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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023

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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?

It is funny that everywhere and anywhere white men must lead. Even in the “diversity” party who is in charge a mentally declining white male. And the backup is Newsome or maybe Pritzker whose brother is atleast an army Coronel tranny.

The gop atleast has a Brahmin close.

  • -19

3 day ban.

Antagonistic, low effort, culture warring.

To everyone wondering why I moderate heavily on top level posts, this is an example of why. It creates discussions that are all heat and no light.

In case other users have missed the hint like sliders: I am watching this thread. Either start a useful discussion or don't comment.

Were you and Dianne close?

@remzem Just so you and others know, moderators can see deleted comments.

This is how I usually figure out the story behind top level deleted comments.


Ignoring the meta ... My general opinion is that the retirement age for social security should be enforced on elected politicians as well. Let the next generation fuck up things.

Well thanks for the PSA to posters to edit out posts in addition to deleting them like on reddit.

thanks that is preferable to me.

Yeah was going to say this. Probably one reason reddit doesn't let mods see author-deleted comments is because there's such a simple workaround extra step (edit to blank or something useless), which only distinguishes between people who know to use it or not. Then again, there are other tools like RSS which pick up the initial posts/comments, so it still is a bit like email where once you've hit 'send', it's out there.

Meanwhile the nice thing about this codebase's change is that you still have access to your own deleted posts (in gray) and can easily 'undelete', which must be similar to what the mods see.

Conversation platform of the future: The entire website has version control embedded into it, for every single post and comment.

XenForo has that, if restricted to mods; mods can see all versions of a post.

@remzem Just so you and others know, moderators can see deleted comments.

Are going to start had holding deleted comments against people?

Some users have been asking for top level deleted comments to be forbidden. So that is one case where deleted comments might be held against a user.

Otherwise not officially. But if you post a trolling comment towards a mod it doesn't go away when you delete it. And I'm not going to completely ignore the fact that they were trying to be a dick.

Some users have been asking for top level deleted comments to be forbidden. So that is one case where deleted comments might be held against a user.

There was a very interesting debate about one of the J6 protesters being a fed, half of which is now gone, so I can understand that. The suddenly disappearing top level posts are also annoying, but I meant more this:

Otherwise not officially. But if you post a trolling comment towards a mod it doesn't go away when you delete it. And I'm not going to completely ignore the fact that they were trying to be a dick.

Surely, someone being a dick, and realizing afterwards they were out of line and deleting the comment should not be against the rules?

No, but it should be noted and if repeated it should be addressed.

It's one thing to let your temper get the better of you, but if deleted rude comments are considered out of bounds for moderation the obvious meta is to post an unpleasant reply you want the author to read, then delete it.

More comments

As a moderator I'm typically trying to sort people into three buckets:

  1. Worthless contributor, actively negative, pisses people off, very unlikely to improve.
  2. Net neutral. Upsets some, but others like them around. Can maybe improve.
  3. Quality poster. Follows the rules, adds to discussion, says interesting things, doesn't need to improve.

People in group 1 we generally want to ban. If you are going to self label yourself into that category, then no amount of following the strict letter of the rules will save you. We have a wildcard rule for a reason.

I'm not a lawyer, and certainly not a rules lawyer. If we thought it would be useful we'd probably only have the wildcard rule. In some sense the rules don't matter. They are guidelines for behavior.

Did they violate an explicit guideline? No. Did they violate the only guideline that really matters? Yes. Deleting their comment was an improvement over leaving it up. But they are letting me know what kind of contributor they are. And I don't see any reason to hobble myself in figuring out which bucket users fall into.

My opinion - it depends. People should get lenience for the deleted comments, but this doesn't mean that repeat offenders when the content of the comments violates the rules shouldn't be smacked lightly.

Can you please hand out bans for repeated deletion of comments?

I haven't seen abuse of this recently. Most deleted comments seem like accidental posts. If there is abuse of this somewhere let us know.

Jesus Christ.

I can think of half a dozen reasons it’s not particularly funny. Starting with demographics. Perhaps you ought to take it as evidence that the “diversity” party cares about literally anything else? No, surely not.