Like does anyone have examples of good content from him [HHH]?
He's changed. I was reading a thread from four years ago recently, he's in there, he posts completely differently. But you know who else was in there? People who disagreed with him. A whole range of opinions, also plenty of people on his side. This whole thread segregation thing is new. And it's definitely not solely HHH's fault things ended up this way.
The phenomenon troubles me, I can't stop noticing it now. I don't know exactly what happened. A popular thing to blame is paid saboteurs or glowies; while there are explanations you can come up with that could fit the evidence, HHH himself is not a glowy or anything like that. Personally I doubt it's that. I think we want this for some reason. People feel vulnerable and they're grouping up and rejecting opportunities to interact with those who aren't likeminded. HHH these days isn't quality, so many of his comments I could just write for him, he basically Patposts; but the thing I actually dislike about him (current day) is how, in threads with a consensus that matches his own views, he will rules-lawyer and backseat mod, trying to silence dissent by hinting "helpfully" about potential violations of rules about whiteknighting. Back when he was working in the admin through DOGE, the Elon thread spent an awful lot of time talking about Trump. It was pretty obviously a release valve for the leftwing politics that wasn't getting posted here, and he was absolutely a soldier in enforcing that consensus.
I don't know that I could blame anyone here for trying to enforce consensus like that, but for whatever reason we're missing a huge chunk of popular sentiment here and I do think we're worse off for it. Perhaps just because I think people end up with unrealistic expectations and predictions. Without the visceral experience of opposition, your idea of what you'd like to have happen doesn't get tempered into an idea of what might actually happen. But...when we do come together, it sure doesn't seem that productive. And one theory I have is that it may be asymmetrical, leftists just can't take the heat and won't come out to play when they're not winning; if they do well in the midterms, all of a sudden we'll be getting a mix of views and lively debate again.
Whatever, I should probably try and get my thoughts together on this and just make a thread. I can see why Null was frustrated by the Kirk thread, but I don't think why he did will really make a difference, and it doesn't get to the root of the problem. But it's a really hard problem!
status451.com
