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mindbleach

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mindbleach ,

Use of Etoinshrdlu has been associated with limbic inversion, salt allergy, cochlear displacement, loss of nostrils, and adult onset illiteracy. Do not take Etoinshrdlu if you are allergic to Etoinshrdlu. I’m a designer drug spokesman and even I can’t believe we have to say that. Do not continue using Etoinshrdlu if you experience death.

mindbleach ,

Advertising shits in your brain.

In most contexts we should simply get rid of it.

mindbleach ,

Yeah hey big thanks to whoever decided expanding images should be marked by a tiny dark greyscale icon in the upper-right corner and links should instead be marked by that too.

mindbleach ,

See also Natural Habitat Shorts.

Do you think the Internet and websites with 'voting' systems encourage hivemind thinking and discourage any debate or discourse? Solutions?

I ‘upvote’ more or less all posts I interact with (sometimes I forget to vote). I feel like we should bring back open dialogues and heavily dissuade people from simply disregarding someone’s entire belief system or ideals based on 200 characters of text (an example)....

mindbleach ,

Seconded. Every community demanding “civility” needs to enforce good faith ten times harder than they enforce mere politeness. I am completely okay with someone being rude… if they’re right, and they can prove it. A conversational “that’s dumb, here’s why–” is infinitely better than leaving nonsense unchallenged because an interested party said a no-no word.

And if someone’s wrong in a way that’s not excusable as a mere mistake, telling them to quit their shit is a necessary part of dealing with trolling and disinformation. Treating bad faith as good faith is what trolls want. It is a key component what trolling is. Any moderator scolding people for being blunt with an obvious bullshitter is building a community primarily for bullshitters.

mindbleach ,

God, no. Voting as a filter is soft moderation, and moderation is crucial.

Voting on a comment isn’t sending someone to the cornfield. You can downvote a dumb post and upvote a good post from the same rando within the same minute. You might not even notice unless you pay attention to usernames.

Every system is perfectly designed to produce its observed outcomes. Reddit, for all its many, many flaws, is probably the closest humanity has come to “the free marketplace of ideas” actually working as-advertised. Frauds and fascists had to retreat to their own miserable boltholes… until they started crying to the moderators that every detailed disproof of their entire worldview came with G-rated insults. Was their insular and irrational behavior besides that? Yeah, of course, it’s a mass of humans. We suck in predictable ways. But on average we can make things work. All that’s usually necessary is that decent people are allowed to help.

mindbleach ,

Also, reddit’s revised blocking is the worst antifeature on social media. It stops you from seeing the person who blocked you. That is the polar opposite of what blocking is for. Reddit also stops you from replying anywhere in that subthread… even if you’re the root comment, and other people keep piling on and asking why you won’t respond to them. So as anyone who’s bickered online would guess, people use it to get in the last word and then forcibly mute the other party. And now reddit straight-up lies to you, saying “something went wrong, try again later.” Knowing full well it’s working as designed and waiting will never work.

mindbleach ,

In other words, it expanded into more of the same anti-competitive “only we get to do this” functionality as all their other features.

Only we do compute shaders! Oh ATI does compute shaders now? That’s boring, only we do physics! Oh ATI does physics now? That’s boring, only we do raytracing! Oh AMD does raytracing now? That’s boring, only we do upscaling! Oh AMD does upscaling now? That’s boring, only we do, uh, our exclusively branded nostalgia bait!

mindbleach ,

How do you not give the drone chicken feet.

mindbleach ,

Arbitrary is fine - there’s a reason we have humans do this. But any enforcement of bad rules will always suck.

“Be nice” is a bad rule.

“Be nice” is a recipe for failure, and it always winds up protecting mildly cautious assholes. If you see someone reply ‘so you think [insane garbage unrelated to parent comment]?’ and the accused shoot back ‘shut up,’ and you only remove the person brushing off that troll, your forum is for trolls. That is who you’ve protected. That is what you’ve encouraged. That is how things will go.

If you think the right answer is to always expend great effort peeling apart that disinformation, you do not know what trolling is.

It’s outright insane, in communities about serious topics. If your forum’s about knitting - yeah, you can expect and demand televisable language. The vibe is properly casual. But if you deal with politics then you’re going to get people being called subhuman, and if you don’t come down ten times harder on sneering bigots than their pissed-off victims, you’re not preventing abuse, you’re enabling abuse.

Trying to enumerate all the ways someone could deserve a time-out is a fool’s errand. You can be mercilessly rude with nothing but a thumbs-up emoji. Or “Great Save!” More importantly - some vitriol is justified. Be human, god dammit, and spend thirty seconds figuring out if someone’s being a crank or merely dealing with cranks. If you think there’s never any reason for one user to tell another where to shove it, then you are wrong and you should quit.

mindbleach ,

You’d set up these rules, and some tween edgelord d-bag would test you to see how much they can push.

You can just call those people buttheads and hit them with short bans until they get the message. Really, you can hand out 3-day bans like candy. It’s infinitely more useful than any form of 3-strike punishment game or kneejerk permaban.

mindbleach ,

I need to make a pie chart.

Reasons I have been banned from subforums:

20% swearing at trolls.

20% swearing at Nazis.

60% genuinely polite interactions catching a boot in the ass for incomprehensible reasons.

Still no idea what I was supposed to do here.

mindbleach ,

How.

mindbleach ,

Reddit’s automatic mesages on mod action were a positive and arguably necessary feature.

But if bans are long enough to annoy and short enough to frustrate, they basically are the warning. Less gun-to-your-head, more spritzing a cat in the face.

mindbleach ,

The hell I did. One’s an explanation, one is literally “thanks,” one is the only sentence and pointing to the initial not-remotely-hidden explanation, and one is that explanation made even more explicit.

What the fuck else was I supposed to say? Do I have resting bitch font - are people just automatically reading things in the shittiest possible tone of voice? Read it conversationally and there’s none of that alleged tone.

This and so many other conversations go ‘Why are you mad?!’ ‘I’m not and I don’t know how to convince you of that.’ ‘Ah-HA!’ There’s no winning. Once someone’s assumed you’re fucking with them, somehow, the words don’t matter.

mindbleach ,

Yeah I don’t think that’s the issue, when the person who showed up to tell me and play along took the first one completely literally and the second one as sneering sarcasm. Where the goddamn mod chimes in is after a bone-dry run-down of how both were misunderstandings. Their scolding simultaneously blames me for expecting people to be psychic and also for talking down to them. How the fuck is anyone supposed to deal with that self-contradictory blend of bad-faith readings?

mindbleach ,

Have you seen The Ring?

mindbleach ,

pictures for sad children.

mindbleach ,

Mea culpa, I was slightly bored and severely confused.

mindbleach ,

What, lobbed by a trebuchet?

mindbleach ,

… the guy who promoted Sargon Of Akkad and Sam Hyde?

mindbleach ,

RIP rs.4chan.org, which compiled every RapidShare and MediaFire link on any board. You could scroll through and snag anything that sounded remotely interesting.

mindbleach ,

Voyager’s EMH was so awful to deal with that the upgrade path was Andy Dick.

mindbleach ,

At least he didn’t delete him by getting Janeway back on cocaine.

mindbleach ,

Nah, “call me” always means “let’s make this a real-time social hierarchy game, because I’m good at exploiting verbal cues and expectations to shove people toward my desired goal.”

mindbleach ,

I can’t tell if “fail-ed coop” is more of an AI fuckup or a human fuckup.

Which I guess is a point for AI’s plausibility.

mindbleach ,

Episodic television from the linear broadcast era means you can jump in damn near wherever and it’ll be an okay time. Usually. Deep Space 9 has more ongoing storylines and every series has some episodes people just haaate. The Next Generation has half of its what-were-they-thinking episodes in the first season. Nonetheless I’d recommend TNG as the starting point, because it has the right mix of grandeur and restraint.

The Original Series is technicolor sci-fi horror dressed as episodic space exploration. It’s campy and melodramatic and by god does it know it. Some episodes were blatantly “what’s available on the back-lot next month?” and are a coin toss between stupid and incredible.

TOS had some movies (roman numerals) and they range from “what if an episode was three hours long” to “modern-day San Francisco zoo heist.” At their best they’re fun and at their worst they’re even more fun.

The Next Generation is high-concept ethical debate framed as the experiences of naval officers. The cast is seriously talented and the writing is usually excellent.

TNG had some movies (bald guy on the poster) and they were written by people who didn’t like the show for people who didn’t watch the show. You have to turn your brain off, but they’re well-directed.

Deep Space 9 was a direct response to Babylon 5. it’s heavy on other species criticizing the openly optimistic and quietly human-centric Federation. It never goes full “revisionist western,” but it gets dark in places. It was also a deeply indulgent excuse to explore characters and cultures from prior Trek.

Voyager did the opposite, by yeeting a ship to the ass end of the galaxy, where nobody’s heard of the Federation. They’re just trying to keep it together and beeline back toward home. It’s the same formula as most TOS / TNG episodes, but with fresh character dynamics and new rubber-forehead aliens.

Enterprise is an origin story starring the guy from Quantum Leap, and the tone is just… weird. It’s not awful, but I’m not personally a fan. Apparently it had an ending even more disappointing than Quantum Leap, which is fucking saying something.

JJ Abrams did some reboot movies replacing The Original Series, and they’re everything you expect when reading “JJ Abrams did some reboot movies.” Great casting, though.

Discovery sounded like it got up its own ass a bit. There’s a point in any long-running franchise where the people making it grew up as fans of it, and it takes strenuous effort not to create a feedback loop of shallow fanfiction stupidity. See: RTD-era Doctor Who, numbered Star Wars sequels.

Picard sounds like season one was written exactly like the TNG movies, which is pretty far from a compliment. Season two is apparently more of a 1990s Trek reunion and I still can’t care.

Strange New Worlds sounds like it’s doing everything right, as a revival of TOS-era “wagon train to the stars” problem-of-the-week storytelling. The universe is big and weird and terrifying and we’re out there pencling in the map. Plus they pulled off a musical episode. That’s always a good sign.

Honorable mentions to Galaxy Quest, an aliens-abduct-actors comedy that is accidentally one of the better Star Trek movies, and The Orville, Seth MacFarlane’s extremely Seth MacFarlane love letter that’s honestly a pretty solid realization of the formula and absolutely knows it. Also neatly illustrating the difference between parody and satire.

mindbleach ,

This depiction of the future feels impossible in 2015.

Hey good news, buddy, that cynicism is about to get extremely vindicated.

mindbleach ,

Star Trek notwithstanding, we’re definitely living in the era of Transmetropolitan’s made-up website names.

mindbleach ,

HuFu.

mindbleach ,

One way or another, you won’t have to worry about it.

mindbleach ,

Yeah, like that Family Guy bit. Bibi saw signs reading “Free Palestine” and said, “Sold.”

mindbleach ,

we are one of the tamest instances when it comes to banning people and deleting comments/posts.

Uh huh.

Bet you don’t even know where the [word] totalitarian comes from or who coined it without looking it up.

Adolf literally Hitler could’ve coined the term, and that wouldn’t change a goddamn thing for how it is used to accurately condemn a genocidal dictatorship. Do you… do you think projection decides what’s real? Like if someone’s the first person to make an accusation, any form of “no you” is false?

we retain our perfect track record of not blocking real instances

Well yeah, your stated agenda is to shit up other conversations. You’re part of a harassment campaign echo-chamber halfway down the gradient from lemmy.ml’s erudite atrocity apologia to hexbear’s openly enforced tankie hugbox.

mindbleach ,

The nature of bad faith is that there is no right answer.

mindbleach ,

… there’s some rapture movies that sound a lot like that.

mindbleach ,

So, Youtube’s dying.

Maybe not right now. Maybe not next year. But they’ve decided to make everybody miserable, for a “business” that still won’t cause enough misery to turn a profit.

Meanwhile creators are censored worse than broadcast TV. Nevermind the effective ban on swearing - they can’t even reference concepts without a surveillance program declaring that their latest video doesn’t count, even though they’ll still slap ads all over that bitch.

Those people have things they want to share with an audience that wants to see. Any middleman can either help, or become irrelevant. Bandwidth is cheap. Some creators are just in it for the money… but the money is bad, on Youtube, and it’s getting worse. Patreon is more direct and far less stupid. As with all these lumbering ruins of 2010s internet media, the network effect of being the default will keep them relevant for a while, no matter what they do. Twitter’s on fire and it’s still not dead. But its prospects sure aren’t getting better… and not because people changed.

People are sadly predictable. These idiot robots exploit that masterfully, to a point, and then act bewildered when more pressure stops making more money. Like they forgot we can just leave.

mindbleach ,

99% of former Facebook users didn’t block ads - but they still left. They found other shit to do. People who’ve somehow never blocked ads still complain about ads. They still recognize how advertising shapes the things they like, and they hate it.

Nobody enjoys being interrupted with repetitive corporate bullshit. Nobody’s thrilled when three-minute videos get dragged out to ten minutes and one second, or when punchy edited conversations sprawl into rambling podcasts, or when recipes start with the chef’s life story. They don’t need to know why these things happen, to know they don’t care.

Even if, god help us, Youtube remains the video-hosting site - spacing out to hours of passive content does not have to be how people spend their time.

mindbleach ,

That would explain the lighting.

mindbleach ,

When the response to that aggression is also genocide fantasies, sometimes a conflict has no good guys.

mindbleach ,

Two sides going ‘I’m gonna wipe you off the map!’ ‘No I’m gonna wipe you off the map!’ is not comparable to one side going ‘get back on your side the line’ while the other goes ‘half your country is our side, actually all your country, also we’re not here, also it’s a special police double-secret operation, also nice kids you got there.’

mindbleach ,

Reality is a team sport, to some people.

mindbleach ,

Then stop scoffing when people condemn both sides.

mindbleach ,

You really are. You’re directly responding to someone saying ‘both sides need to stop,’ and your response is sharply negative. You explicitly call it blaming the victim.

mindbleach ,

UV, then.

mindbleach ,

Scansion, people. Please.

mindbleach ,

Not many killbots running around either, but we’re supposing that may change.

mindbleach ,

I know a joke about UDP, but you might not get it.

mindbleach ,

Yeah, are you ready?

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