RIP Culture War Thread • Hacker News Board

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#91

Post by dmode » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 10:28 PM UTC

silisili wrote: post #87

ufmace wrote: post #14

This highlights some very troublesome trends on the internet these days. We once envisioned the internet as a place of revolutionarily open discourse, where any idea under the sun could get posted somewhere and read, no matter how crazy or bad it seemed, with the worst ridiculed and dismissed, but still able to be read, and the best rising to the top. It seems like we're moving in the opposite direction these days, w…

It's not just 'companies', it's people. Reddit has become beyond frustrating because of how siloed subreddits have become. I have to visit a mix of politics, news, and yes, the_donald, to even begin to get a breadth of happenings and news. This was never more apparent than this whole Smollet case. After it was found that it was a hoax, not only were all threads pointing out it was a hoax removed, but also all previou…

I had the opposite experience with the Smollet case. I actually never heard or cared about Smollet till it started popping up as the #1 and #2 stories in r/news. As someone who is on the left of political spectrum and politically fairly active, I don't of know anyone who really thought Smollet was some representation of the political left. The fact that he was actively "brigaded" and "upvoted" in r/news and r/conservative and r/t_d tells you a lot about political discourse and "comments" section. It has been taken over for trolls and professional trolls at that to score cheap online points, but also to game search engine rankings. There is no space for neutral conversation anymore.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#92

Post by rossdavidh » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 10:28 PM UTC

denart2203 wrote: post #4

"Fourth, I want anybody else trying to host “the national conversation” to have a clear idea of the risks. If you plan to be anything less than maximally censorious, consider keeping your identity anonymous, and think about potential weak links in your chain (ie hosts, advertisers, payment processors, etc). I’m not saying you necessarily need to go full darknet arms merchant. Just keep in mind that lots of people wil…

Be careful what you wish for: it's a good book, but an unnerving read: http://peterturchin.com/ages-of-discord/

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#93

Post by PavlovsCat » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 10:31 PM UTC

gipp wrote: post #19

ufmace wrote: post #14

This highlights some very troublesome trends on the internet these days. We once envisioned the internet as a place of revolutionarily open discourse, where any idea under the sun could get posted somewhere and read, no matter how crazy or bad it seemed, with the worst ridiculed and dismissed, but still able to be read, and the best rising to the top. It seems like we're moving in the opposite direction these days, w…

What you've left out of that idyll of the early internet, though, is that its population was - smaller, by many orders of magnitude - from a highly homogeneous distribution of cultural backgrounds - mostly of comfortable material means These are, and have probably always been, prerequisites for the kind of civil discourse you're talking about. The "heavy-handedness" of tech companies is IMO less a cause than it is a…

I agree about smaller groups, but I remember being in rather diverse forums early on. The one thing people had in common is that they liked reading and writing, and art, and arguing, and were okay with computers. So that also implies a level of comfort, at least for those who weren't posting from internet cafés.

What degraded conversation the most IMO is that people can just slink away. Someone makes a claim, you refute them, they don't respond, or just answer with a total non-sequitur, or ignore 80% of what you said but have 5 new straw men you're supposed to deal with before they acknowledge that. You can't pull that shit in a forum with 100-200 people, you can't make it a habit, people will remember. Now people much sooner just retreat into some echo chamber to lick their wounds, instead of dealing with the other, for better or worse, and one-on-one, not group-on-group. As persons, not via stereotypes, and in our case over 6-7 years.

Yes, we all had in common that we lived on a street, but otherwise it was kinda random and diverse. Musicians, painters, gamers, authors, druggies, age 20 to 50, with most being probably in their 20s. We even had a member we always mocked for being kinda racist, and after years of that he wrote us a thank you post because he slowly had come around and we had played a role in that. We kicked spambots and were cruel to human spammers, but anyone else, we weren't whimps about, first and foremost. George Carlin was still alive, things were good. We weren't "civil", we called each other stupid fucks where applicable, not "disingenuous". But we also responded when called out, civil or not.

Come to think of it, last year one of our sister forums reopened its doors, after 10 years of downtime. The posts go back to the year 2000, and the admin made a sticky saying if anyone wants to delete their old posts, they're totally fine to. I said I'm less ashamed of all the (no doubt super cringy) things that are on that forum by me, than I would be of giving even one inch to anyone holding it against me. If that anti-intellectualism armband lifestyle wins out, the future is dead anyway, and I don't care how successful I am in it. But if it doesn't, then I'll be glad I never gave in, never even considered it ^^

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#94

Post by livueta » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 10:32 PM UTC

npsimons wrote: post #46

As to the "no comments section" policies, I'm gonna be honest: I don't blame them one bit. No one owes anyone a platform, and considering how easy and cheap it is to host your own content, why should anyone be forced to broadcast someone else's opinion? The truth of the matter is there are more trolls these days - see especially "The Card Says Moops" ( https://youtu.be/xMabpBvtXr4 ) as to one reason why. If you say "…

> As I pointed out above, anyone can get a website and domain name.

I wish this were true, but I don't think it is anymore.

If you post or host anything remotely controversial, expect to have your site DoS'd off the internet. How can that be avoided? Well, mostly through the help of one of the big boys (Cloudflare, Google Project Shield, etc). What happens if they decide you're a despicable, e.g. Stormfront? You're pretty much SOL.

Sure, there are plenty of other mitigation services, but they generally get pricey - not only pricey, but asymmetrically pricey. When your detractors know that they can burn through your war chest by expending a fraction of what you lose, that's clearly an unsustainable position.

The same is true for DNS. When every registrar can be pressured into denying you service, you don't have a lot of recourse.

That's not to mention the well-worn argument that, in a hypothetical era where the vast majority of traffic is via one of the big name sites, going off on your own is basically analogous to having your soapbox relocated from Hyde Park to the industrial wastelands. Are you still technically able to speak publicly? Sure, but the original intent of protections on speech is nowhere to be found.

I don't have an answer to the subsequent question of what to do about it, beyond supporting decentralized technologies. That's a tough one. What I do know is that the idea that anyone is able to provide their own platform if deemed undesirable may be comforting, but doesn't really hold up.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#95

Post by berberous » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 10:33 PM UTC

kadendogthing wrote: post #50

ufmace wrote: post #14

This highlights some very troublesome trends on the internet these days. We once envisioned the internet as a place of revolutionarily open discourse, where any idea under the sun could get posted somewhere and read, no matter how crazy or bad it seemed, with the worst ridiculed and dismissed, but still able to be read, and the best rising to the top. It seems like we're moving in the opposite direction these days, w…

>It seems like we're moving in the opposite direction these days Good. >with the internet as a means to control, oppress, and indoctrinate. No, we're just not allowing "information anarchy." Not all information is beneficial, useful, or constructive. Some of it has net negatives. Stop assuming there are enough rational/good actors to counter act the bad/ignorant actors who propagate bad information. We don't have the…

And who decides which information is beneficial, useful or constructive? What makes you think you are on the right side?

By the way, I note that you have been downvoted/flagged to oblivion. I only see your comment because I prefer to browse with 'showdead' enabled. So, you presumably post here because you like this forum, yet your peers think your comment was not worth anyone even _viewing_.

I think your comment was a coherent, good faith attempt to express a view. While I disagree with your view, I'd prefer people debate it with you rather than flag it away.

But how do you feel knowing that your view has been deemed to be net negative and harmful enough that no one should even view it?

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#96

Post by amanaplanacanal » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 10:33 PM UTC

iron0013 wrote: post #61

api wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I scanned the thread a bit and can second this. I am originally from Ohio the type and extremity of right wing ideas present there seemed far to the right of anything typical in the midwest. There are KKK types and similar in Ohio of course but they're pretty extreme outliers in most areas, especially anywhere near a city or a college. I agree that SF is a special kind of bubble, but I do think there's been an explos…

I actually mentioned the Klan in my comment above too, originally, but removed it for fear the mods would consider it flamebait. However, I'm not sure folks here on HN are really aware of exactly how unpalatable (to most people) the contents of the Culture War Thread often were.

I'm pretty lefty. There are certainly some commenters who are aggressively towards the alt-right. There is a much larger groups that is more conservative than most people I know personally. There are a lot of people who I would call liberal. And a few who comment mostly from a social justice perspective.

If you don't normally talk to very right wing folks in your normal life (I certainly don't), you are going to read things you would consider shocking. They don't appear to me to be anywhere near a majority.

For those who would like to form their own opinion, here is a link to the current thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/artngn/culture_wa...

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#97

Post by golemiprague » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 10:33 PM UTC

silisili wrote: post #87

ufmace wrote: post #14

This highlights some very troublesome trends on the internet these days. We once envisioned the internet as a place of revolutionarily open discourse, where any idea under the sun could get posted somewhere and read, no matter how crazy or bad it seemed, with the worst ridiculed and dismissed, but still able to be read, and the best rising to the top. It seems like we're moving in the opposite direction these days, w…

It's not just 'companies', it's people. Reddit has become beyond frustrating because of how siloed subreddits have become. I have to visit a mix of politics, news, and yes, the_donald, to even begin to get a breadth of happenings and news. This was never more apparent than this whole Smollet case. After it was found that it was a hoax, not only were all threads pointing out it was a hoax removed, but also all previou…

There is no problem with the_donald or politics or whatever other group think subs, as you mentioned yourself you can just read all of them to get the whole picture. The problem starts when reddit itself think they should censor some stuff because they don't like it, then you don't even have this option to hear all the opinions and make up your mind. It is even worst when all the big tech companies subscribe to the same type of politics and point of view.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#98

Post by 50656E6973 » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 10:37 PM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #55

haberman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem, as described in this article, is that some people have good faith beliefs, respectfully expressed, that are nevertheless so repugnant to others that you will be tarred for not censoring them.

>is that some people have good faith beliefs, respectfully expressed, that are nevertheless so repugnant to others that you will be tarred for not censoring them. I'm skeptical of this - I've never seen a polite racist argument, for example, or a polite homophobic one. The closest I've seen is a post riddled with condescension - something along the lines of "you don't understand, I'm trying to save your soul from the…

I've been racially slandered for posting MLK quotes, even though I'm not black (they assumed I was).

Conversely I've also been called a racist/bigot for claiming white people didn't invent racism/slavery, or that statistical differences in social groups shouldn't automatically be attributed to oppression, or that Frederick Douglass is evidence of how someone can free themselves from oppression.

They obviously had never studied MLK, Frederick Douglass, or world history, though I'd bet they had spent plenty of time watching cable news and shallow mass media.

The reason they called me those things was not because I was actually espousing hatred, but rather because I was suggesting something antithetical to their ideology.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#99

Post by dmode » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 10:39 PM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #13

What really hit home was this passage: > I acknowledge many people’s lived experience that the thread felt right-wing; my working theory is that most of the people I talk to about this kind of thing are Bay Area liberals for whom the thread was their first/only exposure to a space with any substantial right-wing presence at all, which must have made it feel scarily conservative. I moved from Western Washington where…

Honestly, Bay Area is like >50% recent immigrants. I think a lot of the problem arise because we ascribe the American label of "conservative" and "liberal" to a population who grew up in a very different society. A lot of behaviors that we assign to conservatives and liberals do not line up that way in other societies. For example, in Europe, the far right has very little interest in free markets, and has policy goals that are perhaps more common with the far left. In Asia, you will find deeply religious parties (e.g., BJP) who at the same time are pro-science and climate change. Also, a lot of recent immigrants in the Bay Area "escaped" deeply culturally conservative societies where freedom of sexuality is unheard of and really appreciate the tolerance that is in the fabric of Bay Area culture. So, in that sense, yes, it would seem to be a mono culture here of "liberals", but if you dig deeper the layers are not that simple.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#100

Post by sigstoat » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 10:40 PM UTC

iron0013 wrote: post #70

sigstoat wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's why they get classified as right-wing by most everyone except themselves. "libertarians are always classified as X" reliably identifies a person as opposite-of-X. if you hit up the conservative forums, you'll find libertarians regularly described as dope-smoking lefty hippies, and whatever else.

That hasn't been my experience. On most conservative forums, most people--clearly conservative--describe themselves as "libertarian". Look at elected officials: who's more likely to describe themselves as a "libertarian", Republican politicians or Democratic politicians?

you're talking about self-description. i wasn't.