2B2T and the Actual Benefits of Gatekeeping

I've always been an advocate for gatekeeping, and many others on this server have shown to feel the same. On imageboards and forums the world over, there is a "Keep the normies out" sentiment. Protecting your subculture from the masses is a good thing, but you also need a steady trickle of new blood to keep from becoming stale. Gatekeeping then is not only the art of keeping people out, but also the art of allowing the right people in. I think that no place on the internet I've seen exemplifies this better than Minecraft's 2B2T.

2B2T is the oldest anarchy server on Minecraft. The premise is that there are no rules, and by that I mean NO RULES. People use hacked clients, post racial slurs in chat, grief, use exploits to track players, and have even hacked into the server itself to gain access to admin commands and NO ONE has been banned. Despite all the chaos, the community represents a macrocosm of human civilization. With the rise and fall of civilizations, political struggles, wars, and great works the history of this server is shockingly captivating for a block game. But that's a story best left told by the people who were there. I'm here to talk about how they treat outsiders, and how it not only protects them from normies, but how it filters in those who are best fit for the server. For that, we need look no further than the first thing a new player would see, spawn.

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Spawn on 2B2T is to put it bluntly, a wasteland. There are lava casts everywhere. There is no dirt, let alone trees. The chances of finding food are practically zero. Nether portals lead to traps where geared players wait to kill without mercy. A new player has to perform difficult platforming just to navigate. There are trenches leading to bedrock, and lava walls reaching to build limit. Just finding a way to move without falling to your death is half the struggle. If that wasn't enough, veteran players patrol the area looking for easy kills. This naturally sets up the greatest gatekeeping system I've ever seen.

In order for a new player to escape spawn, they first have to navigate near impassible terrain with zero blocks, or tools. After that they must get past a trench leading to bedrock, a lava wall, and an obsidian wall. Keep in mind that these obstacles are a hike and a half away and the player probably hasn't found any food. The player must then find a highway and walk for thousands of blocks with little chance of finding any food. All this time, someone can spot them, and kill them and it's back to square one (Or block one). If they manage to make the journey without getting killed, or starving to death, then they can branch off and make a base and hope it doesn't get found and griefed. They can now start grinding for gear. Once high level gear is obtained, they can then start trying to make friends and hope they don't kill them. Then, they can probably become part of the wider community, and they would deserve it at that point. Anyone who goes through all that, is a good fit for the server and would probably do well and be liked by the other players. So how does an obscure subculture, or website filter in the right people who can make the community fun and engaging without such extreme and unique circumstances? Well it's simple; obscurity.

Obscurity is by far, the easiest way to filter people. If people flood in from some article, >redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk post, or YouTube video; most won't be a proper fit for the community. Through no fault of their own, they will erode what made it special in the first place. If people seek out obscurity for whatever reason, they will usually be a better fit; being naturally of the same breed of person who seeked out the community in the first place. These people are who you really want to come in. They will breathe new life into the culture by adding their new perspectives and talents. This is important because talent and perspective are rare. This is what makes it special. We join forums like Agora Roads to get away from the decay and monotony of the rest of the internet. People from the rest of the internet coming here would change it more resemble the rest of the internet. Luckily, we have very natural ways of keeping the masses out besides obscurity.

The very design of a forum stands in stark contrast to contemporary websites. Modern websites are designed to provide as much dopamine as possible in the least amount of time possible. A forum on the other hand, requires the user to work for their pleasure. In order to get anything out of this site, you must learn the community, go out of your way to make friends, spend long hours reading threads, and have interesting things to post yourself. This is more demanding of the end user, but the benefit is a much greater sense of satisfaction for those who put in the effort. Most people, even if they flood in from >redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk, will not be able to put in the effort and get bored. And that's the key to all of this: Effort.

The reason 2B2T's gatekeeping works so well is that it requires a lot of effort. Players have to take the time to become part of the community. They must put long hours in before they see a reward. But for those who dare, the reward is worth it. Everyone involved benefits from this too. The community gets cool and interesting people. The new players get a community that they can fit in. Those who get turned away are kept from wasting their time in a place where they don't belong. It's not a wall to keep people out, but a filter to allow the people who will be liked and respected in. To new friends I say cheers, to passers by I say adieu.
 

InsufferableCynic

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I've always been an advocate for gatekeeping, and many others on this server have shown to feel the same. On imageboards and forums the world over, there is a "Keep the normies out" sentiment. Protecting your subculture from the masses is a good thing, but you also need a steady trickle of new blood to keep from becoming stale. Gatekeeping then is not only the art of keeping people out, but also the art of allowing the right people in. I think that no place on the internet I've seen exemplifies this better than Minecraft's 2B2T....
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It's so good hearing someone finally give a worthwhile take on gatekeeping. I am so sick of the "common wisdom" that we should always bend over backwards to accommodate newcomers, even those who fundamentally hate or disagree with us, in whatever community.

It's literally the reason so many communities have gone to shit. How can anything have an identity when everyone from all walks of life are always made to feel welcome at all times? Any position, no matter how benign, can be "upsetting" or "gatekeeping", so the only logical thing to do is have a meaningless identity based on nothing, which erodes the entire community.

This is exactly why so many communities have no depth or culture. It's just surface level interactions with no substance.
 
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I suspect that many younger netizens have mainly been exposed to corpo sites and rarely hear about specific niche interest forums... FB, >redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk etc are public land, and too large to have their own identifiable culture. Someone with experience with those kinds of sites and none other finds the idea of a "standard to participate" alien and oppressive compared to what they are used to, which is where the complaints about gatekeeping come from, but you can ignore them since that simply proves the gate is working as intended.
 
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handoferis

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Those who protest gatekeeping are just mad that they are not the gatekeepers.

And you can see this in practice in every community that folded to the outcry and rejected gatekeeping.
They get infiltrated by the activists, and as soon as the activists have critical mass and power in the community they begin gatekeeping harder than ever before.
They just have different ideas about who should be let in, people like them, and who shouldn't ... anyone who disagrees.

It's a perfect little reflection of revolutionary leftist strategy at large.
They preach about openness, liberty, and representation when they are not in power. Not because these are values they hold, but because it is a means to power.
Once they are in positions of power they immediately begin curtailing liberty and removing the representation anyone who dissents.
Oh boy, do I have the story for you. It's pretty amusing because I wouldn't call this the revolutionary leftist strategy, but rather the strategy of the social justice sect, which incidentally like to dominate so-called revolutionary left movements as a neutralization strategy. How do I know this? I was one of the founding members of a recently formed communist party and watched in realtime as it got subverted by people like this.

As we founded the thing, it was meant to have the goal of being a legitimate communist party with the hope of becoming a serious option once again and trying to do it right this time (lol). We had a couple of young zoomer wastemen from London who were students and a bit too social-justicey but didn't think of them as very serious at all. After about a year, the center of mass moved from the North to London and this is when everything went off the rails. Those wastemen from before? Suddenly elected to decisionmaking bodies, suddenly in control of the membership process. Friends of the main wasteman guy flooded in down south, at the time we were unaware of what was going on and were just happy to be getting more members.

Then the wacky ideas started emanating from the London branch, and we noticed them putting their two black members on pedestals. Branches from the North sent people down to see wtf was going on, and it was bad. Full decadence, people sitting in each others laps and touching each other in the middle of 'serious' meetings, looked more like a fucking clothed orgy than a meeting. Arch wasteman at the center of it all. Concern grew, but we didn't have the numbers to do a fat lot about it at this point in time and we were still capable of blocking stupid ideas.

At this point, a critical error was made and a person who was documented as calling people with vaginas 'cuntscum' among other things was admitted. We were never an anti-trans group, but this was a step too far and it was glossed over by the London crowd, and this person got in. They proceeded to take complete control of the membership pipeline, and were pedestaled super hard by the wastemen. Decline was imminent.

Wackypants SJW started targeting anyone who was even slightly out of line, and was most mad about me, as I still held a fair amount of respect and also the keys to all their online stuff. Eventually I made a slipup (daring to say that black people don't get to be antisemitic just because they're black and breaking up an argument) and the full force of critical mass kicked in. I'd taken a break after this event cause the whole thing was pissing me off, and it turned out wackypants person had been grooming the person implicated in that event to complain about me. The London people turned and were trying to get me to agree to some kind of self-flagellation process, but my self-respect forbade it and I just quit on the spot, caused a load of shit and sent them a bill for handing over my technical work.

They were fucking appalled at this, I found it ironic that the sjws were so upset that someone wouldn't literally do slavery for them. They still paid though, lmao

What's the moral of the story? These people aren't leftists either, they're a uniquely virulent sect of liberals that will corrupt anything they touch, and they'll touch everything given the time to do it.
Also, just don't bother getting involved in politics it's so full of drama and nobody who says they have all the answers deserves any level of power. I was lucky, I had database access to the whole system so I was able to delete any personal information I'd accidentally leaked on my way out with a few queries so they had nothing on me. I still moved house and alerted my job that fucking nutters were after me. I hate to think what these people would do to other people they pissed off, or if they ever held any sort of power. Left sects are uniquely vulnerable to this bullshit, and for this reason they aren't worth engaging with, even if you do agree with Marxist economics, like me.

edit: I should add it feels damn good to be able to talk about this in a place they would be fucking terrified of reading. Thank god for free speech.
 
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manpaint

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I agree with this thread. I am the creator of a RS datamining group called the RuneScape Preservation Unit, here's my experience with gatekeeping:

So the group takes the forum of a private Discord server. RuneScape datamining has a significant overlap with the RuneScape private server community, which is quite the burning trashfire. The main idea behind the discord is that only worthy people (those that contribute to the preservation of RS in some way) are invited to join.

It's been 1 year since the creation of that Discord and pretty much everyone inside it have expressed that they want the community to remain gatekeeped. It creates a network of like-minded individuals that has a shared interest and a baseline of knowledge when it come to RS datamining.

We do have another discord called the RuneScape Archive which is public, but that is just because one of our project is to find old versions of RuneScape, wich require asking the common people to look for old files. It also act has a "trialling ground" in which we can see who is potentially worthy to join the RPU.
 

Still a Youth

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So as far as gatekeeping this site that's understandable. But in starting to believe that much of the strife in my life is a result of gatekeeping. A lot of the things i have enjoyed i've gatekept from people, which has given me a sense of superiority. But im starting to think that gatekeeping has only served to alienate me from my surroundings.
Well it's simple; obscurity
"Well it's simple: obscurity."
ftfy
 
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Milkwater

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I think it even influences how much trascendental "value" we get from belonging to a group.

Agreed. Very fnuy. Very true.
I've been trying to summarize my thoughts for the last hour or so.
I'm a newfag, so I'll wind my neck in and just settle for this:

The greatest communities always require that members create value to enjoy the value they offer.

Toodles.
 
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