RIP Culture War Thread

I would guess they're talking about niche gaming forums. I know a bunch myself - /r/Factorio, /r/KerbalSpaceProgram, /r/Subnautica, /r/StardewValley... oh wait, the latter two aren't that niche.

In my experience, it's a matter of focus and moderation. Unfocused groups turn quickly into toxic cesspools, whether the groups are made of nerds (e.g. 4chan) or genpop (Facebook threads, or comment sections in those publications who didn't yet turn them off).

Do you see the irony in your first sentence? Your concern about information isn't about it being useful but about it can be bad/abuseable? What you decry in "technolibertarians" you are for with censorship.

The same logic applies to both of them except information is a way more useful tool with less potential for abuse and has censorship has proven full of more bads. You complain of status quos and norms not being taken into consideration yet never think of the downsides of your "careful" approach which is actually recklessness driven by fear.

You can always attempt to validate claims that you hear that may be false. There is nothing that can be done to claims not heard and spread. And that is one hell of a camel's nose under the tent.

Abuse is all about the wielder anyway. To give up potential and put oneself in the position of much worse abusers because of "bad people might abuse it".

Polite racist arguments are rare these days, but I've heard them, as well as polite homophobic arguments.

I won't bother repeating them here, but the point is that those arguments are rarely made in good faith. Usually it's someone making a hateful argument cleverly to make it more palatable.

Yeah in my experience it is more conservatives (mostly fundamentalists) who have a persecution complex about it. Which is very differently from those who are or were persecuted.

One brings it out and up everywhere as self-justification as they aren't actually being persecuted haven't tweaked their behaviors from even negative receptions. One may call them drama llamas trenchantly but more charitably it is identity based instead of experience based.

The other is met with far more guarded pessimism and even with angry backlash tends to be in "friendlier" spaces or stressed. It is more confided than presented usually, more angry than righteous. Actually some degree of trauma territory.

These are individual situations based on experiences fundamentally. Ironic inversions of the typical and coexistence of "real" and "fake" persecution behaviors are possible.

This is a really over the top one sided presentation.

The thread being mourned was continually full of really shockingly horrible stuff. Straight faced technobabble laden arguments for genocide and such. A reliable go-to for "oh-shit,-humanity-is-screwed" porn.

It was impossible to tell how much of it was actually awful people earnestly advancing awful ideas vs screwed up performance art with people intentionally posting the worst stuff they could think of just for shock value or to mock the fact that participants there responded so embarrassingly to so much of it. ... but I don't think that is a defense of it at all, it's an indictment.

I had previously believed (and people who knew Scott personally lead me to believe...) that the thread was created as a tarpit for trolls and people with absurdly repugnant views to waste each others time in a place where other people could ignore it-- rather than these discussions invading every other thread and making them useless to the majority of people who want nothing to do with that stuff-- who feel they morally can't just sit and pretend its okay to advance horrible policies but also don't want to waste their lives rehashing ethical arguments that most people considered settled a century ago. The "designated crap thread" approach is sometimes more effective than punting the sources outright (and also less harmful to false positives)...

This post strongly indicates otherwise and is causing me a vertigo inducing shift in how I perceive the author and his community.

I couldn't be more disappointed. And I'm only left hoping that the support of that toxicity expressed in Scott's post is an emotional retaliation to the despicable harassment he reported experiencing ... rather than an earnest position.

I feel like a lot of the HN commentary is essentially unrelated to the actual 'event' -- The 'deplatforming' trend is concerning... but that doesn't really tell us much about this particular venue. Especially since it continues to exist and hasn't in fact, been subject to deplatforming or anything similar. The connection only goes in so far as some of the same pressures probably exists, but I would be a lot more interested in hearing what went on behind some actual major deplatforming incidents. (Medium killing gab.ai's post explaining why they didn't believe their actions supported hate crimes would be an interesting candidate, since it was a meta-deplatforming, so doubly removed from most pragmatic tradeoffs...)