this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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one of the follies of the early non-research internet was that the folks in charge of the more influential communities (Something Awful comes to mind) all tended to be weird fucking libertarian assholes insisting that debating fascists in a “free and fair environment” (whatever that is) must be a good thing, we can’t just ban them on sight for some reason. generally these weird libertarian assholes were motivated by typical weird libertarian asshole things — greed, or being fascists themselves.
and all of these horseshit policies around not banning fascists ended in complete disaster for those communities and those libertarian shitheads (SA again), but somehow they’re practically the only element of those early communities that carried over to the modern internet, likely because caring about community quality doesn’t make money, but pandering to nazi fuckwits does.
it probably goes without saying, but I take the apparently radical stance that nobody needs to interact with fascists and assholes and I won’t give their bullshit transit on any system I control. it’s always been surprising to me how many sysops consider “kick out the fucking fascists” an unworkable policy when it’s very easy to implement — it only gets hard when you allow the worst fucking people you know to gain a foothold.
I'm not up to date on my SA banning people lore, but hasn't it also been several times that after people finally got banned from they made stuff infinitely worse? Like 4chan is from SA, but there was also a far right racist forum for people banned from SA, the my posting career people for example (at least I heard they were banned SA people, which could be a lie, we know how much they love multiple blankets of irony. Also their site is now dead thankfully).
no, MPC was one of the sites set up by nazis banned from SA
Yeah that is what I meant, that I heard it was setup by exSA neonazis. I wasn't 100% sure.
there’s a direct line from SA not explicitly banning ironic naziism to anime nazis being everywhere and I fucking hate it
Not just SA, but everywhere. We should have listened to the barmen of old better. (hope most of you are familiar with the barman who kicks out the polite nazi story).
SA has been taken over by a non-shithead and now the moderation is "yeah, you can fuck off now" and it's much nicer
though tbf it's greatly improved because we're all old with bad backs now and aren't putting up with dumb bullshit any more
that is true! usually these assholes set things up so the communities they founded collapse when they leave (and from what I’ve heard that almost happened to SA) so I’m glad they’re flourishing within their niche without said asshole parasocially positioned at the helm. I really should re-include the forums in the list of places I visit when I’m bored.
to be fair, a lot of the early Internet, including the early research Internet, was driven by libertarian tendencies (which always ignored the dilemma in combining libertarian tendencies with the fact that the entire early Internet was enabled by massive government funding). John Perry Barlow, the EFF, etc. It’s just that a lot of those people were libertarian utopians – and I will fully admit that in my youth it seemed very convincing. It felt like there were no space for bad actors because when the Internet was smaller, it was less obvious to idealists and the naïve that a larger internet would be incredibly useful for bad actors.
As recently as gamergate the EFF was loudly insisting that all by private companies was wrong, and an intervening few years they have only grudgingly and rarely admitted that overly libertarian moderation policies can suppress speech massively. And yet I fully believe all the EFF people mean well.
i look askance at the ones stanning for fucking bitcoin mining
you're not wrong.