Anomander

joined 2 years ago
[–] Anomander@kbin.social 8 points 2 years ago

I have a hard time believing that all of even just most of the men that initially joined her group had “concerning views” if that’s meant to refer to the misogyny we see in those most associated with the term today, but I do know that plenty of the posters I saw on the subreddit years ago when I visited were not of that ilk.

That's fine, but remember you're doubting the one person unique qualified to talk about the developmental history of the movement that they launched from the site that they ran.

I don't think that it necessarily was "all" or "most" but simply that the male presence within the movement was sufficiently represented by individuals with those views that it's one of the first thing she mentions in the context of discussing the growth of the movement itself.

Part of her point seems to be pointing out that they invited those views in, very early in the movement, out of a desire to be inclusive - only to be driven out by those views later on down the road.

I bring that up in this context because I don't think that the movement or the term can be divorced fully from the male misogyny that it's associated with today. Those people are not latecomers to the label, they've been there effectively from the start - from the point where it went from the comments section of Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project blog, to becoming "a community" centered around a shared label.

but I think if the term was originally coined to represent people who were genuinely suffering from external circumstances that put them in the position they’re in, it should remain for them and not those who sabotage themselves via their own toxic behavior.

I've used bold to highlight it in the quote above - that is a big "if" that the person who coined the term says is not true. If it were true, we'd be having a different conversation. But it's not true.

The simple fact is that it's a self-identifier. It's a label that people put on themselves based on their perception of their own life circumstances. The original vision for the term says that neither you nor I get to tell anyone else they're "not a true incel" or to go over their life and tell them the barriers are self-inflicted if they don't see it that way. I guarantee you that the people you want to exclude from the term do very genuinely believe that they are "suffering from external circumstances that put them in the position they're in." No matter how much your or I might see them and think they're clearly suffering from self-inflicted wounds, they are entirely sincere in their belief that their dating life is out of their control and has been a victim of cruel society.

One group deserves empathy and compassion; the other deserves scorn and derision. I don’t think it’s productive or fair to the former group to use the same term for both.

To me? They're the same group. Some members of the group are hateful and shitty. Some members of the group aren't. I'd say that the overwhelming majority of members, from both sides of that divider, are experiencing obstacles to dating or sex that are self-inflicted, even if they also have other barriers that are not. The vast majority of both groups would tell you that their personal circumstances are wholly out of their own control.

The "logic" that group uses around attractiveness and dating marketability and how this or that facet of looks or wealth or social status or whatever is ultimately spurious. If Ricky Berwick get rich, famous, and married - the absolute hard impassible barriers that incels talk about affecting themselves simply do not exist.

[–] Anomander@kbin.social 46 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Internet history pedantry, but by the time the subreddit rolled around, the term and the movement had already been coopted.

Incel started as a term for men who felt depressed about being unable to find a female partner, and the subreddit they created was originally a supportive space for them.

The term was coined somewhere between 1994 and 1997 by "Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project" as a term for people of all genders who were unable to find partnership despite trying. Alana is a woman, and is effectively universally credited with coining the term and founding the movement. The movement wasn't 'for men', the term wasn't about men specifically, and it didn't start on Reddit. It started off as more of a personal blog, where Alana documented her own experiences and struggles - the site gained followers from other people with similar experiences, eventually growing into a combined forum / support group / community.

Then it got taken over by angry misogynists and the term became associated with them, while the original group just kind of got forgotten about. That original group deserves attention and empathy as well as the term they coined; the latter group isn’t even “involuntarily celibate,” as they play a very big role in their own celibacy.

Those folks have kind of always been there, and have always been a heavily represented demographic - Alana has said in interviews that the men who joined in the early days did have some concerning views and some concerning themes were on frequent repeitition in the discussions the community had. I don't think retconning the movement to exclude those people from the "true definition" is doing either camp any favours. The "involuntary" part of the label isn't trying to engage with whether or not the barrier may stem from factors within their control, but solely confined to the fact that they want something and are not getting it. They are simply "celibate, but not voluntarily celibate".

One quip that Alana made in several interviews while defining her modelling of the community she founded was that she didn't care why someone was an incel, ie "it's OK if you're celibate because you're into horses, but that's illegal" that that person should still be welcomed and included in the community.

I just think more people should give some thought to who that term originally belonged to.

I think that in light of this, it's even more important to be accurate and honest who those people are: Not male-exclusive, not limited to this or that cause of celibacy, not specifically gatekeeping out the misogynists or the beastialists any more than any other group. Just any people who want to get laid but are not getting laid.

[–] Anomander@kbin.social 10 points 2 years ago

lmao that is such a good descriptor of what's going on there. Elon figured he could make money from racists wanting to be racist around normal people.

[–] Anomander@kbin.social 9 points 2 years ago

The thing there is that like ... it's not about consistency or values. The fact that he lied is meaningless to him, throwing it in his face is wasted effort. Communication is a tool to get what he wants, not a goal unto itself.

[–] Anomander@kbin.social 68 points 2 years ago (19 children)

And no one is surprised.

Elon made it clear shortly after taking over that "free speech" was speech he happened to agree with, and he had no intentions of ethical consistency on 'free speech' when it came to speech that was critical of him or his platform. Twitter already went nuclear on links to Mastadon and similar alternative platforms earlier this year while their dumpster fire was raging.

[–] Anomander@kbin.social 35 points 2 years ago

I think it's worth addressing that "the right people" are very often going out of their way to be absolutely unreachable by the average joe and are completely impossible for mere poors to meaningfully bother directly. Protest will always inconvenience average people first, because the little people are always affected more than the rich in any action, especially any that would manage to rattle the powerful in any way.

The powerful have managed to structure society and laws alike to make effectively all actions that would target them directly and spare the average joe from any collateral overspill either impractical - or significantly more illegal than protest actions that cast a broader net. The idea from the powerful is to ensure that protest must affect other citizens in order to reach them, and can't just target them directly. Targeting them, alone, is harassment, or trespass on private property, or ... etc.

[–] Anomander@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago

This reads a lot like you're kind of working to shit on them, though.

It looks dead.

Ok? I don't know how you'd get that impression and you don't really elaborate, but I don't really see what might lead to that impression.

You can't even join unless you know someone, to recover your password you need to send an email, and the most upvoted post has 500 votes.

Yeah. Invite systems are a valid solution when you're looking to limit the pace of growth, and social media sites like aggregators often want to rate-limit growth in order to avoid an Eternal September moment changing their culture. Password recovery is amusingly antiquated. Their scoring works different and the numbers don't translate 1:1.

The about section has a philosophy section which likely took longer to write than was taken designing the website, and one of the top posts is about how they're going reorganise everything into their equivalent of subreddits. What's the point if you only have 100 users?

Yeah. Welcome to Tildes, a site utterly dedicated to high-concept, high-content, participation and engagement - with near every aspect of its design based around discouraging low-bar contribution and encouraging effortposts. If you personally find a long philosophy section and a ultra-simple aesthetic to be disengaging to you - then they're probably working as intended, and you're just not the target demographic. They're reaching about the same growth point as Reddit did when it made that decision themselves, and from what he said in the announcement they're facing the same problems. They're sitting at numbers well above "100 users" though, - as mentioned, they're not trying to be a highly-active and super-busy space. Several thousand users on Tildes produce a much smaller total footprint than several thousand users on lemmy or kbin.

Because the guy who created it, seemingly doesn't get that times have changed. I mean, the nokia 3310 was a great phone in its day, but it's 2023.

And I get that they don't care, but if your main audience is former mods who like organising things without the interference of users, they're not going to have enough or sufficiently interesting content to attract critical mass and a wider audience.

At which point, you might as well turn your reddit replacement into a wordpress blog and have the same discussions you're having now in the comment section. Because unlike tildes, people are working on plugins which will allow wordpress to become fully part of the fediverse.

This is the part where it's just like ... did Demiorz kill your dog and fuck your wife or something? Because these read as if it's coming from a pretty personal set of feelings for you.

It's a website where you are not the target user. That's fine. You don't need to hate them for that. They don't need to change for you.

If this whole thing isn't personal between you and them and is simply about the fact that they're a 'reddit alternative' that isn't the Fediverse, I think playing Websites We Use like it's sports teams where our guys are the best and everyone else is shit is ... kinda juvenile.

[–] Anomander@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

About Tildes, it seems to be more of a clone of Digg in the old days.

It may resemble digg 1.0, but it's intended as a spiritual successor to pre-diggpocalypse reddit. It's a project by the guy who originally built Automod and is very much like Reddit was just prior to the launch of the subreddit system - two years before digg 4.0 launched and the refugees started arriving.

Intended to be more of a wide-open commons than a platform for subdivided or niche communities.

Tildes has very limited adoption during the reddit protests because it's on an invite system and doesn't want a huge influx of new people all at once, for all that it is accepting and even seeking growth over time.

[–] Anomander@kbin.social 11 points 2 years ago

"Is that what we're gonna do today? We're gonna fight?"

[–] Anomander@kbin.social 5 points 2 years ago

Probably, because it's a good chill space that serves drinks and they can socialize with their friends while Little Billy gets his haircut.

The same things that appeal to OP would also appeal to many adults that have children, even if those things are of no benefit to the kids themselves.

And the sort of person who'd take a kid to a venue like that, while ignoring how disruptive their kid is to the people normally there - that demographic overlaps pretty heavily to folks who also are completely fine paying $70 for a kids' haircut, because their own cut & colour or beard sculpting run a couple hundred.

[–] Anomander@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

According to the people most likely to feel oppressed by the existence of rules limiting what they can do or say, yes.

Practically speaking? No. Reddit branded itself as "free speech" and pseudo-libertarian during it's launch phase, from a combination of the political leanings of its founders and as a cynical branding decision to differentiate itself from its competition. It never actually was a free-speech platform, so much as a platform that saw free speech as a branding decision and would generally aim to preserve that veneer when there wasn't a good reason to go against it.

In addition to the legal arguments around "platform" vs. "publisher", a solid portion of how the subreddit system started and why it's structured the way it is was so that Reddit Inc and Reddit.com could posture as being broadly "pro free speech" while letting mods take the heat for the content being removed.

During the Yishan/Pao eras, people were forever citing Swartz, Spez, and kn0thing as OG founders who believed in "free speech!!" that new admin and bad mods were destroying their original vision. The Spez came back and made it clear he's not aligned that way. kn0thing very publicly and firmly stated that Reddit was never about absolute free speech and admin had been quietly removing shit for years, this time Pao just announced it. So now you still get originalists trying to argue that Swartz was a free speech absolutist founder whose vision supersedes all the rest as the Pure and True and justifying their outrage. I think if Swartz were still alive during that fiasco, he wouldn't have been digging in to defend their absolute right to screech slurs at people or rally hate brigades against the spherically-inclined; or even continuing to support free speech absolutism in abstract for the platform.

[–] Anomander@kbin.social 5 points 2 years ago

Baader-Lemmyhof?

Probably.

At the very least, I can confirm that the saying was definitely was a thing a decade or two ago, when IBM was major player in enterprise / corporate computing. They generally weren't the best computers, or the best value, or even particularly great - but they were a safe choice.

You went out and bought new computers for the XYZ department from some competitor - and if anything went wrong, your ass was on the line for buying unreliable garbage from a shitty company. If you bought IBM and the same thing happened, management would kind of shrug and assume that the same problem would have gone wrong on any other computer, because IBM is a trusted safe brand.

So the idea that no one ever got fired for buying IBM was a running joke in tech circles - that it's not bad, it's not good, but it is career-safe for the person signing the cheque - and the bean-counters buying computers really like safe.

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