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The Internet of Beefs

ribbonfarm.com

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Re: The Internet of Beefs

#271

Post by howlin »

arbitrary_name wrote: post #260
AgentOrange1234 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound like a bad thing. Have you met people? Do you really want to spend more of your time with them? :)

Yes. And yes. I'll do anything to hang out with people, especially the ones I like. You sound like you're making an excuse for a lack of friends by implying there is no one worth being friends with? Perhaps I've inferred too much, I sure hope so...

To be fair to the poster, virtually anyone you meet in real life will be far less interesting than chatting with someone in a specialized forum like hacker news.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#272

Post by Nextgrid »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #207
tmccrary55 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free but monetized.

Very well monetized such that there are paid moderators. I'm very much okay with this.

I'm assuming you are talking about HN.

I'd be very happy if this was also the case for other networks. Feels like a competent moderation team (not necessarily paid; forums in the good old days had people competing to be voluntary moderators) would make mainstream social media a lot more enjoyable.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#273

Post by DoreenMichele »

Nextgrid wrote: post #272
DoreenMichele wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very well monetized such that there are paid moderators. I'm very much okay with this.

I'm assuming you are talking about HN. I'd be very happy if this was also the case for other networks. Feels like a competent moderation team (not necessarily paid; forums in the good old days had people competing to be voluntary moderators) would make mainstream social media a lot more enjoyable.

Feels like a competent moderation team (not necessarily paid

Moderation seems to generally be better when it is paid. I've done plenty of moderating in my time. I currently am the moderator or a number of things. I'm generally a good moderator.

I'm also dirt poor and I resent the fact that I do so many things for free for people without it coming back to me and my extreme poverty actively interferes at times with my ability to tend to unpaid obligations while I try to eke out a living doing something else for a bit, etc.

I generally have a pretty good track record of doing things for free that I'm willing to do for free and not dumping on other people about how they aren't paying me to do this, but I have seen plenty of moderators over the years have a snit fit about how the membership is ungrateful and they do this out of the goodness of their heart and You People need to behave better, appreciate us more, and quit being so much drama since it's all free, dagnabbit.

I think if you really, truly value something, you should be okay with people being able to do that work and actually somehow pay their own bills because of it.

Reddit is sort of a weird grey zone where Reddit actually makes money and has paid staff, but most moderation on Reddit is unpaid. And I run a few Reddits and I'm still trying to figure out what I think of that weird beast.

But, generally speaking, as someone who has done tons of volunteer work in my life and has also spent a lot of years very poor where all that "goodness of my heart" crapola didn't do a fucking thing for me when I needed some "goodness" from someone else, I think if you resent the service you use for free somehow making money and actually paying its staff, (trying to think of a more PC way to end this sentence and failing -- suffice it to say, I don't have a high opinion of such people).

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#274

Post by Nextgrid »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #273
Nextgrid wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming you are talking about HN. I'd be very happy if this was also the case for other networks. Feels like a competent moderation team (not necessarily paid; forums in the good old days had people competing to be voluntary moderators) would make mainstream social media a lot more enjoyable.

Feels like a competent moderation team (not necessarily paid Moderation seems to generally be better when it is paid. I've done plenty of moderating in my time. I currently am the moderator or a number of things. I'm generally a good moderator. I'm also dirt poor and I resent the fact that I do so many things for free for people without it coming back to me and my extreme poverty actively interferes at times with my…

I wasn't speaking against paying moderators, just saying that even voluntary moderation would be better than the status quo for a lot of communities (it's insane how much work people will give for free in exchange for some random internet points, see Stack Exchange for an example).

There are a lot of people out there who would be happy to work for free to help their community out; forums used to work like that before being made mostly irrelevant by the social media garbage. If you consider that a problem then it's not for you and that's okay. (I wouldn't do it full time either now that I have a job, but back in my teenage years I had lots of free time that I was happy to donate for free, and indeed my Stack Exchange account's reputation - useless internet points - is a testimony to that.)

Paying people means the company needs to put in a significant amount of resources (technical, legal and staff) to manage that, something companies might not want to invest in (at least not right now). Random internet points is at least a stop-gap solution to let the community manage moderation without much investment nor management from the company, and would definitely be a good upgrade from the status-quo.

As a counterpoint, for people having their community's best interests at heard, being paid might actually be a downgrade. I contributed to Stack Exchange years ago for free because I liked to help people and help the community I was part of. I did so on my own time and terms. Being paid would've meant I now had a duty to do it and I couldn't for example decide that I wasn't in the mood to contribute one evening because it was now a job. The other issue is that being paid means you have the company's best interests at heart instead of the community, and those might not align. It's easy to break rules or "look the other way" for the sake of the community when you're a volunteer, less so when your paycheck depends on it.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#275

Post by DoreenMichele »

Nextgrid wrote: post #274
DoreenMichele wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like a competent moderation team (not necessarily paid Moderation seems to generally be better when it is paid. I've done plenty of moderating in my time. I currently am the moderator or a number of things. I'm generally a good moderator. I'm also dirt poor and I resent the fact that I do so many things for free for people without it coming back to me and my extreme poverty actively interferes at times with my…

I wasn't speaking against paying moderators, just saying that even voluntary moderation would be better than the status quo for a lot of communities (it's insane how much work people will give for free in exchange for some random internet points, see Stack Exchange for an example). There are a lot of people out there who would be happy to work for free to help their community out; forums used to work like that before…

Sorry. I think we are mostly talking past each other. It's nearly midnight and I'm getting a bit frayed around the edges at this point.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#276

Post by Nextgrid »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #275
Nextgrid wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't speaking against paying moderators, just saying that even voluntary moderation would be better than the status quo for a lot of communities (it's insane how much work people will give for free in exchange for some random internet points, see Stack Exchange for an example). There are a lot of people out there who would be happy to work for free to help their community out; forums used to work like that before…

Sorry. I think we are mostly talking past each other. It's nearly midnight and I'm getting a bit frayed around the edges at this point.

No worries!

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#277

Post by hyperdunc »

codebolt wrote: post #251
DoreenMichele wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust is earned. It's not something you can assume. That "assumption of trust" you speak of included an assumption that either you weren't LGBT or you would bury it your entire life for the comfort of the larger community. Matthew 10:34-36 34"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35For I have come to turn "'a man against his father, a daughter against…

> That "assumption of trust" you speak of included an assumption that either you weren't LGBT or you would bury it your entire life for the comfort of the larger community. The LGBT community comes with it's own shackles. They assume the only natural thing is for someone to structure their whole identity and lives around what might just be a developmental phase of their youth. I'm certainly glad that type of thinking…

> The LGBT community comes with it's own shackles. They assume the only natural thing is for someone to structure their whole identity and lives around what might just be a developmental phase of their youth.

People who are able to distinguish themselves through individual achievement seem much less inclined to structure their identities around race, sex and other mostly immutable charactertistics.

There's also no such thing as the LGBT community. There's only a community of LGBT people who hold similar political opinions, and whole lot of LGBT people who disagree with them.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#278

Post by scottishcow »

claudiawerner wrote: post #94
piaste wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More heavily watered down than cooler, I suspect. The only other Ribbonfarm article I've read was the "premium mediocre" one, in which they described themselves as a premium mediocre blog, adding "the actual upper-class readers read SSC or Marginal Revolution". On the limited basis of these two articles, I am leaning towards the idea that it was an accurate assessment.

To learn about the link with SSC, it does not at all surprise me that Riboonfarm shows the same aspect of someone talking about various topics (in particular sensitive and sociological ones) without showing any evidence of reading any established research on them. It's perplexing how similar essays on natural world, not taking into account any research on physics in the last 100 years or more, would not be nearly as…

Why is it perplexing? People put more trust in fields where researchers follow (or are expected to follow, at least) the scientific method.

I work in what may be called a "soft" science field, I don't complain when people don't view our output as authoritative as that of hard science. I'm proud of my work, but I don't claim to have any monopoly on truth (or even a better grasp of truth, for that matter) just because I have a list of academic publications. It's the nature of the field.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#279

Post by hug »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #220
sp332 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say the same about IRC. GP's point is that not that many people are even on the platform. Twitter has less than 350 million monthly active users. It's about tied with Reddit. MSN had more unique monthly visitors than that in 2004.

Those numbers brought about something I'm surprised I haven't noticed before. I don't know a single person who actually uses twitter regularly. Where as I know loads of people who use reddit/discord/facebook. And yet twitter is where all of the media attention goes.

Reddit: Lots of users. Mostly pictures of cats. Any insightful comments is... well, in the comments. Any particularly controversial comment is inherently buried by downvotes. Useful if you're combing through communities for information, less useful for grabbing the biggest bit of news.

Discord: You gotta be in the server in the first place. And it's real time. The discussion moves on. Even if anyone had anything interesting to say, it's already gone by the time the news wants to report on it. And they're not on the server anyway.

Facebook: Ugh, old people and essential oils peddlers. Nothing newsworthy happens on Facebook. Just Kevin being racist again.

and then there's twitter: Where most interesting tweets are public, and interacting with a tweet, either insightful or controversial, love it or hate it, just makes it bigger, and more discoverable, inviting more people to pile on or get the boot in, while the media watches on.

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