Spacebattles, and its offshoots - Who would win? A bunch of autistic nerds or a site and its tranny jannies?

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Verdun_Salient

True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
Joined
Apr 21, 2024
For those who don't know, Spacebattles is among the oldest websites on the upper-case I Internet. It is a fanfiction forum with a dedication to power-scaling armies found in sci-fi novels, films, space operas, anime, etc; Given the age of the site and the nature of the topics discussed, you might expect there's a fair bit of lowcow sludge in this crevice.

While this thread primarily discusses Spacebattles, I am also including its offshoots due to (in my opinion), there not being enough from just Spacebattles to justify a thread.

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Context and other things:
A piece of context that I feel is important to mention is that throughout Spacebattles history, its administrators had been almost completely absent from the community, with the owner, Kier, refusing to upgrade its hosting despite cheaper and better options being available. This may be why the moderators on Spacebattles seemed to hold as much sway as they have among the community.

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Description of the sites


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SpaceBattles (SB), circa 1998
The original. Founded in 1998, or something like that. Talks about sci-fi and worldbuilding, and has interactive quests (choose-your-own-adventure stories). As it is older than SA (but only by a year), expect many a lolcow. If you see someone with a pre-2000 join date, they are basically to be treated as deities (assuming they haven't been banned, see below). Became a lefty shithole. Many banned users on SB went to QQ or SV (see below).

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Questionable Questing (QQ) (c. 2012 - 2013)
Founded sometime in 2013 (either January or February), but may have been founded as early as 2012. A smut-filled SB fork for people who are too NSFW for SB or SV (see below). Most of what you see is smut, although you need an account to see the NSFW stuff at all (they do have SFW quests and stories, though). Has almost no rules except "don't post anything illegal" and "don't post about politics" so there's plenty of quests from sick creeps there and banned users on SV sometimes post there to bitch about SV or post their shit. Despite its creep factor, it's the only one of the four sites on this list that isn't disgustingly in-your-face political (by virtue of disallowing politics entirely).

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Sufficient Velocity (SV) (April 21, 2014)
Founded April 21, 2014, originally as a lifeboat for SpaceBattles due to site instability. The name comes from a site in-joke, where the best way to beat something was, "One, at Sufficient Velocity." Several banned users on SB founded SV, two of whom were lawyers (Lord Squishy and Ford Prefect). They also ended up being a lefty shithole, except they have a kangaroo court (because it was set up by lawyers). They have rules which ban rageposting against fictional characters, [1] an exhaustive amount of fake "legislation", and they're your typical lefty shithole.

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The Sietch (TS)
Founded in 2018, the Sietch is a more right-wing offshoot of Spacebattles, formed in the aftermath of the Right Wing PM debacle. It is pretty much a dead website except for its political section. (Sidenote, Sietch is from the Dune Series, referring to a hidden Fremen settlement, a communal gathering or a place of assembly in time of danger)

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What does this site generally have?

While each site is different, each can be said to follow a roughly similar format, and you can 9 times out of 10 find content that would be roughly generalized into the following categories.

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Creative Works and Fiction: This could be considered the meat of the site, containing vast amounts of fanfics set in their own threads, much like here. The writers will post their stories, with each post generally being a chapter, and in between the release of each chapter users discuss anything related to the story. You will not often find drama here, but it does occur. It is sometimes, but not always divided into original stories. Expect a standard level of trash to gems in the rough you'd get from any fanfiction website, with an emphasis on self-inserts.

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VS. Debates: If Creative Works and Fiction can be considered the meat of the site, then versus debates would be the heart of it. Essentially, “Who would win in a fight, Superman or Goku?” and “My favorite book/game/movie’s spaceships would beat your favorite book/game/movie’s spaceships in a fight.” Biggatons and power-levelling can be found in great quantities

Roleplaying: If you know what a play-by-post RPG is, you can probably take a guess on what this is. I do not have much to say about this as I do not participate or really look at it much. As of note, the best way to explain the difference between quests and roleplaying is that the former tend to be closer to choose-your-own-adventure stories, while the latter are closer to a game of D&D

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Whitehall/politics: Easily the worst part of the site in my opinion and almost certainly worthy of a thread by itself, Whitehall is Spacebattles political discussion and debate forum, ala Autistic Thunderdome. Politically, Spacebattles is like a community of Moviebobs, Sufficient Velocity is made up of tankies and people who consider Spacebattles to be too far-right, while Sietch posters would fit in here.

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Spacebattles "Right Wing PM" Debacle

On July 16th 2019, a new account would purchase a membership which enabled them to create a PM Chain with an unlimited number of participants, in this chain, they sent a blog link to 365 active users raising serious allegations that the moderation team had been infiltrated by the far-right. The blog-post (link, archive) claimed that a secret chat group had been created with the website staffs for right-wing users with the ostensible purpose of instructing them on how to remain withing the sites fairly stringent rules on bigotry that was run by right-wing moderators. All hell broke loose, several of the moderators within the board, (such as Spartan303) resigned and formed The Sietch, and an investigation was made. You can read the Spacebattles side of it here.

There are far more on the blog-post and I do encourage reading them for a laugh. Take them with a healthy dose of skepticism however as it was proven that a good number of these, including ones which involved wishing rape on a user were fabrications.
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Now, that is the official history of what happened once it got revealed, but what about the PM Chain itself? How did it come to be?

As far as I can tell, from reading very conflicting reports by people with agendas, this is about what I have gathered about the actual history of the PM Chain, since there were apparently two of them.

Around 2015 - 2016, when Donald Trump made his run for President, and immediately after, the viciousness and divisiveness of the forum had reached its apex, and had begun taking a toll on the moderators who were trying to control it. It should be noted that while political discourse on the forum had never been particularly good, it seems to have gotten really bad there.

Unconfirmed, (but likely not false) rumors state that there were apparently communication between Liberal posters within the Whitehall forum and coordination between them to win debates. In addition, Conservative/ right-leaning posters had always been something of a minority and would constantly be dogpiled and brigaded on a regular basis.

One of the responses to this was to implement new and more stringent rules for the real world discussion forums; specifically NSFD, and Whitehall. These were implemented early 2017 after a fair bit of discussion earlier. Another response was the PM initiative.

While these new NSFD rules were set up to try and limit the poor behavior that was rampant in political debates it wouldn't do much to prevent right-wing debaters falling into rhetorical traps or being baited into breaking the rules as was a common problem. This of course made a lot of work for the Staff who had to enforce said rules.

A solution was to try and improve the overall level of debate by setting up a place where selected people could be given basic debating advice so they would not fall foul of the rules or make so many easy mistakes. Spartan303 was the brains behind this drive and it was not a politically motivated initiative. The goal was for three separate PM chains, one for Conservatives, one for Liberals, and one as a joint chain for both sides to test one another.

The Conservative one was initiated first as it was deemed the one which would offer the best results both for Staff and posters. It was approved by senior staff and began in late January 2017.

Spartan recruited a few Staff members including Peregry, Lightning Count, and LT_Ryguy to help him, those who were either Conservative or open to such points of view in order to build trust with the selected posters. The first wave of recruits was relatively small and an informal atmosphere was created.

The initial objective turned out to be more difficult than anticipated, the amount of time needed on both sides became prohibitive and efforts became sporadic over the course of the project. Overall results were not sufficient to effectively fight back and try to strengthen an alternate point of view in Whitehall. Conservative participation continued to diminish to its current low level. Certain threads remained entirely empty of different viewpoints and voices.

The group ended up becoming more of a social hangout. It was a place to chat and share opinions and views that could be debated without concerns of being labelled by speaking honestly of their concerns. As the only venue open for this and the increasing membership the PM became very large and fast moving, it became larger than some subforums and was enthusiastically embraced as a meeting place and hangout.

The PM had a very broad range of people and views, some of those participants did state views that were against SB forum rules, but not against general PM rules. One of the functions of the PM was to offer a place for people to vent their anger so they did not carry it elsewhere on the forums and direct at others.

Where behaviors or commentary went beyond a line it was confronted and challenged, PM members engaged and tried to find solutions to these problems. Sometimes with success, sometimes without.

The initial PM chain met its end after the user Odo made a suggestion that one of the mods should kill themselves. By that point it was clear the considerable efforts invested into trying to help him work through his anger had failed. A neutral member of staff assessed the situation and resolved that the overall task of helping improve Conservative debate had not succeeded. This particular PM was shut down and a new one designed to act purely as a social hang out with no mission brief was created instead.

The majority of content was conversational with some debating but mostly sharing stories about a huge array of subjects and experiences. It included discussions about SB, the culture there and the issues and complaints they had about it. It also included times when someone in a debate would request advice on how to proceed with a particular argument.

In terms of scandal it was underwhelming, the majority of opinions were little different to old SB in tone and color. It was ultimately why when the situation happened the opposition had to fake a bunch of screenshots, there just wasn’t anything really explosive. It was in actuality rather mundane, with maybe the occasional angry rant by a member of it.



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The Sufficient Velocity Administrative Tribunal

One of the quirks of Sufficient Velocity is that they possess a 'court' called the Administrative Tribunal, made up of elected members of the community. Its purpose as stated on the website is, "for all public reviews of content and appeals of staff actions." In practice, it is a kangaroo court of even worse mods than SB

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I should remind you that is just for being warned in a thread, not even a ban.
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Response from staff member

The following post is of a ban appeal for Birb, related to comments on a thread calling people who go to a drag club freaks. I do not even think the going against the hivemind is the hilarious part, it is the amount of text for a bunch of people to roleplay Law & Order
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More stuff (archive heavy)
As you can expect from a site run by lawyers, specifically Ford Prefect and I believe Lord Squishy, they actually use their bogus "case law" as "precedent". There are a lot of cases to cover, so here are the ones they consider "precedential". These cases are all captioned Staff and <Insert Name of Unlucky Bastard Who Broke The Rules>, because it isn't enough to have a kangaroo court without putting the defendant on the spot, right?

In addition, there is also an entire category of thread where members of the site can point and laugh at folks who get banned for going against the hivemind. That's what happens when your site is founded by lawyers.

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The Long March Roleplay

While this is also from SufficientVelocity, I feel it is representative of the RPs enough to be posted here
This is a power fantasy from democratic socialists and their sphere on how their based true socialism manages to out-compete three superpowers. Including an America they railroaded to be an entire empire of evil that genocides Iceland for no good reason.

As some gems from the TVTropes page states (link, archive)
Gendercide: The Romanian Iron Guard regime in 1984, in response to the Bucharest-based socialist uprising and Comintern intervention, mobilizes every "able-bodied adult" male it can find (read: able to carry a hand grenade) to fight off the Reds or die trying in a desperate bid to "save" Romania from Communism. When the dust settles and the Comintern forces prevail, it is revealed that 90 percent of the male population of Romania dies in the bloodbath, which leads the new female-dominated Red Romania to hastily seek measures to address the massive gender imbalance on top of the desolation of much of the country outside the Bucharest region. This includes everything from relatively mundane policies like encouraging male-skewed immigration from other parts of the Comintern and providing conventional Natalist incentives to more radical solutions like adopting revolutionary gender-noncomformative family policies, legalizing polyamory and conducting experiments in communal living and child-raising.
Crapsack World: By 1984, Iberia has become the epitome of this trope. The destruction of any and all technology and culture on the peninsula resulted in gigantic famines and epidemics, so much that by the time the Comintern invades it, much of the population is dead, the country is littered with ghost towns, and Spanish culture is practically gone. One UAR soldier unfavorably compares it to the Dark Ages.

Gaddafi Lionization

In the story, Muammar Gaddafi is not only changed, but is also turned into a funny meme man who wants to randomly destroy Switzerland. The TVTropes page speaks for itself

Muammar Gaddafi, the second chairman of the Comintern, retains most of his OTL Cloudcuckoolander tendencies, with his hawkish and at times bizarre solutions to problems (that sometimes actually work) within the Comintern becoming a meme within the community. These VERY GOOD IDEAS include:

  • In response to the CDN's internal civil war during 1988, he proposes to gather up thousands of IRB troops, disguise them as German/English/Irish/etc people and sneak them into enemy territory to start revolutions that the comintern can directly support.
  • If elected without a troika, he would have admitted the Seattle Commune into the Comintern and bluffing to Mc Math by telling him that the Comintern built underground bunker cities across the globe and has enough seed vaults to survive a nuclear holocaust and that he was perfectly happy to end the world knowing communism would rebuild from the ruins.
  • Wanting to utterly destroy Switzerland due to a grudge he has against the country for reasons he will not reveal to anyone.
  • Any nation that attempts to make power plays to become "Leader of the Comintern" gets expelled from the Comintern immediately, cut off from any trade and diplomatic efforts and left isolated and alone until it either gives up its ambitions or is imperialized by the other powers.
  • Reeducate German settlers in the mandates into die-hard revolutionaries, then repatriate them back to the Germany and the CAR and have them wage a Protracted People's War.

Finally to top it all off, we get symbolism that makes even David Cage blush

Dying for Symbolism: The extinction of the bald eagle, America's symbol, due to ecological devastation serves to show how far the USA has fallen from its stated principles.
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A final thing I felt I should add

In my opinion, Spacebattles could almost be seen as an example of what overmoderation does to a site. Nobody on the site ever gets a chance to say what they really think about one another, or come right out and say some other guy is a complete cunt, because before they even get close to shitflinging, the mods will slap them on the wrist, put a dunce cap on them, and send them to their corner. This has led to the formation of epic, years-long grudges between large chunks of the user base. Basically everyone on SB is some brand of aspie/HFA and socially debilitated, which makes this even worse.
 
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I tossed this up on the other thread, but if it's pre-2010, ask me anything and I'll try to remember. Thanatos was always a whiny bitch, I remember him posting once about how the crew of his tank made fun of him being a faggot and it hurt his feelings. More troons than you'd expect for the aughts, not really a surprise with the levels of autism present these days, but back then it was unusual.

Did you guys know that In a fight between the Enterprise and the Death Star, the Enterprise would win? That's because it's been established in Star Trek that Lasers can't penetrate the Enterprise's shields, and the Death Star's main weapon is a laser, which can blow up planets, but can't harm the Enterprise.
I'm having flashbacks to that time E1701, Iceberg3K, and BigBryan decided to poke the turbo Autists of A.S.V.S. with arguments on that level. ASVS handed it with their usual levels of grace and patience.
 
I tossed this up on the other thread, but if it's pre-2010, ask me anything and I'll try to remember. Thanatos was always a whiny bitch, I remember him posting once about how the crew of his tank made fun of him being a faggot and it hurt his feelings. More troons than you'd expect for the aughts, not really a surprise with the levels of autism present these days, but back then it was unusual.


I'm having flashbacks to that time E1701, Iceberg3K, and BigBryan decided to poke the turbo Autists of A.S.V.S. with arguments on that level. ASVS handed it with their usual levels of grace and patience.
Please do post any examples of their autism or drama, it would help greatly.

Also, information on SV's dramas is something I probably need to look for, I got their "court", but that is about it.
 
Yeah powerscaling is retarded like that. The way it works is that people will have a favorite character who they will want to wank (powerscaling term for scaling character way too high) and they will take an obviously exxaggerated statement made by another character, make long ass scaling chains (as in, character A fought character B who once took a punch from Character C and character C said that character D is a worthy opponent and so on and so forth) and manage to scale it back to their favorite character. Or they will simply use outliers that are obviously comedic in nature (like this whole spongebob multi solar system thing is probably from the episode where he unwrapped the universe with a string from his shirt) to say that the character is always this strong. But that's nowhere near the worst of powerscaling, the worst is definitely the "higher infinites" and "outerversal" and "platonic concepts" BS.
 
But that's nowhere near the worst of powerscaling, the worst is definitely the "higher infinites" and "outerversal" and "platonic concepts" BS.
Nah bro your character can only control Aleph One acausal pocket universes, mine can control Aleph Two!
Aleph Two? What's this, power scaling for ants? If you aren't up to at least n-huge, you aren't even playing in the minor leagues.
Nah man, I've got multiple mathematicians on staff, once the paper comes out you'll all see that my character is the most powerful!
 
Nah bro your character can only control Aleph One acausal pocket universes, mine can control Aleph Two!
Aleph Two? What's this, power scaling for ants? If you aren't up to at least n-huge, you aren't even playing in the minor leagues.
Nah man, I've got multiple mathematicians on staff, once the paper comes out you'll all see that my character is the most powerful!
The fuck is this shit buddy? My character scales to a Cantor's Ordinal amount of high 1-A hyperverses AND has destroyed infinite amounts of transdual platonic concepts fag, now get in VC (totally not so you can get screamed at and interrupted constantly by a pack of 12 year olds) and debate me!
 
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