Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
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Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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Shaming.
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Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
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Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
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Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
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Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
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Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
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Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
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Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
I'm going to talk about what the Boring Company is doing and why I think it is not only not a terrible idea, but actively a good idea!
Preamble:
This is a complicated idea with a lot of moving parts, both metaphorically and literally. You will have totally reasonable questions! Hopefully they will be answered by the time I reach the end, but keep reading until you get to the end; in written format I can only answer questions one at a time, and your specific question might take longer to get to.
In addition, this is describing the system that I think Elon Musk is working on. He hasn't announced that this is what he's working on - it's guesswork and theorycrafting by me - but there is some evidence to it.
A summary: Elon Musk is attempting to redesign urban and suburban transportation on a grand scale, so thoroughly that the majority of commuters choose to use this system because it's better. This is not a thing you accomplish by building a few tunnels under Las Vegas. The Loop is a prototype of a prototype of a prototype; the beginnings can be seen there, but claiming his plans are invalid because of Loop's problems is like criticizing the concept of trains based on Locomotion #1's terrible speed.
Elon Musk has a unique goal: to make a fast inexpensive public transportation system.
Uber and Lyft have a similar goal! They want to make a fast public transportation system, and they have succeeded! They don't care about inexpensive, and in fact they can't accomplish inexpensive, because drivers are expensive. They're working on self-driving vehicles, and this will help, but it won't solve the issue because Uber and Lyft need lots of roads, roads take up land, and land is also expensive. Note that land isn't just financially expensive, it's valuable - we only have so many square meters of sunlight surface on this planet, and it's a shame we're using it on transportation. This is opportunity-cost even if we don't normally count it as a cost of roads; it's kinda factored in right now because we don't have an alternative, but we could have an alternative and we should consider land usage as part of cost.
Car manufacturers also have a similar goal! They want to make a fast inexpensive transportation system, and they have succeeded! They've abandoned "public" by requiring people to buy into the system with a large upfront expenditure (specifically, "buying a car".) This allows them to get rid of that whole "pay for a driver" thing - the passenger is the driver. It's not as inexpensive as it could be, though, because cars need lots of roads, thus land, thus expense.
Public transport systems also have a similar goal! They want to make an inexpensive public transportation system, and they have succeeded! But it's not fast. In fact, it cannot be fast. Group transportation is intrinsically slow; putting more people on a vehicle either requires frequent stops which slows down everyone else on board, or it requires stops at junction nodes which implies transfers which also take a lot of time. Short-to-mid-distance buses, trains, and subways cannot match uncongested cars, and you can test this on Google Maps by going to a city of your choice, picking two positions, and twiddling with the "Start At" option until you find the fastest times for cars and the fastest times for public transportation; in almost all cases, cars are significantly faster, and I've never found a case where cars are more than a minute slower.
(Airplanes have the same problem, but they're fast enough that people put up with it; nevertheless, an airplane trip still involves an hour or two of bureaucracy and waiting on either side, and chances are good you're not landing at the exact time you'd prefer to. Long-distance trains also have the same problem and the same solution, specifically, "we put up with it because the speed makes it worth it". In both cases, avoiding all that added complexity would make them significantly better. If you can think of a way to accomplish that without a drastic price increase you will become extremely rich.)
tl;dr: Transportation has traditionally been "fast, inexpensive, public; pick two", and Elon Musk is trying to pick all three at the same time.
The Basic Idea
If you haven't heard of the Boring company or the Las Vegas Loop, here's the concept:
Elon Musk thinks tunnels can be built for much cheaper than they previously could be. He is building a large underground network under Las Vegas, with something like 45 stops (this number keeps increasing as they add more to the plan). You will walk up to a stop, request a car, and travel to any other stop in the network. You can do this today, although right now they only have 3 stops, but construction continues.
This is literally the basis of the plan; "let's make tunnels and drive cars through them". I acknowledge this sounds dumb, but it may actually be the best way to accomplish Fast, Inexpensive, and Public.
Let's tackle the easy ones first.
Boring Company tunnels are public because you don't need to buy in with a large investment to use them. You can just show up at a stop, pay a fare, and ride a vehicle to wherever you want to go.
Boring Company tunnels are fast . . . sort of . . . because it's point-to-point transportation. The vehicle is ideally already at the stop, or close by, when you request it, and it takes you directly to your destination, as long as your destination is on the system. This "on the system" limitation is a flaw! We'll get back to that, though.
Boring Company cars currently require drivers, which is expensive. They've said multiple times that this is a stopgap until they have self-driving working. I see no reason to doubt them and the rest of this post is going to take on faith that they'll get self-driving working. Again, prototype of a prototype of a prototype. If you're skeptical about self-driving in general, note that as of this writing there are multiple companies running public services in multiple cities; if you're skeptical about Tesla self-driving, well, me too, but they can always license it. I'm going to just accept this part as solved-in-the-next-decade-one-way-or-another.
Boring Company tunnels are inexpensive because oh god this is where the complicated part starts
Price
Tunnels are, traditionally, very expensive.
There's a lot of reasons for this. Cost disease, in general, is one of the big ones, and if Boring Company gets hit by cost disease then this entire thing might be doomed. I think they're more resistant to this because they are not having cities come to them asking for services, they are going to cities to propose services, and if they're expensive, they won't get any contracts. Note that Boring Company has already turned down a contract because the company was going to waste a lot of money on things that weren't the tunnel, and they just didn't want to be a part of that. I'm going to just cross my fingers that this doesn't happen.
Tunnel size is another big one. Tunnels get much more expensive as they get larger. Train tunnels need to be surprisingly large; they need to hold a train that's big enough for people to stand up in and walk around in. They also need to hold some kind of emergency exit system. With trains, this traditionally hasn't been compatible with the train rails themselves; the cross-ties are a tripping hazard. If you have to run a second extra walkway next to your train then that makes your tunnels even larger. Finally, you need a lot of emergency equipment. The reason this is required is that stations are rather far apart; if stations were closer, the safety regulations let you basically say "look, there's an exit right there, just walk to the exit". Far-apart stations cause significant added tunnel expenses.
The biggest issue, surprisingly, is the underground stations. The most common way of making an underground station is as simple as it is costly:
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Knock down all the buildings above the station
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Dig a giant rectangular hole
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Reinforce the top of the hole
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Fill the top of the hole back in
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Build new buildings on top
This isn't a lack of foresight on the part of the builders, this is actually how it tends to be done. Underground stations are horribly expensive, and this has consequences for the rest of the system. Remember how I kind of skimmed past "far-apart stations cause significant tunnel expenses"? Well, they do, but this is still cheaper than building more underground stations!
This is how the Boring Company is going to solve tunnel price:
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Cars are much smaller than trains [citation needed] and don't require as much sheer size.
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Cars travel on concrete, not rail, and this surface is perfectly suited for passenger exit, meaning that you don't need an extra passenger lane as long as there's enough room to get past the cars. (Note: in the current Loop tunnels, there is, even though it's not obvious in a lot of the videos that have been posted. It's not comfortable, but it's enough for emergency evac.)
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We can reduce the necessary emergency equipment by having frequent stations. Trust me on this for now! I'll get back to this one very quickly.
All of this put together makes Boring Company tunnels a whole lot cheaper than train tunnels.
Stations
Twice, now, I've glossed past issues with stations. The Las Vegas Loop requires stations at every stop so people can get on and off; our emergency system also requires frequent stations. These can both be solved by having lots of stations.
but wait, I thought stations were expensive Nope! Stations are cheap. Underground stations are expensive. The solution is that you just put your stations above-ground. Any parking lot can become a station terminal, as can underground floors of already-constructed buildings.
This works for Boring Company cars because car station positioning is far more flexible than train station positioning is. Train stations have to be long because trains are long; cars are short and so car stations can have basically any layout. Trains run on rails, which have extremely low friction - this is good from an efficiency perspective, but means that trains cannot handle significant slopes without expensive equipment like cable cars. If trains can't handle slopes then above-ground stations for underground rails simply aren't possible. Meanwhile, the minimum footprint of a full-fledged aboveground car station connecting to an underground network is the same footprint as a small house; a tunnel up, a tunnel down, and a few parking spaces, done.
Now we have cheap stations! We can toss a station at every casino on the Las Vegas Loop and not think twice about it. Our tunnels become smaller because we don't need as much emergency equipment, and our trips are faster because you can enter and exit from the cars in more places.
This is a reasonable solution. But it's not a great solution. We still have to drop people off at stations and pick people up at stations; what if someone doesn't have a station nearby? What if someone wants a car from their house off in a suburb or true rural area? Do we need to build tunnels to every single neighborhood, and then require that people walk across half their neighborhood to get home? It's 108 degrees out right now, I'm not walking in that weather. Screw that. And worst, we still need significant land dedicated to this system for the parking-lot terminuses, and land, as I've mentioned, is expensive.
We can do better.
Stationless Point-To-Point
This is where I move into speculation territory. But I really do think this is the plan.
We have an underground network of self-driving vehicles. We have cheap entry and exit tunnels. This is all we need to finish the entire system.
We keep our entry and exit tunnels, and we put them everywhere (which also solves our emergency exit requirements.) However, we get rid of the stations. The tunnels are simply a way of transiting from the underground network to the aboveground road network. "The aboveground road network", you ask? Sure; we're going to co-opt the aboveground road network for part of this. We're not using it for long-distance travel, so we can get rid of the giant tangles of freeways and onramps. But we are using it for last-mile travel, because it's there.
When you request a vehicle, one shows up at your doorway. You get inside and it heads to the nearest convenient tunnel entrance. Most of your trip is spent underground, and then it pops back up into the sunlight to bring you straight to your destination.
No stations, low land usage, point-to-point congestionless travel.
That's the actual goal.
Common Objections
Moved to its own comment due to character count limitations.
Conclusion
The goal of the Boring Company is to make the first fast inexpensive public transportation system. Cars are fast and kinda inexpensive, but not public; Uber/Lyft are fast and public, but expensive; trains and buses are inexpensive and public, but not fast. Elon Musk is trying to get all three at once, and the decisions being made are in service to that. The thing being designed really could not exist before self-driving vehicles; it is a truly 21st-century transportation system and hopes to redesign the urban landscape on a level that we haven't seen in a century.
I have no idea if it will succeed.
Gab - hacked. Truth social - hacked. What if they come for us? The rdrama codebase probably isn't perfectly secure! Chrome or firefox has layers of sandboxes, a hundred different gadgets like 'stack protection' or 'W xor X', and still has a new RCE every week. rdrama can probably be trivially owned if someone googles all the dependency versions for a few hours. also, lol commit history, 'sneed'. If that happens - what leaks? i guess just associations between stored ip addresses (if they are) and post histories. And IP can reveal a lot, or nothing, depending on where you live, ISP, etc. Combine that with a post history referencing improvements you made to your house or your occupation ... might be bad.
Practically, seems incredibly unlikely anyone will care enough to do anything, it's a small community and the essay format gets in the way of 'omg these rightwingers grr'. But, always good to ponder potential security issues. Also, you wanted content, so content.
I noticed that the comment counts don't seem to line up with the total comments on this post, and a couple others. Do we already have shadow bans in place here, or is this just some delay issue?
As the title says. I noticed it while poking at Zorba's profile, and clicked the button thinking it would tell me what it does. All I got was "help message sent". So uh, sorry @ZorbaTHut. But seriously, what does that button do?
Hi guys, I'm @idio3 from rdrama, one of the main jannies there. I like the idea of you running an offsite, but I'm absolutely floored by the implementation.
Now I get that there are features of the main site that wouldn't be appropriate for you guys, since you're looking for a different sort of discussion and atmosphere than we are. Longpostbot, annoying graphical and user-nerfing awards, bardbot, etc - it makes perfect sense to remove those. But other decisions I just don't understand. Most notably - what the hell is your beef with Marseys? Why don't image uploads work? It's like you guys intentionally wanted to preclude people from attempting to have fun :marseyshrug:, with the changes being essentially limited to cutting out as many of our features as you could get your hands on...
Anyway, if you could illuminate the rationale for these things, I'd greatly appreciate it! :marseyblowkiss:
be mottizens
set up own website
fork dramacode
remove 90% of features
manage to break the other 10% of features somehow
True story
Do you have some separate web app? I don't really see what the difference is between this and something with Angular or whatever.
Just wanted to wish you guys luck despite any little growing pains you're having! Have fun over here guys!
I think anyone who's been watching this switchover has noted it hasn't been the smoothest. I'm still kinda decompressing from that and I figured I'd write up why, just so you could all marvel at the ridiculous chain of catastrophes.
So.
We get the site up. People register their accounts. People start almost immediately reporting 429 errors when registering.
429 Too Many Requests is an error that means a user has done too much stuff lately, commonly known as "rate limiting". A lot of the site is rate limited, but it should be rate limited well above what an actual human will do. For example, the account creation is rate-limited at 10 per day per person; if you need more than ten accounts every day then uh maybe you're not behaving quite like we want.
Of course, people weren't making ten accounts per person; rate limiting was broken.
We looked into the rate limiting code. Rdrama runs on a service called Cloudflare, which relays connections and does a bunch of fancy caching and performance optimization and also doesn't provide service if you're farming kiwis. An annoying thing about this kind of a service is that it makes it a little trickier to figure out "who" someone is; Cloudflare includes that information on requests, but it's not in the normal place. The rate limiting code was using the Cloudflare-specific IP info. Problem: We're not on Cloudflare. So that info was just wrong. I took out the Cloudflare-specific stuff and the problem did not get fixed in any way.
Well, Cloudflare does all this fancy optimization (it's called "reverse proxying", please don't ask why), but actually, so do we. The Motte runs on the same server setup as The Vault, and The Vault is specifically designed to be extremely cacheable. We've got our own little similar frontend server doing something identical, and all connections, including Motte connections, go through it. This means we needed to get the IP from our own reverse proxy, using a different technique, which we did, and which also entirely failed to fix the issue.
At this point I tried to disable the rate limiter entirely. The rate limiter refused to disable. We'll get back to this one.
The reason, I guessed, the reverse-proxy IP didn't work is that our reverse proxy is actually behind another reverse proxy. It's reverse proxies all the way down. You may not like it, but this is what peak web development looks like. Anyway, we were getting one layer further up, but we needed to be another layer further up. The hosting service I use does in fact have a switch for enabling this; it's called Proxy Protocol. I turned Proxy Protocol on and the entire site instantly went down. So I flipped it back and the site came back up. Then I did this a few more times just to be sure it wasn't a coincidence. It wasn't.
It turns out that the reverse proxy run by me requires some very specific configuration settings to be compatible with the Proxy Protocol setting. The problem is that I'm running this proxy in sort of a weird way. Most people using this server architecture have, like, an entire devops team. I don't! It's just me. And I don't really know what I'm doing. So cue half an hour of occasional outages as I try something new. It is worth noting that some of the changes I made also broke the site, but I was suspicious that the two changes had to be made together to work at all, so sometimes I'd break the site, then I'd break the site in another way, then I'd sit there for a minute hoping it worked, and it wouldn't, and then I'd revert both changes.
Finally I figured out the magic incantation! The site worked, we got IPs, the rate limiting was functional. The 429 error was forever vanquished! I looked at the site, and checked the perf charts, and noted that we were capping the CPU on the absolute-bottom-barrel server I'd chosen, so I figured, hey, I tried moving servers before as part of a test, this should be fine, let's just fork over an extra $12/mo and boost the server a bunch, and I did this, and the site broke entirely.
I spent another thirty minutes trying to fix it; if anyone noticed the site being entirely down for a while, well, that was me trying to untangle what was wrong. I tried connecting directly to the site from its own computer; it didn't work. I spent twenty minutes analyzing this and eventually realized I was just doing it wrong. Worked fine once I did it wrong. I eventually decided this was a routing issue and had a deep suspicion.
See, Proxy Protocol was set using a switch on the hosting provider's GUI. But that's sketchy as hell - why is it a manual switch? I went back and checked and sure enough it had gotten turned off. So I turned it back on.
Site back up and running.
As near as I can tell, there is a switch on the GUI. But this switch is also overridden by some settings in my configuration. Importantly, it's overridden irregularly; sometimes you'll do something, and it'll say "oh shucks, gotta go check that switch!" Because I hadn't realized this, it went and checked it and dutifully turned it off again.
I think I've fixed that now.
So, what was the deal with rate limiting not turning off?
If you use Kubernetes to run a process, and you tell it you want the latest version of a Docker image, it will download that latest version every time you restart the process.
If you tell it you want a specific labeled version, then it won't. It'll just use whatever it has, even if the label has changed.
So if you changed from "latest" to "dev" and "main" . . . then things just don't update when you think they will, and this change happens silently unless you're aware of what Kubernetes is about to do.
I think I've fixed that now too.
I bet this new server makes things faster, doesn't it?
Nope.
Turned out the CPU usage wasn't even coming from The Motte. It was an Archive Warrior I was running on that just to soak up some extra bandwidth. Apparently it's just stupidly CPU-hungry?
I think I've fixed that also.
And that was my day, more or less.
How's your day going?
(Extra thanks to the various people who were helping out on Discord, incidentally, especially Snakes who fixed a whole bunch of not-quite-as-critical-but-still-pretty-dang-important stuff while I was fighting with the servers.)
(Edit: I forgot to mention that I also spent a few hours trying to unclog an HVAC drain line so it wouldn't flood the house. That doesn't even feel like the same day anymore.)
I liked to post in the Friday fun threads what video games I've been playing recently. Sometimes I recommend the games, and sometimes I ask for recommendations.
I've always enjoyed talking about video games. But themotte has made me picky over the years. Its not just talk that I want. It is thinking, understanding, and discussion of video games that interest me. Video games are mostly a mental activity for me, and so diving into a mental discussion about them often enhances my enjoyment.
I didn't post in the Friday fun thread about what I've been playing, so I'll post now. And I'd like to know what others are playing.
The post I would have written:
This week I've been hooked on factorio (again). I've done many playthroughs of this game. A few vanilla playthroughs (some multiplayer and some not). A krastorio 1 mod playthrough. A few different attempts at the bob's, angels, and seablock mods (never could get into them, too much work, and not enough reward). A krastorio II and space exploration playthrough.
This week though I have been playing with just the space exploration mod. There has been some hints in blogposts that factorio might have an expansion, and that the expansion might be related to the space exploration mod. I thought I'd try and wait for that expansion. But my patience has failed me.
Playing space exploration without the krastorio II mod has been surprisingly way more different than I would have expected. The major difference in my mind is that krastorio II makes the starting world gameplay last too long, and gives too many advantages. I never thought this would be a real problem, but I've never managed to truly beat a space exploration game before. And I realized part of the problem is that krastorio II ties you to the homeworld too strongly. While space exploration on its own forces you off planet just for the sake of some quality of life improvements. For example, you have to go to space in order to get the logistics network chests. The tech is not unlockable based on ground items alone. I don't remember if krastorio II mod combination forced me to go to space, but I do remember that the belt inserters made so many logists aspects so much simpler that the need for drone based logistics didn't seem as pressing. There were also special ground based fabricator buildings for Krastorio II that were larger and much faster (matching the space based ones). But with just the space exploration mod I'm realizing there is an intentional difference. Either you can choose land based production to get productivity bonuses. (and usually the first steps in refinement for special resources). Or you can choose space based production for speed bonuses.
Top level posts should include:
-
a short description of what you're going for
-
a link to the CSS (on gist.github.com or another pastebin that doesn't randomly delete old pastes)
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and an image link to a screenshot.
Like this:
I'm trying to sort of imitate the visual style of old Reddit: no icons, limited width, not much margin space.
https://gist.github.com/FeepingCreature/907b05dd498435cb5a193ebbb5f39846
https://i.imgur.com/R2oBUt5_d.webp?maxwidth=9999&fidelity=high
A suggestion: to avoid especially acrimonious discussion and SSC-posting being our only hallmarks as an independent community, let’s discuss things we can generally come together on.
In a Culture Peace thread, I’d expect to see:
-
An explanation of part of one’s own culture/group identity/tribally specific hobby one feels is misunderstood, without denigrating those who misunderstand
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Events or news stories which genuinely sow harmony instead of discord
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Suggestions for additional Culture Peace actions we can do on The Motte, elsewhere online, and in real life
Right now, only about 30 comments show in the megathread without users clicking "show more" button. This unfortunately has the effect of burying a lot of cultural war discussion, aside from the top few posts, at a time when we're trying to encourage more users to jump over to this site with more comment. For reference, the topic has about 180 comments right now, so by default, 5/6ths of the comments are hidden.
When I use new.reddit I feel like content is being hidden from me on purpose.
It is not quite as bad here. But compare the previous site with here when I collapse threads
Someone wrote some CSS for the Astral Codex Ten when it first launched to make it not suck so much. Can anyone do something so that
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if there is content I get to see it on my screen?
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make following threads easier than counting the number of bars on the left hand side while remembering to distinguish bars-from-threading from bars-from-blockquoting?
Share your CSS, discuss themes/styles/the site's default look/whatever.
I just picked random elements and edited them until it worked, because I couldn't take this GNOMEd infinite whitespace new reddit look even for 30 minutes. My CSS is garbage, relies on a 1080p desktop browser, is probably full of code that does nothing or doesn't need to be as specific, might actually break one or two site functions, etc. but at least it doesn't violate my eyes anymore.
There is a list of defined colors (like --primary-dark1) that comes from the theme, but I don't see how to change them manually except one by one using more CSS. I use the default ("TheMotte") one.
Keep in mind, de gustibus non est disputandum. I'm mostly posting this so others can iterate faster and make proper good-looking themes. If you want to have slim text without the cringe inconsistent layout/color changes and are in a hurry, reading the comments and deleting the sections you don't want should most likely work.
/*unbold buttons*/
.btn {
font-weight: 400 !important;
}
/*hide "is a reply to comment by" link on every single subcomment*/
div > .ml-2 {
display: none !important;
}
/*reorder upvote buttons / userinfo / contents*/
.comment-anchor {
display: flex;
flex-direction: row;
flex-wrap: wrap;
gap: 0px 8px;
padding: 1px;
}
.comment-anchor div:nth-child(1) {
order: 1;
}
.comment-anchor div:nth-child(2) {
order: 3;
flex: 1 100%;
}
.comment-anchor div:nth-child(3) {
order: 2;
}
/*colors*/
body > .container {
background-color: #C0C0C8 !important;
}
#thread, #userpage {
background-color: #C0C0C8;
}
.comment-section {
background-color: #F0F0F8;
}
/*add borders, make slim*/
.comment {
margin-top: 0.1rem !important;
border: 1px solid var(--primary-dark1);
margin-bottom: 1px;
}
.comment .comment-collapse-desktop {
padding-right: 8px !important;
border-left: 1px solid var(--primary-dark1) !important;
}
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Have you found a problem in the site? Do you want to make a suggestion on improvement? Do you just want to say "hi everyone"? Post it here!
If you'd like to help with development, check out the Github and the dev Discord. We have a practically infinite list of small things that need to be fixed or changed.
Reasons why TERFs are wrong about moving off Reddit
Transmisic TERFs are moving off Reddit, and that's a good thing, but they're making hylarous statements about its administration. In this essay, my esteemed colleague Dr Penelope Oaken will explain why their claims are TOTALLY WRONG AND INSANE
As the fediverse allows only posts up to 10Kchars I'll split her thesis in two parts.
if you know any transmisic cockroach, feel free to tag it
Select of their "reasons" and some refutations of them.
In this writeup I will mark some items with an obelus (†) for reasons which will become clear.
1 The mostly male reddit userbase overreports female subs, users and posts creating unsustainable amounts of work for female subreddit mods
This is mostly true; The "manosphere" / MRA & misogyny, hatred, harassment, and violence-promoting audiences on Reddit are responsible for the vast majority of abusive & false reporting - their culture / audience has been harnessed, since GamerGate, to abuse minorities & exploit any vector to silence free speech.
HOWEVER
Reddit has responded extremely well to actioning these false and abusive reports, as well as instances of clear "mass report" dogpiles.
There's now a "Ignore Reports" function that allows moderators to ignore more reports on an item - to prevent having to remove them from queue over and over, and a function to report Abuse of the Report Button.
2 Reddit admins don’t respond to serious and repeated reports of harassment and abuse of female users, mods, and subs.
Three weeks ago, Reddit admins published a RedditSecurity roadmap acknowledging that they're identifying and focusing on hatred aimed at feminine people - https://old.reddit.com/r/redditsecurity/comments/tyiymt/prevalence_of_hate_directed_at_women/ - and we crossposted it to AHS and stickied it. It was also crossposted to /r/TwoXChromosomes and other places on Reddit.
So this claim is false.
3 Reddit bans lesbians and lesbian subs for their same sex attraction and paints them as transphobic but not men who fetishize lesbians via porn, who are allowed to be cis only.
The "Reddit bans lesbians and lesbian subs" is spin rhetoric - Reddit doesn't ban lesbians, reddit doesn't ban lesbian subreddits, and reddit protects lesbians and lesbians subreddits from being attacked or harassed with hatred under Sitewide Rule 1.
This "Reddit bans lesbians and lesbian subs" claim is a lie carried forward from the banning of /r/GenderCritical's ecosystem of subreddits which existed to do several things, chief among them promote hatred of transgender people, especially transgender women.
At AHS, they've repeatedly documented how those subreddits were used overwhelmingly to platform hate speech, including violent rhetoric, targeting transgender people and especially transgender women. They've documented how those subreddits were often populated with tracked misogynists, anti-Semites, White Identity Extremists, and other Racially Motivated Violent Extremists and Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremists.
We don't have access to the level of data that would be needed to prove the hypothesis that these subreddits were astroturfed with huge amounts of sockpuppets, but we strongly suspect that should the question of "Why did these accounts get suspended / these subreddits shuttered" ever get litigated over in a court of law, Reddit is probably going to point out that a large amount of these accounts were inauthentic and that the subreddit operators were manipulating engagement and public perception. We can say that because a number of scientific studies have been done to identify whether the "positions" espoused in GC "communities" are replicated in the general public without the introduction of self-selection bias, and it's been found that GC "positions" are not reflected in the general public - and other studies have found that i.e. the GC "community" and positions and PR campaigns on Twitter are highly inauthentic and driven by media manipulation and a significant amount inauthentic, inorganic behaviour.
/r/GenderCritical marketed itself as "the largest women's forum on the Internet", but evidence points in every other direction.
They allow violent female mutilating sexual content (documented partially in r\/BanFemaleHateSubs)
This claim is false. Reddit's Sitewide Rule 1 prohibits threats of violence. One suspects that because the qualifier sexual is tacked on here, that the content being described is consensual BDSM content. However even sexual content on Reddit is not allowed, by Sitewide Rule 1, to threaten or intimidate.
r\/BanFemaleHateSubs does a good job of organising a community to focus on subreddits that are undertaking hatred of women, and getting that activity reported to Reddit under SWR1. They would likely do better by adopting a set of policies that exclude amplifying and engaging erotica content except where such content is clearly threatening violence or hatred and/or is clearly non-consenting, and would likely do better by recruiting leaders who were not core operators of /r/GenderCritical ecosystem subreddits, including /r/LGBDropTheT -
i.e. they would do better if the public and Reddit admins could believe that they are not core to an ongoing effort to platform bad faith claims of victimhood to disguise attacks on the rights, dignities, and liberties of others.
Because Sitewide Rule 1 explicitly states "While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect those who promote attacks of hate or who try to hide their hate in bad faith claims of discrimination." - i.e., Reddit admins listen to people, not to Karpman Drama Triangles.
Most of the subs for women are squatted on by men, fetishists, Men's Rights Activists, or TRA Extremists including necessary info like /r/Abortion, /r/Feminism
Translation: Many subreddits with obvious names of specific women's issues are operated by user accounts not under the control of FDS's clique, and in much the same way that certain white identity extremists, "dirtbag leftists", and sociopathic manipulator groups tried (and failed) to extort control of those communities away from the people operating them, FDS (which we can clearly see is just GenderCritical rebranded) is once again publicly _Going Their Own Way".
hmmm. That sounds familiar.
Oh well
Onward
Powermods
† +1
"Powermods" is a shibboleth that sprang from /r/friendly_society - a "backroom" collaboration subreddit between the leaders of /r/the_donald, /r/cringeanarchy, /r/metacanada, and other hate groups -- including virulently racist, sexist, and violent RMVEs and IMVEs -- with the express purpose of harassing moderators who enforced the Sitewide Rules (Content Policy is what it was called at the time) and who opposed racism and other forms of hatred - to harass them off the site. [Background of /r/Friendly_Society here: https://old.reddit.com/r/TopMindsOfReddit/comments/f9l717/reddit_today_announced_that_it_would_be_removing/fisqsxj/). It's emerged as "five moderators control 500 subreddits" (where the five moderators in question allegedly "controlling" huge swathes of Reddit were a CSS artist, a crisis counsellor, an automoderator regex tech specialist, a community engagement public face moderator, and an anti-harassment bouncer mod) before settling on "Powermods".
"Ironically" the real powermods are the people who were involved in /r/friendly_society and who are still undertaking an at-scale effort to Make Reddit Die.
The amount of exposure to depraved content the subreddit mods dealt with is traumatizing.
Absolutely true. However, this is true everywhere on the Internet except in private or invite-only spaces such as invite-only Discords, Slacks, private Twitter accounts / groups, private subreddits, etc.
This is especially true of any group or individual who is feminine.
This problem is not a Reddit-specific problem; It is a problem which Reddit has committed to addressing (See 2 above)
Additionally, there's entire networks of invite-only private subreddits on Reddit which host robust and mature communities, predicated on various qualifications. There's zero reason why FDS couldn't operate their own private communities / invite-only communities on Reddit ... unless their presence on Reddit is to recruit and be the public face of a media manipulation / PR campaign.
Men are coordinating offsite to report brigade and spam female oriented subreddits with bannable content (even tiny ones) – resulting in the banning of many female oriented communities for no reason.
† +1
While it's absolutely true that there are groups which co-ordinate offsite of Reddit to report brigade and to spam target communities with objectionable content --------
A: Reddit has means built into its infrastructure to mitigate abusive report brigades (as has been mentioned before) and
B: The « Communities being "spammed" with objectionable content to "get them banned" » lie originated with white identity extremist media manipulator groups operating on Reddit with the goal of instigating stochastic harassment of any good faith groups that sought to advocate for moderation and anti-hatred sitewide rules.
Reddit admins do not, and never have, shuttered any communities because they were raided or interfered with by "brigades" posting objectionable material.
Reddit admins close subreddits as a last resort, and only after the admins follow a process to prompt community operators to moderate their communities to a minimum standard of the Sitewide Rules and the User Agreement and applicable laws.
Reddit admins close subreddits practically only when the operators of the subreddit flatly refuse to follow the Sitewide Rules, the User Agreement, or applicable law.
At this point, any individual or group repeating the « Communities being "spammed" with objectionable content to "get them banned" » lie, is simply signalling to their audience that they are part and parcel of the mafia that's been trying to Make Reddit Die over the past six years.
Reddit Admins continue to allow the manosphere to have a presence on their website, resulting in real world abuse, rape, and acts of terrorism.
We have to agree that Reddit admins can and should do more to scrape gender-based ideologically motivated violent extremism and extremists off the service. We have to agree that these gender-based IMVEs have been connected to documented incidents of violence. We also have to observe that Reddit may be under subpoena and/or other law enforcement requirements to not interfere with ongoing investigations, and that in such cases, the appropriate venue for redress of these complaints is to unite to oust the misogynistic and bigoted politicians controlling or blockading the legitimate ends of government, and get government working once more to effectuate actual justice.
Quality posters have been harrassed into deleting their content off the subreddit and have no copyright protection.
Every person that submits their own content to Reddit retains their copyright, and their copyright protections. They license the use of the content to Reddit for specific conditions as laid out in the User Agreement.
And the way to keep people from being harassed into deleting their posts and comments from a given subreddit is to recruit MANY moderators who understand and recognise harassment and take moderation actions to counter and prevent that harassment.
Or, for example, having a private, invite-only subreddit.
FDS subreddit as one of the last female-only subs
It is not.
has been targeted by admins with unfairly applied rules
† +1
It has not been; The admins have required FDS to enforce the Sitewide Rules and comport with the Moderation Guidelines, which is required of all community operators.
with the intent to eventually ban the sub,
This is now at least the third rhetorical talking point in their "reasons" which is directly lifted from the "Make Reddit Die" (†) crowd -
In conclusion:
Their "reasons" for "abandoning Reddit" are directly shown to be -- at best -- outright misrepresentations and at worst are direct manipulation campaigns and lies propagated by a group of media manipulators who are pushing a very public campaign to try to Make Reddit Die, and this is very clearly the second time that GenderCritical op has "quit Reddit" in a public stink.
I really want the anti-misogyny social justice effort on Reddit which counters and prevents harassment of women, to have better leaders and trustees than a group which clearly has been performatively filling the space in order to recruit for a mass-media-manipulation operation and couch attacks on the rights, dignity, and liberties of others in attempts to hide their hate in obvious bad faith claims of discrimination. We all should want this effort to be led and worked on by people with a clear good faith goal to counter and prevent hatred, harassment, and violence aimed at women.
FDS is clearly not that group. So I can only say "Thank Goddess" that they're stepping away.
I hope this clears things out
I was looking at the new movies and albums coming out and realized how "diversity" in America just seems to mean "add more black people and women" If I asked you to name 10 black or white celebs, I'm sure you'd have no problem naming people both old or new.
However, if I asked you to name asian celebs? hispanic celebs? Arab celebs? Would it be as easy? what about politicians, people of power? I bet you could name more black people of power than people of another colored minority.
Black organizations, like BLM, also do little for other races and its most vocal supporters also do little to help other races or even show the same sensitivity they demand for themselves. BLM expects universal support but have heard little from the BLM people about Chilean children kidnappings, Native American denial of benefits, or even Ukraine
There's so much hype and concern about black people being represented but there's nothing being said about other races being represented and it's a shame because until that happens no one can say they're about equality and representation.
An essay I wrote a while back arguing that dialectical naturalism offers a solid footing for ethics. Since it's pretty core to my moral philosophy, I figured what better to toss to the hounds. Enjoy!
You know it's really me because who else would care about RSS. Although Reddit was originally built with explicit RSS support the nested nature of the weekly culture war thread required a slight bit of jury-rigging to show only top-level comments. So the RSS URL for the last thread looked like this: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/wulqxp.rss?depth=1
I tried adding the culture war thread from here into Feedly but it doesn't seem to recognize the format, and instead prompts me to use a paywalled feature to build custom RSS feeds. Can the rdrama code base support RSS?
I'm not a regular poster on /r/TheMotte. I've done a bit of work getting this website up and running and I plan to stick around and try to help a little more, but I don't know that I will contribute much to the discussion. I just wanted to say that I appreciate that there exists a place where people can discuss the sorts of things that get you banned everywhere else, while setting aside their partisan, political, religious motivations (for the most part) and demanding effort and evidence. That's valuable to me, even if I'm not participating. It's important that someone, somewhere, can do that.
So I appreciate everything you guys do. Thanks for being here.