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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2637 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 6, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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If some person showed up at a spa and insisted on exposing himself to a bunch of people in the locker rooms but insisted that he was just trans and this was just normal, instead of needing a lengthy blog post about this, you could post in CWR.

I think the whole point is that this kind of outrage bait is best suited to /pol/ or various other online forums or subreddits, rather than to this place. Another story about woke trans activism (something I’d say 95% of regulars probably take issue with) without commentary is just a space for people to affirm their beliefs without really saying or discussing anything. It’s like /pol/ collages of migrant crime stories, they just exist to make people mad and lower the quality of discourse; everyone there already agrees with the poster.

The value here (I’d say at least) is in interesting and civilized conversation with smart and often eloquent people who sometimes know things the average person doesn’t, I’ve learnt a lot here from people’s commentary. Another piece of evidence that something we all know is happening and all disagree with is happening isn’t necessary.

The CWR was originally a containment thread specifically for those types of posts. There is utility there if the CW is something you are interested in because you can come in and get a general sense for the current state of affairs. I think that the CW is radically transforming our society, and am thus interested in it, and having meaningful discussions with smart people about it.

Posting the 9000th “look at this trans person maybe this is actually autogynophelia!” take will just naturally receive less interaction, which is generally what the people posting are seeking.

The mods here are, in my opinion, engaging in the most common mistake that people with power make: believing in the idea of central planning or central authority. An individual mod (or small group of mods) cannot effectively plan or micromanage the discussions between thousands of people. The innovation that allowed Reddit, and digg before it, to succeed was the idea of distributed or decentralized moderation. Upvotes and downvotes actually are (with appropriate, hands off moderation to remove spam etc) actually very effective.

Discussion quality on both Reddit and digg took an obvious hit when overbearing moderators tried to micromanage the discussions. It is why Reddit has become such an awful echo chamber, and unfortunately (sadly, again because I value and have valued this community for so long) the signs of this are starting to show here.

Look at the CWR, the latest post is almost a full day old, and is about a sort of meta take on the CW in general not really a roundup of the weeks events.

Well tended gardens of course die due to apathy, certainly a blogpost we all have read and repeated to each other hundreds or thousands of times.

But overtended gardens never bear fruit.

Edit: as of now there actually is a new post in CWR, the previous one was 19 hours ago. The current post is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. It is essentially just a blog post about a realization the poster had about how good being a landlord is. Not exactly a bad post, but again really just a typical blogspot/Facebook style blog post.

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