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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2399 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 29, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Congratulations to @self_made_human, @raggedy_anthem, and @netstack who were elevated to adminhood this week.

Why wasn't there an official announcement of this?

A doctor in a white coat walks in holding a clipboard. He reviews it for a few seconds flipping between pages.

I'm afraid I have some bad news @self_made_human, @raggedy_anthem, and @netstack. You were elevated to adminhood. It looks terminal.

Oh shit, the janny virus claims new victims...

Good thing I'm vaxxmaxxed against it...

Huh? What adminhood? They're blocked by you.(So am I)

Hmm. They blocked me too, as I see when giving a joke reply just now.

Why mass block posters? What impoverished empty version of the Motte do they inhabit?

Same (in fact, I think he's the only person who I know has blocked me).

That said, you can see that they're admins here.

Blocking admins doesn't actually do anything, for what I hope are understandable reasons.

I would hope even Reddit doesn't just let a user vanish from the scrutiny of the mods, but I genuinely don't know if that's the case. That would be suboptimal, to say the least.

How did they choose the new mods? I know in the past there was some complicated system.

Multiple rounds of selection.

In the initial round, a bunch of users who the mods considered trustworthy and generally representative of the forum were selected, mainly going off AAQC count and other things, and then asked to nominate the next set of voters, who would go on to nominate the final set, who were then to nominate the people who they wanted to see as mods. I have genuinely lost track of whether there were 2 or 3 preliminary rounds before the final vote.

At that point, the candidates were asked if they were willing to take on the responsibility, and quite a few demurred. The remainder were finally vetted by the existing admins, and the results came out a few days ago.

As you can imagine, this took a while. I think a few intermediate steps could be taken out of the picture, because the people nominated in the second step were almost all the same people who showed up for the final vote, but at least it brought in new faces who hadn't been chosen by the mods at the start.

@ZorbaTHut based it off the election of the Doge in Venice. It seemed to work well enough last time, and if it ain't broke and also happens to be mildly exciting, don't fix it!

Votes were submitted in private to him, but there was no barrier to people declaring or discussing their choices, in a channel made for them. A surprising lack of acrimony, and I don't recall anyone being uncouth enough to nominate themselves, though I'm not sure if that was expressly ruled out.

You couldn’t nominate yourself or a currently banned poster and were limited to 4 nominees were the instructions I got in the third(final) round.

Noooo! If any of them unveil a new substack in the next month I’ll be sick.

I enjoy these users’ comments, so I will be sad if they fall off the activity mod-cliff and we only ever see them again with mod hats.

Looks shiftily at plans for a Substack, somewhere, somewhen

Well, I have enough on my plate as it is with exams coming up, though the Ritalin does make me procrasturbate more than I ought to, usually manifesting in Motteposting.

Is raggedy anthem already gone?

The mod curse is real.

It was personal reasons, I won't go more into it.

Sad

Netstack was the only person I ever felt compelled to block on this site. In one of his replies to a post about the over-representation of Jews I made a while ago he launched into an odd ad hominem tirade —

Look at yourself. Trawling lists to tally up your racial quotas. Wringing your hands over the tragic underrepresentation of your preferred demographic. So determined to believe that skin color (or however you can most favorably slice the boundaries) determines moral worth and political value. Behold the Übermensch! You are giving an object lesson in why identity politics suck. You are recreating the field of grievance studies. I have no doubt that you could give me a dozen reasons why the stereotypically progressive position is foolish and immoral, so why are you wasting your time recreating it? Have some self-respect.

I hope his admin privileges are double or triple checked by others because it would not appear to me that his judgment is objective on certain contentious subjects. Congrats to others though.

Oh, I remember that. I felt proud of my phrasing at the time; in hindsight, it was more about the feeling of righteous indignation. I definitely got carried away, and I’m sorry for making personal attacks.

"You are arguing in a way that you would not accept from others, and seems objectively bad" seems like an entirely fair criticism.

Somewhat on-topic: check your PMs. :V

Actually, that the argument was bad isn’t the problem. (Judaism is not skin-deep but an ideology and culture, yet Net’s reply instead talked about “skin color”. And my own conclusion was “White Americans are so underrepresented [yet] they are the ones who face the most ruthless black propaganda against their demographic”, ergo the charge of hypocrisy makes no sense.) The problem is instead in the clearly emotional outburst by Net; telling someone to “have some self respect” or saying “behold the ubermensch” displayed an inability to handle the discussion maturely.

I've said this many times in defense of different mods: mods should be allowed to have fun and play full contact.

Nothing in the quoted statement, despite it being excepted by an unfriendly interlocutor, strikes me as out of bounds. It's not an ad hominem, it's an ethos argument.

Thanks! I'll do my best to dust the place as needed haha

Congrats!

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