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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   22343 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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please engage with the substance instead of doing so with mockery.

Fair. As I've said here a few times, I loath safteyism. I find the hypothetical threat scenario so implausible that mentioning it screams of a persecution complex. I should have engaged more substantively.

I was against the move from reddit. I actually never saw a full explanation of why that was necessary. I recall a discussion of "((( )))" use trigging and auto-admin response). Iirc zorba said a full explanation would be forthcoming, but I missed it. I could be misremembering and no explanation was offered, but I remain open to one. That said, I thought having a backup motte was a good idea.

I recall a discussion of "((( )))" use trigging and auto-admin response).

We had a Russian regular here by the name of Ilforte. Really interesting guy, quite prolific. The russian language apparently uses these weird double-parens-looking symbols rather than quotation marks, and some newbie mistook them for the triple-parens "echo marks" of infamy. Someone else responded explaining the difference, saying, "these:[wierd unicode double parens things] are russian quote marks, these: "((())) are triple parens, it's a different thing."

The reply explaining the difference got flagged for anti-semitic content by the reddit admins.

Thanks! That fleshes out my memory, but I'm still lost as to what the mods knew regarding the need to move. Was it "safteyism"? Did they say 'we wont elaborate further at this time' or am I hallucinating that?

I'm interested in that because at the time I thought the move could be plausible, but was leaning paranoic. However, there is a lot I didn't know as a casual reader. I'm trying to put context around OPs claim that JD Vance allusion to a Scott Alexander article threatens the motte. Is this a pattern of persecutorial complexion, or am I off my rocker.

The Reddit admins were in contact with the mods, consistently threatening them.

Nobody wanted to move here man lol. We lost a solid chunk of the community and now Zorba has to maintain the site.

I was wondering about that. I bailed on Reddit years ago and just chalked up 'The Motte' (the only sub I really participated in) as a sad victim to my need to keep the ol' media filters clean. I was glad to re-join when I found the site, but I couldn't tell if there was still some component that touched Reddit. Very interesting!

Specifically, did we ever see these threats? I hit bedrock here

On reddit Zorba:

Alright, so the admins are paying attention to us now. Not going into details, they aren't relevant and I don't want to draw their attention more; ask me again once this is done and I'll vent.

Poster:

Ok, it's a year later. Spill. I'm really curious about the fucked-up internal politics of Reddit.

Zorba

I am confused why this is coming up so often, you're the second in the last two days and I'd totally forgotten about it for months before that.

But anyway, out of a possible overabundance of caution, I'll PM it to you.

AFAICT, the threats were never discussed openly. I could be wrong. I only ask because this new threat rang some bells. Lots of arguably paranoid cloak and dagger stuff in the Meta: the motte is dead thread. I'm still grateful for all the hard work that goes into this place. Its the kind of place I can ask: does this place exist here because of a persecutorial complex; or was the move, like, justified...

weird double-parens-looking symbols

«Guillemets»

It wasn't "((( )))". It was "<< >>", taken by the admins (or maybe "anti-evil operations") to be "((( )))".

There are some admin posts from around the time of the move that discuss it. For the record, it was far from clear that the sub would be banned. There are still places on Reddit that are “edgier” than this place, like the red scare podcast subreddit and /r/4chan, plus a few others.

Because we were in the eye of Sauron. Why? Well, because the admins put us there. Why did they put us there? I suggest you ask them.

Why did they put us there? I suggest you ask them.

This is a genuine curiosity of mine. Iirc, the reddit mods were explicitly not going to explain their actions beyond vague gestures to the Eye of Sauron somewhere around the time Scott (happily) landed in the financial security provided by substack.

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