this is Habryka talking about how his moderating skills are so powerful it takes lesswrong three fucking years to block a poster who’s actively being a drain on the site
here’s his reaction to sneerclub (specifically me - thanks Oliver!) calling LessOnline “wordy racist fest”:
A culture of loose status-focused social connection. Fellow sneerers are not trying to build anything together. They are not relying on each other for trade, coordination or anything else. They don’t need to develop protocols of communication that produce functional outcomes, they just need to have fun sneering together.
He gets us! He really gets us!
“They don’t need to develop protocols of communication that facilitate buying castles, fluffing our corporate overlords, or recruiting math pets. They share vegan recipes without even trying to build a murder cult.”
Of course, commenters on LessWrong are not dumb, and have read Scott Alexander,
It’s like sneering at fish in an aquarium
from the (extensive) footnotes:
Occupy Wallstreet strikes me as another instance of the same kind of popular sneer culture. Occupy Wallstreet had no coherent asks, no worldview that was driving their actions.
it’s so easy to LessWrong: just imagine that your ideological opponents have no worldview and aren’t trying to build anything, sprinkle in some bullshit pseudo-statistics, and you’re there!



