alleyshack

Automod is what I was thinking of when I said I thought Reddit has some tools to do this. The problem, like I mentioned above, is one of scale. Automod is not capable of making judgments about post quality; it can't do anything to enforce a "must be something someone said" rule, for example. Nor is it capable of flagging the many, many variants of the same low-effort submission we frequently get (not without a lot of false positives, at least). That's what my blog's curation team does, and what takes the most time. We can manage the blog's former peak submission rate of 25-35 per day, but given the nature of Reddit I expect that number would skyrocket, overwhelming the mod team.

Modmail isn't public, is it? It's only viewable to the sub's mods. If it isn't public, then it is not equivalent to asks.

For all we Tumblr users love to mock the blue hellsite, it really does do some neat and very unique things. I'm still holding out hope that it manages to stabilize somehow and stick around, because I've tried all the other social media sites and none of them has kept my interest.

I had several text posts flagged by their algorithm. I still don't know how it managed to do that.

I don't want to restrict the subreddit, for one. I have around 295k followers on Tumblr; I can't hand-approve all of them. Plus, restricting the sub would keep new people from finding it.

Plus what the other commenter said about formatting and poor workflow. The mods can just barely handle the current workload of reviewing ~30-40 posts per day, choosing 20 to post, and adding tags as needed. If we had to open an email, then open a link (and hope the link was functional and not malicious), then review the submission, then copy the submission, then open the "submit a post" dialogue, then paste, then format, then post... yeah, that's way too much.

There's an IFTTT workflow for sending Tumblr posts to Reddit, but unfortunately the API it uses doesn't preserve any formatting, so you end up with a giant text blob. I don't think it could handle image posts. If that worked, I'd happily start sending things to a subreddit.

The main thing Tumblr offers that I haven't seen anywhere else is curated submissions. Like the sister reply said, on Tumblr, you can allow anyone to submit posts to your blog (including anonymous users and users without Tumblr accounts). You can set restrictions, such as "only text post or photo+caption submissions", and provide tags for submitters to choose from (e.g., on my blog submitters can choose the tag for the TTRPG they're using).

The key differentiator is the curation. Only those submissions which my mod team approves get posted to the blog, unlike Reddit where all submissions get posted first and then up/downvoted accordingly. I think (?) Reddit might have a way to curate, but it's not feasible at the scale of Reddit and a subreddit equivalent of the blog would quickly overwhelm the mod team and have to become uncurated. Considering the number of low-quality submissions we actively curate out, the result would be a significantly degraded experience. Which is not to say a transfer to Reddit is impossible, but it would definitely be An Effort, and one I'm not sure I'm willing to put in for what's been a fun hobby project for the last seven years.

Asks are another Tumblr feature that I haven't seen in other places. An ask is a question submitted to the blog mods, which the mods can reply to either publicly or privately, and which are visually differentiated on users' dashboards. On Reddit, a question to the mods would look exactly like any other post, and the mods' answer could easily be lost in the sea of general comments on the post.

There are also lesser features that Tumblr has that I've never seen on other platforms. Tagging is a big part of Tumblr culture and something I've had a lot of fun with on my blog. Reblogs and replies are very different forms of interaction than retweets/@'s. Fun coincidences like "dash did a thing" (where two unrelated posts show up together on a user's dashboard in a way that's amusing) don't appear to be a thing on other platforms for various reasons. The visual layout and formatting of Tumblr posts on the dashboard tends to be more readable than Reddit or Twitter.

These are all little things, but they're little things that have built up the personality of the blog over the years. I'd rather close the blog with its personality intact than watch it slowly die as yet another subreddit plagued by low-quality posts, insufficient moderation, and sameness.

(This sounds like I'm down on Reddit, which is not the case at all - I like Reddit, just not as a possible host for my blog.)

This doesn't surprise me at all. I run a reasonably popular non-porn, submissions-based blog and immediately after the ban was implemented, our numbers tanked. Submissions dropped from 25-35 per day to around 10-20, while the number of notes (likes+reblogs+replies) per post has dropped from 600-800 to 200-400.

Unfortunately, we still see about the same total number of spambots and fake blogs in our notes. So at least from my own anecdotal experience, the ban did nothing except drive away human users.

A lot of our followers asked if/when we would move to another platform, but unfortunately for them (and us), Tumblr is the only major blog platform we know of which supports a curated, moderated submissions-based blog. Reddit is the closest runner-up in that it allows submissions and can be moderated, but isn't curatable for all intents and purposes. I suspect if (when) Tumblr goes under, it's going to take my blog with it, which is disappointing.

IANAL or a real estate person, but my understanding is that it's a combination of the following:

1) Laws passed in the 1970s that lock in a home's tax value unless/until it's sold, meaning anyone who owned a home in the 70s will never, ever want to sell because their taxes will skyrocket from their fixed 70's values;

2) NIMBYs forbidding the construction of new housing, especially any high-density housing, meaning an area that's massively grown in population has not significantly grown in housing availability;

3) Tech companies insisting on building huge campuses here, attracting more and more people, who use their tech salaries to snap up the extremely limited housing, leading to tech companies needing to pay higher salaries to attract new employees, leading to those higher salaries being used to outbid others on houses, leading to tech companies needing to pay higher salaries...

When we rented our last house, the real estate agent handling the rental asked why we, a Bay Area-salaried DINK couple, weren't buying. We laughed, because the down payment alone on the house we were renting - a dinky, dingy two-bedroom from the 60s which hadn't been significantly upgraded or maintained since - would have been close to our combined yearly income, never mind the taxes and mortgage payments. And that was for one of the crappiest houses in the neighborhood, not one we'd actually consider buying.

I would also like to see more about the effects of generation/cohort on this issue. We took our Vive and our Switch to my parents' for the holidays, and my nearly 70-year-old parents really enjoyed them. They both really got into Beat Saber, while my dad picked up Mario Kart and Smash really fast, and my mom is diving into Divinity: Original Sin 2 (and has been playing Bejeweled and Chuchel on her own).

They were born in the early 50s, long before computers and consoles were anything like mainstream. They watched us game as kids, but it wasn't until very recently that either of them has actually tried playing much. They're both responding to games like teenagers, but that's anecdotes, not data.

I'd love to know if it's an issue of age alone, age+responsibilities (i.e., do 30- to 40-year-olds who don't have kids or other time-consuming responsibilities shift their preferences the same way equivalent-aged parents do?), or age of their gaming career (i.e., do people who pick up gaming in their middle years or later start with the same interests as young gamers and gradually age out of them with time, or do they start with the interests of "old" gamers?).

- A House of Many Doors

- OneShot

- The Talos Principle

- Portal, if you haven't already played it

- Submachine

- The Myst series

- The Room series

- The Tomorrow Corporation collection

- Anything by Amanita Design

I don't know where the specific article wandered off to, but about six months ago I read a thinkpiece talking about those "happy face/frowny face" buttons that have popped up. The article talked a lot about how the binary up/down, with no ability to comment on specific people/processes/whatever, actually improved both overall ratings and the businesses' ability to address negative ratings considerably. If I find it again I'll update this comment.

Edit: This article has less detail than I remember, but covers the gist (and makes the same Black Mirror reference): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/customer-satis...

IANA doctor, but my understanding from years of trying every antidepressant on the market is that we don't currently understand why SSRIs help (some people) with depression. We know the mechanics of what they do, but not why that function has an antidepressant effect in some people. We don't really have a good idea what mechanically causes depression at all - in some cases, it's related to serotonin, in which case an SSRI might help. But there are a lot of other cases that aren't so obvious, and as far as my understanding goes, the "lot of other cases" is enough to make those who might be genuinely helped by SSRIs' mechanical function (as opposed to a placebo function, which is a whole 'nother issue in this research) be effectively invisible in the data.

A very rough metaphor (and again IANA doctor or scientist, just someone who's struggled with this personally for two decades) would be, "Stitches help people who are bleeding!" Yes, that is true in some cases and under certain circumstances, but what we've been doing with antidepressant drugs is roughly the equivalent of treating every possible bleeding wound with some variant of stitches or butterfly closures. Very effective for some, not helpful for others, actively harmful for a minority.

My understanding is that the anti-fraud vacation thing is related to being able to correlate a decrease in fraud with a specific person going on vacation. If you have money that mysteriously goes missing on the regular and 10 employees who touch it along the way, it's hard to determine which of those employees is responsible. If one of them goes away on vacation for a week and no money goes missing that entire week, you suddenly have a much better idea who might have been involved.

> Why isn't there a way to combine privacy with keeping your data?

Because we haven't figured out how to monetize it yet. Or perhaps more accurately, we haven't convinced the average consumer that it's worth paying for.

In theory, we could build services which do combine privacy with convenience, but consumers would have to be willing to pay for those services - and pay enough to make them viable. But too many people are too accustomed to "free" services, paid for with their data/loss of privacy (an intangible loss which many people either don't care about or believe it's too late to recover), to like the idea of handing over cold hard cash instead (a tangible loss which could directly impact the ability of people on limited budgets to access these services).

I absolutely hate people using my name in conversation. As you say, it feels patronizing, and to me it also feels fake and manipulative, especially in the context of customer support.

It's interesting to me how much advice about communication involves using a person's name. Do most people like hearing their name dropped frequently in conversations with strangers or near-strangers? Or is this one of those weird unproven "truths of the business" that get repeated because they sound good rather than because there's hard data backing up their effectiveness?

(I am not saying no hard data exists; I've just never seen any and the anecdotes I've heard indicate the opposite, so I'm curious.)

Not OP, but for me, it's the jarring-ness of the alarm. A year or so ago, I noticed it's easier to wake up at 6:30am during the summer, when the sun rises and I'm waking up to sunlight. During the summer, I'd usually wake up on my own anywhere from 5-20 minutes before my alarm went off, and it was a comfortable waking up. However, in the winter, I'd be jarred awake by an alarm to a pitch-black room, often smack in the middle of a sleep cycle, leaving me groggy and sluggish.

Once I realized that, I bought a $30 light alarm. It starts to glow softly about half an hour before my desired wake-up time, and except for once or twice when I was too buried under the covers to see the light, it consistently wakes me much more smoothly and pleasantly than getting jarred awake by a jangling alarm. (It has a back-up audio alarm that plays at your normal wake-up time, which shuts off when you turn off the light part.)

In pretty much any writing medium (novels, screenplays, short stories, etc), standard advice involves hooking the reader within the first paragraph or so. This is partly why "in medias res" tends to be such a popular opening technique - it drops the reader straight into the action, which is theoretically more interesting than "She woke up, got dressed, and went downstairs for her daily breakfast of toast and juice...". However, starting in medias res has itself become something of a cliche, to the point where you have to really know what you're doing to be able to use it effectively.

What I think a lot of novice writers, and people giving advice to novice writers, often miss is that "hooking" your reader doesn't mean immediately assualting them with action. All it means is raising a question the reader wants to know the answer to.

For example, "The Wizard Hunters" opens with the line "It was nine o'clock at night and Tremaine was trying to find a way to kill herself that would bring in a verdict of natural causes in court, when someone banged on the door." Not much action - Tremaine is sitting in a dusty library reading books - but that line raises two immediate questions: 1, why is Tremaine trying to kill herself in a way that would be ruled "natural causes", and 2, who's banging on the door at 9pm?

Similarly, "Black Sun Rising", the first book of the Coldfire Trilogy, opens with the line "She wondered why she was afraid to go home." Again, the line raises multiple questions, inviting the reader to keep reading to learn the answers.

As a former Googler, this video doesn't surprise me at all. Google tends to have a bit of a ...culture bubble, I suppose, where the engineers and designers forget that not everyone is okay with having all their data harvested and used in whatever manner Google thinks is best. I suspect this is related to the fact that the vast majority of these engineers and designers are straight, cis, college-educated men who are white or Asian and between the ages of 18 and 35, a group which on average tends to have fewer reasons to be concerned about their data being used against them. Then add in the fact that most employees have bought into the general "all-knowing, all-caring Google" mindset, and you have a perfect recipe for the kinds of thoughts presented in the video.

The scary thing is, most of the people I worked with genuinely believed that ideas like this are good for the user. The fact that such things require extensive privacy invasions don't even cross their minds, because they don't think of it as a privacy invasion. It's just another way to "optimize" toward some goal or another.

I keep my Slack status set to "nohello.com"[0], and ignore any messages sent to me which do not abide by nohello. It's worked pretty well so far.

[0]http://www.nohello.com/

The thing is, Kara almost certainly has clearly articulated, rational, objective arguments for the design decision in question. If she didn't, she wouldn't be making the decision in the first place. (If she's prone to making decisions willy-nilly with no idea why they're being made, that's a different issue.)

So from Kara's point of view, you're getting just as emotional and defensive about, and ignoring clearly articulated, rational, objective arguments for, the decision as you claim she is. Which is the point of the article - if someone goes into a discussion assuming they are the only one who is "objectively correct", they've already failed.

I've used the method outlined in the article very often in my career and it almost always works. Often it turns out I was right and we shouldn't have done X - but sometimes it turns out that Kara knew something I didn't, and X worked out way better than I expected.

Huh, I wonder where I went wrong. Exile just... didn't function. But then, I was trying to run it on my shiny new VR rig, so it might've just been hardware compatibility. :/ Thanks!

What black magic did you have to do to get Myst III to run fine on Windows 10? I tried it a couple months ago and it was so slow and janky and low-res that it wasn't playable. (Maybe because I was using a USB CD drive?)