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When a moderator says to you:
And not even a day later you again repost identitarian bait, with minimal commentary, as a top-level post, I have to assume you have opted to ignore the warning.
I want to emphasize: in absolute terms, this post is "not bad." It's not great, it does challenge both "speak plainly" and "avoid low-effort participation," as well as "make your point reasonably clear and plain" (though this post is in that regard maybe a slight improvement on the last one). That it does those things as a top level post is an aggravating factor. The CW thread is not a dumping ground for posts other people have written on topics that are maximally inflammatory. It's a place to test your thinking, which to a great extent demands that you do some thinking in an open and public way. Gradually accruing the annoyance of the sub by being a one-note piano while evading effortful engagement with others is, if nothing else, egregiously obnoxious.
So let's start the banning at 48 hours.
Maybe my reading comprehension is trash, but how is “I'd like to push back against the contention that Jewish overrepresentation among leftist movements is related to activists being Jewish per se” not speaking plainly?
The idea that some people (eg @Fruck) have suggested is that this poster is claiming to be against antisemitism while also thinly-veiled hmmposting links to internet antisemitism in a way that encourages users to click on them and to conclude from them that the post was ‘wrong’ and the far-right position on the issue ‘right’.
This is a relatively complex form of baiting and a violation of the ‘speak plainly’ rule, although it’s not uncommon online. Still, I’m ambivalent on a ban unless the mods have better proof the poster is trolling or being sneaky.
I'd be ambivalent if it was just a few instances, but it really feels like he's exploiting the system. I wouldn't come to themotte if every other top-level post was one person soapboxing about da joos. HBD was similar: Yes, this is (intended to be) one of the few places on the Internet you can freely debate it, but it shouldn't be the only topic of discussion...
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In a DM conversation they asked me what my political leaning was, and when I responded something like "far-right but not fascist" they responded with a "I don't talk to fascists", so yeah it's some sort of bait considering OP is explicitly talking to fascists.
It is an instance of the thing Zorba(?) said a while ago (paraphrased) "if the trolls are forced to contribute interesting pieces and/or make composed, reasonable arguments in service of trolling, then we've already won"
This slogan falls to Goodhart's Law. The things that trolls produce to satisfy a requirement for interesting posts will never be the kind of things that an interesting post requirement is actually meant for. (Especially not cumulatively. We wouldn't, without trolls, get eight conversations about Jews in a row, even if each post could have been individually posted sincerely and led to a single interesting conversation about Jews.)
There's also the problem that people's ability to detect disruptive posts isn't perfect. And you're not going to get reasonable arguments, you're going to get arguments that are just close enough to reasonable that they won't be immediately thrown out.
I agree with your points, but this doesn't seem to have much to do with Goodhart's Law. The target already is interesting, well-composed, reasonable posts. There's nothing about this situation where a measure becomes a target, since the measure already is the target. What's the difference between an interesting post and a post which appears interesting but actually isn't? Seems like an impossibility; either a post is interesting or it is not.
It's Goodhart's law because you don't actually want "interesting posts", you want interesting posts that don't encourage above normal noise. But you can't measure that, you can only measure interesting posts.
Twitter optimizes for engagement. It's terrible.
We can measure how inflammatory a post is as easily as measuring how interesting it is. Really these vague measures--interesting, well-composed, reasonable, more light than heat, etc.--seem to hold up well against Goodhart's law. We all can tell which posts meet those standards and which don't, and there's not much of a way to fake that.
The bigger issue is when posts don't meet the standard, but do pass some lower "minimal effort to not be seen as an obvious troll" standard. The latter takes a lot less work than producing good posts and you still get to stand on your soapbox and shout incessantly about whatever your pet topic is. You did mention something similar with "arguments.... just close enough to reasonable that they won't immediately [get] thrown out."
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You can just ban people for making bad posts, the mods just don't think that's fair.
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The ban is short, and very much intended to communicate that Amadan's warning should not have been ignored in this way.
We don't like anyone doing top-level posting that is overwhelmingly copy-pasted, even when it's not on a maximally-inflammatory topic, but we also don't want to over-moderate, so when it happens occasionally, or comes from otherwise-well-reputed users, it's kinda whatever. But when one user does it repeatedly, in combination with other kinda-shady behaviors, and immediately after being warned against it, like--what else am I supposed to do?
I'm not necessarily criticizing this ban, but what's the justification behind this? Why does it matter if something insightful came from a user here or from an outside thinker (assuming the poster agrees with what they're sharing)?
Is the idea that this is a way to prevent spamming, by raising the required time commitment to make a top-level post?
It's bound up in a long history of wrangling with "bare links" and otherwise low-effort content. At the extreme, a user could sock-puppet as a way of skirting the rules of engagement. Like, suppose you write a really scathing takedown of your outgroup. Post it here, maybe you get moderated. Post it on Substack and then share it here, though, maybe you don't, depending on how transparent your effort to circumvent the rules of engagement is.
This is not a common problem, by the by, but it is definitely something that has happened in the past. And the foundation of the whole enterprise is that we're here to discuss things, to test our own shady thinking in a community of people who don't all agree with our views. "Here's a thing for you all to discuss" is not quite the same thing as actually participating in a discussion, and can very easily be trolling/bait/etc. So copy-pasting large chunks of text while providing minimal insight of your own doesn't really reach the necessary level. If someone outside the sub says something insightful, sharing it here is fine--even as a top post, if it's not CW. But if it's a picture, or video, or Culture War material, then we are looking for submission statements and effortful engagement.
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