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I've always liked the idea of starting a community that has two rules in its discussion threads: no cynicism/fatalism and no snark. It's just a silly thought ex

I've always liked the idea of starting a community that has two rules in its discussion threads: no cynicism/fatalism and no snark. It's just a silly thought exercise and probably wouldn't work, but it's fun to think about. It seems like both of those get in the way of good discussion.

epmaybe 6y ago
The best I can find right now is /r/Neutral* Like /r/NeutralPolitics
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  This is a good one. Unfortunately given they are subject to Reddit’s new draconian content rules, I feel like it’s a dead man walking.
  - ganstyles 6y ago
    The rules saying to treat other people like human beings?
    - djsumdog 6y ago
      It's not just that. They're killing any contraction to a very very narrow narrative. Voat had a lot of bad design decisions that made it as bad as it is today (https://battlepenguin.com/tech/voat-what-went-wrong/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/voat-what-went-wrong/). Reddit is turning into Voat. A lot of centrists and moderates that leaned a little right are leaving, and they're not going to come back this time to view one or two subs. Where Voat is a hard right cesspool of monothink, Reddit is soon going to be a hard left cesspool of monothink.
      - freehunter 6y ago
        If centrists and right-leaning moderates are leaving because outright racism is banned, I would hesitate to say the people leaving are centrists and right-leaning moderates.
        hindsightbias 6y ago
        So leaning right = racist. A certain candidate won a majority of white women and men voters and while it might be fun to write them all off as “outright” racists there is that little problem of the Electoral College. So might not be prudent to moderate with blow torches, at least until the new order is electorally established.
        ganstyles 6y ago
        It sounds like that's not what the person to whom you're replying is saying. But your general point, shifted slightly, is correct: right wing is racist. I feel like I examine all sides and "lean right" or am moderate, and used to vote for people like Bush and McCain and Romney, but the right wing has become to polluted with racism and outright greed that I voted for Hillary last election and am spending considerable resources fighting the Republican party outright this election.
        hindsightbias 6y ago
        Personally, I don’t think the right has changed one bit since Reagan went to Philadelphia Mississippi. They’re just simply more comfortable saying what they couldn’t say in public before and they finally have a candidate who is their real deal. But I would not be closing what channels are left for those who might be confused or naive. There are more important things than purity, and 2000 and 2016 prove that.
        Reimersholme 6y ago
        Outright racism isn't banned. It's just banned if it's targeted towards minorities.
        mst 6y ago
      - IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
        Yes. It's going to be hard-right misogynists and racists vs ... "hardcore not-hating-women and generally not caring too much about skin color, with extreme passion"? Less sarcastic: You're equating "conservatism" with "racism and misogyny". And while I tend to agree with that, the reverse does not work: not hating women, for example, does not make one a communist.
        pochamago 6y ago
        You don't think specifically carving out an exception for hate speech against "the majority" is likely to embolden the far left?
        deadgunslinger 6y ago
        "Not caring too much about skin colour" The people who only talk about skin colour and have brought it to the forefront of our collective thought, even for people who genuinely didn't think about skin colour. That made me laugh - hard.
        AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        The following is an un-nuanced, sarcastic, flippant dismissal of left-wing arguments about racism. You can even guess from the URL what it's going to look like. https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/8etk0w/this_picture_is_racist_and_i_am_racist_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/8etk0w/this... It isn't a particularly reasonable criticism of honest intellectuals on the left. It's a completely accurate depiction of low-brow populist left-wing extremists, because they disregard the nuance of their own side's positions and just do the thing in the picture, and then use the conclusion to rationalize vicious hostility and censorship. The mirror image of irrationally hating members of the Blue Tribe isn't rationally hating no one, it's irrationally hating members of the Red Tribe.
      - happytoexplain 6y ago
        Calling the hatred, gleeful love of violence, racism, and misogyny that characterises Voat "hard right" is a disservice to the right. And implying there is an equally awful and opposite thing on the left, and that Reddit will become it, is unrealistic. So their content rules are too strict - that's not an abominable evil.
        nindalf 6y ago
        We are so used to viewing the world in binary that we need to find binary systems even when they don't exist. GP is one example of this - Voat is a cesspool of hate, the users mostly lean right. Therefore there has to be a counterpart on the left. Second example - Even though non-partisan metrics show that the Republican party have become more extreme with time, the need to be "neutral" makes it impossible to recognise that. Our need for binary means that we have to consider both sides as mirror images of each other even if they might not be. This video explains more - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mICxKmCjF-4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mICxKmCjF-4
        JohnBooty 6y ago
        Even though non-partisan metrics show that the Republican party have become more extreme with time, the need to be "neutral" makes it impossible to recognise that. Yes. Most of us generally have some sort of impulse to build consensus and seek some sort of middle ground. It's just a foundational aspect of social animals in general, I believe. That breaks down when you throw bad actors -- either because they are intentionally behaving in antisocial ways, or because they are profoundly detached from reality -- into the mix. For an example of the former, our impulse for consensus-building and compromise doesn't work if your buddy says "let's go murder ten people for no reason." It would not be a sane compromise to murder five people, or perhaps find ten people and beat them precisely halfway to death. For an example of the latter, there can be no compromise with certain pseudoscience beliefs. We can't compromise with flat-earthers and agree that the earth maybe is sort of an oblong, oval shape halfway between a sphere and a disk.
        6y ago
  - epmaybe 6y ago
    I mean, if you're against their rules, fine. But to the original question, it's clearly a model that seems to work.
throwaw4y-plate 6y ago
A functional snark detector would be a billion dollar idea.
ALittleLight 6y ago
I've thought about a related idea, for a forum where only positive posts are allowed. I imagined it as something like a subreddit where a SentimentAnalyzer is a mod, and it deletes any insufficiently positive comments and bans any sufficiently negative users.
- squiggleblaz 6y ago
  Oh that sounds perfect! I love your idea! I think the President would also find it very agreeable to his only known ideology!
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    Thanks for illustrating a potential hurdle we might have to hop! I'm sure that, either, together we would be able to overcome it by inventing a new solution, or we'd have fun living with it. :)
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
I agree in regards to cynicism/fatalism, but I fear everyone's cynicism is someone else's obvious ill-that-must-be-named. For example, I consider the relentless attacks on "mainstream journalism" coming from tech people to be repetitive, superficial, ignorant of history (journalism today is leagues ahead of the past), and misguided (phonebook-style "just the facts" neutrality is neither possible nor has it ever been the goal). The same goes for "every politician is corrupt", etc. But I can sort-off see that, to someone with the unfortunate flaw to wrongly entertain believes different from mine, my insistence to criticise every new low of the current US administration, might, in a certain light, also subjectively feel like tired, repetitive cynicism. That's a logical paradox and it has its roots in our discourse no longer being grounded in a shared, objective reality.
- squiggleblaz 6y ago
  > misguided (phonebook-style "just the facts" neutrality is neither possible nor has it ever been the goal) > That's a logical paradox and it has its roots in our discourse no longer being grounded in a shared, objective reality. Don't you contradict yourself? (Nb. I don't know anything about SSC. But I also think some kind of curated discussion is doomed to failure; although it may be interesting to its subscribers, it will never make a dent what is generally read and contributed to. Even if it is moderately successful, those who say "social media discussions are terrible" will continue to say "social media discussions are terrible", since those who want to use Twitter will continue to use Twitter, and that will always be more than those who use Curato. Just for the simple reason that people want to contribute. Probably split agreement/quality moderation is desirable and then crafting individual feeds so that you see quality posts you will probably disagree with more so than low-quality posts that you will probably disagree with. Threaded forums like HN also seem to get better contributions than person-based social media.)
wutbrodo 6y ago
I'm a participant on a political discussion forum that enforces strong civility norms (eg anti-snark), and it very much works. It's very popular these days to say that civility norms are a Trojan horse for enforcing conformity. But the breadth of viewpoints I've seen expressed there is 10x as high as anywhere else, and conversations are consistently polite, insightful, and intellectually honest. It turns out that filtering out stupidity and emotional incontinence leads to adult conversation. More importantly, the norms make any given person feel safe acting like an adult, even if they'd otherwise be inclined not to. This is a big problem with much Internet discourse: putting thought and nuance into a comment and taking your interlocutor seriously is easily deflated with mockery and disdain for "tryhards" or "effortposting". The natural equilibrium is obviously going to be that even people inclined towards intellectual honesty end up in the mud flinging shit at others. Consistent, high-quality moderation around civility prevents the temperature from rising and allows you to actually learn something from every exchange. (It doesn't hurt that the filter effect of these norms mean that the average commenter ends up pretty intelligent: even when someone is wrong, I tend to learn something) Tldr: the norms you're describing work very well IME

epmaybe 6y ago

The best I can find right now is /r/Neutral* Like /r/NeutralPolitics

throwawaysea 6y ago
This is a good one. Unfortunately given they are subject to Reddit’s new draconian content rules, I feel like it’s a dead man walking.
- ganstyles 6y ago
  The rules saying to treat other people like human beings?
  - djsumdog 6y ago
    It's not just that. They're killing any contraction to a very very narrow narrative. Voat had a lot of bad design decisions that made it as bad as it is today (https://battlepenguin.com/tech/voat-what-went-wrong/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/voat-what-went-wrong/). Reddit is turning into Voat. A lot of centrists and moderates that leaned a little right are leaving, and they're not going to come back this time to view one or two subs. Where Voat is a hard right cesspool of monothink, Reddit is soon going to be a hard left cesspool of monothink.
    - freehunter 6y ago
      If centrists and right-leaning moderates are leaving because outright racism is banned, I would hesitate to say the people leaving are centrists and right-leaning moderates.
      - hindsightbias 6y ago
        So leaning right = racist. A certain candidate won a majority of white women and men voters and while it might be fun to write them all off as “outright” racists there is that little problem of the Electoral College. So might not be prudent to moderate with blow torches, at least until the new order is electorally established.
        ganstyles 6y ago
        It sounds like that's not what the person to whom you're replying is saying. But your general point, shifted slightly, is correct: right wing is racist. I feel like I examine all sides and "lean right" or am moderate, and used to vote for people like Bush and McCain and Romney, but the right wing has become to polluted with racism and outright greed that I voted for Hillary last election and am spending considerable resources fighting the Republican party outright this election.
        hindsightbias 6y ago
        Personally, I don’t think the right has changed one bit since Reagan went to Philadelphia Mississippi. They’re just simply more comfortable saying what they couldn’t say in public before and they finally have a candidate who is their real deal. But I would not be closing what channels are left for those who might be confused or naive. There are more important things than purity, and 2000 and 2016 prove that.
      - Reimersholme 6y ago
        Outright racism isn't banned. It's just banned if it's targeted towards minorities.
      - mst 6y ago
    - IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
      Yes. It's going to be hard-right misogynists and racists vs ... "hardcore not-hating-women and generally not caring too much about skin color, with extreme passion"? Less sarcastic: You're equating "conservatism" with "racism and misogyny". And while I tend to agree with that, the reverse does not work: not hating women, for example, does not make one a communist.
      - pochamago 6y ago
        You don't think specifically carving out an exception for hate speech against "the majority" is likely to embolden the far left?
      - deadgunslinger 6y ago
        "Not caring too much about skin colour" The people who only talk about skin colour and have brought it to the forefront of our collective thought, even for people who genuinely didn't think about skin colour. That made me laugh - hard.
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        The following is an un-nuanced, sarcastic, flippant dismissal of left-wing arguments about racism. You can even guess from the URL what it's going to look like. https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/8etk0w/this_picture_is_racist_and_i_am_racist_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/8etk0w/this... It isn't a particularly reasonable criticism of honest intellectuals on the left. It's a completely accurate depiction of low-brow populist left-wing extremists, because they disregard the nuance of their own side's positions and just do the thing in the picture, and then use the conclusion to rationalize vicious hostility and censorship. The mirror image of irrationally hating members of the Blue Tribe isn't rationally hating no one, it's irrationally hating members of the Red Tribe.
    - happytoexplain 6y ago
      Calling the hatred, gleeful love of violence, racism, and misogyny that characterises Voat "hard right" is a disservice to the right. And implying there is an equally awful and opposite thing on the left, and that Reddit will become it, is unrealistic. So their content rules are too strict - that's not an abominable evil.
      - nindalf 6y ago
        We are so used to viewing the world in binary that we need to find binary systems even when they don't exist. GP is one example of this - Voat is a cesspool of hate, the users mostly lean right. Therefore there has to be a counterpart on the left. Second example - Even though non-partisan metrics show that the Republican party have become more extreme with time, the need to be "neutral" makes it impossible to recognise that. Our need for binary means that we have to consider both sides as mirror images of each other even if they might not be. This video explains more - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mICxKmCjF-4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mICxKmCjF-4
        JohnBooty 6y ago
        Even though non-partisan metrics show that the Republican party have become more extreme with time, the need to be "neutral" makes it impossible to recognise that. Yes. Most of us generally have some sort of impulse to build consensus and seek some sort of middle ground. It's just a foundational aspect of social animals in general, I believe. That breaks down when you throw bad actors -- either because they are intentionally behaving in antisocial ways, or because they are profoundly detached from reality -- into the mix. For an example of the former, our impulse for consensus-building and compromise doesn't work if your buddy says "let's go murder ten people for no reason." It would not be a sane compromise to murder five people, or perhaps find ten people and beat them precisely halfway to death. For an example of the latter, there can be no compromise with certain pseudoscience beliefs. We can't compromise with flat-earthers and agree that the earth maybe is sort of an oblong, oval shape halfway between a sphere and a disk.
        6y ago
- epmaybe 6y ago
  I mean, if you're against their rules, fine. But to the original question, it's clearly a model that seems to work.

throwaw4y-plate 6y ago

A functional snark detector would be a billion dollar idea.

ALittleLight 6y ago

I've thought about a related idea, for a forum where only positive posts are allowed. I imagined it as something like a subreddit where a SentimentAnalyzer is a mod, and it deletes any insufficiently positive comments and bans any sufficiently negative users.

squiggleblaz 6y ago
Oh that sounds perfect! I love your idea! I think the President would also find it very agreeable to his only known ideology!
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  Thanks for illustrating a potential hurdle we might have to hop! I'm sure that, either, together we would be able to overcome it by inventing a new solution, or we'd have fun living with it. :)

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago

I agree in regards to cynicism/fatalism, but I fear everyone's cynicism is someone else's obvious ill-that-must-be-named. For example, I consider the relentless attacks on "mainstream journalism" coming from tech people to be repetitive, superficial, ignorant of history (journalism today is leagues ahead of the past), and misguided (phonebook-style "just the facts" neutrality is neither possible nor has it ever been the goal). The same goes for "every politician is corrupt", etc. But I can sort-off see that, to someone with the unfortunate flaw to wrongly entertain believes different from mine, my insistence to criticise every new low of the current US administration, might, in a certain light, also subjectively feel like tired, repetitive cynicism. That's a logical paradox and it has its roots in our discourse no longer being grounded in a shared, objective reality.

squiggleblaz 6y ago
> misguided (phonebook-style "just the facts" neutrality is neither possible nor has it ever been the goal) > That's a logical paradox and it has its roots in our discourse no longer being grounded in a shared, objective reality. Don't you contradict yourself? (Nb. I don't know anything about SSC. But I also think some kind of curated discussion is doomed to failure; although it may be interesting to its subscribers, it will never make a dent what is generally read and contributed to. Even if it is moderately successful, those who say "social media discussions are terrible" will continue to say "social media discussions are terrible", since those who want to use Twitter will continue to use Twitter, and that will always be more than those who use Curato. Just for the simple reason that people want to contribute. Probably split agreement/quality moderation is desirable and then crafting individual feeds so that you see quality posts you will probably disagree with more so than low-quality posts that you will probably disagree with. Threaded forums like HN also seem to get better contributions than person-based social media.)

wutbrodo 6y ago

I'm a participant on a political discussion forum that enforces strong civility norms (eg anti-snark), and it very much works. It's very popular these days to say that civility norms are a Trojan horse for enforcing conformity. But the breadth of viewpoints I've seen expressed there is 10x as high as anywhere else, and conversations are consistently polite, insightful, and intellectually honest. It turns out that filtering out stupidity and emotional incontinence leads to adult conversation. More importantly, the norms make any given person feel safe acting like an adult, even if they'd otherwise be inclined not to. This is a big problem with much Internet discourse: putting thought and nuance into a comment and taking your interlocutor seriously is easily deflated with mockery and disdain for "tryhards" or "effortposting". The natural equilibrium is obviously going to be that even people inclined towards intellectual honesty end up in the mud flinging shit at others. Consistent, high-quality moderation around civility prevents the temperature from rising and allows you to actually learn something from every exchange. (It doesn't hurt that the filter effect of these norms mean that the average commenter ends up pretty intelligent: even when someone is wrong, I tend to learn something) Tldr: the norms you're describing work very well IME