Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 y…
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.