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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Imgur (WP) is an image/video/meme sharing board from ca 2010. Its heyday was before reddit introduced native image hosting in 2016.
Browsing imgur has been a somewhat guilty pleasure of mine. Compared to bigger social media platforms, what I really like about it is that imgur does not optimize for maximizing the time I engage with it. While Tiktok would happily provide you with videos most likely to make you stay on the app until you died of thirst, with imgur, you can spend half an hour a day scrolling through the trending (i.e. upvoted) images. If you want to waste more time, you can scroll through the feed of user submissions, but eventually you will just hit the end of that feed.
Like most internet platforms, the people who upvote images on imgur are leaning broadly left. Trans-friendly, Trump-bashing (plenty of it rather stupid, like "Trump is a pedophile"), but a lot of the content is plain unpolitical, like videos of machines producing wire fences or cats behaving in ways humans tend to find funny.
A few days ago, imgur managed to piss off most of the people voting on images. I think they broke notifications, and the parent company medialabs had fired most of the staff and replaced them with AI.
For a day, imgur was full of a photoshopped image of John Oliver giving medialabs the finger and saying "fuck you, business daddy". More recently, people would post/upvote images which either were completely black or would contain NSFW content such as boobs, with the idea that advertisers would not like that.
Compare to the Reddit API restriction protests of 2023, and the demise of freenode in 2021.
I think one difference is that Reddit has more of a moat than imgur, though. For one thing, the software stack to run reddit seems rather less trivial to replace (though rDrama works well enough for themotte). And the reddit communities are organized into different subreddits, which makes moving them a coordination problem. By contrast, a lot of content on imgur is copied from other social media platforms by users, so reposting it on another site would be trivial.
I would expect Imgur is used something like 95% (if not more) as a regular image hosting site and 5% as an actual social media site and thus expect nothing meaningful to happen. How many people even know that it has a social media element to begin with? I doubt there's that many, if they want an image based social media there's already Pinterest and Instagram.
In the last few years, imgur made it increasingly difficult to share a bare image link. They redirect you to their full site whenever possible, and the "social" features are quite prominent. It's hard to miss.
This change corresponds with my decreased use of the site. The user base is... "Opinionated" and "passionate" would be charitable terms. Wishing death by starvation on me and people like me was popular for a while.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link