Post: #76

(06-11-2015 09:14 AM)Days of Broken Arrows Wrote:  I finally realized what all of this reminds me of.

Back around 1968, MGM Records hired a new president named Mike Curb. He came up with the idea that the label needed to "purge" all the rock groups connected with drug culture (source here).

So, out went the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, both of women had their contracts either terminated or not renewed. And in came...well, no one remembers what he brought in because he essentially killed the label. What was left of it was sold to Polygram Records in 1972.

In his quest to rid the world of pesky, drug-related rock bands, Mike Curb neglected to see that what was selling -- and what would continue to sell -- was exactly that kind of rock music.

Ellen Pao is the new Mike Curb.

And an egomaniac who named a singing group after himself:

Post: #77

The censoring is now in full throttle.

I read on the BBC today that a distinguished scientist was reprimanded for stating that female scientists in the lab "can't take criticism" and get "emotionally attached" to male counterparts.

All of which, of course, is true.

Here is the link:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-33090022

Post: #78

(06-11-2015 02:37 AM)trian1 Wrote:  No commercial economically viable site would tolerate what was happening in that subreddit. They were culpable. They were posting photos of people who worked at a company and listing details about them. They were doxxing employees/people not involved with that site or the controversy with Imgur.

If, and I say "if" because I have never been on Reddit or FPH ever, then I think trian1 has a point.

If a group of users or even the majority of a 'subreddit' were engaging in behavior for which Reddit, as a commercial enterprise, could be held liable, then banning those users and/or shutting down the subreddit is totally valid. To the extent that the FPH users were using it as a forum to dox or "harass" specific people, that could be a legal issue for Reddit, or even a PR issue that could cause harm to the company. If FPH users were doxxing individuals at a company that Reddit relies on a lot in its business, like Imgur, then the motivation to protect the business of Reddit is even stronger.

To me, banning the specific users or killing the entire subreddit is immaterial, really, if Reddit is doing it to protect their business -- its just a matter of convenience to Reddit.

The real issue is whether Reddit allows the same type of behavior in other subreddits that it is shutting down in FPH with respect to pro-SJW issues. In other words, if this is a business decision, then any subreddit that is doxxing or "harassing" individuals should be shut down, not just the subreddits that are focused on anti-SJW issues.

If there is a While Male Hate subreddit where they do the same thing to "privileged" white males, and Chairman Pao is totally fine with that, then clearly the decision is not based on what is best for business, but based on shutting down non-SJW thought.

Post: #79

While I agree that companies who choose the SJW route as a way to make money ultimately will fail, this is not a turning point. The turning point will only come once the required reforms in Academia are implemented.

By that of course i mean mass cutting of funds awarded to the social sciences. By allying themselves with the SJWs these companies are changing their previous privately funded business model to a more indirect publicly funded model. With all the money being spent on "[insert] privilege" studies, the government is creating a SJW media industry and the established players are all racing to fill the vacuum.

Think of the Brown professor as an Evangelical preacher. Both have an audience and both are technically preaching. There are 2 movies out, one is about a dying girl who finds god and the other is about a gays helping helping out the unions(note: both of these are real films). The preacher will recommend the dying girl movie will the professor will drive his students to watch the gay movie. The only difference is, the professor is a funded by our tax money.

As long as more money comes through the pipe, Reddit and others will not change direction.

Post: #80

They're banning a LOT of subs - maybe this is window dressing leading to a round of financing or an IPO.

Post: #81

The hammer drops.

Post: #82

I'd give it a few years before Reddit becomes the way of Myspace and Friendster into internet obscurity. Here's my take on it.

Post: #83

I'm probably the only one here who doesn't understand what Reddit is.

I looked it a few times but all I saw were pictures of cats.

Post: #84

(06-11-2015 04:05 PM)LINUX Wrote:  I'm probably the only one here who doesn't understand what Reddit is.

I looked it a few times but all I saw were pictures of cats.

It's an online bulletin board where members post content from around the internet and condense it into one place basically. Like Buzzfeed with less graphics

Post: #85

^ Is that you in the video Clemmo? I'm guessing so, based on the channel title.

Subbed (under my real name).

Post: #86

(06-11-2015 04:49 PM)Teedub Wrote:  ^ Is that you in the video Clemmo? I'm guessing so, based on the channel title.

Subbed (under my real name).

Yeah. That's my youtube channel. Basically a non SJW version of Buzzfeed.

Post: #87

A bit of a long post, but this seemed like a good opportunity to explain some of my pet peeves with Reddit, and to unload some thoughts about different styles of internet forum.

(06-11-2015 04:05 PM)LINUX Wrote:  I'm probably the only one here who doesn't understand what Reddit is.

I looked it a few times but all I saw were pictures of cats.

A fine state to be in, save yourself the effort and don't bother trying to get into it: Reddit is one of the worst site designs ever created, and the sooner it dies the better.

For a start, it's hard to decode what is and isn't important information from the clunky layout, and the actual mechanics of the site encourage homogeneity of ideas: posts with lots of "upvotes" appear higher up than posts with lots of "downvotes" by default, punishing deviation from the dominant ideas and beliefs of whatever subreddit you're currently in. Coupled with the fact that there are persistent user identities, the desire for ones ideas not to be rendered invisible by mass-downvoting, and the similar desire to be a respected "member" of the "community" create a network of incentives which are thoroughly anti-intellectual; where the best-loved (and therefore most visible) members of each subreddit are those who are capable of most creatively expressing orthodox thoughts.

It's also why the site took off with women in a way 4chan failed to (even if it's still predominantly male) - acceptable and unacceptable opinions are clearly flagged so there is no doubt as to which memes and opinions you need to repeat to "fit in", making it the social equivalent for nerdy girls that Thomas the Tank Engine is for autistic boys.

The unsavoury side effect is that everyone who enters a subreddit comes out with radicalised versions of the beliefs they went in with... and an inability to express them in anything besides fucking memes.

The way I look at it, the two extremes of online communities are imageboards like 4chan, and tightly controlled forums like this one: both have their pros and cons, and are useful for different kinds of discussion.

In an imageboard, there is little-to-no persistent identity for individual users, and posts are ranked purely by the time at which they were posted. As such, different viewpoints have similar visibility, differing only in the frequency they are posted. If you browse an imageboard for any length of time, you will encounter a wide spectrum of views and beliefs, argued with differing levels of artistry - you will also encounter an awful amount of low-quality posts, memes, gore and trolling. In my opinion, imageboards are at their best when the sudden need for a think-tank arises, and there is a coalescence of differing interests on a board. Ideas get thrown around at an astounding rate, and in a few hours there's a virtual army pulling off something that would have been unthinkable the day before. You have to have experienced it first-hand to really know what I'm talking about, but I think a few guys here will know what I mean.

On the other hand, forums like this encourage a generally high quality of posting, at the expense of stifling alternative viewpoints. In the case of RVF, that's not such a bad thing - if you want to encounter alternative viewpoints, simply go anywhere-the-fuck-else on the internet. As with imageboards, posts are ranked by the time at which they were posted, but here people have names, avatars and signatures. Your eye is surely drawn more to posts by members who have consistently posted good things in the past? Unlike Reddit, which rewards what the group-mind values, this rewards what you, personally, value. Places like this are markedly slower to organize than on imageboards whenever there's a "happening", but they tend to be more meticulous and strategic, and so are important in the longer game. I also can't think of anywhere near as many posts on imageboards that have added real value to my life as I can from here, where I've been for a fraction as long.

The restriction to male posters here also solves a problem less controlled forums are crippled by: the way in which male group dynamics are changed by the introduction of women. It only takes one woman, and one thirsty man, to destroy the functionality of any group, and begin the slow change of focus from whatever the group cared about before to women's feelings and vaginas. The only large board I can think of which has escaped this plague, despite not being strictly controlled, is the misc forum over at bodybuilding.com, which is somehow functionally more like an imageboard. I think it's due to the extremely masculine focus of the main board and the fact that, with no one to enforce social consequences for lack of sensitivity towards fee-fees, easily-triggered women know to stay away. There's no dopamine fix to be found; the most they'll get for their screeching is a "top fucking kek" and then everyone ignores them.

I think my idealised forum would be a combination of an imageboard, or some anonymised version of IRC for shit-talking, spontaneous organisation, discussing things of no real consequence, and expressing views in a context where it doesn't matter who gets offended by what, and then this place, pretty much exactly as it is, to discuss game, give/receive lifestyle advice, and read well thought out posts by people who care about expressing themselves in the best possible terms to this community; posts you know will still be there in a year's time.

Reddit is the exact, polar opposite of this - shit-talking is preserved forever, and almost inversely ranked by quality, whilst important (and therefore longer than 7 word) posts are drowned out in a sea of excrement. I hope it dies. I really do - good fucking riddance. The sudden move towards censorship seems unlikely to make the site sufficiently attractive to the kind of women who currently avoid it that they can monetise it. If anything, it's more likely to drive away a large portion of the core demographic, or even cause them to start a rival site that doesn't regulate what is and isn't acceptable "behaviour".

Post: #88

https://www.reddit.com/r/PaoMustResign/c...of_reddit/



Pao has a rich, historied past of this sort of behavior.



http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/03/...ortunists/

Quote:[...]
Let me give these over-eager gender activists some advice: you may want to think twice before adopting Pao as your victim du jour. Because evidence given during the trial reveals that she is anything but a victim. Work emails reveal her to be a callous and resentful employee who bullied colleagues and held grudges.

Her link to Buddy Fletcher, a man with a notorious reputation for frivolous discrimination lawsuits, also raises a very large question mark over her motivation in bringing the claims against Kleiner Perkins.

It’s worth first remembering that Kleiner Perkins was an odd target for a gender discrimination lawsuit. The firm has a much better track record of hiring female talent than its rivals. Women make up 20 per cent of the firm’s members, which is double the average for Silicon Valley venture capital firms. Throughout the trial, Kleiner’s attorneys were able to draw on a number of high-profile female venture capitalists who testified that the firm was one of the most female-friendly in Silicon Valley.

Kleiner maintained that Pao was let go not because she was a woman, but because she was an unpleasant person to work with. Given the result of the case, it’s clear that the jury was persuaded by Kleiner’s arguments, but there has been little discussion in the tech media of the evidence that persuaded them. So let’s dip our toe into some of it.

Kleiner’s attorneys didn’t have to look very far for evidence of Pao’s horrible personal failings. Emails from 2009 show Pao critcising her assistant for taking time off work to help her landlord, a non-English speaker, who had been in a serious car accident. Pao’s response to the domestic crisis was as follows:

“It’s great that you want to be helpful to your landlord. It would be better for me if you could come to work on time. Let me know if you think differently, but I think your job should be your priority.”

The woman had a heart of gold, as you can see.


But admonishing her staff for helping victims of road accidents was just one aspect of Pao’s sociopathy and selfishness. Bizarrely, she kept a chart listing “resentments” that she held over her colleagues at Kleiner Perkins. She also admitted to sending negative e-mails about coworkers behind their backs, and acknowledged that she had once bullied a colleague to tears.

It’s funny how none of this information has made it into the mainstream media or the tech press. They’re all desperate to present Pao as a victim because they’ve bought into a bizarre, self-flagellating narrative about how awful women have it in the tech industry. (They don’t – and especially not at Kleiner Perkins.)

Journalists have preferred to laud Pao as a feminist underdog – a brave victim with a social conscience trying to change society for the better – despite the fact that many of her victims were other women. It’s almost as if the media were blindly supporting Pao because of her gender. Which is ironic, really, isn’t it?
[...]

Post: #89

(06-11-2015 07:08 PM)Ocelot Wrote:  ...save yourself the effort and don't bother trying to get into it: Reddit is one of the worst site designs ever created, and the sooner it dies the better.

For a start, it's hard to decode what is and isn't important information from the clunky layout, and the actual mechanics of the site encourage homogeneity of ideas: posts with lots of "upvotes" appear higher up than posts with lots of "downvotes" by default, punishing deviation from the dominant ideas and beliefs of whatever subreddit you're currently in. Coupled with the fact that there are persistent user identities, the desire for ones ideas not to be rendered invisible by mass-downvoting, and the similar desire to be a respected "member" of the "community" create a network of incentives which are thoroughly anti-intellectual; where the best-loved (and therefore most visible) members of each subreddit are those who are capable of most creatively expressing orthodox thoughts...

I generally agree with this analysis, but it's worth noting it wasn't always like this. Reddit started as a small community of mostly tech-oriented guys. There was a lot of quality on the site. For awhile Reddit worked [or seemed to] when its audience was limited and things like iPhones had not made internet browsing on your phone the primary pasttime of 20somethings.

Back in the day when these things were starting up, there was this notion that if you entrusted people with the basic power to make decisions for themselves, that the results would be good. This is really sort of a core idea to Democracy and Capitalism, so it's not really a shock that people who grew up wanted to bring this core idea to the internet. After all, we finally could make a perfectly agnostic democratic voting system. Then all the quality stuff would rise to the top, right?

That's what I thought at the time. Turns out, we were wrong. The voting system breaks once you reach a critical mass of uneducated, low-effort voters. It's been an educational experience for a lot of us, and hopefully some meaningful lessons can be drawn from the bad examples these sites set for creating better social systems.

Post: #90

(06-10-2015 02:50 PM)kaotic Wrote:  

Millions? Nope, just one voice was silenced, look:



Than means that now we cant see her twats, but her 1128 followers can. Thats like the whole internet brah!

-----

On a side note, Ive always wondered how is it that these "community managers" at the supposedly big, influential web sites have so little followers. An ex of mine worked for a company that managed social media and "follower acquisition" for a couple of huge companies. They had huge budgets assigned for each of them.

This company total Twitter following? a whooping 350 followers, and that included their whole staff.

Post: #91

I never got into reddit. Whenever I visited it looked like the online equivalent of static on a TV set.

That said, this is the first time I've heard that was a large community of fat shamers posting their hate in bulk, and using terms like 'SJW' like we do here. So the Streisand effect is real.

Post: #92

Highly relevant: http://www.everyjoe.com/2015/06/11/news/...assault/#1

Post: #93

Quote:Even the subReddit r/whalewatching was banned, as it was suspected of being an offshoot of r/fatpeoplehate, but was actually a subReddit community of actual whale watchers that had existed for two years.

COME ON! Try and discriminate properly guys!

Post: #94

(06-11-2015 08:50 PM)demolition Wrote:  

(06-11-2015 07:08 PM)Ocelot Wrote:  ...save yourself the effort and don't bother trying to get into it: Reddit is one of the worst site designs ever created, and the sooner it dies the better.

For a start, it's hard to decode what is and isn't important information from the clunky layout, and the actual mechanics of the site encourage homogeneity of ideas: posts with lots of "upvotes" appear higher up than posts with lots of "downvotes" by default, punishing deviation from the dominant ideas and beliefs of whatever subreddit you're currently in. Coupled with the fact that there are persistent user identities, the desire for ones ideas not to be rendered invisible by mass-downvoting, and the similar desire to be a respected "member" of the "community" create a network of incentives which are thoroughly anti-intellectual; where the best-loved (and therefore most visible) members of each subreddit are those who are capable of most creatively expressing orthodox thoughts...

I generally agree with this analysis, but it's worth noting it wasn't always like this. Reddit started as a small community of mostly tech-oriented guys. There was a lot of quality on the site. For awhile Reddit worked [or seemed to] when its audience was limited and things like iPhones had not made internet browsing on your phone the primary pasttime of 20somethings.

Back in the day when these things were starting up, there was this notion that if you entrusted people with the basic power to make decisions for themselves, that the results would be good. This is really sort of a core idea to Democracy and Capitalism, so it's not really a shock that people who grew up wanted to bring this core idea to the internet. After all, we finally could make a perfectly agnostic democratic voting system. Then all the quality stuff would rise to the top, right?

That's what I thought at the time. Turns out, we were wrong. The voting system breaks once you reach a critical mass of uneducated, low-effort voters. It's been an educational experience for a lot of us, and hopefully some meaningful lessons can be drawn from the bad examples these sites set for creating better social systems.

As samsamsam wrote earlier:

(06-10-2015 03:49 PM)samsamsam Wrote:  reddit is fine if you have a real hobby.

While it's true that almost any subreddit you find is going to have some weird prevailing nerdish culture and dumb content that everyone upvotes all the time, the upside of this is that the community is often actually full of nerds with lots of experience and knowledge about whatever topic.

For example, there's an entire subreddit (with almost 150k subscribers) devoted to Slow Cooking (and of course, more general Cooking). There's Build a PC, Ultralight hiking, Archaeology, Guitars. Whatever your hobby might be (besides getting laid), reddit is at least worth a look.

The great thing about reddit's design is that on the one hand, it has a large existing community of people who use the site, so getting a critical mass of users for a new subreddit is easier than it would be if you were to just start your own reddit clone on your own site (remember how fast TRP grew); but on the other hand, if you're not political you can pretty much close yourself off in your own subreddit and ignore all the bullshit. Where else on the internet are you going to find a thread with 100 replies on the subject of alternate guitar tunings?

Part of the reason for this is, actually, the design and layout of the comment threads. Compare reddit to a forum like this, you'll note that FAR less screen real estate is spent on stuff like usernames, avatars, signatures, titles, and other characterization stuff. By default, the focus is the comments themselves, not who posted them. On reasonably-sized non-political subreddits, usually the comment threads are quite manageable in size and the voting system works quite well, with the garbage comments being filtered and the factual, well-written ones floated up. Sometimes a "no memes" and some similar rules are required to keep cheap-vote-grabbing posts from overwhelming the forum, but many communities have been able to manage this. The signal:drama ratio on reddit is actually very good if you stay away from the retard quarantine areas. It's not perfect of course, but it has distinct advantages to other types of forums even given the potential flaws with popularity-voting and such.

Post: #95

Guys!!

Guys!!!!

I can't believe I'm typing these words.

Ellen Pao doesn't know how the site she runs works.

She submitted a private message to a subreddit.
https://archive.is/9RFIp

So now of course the entire section is filled with deletion notices.

Details here: http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/c...essage_to/

How can a person be the CEO of a company and not know how its product works??!! wowjustwow

Post: #96

(06-12-2015 12:01 PM)Kid Strangelove Wrote:  How can a person be the CEO of a company and not know how its product works??!! wowjustwow

Because they were in place to make the company profitable.

Post: #97

(06-12-2015 12:01 PM)Kid Strangelove Wrote:  Guys!!

Guys!!!!

I can't believe I'm typing these words.

Ellen Pao doesn't know how the site she runs works.

She submitted a private message to a subreddit.
https://archive.is/9RFIp

So now of course the entire section is filled with deletion notices.

Details here: http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/c...essage_to/

How can a person be the CEO of a company and not know how its product works??!! wowjustwow

[img]C:\My Documents\pictures\lol.jpg[/img]

Post: #98

(06-12-2015 12:01 PM)Kid Strangelove Wrote:  Guys!!

Guys!!!!

I can't believe I'm typing these words.

Ellen Pao doesn't know how the site she runs works.

She submitted a private message to a subreddit.
https://archive.is/9RFIp

So now of course the entire section is filled with deletion notices.

Details here: http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/c...essage_to/

How can a person be the CEO of a company and not know how its product works??!! wowjustwow

What was the message? On the archive link it just says you need to login to reddit to see the message.

Post: #99

(06-12-2015 01:09 PM)Samseau Wrote:  What was the message? On the archive link it just says you need to login to reddit to see the message.

The link itself is the joke. No one could read it because they're not logged in as her.

Post: #100

A couple of days ago this Fat Chick posted on FB how she wanted to run cyclists off the road for not using the sidewalk....

It made it to a biking FB site I'm part of, I said that at least the biker has used the sidewalk once, unlike her.

Someone said "I was fat shaming".

I replied with "Quit thought shaming me you white woman. Check yo privilege". Bitch didn't know what to say.