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 -
If it's such a burden for Youtube, maybe they should stop focusing on maximizing watch time and keeping people on the site resulting in screen addiction, one of the many ills of modern society.
I think Youtube being so centralized and massive is itself a big problem. Rather than people hosting their own websites where they distribute their own videos and eventually finding ways to distribute videos cheaply, people just decided to outsource video hosting to Youtube, and now they've built up a huge network effect where you can't simply take all your videos and move to a different site, and even if you could you can't just take all your viewers with you. Even the content creators on this service are called "Youtubers" rather than creators. Separately, centralization poses huge questions for archival and preservation of a huge aspect of our culture. What happens if the entire thing goes down? Youtube is even actively hostile to downloading videos and archival efforts, they likely threatened the youtube-dl developers into going away, and the replacement fork yt-dlp is constantly having to make changes and is slowly weakening in accessibility and usability through no fault of their own.
I wasn't expecting to write an anti-Youtube screed, but this is how I feel. I guess my answer is that I don't care if Youtube has to bleed money to provide a service without ads, because the consequences of that are more desirable than the status quo.
More options
Context Copy link