site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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.

3
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Everyone moved to discord unfortunately. Why post anime memes on plebbit whem you can post them in a discord?

I absolutely hate the phenomenon but that's just how it is.

discord is a bunch of tiny microcommunties rather than 1 public square

I'm in the largest discord for the 3rd largest Yugioh yugioh format and we have approximately 20 regulars.

Maybe that makes sense though everyone is siloed and you "gotta be there' for everything in discord, there's no long public record for people who come in to really find easily (though you can search everything good luck finding the info) and discords are extremely hard to discover so you gotta find the place that links to the discord, but once you're in there's little value in leaving.

There's no way to have long form discussion on discord really.

also memes are banned on /r/anime consider posting on /r/goodanimemes instead

It finally clicked with me the other day why Discord drives me up the wall; it's because they took the worst parts of IRC with the worst parts of forums, slap them together, and called the unholy abortion a success.

I don't know how the internet is going to pull out of that goddamn spiral.

There's no way to have long form discussion on discord really.

Elsewhere in this thread I mentioned Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death--if you haven't read it, I recommend it. A lot of his concerns about television apply all the more so to the Internet, particularly as people shift to Discord.

I agree with you that LLM spam is well on its way to really wrecking the whole enterprise.