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Notes -
I often report low-effort link-spamming by right-wingers in this sub; I would have reported the post in question if it hadn’t already been nuked before I saw it. What I’m defending here is not link-spamming, which I agree is bad for the sub. If you recall, my comments in the kerfuffle about JQ-posting were exclusively in defense of SecureSignals, who is not guilty of low-effort link-spamming, whatever else you think of him. I have never defended link-spammers like Foreverlurker or his alts.
Like I told you last time also, my problem is not with you or SS, but with foreverlurker, cake, and all his alts, who is right now plying the sub with his garbage, while you are all cheerfully pretending the discussion developed organically. Do you genuinely not see it, or this some sort of balancing of the scales for your oppression by society? Do we have to tolerate your blatant, daily astroturfing to compensate for your censorship elsewhere?
If a post is allowed by the mods to stay up, and it’s relevant to my interests or provides what I see as a useful opportunity to carry on an organic conversation, I’m going to capitalize on that opportunity. I also make effortposts of my own that have no connection whatsoever to the user(s) that you’re up in arms about.
I’ve never claimed to be oppressed by society.
Please be specific about whom you mean by “your”. Are you accusing me of having some involvement with the link-spamming? I can say with declarative certainty that I don’t know who any of these accounts are, nor if they’re even on my side. Several people here have expressed suspicion and concern that these low-effort right-wing link-spams are actually the work of someone trying to make either the sub in general or right-wingers/identitarians look bad. Or maybe it’s just the work of someone looking to start shit by baiting people into acrimonious arguments. Or, yeah, maybe it is some recruitment agent for some white nationalist organization or website or grift. I genuinely have no clue.
All I can do is report posts that fail to meet the bare-minimum threshold for good-faith engagement. Cake did manage to reformulate his post in order to get it over the threshold, which means it’s fair game to use as a springboard for actual discussion. Do you think it’s my solemn duty to refuse to engage because I don’t totally trust the provenance of the original poster?
No.
Yeah I think they’re wrong, and some of them have changed their minds after reviewing the evidence. Besides, the proof is in the pudding, the resident DR people don’t act like he’s making them look bad, they seem to enjoy the softballs.
Like I said last time:
I’d appreciate it if you presented a coherent scenario, instead of throwing your hands in the air and going ‘he could be anything’.
Yes it is your duty to identify and denounce bad actors, especially from your side. This guy is abusing the charity and kindness we show your side (technically, every side, but since the defector is in your ranks, it’s more your problem, you have the legitimacy to call him out). We’re trying to have a ceasefire here, one of yours keeps shooting, and you refuse to reign him in. Think of him as your antifa, the unacknowledged presence of a defector destroys the trust in that faction. So if your opponents retaliate by either their own astroturfing or censorship, I’ll have to wash my hands of your woes.
I just read the comment thread generated by Cake and it was great as far as I'm concerned. I'm not a white ethno-nationalist by the way.
I thought it sucked, but that's not the point. Are you fine with bad actors flooding the sub with their pet subject as long as enough regulars can wax lyrical in their shadow?
Well I'm new enough that I haven't caught up with the nuances and bad-faith defectors. I'm well aware that communities can deteriorate. I followed Reddit from it's inception and witnessed various incursions from different sides, corporate interests that ruined the flavour. If there is a mechanism we can employ then I'm in favour but I ask that people be careful because i think the greatest risk is the current authoritarian move towards censorship.
Go reread the thread above, can you honestly find nothing good? By all means ban the low effort posts and keep an eye on people who hide their true motives and who are rigidly stuck in their own biases, but don't ban an entire line of thought, the community is currently mature enough to contain it. There's nothing wrong with single-issue posters in my view.
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To be honest, I didn’t realize the extent to which people find the guy frustrating, nor the extent to which you and others might feel that his behavior reflects on my “side”. I feel like I and the vast majority of the DR posters here conduct ourselves admirably to the best of our abilities and well within the standards and expectations of this sub. Having one weirdo who spams bad/questionable content seems like a bad reflection on him specifically, but I don’t really “identify” with him. It shouldn’t be surprising to me that others who are already ill-disposed toward my views would readily seek to tar me with the same brush as the weakman they can point to - and to be clear, rightists are equally guilty of doing so when it flatters their interests - so perhaps that’s on me for not taking the issue seriously enough.
Who, pray tell, is the “we” here? Which faction do you imagine yourself to be affiliated with here? I’m personally not thinking of the state of the sub in terms of some war, alternating between hot and cold, between certain factions. I do come to the defense of certain users with whom I perceive myself as sharing a common cause, but you are correct that I’ve never seen my job as “reining in” some of the shittier DR (or “DR-presenting”) users on the sub. If you’re now at the point where you feel comfortable threatening censorship or psyops of your own, that does certainly present a concerning opportunity for escalating acrimony. I would like to think that most people here don’t perceive the purpose of the sub in terms of “he started it, gotta win this war against the other guys, if this tactic is good enough for them it should be good enough for us”, but maybe that’s naivety on my part.
There’s always a war in the war room. I don’t think of my side as a party in this fight originally (I don’t like your ideology, but I don’t want it censored either). I’m in favour of niceness community and civilization, free speech and all good things. But just because I want everyone to cooperate doesn’t mean I cooperate with defectors. If you cooperate with him and refuse to eject him, your side looks like it’s defecting, polluting the commons. In that case, defecting against your side would be justified.
Civility is great, niceness I'm suspicious of.
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I’m not a mod. I have no power to eject anybody. Do you mean that I should be responding to each and every one of his posts with some variant of “this is a bad post”? In this particular case, he posted a link to an article by an author I like very much, and which I think is very interesting and makes for great discussion. And, lo and behold, a good discussion is in fact happening below the post. If you believe that it would have been better for me to refrain from interacting with the post and its replies in any way, you’re welcome to that take, but I disagree. To do so would have been to allow the only replies to the post to be ones that are in disagreement with it, and by extension with my own views.
Is it your contention that even if he was bad faith through and through, you should still pretend that he wasn’t, because the mods didn’t do anything, or because the discussion is ‘good’ ?
You don’t need mod powers to call him out. ‘bad actor ‘,’ ignore the troll’ etc. work. Yes, I expect you to do this, out of basic fairness. I understand that your views may therefore be less represented, and your favourite authors less discussed. It’s irrelevant. Through his illegitimate posting, everyone else’s views are less discussed.
The only reason why he isn’t banned more quickly is because you and the others treat him with the respect he clearly isn’t deserving of.
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