We’ve seen an uptick in people posting dunks in here that belong in dunk_tank, as well as low-hanging fruit that gets removed from or isn’t allowed in dunk_tank anymore. For context, rule 8 of dunk_tank:
Rule 8: The subject of a post cannot be low hanging fruit, that is comments/posts made by a private person that have low amount of upvotes/likes/views. Comments/Posts made on other instances that are accessible from hexbear are an exception to this.
There’s a reason that dunks are cordoned off to their own comm, some users rightfully don’t want to see reactionary nonsense all the time, even if we’re making fun of the person who said it. /c/cth is a general-purpose comm but it’s NOT for posting some random nobody asshole twitter user’s bad takes, the absolute best course of action to take when you see that stuff out in the wild is to either directly shit on them yourself, or ignore them and don’t give them more attention.
From this point on I’m going to be more stringent about moderating this. I get it, it’s fun to dunk on the libs and the blue checks and the and that’s why we have a whole dedicated comm for that. Any post that’s obviously meant to be “hey look at this piece of shit, let’s laugh at how bad their opinions are, upbears to the left and emojis in chat” belongs in the_dunk_tank. And any super low-hanging fruit doesn’t belong on this site, period (see TDT rule 8 above). We have better things to do with our time than give unearned attention, time and energy to low-follower-count nobodies yelling into the void.
Thanks for your discretion comrades, stay sicko
edit: as others have pointed out, /c/[email protected] is a good place for any and all dunking content not allowed here. Post that ragebait to our comrades at the 'grad, they’ll make good use of it. Also, per rule 9 of TFT dunking on fediverse users is still explicitly allowed so it’s still open season on those in our own backyard.
So the dunk tank should be empty and all posts that once went there should go in [email protected] instead? Because you, the mods, have consistently refused to actually define what “low-hanging fruit” even means. When I raised this point a month ago in the rule 8 announcement thread on TDT, mod replaceable told me he would do “a vibes based analysis on every post” which is clearly a joke, but also clearly not actually an answer.
Bad takes abound in our society, the dunk tank will never be empty.
Continuing to dodge the question
As other people have mentioned both here and when rule 8 was announced, different platforms have different levels of engagement so what’s considered “notable” is going to have a differing level from site to site.
I don’t know that we’ve drawn out like more specific thresholds for different sites but I know we’re still working on getting the feel for it.
Famous, household names like major celebrities or sports players are obviously going to be allowed, as are political figures like senators, congresspeople, heads of state. There’s a sort of moderate level of notability we’re still figuring out, but a good sort of guesstimate area is whether a person has passed milestones like having a wikipedia page, passing 100k subscribers on YouTube or being talked about in newspapers of record, being a leader in an organization of note. Things like that are a good place to start.
If it’s a name you don’t need to explain or you can reasonably explain why an individual you’re posting is a notable person, that’s a good start.
So it actually has nothing to do with number of upvotes/likes/views, which is the ill defined, vibes based metric in the text of the rule, but is actually about notability of the poster, a completely different ill defined, vibes based metric? That’s even more restrictive than the rule as written, which would seem to allow, for example, a post from some random jackass so long as it got an arbitrarily high number under it.
A level of fame is easier to quantify. Upvote counts and Facebook likes can climb to absurd levels from bot activity, like those 350,000 like “AI happy birthday injured babies” or posts someone shared the other day.
It’s going to be a little harder to quantify what level might make that post sufficiently worthy of note.
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A post is low effort/low hanging fruit when few people saw the original, obviously.
But what’s “few”? Where should we draw the line? Yeah, mods can pick some arbitrary number (as is often the case for these kinds of things, it’s the problem of the lump!) but this is also more complicated because there are different standards for different platforms. Like, what number of views on a youtube video is equivalent to what number of upvotes on reddit is equivalent to what number of followers on xitter, etc.? And what about blogs vs news sites? It really does just end up being so blatantly vibes-based.