It needs to be "gender" if they are extending these opportunities to people who identify as female, regardless of biology.
1,816 karma · joined April 4, 2011
And, my initial response to seeing this headline: "Oh, _yes_ you do."
Even if I could dedicate two hours every single day of the year to becoming an expert at something, I'll be 50+ before I'm an expert in it. If I could dedicate about 15% of my waking life to becoming an expert in new things, there is only enough time in my remaining life to become an expert in two things at most. And that's assuming it doesn't take more hours or become more difficult or even impossible to become an expert in new things when you're much older. And, frankly, what's the use of becoming an expert in something in your mid 60s?! Just in time to finish the last bit of your life.
If only I'd known the value of time much earlier in life, so I could have jumpstarted that in my 30s and focused on more than one thing to become an expert in . . . you only realize that sort of thing when it is too late.
Aaaaaand now I'm bummed out. :)
I spent so much of my life working on it. I wrote the software behind it, designed the presentation, handled the customer service, mediated disputes, handled the promotion, and helped with user-founded real-world gatherings built around the community on the site.
It required so much of my attention and, unfortunately, often was so hostile and venomous that the only reason I stuck with it for many of the later years was out of a sense of obligation to the community (many people made friendships through the site, met spouses, established real world businesses, and even put themselves through school thanks to the site) and a sense of obligation to myself . . . I put in all of my 20s and part of my 30s dedicated to the site and service. Hours and hours every day. I put in enough time that it was a second full time job -- not counting the $25k of cash I put in over the years.
I had real life stalkers via the site. I had harassment via my email, IM, and even via local authorities (with such a large community, there are bound to be a few crazies). Hell, even just my email inbox was depressing. For the last 3-5 years of the project, I felt sick every time I would visit my own site. Sicker when I would check my own email for it. To the point that I would go months without going to my website . . . and more without checking my email. At one point, it was so bad that my inbox had 1.1m messages (that is AFTER filtering out spam).
The only thing worse was considering shutting it down. It was a part of me. It was probably my biggest accomplishment at the time. A lot of people dream of building such a huge successful community from top to bottom with their own hands for so long, but never get anywhere close to achieving it. How could I give that up, no matter how much grief it caused me?
I'm not exactly sure what pushed me over the edge, but in 2010, I finally shuttered it. I felt bad for it. I still felt obligated to them and to myself . . . but I sensed I had to move on. And since then, I have had this great sense of relief. I have time for myself and time for other potential future projects. I am no longer forced to dismiss other opportunities, because of the obligation I had to this project. I no longer felt sick thinking of my email. I no longer felt like a prisoner. I felt like I had more control over each day of my life and what I did with it.
I have never been one of those people who sticks in a relationship just because leaving it would make all the invested time "feel like it was wasted". When a relationship goes bad, I move on and don't look back or even keep in contact. I'm good with that. This experience, though, gave me a little insight into all the people out there who have a hard time leaving relationships. Even unsatisfactory ones. Life is short and you only have so much time and energy to put into things. When you have given so much into one thing, it can feel like moving on is a bigger loss than sticking around. I totally get that, now.
But, in the end . . . it was a great choice. For him, it might also be the right choice. All of the "if only things were different" thoughts and all of the motivation to take the reign to chance those things in the community are great, but . . . ultimately can become a way of simply keeping you tied down to the very things that make you regret what you're doing. When that becomes clear, the choice to move on has to be at the forefront.
Someone came into the channel and addressed the group with a colloquial "guys", by asking "guys, can you recommend a library?".
The author of this account, who is admittedly preoccupied with issues of gender and sexism to the point that they admit to having to make efforts not to take offense at people using "guys" colloquially, accosts the unsuspecting visitor.
... Even though they pointed out that they have gone out of their way to no longer take offense at the colloquial use of the word "guys".
... But is, then, offended by the colloquial use of the word guys.
... To the point that they accost the visitor over it. Even implying in front of the whole channel that the visitor is sexist and ignorant that women exist on IRC (which can be the only purpose of calling them out on that word).
The visitor is likely surprised, shocked, and did not come into the technical channel to discuss a technical question to have a discussion about gender and linguistic issues, so tries to diffuse the situation with some poorly chosen attempt at ironic humor by rhetorically employing a couple common internet memes "proof" and "boobs or gtfo". You know, the same way a lot of nice normal people might awkwardly respond to being sideswiped out of nowhere by someone with a pet-issue to grind at every opportunity (though that is something I usually ascribe to people trying to turn every conversation into a debate about guns, abortion, immigration, or Obama's birth certificate).
Nobody has ever been out in public or at a party minding their own business or having a discussion and had someone come out of the blue to attack them loudly in front of everybody about something crazy that didn't seem to have any relevance to the moment? I'm sure that's how this person felt.
Kind of the way I remember having someone come up to me out of nowhere in public to talk about how I needed to find god and was going to hell and, dismissively, I told them I didn't have time to listen to them, because I was already late for a group satanic sacrifice. Spoiler -- I wasn't actually a satanist and I wasn't really on my way to participate in any sort of sacrifice. I was being gasp dismissive toward the person who attacked me like a crazy person, out of nowhere.
The author, who used to get upset at "guys", but no longer gets upset at "guys", except that they just got upset at "guys" admits that the thing that actually upset them was the way the visitor responded. They "expected" or "wanted" the person to engage in a discussion of gender and linguistics. The author states this in the first half of their livejournal update.
In short, the author of this livejournal entry was trolling, knew they were trolling, and while probably unwilling to admit that they were, goes on to detail what can only be described as trolling behavior on their own accord.
And, because the visitor chose to sarcastically dismiss it by repeating a couple silly internet memes rather than take the author's bait to have a heated gender and linguistics debate in a tech channel, the author appealed to the moderators to have the visitor banned . . . which he then was.
The author then poses the question about whatever are we to do about trolls? A hypocritical question, given the circumstances. Nonetheless, it would seem fairly self-evident that what you should do about trolls in a community is appeal to the moderation team of your community to do something about it and if they don't, consider finding a community with better moderation.
I would suggest that the visitor responded to being accosted rather poorly, but I can certainly understand the intent behind his poor response. He was attacked out of nowhere for something trivial (and not even reaching the levels of trivial to most human beings who simply wouldn't give a damn), but probably should have paused for a moment longer and taken a deep breath before responding at all. Perhaps even ignoring the comment entirely and going on with his technical purpose for being in the channel.
I would also suggest that the author was clearly engaging in trollish behavior and then lobbied the moderation in a room that this person is already known in to deal with the person that they tried to troll by trying to label them a troll. They got their way, likely due to the bias of familiarity with the author, and got the person banned. Then went on to write an article outlining everything and purporting to be yet another victim of yet another brash example of sexist internet trolls.
My advice? If you're going to bitch about trolls on the internet, don't be one yourself. If something truly and legitimately is offensive and disruptive, seek moderation, which exists in most communities. And, finally, no matter how well-intentioned you are, someone will always find things to be offended by with regard to yourself, so learn to just shrug it off, not respond or engage such people at all lest you become fodder for their crusade, and just carry on with what you were doing before.
Addendum:
None of this is meant to imply that there are not legitimate assholes out there intending to offend and disrupt, because there certainly are plenty of them.
I am also not "excusing" or "justifying" anyone's behavior. I know the common response to anything short of "oh, you poor thing -- you had to deal with that hideous troll!" would be treated as excusing mistreatment on the internet. I am simply trying to clarify what happened here, according to the livejournal entry, itself. To suggest that the author played a purely innocent role here and was not itching for a fight and engaging in trollish behavior here and then lashing out (via moderators) at someone would be pretty myopic.
When I built a site that existed for a very long time, was very popular, and involved monetary transactions, I had to track nearly everything. IP addresses, address changes, email changes. Everything I could think of. This was then utilized when I suspected someone of fraudulent behavior. I could pull up an administrative screen that compared data in an archive copy (where I dumped the older information for just this purpose and to specifically keep it inaccessible to the outside world for user security purposes). With that, I could see whether several users were actually the SAME user. I even tracked things like user-agent string and detected screen resolution.
A lot of pieces of data can come together to provide more than circumstantial evidence that someone is shilling, trying to feedback-bomb another user, and so on. Enough correlated points of data can confirm suspicions like this. You'd be surprised how many people use an email address for one account, change that address, then create a second account with the email address they used to have on the first account and then use the second address to drive up the value of their stuff by shill-bidding against another user on their own item.
Have a jilted ex-lover? Have a pissy neighbor that is upset at you? Well, they can get meaningful revenge on you through this service. Every time someone google's you, they can find out all sorts of hideous things about you that are supposedly true. And there's nothing you can do about it.
Oh, you can subscribe to their corporate service for a LOT of money. I forgot about that. Of course, all it will do is put your RESPONSE to the vile and illegitimate complaints at the top of the page, instead of the bottom. It will still, however, show up on search results and so will the vile bullshit the anonymous person posted about you.
The Ed whateverhisnameis guy behind the site is one of the most disgusting and useless human beings on the planet.
Unfortunately, the problem with this is:
1) Most sites try to make the best of both options. They put ads everywhere, which essentially makes them beholden to the advertiser and not the reader and then offer an option to give them some money instead of seeing ads. That only addresses "I don't want to see 10,000 ads every day" part. It doesn't address the "I want to be your focus - not your product that you deliver to your advertisers" part.
2) Why is it that when places offer a "support us with money" option, they are so ridiculously expensive? Instead of spamming my face with ads every day, give me an option where I can go ad-free for maybe $5 a year. Nobody does that, though. They say "you can see ads or you can pay us $50/yr". Seriously, you are not getting $50 in value from advertising to me in a year, so why are you jacking up the price ten times over just so I can go without the ads?!
Ultimately, none of this matters. Internet advertising is a joke and a scam and advertisers will slowly catch on. The whole "it's super targeted you guys!" thing really isn't turning out to be that valuable and it is all rampant with fake click-farms and other inherent problems.
Also, the only thing I hate more than a huge site throwing ads in my face for their content is when every little mommy-blogger or part-time ranter on the internet with a Blogger blog has to monetize their stuff. Look, you are not making a living at this. You are not ever going to make a living at this. Why would you do something so gross as to fill a page with advertising for those six people you might get each month who actually bother to read your site?
Do people not realize that there was a time when we did things online (or even back in the BBS days) for the joy of it? For the joy of making and maintaining systems and services? Or for the joy of having people read what we have to say or make use of services we have to offer? Not only didn't we expect to make money (much less a living) from it, we actually spent plenty of our own money.
But now, if you can't monetize something, it just isn't worth doing, I guess. Gross. And you'd rather advertise to me rather than just take a buck from me in a value-for-value trade. Double gross.
PS: I pay for or donate to a number of online services and websites from RDIO and GiantBomb to a couple torrent sites, charities, and chipping in a dollar or two when I find something really special on one site or another that I really particularly appreciated. I'm not cheap. I just don't want to stare at tens of thousands of ads for 8-12hrs a day every day of my life. And, ideally, I'd also rather be a customer than a product... which I guess depends on everyone else also wanting to be a customer, but they're too cheap and would rather just look at a page that is 70% ads than give a dollar now and then.
You know, for all couple of weeks that it's shut down, before we go back to business as usual blowing the taxpayers money and using our positions to benefit from lobbyists, like the last time.
When I die, I expect it to take a few days or more before anyone notices. Then neighbors and immediate family will be aware, followed eventually by work and then my colleagues. My friends (who are all out of state) will probably never know.
I worried about it for like five minutes, once, but then realized that by the time it mattered, I would be dead, so why would I care at that point.
Hell, I even understood the popularity of Rovio's Artillary-like far more than this.
It just goes to show that you don't need a good idea to be successful. Just throw enough dumb ideas to the wind and, eventually, something will sail.
If healthcare insurance were treated like automobile insurance, it would be affordable for the individual and it would remain the individual's responsibility to take care of it themselves.
Instead, our solution to a $20,000 ER visit is to move the expense from the person receiving the treatment to the entire tax-payer base . . . the health care industry still benefits, either way and only those paying the bill for everyone feel the negative impact.
Why is our only solution "more government! More taxes! pay for everyone else's problems!". Why can't we find a way to address the pricing, in the first place? Why is this not even a discussion that has been had?
Oh, right. Lobbyists.
At any rate, the NPR calculator only works if you enter the number of people registering for the "Exchange". So, am I to understand that if you're not registering for "The Exchange", then you will bear no additional costs? I had hoped they'd have some crazy complex calculator that would estimate how much your premiums and taxes and other things would go up with existing HMO plans and so on.
Of course, this is presuming you hate work. I spend more than a third of my life doing it and it's something I really enjoy. A man is defined by his hard/smart work.
The typical work-day in the US starts at 8am and ends at 5pm. Throw in at least an hour or two for commute in the morning and an hour or two for commute in the evening. Possibly throw in some work-from-home after you kick off your shoes and walk through the door at home, too.
I'm sure it is a justifiable complaint if your job sucks and you hate everything about it, but the solution is to do what you can to find a better match between what you enjoy and what you do for a living rather than somehow demonizing "too much work". What almost everyone does who is posting here is not digging ditches or flipping burgers for 40hrs per week and we need to quit acting like it is.
"When the president does something -- that means it is not illegal." -- Richard M. Nixon