Attempt at building kinder, gentler Reddit downvoted off the Web Reddit can be a nasty, nasty place. So nasty that in 2015 half a dozen Reddit employees – some who said they'd experienced personal abuse or threats of violence from Reddit members – bailed from the company and set their sights on "rethinking the way communities exist on the internet". That plan eventually became Imzy.com, a …
This trend towards sign-up before you can even see the site is ridiculous.
No amount of cutesy videos, or parallax scrolling sales pitch will make me sign up to anything. Just throw me straight into the action.
This is another example of mobile's poisonous design paradigms destroying the web.
Do I want to use your product? I don't know.
Will you give it to me? No
When you fail? It's your fault for not giving it away.
When your competitors fail because they gave it all away and can't monetise? Check my entitlement.
(See twitter for a fantastic example of this bullshit.)
The internet in general, and WWW in particular, was built on a model of co-operation and resource sharing. HTTP/HTML in particular were created by Sir Tim for the explicit purpose of freely exchanging information between disparate systems which at the time had no other of talking to each other "simply". After this took off and became popular the usual group of w***ers promptly decided to "monetize" (vomit) the system with things such as paywalls or advertising. In many cases this has been done by initially providing services "for free" initially and then starting to demand ongoing payment once the market's been cornered.
The sad fact is that these people have effectively destroyed the WWW as it was intended. However, this behaviour (1) is remarkably similar to that of either a drug dealer ("first hit's free") or an extortionist ("you wouldn't want anything to happen to your data now, would you?") and is morally unacceptable to me. Moreover, some of us were here before Eternal September and still hold by the codes of conduct that existed before the apparently successful psy-ops efforts to persuade people that somehow they have an *entitlement* to treat me as a revenue stream. You would appear to have been a victim of said efforts if you really believe that those of us ***who built the thing in the first place*** are the people with an entitlement issue.
When you require people to give out real names on a forum site, everyone afraid to speak their minds. Conversation inevitably becomes
Red: Nice day isn't it
Blue: Yes, wonderful weather we are having
When you allow Anon posting or Handles the conversation inevitably becomes
Red: Nice day isn't it
Blue: F*&ck off you cockwoble whore. Don't oppress me with your patriarchal weather.
And things usually degenerate from there
Ahh the global village, It was supposed to bring the world together so we discuss our differences in a civilised and intelligent way; An end to war, famine & poverty!
Turns out people everywhere, from every race, from every religion, from every culture ... are utter bastards
I unironically prefer the second one, because at least it's authentic.
Have you read the comments on that site? The shiny happy people routine is creepy. People aren't that nice in real life, unless they're both on prosaic and are being paid to be nice.
You Belgian lollygagger.
Wars are "authentic". The eternal biological problem is that humans get this voluptuous pleasure from feeling superior to each other. Young testosterone-charged males: apparently get even more pleasure and/or feel less socially restrained.
Cooperation produces enormous benefits, economically, social and security but we have to give up some of these pleasures. (This should be abundantly clear from a brief top-down perusal of history.) There's often - eg, on an anonymous site - no immediate feedback to participants except this voluptuous pleasure, so we need be nudged to give it up or channel it productively by social engineering mechanisms. Facebook may irk, but you will notice it is incredibly successful.
Paid to be nice!?! What kind of Anon are you? regular Anon?
We are the shiny happy Anons! We make the internet world nicer by generating random cat pic everywhere. If you happened to click on our happy cat pic but didn't get brain washed by a full-screen Nyan cat animation, you're not getting our niceness influence. We suggest you to quickly click on our happy cat pic again and embrace our niceness.
Did I mention we are the shiny happy Anons? We are the shiny happy Anons!
"And things usually degenerate from there"
No, this is where the real social justice begins. Because after that display it's only a matter of time before plenty of people will start to ignore Blue thus declining their impact as time goes by.
This is also not a good example in my opinion. Everyone who has frequented forums (even those who moderate swearing) will have run into a situation where one person gets offended by what another person says. Even though that person might not have intended that in such ways, but was merely pretty direct. To use your example:
"Blue: Lovely fucking day, was that all you had to say or are you going somewhere with this?"
This is the kind of response which might offend plenty of people but which, in my opinion, is no direct need to take offense. Sure it's direct and definitely cynical, but you also got to keep in mind that not everyone has a way with words. This Blue guy could provide tons of interesting and good facts in other discussions, making him well known (or notorious? ;)).
My point: a "friendly and fluffy" site would probably filter out those messages. They're not calling names, they're not belittleling people, but some people might find them offensive. Well, I think it's a good thing that some places have raised that bar a little.
So true.
If a TOS could solve the worlds problems and make people really nice to each other, we'd have implemented it years ago.
We have actual laws, with actual consequences, and that still doesn't stop people raping kids and murdering innocents.
What hope do a bunch of geeks have brandishing a TOS at people.
Oh no, not the terms of service, I best not ever break that.
Where only the right opinions are allowed.
Those who do not conform to the hive mind opinion will not be allowed to have their views aired.
They decide what is an acceptable opinion or not.
Anyone who disagrees are intolerant bigots.
And not a /s tag in sight.
Interestingly enough, if you have the mixed salad with the vinaigrette dressing, your calorie (kcal) intake will be almost exactly the same as when eating a Big Mac (without the fries). I'm lovin' it, and so does Don Gorske. Yes, this post is so far off topic that it is approaching the subject of this discussion from the other side.
-- boring. If nobody is talking sensibly, what's the sense in talking? The old Bad Astronomy forum was very tightly moderated, and there were some excellent discussions. Another forum I was on was intentionally provocative, and it could be a snakepit. Many threads quickly became a froth of semi-coherent insults and rude-boy showing-off.
Strokes for folks, though.
You're right. They should have called it fluffi, or maybe cuddli?
Obviously the other thing you need in order to get web success is an inability to spell. Well to be fair it's a word deliberately spelled badly so you can trademark it - but I don't see why I should let sense get in the way of a good rant.
Anyway, I should stop reading this thread, as it's giving me an overwhelming urge to reply to everyone with gratuitous and childish insults, just to dispell this myth that El Reg is a civilised place...
Bum!
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