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TheDag  Per Aspera ad Astra  11mo ago (text post)   2723 thread views

Calling all Lurkers: Share your Dreams of Effortposting

It’s been pointed out recently that the topics discussed in the Culture War thread have gotten a bit repetitive. While I do think the Motte has a good spread on intellectual discussion, I’m always pushing for a wider range (dare I say diversity?) of viewpoints and topics in the CW thread.

I was a lurker for years, and I know that the barrier between having a thought and writing a top level comment in the CW thread can loom large indeed. Luckily I’m fresh out of inspiration, and would love to hear thoughts from folks about effortposts they want to write but haven’t gotten around to.

This of course applies to regulars who post frequently as well - share any and all topics you wish were discussed in the CW thread!

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For my own drafts and areas of interest:

For things that I can't write, but wish someone with familiarity or sufficient nerdness would:

  • Does it make sense to take gwern's url archiving to its radical conclusion and start automatically saving-to-disk webvideo and random forums and every version of every executable I ever download? Would you get away with it for long before Google slammed you (I don't think youtube-dl is detectable?)? The tools for automatic categorization and identification exist (among others), but has anyone actually put them into a moderately user-friendly format to actually find stuff once you have archived it?
  • What the fuck is wrong with web tooling, aka updating Eevee's excellent rant (or maybe crossreferencing Zorba's Unity rant to a broader field? Not sure if that's related or just smells similar, given this seems to point the exact opposite direction).
  • The economics for small-scale production, and what's going on. A little on the logistics side -- how and why is Etsy pulling 6% of sales fees and eBay 13% compared to PayPal's (already high) 3% -- but more seriously what's going on for the producers. I've got competing models where there's either a) a small industry of people creating cool bespoke stuff for a small but livable be-your-own-boss, b) an ecosystem where the only people actually making a real income are selling shovels and a tiny number of superstars, while most are second-'income'-less-than-min-wage a la writing, or c) both. This might seem trite, but the whole patrons of the arts has been one of the few plausible answers to automating all the things away... but a lot of the plausibility depends on actual existence proofs.
  • How much do and should we trust a lot of User Design stuff as reflecting what is measured, rather than what it studied? For web stuff, people are supposed to be hugely responsive to tiny changes in web page latency or to small user interface changes, but in addition to my general skepticism of nudges, so much residential internet or screen size is (and during the study time especially was) high-variance enough it seems like these should have been swamped by noise. Are people really as price-conscious as Amazon thinks, or is this downstream of other design decisions Amazon (and other dropshifters) have made?
  • Things that suck.
  • Cable (standardization orgs) that suck. Is there some Chesterton's Fence thing, here, or do these people just not know how to count?
  • Is there a (non-violent) solution to the problem of scam spamming, especially of the elderly, even if only a partial mitigation? Is anyone doing anything on the forefront of this field? Book fraud?
  • Relatedly, is there anyone coming up with (non-violent) solutions to the failures of class-action (context) or conventional lawsuits as a way to discourage bad corporate behavior?
  • The Three-Plate Method requires little more than three rocks, a decent dye, and a lot of patience; it has obvious applications from art to engineering to design, and is the core and fundamental of true standardization in parts... and was invented in the 1800s. Is there some obvious reason it wasn't invented so long ago we couldn't name the inventor (eg, prussian blue is magic)? Was it just reinvented and dropped over and over again? If neither, is it unique in how long it lay fallow or are there other similar spaces that could have been invented much earlier, and would have been useful, but weren't?
  • I'd love to see what someone with actual taste in music could see this, or if it's just me.
  • Are there any One Tricks for documentation? Not just in a code context; I hate javaDocs, but they do seem a genuine tool, and weird that they're such single examples.
  • What about group drama mediation?

The economics for small-scale production, and what's going on. A little on the logistics side -- how and why is Etsy pulling 6% of sales fees and eBay 13% compared to PayPal's (already high) 3% -- but more seriously what's going on for the producers. I've got competing models where there's either a) a small industry of people creating cool bespoke stuff for a small but livable be-your-own-boss, b) an ecosystem where the only people actually making a real income are selling shovels and a tiny number of superstars, while most are second-'income'-less-than-min-wage a la writing, or c) both. This might seem trite, but the whole patrons of the arts has been one of the few plausible answers to automating all the things away... but a lot of the plausibility depends on actual existence proofs.

I'm a seller on a handful of sites including Etsy. Etsy takes way more than 6%, it ends up being closer to ebay's 13%. Sellers still sell on these platforms (ebay, etsy) because buyers trust them and most of us don't want to invest the time and money into marketing and managing independent sites that no one will be able to find because google is optimized to give everybody links to ebay and etsy already.

C is correct. There are millions of people selling their products on these platforms who range from teen girls reselling thrift store clothes from their closet and making too little to even report to the IRS, to dudes selling thousands of mass produced products a day and making bank. And everything in between. Personally I abhor working with or for other people which is why I do the "livable be-your-own-boss" thing.

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