To allow the clusterfuck of politics inside you need robust filters against torrents of foam, spittle, and incoherent rage. Generally speaking, this means either wise and active moderation or a full-featured set of tools for the users to curate their own feed/timeline. At the moment LW has neither.
Sincere question: Do you think the SSC comments section accomplishes politics while filtering out foam, spittle etc? (or perhaps the comments section there is more robust to simply ignoring bad comments, which isn’t the same on a forum?)
Having no moderator experience, I guess there is probably a lot on that end that I don’t know.
FWIW, I was linked to a SSC post today about “race and criminal justice in America”—so, five-alarm hot button topic—and I quickly read through about half of a super-long comments section, and it was great. Plenty of debate, minimal spittle, collaborative and civil, fact-based and in good faith.
SSC does quite well with politics. I would guess that some of it is because discussion is high-brow, some of it is because other users don’t have problems pointing out that someone is an idiot, but mostly because Scott has little compunctions about banning. For example, at some point he basically banned all vocal NRx people because he didn’t want SSC to be primarily seen as a neoreactionary forum.
SSC also has a fairly user-hostile UI which by now I think is deliberate as Scott doesn’t want to shepherd a large community.
I get the impression that SSC comments have managed to do rational debate better than LW does. People who do bad things there are reliably purged by Scott. The topics are interesting which keeps smart people coming.
Take a population of smart people and regularly cull the most dark-arts/mudslinging/anti-epistemology few %.
I don’t like the SSC comments much because I feel like most of what I say there gets ignored and buried, but I definitely think that SSC is very good at dealing with politics.
To allow the clusterfuck of politics inside you need robust filters against torrents of foam, spittle, and incoherent rage. Generally speaking, this means either wise and active moderation or a full-featured set of tools for the users to curate their own feed/timeline. At the moment LW has neither.
Sincere question: Do you think the SSC comments section accomplishes politics while filtering out foam, spittle etc? (or perhaps the comments section there is more robust to simply ignoring bad comments, which isn’t the same on a forum?)
Having no moderator experience, I guess there is probably a lot on that end that I don’t know.
I think the SSC comments are pretty bad, but I’m not sure they’re any worse on politics than other topics.
FWIW, I was linked to a SSC post today about “race and criminal justice in America”—so, five-alarm hot button topic—and I quickly read through about half of a super-long comments section, and it was great. Plenty of debate, minimal spittle, collaborative and civil, fact-based and in good faith.
SSC does quite well with politics. I would guess that some of it is because discussion is high-brow, some of it is because other users don’t have problems pointing out that someone is an idiot, but mostly because Scott has little compunctions about banning. For example, at some point he basically banned all vocal NRx people because he didn’t want SSC to be primarily seen as a neoreactionary forum.
SSC also has a fairly user-hostile UI which by now I think is deliberate as Scott doesn’t want to shepherd a large community.
I get the impression that SSC comments have managed to do rational debate better than LW does. People who do bad things there are reliably purged by Scott. The topics are interesting which keeps smart people coming.
Take a population of smart people and regularly cull the most dark-arts/mudslinging/anti-epistemology few %.
I don’t like the SSC comments much because I feel like most of what I say there gets ignored and buried, but I definitely think that SSC is very good at dealing with politics.