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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10902 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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What does it actually mean to have politics banned? I assume myself and the majority of motters do understand what people mean when they say they are "tired of politics in video games", but turning that tacit understanding into actionable rules is difficult, and as soon as you start adding in a wider range of people that's going to break down. Like you would inevitably get moderators that ban economic topics because of the crossover with politics, and users complaining about people bringing up e.g. Sony's decision to end disc suport because they consider it a political issue.

I think there's a lot of pretty reasonable behaviors mods could have that plausibly follow the spirit of this. I'm serious when I say:

"you have vast and flexible power as long as you can justify it following the purpose of the company, but the one thing you can't do is violate that purpose or work against the best interests of the shareholders the Motte"

So if people object to how a community's being run, we look at it and talk to the mods. If they say "yes, here is how we are defining 'politics'", then we ask them to put that into a non-foundation rules, and if it seems like it's being vaguely evenly enforced, we shrug and say "looks like it's fine, you are welcome to start a competing community with a different definition". But if they say "yeah fuck that, we don't care" then they get booted; if they say "here is how we define it" and then obviously do not enforce it that way, they get booted.

I think my core answer here is that we allow for any definition that's reasonably defensible as being an implementation of the foundation.

A lot of legal systems work this way; the general concept of "a reasonable person" is woven deeply into the fabric of US law, and there's no formal guidance as to exactly what this means, which means there's a pretty big gray area where people debate over where exactly the line is drawn and the line is often drawn inconsistently. But this is also kinda OK because this means the obvious white cases and obvious black cases get judged properly, and nobody can "properly" judge every gray-area case consistently and perfectly because the very issue is a lack of objective definitions, so whatever, this gives results that are as good as possible and claims to accomplish no better than that.

That's what I'm going for here.

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