[sov]

I've been a member of the sub since its inception, and I've long defended Scott's analyses, but, as a longtime reader and (former) participant in the CW threads, I think he's grossly missed the mark here in the first section. I think if you read the first part of this article really closely, that should be obvious.

"I will be honest and admit I rarely read the thread myself." - Scott

"For all its awfulness..." - werttrew

"...practically ever criticism of the CW thread I have ever read is true..." - yrrosimyarin

"Very little was solved" -rwkasten

"I think the CW thread is obviously a huge lump of positive utility for a large number of people, because otherwise they wouldn’t spend so much time on it" - darwin2500

"...it does have a lot of full-time opinionated idiots squabbling, and is inarguably filled with irrationality, bad takes, contrarianism, and Boo Outgroup posturing. I agree with many of [the criticisms] of overtly racist and stupid posts in there." -c_o_r_b_a

I, too, once held a positive opinion on the thread, and so would anyone, having only the knowledge of its maxims and a bleary-eyed take on a small sample of posts. But once you dig deeper, you get what ought to be obvious from the above quotes. There are indeed many honest, well meaning, well informed people that post. They end up getting absolutely pulverized under the millstone of "power users".

The issue with the thread was never that an surveyable proportion of readers would split between left and right.

The issue was that the power users--the ones who post all the time in seemingly every thread--create an environment that drives away the the best posters.

The issue was that a single person clicking "I consider myself left-wing" on a survey (especially when they know the context of the survey is to show relatively even R/L split and the political milieu of the sub is hard R) is very different than their sheer contribution to the social "overton window" of the thread. Those "left wing" posters are the "I believe abortion should be legal, but also I will post my pro-HBD takes forever, at every opportunity". That is, it doesn't really matter what they clicked, because their contribution to the aesthetic of the thread is not accurately represented by the survey.

The issue was that actual factual experts get drowned in a sea of whataboutism and people who think they know better because they have a study to the contrary (did no one else read Beware the Man Of One Study or Epistemic Learned Helplessness!?).

The issue is that there are so few actual left wing posters that they get called out explicitly, by name to answer for "the left" when "they" do something that the forum deems necessary of an explanation (seriously, darwin2500 has the patience of a saint).

The issue is that people who harass (as above), argue in bad faith or seriously contribute to a negative environment don't catch bans except for extreme cases. To the moderators' credit, I've seen some really bad stuff get posters banned, but to speak of the general thread's failure, many of those posts are sitting on a well-into-the-positive amount of upvotes.

Personally, I'm not sad to see the thread go. It was detritus, and it impelled many quality contributors to leave. My favorite poster on the sub (who pretty much never posts there now) wrote a fantastic bit explaining the sub ~6 months ago.

"The experience can be a little jarring because you’ll have some insightful, genuinely depth hub worth comment upvoted and then another highly upvoted comments next to it will be how we should bring back eugenics and how we should limit immigration to people from high IQ countries in Europe and East Asia" - u/yodatsracist as per below

https://www.reddit.com/r/DepthHub/comments/98jco5/uintervers...

And, to be clear, none of this was explicitly Scott's fault (and, to wit, anyone who harassed him personally/professionally is an utter idiot). It was simply Moloch acting on the machinery of the sub.

[ethics_gradient]

That is a great summary, thank you.

[nullc]

I noticed three main misleading arguments in the blog post:

* That the SSC survey tells us anything about the CW thread. Since per his own survey few of the SSC readers read the CW thread why should we expect that many of the CW regulars took the survey? More than twice as many SSC readers indicated that they were aware of the CW thread and choose to not read it than indicated that they read it, which you might take as evidence that the CW regulars are unlike the survey respondents as a whole in at least some ways. Even if you did establish that the readership was broad spectrum that wouldn't tell you anything about the absence of toxic garbage there. Most people are not comfortable engaging in a forum where harmful views 3-sigma outside of their overton window are taken seriously, even if they're only 1% of the posts in much the same way that most people would be uncomfortable accepting an optional blood transfusion where only 1% of the bags were contaminated by HIV and HEP-C.

[Here is the data on the survey respondents readership of the CW thread:

3175 (42.7%) "No, I don't want to read it", 2346 (31.5%) "No, I didn't know it existed", 1425 (19.1%) "Yes, I read it", 369 (4.9%) "Yes, I comment there", 118 (1.5%) no answer.

I don't want to assume bad faith, but I think it's really suspect that this wasn't mentioned in the post. I think it would be very surprising to the people arguing about the CW thread here on HN on the basis of scott's politics graphs.]

* That complaints are from Bay Area liberals that have never interacted with conservatives. As others in this thread have noted here the racist/xenophobic/misogynistic positions that have people shocked are views that wouldn't be presented in polite company pretty much anywhere in the US. Scott is unintentionally using a "motte and bailey" where he pretends that the complaint is merely conservative views, when instead what people get worked up about is stuff like forced sterilization.

* That the incident is an example of deplatforming or otherwise obviously related to trends that suppress public discussion. At least in so far as I am aware the well known examples of deplatforming looked nothing like the harassment Scott reported. I've seen no evidence that any well known deplatforming event was related to harassment by third parties. The CW thread itself was a move from the SSC subreddit to its own subreddit, not a deplatforming and has clearly radically increased its visibility.

And based on the commentary on HN, I think presence of these three fallacious arguments has significantly undermined public discourse on the subject. There are many thoughtful and interesting comments on HN-- expressing concerns about politics in the bay area, or about deplatforming-- which are essentially disconnected from SSC/CW thread specifically because these arguments served the rhetorical purpose of substituting the issue at hand with a largely unrelated one where the readers already had preformed strong opinions.

Scott would probably have done himself and the public a favor by making his post on this subject an adversarial collaboration.