There's a pretty big set of changes coming down the pipe. These shouldn't have much impact on users - it's all internal bookkeeping - but there's a lot of it, and if there's bugs, it might cause issues. Let me know if anything weird happens! Weird, in this case, is probably "comments you can see that you think you shouldn't be able to", or "comments you can't see that you think you should be able to", or anything else strange that goes on. As an example, at one point in development reply notifications stopped working. So keep your eyes out for that. I'm probably pushing this in a day or two, I just wanted to warn people first.
EDIT: PUSH COMPLETE, let me know if anything goes wrong
Are you a software developer? Do you want to help? We can pretty much always use people who want to get their hands dirty with our ridiculous list of stuff to work on. The codebase is in Python, and while I'm not gonna claim it's the cleanest thing ever, it's also not the worst and we are absolutely up for refactoring and improvements. Hop over to our discord server and join in. (This is also a good place to report issues, especially if part of the issue is "I can't make comments anymore.")
Are you somewhat experienced in Python but have never worked on a big codebase? Come help anyway! We'll point you at some easy stuff.
Are you not experienced in Python whatsoever? We can always use testers, to be honest, and if you want to learn Python, go do a tutorial, once you know the basics, come join us and work on stuff.
(if you're experienced in, like, any other language, you'll have no trouble)
Alt Accounts: Let's talk about 'em. We are consistently having trouble with people making alt accounts to avoid bans, which is against the rules, or making alt accounts to respond to their own stuff, which isn't technically against the rules, and so forth. I'm considering a general note in the rules that alt accounts are strongly discouraged, but if you feel the need for an alt, contact us; we're probably okay with it if there's a good reason. (Example: We've had a few people ask to make effortposts that aren't associated with their main account for various reasons. We're fine with this.) If you want to avoid talking to us about it, it probably isn't a good reason.
Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is not set in stone.
Single-Issue Posting: Similarly, we're having trouble with people who want to post about one specific topic. "But wait, Zorba, why is that a problem" well, check out the Foundation:
The purpose of this community is to be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs. It is to be a place for people to examine the beliefs of others as well as their own beliefs; it is to be a place where strange or abnormal opinions and ideas can be generated and discussed fairly, with consideration and insight instead of kneejerk responses.
If someone's posting about one subject, repeatedly, over and over, then it isn't really a discussion that's being had, it's prosletyzing. I acknowledge there's some value lost in removing this kind of behavior, but I think there's a lot of value lost in having it; letting the community be dominated by this behavior seems to lead to Bad Outcomes.
Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is also not set in stone.
Private Profiles: When we picked up the codebase, it included functionality for private profiles, which prevents users from seeing your profile. I probably would have removed this if I'd had a lot more development time, but I didn't. So it exists.
I'm thinking of removing it anyway, though. I'm not sure if it provides significant benefit; I think there's a good argument that anything posted on the site is, in some sense, fair game to be looked over.
On the other hand . . . removing it certainly does encourage ad hominem arguments, doesn't it? Ad hominems are kind of useless and crappy and poison discourse. We don't want people to be arguing about the other person's previously-stated beliefs all the time, we want people to be responding to recent comments, in general.
But on the gripping hand . . .
. . . well, I just went to get a list of the ten most prolific users with hidden profiles. One of them has a few quality contributions! (Thanks!) Two of them are neutral. And seven of them have repeated antagonism, with many of those getting banned or permabanned.
If there's a tool mostly used by people who are fucking with the community, maybe that's a good argument for removing the tool.
On the, uh, other gripping hand, keep in mind that private profiles don't even work against the admins. We can see right through them (accompanied by a note that says "this profile is private"). So this feature change isn't for the sake of us, it's for the sake of you. Is that worth it? I dunno.
Feedback wanted! Again!
The Volunteer System is actually working and doing useful stuff at this point. It doesn't yet have write access, so to speak, all it's doing is providing info to the mods. But it's providing useful info. Fun fact: some of our absolute most reliable and trustworthy volunteers don't comment. In some cases "much", in some cases "at all". Keep it up, lurkers! This is useful! I seriously encourage everyone to click that banner once a day and spend a few minutes at it. Or even just bookmark the page and mash the bookmark once in a while - I've personally got it on my bookmark bar.
The big refactor mentioned at the top is actually for the sake of improving the volunteer system, this is part of what will let it turn into write access and let us solve stuff like filtered-comments-in-limbo, while taking a lot of load off the mods' backs and maybe even making our moderation more consistent. As a sort of ironic counterpart to this, it also means that the bar might show up less often.
At some point I want to set up better incentives for long-time volunteers, but that takes a lot of code effort. Asking people to volunteer more often doesn't, so that's what I'm doing.
(Feedback wanted on this also.)
I want your feedback on things, as if that wasn't clear. These threads basically behave like a big metadiscussion thread, so . . . what's your thoughts on this whole adventure? How's it going? Want some tweaks? Found a bug? Let me know! I don't promise to agree but I promise to listen.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm bemused that you think this is "vaguely hinting."
Well, first of all, if you were actually discussing whether or not you were right, it might be more legitimate, but I have observed you get absolutely shredded over and over again by people willing to engage with you point by point, and your tactic is to simply do a quiet fade and then come back a few days or a week later with a slightly altered version of the same argument.
Secondly, you have admitted that your purpose here is recruitment (boasting about all the people DMing you for more info) and not actual engagement beyond sticking to the same talking points.
As for "being right", that can still be annoying enough to reach "egregiously obnoxious" levels. Let's take the famous 13/52 statistic. Everyone knows it's basically true. You don't get modded for referring to it or using it in an argument. But in the past we had a couple of people whose entire reason for being here was to grind their racial grievances, and they did nothing but post about black criminality. They got told to knock it off, and not because the mods don't like racism or because we were trying to hide "the truth" about black criminality.
To use the same example offered to Zorba, yes, if someone was doing nothing but posting about AI safety, particularly in the tones of a crusader with an agenda, and just coming back with the same talking points over and over, they would eventually reach a point of "enough is enough." The fact that we don't censor topics doesn't mean everyone gets to go on about anything they want as much as they want any way they want forever because the rules don't say you can't neener neener. The fact that your particular obsession touches hot buttons and that you are coy about your true, unfiltered agenda makes you a bit more annoying that most single-issue posters, but you aren't the only Jew-baiter here and no one is proposing anything like "You can't criticize Jews" or even "You can't question the Holocaust." But contra Hoffmeister, no, this place is not your (or anyone else's) personal soapbox to use as you see fit.
I'm a bit careful of this argument:
Do I think that I, among many others, have shredded SecureSignals in the past? Yes, of course. I think the weak and arbitrary nature of his argumentation is pretty evident. He's assembled a massive theory from the tiniest collection of fragments, and whenever challenged on any one point, he changes the subject and jumps to some other fragment, and eventually either he or the other person gets tired and fade out, and then a week later the whole song and dance happens again. This is tiresome and obnoxious.
However, it's really hard to maintain and enforce a norm that effectively punishes someone for refusing to be persuaded. In this case the position that he's holding is indefensible, but how does that logic apply to other cases? Can or should we ban people for being persistently wrong?
This isn't a plea to not ban SecureSignals. There might be reasons to do that. It's just that the basis of such a ban probably shouldn't be stubbornly refusing to admit that he was wrong. That's very common behaviour. It's how one conducts oneself in the instance of disagreement that matters.
You're allowed to not be persuaded. You just can't post the same topic over and over again. This has to be sensible at some point (leaving aside the question of whether any particular user has reached that point), or you have to live with the fact that your devotion to free speech means 50% of the Culture War threads are going to be me waxing poetic about paperclips.
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It is, because you won't put into words what you are actually complaining about.
Can you cite any examples? I get a lot of replies, and I reply to a lot of them. Sometimes I let people get the last word if the conversation has gone on. I do not think I've gotten "shredded" on any of the topics I've talked about, and if you can point to a thread we can use as a reference for what you are talking about, that would be helpful for everyone.
Again, can you point to anything I have said where I admitted that my purpose here is recruitment? If you are accusing me of something like this you should provide some sort of proof. I think I mentioned people DMing me once to point out that my own experience- receiving a bunch of comment replies and messages about a topic, seemed to stand against the "nobody wants to talk about this" narrative which was being pushed to chill discussion on Holocaust Revisionism. It seems a lot of people wanted to talk about it, and that was my point, no such nonsense about recruitment.
These accusations are not fair without specific examples of this behavior you are accusing me of.
You also ignored my question to you, which is what is "one specific topic" you are talking about? Are my posts about the ADL press campaign, and the other post about Superman both "one specific topic" within the context of your complaint? If so, why?
This seemed pretty forceful, and your response inadequate.
Is an adequate response. It is not a database of murder victims as there has been no investigation that names registered to this database are actually real, unique names of individuals who were murdered in WWII. A name and a passport is not proof that someone was murdered in a gas chamber. Likewise, taking a transport list and assuming that all the people on the transport were murdered and adding them to a database of murder victims, and then later citing the database as evidence that the people on the transports were murdered, is circular reasoning that is void of evidence.
When it came to OP's concrete claim that 70,000 Jews were sent from Lodz to Auschwitz in 1944 to be exterminated, I showed there was no evidence for that, there is in fact substantial evidence disproving that, and he did not respond to that challenge. "Here's a bunch of names and passports in a database" is very different than justifying an assertion like "70,000 Jews were sent from Lodz to Auschwitz in 1944 to be exterminated" and OP ran off right when I challenged him on this point.
In what other world could you just say "70,000 people were sent here and killed" with no expectation of actually having evidence for that claim? It's only in this topic where you can get away with making claims like these with no evidence, and then you just point at a passport in a database when pressed for evidence.
His appeal to the Yad Vashem database also allowed him to conveniently sidestep the primary sources I was citing to disprove his claims about the extermination of Lodz Jews, while he was citing a database where any name can be added to it with no actual proof that they were murdered. Reading that I don't see this thread as evidence for what Amadan is complaining about.
Oh, FFS... are you really going to do Holocaust revisionism in a meta thread?
If I'm being accused of something, I'm going to explain why the accusation doesn't hold. If they want to say I didn't respond adequately, I'm going to point out- yes, I did, I cited primary sources to argue a specific point that was completely ignored in favor of a baseless appeal to emotion.
Funny enough I'm being accused by Amadan of "quietly fading away" when pressed, so yes I will talk about Holocaust revisionism in this thread to show that charge, also, is not true- if I'm pressed on the topic.
Yeah, that will really show them you're not a one trick pony.
Hey, be fair. He didn't start it, others brought it up, and were saying he argued inadequately. That's a totally reasonable thing to respond to.
I don't think it's fair to use "can you give me an example" in a meta conversation to relitigate the object level topic.
For what it's worth "you're getting shredded but you come back with the same arguments" is not a valid criticism in my opinion. a) it's the default behavior of most people, and b) being a one-trick pony who does the shredding instead of being shredded can be just as annoying (just ask the mods about the obsessive HBDers we used to have around), but there's a thousand better things one could say in response instead of going back to the topic itself.
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You're correct that his evidence isn't very strong towards "these were real people who were murdered in this specific way," but it is much better towards "these were real people who died." You don't really address what happened to them aside from "not murder" even after he specifically emphasized the question of what you thought happened to these people.
You are correct that a name and a passport is not proof that someone was murdered. But, assuming that it is a legitimate passport, it is evidence that the person exists. And if we find no later evidence that the person exists, given the amount of record keeping going on, it's reasonable to assume that there's some reason they don't appear—either a name change, or they're somewhere where they wouldn't be producing records we'd find, or yes, maybe they're dead. Especially when there's much more evidence that those who were listed as survivors continued to exist. (I will note that this argument isn't perfect, as evidence of their still being alive is much of why people are classified as survivors in the first place—perhaps the proper way to measure would be to look at how much people who were not involved in the databases show up in later data.)
@faul_sname offered you a couple of ways that it could be shown that his analysis was bad.
You didn't give any idea if any of those were the case, or any other suggestion as to what's going on in those lists.
Do you think those people never existed? That they existed and survived, and there's data many of them, and people just didn't dig to find it? That they existed and survived and there's not much subsequent data for them for some reason? That they died, due to other causes? It can be a mix of causes, of course, but what's the modal way that people wrongly ended up in those databases? I still don't know what your hypothesis is, aside from "a name and a passport is not proof."
Here is Yad Vashem's description of the origin of the Victim's Database:
Does a call center collecting names from over-the-phone testimonies to add to their database, 60 years after the fact, seem to you a scientific way to build a database of murder victims? In any other context, building a database of murder victims containing no evidence that the people you are adding to the database were murdered would get you laughed out of the room. Of course, in building a database like that, proving the person existed with a document is not the most important part- providing some sort of evidence that the people in your database were murdered in the way you are saying they were murdered would be expected in any other context except the Holocaust, where an Israeli calling a hotline and giving a testimony listing names of people he lost contact with 60 years later is good enough to prove a series of murders with absolutely no physical or documentary evidence that such murders actually happened.
This is not a scientific source, it's a cultural and propaganda project.
My hypothesis is that this isn't a scientific source, it's not a database of murder victims. It's a post-2000s propaganda campaign meant to fill the gap in the physical and documentary record with a crowd-sourcing approach of uncritically collecting testimonies and names 60 years after the fact.
Okay, it has lower sourcing standards than is normal. Sure. Based on that, I can totally believe that there are many people who are in there who shouldn't be. But that still doesn't address how unreliable it is, which was what @faul_sname was trying to do.
That's not an answer. You gave a non-answer before, and you just did so again. I don't get it. All you have to say is "I think a bunch of the purported people never existed (either mistakenly or deliberately)" or "a bunch are still around, they just never checked their data, and they probably left subsequent records" or "a bunch are still around, they just didn't leave records in places we can find them" or "they died around that time, but from other causes."
Our standard for asserting that people were probably murdered doesn't have to be that we actually witnessed it, or dug up graves that are definitively there. A whole lot of people vanishing is itself evidence. (It is not, of course, evidence for the method of their death, and does allow for their deaths being incidental rather than intentional—e.g. if they all died from being overworked, that would still explain the "people vanished.")
To be clear, I don't actually myself know how extensive genealogical databases (for example) are, but you haven't actually attempted to answer the question that faul_sname was posing to you. My complaint isn't so much that I'm sure he's right on this, because I don't have the time to figure out how best to verify and assess that. But he clearly put in some effort as to seeing whether the database results were consistent with what they were described as, out of a random sample they seemed to be, and you have not been willing to give any account of your own about what we should find if we tried to investigate the people in the database, nor what actually happened. Once again, the reason that I bring this up is not because I think there's no way you could prove him wrong. It's that he provided evidence and effort to an extent that, if you could not respond to it, it seemed fair to say that you got shredded, as Amadan so delicately put it, made it pretty clear what sorts of things would be relevant responses and what he was actually arguing, and you didn't respond in a way that addressed his arguments, even when repeated more emphatically. That felt like it was a relevant example, and it still feels so.
I would think that the names should be verifiable. If I have a name, I can cross-reference it against other databases. If you have a guy who up until date X (which in this case is at minimum a deportation), is working, paying taxes, buying things on credit, etc., than afterwards simply drops out of all records, it’s pretty simple to assume that they died during that deportation. Do that with enough samples and honestly you could reasonably establish that said group of people were likely to have been killed deliberately.
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It would be reasonable to accuse SecureSignals of using this forum as a “personal soapbox” if he simply blasted his opinions out as top-level comments and then did not respond or participate in dialogue about the views contained therein. This does not describe SecureSignals’ behavior in this forum.
You yourself acknowledge that he actively argues his case; your entirely subjective assessment that he gets “shredded” when he does so is irrelevant. (Frankly I think it’s a dicey look to have a mod weighing in this aggressively on whether or not a particular user “won” or “lost” a particular argument.)
I can think of a particular ex-mod who fits this description to a tee, but I’m not campaigning for him to get banned or modded when he does so. I see no reason why somebody on this forum should be punished by mods for posting things that I personally find annoying, tedious, or repetitive. Again, my proposed punishment for bad takes is to be downvoted and argued with vociferously by other users. Especially because my personal view on what makes a take “bad” very obviously is not shared by the community as a whole. Yours isn’t either, and just because you’re a mod doesn’t mean you should get to bring the mod hammer down on people who post things that you find annoying.
Well, it's not about what you, or I, or any one person, finds annoying or doesn't. That you keep accusing me of wanting to "bring the mod hammer down" on people I find annoying shows you just aren't really paying attention. I assure you, the number of people I find annoying is vastly greatly than the number of people I mod.
I’m referring specifically to this proposed policy. I’m not saying that you have displayed a pattern of capricious modding up to this point. I’m saying that this specific policy - I don’t know to what extent you personally are responsible for conceiving of it and proposing it - is the equivalent of dangling a mod hammer over something that seems to be nothing worse than something that annoys you (and Zorba) personally, but which does not harm the overall epistemic health of the community.
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