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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44923 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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So, mods. Now that you can speak freely, can you spill the beans on what was going on with the reddit admins/AOE? You made some allusions previously but I'd really like to understand what's going on. I have been led to believe that reddit is run by a cabal of terminally online tumblrinas. Surely that can't be right?

@ZorbaTHut explained it (which is to say, there really isn't much more explanation than what we've said before).

My personal opinion is that we probably weren't in as much imminent danger of being banned as many people (including Zorba) believe, but it was inevitable that we would be banned someday. I always watched /r/CultureWarRoundup as a kind of canary, because despite their much smaller footprint, I honestly thought they'd get banned before we would. Their witches are pretty open, and SneerClub definitely knows about them, which means presumably they must get reported fairly frequently.

But I do have two things to contribute which I never would have posted on reddit. First of all, I will confirm that it was indeed Chtorrr who visited us and dropped the "friendly notice" in our mod channel.

And that being said, a few months back there was a "Mod Summit" (via Zoom) to which all subreddit mods were invited. I was the only motte mod who I guess was bored enough to zoom in (I even sent them questions! None of which made it to the queue that got answered, naturally). As you might expect, almost all the talks were about things like "How to build safe communities" and "How to self-care and preserve your mental health while having to deal with all these terrible people," etc.

The most valuable thing I got out of it were screenshots.

Without further comment: https://imgur.com/a/4oIS59D

That screen shot.... LMAO

That's some powerful Doreen Ford energy emanating from them, right there. Oh lordy...

So here's a thing that I've been sitting on for months.

Chtorrr.

I've never seen this mentioned anywhere, which surprises me, but "Chtorrr" is a pretty obvious reference to a scifi novel series named The War Against the Chtorr. "boy it's funny she named herself after the bad guys" no no, that's not where I'm going with this. Hold your butts.

The War Against The Chtorr is a post-apocalyptic alien invasion novel by David Gerrold, best known for his Star Trek episode The Trouble With Tribbles. I haven't read his stuff in over a decade but I know I loved it as a kid, and I've still got the books in a box somewhere - someday I'll dig that out. The Chtorr series was meant to be the longest thing he'd written, originally a trilogy, then six books; the fifth book has been delayed for literally twenty years, jesus christ get that thing finished already.

The overall plotline . . .

. . . okay I'm going to take a brief diversion. The overall plotline has some cool worldbuilding. One of the past events was the USA went totally world-conquering imperialistic and was defeated soundly, a la Nazi Germany but with less genocide. The USA was put under severe economic sanctions but this turned out to be an even bigger problem for the rest of the world, as the USA was producing pretty much all the world's high-tech equipment. The world grudgingly allowed the USA to continue selling tech, which they did.

Later the aliens arrive and large parts of humanity join the aliens and use human military equipment against the remaining US countries . . . and it turns out that the USA has remote killswitches in literally every chip they'd sold post-sanctions. Which they originally put it in stop anyone deciding to crush the USA, and which is technically now being used for that exact purpose, just nobody expected that "anyone" was going to be aliens.

Anyway. Diversion over.

The overall plotline is that an alien invasion shows up from outer space. This isn't the normal "spaceships and greys with guns" invasion. The Chtorr are some kind of symbiotic hive-mind species, including fungal and worm creatures. There's no particular unified military action taken by them, they just kinda . . . colonize . . . and spread . . . and it's hinted that there's some kind of induct-humans-into-the-hivemind thing going on, and large sections of humanity start giving themselves freely over to the Chtorr menace and it's all very bad.

A big recurring theme here is the collapse of civilization and the dehumanization caused thereby. This series does not pull punches; it is not a stars-and-stripes patriotic fight against the aliens (check out Doc Smith's Lensman series if you're into that, it's gloriously ridiculous), it's a bunch of disorganized guerillas who are trying to stop a force that cannot be stopped while under siege from opportunists and warlords and everything else that you would expect from the fall of humanity.

There's murder. There's rape. There's torture. And there's pedophilia.

One of the plotlines is the main character visits . . . god, I don't remember the details. An orphanage? It turns out that the leader has been raping the kids, and they're like, "aw hell nah" and kill the guy and save the kids to bring back to their town. That night, one of the kids crawls into the main character's sleeping bag and asks to have sex, and the main character is all like "aw hell nah" but the kid is insistent and so the main character basically flees the tent and goes to talk to the group leader.

The group leader says, paraphased,

okay, look. This is an insane situation to be in. But this kid, for the last three years of their life, has been taught that physical intimacy is how you show trust. And while we absolutely need to deal with that, we need to get these kids to safety first, and right now we're in the middle of a forest full of people and animals that want to kill us. If you don't prove to him that you trust him, he'll probably run away - we've seen this happen before - and get eaten. We've seen that happen b efore too.

So maybe you should pray to whatever god you believe in, make whatever penance you think is appropriate, and just do it, quite literally, for the sake of the kid.

Or maybe you shouldn't. Not gonna judge you either way. But make the decision that you can best live with.

Sorry you're dealing with this.

And the main character goes back and has sex with the kid.

(Fade to black, obviously, it doesn't go into detail.)

I just want to reiterate that I'm not making this up.

I actually think this is a really good series overall. It's uncomfortable to read - excruciatingly so - but that's kind of the point, yeah? It's asking what atrocities humans do in a situation like this, it's asking what atrocities are justifiable in this situation. Do I think the main character made the right choice? Fuck, I don't know! But that's great. Seriously, I read this book twenty years ago, it's stuck with me the entire time, I still don't know what the right solution is!

But this is the book that Chtorrr chose to name herself after.

And if David Gerrold was posting The War Against The Chtorr on Reddit, I guarantee that Chtorrr would be banning it.

I don't really have a conclusion here; this entire situation is just ridiculous.

I did allude to it once by linking to the cover of War Against the Chtorr. I have never read the books, though.

As for that scene: it strikes me as some really fucked up sublimation. Like, "Can I construct a scenario in which fucking a child is actually the right thing to do, and then write it convincingly into my sci fi novel?" is Piers Anthony territory.

That was my assessment as well, when I came across it. The actual alien ecology parts of the books were completely fascinating and deeply compelling, and a lot more of the books had to do with the psychological breakdown of the surviving human populations... but it was all shot through with the sleaziest, grimiest 70s sexual ethics, the sort of sex-positivity that comes with a metaphorical bad combover and a sweaty upper lip. That part in particular was a bridge too far for me, but quite a few of the other parts left me feeling vaguely ill. At maximum charity, some of that might have been the author's intention, but no thanks either way.

Gerrold did develop his writing chops in the seventies.

Maybe that's why he stopped - he knows his style isn't going to be accepted anymore?

Similarly with John Varley's Eight Worlds stories, which had a similar '70s libertarian field; the last one was decades ago.

Between this and Amadan's sharing of screenshots, I'm happy to announce Reddit's leadership is exactly what I suspected it was, and that I can think of no greater way to shame them than letting them be precisely what they are.

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.

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

This is hilarious, Ilforte's flair approaches unironic reality fast.

(it's «Guillemet» is not an ADL-recognized hate symbol yet on reddit)

Why go to all the trouble? The question reminds me of a thread on Hacker News about Islamic Terrorism. A comment noticing

But this is what's strange with terrorists : they strike me as utterly incompetents. There is so many easy ways to fuck things up, and they always do the inefficient and hard things.

got the response

Every-one thinks that they are the good guy. That isn't just a quirk of psychology, it is also a constraint.

People lives their lives according to different narratives. There is a fire-and-sword Muslim narrative, a quiet-life Muslim narrative, various Western narratives. Some-one living their life according to the fire-and-sword Muslim narrative is a bad guy by many other narratives. But that doesn't liberate them to be a bad guy by their own standards. They still have to be the good guy in their own head.

They have to be the hero, not the ass-hole. They cannot just be a nihilist who wrecks stuff to make things miserable for every-one. There has to be a sense that they are a warrior, fighting bad guys.

Perhaps it is as simple as attacking a cafe where they serve alcohol or a venue where the music is haram, or a business district where they charge interest on loans. I don't really get the inner logic, but I'm sure there is one and it constrains the kind of attacks they can make.

I think that Reddit Admins are just as much constrained by the need to be the good guy in their own head as Islamic Terrorists or any-one else. They must have a reason. They can cope with ignoring that it is fake reason that they manufactured themselves (humans are good at that kind of cope); but they must have one.

I think some people would have batted an eye; like, part of the reason we were still around is that they weren't just banning subs instantly. If you get too trigger-happy you start driving people away.

We left anyway, but this way they get to say "aha, they left, they weren't booted", and preserve a bit of standing and maybe keep some of the other borderline subs around longer.

But why go through all the trouble?

I'd imagine just eliminating subreddits isn't ideal, when its possible you can convert them into whatever the rest of Reddit is. Then instead of an exodus, you get to slowly shape the discourse of people you don't like or agree with. Why give up control over your outgroup?

If they manufacture reasons, the media and Wikipedia, and the useful idiots, can report the manufactured reason, and what they actually did will get no publicity.

Yep, this is my major gripe with Wikipedia. A many articles, particularly the one on Gamergate, basically get writen and then some smug editor sits on it and reverts any changes that disagree with the media naritive, citing the media consensus rule.

German normally uses the Gänsefüßchen, Einführungszeichen or inverted-plus-normal quotation marks, as the Spanish do with their exclamations. Not the guillemet.

I'm also quite curious for an uncensored perspective on this. I knew it was bad, but the story below about being site-banned for coloring a pixel in the canvas thing is so far beyond what I knew about it really threw me. I've always pushed back against the ring of Gyges story, but if admins are willing to go that far just because they know no one will ever find out...

What story below, I can't find it?

Anyway, as one of the active participants in the cat thing, usually there are misconceptions going in both directions. First of all, rdrama people weren't entirely innocent since we actually included our site name in the picture eventually, which was a no no even for most benevolent sites and a no no no hell naw for us.

Weird things happened afterwards though. First of all, instead of using the official offensive content removal tool that just erased rectangles Chtorrr and Redtaboo started erasing our site name and then the cat pixel by pixel with no time delay. Worse, Chtorrr was not just erasing it but replacing it with a neighboring chaos chess pattern, both pretending that it's a routine overtake by them and giving them the unfair advantage of placing a pixel every second instead of every five minutes.

Then the next day shit hit the fan all over reddit, and attempts to censor it only added fuel to the fire. Then it went beyond reddit, for example a World of Warcraft streamer Asmongold made a video accusing admins of cheating that got 150,000+ views. Naturally, being on the business end of a pointed crowd of one hundred and fifty thousand angry people was not fun for the admins in question, and again, that's just from one source (but one of the biggest ones). So there was much not entirely unjustified whining about stochastic terrorism from the admin-loving mods.

It also felt kinda surreal for me, I can't really wrap my head over angering 150,000 people. And we didn't actually do this on purpose at all, it's like how people describe Steve Jobs as having a reality warping field around him that would make people to shoot for the stars, apparently we have something like that that makes people act very stupid, we drew our cute cat and admins (and then admin-supporting mods) went full retard in all the worst possible ways and brought it all on themselves.

Anyways, pretty much everyone involved on our side got a very special ban wherein reddit tells you that your password is wrong no matter what. You can still get a reset password link and it seems to work but nope. I actually tried to talk with the support about it, the only thing that came out of it was that they linked me to a page that admitted that it's a thing reddit might do. They also unleashed the full power of ban evasion detection on us, so I still haven't managed to make a working reddit account (though I do have some ideas about it). I don't know if there were any innocents swept along us, I asked mods of /r/cats (we got a recruitment post there!) if they heard any such reports and they said no, but of course it would be hard for a random stonewalled victim to report anything via reddit itself.

Yeah, it's, like, for a day or two your new account seems to work (besides half of the subreddits that flat out shadowban posts from new accounts with low karma making it a bit of a Catch 22) then they shadowban it for real, then you get logged out and can't log in because wrong password.

Response posted!

For what it's worth, I originally thought they got banned for a pretty-innocuous post they made on The Motte. I'm not sure "we went to draw a cartoon cat on Place, so they banned me from the entire site" is better or worse.

For Anti-Evil Operations specifically, this should link to the most recent post removed by AEO that they've heavily references as a WTF moment, as at best a violation of the use-mention distinction and at worst actively counterproductive. bsbbtnh's post here is not the sort of thing I'd want to turn the forum into a long-lasting debate on, but in addition to the post's removal claims to have received a week-long suspensions.

Unfortunately, most older AEO activities look like the underlying post have fallen off the API that camas uses for indexing, or the full account was hit in ways that make the posts show up as deleted for camas purposes. The first four AEO actions were in response to a thread about a mass-shooter (I think the Dayton Ohio mass shooter?), which were significantly less controversial at the time, and seem to be in the first category. The oft-reference straight-of-wikipedia 'age of consent' list seems to be in the latter category.

Then there's the incredibly bad blocking implementation, that two years in Reddit still hadn't actually formalized those new 'advocacy of violence' rules that were supposed to be out in two weeks, that the mods were getting admin mails asking if they had any questions and then never responding, so on.

There are rumors on /r/ModSupport that AEO is actually a bot, triggering on single words, and that no humans are overseeing the thing.

One more reason I'd dearly love to see all bots banned from Reddit.

Surely that can't be right?

Why can't that be right? What model of the world precludes it?

I watched from the inside as a major FANG company got taken over, where the culture changed from technical excellence to 'social responsibility' or whatnot. So why shouldn't one expect that Merely Reddit got captured by a social cabal?

It's kinda hard to overstate just how much Reddit culture has changed in the past 10+ years. Prior to the summer of 2015, there were basically no subreddit bans, and /r/ShitRedditSays (the woke/feminist sneer sub) was just known as a few goons sniffing glue in the corner. Hell, in 2012 many defaults temporarily blacklisted all posts to Gawker after Gawker doxed the head moderator of most of the more unseemly NSFW subreddits (including creepshots and the then-recently-banned jailbait)... I highly doubt defaults would take that particular stance nowadays.

Also hey nice to see you here, hopefilly my values can be satisfied in the future.

Yeah definitely interested in hearing more about the "AEO". Afaik there isn't anything substantially juicy though; They were just extremely risk averse and lopsided towards preferring false positives than preventing false negatives.

Also shitting on reddit will give us something to talk about here for now, until more people join.

Yes. Censors are my eternal outgroup.

Not a mod but can share some insight. The latest AEO activity on Reddit included removing a comment for including the word “groomer”.

The term was being used to describe adults who knowingly and intentionally share sexually explicit content with children against the wishes of the childrens parents.

It gets funnier than that! They started autoremoving posts on /r/doggrooming/, and Chtorrr was too incompetent to realize that she can see the removed post because she's an admin!

https://rdrama.net/post/89433/reddit-is-cracking-down-on-dog (check out Snappy's snapshots)

Second this. I'd like to know the details of what was going on between the sub mods and site administration. Just morbid curiosity.

I love the sweet sweet juicy gossip of how horrible my censorious outgroup is.

I have been led to believe that reddit is run by a cabal of terminally online tumblrinas

That isn't too far off from the reality of the situation, to be honest. Almost every large sub is run by a small group of power mods that have a particular viewpoint and are openly hostile to any dissent. They try to take over any sub that isn't run by them, often through shady means; so while they don't really "run reddit" per se, the vast majority of reddit content is filtered through them. The reddit admins tolerate them because they do so much free labor, and their views are generally advertiser friendly, so breaking them up isn't really a worthwhile pursuit.

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