JulianRota
2yr ago
I don't think Richard Spencer is very significant. Yes, he has 70k-ish followers. But I don't think that alone means much - some may be fake, some may be hate-reading, or just wondering what he's going to say next. If you flip through his most recent dozen or so tweets, engagement is pretty low - replies and retweets mostly in the single digits and likes in the low double digits.
I agree that panicking about them taking over anything is foolish. I disagree that banning them is good policy. Fundamentally, actual Nazism is stupid and annoying. Why ban them unless you think their arguments are extremely persuasive? They're not. Banning them just gives them a persecution complex and makes people think they are cool and dangerous - their ideas must be really great, or they wouldn't bother silencing them! Wanna rebel from the system? Wave a Nazi flag, it's what the system really hates! Instead, give them all the rope they need to show everyone exactly how stupid and annoying they are. That's what we do here, and it works. We have some posters writing Nazi-adjacent ideas. You can read the threads, it's pretty clear that they aren't convincing anyone that their ideas are good. The only thing I would ban or block somehow is aggressive abuse of random users.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I think they effectively don't exist. There aren't literally zero, but they're smaller and less significant than alien abduction believers, flat earthers, moon landing deniers, and any other ultra-fringe ideologies.
The actual Nazi party was very much a creature of 1920s Germany. Their full ideology and goals are pretty much about that time and situation. Pretty much nobody pays much attention to all the details of it now.
There are some fools who like to fly Nazi flags and basically LARP as them. You can look around at their channels. They never seem to manage to gather more than 3-5 people in any place at once. They don't seem to have much interest in actual Nazi ideology, they more seem to just want to wave the symbols around because it really pisses off liberals. They don't really seem to do much except post stickers around their towns and drop banners on highway overpasses once in a while.
The paths to actual political power in the US are pretty clear and well-known. Participate in local party politics, volunteer for stuff, work hard, try to climb the ladder, buddy up with other up-and-comers who are further ahead, etc. It's by no means easy to make it past the entry-level, but it's all pretty clear and mostly above-board. Nobody who flies Nazi symbols is making it past the front door of any actual political organization. Even if the ideas and behavior weren't rejected entirely, the people who do it are mostly trying to declare that they're "too good" for actual politics and have no interest in or ability to work within any particular system, which mostly involves a lot of compromise and sucking up to people before anyone will even listen to any wild out-there ideas you might have.
Of course, revolutionary politics tries to bypass that sort of thing. But very rarely with any success. To have even a chance of success, you have to be a lot bigger and a lot more organized, and you need to have a crisis of faith in the current institutions. Okay, we might be in shouting distance of a crisis of faith, but nobody outside the mainstream political parties is organized anywhere near well enough to have the slightest hint of a chance of taking advantage of that, certainly not any Nazi flag-fliers.
JulianRota
2yr ago
Everyone on Reddit. Reddit is not the world. Reddit is completely owned by Blue team, 100% top to bottom. Therefore, from a strict culture war perspective from a Red teamer, anything bad that happens to Reddit is good. Doesn't matter if it's mildly annoying a small percent of users or burning the whole company to the ground, it's still good.
I don't know why people pretend that Reddit has any pretense to neutrality when our whole forum left Reddit specifically because of their hostile rules and censorship regime.
JulianRota
2yr ago
Short notice is going to be a big factor. Imagine having less than 3 weeks to calculate out exactly how much you need to charge your users to be able to make the payments, accounting for the Apple/Google tax, implement and test all of the required functionality in the app, including however many new screens around creating and managing subscriptions, submit the updated app through app review, hope there aren't any major bugs, and get your accounting set up to collect these massive amounts of money and send most of it to Reddit, hopefully the payment and billing timelines line up well enough that you don't end up needing to float 8-figure sums for a month or two, hopefully you did the price calculations right too and don't end up owing Reddit an 8-figure sum more than you're collecting, by the way this is 10x to 100x more money flowing through your company than you ever had, do you have the right accountants for this, what are the tax implications, oh by the way these are mostly one-man operations so that's a hell of a lot to handle with no accountants or lawyers already on your payroll.
And if Reddit imposed all of this on you with such short notice, and doesn't seem to care much what effect it has on you, what might they do next week, next month? You're not a well-capitalized operation, can you handle the next time Reddit makes a snap decision changing your whole accounting structure by 2 orders of magnitude with less than a month to respond?
JulianRota
2yr ago
I'm still working on reading through the whole manifesto (has anyone else on this thread actually read the whole thing?), but I just found a paragraph that changes my views a bit (bolding is my own, but the whole paragraph is lifted from the manifesto unchanged):
P96. As for our constitutional rights, consider for example that of freedom of the press. We certainly don’t mean to knock that right; it is very important tool for limiting concentration of political power and for keeping those who do have political power in line by publicly exposing any misbehavior on their part. But freedom of the press is of very little use to the average citizen as an individual. The mass media are mostly under the control of large organizations that are integrated into the system. Anyone who has a little money can have something printed, or can distribute it on the Internet or in some such way, but what he has to say will be swamped by the vast volume of material put out by the media, hence it will have no practical effect. To make an impression on society with words is therefore almost impossible for most individuals and small groups. Take us (FC) for example. If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted. If they had been been accepted and published, they probably would not have attracted many readers, because it’s more fun to watch the entertainment put out by the media than to read a sober essay. Even if these writings had had many readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose them. In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.
Ah, so the internet did exist at the time, though not as a society-dominating force, and he decided to do violence because he thought he wasn't getting enough attention. Yeah that's a hard no from me. You don't get to do violence because nobody cares about your viewpoint. If he worked as hard at improving his communication and spreading his views though normal methods as he did at bombing random people and evading law enforcement, he probably would have had a lot more influence. Instead, he did what he did and he got exactly what he deserved.
Honestly, the more I read the less I care for his overall viewpoint. I'm starting to think I could do an effortpost going against his actual viewpoint.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I'm about a third of the way through reading it myself. It's interesting enough that I think he would have made a better than average Motte contributor. I haven't found anything yet that would seem to justify a terrorist bombing campaign though.
It's just a dream, and the timeline doesn't match of course, but I want to think we could have told him:
It's okay friend, your views are welcome here! We will read them and discuss them with you. You don't have to blow anyone up!
Of course, that might not work. But the greater the extent to which he had the opportunity to be heard and taken seriously and did that anyways, the more he's just a midwit terrorist asshole whose ideas aren't all that interesting.
The more interesting discussions is, to what extent are people with heterodox viewpoints nowadays able to avoid any urge to take radical action because they can find a community that agrees with them, or at least is willing to listen, on the internet?
JulianRota
2yr ago
That's the question indeed. Should we take anything from the fact that we aren't getting the names and career histories of any of the people responsible for these events? If there were WASPs behind any of them, do you think they would be immediately named and publicly fired to demonstrate the organization's commitment to "reversing structural racism" instead of obscuring the details, brushing the events under the rug, while insisting that we have no idea what's going on but it's definitely not a competency crisis due to diversity-based hiring practices?
An aspect of this whole thing I haven't seen touched on yet is that TK mostly did his thing in the pre-internet age. It seems that he started his bombing campaign before he actually wrote his manifesto, but he did indicate that he was willing to stop it entirely if a sufficiently "respectable" publication was to publish it. So I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that he basically carried out a mail bombing campaign to get his manifesto published.
Doesn't it seem at least a little bit crazy that in the modern but pre-internet age, if you have a viewpoint that's severely heterodox but not inherently dangerous, you basically have to carry out a terrorist bombing campaign to actually get it distributed. (Or at least a pretty smart guy could come to think that this was the only practical thing to do.) Yet nowadays, you can post every conceivable variety of batshit insane stuff on the internet for the whole world to see, basically for free. We get some pretty damn heterodox stuff posted on this very forum every day. I can go pull up his manifesto right now, for free, and it doesn't actually matter whether it was published on the Washington Post's website or some random free blog somewhere.
On the other hand, maybe it was fame and readership he was really after, which still doesn't come for free. Sure you can post anything you want on a random blog somewhere, but you won't necessarily get any more readership or engagement than you would if you made a few hundred photocopies and started handing them out at public events in the 80s. I guess if you were doing it now, you could post a URL in your bombs and presumably you'd get a lot more readers, along with an aggressive FBI investigation of where you posted it and who had been posting things there etc.
Anyways, there's gotta be something to the fact that anyone can post anything for the whole world to see now, whether it's strictly conventional, heterodox but reasonable, or completely bonkers.
JulianRota
2yr ago
The problem is that the new API prices are high enough to price almost all third-party apps and services out of existence. Many of them are shutting down before it happens to avoid getting stuck with huge bills that they won't be able to pay. The problem is that reportedly lots of sub moderators rely on these apps and tools to do their moderation work, and they say that the official app and tools are inadequate. Since they're all unpaid volunteers anyways, they might just quit, and it's not clear what will happen to Reddit if a significant number do quit.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I'm not sure it's that much work on top of what sub mods already do, but you do need at least a few trusted users with strong technical skills and a strong enough community for a critical mass of posters to be willing to continue their activity on a new site. We are indeed fortunate enough to have both.
JulianRota
2yr ago
At least, they claimed Apollo is inefficient. I'd like to see some specifics of that, since I'm skeptical. I have written a few Reddit bots, and while the API is weird in some ways, it's pretty straightforward, and I don't see how it's possible to be significantly more or less efficient while doing the same fundamental task. I'm inclined to believe that it's just users of different activity levels until proven otherwise.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I agree with the sibling - have you seen the quality of discourse on the average Reddit sub? We definitely don't want to be the next stop for the average Redditor. Growth is good, but we want a relative trickle of users who at least seem likely to be capable of obeying our rules, not a flood of people who want to post memes and cheap dunks.
JulianRota
2yr ago
This is probably the best place to discuss the latest in the ongoing drama of the Reddit API changes. Short version is that Reddit's APIs used to be free, but they are rolling out a new scheme where they charge pretty substantially for them. The prices are high enough to make pretty much all of the third-party Reddit phone apps non-viable. This has made a lot of people quite upset, as the "official" app is reportedly significantly worse and is lacking a lot of moderator tools that many mods use to run their subreddits. There's a big "blackout" planned for June 12-14th in protest, where the mods of a bunch of subs will turn them private and users are encouraged to not use Reddit at all.
So lots of users are mad and claim that they're going to delete their accounts and/or stop using Reddit at all. It's not clear how many people overall are actually prepared to follow through on this long term. Personally I'm doubtful that it's enough to significantly hurt Reddit.
The developers of all the major independent mobile apps (Apollo, RedditIsFun, Sync, Relay, etc) say they're going to delete their API keys the day before charges start accruing, which will disable all of their installed apps at once. Apparently if they don't, they'll get a pretty hefty bill at the end of next month for everything all of the current users have been doing. Ouch. The Apollo link has a pretty long writeup of the dev's experience where he makes a good case that Reddit doesn't seem to have much interest in working with third-party app developers.
Probably the most significant part is the mod objections. Apparently a lot of mods of big subs do most of their modding on mobile using one of the third-party apps, and they say the mod tooling on the official app is so much worse that they won't be able to do their work. Every reddit sub relies on volunteer mods to keep them free of spam and abuse, and none of them are paid anything, so making their work more difficult will be very noticeable. If many mods follow through on this, it could be very significant indeed.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I listened to most of this so far. Good stuff, though I'd like to see more discussion of the types and evolution of news feeds. I see two basic types, though I guess you could also call it a spectrum - the "simple" type which contains only posts by people you have explicitly followed in strictly chronological order, and the "algorithm" type where an algorithm shows you an endless series of posts based on what it thinks you'd like, which may or may not have any connection to accounts you follow, posts you react to, etc. In the beginning, everything was simple feeds, which IMO are much less likely to lead to that kind of behavior. But nowadays it seems like pretty much everything is moving to algorithmic feeds.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I wasn't sure whether to put this as a reply to OP directly or someone like you, but I'll try here since you seem somewhat knowledgeable about these things.
I'm not at all an expert in these things, but my understanding was that natural biogenesis from soup-of-weird-chemicals to moderately complex single-cell life forms was pretty straightforward and plausible to happen naturally. I understand this was believed to have happened within a few million years of it being physically possible, i.e. soon after the Earth formed and cooled down enough to have liquid water. The things that was more of a head-scratcher in the how in the world did this happen without divine intervention was the jump to multi-cellular life.
How does a cell that evolved to be all about itself and it's direct descendants ever decide to team up with several other cells, which all abandon their individuality and dedicate themselves to the survival of a higher-order organism? Now that seems more like a touch of a higher power. While single-celled life originated (spontaneously?) fast, the first multi-celluar organisms took billions of years to appear AIUI, and it's off to the races after that.
JulianRota
2yr ago
What makes me highly skeptical of the "totally aliens" take is, according to all currently known physics, it's impossible to travel between stars in a remotely reasonable timeframe without an engine with such massively powerful output that it'll be obvious to everyone, especially considering it would pretty much have to be pointed directly at the Earth.
This means that either 1. There are no aliens because it would be blindingly obvious, or 2. Any existing aliens that have made it here have technology capable of bypassing this apparent requirement, which would be so far beyond anything we can conceive of that we would probably be effectively primitive apes to them. And if they're that advanced, why are they spending their time zipping around the Earth in weirdo semi-invisible craft that can only occasionally be seen but never really interact with us. They'd be perfectly capable of taking whatever they want.
JulianRota
2yr ago
Finished reading The Corner. It's, uh, interesting. It doesn't exactly leave me with a high opinion of the overall worth of these people.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I have a feeling that there's a reputation thing going on. If mods are active at deleting spam and maintaining automod to make it more difficult, then spammers mostly don't bother and there isn't that much work to do. But if people pick up that a sub is essentially unmoderated and highish traffic, then it'll be off to the races with constant spam.
Relatedly, I wonder how many mods do most of their work on mobile. If it's a lot, what happens if lots of them just quit when Reddit blocks all third-party apps?
JulianRota
2yr ago
The thing about this, we are constantly told that the tiniest hint of bias against certain races (blacks and jews in the US) is massively dangerous and a slippery slope to literal genocide. Meanwhile, individual hatred and institutional bias against whites is slowly but surely getting stronger, yet there are people (often the same people warning us about how dangerous other types of bias are) who tell us essentially, well they're not literally sending you to death camps yet so what are you whining about? Suck it up and quit being such a scaredy-cat.
Why shouldn't we assume that this type of bias is exactly as unjust and dangerous as any other type? Exactly when will it be okay to do something about it more serious than complaining on the internet?
JulianRota
2yr ago
I have RedditIsFun, but never used it on mobile much myself. I guess I won't at all after this API charging thing goes out. I'm more into desktop, using old.reddit.com. If they ever turn that off, then I'll probably be gone for good.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I wonder if this push will have any effect at all on the increasing hostility towards Jews in Blue-team institutions, particularly towards those who wholeheartedly support Israel?
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-vanishing
Or will they address the anti-semitism coming from Democrat darlings like Linda Sarsour, or from black activists? Or is this just another attempt to attack any conservatives they can paint as anti-semitic while ignoring any signs of it from their own side?
JulianRota
2yr ago
What's the boo and sneer? It's mostly about one particular person, who I said that I at least somewhat agree with. I don't think it's "Boo Outgroup" to acknowledge that there are some intelligent and reasonable people who find themselves in that camp for a while, and that it's pretty common for those to eventually convince themselves that the mainstream view is basically correct. We definitely do have some revisionists here, and we mostly debate them in a reasonable fashion rather than calling them names and banning them, which I believe is the proper way to do things.
JulianRota
2yr ago
Being very very stupid seems to be common, but it's the combination of that and the maniacal insistence on continuing to post the same points over and over again even after they've been thoroughly debunked that's the issue. Taking that into consideration, it's not hard to see why many platforms eventually ban it. At a certain point, you're just annoying the crap out of everybody.
JulianRota
2yr ago
It sounds like you're trying to make a case that Weber's switch is not based on his actual analysis of the available evidence, but on some combination of believing it was a lost cause and fear of the ADL. I think if you read the whole article and the video, he seems pretty genuine in his expression that his mind was changed by the evidence that he researched. If your argument about his true motivation was correct, why would he continue to be critical of "Jewish power" and spill quite a few words to make the case that it should still be fought against, but that this tactic is counter-productive? If he wanted to "go with the flow" or take the easy way out, there's much better ways to do that than this middle position which will likely not appease the likes of the ADL much at all, but will also royally piss off the remaining hard-core revisionists.
This does not seem to be all that unusual of a path to take either - it seems to be fairly common for reasonable and diligent revisionists to come to the conclusion that it's basically correct after all, as another comment in this thread details.
Of course, if you have any other actual evidence that Weber was motivated by something other than reason and evidence, you're welcome to post it.
I think I see some "citation needed" here. Probably their subs aren't too affected by this conflict, though how active that fleet is would probably be pretty secret. The NATO sub fleets might have an idea, but I don't think they're talking. Not gonna bet either way on their nuke arsenal, though I will note that the maintenance quality evident on the high-tech weapons they've tried to bring to bear in Ukraine has not been too impressive.
"Where is the Russian Air Force?" has been the
millionbillion-ruble question in this whole war. Pre-war, every serious defense analyst I could find expected them to systematically dismantle Ukraine in something that looked like the US Gulf War 1. They had the assets on paper to do it. Instead, they've been missing in action. Given the efforts Russia has gone to so far, I somehow doubt they're all sitting in hangers somewhere in perfect condition, with skilled pilots standing by to run complex missions with them as soon as Putin gives the order. It's all speculation on exactly what is going on, but I bet that either their maintenance has been such shit that only a fraction are airworthy, or they are terrified of losing a substantial fraction of them to Ukrainian air defense or otherwise looking incompetent, possibly both.More options
Context Copy link