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.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Just saw news of Dianne Feinstein's death. So does this mean an election to fill her vacant seat? How soon? Likely candidates? Replaced by a more progressive (more woke) or a more liberal (not woke) Democrat? Thoughts and opinions on this?
Low effort top level post. This is against the rules. I strongly doubt that you don't know this. 1 day ban.
This seems excessive. I agree that the post could use more original analysis than she offered, but this is a breaking-news sort of situation that could have important implications, and I think it’s reasonable to want to spark a quick discussion of the major questions sparked by this development.
We are for discussion. Start the discussion if you are a top level post.
We are not for breaking news.
If all you have is questions and no real discussion to add consider:
Normally this kind of thing is only a warning or not brought up at all by the other mods. But what's the point of a rule if it is never enforced? Bad luck of the draw getting me as the reviewer of the post. I am not a fan of infinite warnings.
Fair enough, point #2 strikes me as particularly compelling.
The feeling of working on an effort post on a topic, only to see that it was brought up a half day earlier and the discussion is mostly done is disheartening. It is why I often personally want the rule enforced against others. Point 1 is how i make sure I don't violate the rule or the spirit of the rule. I've had stories I've wanted to share here, but all i can think of is "[link] discuss?"
There is no rule against posts that aren't effort posts. Most effort posts are bad. I'm worried were incentivizing people to write a lot of uninteresting wordy posts just so that they can start a discussion on something interesting. I don't see the harm in asking what other people think about something. What I think we do want is something to stop people from posting just anything. There should be something to explain why something is worthy of discussion. I don't see why it has to be something that requires a lot of effort.
Can you come up with another proxy that keeps intelligent people who do write interesting things coming back to the site, and stops the Motte from turning into the rest of the internet?
The effort is a bar you have to clear to participate here.
We have lots of other rules that have sort of accomplished this goal despite not having requiring all top-level posts to be effortposts.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There is no harm in asking people questions. Which is why we have a small questions Sunday thread. It doesn't have to be used exclusively on Sunday, it can be used all week.
That is explicitly for dumb questions though.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
lol, I mean sorry, but picturing someone despondent because their internet post didn't make it out of the oven fast enough is just embarrassing.
If you have a long effort post to make, why not just make it as a reply to a less narrow top level post like the one above? Shorter posts like this generally have a much broader scope and therefore you can have a lot more replies and jump off into a larger variety of topics. If someone writes a 10 page essay about that time Feinstein almost got killed by left wing terrorists in response to her passing then people that might want to discuss some more topical aspects of the event are forced to post an entirely new top level comment. Which is obnoxious considering this place is already a chore to navigate and horribly disorganized. Especially for anyone trying to find older discussions.
Rude as hell. Have you ever actually worked on an effort-post and contributed a seriously valuable top level comment here? It takes a lot of work to do it well.
You come in here, lurk and benefit off of people that put in time and effort to provide you intellectual stimulation and entertainment, then mock them for doing so. Not a good look.
I generally skim the top levels and am just here for the comments. Much like media posts on reddit. We don't all derive the same utility from the same things.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Its fine if you leave. I only see warnings and bans on your notes. If you don't like it, that is more of a complement than a criticism. Not sure why you consider it worth it.
The people here are interesting, but everything else about this place makes it so obnoxious to use that I go through phases of being frustrated by the limited means of engagement and the convoluted rules.
It's rather ironic to complain about posts generating more heat than light when you obviously don't apply the same standards to your moderation. Maybe the reason this post when to shit was you jumping in all "bad cop" to try and save the quokka effortposters from their despondency. You think of that maybe?
More options
Context Copy link
That isn’t really a response to the criticism. Pure ad hominem. I even understand your position but shouldn’t you hold yourself to a higher standard
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I was surprised by this.
The low-effort rule, as described in the sidebar, seems to be targeting “three-word shitposts.” This does not feel like a shitpost to me. It has a fact (which I had not yet seen) and two legitimate questions—what happens next, and is it likely to shift the Senate one way or another? More importantly, it steers relatively clear of cheap shots.
It's a stupid rule. Should just be some kind of keep it neutral in top posts type rule. It's more interesting when there is a variety of discussion. Often when you wait for someone to make some long effortpost it will narrow the context down to some aspect of the event that isn't very interesting. Then people are less likely to participate in discussing other aspects of it. I even feel like some users do it on purpose as a way to head off obvious discussion points. If anything it should be the opposite. Discussion starters should be more open and short, responses should be higher effort.
I disagree. If you’re making a top level post, at least some effort should be required. Merely posting “Thing happened, so what happens next” under a link to CNN.com is really good as a top level post. Make a point, any point. Talk about how old Congress is. Talk about the political process of choosing her replacement, and the likely candidates. Talk about the implications for some piece of legislation. But drive-by posting is exactly what’s against the rules here. I’m not even asking for length — just that you put more though into it than just hitting the new post button and spamming.
More options
Context Copy link
Back on reddit, there used to be a 'bare-link repository' where you could post just links with minimal commentary. It was filled with low-quality and too culture-warry posts and the mods decided to drop it. I agree it should return, with heavier moderation of some sort.
I fought for its removal the first time and I'll fight it again if I have to. There's no good reason to have it here and it's actively poisonous to people to engage with the culture war in that manner.
The good reason to have it is maybe people will only post interesting links, like this or the kind of links in this. Or even just links saying 'DALL-E 3 was released' or a 'YIMBY roundup for Sep 2023'. I agree they, mostly, posted uninteresting links in the past, which is why I argue that the poisonous links should simply be banned based on their content. But it's a shame that we miss out on some interesting links and interesting discussion just because many of the posters 'can't behave'.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Seeing as how I seem to have kicked all this off, albeit unintentionally, this is why I miss the bare links repository. I wasn't sure where to post this, I didn't think the Sunday small questions was correct (I have now been instructed on that) and I honestly didn't have twenty yards of opinion about this. I saw the news that Senator Feinstein had died, I remembered debate about her and Nancy Pelosi and other old politicians and how they should retire in good time so that their successors could be selected and ready to take over (see the furore over Ruth Bader Ginsberg not retiring, which left Trump select a conservative replacement for her), and I wondered what was going to happen next - special election or appointment of a candidate by the governor or what? And if so, who was the likely pick - someone liberal but not progressive, in her footsteps, or someone more to the left?
Now had I known that cjet was going to moderate strictly on word count, I'd have included all the above. But I didn't, so I asked the question I genuinely wanted to know the answer to, briefly, because I was not expecting an entire row to blow up about it. I asked it on here because you lot are informed about American politics and generally have good, interesting views even if A is taking one side and B is taking another.
Somebody invent a time machine so I can go back and stop myself asking anything more innocuous than "very seasonable for the time of year, ain't it?"
There's a good reason this thread is usually dead when it's first posted for several hours before (often enough) one of our single issue posters comes up with a wall-o-text to start things off.
I get banned for being a single-issue poster and riding a hobbyhorse (see Amadan), I get banned for not being a single-issue poster (cjet79 here because I didn't do an essay on Californian politics), I get recommended for quality contributions - I have no idea what will be approved and what won't 😁
Is this "Make shit up the mods never said" day?
As far as I know (and from looking at your mod log), I have never banned you since we left reddit. I've only warned you a couple of times, and not for "single-issue posting." I remember you acting all concerned that our crackdown on single-issue posting would get you in trouble, and Zorba responded at length to you explaining why you should not be concerned about that.
Yes you do.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
From what I remember it also became so popular that people were hardly posting in the main thread. Effort is just not a great measure of whether a post will generate interesting discussion or not. Plenty of effort posts end up being one-offs that barely get a response because there isn't much to talk about that hasn't already been covered by the post. On the other hand there are effortposts that don't get warnings that are obvious schizoposts that also don't generate useful discussion but get no warnings.
Length is often conflated with effort, you can find an article and copy out a few long blocks of text and end with a short paragraph that boils down to, "what does the motte think about this?" and not get a warning. If you post the link by itself and ask what the motte thinks, then you do get a warning. It's a bad rule because it doesn't accurately capture what makes posts good contributions and it's too arbitrary, it allows moderators too much room to abuse it when they are having an off day or you happen to get a mod with a weird vendetta to protect the effortposters above and beyond what the other mods would do, like OP did with this post. We had a similar phase with Hylnnka or w/e seeing himself as forum batman for awhile.
If you want to effortpost just create a blog or substack and then post as a new thread. I don't see why you'd spend enough time to be half a day late to a discussion (at least 12 hours) be sad about it and not take the tiny bit of extra effort it would take to make the post more visible and get away with it.
My main gripe with the BLR was that a bunch of the posts were 'grayuniwave: new COVID report shows masks and paxlovid cause myocarditis' or 'WOKE college OPPRESSES innocent REPUBLICANS' and 'Joe Biden is promoting wokeness on steroids'. The third one is real. And some of the links that weren't like that weren't inspiring either. The good posts were, almost entirely, by the people you'd expect them to be from (the mods, dase, etc), or the links themselves were authors I already liked independently. (obviously the upvote counts didn't agree with me here)
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/q1jdta/meta_on_short_posts_and_good_posts/
If I were the BDFL I'd just have a BLR and give various volunteers a mod power to specifically delete BLR posts they thought were 'bad' (and would code that feature). But that's quite against the stated (if not the actual) ethos of neutrality and tone not content.
I forgot that people were posting bare links and then effortposting in replies. I actually think that is a better method of posting than the current top level effortpost style. Maybe that would be a happy medium. That at least requires some good faith, but also doesn't completely narrow down conversation. It also would make it easier to post more general things. Sometimes events happen that have about a dozen differnet culture-war aspects to the point where if you did want to effortpost it's hard to even start. If you wanted to write about the government shutdown right now you could focus on the metapolitics of who it's hurting for the election, general disagreement with how necessary funding is held hostage by culturewar pork, the funding of the border and how dire that situation is getting, the funding of Ukraine now that the majority of voters have turned against it.
edit: There are also just a variety of interesting people here and often I'd like to hear their response to the event itself not their response to the response of the handful of try-hards that get off on imaginary internet kudos.
Though I also agree with the most upvoted reply, effort and quality don't necessarily correlate. That's even more true these days with chatgpt making the appearance of effort effortless. Some of the recent mysteriously (some new style of trolling) deleted top levels had a bot feel to them recently.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There are higher standards for top level posts. This would have been fine at any other level.
Effort on posts tends to taper off from the top level. All the responses I saw when I posted were also low effort. The top level tends to set an example.
Top level posts that are equivalent to "here is a thing, discuss." Are low effort in my books. Start by discussing a thing, not by just asking some questions.
We have a small question Sunday for these types of posts.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link