Several users kept pointing out aspartame metabolizes into formaldehyde and that aspartame wasn't approved for 16 years by the FDA until Donald Rumsfeld, former president of the company that manufactures it (Searle) gave the FDA commissioner the boot and appointed a new one.

The wikidorks (aspartame shills?) who police the aspartame article and prevent people from editing it could only respond by ignoring the entire conflict of interest and insisting over and over that the users pointing this out were "paranoid" and "conspiracy theorists" and falling back on industry-funded studies (literally the private corporation that made it studying it) saying it's safe, and the FDA being ultimately trustworthy. They accused the users of "writing a blog" and "diffusing history" (????) and said that this isn't what the talk page is for.

They said that the talk page is only for "suggesting ways to improve the article (that they police)" (????????) When that didn't work they finally accused their interlocutors of being traditional sugar shills, at which point someone responded that both sugar and aspartame are bad for you, and that the USA allows high fructose corn syrup while other countries don't, because it has lax regulations. This is when the entire conversation was shut the fuck down.

TL;DR wiki nerds get to invoke "it's not a forum" rule to shut down people "diffusing history" while accusing their interlocutors of being "paranoid conspiracy theorists" and claiming that pointing out conflicts of interest in the FDA approval is wrong because... the FDA is the most reliable source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Aspartame

    • D3FNC [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Wikipedia used to be fucking awesome like 10-15 years ago for deep science, biomed, medical science. Then wikidorks merged thousands of pages on biochemistry and cellular chemistry because, using their extensive home schooled curriculum from hearts of iron 4, they assumed all these things sounded similar enough they had to be the same thing. Completely destroyed one of the greatest resources in existence. They keep sending me fucking donation requests to create more shitty add on bullshit nobody wants, because I used to donate back when it was an amazing resource. You know, the one they ran straight into the fucking ground because the authors were typically written by the scientist that had spent their life researching, not some 24 year old loser with 15,000 edits or whatever.

      Nerds becoming anti intellectual mouth breathers is the absolute worst fucking development of my adult life.