site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

How did this end up shaking out?

About what you'd expect, I guess.

Vaxry's largely moved away from keeping parity with wlroots main, and instead rewritten and built into hypr the necessary parts of the library -- breaks a bit from the Linux ethos, and likely to make keeping up with bugfixes and such either direction impossible, but may have some advantages for hypr. The community has had a few We're Doing Moderation Better posts, but they're mostly working on actually improving moderation rather than just throwing in a CoC for someone to abuse.

The hypr-based software that was previously being considered by a mainstream distro, hyprcursor, got dropped out of the running for Weird And Not Good Reasons, and there's probably some other related software components that would be good candidates otherwise but are being ignored because of The Drama. There are already projects that have disavowed any hyprland compatibility, and distros that have rejected hypr for social-not-political reasons. There have been broken things on specific equipment or distros where the FDO ban has been a problem, though to my knowledge a surmountable one so far.

FreeDesktop.Org's main website is broken in a bunch of ways that it always has been, but some of these problems (spam issues) make it difficult to tell the downstream results there. Could be that the lack of hypr-related posts in recent days are just no one wanting to do it, could be that accounts doing anything related to the topic aren't getting approved, could be that no one wants to do it because they don't want their account getting blown up.

That said, there's been less impact than I expected: hyprdots has remained active, maintained, and uncancelled/unbrigaded, and while hackernews stories do get the inevitable "worst community ever" comments, it's not the only thing that happens.

There's been some efforts to cancel DeVault over past reddit comments and moderation, as well as an alleged danbooru account, that I'm not going to link publicly. There's some interesting human-watching in it all coming out after his role in the Vaxry stuff, while the page itself points instead to the Stallman cancellation DeVault also championed, but a) that might just be because DeVault's hit on Stallman focused on related topics, b) only got him out of a few social media accounts, rather than any clear impact in code spaces, and c) does have a bit of Pepe Silvia vibes going on.

Vaxry has not come out as trans or nonbinary, to my knowledge.