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This is not what we are looking for in a top level post. And is boo outgroupish. One day ban.
Edit after the fact (14 hours later):
I have seen a pattern happen before where a single troll posts a dumb question. We don't moderate it very quickly and the top level posts following the troll post also become low quality. There could be many reasons for that. Maybe the troll is setting the tone, maybe people think 'well if thats allowable, then surely my post is fine too', or maybe they are trying to be helpful and just knock the troll post from the top of the discussion list.
I wanted to short-circuit that whole downward spiral, but I was also about to leave for a few hours, and then would probably need to go to bed afterwards. I saw my options as: act quickly and stop the downward spiral with little explanation. Or leave it until morning and potentially have a lot more cleanup to deal with. Bad posts sometimes create good discussion, but they just as often create bad discussion (I've already had to go back and ban someone else for one of the sub-conversations that popped up from this).
I am always willing to offer explanations of my moderator actions, but because things tend to spiral so fast here, I can't promise I will always offer those explanations in the exact moment of moderation. Expect it within 24 hours if someone asks for it. If I know I don't have the time or energy to explain myself later I just add my report to the pile, rather than moderating the comment.
This top level post had something like 8 reports. I thought it was obvious that it was a bad top level post. It pattern matches a low effort trolling attempt. I am surprised that people were surprised by this moderation.
What the actual fuck
My original comment has been edited to add explanation
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It's obviously a low effort post that doesn't meet the standards for what we're looking for in a top level post.
I agree that mods could do a better job of elaborating on that though, in cases where they do feel the need to intervene.
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@cjet79's reason was good enough (it's perfectly obvious this was a trollish shit-stirrer asking questions in bad faith), but in addition, @bigtittygothgf is a ban evader, so the ban has been made permanent.
I can only speak for myself, but maybe votes will show that others concur.
I appreciate that the comment fell egregiously short of our standards, both codified in rules and informal but clear in the culture of the place (very low effort and low volume together with provocative phrasing, mainly), and personally don't like having that user around, due to history of what seems to me to be bad faith (and almost invariably low-effort) comments.
I believe that the crux of the problem is one of attitude, that mods do not justify their decisions. You don't need to litigate every call but it'd be less jarring if you cited the specific grievance, like «Too low-effort for a top level, bad track record, 1 day ban» instead of the imperious «not what we are looking for». Rapidly escalating to permaban on a unverifiable accusation of ban evasion (despite the semi-consistent policy, one you have explicitly professed too, of tolerating ban evaders unless they jump on their previous hobby horses) was also a bit much to me.
You don't have to imitate Hlynka either.
My original comment has been edited to add explanation
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Usually I do. But sometimes we don't have a lot of time to write a long explanation of a fairly straightforward decision, we're just doing some jannying, and when we come back to people angrily demanding why we modded someone expressing tribal CW bait that made them clap, we are not going to satisfy them with any explanation and usually aren't inclined to try.
I also am not going to step in and speak for @cjet79.
You are just going to have to accept our judgment on ban evaders, because for reasons that should be obvious, we aren't going to tell you everything that informs our decisions in that regard.
I am not sure where you got that idea. We are not tracking people who were banned on the old sub. If you get banned here and come back with an alt, you're definitely getting banned again.
Your pattern-matching is broken.
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IMO we need something like the BLR back so people can drop interesting things without the expectation they write a whole essay about it to clarify their basic reaction of "I think this is bad.", "I think this is ridiculous.", "I think this is a good thing.", etc. or get the banhammer for booing the outgroup or whatever. I get the ideally that goal of this community is to solicit the essays but I would rather have a place that highlights 70% of recently interesting things with only 75% of them having extended commentary on them versus a place that highlights only 30% of recently interesting things with 95% of them having extended commentary on them, especially since multiple people in the comments will often pick up the extended commentary duty.
Personally, I'd rather hear about interesting new information concerning interracial rape rates (and, yes, not just because I'm racist against blacks, as I'd want to hear about it if it were in the opposite direction too) even if I'm not going to get the fair and balanced perspective on top about how it can be interpreted in some manner that is neutral for the raping demographic, larping as some future historian totally disconnected from present issues. Sure, I wouldn't want every post to be "Science CONFIRMS that BLACKS = RAPE" or it would just turn into heterodox /r/science or /r/politics but I think there needs to be some more intelligent way to balance this out (like multiple different feeds accomplishes).
And yes moderation communication here is also often terrible. But all productive suggestions in that area have been ignored from day one so oh well.
Though it's not nearly as bad as it was at times on Reddit, some mods here are definitely starting to get a bit too active and trigger-happy again (with modding this post probably not necessarily being the worst or even a bad example of it, but still). It seems to me when this place migrated from Reddit, they were very hands-off in its initial phase (which seems to me to be an implicit admission that the capricious and heavily-involved moderation they engaged in at times on Reddit would have strangled the baby in the cradle, which you might think would also make them rethink it in general but maybe not) and things were better than ever. Now they seem to be starting to believe that they have enough of a captive audience that they can begin to return to their old ways though. It's disappointing.
I get that not every post here is great but for the most part some random red-named post popping in occasionally going "No bad little boy don't do that!" (which is only a mildly satirically exaggerated version of how the mods here often chastise people) or throwing out random bans is about as effective as TSA security at the airport. It may occasionally find a knife, but it also misses a lot of knives, throws out a lot of non-knives or things that are maybe knife-shaped but probably not actually that dangerous, and in general annoys people and causes more contention than its benefits can justify. (Of course, this is describing the active behavior. The implicit background threat of moderation is certainly necessary, but that can be achieved while rarely if ever using it.)
Something like the BLR, but maybe 'must give two-sentence summary' + 'mods can, and are expected to, delete bad posts if they have a vibe that they're bad posts even if they technically comply with the rules'?
Sure with the second part applied very rarely if at all. If you're going to have a lower-effort queue, let it be lower-effort.
It depends on the content, though. If the second part was rarely applied, we'd just get the same old BLR, which I mostly found annoying and the mods decided to nuke.
I specifically remember /u/greyuniwave, now suspended, posting a ton of shit in the BLR, usually about covid or conspiracy stuff. Quite a few of his posts were heavily upvoted despite me calling them shit, so my opinion is a minority - but BLR posts often were, and despite that the mods considered it low quality enough generally to be removed, so eh.
Picking a specific BLR thread ... the content just seems uninspiring? Half is awful, whether it's grayuniwave's 10 posts or others (this did get warned, but 45 points?)
But even most of the 'good posts' read like the second page of the NYT. "Matthew Yglesias Responds to Ross Douthat on CRT, the 1619 Project and Public School Curricula."? "On May 24, 2021 the United States State Department imposed a “Level 4: Do not travel” advisory on Japan, the highest level used to advise US travelers against traveling—in effect, a quarantine."? "French lesbians and single women to get IVF rights"? Who cares? (clearly, readers did).
Compare this to an ACX monthly linkspost, or the better parts of HN or /r/ssc, or our toplevel posts, which are just more interesting.
The toplevel effortpost restriction seems to serve as a content restriction preventing the worst of 'random news item that could be replaced with gpt-3 output' or 'JUST IN: corporate racist democrats hate christians.', even when the posters/readers still find the former interesting, and absent explicit content discrimination to balance out the lack of implicit discrimination, the BLR would just suck again.
A BLR without mods removing lots of stuff would still be fine, and I'd still speedskim it, but reluctantly.
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False. We just don't take up the suggestions that people who want to wage unrestrained culture war would like us to implement.
It's fascinating that this is how you model our thinking. Though I'm not sure I believe you sincerely believe this.
We don't ban randomly, and banning bad actors is quite effective.
I should have saved you guys openly saying that the light hand was there to encourage engagement until you thought you had enough of an audience to keep the place going. How else are people supposed to read that other than adding the obvious "then we can crack down and shape the contributors however we want"?
Alas, dissolving the people and electing another is not a realistic option here
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That you immediately imply that any possible suggestion that might have not been taken seriously enough by the mods here would only come from "people who want to wage unrestrained culture war" (the type of veiled insult pretty much all mods here almost always throw out in response to any suggestion that they may not be as open to suggestions as they claim, which I guess you don't seem to realize kind of proves the point), as if there is no possibility that the mods here could have ever dismissed a valid suggestion (I guess you're perfect oracles of what's a good suggestion or not, no mistakes ever?), is a great example of the terrible mod communication I was talking about. Thanks for proving my point with your arrogant and dismissive tone.
Anyway though I'm not going down this rabbit hole since I've seen where it leads: frustration and zero results for those who try to take the whole "moderation here is driven by user sentiment" stuff seriously (as you've proven by starting off the conversation with nothing but passive aggressive sneering).
I do sincerely believe it. The difference in moderation immediately going from Reddit to the new site was obvious. Maybe it's not something you implemented consciously but it sure happened.
Just keep in mind that with this new site you still need us more than we need you. An independent enterprise is always on shakier ground.
No. I was talking about you and your suggestions. Some people have made valid suggestions, some of which have, in fact, been implemented, some of which were acknowledged as good suggestions but were not implemented for various pragmatic reasons.
Nobody needs anything here. This isn't a business, and we're not your employees. We do want to attract and keep members because we all believe in the purpose of the Motte, but that doesn't mean that every individual member gets what they want or that all demands are legitimate.
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Everyone here should be capable of looking at that post and seeing the pattern of "drop steaming statistical turd, ask 'what do you think guys?' while offering no opinions of their own" and targeting the non-existent left membership.
Consensus building! Ban he!
In all seriousness, yeah. The post was probably bad faith, the user ought to be punished for it, and we can still have a decent discussion in the comments. That’s before any ban evasion which may not be obvious.
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The ruling was fair and righteous but the exection was performed with a dull axe.
But executed nonetheless, and thus fair and just.
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No, the reasoning wasn't good enough. If you want people to respond to moderation, you need to give specific feedback. "This is not what we're looking for." is not remotely specific.
Also, since it's perfectly obvious, can you tell us exactly how you were sure that this was a trollish shit-stirrer and not a terse poster asking a question in good faith? Since it's obvious, it should be no trouble, to both cjet79 or you, to say what exactly was obvious about it and how apparently-similar posts that aren't by trollish shit-stirrers are clearly so instead.
Look, you're the mods. You make judgement calls, and our continued presence on this site is evidence that we respect those judgement calls at least enough not to throw our hands up and storm off collectively. But please recognize when you are making those judgement calls and don't just fall back on heavy implications of "It's obvious, and if it's not obvious to you, then clearly you're also a trollish shit-stirrer and probably a ban-evader, so stop asking questions or you might be next." If multiple members of the community are not reacting the way you are to the post and, well, obviously do not find it obvious what is going on, then perhaps it is not actually obvious.
This has never been implied. You have been around plenty long enough, and lobbed enough brickbats at the mods yourself, to know better than accuse us of threatening to ban people for questioning or disagreeing with a mod decision.
Quite often a low-effort shit-stirring comment will nonetheless start a decent discussion. That doesn't validate the comment after the fact.
Doesn’t it “validate” it after the fact? It seemingly proves that the comment was useful from an instrumental perspective. I take your use of the word “decent” to suggest quality not quantity.
No.
Yes.
Can you explain? Basically, I imagine we want moderation to improve themotte (ie increase quality conversation and decrease non-quality conversation). If a statement increases quality conversations, why are we trying to remove?
I guess one could imagine where it directly increases quality conversation by X and indirectly decreases quality conversation by X+N but that seems like a rather big leap.
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The top-level post was terrible, that's the exact kind of post that drives discussion and newcomers away from this place. It's not like it's insightful at all either.
Is it truly this difficult for you to collapse bad top level posts?
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Mate, we make an effort to ban people for that kind of behavior. If you choose to leave anyways you only contribute to the evaporative cooling effect; we're doing what we can to prevent it.
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If OP had a few paragraphs summarizing the article and comparing it to the views of the "left-leaning people", it probably wouldn't have been banned. Toplevel posts aren't supposed to be three sentences!
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