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I like the idea of this place, I really do, but why do people write such long posts. It strikes me as quite obnoxious. Don't you get bored of writing and reading so much text?
I agree with this completely. There seems to be a trend towards very long, and very low information density posts here, and it’s gotten a lot worse.
Something I think that LLMs have taught us is that a very small input can generate a very large output that still contains the same information.
“Trans people are exploiting the historical oppression of gay people as a recruiting tool for their sexual fetish, which I think is unfair” could easily be expanded into 5-6 paragraphs using an LLM.
The first statement would get you threatened with a ban here, whereas the longer LLM’d version (which contains no additional entropy), wouldn’t.
I’m reminded of this famous Seneca quote:
"You complain of avarice; but wasting of time is one of its forms. We waste time more recklessly than our most precious possession, and in comparison with it, property has only second rank. People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy."
I think this trend (and enforcement of it) of creating long, low density posts is a waste of people’s time. We should encourage brevity here, and not look at length as a substitution for quality.
Maybe a balance would be wise? Yes, things can just be expanded by an LLM, but if there is a lot to say, more space is often required. If the density is kept high enough, then length is more strongly correlated with value. And length can often filter out low effort comments.
Of course, on the other hand, that does require us to use more to measure quality than just length, and short comments can still be good, as this one hopefully is.
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Yes I see what you mean. I've become attuned lately to the idea of attention as a sacred act, a la Iain Mcgilchrist. What is it that we are experiencing, wanting to portray, what is important? This requires more time sitting and being and noticing and less time writing, though of course intentions fade away and I easily find myself back in reactive social media scrolling and commenting.
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Goodness no. Longer posts, please. The moderation guidelines for top level posts in the CW threads are fine the way they are, and if anything they should be tightened up a bit.
I don't think I've ever read a post on TheMotte that I would describe as "long and low density". Pretty much every post here is either quite enjoyable to read, or it's on a topic I'm not interested in to begin with, in which case I just ignore it.
I don't think anyone here does that.
This post is short, but kindof exemplifies what I’m talking about. Here is the total information contained in your post:
You could even have just replied
Or even
And no information would be lost. Your post contributes nothing to the discussion behind “I disagree”.
And yet I suspect that a one word reply of “false” would get moderator threats. Because you made your post longer than it needs to be it will stand.
Well, no. You're right that just saying "False" would get dinged for being low-effort, but he added quite a bit more than that.
That some people are more concise than others, and some people are better writers than others, is indisputably true. And requiring people to sometimes use more words than technically necessary also serves a purpose, in many cases. E.g., "I think Those People are terrible" is an allowable opinion, but you have to use more words than that so you are providing something more reflective and worthwhile to engage with than just how much you hate Those People.
You clearly do not like people talking about things that are of no interest to you, or using more words than you want to read. And well, you've got a really good and easy solution to that: don't read posts that don't interest you.
He added quite a bit of unnecessary words to fluff the length of his post, which is my point.
Then what is the purpose of this forum? What is the purpose of moderation at all? Is the idea of community standard interesting? Is the idea of discussing the way people here use words, and the way they could (likely are) using LLMs to fluff their posts up interesting?
"don't read posts that don't interest you"
Clearly this post does interest me. Clearly most things posted in the CWR interest me. You said the exact same thing to me when you got offended/defensive at my criticism of some girl posting ridiculous surveys the other week, suggesting that I'm disinterested in something because I am critical of it.
No, I am quite interested in the way that people signal things to one another. I think that is essentially core to the culture war, and since this entire thread and raison d'etre for this website is discussion of the culture war, I think it's completely reasonable to talk about the ways in which people wage it.
His words added quite a bit more meaning and content.
To cater to people who are interested in the things we talk about here, even things you are not interested in talking about.
I was neither offended nor defensive. I pointed out that "Why are you talking about things I don't want to talk about it?" is frankly a perverse attitude to take on a discussion forum.
That's fine. Feel free to talk about it. But when you make statements about what people are signaling and what you think is or isn't worthwhile to talk about, your statements may be disagreed with.
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This is plainly, obviously false.
I did state that I disagreed with you, but I also stated why I disagreed with you. Frequently it’s useful to give specific reasons when you disagree with someone because there are multiple possible reasons why you might disagree with someone’s claims, and it’s important for your interlocutor to know what your specific reasons are so the discussion can continue. If they don’t know your reasons, they can’t fashion appropriate counterarguments.
Your claim was that “this trend of creating long, low density posts is a waste of everyone’s time”. There are a few different reasons that I could have for disagreeing with this claim. Hypothetically, I could agree with you that TheMotte has a lot of long, low density posts, but I could simply not think that such posts are a waste of time. I could value them for the aesthetic quality of their prose, for example, despite their low information content. Instead, I gave a different reason for disagreeing with you: my reason is that I don’t think that TheMotte has any significant number of long low density posts at all! I stated this plainly in my post. Therefore, my post has more information content than just “I disagree”. Flatly stating “I disagree” leaves your reasons for disagreeing ambiguous.
Your criticism here reaffirms my suspicions that most people who complain about “verbose, low information posts” simply have poor reading comprehension and are insensitive to the information that’s actually being presented to them.
Let's go line by line and see if there is any information in your post that goes beyond "I disagree":
In summary: you disagree. Although "longer posts, please" does come close to going beyond "I disagree", it is in direct response to me saying I want shorter posts. Maybe instead of the total information in your post being "I disagree", it could be "I disagree. I would prefer longer posts."
You are literally quoting something from my comment here, and then...saying that you disagree with it.
Again you are quoting me and simply saying that you disagree.
In none of this do you link to any examples of why you disagree or do you include any new information or ideas other than your disagreement.
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The 'evidence in proportion to how inflammatory your claim is' rule has been de-facto replaced with 'amount of text in proportion to how inflammatory your claim is'. It's good that people can't just post uncompressed 'boo outgroup' statements, but the expansion of the statement would theoretically involve lots of evidence that can be discussed and litigated rather than idle speculation.
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