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RIP Kuro5hin

kuro5hin.org

261–270 of 278 posts

Re: RIP Kuro5hin

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider donating it to the Internet Archive. This is precisely the kind of thing they really do a good job with, and it's worth saving.

> and it's worth saving. That's kind of an interesting question. There's certainly some stuff there worth saving forever, but there's also stuff that's just plain bad or that's the intellectual equivalent of embarrassing childhood photos, which may not be worth saving at all. I never was part of Usenet, but I understand a lot of people were angry at Dejanews and Google when what was once (perhaps naively) viewed as e…

I was a user of K5 and I don't think anyone there viewed it as "ephemeral communication". If they thought so, it seems as though the joke's sort of on them, given that the site stayed operational for almost 17 years.

I can forgive that sort of attitude among the early users of Usenet, because there was a long period during which it was just technically infeasible to have a permanent archive of everything (and it's still kinda true, if you count binaries groups; most Usenet providers don't keep everything forever). But that was definitely not the case by the time K5 came around.

The site's culture, at least IMO, was that if you really embarrassed yourself your way out was by ditching your pseudonym and starting over (or by saying the dumb thing under a throwaway account to begin with, which was perhaps too easy on K5).

There's perhaps some argument to be made that forums that require real-name registration ought to allow comments to either be deleted (bad) or anonymized (probably better) on request, to allow people to move away from past statements. But I don't know if that's ever really been a reasonable expectation on a pseudonymous forum, at least of the non-toy/non-amateur variety.

Re: RIP Kuro5hin

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You actually can't. I had to download Reddit Enhancement Suite today (where I previously didn't bother at work) only to be able to hide r/The_Donald from r/all. It's just fucking everywhere, I can't take it. 50% of the posts are doomsday prophecies and just pure and utter shit. During every US election this happens, and your/their election process is so long you're basically wading in bullshit for 2 years.

I'm not talking about /all. I'm talking about how, for example, on the C++ subreddit some lefties lost their shit and ruined a bunch of discussions because some guy innocently mentioned as an aside using the King James Bible as a text corpus for algorithm testing and interview questions. Only a crazy person would care that this guy mentioned using the KJB, but apparently a fifth of the people there are crazy. Which i…

While I can appreciate the annoyance when people take a discussion off-topic, in a threaded forum like Reddit, you always have the option of just clicking the little 'close' button and collapsing a comment and all of its children. This is really the beauty of threaded comments; it lets people have their sidebar conversations in detail, without permanently dragging the discussion there. Everyone else can just continue to respond to the comment upstream of the derail while interested parties hash it out. (Without this, you end up with something like Metafilter, where there's a huge amount of active moderation and fairly severe community-norms-enforcement, much of it aimed towards keeping discussions on track and dissuade trolling / derails.)

And depending on the context of the conversation, I can totally see why placing "the Bible" and "interview question" in the same sentence would attract attention. My internal HR-department DEFCON meter just went up about two points just thinking about it, and I'm certainly less attuned to Bad Ideas than most. I'm not sure that's a reasonable thing to expect people to just leave alone, particularly again when you have threaded discussions so there's not a ton of social pressure against nitpicking.

Reddit does have its share of problems, but given their apparent goal of being sort of the heir to Usenet in terms of an everything-to-everybody discussion platform, rather than simply a subject-specific discussion site, they seem to do rather well. I sometimes think they're insane and hubristic for the whole "platform" ambition, but they're one of the more successful attempts around right now.

Re: RIP Kuro5hin

#263

Hey so this is Rusty -- What happened was basically that Internap shut down the data center we were in and had to move the servers, and I conspicuously failed to Deal With Things around that. The content is probably not gone forever, but it may be a little while before it reappears. There's a very good chance that it will reappear in the form of an archive of static html pages though, not a live community. So if you'…

Consider donating it to the Internet Archive. This is precisely the kind of thing they really do a good job with, and it's worth saving.

K5 is blocked by robots.txt on Archive.org

Re: RIP Kuro5hin

#264
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its entire culture is in its own special way a joke, from the love of Soviet everything, to the nagant-bolt-as-a-prostate-massager, to the skinwalker stories - and each of these is made even funnier the more that it gets taken over the top. IAmTheStrielok becoming famous from swallowing a DU bullet and nearly dying from radiation poisoning, for example. In that way, sure, layers of irony, inside jokes, etc. But in th…

I was referring more to the openly and unapologetically racist aspects of the board. "It's just memes" isn't an excuse for some of the vile shit that has leaked out of there over its history to the point where they're called /k/lansmen for a reason .

Correct - it's not just memes, it's also leakage from /pol/ and an excellent pleb filter.

But no, having been there for some 5 years now, I've barely seen the term /k/lansmen tossed around.

Re: RIP Kuro5hin

#265
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about /all. I'm talking about how, for example, on the C++ subreddit some lefties lost their shit and ruined a bunch of discussions because some guy innocently mentioned as an aside using the King James Bible as a text corpus for algorithm testing and interview questions. Only a crazy person would care that this guy mentioned using the KJB, but apparently a fifth of the people there are crazy. Which i…

While I can appreciate the annoyance when people take a discussion off-topic, in a threaded forum like Reddit, you always have the option of just clicking the little 'close' button and collapsing a comment and all of its children. This is really the beauty of threaded comments; it lets people have their sidebar conversations in detail, without permanently dragging the discussion there. Everyone else can just continue…

> I can totally see why placing "the Bible" and "interview question" in the same sentence would attract attention. My internal HR-department DEFCON meter just went up about two points just thinking about it

You are the problem and you don't even realize it. You don't realize how crazy you are.

Re: RIP Kuro5hin

#266
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I can appreciate the annoyance when people take a discussion off-topic, in a threaded forum like Reddit, you always have the option of just clicking the little 'close' button and collapsing a comment and all of its children. This is really the beauty of threaded comments; it lets people have their sidebar conversations in detail, without permanently dragging the discussion there. Everyone else can just continue…

> I can totally see why placing "the Bible" and "interview question" in the same sentence would attract attention. My internal HR-department DEFCON meter just went up about two points just thinking about it You are the problem and you don't even realize it. You don't realize how crazy you are.

Actually, I'm pretty sure most people reading this thread will have the same reaction, though not about him.

Re: RIP Kuro5hin

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can totally see why placing "the Bible" and "interview question" in the same sentence would attract attention. My internal HR-department DEFCON meter just went up about two points just thinking about it You are the problem and you don't even realize it. You don't realize how crazy you are.

Actually, I'm pretty sure most people reading this thread will have the same reaction, though not about him.

Your need to pipe in further solidifies my point. It's the totalitarian nature of the left. No dissent from the party line can be brooked.

I am not a christian. I'd be fine with the koran or the bhagavad gita as a corpus. But internet lefties like you two lose your shit and ruin any discussion over mention of the bible.

Re: RIP Kuro5hin

#268

First there was Slashdot, but CmdrTaco insisted on picking the stories for us. He called it an "omelet". Kuro5hin came along to fix this, but discouraged posts that were just links to pages elsewhere on the web. IIRC, this was called "link farming". How many users had the talent and time to create original content, and then survive the ridiculous Kuro5shin editing process? Not many. Digg then encouraged links, but sh…

I'd argue the reason we thrived was because we knew we had to be a platform for communities (subreddits) from the beginning. No single frontpage can be home for everyone, but tens of thousands of communities on a common platform, can scale forever. Slashdot was definitely the OG, though. Got to meet CmdrTaco at a talk I gave a little while ago and tell him thanks for everything he did to inspire us at Reddit.

Subreddits are certainly a powerful idea, but I think reddit would still have triumphed as a single humongous community for all.

Re: RIP Kuro5hin

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I'm pretty sure most people reading this thread will have the same reaction, though not about him.

Your need to pipe in further solidifies my point. It's the totalitarian nature of the left. No dissent from the party line can be brooked. I am not a christian. I'd be fine with the koran or the bhagavad gita as a corpus. But internet lefties like you two lose your shit and ruin any discussion over mention of the bible.

I don't mind anyone using the bible in any technical capacity during a job interview. It's clearly not about religion. The reason I said what I said is because you keep saying things like "It's the totalitarian nature of the left.". You sound like a character from K-pax, and it's not one of the doctors/nurses.

Re: RIP Kuro5hin

#270
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anybody explain how /r/The_Donald even happened? I can't tell if it's serious about Trump or if it's the new containment sub for dudebros. I'm very surprised at how often posts from there show up in /r/all.

Reddit, as a text forum, has a common problem with Poe's law: dry satire is sustained for too long and starts to be taken seriously. Subs that start as sarcastic mockery become havens (and recruiting posts) for true believers.

See... I dunno. I don't think that's the problem, though, at least, that's not my problem with reddit.

My counterexample is Kuro5hin, back when it was still a thing. In the good old days; sure, you could never really be sure who was trolling and who wasn't, but it was usually well-written, erudite trolling. It wasn't particularly repetitive, and it was entertaining.

In my opinion, the problem is not trolling, it's people expressing opinions in repetitive, uncreative and not very entertaining ways. Fundamentally, I believe that the problem is bad writing.

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