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RIP Culture War Thread

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Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#221

Post by intended »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #214
intended wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely NOT. Moderating comments is hard, and it is rarely clear if someone is arguing in good or even bad faith. Tone of voice does not carry on the internet. Worse, Good moderation is simply a better training environment for the next generation of harassers and bad users. From my experience - basic rules got rid of the dumbest type of harasser currently active on the forum, but then created a medium for a more e…

> The rule of moderation is that your attackers keep moving up a Turing-like scale, till inevitably their arguments are indistinguishable from genuine comments made out of ignorance or lack of malice. At this point you really should ask yourself whether to continue moderating such comments. If you're at the level of hearing "dog whistles", you're already starting to act in bad faith. I think Scott Alexander correctly…

Yes and No. in some cases these are known dog whistles - the user later goes to other forums and talks about how they “succeeded”.

In other cases, it highlights my point - it is a subversive form of hate speech and it gets past the mod team:, and starts the radicalization process Or polarizing process.

On the other hand it may be a genuine comment, naturally arrived at by a user, but it pattern matches with the mod team and it gets removed.

For example an old argument which is now easily refuted is “brownies have larger families, and their growth rates are over taking natives!”

That’s a factually correct argument, but it’s an incorrect conclusion which takes (took) advantage of average user ignorance.

But the other issue is that this thread stays up, other people who come across it get “red pilled” or “triggered”.

Subsequently the thread becomes a source for flame wars, “engagement”, and propagates schisms in the community.

In the end moderators have to act based on the taxonomy of ideas presented, not their possible sincerity. Leaving it up will only cause further damages.

As a result moderators, (probably like the police) drift away from the average user views and behaviors.

This is the fundamental crux of the moderation problem, if not of communication itself : we can never know the intent behind a statement.

Is it a sincerely held view by someone who is not a Bigot or racist? Or is it sinister and malignant sentences designed to get past moderators and radicalize/convert users and disrupt other communities ?

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#222

Post by disqard »

Pharmakon wrote: post #148
ufmace wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are true and good points, and the overall argument may be true too. But if so, what are we to do? Don't bother trying to make the world a more peaceful place because we are doomed to failure?

Stop looking at improvements in a “breakthrough” model that becomes equal parts breathless and mindless with each new toy. Start looking at long term, systematic improvements thst raise standards of living, improve education, and reduce conflict. While people are busy fantasizing that they’re changing the world with their latest scooter or delivery app, there are actually groups and individuals who slave away at the…

You sound like you've seen/read Kentaro Toyama's "Ten Myths of ICT4D" [0]

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#223

Post by intended »

jplayer01 wrote: post #209
intended wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s untrue, and ignored evidence from many newer forums and their descent into madness. Take HN, gaming forums and so on - they work decently. Here’s my rules of the network from a moderators perspective 1) politics and religion are about maximally polarizing. If your forum/topic has no need for these topics, exclude them with great prejudice. 2) there are 2 types of forums. Some forums are built around goal drive…

Gaming forums? They rank up there as the worst the internet has to offer. Which one exactly are you taking about? Because all the ones I've seen are toxic cesspools unless it's a subreddit for a niche game like Factorio, which is consequently small with a very specific demographic.

Sorry, I meant dwarf fortress forums, for certain complex games which act as natural effort filters.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#224

Post by intended »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #211
jplayer01 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaming forums? They rank up there as the worst the internet has to offer. Which one exactly are you taking about? Because all the ones I've seen are toxic cesspools unless it's a subreddit for a niche game like Factorio, which is consequently small with a very specific demographic.

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 publicat…

Yes, you are right. I was wrong to being up plain “gaming”. I should have made that clear - the dwarf fortress forums are benign and healthy. The world of Warcraft forums are lexical hellscapes in comparison.

As long as the game has some effort barrier which needs to be overcomed to be enjoyed, the community will be healthy and civil. (All things held equal)

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#225

Post by nullc »

nullc wrote: post #219

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 pos…

A post I once read by a thoughtful author said,

> There’s an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels.

I don't know what has caused the loss of that kind of insight now, but I hope its found again in the future.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#226

Post by wbxrs »

nullc wrote: post #219

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 pos…

Given that your comment is contrary to what the submitted post says and what all comments here say, some proof would be appropriate. You are using strong words.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#227

Post by KozmoNau7 »

yourbandsucks wrote: post #180
CM30 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The key thing about people going around attacking people on the internet is that they're really into attacking people. We could do with a lot more empathy from everyone. And I think it's fair in a certain way to get extra-annoyed at this type of behavior from those who preach inclusiveness. Like, at least the judgmental a-holes are consistent.

We could really use a lot more empathy and patience.

Not just online. Everywhere in life.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#228

Post by nullc »

BryantD wrote: post #9

"On the last SSC survey, I asked who participated in the thread, and used that to get a pretty good idea of its userbase." I think this is worth drilling into. Scott's data shows the user base, but he slips into "I took some random surveys" when he addresses the question of comment frequency. That data is not as high quality. If I had the survey data, I'd use the Reddit API to figure out comment frequency by responde…

The survey data in the past showed that most people on the blog didn't use the subreddit. I don't know why we shouldn't assume that the converse isn't true as well.

IIRC the last survey also had an option for "yes, I know about that thread and stay the hell away from it for the love of god" (okay, the actual option was less extreme than that, but I would have picked my more colorful version if it had been offered and I think many people I know who read SSC would have also). I'm surprised to see that not mentioned in the discussion of those statistics.

Unfortunately with this post the possibility to neutrally poll his readership for their own opinions on that thread more directly is probably forever lost now. Any poll now on the subject would be read by too many users as a question on supporting/opposing harassment campaigns or the tenuous link to deplatforming.

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#229

Post by manfredo »

creato wrote: post #206
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…

> in close to a decade of living and about 6 years working in the Bay area I have met exactly one co-worker that openly expressed conservative views. In my experience in the bay area, it's very rare for co-workers to express political views at all. In fact, I find the bay area to be very politically reserved compared to the open embrace of conservative viewpoints where I'm from (I probably lean more conservative than…

> I have encountered people that aggressively espouse liberal positions every now and then, but in my experience, this makes most other people around them (including me) uncomfortable, and the conversation usually stops quickly. While it is maybe more rare for a conservative to do this, I find it to be met with the same response.

I had the same experiences in Western Washington, but I get the feeling that much fewer people feel empowered to step in and stop the situation where people espouse controversial viewpoints in a manner denigrating to those that believe differently. So people who do aggressively espouse controversial viewpoints think this behavior is acceptable. This does have tangible impact beyond slack and email lists. Our company has made several decisions that many would regard unethical or at least unsavory, and I think there's a strong probability that if there was less of a mono culture someone would have pointed out that these things went beyond the realm of mainstream morals.

Granted, I'm totally complicit in this bystander effect. I don't want to risk any damage to career or network opportunities. The concerning takeaway, though, is that fact that this is an environment that engenders fear in people who try to

Re: RIP Culture War Thread

#230

Post by [deleted] »

BryantD wrote: post #44
pitt1980 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it 'worth drilling into'? What's the relevance?

If there are 10 right wingers and 10 left wingers, but the right wingers post 10x as many comments, that's a rather different scenario than if they're posting equal numbers of comments.

[deleted]
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