Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Is everyone satisfied with the moderation here? For me, it’s getting to unacceptably high levels. For some reason, they recently felt the need to almost double the mods to take care of the shrinking userbase.
Our old charitable custom was to treat strangers as if they were worthy of good faith. Increasingly the mods treat those whose good faith has already been established (such as the recently modded Kulak, Hlynka, Burdensomecount) as if they were strangers.
Like reddit, you can start off as a bastion of free speech, but inevitably mods identify with their function and see mod action as an end in itself, until they become more prison guards than janitors.
So are there good alternatives to the motte out there?
I'm the opposite, until recently I thought there was a big drop in the amount of moderating, to the detriment of the space. Hopefully the additional mods, mean we can keep a tightly moderated space. The whole point of theMotte is that civility needs to be modded for, in order that people with very different opinions can interact. TheMotte allows you to say almost anything...as long as you do it with an eye to framing it civilly for even your opponents. Good faith is helpful, but you still have to maintain your civility. That means not using terms that are likely to be inflammatory to your outgroup, unless those terms are vital to your post.
That requires a significant amount of moderating I think.
Many moons ago, on old reddit, when the ultra-progressive subs like SRS started banning certain words like ‘retarded’, everyone laughed at the futile attempt to stop the euphemistic threadmill. Now, even here, new words are regularly put on the index.
There are no banned words here. You're still welcome to give an example of calling people a slur that isn't antagonistic and waging the culture war.
If you call someone stupid, you will be modded. That doesn't mean "stupid" is a banned word.
Let me venture an attempt, using just the words HlynkaCG used.
"Fagots (sic) exist."
"Trannys exist."
"Elf Brahmins exist."
These seem to be "calling people a slur". Is it "antagonistic and waging the culture war"? Am I already modded? I must say, if even these examples count as bad, I cannot imagine any possible way they could be used that wouldn't be considered "antagonistic and waging the culture war". Perhaps they could be mentioned, but again, I believe this would be enshrining exactly the use/mention distinction into the rules of the forum and simply banning all uses as being inherently "antagonistic and waging the culture war". You're right that the result isn't that they would be "banned words" at the same level of utter stupidity that led to that business professor getting fired for teaching his students a common Chinese word that sounds a lot like an English slur, but I think it'll be pretty hard to maintain that there is any possible way that someone could use them without being banned.
I say this as someone who has no interest in actually using such words1, and I don't think you'll find any sort of inkling toward wanting to use them in any of my comments; I'm not that kind of person, myself. But I sure do prize clarity, especially when it comes to rules that result in folks like HlynkaCG being banned... and right now, we ain't got it.
1 - The only exception being 'retarded', because I think it's, uh, dumb that it's gotten the hate it's gotten. It's a clear example of an impossible euphemism treadmill that will never stop eating every word that even comes close to it, even when they're perfectly fine words on their own. I will forever continue to talk about internal combustion engine timing as being advanced or retarded, and if someone is late to the party, I will almost certainly joke that, "It's okay, they're just retarded. They'll be here soon."
https://www.themotte.org/comment/164812?context=3#context
Comment I made that got AAQCed for some reason. I use the word Faggots in the comment. Was not modded, no scolding was handed down.
One obvious difference, the joke about the motte is accurate, is that it's a single word in a wall of text. So writing more is going to help you avoid getting modded compared to drive by slurring, which is nearly always going to draw attention. Another is that it serves the argument being made, calling the anti war protestors faggots was a choice to capture the mindset of a patriotic American of the time.
So the rule is more like, if you use slurs the rest of your post better be Motte quality stuff. The comment will be held to a higher standard.
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