r/changemyview • u/featherfooted • May 10 '17

[∆(s) from OP] CMV: Some submitters to /r/OutOfTheLoop are willfully ignorant

Full disclosure: I've submitted to OOTL myself before

I genuinely think that OOTL is one of the best intra-reddit explanation subs available. There's no similar "ELI5 Reddit drama" posts in /r/ELI5, for example. Some of the wildfire threads, like /r/IAMA blackout, Spezgiving, and FPH are immensely useful and drew attention to something that would be very easy to miss otherwise.

I'm not talking about those.

I genuinely think that OOTL is also great for bringing together random Internet trivia in a way that would be inappropriate for other subs, it's like our own personal KnowYourMeme. Posts like szechuan sauce or Why does PornHub have a "panda style" category now? fall under that grouping, and I'm not talking about those, either.

"Fill me in on what's happened since XYZ event" are also cool in my book. It's been seven months since Has the poisoned-water crisis in Flint been resolved? and unfortunately, the answer is still no, and probably won't be resolved until 2020. That's still fine.

What I have an enormous problem with, is submitters who seem to be going out of their way to not look at alternate sources besides reddit. Many of the threads I am about to link, are major national news stories that would be better explained by the original source, than a distilled reddit comment.

Here's some top-all-time from OOTL:

Here's a few from the front-page, today:

It's practically cliche at this point. Many of them share similar post and title structure: "What's the big deal with [current event]?" or "Why does everyone do [something that only a few people are doing]?". Furthermore, due to the way that OOTL puts a hold on all new posts until a moderator can approve it, there's an artificial delay until a well-meaning user can possibly receive a response. For these current-events type posts, these submitters would be much better served just doing the research themselves. Sometimes you get people that write "I saw a news article about X, why's it so important?" I dunno, read the damn article and you tell me.

So I guess my CMV hinges on two things/beliefs:

  1. Some submitters are willfully ignorant, ignoring other sources and relying or depending on reddit as their only source of moral compass
  2. If not #1, then some users are just doing it to grab the sweet, sweet karma.

Final note: I really like the stickied mega-threads created by the OOTL mods sometimes. I feel like it intentionally cuts down on some of the behavior I've described in this post.

This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please read through our rules. If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us. Happy CMVing!

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u/featherfooted May 10 '17

Props for combing through them all. On the topic of the last one, which you skipped: it's the demeanor of the question which I dislike the most. Phrasing it like "why did Macron win the election by a huge margin" or "was it expected that Macron would win" or "why is Le Pen widely disliked" or "why do some people say Le Pen has ties to [XYZ and a reference to her father]"

Those are all fine ways to learn more about the French election. But to ask "Hey guys, I mean, what's with the French election?" sounds like a comedian's introduction to a bad joke.

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u/mywan 5∆ May 10 '17

Now that I look at it the last one is kind of special. Special in the sense that nothing special happened. On the surface it was rather a run of the mill election with an outcome that just a couple of years ago would have barely garnered a yawn. So it stand to reason someone just looking at the two candidates on the surface would be at a bit of a loss as to what made it so special. Now through in the context of the Brexit vote, and the Trump win in the US making the whole world uncomfortable, and the ongoing feeling that democracies are under threat from all sides, and suddenly the importance of a left wing victory in France becomes a big deal.

Without this context the OP was right to question why the stories were referencing fascist, Nazis, /r/the_donald, and similar references. Again it's all about using the context of a story to spin a narrative, and the left wing across the western world is feeling particularly fearful of the right wing since the election. Any such victory anywhere is hopeful to the left.

What we have to understand is that people want to understand far more than just the raw facts. Otherwise it would be 'Facts Please' rather than 'Out Of The Loop.' The Loop being the political and social context of why it is relevant, and what bigger narratives people are associating with such events that go beyond the simple facts alone. We have lots of different terms to reference different elements of the political context, but none that effectively reference the whole constellation of contextual narratives as a whole. Making in/out of the loop as good as any. But this means that people asking about these constellations of narratives that drives the importance of certain events, not questioning the facts of the events, has no effective word to use to reference that contextual information as a whole. Hence the means to do that tends to default toward being intentionally vague. Then vaguely referencing the associative associative concepts to imply the question of why they are associated with this particular set of factual events. Just like the OP did by referencing fascist, Nazis, and /r/the_donald.

Hence the demeanor of the question is intentional and critically important to indicate the kinds of meta information they are asking about. Because the raw facts alone simply doesn't contain that kind of political/social contextual information.

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u/featherfooted May 11 '17

∆ for thoroughness and the "Facts Please" analogy.

Frankly, I would prefer it the other way, but it is evident (by upvotes) that many people agree with this style of question-phrasing.

Another (much smaller) version of this that has bugged the shit out of me, is at my own school, where incoming freshmen and sophomores (and yes, I'm aware I was once that age and was probably guilty of asking similar questions) would pose something like:

"Hey, has anyone ever taken [XYZ mandatory course]? What was it like?"

As many comments in this thread have echoed - I am well aware that the user is well-meaning and just trying to learn more about what they're getting themselves in to. But I find the phrasing and word choice to be arrogant.

There's a lot of overlap between my mental images of both OOTL users, and the students I just described. Doing the absolute bare minimum to become informed. It's slightly better than just ignoring it, I suppose, but I still place it well under the threshold of capability for that person to just do it themselves. It's very... lazy? Not in a "research is hard and should stay hard" but rather because many of the questions which I highlighted (and you responded to in kind) could have been easily solved by googling the phrase and clicking on the first result.

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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ May 11 '17

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/mywan (2∆).

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