331–340 of 378 posts
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Yes Early Digg was pretty good. Early Reddit had a lot of good help guides and interesting perspectives. Now on HN. And crossing fingers. (Slashdot seemed to go through the cycle, bottom out, and is ok again?)
Slashdot will never be okay again. I go there every so often to check, and it's still a dumpster fire.
An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour. HN is like that. Small subreddits are like that. Group chats are like that. But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonal…
> An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour. > HN is like that. HN is the only place that is not a pub: jokes are frowned upon, and even moderated out. Post Valuable Content, or GTFO. You can joke and feel belonging liter…
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Walter Benjamin wrote about this all the way back in the 1930s. He observed that early art like frescos painted on walls and sculptures in temples require the viewer to travel to them, but they gave way to paintings on canvas and busts that could travel to cities to meet audiences where they were. Technology continued to push this trend, reproducing art through photography and printing in books and newspapers let it…
Do you have a reference for where Benjamin wrote about this? I found this excerpt from "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction": "With the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for the exhibition of their products. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statue of a divinity that has its fixed place in the interior of a…
"a situation which Paul Valéry pointed up in this sentence: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.” "
"technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room"
The whole essay is great, I'd really recommend reading it and Benjamin's other works.
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Reddit completely deleted all your accounts for this accident?
It's extremely difficult to get reddit banned, let alone this - OP is telling on themselves
Step 1, have multiple Reddit accounts for anonymity (hey, look, I don't want everyone knowing my medical problems that I seek help on, for example). Step 2, encounter 1 mod on 1 subreddit who misinterprets 1 comment (or you violate TOS without realizing it, by accident) and bans you when you seem insufficiently apologetic (I can show you the conversation evidence here, apparently "I'm sorry I made a mistake" is insufficient). Step 3, accidentally post anything to that subreddit (even something tame or supportive) with a different account months later. Reddit, via fingerprinting, will detect this, and now you are irrevocably a Ban Evader(tm) and all your accounts (as well as any new ones you create, which will now automatically be considered "ban evasion accounts") will be locked in turn as you log into them, making it impossible to interact whatsoever with the site except Reddit admins themselves, and good luck reaching them.
I've even bought Reddit Gold (and had plenty of credits remaining). Doesn't matter.
Deleting every Reddit cookie, blocking ads and changing your IP? They'll still figure it out somehow, and now you will be even MORE guilty of "ban evasion". It's ridiculous. There's no way to appeal it. It's guilt via mere suspicion.
Systems without enough humans suck.
Anyway, it's bad enough that your accounts are not actually anonymous there and that Reddit can actually associate all of them with each other. That's enough of a privacy violation on its own to merit not going there.
Anecdotal data of 1 but I still post to FB and Twitter (uh, X) fairly often. I never got into IG (too superficial, and I actually prefer discussion). Tried Threads for a couple days and it never latched. Reddit (arguably accidentally) permabanned me across all my accounts after I accidentally used a different login to post to a sub I had been (debatably, mods can be jerks) banned on 1 of my accounts in a long while b…
Reddit completely deleted all your accounts for this accident?
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It's extremely difficult to get reddit banned, let alone this - OP is telling on themselves
It's absolutely NOT difficult. I've been a Reddit user for decades (I think 2006 was my first account)... if I was actually an asshole, I would have gotten banned a long time ago, instead of 2 months ago. Step 1, have multiple Reddit accounts for anonymity (hey, look, I don't want everyone knowing my medical problems that I seek help on, for example). Step 2, encounter 1 mod on 1 subreddit who misinterprets 1 comment…
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Probably the nicest bonus feature of Mastodon is that I can subscribe to a friend's original posts but unsubscribe to their "boosts," which is Mastodon's way to quickly share content. This way I can follow artists that make cool stuff I want to keep up with, but I don't have to see their political reblogs and other interactions, which helps to cut down considerably on the noise. It's great because it's granular at th…
This is what made me delete my Twitter account. I may follow a software engineer that writes books on functional programming but I just don't care about his stupid dogs or his alt right political ideas.
An online community should feel like an online pub. It should have a vibe, some regulars, inside jokes, and a decorum that is somewhat well enforced. They're cosy places where a sense of belonging encourages participation and good behaviour. HN is like that. Small subreddits are like that. Group chats are like that. But now every social media website became like that one pedestrian street with the H&M and the McDonal…
I think online communities aren't. A pub is a healthy, proper, community experience. Any human interaction that isn't face-to-face is injurious to your health.
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Same for me. Lately my feed is full of Formula One and Debbie Harris of Blondie fame, neither of which is an actual interest of mine. And basically no content from people I care about.
This is my biggest frustration! For some reason, Facebook stubbornly thinks I'm into cars, into Hollywood drama and some other weirdly specific topics. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to indicate that I'm absolutely not interested in any of those topics. Deep into the ad topics I managed to find a place where I could search for topics and indicate that I would not like to be targeted for those, and that se…
But the next day they will show you something "Because you are interested in Topic Y". Where Y is very closely related to X.
I religiously indicated I didn't want to see X, Y or whatever, because I am just not interested in posts from strangers at all. It took two weeks. Then apparently they ran out of topics for me and started right back at the beginning and showed me something for X.