banned
OliveTapenade
11d ago
In Spring of 2015, journalist Rod Dreher received a call from a distraught stranger. The caller said that his mother, an elderly immigrant from Czechoslovakia, was warning him more and more urgently that current events in the United States reminded her of the emergence of communism in her home country in the 1940's. Dreher was skeptical; if the world had really been going to Hell for as long as old people have been saying the world is going to Hell, we'd have been there by now. Yet, there was something about the caller's tone that stuck in his mind and made him keep asking himself, What if the old Czech woman sees something the rest of us do not? [Dreher (2020): Live Not By Lies. p. xi].
For what it's worth, having read Live Not By Lies as well as plenty of Dreher's pre-2015 work, I am extremely skeptical of Dreher's claim to skepticism here. Rod Dreher is temperamentally inclined to catastrophism, and even in 2013 or 2014 he was writing about the coming return of the Dark Ages and the collapse of Christian civilisation and so on.
For instance, here he is in 2014 saying that America is facing a "new Dark Age that our fellow Americans embrace as Enlightenment", and here in the same year approvingly quoting MacIntyre to the same effect. Here he is in 2013 asking "are we Rome?" and predicting civilisational collapse.
He presents himself as a naive ingenue who was shocked by what the communist dissidents told him in Live Not By Lies, but I think it is far more likely that he already knew what he wanted to hear, and found a handful of Eastern Europeans willing to tell him.
I don't think he was shocked. If there's anything new in Live Not By Lies (and the several years of blogging prior to it, of which it is a condensed summary), it's the analogy to the Soviet Union, but Dreher's actual diagnosis of the cultural moment has not changed. It's just saying "this is like Soviet Russia" rather than "this is like the fall of Rome".
(It is also, incidentally, what in my view makes Live Not By Lies such a tedious and intellectually sterile book - most of LNBL is just Dreher describing something in the USSR, then describing something in 21st century America which does not particularly resemble it, and then asserting that they're the same. The Russian famine of 1892 was not actually that similar to covid, for instance - not even in the sense in which Dreher asserts it, as a catastrophe demonstrating the inadequacy of existing state institutions. It goes on and on. There's a criticism of pre-revolutionary Russian aristocracy for being sexually licentious, which may well be true, but given the Soviet comparison that is most of the text, you'd think it would be worth noting that the Bolsheviks were relatively puritanical and banned pornography. But no. Or, say, I agree that the US needs a revitalisation of religion, but the enforced state atheism of the Soviet Union seems qualitatively different to the voluntary slide away from faith that we see in America. The Soviets killing clergy and throwing the rest into the gulags just doesn't seem a great analogy for the way that kids born post-1980 tend to fall away from religion. The situation is meaningfully different. I could go on for a while. At any rate, overall the book is just a series of analogies, none of which are quite successful, because, well, 21st century America is significantly different to the Soviet Union.)
@ HlynkaCG would sometimes drop in with snarky replies to my posts and it was annoying not being able to return fire in kind. Rhetoric is a part of arguing. Being limited to dialectic is like fighting with one hand behind one's back. His time had long come to face the consequences of his incessant rule-skirting. He had gotten so many exceptions.
One suggestion is to form a tribunal of sorts of 5 or so top Motte users. This group would convene every month to award or remove strikes assigned to users based on conduct for the preceding month. The voters would anonymous and contain comments or feedback about what rules were broken and how to improve. If someone accumulates 5 or so strikes they are banned. Anyone can view how many strikes they have. For example, if someone has 4/5 strikes that would be an indication of a need to improve.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11d ago
Fringe suggestion:
Each week, make a random user a “read-only mod.” They don’t get to hand down decisions, but they get to see what goes into the report queue.
The idea is that you’d get a look at the rest of the iceberg. For every dramatic top-level rage post, there’s a dozen uncontroversial bans. Thrice as many warnings. And God knows how many that we judge tolerable, marginal, or otherwise unworthy of a modhat.
By the time someone earns a thousand-character Supreme Court opinion, we’ve seen them in the queue quite a bit. We get a decent idea of how often they trigger a fight. And, perhaps more importantly, whether they have shown any respect for the rules, or if they view previous actions as a tax to get back to their usual.
I can’t actually endorse this idea. It’s too much work and security risk for the value. But I suppose there’s a more mild version, where the mod notes are public? Then when someone gets banned you can go “wow, he had a lot of warnings!”
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
12d ago
“This person’s comments are motivated by pure racial animus” is uncharitable. Were I to say that a Jewish poster who continually defends Israel is motivated by unadulterated racial hatred against Palestinians, and smeared him as an Arab-hater, clearly that would be rule-breaking and I would be banned.
This is not accurate, and you know it's not accurate. "I'd be banned if the shoe were on the other foot!" is the favorite complaint of people who are never actually saying the equivalent thing but something entirely different.
Unless you kept doing this after being warned, you would not be banned. You would be warned to address the actual arguments being made and not the person, and not to uncharitably project motives onto them that they have not expressed.
Yet there have actually been commenters who have cited the IQ of Jews as reason for why they deserve their illegal territorial conquest.
I don't recall anyone saying this explicitly (though I don't doubt you read it that way), but even if someone did say that, there is no rule against making such arguments. People are allowed to make outrageous, specious, or offensive arguments (as defined by the reader) - you are allowed to take issue with them.
“Jews” have been a steady culture war issue this year because of Israel and the protests. And because of their over-representation in influential American positions of power, organized Jewish groups have been worthy of discussion for previous years and for years into the future.
Yes, and you're allowed to talk about Jews. As you do. Constantly.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
12d ago
“This person’s comments are motivated by pure racial animus” is uncharitable. Were I to say that a Jewish poster who continually defends Israel is motivated by unadulterated racial hatred against Palestinians, and smeared him as an Arab-hater, clearly that would be rule-breaking and I would be banned. Yet there have actually been commenters who have cited the IQ of Jews as reason for why they deserve their illegal territorial conquest.
“Jews” have been a steady culture war issue this year because of Israel and the protests. And because of their over-representation in influential American positions of power, organized Jewish groups have been worthy of discussion for previous years and for years into the future. Since Twitter has become unmoderated it has been shown that normative American discourse includes discussion of the group power dynamics as well. So it is not even a dissident idea anymore.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
I just don't think moderation is the issue here. The mods as far as I can tell are generally doing a reasonable job. From my perspective the biggest problem with the state of the Motte is, well, the user base. It's this:
Every once in a while you get people from the opposite side of the political aisle, call everyone here nazis/far-right in an inflammatory manner and they get banned. I think their general sentiment is correct, though - this place is currently filled with moderates and people on the right political, and very few on the left. When I make a low-effort comment that would align with the red-tribe, I get tons of upvotes. When I see someone from the opposite side make a high-effort comment, it gets many downvotes. Now upvotes and downvotes don't mean much regarding the truth or quality of the post, but they do reveal the general user sentiment response to it.
The Motte has a culture. It even has, unfortunately, a groupthink. I don't think it's really possible to have a community of humans without one. But it means that the Motte has positions that it favours as a group, and positions that it disfavours as a group, and this is very obvious if you look at the distributions of likes. People here, just like people on Reddit, are reflexively upvoting things they agree with and downvoting things they disagree with, regardless of intellectual rigour, and the same in terms of verbal responses. Trash that aligns with the majority consensus is favoured; gems that don't are disfavoured.
I'm sure anybody who's gone against that consensus has experienced this - you yourself describe an experience that I've had as well, where low-effort posts that agree with a majority view are heavily rewarded, whereas high-effort posts that I'm quite proud of are probably found under 'sort by controversial' or even 'most downvoted'.
Now it's easy to round that complaint to "people don't agree with me", so we have to be careful with comments like that. My actual preference, for here and for every web forum, is to just eliminate upvotes and downvotes entirely. I think they usually have negative consequences on a forum's culture - in particular, they enable that kind of mindless upvoting-stuff-I-agree-with behaviour, and by providing rapid feedback on how something is received, they make every post more of a spectacle. I find them the equivalent of the studio audience at a presidential debate, cheering for stuff they like and booing stuff they don't, all the while getting in the way of a reasonable discussion or debate between the people at the top.
However, changing that can't actually change the overall landscape, which is the way it is because the user base slants a certain way.
I don't think 'Red Tribe' is the right word here. Going by Scott's original formulation, I would be very surprised if there is more than a handful of Red Tribe people here. Red Tribe is not a synonym for 'conservative' or 'right-wing'. My read is that most of the Motte are Blue Tribe, understanding that to be to do more with education and manners, but also broadly speaking on the right. Even there I want to qualify a bit, because 'the right' is quite diverse, and while we have our share of tech-y-libertarians and people-with-weird-theories-about-race, I'm not sure we have much of that pick-up-truck-driving football-watching beer-drinking evangelical-church-attending gun-owning crowd that Scott called the Red Tribe.
The Motte has very few 'normal' leftists, but it also has very few 'normal' rightists. I always find it a bit weird and refreshing to have a chat with what I think of as 'normal' rightists. I don't want it to sound like I think those people are all lower-class idiots either - they're not. But I chat with people along those lines about politics and suffice to say it does not sound anything like the Motte, even when it is very educated.
Can the Motte change, and attract a more ideologically diverse user-base, and also make its atmosphere more attractive to people with different and challenging perspectives? I don't know. I suspect probably not. Most online communities can't change that easily.
But there's also a case that maybe it shouldn't change like that. Right now this is a place for a particular kind of weirdo, and there aren't a whole lot of spaces out there for people like this. You could accuse me, perhaps not without reason, of being one of the greys from this comic. It's true, I don't love the culture of the Motte and I'd like it to be different.
But then, in other contexts, I've been the pink one, and I know what it's like to be besieged by demanding greys. So maybe I should just forebear, and let the Motte be the Motte, even if that sometimes makes me want to hit things.
MotteInTheEye
12d ago
Hlynka has been hanging out in this space and its predecessors getting banned and unbanned for the better part of a decade now. The discussion around "maybe just a 3 month or one year ban would correct the problem" misses the point - there is no question of changing the way he interacts here, there is just the mods' decision about whether the good outweighs the bad or not, given the way he will inevitably interact. I don't have a strong opinion on whether they got it right or wrong, but any criticism of their decision should be focused on that question, not hypothetical approaches to get him to clean up his act.
aichanuwu
12d ago
This is just ricardian equivalence. Chinese food production is inefficiently optimized from a calorie provision perspective because other countries are supplying cheaper agricultural inputs for higher value produce, especially feeder stocks for protein (pork). Were China to be banned from all imported foodstuffs they will pivot (at uncertain pace) to primary staple production and adjust accordingly (potatoes and millet, primarily). Bear in mind that China has sustained its historically enormous population by farming all along the Yangtze and Yellow rivers during non-flood periods, and the Pearl River in the south has always had huge agricultural output.
The Three Gorges dam has stabilized water levels for Chinese agriculture for the foreseeable future barring damstriking, and cessation of groundwater-extraction dependant agriculture can be reversed on relatively short notice. Domestic food production can be spun up at a fairly fast pace, approximately half a year from seed to harvest depending on the municipality. Will it work? Not my specialization but most Chinese seem optimistic that they aren't at risk of starvation even if USA cuts off soybeans entirely or Ukraine ceases all wheat exports.
Combining the above with the point below that Chinese people stock up for 2 months of spare food at a time, and it is reasonable to presume that temporary food insecurity from US export restrictions will not affect China. Total trade blockage would be more impactful, since that would prevent China from easily pivoting to alternative import sources for either grains or critical factors of production.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
13d ago
I don't think I've seen any clarity from the mods on whether stating such beliefs are against the rules.
Implying someone is "hiding their power level" (i.e. concealing their true beliefs) is not in itself cause for a ban. It is, once again, more about tone (how you say it) than about the specific accusation. Are you trying to engage someone or are you just trying to "call them out" or bait them into flaming back?
Once more: Hlynka's ban wasn't any one post (even if it was one post to which his permaban was eventually attached). It was a pattern of behavior going back years in which he would continually behave in an antagonistic manner, we would tell him to please stop doing that, and he would (sometimes explicitly) tell us that he was not going to stop doing that because he thought his principles and how he thought the Motte should be run were more important than Zorba's policies or our wishes. And you know, fair enough. In a sense I respect that he stood on his principles. But he did so knowing we were going to ban him, because we told him we were going to ban him if he didn't stop flagrantly violating the rules and all but thumbing his nose at us. In his calmer moments he would even tell us that he understood why we kept modding him (but that he wasn't going to stop doing what he was doing).
A long term good poster and someone with a lot of respect in the community absolutely refused to abide by the rules. Eventually, after many, many bans of escalating severity and pleading with him to knock it off or go touch grass, he got banned for good because we were tired of this dance (and of people asking us why Hlynka got to get away with so much).
Hlynka committed "Suicide by janny."
Oh come on, there are comments on here dripping with sheer contempt all the time that don't get the authors banned.
Keep in mind, I'm not a leftoid, I just think that most of the rightoids on here are retarded. If we had more leftoids here, I'd tell them that they are also retarded, cause I genuinely believe that.
But the Tomato didn't express himself in a way more obnoxious than what we see regularly here, so come the fuck on, shape up or have this site keep being viewed as a joke by actually smart people.
Right now, this site is mostly just a refugee camp for midwits who overrate their own intelligence because they realize that different races differ in IQ or whatever (Wow! You just have to be a non-retard to understand that different races differ in IQ for probably in part genetic reasons! Congratulations on having a bare minimum intelligence to be worthy of smart people paying attention to you!).
Having the bare minimum of intelligence to be able to see through leftoid ideas of how everybody's on average equal in intelligence or whatever... doesn't take much. It's just like the bare standard minimum. This site is overrun with lame social trads, religious idiots, authoritarians, and so on... all of whose ideas are not rationally obviously correct, but they clearly are pushing these ideas because they have deep-seated emotional (as opposed to rational) reasons for wanting to push those ideas. They often write things that are not rationally justified, and imply that their opponents are all sorts of nasty things when they write it, but I am not calling for them to be banned. So why ban Tomato for writing a mild few paragraphs poking fun at his political opponents?
Edit: Sorry, I was drunkposting and a bit too harsh. Oh well, I don't mind a week vacation.
cjet79
13d ago
I'm not saying we can't have this discussion, but I will say it was had before:
https://www.themotte.org/post/900/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/193046?context=8#context
As of this time @HlynkaCG has been permabanned. I'm posting this message at the top of the thread, because its not really for Hlynka, its for the community to know. There were a few different posts I could have chosen in the modqueue, and many of them were too buried to be visible. The mod team has given him repeated warnings and bans. And I personally reached out to him last ban to warn him that a permaban was likely coming if this behavior continued.
I mostly do not feel this is a good thing, but it is a necessary thing. Hlynka had quite a few quality contributions, and I don't think I was alone in appreciating his often unique (for themotte) perspective. But he repeatedly did it in a way that just wasn't acceptable for the rules around here.
I would like people to have a few takeaways:
- No one on this forum is infinitely excused of bad behavior. Having quality contributions and providing a unique viewpoint might get you some additional leeway, but our patience isn't unlimited.
- The mods do read and participate here. We know when someone is starting to abuse that leeway. We know when there is frustration about it.
- We do try to be deliberate and slow about things. It can feel real shitty when a cabal of people meet in secret to discuss your punishment and they decide permanent banishment is the solution. For longtime users that have put in the time and effort to be a part of the community here we don't lightly jump to permanent bans as a solution.
Please keep any discussion civil.
I had many other posts that I liked in that discussion, and I feel I'd just be reiterating their points again. So I'll just post those below:
On the topic of rehabilitation:
https://www.themotte.org/post/900/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/193270?context=8#context
I'm not entirely opposed to something like a rehabilitation program for rule breakers. In my experience the rule-breakers themselves are often very much not ok with such a system. I believe anyone that is capable of living in modern society and not constantly getting involved in violence and being thrown in prison is capable of filtering themselves. So most forum users are capable of filtering themselves, but they are not willing to filter themselves. So adding an external filter that is not under their control is not something they want, its just seen as an imposition.
requiring a two page essay on rule-following as a costly signal of contrition and to promote salience of infraction
I've wanted to do things like this in the past. But its not a good idea. We got a lot of complaints that we were just being petty tyrants abusing our power, and that we just wanted people to "bend the knee" and "respect my authoritaay!" And those complaints seem generally correct to me. Some of the libertarian types (myself included) have an allergic reaction to such requirements, and may swing much harder towards "fuck you and your impositions".
I'd rather just treat people like adults, rather than misbehaving kids. If you can't or aren't willing to control your behavior here then we should just part ways. I don't want to try and parent you. I don't want you ass kissing or crawling on your belly to be allowed back in. I just want you to act within the rules we have set out while you are here. That is my only requirement. And because it is the only requirement it becomes a much stronger one. There is no getting around it by willing to be a sycophant.
Having said all that nothing is forever set in stone. Hlynka could come back in a year. But it would have to be an active decision by the mod team. Not a passive one. And if it were to happen, I'd like to see the most reluctant members of the mod team and community convinced.
On the problem of maintaining "politeness" on the internet:
https://www.themotte.org/post/900/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/193363?context=8#context
I'm well aware of the contradiction, I wrote this 5 days ago [emphasis added]:
This is a discussion forum for people with sometimes drastically different views. It feels like a fragile thing somedays. We are asking people to talk politely with one another when they may disagree with each other's entire existence. Most of the internet is filled with people pointing out that politeness in those circumstances is absurd. And thus most of the internet has descended into a bit of a hell hole that I cannot personally tolerate for any topic much less the topics where people might actually have a reason to hate each other.
Hlynka wasn't interested in maintaining decorum when it was an obvious papering over disrespectful or violent thoughts. I admired how long he was able to act on that disinterest without getting permabanned.
Personally, the masquerade is getting boring for me too. But out of respect for mod wishes, I'll try to fade out rather than flame out if it becomes too annoying to bother with.
I'm not really sympathetic to people that can't maintain the masquerade. Because I maintain it quite easily. I'm an anarcho-capitalist, and just about everyone on here is a statist of some sort. I believe most of those views are morally repugnant, and any statist view is an active advocation of violence against me. I also don't consider myself some paragon of self control. I think most people have the self control muscle and exercise it all the time. If you can drive in traffic and not run someone off the road when they do something dangerous to you then you also have that self control muscle. My 5 year old kid has the self control muscle. My 3 year old, does not. So its a skill you can learn and start using as young as 4 years old.
Also according to psychology there are bunch of psychopaths just walking around among us, following the rules, and not murdering people for shits and giggles. We don't threaten to purge all the psychopaths as uncaring monsters walking among us. And the psychopaths mostly don't act like the uncaring monsters that they are, except in specific high level managerial positions where we have designated their behavior "ok".
People complaining that it is hard not to say things in an online forum where they don't need to even participate is a bit mind-boggling to me. I truly do not understand how such a person navigates their day to day life. Perhaps they have an extreme set of blinders? Perhaps they are lying, and its actually very easy to follow the rules around here, they just don't want to? Perhaps they are in a special set of circumstances where people coddle them like I do for my three year old in order to avoid public tantrums?
Opinions on Hylynka and some behind the scenes details on the moderation decision:
https://www.themotte.org/post/900/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/193253?context=8#context
...
Maybe you don't like hylnka, but a lot of people did. The whole pitch on moving everybody here was that we could avoid the overbearing influence of reddit admins, but now we just have...you guys. Hylnka was a dick, and banned me at least once on themotte...but as I have pointed out before: you guys (specifically you, cjet) over way overtending this garden.
No, I like Hlynka. If there is such a thing as "internet friends" I would consider him one. I was the most reluctant among the mods to ban him, and have stuck up for his behavior quite often in the back-channels. The fact that I am the one to ban him is more similar to a "George shoots Lennie" situation. Not comparing Hlynka to Lennie, but the social dynamic of the situation where the most ardent defender of the accused who gave them as many chances as possible has to be the one to carry out the execution.
And yes you have us. This was always the agreement. If you want the reddit admins and some other set of moderators, you know where reddit is. We have gotten significantly more lenient since moving off of reddit, because there is more of a worry of eroding our user base and having no replacement source. If you want no moderation there are places on the internet like that. This isn't such a place, never has been, and never will be given that zorba will probably just shut it down if it came to that.
Most of the discussion here just sounds like (and I suspect heavily is) chatbots talking back and forth to one another. Many have pointed out that a version of a captcha for chatbots is if they are willing to say naughty words or not. What you're basically doing with this ban is saying "you have to sound like a chatbot in order to post here". I think this is a bad idea.
People are allowed to say "naughty words" here. They aren't allowed to put words in other's mouths. Accuse people of beliefs they don't hold with little or no evidence/discussion. And throw out broad sweeping insults to others.
You can say cunt, but you can't call another user one without breaking our rules. If you are not a fan of "politeness" as one of the rules of discussion, I'd again suggest that most of the rest of the internet is still out there.
Here's a suggestion for how to improve themotte and course correct it: give us something like "showdead" on hacker news. Give me the option in my userprofile to have a non mod curated experience where I can see naughty posts and interact with them. People who want the more curated experience can untick this "show naughty" option, and never have to see it. I don’t think you will do this since it takes the power of being a mod away (although keeps the practical purpose), but it would be appreciated.
No. Zorba has been asked about this multiple times before. He has a post somewhere about trash in a river as a comparison. The general point is that our users actually do most of the filtering for us, and mods are here as a backup to make sure there is a clear bright line.
MaximumCuddles
13d ago
In regards to specifically hylnka, whose legendary status is one of the only posters who I think requires special merit, I wish to formally put forward “a motte-ist proposal”;
Hylnka should be unbanned if he provides real, incontrovertible evidence that he has successfully completed “The Hock.”.
I’m not kidding. It’s the ultimate combination of absurd trial by ordeal married with impossibly niche internet humor. It would be the greatest internet happening in a very long time.
hydroacetylene
13d ago
I think hlynka needed to cut out his behavior but that a long term- 3 month or so- ban would be a better solution for AAQC writers, at least to begin with.
As for your proposal- why don’t the month’s AAQC authors get to agree on a permabanned user to unban? I suspect we wouldn’t get many; probably just hlynka.
gattsuru
13d ago
SteveKirk believes, with fairly credible reason, that the federal and some state governments is working in coordination with various online and meatspace merchants to track the sales of major firearm components, in an attempt to track down people who are manufacturing 3d printed or other self-produced guns.
((And while SteveKirk hasn't said it explicitly, I think the feds probably also are trying to track down likely owners of guns sold in private sales who use them enough to modify or require repairs of major components, for both manufacturing charges and to prepare state efforts trying to 'close' private sales or interstate or unregistered ammunition sales, such as California and New York.))
This is bad enough in the sense that it's not actually illegal in many jurisdictions that it's being covered in, and plausibly unconstitutional even in the states that do ban it, but that's just the surface level problem. If you own a 3d printer and normally-bought guns that you're maintaining without producing any 3d-printed weapons, you might avoid a conviction (or even a trial!) should a bunch of ATF agents break down your door looking for guns, but it won't bring your dog back to life. Same for stuff that 'looks like' silencer material.
There are also bump stock or (more often) pistol brace components that have been retroactively banned, after long periods where the ATF claimed they were legal, in ways quite a lot of gun owners who own these things -- and might put photos that get auto-cloud-uploaded, if they're particularly unlucky -- may not know they have been banned.
TracingWoodgrains
14d ago
one person mentioned that Zorba should talk with you about whether you want to remain part of the community.
Reread this and think about the words you wrote, please.
that one guy
You're linking one heavily downvoted jerk, but also--that's the point. Yes, being a somewhat public figure means more people have more opinions about you more aggressively. Having hundreds of people pile on you at once, many of them people you've had longstanding friendly relationships with, feels very very different than a single contentious conversation.
Anyway, since you're mentioning the reaction to the banned books list, look at it. He got some light criticism, a few people questioning his premise, quite a bit of interest. That's it. Nothing particularly notable, nothing dramatic.
The bad reception was because we're highly committed to honesty, not because we're highly committed to the Right.
There are high motives and low motives for every decision. I wouldn't flatter yourself too much here (though I also wouldn't imply that no critics had good points.) I didn't walk away thinking "these guys are highly committed right-wing partisans," I thought, "Huh, these people are willing to make and nod along to false, conspiratorial claims about me and hop in on a massive dogpile in which my character, my motives, and my membership in this space all become topics of heated controversy, thinking the worst of me and extending no grace whatsoever in a time when I could really use it." Unless you've been on the other end of something like that, I suggest not acting too much as if you know what it's like.
Similarly, you can choose to believe that it's just partisanship making people react in silly ways, but I've been around here a very long time and watched many of the best people here move on due to one or another comparable frustration. Explanations of why this forum zeitgeist was acting reasonably and nobly every time only go so far. At some point, it becomes simpler to leave than to explain, and poster after poster has made that calculation.
Anyway, that's enough talk of the bad blood. I usually don't bring it up because at this point I'm in a very lucky position on the whole and I prefer to remember the good memories here. There's plenty of good here, now as ever; I'm just some guy who's been around far too long and seen far too much.
Tenaz
14d ago
vehemence/forum support
Your first example starts with "I like you," and everyone responding disagrees with their point. Your second was immediately banned and the only other comment disagreed with it. In your third, again, most of its replies disagree with it. In the fifth link, most commenters disagree with their take. The fourth link does, admittedly, seem to have some support.
Overall it looks like your reception was neutral to positive in terms of vehemence and support, i.e. there wasn't all that much vehemence and there was some net positive support. You had more defenders than attackers, especially if these are the worst examples you can find, and some of your attackers were very kind and even-handed.
Even the comments on the piece itself look fairly negative, so it really doesn't look to me like TheMotte is exceptional at all in that regard. I think if we conducted a sentiment analysis we'd find TheMotte to be very similar to your reception among your dedicated fans.
Scale
Sorry, can't compete there, because TheMotte is about 1/4 as big as it was back then, and I haven't been involved in any comparable scandals, nor am I a founder of this community, nor am I a semi-professional semi-journalist (I'd feel comfortable calling you a journalist, but I don't mean much by the term, and I'm not sure you'd agree). But after a certain point the scale really isn't important--what matters is whether an acceptable fraction of the community has seen the post, and what their average sentiment towards the post is.
Give one example
I'm hesitant to even bring it up, because you're obviously still pretty affected by the response to your own writing, and my own unpopular post was both low-quality and something more likely than most things to be something you have your own strong negative feelings towards. Still, fair is fair, here's the post I had in mind.
It's an admittedly low-quality comment that generated a startling amount of disagreement (perhaps even "vehemence"). In particular, consider this comment, which is more vehement, lower quality, and less charitable than any of your linked un-modded replies.
Look at any of the responses to my original post. I had essentially no defenders. Everyone disagreed with me, many did so in quite rude terms, no mods stepped in at any point. I'm not too bothered by any of this because on a level I deserved it. My original comment was pretty much just drive-by sneering with very little substance to back up very substantial claims, and my follow-up replies were not much better. I don't think that justifies all the replies but it does explain them and very much prevents me from taking it personally. If I thought it had been a good post, I might have been more upset by the reception.
A better example (iirc) would be the reception to KulakRevolt's "banned books" piece, which I can find if you're interested. People were universally very dismissive of it. You can argue (and I'd agree) that that piece was lower quality than the fake furry curriculum piece, but the fact remains that your reception was nowhere near unique or exceptional and there are right-leaning commenters here who have faced worse.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
15d ago
Depends what you consider "best contributors." A lot of the best contributors are also the spiciest ones - i.e., the ones who write long polemics about how their outgroup absolutely sucks donkey balls. And people who share their feelings about that outgroup stand up and cheer, and get very upset that someone who writes so eloquently about how their hated outgroup sucks donkey balls gets banned. But the thing about those people is that it's usually not the essays about their outgroup sucking donkey balls that gets them banned (because they take great care to write those in a Motte-appropriate fashion). It's the fact that their seething hatred of their outgroup and anyone who would defend them leaks everywhere, so while the sucking-donkey-balls essays get AAQCs, their snippy, condescending, and antagonistic posts directed at people who disagree with them eventually get them banned.
Now if you think we should just let people who write really good donkey-ball-sucking polemics get a pass for insulting everyone they disagree with right and left, that would be one way to "maximize light." But it would also maximize heat.
MollieTheMare
15d ago
Would a sufficiently detailed table of contents satisfy you? Assuming reasonably descriptive chapter and section headings of course.
Especially if there is also a table of figures and list of tables, it seems pretty straight forward to flip through and see how familiar/tractable the content will be.
I do think there is a place for bullets sometimes, but bullets can also be symptomatic of a sort of powerpoint syndrome.
Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the innerconnectedness of ideas.
If you could get the full argument a book makes from reading a bulleted list is there really a point in the book?
Or along the same lines there is the classic:
... bullet outlines can make us stupid
Ultimately arguing that poor use of bulleted lists contributed to the loss of shuttle Columbia.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
15d ago
You've been spamming threads with these kinds of snide remarks, and the last time you did this you ended up getting banned and told to knock it off. Once again I am telling you to knock it off, and banning you for three days. If you have a point to make, make it clearly and directly. Stop attacking people (not just me, you've been attacking people almost at random for the past couple of days). Your contributions so far seem to be nothing but low effort and obnoxious. Keep it up and you will be permabanned.
That was one of the moments that holds the most salience for me, yeah, alongside this from @FCfromSSC. This forum was very much the place I came into my own as a writer, which made it much more painful for me to hear how people saw me when I strayed from the anti-prog line. It's no small thing to watch a large crowd in your digital hometown, so to speak, cheer someone on as he emphasizes he wants nothing to do with you or yours, and no small thing to watch many of that same crowd go on to cheer others as they frame you as a lying agent of the Cathedral who should be banned from the space and whatnot. Many people I respect took issue with my LoTT prank; I remain uniquely disgusted with the reaction I got from this forum in a way that's not easy to shake. The shift from "my online home turf" to "just another forum I visit and post in sometimes" was a gradual one, but that settled it pretty unambiguously. And I'd be lying if I didn't look with grim satisfaction at the place others said would turn into a progressive monoculture and see that it has, despite being quiet, remained precisely the thoughtful discussion space I hoped it would be.
I have always been exactly who I claim to be, and always aimed to do exactly what I claim to be doing. Part of aiming to be honest and open in my self-presentation, though, is that it stings quite a bit when people I think should know better treat me as something I'm not, or reject me for who I am. Things get heated, yes; people don't mean quite that by it, sure; but I do remember.
You mentioned previously a concern about an attitude of "I'm going to cash in on a post from my niche hangout, and not give credit, because I'm afraid I'll get cancelled." I do think my behavior demonstrates pretty clearly that I'm not afraid of controversial associations, not even of attaching my name and career to them. I talk about rDrama in public regularly, where I'm a known regular; I go on podcasts with Richard Hanania and Alex Kaschuta and Walt Bismarck and anyone I think I can have a good chat with; I cover stories and topics sensitive enough that most won't touch them with ten-foot poles. I'll talk with anyone who will talk with me, and build alongside anyone who wants to build alongside me. But I also take very careful note of how people act when the chips are down and my back is against the wall, and when I see people place me on the enemy side of the friend/enemy distinction, I take that seriously.
It's funny, because in many senses I get along well with FC personally inasmuch as we interact; I've appreciated my interactions with you personally; I get on well with many people here and have a lot in common with many of them. In a sense, though, that's what makes it tricky: if my own experience here left me feeling burned, despite making many friendships, usually being well-received, and having a great deal in common with many here, how could I possibly recommend this place as a good conversation spot to anyone who doesn't share the dominant viewpoints here? If, every time someone gets frustrated and leaves this forum, the collective local mind sees it as an issue with that person, not crediting their critiques, what am I to think?
Unsurprisingly, I stand by my long-held critical analysis of this forum. I think it is torn between two purposes, one implicit and one explicit, and the implicit one has been winning for a very long time. Explicitly, it wants to be a respectful meeting place for people who don't share the same biases. Implicitly, it is a place for people who don't like progressives to chat about politics and culture. It works great if you want to be criticized from your right, or if you have an anti-progressive or a more niche idea to share, but people are doomed to disappointment at the gap between its implicit and its explicit purposes unless they share its biases, and if they share its biases they will only entrench those biases further.
I'm sorry to watch this forum stagnate, because after everything it still holds a special place in my heart, and out of respect to it and recognition that I already struck a blow against it once, I've refrained from encouraging people to join the space I think has broadly succeeded in the culture-building project this place envisioned (the postrat oasis on Twitter). If posts from here strike me, I'm more than happy to share them with attribution. When it's relevant, I'm more than happy to talk about this place and the role it's played in my own journey. I personally like, get on with, and respect a great many people here. And yes, of course if the users or mods explicitly want me to promote it in some form, I'm happy to take a look. But yeah, my memories of the Motte have been bittersweet for years now.
VinoVeritas
15d ago
Some of our best people like TracingWoodgrains (who is apparently a furry) and Kulak (who is apparently a very attractive woman? wtf) are now posting on twitter for Muskbucks and some like Hlynka have just been banned by overzealous overlords seeking to 'guide' the community
Legality, no, I don't think so. I am certainly not a lawyer, but for all the stories of this or that platform being banned, I don't think the Motte fits the pattern.
But you certainly could end up in hot water in every sense other than legal if your name showed up next to some Motte quotes taken out of context.
It's not clear how not banning him would be good for the community either. I'm not sure "good for the community" is on the table.
I miss him badly, and it's absurd to me that he's gone and I'm a mod. I originally wrote the above when I was expecting to be banned myself in relatively short order, and conversations with Hlynka fundamentally changed my perspective for the better.
It's usually pretty clear which users are heading for a ban, and I've been trying for a while now to find ways to engage with them constructively to try to stop that from happening, on the theory that the right conversation might be able to turn things around for them the way it did for me. Sometimes it sorta-kinda works. Sometimes it doesn't; I'm still frustrated that I never got to finish my arguments with fuckduck9000. In any case, the universal constant is that no one is happy with the results.
he's a far-out third (fourth?) positionist calling 80% of the political spectrum progressives.
Not a bannable offense. In fact, plausibly true, given some conceptual understanding of those words and the concepts underlying many people's positions. Kinda funny that this is what comes top-of-mind when thinking about why he was banned. Really bolsters jkf's claim.
Keeping humans in the loop puts pressure on the processes to be more legible and comprehensible. If you dump everything into an inscrutable ML model, then the danger is that people will simply offload their thinking to the model and take its word as law. When your account gets banned at youtube, no one can actually say why (except in high profile cases) - it’s just, “The Algorithm said so, and we trust The Algorithm”. I don’t want society to work that way. I want there to be a person who has to take responsibility for the decision, and who can explain their reasoning. No hiding behind a binary blob of trillions of parameters.
Of course, humans can build labyrinthian inscrutable bureaucracies too. And humans can be outright evil. But I’d still rather take my chances with humans. Unlike AI, they have skin in the game - they are conscious entities, they have desires and fears. They can be persuaded or bribed, they are subject to political and social pressures, they will grant exceptions under the right circumstances. These are not aberrant modes of operation - they are necessary to the functioning of a humane society.
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