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We're not asking you to not post about it. We're asking you to also post about other stuff.
Is single-issue posting really such a problem? If a user has a limited knowledge or interest range, what else are they supposed to do? I could understand limiting top level posting frequency so that a single user can't swamp the forum, but allowing them to post and then giving other users free reign to strawman and attribute malicious motives to them seems to be the worst of both worlds. We have a mod, @Amadan, openly and repeatedly refusing to respond to this user's arguments because, (to paraphrase) 'you're only making these points because you hate "da joos" and think they're "lizard people"' (which is just as stupid inane as "muh freeze peach"). To me, that's a far bigger failure of this forum's ideals than a few users with their own hobby horses.
Answering as this forum's resident mid-wit, we lurk more. I rarely post top-level stuff and when I do, it's mostly to draw out viewpoints I'm not sharp enough to think of on my own.
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A lot of people respond to his arguments and he usually disappears if they’re good after a few posts, see when @Stefferi cornered him about his Holocaust revisionism several times over the last year.
But on a wider level yes, single issue posting is against the spirit of the community at the very least.
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The purpose of this forum should not just be to write/dump your ideas on the big truck, but also to read/engage with others' ideas (and then respond). Single-issue posters presumably also don't respond to things that don't align with the one issue they care about, except in order to relate them to their single issue (otherwise this would be sufficient to mark them as not being single-issue). The limit point of this is a community that has no reason for staying together at all, as it is fragmented into a number of issue subcommunities that only really want to talk to among themselves, who at best just get into each other's faces (would the parent poster be happy to have to dig up his JQ-posting among a pile of recurrent posts about whether subobject classifiers are really the best way of capturing set-like behaviour, and whose only interaction with the JQ is that occasionally they inject some post like "very interesting, btw did it occur to you that there is a category-theoretical interpretation of Jewish mtDNA?" into the JQ threads?) and more likely actively disgust each other (since rather than category theorists we would just get an array of different ideologies that find each other vaguely smelly).
Well, if we're going to get into the purpose of this forum...
In the interests of speaking clearly, I think the single-issue posting rule is an unfair moderation policy, and I regret not speaking up about it in the original meta thread.
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Yes, very much so. Humans treat "How many times they've seen a thing happen" as equivalent to "How big a problem is this thing". Our minds, left unchecked, will make this conclusion for us, but we have a name for it - the Chinese Robber Fallacy. Or, if you want a less politically salient example, YouTube's algorithm rewards daily uploads instead of high-quality uploads. While new content has its value, this results in people posting low-quality garbage that is often directed at kids at a higher volume.
It's not SS that is inherently the problem. It's everyone who posts frequently about the same things, because the world is big enough that you could make two or three threads discussing the same basic idea ("progressives do X", "conservatives do Y", etc.) without actually having anything of value to say, but driving the point about some connections in the world into people's minds.
There is an argument to be had that we need people to scrupulously report on every instance of something happening so we can pull from a bigger body of facts to establish a narrative or trend. Organizations like the ADL or NRA for anti-Semitism and gun control respectively do need to constantly be informing their readers about the latest things to happen. But out of respect for avoiding the Chinese Robber Fallacy, no one, not even SS, should be posting "here's 15 things about this topic in the last month", but instead talk about it at a much lower rate and build on a narrative with trend analysis and whatnot.
Basically, we don't need 10 top-level comments about something Disney might do. We need one that goes through each of those events with contextualization.
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That's not correct and I have certainly responded with more than "stop whining about Da Joos" before. It's true I rarely give him much of a response anymore because he always posts the same things and when people do tackle his specific claims, he fades and comes back a short time later with the same arguments pretending the previous conversations never happened (something to pay attention to, if, as you imply, you care about the quality of someone's argumentation). This makes his threads a kind of Holocaust Denial Groundhog Day.
Note that this is not an invitation for you to argue with me about Jews or SS's posts. I don't care if you think my responses are inadequate or I don't engage to the degree you or SS would like.
But we clearly do not prohibit people from "Noticing"-posting, as many people do it. We don't prohibit people from talking about their problems with Jews or women or blacks or their personal dating life or sexual hangups or how much they hate liberals. We have told people who keep hammering one theme over and over again to stop trying to make this place their personal soapbox or therapy group. SS is not being threatened with banning because his arguments are bad or because they offend people. He's being threatened with banning because Joo-posting is all he's here for, and he's clearly not about "testing his ideas."
I'm not looking to argue with you at all, I think you're on the right side of this issue and I'm a lurker at heart. I'm complaining that otherwise articulate commenters are doing the written equivalent of repeating what their opponent is saying in a stupid voice.
You and other replies are pretty convincing that (this particular pattern of) single issue posting is no good, but there must be a better response than this. I don't remember you responding to his arguments in the past, (I'm sure you did and I didn't pay enough attention to usernames). But claiming your opponent is lying about their motives and presenting their argument as a miss-spelled jeer stands out here (it wouldn't stand out anywhere else I've come across).
That said, I appreciate that you don't care what I think of your responses, I enjoy that this place gives lurkers a chance to feel part of it. Occasionally that means we blurt out or frustrations before crawling back under our rocks.
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I think this would be the reason to ban an account rather than single-issue posting. Posting gish gallop manifestos and then retreating into the shadows when someone takes the effort to debunk, only to reappear when the coast is clear, is bad faith participation. Focusing on a single issue, on the other hand, is something you could accuse many people here of.
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If this guy bites it without breaking any actual rules, who's actually going to believe that it was for not posting about "other stuff" enough? Just ban him for posting badthought too cogently and spare us this kind of farce.
There is an actual rule he's breaking, against single issue posting.
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