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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?
Low effort top level post. This is against the rules. I strongly doubt that you don't know this. 1 day ban.
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.
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.
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.
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