Well, it took them long enough.
Today, at long last, the Reddit admins banned the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit for promoting hate; they also dropped the ban hammer on MGTOW2, the main subreddit’s purportedly hate-free alternative. (Attempts by Reddit’s MGTOWs to evade the ban were quickly squashed.)
And there was much rejoicing, especially in the AgainstHateSubredddits subreddit, where the regulars welcomed the news with virtual shouts of “WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO WE DID IT REDDIT” and celebratory crab emojis (which I don’t really get, but whatever.)
It’s not altogether clear why the subreddits got banned now, given that they were blatantly hateful during the entirety of their existence; perhaps the daily drip of user reports from AgainstHateSubreddits activists and others pointing out the hateful content finally became to too much to ignore.
One of the mods on AgainstHateSubreddits has another theory. “End of January 2020 is when MGTOW got placed in quarantine status — when it got cited in an FBI prosecution brief for the sentencing of Christopher Paul Hasson, a domestic terrorist who planned a mass murder, as “gender-based extremist content,” wrote Bardfinn. “[A] year and a half later, it’s finally gotten the plug pulled.”
“So we were right after all,” JTBSpartan added. “Reddit couldn’t touch it because it was the subject of a federal investigation.”
I have no idea if this is what happened, but it does make a lot of sense to me.
So where will the Reddit MGTOW diaspora end up? There are a couple of possible alternatives that I’m aware of. One is the forum at GoingYourOwnWay.com, but so far the exodus there looks like its little more than a trickle; according to a site administer only 11 new people have signed up to join the site today, and the regulars there are warning any them and anyone else who moves there from Reddit that they have stricter rules than their old habitat.
It seems likely that a larger number of the Reddit refugees will end up on the less-regulated MGTOW forum on ruqqus BETA, a work-in-progress Reddit clone.
Some of the new recruits on Ruqqus are trying to spin the Reddit ban as a good thing for MGTOWs.
“Hello, MGTOW brothers,” writes someone called TigPlaze.
I’m over here now after the cowards, liars, and haters banned us on Reddit.
I know many of you are probably angry about the ban, but look at it this way: The feminist trash have accomplished exactly NOTHING by this ban. Here we all are here in a better platform that won’t censor us. The feminists have also proven their own intolerance and hate, the very things they claim to be against. …
So, thank-you, feminist trash, for doing this. We now have a better forum where we can more easily discuss things with total freedom. Thanks for adding to MGTOW freedom, feminists. You’ve already done a great job recruiting for us because your hostility and hatred drive men to us. Now you’ve helped us to get a better forum.
“It is actually a good thing to be free from that platform,” agreed sir_manalot.
We just need to make a new one and it will all be good lol.
And this time they cannot control us.
All I can say is
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Pahahahahahahahaha
I mean, congrats to reddit on finally, reluctantly doing the absolute minimum required, after the damage has been done, but, still –
Pahahahahahahahaha
@David Futrelle:
…and celebratory crab emojis (which I don’t really get, but whatever.)
That’s an allusion to “Crab Rave” by Noisestorm; GIFs from that video have become a popular “Ding dong, the witch is dead!” meme:
Fucking finally.
OT, but is anyone here an expert on Android gadgets? My phone seems to have gotten into a fucked-up state where nothing will update.
There’s been a long-standing issue where two apps, ironically not third-party but core Google products, have been a problem during updating: the Chrome browser, and a system component called Android System Webview which I’ve read is basically an embeddable copy of Chrome that other apps can use to display HTML content. (So, no surprise that if one of those has a problem they both do; or that there are very often updates for both when there’s an update for one.)
The long-standing issue is that trying to update either of those two apps will often fail with the updater getting stuck at the “pending” state and not advancing to “downloading”. Normally, if you go to update multiple apps at once, one at a time will download and install and the others will be “pending” until it’s their term. So this state normally indicates that an update is waiting in line; and normally if an update is “pending” another one is downloading or installing and when it is done one of the “pending” updates will be chosen to download next. With the two problem apps, though, they often behave as if they haven’t reached the front of the line even when they have. If none of the updates are in any of these states (so, there’s an “update” button next to them and no status of “pending”, “downloading”, or “installing”) and you tap a single “update” button, then since there’s nothing ahead of it in line that app will normally immediately start “downloading”. But Chrome and Webview will often just go to “pending” and get stuck there. If there’s a bunch of apps with updates and you just go “update all” and Chrome and/or Webview are among them, it will often update some of the apps and then get stuck with everything that remains in the “pending” state, and either Chrome or Webview having moved to the top of the list. All the other ones are waiting for Chrome and/or Webview, but one of those should be actually downloading. The bug has struck, however, and it “thinks” it’s not at the front of the line and so it’s waiting, while everything else is waiting for it, and no more downloads or installs happen.
Until now, the solution has been three-fold:
That solution has now run into a snag. I had a stuck Chrome update after updating everything else per 1, and per 2 cleared the Play Store cache and restarted to try again. I hit “update all” and then noticed that it said it was updating two apps, not just one, and went to see why. Turns out one of my other apps had released an update during the brief interval when the device was rebooting. Worse, it didn’t choose to update it first, and Chrome had gotten stuck again.
When that happens, stopping all of the updates and then tapping update on just the non-Chrome non-Webview app doesn’t work — if there has been a failed attempt to update Chrome during the session, nothing will update, getting stuck “pending” instead. It seems that it trying to cancel a stuck update doesn’t fully cancel it; it’s in some kind of limbo where it can’t either proceed or abort, even if the UI claims it’s been aborted. So the other update(s) get stuck waiting for the phantom Chrome update that is supposedly cancelled, but actually in limbo. The only fix is to reboot the device and then do the other updates.
Well, it was. This time, even after a reboot I cannot get the other app’s update to download. Force quit Play Store, clear its cache, restart phone, and then update just the other app, and it gets stuck “pending” even with no attempt since the reboot to update Chrome.
Which means I now have a phone that can’t be updated. Probably can’t download and install new apps on it either, since all of that goes through that single point of Play Store failure. It’s also not a model whose battery can be pulled, at least not by the end-user, so I have no way of attempting a true cold reboot as a remedy, at least not short of waiting for the battery to run flat from usage, which would take hours at a minimum. I’m not sure that would be sufficient for a cold reboot either.
And of course with the updater in this persisting-across-reboots limbo state, I can’t genuinely stop and genuinely retry the Chrome update, so it can’t eventually succeed, either by a 20% chance of the bug not striking or by the load on Google’s Chrome-update-serving servers subsiding in a day or two.
So: what do I do? I’d much rather not have to resort to a factory reset if that can at all be helped. None of the updates currently stuck are particularly urgent, unless there’s a Chrome zero-day being actively exploited that I haven’t heard about, but sooner or later I’ll want to update something important, or install something new, and if this hasn’t been fixed by then I’ll have a serious problem … so don’t consider this stop-the-world urgent, but I would like an answer within a day or two, or at least a pointer to where else I might be able to get one (must be free and not require sign-up).
I’m glad to see them go.
Wait, did I say glad? I meant euphoric.
And I know I’m seriously late to the party on this next one, but I’d like to join the rest of the WHTM crew in welcoming Scildfreja back.
@Scildfreja, @IgnoreSandra
It’s been a minute. Welcome back!
@Surplus to Requirements
Sorry, I’m useless in the Android department. I wish you luck.
@MGTOW subredditors
Might I suggest that you congregate on Gettr. It’s a Twitter type of thing and they love your favorite ex-president there. Also, ISIS posts there. You two groups have a lot in common.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gettr-isis-propaganda-social-media_n_610803bce4b00fa7af8523ff
@Kat, ambassador, feminist revolution (in exile)
Don’t encourage them. Civilization only remains standing because the reactionary groups haven’t figured out they’re all basically the same and combined efforts.
@Kat, thanks, it’s ncie to see you too!
@hammer of glass, I don’t think they can collaborate. Their hierarchy-brains are too quick to denigrate and obliviate. It’s our saving grace, I guess!
And in the case where they do collaborate, they will break up soon enough. Even apparently unified groups like white supremacistes often have a lot of internal conflicts after all.
It is possible they cooperate for long enough to do something truly ghastly, so it would be better if they don’t. But it’s not likely.
Wow. MGTOW really don’t like having to go their own way.
Scildfreja! Welcome back! Good to see you again.
The crabs are a reference to this music video for the song “Crab Rave” by Noisestorm, which I see get posted a lot as a celebratory “good riddance” anthem. It went viral after Rush Limbaugh’s death, for instance.
As somebody who’s been following r/AgainstHateSubreddits for a while now, I heartily approve of Reddit’s decision here.
@Ohlmann:
Unfortunately, cooperating long enough to do something ghastly is not as rare as anybody would like, especially if it’s not explicitly phrased as ‘cooperation’. Witness the quiet cooperation between the Conservative Catholics and the Evangelical Protestants which has rendered women’s health in general and abortion in particular pretty much inaccessible in significant chunks of the U.S. This despite the general contempt for Catholics from the Evangelical side, and the fact that up until the 1970s or so abortion was explicitly considered a ‘Catholic issue’ that Evangelicals saw as unfortunate but not one of Evangelicism’s driving concerns.
@Kevin R.:
Maybe this dates me, but I’ve always been partial to a good rousing round of “Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye!” I sang that when they declared Georgia for Biden in 2020, for instance.
It’s a bit of a paradox, isn’t it? On one hand, they’re big fans of hierarchy. On the other, none of them want to be on the bottom or even near the bottom; that’s reserved for the people they consider subhuman. And those people don’t want to join up precisely because of how they’ll be treated. So it’s really hard to maintain a stable hierarchy or gain enough power to force people to join them and then keep them down. To have the kind of power to even attempt to do that, they’d practically already need to be doing that.
Daesh (ISIS/ISIL) did better than most because they had military hardware and the countries where they were most influential had weak central governments. (They still exist, but don’t have anything like the kind of power they used to.)
Huzzah: better late than never.
Also amused by the ones saying it’s “good to be free of that platform.” If MGTOWers didn’t want to use Reddit, they’ve had the option to avoid it all along.
@Buttercup, hi! Nice to see you again!
Not even for crimes against tautology. It’s a brave new world.
Better late than never, I guess?
But I agree with Schildfreja, only more internetty: LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL.
I like the dancing crabs. Very celebratory.
The boys who are all happy about their new homes have obviously stocked their fridges with sour grapes.
@ Surplus
I like that song. Kind of prefer the rock version by Axxis, but yeah… “Na na na na…”
@Kat
It’s great to be back! I’m…wildly inconsistent, just as a person, so I have no idea how long I’ll stay or whatever. Though it is weird that I tend to show up here whenever I start winning the war in my head. (It can’t be won, not truly. There’s just whether I get to think, and whether I get to feel things like happiness and excitement).
The less publicly accessible misogynist bullshit is, the less likely it is that people with potential will be lured into throwing it away by joining those echo chambers.
Good riddance.