The admins have worked their way down their list and finally reached the 18k subreddits. Earlier today we got this modmail from /u/ModCodeOfConduct, identical in content to what many other subreddits have received:
Hi everyone,
We are aware that you have chosen to close your community at this time. Mods have a right to take a break from moderating, or decide that you don’t want to be a mod anymore. But active communities are relied upon by thousands or even millions of users, and we have a duty to keep these spaces active.
Subreddits belong to the community of users who come to them for support and conversation. Moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust. Redditors rely on these spaces for information, support, entertainment, and connection.
Our goal here is to ensure that existing mod teams establish a path forward to make sure your subreddit is available for the community that has made its home here. If you are willing to reopen and maintain the community, please take steps to begin that process. Many communities have chosen to go restricted for a period of time before becoming fully open, to avoid a flood of traffic.
If this community remains private, we will reach out soon with information on what next steps will take place.
In short, we are being told to bend the knee or to die.
For some context: we’re pretty far down the list, so we’ve already had the chance to see how Huffman is responding to larger subreddits involved in the protest. Entire mod teams have been axed for reopening their subreddit but setting it as NSFW or some other such protest. Huffman has also said he wants to put in place ways for mods to be removed by subscribers. For a small sub like ours, that puts us at risk of a larger sub like r/SSC staging an admin-backed coup. So even if we acquiesced to the demand we go back to business as usual, there’s no trust that that will actually protect sneerclub in the long term.
All of us have better use for the remaining seconds of our lives than to work in this version of the punishment simulation.
For that reason, we’re leaving this sub in restricted mode for now. You can comment in this thread, discuss what sneerclub should do, give a eulogy, or so on, but new posts cannot be made. We’ll remain in restricted mode until Huffman shows a good faith effort of backing down from his crusade and responding to the concerns outlined e.g. here and here. I have little faith he’s willing to do this, but maybe he’ll think back to his days of being on the r/jailbait mod team and appreciate the efforts of reddit moderators and come to the table.
If that doesn’t happen and Huffman does axe the lot of us, then he’ll no doubt appoint some necromancer to puppet the corpse of sneerclub. (Personally I’m holding out hope that he can get Scott Aaronson to do it.) But while the body may shamble on, the soul will have reached its rest and gone to the optimal rescue simulation.
Semper sneer.
Don’t worry, I have 10^27 happy simulations of Sneer Club remaining in the status quo.
I’d be happy to follow sneerclub elsewhere, whether you guys want to move to some kind of federated alternative or a self-hosted community or whatever. Just keep me updated.
I kind of can’t believe the admins care enough to pester sneerclub about this though lol
Reddit’s current craze is being driven by LLM nonsense—the API change was all about charging their training stuff for access. So in a sense, sneerclub is being killed by AI. The basilisk comes for us all.
I really hope the existing threads stay available, if only because this subreddit is one of the most extensive resources of “negative” information on the rationalists that’s out there. I think it might be a good idea to copy/migrate sneerclub to another platform too, but until that happens I hope sneerclub on reddit is publicly viewable (even if posting is restricted).
I think it’s important because the rationalists are getting more attention now than ever before. I never thought I’d live to see Yudkowsky write an editorial in Time Magazine, for example, and I find it actually rather alarming that he used that opportunity to advocate for potentially starting a war over AI. I think it would be a real loss if everything available was not viewable by people (including, potentially, journalists) who might be researching them.
I thought I’d take this opportunity to post a timelime that I’ve compiled of some notable events in the history of the Rationalist community. I wanted to document this with sources in order to aid anyone doing research on them.
I consider this to be a work in progress (I originally planned to make this a sneerclub post before the sub went private). I want to eventually make it more extensive, but I started out with the Brent Dill stuff because I find it to be the most damning. (edit: to be blunt, I think the sequence of events makes it seem like they tried to cover up what Brent Dill did, and more broadly that there was an anti-feminist culture within the rationalist community that normalized his behavior)
Feel free to suggest other notable things, with sources if you have them. I haven’t gotten around to saving all of the sources on archive websites yet, but I wouldn’t mind if someone decided to help.
October 17, 2001 Brent Dill (username ialdabaoth) writes blog post about BDSM and domming a 16 year old https://ialdabaoth.livejournal.com/337.html
August 6, 2007 Scott Aaronson posts “A Moral Puzzle”, asking “why do we, as a society, provide food stamps for the hungry but not sex stamps for the celibate?” https://web.archive.org/web/20071006184928/http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=260
February 1, 2009 lesswrong.com launched
February 2, 2009 Yudkowsky publishes “Interlude with the Confessor”, a story of a fictional world where rape is legalized https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qWoFR4ytMpQ5vw3FT/p/bojLBvsYck95gbKNM
Date unknown, 2009 MIRI accepts a 0,000 donation from convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6346750-COUQ-2009-990.html#document/p18/a520891
July 10, 2010 “Solutions to the Altruist’s burden: the Quantum Billionaire Trick” Roko’s Basilisk https://basilisk.neocities.org/
November 30, 2010 Robin Hanson’s infamous “Gentle Silent Rape” article is postsed https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/gentlesilentrapehtml
September 02, 2011 First available version of Yudkowsky’s public OkCupid profile https://web.archive.org/web/20110902200157/http://www.okcupid.com/profile/EYudkowsky
August 29, 2012 Yudkowsky’s OkCupid profile says he has “a strong sexually sadistic streak” https://web.archive.org/web/20120829144053/http://www.okcupid.com/profile/EYudkowsky
August 14, 2013 Yudkowsky facebook post about “metabolic disprivilege” https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10151804857224228
April 18, 2014 Brent Dill comments “I suppose ‘reactionary’ is just the closest affiliation I can latch onto; my actual worldview is a weird sort of nihilistic, depersonalized, ultra-authoritarian fascism straight out of 1984, so it’s kinda hard to find people to flag tribal affiliation towards. 🙁” https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/18/confounder-of-the-day-how-sexy-your-parents-were/
June 3, 2014 Scott Alexander suggests to Brent Dill that he should move to the Bay Area. Elsewhere in the thread, Brent Dill says “Well, I have a LOT of medical debt, but I am also a pretty good computer programmer. On the gripping hand, I’m not conventionally hirable due to mental instability. 🙁” and “I left Phoenix Arizona for here after burning out all of the Phoenix community’s goodwill with my mental health drama.” https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/03/southeast-michigan-meetup-68/
August 10, 2014 Brent Dill says “manipulation is my only natural skill, and the one that I’ve honed the most. (Remember, narcissistic upbringing; probably a lot of unpleasantly narcissistic tendencies in myself as well.)”, “I completely get and agree with Neoreaction, my only objection is about scale. In the world I want to live in, I am a Sovereign King of my own household, where the only options are Obedience and Exit.”, ” I lived with a harem of attractive, submissive women who called me their ‘Master’ and pretty much voluntarily structured their lives around making me happy.” in SSC comments section https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/09/friendship-is-still-countersignaling/
August 31, 2014 Scott Alexander says ” the people who talk about “Nice Guys” – and the people who enable them, praise them, and link to them – are blurring the already rather thin line between “feminism” and “literally Voldemort”” Brent Dill responds in comments: “Also, when people spell out “what you’re doing wrong” and you say “no, I’m pretty darn sure I’m not doing any of that”, now you’re a DENYING horrible rapey misogynist.” https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/
September 19, 2014 Scott Alexander makes a blog post, asking for people to help Brent Dill move to the Bay Area https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/19/open-thread-5-my-best-friends-threadding/
Date unknown, 2014 Brent Dill joins a Berkeley rationalist group house https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2019/cfars-mistakes-regarding-brent
November 12, 2014 miricult.com is live as of this date https://archive.vn/4mQJP
January 1, 2015 Scott Alexander publishes “Untitled”, an 18,000 word post equating neckbeard memes with the antisemitic propaganda of Nazi Germany https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/
Date unknown, 2017? Brent Dill helps to construct “Black Lotus”, the Rationalist community’s Burning Man camp. Brent Dill attempts to invite an underage person but is stopped by staff members https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2019/cfars-mistakes-regarding-brent
Date unknown, 2017 ACDC (the Alumni Community Disputes Council), a group of three unpaid volunteer Council Members (one of whom is a CFAR staff member) is appointed by CFAR https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2018/acdc
Spring, 2017 Dragon Army charter https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/dragon-army-theory-charter-8192dc64ea22
November 11, 2017 “An Exploration of Sexual Violence Reduction for Effective Altruism Potential” posted by Kathy Forth https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gFpaHk2aKq2jGijnd/an-exploration-of-sexual-violence-reduction-for-effective
November 17, 2017 “Sexual Violence Risk Reduction - Let’s Do Tracking!” posted by Kathy Forth https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/suiTJeeEMnv7aPu8p/sexual-violence-risk-reduction-let-s-do-tracking
January, 2018 (precise date unknown) ACDC receives report of Brent Dill’s abuse from a former partner of his https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2019/cfars-mistakes-regarding-brent
March 14, 2018 “EA Survey: Sexual Harassment Questions - Feedback Requested” posted by Kathy Forth https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3oukNayDZXWLzte7c/ea-survey-sexual-harassment-questions-feedback-requested
March 17, 2018 Kathy Forth commits suicide
April 15, 2018 announcement of Kathy Forth’s death https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s93F5JmhCxKDxWukD/remembering-the-passing-of-kathy-forth#
April 2018 (precise date unknown) ACDC recommends not banning Brent Dill from CFAR events, CFAR leadership follows this recommendation https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2019/cfars-mistakes-regarding-brent
June 18, 2018 Kathy Forth suicide letter https://medium.com/@itai.ilyich/if-i-cant-have-me-no-one-can-kathleen-rebecca-forth-born-april-11-1980-31c49ed15121
June 19, 2018 Twitter user RuffleJax posts her account of abuse in the rationalist/EA community, and labels it as a cult https://twitter.com/RuffleJax/status/1009140252085243906
June 22, 2018 2:05 PM theunitofcaring on Kathy Forth https://www.tumblr.com/theunitofcaring/175147222856/im-having-this-horrible-dread-and-confusion-and
June 22, 2018 9:05 PM Scott Alexander publishes a response to Kathy Forth suicide letter, accusing Kathy of false accusations of sexual assault https://web.archive.org/web/20221111065956/https://www.tumblr.com/slatestarscratchpad/175157697076/content-warning-sexual-harassment-suicide-i
September 17, 2018 mittenscautious publishes “Brent, a warning” https://medium.com/@mittenscautious/brent-a-warning-38e447c55ab0
September 19, 2018 mittenscautious publishes “Warning 2”,’s account of Brent https://medium.com/@mittenscautious/warning-2-153ed9f5f1f3
September 19, 2018 mittenscautious publishes “Warning 3”,’s account of Brent https://medium.com/@mittenscautious/warning-3-8097bb6747b1
September 21, 2018 8:22 AM CFAR internal memo regarding Brent Dill is leaked https://pastebin.com/fzwYfDNq
September 21, 2018 CFAR temporarily bans Brent Dill, publishes apology https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2018/acdc
September 21, 2018 r/slatestarcodex mods remove all references to Brent Dill, including external links to medium posts https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9ghlh1/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_17/e6e9sbn/?context=999
October 30, 2018 Ozy posts callout of Brent Dill https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/brent-dill-is-an-abuser/
November 23, 2018 CFAR publishes further update regarding Brent Dill, specifying that he is permanently banned from CFAR events https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2018/further-updates
February 17, 2019 Bay Area REACH declines to make investigation of Brent Dill public, ostensibly to avoid legal liability https://archive.is/6kyIM
January 25, 2021 Qiaochu Yuan posts twitter thread about his experience with the rationalist community, labels it as a unhealthy cult https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1353850359601487874
September 24, 2021 “Common knowledge about Leverage Research 1.0”, alleges Leverage is a cult https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-knowledge-facts-about-leverage-research-1-0-1
October 24, 2021 FTX EA fellowship announced https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sdjcH7KAxgB328RAb/ftx-ea-fellowships
So long and thanks for all the sneers.
My heart will sneer on.
Whenever I see an AI doomer or evangelist, I will tear up and think you all.
yes, the site got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we didn’t create value for shareholders either.
apologies for bad english
when were you when sneerclan dies
i was at mastodon torturing ai gods when dgerard toot
‘sneer is die’
‘no’
and you?????????????
Holy fucking shit. I can’t believe they came for you guys before LCD. Well if anything else - I got the You Know What stuff in front of a journo during the break.
;…really should have somewhere else for discussing the weird harmful cultists before they hurt more people tho.)
Until I found this place I thought I was the only one who thought Scott Alexander’s writings were uniformly terrible. This sub truly helped me see beyond the tech bro bubble I had come to see as normal. Thank you sneerers, and I am glad to stop here.
thank you lmao
seen a few subs reopen with the mods being like ‘well we have no choice, we must do what is best for the Community’
in this community’s case i think dying to stick it to some tech dipshit is maybe the best possible ending
Fucking sad. In completely unrelated news maybe if everyone chips in we can buy spez a nice small submarine
I’ll miss the people who come in here saying they like the idea but why do we have to be so mean, the most
Man this shit is depressing. The COO of my company has a hard on for AI, and shared a fucking McKinsey newsletter with us about how it will add 4 trillion dollars to the economy. Everything about AI right now seems like it’s just an acceleration of those psychopathic consultants’ vision of a world driven purely by profit. But now even my friends , who are very smart people, are talking about the Basilisk.
At a certain point direct action is needed. Otherwise we’ll all wind up as corporate slaves
Shit, if the sub dies how will I know who all the douchebags in Rationality and EA are?
I originally found this community after Scott Alexander’s post “You Are Still Crying Wolf” finally made me notice the obvious disingenuity and manipulative framing to his writing. Since then, this community has been a constant source of humor as I came to realize the (deep) flaws in the sequences and Lesswrong, which had been very influential to me. As I realized more and more the absurdity, faux-intellectualism, and dunning-Kruger delusions of the rationalist space this community was both a fun outlet for my frustration and a place I could learn more. I know some of y’all og sneerers didn’t like us ex-rationalists as much, but I hope you at least appreciated our humor and mockery.
This community may die, but our dark triad traits of mockery, contempt, and above all sneering shall live on.
Also, here are two “rationalist iceberg” memes I found on rationalist discord, they helped me discover some things once I knew what to google (like “Black Lotus” being the name of the Rationalist Burning Man camp that Brent Dill helped to set up).
I still don’t know what some of the stuff is, “2004 ADV suicides” being one of them. So if you know anything, please speak up.
I’m encouraging all subs I participate in to migrate to other services. If the content that people are looking for can be found elsewhere, reddit will die. If the good content just dries up, people will keep trawling the reddit waters looking for their fix.
I don’t love any of the other services currently available, but if you make a decision, I’d be happy to follow.
Edit add: you may also be able to prevent an admin takeover by moving off restricted mode, but instituting some overly limiting rule changes. It seems that many subs taking this approach are avoiding the admin threat letter, suggesting that they don’t have the resources to review all the subs rules and moderation decisions. Ie it is easy for them to look at ‘private’ and ‘nsfw’ settings, but not for them to review how reasonable your rules and moderation are.
The optimist inside me wants to believe that the shuddering of the current swath of online gathering fulcrums will lead at least some people (me included) to go back out in the verdant real world. “Touch some grass”
In peril may lie revival.
Would still be glad to follow other people here to greener online pastures ^^
I haven’t visited in a while, but for a long time this was the only subreddit I checked regularly. It was always a nice place to catch up on internet drama. Watching a cult form in real time and finding people who were more interested in sneering than in joining was pretty reassuring too.
I’ll miss this place.
What if the real sneer was the friends we made along the way
I’d really appreciate it if this sub stays open or at least had some form of an archive.
Last year I had to stop visiting this sub for mental health reasons. I had reached a point when consuming content and participating in discussion primarily focused on dunking on pseudo-intellectual ghouls was doing more harm to me than good.
But I do believe this place provided a valuable service to the world. There’s plenty of places to go online to clown on your Shapiros and your Petersons and your Walshes, but the Yuds and Scoots and whatnot get to fly under the radar which makes them all the more insidious. It was nice to know there’s a spot out there where people can come together and revel in the common understanding of how extremely fucking dumb these goons are.
If some miracle happens and sneer club gets to exist in its current form or a similar form again, I don’t think I’ll be ready to join in. I might never be. It was doing some weird things to my head. But that’s a me thing. I thought I’d stop by to say, good hustle, y’all.
Keep on sneering in the free world.
I can’t tell you what to do or what’s a “good” use of your time.
Huffman is awful and this plan to allow normals to mod the mods seems to defeat the purpose of having mods to begin with. So I completely understanding taking this time to say “nope.”
But personally I’d love it if we tried to keep the community intact – whether on reddit or elsewhere. This space is the only real locus of anti-rationalist thought on the internet.
Not to don the grandiosity and self-importance of the rationalists but I do think losing this space will be a blow to humanity itself.
So if there’s anything I can do to help you guys maintain SneerClub, in whatever form you think is appropriate, let me know.
I don’t post much here, but it’s the only sub that I’m aware of that does a good job of critiquing the whole LW/AI crowd. If there are any other resources please let me know. I’m not even exaggerating when I say that some of the stuff I’ve read on here has helped me get at least a couple of people out of very bad mindsets in regards to AI and what it portends for the future.
I already miss this place, I hope it finds a second life somewhere new.
Godspeed, club of sneer.
I only came here for a few insanely hilarious months. It’s saddening that such a beautiful place has been set aflame by the assholery of Spez and his crew.
I miss it here already.
So it goes.
sunrise parabellum
Well fuck it I guess. Just delete the sub. Fuck these silicon valley twats.
Gentlefolk, it’s been a pleasure sneering with you all.
Where is everyone moving to? I’ve got myself a tildes and it’s not bad over there. Lots of inflow atm for obvious reasons.
Create a lemmy community and we will follow: https://lemmy.world/create_community
Cheers, had some fun here.
Thanks for the entertainment, it was nice to pop in and see the posts from twitter and the like without having to go make my own account.
Thank you for years of learning and entertainment! If the mods decide to relocate, here’s what I just found: https://sub.rehab/
we gotta very janky bootleg sneeratorium going here:
https://awful.systems/c/sneerclub
it’s the instance of a sneer fan who has a test Lemmy server, so expect amusing software failures for an authentically Reddit experience
very early 2000s forum software
all platforms are grass, tomorrow we die, so sneer the day
Gonna miss y’all. It’s been a blast.
Eh, pretty sure it was a good time to call it anyways ! You guys are cool, all the best.
We should have gone with a joyous sneercamp like Vibecamp but better
I might as well take the last opportunity to post here. This sub has brought years of entertainment, and tons of receipts. The TREACLES won’t stop, and neither should you, so I hope the diaspora lands somewhere fun. Till then, don’t let the basilisks bite!
Well, I am a small-time commenter of no account, but I found this sub very illuminating on the weirdo rationalist subject matter. I hope that whatever happens, the posts and discussion remain available somehow, somewhere.
oh, i occasionally post to tumblr about our very good friends with the tag #the crackpot offer indeed
Damn. I’m greatly attracted by a lot of the ideas in rationalism and EA, but just discovered this sub under a month ago (and have subsequently been learning how horrible the people leading those communities are). Hopefully I’ll still be able to look at old posts here
Here’s to a great few years of Sneering!
I’m new here – I was just wondering if anybody had any good suggestions on a kinda pedagogical article/blogpost/thread/video showing that rationalism is not ideologically neutral/that it doesn’t even practice the good analytical reasoning it purports to have as its foundation
Who is Huffman?
Ahahaha you paranoid fucks