What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.- Billy Madison
If I could Thanos my fingers and every subreddit that I moderate became r/AskHistorians-but-fitness, I would do it.
Almost. r/AskHistorians is fantastic and works very well but it has a key difference to fitness - it's pretty much impossible for anyone there to have lived in history, so you can't very well require anybody who is talking to contribute their direct experience. That's fine and it works because it's history. But it's not what I want.
If it were up to me, the only people answering questions would be people who have first proven that they've done something. And it has to be something real. If I could enforce a mandate that to give advice one must either be linking to someone reputable who is giving the advice, or proven to be reputable and experienced oneself, I would do that in a heartbeat. If all you have is a personal training cert or a bibliography go fuck yourself. Sidebar: I learned recently that the CSCS exam is entirely multiple choice questions and I lost all respect for it.
eric_twinge introduced me to the idea of Gell-Mann Amnesia a couple of years ago and it was one of those moments where I realized that something had been in my soul but never properly articulated enough for me to understand it consciously. Every time I end up in a non-fitness sub reading comments from people talking about fitness, I think about Gell-Mann Amnesia. Every time I end up in a fitness sub that isn't moderated by me or someone I know, reading comments from people talking about fitness, I think about Gell-Mann Amnesia.
There was a topic on r/gainit at some point discussing whether or not there should be a mental health thread. I put on my diplomacy hat for that, because the answer deep in my heart is, succinctly, "Jesus fuck no", but I don't think that would play well. Central to my long winded version of "hard pass" is my sincere conviction that Reddit is a barely mitigated pile of shit that no one should try to get advice from about anything. And I have that conviction because I constantly think about Gell-Mann Amnesia. That conviction why I have put so much time and effort into the Wiki.
I used to dabble in other subreddits looking for information about various things, albeit always with an extreme degree of skepticism, until I learned about Gell-Mann Amnesia. Every time I watch Reddit have uncontrolled "discussions" about topics I know about, Reddit reminds me that just about nobody on Reddit knows fucking anything that they claim to know. I do not want to forget that when I go looking for advice on topics I don't know enough about to sift through.
I don't know what it is about human wiring that we so desperately want to give advice even though we shouldn't. Yes, I know that Dunning-Kruger is a thing. Thank you. That isn't what I'm talking about. Is there a name for the phenomenon where you spend a ton of time reading and doing research, and just parrot it back out at other people, never applying it or doing anything yourself? If not, I'm going to name it now - Will Hunting Syndrome. I think it's the perfect name because Will Hunting was an utterly useless asshole right up until the point when Ben Affleck said "If you're still here in 20 years I'll fuckin' kill ya". Because you can't learn anything from Will Hunting that you can't learn by reading a fuckin' book. There's a principle in workshops and presentation that I think of as the "Why are you here?" Principle - If people can get the same thing from a PowerPoint that they'd get from your workshop or presentation, there's no reason for there to be a workshop. Just give people the book and stop trying to be the book. That's how useless you are when all you've done is read a billion articles about just as many training methods but you don't know what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel.
Everybody on Reddit wants to be Will Hunting. But nobody in the real world wants to hear from Will Hunting.
But that rant is played out.
For some reason, people who come to Reddit for advice never seem to consider who they're getting it from and whether they should actually listen. Though, I guess that's not actually true, because what they do all the time is put Reddit on a pedestal. Somehow, Reddit is the pinnacle of trustworthy information and trustworthy people. They think that as a layperson they'll be able to judge which arguments are sound and which are not, and this usually just devolves into demanding sources, then deciding which of those sources - that they could have found all on their own, mind you - are valid, and which are not.
Why did another human being need to be involved in that process?
I hear this all the time - "I want to hear from real people, not some bogus ad filled paid promo something something". As though real people on Reddit are these high quality, purely objective scholars who aren't susceptible to indoctrination and bullshit. But those same people go on to use a method of information gathering in which 99% of what those real people say is ignored unless they like how it sounds. Meanwhile...
Jeff Cavaliere has 11 million subscribers and an army of ball garglers singing his praises on Reddit despite that he is by all possible metrics a charlatan, a hack, and a grifter. Mark Rippetoe and Mehdi's dogshit lifting programs and even smellier dogshit training advice were the beginning and end of how you got started lifting for at least a decade on the internet, r/Fitness included. Look around and you will find subs claiming that eating a pure meat diet cures half the diseases known to man (nevermind that it makes your asshole into a fire hydrant), that Intermittent Fasting is the secret to perpetual youth, that Greg Douchebagguette's maingaining meme is the best way to get jacked despite that zero people have used it to get jacked, that you're totally not a pedophile just because you spend your time posting and looking at pictures of underage anime girls, and that the Jews are behind, like, everything. All because the empty eyed cows who are easily convinced by aggressive conviction outnumber people who know anything real by orders of magnitude, and they talk more, and they talk louder, and they jerk themselves off harder. These people beat one another's dicks like they owe them money. Nobody should get advice from them about anything. But on Reddit, everybody is getting advice from them about everything.
A hand needs to be on the steering wheel or the truck's going in the lake.
The accumulated filth of all their stupid questions and laziness will foam up about their waists, and all the beginners and idiots will look up and shout "Why not let the community and the votes decide?", and I will whisper "No".
I've seen what "the community" decides. Because there is no "the community". There are a handful of regulars who are varying degrees of smart or not, sitting in a boat together, and hiding under the water is an ever-shifting, mostly silent population that can best be described as "Japanese body horror". We're in Tetsuo, Akira, and Envy territory here. The only thing that that leviathan of churning souls all trying to scream with no mouth wants is to gorge itself, and what it likes to eat most is turds.
There's a post on the front page right now, from a month ago, that I feel demonstrates this. "I'm so embarrassed to go to the gym". I let it stay up at the time, so that I can spend the next 6-12 months telling everyone who wants to talk about their embarrassment like it's not 90% hyperbole and melodrama to get fucked and use the search. I regret it. But the leviathan ate that shit and reveled in it. 2000 upvotes and 12 awards for a post that is in every possible way answered by reading the Wiki. The top comment has 3000 upvotes and 6 awards and it says literally nothing. There's a progress post from a few weeks ago that's the same. In almost 2 years a kid gained 30lbs and the only difference I see in the pictures is the pubic hair he grew on his upper lip, probably because his routine is a fucking trainwreck that nobody can learn anything useful from except "Don't do this". 2000 upvotes, 13 awards. Mikey likes it! Last year, there were a few days where "Lifting makes me happy but running doesn't, help" and "How do I tighten a spin lock, like, so tight you guys?" had thousands of upvotes and multiple awards each. They shared space and time with an announcement that two PhDs were going to be doing a Q&A and I'll let you guess how much the leviathan cared about that.
Leviathan tentacles gave Reddit their money to say "I like these". Because the leviathan can relate, the leviathan thinks it got human interaction and motivation to succeed. But when it was done eating, the leviathan went back down under the lake and sat there doing nothing. Those tentacles are never going to come back to the surface to tell us how much they grew because of the turds they ate. The leviathan doesn't know that turds are not nutritious.
If you had a friend who routinely ate dog shit, would you let him pick the restaurant?
Tell me that the leviathan should get to decide.
Do I need to remind anyone that human beings in aggregate are so awful that after all this time we still can't all agree that Santa Baby is one of the grossest songs ever recorded and should never be played anywhere besides Hell and Guantanamo Bay?
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ZBGBs wrote an awesome comment about entertainment versus information. I re-read it regularly. I keep thinking "I should put this in a manifesto or mission statement or something" for r/Fitness, put it somewhere prominent, so new people can see what we're about up front, and leave instead of getting frustrated. Then I remember that nobody on Reddit reads anything anywhere and I forget about it for a while.
I want r/Fitness to be informational. I want that information to be good. This is something I care about, and that drives me. And I want people to put a little effort in when they want help. This should not be controversial, but is. Turns out it conflicts with what a lot of people want, which seems to mostly be either for r/Fitness to be their mother or for them to be everyone else's mother, including the part where your mother constantly forwards nonsense information to you via e-mail and gets uppity if anyone is mean to anyone else.
But that isn't the whole picture. Everyone wants Fittit to be something different. Sometimes it's those things, other times it's other things. In my heart of hearts, I think it's likely that very few people get what they want. I'm ok with that. Most of them are going to fail or give up whether or not they get what they want, and most of them want something that's stupid. They want emotional support, they want real opinions, they want medical advice, they want life advice, they want congratulations for something mundane, they want someone to do all their thinking for them, and they want it all for free. They don't want to read anything though.
RTFM is an acronym that predates my entire life, and people still don't do it. I don't remember ever needing to be told or taught this. It might be because I was "the smart kid" that everybody tried to use as a personal answer machine instead of doing their own homework. It might be because I've worked in the service industry extensively. But, I don't know how to explain to someone who doesn't understand it on their own that in most situations, if the first thing you do is "ask somebody else" and not "read the manual", you're being an asshole. I used to get into arguments with people about it. In hindsight I can admit that because I wrote a lot of the Wiki, it used to be excessively personal to me when people refused to read it. I understand now that a leech doesn't have the ability to understand that it's being an asshole when it latches on to your leg and tries to drain you dry.
I don't know how to explain to someone who doesn't understand it on their own that there is no difference between reading a sentence on an FAQ page and reading that same sentence with an anonymous and probably stupid username above it. I don't know how to explain to that same person that if being denied the latter is really a barrier they can't get over, they are not going to make it. I don't know how to explain to that same person that it is rude to ask other people to do your homework for you for nothing in return.
People say that kind of thing to us all the time when we tell them no in modmail - "You are disheartening me! You are denying me the ability to get fit!" Ok. Then die. You're a coward and a loser. If it wasn't me saying no now, it'd be your melodramatic oVeRwHeLmEd feeling the first time you walk into a gym or try to intelligently decide what to eat, or the first time you feel sweaty and uncomfortable, or the first time you aren't so full of butter and chocolate pizzasandwiches that you feel the tiniest bit of hunger. Your fitness and your emotional state are your responsibilities to manage. That's not my burden. If that's what you want, wire me some money. Otherwise, have some pride and be an adult.
This is the kind of person that gives money to Reddit to say "20 months of training to look almost the same, now that's the stuff".
This is the kind of person that amalgamates into the leviathan.
Tell me that the leviathan should decide.
I think it says something about Reddit's demographic that outside my own circles I get pushback on the idea that being lazy or a coward is bad, and telling people that they're being a coward is right action. Or when MythicalStrength writes about why some people should shut up and quit. Or or or or or. It's tempting to blame it on some nebulous idea of "the times" or "the millennials". I think about John Malkovich saying "Used to be there was a way to do things and things got done. Now everybody's feelings are involved." in whatever movie he said that in. But that feels cheap and stupid when I think about it for more than a minute and I'm not willing to put money on the table for it. I see these people in their teens all the way up to their 40s. I can't really fault a teenager for being a coward, their entire world is a rollercoaster and they only barely know which way is up. Nor can I really fault them for not knowing anything, either. I will absolutely fault a grown ass man or woman though. I don't know how the hell you can function in life if something as contrived and meaningless as a gym terrifies you, or if you're incapable of looking up basic facts on Google and Wikipedia.
Walk around r/fitness30plus sometime if you ever feel stupid or wimpy. I have never seen such a circus of quivering, helpless baby bunnies pretending to be adults. The other day a dude asked, sincerely, if drinking a protein shake would break a fast. Will food break a fast? Do you know what the fuck you're asking? Are you sitting in front of a device that can instantly look up the definitions of words? Reminder that this is a >=30 year old person asking other human beings to tell him what fasting means. This is a normal question to see there. But this is not unique and by my estimation Reddit is overflowing with people who are adults in age but not in brain or skill or effort.
This is the kind of person that amalgamates into the leviathan.
Tell me that the leviathan should decide.
Am I an asshole for deriding such people? I suppose. Is there a polite way to tell someone who is being pathetic that they are being pathetic? The adage says that if I don't know, I should say nothing.
If broken is your normal, and no one tells you that you're broken, how are you to know?
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"Power hungry" is a phrase that gets lobbed out by salty people a lot. They seem to think it's the baddest buck-buck breaker of them all. It's just the mosquito. I think about the concept of "having power" as a moderator sometimes. I don't really know what "power" is supposed to be or mean in this context. r/Fitness is Reddit's #1 Health and Fitness community - a phrase I will ride into the ground - but put in perspective, 8 million subscribers is probably inconsequential, and Fittit sees less than 2% of that in unique visitors on any given day. Sure I can ban anybody I want and remove anything I want, but I kind of feel like that would have to mean something if it were to be "power". Does it mean anything? I'm not convinced it does. I certainly don't feel powerful when I cinch up my full Hefty bag and lug it out to the curb. Maybe it's because I'm an adult and all these people aren't, but that's all I feel most of the time when I nuke stupid things or ban people - for the 5th time in one sitting my kid dropped his peas on the god damn floor and peas are exasperating to clean up. I don't know how one gets a feeling of power out of that. It's more like resigned indifference. And they seem to live in this odd limbo double-think world where they are simultaneously a source of power which I covet and not power at all, depending on what kind of angry the person speaking is.
However, I am sometimes acutely aware that we brought down the kingdoms of both Starting Strength and StrongLifts on Reddit when we took them out of the Wiki, wrote a page about why, and either got people on board with the reasoning or supported the others who had already been trying. I am also sometimes acutely aware 5/3/1's popularity on Reddit seems to have skyrocketed in the last few years and is probably because of us having it prominently in the Wiki. It may have even spread outside of Reddit - The Wiki's page about 5/3/1 for Beginners is #2 on Google. If there's any power that one can say that I have, perhaps that's where it is. But is that really power when the only reason it happened is good intentions executed with resolve? The moment any of us tried to take those levers we pulled to make those things happen, and abuse them in some bad faith way, Reddit the company would cast us down and what we've worked years for would completely evaporate. It only works because we did it with unified good intent and Right was on our side.
There's a meme that I'm aware of that goes something like, He's a mod, he does it for free. I don't pay much attention because as far as I can tell it's repeated only by paramecia. This seems to be used like an insult and I think it's weird but also confirms that one celled critters with no brain are the ones LOL guying it out. Only something without a brain can't imagine doing a thankless task for years without getting paid in service to something bigger than money. Reddit couldn't afford me anyway.
I pay out of pocket for the cost of running the Wiki because its value in the world is something I believe in. It is what I wish I had in high school, when I was skinny and lost. And part of its value is that it doesn't have to run ads or peddle bullshit in order to exist. I am thankful that how good I am at my job allows me this luxury.
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My wife does this thing where she continues an hours old conversation in her head and then continues continuing it out loud. It usually involves the use of vague pronouns and brings my brain to a screeching halt trying to figure out what is going on.
Anyone who tries to tell me that Fittit is worse off with Wendler supplanting Rippetoe is a fucking idiot and I will not be convinced otherwise. SS isn't the worst routine by far, but the reality is that it's a gateway to Rip and everything out of Rip's mouth is an unmitigated embarrassment. The same goes for SL and Mehdi. They are the Dr. Oz of strength training. So, it's fine that Fittit rides Jim Wendler's dick a little bit. Fittit's going to ride somebody's dick because riding dicks is what internet communities do, and if that's how it's got to be, it should at least be a nice big veiny one that lasts and not a turtle head that's done in 30 seconds, like mine.
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Left to its own devices, Reddit would rapidly become 4chan with vote buttons. I think I and the other mods have done an ok job of squeezing some blood from a stone and Fittit is as good a place as one can expect it to be to get help with fitness goals. But sometimes, I think that if it were up to me, we'd go back to a time where Fittit wasn't an option that existed. Sometimes, I think that the world of fitness would be better if the millions of people who don't actually want to change didn't have free access to strangers whose time they could waste while they figure out they're not going anywhere. If one had to have and use social skills to make friends with the huge dude in the gym, or pay a coach, I sometimes think that would be better. Maybe people would respect each other more and quit fucking about as much. Maybe if people whose commitment to action is so low they can't even be called hobbyists didn't have a million articles to read at their fingertips, the people who had value to contribute could spend more of their time dispensing good advice than they do navigating the stupid argument traps the former sets for them.
A hand needs to be on the steering wheel or the truck's going in the lake.
And so we come back to AskHistorians.
It's like poetry. It rhymes.
At some point I read an article about how they ban anything that has even the slightest smell of Holocaust denial, and why, and it changed my point of view. Let's be clear - Nothing in the realm of fitness is equivalent to denying wholesale genocide and trying to make Nazism palatable. But there are opinions in the realm of fitness that are equivalent in the degree to which they are false, biased, and deceptive. "A calorie is not a calorie" is one of the classics and everyone who worships at that altar belongs in a fucking hole. People who hold and peddle those opinions cannot be argued with, cannot be allowed to infect others - they need to be driven out. For now that mostly just means playing a bit of favorites and letting some people have unfettered ability to aggressively shout them down without any repercussions. I feel it's been mostly successful.
If I could Thanos my fingers and every subreddit that I moderate became r/AskHistorians-but-fitness, I would do it.
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Some people seem to think that I'm a very angry person. I write angrily so that kind of makes sense, but I don't feel it. If anything, I'm exhausted. Reddit and the people on it are mostly exhausting. The rest of my life is pretty great, although toddlers are also exhausting (and in many ways similar to people on Reddit). I have been making a concerted effort to engage with Reddit to the barest minimum necessary to keep the ships I've built from sinking or careening off course. It has improved my general disposition dramatically.
I'm purplespengler, thanks for coming to my Time Cube.
