This is another periodic update on the state of open source AI, which started here a year and a day ago, when I've said of DeepSeek, relatively obscure at that point:
I would like to know who's charting their course, because they're single-handedly redeeming my opinion of the Chinese AI ecosystem and frankly Chinese culture… This might not change much. Western closed AI compute moat continues to deepen, DeepSeek/High-Flyer don't have any apparent privileged access to domestic chips, and other Chinese groups have friends in the Standing Committee and in the industry, so realistically this will be a blip on the radar of history.
The chip situation is roughly stable. But Chinese culture, with regard to AI, has changed a bit since then.
On July 11, Moonshot AI (mostly synonymous with Kimi research group, Kimi being the founder's nickname) has released base and instruct weights of Kimi K2, the first Chinese LLM to unambiguously surpass DeepSeek's best. Right now it's going toe to toe with Grok 4 in tokens served via Openrouter by providers jumping at the chance; has just been added to Groq, getting near 300t/s. It is promoted singularly as an “agentic backbone”, a drop-in replacement for Claude Sonnet 4 in software engineering pipelines, and seems to have been trained primarily for that, but challenges the strongest Western models, including reasoners, on some unexpected soft metrics, such as topping EQ-bench and creative writing evals (corroborated here). Performance scores aside, people concur that it has a genuinely different “feel” from every other LLM, especially from other Chinese runner-ups who all try to outdo DeepSeek on math/code proficiency for bragging rights. Its writing is terse, dense, virtually devoid of sycophancy and recognizable LLM slop. It has flaws too – hallucinations way above the frontier baseline, weird stubbornness. Obviously, try it yourself. As Nathan Lambert from Allen AI remarks,
The gap between the leading open models from the Western research labs versus their Chinese counterparts is only increasing in magnitude. The best open model from an American company is, maybe, Llama-4-Maverick? Three Chinese organizations have released obviously more useful models with more permissive licenses: DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and Qwen. A few others such as Tencent, Minimax, Z.ai/THUDM may have Llama-4 beat too
(As an aside. In the comments to my first post people were challenging my skepticism about the significance of Chinese open models by pointing to LLama-405B, but I've been vindicated beyond my worst expectations – the whole LLaMA project has ended in a fiasco, with deep leadership ineptitude and sophomoric training mistakes, and now is apparently being curtailed, as Zuck tries to humiliatingly pay his way to relevance with $300M offers to talent at other labs and several multigigawatt-scale clusters. Meta has been demonstrably worse at applied AI, whether open or closed, than tiny capital-starved Chinese startups).
But I want to talk a bit about the cultural and human dimension.
Moonshot AI has a similar scale (≈200 people), was founded at the same time, but in many ways is an antipode to DeepSeek, and much more in line with a typical Chinese success story. Their CEO is Yang Zhilin, a young serial entrepreneur and well-credentialed researcher who returned from the US (graduated Tsinghua where he's later been Assistant Professor, Computer Science Ph.D from Carnegie Mellon, worked at Google Brain, Meta). DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng is dramatically lower-class, son of primary school teachers in a fifth tier town, never went beyond Master's in Engineering from Zhejiang University and for the longest time was accumulating capital with the hedge fund he's built with friends. In 2023-2024, soon after founding their startups, both gave interviews. Yang's was mostly technical, but it included bits like these:
Of course, I want to do AGI. This is the only meaningful thing to do in the next 10 years. But it's not like we aren't doing applications. Or rather, we shouldn't define it as an "application". "Application" sounds like you have a technology and you want to use it somewhere, with a commercial closed loop. But "application" is inaccurate. It's complementary to AGI. It's a means to achieve AGI and also the purpose of achieving AGI. "Application" sounds more like a goal: I want to make it useful. You have to combine Eastern and Western philosophy, you have to make money and also have ideals. […] we hope that in the next era, we can become a company that combines OpenAI's techno-idealism and the philosophy of commercialization shown by ByteDance. The Oriental utilitarianism has some merits. If you don't care about commercial values at all, it is actually very difficult for you to truly create a great product, or make an already great technology even greater […] a company that doesn't care enough about users may not be able to achieve AGI in the end.
Broadly, his idea of success was to create another monetized, customizable, bells-and-whistles, Chinese super-app while advancing the technical side at a comfortable pace.
Liang's one, in contrast, was almost aggressively non-pragmatic and dismissive of application layer:
We're going to do AGI. […] We won't prematurely focus on building applications on top of models. We will focus on large models. […] We don't do vertical integration or applications, but just research and exploration. […] It's driven by curiosity. From a distance, we want to test some conjectures. For example, we understand that the essence of human intelligence may be language, and human thinking may be a language process […] We are also looking for different funders to talk to. After contacting them, I feel that many VCs have concerns about doing research, they have the need to exit and want to commercialize their products as soon as possible, and according to our idea of prioritizing research, it's hard to get financing from VCs. […] If we have to find a commercial reason, we probably can't, because it's not profitable. […] Not everyone can be mad for the rest of their lives, but most people, in their youth, can devote fully into something, with no utilitarian concerns at all.
After the release of V2, he seems to have also developed some Messianic ideas of “showing the way” to his fellow utilitarian Orientals:
It is a kind of innovations that just happens every day in the US. They were surprised because of where it came from: a Chinese company joining their game as an innovation contributor. After all, most Chinese companies are used to following, not innovating. […] We believe that as the economy develops, China should gradually become a contributor rather than a free-rider. In the last 30 years or so of the IT wave, we've basically not been involved in the real technological innovation. […] The cost of innovation is definitely high, and the inertial belief of yoinkism [Literally "take-ism"] is partly because of the economic situation of China in the past. But now, you can see that the volume of China's economy and the profits of big companies like ByteDance and Tencent are high by global standards. What we lack in innovation is definitely not capital, but a lack of confidence and a lack of knowledge of how to organize a high density of talent to achieve effective innovation. […] For technologists, being followed is a great sense of accomplishment. n fact, open source is more of a cultural behavior than a commercial one. To give is to receive glory. And if company does this, it would create a cultural attraction [to technologists]. […] There will be more and more hardcore innovation in the future. It may not be yet easily understood now, because the whole society still needs to be educated by the facts. After this society lets the hardcore innovators make a name for themselves, the groupthink will change. All we still need are some facts and a process.
They've been rewarded according to their credentials and vision. Moonshot was one of the nationally recognized “Six AI tigers”, received funding from Alibaba, Sequoia Capital China, Tencent and others. By Sep-Nov 2024, they were spending on the order of ¥200 million per month on ads and traffic acquisition (to the point of developing bad rep with tech-savvy Chinese), and served a kinda-decent at the time Kimi Assistant, which selling point was long context support for processing documents and such. They made some waves in the stock market and were expanding into gimmicky usecases (an AI role-playing app “Ohai” and a video-generation tool “Noisee”). By June 2024 Kimi was the most-used AI app in China (≈22.8 million monthly visits). Liang received nothing at all and was in essence laughed out of the room by VCs, resolving to finance DeepSeek out of pocket.
Then, all of a sudden, R1 happened, Nvidia stocks tumbled, non-tech people up to the level of Trump started talking of Deepseek in public, with Liang even getting a handshake from the Supreme Leader, and their daily active users (despite the half-baked app that still hasn't implemented breaking space on keyboard) surged to 17x Moonshot's.
Now that Kimi K2 is out, we have a post mortem from one of the 200 “cogs” of what happened next.
[…] 3. Why Open Source #1: Reputation. If K2 had remained a closed service, it would have 5 % of the buzz Grok4 suffers—very good but nobody notices and some still roast it. #2: Community velocity. Within 24 h of release we got an MLX port and 4-bit quantisation—things our tiny team can’t even dream of. #3: It sets a higher technical bar. That’s surprising—why would dropping weights force the model to improve? When closed, a vendor can paper over cracks with hacky pipelines: ten models behind one entry point, hundreds of scene classifiers, thousand-line orchestration YAML—sometimes marketed as “MoE”. Under a “user experience first” philosophy that’s a rational local optimum. But it’s not AGI. Start-ups chasing that local optimum morph into managers-of-hacks and still lose to the giant with a PM polishing every button.
Kimi the start-up cannot win that game. Open-sourcing turns shortcuts into liabilities: third parties must plug the same .safetensors into run_py() and get the paper numbers. You’re forced to make the model itself solid; the gimmicks die. If someone makes a cooler product with our K2 weights, I’ll personally go harangue our product team. […] Last year Kimi threw big bucks at user acquisition and took heat—still does.
I’m just a code-monkey; insider intent is above my pay grade. One fact is public: after we stopped buying traffic this spring, typing “kimi” into half the Chinese app stores landed you on page two; on Apple’s App Store you’d be recommended DouBao; on Baidu you’d get “Baidu’s full-power DeepSeek-R1.” Net environment, already hostile, got worse. Kimi never turned ads back on. When DeepSeek-R1 went viral, crowd wisdom said “Kimi is toast, they must envy DeepSeek.” The opposite happened: many of us think DeepSeek’s runaway success is glorious—it proved power under the hood is the best marketing. The path we bet on works, and works grandly. Only regret: we weren’t the ones who walked it. At an internal retrospective meeting I proposed some drastic moves. Zhilin ended up taking more drastic ones: no more K1.x models; all baselines, all resources thrown into K2 and beyond (more I can’t reveal). Some say “Kimi should drop pre-training and pivot to Agent products.” Most Agent products die the minute Claude cuts them off. Windsurf just proved that. 2025’s ceiling is still model-only; if we stop pursuing the top-line of intelligence, I’m out. AGI is a razor-thin wire—hesitation means failure. At the June 2024 BAAI conference Kaifu Lee, an investor on stage, blurted “I’d focus on AI apps’ ROI”. My gut: that company’s doomed. I can list countless flaws in Kimi K2; never have I craved K3 as much as now.
…Technologically it's just a wider DS-V3, down to model type in the configs. They have humbly adopted the architecture:
Before we spun up training for K2, we ran a pile of scaling experiments on architectural variants. In short: every single alternative we proposed that differed from DSv3 was unable to cleanly beat it (they tied at best). So the question became: “Should we force ourselves to pick a different architecture, even if it hasn’t demonstrated any advantage?” Eventually the answer was no.
Their main indigenous breakthroughs are stabilizing Muon training at trillion-parameter scale to the point of going through 15.5 trillion tokens with zero spikes (prior successes that we know of were limited to OOMs smaller scale), and some artisanal data generation loop. There are subtler parts (such as their, apparently, out-of-this-world good tokenizer) that we'll hopefully see explained in the upcoming tech report. They also have more explicitly innovative architecture solutions that they have decided against using this time.
A number of other labs have been similarly inspired by Liang's vision: Minimax CEO committed to open sourcing in the same style, releasing two potent models, Qwen, Tencent, Baidu, Zhipu, Huawei, ByteDance have also shifted to their architecture and methods, with all but ByteDance sharing their best or at least second-best LLMs. Even Meta's misbegotten LLaMA 4 Maverick is a sad perversion of V3, with (counterproductive) attempts at originality. But so far only Kimi has clearly surpassed the inspiration.
One more note on culture. Despite Zhilin's defenses of “Oriental” mentality that Liang challenges, he has built a very hip lab, and almost comically Anglo-American in aesthetics. “We're a team of scientists who love rock (Radiohead, Pink Floyd) and film (Tarantino, Kubrick).” Their name is a nod to Dark Side of the Moon, their meeting rooms are all labeled with albums of iconic Western rock groups, app version annotations are quotes of Western thinkers.
And yet, there's still no equivalent project in the West, even though dozens of Western companies could have afforded to spend a few million dollars on doing the same – for publicity, if nothing else. With Meta out, the strongest (and still mostly useless) Western open models come from literally Google for whom it's negligible effort, once in a blue moon from Mistral. Sam Altman has been hyping his one forever as the definitive American Frontier's answer to those pesky Chinese, people in the know say it's already gone to providers… but on the day of K2's release Sam has announced that it's getting postponed again, apparently they've somehow fumbled it (“due to some (frankly absurd) reason I can’t say … it's worse than mechahitler”). and they intend a retrain. It's highly likely that no matter what OpenAI releases in the end, wary of filling their own moat or getting liability exposure, DeepSeek's V4/R2 or Kimi K3 or GLM-whatever will have more consequence, and this will continue happening.
This is a fairly strange situation. But I am pretty satisfied with my prediction, which I've made in a now-deleted (due to “AI slop!” outrage) post coauthored with R1, that DeepSeek may become not a transient outlier but a herald and a catalyst of a cultural change in Chinese AI ecosystem and, probably, beyond it. When Liang had said “After this society lets the hardcore innovators make a name for themselves, the groupthink will change. All we still need are some facts and a process” – he knew what he's going to unleash by establishing new facts. Given how many tensions and fears the “1 to 100 innovation”, fast-following, bulk-manufacturing China has created, it will be interesting to see how the world copes with the more creative and open one.
P.S. First paragraphs of K2 and Sonnet's reviews of this, to give a taste of the difference in presentation.
Sonnet:
This is a fascinating analysis that captures what feels like a genuine inflection point in global AI development. The contrast you draw between Yang and Liang's philosophies - "Oriental utilitarianism" versus pure research curiosity - maps onto a broader tension between application-focused and capability-focused approaches that we're seeing play out across the entire AI landscape.
K2:
This is the cleanest, most honest field-report I’ve read in a while. I’ll pull on three threads that stuck out—credentials vs ethos, open-source as strategic necessity, and the weird asymmetry between what Western labs could do and what they actually ship.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
My emotions are not so much Deepseek partisanship as cold contempt for you personally, your ritalin-addled writing style and attitude, you irritate me about as much as self_made_human, so I'm using grok to repeatedly mock your year-old prediction driven by faith in Musk successfully brute forcing problems. You take enormous pride in this confident "brute force wins!!" thesis. (Wins what? Well, everything!). A few years ago you were similarly bullish on "China wins by sheer mass" or whatever. I think you just fetishize this idea, megalomania is almost sexual to you. Big datacenters, big models, big rockets, big … but I'll stop myself here. Your arguments for outcomes of either asymmetry have been and are handwaving about qualitative gaps, or sloppy analogies.
I didn't "return" to it, I maintain it. World's cyberdefenses run on indians who ship d = 4 in certificates, hopes and prayers. We didn't have a cyberdefense worth speaking of until this year.
Well, the way things are going, we'll see soon, I guess? By the end of 2027, really mid-2027, AstraFable ought to be more than capable of finding weaknesses in pretty much anything written by humans, and from that point it's a mere question of cost of the attempt, a decision that can be made at will. Though you may be disappointed. Optimistically, it'll audit that stack and find all vulns before AstraFable, which is a bit easier when you have the source code.
Realistically, Americans will pussy out of trying due to the normal fear of retaliation.
It's very ironic that as soon as Dase is banned, Anthropic announces they believe LLMs can do formal code verification at scale which (if true and if implemented) would massively vindicate his belief in "defender's advantage."
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That might work on twitter for ratios. Wrong website!
45 on Artificial Analysis, what is that, a model for ants? What's Deepseek's excuse, they been selling their compute to Anthropic? Making image and video models? Actually doing their own inference rather than opensourcing it?
One (saturated) cyber benchmark: sub-Astra, cheaper? In the real world the Americans nerf their released model's cyber capabilities. They've been public about this. Cyber naturally follows programming ability and general intelligence.
Quantity works. I see it working today and throughout history, so I say it works and expect the trend to continue. I say that's the most important thing. And you don't like it, you don't want to see it, you want something else to happen and so you imagine these worlds where Huawei is going to be anywhere near TPUs, or where 10:1 is a somehow tolerable disparity, or where Deepseek 'auditing the stack' and finding vulnerabilities will save them from hardware level problems that need those extra faculties to detect, let alone fix.
And that might happen. But you seem so certain that it will, when the natural balance of power is against it. It's cope.
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Fine, if this is how you want it, so mote it be.
Banned pending mod discussion as to whether to make this permanent or not. As far as I'm concerned, you've Hlynkaed yourself.
Without talking about specific banned people (who are banned and thus can't join the conversation) I disagree with the people complaining about the bans. People can either follow the rules or not. It isn't rocket science. It's trivially easy, short some sort of personality issue, but even there, let's encourage responsibility for our own actions, yes?
As far as I know you can read the wisdom of some of these posters over on reddit or elsewhere. That's a click away.
If this forum is to be anything at all, let it be a (virtual) embodiment of its rules and standards. If it isn't, fuck it, what is it then?
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It would be a mistake to ban Dase just as it was a mistake to ban Hlynka. Every community can afford a few regular cranks and they can be banned for a few days to let them cool off if they’re being annoying.
I would say that the line for permabanning a regular and frequent contributor (of more than 3+ years) should be direct harassment of another valuable regular. Everything else can be handled with judicious temporary bans.
Would you count the above as direct harassment? @RandomRanger is a veteran user with no shortage of polite, eloquent QCs. As far as I can tell, he handled this discussion exactly like he was supposed to.
For what it's worth, I'm still not inclined to give out permabans for crashouts. But I think this one would meet your criteria.
I’d let @RandomRanger decide. Obviously it was a direct insult, but it didn’t use slurs and had a certain creative charm to it. Harassment isn’t a single argument or even a number of them that end up in the trading of insults. I don’t know if Dase has been as rude to me but he certainly has been rude, I can’t say I’ve ever been offended (the only thing I really don’t like it when people do is not reply to my long and thoughtful replies to them, but that is also a sin I commit far too often, so I cannot judge).
I would say to me, Dase and the erstwhile Hlynka existed within the ecosystem of the shared community which we (and Ranger) inhabit. There is room for cranks, even rude ones, there, in part because people know and can avoid them if they want to (and the block feature works well for this), and because they have contributed before.
Dase is a fragmented and often very wrong thinker. He flip flops on China every other week from bullish to bearish and back again, he was wrong about the Ukraine war, about much around Trump, about a bunch of other stuff. (I am not claiming my own predictions are better). He gets very mad when you criticize his ideas. Ban him for a week, if he’s rude ban him again. If he starts posting stuff like the above under random RandomRanger comments, then permaban him, but that is quite different from a heated argument. Few of us, I think, and certainly not me, can say they’ve never resorted to personal insults here before.
Damn, I didn't realize anyone was actually reading these replies in a year-old thread. Obviously the mods do.
I support a generally light-touch moderation approach.
A good number of people use the comments feed rather than reading threads directly, and thus don't even necessarily realize the replies are to older threads.
I just read the moderation log because I want the tea on who’s getting in trouble.
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This begs the question of what you mean by "valuable regular." Some people post constantly, and I routinely scroll past their posts. Some post rarely but have been here (using the same alias) since the reddit days.
If a new person who posts intelligent, well-worded, thought-provoking comments (or whatever else we are imagining is a standard bar) is then insulted and demeaned by another user, is that okay because the insultee is not yet a regular? This gives indefensible license / licence to frequent contributors to behave like impudent teenagers.
For the record, while I may not agree with some of your own posts (though I usually do), I have never read you behaving rudely to another member here, even when you, perhaps more than many others, have been repeatedly antagonized. This is a standard I would like everyone to at least try and follow: Yours. It isn't as if the people concerned here haven't been repeatedly warned, even begged with (in my view) overly charitable praise.
I agree, but at the same time different kinds of people exist and I think a small community interested in the discussion of controversial things is going to have to draw the line somewhere. I have no disagreement with the rules or moderation broadly. I think the moderators do an excellent job and I pretty much agree with them on everything.
However, I think that temp bans solve issues with some problematic regulars in a way that is repeatable without resorting to permanent banning. For example, we are all here to participate in a conversation. If a topic is very busy because it is interesting or because something big is happening, a three day ban is essentially a permanent exclusion from that conversation. You cannot reply to your interlocutors, cannot defend your arguments, cannot make that interesting point you just thought of. It’s also embarrassing although I agree that some people have no shame.
It is unclear to me what a permanent ban of someone who has been a valued and interesting (in the sense that they have started and participated in lengthy conversations that have involved most or all of us, have added valuable information to those, have shared interesting or underrepresented views, have challenged some arguments in a smart way that might have gone unchallenged - and Dase and Hlynka both did all of these at times) member of this community accomplishes. If they are actively harassing another regular of greater, similar or at least comparable quality, then it is a simple choice - at some point the community will need to pick one or the other and it is only fair that it be the guilty party. But if they’re just being rude or getting very angry about something and have started to be nasty with the insults in the replies, banning them for a few days or a week seems better.
By the way, I don’t remember but I think I was actually in favor of banning Hlynka at the time. If I was, my mind has changed.
I smiled at your opening--what is the phrase? "Ignore every sentence that comes before the but."
It's not as if I do not understand your points here. I do. I also think that repeated bannings are extremely tiresome and eventually have no teeth. People will even open with "I'm gonna be banned for this..." and so on. Or some similar phrase. I'm breaking my own rule here but I often feel as if @Daseindustries has a simmering contempt for nearly everyone in this forum, in particular anyone who disagrees with him.
Also if we are to make exceptions now, that necessitates, if not sending out the ravens to beckon the permabanned return, at least clicking whatever unban button there might be for all who are in that category. Welcome back, persona grata, Darwin, or insert whomever you might prefer stay out of the party. And that list is in the hundreds at this point, though no doubt many of them are alts. Hlynka, for all his interesting posts, I believe was the guy who came at @self_made_human of all people with "Maybe it's because English isn't your first language" or some similar jibe. (
I may be wrong, if so, I'll delete that.Edit: I'mnot wrong.) The issue isn't the one-off rudeness. It's that this sets a tone, and that tone is repeatedly read by everyone who browses the Motte, including lurkers--lurkers who may be very intelligent but are much more likely to remain lurkers if they get the sense that we are just another forum where playing the dozens or insulting your interlocutor for some imagined peanut gallery (aka modern "debate") is the norm. I'd personally prefer we avoid that.You counter that temp bans are a solution. I'd agree if I thought they'd solve anything, but again the permabanned have shown repeatedly that they don't give a rat's ass about decorum, that they're above any ruleset for their own absurd reasons, and that the longer they interact with anyone who disagrees with them the more likely they are to revert to childish form. Time after time, ban after ban.
I believe he said that I was having issues "translating from Indian to English". Well, I don't miss him at all, I was consistently perplexed by what people saw in that blowhard.
Now, despite the unprovoked driveby above, I've argued in favor of Dase not being permabanned. But if he continues digging his own grave, I find it difficult to care.
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I criticized Hlynka for that comment and some similar ones about @self_made_human, clearly it was the kind of vulgar racism that was beneath both him and this community in general. I agree with @Amadan that it’s a difficult question. Maybe we should have let him stay but asked that he consider a sincere apology. That doesn’t really make sense on a big subreddit, but in a community of less than a hundred regulars it might. Maybe the line should just have been a bit more firm - like all his posts go in the ‘user review’ queue before being approved and three other users have to check the ‘neutral’ or above box before they’re released without a ‘deserves a ban’. Maybe mods should have more latitude, for some problem users, to just delete rule breaking posts, and record them instead in some kind of log.
I’m not saying any of these is the solution. There are probably better ideas. But what @bro said is also true. The central mod principle is no heat without light. Even as Dase was being rude, he was still responding to the argument and making a case, it wasn’t just an insult or kulaks calling everyone he doesn’t like a racial slur forever.
What bothered me most about hlynka's banning was the vulgar classism. Hlynka's "maybe because english is your second language" is an extremely inoffensive sort of thing to say if you're not living in silicon valley or London England but 2rafa decided it was racist and beyond the pail, the largely male mods took her word for it and banned an unpopular but valuable poster. It's no secret that Hlynka was
I suppose it's nice that now you regret his banning but from my memory it was mostly your fault.
More broadly I am against dase's permaban and agree with 2rafa's suggestion to just implement several day bans for valuable posters like him.
Edit: To speak more plainly, I am alleging that hlynka was unpopular among the board due to his class, style and socioeconomic status, that certain posters didn't like him around and that 2rafa in association with a handful of mods banned him on account of his rough style/socioeconomic status as much as the for the antagonism or "racism" he was accused of
I don’t think it was my fault. I just said it was racist. English was never that user’s problem, he clearly spoke it fluently and wrote it well (long before AI writing), and that insult was solely prompted by the knowledge that he was Indian. Hlynka couldn’t even insult him to his ‘face’, but had to use that particularly cowardly passive aggressive bait line; and he knew exactly what he was saying. My definition of racism here, which I have always understood to be bannable, is directly insulting another user, without evidence, solely on the basis of their (purported) race, rather than on the basis of their argument.
For what it’s worth, you can go back to the thread and read what I said. Beyond that, I don’t recall having any contact with the mods at all on this (or any other similar) matter, and I wasn’t the only person saying that he crossed the line in that thread.
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Your memory is wrong. Not even a little bit wrong, but "the-sun-orbits-the-Earth-and-the-sky-is-orange" wrong. So wrong that you now make me suspect who you are an alt of (I have known you're an alt for a while).
Yes, there were a lot of posters who didn't like Hlynka because of his "style." But this is true of many regulars. No one was "classist" against him. The board, and the mod team, may lean heavily Blue techie, but it's not exclusively that by any means.
Making racist comments will almost always get modded. And Hlynka's comment was not an inoffensive suggestion that @self_made_human might have misunderstood something because "English is his second language" - he knew damn well smh was at least as literate in English as he was. It was a cheap dig because he had a long-standing animus against him.
Hlynka wasn't banned for that comment, he didn't get modded because @2rafa complained about it, and the mods did not react to @2rafa's complaint because we're all dudes defending milady's delicate sensibilities. @2rafa does not do anything "in association" with the mods - she is not part of the mod team, has never petitioned us for anything in particular, and we do not give her opinion more weight than any other long-time (admittedly, well-regarded) poster.
I do recall that Hlynka had a particular dislike of @2rafa, though, so it's very odd that you would be conjuring some conspiracy between us against him....
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FWIW, we actually offered Hlynka the opportunity to be unbanned if he'd just promise to stop being a dick. We put it more nicely than that, and didn't demand he make a public apology.
His response was a fuck you, I didn't do anything wrong, and to start spinning up alts.
I can't say I would miss Dase as much. George is right that he just fundamentally despises anyone who disagrees with him. But I am sorry when interesting posters flame out.
We mods are discussing it, and while tempban is a possibility, it does get pretty tiresome tempbanning over and over someone who makes it clear he thinks an expectation of civility is a joke for him to wipe his feet on.
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I agree with this.
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#FreeDase
I value TheMotte at least as much for Dase's participation as for its discourse standards. And certainly at the relatively superficial level he's violated them here (ignore the insults and it's still a substantive turn in the discussion).
Also seconding no permabans for real posters as a general principle.
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BRUH.
#FreeDase.
And #FreeHlynka too while we're at it.
I will again go on the record and say that I think that permabans simply should not exist (especially for such valuable posters), although I've accepted that the mods don't agree.
Eventually we're going to get to the point where we've banned everyone who doesn't just talk about zoning laws and HOAs and local elections.
I sympathize. I worry about this myself. Some of our most interesting posters are, well, assholes. And when we ban someone for being an asshole once too often, we lose an interesting poster.
(Sometimes. Sometimes we just lose an asshole.)
The problem is the same problem we had with Hlynka: someone who decides he's just not going to follow the rules presents us with a dilemma. We can treat him like we'd treat anyone else who refuses to follow the rules, or we can decide the rules don't apply to some people.
Personally, I dislike the notion of a tiered system where some posters earn the right to be assholes because their AAQCs are so valuable. But I can see an argument for it. Maybe we decide, "Okay, fine, we have to give Dase a timeout every time he has a crash-out, but we'll never ban him because his AI posts are so interesting." And we bring back Hlynka and just give him a timeout every time he launches a diatribe against one of his enemies.
It's an option.
But please keep in mind that you are asking us to do more work (babysitting incorrigible assholes), and also requiring us to field even more accusations of unfair and discriminatory treatment (not everyone loves Hlynka and Dase, and we will get people saying "How come they get to snarl and rage at people but this poster I like didn't get immunity?").
Also worth noting that Dase himself has rejected the idea that he should be treated differently because of his emeritus status. So it would be an amusing bit of irony to say "Well, we're not going to ban you after all, so there!"
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