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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   32897 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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Then there are people like you, who want to drop steaming turds and are constantly infuriated that you're not allowed to.

...Okay, fuck it, the direct approach it is.

While we're on the topic of steaming turds, have you considered that your flair text is one? Every time someone reads one of your posts there's a threat to horribly maim them right above it. I don't know for sure if SteveKirk's threatened to hurt anyone - I haven't read all of his posts and don't have his mod history in front of me - but he sure as hell hasn't made generalised threats against the entire Motte literally hundreds of times.

Seriously, there's an explicit rule here that we shouldn't be more antagonistic than necessary. I find it hard to conceive of a more unnecessary and egregious form of antagonism than your flair text; most Mottizens have never done anything to you and there is no need to antagonise them at all, let alone threaten to gouge their eyes out. You would whack anyone who tried anything remotely close to that - heck, you have - and rightly so; it's corrosive to the board.

I get that you are burnt out from modding a politics board. I used to be a forum mod myself* and got burnt out; in some ways it was good for my sanity when the forum got nuked from orbit by our host. But there are healthier ways to deal with that than firing scattershot threats into the crowd. If all else fails you could even just take a sabbatical; you're not the only mod here and, while you do add value with your modding, the place isn't going to immediately implode without you.

*It wasn't a politics board; it was a stalker board. Among the more interesting modposts I had to make were "please do not urge other members of the board to commit phishing attacks" and "please do not swap advice on how to get away with murder".

EDIT: I've been made aware that this is a quote from someone you banned. Leaving this up, because there's still some merit in the "corrosive" issue and because I'm not in the habit of hiding my mistakes, but I'm significantly less pissed off now.

I've been using things people have said to me as my flair since before we left reddit, and I'm quite surprised that all this time you were reading it as me saying I wanted to a put a screwdriver through someone's eyeballs and never said anything. I figured at least the quotation marks would make it obvious they weren't my words. (That said, I probably need a new flair, but no one has been quite that... colorful in a while. No, this is not a request.)

As for being burnt out, now and then I feel a little sick of this shit, but if I were really burnt out, I would quit.

You may or may not remember, but I joined after theMotte left Reddit (I have a "no major social media platforms" rule, with the exception of my pre-existing YouTube account, which meant I couldn't join earlier).

I'm quite surprised that all this time you were reading it as me saying I wanted to a put a screwdriver through someone's eyeballs and never said anything.

Like I implied, I just wasn't taking the direct approach, because 1) you and I don't know each other that well, 2) I figured that if you were that far gone into misanthropy and given #1, I wouldn't achieve anything besides starting a shitfight, and 3) (until I lost my temper) I didn't particularly want to start a shitfight, because as noted I sympathise with mod burnout (and because theMotte is supposed to not be about shitfights). I PMed Zorba about it nearly a year ago, but his response didn't mention the backstory.

Pretty sure that flair is a direct quote from one of the paranoid leftist-hater people. Could be communicated more clearly, sure.

That was a threat Amadan received, not one he made.

Shit, whoops. I looked, but not in the right places.

To be fair, it's not like the flair itself has a hyperlink. In context it's a weird cross between a justifiable brag and a plausibly deniable cry for help, but out of context it does look hostile.

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