This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
We also had the problem with the database earlier this month, so some of these comments aren't available in their original context. However I am reposting the comments themselves below; it's not a perfect solution, but in various ways it beats the alternatives I could think of. That said, if you find any errors in need of correction (misattributed comments, for example) please feel free to @ me. The number of copy/paste errors I made in the process of trying to put this together is... not small.
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Notes -
@FCfromSSC's original comment:
The modern era is best understood as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. I gotta say, this is certainly one of the more amusing search results, at least in its initial form.
It's interesting watching people here try to figure out what the response is supposed to be. Is it that it's weird to post pictures of other people? No, memes exist, that can't be it. It's wrong to edit pictures of other people? Nope, memes again. It's weird to post pictures of people to make fun of them? Nope, people of Wal-Mart, faces of meth, mugshot collections, and about a million other examples. It's wrong to edit pictures of random people to make them look worse? These pictures are edited to make them look better, though.
Bonus points to the people claiming the objectionable part is politicizing the non-political. I welcome you to 2024, and wish you well in your recovery from long-term cryo-stasis.
So I guess we're down to "It's wrong to edit pictures of random people to make them look better as an implicit criticism of the way they've chosen, of their own free will and for their immediate, personal benefit, to publicly present themselves." But at that point, why not just speak plainly? This is criticism, and people don't like their ingroup being criticized, and they especially don't like criticisms encapsulating a hostile value system presented in a witty fashion by their outgroup. People are objecting not because there's some well-established general rule or value being violated here, but because they don't like having their ingroup's behavior critiqued by their outgroup, and they don't like seeing their outgroup's values expressed, no matter how anodyne the expression.
One option, as @To_Mandalay demonstrates, is to try to exaggerate the critique beyond all reason.
...And this attitude is how we get FBI investigations of "It's ok to be white" flyers on a college campus. The problem is that social critique is a game of subtlety, and treating what is, on the surface level, an extremely mild critique as though it's actually a straight declaration of genocidal hatred just makes one look unhinged. Likewise, it seems to me that the critique here is less "you're a whore and I hate you" and more "you're a whore and you don't have to be." Those two statements are pretty clearly not identical, and the bite of the latter seems, to me, undeniable.
The game-theoretic-optimal response, as with "it's okay to be white", is to simply ignore the issue entirely. The reaction is half the point, and it's the only half containing achievable value, unless you think people are lying when they say that the clothed versions of the pictures legitimately look better. Unfortunately, the social reality we've constructed disproportionately rewards handwaving freakoutery. I suppose we'll see if tribal discipline can beat the implicit reward structure. My bet is that it can't.
And of course, the search goes on. To_Mandalay is correct, I think, in that the hate is really there, and it yearns for expression. This version made me laugh; the ai race-swap-children filter someone else posted in the thread just made me feel sick. The distributed search continues, and the search results accumulate.
What was this in response to, originally? It seems interesting but without the original context it's hard to know what to make of it.
Unfortunately the dragnet did not catch context for me, just the comment. But my memory is that @MachineElfPaladin is correct: DignifAI is the opposite of the porn deepfake apps, it puts naked and scantily-clad people into tuxedos and gowns and the like. "Some people" were arguing that this also is sexist or somesuch.
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If I recall correctly, it was a thread about DignifAI, which was an image-gen model trained to edit photos to put people in "modest" or "respectable" clothing.
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