site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34369 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • 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:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • 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.

12
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

In case you spent the day under a rock, Trump has been reinstated on Twitter after winning a poll by Elon Musk. Not kidding.

I'd like to keep this open & not push the discussion in any direction, so I'll keep this short.

Predictions? What does this mean for Twitter? Elon? Trump? Social media? The country? The world?

This will likely accelerate the Left's attempts to move to a more pro-censorship platform. They also might pressure advertisers to boycott Twitter.

I've seen the left going gaga over Mastodon in response to Musk helming Twitter. Suppose it's a good time to be that company.

Mastodon isn't really a company. It's more like one instance inside a federated network of tweets (the "Fediverse"), similar to how you can start your own email server with your own domain but anyone can send and receive emails from you.

For all the posturing from everyone about how they're fleeing to the Fediverse because of big bad Elon firing the mods and Twitter will soon stop working, the reality is that Mastodon is basically worse in every other way. Almost by definition, Mastodon is comprised of people who are so outcast they either don't like Twitter, or were banned from Twitter (many here recognize this as the "seven zillion witches and approximately three principled civil libertarians" problem). So already you have selection effects for a population of users that are worse than Twitter users.

Then there's the fact that moderation is harder, because while you can ban someone from your own instance, you cannot ban someone from another instance. However what you can do is defederate the instance - in effect, banning the entire instance because it's full of witches or whatever. But even this isn't a panacea, because spinning up an instance is so easy (after all, that's the point of the Fediverse) that people can just evade the defed anyway. Most people will just want a Twitter, a centralized platform that can simply ban the offending persons and be done with it. They don't want moderation taken into their own hands, they want someone else to do it.

Lastly there's also the simple fact that Mastodon and the Fediverse were simply never built to accommodate the huge influx of users from the Twitter exodus. For all the doomerism that Musk firing half the employees will result in the site simply failing to stay up, along with claims that this will happen during the World Cup (no similar claims have been made about Meta who did a huge round of layoffs shortly after Elon did), Mastodon keeps dying under user loads that are a fraction of the users Twitter has. Even other exodus destinations like Cohost haven't stayed up as well. Meanwhile I've never seen Twitter go down at any point. Sure there were sometimes a couple glitches here and there but nothing major.

I haven't used Mastodon (well, or Twitter except for following people manually / via RSS), but it sounds like the moderation support is pretty bad. It's really weird that they have decentralized hosting of accounts/feeds but not decentralized moderation. I understand individual instances may want to ban users, but it seems like there's no moderation mechanism for posts on other instances more fine-grained than banning an entire instance that won't moderate in a way you like. Which seems like it defeats a large part of the purpose of having separate instances if they effectively need to clump into groups that agree on moderation policies.

Yes, one of the largest instances just defederated entirely to shed load.

I can't remember what it was, but back when I was figuring out how mastodon worked there was something about content serving that made me think "boy, that wouldn't scale well at all if a post goes viral across multiple instances."

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats