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VoxAdActa

@ VoxAdActa @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

  • Stop Using Discord for Your Open source Communities | mattcen's mumblings

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  • I can’t grasp the whole concept of Discord servers even though I was moderating one. They’re bad as a knowledge base, they’re bad as a discussion platform, so why do people keep creating them?

    I mean, as a chat room, it's fantastic. It's a massively upgraded IRC (except in terms of the ease of discovering new servers), with QOL features I didn't even know how badly I wanted back in the old Yahoo! Chat days (such as the ability to spin up a temporary thread to take an in-depth conversation out of the main channel without going to DMs). It's for discussions that happen right now and are not meant to be conserved forever because, generally speaking, they're not expected to be that important. I love discord for that, because I miss chat rooms.

    But it's absolutely garbage for being a repository of static knowledge. Releasing patch notes only in discord is ridiculous.

  • Stop Using Discord for Your Open source Communities | mattcen's mumblings

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  • I wish people would stop trying to use Discord as an information repository/hub. It's a chat program. It's designed for people to engage in transient, real-time back-and-forth communication, not to store discussions or information for long-term use. I get so cranky at people who insist that Discord can be used like a web forum when it so obviously sucks nuts at it.

    A forum has content that can stay up indefinitely, where the message history on narrowly defined subjects is packaged into a convenient container and is visible as far back in time as one cares to go. It's easily searchable, and old discussions for which a user has new questions can be brought back up to the top of the list, in full. Trying to recreate that kind of functionality on Discord is not only stupid, but also generally futile. It's the exact opposite of what Discord is intended to be.

  • Toyota claims battery breakthrough in potential boost for electric cars

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  • The quickest way I've found to separate the articles that are going to be meaningless waste-of-time fluff pieces from ones that might be informative is to find the verb in the headline.

    Is it something like "claims", "calls for", "praises", "criticizes", or "expects"? Fluff. If something deserving of a more concrete, direct verb had happened, the headline would have said so. Verbs like "slams" or "attacks" or "demands" are even worse; they're aggressive and enthusiastic about their content but still can't make the claim something actually happened or changed.

    If the verb is preceded by "could", "might", "maybe", or similar, especially with regard to tech news, it's also probably an empty slow-news-day article, but those words aren't necessarily as hollow as the ones mentioned above. Sometimes they'll contain interesting information about the current state of things, even if they're just going to lead you on a merry speculation romp about the optimistic/horrifying future.

  • Moderation Philosophy - On Content Removal

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  • Oh, you're definitely right in that I've seen communities go the other way, and you're also right in being concerned that the transition to alt-right-friendly is frequently more common than left-ideological-purity. Which way a community slides, or, whether it slides at all, is almost exclusively down to the community's moderation policies and enforcement.

    What you'll also see a lot of the time is a community where the cryptofacists infiltrate the discussion with carefully-phrased bigotry, walking up to the ban-line and putting just the tip of their big toe on it. Then, when other community members (rightly and validly) tell them to fuck off, the community members risk getting moderated if their request for off-fucking is phrased too harshly. The alt-right basically use that kind of bright-line moderation as a shield, and won't hesitate to report every negative comment they receive as a reply to "But what positive benefits to society do trans people provide? I'm just asking questions."

    So moderating a safe community is hard work, no doubt. There's a fine line between over and under moderating, and we can't easily rely on a rules-as-written method to do it effectively. There always has to be some degree of subjective discretion, but that degree of subjective discretion can't be so far as to become a purity test.

    So, yes, I agree with you that the terms "persecution complex" and "echo chamber" can be effectively weaponized, but it's not the words themselves that are the problem. In their appropriate context, they'd perfectly accurate and useful for the creation of models and predictions. But the alt-right is famous for taking everyday words and phrases and trying to use them against us, because, to them, words have no real meaning. They're used like magical incatations that are expected to ward us off and confuse us, rather than as tools of communication. See: "You're being racist against white people!", "I identify as an attack helicopter!", or "You're supposed to be tolerant!".

  • Moderation Philosophy - On Content Removal

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  • Moderation Philosophy - On Content Removal

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  • I disagree. I've seen the exact pattern of behavior Gaywallet is talking about, over and over again, in communities that vary from from YA writing advice to antique appraisal. Too often, we start subjecting each other and our allies to ideological purity tests that only get more stringent every time the current crop of "bad actors" or "disruptive influences" has been eliminated. And in a really disturbing number of the cases I've personally seen, the community member responsible (either officially or de facto) for creating these purity tests (and judging the results) isn't a member of any of the marginalized groups they're policing. In the rest of the cases when they were a member of a marginalized group, these folks have had a bad habit of seeing oppression as a ranked competitive event in which whatever group they belong to is the "most" oppressed, and therefore more important than the others.

    For a real example, they might excuse themselves for referring handicapped people with a slur, but are very strict about moderating other peoples' uses of everyday words/phrases that track back to a Native American concepts, even unintentionally. In (another, real) example of this, someone in a gardening forum I used to frequent got suspended for talking about wanting to set up a circular divided plot and calling it a "wheel garden", because it's shaped like a wheel, without knowing that the concept of a "medicine wheel" exists. For another real example in a different forum, and I swear to fucking God that I'm not making this up, a non-indiginous moderator who constantly talked about her "spirit guides" ended up removing/muting the posts from someone in a theater subforum who asked "What do you see as the spine of this play?" because the question was allegedly ableist against paralyzed people.

    The practical result of all of this is everyone either walks on eggshells around that person and their direct reports, or gets run out. We'd constantly have to be trying to anticipate what new, unwritten rule of communication was coming next, because the warnings for violating it would only come in a very narrow window before the ban hammer started being applied. We end up with a place where we can't even criticize the worst bits of our own marginalized communities (like, in my case, complaining about bi and ace erasure in the wider LGBTQ+ space, or the dubiously minimal gains we've made in intersectionality) without being censured, muted, suspended, or banned for being bigoted. That's the definition of an echo chamber, and the constant sniffing around for more and more granularly defined "bad actors" generally meets the layperson's definition of a persecution complex (note: I am not licensed to practice psychiatry or make medical diagnoses in your state/territory).

    Just talking about the fact that this problem exists, and how it begins, is not bigotry. It's a problem. And it needs to be addressed, preferably before people start talking about (real examples) how much a POS a white musical artist is for culturally appropriating dreadlocks or how racist it is for anyone other than Romani to read tarot cards. The kinds of spaces Gaywallet is talking about don't just pop up fully formed overnight, they start out where Beehaw is now and slowly evolve that way over time. Talking frankly about how that's not what we want to be and about how we plan to prevent that is not problematic, it's necessary.

    "There is no cause so right that you cannot find a fool who follows it." --Larry Niven.

  • What are you playing this week?

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  • I got a good deal on Assassin's Creed II and finally figured out how to hook up an x-box controller to my PC (yes, I'm dumb). I never played any of the AC games other than the first one when it originally came out, so I'm excited to get done with work and give it a shot.

  • Chat GPT and the keynote address

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  • I think one of the big problems is that we, as humans, are very easily fooled by something that can look or sound "alive". ChatGPT gets a lot of hype, but it's primarily coming from a form of textual pareidolia.

    It's hard to convince people that ChatGPT has absolutely no idea what it's saying. It's putting words together in a human-enough way that we assume it has to be thinking and it has to know things, but it can't do either. It's not even intended to try to do either. That's not what it's for. It takes the rules of speech and a massive amount of data on which word is most likely to follow which other word, and runs with it. It's a super-advanced version of a cell phone keyboard's automatic word suggestions. Even just asking it to correct the punctuation on a complex sentence is too much to ask (in my experiment on this matter, it gave me incorrect answers 4 times, until I explicitly told it how it was supposed to treat coordinating conjunctions).

    And for most uses, that's good enough. Tell it to include a few extra rules, depending on what you're trying to create, and watch it spin out a yarn. But I've had several conversations with ChatGPT, and I've found it incredibly easy to "break", in the sense of making it produce things that sound somewhat less human and significantly less rational. What concerns me about ChatGPT isn't necessarily that it's going to take my job, but that people believe it's a rational, thinking, calculating thing. It may be that some part of us is biologically hard-wired to; it's probably that same part that keeps seeing Jesus on burnt toast.

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    Permanently Deleted

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  • Yep… people usually interpret “free speech” as “freedom from the consequences of my speech,” but it’s never meant that.

    It's not even that complicated. To these people, "free speech" only means that they believe they should be allowed to scream slurs when they want to make someone feel afraid or worthless. That's literally the only thing they really want to use "free speech" for.

  • LGBTQ+ Americans are under attack, Human Rights Campaign declares in state of emergency warning

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  • Desperately trying to get my ass out of the south right now. Been working on it for almost a year. I was about at the point where I was going to just load up my car and drive until I hit a blue state, and figure out the rest later. Better to be a refugee now, before the brownshirts start bringing out the bloodhounds.

    Fortunately, I think I have something lined up now (tentatively), but god damn it's terrifying down here.

  • how and when did you find out your sexuality?

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  • In my late 30's, I finally managed to untangle myself from an abusive marriage in which a lot of fights over the last couple of years were about me not wanting to have sex often enough. I assumed that the high-anxiety, high-stress relationship was killing my libido, so after I'd taken a little bit to recalibrate myself after the divorce, I started dating again.

    It went fine, I was reasonably "successful" (as such things are often measured from the male perspective), but every time I had sex, I left the event feeling distinctly unfulfilled. It's hard to describe. It was something I thought would make me happy, but, at best, it left me kind of empty, and, at worst, I'd spend the next couple days fighting off anxiety.

    So I decided to get my testosterone checked (it was normal) and get some therapy. At some point I realized that I hadn't been on a date, much less had sex, in over a year, and I was fine with it, and, most importantly, that apparently wasn't normal for guys. I noticed that all of my friends would complain up a storm if they hadn't gotten laid in longer than about a week and a half, and that there were always these very confusing threads on AskReddit or AskMen where guys would say things like "I might be able to go 6 months without sex for a million dollars" or whatever. Whereas I was over here having to look back at old text messages just to find out exactly how long it had been since I last had sex, because I hadn't been keeping track.

    I had one more hookup (Feb. 2021), got the same kind of empty feelings afterwards, and decided that, while the act itself was enjoyable, all the complicated unwritten rules and rituals around sex just made it not worth it, especially considering I never got the happy-fuzzy-euphoric feelings everyone else talked about. I wasn't getting the same payoff that all my other guy friends said they were getting, and instead of thinking they were full of hot air, I decided to take their word for it.

    So after some research, I started identifying as sex-indifferent gray/ace.

    It's not a perfect label; I do experience sexual attraction, but it's not powerful enough to be a motivating factor. Sex is kind of like mowing the lawn, in that it's not awful, and sometimes it can be relaxing or enjoyable under the right circumstances, but I'm not leaving work early because I'm excited to mow the lawn when I get home. And if someone said "Hey, you never have to mow the lawn again!", that would be pretty good news. Sometimes I miss the smell of freshly-cut grass, but on the whole, it's just one more big thing I no longer have to worry about.

    My current girlfriend is also ace, and it works out wonderfully. We cuddle, we hold hands, we laugh, and we never have to argue about sex. Life is much simpler. I'm reasonably happy.