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Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 04, 2022

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.

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How do you all plan on using your new found freedom?

I have already said (((nigger, faggot, tranny, retard, groomer))) in another comment, but I will do it just one more time. What a world to live in, finally can at least mention words !

Jokes aside, other than the commonly discussed pitfalls of infinite freedom (7 gorillion witches and all) , how do you think non-witchy discussions are to change now that AEO isn't breathing down everyone's necks?

Reading the CW thread, it seems to me people are subconsciously talking as if the threat of AEO still exists.

I'm hoping very little.

I think there's a lot of people who think that we were hamstrung by Reddit, and we were always just waiting for our chance to show our true colors. I don't think that was accurate. The issue with AEO wasn't that it was actively preventing us from doing what we wanted to do, it was just making things slightly but increasingly difficult; it was a slow pressure threatening to squeeze the community into dust.

But practically speaking, we already weren't censoring ourselves much. We already had roughly the community I wanted, and I was worried about the future, not the present.

So I'm hoping things just continue along in roughly the same way they were before, except with, y'know, less comments removed for using specific parenthesis.

I mean sure as far as content was concerned there wasn't much self censorship.

But there still was plenty in the form of obfuscation. Even aside from the AEO threat, other redditors were a threat. Many professed complains about not being able to say what they want in the simplest of terms because they fear getting into an argument later in another subreddit and that resulting in someone going through their post history and causing a stink about wrongthink. I consider the elimination of that nuisance a massive positive side effect.

It will be easier to "speak plainly" now. Instead of saying "a certain demographic in the united states tend to cluster around a lower mean in psychometric tests" one can just say "African Americans as a group have lower average IQ scores". Shitty example, ik, but gets the point across.

I think just being able to speak plainly, for real this time! will produce some interesting posts. Yes there are a lot of failure modes, and are still ultimately constrained by "the Rules" but I'm keen on seeing how things pan out.

I'm actually worried that's gonna turn out to be a negative :V I think there's value in people kind of talking around the hotbutton issues. People often have real kneejerk responses to common phrasings, and you can avoid those by using a different less-common phrase.

But I have no idea how to, like, legislate that in rules, so right now I'm just gonna keep an eye on things.

Not exactly related to your point but have you thought about adding the slur filter that rdrama uses? I think it’d be a good idea to have it on for logged-out viewers, at least for certain words

Oh man I would be like a thousand percent tempted to start putting in troll slur filters.

Hmm.

Part of me thinks that isn't a terrible idea, just to get people reading the site and kinda, y'know, ease them in.

But another part of me thinks that this comes across as being ashamed of what we're posting, and I'm just not ashamed of it. I'd sorta rather look people in the eye and say "yes, we are debating controversial things, deal with it".

I'll keep this in mind but my current feeling is that it's not worth the downsides. I'm not entirely convinced by myself yet, though.