hoopd

Have you ever wondered how the electorate becomes uninformed? Certain information is declared off-limits because of what it might make people think or do.

I never once said the mods are employees. I pointed out how much what they do would cost if you had to pay people to do what they do. The "debate" is over how value is measured. If you have something new to add please do.

As you said, mods are being paid in intangibles. If you log in to a website several days a week to fulfill the responsibilites that come with your position, in exchange for compensation, for years at a time, that's called a job. you may not be an employee but at some point you are working.

I'm not saying we can assign a dollar value to this work, I'm saying we can ballpark an amount of value and we might as well communicate that in dollars. If you'd like we can measure it in millions of hours donated. The magnitude of these numbers alone should make this interesting.

Because reddit has no close competitors there is no market for mods, reddit has a monopoly. Since there is no market to tell us what the value of moddding is we have to guess. If there were a hundred reddits competing with each other for mods we could trust the level of compensation they receive. Glut of supply and only one buyer means compensation will be far under what it would be in a "fair market".

If you're dying of thirst and somebody offers you a glass of water some will argue the market value of that glass of water was zero. I get that. There's also the value of what that glass of water was worth to you and there are many ways to approximate that value. There's what you were willing and able to pay at the time, there's whatever water prices were at the time if you walked into a store, the size of a loan you would have taken out for it, etc. If for whatever reason this person gave you many life-saving glasses of water over the years, and you showed little appreciation, there may come a point where the two of you will debate the difference betwee market value and utility value.

I'm not trying to debate market vs utility value. I'm just saying if the mods have donated $100 of time over the years it's different from if they've donated $100 million of time over the years. It's an attempt to have a rational discussion about whether or not they're "throwing a temper tantrum." You're getting sidetracked because I'm using dollars to measure utility value instead of market value. If you'd like you can think of it this way: what would the cost of reddit's mods be if this was happening in a "perfect" market where other companies were competing for moderators.

> If it was so onerous and awful, they'd simply leave. Again, it's telling that not a single one has.

This should be covered in the first semester of college economics: if a company has no close competitors you can not assert that its employees must be happy because they haven't left. People have been screaming for months for a similar place to leave to, it doesn't exist yet.

There's no reason to get sidetracked with a debate about how value is defined, it's a simple question.

You seem to think you have a pretty strong grip on things so you tell me: ballpark, how many hours of work do you estimate have been donated to reddit by its moderators and what's the dollar value of that work?

If each subreddit with 30,000 or more subscribers (all 1,000 of them) required just 5 hours of moderation per day, and that cost $8/hr, that's over $10 million/yr.

This is ignoring many mods are industry specialists who could charge $50-200/hr for the time they're donating to reddit.

Saying they would like their tools updated and to be taken seriously is a small "power play" considering the massive amount of labor they donate to the site each year.

It will also make the site even more toxic as everybody takes sides and starts the same fights over and over again.

That r/shitredditsays is celebrating shows that mistreatment has not been happening to them.

"Over the years we've evolved a business model that depends heavily on hundreds of volunteers who work in exchange for site privileges like banning people they don't like. Some of these volunteers became upset yesterday. We're still rich, they still have nowhere else to go."

Here's a different approach. Read about the history of dishonesty[0] of the woman called the twitter mob to destroy Tim Hunt's career and just think about it for a little while. That's it, just think.

[0] - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3141158/A-flawed-acc...

Unless I'm wrong you're arguing that Uber is safe and efficient because market forces made it so. It's efficient because of technological advances and it's safe literally to the extent required by law.

Because they've opted out of the regulations their competitors are subject to Uber could offer a a more dangerous and less efficient service than current taxi companies and still "compete".

Honestly I don't care if these twitter personalities are "technical" or not. We're not talking about Adria and Shanley because of their technical ideas, or their ideas about technology because as far as I know they have none. They're famous for their social activism.

But let's look at the other ones, shall we:

2004's Kinsey. Kinsey's a hero to the social justice movement, also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Kinsey#Personal_habits

2009's Creation. Opened on 7 screens in the US. Hardly a cultural phenomenon.

2004's Aviator. Close, big surprise Hollywood chooses to mythologize a legendary director's early life.

Tim's Vermeer. "Inventor Tim Jenison seeks to understand the painting techniques used by Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer." Are you intentionally wasting my time?

2011's A Dangerous Method. Look who got first billing and is on the center of the cover. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1571222/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

2015's Experimenter. Do you not know who Milgram is? From the IMDB page the focus of the movie is his inhumane experiments. Whose case does "look at the horrible things this white guy did to people" help more?

1999's Insider. It's a stretch because it's a movie about a whistleblower who happens to be a scientist, but at least it was a big film with real actors.

2008's The Strangest Dream. A Canadian documentary that nobody's ever heard of. Doesn't even have a cover picture on IMDB or even one vote on Rotten Tomatoes. It's about the one guy who left the Manhattan Project. What are the odds that this is a vehicle to pass judgement on all the other guys who didn't leave the Manhattan Project?

> You for some reason switched to fictional scientists with Gravity (2013) and Interstellar (2014). Why is that? For that matter, you restricted me to scientists and mathematicians, while the protagonists of Gravity are engineers and astronauts - it's poor form to change your metric part-way through.

I hoped you would connect the dots that I was talking about large-scale, big-budget movies.

> If I expand the list to include engineers, astronauts, and similar occupations, then "Captain Phillips" (2013) concerns the captain of the MV Maersk Alabama, which was hijacked by pirates, "The Wind Rises" (2013) about Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed Japanese fighter planes during World War II ... oops ! Sory, not a white man, though he would have been an "honorary white" in apartheid South Africa, " Zvorykin-Muromets" (2010) about the Russian inventor of television, "Flash of Genius" (2008) about the Robert Kearns and his invention of the intermittent windshield wiper,

At this point it appears you're intentionally wasting my time for effect, like maybe you're hoping somebody who glances over your post will assume it's well-researched and well-thought.

Naoki Mori? I was hoping you would notice from context I was referencing male scientists who were publicly disgraced as people, not as fraudulent scientists.

I'm sure you'll understand that I don't have enough time to fact-check your ridiculous list of movies and sift through all of your loaded questions, so I've left them unanswered.

> How do you define 'mythologizing' in such a way that it's at least roughly repeatable?....If you can't do that, then you don't really have a good metric.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mythologize

At least you closed with Deep Web which might be an actual counterpoint.

I've never heard of Shanley until today and glancing through what she does it's inflammatory political theater.

> it's useful for her political goals for you to think of her the way you do

I dislike her because people who are that combative make me uncomfortable, not because I can't handle what she says. It's a shame people like her have degraded our culture to a point where having people dislike you is a sign that you're saying something worthwhile.

Really, a recent post is:

> i hate when people make shitty acoustic covers of pop songs just fucking stop you suck at guitar and singing

That's just abusive. But if I don't like her it's a good thing? I'm at a loss, this is like junior high all over again.

Like I said earlier, I can't tell if you're trolling or not.

> `git log --author='Eric S. Raymond'`

On which repo? The current one only goes back to 2005.

ESR is common name, this is the first I've heard of Shanley. I'm really hoping you're not talking about the twitter personality. If you're putting that person and ESR on the same level I don't know what to say.

The bad thing is that we're biasing our culture in a particular direction and pretending that we're not. "Diversity selling" is the product of a massive intentional cultural shift and I'm surprised people get so upset when it's pointed out to them.

crtl-f "raymond"

Instead of IMDB's list of mostly TV movies, how about Wikipedia's Films About Mathematicians[1], look at the biographical films. There are only 8, but the last film biopic of an average white dude was Feynman's back in '96. Last year alone we had major films about Turing and Hawking, and A Beautiful Mind came out in 2001.

Take a look at the most recent big-budget sci-fi. Q: Who had 95% of the screentime in Gravity? A: A woman. Q: Who were the hero scientists in Interstellar? A: A black guy and two women. (How long did Doyle last? What was the race and sex of the disgraced scientist in Interstellar again?)

If you would like to provide a counterpoint, simply name the regular white guy scientists or mathematicians we've mythologized in the past 20 years.

We'll compare that to the efforts towards mythologizing females on HN in the past 30 days. Emmy Noether (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9606497), The Women Science Forgot (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744684), and today's Ada Lovelace.

We'll throw in male scientists who have been publicly disgraced in the past year (offhand I can think of 3) and compare that to the number of disgraced female scientists (I count 0).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_about_mathematic...

I don't think it's a coincidence that the men who have most recently received the mythology treatment are disabled (Stephen Hawking), gay (Alan Turing), had severe mental health challenges (John Nash) or are black (Neil DeGrasse Tyson). I imagine next will be a transgendered hero.