Comments for Slate Star Codex

Comment on Freedom On The Centralized Web by cgag

cgag — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 22:15:06 +0000

I once posted on reddit about an idea for a kickstarter for social movements, for example, pledging to move to Voat if 100k other people will on the same day.

No one replied because it turns out I was hellbanned (shadowbanned).

I’m curious if anyone thinks such a thing might be useful or has other ideas for overcoming the problem of everyone needing to move at once.

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Comment on Freedom On The Centralized Web by Pku

Pku — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 22:14:18 +0000

I may not have been clear, but that was what I was trying to say: That without OSHA, businesses can easily think “well, no one here will get injured” and go on (and if we remove potential lawsuits, there’s nobody but the potential workers talking about it – and most potential workers wouldn’t think an accident would happen to them, so would probably ignore regulations). With the threat of regulation fines, it’s suddenly a (relatively) low-cost by high-probability threat, so it gets taken care of.
(The example I was thinking of, regarding “implementing workplace safety puts you at a ridiculous disadvantage”: Say a town has a dozen plastic toy manufacturing plants, but no OSHA. Six of them put in safety regulations, but those cost them money, so they’re quickly outperformed by the six plants that didn’t and doomed to obscurity. One of those has an accident, gets sued, and goes bankrupt as a result, but the other five dominate the market and hit it big (until they start having enough workers that lawsuits actually become a high-risk possibility and they start implementing safety measures, by which point several workers have lost limbs overall)).

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Comment on Freedom On The Centralized Web by Niklas

Niklas — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 22:12:38 +0000

The obvious universal – and thus not very meaningful – point of cohesion is that all of them claim to care about “ethics in gaming journalism”.

I’m not gonna get into the neverending argument over whether yes indeed this is what they’re all about or no it’s actually just a front for harassing women etc.

But one thing that’s clear is that you cannot signal being both a social justice advocate and a Gamergater. If you involve yourself in it, the SJ community will not accept you as one of their own and thus consider you problematic.

Which, in turn, creates another point of cohesion for Gamergate: Preference of associating with a group SJ considers their enemy. If you cared about SJ, you wouldn’t do it.

Which itself is sort of a mortal sin in that community, I suppose.

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Comment on Freedom On The Centralized Web by another_anonymous

another_anonymous — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 22:09:18 +0000

In addition to what Vaniver wrote above, see also this series of blog posts with some suggestions that I think EY would approve of (and which in any case seem interesting) — I’m linking to the last, as it’s the most concrete (though the others are also worth reading) .

The author seems to be in the LW/SSC-sphere, so they might be reading this…

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Comment on Freedom On The Centralized Web by birdboy2000

birdboy2000 — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 22:01:50 +0000

In theory, yes. In practice, reddit has the regular kind of moderators too, and they have a habit of putting their thumbs on the scale when they don’t like the way metamoderation is going. (Heard rumors about the same problems at Slashdot since Dice bought them, can’t verify.)

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Comment on Freedom On The Centralized Web by Nornagest

Nornagest — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 21:46:36 +0000

it’s very easy to share the source of whatever you heard, and now can’t help but assume that people who “read things somewhere”, without specifying where, are bulshitting.

Attribution norms are different in casual conversation. Giving an attribution for something in person, unsolicited, is likely to be seen as an attempt at a status play*, and most Internet-native sources are so incredibly low-status that using one in this context is about a step above growing a second head that has horns and fangs and utters only blasphemy.

This isn’t even chan-exclusive; 4Chan is about as bad as it gets, but Reddit or Tumblr or some random blog that your interlocutor’s never heard of aren’t much better. Wikipedia isn’t too bad, being only mildly disreputable.

* (E.g. “I read in the New York Times that…” “Well, I read in the Wall Street Journal that…”)

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Comment on OT24: Hopen Change by Nancy Lebovitz

Nancy Lebovitz — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 21:34:20 +0000

Assuming a significant rise in sea level from global warming, how much of that metal would be under water?

It would still be retrievable, but with considerably more difficulty.

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Comment on Freedom On The Centralized Web by Chalid

Chalid — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 21:33:46 +0000

Many MS products have been optimized to appeal to corporations, not individuals. They might suck for you but they don’t suck for the megabank buying 30000 Office licenses.

(And of course if the corporation you work for forces you to use Word, you are more likely to use it on your personal machine out of familiarity, which makes everyone in your network marginally more likely to use it too…)

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Comment on Freedom On The Centralized Web by Randy M

Randy M — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 21:19:29 +0000

You can conversationally “clikc the hyperlink” with the command “Oh yeah, where did you read that? I’d like to check it out.”
Althought granted that does fairly often return a 404:Bad Gateway.

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Comment on Freedom On The Centralized Web by Randy M

Randy M — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 21:16:47 +0000

Well no, but I don’t think those people are the one’s Facebook’s hypothetical competitors are courting. They want the one’s who like Facebook, except for X,Y, & Z which new Fakeblock has, but they can’t use Fakeblock because all their friends are on Facebook and then how would they know what’s up with their friend’s kids/dogs/lunches?

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