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ZorbaTHut


				

				

				

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ZorbaTHut


								

								

								
								
									
								
								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 01 11:36:40 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I've been thinking about culture war in media lately.


For those who don't know, I'm a game programmer, working to kinda move into the game-director role. Obviously at some point I am going to have games with humans in them [citation needed], and since they're humans I need to decide what they look like both in terms of dangly bits and skin color, which is of course now highly politicized, joining the ranks of literally everything else in existence.


But I'm not looking for an excuse to put characters in of one skin color or another. I want a universe that feels reasoanbly alive, with characters who are interesting and not just inserted for politics reasons. So a big part of this ends up being "how do I choose interesting characters that don't feel like a political statement, or at least, if they do feel like a political statement, it's a political statement I don't mind making, or a political statement I'm intentionally making as part of the game, and also, boy it would be nice to come up with a way to insert characters of literally any type without that also being a political statement, and I guess as a side note this involves talking about explicitly political media and what makes it work well or badly".


This has, in fact, been done well.


Let's talk about that.




One good technique is to put in characters that are politically sensitive and then just never call attention to it. Uhura was black, and everyone watching Original Star Trek knew it, because she was, you know, on screen, consistently reflecting fewer photons than Captain Kirk, as black people do. Kirk didn't seem to know it, though; Kirk just kind of ignored it. In fact, I'm not sure this ever came up during all of Star Trek. Uhura was black because Uhura was black, and the show carefully avoided ever making a thing out of it.


Another good example here is Miles Morales in Spider-Verse, who is also black, and again, I'm not sure the movie ever really mentions this. The movie is explicitly not about Miles Morales' skin color. Another example: a lot of characters from Borderlands 2, such as Ellie, who is a fat woman which is essentially never relevant to the plot, and Sir Hammerlock, who is gay.


Sir Hammerlock being gay is an interesting case, so let's talk about it more! With most characters, either you find out their skin color the instant you see them, or it turns into a serious Face Reveal thing (imagine the controversy if the Halo TV series had revealed that Master Chief was black!) But media in general tends not to show much about character's sexualities, and the game industry even less so. Even mentioning romantic choices feels like something that can't be done subtly - all characters could be seamlessly replaced by asexual beings that reproduce via mitosis unless your work is about the fact that sex happens.


(Tangent: Can we, like, do something about that? Have some main characters who start out married, and end married, and the story is never about their difficulties in marriage? Seriously, how many happily married main-character couples exist anywhere in fiction? Note to self, do this sometimes. End tangent.)


(Tangent addendum: I just played Guacamelee 2 and it does this. That's one! Anyway, moving on.)


But in the case of Hammerlock, he sends you on a quest to check out what happened to an old friend of his, and if you happen to dig into the quest details, which most people don't, you find out it's an old boyfriend, and honestly I really like how this is handled. Hammerlock is just a guy who likes guys, and he's worried about his old fling, and this is never turned into a Explicitly Political Thing, and that's cool. 10/10, very human.




Let's talk about another technique! Another technique is to, instead of making the plot not about something, make the plot extremely about something. I did a search for "movies about black people" and one site recommends Malcolm X and another hit provided by Google is a list of "11 movies that confront American racism". You can guess where that is going! Uhura could have been white, Ellie could have been a thin guy, Sir Hammerlock could have been asexual, that wouldn't really have changed any of those pieces of media, but you can't turn Malcolm X into an Asian without some pretty serious plot adjustment!


There's nothing wrong with this solution either. I am generally not interested in this kind of media, but if that's the movie someone wants to make, hey, have at it, all up to them. But because I'm thinking about this for the sake of my own games, I'm discarding this because, as mentioned, I'm just not all that interested.


But while we're on the subject . . .


. . . I can't help but wonder if this is counterproductive.


A painful thing about human beliefs is that we are very very very bad at changing our mind. And having arguments shoved in our face really doesn't help. Walk up to someone who hates skub and shout pro-skub catchphrases at them, if you like; this will not make them more positive about skub, they'll probably just become more certain that skub is bad because all skub-lovers are fuckin' jerks, man. But show them movies that just happen to include skub, in a way where it sorta just . . . doesn't matter? Maybe they'll stop caring so much about the horrors of skub. Desensitization is a hell of a drug.


Show them movies that claim to involve this, but have the movie constantly shouting pro-skub catchphrases?


Well, now we're back where we were before. Or even worse, frankly, because now they'll be expecting any movies with skub in them to be a thinly-veiled propaganda piece. So not only have we failed to convince them with subtlety and care, we've fucked up future attempts to do so. Good fuckin' job, man, way to go.


Skub is an allegory, but you've figured that out by now, so let's move on.




Specifically, let's talk about allegories.


There's an episode in Original Star Trek where the crew finds some guy in space. The guy's face is white on the right side and black on the left side. Wild, right? Aliens! Shortly thereafter, they find another guy whose face is white on the left side and black on the right side. These two people hate each other because they think the other person's face is wrong and their respective countries have destroyed their entire planet in the ensuing war. Also one of them was used as slaves by the other. What is this story really about? Who can say! It is a mystery! We shall never okay it's obviously about racism. Like. Transparently so.


(In one of the weirder and less socially-acceptable examples of nominative determinism I've seen, the script for this episode was written by a stereotypically white guy named Gene L. Coon.)


Star Trek never fucking blinks. At no point does Captain Kirk turn to the TV and say "by the way, black lives matter", or any less anachronistic catchphrase. This is doubly impressive because Uhuru is still in this episode obviously and she doesn't even mention it. There is a single mention that Earth was perhaps not entirely copacetic in the past - by Chekov, not even by Uhuru, and in response to a question that does not feel shoehorned in whatsoever - and then that's it! It just moves on.


This being Star Trek, Kirk of course has to draw a lesson at the end. And he does . . . but fascinatingly, it's a lesson about hate, not about racism. Racism does not exist for Kirk. He is not even considering the issue.


And Kirk's utter refusal to even consider racism frankly drives the point in both harder and more subtly.


It's a brilliant episode. I love this episode. It's a perfect example of how Star Trek writing, while hamfisted at the best of times, was elegant and refined in exactly the right ways. With so little effort they could have turned this into a cultural war! And they didn't!


I want more things like that. I want episodes that don't hammer in the point with a sledgehammer. I want allegories, not blatant propaganda; sure, it's still propaganda, I don't think anyone would claim that Star Trek wasn't. But it's careful propaganda. It's subtle propaganda. It's propaganda that doesn't come across like paid advertising, with the characters mugging at the camera while carefully holding soda cans so the label is visible, and the label says "vote for me in the next election, but not the other guy, he's a fascist, which is proven by this movie about comedic squirrels wearing silly hats".




And here is the point where I run out of clever inspiration.


I'm trying to figure out how I would make either characters that are never called attention to, or characters that are an allegory . . . for trans people.


And it's goddamn impossible.


The problem with trans people (if you are getting linked here in anger because I said there's "a problem with trans people", finish the damn sentence first, christ) is that the entire classic concept of being "trans" is linked, kind of intrinsically, to being invisible.


Not to the person themselves being invisible. But to the trans-ness being invisible. The platonic ideal of a trans man is someone who everyone looks at and says "yes, that is a man, I have no doubt in my mind", and then never thinks twice about. The "trans" part, ideally, vanishes. And this makes it really easy to put a trans man in a game or a movie: you just put a man in.


But that doesn't help. Uhura does not work if she looks exactly like a white guy. The point of Uhura is that she is obviously black and nobody cares. But you can't have someone who's "obviously successfully trans" - it's contradictory! You have to drop a Sir-Hammerlock-esque hint somewhere, and, one, it's really hard to do so when any mention of a trans person's birth gender is "deadnaming", while, two, Hammerlock is totally cool with casually mentioning that he used to pork a dude with a dong, but trans people themselves generally do not want to talk about their birth gender. It's similar to the whole reveal-a-character's-sexuality problem except massively boosted. Put a character in who keeps talking about all the people they're boning and they come across as oversexed and somewhat disturbing; put a character in who keeps talking about how trans they are and you get Hainly Abrams.


So, then what? An allegory? But what allegory can you possibly use?


How do you make a respectful allegory about something that you're trying to show is conceptually acceptable but whose ideal form is intentionally invisible?




Honestly? I don't know.


My best idea here is to do something with aliens; some species of alien with extremely flexible sexual characteristics, who don't mind talking about them but which are never relevant to the plot, just roll it into background worldbuilding. I guess it's ironic that I'm coming up with this idea while also playing around with the concept of an alien species with extreme inflexible sexual dimorphism, but so it goes. But this is inevitably going to result in people yelling "zomg are you saying that trans people are aliens" and so that frankly isn't even going to work.


I cannot come up with a solution here, and this makes me very sympathetic to people who are trying to do it the right way. There isn't a right way. There's never been a right way. There's just a lot of wrong ways.


Feels like a tool missing from my toolkit, to be honest.




I don't really have an ending to this post.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In defense of wrecking Jones:


First, reports are that he was basically ignoring the court system. I think it is entirely justifiable that "ignoring the court system" gets turned into "the court system reminds you, and society in general, that the court system is not to be ignored".


Second, people are looking at the fine and saying that it seems excessive in absolute numbers. But I think there's a lot of value in fines that are relative to someone's net worth. And I think "promoting a harassment campaign against people who had their children murdered, all for the sake of selling merchandise" is reasonably responded to with "a fine of at least 100% of your net worth". Which is about what this is.


If we fine people absolute numbers, we're giving rich people effective permission to do whatever they want while ruining poor people's lives for small transgressions; if the goal is to make them stop, then relative numbers are what you've gotta do.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for June 14, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'll miss you, for what it's worth.




Nowadays, I cringe when I get a comment. I feel anxious when I see a lit-up notification bell. Frequently the sort of responses I engender seem not to be positive or helpful engagement -- often just dismissive one-liners, low-effort commentary that half-makes a point while being maximally personal or inflammatory, without any empathy for other perspectives or attempt to try and understand where I'm coming from.




Yeah, I acknowledge this is a problem. We're running into various problems with long-term shifts, and it's unclear how to fix them; I have some ideas that I'm going to be trying out, but the core issue is just that value drift is hard to deal with. And I haven't come up with a good solution besides "frequent new mods who haven't value-drifted yet" or "clever tricks".


Honestly, maybe I should be doing Doge elections much more often and turn moderation into more of a rotating duty. It's tempting.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Just as an FYI, we just deployed a major performance improvement for this site. It also might be buggy. Please report any issues you run into, especially those involving the display of the front page or comment threads (like this one).


(At the same time we're currently working with a significant performance degradation because of a library bug. Hopefully we'll get that one solved soon too.)


Edit: So far there are 414 janitor submissions, y'all are great, I was expecting to have to wait a week or two to get a good chunk of useful data but nope this is going fast.


(one post is considered one submission, not one set of posts)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not sure we've ever actually had to enforce this, but the official policy with Motte pronouns is:


    

  • You are always allowed to use the person in question's preferred pronoun.
    • 

  • You are always allowed to use "they", regardless of whether the person accepts that or not.
    • 

  • You are always allowed to twist yourself in knots to avoid pronouns even if it looks really silly.
    • 

  • If you're doing something historical, you can also use the person in question's officially preferred pronouns at that time in the story, but don't cleverly split hairs on this one; if you write a story about the Wachowskis, and start out by referring to them as "he", but then switch to "they" when they transition, the Eye of Sauron may look down upon thee.
    • 



The good news about these policies is that everyone finds them slightly uncomfortable, which is probably about as good as we can get.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think the question here isn't "should you, as a person expect to be born into a mostly-empty universe", but rather, "should you expect to be part of a race that has mostly conquered the universe without resistance from other aliens".


In some ways I think people are insufficiently paranoid about the implications of this question, though. I think it's likely that, a few millennia from now, we'll realize that life can be roughly modeled as




Intelligent life forms on a planet, then immediately expands in all directions at the maximum possible travel speed (plus or minus some factors that aren't relevant on an astronomical scale).




And you can kind of use this to break things down into four options.


If humanity is the first species and FTL travel is possible, then we're going to settle the entire universe with no resistance.


If humanity isn't the first species and FTL travel is possible, then this may simply be a paradox; we haven't been settled, therefore our assumptions are wrong.


If humanity is the first species and FTL travel isn't possible, then we will expand in a sphere, roughly at light speed, and eventually meet up with other species that will be less advanced than us and therefore pose little threat.


If humanity isn't the first species and FTL travel isn't possible . . . then we live in a universe full of species-spheres rapidly expanding, and we will be absolutely crushed when we encounter the first one of them.


This is concerning.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[META] Something Shiny and Two Things Boring
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I thought about writing in more detail about that, but didn't end up doing so.


The biggest part, in my opinion, is that blocking someone shouldn't inconvenience the person who's being blocked. If it does, then it'll be weaponized; it'll turn into a tool used against people who are disliked, not a tool used to shape your own experience.


If it's going to inconvenience anyone, it needs to inconvenience the blocker; it needs to be something where they say "eh, it's worth it so I don't have to see that guy anymore".


If someone is *actually rule-breaking" then that's a problem for the mods to deal with. In all other cases, we shouldn't allow random people to gain pseudomod powers at the click of a mouse.




To give a concrete example, I've blocked the pedofascist, but if they will be able to read and respond to my posts there are certain topics I just won't post about then.




If they're breaking the rules then report them.


If they're not, then putting that burden on you instead of on them seems like the right solution here.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 3, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Anyone want to help me test a thing? Just reply here!


I will not be telling you what you're testing; part of the test is to see whether you notice it quickly or not. Please don't tell people until the test is done (but there's nothing secret about it, feel free to talk about it afterwards.)


(no it is not terribly exciting)


(note: testing still open, need multiple people :V)


(edit: everyone through netstack has been added, hoping to get a bit more feedback before I shut this part down for a while)


Alright, probably not adding anyone more after this, and I'll be turning it off when I wake up anyway. Thanks everyone! More news soon.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah, I could've sworn we fixed it, but it appears to have shown back up again. Unfortunately it seems very difficult to intentionally replicate, while very easy to accidentally stub your toe on, which makes it a pain to fix. If you can figure out reliable repro steps I would love to hear them :V


In general, you're welcome to PM me with reports, or post them in whatever thread seems most reasonable and ping me.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[META] Something Shiny and Two Things Boring
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


How is it a burden if they can't see it?




They're restricted from joining the conversation. With the Reddit implementation, it also let people get the last word in, by replying and then blocking.


You shouldn't be able to unilaterally exclude people from the community unless you're one of the people who has that specific power.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Not to be a dick or anything, but help me understand some things...
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
A few answers!




what the hell is your beef with Marseys?




Marsey's your schtick. It's a cute schtick! But it's not ours. If we're going to generate our own culture, we're going to generate our own culture, not start by just riffing off someone else's culture. Our codebase is an offshoot of yours; our community isn't, however. Frankly, while I totally appreciate that you guys exist, you're like the polar opposite of what we want around here; you guys keep doin' your thing, we'll keep doing our thing.




Why don't image uploads work?




A big thing we want here is effortposts. We don't want people to be able to slam down a giant blob of flashy pixels, we want people to write stuff. This is always going to be a text-heavy website, not an image-heavy website; that's the culture we're aiming for.




It's like you guys intentionally wanted to preclude people from attempting to have fun




I mean, bluntly, yes, we are trying to preclude people from having the kind of fun that you guys want to have.


Again, your community's great! I'm glad you enjoy it! But it's not what we're going for here - we do not want circlejerks, we do not want low effort spamposts, we do not want 24/7 memes.


We picked your codebase because it was being used in production and it had reasonably competent moderation features. The extra flashy stuff, as far as I'm concerned, is a negative for our purposes, and so yeah, we're gonna strip it out.


Sometimes your kids don't grow up to be carbon copies of you; we're taking after our other parent :)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Greetings Mottizens!
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I dub this the official rdrama.net visit thread; importantly, the single rdrama.net visit thread, because y'all are kinda spamming the place with low-content stuff.


Post it here and keep it within community standards.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 04, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
700 total registered users. I have no idea how that compares to Reddit's 19,000 subscribers; some of the tools we have now are providing a rather interesting look into the internals, and there's a lot of users whose names I have never seen at all who are dutifully upvoting things that are good and downvoting things that are bad. I think we may have a ton of imported lurkers who were always just invisible before, and I'm glad at least some of them have chosen to come along.


(Hi, lurkers, if you're out there!)


Also, those 19,000 subscribers probably included a lot of dead accounts, Reddit never pruned them at all. So we were never going to get anywhere near that number.


The stats I have also say that we have 150 active users on the site at this very moment, about half of which have registered accounts, but it's hard to say how this compares to the Reddit numbers (currently 2500); the concept of an "active user" is inherently very subjective and we never knew what the hell Reddit was doing anyway, every few months it would jump up by an order of magnitude for a day and we never had any idea why. I always assumed Reddit's numbers were garbage or at least garbage-adjacent.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Site Rollback to February 3rd
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Test


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think the core issue is that you have to heavily subsidize the very concept of childraising. Having children is horrendously expensive, to a point where you can't simply subsidize it by giving money to the people having kids, you have to build systems that make childraising cheaper. And that's not just expensive in a monetary sense, that's expensive in a time sense and an effort sense.


I think, if I were going to try this, I'd be aiming at essentially building an entire new culture around larger familial units; "houses" specifically designed for ten to twenty families living together, with a designated subsidized night caretaker and one or two full-time employees to handle things like food and cleaning. Make it clear that living in these places is easier, in a way that extends beyond simply "having money", but that they're available only for people with kids.


Honestly, this would kinda be aimed at a modern reinvention of tribal living.




For myself, all women with white collar jobs get two year’s entitlement to WFH after every childbirth in addition to parental leave, in which they can’t be required in the office more often than 1x week.




The problem is that people today want careers, and what you're basically offering here is the government guaranteeing that you can cripple your career for your kids if you want. I'm not going to say that's bad - having that available would help - but it doesn't really solve the problem, which is that people don't want to cripple their career for their kids.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Site Rollback to February 3rd
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Ehm... Should i be logged in as you?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for June 14, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I don't see how this is supposed to help. It's not about the moderation, or the rules, it's the zeitgeist.




The idea is that you pick people who aren't jaded, and as they get jaded, they get rotated out. If you want to remain stationary but you're standing on a slow-moving train, you walk in the opposite direction of the train.




I say give people something to do that is not culture war. Any of you degenerates want to mod a game, or something?




This honestly makes me tempted to set up Reddit-esque subreddits. I'm not sure it would work, but it's tempting.


(The codebase did have this functionality, but we pulled it because it was completely bitrotted. Wouldn't be too hard to reintroduce it though.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Sounds like a pretty bad approach honestly :V


Right now recruiting is not the biggest issue I see. Honestly, this thread itself is kind of a bigger problem; note that it's already been mod-warned, but it's entirely "wow, such normie, very woke, what a problem". The thing I'm most concerned about right now is . . .


. . . okay right now it's dealing with the employment tangle I'm dealing with. But after that, the thing I'm most concerned about is tweaking moderation and figuring out a better way to gently-but-firmly shove the tone around, and that's what the volunteer-janitor stuff is for.


Once I've handled that, I plan to go back to recruiting efforts. However, right now the traffic honestly isn't bad - it's lower than it used to be but nowhere near lower enough that I think it's an immediate existential threat.


And I think, if I were going to recruit people, "people who got removed from a community for not reading the room" is not the group I'd be targeting. Especially people in that situation who would push the balance of this community further away from diverse-opinions.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Now that you can speak freely, can you spill the beans on what was going on with the reddit admins/AOE?




Who knows, man.


Here's an example post that they removed, with three posts of context:










I remember starting my career a couple of years later with the earnest belief that I might have only two or three years of employment left before the AI apocalypse came for bankers too
















Probably the most baffling thing I've ever seen from you.














Now, it appears we mean different things by «bankers». For you it's clerks, probably all white-collared personnel. For me, uh, the ultimate proprietors – and it's clear no AI can replace that.












Okay. You're fine. I get it, you aren't a Nazi.










In America, Nazis do this when referencing Jews. It is very much not our "quotes". But I understand that in your culture putting <> is done in a different also valid manner.










But good God, it looks like an American internet Nazi naming the Jew when referring to <>.








Nazis do (((this)))






But « thiis » is just a different type of quotation mark used in French, German, Russian and so on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillemet




That last one - naming the Guillemet - got removed by the admins.


I've got a small list of such similar posts. We had a post removed for listing some global age-of-consent laws. We had a post removed noting that the 6-million Holocaust death toll is dubious because it's built out of many numbers that, themselves, have been readjusted over time but the overall total has never been questioned. We had a post removed comparing the lifestyle of 1880s black slaves in the US to the sub-Saharan continent and to other contemporaneous instances of slavery. We had a post removed noting some weird sentencing laws involving child porn (and similar weird laws regarding the definition of child porn).


These are all things we want to be able to discuss. If people start just berating their outgroup, well, that's uncool. But this wasn't that! These posts weren't as innocent as the quotation-mark one, I'll acknowledge that, but they're still nowhere near the stereotypical Stormfront screed.


Anyway, eventually they sent us a nastygram saying, paraphrased, we were having too many posts removed and saying that we should do something about it before they had to do something about it. They also said that if we had questions, we should send them over. We wrote up a pretty-well-phrased set of questions, sent it to them, and they just ignored it.


In fairness, they never said they'd answer those questions.


And so that's where we were; "go fix this stuff, our censors are inconsistent and overzealous, and we won't give you any answers regarding what's going on."


From there it's just a matter of time until we get booted.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
We're not asking you to not post about it. We're asking you to also post about other stuff.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[META] Something Shiny and Two Things Boring
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Argh, that's going to be a pain to track down.


Any idea when it started? Do you happen to have a lot of people blocked?


Edit: Also, do you mind if I trawl around in the database to look at your notifications? Technically this means I'll probably see your private messages, if you have any, but I don't care about that I just want to look at the database stuff.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[META] Out Of The Frying Pan, Into A Different Frying Pan
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I've been sort-of-seriously considering print ads. I know that sounds nuts. But it's also so weird that I think it might be able to attract some attention.


(Also, it costs money.)




Getting the motte on people's blogrolls and (may Allah forgive me) quoted in Twitter threads seems like the way to go for attracting active participants.




Part of this is the link-trading stuff, and yeah I completely agree that's the best first approach. I can't really organically force people to post in Twitter threads - that's up to you guys! - but it's also the kind of thing that happens naturally if the other work is going well.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Bugs, Suggestions, Small Comments, And Site News
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The "New comments" counter seems to be browser-specific, not account-specific.




True, and I'm afraid this isn't likely to change anytime soon. Thread collapses are the same way, at least for now.




Every time I resize the comment box on desktop it snaps back to the original size as soon as I start typing




Hey, you're right, it does. That's annoying. Bug filed!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Do we already have shadowbans?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
We do, sort of, and also not sort of.


So, first, we have a similar comment filtering system that we had before. In theory we had it disabled but it turns out there's a hilarious bug where there's no "disable" option, and instead people with negative scores are getting filtered, which I think is hilarious and do not plan to change. (We'll be enabling it soon anyway.)


This means that top-level posts need to be approved by us before they go public, as do comments from new users. Turns out these still contribute to the reply count and so that's part of what you're seeing.


Second, if deletes their post, it doesn't decrement the post counter. We should probably fix that. I accidentally replied to someone with a test account and then deleted it and now that post eternally has an extra comment mark. Such is life.


Third, we do actually have shadowbans as well - it came with the site - but we haven't used any yet.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Because people tend to use these things as a way to reinforce their beliefs and make it a hostile environment for others.


I think this falls generally under the "don't be antagonistic", "don't enforce ideological conformity", and "provide evidence in proportion to how partisan your claim is" clauses.