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PaperclipPerfector
7mo ago
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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I have a suggestion for how to solve the problem of balancing the blog-length posts in the CWR with the more discussion oriented stuff a lot of people (like me) would like to see there, and I think I have a thought on why the confusion/frustration exists:
The original "culture war roundup" was meant as a containment thread for all of that weeks stupid culture war happenings. If some person showed up at a spa and insisted on exposing himself to a bunch of people in the locker rooms but insisted that he was just trans and this was just normal, instead of needing a lengthy blog post about this, you could post in CWR. It was a containment thread to prevent these sorts of common, repetitive posts from clogging up the more in depth discussions other people wanted to have.
[edit]: It's probably my fault for being unclear here. I am giving this as a historical example of the type of things which would get caught in the CWR, not as an example of the type of things which should be looked at as ideal posts for the CWR. I clarified in a response below that at least historically these types of posts stopped being made organically because people stopped interacting with them due to their repetitive nature. My general point, also made in that clarifying post, is that allowing users to organically enforce the culture of the community is a good thing, and I contrast this with what I perceive now, which is micromanagement. My response to the 'well tended gardens die to apathy' blog is that it is also possible to over prune a garden.
I think the problem is that the CWR thread has become a place where people go to post their blogs, and that they're trying to emulate the style (or more specifically the length) of SA's posts. In my opinion this results in lots of really, really unnecessarily long, usually pretty terribly written posts about long passed culture war topics. This is fine, and just like everybody else I've of course written tens of thousands of words of blog posts myself. So here's my proposal:
Split the blogs off into their own thread, call it "longform motteblog" or "the bailey: blogs from themotte" or something like that.
Allow the CWR to return to its roots: a weekly roundup of culture war topics.
Still remove low effort trolling, sneering, etc.
For reference, here is a link to the CWR from a random week in 2018: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9sabky/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_october_29/
Notice how most of the posts here follow the form of: here is a current event, here is a couple of sentences either describing it or giving a jumping off point for analysis, and then lots of discussion. The longer posts/discussion type stuff is usually contained beneath one of these topics.
Here we can go back to 2017: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/5z5dm1/culture_war_roundup_for_week_of_march_13_2017/
Almost every top level post made in there would be removed from the current themotte CWR thread.
Maybe this type of thing is just explicitly not what themotte is trying to do, and the name is really just a holdover. Hopefully this explains my frustration (which I believe is shared by others) with the way that length seems to be getting used as a proxy for quality. I hope this also explains the recent post (which I was banned for making) demonstrating that length is not a good proxy for quality, and is easily fakeable using LLMs. (Of course like most people who get banned for anything: I think this was completely unfair, I think the point I was making was obvious, I think it was on-topic, and I think I even made clear that I wasn't trying to deceive anybody, just demonstrate that length is a bad metric for judging quality, especially now that LLMs are cheap and available).
I value the CWR threads, obviously value themotte as a discussion forum, and it makes me sad to see something I value seemingly go away. I have enjoyed the CWR roundup threads for a substantial amount of time (at least 6 years), and I think my recent posts expressing this frustration are an attempt by me to keep that type of (imo valuable) discussion alive.
What stimulating discussion do you expect to get from “trans bad” link drops?
Consider the halcyon days of internet atheism. When someone made a post about “look what those theists did this week, I don’t believe they generated high-quality intellectual output. I think they got a seductive burst of outgroup bad! and went on their way. It’s a recipe for echo chambers.
The atheist-adjacent communities which stuck around, including the ones which would eventually give us this site, took a harder stance against point-and-laugh posting. At the very least they had to couch it in an elaborate Theory of Human Rationality, or something.
If this is what you think my post said, then I don't believe you read it, and I certainly hope you never advocate for continuing to enforce the post length limits that are being enforced here.
I'm saying the other solution is to not have this. Which is my understanding of the current rules and the current lack of Bare Link Repo.
For what it's worth, I think the bar for a top-level is not actually that high. You are correct that people are likely to sprawl out as wannabe Scotts, but I think that fear of getting modded for low-effort is rarely why. There are a lot of reasons why a community of regular SSC readers--ones with a monthly tradition of picking the longest, densest posts as Quality--would feel the urge to sprawl.
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