I'm reluctant to get dragged into the meta-discussion, and heaven knows I've tried to drag this back to Mario Maker already, but I'm glad people are speaking up about this forum's pattern of tacitly sanctioned derailing. I don't even like Dunkey's content for the most part (to me it's 90% insufferable and 10% ingenious, and it took me a long time to warm to that 10%), and rarely find either him or any other YouTuber (press-connected or otherwise) thread-worthy, but the people who come into every one of these to drop their opposition research are really not doing the cause of civility or inclusion any favours.
In the end, I think that all we can do—as exasperated members who know that the governing policy isn't on our side—to lead by example, not get baited, and normalize staying on topic, so the derailments aren't normalized in their stead. It's harder to do it, I think, when there isn't much substance to the content under discussion and actually not much to talk about, which I think is the problem with comedy videos like this one; there isn't much to say beyond laughing and moving on, so all the micro-celebrity gossip washes in to fill the vacuum. But every run-of-the-mill on-topic post does its own little part in not letting social-media-history vigilantism totally run the place.
(I fully recognize the hypocrisy of lobbying for this in an off-topic, post-derailment meta-post.)
As always, thanks for sticking your head above the line and calling this out.
People have such short memories around here. It's like they don't remember what just happened with Etika only weeks ago, where in the thread reporting his death there were still individuals bringing up their collected receipts from old misdeeds, as if it provided a full justification for their own callousness and lack of empathy.
I can't imagine devoting the sheer degree of wasteful attention it must take to keep mental dossiers on every minor entertainment figure's record of verbal misconduct, and to stay ever vigilant for any thread bearing their name or drawing attention to their content so you can dump gasoline on it, hide behind the mods, and maybe even bait a few bans. I don't envy it in the slightest: this confluence of hyper-record-keeping with the intellectual laziness of embellishing and sensationalizing the offences unchecked, and never with any personal consequences. It's a waste of everyone's time, and it actively works against its own purported cause by leaving everybody exhausted and ready to tune it all out.
