Anomander

When ye olde Eternal September hit, many new users did not realize B1FF was satire, and thus chose to emulate the coolest dude on the internet.

I think that you're absolutely right here.

Reddit seems to be operating under a notion that incentivizing content creation will result in more of the current content that is the main ongoing draw of the site - when instead, the kind of people who make content because content makes them money are not the same people as the ones generating shit for free on Reddit.

Worse, the people doing it for money are incredibly likely to "optimize" their returns in ways that are not great for the content itself or the settings it's taken place in. Low-effort, low-draw, content that is easy to monetize rapidly crowds out things like long-form or complex content, and content creators are not respectful of the spaces they're trying to leverage for money.

The near figurehead example was the explosion of "blogspam" that hit Reddit about a decade back - when affiliate and SEO-ridden blogs were getting spammed as submissions and mass posted to comments sections in huge volume. The content creators didn't care that it was unwelcome, they just wanted an audience that would turn into money.

Past precedent suggests Reddit isn't going to do a good job of this, and doing a bad job of it risks driving off what remains of existing 'native' users in the hopes of capturing the sort of low-engagement users who are already satisfied with TikTok or Instagram.

I always loved the convergence of the various Rustled Jimmies memes popping off, just before Harambe happened.

As long as they honor what people have currently bought,

From the announcement, this is a "yes, but also no" because any unused coins on an account stop being honoured after Sep 12, when there will no longer be awards to purchase with them.

So in similar fashion to what I had commented on related to Islam, this reads somewhat like you might be trying to present the broad issue under discussion as more complicated and more ambiguous than it genuinely is. I don't think swapping "Christian" for "Muslim" makes the exact same questions any more complicated, but I do think doing so in order to sidestep what I had said and instead pose 'new' questions does give an impression that your goals here may not actually be discussing the specific things you bring up.

I also notice that you've gone ahead and filled in answers for me, and even responded to those answers - which does reinforce the impression that there's motive in your rhetoricals, and does suggest some specific biases via what you assumed the answers would be.

Should “Jesus is gay” or “The Old Testament is the most horrific book ever” be illegal? Should we create a new word “christianophobia” for that?

So this gets effectively the exact same answer I already gave above, while discussing your example statements related to Islam. Neither "yes" or "no" in absolute sense - but depending on context and on patterns of behavior. I'm not sure why you expected anything different.

Pretty sure no one bats an eye when those things are said, as it should be of course.

I take it you're unfamiliar with the American Bible Belt, who - among many heroic feats of absurd oversensitivity - at one point thought a red paper cup was "Satanic" and have felt profoundly oppressed and like their beliefs were under direct assult due to teenagers working in grocery stores not wishing them "merry christmas". This is the same group of people who very genuinely believe that "gay people existing" is exactly identical to "genocide against Christians" and have seen cross-like shapes - "an X" for instance - interspersed with with effectively anything shaped like stars, sixes, the colour red, rainbows ... fuck it, anything that isn't "Jesus" to be subtle or overt disrespect of their faith and them personally.

So no. People of Christian persuasions will absolutely "bat eyes" at some of the most ridiculous shit imaginable, and those Christians are representative of all of Christianity as a whole in scale exactly parallel to the Muslims you were talking about prior representing all of Islam.

However, you wouldn’t have written your long prose if we replaced “islamophobia” with “christianophobia” and that’s what I find sad.

I think you've been reading evidence to the contrary in order to get to this sentence. That said, I'll grant you - “christianophobia” is not nearly as loaded a term and bigotry against Christians is not a genuine societal problem that Christians face in the English-speaking world in the same way that Islamophobia is, so I would have been more likely to assume it was a bad-faith word-replacement than a genuine and sincere statement about Christians and their sensitivities.

I am a firm believer that all Abrahamic religions are harmful and among the most shameful ideologies humanity has come up with, and I believe in the sacred right to disrespect and ridicule those beliefs.

That's nice. It doesn't read that way. The biases you showed here, the answers you filled in for me, do seem to treat Christians like they're obviously the well-adjusted normal people, even as if they're not "sensitive" and totally don't ever get offended by utterly trivial nonsense - while your prior comment sure did make some pretty sweeping generalizations about what Muslems in general think or are saying as far as their responses to similarly trivial nonsense. I think the decision to represent Christians according to moderate and well-adjusted members of the faith, and Muslims according to the extremists is a bit of an interesting pattern across these two remarks, and adding the context that all of those remarks are made in defense of an apparent desire to say some specific shit about Islam and represent it as completely normal and good-faith ...

Don't get me wrong. You can say what you want. Other people can say what they think about that. Some spaces may decide they don't want you in them. I don't think you're holding the moral highground you'd posture towards if you say some shit that sounds "islamophobic" and then act like they're overreacting and oversensitive for calling it that - when it seems pretty clear you're as sensitive, if not more so, to your own statements being labelled according to the broad category of speech that it most clearly resembles.

And in general - Christians ain't immune either; but "I'll be shitty to everyone" doesn't mean that you're not being shitty at all - or even that you're not necessarily targeting one group and just taking potshots towards the others to obscure which was the intended target.

I don't think that some misuse of a term means the term itself is terrible and invalid and should be opposed at all costs.

Because despite the misuses, islamaphobia doesn't mean "blasphemy" or even that no one can ever say anything negative about Islam. What it does mean, and what it is used for, is as a general descriptor for the propagation of bigotry or hatred, when the propagation of hatred is often actively trying to masquerade as "legitimate criticism" or mere blasphemy.

If I say that the “prophet” Muhammad is a pedophile for raping a 9 year old girl or that the Quran is comparable to Mein Kampf, those offended should not have the ability to silence me with the bogus “islamophobia” excuse.

Depending on a lot more context than is provided here, that "islamophobia excuse" may or may not be particularly bogus.

If someone is going to insist that it is their absolute right to inject "Muhammud is a pedophile" into any and all discussions even vaguely touching on Islam, I'm going to question the motives of that behaviour pattern. I don't think someone would be unreasonable to note that it sure seems like the goal is a lot more to either antagonize muslims or to slant perceptions of the faith, given how out of pocket the remarks are to the room, or how persistent the focus on spreading that exact take might be.

I think that comparing Quaran to Mein Kampf is ... a little above and beyond. I personally wouldn't have cited that as if it were a clearly innocuous remark I wanted community support towards legitimizing. I don't think the fact that you chose Quaran instead of Bible or Torah makes it worse - I think it's just being shitty and insensitive towards multiple groups of people all at once no matter what 'sacred' text you're choosing. In that light, though, I don't think another person would necessarily be wildly out of line to question the choice to target the Quaran specifically, and doubly so if - perhaps - the account making those remarks has a pattern of targeting Islam with provocative or negative behaviour.

Being a bigot against Muslims is one thing, but to try to infer that not respecting their beliefs is necessary being a bigot to them is laughable.

Worth pointing out - that's not what "they" are saying. It's not that anyone who doesn't always respect their beliefs on their terms is a bigot.

What they are saying is actually the reverse: That many bigoted people act on their bigotry by disrespecting their beliefs - and most bigots won't admit to their bigotry. A pattern of behavior that leans in one specific direction that happens to look a lot like the bigots and isn't very worried about not looking like a bigot is generally just ... actually a bigot.

The other one was manufacturing and engineering teams 'back home' would scrawl the Kilroy on parts, like while ships or tanks were being assembled, that would otherwise be inaccessible - which meant that when that thing was hit, or taken apart for maintenance closer to the front, Kilroy was like, inside the sealed-up wall or at the bottom of the engine compartment.

In both your example and this one - both growing the myth that no matter where you went, Kilroy had been there first.

According to my grandpa, it was a myth that they used to feed the new guys and green squads, like a Santa myth, and putting on "genuine belief" in the Kilroy myth was as much of a running joke as the myth itself was. He claimed servicemen were also constantly trying to get commanding officers to unwittingly participate, by doing stuff like submitting paperwork signed Kilroy or that referenced him already being somewhere when troops liberated it - in the hopes that report or news tidbit would be one that COs shared as announcements.

"We're getting paid to put paint on the wall."

I was like 17 or so and had a temp job as a housepainter for a couple weeks, and I was sinking time and energy into doing an excellent job and being really efficient with paint and ... kind of missing the forest for the trees. I was putting unnecessary care & excellence into a back wall and the wall was taking longer to prep than the whole-house job could afford. One of the old guys on site pulled me aside me and, in the eloquent terms above, pointed out that ... the real goal here is paint on the wall. We're doing a good job because we take pride in our work, but the outcome is significantly more important than the journey to everyone else. Doing a "good job" can't wind up as an obstacle to the job itself.

I was always a details person and perfectionist, and that one clear lesson about taking a step back from the details of a task to double-check what the actual goal is ... has always stuck with me.

So I’m assuming the duplicate communities are communities of the same exact name in different instances/server. Is anyone else finding this somewhat confusing?

Generally speaking, yes - but also, this is something that will likely fade over time as specific ones stand out. Currently, the plurality is a result of no developed community for that niche existing; as communities settle and grow, less of that sharding will take place unless there's a crisis in the 'main' one.

I'm on Chrome on two different desktops with most recent windows; I'm getting booted out every 5 - 15 minutes. I had assumed it was deliberate and was eventually going to ask if maybe the timer could be made a little longer.

Generally speaking, the logout timer is shorter than it takes to read the comments section and write anything longer than a paragraph.

It seems connected to "idle" time - I've never been booted out while browsing, but if I pause or do something else I will generally come back to having been logged off. That said, I don't generally browse for 15+ minutes straight, so much as in couple-minute sprints between tasks at work.

For instance, it happened in between logging in to load this thread, reading what everyone else had to say, and posting this comment.

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.

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.