The original of the “If a man is not a socialist before …” line is apparently 19th c. French, with “socialist” replaced by “Republican.” At least, that’s my memory of the conclusion of someone else’s research.

Report comment

The tiers may reestablish themselves eventually, but for whatever reason, witch-hunters always seem to come late to the party, adapting communities rather than adopting new ones. That seems like a source of ‘churn’ in a system that might otherwise stratify out the way you describe.

It seems to me that it’s the phenomenon of Internet witch-hunting as perpetrated by digital natives (instead of older generations of people and media afraid and somewhat ignorant of the Internet as a whole) that was late to the party. The modern witch-hunters are themselves pioneers and early adopters.* I doubt they’ll be late for the Next Big Thing.

In any case, it’s pretty clear that whatever new options appear, the “witches” will flock to the ones with a laissez-faire approach to moderation first. So that’s a major problem for any new social network attempting it, even if it would win over a majority of Western internet users otherwise.

*: Speaking of, I’m somewhat surprised I haven’t seen any attempts at creating an anti-Voat yet, given that the Blue Tribe is similarly pissed at Reddit’s management (and significantly more so at its userbase) than the Greys.

Report comment

the conspicuous rarity of articles advocating gun control or criticizing israeli foreign policy in most major newspapers

I have to ask if you are perhaps referring to some other United States of America? Any time there is a high-profile shooting the major newspapers fill up with pro-gun control editorials, and the only reason you aren’t reading much about Israeli foreign policy right now is that they aren’t fighting with the Palestinians just at the moment. Next time Gaza starts chucking unguided rockets at Sderot, I promise you the New York Times and the AP will once again be publishing nothing but thinly repackaged Hamas press releases.

Report comment

No one replied because it turns out I was hellbanned (shadowbanned).

I’m curious if anyone thinks such a thing might be useful or has other ideas for overcoming the problem of everyone needing to move at once.

Report comment

Report comment

I’m not gonna get into the neverending argument over whether yes indeed this is what they’re all about or no it’s actually just a front for harassing women etc.

But one thing that’s clear is that you cannot signal being both a social justice advocate and a Gamergater. If you involve yourself in it, the SJ community will not accept you as one of their own and thus consider you problematic.

Which, in turn, creates another point of cohesion for Gamergate: Preference of associating with a group SJ considers their enemy. If you cared about SJ, you wouldn’t do it.

Which itself is sort of a mortal sin in that community, I suppose.

Report comment

The author seems to be in the LW/SSC-sphere, so they might be reading this…

Report comment

Report comment

it’s very easy to share the source of whatever you heard, and now can’t help but assume that people who “read things somewhere”, without specifying where, are bulshitting.

Attribution norms are different in casual conversation. Giving an attribution for something in person, unsolicited, is likely to be seen as an attempt at a status play*, and most Internet-native sources are so incredibly low-status that using one in this context is about a step above growing a second head that has horns and fangs and utters only blasphemy.

This isn’t even chan-exclusive; 4Chan is about as bad as it gets, but Reddit or Tumblr or some random blog that your interlocutor’s never heard of aren’t much better. Wikipedia isn’t too bad, being only mildly disreputable.

* (E.g. “I read in the New York Times that…” “Well, I read in the Wall Street Journal that…”)

Report comment

(And of course if the corporation you work for forces you to use Word, you are more likely to use it on your personal machine out of familiarity, which makes everyone in your network marginally more likely to use it too…)

Report comment