NaraVara's recent activity

  1. Is it time to include pronouns?

    ~tildes Ask
    I realize this has become something like a political statement to do this for whatever reason. But a 100% wordcel medium where your only avatar is a text string of your username means if I want to...

    I realize this has become something like a political statement to do this for whatever reason. But a 100% wordcel medium where your only avatar is a text string of your username means if I want to talk about someone I have no idea what to call them. I have to use awkward constructions like “that user” or “OP.” This doesn’t sound nice. This disrupts the delicately crafted meter and flow of my sentences.

    Mayhap we could introduce a teeny-tiny configurable logogram next to the username to disambiguate preferred pronouns. Or maybe even a subscript. It’d be small enough and faded so as not to impact the clean visual but visible enough to free me from having to guess.

    7 votes

  2. Comment on New label suggestion: a removable "One-sided" label that gradually reduces the comment's visibility in ~tildes

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    FWIW, based on that user’s grammar I don’t think they have native English fluency.

    FWIW, based on that user’s grammar I don’t think they have native English fluency.

    2 votes

  3. Comment on New label suggestion: a removable "One-sided" label that gradually reduces the comment's visibility in ~tildes

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    It is definitely judgmental and condescending, but its toxicity would have to be evaluated in comparison to the types of sentiments it’s being used to dismiss. If you’re trying to have a somewhat...

    It is definitely judgmental and condescending, but its toxicity would have to be evaluated in comparison to the types of sentiments it’s being used to dismiss.

    If you’re trying to have a somewhat informed discussion on a topic that presupposes a baseline familiarity with the subject, but people keep chiming in with common folk-misconceptions then you’re going to spend all your time debunking the same folk beliefs over and over again. You will never quite get to discussions that go beyond that. Is that helpful to a community to have it structurally forced to stay stuck at a high school level of understanding?

    There’s a lot of thought-terminating cliches that happen all over the internet in the family of “everyone else’s job is easy except mine or I’m the only one who does any work around here and everyone else is just scamming/lying/coasting.” It’s almost always a result of people who have a limited perspective on the world and lack the empathy or curiosity to understand why other groups exist or what they do. You genuinely can’t have a conversation with someone who has that posture because they’re fundamentally uninterested in learning from you about the thing. No matter how polite or courteous and common their affect is, they’re not capable of having a productive discussion if they feel that way, so it wouldn’t necessarily be out of line to simply tell them “You should familiarize yourself with the existing literature on this subject before commenting further.”

    3 votes

  4. Comment on New label suggestion: a removable "One-sided" label that gradually reduces the comment's visibility in ~tildes

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    Many old forums had bots where you could invoke a command and the bot would pop in with some copypasta to explain something. Often it’s to explain some idiosyncratic thing about that...

    Many old forums had bots where you could invoke a command and the bot would pop in with some copypasta to explain something. Often it’s to explain some idiosyncratic thing about that forum/discord/whatever, but other times it’s also used to just nip certain types of arguments in the bud by summarizing the different sides of the argument without having to rehash it again and again.

    The theory being, if you’re not saying anything new or saying something old in an interesting way, there’s really no point in saying it and everyone might as well get on with their lives. Your disagreements can be noted and ignored.

    1 vote

  5. Comment on New label suggestion: a removable "One-sided" label that gradually reduces the comment's visibility in ~tildes

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    I think you have this backwards here. The privilege of demanding things change to conform to expectations is an entitlement that comes downstream of the repressive hierarchy imposed by a society...

    I think you have this backwards here. The privilege of demanding things change to conform to expectations is an entitlement that comes downstream of the repressive hierarchy imposed by a society that privileges straight White men. That they can walk around with an implicit assumption that society is structured to ease their path, that any and all spaces should be open to them, and that everyone else is just sort of there to provide them with easily consumable products and experiences rather than having different and equally valid beliefs and value systems is the privilege. It can only work if you have an exclusionary system in place to decide who is favored or disfavored by the system.

    The default mode is what everyone else who doesn’t fit into the privileged class has to do, because they lack the coercive powers to make others conform to their values and beliefs. Living in a plural society, with a broad range of lifestyles and perspectives represented, necessarily requires you to be able to ignore and move on. There’s no other way to do it. The main group can have the world suit their preferences because it’s a single group with a singular set of preferences. With multiple groups where deeply held values often conflict the best you can do is have a baseline set of ground rules that every agrees to. These are to be conducive to everyone being able to coexist alongside each other, but then we also all have to agree that some stuff we’re just not gonna get into.

    7 votes

  6. Comment on New label suggestion: a removable "One-sided" label that gradually reduces the comment's visibility in ~tildes

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    If anything it’s underprivileged groups who are adept at ignoring and moving on. It’s the privileged position to think we can meaningfully alter the circumstances to suit our preferences rather...
    • Exemplary

    This remark really does come from a really privileged position and many people really do not realize that.

    If anything it’s underprivileged groups who are adept at ignoring and moving on. It’s the privileged position to think we can meaningfully alter the circumstances to suit our preferences rather than thriving in spite of them. That more or less describes what it is to have privilege, the assumption that the world ought to be shaped to suit you.

    9 votes

  7. Comment on New label suggestion: a removable "One-sided" label that gradually reduces the comment's visibility in ~tildes

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    Yeah I’ve had a decent number of people who were interested but couldn’t bring themselves to join or who did join and got banned because they simply were unwilling to suffer fools gladly,...

    Yeah I’ve had a decent number of people who were interested but couldn’t bring themselves to join or who did join and got banned because they simply were unwilling to suffer fools gladly, specifically the tendency you’ve mentioned. Mostly it’s been policy and business people who get really annoyed by the reductive “everything I don’t like is capitalism” memes that dominate online, as well as design and style people who just see nothing worth engaging with.

    3 votes

  8. Comment on New label suggestion: a removable "One-sided" label that gradually reduces the comment's visibility in ~tildes

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    There’s that, but I also think a lot of the inability to ignore and move-on comes from a tendency to “catastrophize” and think “If I don’t correct the record on this right now then the next thing...

    There’s that, but I also think a lot of the inability to ignore and move-on comes from a tendency to “catastrophize” and think “If I don’t correct the record on this right now then the next thing I know this space will be OVERRRUN with people who think like this.” There’s certainly tipping points where that can happen, but in the vast majority of situations that lone crank or group of disagreeable dudes just ends up being part of the “local color” and known as the lone cranks rather than an incipient movement.

    The times when there actually is something brewing is usually pretty clearly evident if you’ve been around online spaces long enough. They do this sort of thing where they probe the environment by posting from certain sources or proposing certain “just asking questions” style arguments while having this affected faux-courteous rhetorical style. They want you to think they were merely curious and don’t understand why people are being so RUDE to them. It’s usually very easy to identify those sorts of people in contrast to the people arguing in good faith/ignorance or mild disagreements.

    If this were a venue like Reddit or Twitter where there actually are a bunch of media illiterate naïfs who fall for that shtick the posture of being on high-alert at all times would make more sense. But the selection criteria for this place, and the slow rate of growth, make sure that the vast majority of people here have been around the block more than a few times.

    14 votes

  9. Comment on New label suggestion: a removable "One-sided" label that gradually reduces the comment's visibility in ~tildes

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    I think you’ve hit the nail on the head here, and it hints at where the actual solution would lie. We’d need to grow the user base to encompass people who aren’t like this. Early on I tried to...

    I really, really hope I am wrong, and I really hope this series of discussions leads to some kind of outcome. I'm very sorry to be negative straight off the bat, but honestly, I think the Computer Men are the dominant cultural force on Tildes.

    I think you’ve hit the nail on the head here, and it hints at where the actual solution would lie. We’d need to grow the user base to encompass people who aren’t like this.

    Early on I tried to suggest the site put more effort towards attracting people outside the techie crowd with topics like design or fashion or photography. Even if it’s more wrong opinions about stuff it’ll at least be different people being wrong in different ways from each other and that can at least be interesting. But there’s a chicken-and-egg problem and also features that might be needed to attract designers or artists might pull away from the “wordcel” focus of the site.

    12 votes

  10. Comment on New label suggestion: a removable "One-sided" label that gradually reduces the comment's visibility in ~tildes

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    Has Tildes grown past its peak of activity? It doesn’t seem that much larger today than it was 10 years ago? There was a lull for a while and then a surge right after the Reddit API change and it...

    Has Tildes grown past its peak of activity? It doesn’t seem that much larger today than it was 10 years ago? There was a lull for a while and then a surge right after the Reddit API change and it seems to have been in a steady state ever since to me.

    I have no metrics to back this up, that’s just been my subjective experience.

    9 votes

  11. Comment on New label suggestion: a removable "One-sided" label that gradually reduces the comment's visibility in ~tildes

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    I don’t actually know what user or users people are talking about, but the way these discussions have unfolded definitely makes it sound like a lot of users have a specific person or person(s) in...

    If that's a recurring problem with a user, mods are there to solve that. Tildes is a small site that can be intelligently managed by humans.

    I don’t actually know what user or users people are talking about, but the way these discussions have unfolded definitely makes it sound like a lot of users have a specific person or person(s) in mind with these feature requests. I guess I just don’t participate in those threads so I’m oblivious to who, but I get the feeling that in a lot of cases the user isn’t recurrently doing anything that’s actionable for moderation. It seems a group of users simply doesn’t like them and doesn’t want to have to endure their perspective “polluting” their space.

    This is why, when giving feedback on design or features, the guidance is often to explicitly specify what the perceived problem you’re trying to solve for is rather than focusing on the feature or proposed solution. We’re often proposing features/solutions to address a problem, but if we don’t do real thinking about what the problem actually is then we end up designing systems and features that don’t really solve it and also add a bunch of new problems. If we’re pretty clear that the problem being solved for is “I don’t like seeing these people here and wish I could banish them” then we don’t have to play coy with all these workarounds to do banning or downvotes with extra steps.

    19 votes

  12. Comment on Suggestion for a new label: "Misinformation" in ~tildes

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    I think I agree with this take. I don’t see how leaving it up for community discussion is going to be conducive to good vibes and seems more like it’d be a venue for having arguments that are...

    By contrast, it’s hard to see how users can get to any sort of consensus about what to do without discussing things we disagree about. And also, we’re unlikely to achieve consensus by discussing things either. I often give in to the temptation to reply and sometimes it’s because I don’t want to see “misinformation” (as I see it) go unopposed. But I try to remember that it doesn’t actually achieve much. Caring too much that people post things you disagree strongly about can ruin your whole day.

    I think I agree with this take. I don’t see how leaving it up for community discussion is going to be conducive to good vibes and seems more like it’d be a venue for having arguments that are orthogonal to the topic at hand (i.e. arguing about whether the tag is appropriate vs. what’s wrong with the claim).

    Furthermore, crowdsourcing tools like this tends to create an incentive for offsite coordination and brigading, which is an engagement pattern we should probably discourage.

    If a post gets corrected further down in a thread the general convention has been for the OP to edit their post to make a note of that.

    18 votes

  13. Comment on Antisemitism on campus is 'systemic' and going unaddressed, says new report in ~society

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    She gave her a 0% grade. If you can’t identify the very obvious animus behind doing that I think you’re contorting yourself to excuse bad behavior here. If similar accounts were written in a...

    That's not antisemitism? Why is this included? It's not antisemitic to not repeat the Israeli line in everything. Just like it's not unamerican to say that the US Army discontinuing anonymous sexual assault reporting is a dumb idea.

    She gave her a 0% grade. If you can’t identify the very obvious animus behind doing that I think you’re contorting yourself to excuse bad behavior here.

    If similar accounts were written in a report on Islamophobia I have serious doubts people would be making such a point of finding reasons it might be okay actually.

    9 votes

  14. Comment on Building luxury homes is good for the poor in ~society

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    This is more a result of nuclear families than anything. Housing that passes through generations tends to have multiple families living in it at once, or boarders who cycle through, and cultural...

    This is more a result of nuclear families than anything. Housing that passes through generations tends to have multiple families living in it at once, or boarders who cycle through, and cultural norms where adult children live with their parents.

    The 50s was about when big joint family immigrants moved out of cities and into detached suburban housing and the nuclear family norm took hold.

    2 votes

  15. Comment on Building luxury homes is good for the poor in ~society

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    I think the root of it is that we started treating housing as an investment vehicle and people expected to buy starter houses and trade them up. This created a whole culture around home building...

    I think the root of it is that we started treating housing as an investment vehicle and people expected to buy starter houses and trade them up. This created a whole culture around home building and home buying that’s based on how it looks in a real estate listing rather than what it’s like to live in it. It’s far overweights aesthetics and amenities that sound nice on paper but add no value for the people living in it while ignoring things like doors that open and shut quietly.

    A lot of those quality of life things are things people learn the hard way when they live in the same place a long time. In cultures where this is still common people tend to put money into their houses over time to steadily improve them, build additions as their families grow, renovate rooms as their needs change, etc. They’ve lived there so they’ve developed an understanding of things like where it gets damp, where the sun hits, where it’s hot, etc. There’s a whole class of particular knowledge that people learn and build around that doesn’t happen when people trade up to bigger houses instead as their families grow or their life situation changes.

    3 votes

  16. Comment on Building luxury homes is good for the poor in ~society

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    This isn’t really true, it depends on what kind of maintenance you want to do. If you have drywall and you need to do serious plumbing or electrical work you just cut into the drywall and patch it...

    Once we started using wood pulp products maintainability just went down the drain.

    This isn’t really true, it depends on what kind of maintenance you want to do. If you have drywall and you need to do serious plumbing or electrical work you just cut into the drywall and patch it or you knock the wall out and then hang another wall up again. If you build everything out of concrete suddenly that job involves heavy equipment.

    For a continuously occupied residence with climate control there’s no reason a stick-built building can’t last as long as you want. And it’s much easier to be updated or renovated over time, which is good if you value versatility or flexibility. Plus there’s the fact that you’re like, infinitely less likely to die in a fire in a modern building due to safety standards and modern electrical systems.

    9 votes

  17. Comment on Building luxury homes is good for the poor in ~society

    NaraVara
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    In the US tenement basically means slums and carries connotations of poorly maintained, dangerous, and fire-prone rat traps. If you literally just mean subdividing units for rent we just call...

    In the US tenement basically means slums and carries connotations of poorly maintained, dangerous, and fire-prone rat traps.

    If you literally just mean subdividing units for rent we just call those apartments, even if they’re studio/efficiencies.

    The other relevant format is SRO or “Single Room Occupancy” buildings, which people are most familiar with in the form of college dorms. These are units where people get individual dormitories to sleep in but have shared bathrooms and other common spaces with other residents.

    8 votes

  18. Comment on As Reddit stock falls, CEO questions value of Google’s AI Overviews in ~tech

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    Google’s your problem. The forums where more representative groups of people are having actual discussions aren’t happening on Reddit. It’s in related substack articles, microblogs sites,...

    Google’s your problem. The forums where more representative groups of people are having actual discussions aren’t happening on Reddit. It’s in related substack articles, microblogs sites, instagram/threads, and discord groups. Things that Google doesn’t index.

    5 votes

  19. Comment on Is there a way to filter out everything posted by a user? in ~tildes

  20. Comment on Is there a way to filter out everything posted by a user? in ~tildes

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    Yeah if it’s actual out of line behavior I’d agree it’s a moderation issue. If it’s a purely interpersonal issue where two people just can’t help but keep antagonizing each other maybe there’s a...

    Yeah if it’s actual out of line behavior I’d agree it’s a moderation issue. If it’s a purely interpersonal issue where two people just can’t help but keep antagonizing each other maybe there’s a case for that, but I think mediated resolution of the conflict would be better.

    People keep reaching for “technical” fixes to interpersonal problems and I think that really only ever creates cold atmospheres that drift towards antagonistic forms of engagement.

    11 votes