Category: The Undefined Remainder

Geeky stuff. Internet, Games, Free Software, Sci-fi etc.

Feminist lazy linking

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A collection of links, primarily about feminism and gaming.

I’ve been kinda lax in my blogging recently. I’ve been meaning to write on a few subjects but completely useless arguments on reddit keep sucking up on my energy. I’m working on that. That said, you might have noticed that I write more about feminism and satellite subjects lately and this is because I’ve started reading a couple of excellent blogs on the subject in its intersection with gaming and geek culture.

So given that I’m not in the mood to write much today, I thought I’d just post a bunch of interesting stuff instead. Hope y’all like it. Remember that an /r/ before something, means that I’m referring to a reddit section.

A woman shares her story in /r/feminisms of how she was kicked out of an Egyptian protest because she brought up female genital mutilation. Once more a case of how women’s issues need to wait until after the “serious business” has been done.

Penny Arcade discontinued the dickwolves T-Shirt and explained the reasoning behind it in absolute douchebaggery. In my eyes, these dudes have lost serious credit. Of course the discussion that spawn in reddit because of this comment just pointed out how much geek culture is basking in privilege, not to mention rampart misogyny. I posted a link to provide some context from the other side of the dialogue and this was the result. Good going reddit.

Speaking of privilege, have I mentioned the sparkling new subreddit I created to record Reddit’s crass privilege denial? It’s inspired by the late Privilege Denying Dude (of which the tumblr page is once again gone), /r/ShitRedditSays and /r/TransphobiaProject. Join me in bitterly laughing together at some privilege denying dudes.

Mad Props to genderbitch for writing the Methods of Communication for Activists. This is one of the best and most insightful posts I’ve read in years and it gave a lot of insights into the reasons behind The Great /r/Anarchism ShitStorm of 2010. I’m already thinking of ways to combine these particular strengths each of us has rather than argue endlessly with each other.

And now for a blast from the past, check out the sheer amount of misogyny and fat-shaming that exploded from one post critical of the game “Fat Princess”. The internet once again proves to us how despicable gaming culture remains in general. The whole train-wreck of apologia that followed is an embarrassment to all gamers.

And finally, check out this stupifying misogyny from Kanye West. I have only heard of this guy from the whole “Imma let you finish” meme but what I’ve heard of him since just shows that douchebaggery sells in the USA.

And that’s all for now children. If you have have any faith in humanity left after this post, feel free to tune in next time.

So it seems S2 Games continues with the proud tradition of sexism in gaming

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S2 Games, the creator of Heroes of Newerth, shows that they are not below objectifying of women in order to make a buck.

One of the things I liked in the MOBA game Heroes of Newerth is that it had some female heroes which were more than just cleavage and suggestive show of skin (even if those were never far away). The game was still as sexist as most others, what with a multitude of monstrous or fully clothed males and a minority of females, primarily fregile wizards and archers and overwhelmingly suggestive.

I wasn’t really paying a lot of attention to that until now however, and the reason why I started was when their latest hero was revealed in a leaked newsletter and her concept art looks like this:

A "Bikini" robe with patently ridiculous (for someone going into battle) beach panties

Now generally this is not something to get particularly worked up about. Just S2 Games caching on titillation for their primarily teenage/young adult audience. I was content to stay and perhaps argue a bit on the thread on reddit about how patently ridiculous this outfit and character is for the battlefield. However, others brought this issue up in the fora and against my better judgement, I felt compelled to leave a few comments and links there as well.

That went as well as one might expect, as the audience for which S2 is based on is rightly considered to make up the worst community of any game ever. And in one such community, sexism, homophobia and ableism are never below the surface but rather blaring in your face 24/7. So if you want to see the results and possible bash your heads against the keyboard as well ,because of the sheer stupidity and how much S2 will allow crass ableism and homophobia to shine in their official forums, go check them out.

Thread 1 | Thread 2 | Thread 3 (good points, see what replies it gets)

Of course, all the classic derailment and logical fallacies that one might expect have been presented and supported, at times by S2 staff themselves.Here’s some of the most common samples

  • “But every other game is doing it!” – Frequently used fallacy. Actually repeated by a couple of S2 staff. Most people outgrow this in kindergarten.
  • “Don’t you have more important things to worry about?” – Classic Derailment
  • “The audience asked for more boobs, and we delivered” – FSM forbid that you might not indulge your audience’s sexism. Again, actually said by S2 staff.
  • “Sex Sells” – Yeah, for some reason I do not see an equal representation of “sex” for female and LGBT consumption…
  • “S2 is being sexist against males too!” – Repeated Ad Nauseum. Fortunately I only had to link here.
  • “U gay?” (In various expressions) – Not even worth a reply, but mentioned just for the sheer popularity of it.
  • “There’s not so many half-naked chicks and those that are, have a back story which explains why they need to be so.” – Against commonly used and I’m going to expand on this particular a bit more, with pictures, to show just how ridiculous it is.

Part of the last argument is to argue that compared to the overall cast (or other even more sexist games like League of Legends), the amount of “hot” female heroes are not a lot. This argument falls flat on its face when one does even a cursory look at the heroes cast.

  • There’s currently 74 heroes (including Empath)
  • Of these, only 13 (17%) are clearly females (There’s a bunch of characters that are not clear due to their form, but for most of those, their body type and voice pitch is also clearly male)
  • Of these 13, there is only 1 (7%) that is fully clothed (iirc it’s Wretched Hag for which I couldn’t find the concept art) which means showing no cleavage or trying to get some kind of sex appeal [EDIT: I might be wrong here, it may be the case that another hero is fully clothed, valkyrie, as a reddit commenter points out. I seem remember her model as not fully clothed however and I can’t find any official concept art]. All others, including the monstrous females, have a clearly feminine body displaying sexually appetizing forms. Yes, even the monstrous ones. Examples:

A ghost with appetizing cleavage. YumA spider-woman, who still retains a human belly and curves.

And these are the absolutely least sexy females one can find in the game mind you. There’s one more, Moon Queen, for which I don’t have a concept art but only the model, which seems even less suggestive than these, but I can’t tell if her human torso is naked or not.

  • Of the human-form females (in which I’m including “non-humans” who just have a pair of horns or wings to separate them), all of them are suggestive, by which I mean that cleavage and/or naked body/legs are shown. That’s 100%. And while some of them are acceptable (at least in concept, like Valkyrie), most others, by default are absurdly dressed, even for most other games’ standards. (Click for larger images)
Almost naked except for a strip of fabric covering her breasts, a g-string/loincloth on her legs and an absurd hat.
Ophelia is supposed to be one with the beasts and therefore needs to go butt-naked. Of course that means a beach-bikini style cloth and a supermodel body.
Blue skinned assasin female handling a scythe. Her hair and clothes are fading into smoke. She is wearing an elaborate bikini-mail
Fayde is supposed to be a shadow assassin, able to "fade out". I guess that means that anything other than mail bikini is faded out permanently.
A grey-skinned female notching an arrow and riding a skeletal beast powered by green energy. She is wearing practically nothing except a hood and some skeletal bone armor covering her breasts and back
One can only assume that the Forsaken Archer needs to armor towards her front, as she is always running away. Zing!

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Mind you, I am not cherry picking my examples, these are literally the only concept art I could find for the human heroes, with the exception of Valkyrie, which looks like this, which unfortunately does not accurately represent the actual model.

  • If we consider the characters that received an alternative model (through the goblin shop), things become even more sexist. You see, various male and female character are getting alternative models people can buy with real world money or by grinding the game’s currency. When a male gets an alternative male model, it always is something cool. Gladiator (a whip wielding hero) becomes Indiana Jones. Magmus (A burning rock hero) becomes a giant fire scorpion. Kraken (a water-based hero) becomes a giant crustacean.

    But when males become females, or females get an alternative female model, guess what it happens…They become sexier.You remember the spider woman before?

A spider-woman with 6 extra (non-used) legs on her back spread as wings, who still retains a human belly and curves.

Well, she becomes like this.

The spider-woman receives a supermodel body and a face.

And there’s also two male wizards, one of ice, and one of fire. Their transformation from male to female is kinda like this.

An ice-wizard, wearing a long blue robe covering his whole body
Normal for a wizard huh?
The female version of the fully clothed fire wizard. The red robe became a robe-bikini.
Apparently females in Newerth by default can only choose bikini-styled robes.

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Because everyone knows that women can’t compete with men on skill alone. They need to show some cleavage and supermodel looks in order to be their equals. Sigh. Now compare the females with the wide array of looks and builds for the male heroes of which most are not even remotely suggestive, even if they are nominally bare skinned (Because of course the trolls of the forum were all to eager to point to Kraken and complain that he’s too naked as a sarcastic counter-point). You’ve got fat heroes, truly monstrous males, disgusting males, macho males, punk males, mad males, sneaky males and so on, and most of these don’t even need to be remotely suggestive to a female audience to be liked.

And finally of course, the last ditch argument is that all those females are wearing bikinis because their story demands it. Ophelia is “one with the nature”. Nymphora is a nymph (and we all know how those dressed). Valkyrie is a Valkyrie (and Norse concept art shows them as wearing veils and bare breasted) and so on. This argument of course ignores some very important parts. First of all, Valkyries and Nymphs and other historical archetypes were not generally going into battles. When humans do go into battles, they are generally well armoured.

Secondly if all the concepts for your female heroes somehow end up requiring them to wear (chain mail) bikinis in battle, perhaps one should reconsider those concepts because as sure as fuck one can think concepts for heroes which do not end up with them being a titillation product. The fact that S2 seems to be able to think or or choose concepts which require suggestive females shows that their sexism starts from very early on in the design process.

It’s unfortunate that S2 is going this way, when practically both of their competitors are just trying to outdo each other on who can objectify females the most in their games. But I guess one shouldn’t expect better from them anyway given how they treat other similar subjects.

On a last note, I’m going to leave you with an image which shows how the HoN concept artists think of the females in the game. This doesn’t say much but it does display the mentality behind the designers of the game.

5 of the female characters of Heroes of Newerth. All of them showing ridiculous amount sof cleavage and gravity defying boobsTop right to bottom left
Top right to bottom left: Succubus, Ophelia, Andromeda, Dark Lady, Nymphora

Privilege Denying Dude is down once more

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Fuck Yeah, Privilege Denying Dude, is down 🙁

It seems like the PDD is generating quite an amount of hate, enough to be pulled from Tumblr not once, but twice. Or at least this is what I assume is the reason behind the second incarnation of PDD being at status “Not Found” at the moment.

I’m going to give Tumblr the benefit of doubt here and not immediately jump on the accusation bandwagon, although given their previous willingness to hastily accept a half-arsed copyright claim, I don’t hold much hope. I only hope that if the site was indeed taken down by tumblr, the next PDD site learns from all this use something they can control more.

Privilege…so thick…can't breathe…

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Oh Privilege Denying Dude, you so funny!

Just look at this goddamn shit of a thread. The whole thing just reeks of unchecked privilege and rampart douchebaggery. I think this PDD I just cooked up summarizes it nicely.

Picture: Background: 8 piece pie style color split with red and teal alternating. Foreground: White guy with glasses and light shadow wearing a sweat shirt over a button down and short black hair. Has a smug, arrogant facial expression and crossed arms. Top text: “Using "tranny" as an insult doesn't mean that you're "transphobic"” Bottom text: “I don't hate them. I just don't care about their feelings”

Even a large number of transgendered people pointing out how wrong and hurtful he is to transgendered people was not enough to make this PDD rethink his perspective.

I think this brilliant post explains things best (h/t FuchsiaGauge)

Incentives and how the environment affect human behaviour

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Can we radically change the attitude of a whole community by simply giving an incentive which rewards it?

A "Kudos" candy box.
Image via Wikipedia

I’ve recently gotten back into Heroes of Newerth (AKA HoN) and as it always happens when my interest is focused on something particular, I’m getting a lot of ideas for improvements. And one of the things that seriously needs improvement in HoN is the community behaviour. You see, at the moment HoN has rightly conquered the top of the food chain of games with the most shitty community, even bypassing the champions like Halo and Call of Duty with just how much abuse you get to hear in every game from your own team. To give you an idea of how bad it looks, there’s practically no thread in reddit’s /r/gaming (a community of 300k people) about HoN, which doesn’t have at least 1/3 of the people mentioning how bad the community is and how one should keep away from it for this reason. In the official fora, you get “the community is bad” posts almost daily. I was posting about this stuff 2 years ago and things are just as bad now as they were then.

The reason why the community is so bad is practically because of the rules of the game and the kind of mentality it breeds. As one of the community managers explained:

Fact of the matter is, every game in HoN is fought tooth and nail, and most of the time it is simply economically efficient to just try and carry a bad team yourself than it is to try and coach them while playing. HoN is a very fast paced game and ‘playing two heroes at once’ is no easy feat, especially when most of the time when you coach people in-game they wont improve anyways, and will sometimes even get mad at you for trying to help them.

Which is fairly accurate even though I could mention a lot of other stuff that adds to the problem (such as stat tracking). This is fact is a prime example of how the environment of a situation, breeds a certain kind of behaviour from the people in it. In this case, unfortunately it’s complete intolerance of even the slightest failing and rampart elitism. It’s pretty bad in-game but it also heavily spills out in other areas such as the fora or in reddit, making the whole experience require a very thick skin to say the least.

However recently with the 2.0 update, a new exciting feature has been added and that is a form of currency called “goblin coins” and a store where you can redeem those for some aesthetic purchases (new skins, models, avatars, that sort of thing). Now this is the first form of actual incentive the game has that is not directly tied to winning games or achieving some particular task within the game. The fact that the goblin coins are abstracted from gameplay (even though they’re normally awarded because of it) means that they can also be awarded for other reasons, and as the person who pushed for them notes, it allows the HoN devs to use them as an incentive for so much more.

Given correct implementation, goblin coins have the capacity to finally provide an incentive for people in the HoN community to stop being dickwads in or outside the game. It will once again modify the environment so as to mold the human behaviour within it.It is a good first step, but it could be so much more.

Talking with the community manager today, the idea came to me that while goblin coins can be used as an incentive to improve the community attitudes, they are still primarily tied either to winning games (therefore still giving an incentive to be an asshole in-game, if it [appears to] provide a competitive advantage at winning games) , or with IRL currency. These two dilute the effectiveness of using goblin coins as an incentive for any other purpose since it fairly easy for someone to continue being a dick as they can make up for it by simply winning more games, or by just being richer than others in real life.

In fact, this little fact of market economies IRL is one of the main reasons why rich people can afford to be bigger assholes than everyone else since it all comes down to money and we have tied so much of human accomplishment and wellbeing to how wealthy one is. Of course this is not the whole picture but I digress anyway.

This means that it would be far more effective if there was a particular incentive for good behaviour which could not be bypassed by other means and the idea came to me of just how much more effective a secondary currency would be that not only was not tied to the skills of one in-game, or the money they have IRL, but that the only possible way to receive it was by good behaviour in game. Lets call this new currency “Kudos” as a tribute to the Algebraist 🙂

So how could this Kudos economy affect the community? Lets take a theoretical setup. We assume that one can only receive Kudos from other people, you can give Kudos to someone after a match by clicking on their name, or you could give Kudos to someone in the fora for making a good and thoughtful post. There is no other way to receive Kudos. In other words, one cannot buy them with real life money as this would defeat part of the purpose, allowing trolls and dickwads to achieve rewards for good behaviour while not having any.

Now lets also assume that Kudos can only be used in a special shop which sells distinct rewards from the Goblin shop. At the moment, HoN’s goblin shop sells alternative skills and models, avatars and icons and even different announcers voices. Now imagine that the Kudos shop sold stuff that not only you could not find in the Goblin shop, but that complemented any purchases you did from the Goblin shop. For example, while one could buy new models via Goblin coins, you could only buy new skins or accessories via the Kudos shop, so someone who wants to completely “pimp out” their favourite hero, needs not only to be a good player, but also a good player. This can be expanded further with one selling custom avatars, while the other sold custom titles. Stuff like that.

The end result would be a distinct incentive that pushes people to try and be well liked by other players enough to receive Kudos which they can then exchange for something only such people can have. It is not the best incentive one can have since it’s still all based on some sort of an “e-peen contest” in the end, but we are in an imperfect system so we have to do the best we can within it. What this system would achieve is that people would still be trying to fulfil their ego with shiny digital toys, but the actions they use to do that would have a positive effect rather than a negative. This would then create a cascading effect of making the community more welcome to new player and therefore more successful, subconsciously conditioning players to use and expect good behaviour and ultimately for them to abhor and punish bad behaviour.

All this, by simply modifying the environment slightly so that the incentives push for a different behaviour. This is a similar idea as expressed by Human iteration, with the difference is that this is actually feasible in the very short term and we can then actually empirically observe the results in the microcosm of a gaming community. I believe that from an memetic perspective this makes a lot of sense and will be a very exciting experiment to see.

Unfortunately, I doubt S2 (the publishers of HoN) would go through the effort of implementing anything so drastic but one never knows. There is certainly a lot of pressure on them to improve the community behaviour and perhaps the constant and loud outcry on this subject will make them bold enough to try.

A treasure trove of Privilege Denying Dudes

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Concentrated privilege denial. It burnssss

Holy shit, I think I’ve hit the motherlode!

Here’s some necessary background.

Of course, one doesn’t expect much from a community of primarily male teenagers with serious behaviour issues but almost every other post seems to be a PDD waiting to happen. I couldn’t resist making a few and posting them to the privielege denying dude website. And these are just from this 1 post!  I could easily cook up another or two from it as well.

You can see the second one below (click for large image)

Now go forth and mine this thread for glorious PDDs!

Updates for Everyone!

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It’s like the dream-week for all Strategy gamers. 3 mega-patches for 2 TBS and one RTS. We’re never seeing the sun again

It seems this is the week of the mega-update. Three of my favourite games have been patched with a pretty heavy update which changes quite a lot of things all over the place. First it was Heroes of Newerth, which got to version 2.0 and introduced the Casual Mode (that I played and I really enjoyed) a new LoL-style ((League of Legends, another game that follows the DotA recipe)) online shop where people can buy extra stuff for their game like alternative models and soundpacks, plus the preparation for the new Matchmaking system. Unfortunately this also spurred some controversy when it was revealed that one of the new Sound packs was playing on a steretype of gays. The company behind HoN, S2, tried to play it as if it was nothing of the sort , but unfortunately for them, someone spilled the beans. Not cool S2.

Then it was Elemental: War Of Magic, who’s disastrous launch saw the game bashed in almost all reviews and burned a lot of early buyers. Fortunately, Stardock stayed with it and hired some excellent talent in the form of Kael (the guy who directed/created the awesome Fall from Heaven mod for Civilization IV) and the game has completely reworked its mechanics and interface. Now the patch 1.1 which introduces these changes to the community is out and after a few hours of playing it yesterday, I’m extremely happy to say that the game is starting to shape up to my expectations. The game is infinitelly more playable and enjoyable now and the next two expansions (which I’m going to get for free, as a bonus for buying the game early) are going to just keep building on top of that. If you haven’t yet checked Elemental, now is the time, since if you buy it before the new year, you will get the first expansion for free 😉

And finally today, Civilization V released its own big patch, which promises to make significant changes to the AI and address a lot of the game mechanics that were broken or badly designed since release. The AI changes are nowhere near the stuff that Elemental implemented (such as multi-threading AI, which makes new turns come instantly) but are sure to make the game a bit more interesting to play on anything but the highest difficulties where the computer is cheating its arse off. I haven’t yet tried it out as it just came out, but I’m excited about that as well.

With all these updates, I now just have to replay those games, and given other stuff, such as the recent Humble Indie Bundle 2 which just came out this week as well and provides the best offer ever (hint, hint, buy it the fuck now) and the upcoming Steam Christmas Sale, I don’t think I can afford to leave my hourse, eat or sleep for the next weeks. Good thing I’ve got a vacation coming out. Oh and do pay attention to how many people bought the bundle for GNU/Linux and what they paid on average. It’s as if there’s an untapped market or something… 😉

Related articles

The /r/anarchism ShitStorm flares up again: Round Three

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More Drama in /r/anarchism.

The Sacred Chao
Image via Wikipedia

A few days ago, I wrote about the drama that was transpiring in /r/anarchism. Back then I wrote that we had reached a unsteady compromise and I expressed cautious optimist for the future. Well, I’m sad to say that things didn’t turn out the way I planned and the third wave of the shitstorm was soon upon us. I will attempt to explain how we reached this point.

QueerCoup and Db0 bash heads.

At the end of my last post, I mentioned that we had reached a more cooperative attitude with QueerCoup (QC from now on) but this was quite a premature statement. Just one day later, they made a very aggressive post about me, which was quite a surprise to tell you the truth. Soon after, they stepped down as a mod as well and took a less active part in the subreddit.

While QueerCoup was mostly inactive, other people started becoming more active, such as mapthon and thepinkmask who had very strong feminist tendencies. At some point QC returned and made a post praising them, while condemning what they perceived as a majoritarian push by me. However the wording of the post was such that it insulted a female mod that was before, which led to a heated argument between myself and QC again, and finally a call out. While the argument in the end was put down to a bad wording and a misunderstanding, the bad blood between us seems to have been cemented for now and snipes against each other would continue to this day.

Why are they here?

A very common occurance while the above was happening, was people requesting mods to be demodded, or people to be removed from /r/metanarchism. Usually the mods were asked to be removed for not being modded according to the process. People were particularly asking for mods ptimb and enkiam to be removed, which eventually led the former to delete their account altogether. On the other hand, many requested that humanerror and ASDFOKJOI3123 to be removed from the /r/metanarchism approved submitters list, which due to its private nature, would block them from seeing and participating in it.

Tensions flared when enkiam removed around 5 people unilateraly from /r/metanarchism’s approved submitter list and then posted about it. They were quickly restored by other mods, and only two ended up being removed after discussion, but it added to the distrust of enkiam’s power, leading to yet another post calling for him to be demodded. In fact, the curious fact was how the top mods of /r/anarchism (i.e. those who cannot be demodded by others easily), skobrin and dbzer0, were being “pulled” by both sides to act. On one side we were asked to act to demod mods like enkiam while on the other we were asked to start being more active with our mod powers. Skobrin remained largely inactive except removing the most egregious comments, while I tried to receive a clear democratic decision behind my actions.

On the other hand, the process for calling out abusive and oppressive behaviour on the main sub went better, and various elements such as unrepentant MRA derailers and known fascists were banned through a democratic process. A lot of other meta posts were being discussed, such as the header icon and the sidebar policies. Things seemed to be calming down again, but this wouldn’t last.

Welcome to Operation Mindfuck

After someone fraudulently accused the redditor R_A_W of being a stormfront entryist, the pinkmask suggested that this might all be an elaborate trolling attempt in order to see FUD and set anarchists against each other. Given the username of R_A_W as well as some others who used words like “Fnord” in their names taking part in these discussions, a Discordian Operation Mindfuck was suspected and an unconventional solution suggested. However, soon after a discordian was outright banned for their offensive username, an insidious subversion attempt came to the spotlight.

It became obvious that we were being targetted, and it’s not at all a big jump to assume that this further aggravated what followed.

The mother of all ShitStorms

There wasn’t one event that sparked the biggest one of all, but rather a lot of small things coincided to prepare the ground for a lot of lulz at /r/anarchism’s expense all over reddit. I’ll try to present them as accurately and objectively  as I can.

One vital catalyst to the whole issue, was the implementation of the suggestion to make our spam filter public (which includes the deleted posts). I eventually hacked around borrowed code and made our mod actions transparent.

At around the same time, littlepinklies, posted in /r/mensrights to show her support, which drew a lot of visitors from that subreddit, which didn’t go unnoticed by anarchists and happened to coincide with this post by keteht, which sparked a lot of discussion on the actions of the mods in the main reddit and due to the MRA crowd being there, the discussion was skewed heavily towards unmoderation. Further aggravating the issue was the attempted privcheck from keteht which drew a hostile reaction from QC and another call-out for them in /r/metanarchism. Keteht requested to be allowed to see what was being said about his family, but was refused entry by enkiam (eventually overriden by others mods).

Because of the post by keteht which was surprisingly active for /r/anarchism’s standards, a new post was raised calling for a  “referendum”. Unfortunately, it was formed in entirely the wrong way ((In reddit, when one wants to call a vote, they shoudn’t ask people to upvote the topic itself as a form of vote. Doing it this way means that a lot of quick downvotes will hide the topic altogether, stopping the discussion, while a lot of people upvote such topics just to preserve the discussion)). This post was quickly followed by two crossposts in /r/mensrights, the biggest of which was this.

These actions made the moderator enkiam believe that there was an organized reactionary attempt and he made the unfortunate decision to delete the referendum post, as well as the satelite metathreads that spawned around it. However, due to the newly implemented transparency of the spam filter, these actions were now painfully visible and reddit at large picked up on that, and descended on /r/anarchism to call everyone a hypocrite. The referendum post is upvoted to the stratosphere and any opposing comment, especially from radical feminists and mods is quickly downvoted to oblivion.

The cross-posts from reddit at large come in rapid succession. We’re linked from /r/funny, /r/bestof, /r/reddit.com and others, which are some of the most populated places, quickly overwhelming the actual anarchists the frequent /r/anarchism. At the end of the day, /r/anarchism achieves 10 times the number of normal unique visitors, primarily at the referendum post and the next day 5 times as many.

The external visitors heavily upvote the referendum and this is then used as stepping stone from other regulars to ask how a complete unmoderation might happen. Others point how the results is not an accurate repressentation of /r/anarchism’s crowd given how many people arrived from outside and what kind of people they are.

A lot of mods are harassed to step down while this goes on, while a few others leave in disgust or despair when they notice the actions of enkiam. defectedyouth in particular, re-approves the referendum and other mods quickly approve the rest. Reaction against enkiam reaches a fever pitch which eventually makes him declare his resolution. Dbzer0 in the end, requests that he step down which further draws the ire of QC and the /r/anarchocommunism crowd, which declare this an act of cowardice and treason. Other mods voice their their agreement for enkiam stepping down.

Enkiam in the end is gone, as the visitors start dispersing, and so the anarchists voices can once again be heard. For example, a gloating thread for enkiam’s departure is quickly posted but doesn’t draw nearly as much support as one would expect and the OP is quickly reminded that gloating is not at all appropriate in this situation.

As the dust settles, the mods who are left take an unofficial stance to wait and see what the actual community wants, before taking anything more than a janitorial action. A lot of valuable regulars have already left, griffjam, voltairine, zhouligong, ptimb and others, while many who remain become more inactive or take a break. A lot are worrying about how much the reactionary elements will stick around and continue pushing for anti-feminist agendas and how that will affect a community that is split between trying to be inclusive and trying to retain its libertarian character.

Do we need more direct action than debate on inclusive spaces?

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Does oppressive speech merit censorship? We explore this question on reddit.

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As the recent /r/anarchism drama slowly dies down, we keep having discussions on the merits of the various courses of action we’re considering. I just wrote a lengthy reply on the issue of “aggressive censorship” on the subreddit that I thought was interesting enough to share ((I think I’ll start doing this more. My blog remains silent while I write essays over in reddit. Perhaps I can hit two birds with one stone)).

The background here is the ban of a Men’s Rights Advocate (MRA) who started hanging out in /r/anarchism making civil but strictly anti-feminist comments. He continued doing this for a while and many people expressed how annoyed they were by his presence, especially since it coincided with the subreddit being linked from others ones, and thus waves of the classic redditor (which takes casual sexism to new heights) started coming in and upvoting this MRA’s comments. His multiple derailments led me to give him a warning and after discussion among the regular members of the reddit once he outright refused to stop this behaviour, we decided to ban him.

The following is one of the discussions that followed

db0: The problem is not that he’s wrong, but that he’s derailing discussions left and right and is unwilling to stop. I had no problem with him being wrong. I have a problem with him being disruptive. And even though it doesn’t bother me especially, I’m a privileged person in this situation so this doesn’t mean much. His attitude is still creating an atmosphere which is alienating to the people we’re trying to attract, such as women.

humanerror: Personally, I’m highly distrustful of aggressive censorship in the name of attracting alienated persons. I recognize that the intentions behind it are good, but I think it’s essentially wrongheaded and counterproductive. I don’t think making this place into a walled garden where everyone has to walk around on tippy toes for fear of giving offense will succeed in attracting anyone. If an alienated person comes and encounters alienating speech, I trust they will also find that speech downvoted to hell, and probably a dozen other users calling the speaker an asshole. If anything, I expect that that’s the kind of display that would make an alienated person feel welcome. Because they really are welcome, and we don’t need moderator action to make that true.

db0: I was on the same boat, but by reading more about it and talking to such oppressed classes, I can now understand their view better. While it’s OK for us to ignore such comments until they are downvoted, or to rationally argue against them; for such oppressed classes, every instance of casual misogyny hurts and every instance of a privileged comrade treating it as if it’s worthy of a rational response, is giving it credence, and hurts.

We don’t rationally debate things such as holocaust denial (unless we’re just looking to waste time) for example, because to do so would assume that they are not ridiculous to begin with. Of course, we don’t feel the need to ban holocaust denialists (anymore) because everyone knows they are ridiculous and laughs or insults them out of the room. Same with monarchists or pro-slavery people. But sexism, racism and others like them, are still very much accepted and preserved by a large number of people, who are actively maintaining oppression through them to this day. This sheer amount of conscious or casual support means that those ideologies get some serious backup always, and unless we act to marginalize them, this place will not be an inclusive space. The oppressed classes will feel as oppressed here as they do elsewhere. Perhaps marginally less so because there’s more outspoken critics of oppression here, but as we get more and more lurkers who skew votes and swamp us with comments, this organic anti-oppression cannot keep up.

humanerror: I think as a general rule we should be extremely tolerant of sincere dumbasses. Participation in this community is an ongoing learning experience for all of us, and some of us are always going to be further along than others.

db0: Again, I agree, but only as long as those dumbasses are not stubborn. People should understand that this is an inclusive space and act accordingly, by accepting some of the same premises we all do. To give you an extreme example to signify what this means: An accepted premise is equal voting rights for all. If one were to come here, being a sincere dumbass, and ask, “but why do women deserve to vote?” and keep asking this on every democratic decision we’re making and refusing to drop it, then this is derailment.

You may think that they would obviously be ignored which is true in this example, because those premises are now widely accepted. But there’s other premises, such as those of modern feminism, that aren’t, and for feminists, challenging them is as frustrating as the above question. And yet non-feminists do no see this because of their privilege. The extreme question I posted above was considered a “valid” one a 150 years ago or so and this is what made it frustrating to first-wave feminists of that time.

This discussion is still ongoing along with many others like it. What is your perspective on this issue?

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I Survived /r/anarchism's ShitStorm of 2010 and I Didn't Even Get a Lousy T-Shirt.

Db032 Comments

A lot of drama is going on in the anarchism section of reddit. This is the history of it, as seen through my eyes.

the calm before the shit storm.
Image by dearsomeone via Flickr

Anyone looking in on the subreddit of anarchism, would think that all-out-war is breaking out. Call-outs from people against the mods and call-out from mods against each other. Reactionary downvote brigades and sarcastic trolls. Posts about rules and posts against rules. And all the sideline, statists, Men’s Rights Activists and (right-)libertarians having the schadenfreude of their life.

Obviously anarchism can’t work right?

Well yes it can, but before we go into that, let me present the history of these events in as much an objective way I can (I will try to put in some links later).

The origins.

Until one point, we had the unwritten policy of simply modding anyone who is a contributing member of the community. This had been setup by one of the early mods, joeldavis, and it was an interesting alternative to the classic oligarchical mod structures of most other subreddits. It wasn’t perfect but it was good. At this point, there was a general agreement that mod’s only rule was to prevent the spam filter from catching legitimate posts and to check each other’s power.

The Failsafe mod

Given the way that moderation was implemented, any mod could de-mod any other mod, which presented the threat that a malicious person might masquerade themselves as a contributing member long enough to get modded up, and then quickly de-mod everyone else and destroy the reddit. To avoid this, we decided to elect a failsafe moderator who would be the owner of the subreddit and could not be demodded in this way. The candidate was chosen to be Veganbikepunk, the original creator of the subreddit.

Then reddit changed the code so that latter mods could not de-mod their seniors. This made things safer but ultimately more hierarchical unfortunately. This is isn’t so much related but a reason to understand why things progressed the way they did.

Showing our feminist colours.

I don’t remember exactly how it started, but at one point we started modifying the header icon of the reddit to point out our solidarity with other movements, such as radical feminism or queer anarchism. This was opposed by very few mods (particularly a few who were leaning more towards the propertarian values) and quite a few subscribers of the subreddit. Discussions heated up on this issue but most of the regulars agreed that pointing out this solidarity is important.

Unwelcome elements

A few misogynistic and white-supremacy  advocates started appearing in the reddit and posting, well, misogynistic and white-supremacy shit. Many correlated this to the recent change of the header icon, particularly since many of those elements were posting especially against this change. As one mod put it (paraphrase), “feminism made the reactionaries come out of the woodwork.”

This led to outrage from many members of the reddit, who felt that this community should not tolerate such speech which was reinforcing oppression of marginalized classes. This was usually called the “No Platform” position. Many of the old school mods (including myself) suggested that the organic moderation of the community via voting on the comments and their posts was enough to counter such elements and no further action was needed.

Others posted that the organic moderation was subverted via external reactionary brigades ((We do have proof that white-supremacy groups like stormfront have had organized plans to make their position heard, by collectively voting on their positions. People from other subreddits such as /r/mensrights also often request help from their group when they are downvoted and confronted)) and thus, stronger action was required to combat this phenomena and preserve /r/anarchism as an anarchist community.

The Banhammer falls.

As this dicussion was raging, a mod called bmoseley07 (who has since deleted his account) went ahead and banned one of the most egregious scum. A person called Zamato Elite. This is pretty much the point where all shit hit the fan. The ban was quickly reversed by other mods, only to be redone and undone again and again.

The mod discussion pretty much exploded, and two sides quickly formed an polarized in the debate. On one side was the argument that banning is not inherently authoritarian when it combats oppressive actions and speech and that /r/anarchism should be a safe space for oppressed classes. The other side was arguing that free speech is not inherently oppressive, and especially not when it can be countered with other means such as downvoting, and that the problem with those reactionary elements is transient and they will leave discouraged when their comments are consistently downvoted.

Disclaimer: I was on the latter group. At that point, I didn’t believe that the issue was as big as it was made out to be, and certainly not requiring a banhammer.

Things went pretty much downhill from here. Quickly other people were nominated for banning and some did it with very little input from others, further aggravating the other side, who then undid any changes. Insults from both sides were common with one side being labeled “vanguardists” and other being the “manarchists”. Meta discussions on mod abuses raged and many people started posting articles explain why moderation is not inherently authoritarian.

It’s important to note that while this was happening, no mod actually de-modded another one who opposed them. Many people who look in from the outside, think that this actually happened, but this is not true. Even the most radical elements of each camp avoided this.

Guidelining

As things seemed to be devolving into an all out mod-edit-wars, a few people tried to come up with some common ground solutions. The first such attempt was QueerCoup’s Banning Procedure, which was a draft that was continuously updated with input from the community. It didn’t treat banning as taboo, but it also stipulated that it must be the last course of action after all other options have been exhausted. It also required a lot of agreement from the mods and gave a chance to people being targeted to avoid it.

Unfortunately, since many still felt that banning was bad in all cases, this procedure didn’t gain much traction. Some opposed it out of principle. The mod wars continued.

Seeing this, dbzer0 (that is me, in case you forgot) drafted a different policy which basically took the events that were already happening and used them as a basis for a policy. This would allow people who could compromise just a little to work with each other in a more organic way and make mod actions resemble a more direct action.This was met with more support and with the unsaid consent of most mods, since hey, this policy just allowed them to do what they were doing anyway.

Speaking for myself, I had started to accept than banning might be acceptable in some circumstances, in order to preserve the inclusive space of /r/anarchism. I was still very much for free speech and (perma)banning only as a last resort, and against making /r/anarchism a safe space (i.e. a place where no opposing views are requested).

The Purge

As dbzer0’s guidelines started to get traction, the unthinkable happened. Someone de-modded everyone (we had upwards of 50 mods at that point), including themselves, and left veganbikepunk as the only moderator of /r/anarchism. This was quickly identified to be the user idonthack who used to be the most senior after VBP. idonthack was a vocal proponent of the no-banning policies and I assume he did it because the accepted rules seemed to be moving in the opposite direction. He never did account for himself on this (quite authoritarian) act, so I can’t really say much more about that.

This was since known as the Great Mod Purge of 2010. It frustrated both sides, including the only mod left, VBP, who quickly found himself to be the centre of attention.

At this point, I used this release from my “duties” to take a break from the drama in /r/anarchism and go do something relaxing. As such, my knowledge of the events following this, until the last week are a bit sketchy, so If I’m getting something wrong, please correct me.

The Bro-Trolls come, a Monarch Falls.

Even though VBP had stated that he was not going to take any action until a community decision on moderation was reached, he was the de-facto monarch of the sub. He also quickly banned two of the most egregious scum, Zamato Elite and Godspiral.

Around this time, a new reddit was created, pretty much by the pro-ban group of /r/anarchism. This was /r/anarchocommunism and from what I know, it was used as a launch group for a coordinated trolling assault on /r/anarchism. It wasn’t created for this reason, but this happened because of VBP “fatal” mistake.

He banned longtime.

Longtime was one of the most outspoken radical feminists of /r/anarchism. She routinely called out the casual sexism of many members and was particularly fond of using irony and sarcasm as weapons and turning the words of people against them. This had the effect of making her both receive a lot of flak by the people she assaulted in this way, and to also make her a sort of an icon for people fighting against accepted sexism in /r/anarchism. A favourite tactic of longtime was to write a comment in ALL CAPS and exaggerating the sexism or derailment in the comment she was replying to and thus shaming them into submission (imho good) or angering them enough to lash out (imho bad). This will become important in a sec.

After the mod purge, the efforts of the radical feminists were effectively countered. They could no do anything else except use the voting mechanism of reddit and their comments. For longtime, this further drove her to intensify her campaign of ALL CAPS (at this point she was making practically only ALL CAPS comments) as it was one of the few weapons left to their side, until more mods were added.

Unfortunately, VBP who had never been the most active redditor, was not aware of longtime’s style, so he saw one such ironically sexist comment and did a knee-jerk reaction, banning longtime. He was quickly explained the situation and reversed the ban within one hour, but the damage was already done. Longtime left in disgust and soon after deleted her account. This was the catalyst for the Bro-Troll brigade.

The Bro-Trolls were ironic names of historical male anarchists, where part of their name was replaced by “Bro” (“Bropotkin”, “Brahkunin” and so on) , thus signifying the “manarchism” in the politics of /r/anarchism. These people, apart from continuing in the proud tradition of longtime’s ALL CAP sarcastic sexism, started a systematic campaign against VBP. Unfortunately VBP reaction badly to it, quickly making some comments that were uncalled for (such as calling a member of the forum by their real name) and getting defensive.

While this was happening, QueerCoup  started drafting a modding policy, so we can get more mods on the reddit again and then start building the policies of the subreddit. Many others were at the same time requesting that no mods would be added and that we go completely unmoderated, but the rampart sexism that was rising up on the sub convinced many of us that such an option would be unacceptable for an inclusive space.

It was at this point that I started becoming more active again in the sub.

After about a week of harassment, and as the campaign against VBP escalated, he was asked to step down and so he did, leaving skobrin in his place. Frustratingly for many, skobrin wasn’t really active at that time so no further action was taken in the next few days, until he came back and modded dbzer0 and griffjam, who were some of the most supported mods in the new modding suggestions thread.

The meta is diverted.

As you can imagine, the meta discussions in the reddit were intense and drowning all other submissions. As my first act as a mod, I decided to try and work with this by creating a dedicated area for meta discussion which would both facilitate more of it and allow the main reddit to concentrate on actual posts and news about anarchism. This was not a mandatory move however, so anyone who wished could still post their meta topics in the main sub. Many people did find the idea good enough and started using it voluntarily.

At the start, /r/metanarchism was set to restricted mode, which meant that anyone could see, vote and comment on articles, but only the approved members could submit new ones. Soon however, the Bro-Trolls (which had reduced their posting by then) along with a few new accounts started trolling this area as well, so in an attempt to maintain discussion, I switched the security to private, which meant that one approved members could see it. Of course, since it is very easy to be approved, I didn’t consider this an issue, but apparently some did.

The same afternoon, QueerCoup denounced this action and the subreddit and called dbzer0, skobrin and VBP out for de-modding. And this pretty much started the second round of shit-flinging.

Everybody points and laughs

dbzer0, skobring and VBP are called out by QueerCoup, QueerCoup and enkiam is called out by hummanerror and anarchoal, chromalux and reqem is called out by VBP, the classic reactionaries from MRA and whatnot are called out by QueerCoup. Mod and ban guidelines are challenged. And as if on queue, everyone else chimes in to informs us how this is proof that anarchism can’t work,

At this moment, the debate is still raging but at a less intense level. QueerCoup and myself have achieved more cooperative attitude (I’d like to think). We seem to be cautiously moving towards an commonly accepted modding policy that will be very similar to my “Direct Action” proposal. We’ve had a vote and a compromise and those seem to have been well received.

Most of the current drama revolves around QueerCoup being a mod after his position was blocked by other members of the reddit. There’s also some bad blood between the regulars of the subreddit which will take a long time to heal (if ever). The also the issue of the visibility of /r/metanarchism. Mods, as of now, are treading very carefully to avoid being seen as abusing their power or supporting sexism and I’m fairly certain that we will soon reach an understanding and a new balance. Of course, I could be wrong, and things will explode yet again in a third round of drama. Time will tell.

So now you know what’s been going on. I hope I gave you a perspective that shows how the drama is not at all illegitimate and that this is a discussion that needs to happen to allow the subreddit to grow beyond the casual sexism that permeates reddit as a whole. In a future post, I will expand more on why dissent is not necessarily a sign of an unhealthy community.