banned
shamgar
7mo ago
My guess is in most cases he would be better off learning to deal with his disagreeability in a way that does not prevent him from forming meaningful relationships with his local community, as opposed to fleeing into an online bubble of like minded people and becoming atomized and terminally online and building an identity about being very smart. If anything your example makes me more convinced kids should not be on social media, not less.
Also, the fact that in some very specific circumstances social media might have a positive effect on children, does not necessarily mean it is a good idea to have children on social media. I have not looked into it too deeply so I am open to having my mind changed about it, but I have the impression Jonathan Haidt shows pretty convincingly that social media have had a catastrophic effect on teenage mental health, so if that is true it might still be a good idea to ban or at least disincentivize social media for children.
Finally, banning social media is not the same as banning the internet. In a world where social media is banned, your hypothetical very smart child can still get on the internet and look up information of coding and such, without having to be on tiktok or anything like that. This would raise questions about the definition of social media. Maybe it would be feasible to treat platforms that have some sort of addictive recommendation algorithm differently from places where you look up your own content, so kids could look up stuff about coding or politics or find an online community that they like, while not being allowed on tiktok or youtube or whatever and be exposed to algorithms that are basically trying to get you addicted to the platform's content. Or this type of algorithmic feed could become a separate 16+ feature of these platforms or whatever where everyone can use these platforms and look up stuff whereas you have to validate your account and prove you are 16+ before you get access to the addictive features. I am just fantasizing on the spot about specific policies, but trying to get kids off of addictive social media platforms does not have to mean a blanket ban on everything fun and useful on the internet.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
7mo ago
His movement was technically groypers, so alt right but more religious and slightly less woke on racial issues. Whereas Spencer who coined the term or co opted (maybe both) alt right dreamt of a pan European empire with US as it's beacon.
Spencer was a relatively decently educated guy who'd do neo kazi things in a sophisticated fashion, rile up people and ultimately had to become a fed like milo due to the issues he faced. His audience was way worse than him whereas nick from the outset aimed for a young college audience that was like Richard. Both fought over this as Nick didn't like Spencer's direction but would eventually fucking say the same things.
Spencer never saw the effects of live streaming, nick has been streaming since 2018 maybe, YouTube, dlive, cozy (his own service) etc. Now I'm certain he too is a fed as he did rule up people for Jan 6th, both are suspected of being homosexual with nick being caught having Trans porn on his computer and famously having never touched a girl.
So in essence you have a fast talking 120 iq volcel who can't keep his low brow racial views down fighting with a richer, more educated 125 iq man who was not that different.
I mention this because the only guy who actually didn't act out with similar views but a higher iq is Jared Taylor, lo and behold he's still banned despite never crashing college campuses or raising nazi salutes even as a joke.
The great man theory would be represented by someone like Yarvin or his NRx buddies far more because they give a good model of the world and what's wrong. You can send a well meaning progressive an open letter to an open minded progressive and he'd not think you're off the rocker. Nick famously disses Moldbug and every other reactionary because he can't read much and thinks anyone doing well in life is a CIA op, whilst being a fed.
4chan was instrumental, I'm certain nick or Spencer or tate aren't people who fulfill the great man prophecy. You have to know what reality is, why it's the way it is and a path forward that's different from what we had bbfore and what we have now. Then acting upon that, this is a huge ordeal as then you have to convince others who represent the best of humanity around you to follow suit, not all but far more than what we have right now.
Ultimately Trump isn't this reactionary God emperor, his people are certainly not either of those things and the rot in the US or other places isn't easy to thwart. Calling women fat isn't the same as making nazi jokes.
I say this because another youtube guy tired this and failed, Sargon of Akkad, but in the flipside, nick isn't going for elections, so if he acts as a gateway to reactionary or neoreactionary people then it isn't that bad, though these optics are certainly terrible. I should writ a short history in this guy lol, too long of a comment, others may like it.
2rafa
7mo ago
As others have said, this is only an issue in dense old-world cities where a high percentage of the population use public transport already. In these cities I imagine SDCs will be taxed, banned or discouraged as necessary to avoid extreme congestion. In the US it’s irrelevant outside of Manhattan because everyone already drives everywhere.
curious_straight_ca
7mo ago
Imagine being a very smart and disagreeable 15 year old stuck in a small town somewhere. You want to be on the internet, learning to code, arguing about politics, and making friends similar to you ... except social media is banned, lmao. The internet is where the future is, and where power is, keeping kids off it isn't advantageous to them.
cjet79
7mo ago
I think there was a case of this in 2020, guy got a delivery truck and drove it into a crowd at a parade. There was also the Unite the right rally in Charlottesville where a guy drove his car into a crowd. So it does happen sometimes.
Maybe people who go on these killing rampages often want to make it a murder suicide event. Guns make the suicide part easier at the end, whereas the car murderers tend to get caught.
Mass car murder also seems like a crime of opportunity, you need the right circumstances to actually pull it off. Most sidewalks are full of hard things that will wreck a car, including up to concrete barriers that are specifically designed to stop a car. Larger vehicles are necessary. And crowds of people in a flat non barrier area that are not so dense that the vehicle will be immediately stopped, and not so sparse that they can easily see what is happening and move out of the way.
It's a messed up person in the first place that wants to commit mass murder. But I think they usually want more choice in their targets, they want to be dead afterwards, and while cars and trucks are ubiquitous they are actually more expensive than guns and ammo. There are ways to get large vehicles, like theft or working a job site with them. But those are still a little harder to pull off than just buying guns.
I think there is a steady supply of crazy and crazy mixed with the wrong meds that if we magically banned all guns in the US you'd probably see more car based killing rampages. But guns have a specific purpose and they are good at that purpose, so I think they will remain in use.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
7mo ago
This would be solved by introducing a huge amount of Cars-As-A-Service. I believe Elon has already published this idea on the Tesla website.
The idea would be that very few people outside of enthusiasts actually own a car. Everyone else simply pays $50/month (or whatever the price point is) to have on demand access to a Tesla. It's not an uber pool where you share, it's a private car that carries you to/from anywhere even if that anywhere is very far away. You get it in, get to your destination, get out, and the thing just flies off to whomever needs it next. Utilitarian all the way, no "joy of driving" here.
This would do a lot in the way of reducing the need for parking across the board in urban centers because most of these cars would never actually "park" in the sense we think of today. If they aren't moving to serve customers, they're self-refueling or limping back to some sort of service factory for repairs and what not.
The couple tradeoffs I can think of;
- People still want to own cars because cars are emotional attachments and status symbols. They're number 2 in this category besides houses.
- Privacy issues start to become far more real. 100% chance trip telemetry - associated with an account that includes some sort of identifiable info - is constantly logged. A car is downstream from a horse and a horse = freedom to move. The price and convenience tradeoff is for the customer to make - unless human piloted cars are banned from urban centers. And this is the complexity of the system; for it to work, there may be a fundamental personal choice tradeoff. That's the harder barrier to overcome. Noise pollution etc. are all details that can be worked out later.
arsv
7mo ago
Getting into doomer territory, ... They (the car makers) might also get public transit banned
Not sure why he's making a distinction between self-driving cars and public transit. Self-driving cars are a form of public transit. They are not private vehicles, they owned and operated in a way that's quite similar to busses. In a way, a self-driving car is just a better bus.
There are issues that are specific to self-driving cars due to their personal nature compared to conventional mass transit, which are mostly related to privacy. It's much easier to track you in your "personal bus" than it is in a bus with 20+ other people. But he barely touches on it, and also, conventional mass transit would be quickly losing much of the advantage in that respect anyway due to technological progress in surveillance technology.
phailyoor
7mo ago
Speaking from a totally American perspective, transit mode share is already so small as to be irrelevant to the issue of congestion. The only way that self driving cars will increase congestion is through increased trips taken because the cost of driving is lowered. And considering how most people currently own a car and prepay most of the cost of ownership in financing and insurance, I don't see trips increasing that much. Being able to watch tiktok in the car instead of being stuck listening to the radio while driving probably won't increase trips all that much either.
In fact, self driving cars should save urbanism by getting rid of all those horrid parking lots and parking garages. Infill replacing surface parking will bring up density and also close the gap between existing businesses that are surrounded by seas of parking.
So let's go through the video's specific braindead arguments.
If you don't have to pay attention to the road, you can do other things while in transit. This lowers the effective cost of traveling a given distance. As a consequence, there will be more demand for road space, increasing congestion.
Transit share is so low that you could delete buses from every city in the USA and not notice a difference in congestion. You can even look at the EIR statements of transit megaprojects (subways and shit) in California and see that they're projected to do literally nothing to congestion. Transit is a service to increase accessibility for the car-free, not a tool to reduce congestion.
Because autonomous cars are so technology-laden, the market will favor a few large companies that offer a subscription model. There are several consequences of this, which can be summarized as: laws will favor the companies rather than the public.
So what? This doesn't affect urbanism directly. Laws about who can sue when someone gets flattened by an idiot driver don't usually factor into people's everyday decisionmaking. The feeling of safety based on design is what matters.
Getting into doomer territory, car makers might succeed in banning human drivers and pedestrians from most roadways, and increase speed limits to ridiculous levels, causing noise pollution and other problems. They might also get public transit banned (I'm not sure how this would happen but that's the argument).
It would take a monumental stretch to delete sidewalks and crosswalks. Nobody is going to call a self driving car to cross the street, and nobody sane would mandate that. The fact that (granted, inadequate) crosswalks exist in even the most mind-numbingly car-dependent, zero-transit suburbs means that we as a society understand the need for these things even when almost nobody uses them. Regarding noise pollution, nimbys exist, and will obviously be able to limit vehicle speeds for the sake of noise.
How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it)
Not Just Bikes has a new video out: How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it). I have a love/hate relationship with urbanist essayists like this. On the one hand, they often raise issues that most of the time are not explicitly considered by most people. On the other hand, they tend to have a very leftist perspective, and ignore important costs, benefits, and solutions.
The video makes roughly the following arguments:
- If you don't have to pay attention to the road, you can do other things while in transit. This lowers the effective cost of traveling a given distance. As a consequence, there will be more demand for road space, increasing congestion.
- Because autonomous cars are so technology-laden, the market will favor a few large companies that offer a subscription model. There are several consequences of this, which can be summarized as: laws will favor the companies rather than the public.
- Getting into doomer territory, car makers might succeed in banning human drivers and pedestrians from most roadways, and increase speed limits to ridiculous levels, causing noise pollution and other problems. They might also get public transit banned (I'm not sure how this would happen but that's the argument).
Externalities
1 and 3 are similar problems. There are externalities that current laws don't address because they weren't huge problems given historical technology. Namely noise, tire pollution, and congestion. But new technology, autonomous cars, changes the costs and benefits of driving and will make these externalities much worse.
Not Just Bikes's proposed solution is to completely ban anything related to cars from city centers: highways, roads, parking spaces, parking garages. Bans are the same blunt tool that current laws use to force too much parking and not enough housing and bikes lanes to be built, just in the opposite direction. But he redeems himself by proposing putting a price on driving.
If you've ever heard of Arthur Pigou, a price on driving as the solution to 1 and 3 is pretty obvious. If someone really wants to drive at 4:30pm on a Friday when everyone else in the city wants to drive too, let them pay extra to be one of the people who can actually get places. There's a limit to how many people can actually get anywhere at that time, and we might as well offer the slots to the people who get the most value from it, and get some money back for public use in return. Charging a congestion fee completely solves the problem of autonomous vehicles circling the city hoping to be closest to the next customer. They have to pay the same fee as anyone else, so they'll only be on the road if they're the highest-value use of road space.
Not Just Bikes proposes investing in "functional and viable public transit", especially in forms that are difficult to remove, presumably to be able to resist transient political pressure. Of course, any publicly-run agency is going to have a very hard time running "functional and viable" transit when compared to a selfish private organization. And there's no reason a company that makes autonomous vehicles can't make and run buses as well.
A better solution is to price road space appropriately, and be agnostic to who's using the space. This allows the highest-value uses without artificially restricting to "public" or "autonomous" uses. Offer express lanes that guarantee certain speeds by limiting the number of vehicles that can enter. The entry fee is set high enough that there aren't any queues to enter. Crucial here is that any vehicle, private or public, should be able to use the lane as long as the driver pays the fee. This allows many more solutions to transit problems, without the dysfunction of publicly-run bus agencies. For example, corporate shuttles, church buses, and private rideshares should be allowed to use the same express lanes as public buses. And if Jay Leno wants to drive his personal car in the express lane, as long as he pays the fee, let him! Same goes for autonomous vehicle makers. If they want to reserve some space on freeways for their cars, make them compete on price the same as anyone else.
Putting a market-based fee on express lanes has a side benefit of making the opportunity cost of formerly transit-only lanes more legible. A few such market-based lanes can illustrate how expensive existing transit-only lanes really are.
Public Choice
Point 2, that laws will tend to favor autonomous car makers over the public, is just a specific example of public choice being a hard problem. There are analogous situations with Big Tech and the public commons, John Deere and right-to-repair, and Big Oil and climate regulations. I don't have a lot to say here, except that this has always been a problem, in other times and places has been much worse, and is likely to be manageable. People are smart.
An Aside on Congestion and Induced Demand
This video mentions the old chestnut that (paraphrasing) induced demand means it's pointless to increase road capacity. I'll quote one of our own:
Likewise a new freeway lane immediately filling up tells us there are still more people who want to be using this freeway.
If autonomous vehicles lead to people traveling more, that's good! It means more trips are now worth taking. People are visiting friends and relatives more often, working at jobs that are farther away but are a better fit for them, and in general doing more valuable things.
Conclusion
I'd like to see more discussion of the economics of transit, and economic solutions, especially without a leftist slant. But this is the first time I've seen a popular urbanist talk about the fact that self-driving cars will increase road use and congestion. This is great! This fact should be obvious to anyone who's spent five seconds thinking about the consequences of making driving cheaper, but I haven't seen it mentioned much outside rationalist circles. This point alone makes up for any other failings in this video.
jeroboam
7mo ago
I didn’t even know that Tumblr still exists! I thought it died after Yahoo bought it and they banned porn.
ThenElection
7mo ago
I unironically think probably the best way to get people to drop the histrionics and making politics their primary identity is to just lead a happy life and flamboyantly feign ignorance of anything political. Oh, I didn't vote. Or, I voted Trump, because Biden banned abortion.
You can't reason people out of something they didn't reason themselves into.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
As it stands the government can dictate through federal funding that roads be marked for bike lanes
What's the alternative here? That the federal government be banned from attaching any conditions to any funding given to states? How would that even work?
ControlsFreak
7mo ago
I do wonder if that's part of the shift in the youth vote. Youth tend to be somewhat rebellious. Yet, in almost every online forum, complete ideological purity is demanded, with increasing levels of Obvious Nonsense being declared doctrine, leading to utter hysteria. Any young person who observes that even one item of Obvious Nonsense is, in fact, Obvious Nonsense either learns extremely quickly to somehow suppress their intellect... or they promptly get banned from half the internet.
They say that social death is worse than real death. The internet basically is social life in [Current Year]. Thus, I'd imagine that seeing that even minor observations that Obvious Nonsense is, in fact, Obvious Nonsense gets one banned from half the internet (which is basically akin to social death) is significantly radicalizing, in one way or the other.
ControlsFreak
7mo ago
The one thing I didn’t have a response to was when she brought up the fact that she has friends who are “undocumented”.
There are nuanced approaches. I wrote a kind of steelman a few months back. There really are bureaucratic SNAFUs. And the United States Government is truly not kind when an actual SNAFU happens; they are incredibly by-the-book, even when that book is extremely opaque and confusing. Even though there are significant pro-immigrant advocacy organizations out there who will throw every argument they can at the courts on a pro bono basis (yes, they'll throw utterly silly arguments at the wall which should be rejected, too), the courts are for the most part pretty deferential to the gov't in the realm of immigration. The threat of penalties like being banned from the US for ten years can be bandied about for surprisingly minor things.
Now, the trick is to try to divide that group, who mostly are at least trying to do things legally, but who get caught up in some garbage, from the group of folks who are literally just walking across the border, not even trying. Rhetorically, this may get you a long way with your girlfriend. Of course, that trick is surprisingly more difficult to translate into actual policy, and she may honestly be fully justified in thinking that Donald Trump is not going to thread that needle. He may genuinely make things more difficult for some number of sympathetic folks. But of course, now we're getting into the land of tradeoffs, where it's hard to make good estimates. How many people in the 'mostly good' category are really going to suffer? How many people in the 'not even trying' category are going to be kept out? It's probably impossible to predict what fine-grained policy choices will ultimately be made up/down the chain and how those choices will ultimately come out in terms of the tradeoffs.
If you can get her at least this far, and she's capable of understanding that the truly apocalyptic-sounding BS that people are spouting off (e.g., "They're gonna deport all green card holders!") is completely irrelevant and that the most likely outcome is some shifting around of tradeoffs, which may or may not impact her friends... and that you do feel sympathy for any 'mostly good' folks who get further harmed by the tradeoff game, then you're probably in luck. If not, and she simply can't extricate her mind from the most insane propaganda takes? Whelp, you've got decisions to make.
SlowBoy
7mo ago
People drank raw milk for thousands of years. Louis Pasteur only invented pastuerization in the 1860s. It wasn't until the early industrial era of contaminated factory dirt that raw milk began causing problems. Which is to say, pasteurization doesn't make milk safe to drink, it makes dirty contaminated milk safe to drink. Which isn't even a problem anymore because our cleanliness is better. Not to mention that the average cow used for raw milk lives in very healthy natural conditions compared to the feedlot pens used for factory farming mass milk cows.
I've been drinking raw milk on and off again for years. It's never made me sick. Raw milk is banned in certain states, but a dozen or so allow it, and more allow some workarounds. It would probably make the Founding Fathers sick to know that milk as they knew it is now illegal to drink in many places. What kind of liberty is that?
Anyways, the last pandemic probably didn't come from viruses in the food supply jumping to humans; it probably came from novel coronavirus funding. Prosecute the people responsible or bankrupt the institutes responsible. I don't know that either of those things will happen, but with Bobby Kennedy in government it's the likeliest chance we'll ever have.
god_from_celegans
7mo ago
What if political partisanship and DEI is banned, at risk of being fired and losing all funding or special legal status. It worked somewhat for De Santis with Disney and with the Supreme Court with Universities. This could work in a few ways: DEI for political views, or maybe making journalists be sued for lying, or maybe you can have courts audit internal chats of journalists.
Most organisations would bend the knee if funding/firing is at stake (and it should be). It should also apply to all grant, university, NGO, contracts, etc.
GBRK
7mo ago
Show the high-engagement Progressive accounts being banned from X through arbitrary application of platform rules.
I'm sure that regardless of whether censorship is actually happening, I could do that. It wouldn't be proof either way, because anecdotes aren't data-- and similarly, any proof of twitter's previous institutional leftist bent is subject to the same fuzziness. That's why I'm referring to mechanisms and incentives. The actual, technological infrastructure of the site either does or doesn't allow for systematically influencing public opinion. The owner of the site either is or isn't incentivised to use it for that purpose-- and either is or isn't empowered to incentivise their subordinates to do the same. Everything else is downstream of that. Either twitter has always been and still is pushing a particular viewpoint, or it never was and still isn't.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
If there was an SJW consensus prior to Elon, all the same mechanisms and all the same incentives exist to create an equally false right-wing consensus.
Okay. Show the high-engagement Progressive accounts being banned from X through arbitrary application of platform rules. That's the mechanism that dominated prior to Elon, so according to you it should be the mechanism dominating under Elon.
Likewise, community notes didn't exist prior to Elon, and are a significant improvement to the function of the platform.
jake
7mo ago
It's what your quoted text observed, 57%, while Florida requires 60% for changes to their constitution. Far more conservative Missouri passed it with 51.9% Yes vs. 48.1% No, as amending the Missouri constitution requires only a simple majority.
Florida Amendment 4, and the following appears to be the full text:
Limiting government interference with abortion.— Except as provided in Article X, Section 22, no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.
Missouri Amendment 3, full text, and summary:
A “yes” vote establishes a constitutional right to make decisions about reproductive health care, including abortion and contraceptives, with any governmental interference of that right presumed invalid; removes Missouri's ban on abortion; allows regulation of reproductive health care to improve or maintain the health of the patient; requires the government not to discriminate, in government programs, funding, and other activities, against persons providing or obtaining reproductive health care; and allows abortion to be restricted or banned after Fetal Viability except to protect the life or health of the woman.
A “no” vote will continue the statutory prohibition of abortion in Missouri.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
7mo ago
You being unbanned on Election Day is really incredible timing. Welcome back.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Well,
Moderation is adaptive and qualitative.
Rules-lawyering and grudge-litigating are rarely beneficial to anyone on any side of the issue. I notice, however, that you have posted multiple AAQCs, and received no warnings at all, over the past nine months. I would like to say this with all sincerity--not as a taunt, or an inducement for you to now behave as a frustrator--but that's exactly the outcome we wanted to see. You're still here, you're not perma-banned, you make quality posts. Thank you.
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
7mo ago
Thank you! Good to hear I’m not off my rocker.
I have not considered the possibility of a coolant leak… It’s a good question. The idea was to bend the copper pipe such that the pipe in the coolant tank was one piece, with the connections being the only part that could leak, but you bring up a good question.
With that said, things are (hopefully temporarily) on pause. The Russian government’s new mining law came into effect on the first of November (yay, since that’s what legalizes this project) and they announced some upcoming mining location bans.
Boo, since they were not specific about exactly where mining would be banned. Right now I think we would be in the clear, but it doesn’t make sense to move forward until I’m certain. I don’t love sitting on my hands here.
Either way, being this explicit about protecting a user from criticism on the basis of a long record of AAQCs is a new extreme for this system
I feel like you are confusing several separate issues. Nothing I've done in this thread is aimed at "protecting a user from criticism." Coffee_enjoyer was breaking the rules and obnoxiously axe-grinding. His interpretation of Dean's post was bad on a rule-breaking level, and additionally I was annoyed that he had brought that obnoxiousness to the AAQC thread, specifically. If anything, it is coffee_enjoyer whose AAQCs were operating to protect him, here.
Separately, everything I said about Dean being a good poster was in direct response to coffee-enjoyer's obnoxious, overwrought, and rhetorical "is this the kind of posting you want!?" The answer was "yes, that's the point of the AAQCs, these are the kinds of posts we want." I was trying to find a way to help coffee_enjoyer understand why he was being moderated. Ultimately, I seem to have failed to find such a way; coffee_enjoyer seems to me far more interested in being angry about the disagreement between him and Dean (and, by extension, my moderating him over his approach), than in understanding that the problem is not the substance, but in the uncharitable and antagonistic nature of his engagement.
Your complaints are not at that level, but your candor over your distaste for Dean suggests to me that you are making a similar mistake: allowing animus toward a user to blind you to the fact that this is not ultimately about the user, but about the rules. In your little chart:
n% of the community like this user -> user gets upvotes and AAQCs -> user gets away with more extreme posts -> some people who dislike this leave -> m% (m>n) of the community like this user
You've left out my quite explicit point that AAQCs are not a bar to banning. Users cannot get away with "more extreme posts" indefinitely. Some of our best users, along with our worst, have, eventually, eaten bans--always, after deciding that they no longer wished to follow the rules, even perfunctorily. That's genuinely a problem for us! It's something the mod team talks about with alarming regularity. It's really, really frustrating to take someone with years of quality contributions, including former community moderators, and hand them a 366 or a perma or whatever. We don't want to do that! If this was about picking favorites or even picking preferred positions, Hlynka wouldn't be banned. Certain alts still kicking around here probably would be banned. But ultimately, no matter what percentage of the community is on "your side," if you're not going to follow the rules, you're going to get banned.
If you were serious about wanting a space in which people with different politics talk to each other, you should if anything have done the opposite, and treated any tendency in "community sentiment" as indicative of a growth that needs to be pruned.
I can see why you might think that; it's not entirely wrong. But we do engage in a fair bit of "affirmative action." We cut people some slack when they get dogpiled and lash out. We try to give sufficient breathing room to heterodox views. Moderation is adaptive and qualitative. But like AAQCs, just having a minority view is not a perfect shield. The rules will still apply, if less quickly or harshly.
In the end, we can't maintain this space at all if we worry too much about what might or might not "drive users away." One person's final straw is someone else's welcoming hearth. I've been moderating the Motte for more than five years, and I honestly never believed it would last as long as it already has. So I'm afraid I find myself entirely unmoved by your concerns. My goal is not to build this space into anything in particular. I have no KPIs. I just serve the foundation to the best of my ability, until the time comes when that's no longer needed, or wanted, or necessary.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
I'll take the point that I was being overly dramatic with the comparison, and that this did not help my case. I got somewhat drunk on spite there. However, I stand by the intended point, stripped of the drama: if you make it so that certain users or viewpoints can't be attacked, you might get some more people to like those users and viewpoints, but you'll make others quietly hate and resent you and the organisation that gave you the power.
I've been following the discussions about the moderation system for long enough that I'm quite familiar with these principles you explained; I just think they are bad and have done a lot of damage to the discourse, which you only don't see because you keep grading yourself on a curve and by deferring to the sentiment of the very community that you create by following this approach. If you drive away most people who disagree, you will naturally see agreement up until the point where you have evaporated down to a size such that sentiment shifts to "we have a great community, but somehow nobody wants to join and listen to our great points". /r/CWR, in its own "community sentiment", felt that it was doing great right down to the point of maybe getting 100 posts a week. If you were serious about wanting a space in which people with different politics talk to each other, you should if anything have done the opposite, and treated any tendency in "community sentiment" as indicative of a growth that needs to be pruned.
Either way, being this explicit about protecting a user from criticism on the basis of a long record of AAQCs is a new extreme for this system; we seem to be evolving from a soft loop along the lines of "n% of the community like this user -> user gets upvotes and AAQCs -> user gets away with more extreme posts -> some people who dislike this leave -> m% (m>n) of the community like this user" to a harder loop where the penultimate step is "some people who dislike this get banned". In some alternative timeline that might have only differed from the current one by a handful of votes here and there at first, coffee_enjoyer would have been the "excellent poster with an absolutely stellar history", and Dean would be the one getting called a single-issue poster and told that he narrowly avoided a ban. I don't want to hide the bias that stems from the circumstance that I would mildly prefer that timeline over the current one (very mildly, though), but that callouts based on substance and discussion discipline get treated this way at all is bad, and that you have set up a system that amplifies small differences in initial conditions in such a fashion makes it seem unlikely that this was an intentional act of "gardening" as opposed to excuses being made for a yard full of weeds.
I don't think there's anything weird about it. The ideas in the manosphere (men and women are different and those differences reach the level of psychology and not just anatomy) are in the same category of unmentionable/cancellable beliefs that holocaust denial and regular old racism are in. If you're someone in the manosphere who wants to talk about those ideas seriously, the only places you'll be able to actually have that conversation is in the same places that let other unmentionable beliefs be discussed. I personally think that this is actually one of the reasons behind the rise in antisemitism and racism - if a young guy wants to learn how to actually have sex with women, he's getting a full course of banned and disreputable ideas.
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