I was looking over some of my charts of albums recently and I thought this might be a cool idea.

If you don't know what a chart is, basically you can go here and put together a chart of up to 100 of your favorite albums to show people a quick look at your taste or whatever. I've seen people use this as favorite albums, albums that mean a lot to them but aren't necessarily their favorite, people putting custom pictures and making a list of their favorite artists, people making a chart of albums with a "theme" (food on the cover, albums about break-ups, albums of certain genres, etc.), the possibility is whatever you feel like putting together a bunch of albums/artists/anything else you can think of together to show to other people interested in them. I thought it might be a cool idea to see what other ~music users enjoy listening to.

You can also use this to show your rateyourmusic account if you have one, your last.fm, your sputnikmusic, anything pertaining to music that would be cool to look at.

I always had a little problem with Laura Charles in this 1985 cult classic.

At the beginning of the movie, Laura's manager is begging her to play a tape. He tells her a man named Eddie Arcadian will hurt him if he doesn't get it played. He is literally terrified and begging. You can see he is terrified.

Laura actually says to him, "My life isn't filled with all that...... Drama." That's how she says it, she pauses before the word drama. Think about how dismissive that is. He is scared for his life and tells her as much, and she just says something that dismissive. Then she berates him like it is his fault he is in the situation. And the kicker is, she says her life isn't filled with all "of that drama" for two reasons. She liked the idea of it. The idea of thinking she was this person with no drama. And because she didn't care because it didn't affect her.

So the movie goes on. Now Laura is in danger of Eddie. It was all because Eddie wanted the tape played. There wasn't any "drama" in her life that caused it. But does she stop and realize that? Nope. Does she for one second think, "Gee maybe it wasn't my manager's fault he was in this situation. I wonder if he is okay?" Nope. She suddenly cares because it affects her.

And then everything in the end works out for her of course. And we never know if Eddie killed the manager or what happened to him. Laura never even looked for him to even just apologize, let alone make sure he wasn't dead.

What are your thoughts?

This place seems a bit sparse so lets have some comics talk.

Now Im no hard core Batman fan so Im looking at this from a casual lens but it seems to me that Bruce Wayne has the potential to do SO MUCH for Gotham with his billions but doesnt because he wants to run around at night reliving his revenge fantasy over and over.

Yeah he donates to charities and dedicates an orphans home every now and then but with his economic wingspan you'd think he could dump money into the city to improve it in all aspects.

Thoughts?

TLDR: Bruce Wayne is gotham's biggest villain. Change my mind.

I'm sure some of you might have this as a hobby or more of a profession.

I'm pretty new to it as I haven't really done much at all yet, and I'm looking to create a sheath for a knife. Are there any good videos to watch before diving into it, or any articles that come to mind?

Think of this as a place to discuss this topic as I didn't see one posted yet. Any input will be helpful!

Who are you rooting for? Who do you hope to see knocked out? After a rather unpredictable two matchdays anything can happen.

Personally I'd put my money on Germany despite their weak performance until now. But I'm also hoping see an underdog team make it to the finals.

Westworld Season 2 is in full swing and I love it so far, but would you live in Westworld if you could? A world with no consequences other than its own societal pressures seems pretty enticing...

While reading up on what it takes to run this site, it just occurred to me that the site is hosted on one server with one network connection. Adding a CDN or cloud based DDOS protection would run contrary to the "no third party" thing we've got going on here, so that doesn't seem like an option.

So I got to wondering, what would happen if a malicious actor were to sic a botnet on us? I imagine the outcome would not be good. Do we have any strategies to deal with this?

Any perspectives on that, fellow Tildoes? Tildarians, Tilderinos, Tildonkeys, etc.?

From what I can tell, the main argument against it is that it's not historically accurate. I guess that makes sense, but A) that doesn't seem to warrant the utter seething rage that I see from opponents, and B) I rather doubt the Battlefield franchise has made it a habit to be 1-to-1 regarding history anyway. I've played none of them, but I saw someone mention that in-game events are definitely not historically accurate anyway. So I guess the "keep women out" side is conflating the game's setting with a declaration of dedication to historical accuracy? Seems silly to me to take umbrage at a game failing to meet an expectation that you invented.

Then again, maybe I'm wrong. My initial gut reaction was to write it off as casual sexism and an unwillingness to break tradition, and while I'm sure that explains a minority of the outrage, I highly doubt the controversy can be explained so simply.

Anyone here want to way in?

Happy Father's Day!

I thought I will chat a bit about my very favourite cartoon father figure - Iroh from The Last Airbender.

What I find really interesting about this character, and honestly fans can probably write novels about him, is that while he plays a major father figure to the cast, his own son is never really seen on screen and not given much development.

Still, he openly and freely offers his wisdom and help to anyone, whether they are seeking or accepting of it or not. This is not to say that he forces his views on anyone, but is usually the opposite, allowing the kids to weigh and process issues on their own with his guidance, which ends up visibly frustrating for him when it comes to Zuko.

There are lots of examples of him being a good "father”, but most notable for me is his quick forgivess of Zuko.

For all who have seen the series, what do you think? And for those who haven't, you really need to.

I thought about posting this as a comment in the other active pronoun conversation but I didn't want to derail it with a tangent. For starters I should make it clear I believe honoring someone's pronoun preferences is a matter of basic decency and respect. Conversely, insisting on using a different word when you know someone doesn't like it is, frankly, a jerk move. It's being antagonistic for no good reason.

That said, an acquaintance recently informed me that her 4-year-old prefers to use the pronoun "they." I have to admit something about this situation doesn't sit right with me. I'm also the parent of a 4-year-old, and it's clear to me that kids that age aren't developmentally equipped to make an informed decision about gender identity.

I can't help but feel like the parents are putting words in their kid's mouth, projecting a non-binary assumption onto a minor who lacks the cognitive and emotional maturity to manage it in any meaningful way. Saddling a preschooler with that kind of baggage just strikes me as irresponsible parenting.

I'm not saying there should be some kind of hard-line age of consent, just that four is too young. One ought to be far enough along developmentally to come to one's own conclusions about pronouns and gender presentation.

Apologies if I'm strawmanning, but I guess the argument could be made that all kids should be referred to as "they" — by default — until they reach an appropriate age to choose their own gender identities. I can sympathize with that as a goal, but it strikes me as unrealistic. I don't think society would ever be able to attain that kind of widespread change.

I'm curious what my fellow tilders think about this subject. (FWIW, I am referring to this kid as "they" and keeping my objections to myself, apart from this discussion.)

This movie absolutely destroyed me.

To be fair, I am very affected by the sadness and trauma of others, so it's not surprising that this movie almost killed me. To borrow from a comment I made on another user's post "This movie was a 2 hour long gut punch, and the end was a fever dream." It was so very traumatic, exhausting, uncomfortable, and TERRIFYING. And traditional horror movies do not ever scare me.

My overwhelming feeling for most of the movie was profound sadness. This family torn apart, the horrible things they say and think... the panic attack that Peter has and when he asks his friend to hold his hand? That was one of the times I actually cried. His numb stupor after his sisters head gets knocked off by a telephone pole(!!!!!). His mother's screams when she finds her headless daughter in the back of the car. The desperation when Steve splashes Annie in the face with water. The two times (one reality, one dream) Annie says just awful things to Peter. Peter smashing his face into the desk. Peter screaming/pleading "Mommy!" as Annie tries to get into the attic after him. These are all times I felt overwhelming sadness. Tons of other feelings: anger, disgust, terror, etc. But huge amounts of sadness that I've never felt during other horror movies.

Let me preface this by saying I know what the director has said about his vision and "what the movie really means." But I've never cared about a movie enough to actually fundamentally disagree with the person who created it before. self-deprecating eyeroll

This movie as a straightforward demon-possession/ occult movie does nothing for me. The whole time I had no doubt that it was a family torn apart by mental illness and that devastated and terrified me.

I'm going to post my inexpert interpretation as a comment. It won't be a synopsis, but there will be oodles of spoilers.

*Edit: I thought the movie was great. I don't know if I'll ever see it again.

I wrote this thinking about how people think that world peace is something worth moving towards in a lot academic spheres. It is being used to justify modern continued injustice and i have a lot of problems with that. I think that this more 'peaceful' world isn't that great of one if it comes at the sacrifice of our many current problems we face today. I look at few major academic theorists like Ian Morris and Pinker. I was thinking of actualy discussing both in more detail but i just gave their wiki sums for their books though i have read them becaause i was a little lazy. i should change that in a possible follow up but i wanted to hear what people thought about this before that. https://diogenesoftoronto.wordpress.com/2018/06/05/a-closer-look-at-world-peace/

I've been consuming a ton of media about the world wars lately. There seems to be an inexhaustible supply of historical fiction, records, memoires, and documentaries. But so far, very few things have come close to painting a cohesive picture.

Most of it focuses on hot spots like Verdun, Pearl Harbor, Dunkirk, Normandy, the haulocaust, the atomic bomb, enigma, u-boats, the luftwaffe, Stalingrad... And I can see why. Even on a microcosm level, the conditions of the stories are unimaginable.

The issue I'm having is that I feel like our cultural memory of these events his been eroded over time. We have these impressions of what we think it was like, but not an overarching understanding of the complex series of events throughout the 20th century. We have an overabundance of records, photographs, film, and documentation in general, but maybe it's the overabundance that makes the digestion such an insurmountable undertaking.

What are your experiences with studying this time period? How do you feel about the quality of your understanding? And finally, do you have any recommendations for myself and others?

Solo is not doing so hot in the theaters right now, despite the good reviews. Here's hoping that positive word-of-mouth can save it. But what I've noticed online is a huge amount of people placing most of the blame on the divisiveness of The Last Jedi. While I never claimed that the Last Jedi was a perfect movie and it definitely has some serious flaws, I feel like the hate train for that movie is hugely overblown online compared to what actual people out in the real world think. So I figured I'd check in here and see what the general opinions are on The Last Jedi.

EDIT: shit, anyway I can fix that title?

Well hello,
I'm still learning about the blockchain day by day and it's quit interesting to try to "predict" the future use of this technology. But i have my own doubts.(maybe I'm still lacking in research)

1. If everything will be decentralised, how will you make the profit out of it?(business point of view)
2. If you have million dollar today to work on blockchain technology what business would you get into to get appropriate profit in near future?(Of course excluding those exchange of cryptos)
   P.S: You are not a tech company and just want to enter in the field.

Hey all,

There's been a huge amount of response to this post about Hyponotoad's banning that I think merits a lot more consideration than as just a bunch of fractured comment threads.

Some questions that come to mind:

~ What does it mean to have "quality discussion",?

~ How do you distinguish between quality discussion and not quality discussion?

~ What does it mean to act in "bad faith"?

~ How, as a community, do we best achieve tildes' stated goals?

Older comments have an unfair advantage on Tildes if you sort by votes: they have had more time to collect votes.

What's interesting is that Reddit is less affected by this problem: since the default sort is "best", which sorts by expected (in a statistical sense) upvote/downvote ratio, newer comments with a good ratio can quickly move to the top.

I don't see a straightforward way to extend this to Tildes, since we don't have downvotes. Any ideas? Of course you can sort by newest first, but then you lose the benefit of votes entirely.

Maybe we could compute the expected final number of votes, based on age, current score, and a model of how comments gather votes as they age? Is there a way to download tildes data somewhere? I could try to investigate.

So I've been having a slightly off-topic discussion on a thread here and figured this would be a good subject to have wider input on.

I don't think markdown adds anything to Tildes and I think it actually degrades the experience for new users. Right now we're mostly old experienced reddit users and mods, but that hopefully will change. To me, markdown adds a not insignificant hurdle to formatting. Markdown has very few uses besides reddit and Github, and even then there's a few different types.

I suggest a WYSIWYG text box with a tabbed HTML option for those who want to use code formatting. Let's use something that's standard and encourages users to learn useful code.

Tell me why I'm wrong Tildes!

Edit: I primarily use mobile, so maybe that's part of the disconnect here. But it seems I'm the only person who cares and still thinks markdown is almost useless. I'm fine being in the minority. I still feel it's a good idea to look beyond the bleeding edge to the time when there's 300,000 or 3,000,000 uses.

Have a good day everyone!

Trailers

• Battlefield 5 Official Multiplayer Trailer

• FIFA 19 Official Reveal Trailer with UEFA Champions League

• Origin Access Premier: Official Reveal Trailer

• Unravel Two Official Reveal trailer

• Sea of Solitude: Official Teaser Trailer

• NBA LIVE 19 Official Reveal Trailer

• Madden NFL 19 - Official Reveal Trailer

• Command and Conquer: Rivals - Official Reveal Trailer

• Anthem Official Cinematic Trailer

• 4 Minutes of Anthem Open World Co-Op Exploration Gameplay - E3 2018

Thoughts?

Here are the top ten reddit comments from Feb of 2018, based on their character length multiplied by their votes.

E.g. the first comment has 5,144 characters with a vote of 42,457 so it had the highest rank of 218,398,808.

https://www.reddit.com/r/justneckbeardthings/comments/7wwyw5/neckbeard_crew/du4cbk5
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/7xkstl/shooting_at_south_florida_high_school/du94nag
https://www.reddit.com/r/uwaterloo/comments/7w0dgv/dave_tompkins_is_overrated/dtwzhbz
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7vwkqg/hey_reddit_what_products_are_identical_to_a_brand/dtvtkzd
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/80xs1v/china_bans_george_orwells_animal_farm_as_xi/duzfoko
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/80h9bj/why_is_it_okay_to_cook_some_animals_alive_while/duvwgg8
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7xztxf/who_is_the_worst_person_youve_ever_met/ducsa86
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7zwebj/barbershairdressers_of_reddit_how_exactly_do_you/durco2m
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7wi1g8/what_concept_fucks_you_up_the_most/du13k9x
https://www.reddit.com/r/wifesharing/comments/7wa854/my_bf_is_looking_for_inspiration_what_would_you/duz0q9l

On the whole, there does seem to be a correlation between comment length and comment quality, especially when votes are factored in. More details here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRC08EWmy1GgzdrIvR2p9EGUpQpIbYjp8MmvlgfNT4REbXbjxOUUdXBHMqXnF_4OGsR9PrV_-xuehlW/pubhtml

So, it might just be that I'm older and notice these things more, but it really seems to me that fan groups are becoming more and more toxic overall. It feels like over the past 5-8 years specifically fanbases are reaching toxic levels faster and faster.

I remember when bronies became a thing, it took them like 3-4 years before the dangerous, threatening, and assholeish behavior really began to become common. Then Steven Universe came out and it only took them like 2 years to start sending death threats to people who didn't support their head-cannons. Rick and Morty went toxic in under a year and a half.

Then there's the shit in long-running franchises. Star Wars has had multiple of the actors shutting off social media from the toxic bile being shot at them. Chris Pratt is getting hate for what Star Lord did in Infinity War.

There's memes too, weirdly enough. Calarts is the biggest example I can think of. People made a dumb joke about how all the cartoons look a like today and someone pointed out how a few of the artists went to this one school in California and it became a catch all term for the shitty artstyle, and then within like 4 weeks the school has to go into lockdown because someone made a tongue-in-cheek threat of shooting the school up. A few years ago trolling attempts would be things like ordering a bunch of pizzas to the school or something annoying and dickish but overall harmless like that.

I know toxicity amongst fanbases has always been a thing, but it really seems to me that they're reaching unseen levels and doing so faster and faster. I mean Rick and Morty fans rioted over fucking dipping sauce, there are the aforementioned Steven Universe death threats, the directed attacks of actors on social media, fucking joking about shooting schools up because you don't like the art-style a few of their graduates used in a time where we've seen like 6 school shootings in half a year, there was that whole Voltron incident where a fan stole storyboards or something and threatened to release them to the public unless the creators of the show made their favorite gay ship a thing.

I guess what I'm getting at is what the fuck is happening that's poisoning every single community online? It's like everything has suddenly devolved into Youtube comments. How did we get to this level of toxicity? Or am I just more aware of this shit now and it's not really all that different from how it used to be?

Dear Tildes community,

this is an issue that's bugged me for some time. I might struggle to put this into the right words initially, because I have not studied either philosophy, psychology, biology, sociology or anthropology. Yet, all of those fields could input into this. I will edit this post to clarify things once people start commenting.

I will begin by stating the question at the root of the issue I am trying to explore:

Does de-humanisation of others occur automatically, as soon as we believe that we can predict their actions?

Things to consider:

• What is a measure of 'humanity'? Is it consciousness? Self-awareness? Intelligence? Empathy?
• Is it true that a more 'conscious' or 'intelligent' creature is closer to us in nature and therefore should enjoy more rights, considerations, or respect? (Case in point: Some countries will not allow performing surgery on an octopus without anesthesia, due to them being considered very high up on the ladder of consciousness)
• It is easy to conflate consciousness and intelligence. I think that's a bit of a trap. I have often looked at intelligence as a sort of "clock rate" of the brain. As in, you might be able to process information very quickly, but that's still pointless if you're running the wrong algorithms, or have very little knowledge to rely on. Intelligence all by itself is not a good measure of how 'conscious' or 'aware' or 'human' something is. Often, however, people tend to call animals more intelligent or less intelligent when they mean 'more highly developed', or 'more conscious'. The same probably applies to people as well.
• Additionally, among self-aware, conscious beings (humans), empathy and intelligence van cary wildly. Therefore, does consciousness, or even 'human-ness' vary? Is a highly intelligent psychopath less human than a much less intelligent but empathetic person?
• What do we use to assess whether a human is highly developed, or less developed / desirable? (Brushing aside the notion that we obviously shouldn't do so). I think it is important to look at what mechanisms have been used in the past to demonise swathes of the population, in order to discredit them or further some kind of agenda. Take African people during the slave trade. They were called primitive, less intelligent, less human. In fact, in more subtle ways this even happens to women nowadays. They are constantly belittled by chauvinists, for supposedly being less intellectually capable due to their gender. Are these all forms of de-humanisation, linked predominantly to intellect?
• What is this founded upon? Is it predictability of their actions? Let's try to go full circle. How does one discredit a part of the population? One observes them and demonises their behaviours (and with that, culture, etc.) The predictability of such behaviours is essential in this. You cannot reliably say that "those brutes do [x], how disgusting", without there being frequent evidence of it actually happening. (On the flip-side, could people be predictably advanced or developed?)
• What do we think of predictable people in general? Predictability has negative connotations. At best it's boring (say, a highly intelligent beaurocrat), at worst, stupid / less human (say, racists talking about another culture being predictably primitive)
• Is there an implication of people, or beings, who are more predictable, having less free will? If your intellectual faculties are limited, or you operate on instinct more than you do on rational or logical deduction, you become more predictable, ergo, predictability == stupidity. (I know this is a fallacy, but I am trying to establish why one might irrationally and subconsciously dehumanise, not arguing in favour of this dehumanisation or trying to defend it)
• Take our favourite pets. Cats and dogs. They are pretty highly developed and if it wasn't for humans, they'd be unchallenged apex predators ruling the world. They display complex behaviours, at times even hard to predict ones. But still, they are animals and behave in reasonably reliable patterns. They are also not able to pass the mirror-test for self awareness, implying they are not (or only in extremely limited ways). So, one could argue they are less human, less intelligent. Now look at insects. Even less intelligent. Even though it could be argued that some (like ants) display a form of swarm intelligence, they are still extremely predictable. (Except for, perhaps, the flight patterns of flies or mosquitoes, which evolution has scrambled into extremely random patterns to avoid them being swatted. But that's just hard-coded into their genes, not an intelligent thought process)
• So, once more. Think of someone you really don't like. Do you ever call them stupid for their actions? Would you ever say "here we go again, they are doing this again". Particularly if they are your boss? Perhaps it helps you cope with their shitty behaviour to dehumanise that person. Make them a lesser human being, to compensate for the fact that they make you feel powerless in their work. If dehumanisation is such an immediate and convenient mechanism to protect yourself from feelings of inferiority, or to stop yourself from being threatened (say, by a different culture), perhaps it is in fact an ingrained behaviour, which expresses itself on a larger scale once fueled by propaganda and political intent. If we identify it and understand how it happens, we may protect ourselves against it by elevating others to a higher status of 'human-ness'.
• When we 'have figured someone out', we are stating we can predict them. Are we putting them beneath us, henceforth? Are they 'less' than us in some ways? It gives us power to be able to predict, so it makes us more powerful than them in some way, so it makes them lesser beings in some ways.

Why am I bringing all this up? In my life, so far, I have gone from being very insecure, mistrusting and scared of people, to much more open, trusting and confident.

The more insecure I was, the more time I spent trying to prove to myself that I was somehow superior to others. Generally using intelligence as an argument (uggggh....). You know, like the goth teenager sitting in their basement, who is oh-so-individual and everyone else is so stupid and nobody understands my pain, etc. (see, dehumanising my past self right there, haha).

The more I started trusting people and the more I started seeing everyone around me as humans, humans just like me, the more I began to see how others still apply these weird dehumanisation mechanisms to make themselves feel superior. This made me wonder whether there is some kind of innate drive to do so. Try to predict others, or paint them as predictable, to prove that you are superior to them, because they would not be able to predict your actions, as you are so far beyond their capabilities.

So yeah, uhm....let me know what comes up in yer heads as you read through this, I'd be most interested to hear your perspectives.

A long time ago I had noticed a trend developing on reddit where people were starting to preface their comments with: "I for one". It's pretty insignificant, which is why I never made a post about it at the time. Since then, its use seems to have spread significantly on the site and I've seen it a bit here as well.

It makes sense to use the phrase when talking about or quoting another person to help separate their opinions from your own. The weird thing is many people now seem to use it when its not ambiguous that the comment is their own opinion. I was under the assumption that the default position should be that the comment is the opinion of the person that posted it.

For example:

"I for one, prefer dark chocolate over milk chocolate."

Is the same as:

"I prefer dark chocolate over milk chocolate."

There's nothing wrong with using the phrase, it just reads like someone trying to pad out an essay for school.

Have you noticed people using the phrase on other sites? Is it a phenomenon more specific to reddit?
Do you use the phrase yourself? If you do, what is your thought process when typing it out?

https://careers.blizzard.com/en-us/openings/oNiH7fwD archive.is mirror

We're working on a new, unannounced Diablo project. Are you a skilled Dungeon Artist? Come work with us, and together we will build something exceptional.

• Work directly with level design to build atmospheric dungeons with a focus on composition, detail and mood, while ensuring that the gameplay space is readable.
• Work with Lead Environment Artist and the Art Director to ensure all environments are meeting the high-quality bar Blizzard is known for.
• Experience working with a lead artist or art director in developing a unique and cohesive modeling and texturing style for environment assets

Definitely looks like a whole new game in the pipeline. Any other dungeon crawler fans on ~tildes so far? I think I've got 300+ hours in Diablo 3 alone, let alone 1 and 2.

What do you want in a new Diablo, what do you definitely not want?

I originally posted this as a comment here but thought it might deserve it's own discussion.

I think that the rise of megathreads/ultrathreads/collections of threads on reddit has been a large detriment to the site.

I'm a mod for a few large subreddits that utilizes them (and I know a good portion of people reading Tildes right now are as well), and as time goes on I've started to dislike them more and more.

At first they were great - they seemed to silo off all the posts and noise that happened around an event, and made the lives of mods easier. Posts that should've been comments could now be removed, and the user could be pointed towards the megathread. Users could go back to the post and sort by new to see new posts, and know that they'd all have to do with that one topic.

I believe that this silo actually hurts the community, and especially the discussion around that original megathread, more than it helps. As modteams I think we underestimate the resilience of our communities, and their ability to put up with "noise" around an event.

The fact that we are in a subreddit dedicated to that cause should be silo enough - each post in that subreddit should be treated as an "atomic" piece of information, with the comments being branches. By relegating all conversation to a megathread we turn top level comments into that atomic piece of information, and subcomments into the branches.

But that's just a poor implementation of the original! There are some edge cases where this might make sense (take /r/politics, it wouldn't make sense to have 9 of the top 10 posts just be slightly reworded posts on the same issues), but I think this can be remedied by better duplication rules (consider all posts on a certain topic to be a repost, unless the new post has new or different information).

There is something to be said about the ability to generate a new, blank sheet of conversation with a post, that is not marred with previous information or anecdotes. New comments on a megathread post don't have that luxury, but new posts do.

Additionally, I feel like the way reddit originally conditioned us to view posts is to view them then not check them again (unless we interacted with someone in it or got a notification). This prevents potentially great (but late) content from gaining visibility, as a non-negligible portion of the population will still be browsing the subreddit, but will never click the post again.

Openly published research makes science advance at a wonderful rate. In my experience scientists and researchers support open research in a nearly dogmatic fashion. Personally I am generally for it. However here is my concern.

I believe that humanity is in a terrible race. One of the competitors is the advancement of science, which of course can sometimes be used in a dangerous ways. The other competitor is our society moving towards murder and war becoming obsolete. The science is obvious and needs no examples. Societies move towards the sanctity of life is shown here.

"Violence has been in decline over long stretches of time", says Harvard professor Steven Pinker, "and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence."

Now to get to my point. In the past scientific advancement has created some really scary things. Atomic weapons, bio and chemical warefare, etc. However, those weapons took a lot of people and capital to produce, and had relatively un-scalable effects. Now with open research on advancements like CRISPR, we are nearing a time where in the near future a smart high school biology student with a few thousand dollars and an internet connection will be able to create self-replicating custom viruses that could kill millions. The asymmetric threat has never been greater.

Do you agree with my assessment and concerns?

If so, do you believe that there should be limits on publication of research in certain areas?

Edit: I should have said CRISPR and gene drives. Here is a TED talk on how gene drives can change and entire species, forever.

In light of @Deimos mentioning that we have a lot of "favorite" topics going around, how about something a little meatier?

I've seen it a few times already around threads that someone uses the word "guy" to refer to a poster and the response is "I'm not a guy". I'm not trying to invalidate this stance, but rather make this argument in the same way I argued for a singular "they". Consider the following:

• the plural form, "you guys" is already neutered. I can walk up to a group of women and ask "How're you guys doing?" and it doesn't draw any ire
• we've similarly neutered "dude" in both the singular and plural, but it's especially casual and almost familiar
• "gal" sounds like something out of the forties, "girl" is diminutive, and "person" is clinical / formal
• we don't have another common, non-gendered, non-specific term that fits the "sounds right" criteria and fits in the environment like the one we have (wherein users are getting to know each other and don't know exactly how to address one another).

I realize that this is probably masculine-normative and therefore problematic, but my main goal here is to stimulate discussion on a meatier topic (gender) without having it be an incredibly serious topic.

[EDIT]

I want to clarify a few things, as this reads a lot more trolly than it did 6 hours ago.

generalizing "guy" is a sexist idea because it attempts to make the masculine the generic (what I called "masculine-normativity" above). However, there isn't a term that adequately replaces "guy" but is neutered (@Algernon_Asimov brought up that "dude" fits, but is as more casual than "guy" than "person" is more formal). [Edit edit: I'm an idiot. They pointed out that "dude" as I had defined it earlier in my post would work just as well, but they did not agree that it has been neutered]

Instead of bringing this up as purely a matter of diction, I set myself up as an antagonist to see what would happen. And for this I apologize.

That said, I feel like there is some good discussion here and do not want to call making the thread a mistake. More that mistakes were made in the manner of its posting.

The ending of a movie ultimately makes it or breaks it for me.

I'm old. I've seen thousands of movies. I've read thousands of stories. It's hard for me to be legitimately surprised by an ending.

The ending of Upgrade blew my mind.

If you love an unusual ending, if you love sci fi, and if you don't mind a little bit of the old ultra-violence, I fully recommend.

My focus when partaking of an accumulated work of written word has always been on the story itself. The ideas and plot and characters presented transcend the physical media within which they are presented. But I know from reading various forums, including that-site-which-shall-not-be-named, that many people steadfastly cling to their tomes of dead trees with a fervor that seems unshakable in the face of technology. The smell of mold ridden paper, the tactile sensation of flipping through the pages, the collectibility of a treasured collection of ideals... I understand the value of collecting an antiquated form of presentation, but does it truly add anything to the story telling experience? I liken it to vinyl records; the ability to touch what you are partaking of, that tactile and physical wholly personable experience with the media with which you are interacting can be a powerful motivator, but to try to convince me that Spotify is inferior because it is new and digital and convenient seems deplorable. When I read the same story on a Kindle are we not experiencing the same thing? Does the fact that I carry my entire library of 900+ books with me in my pocket dilute my experience? I can zoom, and dictionary, and Wikipedia, and translate literally at the touch of my finger. I can highlight and make notes, I can scan the book without losing my place, without ever needing a bookmark. What am I missing by not having dedicated and decidedly wasteful space in my home for storing my leaves of enlightenment?

I first read "The Giver" circa 1998 when I was still in elementary school, and it changed my life. From that moment on, I craved idyllic utopias with undercurrents of death and despair but couldn't find them anywhere. I moved onto ghost stories and fantasies and Harry Potter, but still I read The Giver several times a year, inevitably kicking off a pre-family-computer search for more. The simple but powerful themes made me feel wise and the promise of euthanasia made me feel dangerous, and I was changed again.

Imagine my relief when I found Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale." And Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World." And, finally, a name for my favorite genre. Even after I learned the phrase "Dystopian Fiction" and told everyone I could about it, it wasn't easy to find all the books I wanted. But I read "1984," "Fahrenheit 451," and the classic allegorical novels. When I was in high school, I read Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" and Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," and I was shaken to my core and felt content enough.

[This ended up being more melodramatic than I originally intended; I'm definitely not a writer. I just wanted to get across my adolescent depth of feeling for dystopian fiction before I actually come to the point in my timeline when "it" happened. *self-deprecating eye roll emoji]

I actually enjoyed "The Hunger Games." The world compelled me even when the characters did not, and while I would have liked a touch more exposition about how the high society came to accept the murder of children, it was still chilling. But then the world exploded. YA dystopian novels were spilling from publishing houses with abandon as the populace became as obsessed as I was, and of course I was thrilled! And then I was miffed. And then I was disappointed, and then I became some sort of crotchety old-man/hipster hybrid. "No I'm not just jumping on the bandwagon! I was here before the world even knew its name! Back in my day, dystopian books had actual themes, not just unhealthy love-triangles and shadowy-but-one-dimensional villainous overlords!" The genre became overrun, in my opinion, with authors trying to cash in on the success of the big name novels without any passion for subject matter. Characters were flat, love stories were rampant and boring, and the dystopian world-building was over-the-top, reaching, and unearned. I still feel a little bit cheated.

I do feel bad about being so petulant; I'm glad that this surge has fostered a love of reading in zillions of children. I'm honestly probably missing out on some excellent novels, but now I'm hesitant to read a post-2012 book marketed as "Dystopian" lest I'm forced to live in yet another world where love is a disease ("Delirium"-Lauren Oliver) or, preserve me, where all forms of language have become deadly to adults ("The Flame Alphabet"-Ben Marcus).

Hopefully that wasn't too boring! I'm done now! I want to know if you've ever felt similarly, if you think I'm flat wrong, if you have some post-2013 novels I should read, if you want to talk about the genre... anything!

I imagine that I'm not the only one here now that was part of the Digg exodus to Reddit many years ago and I wonder what you all think we can learn from the rise and fall of these platforms to better design our new community.

Is it inevitable that our social networks degrade with population until a new one rises from Its ashes, so to speak?

What can we do to protect ourselves from this pattern and maintain a healthy populace?

Hi tilders (tildes? tilded?),

I thought it might make sense to group threads by hobby for now, to start -- and the hobby I've been spending the most time with recently has been fountain pens. They're great! I hope you like them too.

Wrote something out to kick things off: https://i.imgur.com/vNOS7QK.jpg

Write something back in return?

I feel like it's been pretty well established that Tildes is supposed to be a place of discussion with maybe occasional fluff here and there that can be filtered out. But there's a large grey area that I think should be addressed.

I'll take a few of Reddit's subreddits as an example.

I think it's pretty clear that a group resembling /r/aww should not be allowed on Tildes since it is pure fluffing and does not really bring a big quality of discussion to the community as a whole.

But how about a community such as /r/QuitYourBullshit? That could arguably be either unnecessary or a place of good discussion. There's a lot of grey area regarding the quality of that subreddit.

Now, I know what some people might try to say. We shouldn't try to replicate Reddit, and we should instead let the communities grow organically.

Yet, if Tildes is going to grow at all from Reddit, people are going to want to replicate the communities they so dearly loved on Reddit, regardless of quality. People who were active on /r/dankmemes are going to want a /r/dankmemes equivalent here. People who were active on /r/todayilearned or /r/JusticeServed are going to want an equivalent here as well. So the question is: how are we going to deal with the large demand for variably fluffy groups while simultaneously keeping the quality of discussion up?

I think this is a real issue that is going to have to be dealt with before widespread adoption of Tildes can occur.

At some point reddit had plans to implement a federated protocol and let users run their own instances, but that was throw out of the window to satisfy shareholders interests. Does tildes has plans to implement a federate protocol in the future or is something that hasn't been considered?

Let's do it guys! Every good forum/community from Ars Technica to the XKCD forums has had a go taking turns playing the most detailed simulation game I have ever seen. I can generate the world for ideal 44.10 (and hopefully 44.11) settings with my extra adventurer reactions.

Now that dwarves can get angry and stressed again, now is an opportune time. Who's with me?

I'm grateful for being invited and I'm happy to see the community enjoy a smooth ride so far.

I really hope the platform does not follow in the footsteps of Reddit's karma mechanism. I find that this cumulative store of points attached to each user to encourages them to seek more points, regardless if they steal content or repost their own old material for another karma-harvesting run. Instead, if users can be appreciated by the actual number of posts they've submitted much like the bulletin boards of old, it would be more fair in my opinion. It'd be a measure of the effort and contribution made by a user, not only what others think of them.

For example, my profile would say "Eyehigh posted 20,000 posts" instead of "Eyehigh seemed to impress 20,000 people enough for them to leave an upvote, so here's the 20,000 upvotes."

What do you think?

I can't be the only one who looks at discussions about moderation, community norms, etc. and wonders who we are and aren't hearing from. What's the strategy for ensuring we have a breadth of perspectives (not talking US electoral politics, here) while setting early (possibly persistent) standards and structures?

I'm fairly new to the site as I came in from the hackernews post a fortnight ago. I enjoyed the fact that this site doesn't have downvotes. However, when I am reading through posts I am seeing the noise tag on multiple posts that don't seem to merit it, with examples linked below. The comments aren't literary masterpieces by any stretch, but they are concerning the topic on hand. The noise tag appears to be getting used as a downvote or "I disagree" button.

I know the user that was the first ban also used the noise tag this way, but this seems to be a more wide spread issue than one user. We can't prevent a de facto downvote tag from appearing organically everywhere. Eventually sub communities will form around a tilde and adopt a tag as a downvote, the same way all online communities change the meaning of some word or tool they already have. I don't think that we want this to be a standard tildes wide behavior however.

How should we go about preventing the use of tags as downvotes like this? Stricter moderation? Removing tags with negative connotations? Making tags visible only if they reach a certain threshold?

https://tildes.net/~talk/105/mozilla_to_remove_meritocracy_from_governance_docs_because_its_problematic#comment-6kb
https://tildes.net/~talk/105/mozilla_to_remove_meritocracy_from_governance_docs_because_its_problematic#comment-6mh
https://tildes.net/~misc/10r/furries#comment-6pq

I think automation is coming quick and fast and think that a landmark event will be when food can be farmed, packaged, shipped and sold without requiring any humans to be involved. I see the foundations in place already with Amazon Go and autonomous vehicles and it doesn't seem like too much longer before this kind of automation could be possible in my mind.

Anybody want to weigh in with thoughts/discussion? What effects might it bring? Will it lead to a sort of monopoly as the food could be sold so much cheaper? When might this scale of automation be plausible? Anything really, just looking to spark some discussion :)

Have any of you seen Solo? Possible spoilers if not.

Personally, I loved it. After having been dissapointed by The Last Jedi, Solo was refreshing, in my opinion it felt like a classic Star Wars film. I loved all the characters, including Ehrenreich's potrayal of Han which I fully bought.

Also the humour, compared to The Last Jedi, was far better. Whilst there weren't many laugh out loud moments, I was grinning throughout. And I far preferred it to the eye rolling cheesy jokes of TLJ.

And as someone who has watched the Clone Wars and Rebels series, I loved the reveal of that certain character.

Of course there were some cons, but they were relatively minor, in my opinion. The opening was a bit rough, and I got a bit confused at the end with the constant changing sides. And to be honest, I didn't really care for Marauders.

What did you guys think?

Hey everyone,
I've seen a bunch of posts discussing the design of the site, and I was wondering if there are any other designers on here that would be interested in discussing the interface more precisely, and coming up with potential improvements. I wrote up a design audit and gave it to @Deimos last week, and I wanted to share it with everyone and generate some discussion about minutiae such as colors, placement and styles of buttons and links, etc. I feel like these are just as important as larger features that people are asking for (such as a markdown preview), and have the added benefit of being very fast to iterate on.

(0) Background

This is coming off a discussion in today's thread on forming new groups around whether or not to add a group for politics. I expressed there that, given my moderator experience on /r/ChangeMyView and /r/NeutralPolitics, I opposed making such a group given how Tildes currently stands.

(1) Political discussion is nearly always garbage.

I don't think anyone needs reminding of this, but political discussion almost uniformly fails to achieve anything positive in almost any social media platform. Your uncle's facebook rants? Garbage. Political sniping on Twitter? Garbage. The endless repetitive point scoring and outrage fest on most political subreddits? Garbage.

So, we have to ask, why is this content garbage?

(2) People want to be heard, but nobody wants to hear.

I do not think political discussion is garbage because of bad faith trolling. That certainly exists and does not help, but usually it's not hard to ID the trolls, and excepting egregious stuff like doxxing or threats, to ignore obvious bad faith absurdity.

The much bigger issue is that what people want to do is to be heard and validated in their political views. This is not merely that they want to proselytize or to win converts, but that they're seeking validation and a sense of rightness or righteousness in their statements.

This desire is toxic to a neutral forum, because invariably on any divisive issue, you will not merely be heard and validated, but will be challenged and denigrated. Indeed, often the challenges and denigrations themselves are the same performance in reverse. Members of each team trying to dunk on the other and earn validation for how hard they owned the other side.

(3) To overcome this, a successful political forum must have a purpose other than mere commentary.

On /r/ChangeMyView and /r/NeutralPolitics, we have been able to build forums which have large amounts of productive and non-hostile political discussion. The key to this is that neither forum allows for being heard, or general discussion, as its reason for being.

On /r/ChangeMyView we limit posts to views people genuinely hold, and are open to changing (CMV rule B). This requires that OPs cannot come to troll or soapbox. It is by far the most frequently used rule of ours in terms of removing submissions, almost always on the soapboxing side.

On /r/NeutralPolitics, we limit posts to neutrally framed questions about political subjects, which can be answered with facts. By doing this, we narrow the scope of discussion away from soliciting feelings (which is an invitation to people posting just to be heard) and towards bringing forth factual information, where people might learn something.

I don't know what purpose a political forum on Tildes might have, but to succeed it must have a clear purpose, and that purpose must be one which excludes people posting merely to be heard.

(4) In addition to a purpose beyond being heard, a political forum must have extreme civility rules.

Both CMV and NP have extremely similar rules in this regard, and they are absolutely crucial to the success of the fora.

In general, any comment or post which in any way denigrates another user should be removed. This is an extremely broad civility rule that is well past what most subreddits do. Calling another user a liar, or accusing them of bad faith posting is banned on both CMV and NP for example, even when such accusations are true.

The prohibition on what even may be seen as justified rudeness is I think the key to a civility rule. It immediately removes from the moderation process any discretion around the substance of the politics, and makes it a neutral rule which can be applied evenly to all parties.

It is also necessary because nothing productive ever happens after bad faith is accused. Almost uniformly, once someone is rude, if there is a response back to them, the response will be rude in kind, usually more severely. People love to try to get the last word in, and a clear, objective rule banning "they started it" spats is also an important component. CMV's wiki has a really good overview of how we enforce this rule there.

(5) Conclusion/TL;DR

I don't know exactly what political content should exist on Tildes. I do know that a general politics group will not work, and that rather a politics channel should be focused on a discrete purpose other than just discussion.

I would almost certainly ban link posts from any politics group, since inherently they're going to act as just headlines for people to pontificate on, without guiding discussion towards a particular goal. I would also obviously enforce civility, and have much stricter moderation of it than I might on a non-politics forum.

Edited for formatting