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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35438 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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That’s where the evaporative cooling comes in. Trimming off the few most vocal is liable to shift the norms and to discourage others.

So long as the few most vocal are either principled libertarians or lost channers, moderation is going to have a pseudo-leftwards bias.

Here on Motte we’ve seen similar effects. Certain high-profile commenters get banned for being inflammatory, and then a few others announce dissatisfaction, followed by flouncing or suicide-by-mod. I want to say the reasoning is usually “Mod X is a partisan hack.” @HlynkaCG, I’m struggling to remember names, have you got anything?

Certain high-profile commenters get banned for being inflammatory

Where inflammatory is best understood as "in violation of implicitly leftist values".

Implicitly leftist in the same way as tankies regard "having stuff" as an implicitly bourgeois value, maybe.

When you filter against abrasive personalities, you are filtering for leftists, who are on the whole higher in agreeableness.

For this community, that’s a bit complicated, given the more classically-liberal principles involved.

This community descends from a cult of personality based around a neurotic progressive who disliked a bit of the left's excesses (as they threatened him personally and he's highly neurotic), but outside of those personal threats was enthusiastically on board with the entire far-left culture.

So much so he deliberately invested the whole of his private and personal life into those far-left environments!

Of course the values this community enshrines are implicitly leftist. They're less left than they could maximally be, but nevertheless still enshrine leftist ideas.

How would this community look and even work if it adopted different values? Are you implying there is a workable and desirable alternative, and one that has no taint of leftism? Or are you merely issuing a complaint with no further implications?

It'd look very similar, of course, much like how The Schism and Culture War Roundup largely look identical despite being polar opposites. There'd be different participants and opinions being discussed, but it'd work fine.

If you want my ideal forum, it's a place where all the banned effortposters from yesteryear are given free reign. All the best writers in The Motte's history got banned and the community has forever been lesser for it.

So the difference would be that making effortposts grants you protection from bans? Is that the Motte minus its leftist values?

I'd remove bans for everything except illegal content, actually. The ability to block others or simply ignore them is perfectly serviceable, and there's really no need of moderators beyond that.

So banning is left-wing and that's all there is to it?

More comments

If you are saying that the reason ResetEra or RPGNet became totally insane is that evaporative cooling drove away everyone not-insane, I agree.

But I do not think you are saying that. I think you are saying "right-wing people really really want to say nigger and then when people get banned for saying that the whole left-wing march starts."

Any place useful, regardless of polarity, needs to keep out

  • fed posters

  • glowies

  • fucking idiots who are genuinely "on our side"

and barrels of ink will be spilled saying, in way more words, "our side has no bad people, they are all plants from the other side, and, man, speaking of the other side, let me tell you about them, did you see their claim that the only people posting hate on their forums are outside wreckers?"

Anyway. All that ink is irrelevant because as far as the place is concerned all three of those groups are identical and the antibodies to keep out one keeps out the others.

What’s a “glowie”?

An FBI plant.

They may or may not exist, but getting rid of people who might-just-as-well-be-glowies is an important skill for any group.

So as far as I can tell, fedposters are plants who plant incriminating "evidence" in fora, while glowies are plants that try to coax the same from the real posters? Is there a strict distinction between the two?

no, they're two different modes of the same basic behavior.

Federal agents have a long history of finding disaffected and dim but otherwise-peaceable people and encouraging them to participate, even minimally, in highly illegal activities of the agents' conception and design, with disastrous results for the individuals and often the rest of their community. Disaffected groups also tend to have a small number of not-terribly-bright people who try to do something, with disastrous results for their community. Whether the person suggesting poorly-concieved, pointless, doomed "direct action" is actually a fed or just fatally stupid is unknowable and largely irrelevant. Either way, treat them like they're radioactive.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/glowie-glowposting

My favourite

I do like that Mokou glowposting reaction picture.

On a completely unrelated note I wonder if anyone feels the same way I do about the Chinese net in that it‘s very heavy on the sarcasm and quite aggressive in tone; it is quite a bit different from older Chinese. (Though I suppose it is the same for any language that makes its way to the internet…)

So I don’t know if those two forums were hit by evaporative cooling or by hostile admin takeover. Couldn’t say. I’ve been thinking about smaller, hobbyist servers. The sort that start out with a “no politics” rule.

There is some subset of users which wants to use slurs. Maybe they’re edgy teenagers, maybe principled free-speech crusaders. They are more likely to lean right.

As long as banning members of that subset disproportionately hits the right, the window gets to slide left, even if the subset is really small. No ideology needed—though it certainly shortcuts the process.

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