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1yr ago
I wish there was a way to hide child comments, preferably by default but also with a button like Reddit (or maybe it's a RES feature) has at the foot of a comment. I found the big thread increasingly difficult to read and I didn't understand why and after going back to Reddit I realized it's because I have the settings to hide child comments and only click to have them appear.
So, I can click each comment thread and read it individually and slowly open each thread to follow each comment chain. As it is now, hiding comments to make earlier comments more readable doesn't really work because you have to hide the initial comment to hide the ones below it.
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1yr ago
It's not quite the same as the hide child comments button that Reddit has. This version hides the comment as well as the ones below it. The hide child comments button lets you read the post, open the comments below it and slowly reveal each comment thread that came from the initial comment. Which really helped readability to me. The minus/plus doesn't work nearly as well because it hides the comment itself and even conceding that being the way things work now it's much less useful for being at the top of the comment rather than the bottom, which matters when there's ten paragraph long posts.
Though, really more importantly for me was the option that allowed you to hide child comments by default, which essentially nested all comments within each top-level comment. So, you'd open the megathread and only see the top-level posts and nothing else until you clicked the show child comments button. I will admit though, I used one's Reddit-like CSS:https://www.themotte.org/post/29/share-your-css/2003?context=8#context and I find the megathread much easier to read now, so I do think a lot of it being harder to parse might be the default theme.
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1yr ago
I think certain movies are self-selected to get good reviews. It's why documentaries have almost always been very highly rated (throughout RTs lifecycle) even if they're not that good because the audience that would be willing to watch a documentary on a subject they don't have an interest in and also rate something poorly which affirmed their views is very low. I'd bet for a movie like this it's about the same sort of self-selection. People who can sense or an anticipate the presentism or pandering even just from the idea/poster/trailer are unlikely to see it and unlikely to review it. Also, RTs % system is based on if a movie is rated a 6 or higher, that's all. Every 100% RT movie could be straight 6/10 reviews across the board.
You read the first link wrong, Snatch is a 93% audience rating the 74% is for the critics rating. Just like Blade Runner has an 89% on that list because that's the critics' rating, the audience rating is 90%.
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1yr ago
It's unidentified. If there are 25-50 active serial killers out there, there could 1950 unidentified serial killers serving life in prison for the single murder that got them caught. I admit the number seems outlandish but I expect there's a lot of serial killers that never got found out or even suspected as serial killers in the past but still did probably got caught for a single murder.
Though judging by the terminology in the OP it is probably just anyone that's committed 3 murders in sequence with time in between the crimes and not 2000 Francis Dolarhydes.
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1yr ago
I remember the topic being disproving election malfeasance updates weekly. I don't remember how much engagement but I do remember checking out of those posts because they were the same every week where two sides simply talked past each other.
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1yr ago
I mean you're right, it's just signalling. I'd bet those people who said they'd never eat at Chik-fil-A are lying or simply don't like it and happen to be telling the truth for that reason. I've seen numerous woke people just give up caring when it comes to boycotting anything they like. Sure, Chick-fil-A and In & Out* are "piece of shit" companies but they still order it anyway they just make sure to let you know that it's wrong to do it. It's also possible there are people taking a principled stand that just don't talk about it but every single person I've met, or seen online, who's talked about this issue (and recently, too) has admitted that Chick-fil-A is a bad or piece of shit company and then still bought Chick-fil-A.
People I've seen, for the most part, have no idea about the object-level reasons why someone or something is bad. It's the same for anything political, really. They get given a vague idea by someone else who summed it up and their mind is made up. JK Rowling might be a perfect example of most of these people being the most informed about the reason why they're supposed to hate, but I bet none of them know what she's actually said. They just know that she's anti-trans. But they'll still see the next Fantastic Beasts movie and buy the next Harry Potter game.
I will admit this is stronger on the left side of things. The not knowing part, but I wonder if that's partly because of their cultural dominance and maybe the fact that right side people maybe feel like they need to look everything up several times to verify it because they don't trust a left source which would be most of them. And part of the cultural dominance is keeping the signals straight and in line with each other. On Reddit right now there were about four or five coordinated stories about Jordan Peterson crying about being called an incel by Olivia Wilde. But actually he cried for incels in general but nobody read the actual article or the video it was about. Most people repeated things about him that were patently false to signal to everyone that they know he's bad news. I bet they believe it. Once it's about politics/culture war information becomes useless. It's shocking to me how cavalier people are with their hatred.
*I'm not sure that In & Out has even done the getting sullied with a game of telephone thing, but simply being openly Christian is mostly enough and the rest is filled in with whatever their head made up, incidentally this is why Chris Pratt is a "piece of shit". I've heard this about him several times. But I bet you they still see the next Chris Pratt movie and then make a big point to complain about him when they don't even know what he's bad for except that he's Christian and/or Republican.
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1yr ago
I'd bet it has something to do with the fact that small businesses and individuals aren't really a big enough fiscal presence on the internet to matter. Everything is big websites of big companies anyway. I remember reading/talking about how without Net Neutrality we'd just be a few giant websites and that's how it happened out anyway even with Net Neutrality in place.
Related to this, I was reading about Netflix peering deals because I was wondering how Net Neutrality dealt with that and apparently ISPs can effectively throttle large companies if they feel like it because refusing connections from another network and/or not delivering it in a timely fashion is not a violation of Net Neutrality. It only becomes about Net Neutrality when it's on their network. So, they can essentially extort money from Netflix to keep its connections to their network from being refused or connected slowly.
I think people just assumed Net Neutrality meant more than it actually does because to my tiny mind the above seems like just the kind of thing that Net Neutrality should protect against.
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1yr ago
That's what Netflix was doing. They were paying Cogent to take the traffic and it was being delivered to Verizon but because Cogent was handling Netflix it was using more bandwidth than Verizon felt was fair so they let their ports fill up with Cogent and it slowed all Netflix content to Verizon. Netflix subsequently entered paid peering agreements with Comcast and Verizon after this to make sure their interconnections weren't disrupted. That just seems like a scam to me and not just toward Netflix. If I'm paying Verizon to provide me with internet and they don't provide Netflix simply because they're unhappy with their peering agreement with Cogent then that seems like something that shouldn't affect the customer and if it does it seems like they're not providing the thing they're supposed to be selling.
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1yr ago
It was actually interesting to me how Rings of Power is doing poorly relative to what I had expected its marketing to push. Nielson's minutes watched for the first two episodes came out last week and it was the top but not by what I expected. I think House of the Dragon had four episodes by then so that could confound a 1:1 comparison but I recall it only beating House of the Dragon by a kinda large margin (which should be expected for a premiere and one this heavily promoted) but House of the Dragon was still winning technically because the Nielson numbers for minutes watched didn't include live numbers for people who have cable/satellite for House of the Dragon. Though I wouldn't take into account people who talk about declining viewership, everything declines in viewership throughout a season, it might pick up near a finale but usually only up to the level of the premiere. Shows can increase viewers from season to season (this is very rare but usually happens when shows actually become hits like Game of Thrones or Stranger Things) but it never really happens while a show's running during a season.
The development path for Rings of Power started with Amazon buying the rights. I think that's the real problem. Well, the real problem is they bought the rights to something that they intended to use to make fanfiction about. It's like Amazon thought Lord of the Rings was a big IP because of its world and was something akin to Marvel or Star Wars where they were buying some broad spectrum IP they could make a bunch of stories out.
I just don't think Lord of the Rings works that way. In the same way it doesn't work for A Song of Ice and Fire. The minute Game of Thrones ran out of dialogue written by Martin it was apparent and depressing. They bought the rights to the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and they're not even using them. They just wanted a name for a show and some of the characters. I don't understand Bezos. He loves The Expanse, revives it from cancellation, and then just lets it die. By the end it was just heads talking in black rooms with obviously half a season of content missing. And, he loves Lord of the Rings and wants to buy the rights for a massive amount of money with no plan other than to not make Lord of the Rings. Maybe it's not even about the prestige of making a good show, or celebrity clout, but just that he just wanted the prestige of owning those stories.
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1yr ago
Smirkgate kid got all his cases dismissed for being "objectively unverifiable" so the media's response was just non-actionable opinions. Which means they're broad or vague enough that you can't objectively say they're false. Though he did settle with CNN and The Washington Post before the trial was dismissed so he got something.
Other kids at the school trying to file a suit pseudonymously had their case thrown out for being pseudonymous but it was also stated that it would have been dismissed anyway because of the same reason as above.
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1yr ago
That wasn't my contention that was the judge's contention when he struck the suit. WaPo and CNN settled the case last year. The rest of his cases were struck down by a judge a few months ago, I assumed people here would've been aware of that. I saw it Deadline with all the comments celebrating that the racists lost. I guess if no one makes a top level post about it here it might as well never have happened.
Your line of reasoning also assumes that each media outlet had the exact same level of potential culpability which would be impossible unless they all posted the same articles and made the same tweets. It's possible CNN and WaPo settled because they thought the cases against them were strong and the other outlets didn't settle because the cases against them were weaker.
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1yr ago
I wonder how much having the votes at the bottom of a post is having an effect on longer posts simply getting much less voting engagement. I doubt weird voting patterns are bots here just because it does seem trivial enough to to pull a Unidan and create however many alt accounts you want to upvote yourself if you need the self-esteem boost. I don't even think it would be against the written rules. It's possible no one is doing that but it's an easy way to explain specific comments being singled out for praise or disdain with votes and that happening in quick succession.
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1yr ago
A lot of this, not saying all, is just related to the internet and its relative anonymity. In real life I think we all calibrate ourselves to be more ingratiating to those we're dealing with and even if we're comfortable enough to have an argument with someone it's often a much less appealing proposition than being able to downvote and move on or close the tab or block because of the oft-mentioned skin in the game. Even online I think if you consider someone a friend you're going to be less hostile, less likely to argue, more likely to calibrate your opinion toward theirs if you value them as a friend. Mistake theory is how we mostly code disagreements in these conditions and I think it's much more likely to be true if only for these conditions. Someone around me starts laying into the Democrats and I can nod and agree with the rest of them because I do. Someone around me starts laying into the Republicans and I can also nod and agree because I do. These are somewhat reflective of my opinion but they're also me agreeing with them because it's easier to agree and I'd rather have a conversation with someone than an argument.
As a pseudonymous internet commenter you're willing to disagree and let your inhibitions go. The interaction is not really about getting along anymore it's about winning and getting the praise and esteem that goes along with that. You'll sandbag a win because it's in your best interests to appeal as an underdog. You're more likely to tell the truth that you've kept secret from friends and relatives but you're also more likely to lie. Everything is amped up and so much of it is about getting attention/respect that Conflict theory is not only easier it makes sense because the goal is to win and you already know you're right. Progressives control the narrative, it's obvious because of reasons A,B, and C. These are all true. I also know that none of my friends or relatives agree with this but that's D and why would I include something that undermines my idea when I have data that agrees with it? I think there's a certain level of disingenuous rhetoric that everyone engages in when presenting an argument because they're trying to "win" and often that comes off as a disconnection or inferential step away from your reality but I think a good portion of it is never really turning off the war part of the culture war. In a way it's kind of a mistake theory for conflict theory, I guess but I believe people engage in this behavior, even unknowingly, much more than they'd ever admit. This is all me probably typical-minding but it's how I explain almost everyone ever sandbagging their own position/politics to appear as a more appealing underdog for some reason.
I think you're right and the more steps removed you are from someone and their knowledge the more likely you are to look at it and think that they're smoking bath salts. Society seems to be built more towards atomization and it's a hell of an easy way to create hundreds and thousands and millions more inferential steps between each other and our trust or acceptance of one another's knowledge. I also think that it's fair to call that disconnect reaction a natural heuristic toward not being fooled. And I think that heuristic instinct gets stronger the more it's proven correct and it's often easy to prove it correct with whatever data you want that supports your disconnected feeling. It might be right or wrong but I think it's safe to say that we mostly find it wrong even if most of the time it actually is wrong because most of the time the heuristic works and that disconnection from others is often a much stronger weight toward our eventual conclusion of accepting that information than piles of links to studies/articles even if the media and academia have done themselves no favors here.
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1yr ago
In my recollection it's been discussed on the Motte before but not nearly as much as I've seen in it in /r/all. Literally any post with a penis or even mentioning foreskin would devolve into male circumcision debate and I remember it at least ten separate times in random threads. The people invested in caring about it care about it is so much that I would never want my kid to be circumcised. I remember watching a Penn and Teller Bullshit episode about circumcision and there was this guy who was so obsessed with getting his lost foreskin back that he attached weights around his penis to create new foreskin. If it is affecting people that much from the trauma or loss of potential sensation or just becoming obsessed with wanting that part of their body back I'd never do it to my kid because I would not want him on Reddit going into a /r/funny post showing two different mushrooms and comparing them to uncircumcised/circumcised penises and feeling the need to lay out seven paragraphs with ten citations about how evil circumcision is. Whatever health benefits the WHO gives or even the prevention of a future mentioned below is not worth my kid growing up to make a post like that on /r/funny.
But the best argument in favor that I have is this: I used to listen to Loveline and the amounts of calls they would get from men who had Phimosis or tearing during sex of their foreskin and had to have an adult circumcision were at least biweekly. I also remember the kid in Nip/Tuck who was uncircumcised and girls made fun of him and his parents wouldn't let him get circumcised, so he tried to circumcise himself in the bathroom with his dad's scalpel. Though that one probably is vanishingly rare in real life.
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1yr ago
I'm sure a lot of people knew this but the bottom left picture instantly made it obvious to me that Jeffrey Donovan's character in Sicario and Soldado is based on Mike Vining.
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1yr ago
Can't say I agree with the discrepancy in time between the two posters ban lengths. It gives the impression that being antagonistic first is less against the rules than being antagonistic toward someone being antagonistic. Also, your flippant antagonism toward the person you're banning should get you banned as well if we were all playing on the same field.
It's possible, they usually specify if that's the case. I don't care that they were banned or even the lengths they chose I just think the discrepancy is too disproportionate all else being equal. To be honest this just seems like playful banter being interpreted as much harsher than either user meant it to be but maybe I'm wrong. nara's little poke with a stick to the user after the ban reminded me of what Hlynka would do with bans and why they bothered me so much (though I think they're both excellent contributors in general).
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1yr ago
I don't see any of that in the modhat reply. I think you should separate a person from their posting patterns outside of when they make mod decisions because it's not fair otherwise. You seem to be making an assumption about what they mean when they say groomers and then ignoring the clarification and saying they're lying. That's just wildly uncharitable. If you will just say that someone's opinion is not what they say it is and it's only what you think they actually mean then there's nothing to be done about meeting a level of discourse you apparently want which I guess is not meeting expectations and definitions that you've made up that they don't agree with.
I mean sometimes it's clearly apparent to me that the rules are not enforced equally, especially to those who are mods but in general it's mostly people who are known. I'd prefer the rules to be far more laissez faire. The post you linked to I wouldn't ban you for but I do think it makes a particularly uncharitable argument that's clearly done in bad faith and with a style that's teetering toward unhinged. nara said you might be suicide by modding there and this post certainly doesn't help that case. Especially when your responses to people asking you questions about that post is simply to do that extremely obvious bad faith argument dance where you just ask an extended series of questions in multiquotes and then disregard or ignore the responses. And it all seems to come back to you making an assumption about what another person is actually saying. I mean if you're going to approach every response or criticism as someone doing a dogwhistle that they say they're not doing then you may as well get banned and only talk in a forum with yourself because clearly that's the only person that can wade through that expectation with clarity.
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1yr ago
There's no reason to talk about Jan 6 on themotte. The topic exists for one person and they hold it hostage as a one man army. It's pretty remarkable but I don't have the wherewithal in me to withstand the scrutiny.
It feels like what would happen if ChrisPrattAlphaRaptor showed up any time you mentioned COVID to disprove you or interrogate you as if you were a collegial equal. And it's not even solely about that kind of engagement, the obvious amount that this matters to ymehskhout is so large that I'd feel uncomfortable with any engagement at all because without full agreement I'd be immediately be dealing with a hostile adversary who knows far more about this than I do and is schooled in the subject much more than I am as well.
It feels like that guy who posts about Ivermectin and Scott. He probably knows what he's talking about more than me, but it's obvious from the persistence on a specific topic alone that something altogether alien to me is happening for them that's not happening for me and I'd rather just skip and move on to the next topic than engage.
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1yr ago
I was trying to imply you didn't do that but what it would be like if you did.
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1yr ago
In one of the recent episodes of South Park they reveal that Token's name was actually Tolkien the whole time (because his parents loved Lord of the Rings) and Stan was the only person who actually thought it was Token.
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1yr ago
It was definitely before it started airing, but it was after they had done the previews with the diverse casting, so it's possibly related, dunno.
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1yr ago
Not gonna talk about NCFOM since everyone else has it covered but I'd say Cabin in the Woods doesn't subvert tropes it contextualizes them or simply points them out. Nothing about the movie really subverted what you expected to see. I think anytime something is meta at all people just say it's subverting expectations for no reason. I didn't particularly like it but it's not criticizing tropes it's just trying to fit them all into the movie so they can all be explained by the movie itself. It's generic by design because it needs to be as trope-filled as possible while also giving those tropes a reason to exist beyond "they were stupid, serial killer is evil, monster was hungry." The entire movie reminds me of a scene in Community where Annie tells a joke but it's not 100% factual so somebody corrects her. Great. Thanks for making my horror tropes have contextual reasons to exist, now they're terrifying.
Trope is a bad word for what's happening because it's too contaminated to really use to get any real meaning across, really, in any capacity. Everything is somehow a trope and its immediately negative. Tropes aren't really good or bad but woke tropes are almost invariably bad for several reasons. A black person instead of a white person isn't a subversion of expectations, it's a meta-subversion of expectations which should be meaningless to the plot but isn't. The reason it's a woke trope is the reason it's bad. The black person will not be the underdog. They will say they're the underdog, but nothing in the story usually holds that to be true. And almost always, conversely, when they make a genius woke character they will say they're a genius, but no actions or dialogue demonstrate this except that it is said to be so. "Sansa is the smartest woman I know." It's betraying the narrative for the sake of making these woke tropes true if only because the writers have written it to be so.
Also, the rules of the world are not the rules of a story. The underdog losing is a subversion of expectations because it's a story. The heroes are supposed to win and when it doesn't happen that's the subversion. Earning the subversion or making the trope not bad is about having it make sense once all is said and done. If they lose or win it needs to build to that in some way. A lot of stories don't bother to do this anymore. The subversion comes because the writers just write it to be so. It's stories written by people who kind of understand what goes into a story but don't understand what makes it good. Underdogs do not have to lose greater than 50% of the time, they should be, as set up in the story, worse than the antagonists, that's all. But this clashes innately with the meta-woke insertions. Black people and women need to be the heroes but they can't be portrayed as worse, so they just portray them as perfect. Perfect people are boring and also they're not subverting anything anymore when they do this. The audience expects them to be perfect, there's no subversion going on here except in the writer's and some critics' minds. What we expect of the world is not what we expect of a story. Anyone who watches sports and roots for one specific team knows this. But you rarely make a story out of a losing team's season, that'd be the subversion because the winning season is almost always the more interesting one.
It's just lazy. They want a black girl genius with no flaws and no interesting dialogue or actions and nothing done to even suggest they are a genius and they also expect that to be as engaging as a flawed, drunken white man who uses his genius to deflect and cover his weaknesses. Why is it the same in their eyes? Because she's black. Race, gender identity, sexuality, are a replacement for personality for many writers and uniquely stifling because no one really has the guts to give their characters flaws so they're all the same character which is not nearly as interesting. If you woke trope a story you will get a worse story almost invariably because its really hard for writers to not inject a new personality into a character that has been race/gender swapped and the personality of that character will suffer making the story worse. The idea of doing the woke trope swapping is pretty telling to begin with because it usually means a not healthy amount of presentism will be brought to bare on the story. Any british show that takes place hundreds of years ago will have a superbly able black person who acts as if its the current year and they will talk about their plight to others as if its the current year and a good portion of the story will include a woke sideplot that has nothing to do with the main plot.
In my mind, the things don't make a story bad, but they're a hallmark of people who don't care if they've told a good story but just that their propaganda/fetish/social commentary is out there. The more annoying thing, to me, is that it's obvious when this is done even on a small scale. Anyone who says it's not done is a liar. But once it's done it has an aura of protection because people are only criticizing the story because of its woke agenda (it also doesn't help that the reviews that do criticize often only talk about the woke agenda as why it's bad but that's just another level of why this deflection is so annoying) and if you criticize it you're only doing it because you're a racist/misogynist/nazi. I'm not sure it makes normal people more likely to like it but they won't believe bad reviews and will slog through a whole season before they think something might not be right with it. I think that's reason enough for Amazon to go full hog into protecting properties by having them critic proof before they air just by diversifying the cast.
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