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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13304 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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That's reasonable. Thanks for taking the time to explain.

I want to record some general observations — they're not specifically about mkc, but obviously the context of this interaction is going to be read into them.

  1. There are corrosive patterns of behaviour that exist below the level that most people would want to report, or that would generally be modded. For example, repeatedly and egregiously lying about what other comments have said.

This is difficult to mod. Some people are going to call it "subjective" — I disagree, but there's a grey zone. Modding this too heavily is going to cross into tone policing, or outlawing people just misunderstanding each other. It's reasonable to err on the side of not modding this.

But it's still corrosive! Consider this exchange:

ALICE: Water is poisonous. BOB: Water isn't poisonous. Maybe you're confused about "dihydrogen monoxide" [insert effortpost] ALICE: if you're confused about the existence about poisons, I recommend this link. Obviously water itself isn't poisonous (idiot). If you're imagining that poisons can't be dissolved in water, I'm prepared to prove you wrong on that stupid position.

In this situation: does Bob report Alice? I don't think so. Maybe it's worth putting in more effort to point out the bullshit Alice has just pulled by lying.

But multiplied across many interactions... Alice can keep lying with zero effort, while the truth has to put in tons of effort to constantly correct the record.

If that's the recommended paradigm (I'm uncertain to what extent you endorse this), then backseat modding is kinda an implicit pillar of this ecosystem. People have to keep putting in effort to point out "no, you just lied — you said X earlier, and now you're pretending you said Y".

I'm aware that this gets under my skin. I'm correct to get really, really annoyed by this. I don't care if a person is a rightist, a leftist, or whatever — I care when they lie in a way that's easily disprovable by looking at the transcript, but that the average Motte reader wouldn't bother to go and read.

The correct behaviour is for me not to respond to this by flipping out, as I did in your link.

... but it's also a problem that someone keeps lying so much that they make someone flip out. You don't actually need to have a long list of shit posters who aggravate you.

I'm not proposing banning anyone for being annoying, or for having the wrong politics (that would be insane). I just want to register that there's this middle ground where disingenuous people can DDOS the Motte with truth-agnostic comments without any kind of restriction or punishment, so long as they stay below the level where they'll get actively modded.

I don't know the solution, I just don't think the current situation is... eh.

You're not exactly wrong. And you're not the first person to point this out. And mods have talked about how to deal with people who are "really fucking annoying but just below the threshold of needing to be banned" before. We don't have a perfect or consistent solution. What usually happens is the really fucking annoying people eventually cross the line, or become so annoying that we apply the "egregiously obnoxious" wildcard rule, which we don't like to do because it's easy to abuse.

But there are a number of corrosive patterns of behavior, and most people have very... partisan ideas of who's corrosive and annoying and who isn't. And we mods are most of all trying to avoid letting partisan biases make us start wanting to ban certain people.

Darwin, for example. MKC seems to have taken a few pages from his playbook.

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