Anomander

Yeah, absolutely nothing was preventing them from doing so already, without launching Threads.

Blocking Meta / Threads instances isn't going to stop them, either.

Please, tell me what I think some more. It went so well here.

You’re falling into the trap that 5e sets of assuming what is on the character sheet it’s all that’s available to the characters. By forcing players into subclasses that are all just cookie cutter variations of each others, you’re encouraging players to stay entirely in their sheet. To approach every problem by first looking to their sheet and trying to find the right number instead of creatively looking at the narrative we’re building together and finding a unique solution.

None of this is true. It's a weird strawman that you've made up, that would make absolutely no sense to any real person's opinion - if you weren't trying to create a fictional scenario where having more diversity of choice and options was somehow bad.

It’s not a “me” problem to acknowledge that 5e subclasses and races are incredibly samey mechanically,

It's absolutely a 'you' problem to see a wide variety of options with very few mechanical constraints, and go "yeah, that limits creativity" - if you feel your creativity is somehow enhanced by having hard mechanical limits on which races and classes can do what tasks in a TTRPG ... you can still create that experience for yourself in 5E. Like, having more options doesn't prevent you from playing however confined and restricted you want - so making all of these points about me, about other people is just projecting your own limitations on the rest of the world and then criticizing them for a problem only you seem to have.

and if you can’te see past the matrix and pretty illustrations WOTC uses to distract from that, that’s a you problem, for not really getting how this game works at the fundamentals.

Like that. That's not my opinion, "pictures" aren't why I have my opinion or why I might have the opinion I don't, and I definitely understand the mechanics more than fine. You just made up an opinion for me, made up an explanation why I might have that fictional opinion, and then got snide with me about an entirely fictional scenario you put on me.

You can just not use Tashas if you want. Imagining that other people need hard-coded stat penalties just to "be creative" and that's somehow impossible in a system where you, or they, can still choose to have hard-coded stat penalties is just the wildest thing to pretend is 'wrong' with D&D.

It’s like the custom stat benefits rule from Tasha’s. On its face, seems like a good idea. But now you just have every race being a reskin of each other. Kill the subclass. Embrace class differences. Let players make their characters unique based on the stories we make together, not trying to fit them into a predefined cookie cutter box.

This is so bizarrely self-contradictory.

Force players to only play the nine classes with no subclasses or features, force species into hard-locked stat differences ... to avoid them being cookie-cutter? Like forcing anyone who wants to play a reasonably-optimized STR character to play a species with inherent STR bonus increases creativity somehow? As if using Tasha's rule to play an unconventional species as a STR class means that player somehow cannot possibly also give their character a unique and interesting story as well as a slightly unconventional class/species combo? Make it make sense.

If you think that having more tools to customize and differentiate species and classes reduces creativity, that's a you problem and not a rules problem.

So "transition treatments" have gone up 4000% ... in the time period following the treatment becoming available. If being a gymnast was illegal until 2009, or nobody had invented a trampoline until then, you can certainly bet making it legal or possible to do floor routines would result in a 4000%+ increase in people who were openly and publically gymnasts.

Trans people, trans kids, have always existed - we just didn't have the technology to provide the treatment in that article.

That article is choosing to cite the numbers on the treatment rather than the condition because the treatment's very recent launch means it allows the presentation of a scarier number.

You're aligning yourself with nazis while engaging in sophistry to pretend that neither you nor they are nazis.

All these wild mental gymnastics to explain how it's not like that, or the farcical posturing of academic exactitude and "nuanced understanding" - those are the exact same shit as nazis sending in the quiet well-spoken guy to break the ice and get a foot in the door.

You're doing triple overtime to figure out ways to argue compassion for cryptofascists and nazi sympathizers, while going even further out of your way to avoid having the faintest shred of empathy for people who simply want nothing to do with any of that bullshit.

You can call them whatever you want. You don't get to demand that we call them what you want us to. You don't get to demand that we ignore your choice to align yourself with them, to defend them, and to try and make their views sound more palatable and more reasonable than their end goals.

Since everyone is so happy with misusing the term, what are we going to call ACTUAL nazis so that we can differentiate people you disagree with and ACTUAL FUCKING NAZIS.

I completely understand that you absolutely refuse to get it and will continue to avoid getting it forevermore - but I'm going to say it for the rest of the room anyways.

Those guys are the "ACTUAL FUCKING NAZIS".

They just understand that pretending that they're not is the only way to get through the door of spaces dominated by the reasonable mainstream they'd like to sell their ideology to. They know that the reasonable mainstream wants nothing to do with "ACTUAL FUCKING NAZIS" so the "ACTUAL FUCKING NAZIS" dress up as the people you're currently defending and trying to make this conversation about. And anyone in that group that you're trying to defend the nazis by pointing towards, any single person among them who doesn't want to stand with nazis - changes where they stand so that they're not with the nazis anymore. You're staying still while trying to defend that decision.

The "ACTUAL FUCKING NAZIS" don't dress up in SS Uniforms and 'heil' each other in the comments sections - they pretend to be reasonable mainstream people and in order to present their views and their talking points wrapped in rhetoric that masks its nazi roots. They want to win over the mainstream, they want to convince people they're "on to" something, they want to exploit our willingness to engage in discourse to sell their views and advance their ideology. They are not here to engage in debate - the debate is merely a vehicle towards seizing power and then acting out an ideology of violence and hatred.

I'm not 'playing semantics' - I'm not even engaging with yours.

We are not going to split hairs and massage academic definitions until "ACTUAL FUCKING NAZIS" aren't actually nazis anymore. Either you're a useful idiot and not qualified to try and talk down on folks about the intricate semantics of "nazi" - or you're actually on their side.

Carefully, on a case-by-case basis; and the community.

It's not nearly as complicated as it seems on the surface - and you're trying to make any definition of "nazi" as complicated as possible, because you're wanting to delegitimize any rejection of nazis or nazi speech.

Remember how you said you don't care if people like you, you just want to push your topics on other people?

it diminishes its significance and undermines your credibility.

No one cares if the Nazis think they're "credible" or not. Each and every one of them will tell you they're not a nazi and they 'hate' nazis - while defending themselves and their nazi buddies from critique by insisting the label for their ideology is, for example, "cheapened" if applied to anyone who is not a card-carrying, armband-wearing, farcical exaggeration of stereotypical Nazis in full Reich dress regalia.

They always send the clean cut, quiet, polite one in first. And that guy puts a foot in the door, argues that their pals aren't really nazis, and that everyone in the room are the real baddies for judging those other guys unfairly - and tries to pry the door wider so their Nazi buddies can come in. Sure enough, every time, you let enough nazis in the room and the room is a nazi space now - so the whole gang of them don't have to pretend at being polite non-nazis anymore. The polite veneer, the deep care for "debate", and "respect for all viewpoints"? Those are all just tools, trying to whitewash and re-legitimize an ideology whose end goal is harming other people.

Notice how I'm casually referring to you like you're one of them? That's not some wokist over-use of the term. You're standing here defending them, you're trying to shove a foot in the door for them, laying down apologia for their views and their right to share them - you've spent like a week around the Fediverse arguing against any actions that have served to limit Nazis access to polite and adult spaces within the Fediverse as a whole. I don't care what you believe about yourself, or your views, or your ideology.

If you're going to stand with Nazis, if you're going to stand for them, consistently and repeatedly - don't get all offended and playact at being victimized when people assume that you are a member of the group you chose to stand with.

Except that's a sidestep. The viewpoint you were defending was saying that this one specific option, that has substantial academic backing for positive outcomes for kids, should not happen or should be prohibited.

That's not "discuss other options" - that's discussing this option and arguing that society should take it away.

That you're now trying to argue that it's just discussion and it's reasonable debate and - forgive my bluntness - being openly dishonest about what the original speech was that you're defending with "free-speech" and anti-censorship talking points is like ... the example case for how this thread started. The nazis and the transphobes and the hateful bigots can always, easily, spin their own takes as righteous and reasonable debate - if you let them lead the dialogue and frame their discourse through the most-appealing lenses possible. And they can make valid-sounding and appealing arguments for why you, too, should defend them and their right to speak.

But inevitably they are also going to use any and all space you clear for them to be hateful and bigoted and call for harm to other people - that is their goal. Everything else is just a setup play.

I don't think I jive with the notion that kbin is somehow "above" hating Nazis.

My understanding was that the traditional chilis used were Thai or birds-eye chilis, and ripe red jalapenos were used by immigrants to North America when thai chilis weren't available. The "sriracha pepper" is a modern invention to capitalize on the popularity of the sauce, rather than the source of it - and it is still just a close relative of the jalapeno.

Just the same way the funding bar works. As long as no one is lying, confused, lazy, mistaken or busy it's bulletproof.

Ah. Of course. People will declare the undeclared money they receive.

Maybe a light/dark bar showing declared and undeclared funding.

How is that supposed to work, though?

Like, say I'm wildly corrupt and taking money to push stories about Smurfs. Big Gargamel sends me $1K a month to use my influence to seed stories that talk negatively about the Smurfs. I don't say shit. Big Gargamel doesn't say shit. How would the "undeclared funding" bar know?

Absolutely - that so much of Reddit's niche and success was being a place where people already were. Folks who made memes or wrote articles went to the place where the audience for that content was pre-built and was focused in a predictable way. Folks who had questions or contributions to make went to the largest community they could find, tied to the content they were focused on.

Absolute reader numbers or absolute activity are only indirect metrics, what the community needs is a large-enough dedicated core to keep a sense of culture and continuity alive, a steady flow of new content or topics, and enough incoming members to replace natural attrition. I find that the last two tend to be strongly linked - for a niche-topic community, one of the best sources of content and activity is beginner questions. Experts often don't have a ton to talk about day-to-day, unless some big news or development has happened, in which case the topic is explored until exhausted and then dropped. But have a steady flow of newbies there to ask the experts questions, and that will prompt not just responses for the newbies, but conversations among the experts on the side.