Anomander

Anomander, hace 11 meses

The idea that Reddit is staging some nefarious conspiracy to "poison" fediverse spaces ... is losing the whole plot.

OP's straight up writing fanfiction trying to cast a site they just left as villains in some swashbuckling coming-of-age story. It's a nine-hour-old account, and they're already embracing the Us vs Them mentality and trying to sell it with prose.

I don't know how OP managed to pick fights within a couple hours of signing up for their account, but I'd suggest that if they left Reddit for "toxicity" only to immediately find it here too ... maybe they're carrying it around with them?

Anomander, hace 11 meses

Kbinaut here. I'm still wondering if Kbinite or Kbinaut will win out lol.

Kbean.

Anomander, hace 10 meses

I criticized you for jumping to conclusions and fabricating narrative to support them. And apparently you got so offended by the criticism that ... you went and did it all over again, targeting me, committing even harder to the bit.

You just wrote a bunch of wild fanfiction about me and then tried to have an argument with that imaginary version of me. Might as well just yell at ghosts in the shower if you're that desperate to feel like you've snatched some petty victory from the jaws of self-inflicted defeat that is this thread.

You're the problem with your own experience.

This response is hugely excessive for the "provocation" and yet I'm sure you'll storm off imagining that I'm the big meanie here and you were some completely reasonable and utterly justified saint of good behaviour - for absolutely going off on someone who gently mocked your very serious demands for everyone to be nicer to you and meaner to the people you dislike. And you've done that to everyone who wasn't fawningly positive towards you in this thread - that you started by being hateful and childish towards a site you just left and the userbase of the site you just joined.

Even with the tiny sample size I can see why you have so many encounters with "toxic" people. You antagonize and attack people, then pretend they were the toxic ones if they defend themselves.

It's not hard to miss that you've just happened to call me all of the things that other people have told you about yourself in this thread. Hell, this whole little speech would have been far more appropriate as something someone said to you, if they were trying to hurt your feelings; so given how off the mark it was when directed at me, it's easy to wonder if maybe you're projecting a little here.

Anomander, hace 1 año

Yeah - as of about thirty minutes ago, Apollo just crashes as soon as it boots.

Anomander, hace 1 año

Mine has started loading normally without that. Obviously no content, but I don't have to turn off connection to have it not crash now.

Anomander, hace 1 año

I don't think I jive with the notion that kbin is somehow "above" hating Nazis.

Anomander, hace 1 año

Except that's a sidestep. The viewpoint you were defending was saying that this one specific option, that has substantial academic backing for positive outcomes for kids, should not happen or should be prohibited.

That's not "discuss other options" - that's discussing this option and arguing that society should take it away.

That you're now trying to argue that it's just discussion and it's reasonable debate and - forgive my bluntness - being openly dishonest about what the original speech was that you're defending with "free-speech" and anti-censorship talking points is like ... the example case for how this thread started. The nazis and the transphobes and the hateful bigots can always, easily, spin their own takes as righteous and reasonable debate - if you let them lead the dialogue and frame their discourse through the most-appealing lenses possible. And they can make valid-sounding and appealing arguments for why you, too, should defend them and their right to speak.

But inevitably they are also going to use any and all space you clear for them to be hateful and bigoted and call for harm to other people - that is their goal. Everything else is just a setup play.

Anomander, hace 1 año

Carefully, on a case-by-case basis; and the community.

It's not nearly as complicated as it seems on the surface - and you're trying to make any definition of "nazi" as complicated as possible, because you're wanting to delegitimize any rejection of nazis or nazi speech.

Remember how you said you don't care if people like you, you just want to push your topics on other people?

it diminishes its significance and undermines your credibility.

No one cares if the Nazis think they're "credible" or not. Each and every one of them will tell you they're not a nazi and they 'hate' nazis - while defending themselves and their nazi buddies from critique by insisting the label for their ideology is, for example, "cheapened" if applied to anyone who is not a card-carrying, armband-wearing, farcical exaggeration of stereotypical Nazis in full Reich dress regalia.

They always send the clean cut, quiet, polite one in first. And that guy puts a foot in the door, argues that their pals aren't really nazis, and that everyone in the room are the real baddies for judging those other guys unfairly - and tries to pry the door wider so their Nazi buddies can come in. Sure enough, every time, you let enough nazis in the room and the room is a nazi space now - so the whole gang of them don't have to pretend at being polite non-nazis anymore. The polite veneer, the deep care for "debate", and "respect for all viewpoints"? Those are all just tools, trying to whitewash and re-legitimize an ideology whose end goal is harming other people.

Notice how I'm casually referring to you like you're one of them? That's not some wokist over-use of the term. You're standing here defending them, you're trying to shove a foot in the door for them, laying down apologia for their views and their right to share them - you've spent like a week around the Fediverse arguing against any actions that have served to limit Nazis access to polite and adult spaces within the Fediverse as a whole. I don't care what you believe about yourself, or your views, or your ideology.

If you're going to stand with Nazis, if you're going to stand for them, consistently and repeatedly - don't get all offended and playact at being victimized when people assume that you are a member of the group you chose to stand with.

Anomander, hace 1 año

Good luck with your quest. May you find that place eventually.

Anomander, hace 1 año

What is the cost of free health care? Where is it paid for?

Taxes.

Except that you guys are paying retail + markup + profit for the investors + "we have a monopoly" fees + "lol, your other option is dying" surcharge.

We just buy healthcare at-cost and wholesale.

I pay like $2K a year in taxes towards healthcare. $2K invested in a socialized healthcare system buys services, service time, and supplies that would cost an American hundreds of thousands of dollars when paying for them as an induvial in a for-profit healthcare system.

Yeah. Sometimes I pay for healthcare I don't use. Sometimes there are inefficiencies in the system. It is not a perfect system. But it's also not making anyone go bankrupt due to a medical emergency.

Paying $100K just to save $2K is never going to be good math, no matter how creative we get with the accounting.

Anomander, hace 1 año

You're aligning yourself with nazis while engaging in sophistry to pretend that neither you nor they are nazis.

All these wild mental gymnastics to explain how it's not like that, or the farcical posturing of academic exactitude and "nuanced understanding" - those are the exact same shit as nazis sending in the quiet well-spoken guy to break the ice and get a foot in the door.

You're doing triple overtime to figure out ways to argue compassion for cryptofascists and nazi sympathizers, while going even further out of your way to avoid having the faintest shred of empathy for people who simply want nothing to do with any of that bullshit.

You can call them whatever you want. You don't get to demand that we call them what you want us to. You don't get to demand that we ignore your choice to align yourself with them, to defend them, and to try and make their views sound more palatable and more reasonable than their end goals.

Since everyone is so happy with misusing the term, what are we going to call ACTUAL nazis so that we can differentiate people you disagree with and ACTUAL FUCKING NAZIS.

I completely understand that you absolutely refuse to get it and will continue to avoid getting it forevermore - but I'm going to say it for the rest of the room anyways.

Those guys are the "ACTUAL FUCKING NAZIS".

They just understand that pretending that they're not is the only way to get through the door of spaces dominated by the reasonable mainstream they'd like to sell their ideology to. They know that the reasonable mainstream wants nothing to do with "ACTUAL FUCKING NAZIS" so the "ACTUAL FUCKING NAZIS" dress up as the people you're currently defending and trying to make this conversation about. And anyone in that group that you're trying to defend the nazis by pointing towards, any single person among them who doesn't want to stand with nazis - changes where they stand so that they're not with the nazis anymore. You're staying still while trying to defend that decision.

The "ACTUAL FUCKING NAZIS" don't dress up in SS Uniforms and 'heil' each other in the comments sections - they pretend to be reasonable mainstream people and in order to present their views and their talking points wrapped in rhetoric that masks its nazi roots. They want to win over the mainstream, they want to convince people they're "on to" something, they want to exploit our willingness to engage in discourse to sell their views and advance their ideology. They are not here to engage in debate - the debate is merely a vehicle towards seizing power and then acting out an ideology of violence and hatred.

I'm not 'playing semantics' - I'm not even engaging with yours.

We are not going to split hairs and massage academic definitions until "ACTUAL FUCKING NAZIS" aren't actually nazis anymore. Either you're a useful idiot and not qualified to try and talk down on folks about the intricate semantics of "nazi" - or you're actually on their side.

Anomander, hace 1 año

So "transition treatments" have gone up 4000% ... in the time period following the treatment becoming available. If being a gymnast was illegal until 2009, or nobody had invented a trampoline until then, you can certainly bet making it legal or possible to do floor routines would result in a 4000%+ increase in people who were openly and publically gymnasts.

Trans people, trans kids, have always existed - we just didn't have the technology to provide the treatment in that article.

That article is choosing to cite the numbers on the treatment rather than the condition because the treatment's very recent launch means it allows the presentation of a scarier number.

Anomander, hace 1 año

A lot of social sciences is about generating and constructing data to prove something that seems obvious to most casual observers.

Part of why is cases like this - that despite it seeming evident to many folks, there are many others who insist that poor people are to blame for being poor, and bad individual decision-making is the only reason that poverty exists.

Anomander, hace 1 año

Sometimes people want to talk about their shit with people who can directly relate to it, and would prefer if people who can't relate aren't invited to the conversation.

I'm a man but I just would not be interested in that specifically.

There is a gap between "I'm not interested" and "I refuse to understand why someone else would be interested" that's not really acknowledged here but is important to be able to engage with.

Anomander, hace 1 año

Reddit removed the mod team for 'making the community inaccessible' - and then have left the community inaccessible due to no moderation for longer than the original mod team had it closed.

I know the irony there is damn near horse pate at this point, but that shit's still funny every time it comes up.

Anomander, hace 1 año

In that vein, it's very much worthwhile to take the time to write a review explaining why the app sucks. It legitimately does, and I'd have been far less annoyed about the initial API change if the app they're trying to force folks to use wasn't so goddamned awful.

Then ... leave out the API stuff, the Reddit corporate bullshit, Apollo or RIF - Apple will scrub review-bombing from Apps' pages, and mentions of drama or competitors makes it easy to target those reviews.

Anomander, hace 1 año

Admin realized that despite all the applications, there were:

• People requesting the subreddit so they could continue the protests.
• People requesting the subreddit so they could give it back to the original mods.
• People requesting the subreddit so they could own it.
• People requesting the subreddit because they have strong feelings about "moderation" and want to /worldpolitics it.
• Absolutely no one who wanted to just do what the old mods did.

From what I could see, there no actual good-faith requests from people who genuinely cared about /TIHI and wanted to moderate it well and diligently. And like, who's surprised? It's a huge subreddit without a concrete community core, it's more of a content category. I don't think anyone except the mods cared about the community itself, because there barely was one.

That's the same issue they're running into with the other large subs. They're too huge and too general and everyone is just another face in the crowd, so there are very few people who care about that specific space in the way that makes for good volunteer moderators - in most cases, when those people existed for those communities, they were already recruited into the old mod team.

And all the people who want to mod are either activists for the protest, the sort of power-hungry weirdos that end up as powermods, but who showed up to Reddit too late, or somebody with an axe to grind about moderation in general seeing an opportunity in the massive unmoderated subreddit.

Anomander, hace 1 año

That person had effectively no mod experience, but was already on the moderator list there - having been added by the old team.

Head mod chose to reopen under protest by turning off anti-scam bots and similar - letting sub continue to function visibly the same, but without the bot-supported protection it had used prior. He somehow talked his way onto the team during the protests, and then went to Admin and arranged to oust the head mod who had shut down the bots and was doing protest stuff in the sub.

He has since been returned to the bottom of the mod hierarchy there, for whatever that's worth.

---

Like, I kind of get that guy's point in some senses - simply turning off security features that quietly protect users, without announcing it, sure seems like the kind of thing that would hurt users pretty quick - without ever affecting site Admin. Especially when the head mod who shut down those bots wasn't the user/mod who was responsible for them, it's not 'their' bot if they're gonna go home and take their toys, as it were.

Staging a coup and getting Admin to put him at the top of the modlist is hyper shitty, and Admin's decision to promote someone who wasn't really part of that community to that sort of position is utterly inexplicable if we were trying to square their actions with their stated values.

Anomander, hace 1 año

That's what Narwhal dev had publicly offered previously, there's no firm confirmation that's actually the deal and I'd be a little surprised if it was.

I think Reddit chose to give them a sweetheart deal because they're the worst competitor app, the dev had been least publicly critical of the API changes, and Reddit wants the PR value of an example case "proving" their API changes weren't maliciously anticompetitive towards third-party apps.

The fact that Narwhal has struck a deal now allows Reddit Inc to say "see! we do work with third party apps; it's not that we're bad, it's that RIF and Apollo are big meanies who won't cooperate!"

Anomander, hace 1 año

Indirectly, that was some of my point.

It looks strongly like one of two things has happened - either Narwhal took the knee and has accepted absolutely abysmal terms in order to remain in existence, or Reddit has offered them a better deal in private to keep them afloat - solely to use them as a PR example case.

The only thing that seems unlikely is that they're working under strict terms of the published agreement, otherwise IMO costs to users are functionally unfeasible.

Anomander, hace 1 año

There was also some very good and valid reasons why real people wound up with those usernames - mainly, that the signup process (from the App I think? maybe also in New Reddit?) both downplayed, and obstructed changing, the default username during the process - and instead led the user to believe that only the "display name" selected later would appear to other users on the site.

Completely omitting the fact that anyone on old reddit or accessing through an app would only see the username, as "display names" don't seem to have ever been served via the API.

To many of those users, they had no clue that what people were seeing attached to their comments or submissions was "extravagant_mustard_924" and not "Cool Dude Brian" or whatever they'd put in as their display name. They were led to believe that the latter was all that would display, and that signing up with a default account name would only determine what they entered in the top box while logging in.

Anomander, hace 1 año

Furthermore it's revealed that this powermod claims to have had a connection to reddit admins.

A lot of American mods do; there were a few years there with top admin and community teams did a 'roadshow' type thing where they'd schedule meetups and connect with mods in person. Having met admin in person isn't really that wild an indication of favour, so much as having showed up to an event somewhere.

Anomander, hace 1 año

It's a very classic Reddit Inc thing - they know that they have a poor relationship with their mods, they know that they need to address that ... so they do something fun and quirky and showy - but then fail to make any sort of concrete follow-up on or take actions supporting the connections they've made.

Anomander, hace 1 año

There were years there when any watermark from another site would get OP lynched in the comments, and now Admin over there is sufficiently out of touch they're going to start doing it to their own content.

Bets are on that this is a stupid kneejerk test from Reddit, worried that post-migration community hubs are going to "profit from their content" the same way Reddit did to places like ifunny or 9gag during it's entire growth arc.