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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2302 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 14, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How do I make online friends?

Due to a number of factors that paranoia opsec considerations prevent me from explaining, I am currently in a situation where I can’t regularly see/call the friends I’ve made and cannot make new ones. This has motivated me to turn to the Internet: stories of gaming groups or webcomic fans or whatever who stayed friends for over a decade and met up with one another and were chosen to act as best men at one another’s weddings—these stories are rather common. It seems nice! To think, no matter how busy your day is, no matter where you are in the world, you can always hop on voicechat and spend some time with your mates.

Therefore, what I’m wondering is where and how you’d make these online friends. My vague recollection of how this would work ten years ago was that these were the options:

  1. Find some multiplayer video game, find a community server with a constant/active playerbase, take it from there.

  2. Look up “forums for [INSERT HOBBY HERE]”, choose one you like, take it from there.

  3. Surprisingly, I remember making a good couple of Internet acquaintances on Tumblr. So certain social media sites might yield bounty.

But I don’t think these approaches work as well in Anno Domini MMXXIV. Approach 1 is hampered by the lack of modern multiplayer games with community servers (although there are probably still a number of niche ones out there). Approach 2 is hampered by the death of the classical forum. Nowadays, it seems that Discord servers [^1] have supplanted them, but most of the “public” servers that I recall being included in those large lists of Discord servers tend to be insufferable: no actual discussion of anything, just five-message-a-second posting rates of nonsense. I’ve heard that servers for specific YouTube channels tend to be better, but I’ve never been enough of an e-celeb fan for that. Approach 3 might be tenable, although Twitter might have taken Tumblr’s place, but I’d really prefer not going that route: I was briefly on Twitter at one point, and I quickly turned into an absolute notification whore, constantly checking to see if I got any new likes or replies or followers. Maybe that’s a “skill issue” on my part, but I’d rather not put myself in that vulnerable position again.

Also, common to most of these approaches is the problem that I don’t love most Internet culture any more. Often, it feels like online communities either get turned into MtF transgender therapy circles, or “/pol/-Jugend” witchling havens (where the average witch must be 15 years old). Ah, and in general, you’ll see places filled with kids who think and speak in all-caps memes. This can’t be a universal phenomenon, but I feel it deserves mention.

So, what suggest the fine users of The Motte? How have you made Internet friendships?

[^1] I absolutely loathe the terminology “server” in this case: it’s a complete lie! A Discord “server” isn’t actually a separate server. Rather, it’s almost certainly merely a bunch of entries in a centralized database. You are not the one in control of your server, you are not the one running your server: Discord is. This unfortunate appropriation of a term from the days of IRC (when your server was an actual server) rankles the FOSS autist in me.

The crowd at Datasecretslox, a sister site to this one, have annual in-person meetups, and I gather many of the commenters also participate in a loosely-affiliated Discord channel. Possibly as a result, they seem to have quite a bit more of a community feel over there. You might give them a shot.

Yeah, I’ve heard of DSL before but never got around to looking into it. Probably worth at least a lurk given your description. Thanks!

I don't understand why the motte can't either. No one would even have to reveal their tags, everyone would just know that you're from the motte. Some people here are scared of being doxxed past the point of any rationality. Their reasoning usually has no statistical or information theory backing, it's all just woo god AI with 0 false positive rate nonsense.

A little story of my life no one would believe if I tell them. My employer is a SSC reader. I met him at a SSC meetup while I was in university and I asked him for work 2 years later when I was having a hard time finding work. Going to that 1 meetup changed my life.

It's a shame we can't meet the people we spent so many cumulative hours having good discussions with.

I don't really give a damn about doxing, but I don't live in America, and I'm not enough of conversationalist or social networkers to make a good host for a German Mottizens meeting, so by force of geography I don't see it happen for me either way.

Are you sure about the "no statistical or information theory backing" part? Even if they don't provide a good explanation, their worries are valid as deanonymization is rather easy. Sufficiently advanced information theory mathematics may as well be magic, by the way

I hate to be the "source" guy, but source? Give me a few good papers to read and I will potentially change my mind. I have yet to receive any. It doesn't have to be a paper, just anything at all.

Key search terms "stylometry" and "social media":

Using publicly available data, our best model, a combined temporal-linguistic one, was able to correctly match the accounts of 31% of 5,612 distinct users across Twitter and Facebook.

Does sub 50% accuracy impress (scare) you?

Yes, because the baseline for "randomly guessing" is 1/5612 ("twitter user @fluffyporcupine matches this specific one of the 5612 facebook users"), not 1/2 ("twitter user @fluffyporcupine is/is not the same user as facebook user Nancy Prickles").

Doesn't scare me for personal reasons -- I'm trivially identifiable, you don't need to resort to fancy ML techniques. But if you're actually trying to remain anonymous, and post under both your real name and a pseudonym, then perhaps it's worth paying attention to (e.g. spinning up separate throwaway accounts for anything you want to say that is likely to actually lead to significant damage to your real-world identity and doing the "translate to and from a foreign language to get changed phrasing without changed meaning" thing).

https://gwern.net/death-note-anonymity#de-anonymization

These 18 references (under that large paragraph) scare me a little, what about you? I have personal experience as well, but not at some impressive level that I can write about. It's just a general savviness which has taught me that most people are safe because bad actors lack interest or competence, and not because finding them is impossible

I think I would stand out like a sore thumb in a group of motteizeans enough to be doxxable even if we don’t share our usernames.

I register I have no fucking idea who you are.

You could approach things from the opposite direction and just go by your username. It’s long, but at least it’s pronounceable.

Huh, I'm not sure how. (No need to reveal.)

Here I was, thinking the same.

Has the idea previously been raised and rejected, or is it something that’s just never been considered here? And if it was raised previously, did that occur when The Motte was still on Reddit? If so, some people’s opinions might have changed now that we’re on our own site.

You know, it really wouldn’t take too many people to make some kind of meetup feasible. I think DSL’s usually only have around a dozen people. It would just take a small nucleus of attendees and careful initial planning.

(To be clear, I’ve never been to an SSC or DSL meetup before, despite considering it, and I’m guessing I probably wouldn’t end up going to one associated with The Motte either unless it were National Park-based, and even then, it’s doubtful. Adjust your view of what I’m saying accordingly.)

Have never heard of this. Was this another splinter site that happened concurrently with The Motte's leaving reddit?

This one happened a few years before, during the whole NYT SSC fiasco. Very shortly after Scott took SSC offline, a group of regular participants in SSC’s open threads converged on bean’s Naval Gazing blog and decided to spin up a replacement community, since it wasn’t clear how long SSC would be dark. By the time Scott started ACX, the group had enough momentum to keep going as a separate site. Like this place, the userbase is generally pretty anti-leftist but is at the same time far from being a conservative echo-chamber. At least a few people regularly participate on both sites.

I made a whole bunch of friends from joining an Arma 3 clan or two and playing Escape from Tarkov with random strangers. Hell, even a few people from this site.

A close-knit gaming group is probably the easiest route, since I've been on The Motte for who knows how long and it takes a while for people to care enough to call you a regular or befriend you.

Hmm.. I think my oldest Arma buddies and I have known each other for 7 years, we're all in a WhatsApp group shitposting even if I haven't played properly with those idiots in 5 years or so.

Man, so there are still multiplayer games out there where you get to know your teammates/opponents, instead of them merely being faceless hindrances delivered up by a matchmaking system. Who knew? Thanks for the vidya recs.

since I've been on The Motte for who knows how long and it takes a while for people to care enough to call you a regular or befriend you.

Yeah, that makes sense. This seems reflected the fact that off-topic threads (e.g. this one, Wellness Wednesdays, Friday Fun Thread, etc.) are relatively inactive compared to the main Culture War thread (for contrast, I remember that on old-style forums, off-topic threads were often more active than on-topic ones, even if more effort went into the latter), meaning that the userbase here is relatively less-concerned with interacting with their fellow interlocutors outside of the context of culture war debate. I know that personally, I primarily come here to read intelligent people discuss current events, and any knowledge that I’ve acquired regarding these people qua people usually comes from someone explaining how their nationality/occupation/life story has influenced their perspective on some issue. Another possibility regarding the imbalance in activity in these threads, though, is that the framing of the off-topic threads as belonging to a specific day dissuades some users from posting top-level comments in them after that day has passed (even though I know that many users do use them as weekly threads). Well, I’m just musing here, and I am personally content with lurking The Motte as it is.

May I recommend virtual reality? The cost and nerdiness is still a filter which stops certain types of people (just like how early adopters of the internet were of superior quality to current users). You won't have to go outside in order to socialize anymore, but VR is still real enough that your social skills will be allowed to rust too much (even body-language is quite important). VR is a combination of socializing and gaming, and there's lots of nerdy subcultures. I use it for language learning and socializing, but I have friends who make a living selling 3D models and VR-related programs.

The biggest application I know is VRChat. It's popular enough that it has its own normie space which is probably rather off-putting to you, but there's a rather large community which is invisible on the surface and which you can only access through meeting other people who want to escape children and casual users who think that being loud is a form of humor. I should warn you that there's a lot of sexual deviants as well, but that's mostly a danger to the weak-willed and undisciplined, so I don't think it poses a danger to you, it may simply mean that an extra 30% of users won't appeal to you.

Yeah, VR has been on my radar for a while as something that would be really cool to get in on the ground floor of. (Well, maybe not the ground floor any more, but it’s still relatively early in the game (to mix metaphors), as you note.) I think it would be really fun to develop for it as well. The main thing that’s been keeping me from going for it has been analysis paralysis over which headset to buy. Last I remember, the Vive was the best?

Regarding socialization in VR, I heard online that most of the fun is going on in private worlds, the public ones having been overrun (as you note). So then how does one find these private worlds? Just wander around in public until you meet an emissary from the walled gardens who will let you in?

I think it's Valve index or the HTC Vive pro. I know there's a Vive pro 2, but as far as I know it's not better than the pro 1 in every way, just some. And if you have a lot of money there's high-res headsets like the Pimax 8K but it requires a beast of a graphics card. If you want a good mic, I think the valve index is best. The index controllers aren't as durable as the Vive controllers, and they have less battery, but they offer finger tracking which is cool.

The fun does happen in private worlds (or friends+/friends only, really), but many regulars still go to public now and then. After befriending them you just have to catch them in a friends+ or friends-only world, and add the people on there you think are cool. By meeting friends and friends of friends, you can expand your network very quickly. Some more picky people will be in the orange mode which means "Ask me", i.e. send them a request if you want in. They probably need to be somewhat familiar with you before they accept such a request. People like this go orange mode because they have more friends who wants to join them that they have the energy to handle.

For the most part, the most popular places suck (trolls go the places with the most victims - surprise surprise). The exception to this is event-worlds. There are a lot of events in VRChat, and those who join them tend to be serious and invested players rather than trolls. Sometimes you need to add the event-host as a friend in order to join (they are quick to accept, don't worry)

Bonus knowledge: Asian cultures have much less of a need for walled gardens, I'm not sure why (wait, yes I am. It's a combination of 'high trust society' and lives not revolving around politics. This will all be gone perhaps 15 years from now as Western problems hit Asia. I'd be happy if this problem doesn't get worse due to me making this comment). If you speak some Asian language, you shouldn't have any problems getting close to people (even if they're somewhat famous in the community).

So the Index or the Vive Pro is the best headset? Got it. As for the “VRChat Newbie Flowchart”, is it something like this?

  1. Hang around out-of-the-way places (public worlds with low pop. count) and events

  2. Meet the occasional fun person

  3. Join the friends/friends+ worlds that said fun people are hanging out in

  4. …

  5. Profit

I also bet that in general, the wheat gets separated from the chaff pretty quick in these sorts of environments. People who put up with trolls and screaming children eventually find others of their sort, and they end up coming together. This sound about right?

(As for the Asian languages point: thankfully, my 日本語 is not nearly good enough for me to feel confident about barging into some JP world and mucking up the place. Unfortunately, I fear that your timeline for when Western culture war cancer metastases to Japan is probably too optimistic. Already, there are hints in various places of Western culture-war concepts being imported to Japan. I might make a top-level post about this at some point, but I probably won’t.)

Yeah, sounds about right!

But even among well-meaning people, there's different types and playstyles. I might jump words a few times without finding anyone who feels compatible with my mindset, even if I don't encounter any trolls. You'll quickly learn what sort of people you're encountering. Eventually, you can tell the personality of people just by their avatars (there will be a few false positives, so don't act on your heuristics too quickly. Those who break them are the most interesting ones)

You're right, it's too optimistic. 5 years ago I thought 30 years. Perhaps 8 years is more correct. I can't predict the amount of resistance and stubbornness remaining. I'd love to read your thoughs on the issue, but no pressure!

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