A blog is a lousy social medium; heck, social media are lousy social media. I think lately that I’ve been wrestling far too much with the problem of community on the web, and I have become disillusioned. That this particular community has been under siege by trolls and slimers and shit-stirrers hasn’t helped, either, or that there is far too much cliquishness of a painfully artificial sort.

I must also say that I find the wider community we tried to build at Freethoughtblogs is less a unified group than a disparate collection of loosely affiliated blogs that have found a convenient hosting service, which doesn’t help my mood much, either. We are all objects in space, drifting, occasionally bouncing off each other or tugging gently at each other’s masses. And that’s about it.

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I travel a fair bit…a bit more than I can enjoy, actually. To me, an airplane represents a period of tedious antiseptic confinement, and a hotel room is a closet with a bed that I’ll use for sleeping, nothing more. So this story of a subculture that games the airlines to get constant free travel and hotel rooms is a horror story to me. They fly around pointlessly, land in exotic places and never leave the airport, just waiting to board the next leg of their circuit.

I guess it is a kind of game, and these people are masters of it. I just don’t see the point.

Yet another article about the ongoing Reddit failures portrays those who run the site as Libertarians who have no idea what they’re doing, and the attitude of dudebros running a place to pander to dudebros is inescapable.

Banning communities that actively encourage rape is unequivocally good (even though action hasn’t been taken yet), but it shouldn’t end the discussion. Reddit doesn’t deserve special credit for banning places that tell men to rape women. That ought to be one of the easiest decisions in the world, and the fact that it seems like a novel approach to governing a site with 160 million monthly visitors is abhorrent. Huffman’s plan for hate communities like r/coontown is to quarantine them from the rest of Reddit. But the mechanism of this isolation is a joke. Former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong’s approach to hateful content was telling everyone that “each man is responsible for his own soul.” Reddit’s new policies are basically a restatement of that, plus a button you have to click on. Users will eventually have to sign into Reddit to access its worst communities, but that means nothing will change for everyone who already uses Reddit — Reddit already requires you to log in to leave comments or vote on links, and those members represent the entire community.

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There are these maps of the popularity of certain cuss words in the US — I, of course, browsed through them looking for my county to see what word is representative of our preferred profanity. There are all these words that I’d blush to say in front of my mother, and nope, Stevens County is on the low end for all of them. There’s only one where we stand out.

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It’s always only been second to YouTube in the abysmal quality of its comments, and it’s intentionally structured to promote the worst behavior in its community.

In practice, the ability of anyone to spawn their own subreddit plus the upvoting/downvoting mechanism leads to each subreddit being an angry little fiefdom fiercely dedicated to its own idea of consensus where dissenting opinions get downvoted into oblivion. A community that’s seen to have a particularly obnoxious bias, say, r/Android supposedly being in the tank for Google Nexus devices, will develop a community focused on attacking the first community for being a “circlejerk” (r/Androidcirclejerk) that has the exact opposite bias and exists to post memes mocking Google Nexus devices for how they’re overrated trash. Eventually one community will lose its patience and “brigade” another community, flooding it with hostile posts in order to show the other side how wrong they are, and mods are forced to stay up all night banning people until everything settles down again (and several users, usually female, have quit Reddit for good after being blasted with death threats).

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