Uff, I’m glad to hear this. I still have most of a tube of blue glitter around. I used a tiny bit in some play slime I made the nieces one year. Three years later, I still find a flake or two sometimes when I deep-clean my kitchen – and I don’t remember spilling any when I used the stuff.
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Right now trolls and known shit stirrers acting like victims at the other place is grinding my gears:
I’ve found that my hair-trigger has diminished since abandoning the big tent. 2017 has kept it alive, hence my wealth thread, but I’m finding other outlets. I’m finding the quiet.
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And one of those members 
has requested anonymization over yonder. Odd.
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I am very grateful we have a haven here, away from the troll parade. 
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I see my joke topic got eaten over there.
To the extent I meant to mock anything in particular, it was this
bbs.boingboing.net/t/lets-focus-on-fixing-problems-and-not-prejudice/112727
not anybody here.
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I think you’ve lost more threads to mod action than anyone else.
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Christ on a stick. I’m glad I feel no urge to log into that garbage again. It’s not quite as bad as reddit in that the long time trolls aren’t long time and easy to nope out of. The stupid burns, though.
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It hurts, every time a regular there posts a farewell. Seems like it’s getting quiet. I understand why they leave (fighting entropy hurts). I sometimes run into them on other sites - like the beloved Modusoperandi - but others have completely vanished.
Software has a major effect on the community that uses it, and the deliberate lack of built-in muting in Discourse has been bad overall.
It’s why we try to be responsive and inclusive here. It’s why we’ve built features, adapted features, and why we try to contribute positively to the community at large.
Thank you for joining us. We hope to be here for you, not only for the next St Elsewhere’s Day, but now and for as long as we can.
Y’all make it worthwhile.
<3
- Austin aka @tinoesroho
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If someone’s being an egregious asshole, they should be blocked/banned, otherwise the people involved should work it out like adults. Of course, who makes that call and how is a difficult problem. But the sort of reverse-partial-banning-via-shaming idea that they’ve come up with there just won’t work. Requiring everyone to keep whitelists and blacklists of who they are and aren’t allowed reply to (and on which topics?) and check it before each and every post is unworkable.
They need better moderation. As a tech, I can think of a software solution whereby a poster could select people who are not allowed to reply. (And a flag that if somebody selects too many people, they might be the asshole.) Still messy though because people could just bypass it by replying from another account. Ultimately, it comes down to trusted moderaters acting on good-faith and same for normal participants. You can’t automate out social issues.
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It would be much easier for the BoingBoing BBS if they didn’t give ban decisions to people who didn’t give a crap about the commenting community. Kind of a betrayal of the old days when it was just Bay Area people doing 90s computer stuff. Tell the publisher he needs to step back into making money in Daddy’s business or… accept the role of keeping the site alive.
Time for editors and contributors to bust out elsewhere.
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I thought he bailed from here weeks ago, tbh. Kinda sad, honestly. We had many similar interests and tastes.
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Thank you.
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Good riddance.
I find it interesting how some people are always angling to paint me as the bad guy, when they are anything but perfect themselves.
I may be an asshole at times, but I own it and I don’t go trying to force my assholery on anyone else.
I don’t ever expect tech to resolve social problems; it just doesn’t work that way.
The problem arises when some of the people involved refuse to to move on, even in the interest of keeping the community running smoothly; or when they act like ‘free speech’ somehow means that they have “the right” to antagonize others.
It’s not that hard to just leave people alone once they’ve made it clear they don’t want to be bothered. A refusal to do so speaks to a disturbing sense of entitlement; no one owes anyone else any time or attention.
Again, it’s worth noting that every single person involved in that particular whiny bitch-fest over there was a male, just chomping at the bit to tear down a female who declines to engage with people she doesn’t like, Ie, me. It doesn’t matter whether I put it politely or brusquely say fuck off; they act like the denial for attention is some sort of major offense.
O_O
I completely understood that it was a joke and you weren’t mocking anyone here.
@tinoesroho; thank you for all the work you’ve put in here. Like @Nightflyer said, I’m grateful to have Elsewhere.
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There are two kinds of people who regularly end up embroiled in conflict: bullies and targets. The problem is that we’ve been force-fed the “it takes two to tango” bullshit for so long that outside observers who don’t automatically go seeking weakness assume that if you are involved in a lot of conflicts with different people, you must be the aggressor.
No, sometimes you have qualities that are easy to target. So those inclined to target do so. And then they point to all the other times when you have said “enough is enough” to cry that “X fights with everybody”. And outside observers just looking at the stats use that against you.
We need to get out of this thinking that everyone bears an equal share in conflict. Because generally, it’s not true, and it’s a handy weapon against women and minorities.
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Indeed, by disintermediating human factors it may worsen them. The temptation of people to see other people as nothing but numbers is facilitated.
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It’s not serious enough for this thread, but… search engines.
One problem is when results are attack sites.
Another problem is when results are missing the search terms, and the site doesn’t say so. On Google, there are verbatim, there is +term, there is “term,” but none of these filter out the spurious results.
Another relatively minor problem is the proliferation of Revolvy, etc. I can work around these by adding -Revolvy to each search, but maybe there’s a way to skip typing -Revolvy every single time.
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It is perfectly serious enough for this thread. This is Stuff That Grinds My Gears, and this counts as a gear grinding.
Some of the results are indeed spurious, often to the point of absurdity. Some of the image search results are porn, or at least sexualized, even with safe search on, because safe search ain’t perfect, and only a human knows for sure if something is being sexualized.
There ought to be a way to set search preferences, so you don’t have to set the literals every time. Ought to be, but probably isn’t.
Also, this is the first I’ve ever heard of revolvy. I have no clue what the fuck that is. It’s probably your search engine bubbling you, which the Go Ogle people like but which I hate. When I’m looking for something, I’m looking for that thing, not a completely unrelated thing Go Ogle thinks I’m into.
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Also, the firewall at work caught and blocked this site. On the one hand, it is not work related, so I suppose they got me. On the other hand, this site is just distracting enough to serve as a reset button for me, and not distracting enough to actually distract me from my work, and there are far worse sites I can still access. But the point is moot, because the firewall is so dumb I can easily circumvent it.
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I think Revolvy aggregates Wikipedia articles.
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While I’m grinding work related gears:
This happened to me a couple months back. Because the exact nature of the problem, and the tool requested to solve it with, are both highly technical and seriously boring, I will use a fruit metaphor instead.
Boss A: I want you to peel an apple.
Me: Fine with me.
Boss B: I want you to use a corkscrew.
Me: Are you sure?
Boss B: Listen kid, I’m a world renowned expert in corkscrews, and I say use a corkscrew.
[Later] Me: I’m getting funny results with this corkscrew.
Boss C: Make a presentation about it, and let’s see what’s going on.
[Later] These results look funny. The presentation must be bad. Try this and this and this and this…
[Still later] Yeah, these results are bad. Let’s have another meeting to discuss.
[In meeting] Boss C: Hey sonny, did you use a cheese grater like I told you to? I’m a world renowned expert in cheese graters, and nothing peels an apple like a cheese grater…
Bosses A, B, and C: Using a corkscrew to peel an apple is the wrong approach.
Me: I could have told you that!
Boss C: Then you should have spoke up sooner!
[writes down in little notebook: LearnedCoward does not make good presentations and spends too much time investigating dead ends]
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