[michaelmrose]

Can you give an example of a thread on /lit that is of notably higher quality than what can be found on reddit and call out specific comments that wouldn't have been made without benefit of anonymity?

I was put off by the gross fire hose of drek on other boards on 4chan when I looked at it initially but note lit seems to have actually reasonable discussions. That said it doesn't look to my eyes notably different from say reddit save for the intermittent random gross like slurs tossed about which add nothing whatsoever. If folks were banned for calling each other slurs one would hope the same people who had something to say could just say it without including the slurs.

Do you have a counter argument?

[siegecraft]

I don't have specific examples as I am not a regular reader of lit, but I can comment on "it doesn't look to my eyes notably different from reddit." The anonymity, lack of up/downvotes, non-hierarchial layout, lack of moderation, and heavy focus on images creates a very different experience from reddit. Some say this leads to better and more organic discussions (I agree for the most part), but I think they're only going to be as good as their community. Anyway, there's no reason you can't use them both.

> specific comments that wouldn't have been made without benefit of anonymity

Open any thread and you will find tons of examples, no reason to post them here. But I expect you meant specific comments that are valuable and insightful? Probably a matter of taste. On reddit it is at least much easier to find highly-rated comments, which is a plus for voting.

[michaelmrose]

I opened many threads and see zero examples of discussion that couldn't have happened here on or Reddit. The only things I see which couldn't be posted here are offensive and worthless. Can you post a single example?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

You see many examples of comments, I'm sure, that look like they could happen anywhere.

And you continue to believe that, right up until you see a comment just like them, that gets someone banned from reddit. And then you're irate, and you wonder why you were banned. But you can't even get much explanation, because having been banned from reddit, they've taken the one way you might use to demand the explanation.

But even that's not the full picture. Sometimes there are people whose "contrariness" is a bit higher than other people's. And they refuse to participate in places where they aren't allowed to say whatever they want, even if pretty much all the time they'd never say anything that would get them banned. Are those people more interesting than others? Who knows, you'll never find their stuff on reddit.

I think in the legal world, you call this over-moderation a "chilling effect". You don't have to censor everyone, it turns out, if you can scare or bully them into self-censoring.

Eventually, I think, everyone sees what we're talking about. It's just by the time it's so overt that even you can't deny it anymore, there won't be much anyone can do about it.

[pseg134]

They’re easy to miss when you are trying not to see them.

[malfist]

Feel free to provide an example of what we're missing

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> If folks were banned for calling each other slurs one would hope the same people who had something to say could just say it without including the slurs.

You'd hope that, but it doesn't work that way.

In a place where you can be banned for the gross slurs, you might be banned for relating some personal anecdote in which you speak of some other person making a gross slur. Why, when you didn't type in the gross slur yourself?

Who knows. Maybe they think you're secretly a klansman, trying to pollute people's brains with the slur without actually saying the slur. Maybe they think you're not sufficiently progressive enough because you actually have a personal history where you were proximate enough to a bigot that you could hear what they were saying. Maybe it really is Orwellian, and you thought the word though you didn't put it in the comment.

But considering the extra effort it would take to post in such a place, always wondering if the next comment will get you banned, why would you bother?

People with interesting things to say will find it difficult to exist, belong, or remain in such a forum.

I don't think you get any of the good, without accepting that some of the bad has to be present too.

These people who do that sort of banning, somewhere in their shriveled little brains actually believe they're making the world a better place.

[michaelmrose]

I don't think we have to choose between no moderation and excessive moderation nor between 100% anonymity and none. Consider our nicks we each chose the level of anonymity we were comfortable with.

I think if you consider the space of probable commenters and comments and the average quality of discussion obtained by the probable commenter that produces a comment you ought to be able to figure out why removing the producers of some comments improves quality of discussion.

Consider a discussion about an interesting new piece of tech into which a commenter inserts an ad for soap. The comment is not worthless it is worse it has negative value because every reader of the thread must consume more noise to get to the signal. The probable future contribution of the commenter is 99.999999% likely to be negative because commenter is obviously a robot pushing spam. If you allow it then soon your threads will be 90% ads and soon 100% ads because actual people will tire of wading through the slop. Then your threads will only be available on archive.org because the spammers murdered you.

Now lets consider an offensive human being. They see everything in the world as a jewish conspiracy against folks like themselves. They ARE capable of normal communication but they are prone to tracking back to their odious and tiresome conspiracies. First the discussion was about finance aaaaaaaaand now we are talking about Jewish people running the world. Most readers experience this commenters words as offensive and tiresome. Some waste mental energy for the nth time debunking the obvious nonsense. In general the perceived quality of the forum declines and the more content like this we have the more value we lose as other readers go elsewhere.

Unlike the robot have something to lose here both ways. Focusing on the folks you lose because they can't use slurs and not the people you lose because they won't hang out some place they get slurred is a fundamental failure of analysis.The poster may be capable of providing valuable contributions we will lose if we drop an instant banhammer here but we have even more to lose by keeping him on with present contributions. Why?

Two factors:

- Smart helpful content takes energy and the kind of person who you actually want to write commentary has many demands on their time because they actually do useful things. By contrast your uncle who doesn't work can cut and paste or type the same screed from memory at spam bot like levels. Given a chance bad commentary will dominate by volume

- The kind of person capable of producing useful comments is dramatically less likely to also produce bigoted screeds because the through and intelligence needed to produce such allows one to either not think like that or at least to talk about finance without injecting such.

That is to say there is high value in each ban and little of value lost per commenter banned. In fact almost all value that might be lost can be retained by watching new commenters and have them receive polite negative feedback or official warnings instead of instantly banning them when the transgressions are not egregious.

If your uncle can control his tenancy to track back to conspiracy theories he can contribute if not then not much of value has been lost.

Again focusing on the folks you lose because they can't use slurs and not the people you lose because they won't hang out some place they get slurred is a fundamental failure of analysis.

Their shriveled little brains are 100% correct.