feotakahari | (no subject)

My actual problem with the Rationalist community is that someone like Kontextmaschine or Voxette-VK gets reblogged all the time for their “insightful posts,” and then they post something abhorrent about how it’s right for some people to subjugate or exterminate other people, and then they keep getting reblogged and no one ever mentions it again. It’s like, am I the only one who remembers that they said that? Doesn’t anyone else think those comments give some insight into the real reasons behind their other opinions about things like government intervention or disability pay?

Weirdly, the one person who consistently gets held to task for awful posts is Scott Alexander, and I have no idea what makes him different. People complain about Eliezer Yudkowsky, but more in terms of finding him cringy than in terms of disliking his opinions. There’s also Communists who aren’t Rationalists, get called out once by Rationalists for the exact same awful takes as these Rationalist authoritarians, and then never get brought up again because Rationalists aren’t into Communism much.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I wonder if the tumblr design helps that along? Instead of a sense of continuity, you just have posts that get reblogged a bunch, and the worse stuff gets buried and easily lost.

I mean, people also can be contributing to it for sure. <_< But if all you know about a person is through other people's reblogs of it, it's pretty possible to only know their "greatest hits" and not realize what else they're posting. --Sneak

I have a tendency to wiki-walk in social media, and it seems like most people don’t do that. E.g. if someone I like makes an interesting post, and it’s a reply to what Voxette said, I go look at Voxette’s blog and see if they’re involved in other interesting discussions. That helps me find interesting stuff sometimes, but it also digs up a lot of TERFs and such. I guess you’re right that if you don’t wiki-walk, you have no idea who these people are.

Yeah, we do the Wiki-walk too, sometimes! (Though we quit with tumblr because it was a really fandom-heavy space, and we get oversaturated with that stuff really fast.) But I can see how someone who's only interested in posts about a narrow subject don't end up wading through someone's full profile. (Especially if they're like... I don't know, 90% memes, 5% philosophy, 1% the subject you care about.)

--Sneak