This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Personally I don't think it would be that bad, and if only considering purely selfish reasons I'd even welcome it. People generally underestimate just how much of the bottom-tier dross of the internet originate in India and Southeast Asia, like a global Eternal September, and having that blocked would substantially improve the net in general (for westerners, naturally; not so much for the Indians themselves!).
The reason for this is simple: India is huge, rich enough for most people to be online, not rich enough to not need to bother with small amounts of money, and they speak English decently enough. More importantly, there is a pervasive cultural trait where "looting the commons" is seen as basically acceptable; and by not doing it you're seen more as a schmuck than virtuous. This causes people to rapidly consume every bit of easily-exploitable goodness in a community, externalities be damned.
As an example, I am a software developer with a bit of open-source contributions. Each year, DigitalOcean has an event they call Hacktoberfest, where if you submit code to any open source project they send you a T-shirt. Perhaps predictably this causes a massive flood of inane garbage from Indian users wanting their shirt, forcing everybody else to spend all month dealing with spam.
Who do you think is making those click-farm spam sites that rehost e.g. StackOverflow content that has made Google so bad in recent years? Indians, grinding out a few bucks of ad revenue at a time. A lot of the trash on YouTube/Facebook is from there too, like those awful videos for kids. For the same reason, they're also responsible for the bulk of the scam calls plaguing the rest of the English-speaking world. It's no coincidence that the second-worst country for that, Nigeria, shares relevant traits (large population, middling poverty, English proficiency). Brazil would possibly be number two, but "luckily" their non-elite population don't speak much English at all.
A straightforward objection to "block it all" would be that some genuinely good users would be caught in the middle. Sure, but the quality of a community does not hinge much on the absolute amount of good users, but the average. We would hardly be on themotte if that wasn't the case! Having India ban you presents an excellent opportunity to improve your service without being accused of e.g. racism, and you get free-speech goodwill to boot.
(Even more tangentially I am awaiting the moment when some internet hustler guru discovers how you can exploit some modest opportunity for deploying LLMs and spamming people, unleashing a flood of garbage on some unlucky website. I imagine it will be something like a zillion LLaMA-powered Indians commenting on every post with a text containing random Amazon affiliate links fluidly shoehorned into it, or a hundred add-filled spam sites for every legitimate one when you search for anything. By then we'll have to actually do something.)
I am reminded of when 4chan ip banned the entire nation of Turkey over karaboga spam.
More options
Context Copy link
True, as a user I would likely benefit. As an owner, I might have other incentives though. I don't know how accurate these numbers are but roughly Twitter gets 53% of its revenue from the US and 16% from Japan. The specifics from India are not listed but as the 3rd largest market it's bound to be a significant amount.
More options
Context Copy link
Wouldn’t VPN solve that issue?
Too costly (time and money) for spammers but not for the competent ones.
4chan not only blocks VPNs, but also Tor too.
More options
Context Copy link
Not if you were determined to fuck them over. You can use a VPN but you can't escape from the speed of light. If you REALLY wanted to exclude a population you could use time based "triangulation" to determine where the client is located at. Then block access.
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, any sort of gatekeeping hurdle would improve it, though even mild inconveniences will significantly limit interaction from good users too. I wouldn't check e.g. this website very frequently if I had to spin up a VPN every time, for example.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link