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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

#521

Post by avar »

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.

Instead of making condescending comments towards people that are just trying to engage you in conversation you could take a leaf out of your own book and "just give up the practice and stick to being generally pleasant to be around" :)

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#522

Post by reitoei »

vidarh wrote: post #37
reitoei wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In-fighting within communities is one of reddit's biggest problems.

Yes, but then those who don't enjoy that infighting can, and often do, leave and form their own.

Which fail in 99% of cases, so they come back to the original one more bitter than when they left.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#523

Post by gilleain »

blakeyrat wrote: post #340
gilleain wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree that SO has little community (or quite a hostile one, if any) but that may be because it is a victim of its own success. I see the same thing happening in other stack-exchange sites, sadly. The underlying problem may be the gradual fatigue at questions of the form: "HOW DO I DO DIS???!! SOLVE THIS FOR ME NOW PLZ!!" or even the more subtle "I was wondering about this homework-like question...?" which are…

My own personal experience with SO as a Q&A site is I've had a literally 0% success rate. None of the questions I've posted have ever been successfully answered. (Now I don't even bother.) I think that's because the site encourages people to get all the internetpointzzz reputation currency, and not to, you know, actually answer questions. And the questions I asked were somewhat difficult, because I'm not a dummy and…

Catching all the pointzz (it also has badges!!) can be a problem. Especially on SO itself, there can be a race to answer a question, which means the quality of the answers suffers sometimes.

Difficult questions really don't work well, sadly. Unless there is the rare situation that some expert out there happens to know the answer and has the spare time to post a long detailed reply.

Didn't realise you couldn't answer your own questions without sufficient rep - that sounds a bit rubbish. Don't think you get any points from it either (obviously, otherwise you could just rapidly post a bunch of empty 'questions' and accept all your own answers).

Ultimately, stack-exchange sites seem to work well for a certain volume of questions, with a certain minimum number of enthusiastic varied experts in some field, for a certain level of question (not homework, not blue-sky research). This is kind of Goldilocks-obvious I suppose...

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#524

Post by _0ffh »

DenisM wrote: post #496
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't tell if you're being serious or not. Would you actually enjoy that kind of network? Sarcasm is really hard to identify, and would be really hard to ban.

Yes, absolutely. Sarcasm poisons the well of conversation like nothing else. When people disagree and provide an argument you can have a conversation about substance. When people disagree and provide no argument or a personal attack, it's easy to dismiss and move on from there. Sarcasm leaves you hanging precisely because it's hard to identify - is the person serious so you should continue to put effort, or is he not…

It would be a strange use of sarcasm, in my opinion, to use it to keep people arguing to no avail. I'd rather call that disingenuous goading, not honest sarcasm.

Personally, I'm rather fond of sarcasm and irony. But if I find myself in a dialogue, and another party seems to not get the point of a sarcastic or ironic comment, then I will point out the miscommunication.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#525

Post by punee »

rblstr wrote: post #519
letsbereal wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if she has just been (yet again) nominated as one of the World's or Britain's best costume designers, how is poking fun at her current outfit, by a comedian of all people, "being mean"? Is it not that contrast that makes the joke?

Well just watch the whole thing, from nomination to winning, to award acceptance to Mr Fry taking the stage again and tell me that his comment sounds like a joke. I'm sure he intended it to be a joke and to not be taken seriously, and I'm sure he was sincere when he was calling her the best costume designer in Britain, but the joke didn't work. The comment came across as crass and harsh and mocking of a woman who's j…

His comment sounds like a joke.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#526

Post by _0ffh »

skybrian wrote: post #235
david-given wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My theory is that it's because social media systems encourage and publicise agreement, while discouraging and hiding disagreement. This leads to a huge positive feedback effect on any meme that catches even a tiny number of people's attention, no matter how crazy. On twitter, you signify agreement by retweeting; this takes seconds and permanently adds to the tweet's score. But to disagree, I have to write a message o…

The problem with downvoting (at least simple versions) is that it allows separate communities to interfere which each others' communications. So, say you have hunters and animal-rights activists. They should be able to talk among themselves on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook without interference from the other side. You don't want one side to start downvoting the other side's posts into oblivion so they can't even talk…

It's been obvious for a very long time that up-/downvoting is just a horribly broken mechanism. Much more so, if it's upvoting only. Twitter tries to ameliorate that with the ability to block people, but that's just a crutch.

The solution is laughably simple in theory, but it seems to keep getting ignored: Don't use a simple sum of votes. Instead use some method - any method really - to weight the votes of users depending how much their past voting behaviour correlates with your own.

I've been writing about this over six years ago, for example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095500

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#527

Post by greggman »

inanutshellus wrote: post #218
david-given wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My theory is that it's because social media systems encourage and publicise agreement, while discouraging and hiding disagreement. This leads to a huge positive feedback effect on any meme that catches even a tiny number of people's attention, no matter how crazy. On twitter, you signify agreement by retweeting; this takes seconds and permanently adds to the tweet's score. But to disagree, I have to write a message o…

> Maybe we just need a 'dislike' button along with the 'like' button. It'd certainly be an interesting experiment. FWIW, this is coming very soon to FB in the form of "reactions" rather than a simple "dislike" feature. http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/27/facebook-reactions-launch...

It's already been shipping for a while. 3-4 weeks?

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#528

Post by r721 »

joopxiv wrote: post #117
r721 wrote: post #26

I wonder is it so hard to build an automatic "insult" detector with all recent progress with deep learning. Quick googling gave quite a couple of older papers: "Offensive Language Detection Using Multi-level Classification" http://www.eiti.uottawa.ca/~diana/publications/Flame_Final.p... "Automatic identification of personal insults on social news sites" http://labfs.eecs.northwestern.edu/~sara/Site/Publications_f...

When this was a topic in University a few years ago, it was still very hard to properly detect humor, especially sarcasm. If I understood this correctly, this whole episode was kicked of by Stephen making a joke about some lady's attire. I don't know what would be worse; the sanctimonious fallout or his tweet being censored by an automatic insult detector in the first place. (actually I do: the second).

I was thinking about a tool, not a universal censor :) Something like a special place for notifications: "Hate mail" - some people with loads of noise replies would definitely appreciate that. Also offensive replies could be shown last when displaying tweet with replies, for example.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#529

Post by kedean »

sosuke wrote: post #485
kedean wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't the occasional disagreement, it's when communities raid each other, since people are much more brazen online than in person. In person, thousands of atheists would never march into a church during mass and start berating members for their beliefs, but that's very common in unmoderated communities. Moderation solves this issue when you can shard your communities (see reddit), but Twitter is just a gl…

"communities raid each other" I love that image and it makes a clear picture for me. Playing on a PvP server of WoW before any expansions there was no formal PvP game. What spontaneously happened though was the raiding and taking over of the other factions town. Making a mess and disrupting otherwise normal play until everyone got tired and went to sleep. It feels so much more intense (real?) in the social media worl…

I think because it takes so little effort. Even in an MMO, you have to man your character to do anything. On twitter all it takes it for at least one person to be tweeting at a given moment to ruin the other community.

Plus, people on WoW would be paying a subscription, people are much more risk averse when they pay. Social media is free, and there's little to lose for most people.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#530

Post by _0ffh »

tomjen3 wrote: post #329
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…

It is almost like humans are tribal and will defend their own tribe and attack other tribes.

And will readily defend the most horrible offenses by members of their own tribe, but be horribly offended over the littlest misstep from members of others.
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