wemptronics
1yr ago
Do Reddit mods actually improve Reddit much?
Yes. I never spent much time on the yuge subs as a user, but I did mod a larger sub for awhile. There's an incredible amount of generic internet garbage that reddit jannies clean up on a daily basis. For the smaller, conversational niche subs (<25-50k users) mods don't make as many mod actions. They still provide an important service. Good mods set the tone and prolong the life of a sub. Up until it grows to maximum reddit velocity and is ruined by reddit growth. The Motte is an extreme example of autistic, niche discussion sub, but its mods were/are necessary to maintain course.
wemptronics
1yr ago
It's been awhile! Adding to the queue of running/cooking mouth garble noise media.
I'll preface this by saying I do not know the details of whatever dumb things Karl said a few weeks ago. Other than what you posted below.
I believe Karl suffers from a simple and severe case of contrarianism. Karl is or has attended Church of Satan stuff, and the Church of Satan is filled with contrarians, skeptics, rebels, and cynics. Out in the world, a contrarian can be satisfied as a supporter of guns rights. There's a litany of false beliefs and memes surrounding firearms to feel sufficiently superior to the masses when it comes to firearm discussion, the Second Amendment, etc.
On the internet, especially in the "guntuber" scene, it's not enough for an uber contrarian to be satisifed as A Gun Guy. The gun guys can be said to be pretty similar to one another. They are freedom loving, right coded, proud rural Americans. To satisfy uber contrarian desires, one must go against the grain. It's the culture he has to set him self apart from as a transgressive guy.
A few years ago Karl would appear to be a principled libertarian or anarchist with libertarian streak. Maybe he always had some edgy takes, but what he shared were principles that could be considered advice-- no matter political leanings. A healthy skepticism of authority and the Feds, high value on self-sufficiency, personal responsibility, and safety/security. Now, he's a culture warrior. It might be the youtube version of audience capture, or it might be a natural progression with Karl filling a niche in the market. These days there is more demand for self-declared leftist/left of center gun enthusiast types. It's the culture war stuff that fills the gaps and allows him to stand out.
I suspect Ian saw this coming years ago. Whatever falling out they had over InRange business wise (afaik they are still friends) I am confident it was around Ian's basic "minimize political stuff, keep it professional" policy that has allowed Ian's brand to explode. They made some entertaining content together, but without Ian to check Karl's excesses he's gone a little kooky.
wemptronics
1yr ago
RE: He Really Does it for Free? Volunteer Janitor Duty.
There's something frustrating about the multiple choice format. An "other" box with text defeats the purpose of efficiency, but mayhaps we could send additional context into the abyss and you can pretend to read them? Mods get the chance to write their reasoning down in a modded comment.
Perhaps I'm just not cut out for the high stakes decision making required for internet discussion moderation.
Can we define "neutral"? In this context I consider a neutral comment as not the best comment, but it doesn't break the rules. It's not a bad comment in that it provides some value to the forum's mission, but to be a good comment it would have benefited from more evidence, information, or clarity. Is this the general intent or is it meant to be a cop out option?
Maybe even a second section. Leave the first options as is, good, bad, neutral, aaqc. Then a yes/no to a "does this break the rules." Would complicate how the rating is done. Definitely a fan of the distributed janny work though. Great idea!
wemptronics
1yr ago
"WH" is a personal nickname I have for what can broadly be described as the Deep State. It stands for "Werm Hat."
Okay, that part is a lie. This could not be possible. The WH today could have possibly have strong armed Twitter so long as they had a time machine. Not a good or accurate sentence, yeah.
It seems that mid-high level staff at Twitter made a decision that about half of the company disagreed with, and they argued about it the whole time, and nobody in the Government ever told them to censor the laptop story?
Through any of these communications. Ah-hah!
I don't think we need to get conspiratorial though. The absence of any direct communications does mostly confirm that the decision to censor the story based off the "Hacked Info" policy was kinda-sorta just made up by Twitter employees. We find out in the string of posts that previous implementation of the Hacked Info policy required authorities to say some content was h4x0r3d in order for Twitter to remove it. Had this occurred, and we had Twitter employees citing a statement from the WH as reason for censoring it, we'd have a much stronger case to say it was the result of government pressure with Twitter laundering a false statement.
It sounds like Twitter staff made the decision to censor the laptop story and suspend the NYPOST based on personal political leanings. This was in direct contradiction to company policy. I believe "not 2016 again" was mentioned by at least one exec in these communications. I'd be more willing to cite the thing if it was in a dang news article or substack.
"The first amendment isn't absolute" bit is a conspicuous wink wink, nudge nudge vote of approval. I agree it doesn't exude the air pressure. To characterize it as a coordinated campaign of governmental interference or conspiracy would not be accurate. One thing I thought about after seeing was the Moldbuggian Cathedral essence of it all. When you look at the event as a whole it's pretty convincing. It all worked swimmingly.
Truthful October Surprise smear campaign targeting favored party candidate gets censored by employees of the largest politically relevant social media platform in the world. No direction between between favored party and party loyalists required. My recollection is the "Hunter Biden laptop story = Russian hackers" narrative went on for some weeks as the premier explanation and deflection. The media cover for a Biden win was total, complete, and impressive. So impressive that Ro Khanna thought it was too impressive and not a good look.
Maybe that theory of decentralized coordination can't ever be disproven as a convenient explanation, or we can accept this result as a logical, realistic end in a string in decisions. Of course the Twitter staff wanted to, and then did, successfully censor the story! Why wouldn't they?
EDIT: Tangential, but I checked out of curiosity. NYPost was suspended on the 14th of October. The account was reinstated 2 weeks later on the 30th and Twitter made this announcement.
wemptronics
2yr ago
Small question. Are user reports still semi-anonymous? Do mods still not see specific usernames who make comment reports? I'd never know even if you lied, but I figured I would ask.
wemptronics
2yr ago
Good additions. I believe the "watch your back" quote comes from the godmother once again and the full statement was, "a white male that told her to watch her back going to the team bus."
I had to watch women's volleyball for this, so I'm riding it as far as I can
There are worse women's sports to watch.
Since the thread only loads five comments at a time (Zorbaaaaaa!) I will do a small, top level update on the BYU-Duke volleyball saga. You can find previous discussion in the thread below. In short, a black college volleyball athlete claims she repeatedly heard bad words during a game with thousands of fans in attendance. Said athlete has some family that amplifies her grievance, specifies the claims, and off it goes to become a thing.
Today, BYU released a statement on the conclusion of their investigation. BYU found no evidence bad words were used, nor could they corroborate bad word usage from witness testimony. BYU formally apologized to the poor chap who was banned from the game.
We also reached out to more than 50 individuals who attended the event: Duke athletic department personnel and student-athletes, BYU athletic department personnel and student-athletes, event security and management and fans who were in the arena that evening, including many of the fans in the on-court student section.
Duke's athletic director also released a short statement:
The 18 members of the Duke University volleyball team are exceptionally strong women who represent themselves, their families, and Duke University with the utmost integrity. We unequivocally stand with and champion them, especially when their character is called into question. Duke Athletics believes in respect, equality and inclusiveness, and we do not tolerate hate and bias.
Which is about as close as you get to "we will not contest the conclusion of the investigation" in a PR statement while making sure people know you hate racism, still support your athletes, etc. This is a case we've seen before. It did not garner quite as much attention as the Covington case or Smollett case, but follows the same path as them. I do not have much to add, because I'm not sure there's a lot of light here. If there is a way to cool off the culture wars it might start with interrupting the racism-to-national-story pipeline.
One interesting thing. I do not believe we saw the alleged perpetrator's name get released on the internet. BYU immediately put security in the relevant section after Richardson's claim. Eventually security targeted a UVU student and removed him, but BYU has since apologized to him. Perhaps this is evidence we are learning? The crowd may have helped in preventing his identification online or his purported disabilities protected him to an extent. Maybe all it took is one reasonable person in the chain to decide to keep his name under wraps until things had been confirmed. If so, kudos to him or her, because there's an alternate time line where some poor kid with a mental disability gets publicly shamed by Twitter mercenaries.
This aspect may have been the product of the media seemingly being disinterested in investigating this story. Alternatively, the media may be past all that jazz in these types of cases. If I were an editor Nick Sandmann's lawsuits would have some impact on how I treat these stories. Perhaps they realize the juicy headline is enough rather than the public shaming process. Hey, that'd be something. These types of cases are pure culture war all the way down. An army of online I Told Ya So's will continue to clash with the Of Course They Said Nothing Happened vanguard and Racism Is Still A Big Problem Anyway main line of infantry. So it goes.
The best I've seen so far has been this BYU fan/alumni doing extensive research on the subject. That twitter user also cites some investigation done by this college sports outlet. The TLDR is that not a single person who was in attendance, nor a single person who has gone through the dozens of hours of footage -- including the police -- has been able to verify any racial slurs were used at the game. Not any fans that were there. Not any of the coaches. None of the players. Nor the visiting talent scouts that were seated in the relevant section of seats.
It's very likely the spectator, who was banned after the game, was not yelling slurs at players. He was not even at his seat and, at one point was on his phone, during the times when Richardson claims to have heard the slurs. This is all visible in footage and nobody sitting around him has claimed to have heard bad words. Apparently that fan is autistic not that it is particularly relevant. Poor chap.
One charitable theory that sounds plausible is that Richardson misheard "COUGARS" as a slur. Building on that, another theory is that Richardson got boxed into doubling down on her claims after her Godmother (running for political office) publicly made the specific claim that Richardson 'was called a nigger every time she served.' In the above Twitter thread he does post the footage of all her serves.
Personally, I do not fully doubt that Richardson thought she heard some no-no words at the time. In retrospect, that reflects more on her and her perception of BYU than anything else. While it's possible it was a cynical, pre-planned stunt that still sounds crazy to me. I guess there is no real cost in doing so? Especially if you were certain that no real questions would be asked. All the rest of it, the story, the narrative, the coverage, and national attention is a little sad, but unsurprising. The best investigative journalism on this case was done by some random fan who merely could not believe the story. The fact this would be a national story at all, even if her claims ended up being true, is also a little sad, but unsurprising. Some autist at volleyball game yells mean words and gets banned. So what?
TL;DR: A big nothing burger. Demand for racism continues to exceed supply, etc. Into the memory hole it goes.
EDIT: Highlighting this quote from Richardson is a little culture warry, but I think there's genuine value in recognizing that her beliefs likely contributed to this story going national.
Roberts does specifically mention application essays as unacceptable. That does restrict one of the simplest, most pervasive methods universities currently use to discriminate based on race. Although I agree they'll be back in 10 years to decide if something qualifies as "other means" in a new case. That was probably going to happen anyway.
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