Overlooked Something Dumb With Public Comments

 Due to fixed action patterns, public comments sections are guaranteed to be sewage canals even without CIA speech interference. 

 

So, fixed action patterns. I'm sufficiently sure that public speaking counts as a fixed action pattern. Naturally, if you think you're doing a public speaking event, you're going to talk like a politician, or at best, a marketer. Or, put another way, marketers and politicians talk the way they do because that's how the public speaking fixed action pattern works. 

 The issue is that public comments trigger the public speaking fixed action pattern. Similar to the way outlawing marriage triggers the prostitution and/or adultery fixed action patterns in women. 

 I had been assuming that pseudonymity or anonymity meant it was sufficiently private. However, I did the dumb thing: I forgot to check. Didn't question that assumption. This has been a problem, as I was clearly wrong. 

 Politicians and sophists are the way they are because the public is not trustworthy. Public speaking is an obligate-defector arena. You can't negotiate with the crowd. If you're their leader you can command them, but of course Despotism has no overt leaders. The speaker can't build trust in the crowd, and in return the crowd can't built trust in the speaker.
 Outside very specific and unlikely contexts, public speaking (and listening) is an act of warfare.

 Consequently, public comments are nearly guaranteed to be useless. Unless someone consciously and painstakingly subverts their fixed action pattern, it is unlikely that they can say anything worth trusting. It is near-impossible to communicate using broadly-visible feedback. 

 Even if you do want to subvert the fixed action pattern, it needs some etiquette or norm to deal with the fact that others will not subvert. Your pseudo-private communique will be warfare'd on by publics. E.g. the subverters need to be able to reliably identify and ignore the publics. This invokes a coordination problem, e.g. they need to find a Schelling etiquette, which in turn invokes Revenge is Sour. If folk could coordinate they would not be Democratic Man. 

 Check: usenet solved the etiquette thing by applying coordination. They "gently" bullied all the immigrants until they were socialized. I expect there was a shadow king or a shadow pope commanding the morals. 

 Double check: usenet failed because they were "high trust." They blacklisted instead of whitelisted. They accepted everyone until someone refused to submit, who they would ostracize. Originally the newcomers had a smaller population than the regulars, allowing assimilation (using cult indoctrination dynamics). Being "high trust" is okay in this situation, as they could bully the blacklisted ones off usenet.
 When the population they needed to blacklist outnumbered the validly-whitelisted population, the blacklisted ones assimilate the whitelist, instead of the whitelist carrying on ignoring all the immigrants. 

 Triple check: when usenet was limited to university students and profs, it was sufficiently non-public. You knew most of the population would and could never see it. More like a cafe, ephemeral speech, than an internet forum. Doesn't forcibly trigger the fixed action pattern.

 Basically what public comments are useful for is cheering and jeering. Mob behaviour. Not, in my opinion, useful. 

 Solution: public commentators openly pledge to subvert their fixed action pattern; they get interviewed for possible whitelisting. Physically possible but it probably would have happened already if remotely likely.
 Solution: use public comments only for invitations to a private realm.
 Solution: ensure your private realm isn't pseudo-public, e.g not a game developer discord.
 Technique: write out a public-facing comment, then explicitly avoid saying any of what it says in the private forum.

I suppose I have been hankering to drive off my last 12 readers. I can go full pseudo-private. Maybe start by posting my nighttime dreams. "I don't care." Yes, I know. Only irrationality made you think you cared in the first place.

 P.S. I just analytically proved that ads are inherently criminal. All billboards are vandalism. Women like ads because hybristophilia. Even verbal hawking is vandalism (which is why it's unpleasant). "Free" advice is worth less than you pay for it. P.P.S. Blogging is godless communism, not an exception to the free lunch rule. How substack is not a solution: I can't give free subscriptions to folk I want to talk to, and functionally the 'stack, due to KYC rules, is an FBI honeypot. If I accidentally trigger a Regime allergy, they don't need to round anyone up because we've all helpfully rounded ourselves up. Sure they're unlikely to J6 a private 'stack, but that's not the kind of risk where 'unlikely' is sufficiently low.