parsoj

hmm - I didn't get that read about the author at all.

In fact the whole premise of the article (comparing moderation policy differences between different subreddits) - would suggest they totally understand that reddit moderators aren't all pulled from one homogeneous pool of employees.

I think the "site wide" bit was actually brought up by the moderator - referring to the fact that the /r/moviedetails moderation checks your full post history across all of reddit (not just your behavior on /r/moviedetails) and bans you from their subreddit based on that.

I'm confused - is this complaining about the genre as a whole being less popular? Or just books? I think with one of the most hyped and games of the year being a cyberpunk game (with "Cyberpunk" literally in the name) - its definitely premature to call the genre as a whole "dead" If this article is just lamenting the absence of Cyberpunk books - well surges in popularity in one media can always carry over to others...

I think you are missing the point, and the point of the original "appeal to politeness" argument. It is polite and appropriate to give someone the benefit of the doubt and "believe them" as in follow their line of thinking and investigate the point of view that they have. However - giving someone the benefit of the doubt and trying to see their point of view doesn't mean you follow their every command and accept every proposed solution. It just means you listen, and try to work with them to solve the problem.

I think this is a basic tenant of research - you can't always expect a specific outcome, sometimes you just have to explore curiosity and see what turns up.

However the contrarian in me wants to call out a counter-point:

> Working on unimportant problems can create important side-effects.

If over-applied - this logic can essentially become the tech-investor equivalent of trickle-down economics.

Who is to say that those areas that benefited from the side-effects of other work wouldn't have benefitted even more from direct investment?

Why aren't cloud, or even local, VM's being brought up? You irrevocably blow up your linux VM... just spin up a new one - or revert to your snapshot from earlier in the day. I'd actually make the argument that virtualization would make it easier than ever to safely experiment with things. Complexity has definitely gone up, and the time and ability to peacefully munch on problems under a tree has definitely gone down. But, I would argue that if a learner given the right sort of virtual sandbox, instructions on how to reset their state to working order, and an internet connection with google, the linux docs, and stack overflow bookmarked, there is a lot of learning to be had!