Somehow some guy from Auburn made his way to Greenwood and barricaded himself in one of the buildings in my apartment complex and claims he has a bomb. He probably doesn't but goddamn it guy fuck off. Apparently it was supposed to be a casual warrant arrest and somehow it just escalated.
Two for two today. My girlfriend came to pick me up because she couldn't go home from the previous thing. We're waiting at a light that we can't turn at because the block keeps filling up and this guy behind us is getting serious road rage. Starts making obscene gestures towards us and my girlfriend flips him off. So he gets out of his car and tells my girlfriend to "learn how to fucking drive". I told him to fuck off a few different ways and he gets up to the window like he wants to fight me or something. This guy had to have been in his mid fifties. He was an older guy and had graying hair. I made some comment about how mature he is getting out of his car to yell at a lady which shut him down a bit. Finally the guy goes back to his car and speeds off and goes to the right. Coincidentally the left turn becomes open and we go on our merry way.
Had surgery on my foot yesterday, weird as fuck not being able to walk around as per normal, needing to hobble everywhere lol. I can't even sit at my desktop because I can't keep my foot elevated enough due to height of the table and chair being exactly perfect for normal posture. Also the surgeon decided to keep me in for 24 hours so I was stuck without a phone charger or laptop and had only broadcast TV to watch, this was worse than the surgery, so many adverts and trash shows. Went to sleep instead. Also nurses got worried that I had an irregular heart rate, I checked it myself and realised it was secondary to opiate respiratory depression so only needed fluids and for my body to get rid of the residual opiate. (Opiate wasn't dealing with getting rid of my regular anti-epileptic). After-hours doctor couldn't even work this out and left the nurses with no specific instruction other than if I got dehydrated to give me fluids. I just drank excessively, resulting in rapid elimination and my heart rate regulated.
Also I was weirdly classified as having a fairly high anxiety throughout the visit.
Knowing what's going on the healthcare's side is so weird when you're the patient. Only people who were great with this were the Radiography squad who trusted me to position my foot correctly for all 3 views.
My girlfriend had a ladder accident and broke he heel bone. She also complained about a bad back, but the doctors didn't do anything about it. She then insisted on another appointment and got an appointment at the cat scan place. She had the scan this morning, and got a copy of the results on a CD.
And we looked at the images, and she clearly has a broken back! We're not even close to being medical experts and it's totally obvious there is a crack in one vertebra. So that's no fun. It'll mean a longer rest and more physiotherapy.
Spent my day off in what could only be called a rat cave filling holes and occasionally doing battle with the vermin for the best part of eight hours. Although I look to have got the best of them physically they seem to have won with crafty biological attacks, in so far as I seem to have lymes disease. I also watched Jurassic World which was a spectacular let down.
Edit; Yeah Luke you would be amazed how easy it is to miss those things. I broke my back falling of a bouncy castle when I was a kid and no one noticed. It was only going to the hospital for falling off a horse did they twig on.
My girlfriend had a ladder accident and broke he heel bone. She also complained about a bad back, but the doctors didn't do anything about it. She then insisted on another appointment and got an appointment at the cat scan place. She had the scan this morning, and got a copy of the results on a CD.
And we looked at the images, and she clearly has a broken back! We're not even close to being medical experts and it's totally obvious there is a crack in one vertebra. So that's no fun. It'll mean a longer rest and more physiotherapy.
Well, it's great that she stuck to her guns and made them find it. I hope the physiotherapy doesn't take too long.
Atko apparently would rather stick his head in the sand and believe that good intentions and strong ideals defeat the reality that shitty people being allowed to use his site for shitty purposes can affect his relationships with hosting providers and fund transfer companies like Paypal even if he's complying with the law in his country (which is not necessarily definitively true at this point.)
And god forbid you say "Hey your ideals are awesome and I like them but here's how the world works and here's how people are going to fuck you" because you'll just get downvoted into a hole. Irony squared.
Too bad, because I liked Voat before people started vandalizing the hell out of it. Build a wall and somebody will pee on it.
Dude, Voat got what it had coming. I mean, leaving aside the questionable legality of welcoming a whole mess of racists, conspiracy theorists of the holocaust-denying variety and your garden variety anti-semites(often all three) on your German-hosted service, they also had straight-up "Jailbait" boards with images of minors being handed around for a purpose I'm pretty sure you can guess quite easily. And naturally, Atko stuck with the Reddit version of what free speech means, which is the ability to be as horrible of a fuckstick as one wished, without any risk of consequence, welcoming these people with open arms even if the community at large didn't, as you've said.
Voat may or may not have been alright in the past, but it and Atko deserve every iota of what's coming to it/him, all the more so because it/he could have stopped it at basically any time. When you douse your house in petrol, then call in a bunch of pyromaniacs, telling them they can feel free to play with matches as they please, you're not free of blame when your house gets burned down.
I know that Rym will ask me to cite proof again but Voat really was initially inhabited by people who wanted to talk about "fringe" politics like Marxism and Randian stuff without all the noise over on reddit. It has since morphed into shitposter HQ, but it wasn't that way to start with nor do I think Atko set out to create that. He's just naive about the user base he's cultivating, I think.
Yes, it's a miserable pile of shit now. Not debating that at all. So is reddit, though.
I'm not sure what he could have done when 40,000 jerkoffs showed up except take the whole thing down, though. Maybe revert a day's worth of user registrations and lock the register form until he could get a posse together. And he'd have been cat-called night and day over that.
I'm not sure so about "Now" either, so much as "Just in the places you didn't frequent." I remember the last time I heard about Voat, which was after /r/conspiracy's subreddit dedicated to doxxing the families of Sandy Hook Victims was shut down, and they fled to Voat. It was rather less noticeable, since it was a much smaller group, but they found a happy little home there.
I'm not sure what he could have done when 40,000 jerkoffs showed up except take the whole thing down, though.
As best I could tell, his response was to start shaking the donation cup at the door.
Edit - Going back to comments around the time of the /r/conspiracy dox sub moving, seems rather like Voat was already a dumpster fire, just a smaller, more out of the way one that nobody much was paying attention to.
Voat really was initially inhabited by people who wanted to talk about "fringe" politics like Marxism and Randian stuff without all the noise over on reddit. I
There was, and still is, literally nothing preventing that kind of discussion on Reddit. There never has been, and there still isn't. There was no need to "migrate to another site" to talk Marxism.
All the likely sub names are squatted by some intensely tedious people. Call it a personality conflict if you want but there's a reason the split happened.
All the likely sub names are squatted by some intensely tedious people. Call it a personality conflict if you want but there's a reason the split happened.
There's a number of reasons that trying to start a brand new forum on reddit on a topic that already exists is a pain in the ass. Most can be avoided by just registering a new reddit account, but if people are already going to a new site anyway in an attempt to leave the riff raff behind, it's just easier and less frustrating.
Namespace matters, though. You will always be working uphill to grow a community with a less intuitive name on reddit.
Right now the front page of Voat is filled with "What? There's child porn here?!" after I got downvoted into a pit this morning for telling Atko to wake up and take out the garbage. Drama drama drama. I deleted my account.
In general, I've found that the people who scream the loudest about "censorhship" on private Internet fora have the least interesting content to share - or they want the ability to be a douchewad without suffering social ramifications.
So it does not at all surprise me that the majority of people who jumped to Voat because reddit was "censoring" them are, in fact, obnoxious dickbags that nobody actually wants around.
There's a number of reasons that trying to start a brand new forum on reddit on a topic that already exists is a pain in the ass. Most can be avoided by just registering a new reddit account, but if people are already going to a new site anyway in an attempt to leave the riff raff behind, it's just easier and less frustrating.
That's utterly dumb. The new sites had even less way to manage a community, literally guaranteeing that the problems of the old site would be even worse. You could not possibly leave those people behind if the new site is even more "open" to discussion.
Namespace matters, though. You will always be working uphill to grow a community with a less intuitive name on reddit.
Namespace doesn't matter if the community is strong enough to form. If it isn't, then it can't form ANYWHERE.
Also, "voat" is less well known by a landslide than reddit. That namespace doesn't even exist to the vast majority of people, even people who USE the Internet and even reddit regularly.
>want the ability to be a douchewad without suffering social ramifications
I agree with this. What I'm mostly concerned about is with people jumping on bandwagons and labeling certain kinds of speech as "dangerous". I think that should be reserved for some pretty extreme cases.
There's quite a lot of noise being made on Voat right now about ejecting the obnoxious dickbags, but the response I got from Atko was based mostly in semantics and evasion (Voat doesn't actually HOST any objectionable images therefore blah blah blah" so yeah, I'm out.
I agree with this. What I'm mostly concerned about is with people jumping on bandwagons and labeling certain kinds of speech as "dangerous". I think that should be reserved for some pretty extreme cases.
That's not what was happening on reddit. Reddit is a free speech paradise except for directed harassment and child pornography.
I haven't seen the evidence of directed harrassment by FPH even though I think they're all a waste of oxygen. I don't say it doesn't exist, I say I haven't seen it. So I can't comment on it. SRS I know directs harrassment all over. Their attempts at plausible deniability by making it very expressly against their written policy doesn't impress me, because it's the same core group that was doing it all over the place not very long ago.
Calling reddit a "safe space" right before banning a bunch of shitty communities pretty heavily implies that the speech there was dangerous because the context is reddit, which is a discussion platform.
Calling reddit a "safe space" right before banning a bunch of shitty communities pretty heavily implies that the speech there was dangerous because the context is reddit, which is a discussion platform.
A discussion platform that is unambiguously used by a core of people to organize and launch directed harassment.
As far as I can see, no political speech has ever been banned from reddit.
FPH wasn't banned because it was abhorrent. It was banned because the people using it were abhorrent. And it worked: they're all flocking to increasingly shitty sites. They are welcome to continue to use reddit if they refrain from collecting together into the same harassing community again.
No political speech has ever been banned on reddit by the admins, as far as anyone knows. The core subs of reddit have some undeniable curation going on. And that's their prerogative, but it's dumb to pretend it doesn't happen.
Yes, you can form your own /r/mypoliticalrants and post all you want to an audience of nobody but it's disingenuous to pretend that this makes content shaping a non-issue on a site with an audience in the tens of millions and that pretends to use user voting to influence content in a meaningful way.
No political speech has ever been banned on reddit by the admins, as far as anyone knows. The core subs of reddit have some undeniable curation going on. And that's their prerogative, but it's dumb to pretend it doesn't happen.
They're two entirely separate things.
If you don't like the curation, make a separate subreddit. Done.
that pretends to use user voting to influence content in a meaningful way.
The user voting is what pushes what you call "fringe" speech to the bottom. You can't have it both ways. You can't have open voting and also have niche views rise to the top.
Go smaller and curate to a smaller audience. You have zero other option.
Then let user voting push the fringe opinions to the bottom. That's not enough for the mods of default (and former default) subs, though. They routinely remove predictable topics which don't violate written rules of the subs.
And I'm not talking about people who are rules-lawyering to be obnoxious. I'm talking about opinions they simply don't like. /r/undelete used to be a pretty good resource for this but some drama went down there and now it's unreliable, too.
Reddit is cliquey and biased, like any other news source, but the problem with reddit that makes it unique is the veneer of democracy, which is misleading.
This is why I always though Reddit was garbage, because the voting not only pushes fringe speech to the bottom, but it pushes anything considered remotely objectionable to the bottom too. So you end up with a bunch of like minded people jerking off on each other.
Then let user voting push the fringe opinions to the bottom. That's not enough for the mods of default (and former default) subs, though. They routinely remove predictable topics which don't violate written rules of the subs.
So don't post in subreddits that have bad mods. You're in their playground.
Reddit is cliquey and biased, like any other news source, but the problem with reddit that makes it unique is the veneer of democracy, which is misleading.
So make a subreddit where no one will moderate, and let voting decide. See what happens.
So we're doing ad absurdum now? I'm not arguing for no moderation. I'm arguing for ethical moderation. Reddit has not got it. If you want citations, read the entire history of /r/undelete.
The problems with making your own sandbox instead of trying to fix the big sandbox everybody's already playing in have already been addressed all over the internet. Taking your ball and going home every time a few people decide to shape the dialogue in a popular venue to their liking isn't productive.
So we're doing ad absurdum now? I'm not arguing for no moderation. I'm arguing for ethical moderation. Reddit has not got it. If you want citations, read the entire history of /r/undelete.
That's all stupid. I'm sorry, but it's just really, really silly. The whole thing. The whole culture.
If you want ethical moderation, whatever "ethical" means to you, then you have to make a subreddit and assign moderators who will do it. There's no other way.
What, you want to argue with some shithead on his own turf in a place where he has complete control of the conversation and can literally just delete your posts? Good luck.
If you don't assign mods arbitrarily, and you don't have zero mods, then what? Vote on mods? That won't be better.
When you have an echo chamber with 10 million people reading it and the illusion that topics are being curated democratically, you have a propaganda engine that the average reader doesn't consider to be a propaganda engine. It's basically engineered to make you think a little less critically about what you're reading.
And yes, it's incumbent upon every human being to be critical about the information they take in and consider its veracity and etc etc etc, but the reality is that something like half the population barely has the capacity to do that whether due to education, luxury of time to perform critical analysis of every relevant issue, etc. At some point you've got to trust *some* source of current news, somewhere. Or you can live in a cave and hope nobody bothers you.
This sort of stuff shapes national policy. It's not stupid at all. It's concerning.
I'm not proposing a solution to reddit, Rym. I'm just saying it's broken. I agree that you're not going to build a propaganda proof discussion platform no matter how much time you spend engineering it. It's impossible.
Voat was an attempt by many to at least kick the can down the road a bit, mostly by breaking the momentum of very large communities with very well established cultures and mod teams with their own particular biases, but then it got cancerous pretty quickly. Maybe the founder(s) even intended that in the first place. He/she/they sure don't seem super concerned about it beyond posting aghast responses to the takedown of their hosting and their paypal and to, as Churba said, shake the donation cup. So, I dunno man. I feel like you're arguing against a position I'm not taking.
Comments
Been a crazy day.
Also the surgeon decided to keep me in for 24 hours so I was stuck without a phone charger or laptop and had only broadcast TV to watch, this was worse than the surgery, so many adverts and trash shows. Went to sleep instead.
Also nurses got worried that I had an irregular heart rate, I checked it myself and realised it was secondary to opiate respiratory depression so only needed fluids and for my body to get rid of the residual opiate. (Opiate wasn't dealing with getting rid of my regular anti-epileptic). After-hours doctor couldn't even work this out and left the nurses with no specific instruction other than if I got dehydrated to give me fluids. I just drank excessively, resulting in rapid elimination and my heart rate regulated.
Also I was weirdly classified as having a fairly high anxiety throughout the visit.
Knowing what's going on the healthcare's side is so weird when you're the patient. Only people who were great with this were the Radiography squad who trusted me to position my foot correctly for all 3 views.
And we looked at the images, and she clearly has a broken back! We're not even close to being medical experts and it's totally obvious there is a crack in one vertebra. So that's no fun. It'll mean a longer rest and more physiotherapy.
Edit; Yeah Luke you would be amazed how easy it is to miss those things. I broke my back falling of a bouncy castle when I was a kid and no one noticed. It was only going to the hospital for falling off a horse did they twig on.
Atko apparently would rather stick his head in the sand and believe that good intentions and strong ideals defeat the reality that shitty people being allowed to use his site for shitty purposes can affect his relationships with hosting providers and fund transfer companies like Paypal even if he's complying with the law in his country (which is not necessarily definitively true at this point.)
And god forbid you say "Hey your ideals are awesome and I like them but here's how the world works and here's how people are going to fuck you" because you'll just get downvoted into a hole. Irony squared.
Too bad, because I liked Voat before people started vandalizing the hell out of it. Build a wall and somebody will pee on it.
Voat may or may not have been alright in the past, but it and Atko deserve every iota of what's coming to it/him, all the more so because it/he could have stopped it at basically any time. When you douse your house in petrol, then call in a bunch of pyromaniacs, telling them they can feel free to play with matches as they please, you're not free of blame when your house gets burned down.
Yes, it's a miserable pile of shit now. Not debating that at all. So is reddit, though.
I'm not sure what he could have done when 40,000 jerkoffs showed up except take the whole thing down, though. Maybe revert a day's worth of user registrations and lock the register form until he could get a posse together. And he'd have been cat-called night and day over that.
Edit - Going back to comments around the time of the /r/conspiracy dox sub moving, seems rather like Voat was already a dumpster fire, just a smaller, more out of the way one that nobody much was paying attention to.
Namespace matters, though. You will always be working uphill to grow a community with a less intuitive name on reddit.
Right now the front page of Voat is filled with "What? There's child porn here?!" after I got downvoted into a pit this morning for telling Atko to wake up and take out the garbage. Drama drama drama. I deleted my account.
So it does not at all surprise me that the majority of people who jumped to Voat because reddit was "censoring" them are, in fact, obnoxious dickbags that nobody actually wants around.
Namespace doesn't matter if the community is strong enough to form. If it isn't, then it can't form ANYWHERE.
Also, "voat" is less well known by a landslide than reddit. That namespace doesn't even exist to the vast majority of people, even people who USE the Internet and even reddit regularly.
I agree with this. What I'm mostly concerned about is with people jumping on bandwagons and labeling certain kinds of speech as "dangerous". I think that should be reserved for some pretty extreme cases.
There's quite a lot of noise being made on Voat right now about ejecting the obnoxious dickbags, but the response I got from Atko was based mostly in semantics and evasion (Voat doesn't actually HOST any objectionable images therefore blah blah blah" so yeah, I'm out.
Calling reddit a "safe space" right before banning a bunch of shitty communities pretty heavily implies that the speech there was dangerous because the context is reddit, which is a discussion platform.
As far as I can see, no political speech has ever been banned from reddit.
FPH wasn't banned because it was abhorrent. It was banned because the people using it were abhorrent. And it worked: they're all flocking to increasingly shitty sites. They are welcome to continue to use reddit if they refrain from collecting together into the same harassing community again.
Yes, you can form your own /r/mypoliticalrants and post all you want to an audience of nobody but it's disingenuous to pretend that this makes content shaping a non-issue on a site with an audience in the tens of millions and that pretends to use user voting to influence content in a meaningful way.
If you don't like the curation, make a separate subreddit. Done.
Go smaller and curate to a smaller audience. You have zero other option.
And I'm not talking about people who are rules-lawyering to be obnoxious. I'm talking about opinions they simply don't like. /r/undelete used to be a pretty good resource for this but some drama went down there and now it's unreliable, too.
Reddit is cliquey and biased, like any other news source, but the problem with reddit that makes it unique is the veneer of democracy, which is misleading.
The problems with making your own sandbox instead of trying to fix the big sandbox everybody's already playing in have already been addressed all over the internet. Taking your ball and going home every time a few people decide to shape the dialogue in a popular venue to their liking isn't productive.
If you want ethical moderation, whatever "ethical" means to you, then you have to make a subreddit and assign moderators who will do it. There's no other way.
What, you want to argue with some shithead on his own turf in a place where he has complete control of the conversation and can literally just delete your posts? Good luck.
If you don't assign mods arbitrarily, and you don't have zero mods, then what? Vote on mods? That won't be better.
And yes, it's incumbent upon every human being to be critical about the information they take in and consider its veracity and etc etc etc, but the reality is that something like half the population barely has the capacity to do that whether due to education, luxury of time to perform critical analysis of every relevant issue, etc. At some point you've got to trust *some* source of current news, somewhere. Or you can live in a cave and hope nobody bothers you.
This sort of stuff shapes national policy. It's not stupid at all. It's concerning.
I'm not proposing a solution to reddit, Rym. I'm just saying it's broken. I agree that you're not going to build a propaganda proof discussion platform no matter how much time you spend engineering it. It's impossible.
Voat was an attempt by many to at least kick the can down the road a bit, mostly by breaking the momentum of very large communities with very well established cultures and mod teams with their own particular biases, but then it got cancerous pretty quickly. Maybe the founder(s) even intended that in the first place. He/she/they sure don't seem super concerned about it beyond posting aghast responses to the takedown of their hosting and their paypal and to, as Churba said, shake the donation cup. So, I dunno man. I feel like you're arguing against a position I'm not taking.