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This is a bit f'd, Quora

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Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora

#131

Post by wahnfrieden »

_delirium wrote: post #31
vladd wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can no longer browse Quora while being logged out: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4332978

I'm still confused how that gets by Google. The full text shows up in search results, but is blurred by CSS for humans. Isn't that not allowed? Even experts-exchange includes the readable plaintext answers way at the bottom if you scroll down, for that reason. edit: removed discussion of googleoff/googleon directives in the HTML source. Seemed suspicious, but apparently it's something to do with Google Search Applian…

Google allows this if you show the first page's content for visitors that came from Google. If Quora does this, it's fine - it's Google's concession to old-world media.

Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora

#132

Post by ceol »

lubujackson wrote: post #128
ceol wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That rapist thread in /r/AskReddit was, next to the time a poor girl was harassed due to a user thinking she faked her assault story, the worst thing I've ever seen on reddit. The direct responses were exactly what the OP had asked, but the comment replies by users were flooded with rape apology and victim blaming. In one instance, a rapist had to tell people to stop apologizing for him because he knew he was an actu…

Much, much better support on Ask Metafilter. You have to pay a whole $5 for eternal access, but that's apparently enough to reduce the level of trolls by 9000%.

I keep hearing good things about Metafilter. Maybe it's the solution to my ever-growing problem of what to replace reddit with.

Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora

#133

Post by koglerjs »

ceol wrote: post #129
koglerjs wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst things are often a truth that needs to be heard. You are writing from a position of fear. That people can express something that shouldn't be heard. You can't fight the truth. And you can't fight the open expression of it. The really difficult part, which is what my post was trying to explain; the really difficult part is actually _creating_ the open expression of truth. Because you have to have a mix betwe…

I'm not writing from a position of fear. The thought process of rapists is an interesting— albeit chilling— subject to study. My problem was with the responses to the rapists by what appeared to be normal, well-adjusted people: Heavily upvoted comments excusing what was textbook rape because alcohol was involved, or she said she wanted it at one point (or maybe she didn't and they assumed she said it), or because she…

I think what I'm saying is that you're upset about a thing that is a necessary reaction to the telling of truth.

Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora

#134

Post by rm999 »

ceol wrote: post #117
redthrowaway wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you take the replies to replies from a single thread, and conclude that the site itself is useless? I suppose I should discount Stack Exchange, as there undoubtedly questions for which all of the answers are unhelpful or incorrect. Your comment reeks of the typical reddit hate on HN, without anything to back it up.

I wouldn't say the entire site is useless, but the good communities are few and far between due to the reddit's culture abhorring any sort of moderation. Would you like me to edit my reply to be more specific to /r/AskReddit? Certainly if you have a scientific question, /r/askscience is great, and /r/philosophy tends to be decent most of the time. But my point is that getting honest, relatively troll-free discussion…

While you acknowledge it's not the case, you're still making the mistake of thinking of reddit as a single community that is run in a homogeneous way. But subreddits have successfully and neatly separated the wheat from the chaff.

Dig a little and you can find some great niche communities that don't exist outside of more archaic forum-style sites (communities that sites like quora would love to capture).

Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora

#135

Post by confluence »

I understand people's outrage at this invasion of privacy - but honestly why do people think that anything they have ever done online hasn't already been tracked and recorded (not being paranoid or anything - just being realistic).

There is a lot of value in figuring out who someone is, what they like and don't like and what they are likely to buy (ad networks/trackers etc.).

Hence you MUST assume that everything you have done, and ever will do, is, for all intents and purposes, PUBLIC FOREVERMORE.

Not "whisper public" but shared across YouTube public with 100 MILLION PEOPLE.

Once you assume that situation you attempt to mitigate possible pitfalls and these things don't bother you so much (they still will - but the sting isn't nearly as strong).

And no - the web isn't going in the opposite direction - privacy is dead - long live privacy!

You can try and shame or regulate it away - but seeing the web as it is today and where it's going - there is no turning back.

Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora

#136

Post by jmduke »

koglerjs wrote: post #133
ceol wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not writing from a position of fear. The thought process of rapists is an interesting— albeit chilling— subject to study. My problem was with the responses to the rapists by what appeared to be normal, well-adjusted people: Heavily upvoted comments excusing what was textbook rape because alcohol was involved, or she said she wanted it at one point (or maybe she didn't and they assumed she said it), or because she…

I think what I'm saying is that you're upset about a thing that is a necessary reaction to the telling of truth.

The reddit thread in question had an absurd amount of victim-blaming.

Not to disparage reddit as a whole, but there's a lot of close-mindedness and misogyny in the more populated subreddits.

Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora

#138

Post by Zarel »

ceol wrote: post #117
redthrowaway wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you take the replies to replies from a single thread, and conclude that the site itself is useless? I suppose I should discount Stack Exchange, as there undoubtedly questions for which all of the answers are unhelpful or incorrect. Your comment reeks of the typical reddit hate on HN, without anything to back it up.

I wouldn't say the entire site is useless, but the good communities are few and far between due to the reddit's culture abhorring any sort of moderation. Would you like me to edit my reply to be more specific to /r/AskReddit? Certainly if you have a scientific question, /r/askscience is great, and /r/philosophy tends to be decent most of the time. But my point is that getting honest, relatively troll-free discussion…

If I may rewrite your comment a bit:

"I wouldn't say the entire internet is useless, but the good websites are few and far between due to the internet's culture abhorring any sort of regulation.

"Would you like me to edit my reply to be more specific to [Facebook, YouTube, pick a popular site]? Certainly if you have a scientific question, [insert science website] is great, and [other website you like] tends to be decent most of the time. But my point is that getting honest, relatively troll-free discussion on the internet, especially in the popular websites, is uncommon."

While you seem to acknowledge that Reddit is several communities, not one, many of the things you say still make it seem like you're lumping Reddit into one community and one culture.

Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora

#139

Post by ceol »

rm999 wrote: post #134
ceol wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say the entire site is useless, but the good communities are few and far between due to the reddit's culture abhorring any sort of moderation. Would you like me to edit my reply to be more specific to /r/AskReddit? Certainly if you have a scientific question, /r/askscience is great, and /r/philosophy tends to be decent most of the time. But my point is that getting honest, relatively troll-free discussion…

While you acknowledge it's not the case, you're still making the mistake of thinking of reddit as a single community that is run in a homogeneous way. But subreddits have successfully and neatly separated the wheat from the chaff. Dig a little and you can find some great niche communities that don't exist outside of more archaic forum-style sites (communities that sites like quora would love to capture).

I know well of the niche communities in reddit. I frequent most of them to hide myself from the default subs. However, the same problems still exist.

For instance, I enjoy the show Adventure Time, so I subscribed to the /r/adventuretime subreddit. It was fine for a while, but then a submission popped up on my front page. It was a photograph of a group of kids cosplaying as Adventure Time characters at a local convention, and a few of the kids either had a "poorly done" costume or were heavier than the characters they were cosplaying. The top comments in this thread were saying hurtful things about their weight and attractiveness. Not fluffed up "jokes"; these were crude and would warrant a punch in the face in any real life situation. When I made a comment about how it was rude for them to say such things, and that cosplaying is about the person cosplaying, not the people viewing, I was met with hostility and downvotes. I even messaged the moderators asking them to remove the comments since they offered nothing but vitriol, but the only moderator to respond said, "I'm not their mother. This is the internet."

You can try to escape it by going into smaller and smaller subreddits, but you'll never outrun it. This is what I mean by it being pervasive.* It's in everything on the site. You can argue "reddit isn't a single community" and all, but there are some characteristics that permeate through almost all sections (or maybe eventually show up due to how the site is designed.)

* edit: I realize after I posted that this was a different comment chain. The comment to which I'm referring is this one, last paragraph: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4378485

Re: This is a bit f'd, Quora

#140

Post by samstave »

wpietri wrote: post #104

The forced login stuff really enraged me. This is the rant I posted to Quora on the topic in hopes of getting them to change their minds: For a long time I've been meaning to write personal stuff about my mom's death last year from a brain tumor. The question "Death and Dying: What does it feels like when doctor says you'll just live X days / months?" popped up in my feed. So I answered it. In detail. Crying as I wen…

Quora was founded by facebookers. People who actually have the worst fucking view online about what should be private and what should be public.

People who have no digital-cultural compass because the only reference point they have is from working at Facebook, thus they think that "this is how it was thought of and done at Facebook - and Facebook is the most overly hyped company in history, so I must be a fucking genius!"

No thanks.

Done with quora forever.

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