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Too many people have peed in the pool

stephenfry.com

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Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#361

Post by chippy »

rblstr wrote: post #279
monksy wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at what was actually said: "Only one of the great cinematic costume designers would come to the awards dressed like a bag lady." If people weren't so quick to jump on the "blame the white guy" wagon... you'd see that it was actually a pretty clever statement.

I mean, I watched the show, I heard what he said, it's whole tone was off compared to the rest of the night. It really stood out and sounded awfully harsh. Now I'm not going to go to twitter about it, it didn't offend me but it did come across rather mean and crass.

>it didn't offend me

Fry's post says that one of the problems is due to people being offended on behalf of other people they have never met.

So they are not offended personally (e.g like most people), but they imagine that it would be offensive to someone else (e.g. a minority) and decide to co-opt this imagined offence.

It's a curious difference in being offended personally, and defending others via imagining the offence of that other. One can see another point of view, but its harder to imagine another changing their point of view.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#362

Post by moron4hire »

brandon272 wrote: post #353
moron4hire wrote: post #31

The problem isn't that this is a Twitter problem. It's that this is a cultural problem. People kinda suck. People kinda suck a lot. I was having a conversation with a friend at lunch, when I started putting ketchup on my hotdog. He looked at me and incredulously questioned, "really? What are you, like, 8 years old?" I had never even heard of the idea that "only children put ketchup on a hotdog." Yet here was someone…

I don't think that your friend considered his remark to be a joke worthy of a laugh, but it sounds like "good natured ribbing" over something entirely benign. It's a social technique employed by many people on a day to day basis as a bonding method where no offense is usually intended and no offense is usually taken. Where your friend failed, in my opinion, is that he should recognize that not everyone is receptive t…

I don't think I need a rando on the internet to explain what ribbing means to me.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#363

Post by braythwayt »

askafriend wrote: post #339
braythwayt wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not playing devil's advocate, it's constructing a false dichotomy. As a counter-example, are you saying that the best way to have a discussion about Young Earthers is to give them equal space in every geology textbook? I don't think you're saying that, and I don't think I'm saying that we as a society should mask our problems.

Twitter isn't a textbook though. It's goals as a communications platform are completely different. It's like saying, would you rather design SMS around masking Young Earther's ideas? In the 20s, you would have had these services designed around not conversating about alcohol. Is that right? Is it wrong? I don't know if it's for the communications platform to decide. However the communications platform can provide the…

> Twitter isn't a textbook though. It's goals as a communications platform are completely different

Twitter is a company. Its goals and the way it tries to achieve the are as subject to discussion and criticism as any other company.

As for the rest of your comment, you keep talking about “masking” when I never used that word. I conclude that you have a preconceived idea of what I am saying, and are arguing with that. Since it isn’t what I’m saying, I have no obligation to defend it, or even explain why when you put words in my mouth, the difference between your words and my words are.

When you begin an argument with “So what you’re saying, is...” I need go no further than to say “No."

> However the communications platform can provide the user tools to...

And now you are talking about how Twitter could change its offering to improve the lives of its users. Which is what I was talking about. Seems like a good place to break off.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#364

Post by brandon272 »

moron4hire wrote: post #362
brandon272 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that your friend considered his remark to be a joke worthy of a laugh, but it sounds like "good natured ribbing" over something entirely benign. It's a social technique employed by many people on a day to day basis as a bonding method where no offense is usually intended and no offense is usually taken. Where your friend failed, in my opinion, is that he should recognize that not everyone is receptive t…

I don't think I need a rando on the internet to explain what ribbing means to me.

I apologize! It seemed like you did. Have a nice day.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#365

Post by punee »

spatulan wrote: post #151
Paul-ish wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been waiting a long time for someone to use lessons learned from recommender systems to build a social media site like reddit, but rather than having users group themselves up, they would be shown posts algorithmically, based on how they have voted in the past. For example, if I vote for a lot of pro EFF posts, maybe I will see more posts about free software or something like that. This also allows the site to…

That sounds horrible. I don't want the internet to become a giant echo chamber. I want to hear differing views from time to time, because I might be wrong.

So you will upvote differing views that you find interesting. And they will be included in your "bubble". Tada.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#366

Post by askafriend »

braythwayt wrote: post #363
askafriend wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter isn't a textbook though. It's goals as a communications platform are completely different. It's like saying, would you rather design SMS around masking Young Earther's ideas? In the 20s, you would have had these services designed around not conversating about alcohol. Is that right? Is it wrong? I don't know if it's for the communications platform to decide. However the communications platform can provide the…

> Twitter isn't a textbook though. It's goals as a communications platform are completely different Twitter is a company. Its goals and the way it tries to achieve the are as subject to discussion and criticism as any other company. As for the rest of your comment, you keep talking about “masking” when I never used that word. I conclude that you have a preconceived idea of what I am saying, and are arguing with that.…

It seems we are actually in agreement then! I apologize for misreading.

I think it's the "which media to promote" bit which may have thrown me off.

Cheers!

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#367

Post by mattmanser »

daniel-cussen wrote: post #74
blhack wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on this one for a pretty long time. A little over 7 years according to my user page. The quality has not noticeably gone down. There are a lot less technical articles now than I feel like there used to be, but that might very well just be because I've gotten more technical, and now everything seems like an opinion. I think it's because HN is actually willing to defend itself. We used to have days where ever…

Either Haskell or Erlang. I'm 90% sure it was Erlang.

It was Erlang!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1919897

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#368

Post by ptaipale »

kefka wrote: post #333
Kalium wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people believe it's their right to disrupt the communities of others. They call it "activism" or "advocacy" or "defending family values" or whatever the justification du jour is. It's all basically trying to stake a claim to the whole service as the territory of your tribe. I like the idea of reinforcing some separation, but I also fear it may be too late. A lot of people seem to derive joy from attacking th…

> "defending family values" Which is what I hear exclusively regarding Christian activists. They disregard any non-Christians whom have families, or of other value systems.

Yes, that's one funny name for a thing. Another is "social justice" as in SJW.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#370

Post by reitoei »

lordnacho wrote: post #4

It's a wonder he lasted as long as he did. I've joined a number of online forums through the years, and I've always ended up leaving them due to a spiral of "tone gets rough / the good people leave". I'm still in this one, but I guess we'll see how long it lasts here. Seems different somehow, but they all do in the beginning. What are some innovations in solving the asshole/quality spiral? There's lots of takes on mo…

Reddit employs an automoderator bot that supports a lot of different types of customization. Each subreddit may have a completely different bot configuration.

In the same context, you would think that the asshole/quality spiral (love this description, by the way) could be managed by a combination of moderation bots/humans and (especially) the voting system, but when a sub gets big (say 70k users), it's quite often the assholes who are most vocal and cause the most trouble. With that amount of users, there will be a certain amount of "brigading" and a certain group of users who will play along with the griefers for fun.

It's been mentioned above, but a user base can reach a "tipping point" where it becomes impossible to manage with a a small amount of moderators, a bot and a voting system.

Something will eventually give. I've seen all this play out numerous times and experienced it first-hand.

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