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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   23736 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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It's very easy to conceive of them as anti spam bot/impersonation/algorithm manipulation etc measures that you would deploy in order to help hide how fast (and in what ways) you detect them while still not allowing them to deteriorate the typical user experience. This is a pretty common sort of thing in video games for instance, ban waves of cheaters and hackers so they don't know what triggered it.

Notably in these cases, these users weren't banned, although they didn't show up on trending and in some cases search. I am aware that fighting the battle of "that's not what shadowbanning means" is probably a losing proposition but it annoyed me because many people who didn't realize the difference would conflate the two meanings of the term in discussions

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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