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What is the perverse incentive?
If firmamenti's post had simply appeared as a top level post with no further context, I would have stopped reading after the first paragraph and not replied to it. Because it's a boring post. I probably also would have reported it for being likely GPT-generated. If I was a mod myself, I'd be skittish about pulling the trigger on the banhammer without concrete proof (even though this case is pretty blatant), but for repeat offenders who weren't making valuable contributions, I'd be more likely to exercise the elastic clause in the rules and just ban.
So again, what's the incentive here? The incentive of being able to lower the quality of the forum and drive people away by making low-quality posts that aren't technically banworthy? You've always been able to do that on any website. That's not unique to TheMotte.
It's no different from saying that you're going to make a lot of obnoxious bad faith arguments, but with a polite tone, and see how long it takes to piss everyone off. Yeah, you could do that. But I would hope that no one wants to.
You can't literally moderate for quality. But we can filter out posts like FarNearEverywhere's OP. So as far as I'm concerned, the rules are working as intended.
I think you are being very optimistic. Especially when we are talking about nerds, and double especially when we are talking about contrarian nerds who talk about verboten topics, my expectation is that any available vulnerability will be exploited, the only question is when. We have indeed seen the "unfailingly polite but obviously bad faith" method used, and it won't be long before we see this method too - assuming we don't count firmamenti's post here, or various posts by others from the prior month that I can't prove but strongly suspect were gpted.
The thing is, my biggest issue with it is that while there will be trolls, I am more worried about our hammers finding a new class of nail - I don't think the mods will be nearly skittish enough. They are invariably going to make someone feel like absolute shit by calling their earnest early forays into writing 'like a motter' "obviously chatgpt". It's the worst of both worlds - gpters will just deny using it, and some innocent people are going to be confidently smeared as bots.
Also you absolutely can moderate for quality, of course you can, that's how media criticism started. We just haven't figured out how to do it while keeping in line with the other rules like niceness. Yet. I think we could if we tried.
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On, so far as I can tell, the grounds that it was too short. I didn't include links, I was not going "can you believe what they did?" and it was not "boo, outgroup". That leaves me with "Had I padded it out with a few paragraphs of fluff, I could have asked the same questions and gotten a pass". If I'm wrong, correct me.
You're not wrong. I still stand by the mods. Hell if you even added like, four sentences it probably would've been fine. Maybe 5-6 on the safe side. I see that as quite reasonable for a top level comment.
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