So I’m assuming the duplicate communities are communities of the same exact name in different instances/server. Is anyone else finding this somewhat confusing?
Generally speaking, yes - but also, this is something that will likely fade over time as specific ones stand out. Currently, the plurality is a result of no developed community for that niche existing; as communities settle and grow, less of that sharding will take place unless there’s a crisis in the ‘main’ one.
I have a hard time believing that all of even just most of the men that initially joined her group had “concerning views” if that’s meant to refer to the misogyny we see in those most associated with the term today, but I do know that plenty of the posters I saw on the subreddit years ago when I visited were not of that ilk.
That’s fine, but remember you’re doubting the one person unique qualified to talk about the developmental history of the movement that they launched from the site that they ran.
I don’t think that it necessarily was “all” or “most” but simply that the male presence within the movement was sufficiently represented by individuals with those views that it’s one of the first thing she mentions in the context of discussing the growth of the movement itself.
Part of her point seems to be pointing out that they invited those views in, very early in the movement, out of a desire to be inclusive - only to be driven out by those views later on down the road.
I bring that up in this context because I don’t think that the movement or the term can be divorced fully from the male misogyny that it’s associated with today. Those people are not latecomers to the label, they’ve been there effectively from the start - from the point where it went from the comments section of Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project blog, to becoming “a community” centered around a shared label.
but I think if the term was originally coined to represent people who were genuinely suffering from external circumstances that put them in the position they’re in, it should remain for them and not those who sabotage themselves via their own toxic behavior.
I’ve used bold to highlight it in the quote above - that is a big “if” that the person who coined the term says is not true. If it were true, we’d be having a different conversation. But it’s not true.
The simple fact is that it’s a self-identifier. It’s a label that people put on themselves based on their perception of their own life circumstances. The original vision for the term says that neither you nor I get to tell anyone else they’re “not a true incel” or to go over their life and tell them the barriers are self-inflicted if they don’t see it that way. I guarantee you that the people you want to exclude from the term do very genuinely believe that they are “suffering from external circumstances that put them in the position they’re in.” No matter how much your or I might see them and think they’re clearly suffering from self-inflicted wounds, they are entirely sincere in their belief that their dating life is out of their control and has been a victim of cruel society.
One group deserves empathy and compassion; the other deserves scorn and derision. I don’t think it’s productive or fair to the former group to use the same term for both.
To me? They’re the same group. Some members of the group are hateful and shitty. Some members of the group aren’t. I’d say that the overwhelming majority of members, from both sides of that divider, are experiencing obstacles to dating or sex that are self-inflicted, even if they also have other barriers that are not. The vast majority of both groups would tell you that their personal circumstances are wholly out of their own control.
The “logic” that group uses around attractiveness and dating marketability and how this or that facet of looks or wealth or social status or whatever is ultimately spurious. If Ricky Berwick get rich, famous, and married - the absolute hard impassible barriers that incels talk about affecting themselves simply do not exist.
Internet history pedantry, but by the time the subreddit rolled around, the term and the movement had already been coopted.
Incel started as a term for men who felt depressed about being unable to find a female partner, and the subreddit they created was originally a supportive space for them.
The term was coined somewhere between 1994 and 1997 by “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project” as a term for people of all genders who were unable to find partnership despite trying. Alana is a woman, and is effectively universally credited with coining the term and founding the movement. The movement wasn’t ‘for men’, the term wasn’t about men specifically, and it didn’t start on Reddit. It started off as more of a personal blog, where Alana documented her own experiences and struggles - the site gained followers from other people with similar experiences, eventually growing into a combined forum / support group / community.
Then it got taken over by angry misogynists and the term became associated with them, while the original group just kind of got forgotten about. That original group deserves attention and empathy as well as the term they coined; the latter group isn’t even “involuntarily celibate,” as they play a very big role in their own celibacy.
Those folks have kind of always been there, and have always been a heavily represented demographic - Alana has said in interviews that the men who joined in the early days did have some concerning views and some concerning themes were on frequent repeitition in the discussions the community had. I don’t think retconning the movement to exclude those people from the “true definition” is doing either camp any favours. The “involuntary” part of the label isn’t trying to engage with whether or not the barrier may stem from factors within their control, but solely confined to the fact that they want something and are not getting it. They are simply “celibate, but not voluntarily celibate”.
One quip that Alana made in several interviews while defining her modelling of the community she founded was that she didn’t care why someone was an incel, ie “it’s OK if you’re celibate because you’re into horses, but that’s illegal” that that person should still be welcomed and included in the community.
I just think more people should give some thought to who that term originally belonged to.
I think that in light of this, it’s even more important to be accurate and honest who those people are: Not male-exclusive, not limited to this or that cause of celibacy, not specifically gatekeeping out the misogynists or the beastialists any more than any other group. Just any people who want to get laid but are not getting laid.
They can already access the data, it’s all federated and it’s all publically available effectively by definition, they don’t need to launch a platform that interacts with Fedi in order to scrape it. And Meta will only be able to scrape user profiling data on the people accessing Fediverse through their own tools and platforms. In the large term, all data is useful and getting the additional facets of how their users interact with a twitter-like platform is good - but I don’t think that’s really why they chose to federate.
But…
What joining Fediverse does offer them is a way of launching their Twitter-rival product with genuine and organic content or activity already present.
Facebook & Instagram’s primary demographics are not internet pioneers, they don’t tend to build new things - they feed off existing activity and build on top of it. They access the platforms to consume content, and only move to creating or posting content over time as they develop networks on the sites. Meta cannot realistically launch a Twitter competitor whole-cloth. The sort of people who joined Twitter early to build that space aren’t joining a Meta product, likewise the people who join new platforms or normal fediverse.
If it launched empty, it would remain empty. People would check it out, see almost no content or no content they care about, and not come back. Meta can only realistically launch a product like Threads with activity already occurring, and things like AI content or fake profiles aren’t necessarily convincing enough to lure in the punters. But Fedi is preexisting and active and there’s already A Thing there that Meta can point their users at, there’s already content to consume and people to interact with.
I don’t think so; it won’t hurt ‘us’ anymore than we were hurt yesterday, when Threads hadn’t launched yet.
as if Apple or someone on the Store team has VC money riding on this.
They don’t have VC money riding on this. VCs aren’t offering the kind of money that Apple cares about, especially when the trade-off is getting caught ‘fixing’ the marketplace somehow.
But there doesn’t need to be dirty money in play - Apple has long been inclined to manipulate ratings in the App Store, and almost universally in ways that trend more positive. Even as a completely free app that generates no revenue for Apple, having it on the store and having it highly rated on the store makes the App Store look good. Apple wants there to be a positive impression of using their walled-garden app environment and highly-rated free apps for popular sites and services supports that. They can even argue that the ratings on their store prove that theirs is the better environment, because Reddit for iOs is rated better than Reddit for Android, and “they’re the same app!” so therefore it’s the platform that gets credit for the gap consumer perception.
More, Reddit needs to generate revenue, and lots of users are reaching the site from mobile. It makes sense to find ways of monetizing the app, especially if they can corner the market on it - and Apple gets a cut of all purchases made through their platform.
Effective journalism. Someone asked him the right question in the right way, and he wound up volunteering something he might not have otherwise chosen to say.
That said, I think some of this is just reasonable openness and accountability. Given the game was effectively a full year ago and the issues with VAR from that game are still a somewhat spicy topic, it’s obviously something he’s been questioned on rather a lot - and given that PGMOL also released a statement, and he mentions that he spoke to on-field ref after the game … it seems like he’s already owned that mistake professionally and personally, so making the same acknowledgement of error publicly isn’t that huge a step beyond that.
It was definitely a mistake that the fans deserved an accounting of, considering it’s the exact sort of problem that VAR exists to address - and that it should have been a call, of some sort at least, was absolutely undebatable to anyone who’d seen it.