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PaperclipPerfector  3yr ago (text post)   40413 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Sounds like the problem here is the originator opening the gates. Otherwise the mods and population could have kept chugging along. At least until someone justified a wargoal to Reddit admins.

I don’t think that plays out the same way for woodworking. There’s no originator to destabilize the whole community. You’d have to go straight to the top and try for mass demonetization. As I understand it, YouTube is absolute garbage as a platform, but I don’t think it tends to moderate for not saying something. I hope.

I recall something similar happening when I last was looking for Minecraft launchers. One of them was reasonably recommended, but the latest commit had deleted a woke code of conduct. Ooo, scary—oh. He also booted anyone he thought was too left-leaning from the permissions. There goes the neighborhood.

Easy fork, right? Just make their own PolyMC and don’t let this guy in. But network effects mean that requires a bunch of hand-wringing warning people off the old brand name, which is now dead to “anyone of sane mind.”

I mention all that because my first reflex was to tell you to suck it up and make /r/TrueBattletech or whatever. There’s clearly a supply of recently unemployed moderators. But I realize that the network effects are stacked against you, and that no matter what you do, it will be painted as a reactionary shithole. That sucks, and I’m sorry to hear about it.

While we’re on the subject…Please tell me that RogueTech is still okay?

I don’t think that plays out the same way for woodworking. There’s no originator to destabilize the whole community

If it happened to knitters it can happen to woodworkers. Centralization helps but isn't critical. There was no centralized platform for internet atheists, but Atheism+ still happened.

I don’t think that plays out the same way for woodworking. There’s no originator to destabilize the whole community. You’d have to go straight to the top and try for mass demonetization. As I understand it, YouTube is absolute garbage as a platform, but I don’t think it tends to moderate for not saying something. I hope.

I put nothing past them. Having centralization of a hobby makes it easier. But activist and infiltrators make it work just as well, just slower, without.

Maybe it starts with a campaign for all woodworkers to start putting their pronouns in their correspondence, and announce it at the beginning of each video. It's not like everyone would do it overnight. But maybe a few would. Then maybe one of the really big channels on Youtube gets talked into doing it, and suddenly there is a sea change. Next thing you know, if you aren't announcing your pronouns at the beginning of your woodworking videos, the comments section becomes a sea of accusations of bigotry. I know, I know, comments on youtube, what do you expect? Well, at the moment, most comment sections on woodworking video are actually profoundly helpful. I know, right?

Then the pressure ramps up. Suddenly all the channels are trying to outdo each other promoting Pride, or donating to LGBT causes. A little bit later, they are just straight up proselytizing for Democrats and calling all Republican's Nazi's.

Because it's a community, and it's also a hustle. In a sense it's zero sum, because there are only so many eyeballs you can get on your content. And most of the creators network extensively, and you don't want to find yourself outside the network. Same as most Youtube verticals.

Maybe a few channels find themselves left out of the network because at some point the meat AI that is the typical mob of "creators" that's been trained by the Youtube Algorithm hits a line they simply cannot cross along with everyone else. Maybe they can't throw their family under the bus as being bigots. Maybe they actually don't agree with mutilating and sterilizing children as a form of "trans health care". When all their former friends and colleagues treat them as persona non grata, they are immediately radicalized in the other direction.

And that is the hellscape I'm afraid is in woodworkings future. Because I've seen it happen, over, and over, and over again.

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I recall something similar happening when I last was looking for Minecraft launchers. One of them was reasonably recommended, but the latest commit had deleted a woke code of conduct. Ooo, scary—oh. He also booted anyone he thought was too left-leaning from the permissions. There goes the neighborhood.

To be fair to the broader Minecraft community there, launchers by necessity have to have the ability to run arbitrary Java code with a pretty minimal level of sandboxing: there's a lot of harm that can and has happened through supply chain attacks. Booting a lot of maintainers has been one of the warning signs for a GitHub compromise.

If you want a real spicy version, I'd point to how LexManos got kicked out of leadership roles.

I think there are a lot of reasons to distrust upvotes as a metric of value or even general preferences.

If the userbase did, in fact, overwhelmingly prefer to amend the rules, that’s fine. Would that have resulted in this sort of originator revolt?

That's why it's important to have a principled rule in the first place, because majorities don't have principles.

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