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.
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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.
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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