321–330 of 332 posts
I think it's fair to call abnormal behavior a form of insanity. But unless it is detrimental to their well being within their environment, it might not be an illness.
One interesting thing regarding this was when Reddit added a "chat with a random user" -feature a few years back. I was so used to the high quality submissions and comment threads that when I was paired to chat with random lurkers it was kind of eye opening how they were just... really plain and hard to hold a interesting conversation with. And this is exactly why communism will NEVER work: 90% of the population just…
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>but outlier Wikipedia editors need only be superhumanly obsessive. Yup. The way the internet works is it privileges the perspectives and opinions of people who have an abundance of time to spend on the internet (either because their jobs are online or because they just have a lot of free time). So you wind up seeing the perspectives of bored office workers overrepresented and manual laborers underrepresented, you se…
> And any system that relies on majoritarianism to do curation just amplifies these defects. This is such an important point it needs to be repeated.
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It's a problem for Wikipedia which says a central principle is that it's the enclyclopedia anyone can edit. That's clearly not true with Wikipedia's hostile to new users policies (even with the existance of "don't bite the newbies"). Even creating a username means you have to navigate the username policy, and the two admin boards (one RFC, one noticeboard) for usernames. There are two templates for usernames (and tem…
The username policy is quite simple. A username: 1. Must represent a single person, not a company, organization, website, band, partnership, or other group of people 2. Must not be deceptive or impersonate someone else 3. Must not be unreasonably long 4. Must not be inflammatory or imply that you intend to troll If you create an account that doesn't meet this policy, an administrator will prevent you from editing unt…
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Given your point about the donald, you'll despair at https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/117289/86725 . Check out the history and the comments-moved-to-chat. Answerer suggests creating lots of social media accounts as a way to drive bad search results about you off the first page of Google, and lists a bunch of possible sites to sign up to, including Gab. The mention of Gab gets censored by a moderator, but not befo…
I'd encourage anyone convinced by this comment to do some research into the antisemitic and white supremacist comments which representatives of Gab have openly, publicly made.
Yes. Most of the content you watch on TV was written and acted by outliers. The products you use and consume were crafted, marketed and even distributed by outliers. First, when zoomed out, outliers in all possible tasks become more common — internet commenting is just a subset for silly folks like me. Secondly, the emergent human social fabric is built to recognize and amplify outspoken and / or talented outliers, v…
I still think it's surprising that there are so many lurkers who literally never engage in the discussion, considering the barriers to do so are so low.
Am here for over 2 years now, rarely upvote something, haven't submitted anything and this is just my 2nd comment... Pretty sure this rule holds for close to all kind of forums.
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I'm kind of confused here- you mentioned Plato, but wasn't Plato a professional culture generator?
The reference is to Plato's allegory of the cave. Prisoners are chained so they are facing the back wall of a cave. Puppeteers project a play of shadows onto this wall and the prisoners, knowing no better, take this show for reality, when in fact, reality lies outside the cave. The OP was comparing the shadow-players to the professional cultural generators. https://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm
Thanks for that.
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That has always been the case with humanity in general. Think of book authors, there are few of them, but they've been influencing our thinking for hundreds of years. The problem now is, the barrier for entry has become incredibly low (although, this would have been true when the printing press was invented too). I stopped using reddit because of this. I've no idea about the credibility of the authors, their intentio…
> When I'm listening to someone's opinion, I'd like to know more about them, so I can decide for myself how seriously to take it. This outlook is alien to me. I'm quite the opposite; I'm happy reading and judging anonymous comments purely on the strength of the argument being made there and then (although I don't ignore the background and history of a commenter when that is available to me). Not attacking your point…
I only look through the post history of someone if I feel they have a particularly interesting outlook, or if they're batshit crazy and I'm a bit bored.