Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
one of the follies of the early non-research internet was that the folks in charge of the more influential communities (Something Awful comes to mind) all tended to be weird fucking libertarian assholes insisting that debating fascists in a āfree and fair environmentā (whatever that is) must be a good thing, we canāt just ban them on sight for some reason. generally these weird libertarian assholes were motivated by typical weird libertarian asshole things ā greed, or being fascists themselves.
and all of these horseshit policies around not banning fascists ended in complete disaster for those communities and those libertarian shitheads (SA again), but somehow theyāre practically the only element of those early communities that carried over to the modern internet, likely because caring about community quality doesnāt make money, but pandering to nazi fuckwits does.
it probably goes without saying, but I take the apparently radical stance that nobody needs to interact with fascists and assholes and I wonāt give their bullshit transit on any system I control. itās always been surprising to me how many sysops consider ākick out the fucking fascistsā an unworkable policy when itās very easy to implement ā it only gets hard when you allow the worst fucking people you know to gain a foothold.
SA has been taken over by a non-shithead and now the moderation is āyeah, you can fuck off nowā and itās much nicer
though tbf itās greatly improved because weāre all old with bad backs now and arenāt putting up with dumb bullshit any more
that is true! usually these assholes set things up so the communities they founded collapse when they leave (and from what Iāve heard that almost happened to SA) so Iām glad theyāre flourishing within their niche without said asshole parasocially positioned at the helm. I really should re-include the forums in the list of places I visit when Iām bored.
to be fair, a lot of the early Internet, including the early research Internet, was driven by libertarian tendencies (which always ignored the dilemma in combining libertarian tendencies with the fact that the entire early Internet was enabled by massive government funding). John Perry Barlow, the EFF, etc. Itās just that a lot of those people were libertarian utopians ā and I will fully admit that in my youth it seemed very convincing. It felt like there were no space for bad actors because when the Internet was smaller, it was less obvious to idealists and the naĆÆve that a larger internet would be incredibly useful for bad actors.
As recently as gamergate the EFF was loudly insisting that all moderation by private companies was wrong, and in the intervening few years they have only grudgingly and rarely admitted that overly libertarian moderation policies can suppress speech massively. And yet I fully believe all the EFF people mean well.
i look askance at the ones stanning for fucking bitcoin mining
youāre not wrong.
Iām not up to date on my SA banning people lore, but hasnāt it also been several times that after people finally got banned from they made stuff infinitely worse? Like 4chan is from SA, but there was also a far right racist forum for people banned from SA, the my posting career people for example (at least I heard they were banned SA people, which could be a lie, we know how much they love multiple blankets of irony. Also their site is now dead thankfully).
thereās a direct line from SA not explicitly banning ironic naziism to anime nazis being everywhere and I fucking hate it
Not just SA, but everywhere. We should have listened to the barmen of old better. (hope most of you are familiar with the barman who kicks out the polite nazi story).
no, MPC was one of the sites set up by nazis banned from SA
Yeah that is what I meant, that I heard it was setup by exSA neonazis. I wasnāt 100% sure.