ZorbaTHut
14d ago
Alright, I actually am going to push back on this. (Ping @AhhhTheFrench so you don't feel like you're grumbling into the void.)
Courtesy is the first section in the rules. That's not an accident, it's literally the first goal. And yes, this sometimes - probably often - means that we tell people not to speak as if they're in a group of friends, but rather as if they're in a group of professional colleagues. The reason is that incivility gradually corrodes what we're going for here. Not all at once, but one step at a time; it gets normalized, it gets standardized, and a significant part of the possible community finds that the place is now hostile.
From the rules:
Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
Some of the things we discuss are controversial, and even stating a controversial belief can antagonize people. That's OK, you can't avoid that, but try to phrase it in the least antagonistic manner possible. If a reasonable reader would find something antagonistic, and it could have been phrased in a way that preserves the core meaning but dramatically reduces the antagonism, then it probably should have been phrased differently.
"Leftoids" is dismissive towards roughly half the population and there's just no good reason for it; you're not getting anything out of it for the argument, you're just using a slur against your outgroup.
Don't do that, please.
ZorbaTHut
7d ago
Alright that took longer than it should have, but it should be fixed now. Let me know if you have trouble!
ZorbaTHut
10d ago
Is this really where the bar of a slur is?
Yeah, frankly. We keep it pretty low.
Are you going to apply this level of sensitivity to everyone?
Yes. If you think someone's pushing the line, report it; if it gets approved and you disagree, you're welcome to ping modmail if you feel strongly about it.
ZorbaTHut
19d ago
They do, yeah - a character is a character, it doesn't do anything smarter than that.
That said, it looks like you're at 20k characters, which . . .
. . . okay, yeah, looking into it again, posts have a 20k limit and comments have a 500k limit.
Let me pester some mods and see if there's a reason we did it this way or if we should just go ahead and relax posts to also be 500k.
ZorbaTHut
15d ago
You're welcome to give it a shot!
Note that the "new comment" markers are entirely clientside via cookie, we're not storing those serverside. There may be performance issues with trying to make this all work - I don't want one SQL query per user when someone reads a page, for example. But I'm pretty sure this should be solvable, and it will of course be easier to solve with a working prototype.
ZorbaTHut
20d ago
Alright, so it turns out that it won't let you change nothing :V
If you add a single letter do you still have the issue? I'm currently unable to reproduce this locally, unfortunately.
ZorbaTHut
2mo 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
21d ago
If you hit "edit" and just try to leave it as it is, do you still get the same error? It's possible editing is using the old wordcount limit, which should be fixed.
ZorbaTHut
3mo ago
Hence my wondering why that multiplication of entities was necessary.
So, here, lemme quickly explain.
We've (okay, "I") have a general policy of not demodding mods merely for inaction. I'm happy for them to come back, I'm also happy to have them giving feedback in the Mod chat channel. All of that is useful!
The downside is that this means we have a list of mods and a significant number of those mods don't really do anything. They're still valued people who I'm happy to respect, we just don't get a lot of work done, and the work needs to be done.
Before inviting new mods we were basically down to two mods who were commonly active and another two who were occasionally active, but one of the commonly-active mods was mostly active in doing the quality-contribution reports (which is valuable!) and so practically one mod was doing most of the moderation work. They were doing a good job but I'm always really leery of a bus-number-of-one situation:
- If they vanish, suddenly we have no working moderators
- If they start turning toxic, I have a big problem because I don't want to ban them because we would have no working moderators
- It's really conducive to value drift, which we might not even notice because it's just one person doing that work
In addition, it's a lot of stress on someone's back, which of course increases the chance that they decide they're done and they want to move on. Worse, they know they're a column, so maybe they end up feeling obliged to keep doing this when they don't want to, which pushes us right back into "start turning toxic" and "value drift" territory. It's a bad scene all around.
My main goal here was to take that bus-number-of-one and turn it up to two or three mods, entirely just to solve the problems with having a single mod.
When I've added mods before, my general experience is that for every two mods you invite, one accepts, and for every two mods who accepts, one contributes. If I want one active mod I gotta invite four mods.
So I invited four mods and they all accepted.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm honestly quite happy about this - maybe this means we'll have a healthy mod population until I can finally get some of the next set up updates to the Volunteer system done. But it still wasn't quite intended.
The tl;dr:
- We have fewer active mods than it looks like
- Having too few mods has a bunch of unfortunate consequences
- I went to add more mods and got more new mods than I expected
ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
Nah, that's exactly the expected consequence of the database vanishing - the site resets to Empty, and the first person who makes an account becomes admin.
Which doesn't mean there wasn't a hacker, just that it isn't evidence of there being a hacker.
Also, it means some poor guy picked exactly the wrong moment to make an account and accidentally discovered that they were now the admin of an empty site.
I've been thinking about culture war in media lately.
For those who don't know, I'm a game programmer, working to kinda move into the game-director role. Obviously at some point I am going to have games with humans in them [citation needed], and since they're humans I need to decide what they look like both in terms of dangly bits and skin color, which is of course now highly politicized, joining the ranks of literally everything else in existence.
But I'm not looking for an excuse to put characters in of one skin color or another. I want a universe that feels reasoanbly alive, with characters who are interesting and not just inserted for politics reasons. So a big part of this ends up being "how do I choose interesting characters that don't feel like a political statement, or at least, if they do feel like a political statement, it's a political statement I don't mind making, or a political statement I'm intentionally making as part of the game, and also, boy it would be nice to come up with a way to insert characters of literally any type without that also being a political statement, and I guess as a side note this involves talking about explicitly political media and what makes it work well or badly".
This has, in fact, been done well.
Let's talk about that.
One good technique is to put in characters that are politically sensitive and then just never call attention to it. Uhura was black, and everyone watching Original Star Trek knew it, because she was, you know, on screen, consistently reflecting fewer photons than Captain Kirk, as black people do. Kirk didn't seem to know it, though; Kirk just kind of ignored it. In fact, I'm not sure this ever came up during all of Star Trek. Uhura was black because Uhura was black, and the show carefully avoided ever making a thing out of it.
Another good example here is Miles Morales in Spider-Verse, who is also black, and again, I'm not sure the movie ever really mentions this. The movie is explicitly not about Miles Morales' skin color. Another example: a lot of characters from Borderlands 2, such as Ellie, who is a fat woman which is essentially never relevant to the plot, and Sir Hammerlock, who is gay.
Sir Hammerlock being gay is an interesting case, so let's talk about it more! With most characters, either you find out their skin color the instant you see them, or it turns into a serious Face Reveal thing (imagine the controversy if the Halo TV series had revealed that Master Chief was black!) But media in general tends not to show much about character's sexualities, and the game industry even less so. Even mentioning romantic choices feels like something that can't be done subtly - all characters could be seamlessly replaced by asexual beings that reproduce via mitosis unless your work is about the fact that sex happens.
(Tangent: Can we, like, do something about that? Have some main characters who start out married, and end married, and the story is never about their difficulties in marriage? Seriously, how many happily married main-character couples exist anywhere in fiction? Note to self, do this sometimes. End tangent.)
(Tangent addendum: I just played Guacamelee 2 and it does this. That's one! Anyway, moving on.)
But in the case of Hammerlock, he sends you on a quest to check out what happened to an old friend of his, and if you happen to dig into the quest details, which most people don't, you find out it's an old boyfriend, and honestly I really like how this is handled. Hammerlock is just a guy who likes guys, and he's worried about his old fling, and this is never turned into a Explicitly Political Thing, and that's cool. 10/10, very human.
Let's talk about another technique! Another technique is to, instead of making the plot not about something, make the plot extremely about something. I did a search for "movies about black people" and one site recommends Malcolm X and another hit provided by Google is a list of "11 movies that confront American racism". You can guess where that is going! Uhura could have been white, Ellie could have been a thin guy, Sir Hammerlock could have been asexual, that wouldn't really have changed any of those pieces of media, but you can't turn Malcolm X into an Asian without some pretty serious plot adjustment!
There's nothing wrong with this solution either. I am generally not interested in this kind of media, but if that's the movie someone wants to make, hey, have at it, all up to them. But because I'm thinking about this for the sake of my own games, I'm discarding this because, as mentioned, I'm just not all that interested.
But while we're on the subject . . .
. . . I can't help but wonder if this is counterproductive.
A painful thing about human beliefs is that we are very very very bad at changing our mind. And having arguments shoved in our face really doesn't help. Walk up to someone who hates skub and shout pro-skub catchphrases at them, if you like; this will not make them more positive about skub, they'll probably just become more certain that skub is bad because all skub-lovers are fuckin' jerks, man. But show them movies that just happen to include skub, in a way where it sorta just . . . doesn't matter? Maybe they'll stop caring so much about the horrors of skub. Desensitization is a hell of a drug.
Show them movies that claim to involve this, but have the movie constantly shouting pro-skub catchphrases?
Well, now we're back where we were before. Or even worse, frankly, because now they'll be expecting any movies with skub in them to be a thinly-veiled propaganda piece. So not only have we failed to convince them with subtlety and care, we've fucked up future attempts to do so. Good fuckin' job, man, way to go.
Skub is an allegory, but you've figured that out by now, so let's move on.
Specifically, let's talk about allegories.
There's an episode in Original Star Trek where the crew finds some guy in space. The guy's face is white on the right side and black on the left side. Wild, right? Aliens! Shortly thereafter, they find another guy whose face is white on the left side and black on the right side. These two people hate each other because they think the other person's face is wrong and their respective countries have destroyed their entire planet in the ensuing war. Also one of them was used as slaves by the other. What is this story really about? Who can say! It is a mystery! We shall never okay it's obviously about racism. Like. Transparently so.
(In one of the weirder and less socially-acceptable examples of nominative determinism I've seen, the script for this episode was written by a stereotypically white guy named Gene L. Coon.)
Star Trek never fucking blinks. At no point does Captain Kirk turn to the TV and say "by the way, black lives matter", or any less anachronistic catchphrase. This is doubly impressive because Uhuru is still in this episode obviously and she doesn't even mention it. There is a single mention that Earth was perhaps not entirely copacetic in the past - by Chekov, not even by Uhuru, and in response to a question that does not feel shoehorned in whatsoever - and then that's it! It just moves on.
This being Star Trek, Kirk of course has to draw a lesson at the end. And he does . . . but fascinatingly, it's a lesson about hate, not about racism. Racism does not exist for Kirk. He is not even considering the issue.
And Kirk's utter refusal to even consider racism frankly drives the point in both harder and more subtly.
It's a brilliant episode. I love this episode. It's a perfect example of how Star Trek writing, while hamfisted at the best of times, was elegant and refined in exactly the right ways. With so little effort they could have turned this into a cultural war! And they didn't!
I want more things like that. I want episodes that don't hammer in the point with a sledgehammer. I want allegories, not blatant propaganda; sure, it's still propaganda, I don't think anyone would claim that Star Trek wasn't. But it's careful propaganda. It's subtle propaganda. It's propaganda that doesn't come across like paid advertising, with the characters mugging at the camera while carefully holding soda cans so the label is visible, and the label says "vote for me in the next election, but not the other guy, he's a fascist, which is proven by this movie about comedic squirrels wearing silly hats".
And here is the point where I run out of clever inspiration.
I'm trying to figure out how I would make either characters that are never called attention to, or characters that are an allegory . . . for trans people.
And it's goddamn impossible.
The problem with trans people (if you are getting linked here in anger because I said there's "a problem with trans people", finish the damn sentence first, christ) is that the entire classic concept of being "trans" is linked, kind of intrinsically, to being invisible.
Not to the person themselves being invisible. But to the trans-ness being invisible. The platonic ideal of a trans man is someone who everyone looks at and says "yes, that is a man, I have no doubt in my mind", and then never thinks twice about. The "trans" part, ideally, vanishes. And this makes it really easy to put a trans man in a game or a movie: you just put a man in.
But that doesn't help. Uhura does not work if she looks exactly like a white guy. The point of Uhura is that she is obviously black and nobody cares. But you can't have someone who's "obviously successfully trans" - it's contradictory! You have to drop a Sir-Hammerlock-esque hint somewhere, and, one, it's really hard to do so when any mention of a trans person's birth gender is "deadnaming", while, two, Hammerlock is totally cool with casually mentioning that he used to pork a dude with a dong, but trans people themselves generally do not want to talk about their birth gender. It's similar to the whole reveal-a-character's-sexuality problem except massively boosted. Put a character in who keeps talking about all the people they're boning and they come across as oversexed and somewhat disturbing; put a character in who keeps talking about how trans they are and you get Hainly Abrams.
So, then what? An allegory? But what allegory can you possibly use?
How do you make a respectful allegory about something that you're trying to show is conceptually acceptable but whose ideal form is intentionally invisible?
Honestly? I don't know.
My best idea here is to do something with aliens; some species of alien with extremely flexible sexual characteristics, who don't mind talking about them but which are never relevant to the plot, just roll it into background worldbuilding. I guess it's ironic that I'm coming up with this idea while also playing around with the concept of an alien species with extreme inflexible sexual dimorphism, but so it goes. But this is inevitably going to result in people yelling "zomg are you saying that trans people are aliens" and so that frankly isn't even going to work.
I cannot come up with a solution here, and this makes me very sympathetic to people who are trying to do it the right way. There isn't a right way. There's never been a right way. There's just a lot of wrong ways.
Feels like a tool missing from my toolkit, to be honest.
I don't really have an ending to this post.
ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
I've tried that before and what inevitably happens is I just end up ignoring the success notices.
In this case, however, I'm using healthchecks.io to handle this; it'll start pinging me on its own if it doesn't get regular notifications of success. So unless that service goes down, we're good.
To be ever safer, the script that sends the success notification should pull some independent confirmation the backup actually occurred, like the output of ls -l on the directory the database dumps are going to, and should include this in the notification text. Without this, a 'success' email only technically means that a particular point in a script was reached, not that a backup happened.
Ideally, yeah. In this case it's worth noting that it's taking full drive images, so it's, uh, kind of hard to do an ls. I guess I could run it as root and do a whole loopback thing to mount the image but I don't think that's likely to be necessary.
ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
repost because server wipe, if that’s cool with everyone
For what it's worth, I consider "the server got wiped so I'm reposting it" to be 100% justified.
. . . even if it makes naraburns's job a little harder from having duplicate copies of quality contributions.
ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
I can think of a few ways the site could go kind of weird with regards to login tokens during an incident like that. Easiest way to solve it is just to reset the login signature code.
Now everyone gets to log in again also, which inevitably means I'll get like six emails from people who entered a random password and didn't bother to save it and also didn't set their email so they could recover it.
ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
I'm not convinced the work is worth it, given the development effort of putting this all together, the fact that some information is still missing, and that it'll just fall into the mostly-unknown chasm soon anyway.
If someone else wants to do the development work I'd strongly consider running it, though.
Here's the dump from the Quality Contribution database, for anyone who had one of those.
Also, pewrqqrwe did some work extracting posts from archive.org and ended up with this list. (Edit: revised version with more posts.)
ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
There's a few people on the dev discord talking about it, and it appears to be Actually Kind Of Difficult. Honestly, copy-pasting those posts out would be the easiest solution.
I am desperately in need of sleep and will be tackling the AAQC recovery tomorrow.
ZorbaTHut
3mo ago
Civility is often helpful, perhaps even necessary, but as a filter on the truth, civility has a cost. Ideally, we should all be capable of hearing the hurtful antagonistic truth, and just keep cooperating, or here, discussing. Of course, in the real world, without the filter, people will fight or walk away. Civility is therefore just a compromise to our weakness and egotism, like you say “our very human tendency to bridle when we perceive we are insulted or demeaned“.
Yup. No argument.
Our club’s informal norms are cordial enough, its members stoic enough, that imo we don’t need a strongly enforced filter.
This is where I disagree.
You're right, in a sense. Our club is cordial enough. It's cordial enough almost by definition; it's cordial enough because the ones who weren't cordial enough already left.
Relaxing the filter pushes that boundary a bit further. It would cause more people to leave.
The club would still be cordial enough, defined in terms of the remaining members of the club, because it cannot be anything else; a group will always consist of the people who are members of the group. But merely consisting of the people who are the members of the group isn't enough. One must weigh the value of the people who are no longer in the group against the cost of keeping those members.
Here's the Foundation, which is, as always, the touchstone to use when discussing rule changes:
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.
Rules against anything is a sacrifice. I'm not going to argue otherwise. In an ideal world, we could somehow allow all forms of discussion to occur without driving anyone away. But in practice, that ideal isn't achievable. Any amount of permission we give will drive people away; any amount of restriction we impose will halt conversation. Rules against anything is a sacrifice, but at the same time, a lack of rules against something is also a sacrifice.
I personally think we've achieved a reasonable balance, but I also thought, for some time, that perhaps we'd gone a bit too far in the direction of lack-of-rules. Some of our new mods agree and are willing to put more time into shoving the general conversational climate in the direction that they think is appropriate.
This is a sacrifice. I am genuinely sad for the conversations this kills, that we will never see because the strata of the forum itself no longer supports them.
But I'm happy for the people and opinions we may bring back.
If you want to convince me otherwise, you need to make a good argument that less moderation better suits the needs of the Foundation. I think you'll have a hard time doing this, because you'll need to convince me, and convincing me is hard, ironically because I don't have any firm evidence, I just have gut feeling and instinct. This means you need to either provide a form of evidence that I'm not convinced can exist, or you'll need to overcome that instinct.
But that's your goal, and merely pointing to the conversations lost isn't going to do it.
I'm already aware of those, insofar as someone can be aware of something that never existed.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Now that you can speak freely, can you spill the beans on what was going on with the reddit admins/AOE?
Who knows, man.
Here's an example post that they removed, with three posts of context:
I remember starting my career a couple of years later with the earnest belief that I might have only two or three years of employment left before the AI apocalypse came for bankers too
Probably the most baffling thing I've ever seen from you.
Now, it appears we mean different things by «bankers». For you it's clerks, probably all white-collared personnel. For me, uh, the ultimate proprietors – and it's clear no AI can replace that.
Okay. You're fine. I get it, you aren't a Nazi.
In America, Nazis do this when referencing Jews. It is very much not our "quotes". But I understand that in your culture putting <> is done in a different also valid manner.
But good God, it looks like an American internet Nazi naming the Jew when referring to <>.
Nazis do (((this)))
But « thiis » is just a different type of quotation mark used in French, German, Russian and so on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillemet
That last one - naming the Guillemet - got removed by the admins.
I've got a small list of such similar posts. We had a post removed for listing some global age-of-consent laws. We had a post removed noting that the 6-million Holocaust death toll is dubious because it's built out of many numbers that, themselves, have been readjusted over time but the overall total has never been questioned. We had a post removed comparing the lifestyle of 1880s black slaves in the US to the sub-Saharan continent and to other contemporaneous instances of slavery. We had a post removed noting some weird sentencing laws involving child porn (and similar weird laws regarding the definition of child porn).
These are all things we want to be able to discuss. If people start just berating their outgroup, well, that's uncool. But this wasn't that! These posts weren't as innocent as the quotation-mark one, I'll acknowledge that, but they're still nowhere near the stereotypical Stormfront screed.
Anyway, eventually they sent us a nastygram saying, paraphrased, we were having too many posts removed and saying that we should do something about it before they had to do something about it. They also said that if we had questions, we should send them over. We wrote up a pretty-well-phrased set of questions, sent it to them, and they just ignored it.
In fairness, they never said they'd answer those questions.
And so that's where we were; "go fix this stuff, our censors are inconsistent and overzealous, and we won't give you any answers regarding what's going on."
From there it's just a matter of time until we get booted.
ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
Oy. That doesn't surprise me, honestly, I should probably clear logins just in case weird stuff happened.
Offline again, back in a few :V
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
A few answers!
what the hell is your beef with Marseys?
Marsey's your schtick. It's a cute schtick! But it's not ours. If we're going to generate our own culture, we're going to generate our own culture, not start by just riffing off someone else's culture. Our codebase is an offshoot of yours; our community isn't, however. Frankly, while I totally appreciate that you guys exist, you're like the polar opposite of what we want around here; you guys keep doin' your thing, we'll keep doing our thing.
Why don't image uploads work?
A big thing we want here is effortposts. We don't want people to be able to slam down a giant blob of flashy pixels, we want people to write stuff. This is always going to be a text-heavy website, not an image-heavy website; that's the culture we're aiming for.
It's like you guys intentionally wanted to preclude people from attempting to have fun
I mean, bluntly, yes, we are trying to preclude people from having the kind of fun that you guys want to have.
Again, your community's great! I'm glad you enjoy it! But it's not what we're going for here - we do not want circlejerks, we do not want low effort spamposts, we do not want 24/7 memes.
We picked your codebase because it was being used in production and it had reasonably competent moderation features. The extra flashy stuff, as far as I'm concerned, is a negative for our purposes, and so yeah, we're gonna strip it out.
Sometimes your kids don't grow up to be carbon copies of you; we're taking after our other parent :)
I'm honestly impressed at how we can write rules that are so ridiculously lax that I would never expect anyone to run into them, and have people run into them anyway.
Just go post about something every week! Here's a nerd making goat noises! Here's some nerds comparing cards in a game they've never played! Here's another nerd taste-tasting AI-created cocktails! this is not hard
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