Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Internet of Beefs

ribbonfarm.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 342 posts

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#221

Post by DoreenMichele »

kick wrote: post #17

I hesitate to criticize this person, because they're presumably writing for an audience that already knows them, and probably are following for this style of writing, but I have to ask: What is it with think-pieces that state obvious and widespread conclusions while using jargon and jokes to obscure how basic of conclusions they really are? I can't fault people who do this because they're paid by the word and taking…

I only was willing to look at the article because it was Ribbon Farm and the series on the Gervais Principle was really good. I know a lot already about social stuff. I don't often get big epiphanies from reading things.

People sometimes make up terminology because they are trying to communicate ideas for which there really aren't popular terms. I struggle with this myself. I get accused of being idiosyncratic, using words to mean something they don't to other people, etc.

New ideas require new terminology. It's part of why living languages grow, change, add new vocabulary, etc.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#222

Post by Polylactic_acid »

ericdykstra wrote: post #216
Polylactic_acid wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think entertainment is a lesser issue to the real problem which is car centric urban design. We all live so far apart that it is very time consuming, expensive and tedious to meet other people. Rather than just stepping outside and walking/cycling to someone you have to own a car, spend 30 minutes driving and then 30 minutes back. Or you could just play a video game with them over the internet in the few minutes it…

There are certainly a number of factors, but the prevalence and addictiveness of entertainment technology is without a doubt a major factor. Plenty of hikikomori in the safe, walkable Tokyo. What's keeping them inside?

I'll admit I know very little of the culture in Japan so there are quite likely other factors. I am just talking from personal experience as a 2x year old in Australia. I would happily meet up with friends regularly but it never happens because they live too far away, most of us do not have cars and because most of us live with parents, meetups tend to be in the city where the only activity is drinking. Video games perhaps allow us to have fun when we might have otherwise forced ourselves to go out but I think the primary factor for me is how difficult it is.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#223

Post by misnome »

coldtea wrote: post #176
DoreenMichele wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a comment on a forum, not a PhD thesis. There are other ways to attend gatherings of people now. You and I are attending one of them right this minute: a forum on the internet. For my purposes, talking with people on HN is generally superior to most meatspace options. I have a compromised immune system. No one is going to cough on me on HN. I'm a woman. This is an overwhelmingly male space. No one here can physi…

> I'm a woman. This is an overwhelmingly male space. No one here can physically assault me the way they could in meatspace. And yet women managed to exist in outside society and participate in all kinds of actions in the 60s and 70s for example (including protests, acid tests, trips to India, and all kinds of stuff), under much worse conditions (re: average societal sexism, etc), without all today's drama. It's like…

> And yet women managed to exist in outside society and participate in all kinds of actions in the 60s and 70s for example (including protests, acid tests, trips to India, and all kinds of stuff), under much worse conditions (re: average societal sexism, etc), without all today's drama.

But that doesn't mean that it wasn't there or that there wasn't a problem - just that they were less able to talk about it without more severe consequences to themselves, and we've hardly moved past that now. Dismissing it all as just "drama" sounds like implicitly wishing that the situation would go back to suffering in silence.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#224

Post by Ghjklov »

ericdykstra wrote: post #216
Polylactic_acid wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think entertainment is a lesser issue to the real problem which is car centric urban design. We all live so far apart that it is very time consuming, expensive and tedious to meet other people. Rather than just stepping outside and walking/cycling to someone you have to own a car, spend 30 minutes driving and then 30 minutes back. Or you could just play a video game with them over the internet in the few minutes it…

There are certainly a number of factors, but the prevalence and addictiveness of entertainment technology is without a doubt a major factor. Plenty of hikikomori in the safe, walkable Tokyo. What's keeping them inside?

>What's keeping them inside?

I would guess they've shut themselves in and away from the shame and rejection by society and have found the tiny inkling of happiness possible in that hole. And as society continues to rejects them further for being in a hole, the hole only gets deeper.

Understandable, since the minute they go outside, everything is stacked against them and even with help, they probably won't be able to compete on the same level as the normal people who didn't fall into the hole. I can't win outside, but I can be happy in my hole. Hole good, outside bad.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#225

Post by uncle_j »

fallous wrote: post #208
uncle_j wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People replace God with something else I have noticed. Many of the Atheists in the Atheists community in the United States started a new organisation called Atheism+, which alienated a lot of group and those in Atheism+ started added a lot of dogma, which I find as someone who observed the split from the outside in the UK to be somewhat ironic. I am not religious myself (but I am slowly having a greater appreciation…

Indeed, as an atheist I long ago recognized the value of religion even if I could not believe in myself.

The problem is that a lot of writing from ancient sources e.g. Bible, Confucius etc. get discounted because of the language used. If you actually think about what they actually meant at the time a lot of the time there is a lot of wisdom in it but because of the language used it is too dense for most modern readers.

Unfortunately a lot of atheists just decided they knew everything once they realised that the Bible wasn't the literal truth. Many Christians wouldn't claim that and Atheists tend to point at the likes of Ken Ham to strawman the rest of the Christianity.

However I do appreciate Christianity in Europe is very different than it is in the USA.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#227

Post by wtmt »

devchix wrote: post #128
CommieBobDole wrote: post #2

This is an excellent analysis of the state of the modern internet, though I don't entirely agree with his diagnosis of the cause; I think it's more down to two main things: 1. We are all, at heart, covetous xenophobic apes, and we've been doing the same basic thing (arbitrarily define an in-group and an out-group and proceed to wage total war on the out-group) since before we were even human. This is just the latest…

>conflict is the most engaging kind of engagement This doesn't feel right. I ask myself, do I go places to look for people to fight with? Emphatically no. Do you? Probably not. I just read this great|hateful book|movie|thing. I want to talk about it with people who have experienced this book|movie|thing, would be great if they saw it the way I did, also great if they disagreed but we could discuss it with a shared la…

>> conflict is the most engaging kind of engagement

> This doesn't feel right. I ask myself, do I go places to look for people to fight with? Emphatically no. Do you? Probably not.

Most people are thrust with conflicts on TV. It may not have been their choice to go to, but that’s the fare available from most TV networks (especially the only fare on news and news related debates). World over, the networks know what attracts and addicts more eyeballs (it is conflict and frustration). Social networks also amplify these kinds of conversations. You may visit Twitter to just read some interesting piece of information from someone you admire or like, but the platform is built in a way to distract you over and over again into a deeper rabbit hole of conflict. It’s the same on other “engagement driven” business models too.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#229

Post by fallous »

uncle_j wrote: post #225
fallous wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, as an atheist I long ago recognized the value of religion even if I could not believe in myself.

The problem is that a lot of writing from ancient sources e.g. Bible, Confucius etc. get discounted because of the language used. If you actually think about what they actually meant at the time a lot of the time there is a lot of wisdom in it but because of the language used it is too dense for most modern readers. Unfortunately a lot of atheists just decided they knew everything once they realised that the Bible wa…

Sadly I think a number of atheists decided that an absence of religion meant that there was also an absence of morality, at least in any universal sense. Oddly that put them in agreement with the theists, even if neither realized it.

One of the benefits of religion as I see it is an establishment of a morality that rises above "that which is popular in the moment." Most people are too busy dealing with the minutiae of day-to-day living to sit back and ponder the philosophy of morality, and while some religions may hold unpalatable beliefs they at least have the virtue of being predictable as opposed to the temporary vagaries of the mob.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#230

Post by wtmt »

gambiting wrote: post #28
danharaj wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're taking for granted how twitter is used as a global cafe by communities that would otherwise be disjointed and isolated. For every controversial tweet or tweet of drama, theres thousands of enriching conversations happening that could otherwise not occur. I think it's ironic that negative takes on the twitter model tend to be as shallow and polarizing as they claim the platform to be. As for me, I think…

>>For every controversial tweet or tweet of drama, theres thousands of enriching conversations happening that could otherwise not occur. I don't believe that this actually happens. Definitely not on twitter anyway.

>>For every controversial tweet or tweet of drama, theres thousands of enriching conversations happening that could otherwise not occur.

> I don't believe that this actually happens. Definitely not on twitter anyway.

I believe that the GP has it reversed. I’d rephrase it in the other sense (what I see as reality) as:

“For every enriching conversation happening on Twitter, there are millions of controversial tweets or tweets of drama that occur and would anyway occur.”

Post reply on HN