el_cujo

Unfortunately, I don't think it's as simple as "just go back to smaller groups". For companies, more users = more revenue, there isn't realy much incentive to not try and pull in as many people as possible. And then for most normal users, if they here about some big site, they're inclined to join that so they don't miss out on the the funny tik tok memes/all of their friends being on instagram/etc. For them, what benefit is there to a smaller site where you can't get as many followers or where your friends/favorite celebrity isn't a member.

I agree with you that size is one of the main contributing factors to the problem, I just don't think smaller sites is a practical solution for the public at large. That being said, if you don't care about "fixing" the public problem, then you're right on the money. If you personally don't want to experience toxicity, get off the big sites, it's that easy. I just don't see that being a fix for the average teenager/college student/boomer

I'm not anti-vax, but this is a discussion on toxicity on the internet, and I see plenty of people who take great pleasure in just unloading on anti-vaxxers because they know it's a target nobody will scold them for being cruel to. It's pretty obvious these types don't really care about changing the minds of the anti-vaxxers either, people usually don't have an epiphany about their life just because somebody was mean to them online. If anything, it's an opportunity for anti-vaxxers to band together against people who are cruel to them and probably even more deeply ingrain their beliefs.

This doesn't mean anti-vaxxers should be tolerated as a viable alternative lifestyle, but throwing curses at them online and spamming memes that make them out to be mentally challenged really doesn't do anything but satisfy a bully.

This is my experience as well. In the early/mid 2000s I mostly browsed sites with a small, dedicated group of regular users. These sites were (mostly) civil and had a "small town" feel where you kind of knew everyone or at least recognized their username. Even back then though, I went on a few sites where the userbase was big enough that you'd be mostly interacting with people who you may never see again on that site, and as a result it was quite a bit less civil than the small sites.

I think the big difference between today vs. back then with respect to toxicity, is now that the web is so centralized, most sites the average person probably visits (twitter, reddit, etc) involves them interacting with strangers who they may never interact with again, so there is less of a feeling like they need to "hold back" like you might when talking to someone you know you'll meet again.

Probably the only exception to this (for me at least) was Facebook, because back when I used it I almost exclusively interacted with people I knew, so there was still that same incentive to not be an asshole because you'd actually meet these people again later. These days a lot of people interact with strangers in the comments of pages/groups for like politics and other stuff, and I feel like that's where most of the nastiness is.

>Anecdotally, I believe burnout is more likely when you work on a job that only cares about profits, or is not fulfilling in some meaningful way.

I worked in academic medical research for a while and many people seemed burn out. There was basically no profit motive since we were working for research grants and there was pretty strict controls on how that could be divvied up on payroll (can't just get a million dollar grant and give the boss a 300k pay raise). You'd think it would be fulfilling since we were studying disease/working towards treatments that could actually help people. Meanwhile I have friends in finance working in purely profit-driven roles that don't really help the world per se, and they don't seem burnt out at all. I really think a feeling of freedom has a bigger role than anything else. If you feel like it's not a big deal for you to take a vacation or a long lunch or just be away in general, then you'll feel less burnt out than someone who is expected to show up every day and give it their all with no end in sight, even if the goal they're working towards is something altruistic.

The only thing I prefer about google at this point is that occasionally if I search something where I just want an answer and not a result link, google will just give me the answer in that little box at the top of the result page. Something like "when are the oscars". It's a nice little convenience that saves me from having to click some article and scan for the info. If DDG had something like that, I'd never even miss google.

>found that 51% of food franchisees earn less than $50k per year and only around 7% take in $250k

Unbelievable, owning a franchise seems pretty stressful just to be taking in 50k/year. I guess once you get it off the ground with good managers you don't have to baby it as much, but still.

The point of this was to look at questions the author thought were interesting but maybe overlooked I think, not a "TOP 10 QUESTIONS WE NEED ANSWERED NOW OR THE HUMAN RACE IS DOOOOMED!!!" listicle.

This is a good idea. Depending on the field, there really shouldn't be any statements in the text about the findings in the paper that aren't directly backed up by "proof" in a figure. If you're familiar enough with the methodology, just looking at the figures should give you a good idea of what the authors did.

>"oh you're lonely? deal with it, or just make friends!"

No, it's much worse, it's telling you to just hang out more with all of those friends you already have.

>they aren't predictions at all

Sure they are, it's a nice counterpoint to the people who think in 10 years we'll have flying cars and a fully immersive VR matrix and nobody will have a real job since AI and robots will do everything for us.

I don't know if this is true everywhere, but in my city in the US, cars are supposed to stop at crosswalks (not talking about at intersections necessarily) if a pedestrian is crossing even if there is no stopsign or signal beyond the white paint on the road, but this is NEVER observed in my experience. Thankfully it seems like most pedestrians don't know this either so we don't get people trying to challenge cars to make a point at risk of their own lives.

The US isn't exactly known for it's fair and perfect legal system (particularly if you're brown), so the fact that Japan's numbers are even higher says something.

type vimtutor in your shell for the "intended" tutorial

>Twitter is the most intellectual, and underrated, social network, because people follow too many political accounts and celebrities instead of other people

I mostly agreed up until this. These days it feels like on Twitter, everyone is political at least some of the time. Even a lot of otherwise interesting people who talk about technology 95% of the time, politics just HAS to slip in the other 5%. I don't even really blame them, certain groups treat you like a political enemy if you aren't constantly kowtowing their politics, it's like paying protection money to the mob. Most of these types have personal blogs where you can get their high effort technical posts without the low effort political trash, I'd say go to that instead of Twitter. Fuck Twitter.

>Most of the predictions are decades away in the future, so the story can go on unchecked for decades. And so on.

It's not just the sea level rising stuff in the future though, now basically any adverse weather event is blamed on climate change. Powerful hurricane, big mudslide, wild fires, etc. I'm not saying climate change doesn't play a role in any of these, but the news media plays it a little loose with any of these events and citing them as being caused by/evidence of climate change with 0 proof. But again, if you question any of if then YOU are the one painted as being against science.

Yeah I agree there is a very strong incentive for certain groups to disprove climate change and they're backed by a lot of money and influence. Comparatively, there doesn't really seem like that big of an incentive to sell a "lie" that CO2 is fucking the climate. That being said, it does irk me a bit that I know so many people who smugly demean the moronic science-deniers who don't believe in climate change, even though they themselves don't know any of the data or figures that support climate change. Most people just follow whatever their talking-head of choice on tv tells them to believe.

>In this day and age, feeding into the narrative that science is just another competitive team sport where people compete with whatever means necessary is downright dangerous.

>Reality is much more nuanced, and the article actually does a good job of detailing that.

It's bad to sow too much mistrust in science, sure, but it certainly feels like society right now is way too far in the opposite direction right now, with people blindly believing any headline following the phrase "a new study says..." or "scientists say...". A lot of scientific fields are very competitive for funding right now, there is immense pressure to twist every result into a "win" while equally important null results ("we tried X and surprisingly it did not worked") are basically treated as worthless.

People shouldn't blindly mistrust science, but blind trust is just as dangerous, the system right now is far from perfect. I believe most researchers still ultimately want to solve mysteries in nature and improve life, but they're also human beings who ultimately want to be able to keep working and provide for themselves and their families, these two motivations are not always perfectly aligned.

This has been my experience more-or-less as well. Any graduate student that does anything even alzheimer's adjacent at the school I used to work at absolutely had to have a certain two researchers on their dissertation committee and they would 100% not let you progress without throwing a bone to beta-amyloid in your proposal (along with heavily pushing you to pander to some of their personal pet theories).

It's a sunken cost fallacy at this point, people have build entire careers on the beta-amyloid stuff and they will NEVER accept an alternative because it would make them irrelevant. These same people hold a lot of power in the field.

I'm definitely not suggesting this is the norm (especially for new investigators or those going up for tenure) but my time in academic research has been kind of the opposite. Almost everyone in my lab would take at minimum the week from christmas to new years off. There's a pretty big annual conference in my field every late October/early November, so really every year, not much gets done at all from November to mid-January unless you're a student close to defending your dissertation. In fact a lot of people I knew at the time outside my own lab cited non-strict hours as being one of the main perks of the job along with being relatively easy to take time off for holidays. Again, I get that it's not like that everywhere, but just thought I'd share the "24/7/365 crunch time" isn't completely universal either.

Had the same thought. I find it very easy to skip breakfast and still not feel the need to go overboard at lunch but I have a hard time falling asleep if I didn't eat a filling dinner. Lunch + dinner only lifestyle fits me much better than breakfast + lunch only, I know a lot of people who try to fast from 8 PM to noon who do the same.

I like the general principle here of trying to keep website design relatively simple and self-reliant, but I'm not sure I agree with the idea that "link rot" is some horrible problem we desperately need a solution for. Good articles will be lost in time, but I think that's OK. New good ones will be written too. It's OK for content to be ephemeral, we don't have to be so obsessed with FOMO and making sure every blogpost ever made is etched into diamond to survive for 100 generations. If you read some article you thought was great, it's OK to just be happy you read it rather than spamming it to the four corners of the earth to give it as many eyes as possible.

I guess they don't feel like they need to pay more if they have a big pool of potential interns all willing to live in a hostel for $15k/year

Not in their pods, er I mean cells.

I think that "co-living" spaces like this were common for factory worker-types around the industrial revolution, where you were with strangers rather than roommates, but my only source is that I vaguely remember hearing it on some podcast so take it with a grain of salt.

I could maybe see doing something like this if it was $300/month cheaper and each pod had a retractable door, almost like those Japanese capsule hotels. I get that in a space this small you aren't going to have much privacy, but to not have any sort of divider to block in the bed space seems over the top. Maybe the idea is that if people can close themselves off, they're more likely to do something like play their music too loud or watch stuff on their computer with the volume too high versus if there is no divider they'll be more conscientious?

I didn’t mean that they aren’t usable like that, but that a lot of people try them out after hopping between a bunch of Linux distros first. I know people who use FreeBSD as a daily driver and do all of the normal stuff your average user would be able to do in terms of web browsing

Even for a work computer, if I can't easily open, say, Stack Overflow then it's a non-starter.

I think it's just an evolution of distro-hopping even though I don't think people like to admit it. After you've tried all of the major linux distros and you're still looking to play around with something different, the next step is to jump to something like BSD or Haiku or Plan9. You might not get a lot of people openly admitting this though, seems like it's looked down upon to try out something new like this "just for fun" versus having some super specific technical reason. Then again, the "just for fun" distro-hoppers may not stick with Plan9 long enough to tell anyone about it before they move on to something else :P

I'm sure WMF does some good stuff, but I'm sure the average donator just thinks they're donating to keep Wikipedia alive and online and has no idea about all of the extra stuff WMF does (and therefore needs money to fund). I'm not necessarily saying WMF's stuff isn't worth funding, but it really seems like they're tricking people into paying for it under the guise of keeping Wikipedia running.

Looking at your methodology critically is crucial to all fields of science though, as is changing your conclusions and interpretations as more findings come forward. Dismissing someone outright for challenging something that has become dogma is anti-scientific even if that dogma is based on facts. If it's actually true, then it will stand up to scrutiny.