The Sad Reality of the NoFap Community. Please Read.

How scathing. I'd just like to be clear about this: I wasn't telling you I was dissatisfied with your answer because I thought you cared or because I thought that doing so would improve the persuasiveness of my criticism. I was telling you that I was dissatisfied because I thought that was decent justification for deeper questioning, which you mocked me for doing. I told you:
"... and when I wasn't satisfied with your response, I asked a follow up question that was more pointed and specific"
You see, the dissatisfaction was justification for my more specific questioning. It has nothing to do with your priorities, and I clearly was not implying that you did this experiment for me. If you really think I said that I wasn't satisfied with your response because my ego is so large that I actually believed you did this experiment to satisfy people like me, then I think you are treating me with intellectual dishonesty.

I thought your original intention was to improve the community?

I'm not disagreeing with you that it has motivated some people. Your experiment has obviously motivated some people. I'm claiming that there was an unnecessary cost bound to that motivation. I'm claiming that there are far less harmful ways to motivate people. This seems to be the point at which we aren't seeing eye-to-eye.

Nor do I think it should. My feelings and my judgments are not your responsibility. I'm not asking you to consider my feelings, I'm just pointing out flaws with your experiment and asking you to consider them in the future should you decide to do something like this again.

Do you not agree that out of the millions of ways you could have effectively improved or motivated our community, there were ways that were more harmless than your experiment?

I sincerely do not understand this example or how it pertains to my question at all. Could you maybe describe how it relates to this discussion in more detail? I'm not making the connection myself.

I never said that I wanted you to be rude with me. I just said that being polite and wishing me the best isn't going to do anything to improve your argument.

 

I'd like to chip in my 2 cents, and I apologize if I'm regurgitating what someone else here said unknowingly, as there are many posts and I have not read them all.

I'd like to start by saying I support Legion here, as well I don't advocate for tempting addicts like this, ultimately the addicts are the ones who chose to click on the post, and reply in a lewd manner. Furthermore, Legion clearly helped them see the error of their ways, and now they are better people (hopefully), and well that might of been a trigger, they should be strong enough and attentive enough to know they are on NoFap and could reach out for help or endure it. Legion did uncover what a lot of us might suspect however, and that's the short sighted and still lustful atmosphere of NoFap. Now I will try to not put my religious bias here, but I believe perverse behavior is wrong WHEREVER, WHENEVER, AND HOWEVER IT OCCURS.

Many on NoFap think of this as a tool for better sex lives and what not, and while I am happy they are breaking free from PMO, it is disappointing, to say the least, to see them still stuck in a mindset that prioritizes sex and pleasure more than charity, self improvement, and purity from lust. It is clear that those who this post is about have or had this mindset, and are still in thrall to our hypersexualized and hedonistic society, and viewed the post in a dehumanizing, defiling manner. However, I would not blame them or anybody on NoFap for being raised in this perverse society of ours, and as much as we differ from normal society, the worse aspects of our society still bleeds over.

Now to the point. I think what Legion has exposed should be utilized to help NoFap reject, or at least consider less the perverse and sex-obsessed attitudes that bleed over from our hypersexualized society. The advocates of this sex obsessed doctrine are, knowingly or unknowingly, still in thrall to perverseness, and it would be good to have NoFap help them cleanse themselves of this clouding, harmful mindset that is seen.

 

To be fair people calling this experiment harmful is a bit excessive.
Yes, he baited people.
Those people all messaged him first.
He made an account, posted here, then just observed.
Simple experiment.
After he was done he deleted the account and ended it there.
He didn’t try to persuade or entice anyone.

One criticism I can agree with is using someone else as a profile picture. Probably added more appeal and drew more people in.


Yes the experiment can be seen as pretty pointless.
At the same time however, OP could gauge the degree of the problem (if you wanna call it that) at hand if he was curious to do so which I think isn’t the biggest crime ever.

Maybe he thought a lesson could be learned from this, which there can be.

You guys are treating OP like he’s a diabolical monster sitting behind his computer snaking people in the most horrible/immoral way.

If his intentions were to demonize the people who messaged (which I don’t think they were) then obviously this is pretty fucked up. Other than that there’s no reason to get your panties in a bunch over this experiment he did.

All the people getting angry about this need to relax. Get outside or just fa.....nvm scratch that

 

Yeah, I guess we would have to ask them. Too bad the only way to do that would be to expose their names, publicly shaming them. I guess that's the "cost" I'm referring to. It's not really a quantifiable loss of any sort, so maybe "cost" isn't the correct word to use, but I think the fact that their names can't be exposed is the driving force behind my criticism of your experiment. I am not claiming that your experiment harmed any individuals. I obviously don't know the people involved, so I don't know whether they were harmed or not as a result. I'm saying that this experiment, in theory, has potential to harm people by making them feel ashamed, deceived, or cheated. I'm also claiming that there are better ways you could have accomplished your goals.

Here are three goals you've listed that you've given as justification for your experiment that I think you could have accomplished without lying to anyone and without bringing anyone any shame:

• I wanted to understand the state of our community - If you had a question about how female users are treated on this forum, then you could have asked a female user about her own experiences. Since a few female users have already responded to this thread saying they've had similar experiences, I think it's safe to say that there's no doubt you would have gotten the same sort of information without needing to generate a fake profile and lie to people.
• I wanted to improve our community / Raise awareness of problems in our community - I think it's pretty obvious that you didn't need to conduct this experiment to improve our community or to raise awareness of these issues. Many others have already stated it in this thread, but you need to be the change you want to see. Set an example for other users of how you think others ought to be treated here. If you see behavior you find inappropriate, report it.
• I wanted to help struggling addicts with motivation, support, compliments, etc. - You could have done this without setting up a fake profile, and I don't think I really need to explain why that's the case.

Does that give you a better understanding of why I think there was a "cost"? I'm claiming that you could have accomplished all of your goals without deception, and without creating the risk of shaming other users. I believe that criticism holds ground, as you say.

No, it's not pointless.
This is an extreme example, but it will be illustrative, so bear with me.
Let's suppose I did an experiment where I removed someone's skin with a cheese grater until they asked me to stop. The point of the experiment is to find out just how much skin you can remove from a person before they tell you to stop. You do the experiment and confirm that the answer is a few millimeters of skin. In your terms, you have affirmed that, fundamentally, only a few millimeters of skin can be removed before a human being will ask you to stop.

You are claiming that it would be pointless to discuss the flaws of this experiment just because it's already been conducted? Why?

If that experiment is too unbelievable for you to consider, then consider MKULTRA, which was an experiment conducted under the JFK administration by the American CIA. One of the purposes of the experiment was to determine whether LSD could be used in conjunction with human torture methods to extract information from people. The experiment has been completed, and the results are fundamentally correct (turns out, you can use LSD in conjunction with torture methods to extract information from people), but there was an enormous ethical cost to MKULTRA. Are you really claiming that there's no point in discussing the ethical flaws of MKULTRA just because its results are true and correct?

No, here's what's going on: You and I have the same motives and the same wishes. We both want this community to be better. We both want this community to be aware of what's going on. We both want to help other addicts by motivating, supporting, and complimenting them. I think the point where we disagree is how those goals ought to be accomplished.

 

I like the example. So, let's say that there was a drug that was functionally equivalent to Paracetamol in every way, except that there was no risk of kidney failure from using it (assume it also introduces no new side-effects or risks). Let's call my imaginary drug Wonderdrug, just for reference. Wouldn't it be better to use Wonderdrug rather than using Paracetamol, even though the risk of kidney failure is not equivalent to kidney failure?

Just to illustrate how much I love this example, I'll show you how it pertains to the discussion at hand: your experiment is analogous to the Paracetamol, and kidney failure is analogous to feelings of shame (which can exacerbate pornography addiction), feelings of being deceived, and feelings of being unwelcome to this forum. The more direct, bullet-pointed solutions I offered (which you said you agreed were valid) are analogous to the Wonderdrug. My bullet-pointed solutions in my previous comment solve the same problems you set out to solve with your experiment, but without the associated risks. Isn't that better for everyone?

I guess my point is that you have a moral obligation to minimize risk, if you can.

MKULTRA was a fascinating event. It happened without the knowledge of the President at the time. Most of the existing primary sources surrounding MKULTRA are interviews with JFK and the leading men of the CIA during his term. It's really intense stuff. There are a lot of conspiracy theories and unreliable information surrounding MKULTRA, so make sure that you stick to primary sources if you're going to read about it.

I'm glad that you took such precautions, and I'm glad you did what you could to minimize the impact of your experiment. Please just consider what I've said about minimizing risk. I'm sure you already understand this, considering you're a user on this forum, but just remember that addiction is an extremely sensitive matter, and that compassion, assertiveness, and direct encouragement are extremely powerful tools that pose no additional risk to addicts.