banned
Great post and I think it provides valuable context.
powerusers farming karma
But... why? There is no use to karma. I have lots of karma on Reddit. Trust me it's useless. This isn't Twitter. Posts from users with 1 million karma are not given more visibility than posts from users with 100 karma.
The game is not farming karma for $$$. The game is trying to capture Reddit for the left. And it worked.
Mods of even the largest subs are given no tools to identify bad users. We were never told by admins when a brigade was happening, we had no method of specifically detecting brigades
As to those random subs popping, the paid users either start new ones or take over dead ones, then upvote bot submissions in their critical windows so they're pushed to wider visibility and actual users start upvoting.
It's just so easy. 0.01% of users can control the narrative quite easily. Just create a bunch of accounts to upvote/downvote during the critical window right after posts or comments are submitted. They aren't even "bots". They're real people using VPNs.
Trump supporters did it back in 2016. Then they got banned. Now only the left is allowed to do it.
In both cases, doing some reforms but not going in the direction of black communist nationalists would definetly be much better than handing power to black communist nationalists like Mugabe and the ANC. Indeed, if you want to avoid racism, you not only don't handle power to them, you suppress them by force and not allow them to have organizations. What we got now, is liberal parties worldwide trying to copy the ANC agenda. Global liberalism supporting ANC coming to power is also condemnable. Modern new left liberalism is a very radical ideology that doesn't get sufficient negativity for it.
Even if you have a multiethnic country that isn't going to seperate, you should supress by force this kind of ideology and politics on the basis of protecting a group, in this case whites, either as minority, or as a larger demographic. Democracy as it is understood does not necessarily imply allowing all sorts of policies and the tyranny of progressive supremacists. But in any case, it is the better choose to suppress the choice of voters for black communist nationalists, and even of elites who bypass agenda of voters and are even more supportive of such ideology as has been the case in some european countries. Or even of very influential NGOs of this ideology which become a state within a state.
A South Africa that didn't allow parties like ANC and those more extreme, and such politicians found themselves in prison, and parties and organizations with such agenda banned, would be both a better governed one, and one that seeks the common good and respects the rights of its people, over following an agenda to screw whites, for blacks and promote communist nationalism which is also horrible policy in general. Doubly so when it is black communist nationalism against whites, that pretends their contributions to the economy is due to legacy of apartheid and racism. In both a democratic, and non democratic system you should suppress this ideology and its organizations.
Of course, if a significant part of a different ethnic group population has an agenda that is about screwing over the other ethnic group and pretend they are antiracist when doing so, then I don't see why separation is necessarily the wrong choice. Less problem of inequality between blacks and whites in the same country, if they are in a different country.
It raises the question of what the purpose of government is (ie is it about creating a good life or is it about self determination). If the latter, then what is the SA argument against allowing the Boers to form their own separate country. There isn’t even the anti colonialism argument.
Absolutely valid point, for which the answer is that the movement that is against Boers having self determination is a hypocritcal antiwhite black nationalist and other intersectional alliances movement. It isn't a consistent movement that consistently follows principles for, or against self determination, or for, or against racism. It is who/whom that animates this movement. Even though there are definitely supporters of it who don't see themselves that way.
No_one
14hr ago
In much of Europe, meat is almost banned in public institutions.
City canteens rarely serve it, university canteens the same. E.g. in Berlin, the limit is one dish with meat per day on 4 different days.
TitaniumButterfly
14hr ago
It doesn't really make sense to say that the government banned something so that the government wouldn't mandate it.
Makes perfect sense to me. It's not like 'the government' is a person with a coherent agenda. Governments do things all the time with the intention of constraining their future iterations.
ResoluteRaven
14hr ago
Lab-grown meat has made it surprisingly far given how many people hate it for different reasons: Cattle farmers and the meat industry want to kneecap their economic competition, conservatives dread a future where steak is banned and scientists in white coats force feed them pink slime, hardcore vegans think that true commitment to their cause should require sacrifices and this sort of moral shortcut would undermine the whole puritan thing they have going on, economists hate it because it's currently expensive as hell, non-Westerners laugh at the whole enterprise, and environmentalists who can do math insist on switching to insect, soy, or mushroom protein instead.
Really the only groups rooting for its success at the moment are biotech investors hoping to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing, biologists who are overconfident in their ability to pull it off, and the aforementioned liberals and environmentalists who haven't crunched the numbers.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
15hr ago
I do not see a route by which the establishment arm of the GOP regain authority over and support from their base, which has been in open rebellion for some years now.
I agree with this. Which is why my scenario is that the Republican party will be suppressed; we'll have at the very least Democratic dominance, as in the early 20th century, maybe more. I wouldn't rule out the GOP getting banned.
..As for the rest, I maintain that the ultima ration is preferable to an uncontested blue tribe win, and that it favors Red Tribe.
I'd like to believe that last point, but I don't see sufficient evidence, particularly given my first-hand experience with other Red Tribers — I don't see my parents or brother winning in any civil war, regardless of the veritable arsenal of guns and ammo they've accumulated. You certainly aren't providing any evidence of that. Comparisons to the Taliban are facile and misunderstand how the latter won. Sheer numbers of people and (merely-civilian) guns are not nearly as relevant to victory as command and coordination. A small, disciplined force almost always overcomes an uncoordinated rabble of individual, independent actors.
And since you're not going to provide such, for no other reason than because you don't have any (and when you claim other reasons for not sharing, you are lying), yes, I suppose I am simply stating that you offer no explanation, are a liar and thus should not be listened to.
Feel free to elaborate. It's not the EAs that are able to ban meat, lab grown or otherwise. It's the state, which has just now banned lab grown meat apparently in order to "steal a march" and prevent itself from banning real meat.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
17hr ago
"Those", being the same government that just banned it?
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
17hr ago
In this thread we're talking about a government action. It doesn't really make sense to say that the government banned something so that the government wouldn't mandate it.
Corvos
1d ago
I think it means, as you say, specific, personal drama from other forums. If I recall correctly, someone got tempbanned a few years ago for making a top-level post that was just a blow-by-blow of drama they'd had on a different site. I would guess the intent is to prevent the Motte being recruited for internet raids and turf wars. Probably less relevant now we aren't on reddit.
johnfabian
1d ago
This is just the substack equivalent of the more deranged branches of critical theory. They posit that because they are against the people who claim all media is actually engaged in fighting a war for the fate of the soul of society and YOU need to pick a side, that in fact all media is actually engaged in fighting a war for the fate of the soul of society (but different). I'm fond of reading tea leaves but I think one loses the point (and fun) of it when you start smashing your head into your cup.
I was reflecting upon this earlier today when I saw on Reddit that the children's show Bluey had uploaded to youtube an episode that had been "banned" in the US. It wasn't actually banned, but Disney decided not to include it in the show's episodes for American subscribers. You can watch it here and take a guess as to why that might be. If you haven't heard of Bluey, it was the second-most watched television show (in total minutes) in America last year in spite of its short format. It's a charming show and is much more tolerable to adults than much of contemporary children's programming, most of which seems like the virtual equivalent of crack cocaine. It's been in the news recently because it may or may not have ended (?) despite being massively successful and profitable. I took a gander at some of the culture warring over it and it's invariably idiotic. The lunatic left see its messages of friendship and inclusion as proof it is secretly Marxist; the retarded right see a wholesome nuclear family with nary a Pride flag in sight and think it's hiding its power level. This kind of reading-into-things seems to me little different than the kind in the linked article.
Any time I see stuff like this my eyes protectively glaze over and my curiosity is ended. All of this kind of culture war obsession just strikes me as so incredibly infantile.
Ben___Garrison
2d ago
"I have a great, on-topic and timely post to share with this reddit community, but my account is too new. I'm going to purchase an account with a pre-existing history so I can share this incredible post with a community that I have no pre-existing engagement with."
I didn't say anything like that so I don't know where you got that.
Spotting accounts like this harvesting karma is like spotting people who are in the middle of getting their robbery tools ready
Comparing Reddit upvotes to burglars ransacking peoples' homes is laughably hyperbolic. Again, I've only ever seen these bots end up either 1) getting banned, or 2) advertising for porn on NSFW subs, which is fine. The assumption that they have to be doing something bad doesn't really hold up to the benign results I've seen.
The Motte tried to actually avoid breaking the rules of Reddit, and we split because we knew that not actually breaking the rules wasn't going to be a defence against the eye of Sauron
I was referring to rules as they're enforced. Reddit's rules might be fine if applied evenly, but they're still problematic with how they're enforced.
MartianNight
2d ago
Nit pick: /r/the_donald was the banned subreddit.
sliders1234
2d ago
The bill barely does anything to eliminate asylum.
I have repeated told you why I oppose the bill. But it summarizes to I believe the bill would increase immigration I do not want. You are fine to disagree with my logic. What is not fine is acting like I haven’t told you why I oppose it.
The bill lacks any teeth to limit immigration during a Democratic Presidency. America is also very bad at letting the legislature get a second crack at legislating. The Dems offered the GOP very little in this deal. Biden would claim victory if the bill passes, probably enforce the border during the election season, and once the election was over every loophole in the bill would be utilized by the left to flood the border again with immigrants.
I prefer to just boost Trumps chance at election which would allow us to actually fix the border.
If Dems gave us a real bill with teeth and banned the current asylum situation I would vote for the bill and give them the win, but they are not doing it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
you're either a coward or a dullard
This is not allowed. Banned for three days.
Blueberry
2d ago
Btw: it was the right decision to flee reddit. Before their IPO recently they banned a few inconvenient subreddits. The specific case I know was that a country had two subs, a bigger progressive one and a smaller right wing one, and the latter was heavily brigaded and any small infraction was reported. It was then closed by the admins as causing too much work and being badly moderated (which it wasn’t).
jeroboam
2d ago
because manipulation implies an outcome the target isn't desiring to happen.
This is a good point. In the past, both left-wing groups and right-wing groups sought to manipulate Reddit. Both were successful. Back in 2016, many posts from /r/thedonald reached the front page. Then their subreddit was banned.
Now only left wing groups are allowed to manipulate Reddit. It's anarchotyranny.
jeroboam
2d ago
What I saw was that a lot of them get banned pretty quickly, but some of them turned around and sold their account to a third party.
But... why? Reddit users don't have followers like Instagram or Tiktok.
There's almost no value to a Reddit account, even if they have 1 million karma.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
2d ago
Basically what @madeofmeat said. If a mod is in a discussion thread as a participant and someone says something rude/antagonistic to the mod, we generally will recuse ourselves and let another mod adjudicate. (This is not a "blanket policy." If you reply to me by saying "go fuck yourself" - something that has actually happened - I don't feel a need to recuse myself in handing out a ban.) But if a mod modhats you and you reply to the modhat comment with antagonism, you're escalating and that mod is entitled to decide message you're sending is "I will not follow the rules and need more serious consequences."
Note also that no one ever gets banned for responding to a modhat comment by saying "I think your moderation is bad and I didn't deserve to be modded." We probably won't agree with you, but we don't ban people just for arguing or disagreeing with us. What @FarNearEverywhere did was flat-out say "No, I will not follow the rules." If she's just omitted the "No," I'd probably have told her (again) to regulate herself and stop using her feelings as an excuse. If she'd wanted to debate why her post was too condescending but the one she was responding to (which she claims started it) was not, I might or might not have indulged her, but I wouldn't have banned her.
But if a mod says "Stop doing this" and you say "I will not stop doing this," well, what kind of response are you expecting?
Ben___Garrison
2d ago
I followed a few of these types of accounts, the ones that would repost old stuff to farm karma. Some of them were on /r/4chan, some were on bigger subs like /r/pics or /r/funny. What I saw was that a lot of them get banned pretty quickly, but some of them turned around and sold their account to a third party. The most common client seemed to be porn actresses trying to sell their videos. It seemed like the ones farming accounts were typically from 3rd world countries like Indonesia and Bangladesh, although I bet there's pretty stiff competition from chatGPT now.
Reposting something popular is pretty common, and I don't think it's particularly harmful even if it's a little annoying to see the same thing (but how many of us even remember Reddit posts from years ago)? There's a big difference between that sort of thing, and political manipulation via buying upvotes, which is theoretically doable but I don't think anyone has shown real evidence that it's widespread. The layman's idea is politics is an arena drenched in money with moustache-twirling villains engineering everything behind the scenes, but in reality it has a lot less money than the power it wields would presumably incentivize, mostly due to coordination problems.
Seeing an entire Reddit thread with similar comments is very strange, and it's a shame that the new thread you mentioned got taken down as I would have very much liked to examine some of the accounts to see what they're up to.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
4d ago
No one is telling you how to feel your feelings. You know that having feelings and how you express them are two different things.
You get cut more slack than you know because people (including me) actually like you quite a lot, despite your inability to control your feelings and your tendency to respond to even the least little bit of poking with explosions. So be assured that the contempt you are showing me now and have shown me in the past is not taken personally.
That said: replying to a mod telling you directly to stop doing something with a foot-stamping "No, not gonna, you can't make me, you're not the boss of me" temper tantrum is an escalation with a response that you clearly chose. So yes, banned.
I don't need or want to deal with this nonsense right now, so I will let the other mods decide when or if to end your ban.
FarNearEverywhere
4d ago
No.
I've put up with you doing the Nanny bit because you're a mod and you have the authority, but I'm not going to accept sneering without responding in kind.
If OP can be polite about their response, I'll be polite in return. OP goes on about "reality is only allowed to have appropriately gritty" so on, I'll respond in the same tone.
You can tell me I'm wrong, you can tell me I'm banned, but you can't tell me how to feel my feelings.
I'm going to once again recommend "The Eternal Front" by Walter Blaire.
Technically it's a mildly hard mil-sf but the war is just the setting. Yes, there are fights, but mostly the novel is more of a mystery/spy/political story.
It's very well written for a self-published work and quite novel, to me.
All the constituent parts have been re-worked and put in an arrangement that is arguably original.
As in, vastly better than the typical technothriller tier writing most SF has.
I once wrote a nice message to the author, saying it's on the level of how Iain Banks wrote when drunk. He really liked it. Hard to judge, but I don't think I'm more than mildly wrong.
Most books - like e.g. 'Bobiverse' are painfully contemporary. You've got SF trappings, but everything else - language, ethics etc feels like modern day West.
This book - the SF trappings are minimal, 99% of stuff used during the plot is pure electric age tech, or even late steam era. It's set on the fringe of a rapidly declining colony that started with cca 22nd century tech level - AIs, fusion power, 'reasonable' nanotech etc.
The languages spoken by the various groups are all recognizable modern English - but style / vocabulary wise feel alien. However, unlike Star Wars, it's 'actually sf' in that it tries to be internally coherent, cares about historical, political and technological constraints and so on.
People have their own odd ethics. The colonists, Haphans, culturally seem like a weird mix between 19th century Britain (social mores) and North Korea (politics). They're described as pretty much human, but clearly from a 'prepped*' population. There's no mention of Earth whatsoever in their history, or of other non-Hapha humans, although Earth clearly exists within the setting because there's one oblique reference to it - a Hebrew derived name in a minor, outsider character.
The natives ancestors were human once but aren't, anymore. They're descended from someone's 'plausible' idea of a supersoldier race. There's a small bit of 'art major biology' in the book, but most of the stuff is within bounds of physics and biology.
They're savants at fighting - much more accurate, fast breeding, love fighting, vastly better reaction time, far less likely to die from injury, immune to disease, a second grafted on nervous system preventing combat fatigue or undue fear of death, a whole set of instincts related to weapons and looks like also primitive armament production. Neurologically problematic for them to tell a lie. And so on. Interestingly, linguistic drift is also what they're missing entirely.
They seem about as intelligent as Haphans, who seem pretty normal, but the feral supersoldier heritage causes problems - e.g. engineers or scientists killing each other due to disagreement is a frequent, not very rare risk. By themselves, they only ever achieved high middle ages technology.
*Quote from Iain M Banks' Algebraist (spoilers):
Prepping. A very long-established practice, used lately by the Culmina amongst others, is to take a few examples of a pre-civilised species from their home world (usually in clonoclastic or embryonic form) and make them subject species\slaves\mercenaries\mentored. so that when the people from their home world finally assume the Galactic stage, they are not the most civilised\advanced of their kind (often they're not even the most numerous grouping of their kind). Species so treated are expected to feel an obligation to their so-called mentors (who will also generally claim to have diverted comets or otherwise prevented catastrophes in the interim, whether they have or not). This practice has been banned in the past when pan-Galactic laws (see Galactic Council) have been upheld but tends to reappear in less civilised times. Practice variously referred to as Prepping, Lifting or Aggressive Mentoring. Local-relevant terminology: aHuman & rHuman (advanced and remainder Human).
dasfoo
6d ago
Could Silicon Valley, not unlike how they targeted Crowder's business through the algorithm, having also targeted his marriage?
I mean, yes? But probably not? And do you have any corroborating data outside of Crowder sitting in the middle of this Venn Diagram? "People shadowbanned by YouTube" & "People who got divorced?" Is anyone else even speculating about this?
I think any persuasive case would have to include some sort of theory for why instigating a divorce would be in any way beneficial to the conspirators. Is it known that non-divorced right-wing comedians are less desired by social media outlets? Or is the idea that social media companies are interested in causing divorces for some other reason and just picked people they don't like as guinea pigs?
So when is Florida banning jelly beans? And calorie-rich sodas sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup? And sugary breakfast cereals? And cancer-inducing smoked meats? Tobacco? Alcohol?
Why should all those foods that we know are unhealthy and that consumers actually do overindulge in to the detriment of their health be allowed, but a meat substitute that is likely to be much healthier and is not even widely available needs to be banned?
I don't think “probably” is right; which nutrients and vitamins are essential is pretty well known, so the chance that lab-grown meat is unhealthy in some unpredictable way is pretty low. Especially since nobody suggests you switch to a meat-only diet; the idea is that you eat this in moderation, along with fresh fruits, nuts, and vegetables, just like the recommendation is for real meat.
Still, if you personally don't want to take the risk, you would still be welcome to stuff your face with jellybeans, vodka and tobacco because you believe that's the healthier alternative. That's hardly an argument for a ban.
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