Improving support for adult content on Mastodon • Hacker News Board

Re: Improving support for adult content on Mastodon

#61

Post by gsich » Mon, May 06, 2019, 7:00 AM UTC

jamesrcole wrote: post #39

iamnothere wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a modestly funded project, Mastodon is never going to achieve "hockey stick" growth, and it would probably be overwhelmed if this happened. It's better for them to pursue a strategy of gradual, steady growth. Mastodon is continuing to grow steadily, and it does so in the face of established players who can outspend and outrun them. 2 million users is pretty damn good for an open source project that doesn't have a…

The terminology is still going to seriously hinder uptake. All of what you said can be true and better terminology would still be better for them.

Just your opinion.

Re: Improving support for adult content on Mastodon

#62

Post by door5 » Mon, May 06, 2019, 7:10 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #57

iamnothere wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few people show up to say this every time Mastodon is mentioned. I disagree, it's memorable and I like it. Obviously the users don't mind either. Twitter sounded like a dumb name too, but they kept it and now nobody thinks twice about it. (Can you imagine: "Twit means idiot, nobody will use this service because of that!") Most creative names sound dumb until they stick around long enough.

A few people also used to show up to say similar things about DuckDuckGo’s vaguely Fisher-Price branding, and now DDG is still a fringe of the market even in our increasingly privacy-conscious, big-tech-company-skeptical times. Sometimes branding matters.

I would propose that bad branding is a symptom of a deeper problem, that the services were designed by engineers motivated primarily by ideology, which is very unlikely to reach a wide audience outside of engineers and activists

Re: Improving support for adult content on Mastodon

#63

Post by claudiawerner » Mon, May 06, 2019, 7:37 AM UTC

WAHa_06x36 wrote: post #53

jim-jim-jim wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off topic but I did a double take when I scrolled past your name. Are you the same guy who did some kind of imageboard related stuff years ago? I know that's vague, but my brain is fried and I can't remember why I remember you.

Many, many years ago, yes. Well remembered.

I'd just like to say thanks for creating Wakaba and Kareha and furthering internet culture (and its study). I can't begin to recount the times I had hosting a small board with a few friends and of course the good experience on all the Wakaba boards I used, and my blog which for a while was running on an admin-OP-only basis. Wakaba was arguably what got me into Perl.

Re: Improving support for adult content on Mastodon

#64

Post by gsich » Mon, May 06, 2019, 8:31 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #59

harpiaharpyja wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, it's not any more funny than if you substituted tweet in each of those.

It’s less funny because of the implied association with flatulence.

Most stuff on Twitter is mental flatulence ...

Re: Improving support for adult content on Mastodon

#65

Post by WAHa_06x36 » Mon, May 06, 2019, 9:54 AM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #35

r00fus wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than cockroachdb but not exactly a noteworthy brand name.

It depends on who's being marketed to. If CockroachDB was being sold to the average person, it'd be an awful name from a branding perspective. In reality, it's being sold to nerds who probably aren't as off-put by the name and are more interested in what it does as a database. To hit the point home, the database is designed with resilience in mind, just like actual cockroaches! For something being marketed to the mas…

You know, you should really be able to just look at the current landscape of popular services to see pretty clearly that having a good name means absolutely nothing whatsoever in terms of becoming popular.

Every single popular service today has an utterly awful name. It did not stop them.

Re: Improving support for adult content on Mastodon

#66

Post by jamesrcole » Mon, May 06, 2019, 10:09 AM UTC

jclulow wrote: post #46

jamesrcole wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Edit: people downvoting this, care to explain what you disagree with in it?] Breaking news. In a series of explosive toots... The foreign minister was forced to resign after a number of offensive toots... OMG, your toots are so funny!... Everyone's talking about what J K Rowling tooted today... I can't believe you tooted that!... ...and so on If you think I'm joking then that shows how bad a name "toot" is. Because…

That honestly all sounded ridiculous a decade ago with "tweet", too. The success of the platform has normalised the nomenclature.

I don't agree with that at all.

It's difficult to show evidence for the absence of something, though.

It'd be possible to show evidence of it, like that every time the word "tweet" was brought up the were people saying it sounded ridiculous and embarrassing.

Re: Improving support for adult content on Mastodon

#67

Post by piaste » Mon, May 06, 2019, 10:32 AM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #31

barbs wrote: post #12

I feel like "BlurHash" is a misleading name, since it's not a hash of the image data that gets created, it's just highly compressed to just some data about the colours used. Unless I'm misunderstanding something?

You could say that hash is a very aggressive, lossy compression. Same image will result in same hash. Different images will often result in different hashes. That makes it a valid hash.

> You could say that hash is a very aggressive, lossy compression.

You could but it would be about as misleading as a sentence could possibly be.

The purpose of compression is to preserve content as much as possible: similar inputs should give similar outputs, and the output should provide as much information about the input as it can.

Hashing deliberately does the exact opposite - slightly different inputs should give wildly different outputs - as its primary purpose in the case of crypto hashes, and in the case of index hashes as a performance optimization (which is the primary purpose of index hashes).

Re: Improving support for adult content on Mastodon

#68

Post by MattJ100 » Mon, May 06, 2019, 10:45 AM UTC

piaste wrote: post #67

viraptor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say that hash is a very aggressive, lossy compression. Same image will result in same hash. Different images will often result in different hashes. That makes it a valid hash.

> You could say that hash is a very aggressive, lossy compression. You could but it would be about as misleading as a sentence could possibly be. The purpose of compression is to preserve content as much as possible: similar inputs should give similar outputs, and the output should provide as much information about the input as it can. Hashing deliberately does the exact opposite - slightly different inputs should gi…

From Wikipedia: "A hash function is any function that can be used to map data of arbitrary size onto data of a fixed size."

As for hash functions having the desired property of different inputs leading to vastly different outputs, that only describes one subset. There are many hash algorithms that aim to achieve precisely the opposite, such as simhash.

Re: Improving support for adult content on Mastodon

#69

Post by jamesrcole » Mon, May 06, 2019, 10:56 AM UTC

prophesi wrote: post #45

jamesrcole wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But people thought "tweeting" was ridiculous, and they made fun of it relentlessly. I don't think the terms "tweeting" and "tooting" are in the same ballpark in terms of how ridiculous they sound to people. > In the end it doesn't matter all that much. But naming does matter, which is why companies spend huge sums on it each year. (Btw I removed those examples from my earlier comment as I felt they weren't relevant…

Honestly, the name doesn't matter once the network effect kicks in.

But the naming (especially "toot", less so "Mastodon") will likely stop the network effect kicking in IMO. I think it's that bad.

Re: Improving support for adult content on Mastodon

#70

Post by jonnycomputer » Mon, May 06, 2019, 10:56 AM UTC

jonnycomputer wrote: post #6

olah_1 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the language of "toot" is extremely hokey and will never be taken seriously. It implies farting for most Americans. "Tweet" reminds people of birds. As in "a little bird told me". Which is appropriate for a gossip style network.

mastodon's tooting...

to be fair, tooting also means to blow one's horn. Which come to think of it, also sounds pretty funny.

More seriously, the American Heritage Dictionary gives the following definition:

     v.
    To sound a horn or whistle in short blasts.
    v.
    To make the sound of a horn or whistle blown in short blasts or a sound resembling it.
    v.
    Slang To snort cocaine.

None of which is to fart. I do wonder if that meaning is a regionalism?