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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26381 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023

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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.

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?

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?

It was shit before I arrived and said anything. There were four 4 relatively low effort post responses, three of which had reports, and one of them was crappy enough that I handed out a warning for it.

Why on earth should moderation be held to the exact same standard as commenting?

Because moderation is often inflammatory, far more than trolls, they should be held to higher standards. Should police not be held to higher standards than civilians? What a bizarre question. Mod straight up admitted that most other mods would have just warned the user and not banned and then did it anyways due to personal vendetta.

'Personal vendetta' is your view, mine is that they treat first time offenders differently from others.

Mods are held to different standards, not necessarily higher on all axes.

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

They started it off with a criticism where they basically call the purpose of themotte "embarrassing"?

I mean this without ad hominem, and without reference to the remzem: if you are not here to discuss the culture war then you don't belong here.

The second criticism is that larger essays tend to have a narrowed scope. I don't think this is even true. Plenty of top level long posts have a large scope. If it was true, their complaint is then that the discussion is overly narrowed, so if you want to post on a separate aspect of the event you need to go create your own high effort top level post. This sounds like a feature of the rules and not a bug. Our rules are meant to facilitate higher effort discussions. Complaining because a rule does exactly that is always going to be met with a "good, glad its working".

The third criticism is that searchability is poor on the website. I'm human, not a robot. I do try and hold myself to a higher standard, but the user has quite literally missed the whole purpose of the community, and insulted it while deep into that misunderstanding. So yeah at this point I was annoyed at the user, and didn't address it. If someone who was a respected member of the community had asked me I would have probably addressed it thus:

  1. We do try and preserve some good discussions via the quality contributions reports.
  2. Its not entirely clear to me how searchability would improve the quality of discussions. I'm open to hearing that explained.
  3. Some users don't want searchability. They don't like the thought that their words on this website could be collected and sifted through in order to unmask their real-life identity.
  4. Searchability would also probably need to be built in from the start. I suppose we could run posts through an AI and have it auto-categorize them. But the typical way to do it on the internet is to have the users categorize their own stuff. That is the only way you get past a simple text search, but you can already text search on this website, so I assume that isn't what they wanted.

The fourth criticism is that navigation is a chore. No details on why, so its hard to know what aspect of it is a chore. The fifth criticism is that nothing is organized. I'd probably have the same responses to that criticism as I would to the searchability complaint.

In general the goal of this community is discussion. We try to have rules and features that serve that purpose.

  1. The first criticism was not criticism of the motte or discussion. It was a criticism that someone would get disappointed that someone preempted their post.

  2. With respect to your second point, scope (like quality) is orthogonal to length. What I think we want is insight; not length.

The first criticism was not criticism of the motte or discussion. It was a criticism that someone would get disappointed that someone preempted their post.

They are still shitting on quality posters. I'd rather keep the quality posters happy rather than this user.

With respect to your second point, scope (like quality) is orthogonal to length. What I think we want is insight; not length.

And the top level post provided no insight either. Shared a link story, asked some basic questions, and basically said "discuss". Had it done so, or attempted to do so I might not have banned.

I don't think my minimum level standard for a top level post is very high. People seem to come out of the woodwork every time this comes up acting like I'm asking them to write a novel. I'm not. Just start the discussion, put some level of thinking and effort into your post. If it looks like you tried and fell short I'll probably only provide a warning. The original poster did not try at all. And there is a group of users that constantly want to resurrect the bare links thread, so they post what they think is just past the line on acceptable. Sometimes I am going to drop bans for this. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Shared a link, asked some basic questions, and basically said "discuss". Had it done so, or attempted to do so I might not have banned.

Since I got the banhammer, let me get this much clear - no links were shared. Go back and read it, I didn't link to anything. I said I just heard the news and wanted to know what would happen next. You're in your rights to hit me for that, but don't say I did something I didn't do.

Fixed

I think it’s fine to think “there is something a little off if someone gets despondent over being preempted on a discussion board.” Look, I participate here because I think the people are interesting etc. But it isn’t like we are competing for Pulitzer Prizes etc. If someone preempted something, I’d think “well at least there is another person who thinks like me and seems reasonably intelligent” and go on my way. Being despondent is not psychologically healthy.

"despondent" is a word that remzem added to the discussion as a way of insulting the posters.

I only used the word "disheartening".

Magnifying another person's complaint to make them seem unhealthy isn't exactly good behavior is it? Or would it be fine for me to characterize you and remzem as "suicidally upset" over this rule scuffle?

Of course it would be fine, nobody here can punish you for any reason. But let's pretend there was some mechanism by which users could correct flawed behaviour by mods. I would say adding the word suicidally in there was obvious hyperbole to paint your opponents poorly. I can not say the same of calling the disheartened despondent, even google considers that accurate -

/images/16961752618276987.webp

It's similar, not the same. Disheartened is most similar to discouraged.

But sure let's pretend they are the same, your post above no longer makes sense:

think it’s fine to think “there is something a little off if someone gets disheartened over being preempted on a discussion board.” Look, I participate here because I think the people are interesting etc. But it isn’t like we are competing for Pulitzer Prizes etc. If someone preempted something, I’d think “well at least there is another person who thinks like me and seems reasonably intelligent” and go on my way. Being disheartened is not psychologically healthy.

Why is being disheartened not psychologically healthy?

Mod posts can be reported. We have reprimanded each other before.

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