There's a pretty big set of changes coming down the pipe. These shouldn't have much impact on users - it's all internal bookkeeping - but there's a lot of it, and if there's bugs, it might cause issues. Let me know if anything weird happens! Weird, in this case, is probably "comments you can see that you think you shouldn't be able to", or "comments you can't see that you think you should be able to", or anything else strange that goes on. As an example, at one point in development reply notifications stopped working. So keep your eyes out for that. I'm probably pushing this in a day or two, I just wanted to warn people first.
EDIT: PUSH COMPLETE, let me know if anything goes wrong
Are you a software developer? Do you want to help? We can pretty much always use people who want to get their hands dirty with our ridiculous list of stuff to work on. The codebase is in Python, and while I'm not gonna claim it's the cleanest thing ever, it's also not the worst and we are absolutely up for refactoring and improvements. Hop over to our discord server and join in. (This is also a good place to report issues, especially if part of the issue is "I can't make comments anymore.")
Are you somewhat experienced in Python but have never worked on a big codebase? Come help anyway! We'll point you at some easy stuff.
Are you not experienced in Python whatsoever? We can always use testers, to be honest, and if you want to learn Python, go do a tutorial, once you know the basics, come join us and work on stuff.
(if you're experienced in, like, any other language, you'll have no trouble)
Alt Accounts: Let's talk about 'em. We are consistently having trouble with people making alt accounts to avoid bans, which is against the rules, or making alt accounts to respond to their own stuff, which isn't technically against the rules, and so forth. I'm considering a general note in the rules that alt accounts are strongly discouraged, but if you feel the need for an alt, contact us; we're probably okay with it if there's a good reason. (Example: We've had a few people ask to make effortposts that aren't associated with their main account for various reasons. We're fine with this.) If you want to avoid talking to us about it, it probably isn't a good reason.
Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is not set in stone.
Single-Issue Posting: Similarly, we're having trouble with people who want to post about one specific topic. "But wait, Zorba, why is that a problem" well, check out the Foundation:
The purpose of this community is to be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs. It is to be a place for people to examine the beliefs of others as well as their own beliefs; it is to be a place where strange or abnormal opinions and ideas can be generated and discussed fairly, with consideration and insight instead of kneejerk responses.
If someone's posting about one subject, repeatedly, over and over, then it isn't really a discussion that's being had, it's prosletyzing. I acknowledge there's some value lost in removing this kind of behavior, but I think there's a lot of value lost in having it; letting the community be dominated by this behavior seems to lead to Bad Outcomes.
Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is also not set in stone.
Private Profiles: When we picked up the codebase, it included functionality for private profiles, which prevents users from seeing your profile. I probably would have removed this if I'd had a lot more development time, but I didn't. So it exists.
I'm thinking of removing it anyway, though. I'm not sure if it provides significant benefit; I think there's a good argument that anything posted on the site is, in some sense, fair game to be looked over.
On the other hand . . . removing it certainly does encourage ad hominem arguments, doesn't it? Ad hominems are kind of useless and crappy and poison discourse. We don't want people to be arguing about the other person's previously-stated beliefs all the time, we want people to be responding to recent comments, in general.
But on the gripping hand . . .
. . . well, I just went to get a list of the ten most prolific users with hidden profiles. One of them has a few quality contributions! (Thanks!) Two of them are neutral. And seven of them have repeated antagonism, with many of those getting banned or permabanned.
If there's a tool mostly used by people who are fucking with the community, maybe that's a good argument for removing the tool.
On the, uh, other gripping hand, keep in mind that private profiles don't even work against the admins. We can see right through them (accompanied by a note that says "this profile is private"). So this feature change isn't for the sake of us, it's for the sake of you. Is that worth it? I dunno.
Feedback wanted! Again!
The Volunteer System is actually working and doing useful stuff at this point. It doesn't yet have write access, so to speak, all it's doing is providing info to the mods. But it's providing useful info. Fun fact: some of our absolute most reliable and trustworthy volunteers don't comment. In some cases "much", in some cases "at all". Keep it up, lurkers! This is useful! I seriously encourage everyone to click that banner once a day and spend a few minutes at it. Or even just bookmark the page and mash the bookmark once in a while - I've personally got it on my bookmark bar.
The big refactor mentioned at the top is actually for the sake of improving the volunteer system, this is part of what will let it turn into write access and let us solve stuff like filtered-comments-in-limbo, while taking a lot of load off the mods' backs and maybe even making our moderation more consistent. As a sort of ironic counterpart to this, it also means that the bar might show up less often.
At some point I want to set up better incentives for long-time volunteers, but that takes a lot of code effort. Asking people to volunteer more often doesn't, so that's what I'm doing.
(Feedback wanted on this also.)
I want your feedback on things, as if that wasn't clear. These threads basically behave like a big metadiscussion thread, so . . . what's your thoughts on this whole adventure? How's it going? Want some tweaks? Found a bug? Let me know! I don't promise to agree but I promise to listen.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I’ll register my disagreement with the crackdown on single-issue posters. Frankly, I just don’t see why people have a problem with it; it definitely does not feel like the Culture War thread is bogged down by too much discussion of one particular topic, and if there’s a thread I’m not interested in I can just hide it and move on.
It seems to me that it’s the particular topic that certain accused “single-topic posters” have chosen that is getting people’s hackles up. If there was a user who only wanted to post about, say, AI safety, or some other issue that doesn’t carry significant emotional valence for other users here, I think that people would readily see the value of just tolerating that poster and hiding his threads if they don’t care about the issue in question.
I suspect that the mods have one particular user in mind - one whose supposed “single-issue focus” is the JQ - with this policy. Maybe I’m being uncharitable and there are other prominent users who rub people the wrong way by flogging specific hobby-horses, but the fact that I can’t think of any illustrates, in my opinion, that this is not in fact a widespread problem that needs addressing.
He's not the only one, and that's not the only topic, but yes, you are correct that this is the central example.
There are other reasons for telling someone to knock it off (for example, blatantly using the forum as a soapbox for recruitment). And Holocaust deniers going on about the JQ are not the only ones we've ever asked to give it a rest with their single-issue axe-grinding.
Given that you are accusing the mods of wanting to crack down on an issue because we don't like it, you will surely not consider it uncharitable of me to observe that you are more willing to defend obsessive axe-grinders who happen to be aligned with you. If there was a leftist constantly going on about how white nationalists are Nazis who should be deplatformed and disenfrachised - but always managed to write it long form posts that don't break the rules - can you honestly say there would not come a point where you would be asking us to tell him to give it a rest?
I can answer honestly: yes, if someone who was saying things I liked, or at least constantly annoying people I don't like, was doing this, I would still tell them to knock it off if their pet topic was all they ever posted about, in constant, long-winded JAQ style. As Zorba said, this place is for discussing things, not just nailing your thesis to the door over and over and over again. The "particular user" never participates in any discussions except when there's a chance to dunk on Jews.
There already are, and there have certainly been significantly more in the past. Remember JeanStealers? I make liberal use of the report function if I feel that a post is uncharitable, if its central thesis is “outgroup bad”, or if I feel that ot contributes nothing of intellectual value. Obviously I’m far more likely to do so if I find the post in question ideologically unpleasant; I’m a human being, susceptible to normal human failures and perceptual blindspots, and I’m more likely to notice the flaws and shortcomings of a post I disagree with.
What you have failed to adequately explain is why single-issue posting is inherently bad for this forum. Why can’t I just hide threads on topics I don’t find interesting or worth engaging with? The whole “recruiting for a cause” thing has always been massively ill-defined. Does it mean “trying to get people to enroll in, or give money to, a specific organization”? If so, the user in question has, to my knowledge, never done so. Or does it mean the far more nebulous “trying to convince people that a specific issue or ideology is important and worth subscribing to”? If so, that describes roughly every single post here.
Also, for what it’s worth, the poster in question does, in fact, engage with other topics. He has replied to a number of my comments about non-Jew-related posts, which is how I know that to be the case.
There is value in not allowing a community to become a free-for-all for traveling preachers to lecture to its membership.
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It's the Community Pool theory of community development. Every action kind of influences everyone to a small degree; if everyone's wading through a dozen posts of "the Jews did this" to get to the meat, it's going to drive away people who aren't interested in that, and simultaneously encourage people to jew-post. This both makes the problem worse and removes the mitigating factor.
But are people wading through a dozen Jew-posts every time they visit this forum? The answer seems to be a definitive no. SecureSignals does not post all that often, and few other posters comment very often on the issue either. That particular topic does not come close to outweighing discussion of other topics.
It seems like something is happening here where each JQ post is considered so inflammatory that it “weighs as much as” some larger number of an equivalent post on a different topic, such that you’re treating each individual post like it’s a dozen posts.
I could understand if the JQ was genuinely a massively frequent topic of discussion here relevant to other topics, but the numbers don’t seem to bear that out at all, so I hope you can understand why I suspect that is not the full explanation. Perhaps that you consider any significant amount of discussion on that particular topic to be a potential vector by which this sub becomes a true “den of witches”. If that’s the concern, then I have my own concerns about what that could mean for future crackdowns on certain topics if they fail the mods’ “annoying” filter.
Again, as I said above, I think it’s transparently the case that you would not be treating this as a serious issue if we had a prominent poster whose sole area of interest was something anodyne like AI safety. Everyone would readily recognize the value of tolerating that poster and hiding his posts whenever they popped up, if that’s not a topic they’re interested in. It’s only because SecureSignals’ primary focus is an inflammatory topic that this is becoming an issue.
The problem is that this pushing-the-general-community-tone behavior happens, to some extent, proportional to how often this sort of post shows up. And if we're not getting anything out of the posts - and I think at this point we arguably aren't - then it's a net loss.
Note that I'm not saying that any specific topic should be banned, I'm talking about people who seem to be here only to push a single topic. It's the "ugh, this guy again" subject.
Actually, if someone brought it up to me, I probably would.
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Yeah, @SecureSignals is less bothersome to me than Foreverlurker was, just because, despite being fairly focused on Jews and holocaust, he talks about it at a frequency that is more reasonable.
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Just so we're clear, you guys are done with the line that he was a simple centrist worried about antisemitism and the rise of the far right, like he claimed? He should have been banned on bad faith alone.
Huh? Has anybody claimed that about SecureSignals? I certainly never have. I don’t think he ever has. Do you have evidence of such a claim? He has always come off as a sincere right-wing antisemite, since I’ve been aware of his posting.
I'm talking about foreverlurker and his alts.
My problem with foreverlurker is that his posts were low effort, not that they were all centered on a particular topic.
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Oh. Yeah, that’s not who I was talking about.
I thought with the OP focus on alt accounts, private accounts, and single issue posting, they, and therefore you, meant FL, who did that. Else, SS ban, burdensomecount ban, hlynka ban, darwin ban, most bans, I oppose on general free speech grounds, but I don't want to pester the mods too often. When I did hamster duty, I usually clicked neutral or good, but I realized janitor nullification wasn't what zorba had in mind and I'm grateful to the guy, so it seemed pointless.
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He was banned, IIRC (not just for being a one-note poster, but for being consistently antagonistic).
Yes, you and a number of others largely report posts you object to ideologically.
I think Zorba and I have explained that. Being a one-note drummer is annoying, and this is not your (or anyone else's) personal soapbox. People are allowed to have their causes and their hobbyhorses, but they are also expected to participate here in good faith, not just use it as a platform for grinding an axe.
Is this something you keep track of much?
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Interesting, can the mods see who reported a post?
Yup.
I've thought about turning it off, but if I do, it'll happen after a more thorough melding of the report system and the volunteer system.
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yes, it looks like this
https://i.imgur.com/nFVD1iq.png
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For being antagonistic to other users. Is SecureSignals consistently insulting other specific posters, calling their posts stupid, being uncharitable toward them in particular? I don’t perceive him as doing so. What I see him doing is effortful replies with interesting citations from primary sources. JeanStealers never did anything remotely close to that.
I mean… yes, it is. This place is a soapbox for all of us to weigh in on the things we think are important, and to cast our opinions out to the public to be judged and heard. If we do a good job, they are received well, and might change people’s minds. If we do poorly, we get downvoted, and if we do poorly in certain specifics ways, we get modded. As far as I’m aware, being annoying is not against the rules. If you want to make it part of the rules, then fine, but that’s what I’m disagreeing with. I don’t see how having strong opinions on one particular issue, and seeing a variety of other issues through a lens of how they connect to that issue, is “not in good faith”. If your posts are effortful, and consistently introduce new supporting information and arguments in response to specific criticisms and questions - all of which, I believe, is true of SecureSignals’ posting - then you should be free to continue to do so, and let the chips fall where they may.
At times notably so, yeah (see footnotes section of that comment for examples). Though also that entire thread was a shitshow.
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