Post Aesthetics
Post Aesthetics was a poser Facebook group full of poor quality memes. Under the guise of campaigning for social justice, the group has a hypocritical set of policies. It is led by a hypersensitive mod team which will ban for the slightest perceived offense, or often for seemingly no reason at all. The group has a complex system of categorizing some content into requiring either a content warning or trigger warning. Although this isn't in itself a terrible idea and is done sensibly in some other internet communities, the moderators are able to arbitrarily decide what kind of content needs what kind of warning, sometimes leading to some seemingly nonsensical guidelines. Infamously, Post Aesthetics requires members to post a content warning on pictures of food. Members are given a very small window of time to edit posts if someone asks for a content warning, and people are often banned for missing the window. If a member accidentally mislabels something, that is also grounds for a permanent ban, since this will be perceived to be making fun of content warnings or trigger warnings, even if the mislabeling was a genuine mistake.
Post Aesthetics is a medium sized Facebook group in terms of member count. It has about 40,000 members, considerably more than Cirque du Twerque and slightly more than Hackathon Hackers, but the group pales in comparison in size to EEQ or PHP.
Most of the group's moderators seem to live in the US and either attend college or are college educated. Many are white. Post Aesthetics has a habit of refusing to explain its complex rules and large corpus of social justice jargon, instead opting to condescendingly demand that people research anything they don't understand, under constant threat of permanent ban if they won't (or don't know how to). This is inherently biased against people who are less privileged than them, such as people from less developed countries or people with poor educational backgrounds, who may have not been exposed to these ideas in college courses or on certain parts of the internet.
There is a prevailing "us versus them" mentality throughout the group, with anyone disagreeing with the moderators even slightly deserving of an instant ban.
In early May 2016, the head mod of Post Aesthetics seemingly attempted to cheat on his final project in an introductory AI class when a CdT member asked to be unbanned. He demanded that the CdT member complete an unsupervised learning program by a certain date, which was assumed to be the day before the due date of the actual project, to become unbanned. This was all but confirmed when cross-referencing the syllabus of a class at the moderator's listed school.
Also in May 2016, Post Aesthetics banned the Dat Boi meme, which depicts a frog riding a unicycle, for being racist.
Also in May 2016, a number of Post Aesthetics moderators infiltrated Cirque du Twerque, and have been quite chill so far. Time will tell what their true intentions are.
Although the group is almost universally ridiculed on Cirque du Twerque, there exist several Post Aesthetics shills in our ranks, and one or more "moles" who report negative things that CdT members say about Post Aesthetics to its numerous mods. These shills appear to believe that Post Aesthetics is infallible because they agree with its stances on social justice, and despite widespread evidence of corruption and incompetence in its leadership, they continue to vehemently defend the group.
Many members agree that the ideas that Post Aesthetics promote would be commendable if their methodology weren't so deeply flawed and their memes weren't so shitty. Some members believe that Post Aesthetics' incompetence and corruption give the social justice movement a bad reputation, potentially turning people away from it due to its seemingly extremist views, unwelcoming environment, and unforgiving attitude. Other CdT members fundamentally disagree with some of the perceived goals of the social justice movement and dislike Post Aesthetics for that reason. However, unlike Post Aesthetics, CdT is always open to healthy debate about these issues (as well as dank memes).
In May/June 2016, Post Aesthetics closed and migrated to post post post post aesthetics. However, post post post post aesthetics remains a shitty group.
In July 2016, a post post post post aesthetics mod posted in CdT numerous times to appeal bans of certain CdT members. Most bans were not withdrawn, and said moderator banned all CdT members that were not already in the group to prevent "edgy assholes".
