impassionata (on the other). Do you think any of the people complaining about all the people driven away by so many threads about HBD and Jews and progressives-are-cancer might have a point as well?
Is this the "You give leftists extra slack to try to cultivate ideological diversity" argument again? Because I recall one time when Zorba said something like "Yes, we have a problem keeping leftists around and so we might sometimes go easier on a lefty who's taking a lot of flack," and for years since y'all have beaten that particular horse to death. I can tell you that at present, there is definitely no intentional extra slack given to left-leaning posters.
I do believe you try to. I also believe you are fallible, and susceptible to the same sort of biases that people like to think themselves above. I also know that mods have regularly appealed to personal subjectivity towards those they moderate as they do.
I do believe you try to be even-handed, I challenge that even-handed is subordinated to other concerns, and I base this off of mod comments in ban-posts or kicks which elaborating why certain degrees are inflicted. The words to use them may change- 'not becoming an echo chamber' or 'don't want to drive away key counter-balances' or 'you were a good poster and we'd like to be again"- but past compromises compromise future credibility.
Of course it does, you made a truism of a generality. Nobody goes 'ban the people I don't think should be banned,' because it creates a paradox. This is what I mean by mods not being above logical failures when under their subjective presence.
But, if that feels too confrontational, let me ask a question in turn-
Amadan, how many times in all my years at the Motte have I ever reported someone asking for them to be banned?
Certainly. But the point of a legitimate justice system isn't being non-objectionable, it's being consistent/credible and legitimate. The conflation is why I believe there is a breakdown, and interjects the biases I was mentioning before.
Or me. I am well aware that geopolitics is a hobby horse.
Not drive them away- drive them into not responding to them.
When you have a mix of 'good' posters (those who will only respond in accordance to the rules) and 'bad' posters (those who will respond emotionally, and at risk of the rules) facing a 'nasty' poster (who is not going to change or engage in good faith), the 'good' posters will avoid risk by disengaging. By ratios alone, that makes bad posters a larger share of the remainder, which in turn changes the dynamics of reporting and perception of bad posters, because rather than one bad poster against many good and a few bad, it becomes one bad against many bad and now even-handedness rears it's ugly head because what does 'even handed' mean in practice when dealing with one-vs-many? It certainly doesn't often mean joining in with the unsightly crowd.
This is the environment which drives people away- where dogpiling is very obviously occuring on unpopular positions by obstinant people, where the optics are of mods taking greater actions against those objecting to those in bad faith than against the actors they will eventually ban anyway, where good-faith engagement is hard to find because the good-faith opponents left and the remainder are the sort motivated by emotion, and where even-handedness struggles to handle two different sorts of 'bad'.
This is not the worst environment, or even a worse environment than alternatives, but is the climate of the motte when unmoving bad-faith arguments are raised time and time again.
I absolutely think they have a point, and encourage them to make it- because I believe the mods have a point to, in that a key purpose of this forum is how to argue, not what to argue. This is not a curated garden of harmony, this is a moderated battleground. Siege warfare is our literal visual metaphor, and the motte is for defending points under challenge.
Points are not to be dismissed from consideration, they are to be defeated. Even if people are being driven away by HBD and Jews and progressives-are-cancer... so what? What would you do differently if that were true, that you would not do despite it being true?
Whether there is an intention is irrelevant to whether there is, because, again, biases and other concerns and how subjective things get framed in the context of incentives other contextual priorities. And, of course, prior interest such an intention, even if it's not formal (or even informal) policy at the present.
Yes, of course we're subjective and fallible, but none of that answers how we're failing at consistent enforcement.
I don't know how many times you have reported someone, and I have no way of knowing whether if you reported someone it was your intention to get them banned. If you're asking me to guess, I think you do not seem like someone who usually makes spurious reports or tries to get someone banned.
Nothing, because I agree with you that being able to lay siege to (and with) those arguments is the point of the Motte. Of course we lose some potential contributors who don't want to argue with Holocaust deniers or conflict theorists who view them as cancer. And I'm sure we also lose some contributors who are infuriated by certain posters being allowed to make repetitive arguments in what they consider to be bad faith.
I still don't see how you think we can somehow select the "bad" posters and apply rules to them in a way we are apparently not doing right now. I get that you think we didn't apply the rules consistently to Darwin, or JB, or ymeskhout. I don't agree, and you haven't tried to convince me, you've just claimed we don't.
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