Them being routinely banned is indicative of the site cultural. That culture being: against antisemitism.
Chana
joined 3 months ago
It was presented at a conference in Copenhagen and so was surely peer reviewed.
Peer review is garbage.
I regret to inform you that this is fairly representative of liberal academic "analysis" of social media. The authors are just less competent at covering their asses with jargon and pretty plots.
Behold: the stunning incompetencd rife in academia. One does not need to understand a subject matter or produce an interesting and well-executed result, they must only please their funders and publish. There are errors all over the place, beginning with the basic premise of not critically examining their loaded term, "extremism", but I'll point out things I found funny.
The two most popular communities, c/genzhouarchive and c/genzedong, are related to left-wing extremist subreddits that have faced restrictions from Reddit
c/genzhouarchive, as you might guess from the name, is an archive basically bereft of user interaction. It just reproduces the posts from the subreddit and naturally hasn't had new posts in two years. They call this the "most popular" presumably because it has the most posts but refused to rub their big braincells together long enough to understand its content... again, obvious from even just the name.
where r/GenZedong was quarantined for spreading misinformation (Chow 2022)
Again a loaded term that goes uncritically examined. The factual accuracy of what is said is never contended with in this article nor the citation. Per the citation it is misinformation because Reddit the company said it and some Reddit users made allegations.
This is also a subgenre of academic grifting and it goes hand in hand with these "topix modeling" papers that look at Reddit, Twitter, etc. It is primarily a way to receive funding from liberal institutions to "understand misinformation" etc on social media and they all use the same vacuous terminology and methods of investigation, generally without critical investigation of the meaning of their own work. Meaning it simply asserted, simplistically.
Our manual inspection on the banners of these subreddits finds that they fit Petterson’s description of contemporary tankies (Petterson 2020)
lmao they put quotes around so many terms but not tankies. The axe-grinding political incompetents can't hide their angle despite the pretenses.
Also their citation is to a "biblical studies" journal and article by a big Foucault fan. The authors presumably have no idea who Foucault is and cited this just to have a citation for the word tankie, something I find amusing.
Temporal Analysis
They created an entire plot and wrote sentences about how the genzhou archive stopped having posts because it is an archive and got banned from Reddit. So they did understand it as an archive but still say "most popular" out of incredible intellectual laziness. And then waste time saying anything more about it, including posts going down when the thing it copies from goes away. lmao.
The same plot shows genzedong posts rocketing after the subreddit is banned. It was a life raft community. That means the thing it was meant to do happenes. This fact is never mentioned, it is jist characterized as "when banned extremists go elsewhere", wow what an analysis.
Monthly Perspective Analysi
These people are so lazy they didn't even do their own sentiment modeling. They just sent posts to a Google API and accepted the results for things like "severe profanity" and "identity attack". What those mean is never questioned. Is this article full of identity attacks because it uses the term tankie? The authors could never think to ask that kind of question.
Anyways this laziness reminds me of many academics I've known. Real grifters that think highly of themselves but always take the easiest path that sounds high tech because it means more funding and press.
They do not provide a single example of how a given post correlates to a given set of topic scores, sentiments, etc. The results are simply accepted. This is classic lazy academic behavior when it comes to "analyzing" social media. What they actually want to do, but never state, is to produce some pretty graphics by turning a mass corpus of posts into categorized numbers, sometimes as a network, and to say some meaningless garbage about the results to fit some agenda.
Topic Analysis
Here they seem to have actually run some models, though again using someone else's package. The choice of this package is never explained. They do mention its basic attributes in order to embed like 5 more pointless citations, though.
The top topic from their fancy analysis? "ridic, neatza, totes". Wow, you sure did extract data! So meaningful! The second? "xd, tysm, ja" Lmao. The third? "dprk, korea, kim" finally, a topic! The tankies discussed the DPRK around this time! Amazing! Anything more to say about that? No? Cool! Great work!
They then say that the users of a communist country support the DPRK and China (but how!?) and cherry pick an example of antisemitism that was from a user that was banned 5 years ago, i.e. long before this article was written. They do not mention that this person was banned nor that the antisemitism was called out. They leave it implied that banned comments are actually representative of the community. Liberal academics premise their existence on incuriosity and dishonesty.
It is interesting to note that there are 3 years of more recent material that they did not "analyze". Conspicuously they only cover a couple months after the genzedong and genzhou quarantines/bans despite showing and modeling years prior. It is conspicuous. They do have more recent citations, however. I wonder if they were just lazy or incompetent or if they have just been shopping this thing around for 3 years and couldn't be asked to update their plots.
Either way, this is basically incomoetent Masters student level work that should never have been published. It waa presented at some recent conference.
Parts of Mindanao will have that vibe both aesthetically and politically.
I forgot to focus on the rust part of your question.
Preventing rust from scratches is the original primer's job. If it is fully scratched through to metal and you only care about preventing rust there's basically two options I am aware of. The first is to refinish the panel or do an expert job at spot repair (allegedly very difficult), beginning with heavy sanding to identify where the scratches are and ideally remove them so they so not remain nuclei for rust. The other is to clean and adopt a protection routine to slow down any rusting process. Basically apply some mild anti-rust, wash thoroughly with water to remove electrolytes, dry immediately and thoroughly, perhaps with rubbing alcohol, and then wax. Consistently waxing every two weeks or so creates a protective barrier. There are easy spray on + buff waxes out there if you want to do it in just that spot.
Monitor the paint for bubbling, which indicates a deep and pervasive rust and a need to replace the entire panel.
The knowledge I have is from researching this stuff for bikes and it has a lot of overlap because we use the same materials and supplies - e.g. 2k rattle cans and clear coat. So I've read a bunch of recommendations and videos about cars as well.
Most car people will say that if you want to prime+paint+clear coat you need to take off and redo the whole panel. Like sand it down to at least the primer and go from there for the whole panel. This also usually involves proper color matching, knowing the exact color code. Basically nothing adheres well to an intact clear coat, including primer, so the edges of any "spot fix" with your strategy will be prone to flaking, as the clear coat will be intact at the edges. Some people seem to get away with spot fixes using these supplies but they also tend to be experienced at doing these kinds of things, have airbrush setups, that kind of thing.
If it is a small section, many people use best-guess color matched nail polish as a spot fix.
Dishonest liberals aside, both versions are ugly bourgeois garbage.
I think he's some kind of Maoist
LLMs don't think they just chew up and recycle garbage from the internet. Sometimes the recycled garbage is tasty, yum yum! Like you don't know the right terms for something but you can describe it and by association it will find the right links for you (basically a search engine). But usually, recycled garbage is still garbage and churning it only makes it worse.