The weird thing about online communities is that at some point they transition from being promotional opportunities owned by the promoter to online communities owned by the users and promoters alike.
Part of the role of Reddit, HN and other social media is to motivate you, the collected developers out there, to write your own version and fix all the problems you see in the system (software + admins + "culture") as it is now.
That includes me. Maybe after the wedding, kid's baseball game, co-worker's going away party, and stuff this weekend.
Problem is, fixing the software won't fix how it's misused. I come here both for the community and the network. Added features would be nice, but my rather small list of gripes is primarily with the utterly opaque, broken, and sometimes downright moronic way it's run sometimes.
It's not broken enough to drive most people away, and that's its prime benefit. But what I'd give for the same site, moderated differently...
For me, the question is knowing what exactly I'd do differently. On a lot of crucial points, I don't know and don't know how to find out (except experimentation).
I have learned distrust. I distrust anything that makes me feel good without having achieved something that merits that sensation.
Alcohol is like being wrapped in a comforter. You are warm, the world is soft, and like a child, you trust in everything turning out alright.
This has no relationship to the real world.
While I have enjoyed alcohol many times, and both drunk to excess and been a social drinker, I find that it distracts me. It distracts from what I should be paying attention to, while I'm busy feeling good and safe.
> you trust in everything turning out alright. This has no relationship to the real world.
I have tried the opposite: 100% serious balls to the wall control freak & pessimism and mistrust of "everything turning out alright". I'm sad to report that that approach is no good.
I'm starting to think a decent dose of naive "it'll turn out alright" is useful.
My Dad used to fix radar on large ships. The company motto was "It'll be all right when you get to sea, Captain". Oddly enough, it always was. Even if the radar failed, they had radio, loren, pilot guides &c.
Sounds tautological, but it preserves the idea that multiple real world forces determine the outcome, not wishing or feeling. That might save us from paranoia.
Once, deep in a meditative trance, I channeled Perl. My friends took me to the hospital after I refused to stop speaking in regular expressions and hashes of hashes.
Keep pushing, Google. We're all waiting. Is the future of Gmail that it will be manipulative corporate bloatware, or a cool hacker innovation that changed email by streamlining it? Looks more like the former today.
> the structure of a persuasive essay is a non-fancy, workaday model that works just fine.
I agree with this, but would like to point out that grey-area's point was that there are other forms which fit other uses:
> There are various ways of structuring an argument - as a dialogue, as thesis, antithesis then synthesis, or treating it as an oration like Cicero's with 6 parts ending in a peroration.
The five-paragraph comp works very well for a standard argument.
Anything that doesn't fit the thesis requirement, like a list or synthesis, might not do so well with that format.
> the habit people have of making a list (as the OP does) as if this is a substitute for properly structuring their thoughts - to me that's a cop-out and not far above no structure at all.
Speaking as a language professional:
If there's no direct association between the parts, present them as a list.
Otherwise, you're going to impose narrative structure that does not add meaning and thus is extraneous.
> I object to a huge, creepy advertising company having that much access to me and my data, I think it’s unwise to use many proprietary, hard-to-replace services in such important roles, and I think it’s downright foolish to tie that much of your data and functionality into proprietary services run by one company in one account...
He makes a good point.
Absolute power gets abused absolutely.
Unless the person to whom the power is handed is some kind of Zen master, it's likely they'll use that power for personal agenda.
The groups they like will become elites. The ones they don't will get lined up against walls and shot.
That's just how it is.
Even though Google says, "Don't be evil," they aren't Zen masters.
He doesn't sound like a Zen master to me either. I know it's probably hard to distinguish between Buddhist sects but "success and happiness" (the subtitle of the book that is promoted in the video) are not terms Zen Buddhism deals with usually.
Normal Buddhism does deal with these extensively, Four Noble Truths are all about suffering. But Zen Buddhism tends to dismiss these concepts as unimportant. They may be true, they may not be true, but while you're looking for happiness and success, Zen offers nothing.
Mindfulness meditation is rather cool, as is general Buddhism. I'm just trying to distinguish a bit here.
I don't have much of an opinion on this topic, since it seems to me that any large concentration of money and smart people produces innovation (so do lone geniuses). But I thought this article was interesting.
