RIP Culture War Thread

>hen make some fake accounts and post something bad yourself. Write hit pieces on the owner or author and highlight those cherry-picked things. Spread those pieces far and wide, and keep writing new ones with the same theme.

I've never heard of this happening - was there specific instances of this you were thinking of? I'd like to read more, if possible.

Anonymized is unfortunately not useful for this -- you need to be able to get to the reddit user names. I don't see anything in there that would provide number of comments they make in the culture wars thread, and that's really what you need.

I want to agree with the direction while disagreeing with how the details are framed. Particularly the taste of the idea that the internet is supposed to realise the ideals of technocrats leaves me with a bad taste on the tongue.

Small numbers of highly motivated activists are part of the problem, but also part of how things are - pretty much by definition, change is led by activists who commit to an idea before it becomes mainstream. I find even for movements that I agree with the person pushing for change is often someone who I consider unhealthily dedicated to that particular topic. To say nothing of movements I disagree with. I'll pick on Stallman as a well known figurehead for this sort of thing. Activists attempting to shut people down when they can is (a) not going away and (b) going to be a tradition dating back to time immemorial.

We should look to politics for examples of the forces at play and the organic solutions that are found. Political debate in a government setting swiftly degenerates into a shouting match if it is not absurdly ritualised. Technical discovery and discussions is done by small committees and with a few chosen representatives of the major ideologies to keep the signal-noise ratio acceptable. Executive power is embedded in an apparatus of precedent, ritual and respect that protects it from activism, even if it looks like the executive is misbehaving.

I'd suggest the last sentence is key to the problems emerging on the internet - infrastructure controllers (Google, SSC, etc) aren't emerging from large agglomerations of people and don't have the unbreakable support network enjoyed by political leaders allowing them to fight back against unreasonable activists (eg, think Trump - the structures that protect him from activists must be world-class). I found this post enlightening to just how damaging the N-to-1 relationship between the weakest link in the system and activists can be, even when the weak link isn't a creator and is obviously committed to free speech and moderate ideals. The implications are profound.

Well, I wouldn't exactly say no one is. Often, it ends up being revealed that the people attacking others for these culture war things are usually hiding some dark secrets of their own, or acting as hypocrites, and people have made quite a deal out of that.

For example, the person whose video about questionable YouTube comments set off an advertiser backlash ended up getting involved in a bunch of stories themselves for making the exact same kind of content (as mentioned by Keemstar, Review Tech USA, etc). The GamerGate controversy had dozens of examples of people getting doxed or revealed as hypocrites, and certain entire forums exist pretty much to dig every bit of random people's personal backgrounds.

You're right in that everyone has said something they regetted/should regret, and that people should be more forgiving and understanding, but it's not due to people not looking up the histories of the attackers. It's because everyone even remotely involved in a controversy will basically get doxed to hell and everything they've ever done or said used against them, accused and accuser alike.

I enjoyed the culture war thread. It was a place on the internet where there was a radical toleration of ideas, so long as they were given in good faith. Bans were frequent to those who broke the rules, and some ideas were morally repugnant. But when people made them, you were able to read a discussion, debate, and often refutation of their points, that focused mainly on ideas.

You had some weird people, with weird ideas, who found this to be a nice home. Often they were very smart, but had strange ideas on humanity, race, religion, politics, and knew they couldn't share them anywhere else. I, personally, enjoy trying to look through the world of all different types of filters.

In fact, I think it's important. While the mistakes of history are so obvious now, at the time plenty of smart and good people supported terrifying and cruel policies. The first step, in my opinion, to not making those mistakes, is to formulate a deep empathy for why they made them. For why you might have made the same mistake without the benefit of hindsight.

My best defense against this is to inoculate myself by reading and understanding a wide variety of strange ideas on the world.