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RIP Culture War Thread

301 points by whiddershins 8y ago

whiddershins 8y ago
This is a long piece. I am submitting it because particularly the second section, about comment moderation, seems to have wide-reaching implications for tech and conversations.
- Diederich 8y ago
  Thank you; it was quite illuminating.
dang 8y ago
Url changed from https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread-two/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread..., which is broken.
- pitt1980 8y ago
  its broken because the author didn't want it shared in this fashion
  - whiddershins 8y ago
    Did the author state that? Because I wouldn’t have shared it if that was stated. Edit: the author states that the post is having technical issues. I don’t believe there’s any indication it shouldn’t be shared/discussed.
    - berberous 8y ago
      I also assumed the broken link was an intentional way to avoid amplifying this post too much, given the context and some history, but Scott posted in the SSC subreddit that the technical issues on this post were not at all intentional. So should be all good to share.
    - pitt1980 8y ago
      its tagged 'Things I will regret writing' I implied it, maybe I'm wrong
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        Many posts on SSC are tagged with this; Scott Alexander sometimes indulges in writing opinion pieces on controversial Internet topics.
  - dang 8y ago
    The current link is a long new article that seems fine to share, whether or not there was a second.
denart2203 8y ago
"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 will try to stop you, and they’ve had a really high success rate so far." Someone from the commentor community here should do a historical study on censorship like this (not exactly like this, of course, since the internet didn’t exist) under representative governments. Is it rare or unprecedented for voters to polarize into two tribes that will not communicate without the state falling into civil war? Or is it common and just feels like a coming civil war because we haven’t lived a large enough sample size?
- iron0013 8y ago
  Which government is censoring people?
  - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
    I didn't see the claim that there was one. Are you replying to the right comment?
- rossdavidh 8y ago
  Be careful what you wish for: it's a good book, but an unnerving read: http://peterturchin.com/ages-of-discord/ http://peterturchin.com/ages-of-discord/
BryantD 8y ago
"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 respondent type, and see if there's anything interesting there.
- pitt1980 8y ago
  Why is it 'worth drilling into'? What's the relevance?
  - kkarakk 8y ago
    in my limited experience, open forum social boards without a particular political stance very rarely have data available easily
  - BryantD 8y ago
    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.
    - pitt1980 8y ago
      Even if that’s the case, so what?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- whiddershins 8y ago
  I believe Scott makes the survey raw anonymized data available: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/13/ssc-survey-results-2019/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/13/ssc-survey-results-201... So, drill away!
tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
The idea of capturing the best commentary from that thread really stuck out to me. It would be great to do some kind of annual anthology, internet-wide. The best insights rounded up, year after year. You could break it down by topics or region, and publish each year. The historical value of something like that would be really excellent, as time goes on. You could really capture the mood of each society for a given year or time period, in a very accessible way for future generations. I'd read the everloving crap out of that.
manfredo 8y ago
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 I grew up to the Bay area. I lived in a liberal area in WA, but conservatives existed and more importantly were visible. The congressional district I lived in flipped between Republican and Democrat twice while I was a kid. Some of my parents friends made cases for conservative viewpoints, and in retrospect I really respect my father encouraging me to listen even if I didn't agree. When I moved to the Bay area it felt like I stepped into a world where conservatives might as well be foreigners, or even a different species given the way some people talk about them. Even though I usually agree with the positions they hold, I've become alienated from much of my co workers by the way they openly express disdain for conservatives in a way that demonstrates a clear lack of experience in talking with people on a different end of the political spectrum as normal people. It's jarring to see people simultaneously patting themselves on the back for being inclusive and welcoming at the same time as they exhibit disdain for half the country. I also worry that this is a positive feedback loop of exclusion. Fewer non-left people join Bay area tech companies because of the liberal monoculture. Then the liberal monoculture becomes stronger as there are fewer people calling out ways in which the company is being exclusive towards non-liberals, this leading to an even bigger monoculture, and so forth. It's probably the second biggest thing that is makinge consider moving away from the Bay Area, after cost of living. Sure, I prefer to hav mostly like-minded (liberal) friends, but consider this: 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. I just don't think that kind of extreme political segregation is healthy.
- iron0013 8y ago
  I'm from the midwest, and the thread seemed consistently right-wing and reactionary to me. I don't encounter people with... let's be charitable and call it "controversial" politics like those of the typical Culture War Thread poster in my day-to-day life, so what exactly does Scott think is an appropriate contrast to the liberal bubble he thinks dominates west coast tech culture? East Texas? A Trump rally?
ufmace 8y ago
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, with the internet as a means to control, oppress, and indoctrinate. Giant tech corps effectively taking over most means of communication and using their powers to openly censor things are part of the problem. IMO, a bigger part of the problem is the trend among activists that anyone with an improper opinion must be destroyed, along with anyone who allows them to express that opinion, and anyone marginally associated with anyone who allowed them to express their opinion, etc. It seems like a well-honed process now. Cherry-pick the worst things anyone has said or posted. If nothing sufficiently bad has been posted, then 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. Direct them at anyone associated with the target. Repeat and keep spreading the net until somebody breaks. Is this what we created the internet to be?
- labster 8y ago
  It sounds like you wanted a revolutionary open discourse, and are surprised that the discourse is full of revolutionaries. I really don't know how to fix the human empathy problem, though.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - seiferteric 8y ago
    My problem is all of the throwing stones in glass houses, hypocrisy an self righteousness I see out there. It's so easy to attack something a public figure might have once said but no one is looking through the "attackers" entire history to see what they might have once said. I don't believe any real person has never said something they later regretted (or should regret) and would be embarrassed by if it came out. As you said, empathy is the problem. People need to be more forgiving ans understanding. Only when someone has established a record of being wrong/bad should they be "attacked" for it, otherwise it should be sufficient to respectfully point out why you think they are wrong and move on with your life.
wbxrs 8y ago
Looking at those charts, why are libertarians considered right-wing? They may be so economically, but they definitely are to the left (or even the far left) socially. Giving that this post talks about social stuff, and not economical stuff, I believe that 51%/49% chart to be simply wrong.
- thebooktocome 8y ago
  They may be socially liberal as individuals, but they are all too willing to curtail the government's ability to protect the rights of minorities. That's why they get classified as right-wing by most everyone except themselves. For example, the libertarian solution to the Christian baker, gay wedding cake problem is that the government does not have the right to stipulate non-discrimination laws for public-facing businesses. Follow that logic to its natural conclusion, and we're back to segregated restaurants. Doesn't sound very leftist to me.
  - rosser 8y ago
    The counter-argument to that is often something like, "Well, people just won't patronize the segregated establishments, because who would support that?!", and with that, we've demonstrably already lost touch with reality.
  - Stronico 8y ago
    That's like saying having legal abortion guarantees a zero percent birthrate. It would be legal to for restaurant owners to offer segregated sections if they wanted to, that's all.
    - mikeash 8y ago
      And we know from past experience that the end result of this is greatly reduced facilities available for minorities.
  - sigstoat 8y ago
    > 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.
paulpauper 8y ago
I dunno why people think moderating comments is so hard. It's obvious when someone is arguing in bad faith: repeating the same stuff over and over, condescending tone, dismissing opposing side, etc. People are afraid of being accused of censorship.
- haberman 8y ago
  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.
  - komali2 8y ago
    >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 sin of homosexuality."
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Go visit the Culture War threads then. The article states that the CW threads were full of these kinds of arguments, so if you want to see examples, you know where to go.
      - komali2 8y ago
        Yea, that's what I'm trying right now, nothing good yet though. I'll keep scanning here and there though.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - 8y ago
fallingfrog 8y ago
I think part of the reason for this is just the period of dislocation that we're living in. I mean if the culture war thread was around in 1967 what kind of things do you think you'd find in it? It would have been much worse than what people write today. 7000 buildings burned in the city of Detroit and the president had to send in the 82nd and 101st airborne divisions to put down the rioting. What would those people have said on reddit? Now, things are changing again, and people are dividing into camps. In other words I think that the external situation is driving the online discourse rather than the other way around.
microcolonel 8y ago
I've seen a similar outcome on some Discord rooms and occasionally on Twitter. I think a lot of it has to do with the attitude people take (and the difference based on platform, I think, tends to relate mostly to the attitude an uninitiated person would take on that platform).
Tenoke 8y ago
I can only describe Scott as a paragon of intellectual honesty and a true proponent of fair and unbiased discourse. So it saddens me to see him [partially] silenced by trolls and people who are dishonestly pushing their agendas. I can imagine how many discussions and people have been silenced in a similar manner, especially when things are more muddled.
- mundo 8y ago
  +1, I don't always agree with him but I don't think there's another blogger who can touch him for niceness, thought-provokingness, and intellectual courage. He's like a walking, talking manifestation of the HN submission/commenting policy. (For anyone who's just learning about him, there's a "About/Top Posts" on the top menu. He's probably most well-known for writing on contentious political topics with unusual civility and insight, but he also has a ton of stuff on psychiatry (how various psychiatric drugs work, analyses of drug studies he does/doesn't agree with, etc) and on science generally that's quite useful, e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-study/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-... )
  - owenversteeg 8y ago
    That's a great article, thanks! I'll have to read more of his stuff.
jumelles 8y ago
> Any fair moderation policy won’t provide the moderator with any excuse to delete [the guy who really likes pedophilia ... posting on every thread ... followed by a ten thousand word manifesto]. And there's the problem. It's not "unfair" to delete comments like those described.
- mundo 8y ago
  He means fair in the sense of content-neutral or objective. Obviously any forum can just delete stuff the mods don't subjectively like, that's the default option used by most fora.
keypusher 8y ago
Was the full thread archived anywhere?
- dinglejungle 8y ago
  It's multiple years of weekly threads: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/search?q=flair%3ACulture%2BWar%2BRoundup&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/search?q=flair%3ACul...
npsimons 8y ago
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 https://youtu.be/xMabpBvtXr4) as to one reason why. If you say "get your own website and post there" it raises the bar just enough that trolls won't do it. I think this is a good thing. Note that I am firmly in favor of Net Neutrality and carriers (eg ISPs, registrars, etc) banned from having tiers or otherwise hampering access. What I oppose is people crying censorship when big name sites kick out the despicables. As I pointed out above, anyone can get a website and domain name.
- livueta 8y ago
  > 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.
  - KozmoNau7 8y ago
komali2 8y ago
>A subreddit devoted to insulting and mocking me personally and Culture War thread participants in general got started; it now has over 2,000 readers. Anyone know which subreddit that is?
- iron0013 8y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/
  - ethics_gradient 8y ago
    Not sure if there's more mocking or calling out, HBD and otherwise. The forum's focus on HBD seems something worth critiquing extensively.
    - PoignardAzur 8y ago
      Let's be clear on one point: they're complete jerks. Well, not exactly. Like, imagine your best friend is pro-conservative; he's a really nice, polite, sensitive person who's mostly willing to hear opposite viewpoints. Then you watch his posts on r/the_donald, and he's acting like a sneering, disgusting douchebag, ranting about "libtards" and how lefties are morons bent on destroying the fabric of the country? Sneerclub is the same. I can totally believe that most people there are reasonable people with reasonable concerns, but the community brings out the worst parts of them the same ways others like the_donald and TheRedPill do.
natalyarostova 8y ago
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.
- pl1234 8y ago
  recently the mods started banning people for unorthodox ideas, in old threads you can see kevin mcdonalds work being discussed as plausible, that wouldn't happen on recent threads. Your paragraph on the "mistakes" of history doesn't make sense because morality is subjective.
simonsarris 8y ago
> People settled on a narrative. The Culture War thread was made up entirely of homophobic transphobic alt-right neo-Nazis. [...] > But instead it was always that the the thread was “dominated by” or “only had” or “was an echo chamber for” homophobic transphobic alt-right neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that the subreddit was dominated by homophobic etc neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that the SSC community was dominated by homophobic etc neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that I personally was a homophobic etc neo-Nazi of them all. I am a pro-gay Jew who has dated trans people and votes pretty much straight Democrat. I lost distant family in the Holocaust. You can imagine how much fun this was for me. I see this happen often, including to myself, and it's why I stopped talking about politics (or even interesting philosophy/economics questions except among other phil students) on Facebook. Anything deviating from the opinions of a few vocal friends would lead to muted threats, worded like: "So you're essentially making space for Nazis by saying its OK to talk about this?"
legitster 8y ago
What a depressing read. Even acknowledging controversies are controversial.
zaroth 8y ago
What stands out to me the most in this post, and I hope people can see this and recognize how widespread it has become, is the use of slurs to silence someone, by calling someone a nazi, or a racist, or alt-right and the like. SSC had a fabulous post (years ago?) about Trump and the narrative that he is appealing to nazis or alt-right. And now to see the same tactic used against Scott here. I wonder at what point a slur will be called a slur, regardless of who is targeted, even when it is deployed against a white cis-gendered male trying to speak his mind? At what point can we try to promote a specific subgroup but not at the expense of the perceived alt-group? It frustrates me that these labels are cheapened and weaponized like this so pervasively. Why is it so convenient to label someone as a wrong-thinker and this is an acceptable shortcut to nullify rather than engage and grapple with their ideas? I think there are a lot of people hoping Trump will be re-elected not even remotely because of any measure of competence or even particularly as a matter of policy, but just as a way to say, no, the culture war doesn’t get to disqualify a Presidential candidate by drawing him as a caricature of a nazi or a racist. I’m sorry to read that Scott has been on the receiving end of this kind of information warfare. I don’t know what the defense is supposed to be in this age of doxxing and righteous indignation. I guess at least I’m glad his blog is still being hosted and his DNS still resolves.
- eli_gottlieb 8y ago
  >I think there are a lot of people hoping Trump will be re-elected not even remotely because of any measure of competence or even particularly as a matter of policy, but just as a way to say, no, the culture war doesn’t get to disqualify a Presidential candidate by drawing him as a caricature of a nazi or a racist. Ok, and I'm hoping to have Sanders win on grounds of policy. Because, you know, once you actually get down to observable, object-level matters of Presidential performance like competence or policy, Trump is motherfucking godawful by almost everyone's standards, before you start warping the standards for culture-war reasons.
  - sastaha 8y ago
    "observable, object-level matters of Presidential performance like competence or policy, Trump is motherfucking godawful by almost everyone's standards" Your mistake is to assume that almost everyone wants the Camp of Saints and the Bernie free stuff agenda. As someone who will end up paying for that agenda, I'm less enthused.
helen___keller 8y ago
I think the internet is just an awful place to have a "national discussion" honestly. Arguments you encounter are not representative of opinions actual people hold, both because of bad faith internet trolls & because of vocal minorities. I think people have started learning this, which is why so few people care about social media censorship and the lack of open debates on the internet. Most people have probably had enough 30 comment threads with trolls on facebook to not give a shit about internet debate by now. Nowadays if I want a good debate or a debate on a truly controversial topic, I would only do so in a closed chat room with people I know. The internet is only for advertising my opinion rather than debating it, although I am as guilty as anyone of occasionally getting derailed into a full argument.
- humanrebar 8y ago
  In my experience, actually having conversations about meaningful and controversial subjects is impolite and a good way to lose friends. At least on the internet, the other party can just stop talking when they're done. They won't feel like they're cutting off or abandoning a friend.
  - helen___keller 8y ago
    Well, I know which friends are comfortable talking about what. It's usually still over the internet too.
  - KozmoNau7 8y ago
    If you can't have conversations and even discussions about meaningful or controversial subjects with your friends, I would say they were never actually your friends. I am friends with some people whom I wildly disagree with on a number of subjects, especially politics. But we have common ground in shared interests (music and whisky), and we use that as a basis for civilized discussion. We might disagree wildly and be political "enemies", but we are still more alike than we are different.
    - humanrebar 8y ago
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
Just speculating here... The Russian playbook in 2016 wasn't just to get Trump elected. It was to divide America. Now, we seem to be doing pretty well at that all on our own, but I wonder if some of their work would be to divide online communities, especially one where people from different tribes could talk reasonably with each other. And, reading the article, it seems like this could easily have been an orchestrated campaign disguised to look like a bunch of people just self-organizing to yell at something they didn't like because it allowed "them" to speak. (Or, it could in fact have been just a bunch of people self-organizing to yell.)
- defen 8y ago
  I don't think we need to invoke the Russians - I think an easier explanation is that some people just love being volunteer morality police. It cuts across political or religious ideologies. The justification is always prevention of harm, even though it's not at all clear to other people what specific harm is being prevented.
- fiblye 8y ago
  Americans hating Americans is part of our culture. There were people who didn't want to leave England. 100 years later, half the country up and split off and both sides went and killed each other trying to decide who was right. Then 100 years after that, half the country freaked out about the mere concept of equal rights for all and the North-South/Dem-Rep/urban-rural divide became solidified once more and hasn't really changed to this day. I find it hard to blame it all on a few paid Russians commenting on twitter or reddit. If a few guys can get paid to completely divide a nation of 300+million through internet comments, either they're the most persuasive people to ever exist, or the divide was already there. It's not even hard just to read some American news and see how literally every single site that covers mainstream events or political topics makes every single thing into an us vs. them situation. There's no escaping it, and it drives clicks, so there's no motivation to stop. And it's absolutely bizarre how certain parts of the internet are absolutely flooded with hatred for Russians as a whole, with someone always coming in to scream about them. It reminds me of hearing people's ramblings after 9/11, except this time it's primarily "young and informed" individuals.
sov 8y ago
I've been a member of the sub since its inception, and I've long defended Scott's analyses, but, as a longtime reader and (former) participant in the CW threads, I think he's grossly missed the mark here in the first section. I think if you read the first part of this article really closely, that should be obvious. "I will be honest and admit I rarely read the thread myself." - Scott "For all its awfulness..." - werttrew "...practically ever criticism of the CW thread I have ever read is true..." - yrrosimyarin "Very little was solved" -rwkasten "I think the CW thread is obviously a huge lump of positive utility for a large number of people, because otherwise they wouldn’t spend so much time on it" - darwin2500 "...it does have a lot of full-time opinionated idiots squabbling, and is inarguably filled with irrationality, bad takes, contrarianism, and Boo Outgroup posturing. I agree with many of [the criticisms] of overtly racist and stupid posts in there." -c_o_r_b_a I, too, once held a positive opinion on the thread, and so would anyone, having only the knowledge of its maxims and a bleary-eyed take on a small sample of posts. But once you dig deeper, you get what ought to be obvious from the above quotes. There are indeed many honest, well meaning, well informed people that post. They end up getting absolutely pulverized under the millstone of "power users". The issue with the thread was never that an surveyable proportion of readers would split between left and right. The issue was that the power users--the ones who post all the time in seemingly every thread--create an environment that drives away the the best posters. The issue was that a single person clicking "I consider myself left-wing" on a survey (especially when they know the context of the survey is to show relatively even R/L split and the political milieu of the sub is hard R) is very different than their sheer contribution to the social "overton window" of the thread. Those "left wing" posters are the "I believe abortion should be legal, but also I will post my pro-HBD takes forever, at every opportunity". That is, it doesn't really matter what they clicked, because their contribution to the aesthetic of the thread is not accurately represented by the survey. The issue was that actual factual experts get drowned in a sea of whataboutism and people who think they know better because they have a study to the contrary (did no one else read Beware the Man Of One Study or Epistemic Learned Helplessness!?). The issue is that there are so few actual left wing posters that they get called out explicitly, by name to answer for "the left" when "they" do something that the forum deems necessary of an explanation (seriously, darwin2500 has the patience of a saint). The issue is that people who harass (as above), argue in bad faith or seriously contribute to a negative environment don't catch bans except for extreme cases. To the moderators' credit, I've seen some really bad stuff get posters banned, but to speak of the general thread's failure, many of those posts are sitting on a well-into-the-positive amount of upvotes. Personally, I'm not sad to see the thread go. It was detritus, and it impelled many quality contributors to leave. My favorite poster on the sub (who pretty much never posts there now) wrote a fantastic bit explaining the sub ~6 months ago. "The experience can be a little jarring because you’ll have some insightful, genuinely depth hub worth comment upvoted and then another highly upvoted comments next to it will be how we should bring back eugenics and how we should limit immigration to people from high IQ countries in Europe and East Asia" - u/yodatsracist as per below https://www.reddit.com/r/DepthHub/comments/98jco5/uinterversity_describes_the_benefits_of_street/e4h7c8v/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/DepthHub/comments/98jco5/uintervers... And, to be clear, none of this was explicitly Scott's fault (and, to wit, anyone who harassed him personally/professionally is an utter idiot). It was simply Moloch acting on the machinery of the sub.
bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
Previously, I've been following /pol/ on 4chan for some years. What have impressed me is not the content itself, but its organization, the social structure, the creation of memes, the evolution of fringe political/identity movement that is unimaginable before the Internet. To understand its associated problem with it, it's crucial to establish a solid understanding of the underlying mechanism, the underlying social and economic factors that contribute to the problem of trolling. This is why I'm quite disappointed about the mainstream media. For example, what are the social and cultural basis of Gamergate/Dark Enlightenment/incel movement? If you can't understand the underlying social basis and mechanism, and just blindly discredit them it as "far-right troll campaign", then it is parts of the problem, not the solution. I've said repeatedly online - this kind of cultural issue is NOT about "the liberal media", "antifa", "SJWs", "trolls", "incels", "alt-right", "fake news", or "Donald Trump", these are just the "first-order" effect - what most people have easily observed. But the underlying issue - how Internet works to produce these ideas, the larger social problems behind them, can only be understood by looking at it from a higher perspective, as a postmodern phenomena, and to study it faithfully and carefully by the best sociologists and psychologists, and by the people who understand these online community and technology, and can analyze it in a neural way, just tell us how the system works, without preexisting bias or political stance. So we can finally have some ideas to solve it. Unfortunately, the number of people who are doing academic studies on these subjects, is almost nonexistent. Personally, I'm only aware of the following people who are studying it. o Book: Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web, by Cole Stryker. This is probably the earliest and the most well-known one. However, its ~2007 narrative of 4chan and its politics is out-of-date, but it still covers how an online platform can popularize a radical social movement. o Book: This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture, by Whitney Phillips, published by The MIT Press. This book explores history of trolling, and studies it from a cultural and social perspective, and identifies some of the underlying mechanisms. o Talk: The dark side of free software communities, by Morgan Gangwere, at LibrePlanet 2018. The talker discovers the fringe tech culture on the wild Internet, on 4chan/8chan, characterized by hatred - where RMS was the official mascot, and quite a few people (possibly basement dwellers) who believes the Internet is controlled by the evil monopolists/Freemason/Jewish/capitalist conspiracy, free software is not an exception but it's still a powerful tool against their rule, and how SJW is undermining it. Unfortunately, the talker's research focused on building a good community, not a detailed study of fringe tech culture. o Book: Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right, by Angela Nagle, focuses on the history of the current cultural war online. I haven't read the book yet, so I'm not sure what is the perspective of book. It seriously deserves more complete study from more people, I'm more interested in an ethnography-based approach. However, I don't have any background knowledge on sociology to make any insightful commentary on it... Seriously, reading /pol/ has almost made me wanted to change my major from software engineering to sociology, just to study it and trying to understand how the counter-cultural fringe politics works online, however, it's an unlikely career for me to pursuit.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jackmaney 8y ago
Good riddance. [spits]
nullc 8y ago
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...)
- nullc 8y ago
  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.
Fnoord 8y ago
What happened here is that people who have "extreme" opinions have found a platform to express them, and people tend to remember or focus on the outliers instead of the nuance (hence skewed perception). Whereas some or most within inside the community learned to listen to each other and respect having different opinions on controversial matters, outsiders did not respect this, and actively harassed a leader of the community (moderator) in a campaign for change (getting rid of the community). Having been a moderator in multiple communities, I know a sure way to burn out is to be one. It is also a perfect way to get rid of your opponent: suggest they become a moderator. I've been burned by that multiple times. I still moderate communities, and I'm good at it (also because of my background, e.g. technical; other people have other qualities), but only small ones. Even if it has exactly the same signal-to-noise ratio as a large community, you end up with less noise and therefore it takes less time. People know each other better. A very good (but specific) analogy comes to my mind: World of Warcraft. Nowadays, you can swap your character to another server (called "realm") and faction (red being Horde, blue being Alliance), etc. Back in the days of early WoW (Vanilla and TBC) you invested in your character and were therefore bound to realm & faction. These were relatively small worlds where different guilds (akin to "clans" or "teams") existed. People knew each other because of the size; akin to a small town with communities. Fast forward post TBC and you had the later expansions where with the click of a button people were in a group of random players of the same faction (regardless of realm). Playing together with 4 or 24 strangers whom you will likely never meet again. This decreased the relevance of reputation among peers and allowed for so-called toxic behaviour. WoW is just one simulation of that phenomenon (for which I don't know the name). I'd say the problem, summed up, is that people get away with harassment on the Internet because of the sheer anonymity/pseudonymity and physical distance.

301 points by whiddershins 8y ago

This is a long piece. I am submitting it because particularly the second section, about comment moderation, seems to have wide-reaching implications for tech and conversations.

Diederich 8y ago
Thank you; it was quite illuminating.

dang 8y ago

Url changed from https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread-two/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread..., which is broken.

pitt1980 8y ago
its broken because the author didn't want it shared in this fashion
- whiddershins 8y ago
  Did the author state that? Because I wouldn’t have shared it if that was stated. Edit: the author states that the post is having technical issues. I don’t believe there’s any indication it shouldn’t be shared/discussed.
  - berberous 8y ago
    I also assumed the broken link was an intentional way to avoid amplifying this post too much, given the context and some history, but Scott posted in the SSC subreddit that the technical issues on this post were not at all intentional. So should be all good to share.
  - pitt1980 8y ago
    its tagged 'Things I will regret writing' I implied it, maybe I'm wrong
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Many posts on SSC are tagged with this; Scott Alexander sometimes indulges in writing opinion pieces on controversial Internet topics.
- dang 8y ago
  The current link is a long new article that seems fine to share, whether or not there was a second.

denart2203 8y ago

"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 will try to stop you, and they’ve had a really high success rate so far." Someone from the commentor community here should do a historical study on censorship like this (not exactly like this, of course, since the internet didn’t exist) under representative governments. Is it rare or unprecedented for voters to polarize into two tribes that will not communicate without the state falling into civil war? Or is it common and just feels like a coming civil war because we haven’t lived a large enough sample size?

iron0013 8y ago
Which government is censoring people?
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  I didn't see the claim that there was one. Are you replying to the right comment?
rossdavidh 8y ago
Be careful what you wish for: it's a good book, but an unnerving read: http://peterturchin.com/ages-of-discord/ http://peterturchin.com/ages-of-discord/

BryantD 8y ago

"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 respondent type, and see if there's anything interesting there.

pitt1980 8y ago
Why is it 'worth drilling into'? What's the relevance?
- kkarakk 8y ago
  in my limited experience, open forum social boards without a particular political stance very rarely have data available easily
- BryantD 8y ago
  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.
  - pitt1980 8y ago
    Even if that’s the case, so what?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
whiddershins 8y ago
I believe Scott makes the survey raw anonymized data available: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/13/ssc-survey-results-2019/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/13/ssc-survey-results-201... So, drill away!

tenaciousDaniel 8y ago

The idea of capturing the best commentary from that thread really stuck out to me. It would be great to do some kind of annual anthology, internet-wide. The best insights rounded up, year after year. You could break it down by topics or region, and publish each year. The historical value of something like that would be really excellent, as time goes on. You could really capture the mood of each society for a given year or time period, in a very accessible way for future generations. I'd read the everloving crap out of that.

manfredo 8y ago

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 I grew up to the Bay area. I lived in a liberal area in WA, but conservatives existed and more importantly were visible. The congressional district I lived in flipped between Republican and Democrat twice while I was a kid. Some of my parents friends made cases for conservative viewpoints, and in retrospect I really respect my father encouraging me to listen even if I didn't agree. When I moved to the Bay area it felt like I stepped into a world where conservatives might as well be foreigners, or even a different species given the way some people talk about them. Even though I usually agree with the positions they hold, I've become alienated from much of my co workers by the way they openly express disdain for conservatives in a way that demonstrates a clear lack of experience in talking with people on a different end of the political spectrum as normal people. It's jarring to see people simultaneously patting themselves on the back for being inclusive and welcoming at the same time as they exhibit disdain for half the country. I also worry that this is a positive feedback loop of exclusion. Fewer non-left people join Bay area tech companies because of the liberal monoculture. Then the liberal monoculture becomes stronger as there are fewer people calling out ways in which the company is being exclusive towards non-liberals, this leading to an even bigger monoculture, and so forth. It's probably the second biggest thing that is makinge consider moving away from the Bay Area, after cost of living. Sure, I prefer to hav mostly like-minded (liberal) friends, but consider this: 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. I just don't think that kind of extreme political segregation is healthy.

iron0013 8y ago
I'm from the midwest, and the thread seemed consistently right-wing and reactionary to me. I don't encounter people with... let's be charitable and call it "controversial" politics like those of the typical Culture War Thread poster in my day-to-day life, so what exactly does Scott think is an appropriate contrast to the liberal bubble he thinks dominates west coast tech culture? East Texas? A Trump rally?

ufmace 8y ago

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, with the internet as a means to control, oppress, and indoctrinate. Giant tech corps effectively taking over most means of communication and using their powers to openly censor things are part of the problem. IMO, a bigger part of the problem is the trend among activists that anyone with an improper opinion must be destroyed, along with anyone who allows them to express that opinion, and anyone marginally associated with anyone who allowed them to express their opinion, etc. It seems like a well-honed process now. Cherry-pick the worst things anyone has said or posted. If nothing sufficiently bad has been posted, then 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. Direct them at anyone associated with the target. Repeat and keep spreading the net until somebody breaks. Is this what we created the internet to be?

labster 8y ago
It sounds like you wanted a revolutionary open discourse, and are surprised that the discourse is full of revolutionaries. I really don't know how to fix the human empathy problem, though.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- seiferteric 8y ago
  My problem is all of the throwing stones in glass houses, hypocrisy an self righteousness I see out there. It's so easy to attack something a public figure might have once said but no one is looking through the "attackers" entire history to see what they might have once said. I don't believe any real person has never said something they later regretted (or should regret) and would be embarrassed by if it came out. As you said, empathy is the problem. People need to be more forgiving ans understanding. Only when someone has established a record of being wrong/bad should they be "attacked" for it, otherwise it should be sufficient to respectfully point out why you think they are wrong and move on with your life.

wbxrs 8y ago

Looking at those charts, why are libertarians considered right-wing? They may be so economically, but they definitely are to the left (or even the far left) socially. Giving that this post talks about social stuff, and not economical stuff, I believe that 51%/49% chart to be simply wrong.

thebooktocome 8y ago
They may be socially liberal as individuals, but they are all too willing to curtail the government's ability to protect the rights of minorities. That's why they get classified as right-wing by most everyone except themselves. For example, the libertarian solution to the Christian baker, gay wedding cake problem is that the government does not have the right to stipulate non-discrimination laws for public-facing businesses. Follow that logic to its natural conclusion, and we're back to segregated restaurants. Doesn't sound very leftist to me.
- rosser 8y ago
  The counter-argument to that is often something like, "Well, people just won't patronize the segregated establishments, because who would support that?!", and with that, we've demonstrably already lost touch with reality.
- Stronico 8y ago
  That's like saying having legal abortion guarantees a zero percent birthrate. It would be legal to for restaurant owners to offer segregated sections if they wanted to, that's all.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    And we know from past experience that the end result of this is greatly reduced facilities available for minorities.
- sigstoat 8y ago
  > 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.

paulpauper 8y ago

I dunno why people think moderating comments is so hard. It's obvious when someone is arguing in bad faith: repeating the same stuff over and over, condescending tone, dismissing opposing side, etc. People are afraid of being accused of censorship.

haberman 8y ago
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.
- komali2 8y ago
  >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 sin of homosexuality."
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Go visit the Culture War threads then. The article states that the CW threads were full of these kinds of arguments, so if you want to see examples, you know where to go.
    - komali2 8y ago
      Yea, that's what I'm trying right now, nothing good yet though. I'll keep scanning here and there though.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - 8y ago

fallingfrog 8y ago

I think part of the reason for this is just the period of dislocation that we're living in. I mean if the culture war thread was around in 1967 what kind of things do you think you'd find in it? It would have been much worse than what people write today. 7000 buildings burned in the city of Detroit and the president had to send in the 82nd and 101st airborne divisions to put down the rioting. What would those people have said on reddit? Now, things are changing again, and people are dividing into camps. In other words I think that the external situation is driving the online discourse rather than the other way around.

microcolonel 8y ago

I've seen a similar outcome on some Discord rooms and occasionally on Twitter. I think a lot of it has to do with the attitude people take (and the difference based on platform, I think, tends to relate mostly to the attitude an uninitiated person would take on that platform).

Tenoke 8y ago

I can only describe Scott as a paragon of intellectual honesty and a true proponent of fair and unbiased discourse. So it saddens me to see him [partially] silenced by trolls and people who are dishonestly pushing their agendas. I can imagine how many discussions and people have been silenced in a similar manner, especially when things are more muddled.

mundo 8y ago
+1, I don't always agree with him but I don't think there's another blogger who can touch him for niceness, thought-provokingness, and intellectual courage. He's like a walking, talking manifestation of the HN submission/commenting policy. (For anyone who's just learning about him, there's a "About/Top Posts" on the top menu. He's probably most well-known for writing on contentious political topics with unusual civility and insight, but he also has a ton of stuff on psychiatry (how various psychiatric drugs work, analyses of drug studies he does/doesn't agree with, etc) and on science generally that's quite useful, e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-study/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-... )
- owenversteeg 8y ago
  That's a great article, thanks! I'll have to read more of his stuff.

jumelles 8y ago

> Any fair moderation policy won’t provide the moderator with any excuse to delete [the guy who really likes pedophilia ... posting on every thread ... followed by a ten thousand word manifesto]. And there's the problem. It's not "unfair" to delete comments like those described.

mundo 8y ago
He means fair in the sense of content-neutral or objective. Obviously any forum can just delete stuff the mods don't subjectively like, that's the default option used by most fora.

keypusher 8y ago

Was the full thread archived anywhere?

dinglejungle 8y ago
It's multiple years of weekly threads: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/search?q=flair%3ACulture%2BWar%2BRoundup&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/search?q=flair%3ACul...

npsimons 8y ago

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 https://youtu.be/xMabpBvtXr4) as to one reason why. If you say "get your own website and post there" it raises the bar just enough that trolls won't do it. I think this is a good thing. Note that I am firmly in favor of Net Neutrality and carriers (eg ISPs, registrars, etc) banned from having tiers or otherwise hampering access. What I oppose is people crying censorship when big name sites kick out the despicables. As I pointed out above, anyone can get a website and domain name.

livueta 8y ago
> 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.
- KozmoNau7 8y ago

komali2 8y ago

>A subreddit devoted to insulting and mocking me personally and Culture War thread participants in general got started; it now has over 2,000 readers. Anyone know which subreddit that is?

iron0013 8y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/
- ethics_gradient 8y ago
  Not sure if there's more mocking or calling out, HBD and otherwise. The forum's focus on HBD seems something worth critiquing extensively.
  - PoignardAzur 8y ago
    Let's be clear on one point: they're complete jerks. Well, not exactly. Like, imagine your best friend is pro-conservative; he's a really nice, polite, sensitive person who's mostly willing to hear opposite viewpoints. Then you watch his posts on r/the_donald, and he's acting like a sneering, disgusting douchebag, ranting about "libtards" and how lefties are morons bent on destroying the fabric of the country? Sneerclub is the same. I can totally believe that most people there are reasonable people with reasonable concerns, but the community brings out the worst parts of them the same ways others like the_donald and TheRedPill do.

natalyarostova 8y ago

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.

pl1234 8y ago
recently the mods started banning people for unorthodox ideas, in old threads you can see kevin mcdonalds work being discussed as plausible, that wouldn't happen on recent threads. Your paragraph on the "mistakes" of history doesn't make sense because morality is subjective.

simonsarris 8y ago

> People settled on a narrative. The Culture War thread was made up entirely of homophobic transphobic alt-right neo-Nazis. [...] > But instead it was always that the the thread was “dominated by” or “only had” or “was an echo chamber for” homophobic transphobic alt-right neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that the subreddit was dominated by homophobic etc neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that the SSC community was dominated by homophobic etc neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that I personally was a homophobic etc neo-Nazi of them all. I am a pro-gay Jew who has dated trans people and votes pretty much straight Democrat. I lost distant family in the Holocaust. You can imagine how much fun this was for me. I see this happen often, including to myself, and it's why I stopped talking about politics (or even interesting philosophy/economics questions except among other phil students) on Facebook. Anything deviating from the opinions of a few vocal friends would lead to muted threats, worded like: "So you're essentially making space for Nazis by saying its OK to talk about this?"

legitster 8y ago

What a depressing read. Even acknowledging controversies are controversial.

zaroth 8y ago

What stands out to me the most in this post, and I hope people can see this and recognize how widespread it has become, is the use of slurs to silence someone, by calling someone a nazi, or a racist, or alt-right and the like. SSC had a fabulous post (years ago?) about Trump and the narrative that he is appealing to nazis or alt-right. And now to see the same tactic used against Scott here. I wonder at what point a slur will be called a slur, regardless of who is targeted, even when it is deployed against a white cis-gendered male trying to speak his mind? At what point can we try to promote a specific subgroup but not at the expense of the perceived alt-group? It frustrates me that these labels are cheapened and weaponized like this so pervasively. Why is it so convenient to label someone as a wrong-thinker and this is an acceptable shortcut to nullify rather than engage and grapple with their ideas? I think there are a lot of people hoping Trump will be re-elected not even remotely because of any measure of competence or even particularly as a matter of policy, but just as a way to say, no, the culture war doesn’t get to disqualify a Presidential candidate by drawing him as a caricature of a nazi or a racist. I’m sorry to read that Scott has been on the receiving end of this kind of information warfare. I don’t know what the defense is supposed to be in this age of doxxing and righteous indignation. I guess at least I’m glad his blog is still being hosted and his DNS still resolves.

eli_gottlieb 8y ago
>I think there are a lot of people hoping Trump will be re-elected not even remotely because of any measure of competence or even particularly as a matter of policy, but just as a way to say, no, the culture war doesn’t get to disqualify a Presidential candidate by drawing him as a caricature of a nazi or a racist. Ok, and I'm hoping to have Sanders win on grounds of policy. Because, you know, once you actually get down to observable, object-level matters of Presidential performance like competence or policy, Trump is motherfucking godawful by almost everyone's standards, before you start warping the standards for culture-war reasons.
- sastaha 8y ago
  "observable, object-level matters of Presidential performance like competence or policy, Trump is motherfucking godawful by almost everyone's standards" Your mistake is to assume that almost everyone wants the Camp of Saints and the Bernie free stuff agenda. As someone who will end up paying for that agenda, I'm less enthused.

helen___keller 8y ago

I think the internet is just an awful place to have a "national discussion" honestly. Arguments you encounter are not representative of opinions actual people hold, both because of bad faith internet trolls & because of vocal minorities. I think people have started learning this, which is why so few people care about social media censorship and the lack of open debates on the internet. Most people have probably had enough 30 comment threads with trolls on facebook to not give a shit about internet debate by now. Nowadays if I want a good debate or a debate on a truly controversial topic, I would only do so in a closed chat room with people I know. The internet is only for advertising my opinion rather than debating it, although I am as guilty as anyone of occasionally getting derailed into a full argument.

humanrebar 8y ago
In my experience, actually having conversations about meaningful and controversial subjects is impolite and a good way to lose friends. At least on the internet, the other party can just stop talking when they're done. They won't feel like they're cutting off or abandoning a friend.
- helen___keller 8y ago
  Well, I know which friends are comfortable talking about what. It's usually still over the internet too.
- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  If you can't have conversations and even discussions about meaningful or controversial subjects with your friends, I would say they were never actually your friends. I am friends with some people whom I wildly disagree with on a number of subjects, especially politics. But we have common ground in shared interests (music and whisky), and we use that as a basis for civilized discussion. We might disagree wildly and be political "enemies", but we are still more alike than we are different.
  - humanrebar 8y ago

AnimalMuppet 8y ago

Just speculating here... The Russian playbook in 2016 wasn't just to get Trump elected. It was to divide America. Now, we seem to be doing pretty well at that all on our own, but I wonder if some of their work would be to divide online communities, especially one where people from different tribes could talk reasonably with each other. And, reading the article, it seems like this could easily have been an orchestrated campaign disguised to look like a bunch of people just self-organizing to yell at something they didn't like because it allowed "them" to speak. (Or, it could in fact have been just a bunch of people self-organizing to yell.)

defen 8y ago
I don't think we need to invoke the Russians - I think an easier explanation is that some people just love being volunteer morality police. It cuts across political or religious ideologies. The justification is always prevention of harm, even though it's not at all clear to other people what specific harm is being prevented.
fiblye 8y ago
Americans hating Americans is part of our culture. There were people who didn't want to leave England. 100 years later, half the country up and split off and both sides went and killed each other trying to decide who was right. Then 100 years after that, half the country freaked out about the mere concept of equal rights for all and the North-South/Dem-Rep/urban-rural divide became solidified once more and hasn't really changed to this day. I find it hard to blame it all on a few paid Russians commenting on twitter or reddit. If a few guys can get paid to completely divide a nation of 300+million through internet comments, either they're the most persuasive people to ever exist, or the divide was already there. It's not even hard just to read some American news and see how literally every single site that covers mainstream events or political topics makes every single thing into an us vs. them situation. There's no escaping it, and it drives clicks, so there's no motivation to stop. And it's absolutely bizarre how certain parts of the internet are absolutely flooded with hatred for Russians as a whole, with someone always coming in to scream about them. It reminds me of hearing people's ramblings after 9/11, except this time it's primarily "young and informed" individuals.

sov 8y ago

I've been a member of the sub since its inception, and I've long defended Scott's analyses, but, as a longtime reader and (former) participant in the CW threads, I think he's grossly missed the mark here in the first section. I think if you read the first part of this article really closely, that should be obvious. "I will be honest and admit I rarely read the thread myself." - Scott "For all its awfulness..." - werttrew "...practically ever criticism of the CW thread I have ever read is true..." - yrrosimyarin "Very little was solved" -rwkasten "I think the CW thread is obviously a huge lump of positive utility for a large number of people, because otherwise they wouldn’t spend so much time on it" - darwin2500 "...it does have a lot of full-time opinionated idiots squabbling, and is inarguably filled with irrationality, bad takes, contrarianism, and Boo Outgroup posturing. I agree with many of [the criticisms] of overtly racist and stupid posts in there." -c_o_r_b_a I, too, once held a positive opinion on the thread, and so would anyone, having only the knowledge of its maxims and a bleary-eyed take on a small sample of posts. But once you dig deeper, you get what ought to be obvious from the above quotes. There are indeed many honest, well meaning, well informed people that post. They end up getting absolutely pulverized under the millstone of "power users". The issue with the thread was never that an surveyable proportion of readers would split between left and right. The issue was that the power users--the ones who post all the time in seemingly every thread--create an environment that drives away the the best posters. The issue was that a single person clicking "I consider myself left-wing" on a survey (especially when they know the context of the survey is to show relatively even R/L split and the political milieu of the sub is hard R) is very different than their sheer contribution to the social "overton window" of the thread. Those "left wing" posters are the "I believe abortion should be legal, but also I will post my pro-HBD takes forever, at every opportunity". That is, it doesn't really matter what they clicked, because their contribution to the aesthetic of the thread is not accurately represented by the survey. The issue was that actual factual experts get drowned in a sea of whataboutism and people who think they know better because they have a study to the contrary (did no one else read Beware the Man Of One Study or Epistemic Learned Helplessness!?). The issue is that there are so few actual left wing posters that they get called out explicitly, by name to answer for "the left" when "they" do something that the forum deems necessary of an explanation (seriously, darwin2500 has the patience of a saint). The issue is that people who harass (as above), argue in bad faith or seriously contribute to a negative environment don't catch bans except for extreme cases. To the moderators' credit, I've seen some really bad stuff get posters banned, but to speak of the general thread's failure, many of those posts are sitting on a well-into-the-positive amount of upvotes. Personally, I'm not sad to see the thread go. It was detritus, and it impelled many quality contributors to leave. My favorite poster on the sub (who pretty much never posts there now) wrote a fantastic bit explaining the sub ~6 months ago. "The experience can be a little jarring because you’ll have some insightful, genuinely depth hub worth comment upvoted and then another highly upvoted comments next to it will be how we should bring back eugenics and how we should limit immigration to people from high IQ countries in Europe and East Asia" - u/yodatsracist as per below https://www.reddit.com/r/DepthHub/comments/98jco5/uinterversity_describes_the_benefits_of_street/e4h7c8v/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/DepthHub/comments/98jco5/uintervers... And, to be clear, none of this was explicitly Scott's fault (and, to wit, anyone who harassed him personally/professionally is an utter idiot). It was simply Moloch acting on the machinery of the sub.

bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago

Previously, I've been following /pol/ on 4chan for some years. What have impressed me is not the content itself, but its organization, the social structure, the creation of memes, the evolution of fringe political/identity movement that is unimaginable before the Internet. To understand its associated problem with it, it's crucial to establish a solid understanding of the underlying mechanism, the underlying social and economic factors that contribute to the problem of trolling. This is why I'm quite disappointed about the mainstream media. For example, what are the social and cultural basis of Gamergate/Dark Enlightenment/incel movement? If you can't understand the underlying social basis and mechanism, and just blindly discredit them it as "far-right troll campaign", then it is parts of the problem, not the solution. I've said repeatedly online - this kind of cultural issue is NOT about "the liberal media", "antifa", "SJWs", "trolls", "incels", "alt-right", "fake news", or "Donald Trump", these are just the "first-order" effect - what most people have easily observed. But the underlying issue - how Internet works to produce these ideas, the larger social problems behind them, can only be understood by looking at it from a higher perspective, as a postmodern phenomena, and to study it faithfully and carefully by the best sociologists and psychologists, and by the people who understand these online community and technology, and can analyze it in a neural way, just tell us how the system works, without preexisting bias or political stance. So we can finally have some ideas to solve it. Unfortunately, the number of people who are doing academic studies on these subjects, is almost nonexistent. Personally, I'm only aware of the following people who are studying it. o Book: Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web, by Cole Stryker. This is probably the earliest and the most well-known one. However, its ~2007 narrative of 4chan and its politics is out-of-date, but it still covers how an online platform can popularize a radical social movement. o Book: This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture, by Whitney Phillips, published by The MIT Press. This book explores history of trolling, and studies it from a cultural and social perspective, and identifies some of the underlying mechanisms. o Talk: The dark side of free software communities, by Morgan Gangwere, at LibrePlanet 2018. The talker discovers the fringe tech culture on the wild Internet, on 4chan/8chan, characterized by hatred - where RMS was the official mascot, and quite a few people (possibly basement dwellers) who believes the Internet is controlled by the evil monopolists/Freemason/Jewish/capitalist conspiracy, free software is not an exception but it's still a powerful tool against their rule, and how SJW is undermining it. Unfortunately, the talker's research focused on building a good community, not a detailed study of fringe tech culture. o Book: Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right, by Angela Nagle, focuses on the history of the current cultural war online. I haven't read the book yet, so I'm not sure what is the perspective of book. It seriously deserves more complete study from more people, I'm more interested in an ethnography-based approach. However, I don't have any background knowledge on sociology to make any insightful commentary on it... Seriously, reading /pol/ has almost made me wanted to change my major from software engineering to sociology, just to study it and trying to understand how the counter-cultural fringe politics works online, however, it's an unlikely career for me to pursuit.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jackmaney 8y ago

Good riddance. [spits]

nullc 8y ago

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...)

nullc 8y ago
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.

Fnoord 8y ago

What happened here is that people who have "extreme" opinions have found a platform to express them, and people tend to remember or focus on the outliers instead of the nuance (hence skewed perception). Whereas some or most within inside the community learned to listen to each other and respect having different opinions on controversial matters, outsiders did not respect this, and actively harassed a leader of the community (moderator) in a campaign for change (getting rid of the community). Having been a moderator in multiple communities, I know a sure way to burn out is to be one. It is also a perfect way to get rid of your opponent: suggest they become a moderator. I've been burned by that multiple times. I still moderate communities, and I'm good at it (also because of my background, e.g. technical; other people have other qualities), but only small ones. Even if it has exactly the same signal-to-noise ratio as a large community, you end up with less noise and therefore it takes less time. People know each other better. A very good (but specific) analogy comes to my mind: World of Warcraft. Nowadays, you can swap your character to another server (called "realm") and faction (red being Horde, blue being Alliance), etc. Back in the days of early WoW (Vanilla and TBC) you invested in your character and were therefore bound to realm & faction. These were relatively small worlds where different guilds (akin to "clans" or "teams") existed. People knew each other because of the size; akin to a small town with communities. Fast forward post TBC and you had the later expansions where with the click of a button people were in a group of random players of the same faction (regardless of realm). Playing together with 4 or 24 strangers whom you will likely never meet again. This decreased the relevance of reputation among peers and allowed for so-called toxic behaviour. WoW is just one simulation of that phenomenon (for which I don't know the name). I'd say the problem, summed up, is that people get away with harassment on the Internet because of the sheer anonymity/pseudonymity and physical distance.