The dynamic I match it to is “being mean for its own sake, to a specific individual, over an extended period of time, in an environment where they can’t get away from their tormentor(s).” The social equivalent of a cat playing with a mouse it’s caught.
N=1 for this interpretation, and it may not be quite necessary or sufficient even by my own lights.
Edit: A more succinct definition might be: “Bullying: persistent, targeted cruelty.”
I asked this in the open thread, but maybe it’s more likely to be noticed here: Are the solstice events recorded and/or streamed? I’ve wanted to go but I’m too far away.
In-jokes (and in-not-jokes) can signal both inclusion and exclusion; there’s a difference between “you won’t get this, you’re not part of our group,” and “you don’t get this? Let us show it to you.” Relevant XKCD.
In my own experience, people don’t mind in-jokes as long as they feel like you’re letting them in on the joke.
Are there recordings or streams of the LW secular solstice celebrations? I’ve wanted to go, but there are none in my area.
How do you deal with noticing you’ve been mindkilled?
I recently did something I regret, and on reflection I note that the impetus was probably anti-Purple sentiment.
(ironically, I managed to simultaneously demonstrate some epic hypocrisy; I was inveighing against mindkilling anti-Orange sentiment at the time)
This bothers me. I’ve done what I can to repair the error, but it still bothers me. I assume it’s not an uncommon experience, though. Thoughts?
I’ve written a bit about this, but I never finished the sequence and don’t really endorse any of it as practical. Some of the comment threads may have useful suggestions in them, though.
Discussion quality is a function of the discussants more than the software.
I think we are better off using something as close to off-the-shelf as possible, modified only via intended configuration hooks. Software development isn’t LW’s comparative advantage. If we are determined to do it anyway, we should do it in such a way that it’s useful to more than just us, so as to potentially get contributions from elsewhere.
What’s the replacement plan? Are we building something from the ground up, re-forking Reddit, or something else? I’ve nosed around contributing a few times and keep getting put off by the current crawling horror. If we’re re-building from something clean, I might reconsider.
I’d second this, but it might not be as easy as it sounds like. It seems the site is a technical black hole and the mods are effectively operating in a straitjacket; the intersection of the set of people who have a stake in the site, and the set of people who actually have direct DB access, is the empty set. Also, outsiders who see its internal structure for the first time have reactions like this, which really isn’t a good sign.
I’ve nosed around contributing to the effort a time or two, but always end up backing off when I realize just how aggravating trying to work on it would be. This makes me feel bad.
...that being said, if your suggestion is actually easy, this is a no-brainer. Won’t solve puppets that have been around for a while, but it limits how long the mods have to play whack a mole.
[edit: depending on how the disabling is coded, it might be easier to disable downvoting against known targets]
80%. Kind of depressing. I remember when he was controversial but sane.
Downvoting appears to be temporarily disabled; I didn’t notice the change, but I’m guessing it was turned off to prevent his other abuses and this is him burning the commons in retaliation.
Possible, if extreme solution: Decentralize modding. Give whoever’s on the last 30 days top karma and has been around long enough to be identifiable the right to nuke posts on their own judgement. Precedent: that’s more or less how Eliezer inaugurated the first set of mods, though the reference escapes me at the moment.
I think there’s two forces involved here.
It’s almost as though the issue were accountability.
And I think this is one of them. Under a Hanson hat, Talk isn’t about Information. That is, for most things most people say on the net, this:
Author: “Hi! I just said a thing!”
is their only genuine content, no matter what words they happen to pick to express it. The fear is that others will hold them accountable for what they said rather than what they meant. They’re playing the “I just said a thing!” game, but on a personal blog they might get accosted by people playing the “let’s have discussions” game, and that would be awkward because one of the conceits of the former is that it pretends to be the latter.
In short, blogs signal the wrong things to non-nerds, they’re the wrong kind of conversation. Our signal is their noise.
For one rather public and hilarious example, witness Scott Alexander’s flight from LessWrong
But I think something different is going on here, and with other diasporists. Scott et al are clearly playing the discussion game, really well. I think the second force driving people from forums to blogs and from blogs to social media is convenience.
Not having direct control of your posting environment is a trivial inconvenience. Having to run your own posting environment is also a trivial inconvenience, once the novelty of owning it wears off. Tumblr and twitter are extremely convenient. Especially twitter; you don’t have to feel bad about emitting opinions without thought if the format makes depth of thought impossible! Both even make it possible to Say A Thing without saying any thing!
Never bet against convenience. Discussion moves from formats that ask more of the discussants to those that ask less. This rule is good when applied to the process of posting, and bad when applied to the content of posting, but in practice applies equally to both.
Strong writers enjoy their independence.
This is, I think, the largest social obstacle to reconstitution. Crossposting blog posts from the diaspora is a decent workaround, though—if more than a few can be convinced to do it.
Sarah Constantin, Ben Hoffman, Valentine Smith, and various others have recently mentioned planning to do the same.
Prediction: If they do, we will see a substantial pickup in discussion here. If they don’t, we won’t.
People go where the content is. The diaspora left LW a ghost town not because nobody liked LW but because all the best content—which is ever and always created by a relatively small number of people—went elsewhere. I read SSC, and post on SSC, not because it is better than LW (it’s not, its interface makes me want to hit babies with concrete blocks) but because that’s where Yvain writes. LW’s train wreck of a technical state is not as much of a handicap as it seems.
I like LW-ish content, so I approve of this effort—but it will only work to the extent that the Royals return.
One should probably distinguish between buying things for what they can do and buying things just to have them.
markmanson.net does have excellent stuff. What are you waiting for?
Dunno about anyone else, but he does have excellent stuff, and I keep forgetting it exists because I can’t find an RSS feed to add to my list so I see new posts.
I dunno, I liked it better as Open Threat. ;-)
Someone is upvoting your posts besides me. This one is at +19.
Touche. It’s kind of a shame that Main is out of commission, or I’d be earning a gazillion karma for this.
I meant we could have one spec chapter spec describing types, messages, requests and responses, and then one or more ‘encoding’ chapters describing how these messages are represented in JSON over HTTP, or in… something else.
Hrm. I actually really like this idea; it fits right in with my separate-form-from-function philosophy, and I think standardizing semantics is much more important than standardizing the format of messages over the wire (even though I do have strong preferences about the latter). You’d have to be awfully careful about what went into the spec, though, to allow for a wide range of representations. e.g. if you have a data structure that’s an arbitrarily-nested dictionary, you’re limiting yourself to formats that can represent such a type; otherwise you have the same sort of potential lossage you’d get through a gateway.
But in principle I like it.
[edit: If you were really careful about the spec, you might even be able to get an NNTP-compatible representation “for free”]
Whereas in NNTP, if I understand correctly, I can put any string I like in the From: field.
True with respect to the protocol. I was going to write about this in a future post but maybe it’s better to talk about it now, if only to expose and (hopefully) repair flaws beforehand.
Yes, you can forge From headers, or mod approval headers, or anything really. But the forged message has to enter the network through a server on which you have an account, and that system knows who you are and can refuse to originate messages where the From header doesn’t match the authenticated user. On Usenet this is ineffective; the network is too large. But in a small private network it’s possible for node owners to collectively agree “none of us will allow our users to forge From headers.”
Moderated groups theoretically work like the mailing lists you describe; articles get redirected to a moderation email address. Direct posts are only accepted by the moderator. The address can be (probably is) monitored by software rather than a person, and that software can enforce a policy like “reject posts by users on the Banned list, reject posts with no parent from users not on the Local Sovereign list, accept all other posts.”
As I understand it, cancels and supercedes are also posts in their own right and go through the same moderation queue, so you can extend that policy with “accept cancels or supercedes by the same user as the original post, accept cancels or supercedes by users on the Moderator list, reject all other cancels or supercedes.
I think this works as long as the From header can be trusted—and that, as above, that can be arranged on a closed network (and only on a closed network).
I probably haven’t covered all bases on this; how would you sneak a forged message through such a setup?
In a mailing list or an NNTP group, once clients got their copies of a post, there’s no way for a mod to force them to forget it if they don’t want to.
I consider that a feature, not a bug, but I think I’m misunderstanding you here; no system that permits local caching can prevent clients from keeping old versions of posts around. And web pages are certainly cached (and archived). So I don’t think you mean what it sounds like you mean.
It’s a matter of integration: I want the same settings, and client software, that you use for the rest of the forum to apply to privmsgs.
I don’t share the preference, but I don’t think this represents a conflict. There’s no reason a web client couldn’t present one UI to its users while doing two different things on the back end, IMAP for PMs and whatever else for the forum. Newsreaders do exactly that to support reply-by-email, and it works fine from what I’ve seen.
I get the impression most projects do that backwards, and that that’s a large part of how we got into this giant mess of incompatible discussion APIs.
Somewhere later in this sequence I’m going to address the social problem of convincing people to buy back in. The very short version is: Make it more powerful than what they’ve got, so they have an incentive to move. Make sure they are still running their own shows, because status and sovereignity matters. And make it more convenient to migrate than to manage what they’ve got, because convenience is everything.
Once you get three or four diasporists back, network effects does the rest. But it needs to be an improvement to the individual migrant even if nobody else does it, otherwise the coordination problem involved is incredibly hard to beat.
You should think about it as “What kind of a new discussion framework can we bestow on the soon-to-be-grateful world” :-)
Sometimes I think the best way to promote my ideas would be to start an NNTP-backed forum hosting service. I know it’s within my capabilities.
Then I realize that 1. that would be a lot of work, and I have a day job, 2. nobody cares except me, and 3. I would be competing with Reddit.
I agree with most of this, with the exception that top-level posts should not have any special status at the protocol level other than not having a parent. Clients are free to present them specially, though, including whatever ‘default’ interface each site has. Whatever moderation layer exists may do the same.
I also dislike private messaging systems—not so much because they shouldn’t exist, but because they should be implemented as email accounts that only deliver mail among local users, so you can handle them in your regular email client if you want.
[Edit: Note that tags and a lot of other post metadata could be implemented as extra headers in a news article. Not karma, though.]
Your description of basic architecture in particular is an excellent summary of what I want out of a discussion protocol.
This bears repeating. I’d add another distinction: If you’re talking about policy, you’re probably OK; if you’re talking about people, you’re probably not.
(also, on a purely selfish note, the contemporary political shitstorm has taken over every other venue I communicate in and I really would rather not see it here)