This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This is roughly my plan, yeah.
themotte.org/r/pot means "the current subreddit named pot, whatever that might be"; it is not actually a unique identifier. It's possible that if you go to /r/pot itself, you would get redirected to themotte.org/r/pot/main/102, which will always refer to Subreddit 102, later to be known as trees, even if it's no longer /r/pot. This means that anyone going to "/r/pot" ends up in whatever community we currently have blessed with the name "/r/pot", but a copypasted link gets that specific community even if it has since been renamed.
Thread links don't include a subreddit ID, but they do include a post ID; the subreddit and thread name are completely irrelevant. Reddit already does part of this -https://old.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/1tehscm/theres_a_fox_family_living_under_our_front_porch/ is the exact same as www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/1tehscm/i_sure_do_love_beef/. And while it does validate the /r/aww part for some reason, the comment ID is globally unique. We just have to make it pay attention to that.
Well, the buck stops with me, in the end. So, "me, or someone delegated by me to solve these problems".
One thing I'm currently unsure of is how to tell when it needs actual attention; obviously any subreddit as big as /r/politics is going to have people constantly spamming "this subreddit is violating its own rules" reports. But this feels like one of those "we'll deal with that later" things; I can't come up with a solution when I don't see how the problem behaves. It will be a problem, but this also feels solvable.
Yeah, this is fair; I may have to bump "you can make a site" up in priority for the sake of buy-in.
DNS may be a surprisingly small issue; ARFCOM was due to being kicked off Godaddy, I think? There are much better DNS providers out there who are far less eager to kick people off.
I'm actually not too concerned about custom templating, you can do sufficiently bad stuff with CSS that a real bad actor will find a way to be a nuisance anyway. One step at a time here, honestly.
COPPA is a gigantic pain. I would probably just remove 13-or-younger logins to start with, frankly. This is maybe something I should be doing already though. I am . . . not looking forward to the legal side of this.
Huh. That's a neat idea.
It is definitely . . . controversy-fraught, let's say. At the same time, if community names really aren't permanent, it feels more adjustable. Something like the Ark situation could be handled by just tossing a thread onto all relevant communities and saying "hey, we want to solve this, hash out what names you'd prefer?" and doing a doge-ish process to come to a sensible agreed-upon conclusion.
(I would fully want to automate the Doge process.)
I'm actually not familiar enough to Tumblr to know what's going on here. What did happen?
I think my gut feeling is that user tagging works actually pretty well as long as you have reasonable thresholds for when you officially bless tags. Steam games are technically user-tagged and do just fine; I can also think of, uh, a site with a number in it that has a phenomenally thorough crowdsourced tagging system.
This does tap into one other actual big problem, which is the increasing tendency of governments to want to segregate anything even vaguely adult away from the entire rest of the world.
I can think of a few approaches.
One is to just not worry about it. Reddit still has porn. Deal with it. I feel like porn is less of a problem for communities than it is for community managers without a spine, and I don't plan to be that person.
Another is to have a "everything except the porn" URL, and then an "everything including the porn" URL, using the "everything except the porn" URL pretty much everywhere we can. You want the porn, someone will eventually mention the with-the-porn version; go to that site.
Yeah, you're not wrong.
I think there's a point where this can be solved by the biggest whale simply saying "no, we're not going to do that; you can de-federate with us if you want, but other than that, deal with it, because we are not planning to de-federate with other groups". There's a lot of really awful people running email servers that can still send emails to gmail, so this is clearly not an unsolvable problem. And that's not even indirect federation, that's direct sends!
Copypaste seems survivable, but I'd be a little cautious about what that does if people manually type a link to a community. Admittedly, might not be a common enough use case to matter.
Yeah. And a lot of the metrics that would be naively useful, like whether there's a bunch of splintering or a quickly growing competitor subreddit, are bad to make actual measures because Goodhart.
Fair point. I'm mostly thinking about the incompetent actor that needs ten hours of your tech support's time while you get a reputation for 'breaking' a sub for them putting a period in the wrong place. But that's what reset/load default buttons are for.
For fandom reasons, Tumblr's pretty notorious for weird, overlapping, and very unintuitive tags, and despite that, those tags can take off aggressively. Sometimes this works out well, especially when it's got some coordination: #undertail has 'stuck' several years after Toby Fox proposed it, if anyone wants to see Asgore dad bod and some skeletons bumping uglies. Just as importantly, if they don't, they have to make a significant typo to get from #undertale to that one. But more often, you end up with (overlapping) acronyms, barely related content using snowclones, or bizarre memes (general news updates get tagged with SPN shipping names).
And then you get trolls that will spam every high-profile matter with unrelated content, either to screw up tag following, trying to push their own visibility, or to start fights.
Tumblr's user tagging system has been kinda reused as a way to out-of-thread comment, and it's tied to (thankfully only original) posts rather than to subreddit or forum equivalents, so some of those issues (eg, threads getting tagged 'lmoa' or 'yes') aren't as likely to show up in a sanely designed site. But they're illustrative.
Yeah, the boorus have definitely made it work. That said, they've also typically had to do so with a very heavy hand and a lot of cruft: you probably don't have to worry about a four hundred line analysis to translate "pussy" to "vagina" (a literal two-year on-going process at e621, still incomplete), but I'd still plan early around a situation where a big fandom coalesced around thirty or so completely unrelated tags, some of which overlap with other intended uses of those same tags.
That's fair. I'd long-hoped that the old compromise of 'I won't make you see it, you don't make me see you whine' could last, and despite its difficulties, there's reason to hope it was rejected rather than really failed.
I guess I'm more motioning around the non-porn variants being a problem that will arise, if not one as immediately likely to result in legal threat.
Worth noting that Goodhart is relatively easy to avoid if you just don't mention what the metrics are. The Motte has always had thresholds for new users to stop getting their messages filtered. Nobody but the mods have ever known the details of those and we've never had trouble with people gaming them.
I'm honestly fine with a heavy hand for some of the larger and more popular tags, and the smaller ones aren't as important.
Yeah, this is fair.
I think my answer here is to follow the letter of the law, because I mean, it is the law, but also to make the rationale as public as possible.
"We have removed this due to a legal note from this party."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link