overthemoon

This inspired me. I think this kind of work would be fascinating and deeply satisfying.

Do you mind if I ask how that went? I've circled these issues before. For me, I suspect the underlying issue is something else, but I'm curious about your experience.

Tik Tok is the reason I've been told several times I have ADHD. Pretty sure I don't! This phenomenon is so infuriating. The only half-convincing defense I've heard of it is that it could, maybe, theoretically, disseminate information about illnesses to people who don't have the money to see a professional, but the other effects are so much worse it doesn't seem worth it.

Really wonderful piece. I bought a Krazy Kat collection in college when I'd read that Watterson was a fan, I didn't realize it had such a reach.

https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/twitter still says it's up, definitely down though. Which is weird, normally they're pretty on top of things.

It is weird. I think it's a stand-in for nostalgia for lost media formats and the experience they engendered. I have a lot of fuzzy feelings about it, because it was an event on Friday when my parents would take us there, or my dad would stop by after work and get movies or video games. I would just about shit myself when he finally got a copy of Super Mario All-Stars or Earthbound. When I was a little older it was close enough that I could ride my bike there.

But for me, it's not really about Blockbuster. It's about the format of home video. All the ritual, the excitement surrounding a new release that everyone wanted, sitting down to watch it together. It's about the object of video, the thing you can hold, and is similar to why I like to collect vinyl. I like the artifact in and of itself, along with what's encoded on it.

It's really good, and I came here hoping to learn more about how it was accomplished.

I do the same. It has always annoyed me that we have a 3 syllable name for the letter W.

In theory, that's not what education is for. In practice, that's absolutely what people go to college for.

This is why this conversation is moot. People keep wringing their hands over this "moral hazard" or whatever, but it's been like pulling teeth to get him to commit to 10k with a bunch of dumb qualifiers and means testing. It's not happening, except as a token for a few people come election time.

Honestly, they are cute, I like having them around, but we've got some feeders, and if there are house sparrows, there are no other birds. We've been tweaking the feed we use and the form factor of the feeders to keep them away. Since we switched to nyjer, they've generally left the feeder alone, and we get finches instead.

IMHO it's a serious concept, AND it's vastly overused. It's something to be taken seriously, and I think there are a fair number of people who find it has explanatory power in their lives. But yeah, it's also a fad. That this framework has come to be the dominant model of interaction in the discourse is an insult to people who have experienced real trauma, even more so because often there seems to be no effort at healing, just rolling through the identity supermarket picking up various kinds of afflictions and mental illnesses as a personal definition rather than a diagnosis pointing to treatment.

That was maybe more glib than it should have been, and I am sympathetic to the desire to figure out who you are absent many of the normal meaning-making centers people used to have. Without that, there is only the identity supermarket. What's more, trauma-as-spectrum isn't the worst way to think about the aches of being a person. Maybe you weren't beaten as a child, maybe you didn't flee an invading army, but the pain and sadness lives on inside you nonetheless.

The darker side of it is that rolling around on the ground holding your tummy and crying is an efficient attention-getter.

So there's nuance. I think it's a serious idea, with serious consequences, and too many very unserious people have glommed onto it.

I didn't know that! Interesting.

At least when I was growing up it was the New International Version. You were a fundie if you insisted on the KJV or the NKJV among people I knew.

I worked in worker's comp briefly as a paralegal, and we'd pay doctors handsomely for a written opinion based on their review of medical records, which was most likely filled out by an assistant and polished off by the doctor. Good work if you can get it!

Has it ever turned out that one of these words means something dirty or profane or something in another language?

I agree. The beef I would add with those games is that they feel like theme parks. There's no real frontier. Elite Dangerous came close, it was a thrill to be the first one in a system. Genuinely don't know how you'd solve that, though.

One obstacle you have to overcome is that there has to be an investment that is risked by the players. There's not much of a cost to gank someone usually, or it's simply not allowed at all except in a controlled way. One thing that forces people into social cooperation is to protect against the potential for loss. As I understand it, confrontations with other players in EVE Online are dangerous because of that investment of time and/or money. That's part of what makes roguelikes and battle royales so compelling. That said, you have to balance it against being appealing enough to more casual players--how do you encourage investment without making it a boring grind or too expensive?

My dream is a lot more narrow: I want a mod or an official game mode for Deep Rock Galactic where two teams of 4 dwarves race to the center of a cave for resources and have to take it back to the drop pod. It should disincentivize players from fighting each other directly, but instead deploy traps and waves of bugs against each other.

It's SUCH a good game as it is. I think it could only improve with the addition of creative PvP modes.

Yeah, it's awful. It's padded out with useless preamble I assume for SEO reasons. Troubleshooting Windows issues with Google is a waterfall of this bullshit. I hate having to go to windowsitgeektuts.com to read six paragraphs about how people like to hear sound out of their computer just to be told to reinstall the driver.

I hear what you're saying, and I think it's true that some people react with hostility when confronted with some of this stuff, but separate from the actual values, this article describes a destructive and unproductive social dynamic. I think the most interesting bit is that the author describes similar cannibalistic dynamics happening in neo-nazi subcultures. Whether the values here are worthy is beside the point.

Questioning the moral standing of those who would criticize the dynamic itself isn't useful or worthwhile. It conflates interpersonal confrontation (useful, good, corrective, it's how we build each other up) with a zillion passersby hurling invective at a guy who, in this case, found it so troubling to have a mass of people condemn him on a moral spectrum that is very dear to him that he ended up suicidal.

Maybe, but I kind of doubt it. Trump is a black hole of attention. He warps the discourse around himself. If he's on Twitter, people have to go there to find out what he says. Moreover, Musk is a bit more immune to public outcry on the Trump axis than previous owners, in my opinion. It doesn't seem hard to brand it as a triumphant return, and distance himself from Truth Social. His fans will happily eat that up, the people who hated him will keep hating him, and Musk will enjoy making people mad. He's coming back for sure, if only because it's going to juice Twitter's numbers.

There's no leaving Twitter, in my opinion. Its the only game in town. That said, I sincerely hope there is a fracture here. An ecosystem with many smaller platforms seems far healthier to me.

That's exactly my point. I don't think the people who wanted this or that account banned really thought through what they were saying when they were appealing to the private nature of Twitter's ownership.

I have no illusions about how well-managed Twitter has been up to this point, but it is bitterly ironic that the narrow, libertarian-adjacent argument that goes something like "they're a private enterprise, they can ban whoever they want, free speech has nothing to do with it" is being tested. What happens when a giant, unaccountable communication monolith is run by a guy you don't like?

I can't stand the man, and I dislike the idea of him owning Twitter. Who knows what's going to happen, whether he'll succeed or not, Maybe he'll put his money where his mouth is re censorship, I don't know, but that there will be an ideological changing of the guard is inevitable, imo. What then? Do we really want these platforms to have so much unaccountable control over the discourse?

What makes sense? What do you think the plan is?

I think about this too. It's got a conflict ("he's doing something I don't want him to do"), it's weird enough to be eye catching but not weird enough to be unbelievable, serious enough to warrant concern but not so serious that it isn't funny to read and think about, and comes with an explicit invitation to engage. It's got relatable themes (loneliness, male hobby obsession, finding fulfillment outside the drudgery of work) and has an easy entrypoint for engagement.

I'm not saying this is fake, especially since it wouldn't really matter either way, but it's interesting to think about. I remember reading something about people who fake advice column letters. There's a real art to the best ones.

I hear what you're saying. A few months ago, a guy, clearly homeless, rang my doorbell and offered to shovel my driveway in exchange for some small amount, I can't remember. It couldn't have been more than ten bucks. I do not need that. I can get it done in about 45 minutes. It felt posh and exploitative. What I realized later is that he was just asking for some dignity. To earn something, to not be a charity case. He wanted to feel like he was offering something worthwhile in exchange.

I've thought about that incident a lot. I too am disgusted by how society is organized. When confronted by my own relative wealth and privilege, I felt gross. But in that exact moment, you can't re-engineer the economy. You have to choose whether or not to be generous while respecting that person's dignity. I can only speak for myself here, but too often I'd rather just not encounter hardship in others at all. This is a bad impulse. The world is a terrible broken place, and it's right to be generous in whatever way someone will accept in that moment.

This reasoning is often used to justify poverty wage jobs--people want to work, so let them--and that's definitely not my take. I think work can impart dignity, there's a certain amount of shitty work that can't be avoided, but you can't feed your children with dignity, so let's pay people a lot more.

How effective was it?

With the caveat that I very much believe in civil, good faith discourse, I find that in being a formal critique of the discourse, it can nevertheless introduce the author's own ideological preferences (fine) in a way that appears neutral (not fine) or purely formal (very not fine). Here are two examples:

> Calls for good faith communication are understood at best as naive requests to calm the outrage and conflict that now runs rife in political discourse. Both ends of the political spectrum (the far left and the far right) express this view. Both sides believe that “the other side” simply can’t be trusted and therefore cannot be engaged in good faith.

This phenomenon exists, it permeates the spectrum. However, the use of the word "far" here sticks in my craw. It implies, without outright suggesting, that the center is the reasonable referee, rather than existing on a spectrum that has a history. What is center today may very well have been "far left" or "far right" 40 years ago, and its relative distance from other ideologies is irrelevant when it comes to objectivity. You have a home base. It's not just "Liberalism". No one is a contentless unit of democratic formalism.

> Given well-documented advances in the field of information warfare, there should be no illusion: today’s culture war cannot be won by any side. Mutually assured destruction is now the name of the wargame.[6] The saturation of bad faith communication throughout culture is steadily increasing, like a kind of dangerous background radiation emitted from scientifically engineered memetic weaponry. Public political discourse is quickly becoming a toxic warzone, leaching externalities into families, friendships, and identity structures.

"Culture war" is a slur for a particular kind of vitriolic discourse, but it is in fact a war over what we consider the common good. In other words--politics. This is the meat and potatoes of democracy. Liberalism says the state shouldn't have an opinion on it. The "common good" is what we all agree it is. People will disagree. So then it stands to reason that whoever has the most influence (defined as broadly as you'd like) gets to decide what the common good is. This war has high stakes.

This also smuggles in the notion that so-called information warfare has in fact warped political outcomes, which is far from being well-documented. The cause->effect sequence is not established. But let's say it is--who are the actors, and why are they doing it? Those motivations have political causes. What are they? Or is misinformation just metastasized communication, chaotic irruptions that happens over a long enough time scale?

Overall, this presents a primarily formal and cultural diagnosis of political chaos and fracture as the root cause, couched in objective language, when that is itself an ideological position. There are other analyses. One might argue that the fractured discourse is an effect, not a cause, but it's taken for granted that _formal_ misbehavior is the cause of the fractious political atmosphere, rather than... well, anything else, I guess. Substitute your favorite diagnosis here.

It's fine to have this analysis. It's not fine to pretend it's anything but an ideological, non-objective analysis. I get the impulse to try to rise above the fray. Politics is ugly, but it's ugly because the stakes are so high. Getting lost in the weeds of formal objections isn't going to fix anything. There's more going on than just procedural fuck ups.

Just my take. I might be imbuing this article with the sins of similar pieces it doesn't commit (although I don't think so), but I think this tendency is common enough that it's worth bringing up. It happens fairly often on HN. Nerds love rules. I'm no exception.

I'm continually shocked at how technically incompetent academics can be. Otherwise brilliant people with the most batshit technical workflows I've ever seen.

I think this is right. In addition, IMO ultimately it feels hollow if you can't piss anyone off. Twitter makes it possible to search for the living avatar of whatever you hate the most so you can tweet invective at them until your head explodes. It feels good, even for a moment, to tell your enemies what's what. If you're on a platform with only MAGA people, what's the point? I signed up out of curiosity after it launched and there was so little actual engagement. Maybe that's changed, I dunno, but at any rate, a key component of the MAGA movement was how much certain high profile people obviously hated it and felt threatened by it. (Whether one thinks they should have or not is immaterial to the fact that it thrived on the hate and contempt from mainstream liberal mores havers.) If you can't see them being mad at you for having your own social media network, it loses its charm.

Also, the fact that as far as I know Trump still hasn't posted anything there is a major unforced error. If nothing else it was a way to get a direct line to him post Twitter ban.