dollop_of_cream

Bravo, I couldn't care less about the historical context of the tool. I do care deeply that we have no hate.

Hey thanks for explaining this. Twitter's not something I ever warmed to and still look at people with confusion when they use it. Like artists, there is a crazy work pressure for academics to get noticed. To the point of cruelty sometimes. It makes sense that Twitter would work because, like you said, it works well-enough and has a low barrier to entry.

Yes that's it. It feels sort of manipulative.

lol, no not like that. Extreme case, as in, when the modal value is a 4% uptake with an SD of 0.5, then picking something with a 73% uptake is an extreme case.

Yeah, I've learned so much from people on that place.

The thing that is killing reddit for me is its endless suggestion of communities that I may want to read. I use reddit to get away from having stuff shoved into my face. I want to explore and find things that are relevant to me or things that are unique and challenging, not have random nonsense shown to me as a way of increasing some silly engagement metric.

There is a very impressive set of reasons why we could and should encourage less CO2 intensive forms of transport, indeed many actions. However, these arguments always seem to me to take the pattern of picking the extreme example of whatever good we are hoping to achieve and then implying that everyone else could easily make the switch. There is always a wide and natural variety in things and this is true for differences between nations too. Extreme examples used like this often just end up making a bigger divide between people because the discussion misses all of the important differences that constrain choices and shape outcomes. We just end up talking from our own perspectives and experiences rather than exploring the complicated and difficult questions of how we can produce localised and regional responses to CO2 emissions drawn from fossil fuels.

Can't imagine anyone being surprised about him lying.

TLDR, yes and the current popularity of Reddit may be because it is actually hiding how it is not really that much of a community of people but rather a bad simulation.

My PhD was in this area of how older-style internet forums operate and touched on why they continue to hang around. Yes they absolutely (with caveats lol) have a future, but the mass appeal of the reddit style is surprising. I didn't delve into that in my work but do have an educated guess that could be explored further (hint by someone else) to explain that.

Forums require a lot of engagement and memory on the part of the people who use them. Think about how context is needed to understand any text - like how easy it is to misunderstand just what the hell the USA founders really meant in the Constitution because their world-view is mostly gone. Pick any other old document if that's a little too contentious for you.

Well, forums are the same. They require a community of people who interact with one another so that meaning can be created and maintained. Like you said, you have to read and read and read and then comment and get picked on for getting some minor lingo wrong or for breaking some taboo. Eventually, if you stick to it, you'll become a part of the "machine". Quite literally, you will be hosting the knowledge and processes that make the forum work, just in your head and not on the server. There are some decent higher-level theories that can help give a conceptual framework for this sort of thing. Post-materialism is helpful, so is technological posthumanism. A shortcut to all this is to think of the transhumanist movement in the 1990s. They thought they would upload their consciousness to the net. Well, in a twist of fate, the net has been downloaded into our minds instead. Basically, all those apps and stuff don't make sense unless you have some cultural wetware installed in your noggin and some ability to communicate with others in order to keep it constantly updated.

That's a lot of work and most people don't do it. Instead, they'll grab the simple and readily-accessible stuff. Memes, catch-phrases, "in-jokes" that aren't really "in" anymore. Basically, most of Reddit can be considered a simulacrum - a piss-poor representation of community that requires little effort to participate within. Notably though, at the same time Reddit is full of the kinds of complex and effort-laden communities that I mentioned before. It is just that they are hidden in plain sight. Anyway, gotta go, it's bedtime.

I have former academic coworkers who use it to promote their publications etc. It's an odd thing because their (very left) politics definitely don't belong on twitter anymore. The only reason I can think of why they stay is because they are still convinced that one day they'll become famous. Twitter really seems to play on the idea that everyone can be a superstar. Sad really.

Yes, SSDs are definitely a viable option now

I'm using a Synology setup. I thought I'd grab an off the self option as I have a habit of going down rabbit holes with DIY projects. It's working well, doing a one-way mirror off my local storage with nightly backups from the NAS to a cloud server.