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The rate would be per-[leftist/rightist] comment / per-captia of comments rather than just raw instances. If 50% time a human interacts with a bear it mauls them but you only interact with a bear 10 times, it has a per captia rate of 5/10. If 27k murders by men occur but 3 million interactions happen, it has a per capita rate of 0.0076. The Human male still murders more people but overall interacting with human men is safer than interacting with a bear.
If 70k out of 100k of comments on a reddit forum are "boo-outgroup" vs 800/1k on the motte, the motte is far more "boo outgroup" despite there being overall less motte "boo-outgroup" comments. The rate is much higher. Your stated ""rate" is per instance or total count. This manipulates statistics to give the lower population forum more grace when per-captia is more honest, because it accounts for the confounding factor of the lower population.
There is something deeply ironic and funny about having to explain "per-capita" to a claimed leftist, defending righties.
Give me a metric about quality that we can agree on. Because if the answer is "it is subjective" then it has nothing to do with "equality of outcome". Pointing out tribal behavior is not an outcome, and I doubt anyone at the motte will be super plus-ed when we implemented a quota system for responding to outgroup comments/posts. This entire argument is me saying "it exists in parallel" and you saying "nuh-uh and if it did all those comments deserved it", which I believe is the The Law of Merited Impossibility, aka gaslighting.
By controlling for the overall population of the forum, you're abstracting away the actual interesting part. If your purpose is to judge the average morality of the users of a forum, as measured by their penchant to dogpile, etc. commenters who try to rock the boat, then sure, you can use that metric. But I'm not sure that's of particular interest to anyone, and I'm certain that that is so abstracted away from the way people interact with online forums that no one can make any sort of meaningful intuitive guesses about such things, especially when comparing numbers that are orders of magnitude apart.
That's why when people talk about places like this/Reddit being unfair or hostile to leftists/rightists, I believe that it tends to be about a typical (boat-rocking) leftist/rightist's experience in using that forum, not about some sort of average of how commenters tend to react to such comments. Perhaps I'm wrong, and most people talking about such things are using your abstract metric; I just don't know what use that metric would be other than for some sort of a virtue-measuring contest between forums.
We might have different views on what the interesting part is then. The original thesis that I responded to was "here are the observed forum behaviors on lefty forums" It missed the most interesting extension to me, which was that righty forums behave no differently. The behaviors described are inherent to human tribal politics at a cognitive substrate that extends beyond a left/right spectrum.
I had also inferred a larger thesis that right-wing dominated forums are morally better then left-wing dominated because they don't perform the stated behaviors are anywhere near the same rate. Per-capita rate is then a more relevant factor, because my thesis, is that no, the rates are probably similar. And that principled Libertarians (and the permanence of their values) are the larger factor in the openness and quality of forums than any left/right split. And as this comment pointed out, lots of libertarians are realizing that the righties are not opposed to lefty tactics, they just want different targets.
The idea that right-wing dominated forums would have any sort of moral superiority (in terms of the average rate of dogpiling, etc. behavior by users) over left-wing dominated ones in some general/average/typical/categorical sense - or the reverse - is one I find so utterly absurd* and detached from reality that it's something that I'd only charitably infer as a claim by someone on TheMotte if they actually explicitly make that specific claim. I don't see anything in the comment to which you replied nor this comment thread in general where I would feel comfortable inferring such a claim. It seems to me that the comment is about the experience of individual users who tend to "rock the boat" with respect to the dominant side in the forum.
And it seems to me to be about the specific state of things right now; i.e. leftists do have easy access to lots of online echochambers in a way that rightists don't; as such, regardless of how both leftists and rightists are exactly as likely to fall victim to their natural human biases when managing forums they dominate, we see an emergent property of the types of leftists and rightists who congregate at different types of forums. I'm not the original commenter, but it seems to me that reading some sort of moral judgment, either about groups, forums, sides, etc. in the comment to which you replied is jumping to conclusions.
* I find this absurd, because, besides being just completely obviously completely impossible to adjudicate in any way, it also has basically no consequence for anything in terms of how people actually interact with each other and forums. It's not as if there's some movement that claims, "right-wingers are non-coincidentally, non-incidentally, morally superior to left-wingers in terms of maintaining good faith discussion forum standards, and therefore, for the betterment of discourse throughout society, we should make all forums right-wing dominated" or whatever (except in the tautological case where people redefine "values logic, empiricism, evidence over emotion" as "right-wing."). I mean, maybe there is, but it's certainly not one that has any meaningful influence.
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