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Containment thread? It worked pretty well for covid, when covid stuff was sucking all the air out of the room.
What determines if a topic gets such a thread?
I think an archipelago of single-topic threads is kind of at odds with our usual approach. Obviously we do megathreads, sometimes, but I’m not sure I could give a principled reason.
If it’s just a compromise, well…I feel like Covid has a much better case than Holocaust denial. Global impact, headline news, personally keeps people from doing stuff.
I think the guideline should be "the topic keeps coming up over and over again in the threads for separate weeks, and the conversation in the new week tends to reference the conversation in older weeks". Covid, when it was a thing, absolutely qualified as that. Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Palestine were somewhat less of this, since each week's thread tended to be about current events more than about continuing to hash out an ongoing disagreement. Trans stuff, I think, qualifies for this, as it does seem to be the same people having the same discussion over and over. Can't think of too many other examples.
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Covid interacts with everything. In 2020 YouTube was pushing those no opt-out "special feature" boxes with videos like "demanding racial equity in COVID-19 response." The BLM riots got a special public health exemption to people otherwise not allowed to leave their houses. You can't talk about those things in an isolated wuflu containment thread.
Whereas holocaust related things rarely happen IRL, at least at the moment.
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Eh, I don't know that making a dedicated space is wise, because it looks bad.
Don't pin it and I think it's fine. The people who want to have that discussion can subscribe to the thread. A second such containment thread for rationalist inner-circle social drama would also be nice. Maybe a third for trans stuff.
I think "topics that tend to suck all the air out of the room when they get brought up go to their own containment thread, anyone who cares to discuss that topic can subscribe to the thread, containment threads only get pinned if there's at least a quarter as much past-activity in them as in the typical CW thread" would probably be an improvement.
TBH if someone is put off by the fact that holocaust denial stuff gets put in a dedicated thread rather than banned I think they would probably be put off by the speech norms here anyway, best that they discover that early. I personally find the discussion tiresome and poorly argued, but I don't think there's a low-time-investment way to moderate on that basis, at least not yet. Maybe check back in 3 years and LLMs will be at that point, but for the time being.
All that said, I am not a mod, nor am I volunteering to spend the amount of time it would take to be a mod, so ultimately the decision should be made by the people who are putting in that time and effort.
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