RIP Culture War Thread
This is a really over the top one sided presentation.<p>The thread being mourned was continually full of really shockingly horrible stuff. Straight faced technobabble laden arguments for genocide and such.  A reliable go-to for &quot;oh-shit,-humanity-is-screwed&quot; porn.<p>It was impossible to tell how much of it was actually awful people earnestly advancing awful ideas vs screwed up performance art with people intentionally posting the worst stuff they could think of just for shock value or to mock the fact that participants there responded so embarrassingly to so much of it. ... but I don&#x27;t think that is a defense of it at all, it&#x27;s an indictment.<p>I had previously believed (and people who knew Scott personally lead me to believe...) that the thread was created as a tarpit for trolls and people with absurdly repugnant views to waste each others time in a place where other people could ignore it-- rather than these discussions invading every other thread and making them useless to the majority of people who want nothing to do with that stuff-- who feel they morally can&#x27;t just sit and pretend its okay to advance horrible policies but also don&#x27;t want to waste their lives rehashing ethical arguments that most people considered settled a century ago. The &quot;designated crap thread&quot; approach is sometimes more effective than punting the sources outright (and also less harmful to false positives)...<p>This post strongly indicates otherwise and is causing me a vertigo inducing shift in how I perceive the author and his community.<p>I couldn&#x27;t be more disappointed. And I&#x27;m only left hoping that the support of that toxicity expressed in Scott&#x27;s post is an emotional retaliation to the despicable harassment he reported experiencing ... rather than an earnest position.<p>I feel like a lot of the HN commentary is essentially unrelated to the actual &#x27;event&#x27; -- The &#x27;deplatforming&#x27; trend is concerning... but that doesn&#x27;t really tell us much about this particular venue. Especially since it continues to exist and hasn&#x27;t in fact, been subject to deplatforming or anything similar. The connection only goes in so far as some of the same pressures probably exists, but I would be a lot more interested in hearing what went on behind some actual major deplatforming incidents. (Medium killing gab.ai&#x27;s post explaining why they didn&#x27;t believe their actions supported hate crimes would be an interesting candidate, since it was a meta-deplatforming, so doubly removed from most pragmatic tradeoffs...)