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