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I've removed this post as it was just a copy-pasted article. Please remember:
In other words, this is a place for discussion. If you'd like to discuss this essay, you may link to it, even quote from it, but then you have to do the work of offering some evaluation or insight of your own. There is no minimum word count, but "low effort" is something that is often evidenced by a low word count.
On a somewhat meta point, this isn't the first case of a low-effort repost of some white nationalist rant on the Motte, is it? I'm starting to feel a little concerned that the Motte has been identified as a possible recruiting site by people in that sphere.
As Naraburns points out in another comment, if you want to stick to spaces where white nationalists are not allowed to attempt persuasive arguments in favor of our positions, you are welcome to try everywhere else on the entire internet. Can you let us have this one teeny-tiny space where we can actually have a respectful and open dialogue with people, allowing them to weigh our arguments without multiple layers of reinterpretation and misrepresentation by media gatekeepers? I do hope that’s not too much to ask.
It is too much to ask if those discussions crowd out everything else.
Just on a practical level if white nationalist talk floods the forum, it will cease to be an interesting forum to non-white nationalists.
I’m going to ask the same thing I asked Amadan during the discussion about JQ-posting: are white nationalist discussions crowding out everything else? A quick perusal of discussion topics in this week’s CWR suggests precisely the opposite. There are still tons of discussions about all sorts of topics on this forum. If people don’t like the race/identity threads they can hide them, the same way I hide discussions about LLMs or macroeconomics or other issues I feel unqualified to assess or weigh in on.
Amadan and I see additional topics because we are moderators. Plenty of things get filtered out and never removed from the filter. Lately, almost all of that filtered stuff is white nationalist type rants, and sometimes just fully copy pasted articles like above. Since the inception of this website our worst content violations have been ... white nationalist might not be the right word, since I doubt you'd want to associate with them. But users like die[n-words]die, with accompanying images in their profile.
As moderators, we really can't just completely ignore the white nationalist threads. We still have to enforce the rules here. So when fights flare up I have to go read the relevant threads. And the race threads are either consistently causing problems, or common enough that there is a constant influx of reports from those threads.
Basically the white nationalist types are bad neighbors. They move in and cause all kinds of fights and problems. As soon as you allow any of them in you have to create a strict dividing line to keep out their worst elements. And then when you point out these problems we are asked to pretend that they are not coming a single group. That group has claimed that they receive unfair discrimination from just about everyone. Does any of this sound familiar? How would you suggest handling such a troublesome group?
So, this is useful and sobering information for me to have, and I appreciate you sharing it. Obviously without seeing the specific threads you’re talking about, and without observing the behavior of the specific users responsible for them, it’s difficult for me to assess how likely it is that the vast majority of them are trolls or similarly bad-faith users. I would strongly suspect that this is true of the “die[Ns]die” guys, but I recognize my biases as far as that’s concerned. Certainly the more unseemly parts of the racialist right have never had a shortage of thuggish atavistic types and edge-lords like that.
I’ve been honest from the start in saying that my overriding concern here is to stringently oppose attempts to limit my own ability to responsibly present my views in this forum. I believe that my record, insofar as I have never been banned for any length of time by the moderators here, speaks to the fact that such views can be dealt with in ways that are well within the bounds of acceptable discourse here. I acknowledge that topics of race and identity are bound to evoke stronger and more negative emotions than other topics, and I acknowledge that this does create extra work for you guys relative to what’s created by more anodyne discussion topics, but from my non-moderator perspective, that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
All that being said, the analogy you imply in your final paragraph is both clever and incisive. I’m pretty much forced to take it seriously. I’d be a massive hypocrite not to! So, I guess I should probably ask: what, if anything, do you suggest that I personally should do in order to help ameliorate the issue. Is @fuckduck9000 correct that I should be more vociferously calling out apparent bad-faith posters who purport to share some funhouse-mirror version of my views? Would that even help at all? It sounds like the vast majority of these posts are being caught by the filter and never even make it to the sub, so I can’t really do anything about any of those.
So, here, I'm gonna post this in the main thread, but I'll show it to you first (and I guess anyone else who checks my comment page, hi there!) Here's the current prototype for the single-issue-poster rule:
We occasionally have trouble with people who turn into single-issue posters, posting and commenting only on a single subject. We'd like to discourage this. If you find yourself posting constantly on a single subject, please make an effort to post on other subjects as well.
This doesn't mean you need to write megaposts! This can be as simple as going to the Friday Fun Thread once in a while and posting a few paragraphs about whatever video game you last played. But this community is fundamentally for people, and if a poster is acting more like a propaganda-bot than a person, we're going to start looking at them suspiciously.
This rule is going to be applied with delicacy; if I can find not-low-effort comments about three different subjects within your last two weeks or two pages of comments, you're fine.
Does that work?
Honestly I'd like it if everyone did that more often :V
I have no complaints with this. I think it’s both reasonable and salutary to encourage people here to act like humans with varied interests and to inculcate some level of social participation in the community.
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