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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32433 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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I forget whether I already posted this, but it occurred to me recently that it may be more accurate to say that J.K. Rowling, and perhaps TERFs in general, are sexist than to say that they're transphobic. Rowling supports the right of people to dress however they like and receive whatever medical intervention they desire. She uses preferred pronouns in polite company. But she wants spaces to exist that discriminate based on biological sex, without taking someone's gender identity or expression into account. The term for sex-based discrimination is sexism.

This is not what we are looking for in a top level post. And is antagonistic. One day ban.

Edit (14 hours later):

I may have misread the antagonism in the post. There was a report saying the same thing, so I thought I wasn't the only one seeing it. Mea Culpa, but the ban was primarily for the other thing anyways:

The main problem is that this is a short single thought top level post. Closer to a journal entry. Right beneath it in the thread was a short low effort troll post.

I have seen this happen again and again. A bad top level post leads to other people making bad top level posts. Normally there are no consequences for mediocre or bad top level posts. But in order to prevent more of them from happening ... I added consequences. The next post was higher quality. I'm not confident enough to claim that the ban tactic worked, maybe those would have been the next posts anyways. But it didn't clearly fail either.

I would also like to point out that there is now a quality post on the JK Rowling and Harry Potter situation. One of the specific reasons that we don't want low effort top level posts is that they tend to crowd out high effort top level posts. What if everyone already got in all the JK rowling and trans discussion down here, and no one responds to the high quality post above? It creates an incentive to post quickly, and not spend too much time writing up an effort post.

This is not what the community is looking for in moderation. Do better.

For example, better moderation would look like "This is not what we are looking for in a top-level post. We are looking for comments with features X and Y, and without Z, and your comment (while having X) has not enough Y and too much Z."

Also, as the comment reads as not at all antagonistic to me, you should really specify what exactly in it you find antagonistic. As it is, the moderation looks capricious and tells me nothing at all about what I should post to avoid a similar ban.

My original comment has been edited to add explanation

Thanks and much appreciated.

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