‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

Though there are email blacklists for known spammers, and it can be hard to administer a new email server. You wouldn't want to block Gmail, though.

Speaking of which, I'm not seeing why every instance operator would decide not to grow. It seems like, if the federated protocol is successful and allows it, new large providers would spring up like Gmail and Hotmail.

> Though there are email blacklists for known spammers, and it can be hard to administer a new email server. You wouldn't want to block Gmail, though.

Most people typically find an instance with people similar to them. Most of my followers/followees are on the same instance as me. While blacklisting an instance can be problematic, it's also probably not that big of a deal for most. Moderators are more willing to take actions like this when each user does not contribute to their bottom line.

> Speaking of which, I'm not seeing why every instance operator would decide not to grow. It seems like, if the federated protocol is successful and allows it, new large providers would spring up like Gmail and Hotmail.

Hotmail and Gmail came about because running your own email is difficult (I used to run my own email). You have to setup SPF records, DKIM records, on top of which many mailers send non-standard mail out, which you have to make sure your rules accept these non-standard pieces of mail. Right now the ActivityPub standard is well defined, and most instances already follow the server-to-server API. Spam is also a huge problem in the email world because of the ease of sending an email. You don't need a mailserver to send mail to an address, but you need to setup an instance and have other users specifically follow you to send spam toots, or Fediverse messages. On top of this is a community interest in creating software (like Pleroma) that is easy to install and administer. All of these combined decrease the friction for lay (for multiple definitions of lay) users to run their own instance, which makes the gulf between a (not-yet-existent) commercial instance and a personal instance a lot smaller. While there will be a space for commercial providers which use ads or subscriptions to pay for their instances, the ease of personal setup makes centralization a lot less of a tendency for the Fediverse than it did for email.

The military didn't decide to start having pistol grips on their rifles because it looks cool, vertical foregrips originated in the military and it wasn't because they look cool. I own a .308 rifle with a pistol grip, folding stock, foregrip, bayonet lug, threaded barrel and a 20 round magazine and none of these features are needed for hunting but they are damned convenient for killing people.

You can try to tell me that it's no more deadly than a hunting rifle but there are reasons that the seal team 6 don't go in with hunting rifles and full auto fire isn't the only reason.

I think it's important to recognize that these rifles are more than just hunting rifles and also that we should still be allowed to have them because the second amendment is NOT about hunting.

The presumption of bad faith is both a lack of imagination and a lack of information. The person cannot imagine how a reasonable person might believe something, and why they might believe it.

The accusation of sexism is a perfectly good example, with James Damore as the case study. His words were twisted into things he didn't say, because his uncharitable opponents couldn't imagine that he was simply saying what he was saying. No, no, he must be dogwhistling something far worse, it cannot simply be that their own premises are too narrow, that their own value judgements are coloring their reading.

As for ethics in journalism, I'm one of those "deplorables" too, and you know why? Because there were 100x more people talking and emailing about that then were causing amok on Twitter. If the black bloc shows up at a protest, you don't suddenly dismiss everyone else as car torchers and bus stop smashers. But that's exactly what the press did to gamers, and that's why they were so pissed off. And the more they wanted to be heard, the more fringe behavior there was to point to to support the foregone conclusion. When the police does it at the G20 and calls it kettling, the progressives don't like it, but when they do it, it's just fine.

What's particularly galling is that none of this was new: the online harassment, the doxing, the stalking, that was pioneered on Something Awful's leftie forums like Helldump and LF. And lo and behold, those people ended up in media cliques like Weird Twitter. Pots calling kettles black is not a new concept, it's just amazing they fooled so many into defending their incestuous little circle. History has been rewritten, and now apparently online trolls never existed until 2014, when the fire nation attacked, and everyone of import got amnesia.

Here is what I saw. To change my mind, you'd have to prove that there was a massive invisible shadow campaign that could somehow eclipse hundreds of thousands of views, posts and tweets:

https://medium.com/@KingFrostFive/gamergate-august-2014-revi...