reddit.com
So it turns out that the triple-parenthesis thing can get you banned from reddit even for benign nonsense. Some context: in some open source AI image models, you can use parentheses to emphasize terms that you want the model to pay more attention to. In this case, the author wrote "(((detailed face)))" and some other terms in their image prompt.
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I still don't understand. Who are those people and why are they like this? Was it me or was it them? How did it get to where I sort every thread by controversial not because I expect to see racists and trolls, but people with actual opinions of their own discussing the linked content? I remember, many years ago, in the time before reddit, I'd occasionally peek at the comments of something like a yahoo! news article and feel a chilling contempt for the people commenting there. How stupid must those people be, I thought, that they spend their time hanging out in the comment sections of news articles that, judging by their replies, they hadn't even read past the title, which struck me as so utterly pathetic since the articles weren't even that long. Those comments always stood out to me as a major drop from the usual quality of discourse I'd find even on forums.
But then at some point I got linked to reddit, a site that pretty much just centralizes comment sections for other content. I still don't know if I actually degenerated from using the site or there was something there. I remember initially, I felt overwhelmed by the deluge of clickbait titles, the many urban myths that redditors were spreading around in the comments. Maybe that should have been my cue to leave, but I stayed. It wasn't necessarily a conscious choice, but it just seemed like I couldn't get away from reddit because search results seemed to be getting increasingly useless so I'd end up back on the site multiple times a day through google searches, anyway. I still don't know, did the clickbait and urban legend sharing actually go down, or did I simply stop noticing because I got used to it the same way one gets used to seeing fag and nigger on 4chan? Or an even worse possibility: was I able to identify so many falsehoods on reddit at the beginning because prior to that, I was getting all of my information from other sources, and maybe, by some later point, I had consumed an information diet so high in reddit content that now I was one of the many who unwittingly believe in many falsehoods?
Or maybe I just evolved over the years? When I was a kid, I was firmly far left, but I was always curious about how could others genuinely believe in something else? That is, how could anyone be for anything right wing, how could anyone believe in religion, how could anyone be for war? I got my start with Christopher Hitchens, evolutionary psychology, and libertarianism - those were sufficiently close in inferential distance as pathways to understanding beliefs hitherto completely alien to me. Eventually I made it all the way to where I can see why fascism can look like a genuinely better way to run a society, but god was the hardest one, had to take some mind-altering substances to see how that one might be true. I think nothing at all of it now, to be a left-winger at heart who can comfortably play devil's advocate for right wing positions without condescension. But I've found in life the feeling of "I didn't understand X until now, and now I see clearly those who don't" tends to be fleeting. Eventually you get used to X, it starts to seem so obvious, and before long you don't even functionally remember what it's like to not understand X, and you start to wonder if every smart person is supposed to understand X and if your journey of figuring it out only had to take place because you were an otherwise intelligent person who, through bad lack or something, had acquired really bad priors for X.
All this to say in the end that redditors piss me the fuck off. I hate it all: their formulaic snark, their seeming inability to realize that said snark is not an actually good argument, their persistence in relying on a predictable sequence of snarky arguments as if I won't notice the blatant straw man in the next one, their pathetic attempts to "win" by blocking and reporting, the nauseating ignorance of just how mainstream (nothing wrong with being mainstream if they'd just drop the conceit that TPTB aren't on their side) their views are, their many thought-terminating cliches, their faux education about "concern trolling", "sealioning", "just asking questions", "paradox of tolerance", their habit of reporting you to the suicide bot. I hope they're kids, I hope they have 2 digit IQs, I hope they're a highly unrepresentative, mentally ill subset of the population, I really hope people like redditors isn't the best humanity can hope for at scale.
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