banned
Emeritus
1yr ago
Advertisements provide immensely negative utility to society. They stifle competition (advertising budgets for megacorporations are huge, small companies can't compete with that) and prey on normies who are manipulated by ads into making irrational purchases that they otherwise wouldn't make (and into sharing the ad with their friends).
A lot of ads, even on major ad networks, are literally just for malicious scam websites. They're annoying by design, waste human attention, shit up websites, and degrade performance.
The utility that a company gets when you watch one of their ads was not produced out of thin air. No value is created by an ad. It's utility that's being stolen from the average consumer in aggregate. If all advertising was magically banned I think a lot of economic problems would disappear overnight.
The downsides you're describing of ad-blocking are real, but are the result of a race to the bottom. Anyone who stops showing ads on their site (or whose userbase blocks ads) is obviously going to get paid less money and might not be able to support their site. Anyone who does show ads on their website might benefit themselves, but will necessarily be hurting the world to a greater extent: something I'd describe as antisocial.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
I personally will never put effort into anything in a place where I know I'll be banned at the drop of a hat. Why bother? Especially if, like you said, it may be silently hidden from everyone.
Okay! If you change your mind, you're welcome to give this place another try.
Maybe you appoint a janny team that turns out to all be trans, and they start shadowbanning anyone who questions transdeology.
Then I boot them and find new moderators. Seriously, the userbase has never been shy about complaining about moderators, and I have booted moderators before (okay, moderator.)
I just don't understand how groups that have been run off of reddit can still be drawn to strong moderation.
Because nobody has managed to make a good serious discussion site without strong moderation.
If you think it's possible, I encourage you to prove me wrong and do it. But I'm not convinced it's possible.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
I personally will never put effort into anything in a place where I know I'll be banned at the drop of a hat. Why bother? Especially if, like you said, it may be silently hidden from everyone.
It's not as though the moderation here is some great mystery. The mod team has a considerable history, and while they have their critics, I have found their actions to be exceedingly reasonable in the past.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1yr ago
Admittedly this is just me living here (in Japan), but Japan has pretty damn solid gender norms to this day. As with all generalizations of this sort, there are many many exceptions, and yes, it depends on one's definitions of strict in this case. Women still go about in frocks and heels here--and I mean college students going to class. The biggest changes I've seen in 20 years are not necessarily on the side of women--for whom the glass ceiling is still very much present and the most lucrative work to be found relatively easily is sex work (and you name it, it exists here)--but in men. Men here have slowly (at least in popular culture and what I routinely witness say, on trains) become more dandified and dainty. This could be to some degree a temporary influence of trends in South Korean pop (There's a complex relationship there--South Korean banned Japanese music entirely until 1998 and only then did the Japanese begin thawing attitudes toward K-Pop, which has since become massive here, along with Korean TV dramas). Anyway Japan is no Afghanistan to be sure but it's night and day compared to, say, Australia or the US.
ardent
Become adorable and ungovernable
1yr ago
It's kinda hard to overstate just how much Reddit culture has changed in the past 10+ years. Prior to the summer of 2015, there were basically no subreddit bans, and /r/ShitRedditSays (the woke/feminist sneer sub) was just known as a few goons sniffing glue in the corner. Hell, in 2012 many defaults temporarily blacklisted all posts to Gawker after Gawker doxed the head moderator of most of the more unseemly NSFW subreddits (including creepshots and the then-recently-banned jailbait)... I highly doubt defaults would take that particular stance nowadays.
Also hey nice to see you here, hopefilly my values can be satisfied in the future.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
I'll probably hang onto a Reddit account, maybe not the one I used on themotte, for a while. Until the archives become unusable or unsearchable with google. Reddit remains a useful repository of eg hobby information. There are probably comparable or better forums out there for each individual purpose, but I don't know what they are off-hand, and it's easier to search "Reddit typical repairs e46 3 series" and find a nice thread already put together, than it is to find which bmw forum is any good, figure out how to navigate it, etc. It seems unlikely that /r/weightroom or /r/trucks are gonna get banned for political reasons any time soon, though I guess anything is possible.
DongusTheHedgehog
1yr ago
Moon talked about this in a stream with RekietaLaw, I don't know if the stream is still up since Keffals campaigned have Rekieta banned from youtube and disbarred, which resulted in him getting a community strike on youtube and being temporarily banned from the platform.
According to Moon, Near was not harassed and is not dead.
Near contacted Joshua Moon and offered money for having their thread deleted. The thread was tiny and not all that negative, nobody in the thread contacted Near. Moon refused and Near escalated to extortion by threatening to kill themselves.
Moon didn't get a chance to respond to the extortion as Near was reported dead the following morning by a random who claimed to be "close to Near".
The only proof offered of Near's death was an urn with Near's alleged name on it, again, by a random.
Near was residing in Japan at the time of the alleged suicide and they are an American citizen. The deaths of American citizens in Japan are reported, I forgot at what frequency, but KF users waited for the next report and found that the last death of an American citizen in Japan had been before Near's email exchange with Joshua Moon. More reports came and no American citizens were reported dead in Japan. There is no death certificate or any official confirmation of Near's death, only a picture of an urn by a twitter rando.
RococoBasilica
Actually a Quality Retribution
1yr ago
And this is exactly why free speech and open inquiry is so important. Had we just banned the topic, I would have never stumbled upon someone with the patience and knowledge to take revisionist accounts to task. This way, I actually learned something (and, if it matters, have now even less doubt in the facticity of the Holocaust than before).
Porean
1yr ago
To which tribe shall the gift of AI fall?
In a not particularly surprising move, FurAffinity has banned AI content from their website. Ostensible justification is the presence of copied artist signatures in AI artpieces, indicating a lack of authenticity. Ilforte has skinned the «soul-of-the-artist» argument enough and I do not wish to dwell on it.
What's more important, in my view, is what this rejection means for the political future of AI. Previous discussions on TheMotte have demonstrated the polarizing effects of AI generated content — some are deathly afraid of it, others are practically AI-supremacists. Extrapolating outwards from this admittedly-selective community, I expect the use of AI-tools to become a hotly debated culture war topic within the next 5 years.
If you agree on this much, then I have one question: which party ends up as the Party of AI?
My kneejerk answer to this was, "The Left, of course." Left-wingers dominate the technological sector. AI development is getting pushed forward by a mix of grey/blue tribers, and the null hypothesis is that things keep going this way. But the artists and the musicians and the writers and so on are all vaguely left-aligned as well, and they are currently the main reactionary force against AI.
The best I've seen so far has been this BYU fan/alumni doing extensive research on the subject. That twitter user also cites some investigation done by this college sports outlet. The TLDR is that not a single person who was in attendance, nor a single person who has gone through the dozens of hours of footage -- including the police -- has been able to verify any racial slurs were used at the game. Not any fans that were there. Not any of the coaches. None of the players. Nor the visiting talent scouts that were seated in the relevant section of seats.
It's very likely the spectator, who was banned after the game, was not yelling slurs at players. He was not even at his seat and, at one point was on his phone, during the times when Richardson claims to have heard the slurs. This is all visible in footage and nobody sitting around him has claimed to have heard bad words. Apparently that fan is autistic not that it is particularly relevant. Poor chap.
One charitable theory that sounds plausible is that Richardson misheard "COUGARS" as a slur. Building on that, another theory is that Richardson got boxed into doubling down on her claims after her Godmother (running for political office) publicly made the specific claim that Richardson 'was called a nigger every time she served.' In the above Twitter thread he does post the footage of all her serves.
Personally, I do not fully doubt that Richardson thought she heard some no-no words at the time. In retrospect, that reflects more on her and her perception of BYU than anything else. While it's possible it was a cynical, pre-planned stunt that still sounds crazy to me. I guess there is no real cost in doing so? Especially if you were certain that no real questions would be asked. All the rest of it, the story, the narrative, the coverage, and national attention is a little sad, but unsurprising. The best investigative journalism on this case was done by some random fan who merely could not believe the story. The fact this would be a national story at all, even if her claims ended up being true, is also a little sad, but unsurprising. Some autist at volleyball game yells mean words and gets banned. So what?
TL;DR: A big nothing burger. Demand for racism continues to exceed supply, etc. Into the memory hole it goes.
EDIT: Highlighting this quote from Richardson is a little culture warry, but I think there's genuine value in recognizing that her beliefs likely contributed to this story going national.
SomethingMusic
1yr ago
I found myself trending to individually check subreddits anyways, so I found that except for a bookmark which I already had on my toolbar my habits haven't changed much. As I've seen the more interesting subs constantly get maligned or removed for one reason or another despite their intellectual and milque-toast (seeing /r/itsafetish get banned was a travesty) posting rules I think it's ultimately for the better that Motte is proactive on migrating to a new forum instead of being eventually quarantined or banned with no preparation whatsoever.
sparticus-was-wrong
1yr ago
Using ad-blockers is antisocial behavior and should be discouraged or banned wherever possible.
People are "voting with their feet", as they always have. As long as there have been ads people have been trying to escape them. When VCRs came out with a record function the first (only?) use I heard about from everyone was recording shows you want to watch and actually consuming them later so you could skip the ads.
Just because you like a certain financial model doesn't mean you have some right to it. I despise it, and given how much effort people are willing to invest to avoid ads, I think a strong argument can be made that it's simply incorrect. Content creators also don't have any right to making a living via their content. People do not want ads, for the most part, so if they can't find a way to sell their product without the ad model then it's just another business that failed like millions of others.
See the decline of the newspaper for what content creation looks like without advertising dollars:
Paid news content indeed lost to free content. I don't think that proves the ad model is somehow superior. People were happy to read news when they could ignore the ads and pages loaded fast enough. I suspect people might be more open to paying for news again now if a reasonable micro-transaction model existed, except that the news has gotten so poor it's hard to justify paying anything for most of it.
but not viewing any ads that pay for the content you consume is just expecting the world to provide you with something free of charge.
I don't expect it. But they do it. Is your expectation truly that I sit there and try to concentrate on some advertisement which I've already seen (well, had playing in the background while I wait for my content to start again) dozens or even hundreds of times before because of... I don't know, some capitalism-reglious piety?
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1yr ago
You are conveniently forgetting Q and all that sphere exists. Or the entire edifice of religions and various right wing ideologies which are still around and well.
I don't blame you, the platforms do everything to show you contra and not the competition but it's there.
You're right in that the right is correctly identifying they are under attack and losing, and signing up to that cause isn't fun, so it doesn't attract the people who do it for those reasons. But what's there to do? The fun tactics of the right (a little trolling) are met with strong repression and getting banned from everything everywhere.
SIGNIT
1yr ago
You're forgetting that reality has a left wing bias.
Consider the keffals drama: if it was a rightoid vying for a rightoid cause, they would not have enjoyed the success that keffals did. Keffals manages to represent the mainstream, popular interest, and thus with minimal effort on her part she can succeed in her goals. While keffals instigated and pushed forward the situation, she only managed to do so because the broader world was prepared and receptive. Compare something like the Ottawa trucker protests. Possibly due to the police being supportive of their cause, they managed to dig their heels in and create a protest that seemed to actually be challenging the powers that be. Gofundme was allowing them to receive donations. The media was altogether against them, the house of commons passed the emergency act and started freezing bank accounts and arresting people, and suddenly their whole movement was fucked. Keffals, while she might seem the underdog in a given matchup, enjoys the support of the cathedral, while the truckers, while they may have seemed to momentarily have the upper hand, didn't.
The relative penetration of either side on online platforms just reflects the inherent bias of those platforms. Fun, playful rightoid youtubers either got taken down, or completely shifted their politics towards leftoidism to protect themselves. Very serious and careful, usually quite milquetoast, rightoid youtubers are also still around. The result is that it seems like only leftoids can be playful, when in fact the platforms themselves filter away playful rightoids.
I don't see any meaningful way in which the "the Right [lost] the terminally online". Many terminally online people are rightoids. You don't usually see them on reddit or twitter, because they get banned on reddit or twitter. Or they attenuate their views there to avoid being banned.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
Curious how you mentioned failures internal to the right, but you didn’t mention The_Donald getting banned from reddit.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
usually met with
pats on the backsnaps (sensory issues!) and goodboyspersons.
This is a really condescending way of mocking your outgroup. The rest isn't really better, adding up to a real hand-wringing over how much leftist spaces must suck. Adding a paragraph about how Both Sides^TM of the terminally online have flaws doesn't really make the smears any more charitable.
With the obligatory tone policing taken care of: I think you're making a bit of a homogeneity error. Observing melodrama and overreaction on leftist Twitter is something of a pastime of this sub. The outrage machine is not driven by good vibes and hugs. People have been "literally crying and shaking rn" for years.
You may well be correct to observe that leftist hobby communities are more likely to be positive. I'd credit this not to an evangelist reward cycle, but to evaporative cooling. Leftist spaces are less likely to make people feel uncomfortable enough to leave. Whether this has anything to do with "big tent" politics, inclusive language, microaggressions, pronouns, or the much-maligned hugboxing? I couldn't say.
Free speech absolutism is arguably shooting itself in the foot here. The first message I got upon signing up here was an ALL-CAPS question from an offensive username. As I looked for a report button, I realized, "shit, we don't have a ToS here, do we?" Did I actually have grounds to request deplatforming this guy merely for posting slurs and, I'm told, using a NSFL profile banner? The answer is obviously yes, as he was a walking rule violation, but I wouldn't have even asked myself the question on a more left-wing site.
(If this happens to anyone else, please send a mod message to Zorba. He's confirmed that such accounts will be banned; there's just no report button yet,)
A subset of the right wing has staked out "being allowed to use slurs" as their Gadsden flag. That circle is near-completely contained within the circle of users who value "owning the libs." As long as this is true, sane moderation is going to have a left-wing bias. To some degree, this must go out the window in extremist left spaces. I'm not going to claim ChapoTrapHouse was a bastion of reasoned debate. It's the hobbyist Discords and niche interests that live and breathe on niceness, community and civilization.
If you want to know what the happy, affirming, not-so-para social group looks like for right wingers, go to a church picnic. Maybe Baptists or Presbyterians, maybe LDS. The Pentecostals get up to some absolutely wild group delusions, but they seem to be having a pretty good time with it. This is the power of community, of cohesion--and it comes with its own set of strictures.
As a final note, while Contrapoints really, really isn't my style, I wouldn't call it vacuous. Not in the same way that I'd label something like a mukbang. I'm under the impression that she puts a lot of effort into the scripting as well as the presentation. It's especially an ironic comparison given that Contrapoints and BreadTube were explicitly designed to drive Peterson-style engagement.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
"Only have access to the good stuff" is probably best accomplished by limiting access to GPUs at all.
This is already happening. The US government has already banned Nvidia from selling high-end chipsets to customers in China. One important point about the bans is that this not only bans the current top-end chips but also anything they develop in the future with similar capabilities - so in a few years it will cover high-end gaming cards too, and gradually extend lower down the range as time goes on.
That's currently in the geopolitics sphere, but it's easy to see it being rolled out to other customers that the people in charge don't want to have unfiltered access to modern AI tools. If the masses want powerful GPUs they can use an online service like GeForce Now or Dall-E that restricts any sort of dangerous/undesirable behavior.
"Speak plainly, but not too plainly" ????
Yeah, that's a tough one. But I don't think kicking the can down the road really doesn't help all that much, those destined to have that reaction will have it eventually and will probably flameout and get banned in short order.
I don't see the utility in taking the responsibility to spare the feelings of people who are incapable of not having their feelings hurt. Nth order effects be damned?
I think this is inevitable result of the fact, that modern leftism from its philosophical foundation leans much more into pathos/ethos as modes of argumentation as opposed to logos. It is considered valid to accept that there are "other ways of knowing", things like "lived experience" are okay form of debate and affiriming/celebrating various identities and rewarding proclamation of excess privilege give one more social points. However this can also create a very stressful environment in case of infighting or disagreement. As much as conservatives talk about "cancel culture", the phenomenon exists even more strongly inside the movement.
This is where ethos type of persuasion comes in, being on the other side of critique for insufficient commitment can be highly damaging psychologically, compounded by potential loss of all the whole support network to boot in case you get banned/ostracized. As an example one can use latest kerfuffle around Young Turk's Anna Kasparian for her comments on violent crimes, but there are other stories of let's say detransitioners and other pariahs from the movement now living outside. The thing is, that once you are booted from the movement then you are marked as "rightist" which keeps the movement pristine and happy place at the first glance.
Also as somebody else mentioned, this behaviour exists on the right in form of religion and in case of various specific subgroups. I am sure that let's say if you waded into some MGTOW message board venting your frustrations, you will find a lot of support and positive reinforcement over there. The difference is that these spaces are mostly marked as "extremists" and pushed to the darker corners of the internet as opposed to let's say and outright misandrist radical feminists which are fully mainstream.
sliders1234
1yr ago
Yes. Jews always over represent in all online communities. Overrepresent in academia and creative arts. I’ve just accepted Jews are smarter than the average white person probably thru centuries of being banned from manual labor and thus breeding higher intellects.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
True, there's also that. But isn't that an internal failure of the right? Imagine being a sitting president and getting personally banned from twitter, a company in your country! Imagine having your supporters booted off major platforms based in your own country. Trump should have been able to protect his supporters, as I said. He should've been able to use state institutions to impose costs on these sorts of behaviours. DeSantis is doing it in Florida and he is less powerful!
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
1yr ago
No, because gambling losses are not socialized. liberal arts degrees are more socialized. A case can be made that bad food should be banned because it imposes an externality in the form of higher healthcare costs
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
Reading the CW thread, it seems to me people are subconsciously talking as if the threat of AEO still exists.
Well, here's my personal view ( @ZorbaTHut can chime in, I think we're all kind of getting used to the "new normal" and will be for a while):
Yeah, you can use all the no-no words that risked getting you admin-banned back on reddit. Go ahead, retardniggerfaggottranny it all out of your system.
That being said, we don't want threads full of retardniggerfaggottranny. The Motte never has been and hopefully never will be that kind of place.
You want to call something retarded? Fine. You want to talk about the word nigger or quote someone else's use of it? Fine.
Actually referring to people as niggers or faggots or trannies is not fine.
As for all those sizzling hot topics, like Holocaust denial and whether trans women are men (or groomers) and whether HBD says blacks are too stupid to ever build rocketships, yeah, we can have those discussions now without worrying that AEO will come and put a boot on us, but we still expect a reasonable attempt at quality discussion, not just manifesto-posting and baiting.
I seem to have been shadowbanned already - if I'm not logged in I can't see any of the comments I've made. This is only my 4th comment; how did this happen? I had such high hopes!
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