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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   25182 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

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Okay, this is just linkspam.

Yeah, some of it is kind of interesting. Like a listicle or a "You won't believe..." TikTok or YouTube thumbnail is interesting.

We have rules against low-effort posts that are just collections of culture war fodder. No, we are not going to bring back the link roundup. That is not what this place is for.

Don't do this again.

I visit this place less than I used to, partly because post-Elon twitter has filled the uncensored political discourse gap, but also partly because these overly-strict rules have led to too many long-winded, low information density posts dominating this thread - and some interesting events going entirely undiscussed, presumably because no one can be bothered to write 10 paragraphs about it to avoid being modded for low effort.

As soon as someone says "I have to write ten paragraphs to..." I dismiss them as someone disinterested in factuality.

OK, my apology. If such content is unwelcome there, I will not post such links here any more.

Is there any other forum where you normally post them?

Please bring back the—

No, we are not going to bring back the link roundup. That is not what this place is for.

...oh.

I miss it too.

I do see what you are getting at, but (for one) I hadn't heard about the Bigfoot news so that was genuinely new and informative for me. Maybe this would have worked better for Friday Fun Thread, but thanks for that one, Eetan!

Okay, this is just linkspam.

It is an extremely interesting link collection that I personally quite enjoyed. Thank you.

We have rules against low-effort posts that are just collections of culture war fodder.

Curating those links requires more effort than a vast majority of the posts here.

No, we are not going to bring back the link roundup.

But you should.

Don't do this again.

Please do this again.

If you don't like the rules you can raise it with us and we'll discuss it (but this particular rule has been discussed repeatedly and we are very unlikely to change our minds). Telling someone else to set themselves up for a ban is definitely not going to move the needle.

I think it would be interesting to allow a lower level of effort (a paragraph or so) for links relating to events older than a specified interval --- tentatively a week, maybe even a month. If necessary, those could be confined to a single thread.

A little off-topic, but how about a thread for registering predictions?

Last night I had a vivid dream that I was in Seoul, South Korea and suddenly there was a major incursion by the North Koreans. Yes, it's pretty unlikely that I have the gift of prophecy, but hey, a guy can dream, right?

Bring back relatively-bare link posting! In its own thread if need be.

The top-level post below this one (JeSuisCharlie's) is literally just a link with a quote from that link: the only user-provided content is the label for the link. EDIT: that was a second-level post, not a top-level one, and that does detract from my point somewhat.

You don't mod it, despite that having less personal commentary than any one of Eetan's links.

The resulting discussion from that post is interesting and enjoyable. The Motte would be worse off without it. That is true for this top-level post as well.

People posting uninteresting links is a self-solving problem when no one responds to them. We're a discussion forum, and having a jumping-off point for a discussion is useful.

The top-level post below this one (JeSuisCharlie's) is literally just a link with a quote from that link: the only user-provided content is the label for the link.

You don't mod it, despite that having less personal commentary than any one of Eetan's links.

It's not a top level post, it was a response to eetan.

Discussion engagement with a topic is a limited resource here. So if you spend the time to write up an in depth post and it take you half a day, you don't want someone sniping the topic by basically posting a dumb article or twitter thread.

Yes you can respond to them, but responses often get less engagement than the top level.

Other spinoffs of the culture war thread concept have been tried. The ones that allowed bare links are all dead.

It's not a top level post, it was a response to eetan.

Yup, I got this wrong. I've edited my original post to make note of this.

Discussion engagement with a topic is a limited resource here. So if you spend the time to write up an in depth post and it take you half a day, you don't want someone sniping the topic by basically posting a dumb article or twitter thread.

That's a fair point: you want the opening post on a given topic to be the highest-quality post, so low-quality posts that take less time to write can undercut people with less effort.

The question is, is a higher-effort post actually going to be written on a topic? From the above, I've seen the dinergoth thing before on the Culture War thread, but that was a previous week, so it seems there was more discussion to be had on it. I'm not sure if the other topics would have otherwise gotten any mention. And if there ends up being no post on a topic otherwise, then the relatively-bare post was the highest-effort post and it's being blocked by the forum rules.

I don't have a great way to solve all of these issues: the best thought I have is to have a bare-links-allowed post later in the week, so that anyone wanting to write detailed posts has a few days head start at the start of the week. That doesn't help with events that actually occur midweek though, and "no bare-links posts about things that happened less than 2 days ago" seems like it would be too annoying to implement for the mods. IIRC we used to have something similar around major tragedies, although I may be confusing that with another forum, and major tragedies are thankfully rare (or we calibrate "major" by how common they are, at least)

Other spinoffs of the culture war thread concept have been tried. The ones that allowed bare links are all dead.

Do you mean on TheMotte, or are you talking about places like TheSchism? I think that's maybe a "correlation implies causation" instance: the problem with TheSchism was not its bare link thread.

Depending on what your criteria for "other spinoffs of the culture war thread concept" is, rDrama seems to be alive and quite active despite allowing basically any level of effort or non-effort. The discussion criteria is clearly not up to the standards of theMotte, but I think that's more downstream of the userbase and general comment moderation.

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