This is rather hilariously slanted. "Bigotry by subreddit". Really?
"[TumblrInAction], a subreddit dedicated to mocking Tumblr – where marginalized groups, particularly LGBTQ, post about their experiences"
Here they neatly imply r/TumblrInAction mocks LGBTQ issues when in fact, it mocks people who use identities as tools to divide and hit people over the head with. Which is incidentally what this report does:
"Overt bigotry: the use of bigoted (racist/sexist/homophobic etc.) language, whether targeting any particular individual or more generally, which would make members of the referenced group feel highly uncomfortable"
In other words: assuming everyone in group X feels the same way about what the authors consider offensive language. This ignores e.g. the vast amount of gay people on chan boards who say "faggot" for fun to each other.
This so-called bigotry is contrasted with "supportiveness", apparently a desirable trait. Yet you can easily find people's horrible behavior being supported in more hugbox-style forums, when they get into an in/out-group fight and all the niceties go out the window for the sake of victimhood. We saw this with Atheism+, with r/GamerGhazi, and the "women in tech" activists.
Speaking of, notice how they explicitly contrast r/TheRedPill with a companion "Women in Tech" link in the footnote/popup for no stated reason. TheRedPill is supposedly "dedicated to male chauvinism", where "bigoted comments received approval". Well, if you define the entire subreddit's subject matter as bigoted, are you surprised the community appears to support bigotry by your own count? I have read TheRedPill, it is the male equivalent of Jezebel, nothing more, nothing less.
Really, this is just spreading fear about certain reddits, as the summary practically admits: which communities you should avoid, according to data. Yet the most toxic subreddit of all by their own data, ShitRedditSays, is nicely euphemized as home to "unproductive conversations".
Also if the authors think they "delved deep into the darkest recesses of the inter webs," by analyzing reddit comments, they are naive beyond belief.
The authors admitted in a Gamasutra article they didn't really understand their own model, but it was getting too much traffic for them to mess with it. Does that sound like credible academic work to you?
Aside from all the methodological issues with modeling human behavior by discrete transitional states on a 2D Moore neighbourhood, the entire thing is just dishonest. It pretends to be about general biases, free from context, but it forces everything in a binary model, which only reinforces the "white/people of color" and "male/female" progressivist battle lines, even as they insist this is not what it's about. That's just wanting to have your cake and eating it too: either this model is meaningless and we shouldn't expect it to say anything at all, or the model is meaningful and we should be able to interpret it as applying to real issues.
I love Vihart's math videos, but this article is interactive propaganda coloured by her social justice views, and I won't pretend otherwise. Disappointed but not surprised it comes from the MIT Media Lab clique.
Or maybe this is just one of the few places where women aren't automatically given special treatment, because it's inhabited by people with autistic tendencies who place a strong importance on fairness by principle, instead of catering to individual feelings. This is a fact that is uncomfortable for many women and men, because face it, women are privileged to be seen as victims in need of protection, and feminists keep on dismissing every single study and statistic that proves this, because no matter how many steps are taken, they will never be happy, by design. Acknowledging this is seen as sexist by many, even though you will find endless articles, shows and panels by women, for women, talking about women, while the gender reverse is derided as both dangerously extremist and hilariously pathetic.
That sort of contradiction is generally a sign of frantic rationalization against an obvious truth. That truth is, of course, that men are invisible by default, unless they distinguish themselves by doing. By only paying attention to the men who pass this threshold, it is then easy to believe that all men are doing well, while ignoring the equally sizeable portion of janitors, garbage collectors, construction workers, coal miners, etc. on the lower rungs of society, who are overwhelmingly male as well.
In tech specifically, it's all the people busting their balls with 80 hour work weeks in order to keep the servers running, fix all the bugs despite unreasonable deadlines and generally do the thankless job of solving problems you didn't know you had in a way you don't need to care about. You don't get a cookie for showing up, funny how that sentiment is considered perfectly valid against "Nice Guys", but unfair against entitled women. Actual equality scares the shit out of feminists.
No but you've pulled this exact same "do you know who I am???" spiel before. I remember the account name. Didn't care then either.
Hint: if you were relevant, you wouldn't need to remind people. And if you weren't stuck up, you'd have made a point here instead of acting sanctimonious.
As opposed to the special snowflake club ignoring the politically inconvenient research done in the last 20 years on gender equality? Differences in in-group bias, differences in headline coverage as victims, differences in court judgments, ...
Let's keep rewriting history so that white men are to blame. It's not like they do things like land probes on comets or anything.
Meanwhile nobody still gives a shit about the way women treat men, or men's "lived experiences". You complain, people listen. We complain, we are told to suck it up.
For some reason, "observant" women keep denying it though.
I can't help but see your comment as a symptom of the problem it's describing. Not trolling, but geek bias... specifically the blind spot of assuming everyone is as sincere as you.
The big problem with comment sections isn't "trolling", it's that most people aren't there to have a fair, rational discussion in the first place. They are there to be entertained or distracted, that will be the main motivation of people doing the browsing. They want to see their opinions and choices validated, while uncomfortable and inconvenient facts are hidden or mocked. At minimum they will avoid anything that reflects badly on themselves and where they can't shift the blame easily. See for example the latest wave of "criticism = harassment" in news sections and on Twitter, where being called out for saying stupid things in public is frantically derided as "sea lioning" which must be stopped.
So trying to fix comment sections behaviorally does not work because they stop being comments. At most you can do something like StackOverflow, which follows a strict Q&A format and bans repetition. It's not really a forum, it's a wiki of googleable questions, and like Wikipedia, is mostly unappealing and unwelcoming to outsiders with fresh ideas.
Besides, the appropriate answer is not to censor and hide, but to confront and refute. You want bad ideas to be catalogued and paired with their antidote, not let people remain blissfully unexposed, their mental immune system ready to overreact to the slightest provocation. The only forums I know of where everyone gets along with everyone are echo chambers. In real discussions somebody's toes always get stepped on. Real names do not help there btw, people still make plenty of dumb comments with their face next to it, it only helps the offendees play the victim card.
I think your "inevitable descent into trolling" is a bad description of how intellectual forums grow their audience: they become more superficial, more emotionally driven and more focused on presentation than merit. Like TED talks. But if you don't grow, you stagnate and turn into an echo chamber. Neither is desirable, you can only try to grow responsibly. You have to allow disruptive voices no matter what.
Double Fraud productions? No thank you. Tim Schafer, you are an insufferable, money-wasting, hypocritical bastard. Gets 8x as much money as he asked for, then delivers less than half of a game in twice the time (Broken Age part 1). Then he does it again, but doesn't even promise to finish the game, just to wrap it up and release as is (Spacebase DF-9).
Insanity. 90% of linear algebra can be understood from graphically examining affine transforms. Doing visuals last is what leads people to conceive of matrix-vector multiplication as a set of meaningless dot products as opposed to just multiplying the basis vectors by the matching coordinate and adding them all up.
When you have no valid point to make, attack the messenger. Don't project how you feel about my opinion onto me, I'm happy and optimistic that this whole oppression charade is finally coming crashing down.
It is amazingly courageous how you manage to go through life with such an inescapable handicap. It must be so hard for you, having to contend with the possibility of encountering strangers and having to deal with them by yourself in a public space. What has the world come to, when such cruelty is not opposed? Something must be done! Now where are all those useless, good-for-nothing men?
Because everyone who doesn't live in one of the SJW/progressivist cult bastions realizes that:
a) Talk is cheap, action matters, and the PC police's main strategy is to complain until other people change, instead of enacting change themselves. Accommodating them is useless, they will simply find something new to complain about. Apologies are always insufficient, defiance is considered a declaration of war.
b) Language is indeed important, and redefining concepts like "privilege", "misogyny" and "harassment" to mean whatever the club of the perpetually offended thinks they mean is damaging to sane discourse.
Why do we teach everyone history? Because it's valuable to know where we came from, and to realize that whatever's going on today, it's probably happened before.
Why do we teach everyone math? Because it creates quantitative literacy, because it helps people deal with systems and complexity, to break down problems logically, and to not let biases get in the way of the truth. Or at least that's what I wish it would be focused on, instead of producing droids who know how to execute symbolic algorithms.
If your upset is about stereotypes and speculation, why did you bother to specify the gender of the author?
"It makes me lose respect for the person who thinks they can pontificate about someone else's experience and motivations."
Except this is what men have to contend with all the frickin' time. Apparently when I do it, I'm not "sharing my lived experiences", I'm "mansplaining".
I also didn't deny the existence of a cultural component, merely that it is not the entire story. If the cultural component was the dominant factor, you would see cultures where the situation is reversed. We don't.
"[TumblrInAction], a subreddit dedicated to mocking Tumblr – where marginalized groups, particularly LGBTQ, post about their experiences"
Here they neatly imply r/TumblrInAction mocks LGBTQ issues when in fact, it mocks people who use identities as tools to divide and hit people over the head with. Which is incidentally what this report does:
"Overt bigotry: the use of bigoted (racist/sexist/homophobic etc.) language, whether targeting any particular individual or more generally, which would make members of the referenced group feel highly uncomfortable"
In other words: assuming everyone in group X feels the same way about what the authors consider offensive language. This ignores e.g. the vast amount of gay people on chan boards who say "faggot" for fun to each other.
This so-called bigotry is contrasted with "supportiveness", apparently a desirable trait. Yet you can easily find people's horrible behavior being supported in more hugbox-style forums, when they get into an in/out-group fight and all the niceties go out the window for the sake of victimhood. We saw this with Atheism+, with r/GamerGhazi, and the "women in tech" activists.
Speaking of, notice how they explicitly contrast r/TheRedPill with a companion "Women in Tech" link in the footnote/popup for no stated reason. TheRedPill is supposedly "dedicated to male chauvinism", where "bigoted comments received approval". Well, if you define the entire subreddit's subject matter as bigoted, are you surprised the community appears to support bigotry by your own count? I have read TheRedPill, it is the male equivalent of Jezebel, nothing more, nothing less.
Really, this is just spreading fear about certain reddits, as the summary practically admits: which communities you should avoid, according to data. Yet the most toxic subreddit of all by their own data, ShitRedditSays, is nicely euphemized as home to "unproductive conversations".
Also if the authors think they "delved deep into the darkest recesses of the inter webs," by analyzing reddit comments, they are naive beyond belief.