ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
I don't know why exactly this has happened, but ever since Amadan asked you to avoid culture war in the Fun thread you seem to have gone on a shitposting spree. There's this, of course, but there's also this and this and this.
Whatever the reason for this, knock it off; this is low-effort and antagonistic and largely valueless.
My first suspicion is that in a world with cryonics, this means body modification is sufficiently good that people can transition fully and convincingly without too much trouble.
I've actually got a game idea that, for complicated reasons, plays really well with homosexual/bisexual relationships, plays really badly with 2020s trans sensibilities, but is completely compatible with super scifi medical technology.
So I'm planning to just not have "trans people" as such, and if anyone asks, I'll say "oh yeah, medical science is really good, if you want to change your body you just go to the doctor. Takes like an hour of filling out paperwork, then you show up for a shot every week for a few months. Totally normal, nobody cares."
I know some people are going to get bent out of shape anyway, but, hey, fuck 'em.
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
There's one big issue I have with this, and this is going to sound dumb, but bear with me, this is a gamedev's perspective:
Easy contribution options are a great way to get people to feel ownership and buyin of a community, and that keeps people coming back.
This is entirely an argument around trying to attract people. But I think that's important - hell, I think it may be the single most important thing that we need to deal with in the next few months. Every bit of complexity that's added drives people away. That isn't always bad, but we have to be super-careful about driving the right people away. In an ideal world I want to attract 100% of the people who are interested in complicated and difficult debate, and 0% of the people who aren't, and I'm not convinced that a more complicated front-page voting system is going to cleave those percentages in the way we want.
This is not to say the current voting system is here to stay. I do have quite a few ideas on ways to improve it, taking inspiration from things like Discord and Slashdot. But right now that's just on the backburner, I'm afraid; we have somehow avoided the frying pan but are now on a slow conveyor to the trash can, and that's what I gotta deal with first.
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
Alright, I'm serious about this: change your name. This is the third time I've asked, and this time I'm banning you until you do. Imitating existing users is uncool regardless of who it is, and given that you can just change your nickname, I don't see much reason for us to tolerate it.
Send a message to the admins once you've done so and we'll unban you.
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
Alright we don't technically have a rule against recruiting people here for political causes . . .
. . . but if you're going to do it, you gotta do it in a more neutral way. This feels like part waging-culture-war, part not-writing-like-everyone-is-reading, and part being uncharitable.
I'm not sure what you were planning to accomplish with this but this isn't the place for it.
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
Occam's razor: Someone on rdrama made a GPT-bot trained on the Motte corpus and unleashed it for the drama.
The funny part is that someone actually did do this; we banned it within a day, and they said it had taken rdrama a few weeks to catch on.
Entirely possible someone's done it again, of course.
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
Y'all forgetting Impassionata?
The frustrating part of the banned people listed is that they were interesting, but they weren't able to curb the worst parts of their behaviors enough for us to let them stick around. Or it turned out they were interesting in exactly one way and unable to understand "okay, post about that specific thing less, please".
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
Yeah, SSC -> The Motte Reddit -> here. I wasn't really confident the first move would work either.
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
Visual design change feedback requests!
Before: https://i.imgur.com/hbl021t_d.webp?maxwidth=9999&fidelity=high
After: https://i.imgur.com/ZtvjwBx_d.webp?maxwidth=9999&fidelity=high
This is the kind of thing where I'm pretty sure I'm going to wake up tomorrow and see three major problems, so don't treat this as set in stone. This is also the kind of thing where I will never come up with a design that satisfies everyone, so don't expect me to keep working on it until absolutely everyone is happy. But I do want feedback; let me know what you think.
edit: hah, so apparently if you paste in an imgur link it mangles the URL. Fascinating. Bug filed.
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
I actually like Rick And Morty for similar reasons to Bojack Horseman. It's about watching a broken person who isn't in control of their own life, who is kinda legitimately trying, and who is actually learning and getting better, the question is just whether they'll figure out how to be a good person before the weight of all their past bad decisions catches up with them.
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
I think the question here isn't "should you, as a person expect to be born into a mostly-empty universe", but rather, "should you expect to be part of a race that has mostly conquered the universe without resistance from other aliens".
In some ways I think people are insufficiently paranoid about the implications of this question, though. I think it's likely that, a few millennia from now, we'll realize that life can be roughly modeled as
Intelligent life forms on a planet, then immediately expands in all directions at the maximum possible travel speed (plus or minus some factors that aren't relevant on an astronomical scale).
And you can kind of use this to break things down into four options.
If humanity is the first species and FTL travel is possible, then we're going to settle the entire universe with no resistance.
If humanity isn't the first species and FTL travel is possible, then this may simply be a paradox; we haven't been settled, therefore our assumptions are wrong.
If humanity is the first species and FTL travel isn't possible, then we will expand in a sphere, roughly at light speed, and eventually meet up with other species that will be less advanced than us and therefore pose little threat.
If humanity isn't the first species and FTL travel isn't possible . . . then we live in a universe full of species-spheres rapidly expanding, and we will be absolutely crushed when we encounter the first one of them.
This is concerning.
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
(As an aside: does it still count as a "bare link" if I point to my own content, just hosted elsewhere?)
It's not ideal. I'd prefer if you at least included the first few paragraphs of text from it.
Alternatively, post it both here and on your blog, include a link to the blog at the bottom. You're welcome to advertise as long as it's the same content you're posting :)
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
like a sticker saying "Actually A Quality Contribution!"
I'll admit I'm entertained at this idea. I've put it on my list :D
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
Honestly a good reason I wrote it out is just because it was a funny clusterfuck. But yeah, the whole place is going to be unstable for a while; that's just the truth of launching a new service, especially when you don't have a full-time dev team.
In general I'm not going to be posting these unless they're specifically interesting :V
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Target was algorithmically detecting pregnancy over a decade ago.
If Facebook doesn't have data regarding these symptoms, it's either because they haven't bothered or because they actively are trying to avoid it.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Hah, I like how Uhura doesn't even take offense there.
These all feel like really good examples of doing it right, honestly. Yes, if you're pulling a character in from ancient times, they're going to have some confusion about a black woman serving on board the bridge, of course they are! But that doesn't need to be the thing the episode is about, and in fact probably shouldn't be. Allegory, not sledgehammer.
. . . also that's a pretty funny line in response to Sulu.
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
I guess I assumed at least one mod had seen a 6-day old, second level comment and the 10th highest comment of the week. If I was wrong, mea culpa.
I can't speak for the other mods, but when I'm reading over comments I'm often not thinking about them with mod-brain, if that makes sense. There's been times I've browsed recent comments, gone to look at the mod queue, and said "oh shit, yeah, that comment I literally read a minute ago was awful, wasn't it".
Reports absolutely help, and reporting it for the right thing is also important, but if it's ambiguous, don't stress too much about it - choose a report reason that's defensible and you're in the right ballpark.
(Every once in a while someone reports a twenty-paragraph megapost for "low effort" and I tend to just sort of approve those after a quick skim to make sure it's not the word "cheese" repeated a thousand times, so if someone is being antagonistic in a megapost, and you report it for "low effort", that might be a wasted report; don't do that. "Not reporting megaposts as low-effort" is basically the bar of report-quality that I ask :V)
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
Fixed now! Sorry about that - we made a change with how hidden/deleted/removed comments work (they will no longer automatically hide all child comments) and there was a glitch in the HTML.
Naturally it also happened right before I needed to head to bed, but I figured it wasn't going to be a lethal bug to leave up overnight.
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
I strongly advise everyone here boycotts woke brands. It’s important that we end this culture and the only way we get back to normal is fighting fire with fire.
From the rules:
*Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity.
"As everyone knows . . ."
"I'm sure you all agree that . . ."
We visit this site specifically because we don't all agree, and regardless of how universal you believe knowledge is, I guarantee someone doesn't know it yet. Humans are bad at disagreeing with each other, and starting out from an assumption of agreement is a great way to quash disagreement. It's a nice rhetorical trick in some situations, but it's against what we're trying to accomplish here.
You don't get to claim that you have the unambiguous moral high ground, knock it off.
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
Personally, I'd say that you might be on the wrong community.
Ideological diversity is the entire point of this place, and that's not hyperbole, we have a Foundation that defines the point:
The purpose of this community is to be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs. It is to be a place for people to examine the beliefs of others as well as their own beliefs; it is to be a place where strange or abnormal opinions and ideas can be generated and discussed fairly, with consideration and insight instead of kneejerk responses.
All of the community's rules must be justified by this foundation.
If you feel so negatively about left-wing people that you're not able to discuss things with them then you're in the wrong place.
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
So the historical reason is that we did this because that's what the Slate Star Codex subreddit did and I didn't want to rock the boat.
But I actually think this may be an accidentally brilliant choice. The problem is headlines. If you see a row of headlines - which you do on a front page - then you naturally gravitate to whatever you're most interested in. I know you've skipped headlines when browsing Reddit, right? You say "that looks interesting, that doesn't, that doesn't, that does!" and click on things based on that.
That means people go to the things they find most interesting, which also means the things they already have the strongest feelings about. And I think that's a positive-feedback effect that causes people, and communities, to hyperspecialize around points of anger and disagreement.
In this case, you can't do that. You skim, and maybe you find yourself reading an effortpost on a random fight in the Irish Troubles. You wouldn't have intentionally chosen to read that, but, well, now you're reading that.
I think this may both reduce the anger-pressure-cooker effect and encourage people to branch out into other posts.
Sometimes people put headlines at the top of their big posts and I've honestly considered banning those entirely. I haven't done that, but I've thought about it.
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
We need to get the rest of them up on the site, but everything in the last few years is copied to our own infrastructure already, it's just a process of editing which I have been mostly ignoring while I work on this site.
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
The full server infrastructure right now is around $50/mo, which I'm just paying out of pocket. I do plan to set up a donation system at some point, but 24 hours ago I couldn't - Reddit doesn't allow it - and I suspect I'm going to have more important things on my plate for a while.
A related question, are there any concerns over site integrity that we as the rank-and-file can help with? I assume reporting bad actors and using the vote system responsibly are a good start.
Yep, definitely a good start :)
If you're a coder, or visual designer, joining the development server and contributing would be helpful. Otherwise, post stuff that's good. The site doesn't work without people, and people don't show up without content.
If you want to go the extra mile, try posting links to the site, ideally to specific relevant posts, in communities with a similar tone. We really do need a source of fresh blood and that's going to be our biggest long-term struggle, I think.
I think the core issue is that you have to heavily subsidize the very concept of childraising. Having children is horrendously expensive, to a point where you can't simply subsidize it by giving money to the people having kids, you have to build systems that make childraising cheaper. And that's not just expensive in a monetary sense, that's expensive in a time sense and an effort sense.
I think, if I were going to try this, I'd be aiming at essentially building an entire new culture around larger familial units; "houses" specifically designed for ten to twenty families living together, with a designated subsidized night caretaker and one or two full-time employees to handle things like food and cleaning. Make it clear that living in these places is easier, in a way that extends beyond simply "having money", but that they're available only for people with kids.
Honestly, this would kinda be aimed at a modern reinvention of tribal living.
The problem is that people today want careers, and what you're basically offering here is the government guaranteeing that you can cripple your career for your kids if you want. I'm not going to say that's bad - having that available would help - but it doesn't really solve the problem, which is that people don't want to cripple their career for their kids.
More options
Context Copy link