Comment on Arxiv bans slop
tomenzgg@midwest.social 1 week agoWhen someone proposes, implements or enforces a clearly sensible rule, and someone else brings weird corner case scenarios up, always ask yourself if there’s a conflict of interests.
I can’t tell if I started doing this more as disinformation became more prevalent over the recent years or it’s something I’ve always done; I don’t know where I would’ve picked it up from.
Nevertheless, you’re spot on; it’s an incredibly good rule-of-thumb.
(I just realized it might’ve been funny if I’d responded to this with a weird, corner-case scenario, instead; but it’s late and I can’t think of a good one for it)
lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 week ago
But what if the interests in conflict do not come from the person themself, but someone else forcing the person to take a side they wouldn’t otherwise? Such as mind-controlling aliens? (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)
Serious now. I noticed this from a forum I moderated ~10y ago. The admin always asked us mods and veteran users for feedback, before changing rules; but even for rules we were unanimously in favour of, there was always a bunch of users complaining. The contrast was so obvious it made me check the users’ profiles for context. It was always like this: the user claimed to be “deeply concerned” with the impact of the rule, brought up a thousand corner cases, and then as you checked their profile they were doing exactly what the rule was made against.
For example: the admin implemented a rule that NSFW content needs to discussed in threads tagged “(NSFW)” in the title. One of the users started complaining about the ideal way to format it, and if it actually counts as a NSFW thread if someone used square brackets instead of parentheses. That same user was temp-banned once for spamming multiple threads asking “tell me how to say ‘piss in my mouth’ in [insert language the thread was about]”.