[NoMoreNicksLeft]

The reddit discussion for /lit/ is hilarious. It's sad how even reading books has become some political thing. God forbid I like an HP Lovecraft story because it's creepy.

Some of the comments have this "I like how honest and unrestricted /lit/ is, but why can't we have that without all the Nazism and patriarchy" vibe that's just so incredible, I sort of stare at them in amazement.

[ecshafer]

It really just shows how Reddit often “doesn’t get it”. If you don’t want that stuff then just don’t look at it. But Reddit also due to the voting system just kind of tends towards this lowest common denominator malaise of mediocrity. /r/books, /r/literature or even something like /r/fantasy just tends towards talking about a few popular easily digestible books or meta topics.

[huggingmouth]

In case someone needs it spelled out to them: 4chan became such a great place precisely because your allowed to say what you want there. Participating is easy because you can be honest and don't have to police yourself, and as a result posting there becomes FUN.

[michaelmrose]

Can you give an example of a thread on /lit that is of notably higher quality than what can be found on reddit and call out specific comments that wouldn't have been made without benefit of anonymity?

I was put off by the gross fire hose of drek on other boards on 4chan when I looked at it initially but note lit seems to have actually reasonable discussions. That said it doesn't look to my eyes notably different from say reddit save for the intermittent random gross like slurs tossed about which add nothing whatsoever. If folks were banned for calling each other slurs one would hope the same people who had something to say could just say it without including the slurs.

Do you have a counter argument?

[siegecraft]

I don't have specific examples as I am not a regular reader of lit, but I can comment on "it doesn't look to my eyes notably different from reddit." The anonymity, lack of up/downvotes, non-hierarchial layout, lack of moderation, and heavy focus on images creates a very different experience from reddit. Some say this leads to better and more organic discussions (I agree for the most part), but I think they're only going to be as good as their community. Anyway, there's no reason you can't use them both.

> specific comments that wouldn't have been made without benefit of anonymity

Open any thread and you will find tons of examples, no reason to post them here. But I expect you meant specific comments that are valuable and insightful? Probably a matter of taste. On reddit it is at least much easier to find highly-rated comments, which is a plus for voting.

[michaelmrose]

I opened many threads and see zero examples of discussion that couldn't have happened here on or Reddit. The only things I see which couldn't be posted here are offensive and worthless. Can you post a single example?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

You see many examples of comments, I'm sure, that look like they could happen anywhere.

And you continue to believe that, right up until you see a comment just like them, that gets someone banned from reddit. And then you're irate, and you wonder why you were banned. But you can't even get much explanation, because having been banned from reddit, they've taken the one way you might use to demand the explanation.

But even that's not the full picture. Sometimes there are people whose "contrariness" is a bit higher than other people's. And they refuse to participate in places where they aren't allowed to say whatever they want, even if pretty much all the time they'd never say anything that would get them banned. Are those people more interesting than others? Who knows, you'll never find their stuff on reddit.

I think in the legal world, you call this over-moderation a "chilling effect". You don't have to censor everyone, it turns out, if you can scare or bully them into self-censoring.

Eventually, I think, everyone sees what we're talking about. It's just by the time it's so overt that even you can't deny it anymore, there won't be much anyone can do about it.

[pseg134]

They’re easy to miss when you are trying not to see them.

[malfist]

Feel free to provide an example of what we're missing

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> If folks were banned for calling each other slurs one would hope the same people who had something to say could just say it without including the slurs.

You'd hope that, but it doesn't work that way.

In a place where you can be banned for the gross slurs, you might be banned for relating some personal anecdote in which you speak of some other person making a gross slur. Why, when you didn't type in the gross slur yourself?

Who knows. Maybe they think you're secretly a klansman, trying to pollute people's brains with the slur without actually saying the slur. Maybe they think you're not sufficiently progressive enough because you actually have a personal history where you were proximate enough to a bigot that you could hear what they were saying. Maybe it really is Orwellian, and you thought the word though you didn't put it in the comment.

But considering the extra effort it would take to post in such a place, always wondering if the next comment will get you banned, why would you bother?

People with interesting things to say will find it difficult to exist, belong, or remain in such a forum.

I don't think you get any of the good, without accepting that some of the bad has to be present too.

These people who do that sort of banning, somewhere in their shriveled little brains actually believe they're making the world a better place.

[michaelmrose]

I don't think we have to choose between no moderation and excessive moderation nor between 100% anonymity and none. Consider our nicks we each chose the level of anonymity we were comfortable with.

I think if you consider the space of probable commenters and comments and the average quality of discussion obtained by the probable commenter that produces a comment you ought to be able to figure out why removing the producers of some comments improves quality of discussion.

Consider a discussion about an interesting new piece of tech into which a commenter inserts an ad for soap. The comment is not worthless it is worse it has negative value because every reader of the thread must consume more noise to get to the signal. The probable future contribution of the commenter is 99.999999% likely to be negative because commenter is obviously a robot pushing spam. If you allow it then soon your threads will be 90% ads and soon 100% ads because actual people will tire of wading through the slop. Then your threads will only be available on archive.org because the spammers murdered you.

Now lets consider an offensive human being. They see everything in the world as a jewish conspiracy against folks like themselves. They ARE capable of normal communication but they are prone to tracking back to their odious and tiresome conspiracies. First the discussion was about finance aaaaaaaaand now we are talking about Jewish people running the world. Most readers experience this commenters words as offensive and tiresome. Some waste mental energy for the nth time debunking the obvious nonsense. In general the perceived quality of the forum declines and the more content like this we have the more value we lose as other readers go elsewhere.

Unlike the robot have something to lose here both ways. Focusing on the folks you lose because they can't use slurs and not the people you lose because they won't hang out some place they get slurred is a fundamental failure of analysis.The poster may be capable of providing valuable contributions we will lose if we drop an instant banhammer here but we have even more to lose by keeping him on with present contributions. Why?

Two factors:

- Smart helpful content takes energy and the kind of person who you actually want to write commentary has many demands on their time because they actually do useful things. By contrast your uncle who doesn't work can cut and paste or type the same screed from memory at spam bot like levels. Given a chance bad commentary will dominate by volume

- The kind of person capable of producing useful comments is dramatically less likely to also produce bigoted screeds because the through and intelligence needed to produce such allows one to either not think like that or at least to talk about finance without injecting such.

That is to say there is high value in each ban and little of value lost per commenter banned. In fact almost all value that might be lost can be retained by watching new commenters and have them receive polite negative feedback or official warnings instead of instantly banning them when the transgressions are not egregious.

If your uncle can control his tenancy to track back to conspiracy theories he can contribute if not then not much of value has been lost.

Again focusing on the folks you lose because they can't use slurs and not the people you lose because they won't hang out some place they get slurred is a fundamental failure of analysis.

Their shriveled little brains are 100% correct.

[beowulfey]

I think it’s just a matter of taste, honestly.

I don’t enjoy 4chan (I mostly browsed /mu/ when I visited) probably for the same reasons that you do. And that’s perfectly fine!

[tiltowait]

r/books is a disappointingly bad sub. I subbed there for a while, but it was filled with the same recommendations over and over (which is the problem with any recommendation subs).

The kicker for me, though (and the reason I unsubbed) was when the mods barred any posts complaining about the casting of Roland in the Dark Tower adaptation that was made several years ago, on the grounds that the only reason for anyone to disagree with casting Idris Elba was racism. People pointing out that changing Roland's race fundamentally changes his relationship with Susannah (and possibly even has implications for Susannah's relationship with Eddie) had their posts removed.

[edgyquant]

Thats why I don’t use Reddit and would never take any opinion on something from there seriously.

[lukas099]

I use /lit/. It definitely does have Nazism and patriarchy plastered over it. If you dig around, there are great posts there. But it is a valid complaint.

I'm wondering, do you take more issue with the Redditors saying they don't like the far-right stuff on /lit/ than you do with the actual far-right stuff on /lit/? Or are you commenting on the political nature of the entire (/lit/ + Reddit) system?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> I'm wondering, do you take more issue with the Redditors

I joined a subreddit a few years ago, printSF, I think (not sure) thinking that it might be more to my liking. The regular science fiction subreddit seemed to be more about Marvel movies (it's not just reddit that does this, scifi.stackexchange might as well be harrypotter.stackexchange).

I tried to like it. I saw books and authors that were unfamiliar (that should be good... it's difficult to find new stuff I enjoy). But then I started digging into the comments, and it was complete drek. There was one day when I must have read through two dozen, and "Bechdel" was in every single one of them. I don't think I knew what it was at the time, but one of them was a comment haranguing someone else about it, and so I enedd up learning that day.

Another time, someone mentioned Asimov's Foundation in a recommendation thread. The replies were bizarre.

It's clear that whatever they were after is nothing like what I want to read. We're not wanting the same genres. And I don't know why. It'd be one thing if these same sorts of people who were concerned with all that bullshit were happy and well-adjusted. Then it would mean that I was just some old fuddy-duddy and that the world had moved on without me. But they're not happy or well-adjusted, and they seem as if all they want out of this (and everything else) is to ruin and trash what they can.

I suspect that too many literature classes in public schools and community colleges are to blame. They can't listen to or read a story and just enjoy it for what it is. Everything must be deconstructed and hidden meanings revealed, the sort of hidden meanings only they're clever enough to see. And that opens up the cracks for their weird-assed politics to be inserted into it. Then every interaction between every two characters is homoerotic, every dystopia is a critique of capitalism, and the only horror permitted is how conservative modern governments are.

So yeh, I guess you could say this is a bigger problem for me than some halfwit in mama's basement trying to be an edgelord on 4chan and failing. And I hesitate to say that too loudly most of the time, because even though none of my words here are offensive, having described my personality there are those who would seek to make sure I'm not allowed to post ever again.

[lukas099]

So I guess the differentiator for you is that the 4channers are trying to be edgy, meaning they do not take their extremist positions seriously, whereas the redditors are more serious about their political statements?