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Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

arstechnica.com

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Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#231

Post by bonzini »

namlem wrote: post #216
lacampbell wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too am always baffled about how much more accepted communist imagery is than Nazi imagery. Mao and Stalins death counts far outstrip Hitlers. Also anyone advocating nazism in public would be rightly shouted down but you get heavily upvoted posts here advocating all sorts of nonsense proven to kill millions.

Communist death tolls are mostly due to economic mismanagement, whereas the Nazis were intentionally exterminating people. Obviously many people were killed in the gulags, but that number is far smaller than the numbers killed in Nazi death camps or in the famines which resulted from the aforementioned mismanagement.

Some of the mismanagement however was intentional (for example in Ukraine) and/or enforced to a criminal extent (thinking of China here). People died of starvation because their harvest was taken away in its entirety.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#232

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ctdonath wrote: post #106
SippinLean wrote: post #70

Cool experiment, very disappointing outcome. To me it was an experiment in dynamic, ever-changing art; giving way to creation and destruction. In the end, it was just scripted bots working to preserve art, mostly corporate logos and national flags. Why was there no captcha?!

Interesting philosophical contrast between this, your suggestion, and http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com - anarchy vs benevolent dictatorship vs capitalism.

The benevolent dictatorship being represented by any pixel rendered image you find to be "benevolent" presumably.

Compare the r/places output to MDH and http://media.cntraveler.com/photos/56d0aee058d9a8773c109eb2/... and you'll probably establish a consensus for the "benevolent dictator" made art above the others?

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#233

Post by PhasmaFelis »

Navarr wrote: post #55
eatitraw wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think there is anything actually political on the final /r/place piece other than country flags. There are various flags of different anarchist movements, very long trans* flag, LGBT flags here and there. IMO, all these count as "actually political".

Anarchist movements I can see, but I don't think trans/LGBT flags count as "political." It's an identity, not a political statement. It'd be like calling christian crosses "political"

I agree that being queer shouldn't be political, but as long as millions of people's politics are centered on being anti-LGBT, simply being out of the closet is a political act whether we like it or not.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#235

Post by H4CK3RM4N »

mikeash wrote: post #143
Nexxxeh wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/r/wales and /faroeislands had a mutual defense pact, enabling both (small in terms of Reddit) communities to punch above their weight. It was great fun, fighting off trolls and attempts by other subreddits to aquire further real estate for themselves. /u/SCtester cleaned up the final image to fix up (ed: some of) the in-progress and rogue pixels and damage by the "void" group. http://i.imgur.com/7E3bAnE.png There ar…

Reading through the conversation on this stuff, I'm wondering if this weird combination of amusement and befuddlement is how my parents felt when I was telling them about my online activities back in the early 90s.

Wait until you hear about how 4chan's My Little Pony and Politically Incorrect(read: Nazis) became friends after this year's April Fools prank.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#236

Post by H4CK3RM4N »

porsupah wrote: post #136
Yen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The other thing this author tried to make this about was politics. I think there is something to be said about politics, here, but it's not about specific countries, ideologies, or personalities - it's about the nature of how we do politics. In order for anything interesting of scale to get created, it required multiple users cooperating. In some cases, this means convincing them to abandon the project they want th…

Indeed - in /r/furry, we had a sort of accidental affiliation with /r/touhou, though from the looks of things, the size of the sub was sufficient for self-maintenance. That said, our Snoo did wind up sustaining some damage: http://i.imgur.com/oNyqdzz.png Which the mods duly embraced; if you go there now, the sub has been appropriately renamed: http://i.imgur.com/uvTwe8o.png I'm fine with this. ^_^

I still love how all the furry subs collapsed into the snoo and Yiff me daddy after starting with many different logos.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#237

Post by pkamb »

dccoolgai wrote: post #218
pkamb wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why that was what a group of people put serious time and thought into creating.

Bless you. Don't ever go to reddit.com

I get the fun of /r/place. I get the flags. I get the characters. I don't get the big block of text from Revenge of the Sith, and (mainly) how supporters of that beat out other communities.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#238

Post by H4CK3RM4N »

wutbrodo wrote: post #184
metamet wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen any of the alt-right communities? The alt-right is not your traditional conservative. It's not a preconceived notion that /r/the_donald is filled to the brim with hate speech and trolls. You simply have to go there and look for yourself.

I think the term "alt-right" at this point is just a catch-all derogatory for shitty people who happen to be a certain type of nationalist rightist, in much the same way that "SJW" refers to shitty people who happen to be associated with the social justice movement. Before the election, there was a narrower meaning, but as soon as the Clinton campaign mentioned it and the media picked it up, any hope of the term havi…

The best description I've seen of the alt-right is /pol/ as an ideology.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#239

Post by lifeformed »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #226
lifeformed wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it so important to accommodate trolls and nazis? If a stranger in my house at a party drew a swastika on my wall, I'm kicking him out. If someone on my website did the same, I would also remove him. It's not me getting offended, it's just curation of the community. If someone doesn't want to follow the social norms of the community they're in, fine, but they'll pay the consequences. They can form their own com…

>If a stranger in my house at a party drew a swastika on my wall, I'm kicking him out. // So you say "draw what you like on the walls" and then punish a follow of Vishnu because you associate the symbol differently to them. Don't invite strangers to draw stuff on your walls then? >If someone doesn't want to follow the social norms of the community they're in // Such as free speech. Don't give people freedom of speech…

Context is important. Communication is as much about interpretation as intent. If you draw a swastika in an environment where a swastika represents nazis, without taking the care to establish the context in which you would not be misrepresented, then sorry, I'm erasing it. 99.999% of the time an unadorned swastika is drawn anonymously in public in a Western environment, it's not the religious kind. So save it for a situation where the meaning is clear.

I didn't give anyone freedom of speech. If someone calls me racial slurs in my house, I'm kicking them out. Freedom of speech is for the courts, not for curating the communities I want to be in.

Re: Reddit’s April Fools’ experiment

#240

Post by Dylan16807 »

qu4z-2 wrote: post #208
Dylan16807 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By the same standard They were describing a situation of 99% bad people where you write off the 1%. You seem to be describing the inverse. That's not the same standard.

Is there some source for these percentages or are the numbers generated purely from a sense of "I like this group" vs "I don't like that group"?

Those numbers are not my opinion on anything in particular. It's a loose representation of how they were describing the groups. eropple said one in a few thousand were innocent, while Karunamon was describing a minority of the group as racist/terrorist.

There's a big difference between "almost all of this group is terrible, you are enabling them and should be painted with the same brush" and "a tiny fraction of this group is terrible, you are enabling them and should be painted with the same brush".

It's a fully general statement, not about particular groups.

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