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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45471 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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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.

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