If it does get shut down, I imagine all the regulars will just try to keep it going on a new sub or something, so the sneer need never stop, even if they won’t be able to piggyback on Scott’s reputation anymore. And hell, they’ll probably throw a tantrum claiming the shuttering is a sign that Soros’ thought-exterminating SJW labor camps are coming, so comedy-wise it may even be a net positive.

But we should still totally take credit and declare the exact date of the shutoff a /r/SneerClub holiday.

Bee tea dubz, I’m going to claim—without any evidence cuz who needs that?—that our incessent light-shining is what made Alexander realize how much of an embarrassment the r/SSC culture war thread is.

We did it, sneerclub! Mission accomplished and all that jazz.

Shutting down the culture war thread would be good for humanity and general human decency, but bad for the content flow of r/sneerclub, truly a tough choice.

Well, it would be a good change on the whole. And so long as some loon somewhere is posting about how fundamental physics needs to be abolished because electron-chan can’t hug proton-kun as close as she wants, there’ll always be a place for sneerclub.

(‘But what if the real sneer was the friends we made along the way?’)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=dmyJ1RVfnPE

For far too long I wondered if SSC-CW could actually be a good place for thoughtful discussion, if only it were populated with a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives instead of a bunch of white American men trying to solve race and gender and global politics all by themselves. But I’ve come to realize that internet forums in general, and Reddit in particular, will always tend toward echo chambers, usually for bigoted ideologies. Any slight imbalance between the sides (and there are always sides) gets amplified at light speed as the system rewards some people for sharing popular opinions and punishes others for going against the grain, until they just leave in frustration and create a chain reaction. You get a lot more internet points from the friendly audience for a fiery smackdown than you do for a sober attempt to reason with one pseudonymous stranger, who often turns out to be a thinly veiled Nazi anyway.

So at least sneering is honest. Nobody thinks it’s educational or healthful. The risk of the culture-war threads is that people might let their guard down and actually believe they’re getting a well-rounded diet of expert knowledge and representative points of view, just because everything is polite and expressed in complete sentences. It’s the same toxic nonsense as every other politics thread on the internet but Rationalists are gullible enough to swallow it because it’s expressed in their bafflegab.

If it gets shut down, even if only to spare Slate Star Codex the embarrassment of having the Fourteen Words upvoted so much, then good riddance. I hope participants will take that energy they spent arguing about refugees’ physiognomy or whatever and redirect it toward following the news from primary journalistic sources, and having their political conversations in real life with close friends whose personal experiences they know and respect.

I want to figure out what to do with the Culture War thread the community, given that the Culture War thread is >95% of /r/ssc content, and it’s become evident that the whole community has become nothing but a thin veneer for Culture War

FTFY, Alexander. But kudos on the critical self-reflection. BTW, love your article on motte-and-bailey, made good use of the term several times now.

“Guys, you’re making me look bad, and I’m almost having to think about why, and it hurts.”

And give up a potential revenue source as a crowdsourced think tank and/or test market for right-wing culture war memes?

It took way too long for our secondhand embarrassment to become his own…