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We're on a site five steps removed from a LiveJournal called squid314, and I certainly wouldn't have predicted this back in April 2014. Scott had been doing SSC for about 14 months, the events that would result in GamerGate were still playing out, and I don't think /r/slatestarcodex was even around then (June 2015?).
I'd posit something like "the openness of the system can only be in proportion to the quality of the general population". As the population gets worse, more gatekeeping is required. Unified logins, generic codebases, and modern web design are on average bad signs; single-site authentication, custom codebases, and archaic design are on average good signs. A lot of commercial web design is to make it easy and attractive for anyone to participate, and in a way, I think we want the opposite. We want people who value the content enough to step outside the path of least resistance.
But there's also the problem of keeping population growth above replacement.
Gatekeeping and openness aren't exactly the same, you can be "open" and also high-quality if you're swift, brutal, and arbitrary with moderation, which is the best place to be imo.
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If hypnosis works on some people, why not force people making virtual boyfriend apps into conditioning women using those apps into having a 'breeding kink' ?
I could see CPC okaying this.
My suspicion has always been that the CCP elite is less committed to increasing the birthrate than is often suggested.
They don't really need to if the rest of the world sinks even more.
I'm not sure though. They've been trying to curb excessive working hours. I doubt they're doing that so their subjects can have more leisure time.
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I... was making a joke about the problem of getting new members to this forum, if we're deliberately not making it easy to join.
But OK, if we can get the makers of virtual boyfriend (or girlfriend) app to insert hypnotic suggestions to follow the "Courtesy" rules in the sidebar, that'd be a major win for humanity. Heck, even "don't be egregiously obnoxious" would go a long way toward making the Internet usable again.
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The subreddit was created in early 2014.
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