NYT Article on Slate Star Codex Sourced from Reddit “Sneer Club”

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30 points·apsec112··4 comments

Oh, if y'all don't like Sneer Club [0], I can't wait to hear what y'all think about Tech Takes [1].

A lot of folks seem to misunderstand why these curations exist. The main goal seems to be to document the hateful and bigoted beliefs of folks who frequent certain influential forums (LW, HN, Twitter), not to dox or raid them. Merely documenting racist utterances is enough to draw complaints.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/techtakes/

I think when someone posts over 3,600 comments on a forum that calls itself "Sneer Club" - that would be over twenty comments a week, every week, for three years - we should question who is really being "hateful".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRBsaJPkt2Q

> to document the hateful and bigoted beliefs of folks who frequent certain influential forums

This seems like the sort of thing the Chinese Robber Fallacy was invented to describe.

> [David Gerard] also frequently edits the LessWrong Wikipedia article, always towards criticism (in violation of WP:AXEGRIND)

Wikipedia is an interesting subculture of its own. Here is a fun fact involving its cofounder, Larry Sanger: his own criticism of the encyclopedia is banned from it: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ideological_bias_...

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