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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27461 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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There's so much interesting stuff going on right now - why is every post here such a snoozefest? Is anyone else checking here less and less often because equal quality commentary seems increasingly available elsewhere?

  • -12

I have noticed an increase in long posts with low information density. My two hypotheses are that some users are either abusing stimulants (a survey would be interesting) or padding out their posts with LLMs. The former I suppose can't be helped, but the latter should be banned.

some users are either abusing stimulants

Ahem, I do have ADHD, and I resent the highly targeted accusation that just because half my posts here are written because I'm procrasturbating on studying, that constitutes abuse of a controlled substance!

I agree with the ideological impulses of most motte users and I assume a lot of upvoting/downvoting here is driven by "This person argues well" rather than "I agree with them". So every time I see a wall of text I just quickly check its score to make sure it is worth reading.

but the latter should be banned.

enforcing may be hard

third option: you learned many of things that were new for past you

My two hypotheses are that some users are either abusing stimulants

some people are writing addicts

The latter is definitely banned. Anytime we catch someone doing it they get banned. If we think they are doing it but we don't have proof they are on our shitlist for a while.

Those users are just following mod’s incentives.

We've banned more people for using LLMs then we have for low effort posts.

That's a bad summary because it doesn't account for how frequent the things are. We haven't banned anyone for murdering their opponent even though that's a worse offense than either low effort or LLMs.

(And the proper comparison isn't LLMs specifically. You ban relatively fewer people for long grammatical, low information posts than you do for standard low effort posts. This creates incentives for long, grammatical, low information posts.)

We haven't banned anyone for murdering their opponent even though that's a worse offense than either low effort or LLMs.

Isn't that mostly a result of it being kinda difficult to reach through the screen and throttle the other person?

Now I'm wondering about a way of inducing death online via something like epileptic seizures and strobe lighting.

Don't worry mods, this is all purely theoretical as I have nowhere near the technical skill or knowledge to put something like that into effect!

Jiro says nobody's been banned for murder, and that evokes in me the same spirit as this exchange from "The Man Who Was Thursday":

“I say we are merciful,” repeated Gregory furiously, “as the early Christians were merciful. Yet this did not prevent their being accused of eating human flesh. We do not eat human flesh—” “Shame!” cried Witherspoon. “Why not?”

Isn't that mostly a result of it being kinda difficult to reach through the screen and throttle the other person?

Yes, that's the point. "There are more bans for X than for Y" doesn't imply that Y is being treated more leniently.

This topic has literally come up anytime anyone has even been lightly reminded to not post low effort top level posts. And just about every time, some user like grognard says something like "that is what the mods incentivize" and then some idiot goes and makes a new account and starts posting LLM crap. You all don't see it because we don't let it through the spam filter. Occasionally some long time user jokingly posts it in response to a grognard type post, and we ban them.

Making a boring post is its own form of punishment. No one reads it and no one responds, or if they do respond they just accuse you of writing an LLM post. I'm almost certain that the accusations of LLM posts are more common than actual LLM posts, especially for stuff that gets through the spam filter.

Also people absolutely do get banned for long posts all the time. Jewdefender was recently perma-banned, and it was not for low effort posting. The last person I temp-banned for a low effort post did a low effort drunk post on thanksgiving. I gave them the ban mostly because I knew I'd be the only mod to look at it for possibly a few days, and I was annoyed at them giving me work to do on thanksgiving. It didn't help that it was a user with a bunch of past warnings and bans.

People keep complaining about it because it’s a legitimate problem.

If we’re just going by: how annoying are they to scroll by, then the long, low information density posts are worse (by a lot) than what call low effort posts. (I think these long low information posts are pretty low effort too). At least with short posts I know if I’m interested in it in a few seconds. Long manifestopoasting might take a couple of paragraphs before I realize what garbage I’m reading.

+1 for banning the blogposters at least as much as you ban the link posters

+1 for please please please just bring back the BLR please.

I use to be in favor of the bare link repository, I was heavily against removing it.

I have since changed my mind because of the culturewarroundup subreddit. They died. We lived.

The reason I think this has happened is that we require people to have discussion worthy things to bring to the table. How do we determine if something is discussion worthy? We ask our posters to start the discussion. If they can't it tells us one of a few things:

  1. They can't start the discussion on a given topic, because the topic sucks for the discussion purposes. This was one of the original reasons for creating the bare link repository and then removing it altogether. What tended to happen is people just dropped controversial thing #937 into the mix, and it wasn't very interesting to anyone. The topic is a dead horse, heavily beaten. Or the topic is just boring and not actually very culture war ladden.
  2. They can't start the discussion on a given topic, because they aren't a great writer and they don't know how to start the discussion. Many of these turned into flame threads.
  3. They won't start the discussion on a given topic, because they are lazy. As grognard said "I know man, how frustrating it can be when these goddamn wordcels won’t give me my insight porn fix. Daddy needs his medicine." There seems to be this type of person that comes here looking for insight porn, but yet providing nothing. They want to dictate the direction of insight porn without providing any. Fuck them. They are leeches and parasites. Contribute first, and then you can dictate the direction of insight porn.

There will always be one place that caters to the leeches and parasites. It will be the best place for reaching the most number of people. We aren't that place. We can't compete on that dimension. If you want to contribute we do our best to help. If you want to constantly bitch and complain about your inability to dictate the direction of discussion, we aren't a great place to be. You are in the latter category. Your only quality contribution is a long winded complaint about the BLR. Your numerous warnings are all a result of you complaing about someone posting top level comment about a topic you don't want to discuss. You are a leech and a parasite on the good discussions of others.

Wow cjet, I disagree with you on something, and when the topic comes up, I say that I like brevity and provide that side of the argument for it.

That makes me a leech and a parasite on the good discussions of others?

Absolutely unnecessarily mean and hurtful. Yeah that’s the only comments you see from me because they’re usually replies to you when you’re being a jerk to somebody.

+1 on a hell no for the BLR. The point isn't even about a place dying, places like these can be pretty active, but they become one-note, depressing, and intellectually vacuous. My go to example was KotakuInAction, it was getting plenty of new posts and hundreds of comments for as long as I bothered checking up on it.

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