You write "if the claim is indeed true that racists/sexists think the blog is great" - but this isn't even the kind of thing that could be true. Imagine how you would prove this claim, do you go to the National Association of Racists and ask for their stance on SSC? Is there a poll of racists and their opinion on niche blogs somewhere?
"Racists" is ill defined by itself. People aren't racist or not the way they are right or left handed. Racism is a spectrum and much of it is debatable and nuanced and affected by context and all that. This is like saying "Some number of an undefined group like something. Prove me wrong." That's not a legitimate claim and there is no need to try and rebut it.
I have no doubt that some racists like the blog and other racists don't like it. Do more racists (proportionally) like and read SSC or the NYT? I don't think you can answer that.
Regarding the feminist issue I'll have to go back and read that post before writing more.
Marketing is essentially the working, reproducible arm of the social sciences, and marketers know a lot about human preferences and how to link them to motivation.
Just because you have more data, it doesn't mean that you can identify constructs like racism from this loads of data. You'd need some kind of ground truth mechanism (like an index of behaviour towards different races) which neither Facebook (nor anyone else) has. It's just wildly implausible.
Maybe, in ten years, NLP will be good enough to identify this, but I don't think these constructs are easily identifiable from text, certainly not in a public space such as Facebook.
> Marketing is essentially the working, reproducible arm of the social sciences, and marketers know a lot about human preferences and how to link them to motivation.
I get what you're trying to say here, and maybe that works in a small number of places, but having worked with marketers in analytics for the past decade or so, suffice it to say that I rarely praise the standards of experimention and (lack of) rigour employed by them.
If the blog has sexist/racist content that attracts sexists and racists, sure, that's a problem, but if the blog had such content, the NYT article wouldn't have resorted to pointing out the commenters, they would have linked the content.
> As to the feminism issue, in the full context, he criticizes feminism with respect to specific points and texts from feminists (which he is 100% entitled to), but then ends with the sentence in question that to me whichever angle you look at it from says, feminism and pure evil are not too distant. As I noted, he could have backed away from the statement easily by saying his statement is wrong (if he thinks so), but claiming it's out of context is dishonest and a diversion.
Specifically, in context, he said "People who go out of their way to be horrifically mean to other people who are pretty unfortunate and unhappy and don't understand why, just for asking why, are pretty much pure evil", it wasn't an attack on all feminists ever, it was an attack on people who he specifically thinks are doing something extremely terrible. That's the context.
Most of the ire is directly at the sequel trilogy, notably the last two movies thereof. So if one of your coworkers says they hated The Last Jedi but loved The Mandalorian, then you can reasonably report them to HR for engaging in discomforting behavior.
I'll try to put this as objectively as I can. There is now a cultural overlap between those that support varying degrees of "censorship" and progressives, and between those that support "free speech" and, let's say, anti-progressives. This makes sense because now racism/sexism is more likely to be censored than extreme progressivism. Probably if it were the other way around (if extreme progressivism were more likely to be censored) then those same progressives would become staunch free-speech advocates and anti-progressives would be fighting for more "content moderation".
So if you are generally for the toleration of ideas, perhaps holding some unpopular opinions yourself, and against censorious tactics, you tend to attract extreme anti-progressives as well. For the most part, racists and sexist do not see themselves as racists and sexists, they see themselves as holding true but unpopular beliefs. Another interesting example of this is Sam Harris somehow having a fair amount of Trump-supporting listeners even though he spends a lot of time ranting about how incompetent and morally-bankrupt he thinks Trump is.
I am not saying this is the case (as I have no connection with the blog), but if the claim is indeed true that racists/sexists think the blog is great (which is the main takeaway I got from the article), that needs to be addressed as to why they are attracted there, and Mr. Siskind does not do that. If the claim is bogus, then the claim is bogus, but Mr. Siskind does not refute that they are attracted to his blog.
As to the feminism issue, in the full context, he criticizes feminism with respect to specific points and texts from feminists (which he is 100% entitled to), but then ends with the sentence in question that to me whichever angle you look at it from says, feminism and pure evil are not too distant. As I noted, he could have backed away from the statement easily by saying his statement is wrong (if he thinks so), but claiming it's out of context is dishonest and a diversion.