Maybe it's just me, but every time I see the current Mozilla make a decision, I'm so grateful they immediately ousted Brendan Eich (with his "proven technical and leadership background" bullshit) and appointed the former head of marketing as CEO instead.
Sometimes you can deal with it even better. Fortunately in the US there was a grassroots customer revolt against the corruption so strong that the FTC stepped in in direct response to make it clear that, yes, disclosure of financial relationships is absolutely required.
And just this weekend the Society of Professional Journalists also publically stated that reviewers with relevant personal relationships must disclose them (or preferably just recuse themselves from those jobs).
Funny how none of that has been considered newsworthy . . .
The animated gif is a testament to the importance of compatibility and adoption for a file format. It sucks at compression and quality, and doesn’t support any sound whatsoever.
How many expert committees and standards organizations and patent wars have revolved around implementing and promoting dozens of “superior” video formats (including codecs and containers and server/client software)? Despite all that effort and conflict, the animated gif reigned supreme as THE most widely used video format of the internet until the rise of Youtube (and it was arguably still competitive for awhile afterwards, and still hasn't gone away). Because it works absolutely everywhere, since the 90s.
The problem, as anyone who has had a problem with Google and needed to talk to a human knows, is that Google doesn't have a lot of staff to deal with this kind of thing. They try to have an algorithm detect and deal with abuses, but they're often wrong or inadequate which leaves regular people without a lot of options.
All of that is probably an advantage in DCA's eyes. They see Youtube's "accusation == guilty until proven innocent (plus the kafkaesque nightmare of trying to file an appeal with the automated scripts/machines)" copyright reporting system, and they want Google to implement something similar in their favor.
And they have a good chance of getting it, too, because Google will just want to make them to go away.
Stunning Drop-Off in War Deaths Since
on
Twilight of the Bomb
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This whole vid is well worth your time (seriously, make a note to watch the whole thing today if you haven't), but the last section (starting at 14:20) is particularly striking in how few war deaths have occured since the invention (and rapid development/manufacture) of nuclear weapons.
He's feeling like reddit is picking and choosing which "harassing" subreddits are ok, and which aren't.
And the CEO (user "spez") has pretty much confirmed it (which of course means Reddit is NOT anti-harrassment, btw): http://i.imgur.com/e5ZTdhl.png
So SRS is demonstrably violating the rules (hell, that's in its mission statement), yet admins make excuse after excuse about how they won't ban them. Does anyone think spez would spout this bullshit about "improving our own technology" if SRS didn't align with him politically?
This is exactly the problem the new Reddit regime. There effectively are no public, written rules, just whatever the admins feel like doing. Every vaguely worded "content policy update" is therefore rendered totally meaningless, and everyone (rightly) calls them out on it. Because they're obviously just trying to do away with any inconvenient transparent rules in favor of the secret, biased, politically- and monetarily-motivated ones they'd rather enforce (but can't admit to).
Props to/. for remembering the censorship icon this time.
The fact you're forced to tie everything to your Google+ profile with YouTube, Google play, and other services just sucked!
. . . and is made immeasurably worse by the real name policy. If you want me to participate in an online community in a lasting and meaningful way, there's no way in hell I'm using my real name.
Even worse, Google tried to confuse the issue (i.e. talk out of both sides of its mouth) by drawing a practically meaningless distinction between your "real" name and your common" name. See, your common name is "the name that you commonly go by in daily life," as opposed to your real name which is . . . fuck if I know. IMO, it was intentional double speak so they could claim "it's not actually a real name policy" whenever convenient.
Add to that at least one false start of rescinding the policy (is this one for real? Who knows?), and it's no wonder most of the internet judged them no more trustworthy (and of course potentially more dangerous) than Facebook.
Now they claim they're de-coupling g+ from all their services. How many people think they've had any change of heart vs. thinking (as I've seen expressed here) they've found some other sneaky way to "link" you across their services?
also to engage in the much-needed conversation of diversifying the tech field with more pluralistic perspectives.
LOL yeah, why don't you try actually clicking that link and reading the comments./. was totally fed up with this "much needed" agenda (and the spurious justifications for it) well over six months ago.
Except neither side was willing to let any of that go. That's the problem I had with it.
Well, I concede you've got me there.
As I've said before, Slashdot's ownership/editors soon realized that straightforwardly anti-Gamergate articles were getting soundly debunked in the comments, so they stopped mentioning it directly in the title or summary (the recent Brianna Wu interview is rare in that regard, at least these days).
Instead, they've posted countless articles with the same pattern: "Harrassment, mysogyny, threats. Harrassment, mysogyny, threats . . . oh btw Gamergate" (i.e. they attempted to wrap GG in identity politics). Many/. users (including me) still recognized the propaganda for what it was and call it out. Yes, I admit it's very difficult for me to "let that go" unchallenged. Fortunately, even that editor tactic didn't work for very long.
Nathan Grayson wrote an article that gave positive coverage to Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest, without disclosing that he was thanked in the credits and clearly knew Quinn. DQ was only one of 50 games covered in the two paragraph article, yet was somehow singled out in three ways:
a) The article’s title “Admission Quest” was a play on DQ’s title.
b) The only screenshot (a huge background to the title) featured from any of the games was from DQ.
c) DQ was the first game (of only four) mentioned in the very short prose, praised as a “powerful Twine darling.”
Grayson wrote another article about Quinn’s role in a failed game jam TV show, painting her in a positive light. Despite the fact that the two were good enough friends to have planned an upcoming trip to Vegas together, this article also failed to disclose their relationship.
You can try to ignore the accusation, censor and libel those who exposed what Grayson did, or try to strawman the accusation into something else . . . but none of that makes it go away.
Point being, I'm actually quite glad that Slashdot didn't add Gamergate to the stinking, festering pile of identity politics it already took upon itself to be responsible for.
I would have been all for/. simply covering the journalism scandal (and resulting failed blackout&censorship, and eventual reform to ethics policies) and leaving identity politics out of it. Problem is, they tried to do the exact opposite and it blew up spectactularly in their faces.
For me, the three* agendas of this/. regime that best demonstrate how out-of-touch it's been with the users (if not outright saying "fuck you" to them) are:
1. ramrodding of Beta down everyone's throats
2. shameful attempt to ignore Gamergate (still not a single article on/. covering the journalism scandal, when there should have been at least one for each of a dozen or so events/milestones), and later (after the cover-up and news blackout didn't work) joining the campaign to intimidate and libel those who spoke out against the corruption
3. constant stories about women being less represented in STEM vs. the general population, with analysis of the cause always limited to accusations of sexism (and devoid of analysis of innate female preferences, or corporate agendas designed to inflate the workforce)
* Honorable mention for Bennett Haselton
The Company, however, has not successfully leveraged the Slashdot user base to further Dice's digital recruitment business
I, for one, am damn proud you were also unable to "leverage" the user base against Gamergate in order to protect corrupt journalists and fall in line with rest of the colluding outlets who tried to cover up the scandal and smear the dissenters (fuck knows why you thought it was a good idea to try). Countless other forums outright banned pro-GG discussion, and Slashdot's long history of user moderation and fierce opposition to censorship must have been a much-needed thorn in your side.
Hackers welcome.
Have at it: It's easy to root (and rooting won't void your warranty). Everything opens with standard screws. Hardware hackers can create their own peripherals, and connect via USB or Bluetooth. You want our hardware design? Let us know. We might just give it to you. Surprise us!
But close to release, I decided to never buy one after I learned that the company didn't support a genuine end user recovery mode, and witnessed an Ouya employee (Al Sutton) berating and insulting the customers who insisted on one.
His attitude about custom firmware was shocking as well.
From a long-dead ouyaforum.com thread:
I'm keeping a track of how many requests we get relating custom firmware, and from what I'm seeing the user base is not as interested in custom firmware as you might think, which is echoed by this thread (we've shipped 60,000+ units, and less than 10 people have commented in the last month in this thread about getting access to recovery mode).That doesn't mean that we're shooting the idea down, you need to keep in mind that in terms of priorities this is way down the list as you'd expect from any feature where it's being requested by less than one tenth of one percent of the user-base.
After people began calling Al Sutton out over this and citing the Kickstarter page to him, he made things even worse by implying that root access was a priviledge and that Ouya was doing modders a special favor by having it, and that Ouya hadn't promised much of anything (instead attempting to compare the console's openness to that of consoles you can buy at Gamestop).
As for "Open"; Well, a year or so ago the idea of going into a gaming centric store like GameStop or Game, buying a console, taking it home, writing a game on it, and publishing it without spending big money on development kits, licensing, and the like was pretty much non-existant. That's where OUYA is open; It's open to anyone to write games and apps without having to pay dev kit and licensing fees, it's open in that once you have your console you can code for it.
The reason you can still simply get root access is that I've seen people want to tinker beyond what most users would do. OUYA could stick to what was originally put on the Kickstarter page and take away root from non-devkits, but I, for one, would be against that, because I've seen that people do use it constructively and responsibly, and not everyone bricks their device then raises a support ticket to try and get OUYA to fix it.
It really floored me to read this a week before Ouya's launch, given the kickstarter page's promises of hackability.
Anyone with a reflashable phone (or any pretty much any other Android device whatsoever capable of using custom ROMS) knows that a real recovery mode is absolutely essential, in case the OS/kernel gets borked. And a functioning non-OS-dependant recovery mode isn't just important for hackers. It could also be the difference between a faulty official update merely inconveniencing you, or outright bricking your console. Ouya's supposed "recovery mode" relies on an already-bootable OS, so it's useless.
Even worse was the principle of the thing, and the evil behaviour of promising a feature from the beginning, then trying to handwave it away at crunchtime and citing a vague low demand (which wouldn't matter even if true). It reeks of Elite:Dangerous, which announced that they disabled the offline mode right before release.
Just wait until they figure out they can spin a "harrassment" narrative painting all H-1B skeptics as "hold-out racists defending a white boys' club." From what we've seen over the last year, we damn well know a huge chunk of tech news media would fall right in line to parrot that propaganda (even if that means pulling a complete 180 on their previous position, and even if it means abandoning their core readership).
If 'politically correct' means not wanting to award a prize to a game encouraging vigilante, or state sponsored, murder of low level minor criminals then I suppose that's what you should call it, personally I prefer 'not being a dick'.
That a game depicts (and even glorifies) some kind of evil (or just "being a dick") behavior doesn't mean it "encourages" that behavior in the real world. We know the difference and we don't need you or anyone else to police content for us.
Just because poaching is a major issue doesn't mean that routinely killing poachers is the best answer. We don't encourage people to stalk and kill murderers, rapists etc.
Correct. But we of course do make shitloads of games where such behavior is depicted (and even glorified). Do you get it yet?
By using the term "SJW", you have outed yourself as someone who has had to deal with annoying, dishonest, power hungry, attention-seeking, hypocritical SJWs.
What's appalling is that the/. editors must be aware of her history by now. It's been pointed out repeatedly in the comments of multiple stories posted to the front page (including OAPI's founding). They're exploiting serious issues to try to build publicity and goodwill for hypocritical, attention-seeking "activists" who clearly deserve the opposite.
Randi Harper is a notorious harrasser and citing her in relation to anything (especially harrassment prevention) seriously damages the credibility of your cause.
You want me to give a shit about the "other things" gamergate represents start a new fucking movement. I could give two fucks what that movement has to say at this point.
Hey, I recognize that shitty attitude. It's downright identical to Gawker's . . . right before the FTC got involved in December (in direct response to GG pressure), and Gawker was forced update their disclosure policy (and tons of articles that were then clearly in violation). And things have only gotten worse for them since. Read it and weep: http://www.reddit.com/r/Kotaku...
The section of the FTC's website that deals with disclosures was updated late last month:
Some of this new guidance directly reflects the language and particulars of the concerns GamerGate asked the FTC to address.
"Is “affiliate link” by itself an adequate disclosure? What about a “buy now” button?"
Consumers might not understand that “affiliate link” means that the person placing the link is getting paid for purchases through the link. Similarly, a “buy now” button would not be adequate
Does this guidance about affiliate links apply to links in my product reviews on someone else’s website, to my user comments, and to my tweets?
Yes, the same guidance applies anytime you endorse a product and get paid through affiliate links.
The revised webpage contains a great deal more language that needs to be analyzed but these two examples in particular reflect specific complaints GamerGate had about how Gawker Media handle their affiliate link disclosures. I know of no other group of people who were vocally complaining about this specific practice to the FTC. In addition, the FTC emails from my previous posts confirm that, yes, the FTC tailored part of their new guidance because of frequent complaints sent by GamerGate.
That's only scratching the surface of the FTC guideline updates directly attributable to Gamergate (follow that link for plenty more), but you get the idea.
Yes, you're free ignore the disclosures on Gawker articles if they bother you, or don't care . . . but they will be made available to you, by law . . . just as Gamergate wanted from the very beginning of the journalism scandal. Deal with it.
Put another way: If the Reddit leadership wants the mods' valuable labor to remain free as in beer, then they'd better allow it to remain free as in speech.
The admins didn't realize how much we rely on Victoria. Part of it is proof, of course: we know it's legitimate when she's sitting right there next to the person and can make them provide proof. We've had situations where agents or others have tried to do an AMA as their client, and Victoria shut that shit down immediately. We can't do that anymore.
Chooter didn't allow anyone to do fake third-party AMAs, nor did she allow anyone to pay money to do an AMA. She practiced what she preached: http://blog.prspeak.com/blog/p...
Reddit has unbelievable traffic and reach, so stuff that earns popularity there gets spread to virtually everywhere and everyone.
It's exposure that marketers (of anything: products, politics, whatever) would kill for. They want to buy their way in, but not if some dirty peasant can tell the truth and (through sheer merit) get voted up and be taken just as seriously (or more seriously) than their bought & paid for message.
So Reddit sees advertisers chomping at the bit to throw money at it, but first Reddit has to demonstrate that it can crush contrary opinions at will.
IMO redditors are right to be suspicious that Reddit suddenly removed (without explanation) the only person whom they trust to expose fake/paid AMAs.
No, we don't know why she was fired. But even if it was for cause, what the mods and community are most angry about is the lack of communication from admins (lots of them were left hanging for scheduled AMAs, with no word from Reddit). You see this lack of communication cited over and over again in the explanations on the subreddits made private. They say it's been a problem for years, and yesterday was just the tipping point.
Reddit's rationalization of its recent taste for censorship is that they want to create "safe spaces" to prevent abuse, harrassment, threats, terrorism, earthquakes, etc. But that is clearly a lie because they never provide evidence of such harrassment and they allow much worse subreddits like SRS to exist, and many other subreddits have been banned since FPH without even the pretense of a "harrassment" excuse, and there are other examples of uneven enforcement (e.g. the admins told KiA (the Gamergate subreddit) that they can't post public company contact info, which appears to be a "rule" unique to KiA).
Saying the wrong thing (especially criticism of Pao) can easily get you shadowbanned, which means you can see your own posts but no one else can see them. This feature can only be used by admins (not mods), and its only legitimate use was against spammers and bots, but even that's no longer the case because tech-savvy users (e.g. spammers) know how to test for it. Now it's just a sneaky way they censor with the hope of avoiding a confrontation and backlash.
Of course none of these unique and secret and biased rules and enforcement policies have been communicated to the community or mods either. This is almost always the real root cause behind every Reddit leadership fuckup with corresponding mod/user uprising, and this time even they and their friends in the corrupt, colluding tech news media--you know, the ones who hailed Pao as a hero of women for her frivilous failed lawsuit--can't hope to spin this user/mod revolt into a "redditor harrassment" narrative. It all started over Reddit's firing of a universally-beloved female employee, for fuck's sake. Redditors would trade
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it's just me, but every time I see the current Mozilla make a decision, I'm so grateful they immediately ousted Brendan Eich (with his "proven technical and leadership background" bullshit) and appointed the former head of marketing as CEO instead.
Sometimes you can deal with it even better. Fortunately in the US there was a grassroots customer revolt against the corruption so strong that the FTC stepped in in direct response to make it clear that, yes, disclosure of financial relationships is absolutely required.
And just this weekend the Society of Professional Journalists also publically stated that reviewers with relevant personal relationships must disclose them (or preferably just recuse themselves from those jobs).
Funny how none of that has been considered newsworthy . . .
A story about this but not the racist Code of Conduct they're trying to shove down everyone's throats?
The animated gif is a testament to the importance of compatibility and adoption for a file format. It sucks at compression and quality, and doesn’t support any sound whatsoever.
How many expert committees and standards organizations and patent wars have revolved around implementing and promoting dozens of “superior” video formats (including codecs and containers and server/client software)? Despite all that effort and conflict, the animated gif reigned supreme as THE most widely used video format of the internet until the rise of Youtube (and it was arguably still competitive for awhile afterwards, and still hasn't gone away). Because it works absolutely everywhere, since the 90s.
The problem, as anyone who has had a problem with Google and needed to talk to a human knows, is that Google doesn't have a lot of staff to deal with this kind of thing. They try to have an algorithm detect and deal with abuses, but they're often wrong or inadequate which leaves regular people without a lot of options.
All of that is probably an advantage in DCA's eyes. They see Youtube's "accusation == guilty until proven innocent (plus the kafkaesque nightmare of trying to file an appeal with the automated scripts/machines)" copyright reporting system, and they want Google to implement something similar in their favor.
And they have a good chance of getting it, too, because Google will just want to make them to go away.
This whole vid is well worth your time (seriously, make a note to watch the whole thing today if you haven't), but the last section (starting at 14:20) is particularly striking in how few war deaths have occured since the invention (and rapid development/manufacture) of nuclear weapons.
He's feeling like reddit is picking and choosing which "harassing" subreddits are ok, and which aren't.
And the CEO (user "spez") has pretty much confirmed it (which of course means Reddit is NOT anti-harrassment, btw):
/. for remembering the censorship icon this time.
http://i.imgur.com/e5ZTdhl.png
So SRS is demonstrably violating the rules (hell, that's in its mission statement), yet admins make excuse after excuse about how they won't ban them. Does anyone think spez would spout this bullshit about "improving our own technology" if SRS didn't align with him politically?
This is exactly the problem the new Reddit regime. There effectively are no public, written rules, just whatever the admins feel like doing. Every vaguely worded "content policy update" is therefore rendered totally meaningless, and everyone (rightly) calls them out on it. Because they're obviously just trying to do away with any inconvenient transparent rules in favor of the secret, biased, politically- and monetarily-motivated ones they'd rather enforce (but can't admit to).
Props to
P.S. http://i.imgur.com/fT11pIg.png
The fact you're forced to tie everything to your Google+ profile with YouTube, Google play, and other services just sucked!
. . . and is made immeasurably worse by the real name policy. If you want me to participate in an online community in a lasting and meaningful way, there's no way in hell I'm using my real name.
Even worse, Google tried to confuse the issue (i.e. talk out of both sides of its mouth) by drawing a practically meaningless distinction between your "real" name and your common" name. See, your common name is "the name that you commonly go by in daily life," as opposed to your real name which is . . . fuck if I know. IMO, it was intentional double speak so they could claim "it's not actually a real name policy" whenever convenient.
Add to that at least one false start of rescinding the policy (is this one for real? Who knows?), and it's no wonder most of the internet judged them no more trustworthy (and of course potentially more dangerous) than Facebook. Now they claim they're de-coupling g+ from all their services. How many people think they've had any change of heart vs. thinking (as I've seen expressed here) they've found some other sneaky way to "link" you across their services?
also to engage in the much-needed conversation of diversifying the tech field with more pluralistic perspectives.
LOL yeah, why don't you try actually clicking that link and reading the comments. /. was totally fed up with this "much needed" agenda (and the spurious justifications for it) well over six months ago.
I heard they're still allowed to fake rock-throwing attacks, but they have to use CGI instead of cutting to a black screen.
Except neither side was willing to let any of that go. That's the problem I had with it.
Well, I concede you've got me there.
/. users (including me) still recognized the propaganda for what it was and call it out. Yes, I admit it's very difficult for me to "let that go" unchallenged. Fortunately, even that editor tactic didn't work for very long.
As I've said before, Slashdot's ownership/editors soon realized that straightforwardly anti-Gamergate articles were getting soundly debunked in the comments, so they stopped mentioning it directly in the title or summary (the recent Brianna Wu interview is rare in that regard, at least these days).
Instead, they've posted countless articles with the same pattern: "Harrassment, mysogyny, threats. Harrassment, mysogyny, threats . . . oh btw Gamergate" (i.e. they attempted to wrap GG in identity politics). Many
Nathan Grayson wrote an article that gave positive coverage to Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest, without disclosing that he was thanked in the credits and clearly knew Quinn. DQ was only one of 50 games covered in the two paragraph article, yet was somehow singled out in three ways:
a) The article’s title “Admission Quest” was a play on DQ’s title.
b) The only screenshot (a huge background to the title) featured from any of the games was from DQ.
c) DQ was the first game (of only four) mentioned in the very short prose, praised as a “powerful Twine darling.”
Grayson wrote another article about Quinn’s role in a failed game jam TV show, painting her in a positive light. Despite the fact that the two were good enough friends to have planned an upcoming trip to Vegas together, this article also failed to disclose their relationship.
You can try to ignore the accusation, censor and libel those who exposed what Grayson did, or try to strawman the accusation into something else . . . but none of that makes it go away.
Point being, I'm actually quite glad that Slashdot didn't add Gamergate to the stinking, festering pile of identity politics it already took upon itself to be responsible for.
I would have been all for /. simply covering the journalism scandal (and resulting failed blackout&censorship, and eventual reform to ethics policies) and leaving identity politics out of it. Problem is, they tried to do the exact opposite and it blew up spectactularly in their faces.
1. ramrodding of Beta down everyone's throats
2. shameful attempt to ignore Gamergate (still not a single article on
3. constant stories about women being less represented in STEM vs. the general population, with analysis of the cause always limited to accusations of sexism (and devoid of analysis of innate female preferences, or corporate agendas designed to inflate the workforce)
* Honorable mention for Bennett Haselton
The Company, however, has not successfully leveraged the Slashdot user base to further Dice's digital recruitment business
I, for one, am damn proud you were also unable to "leverage" the user base against Gamergate in order to protect corrupt journalists and fall in line with rest of the colluding outlets who tried to cover up the scandal and smear the dissenters (fuck knows why you thought it was a good idea to try). Countless other forums outright banned pro-GG discussion, and Slashdot's long history of user moderation and fierce opposition to censorship must have been a much-needed thorn in your side.
Here's what the Kickstarter page said about openness and hackability:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console
But close to release, I decided to never buy one after I learned that the company didn't support a genuine end user recovery mode, and witnessed an Ouya employee (Al Sutton) berating and insulting the customers who insisted on one.
His attitude about custom firmware was shocking as well.
From a long-dead ouyaforum.com thread:
After people began calling Al Sutton out over this and citing the Kickstarter page to him, he made things even worse by implying that root access was a priviledge and that Ouya was doing modders a special favor by having it, and that Ouya hadn't promised much of anything (instead attempting to compare the console's openness to that of consoles you can buy at Gamestop).
It really floored me to read this a week before Ouya's launch, given the kickstarter page's promises of hackability.
Anyone with a reflashable phone (or any pretty much any other Android device whatsoever capable of using custom ROMS) knows that a real recovery mode is absolutely essential, in case the OS/kernel gets borked. And a functioning non-OS-dependant recovery mode isn't just important for hackers. It could also be the difference between a faulty official update merely inconveniencing you, or outright bricking your console. Ouya's supposed "recovery mode" relies on an already-bootable OS, so it's useless.
Even worse was the principle of the thing, and the evil behaviour of promising a feature from the beginning, then trying to handwave it away at crunchtime and citing a vague low demand (which wouldn't matter even if true). It reeks of Elite:Dangerous, which announced that they disabled the offline mode right before release.
Just wait until they figure out they can spin a "harrassment" narrative painting all H-1B skeptics as "hold-out racists defending a white boys' club." From what we've seen over the last year, we damn well know a huge chunk of tech news media would fall right in line to parrot that propaganda (even if that means pulling a complete 180 on their previous position, and even if it means abandoning their core readership).
If 'politically correct' means not wanting to award a prize to a game encouraging vigilante, or state sponsored, murder of low level minor criminals then I suppose that's what you should call it, personally I prefer 'not being a dick'.
That a game depicts (and even glorifies) some kind of evil (or just "being a dick") behavior doesn't mean it "encourages" that behavior in the real world. We know the difference and we don't need you or anyone else to police content for us.
Just because poaching is a major issue doesn't mean that routinely killing poachers is the best answer. We don't encourage people to stalk and kill murderers, rapists etc.
Correct. But we of course do make shitloads of games where such behavior is depicted (and even glorified). Do you get it yet?
By using the term "SJW", you have outed yourself as someone who has had to deal with annoying, dishonest, power hungry, attention-seeking, hypocritical SJWs.
What's appalling is that the /. editors must be aware of her history by now. It's been pointed out repeatedly in the comments of multiple stories posted to the front page (including OAPI's founding). They're exploiting serious issues to try to build publicity and goodwill for hypocritical, attention-seeking "activists" who clearly deserve the opposite.
Randi Harper is a notorious harrasser and citing her in relation to anything (especially harrassment prevention) seriously damages the credibility of your cause.
Haha read some of the offending quotes under Color Blindness. "I have a dream" would fit right in.
You want me to give a shit about the "other things" gamergate represents start a new fucking movement. I could give two fucks what that movement has to say at this point.
Hey, I recognize that shitty attitude. It's downright identical to Gawker's . . . right before the FTC got involved in December (in direct response to GG pressure), and Gawker was forced update their disclosure policy (and tons of articles that were then clearly in violation). And things have only gotten worse for them since. Read it and weep:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Kotaku...
The section of the FTC's website that deals with disclosures was updated late last month:
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advic...
Some of this new guidance directly reflects the language and particulars of the concerns GamerGate asked the FTC to address.
"Is “affiliate link” by itself an adequate disclosure? What about a “buy now” button?"
Consumers might not understand that “affiliate link” means that the person placing the link is getting paid for purchases through the link. Similarly, a “buy now” button would not be adequate
Does this guidance about affiliate links apply to links in my product reviews on someone else’s website, to my user comments, and to my tweets?
Yes, the same guidance applies anytime you endorse a product and get paid through affiliate links.
The revised webpage contains a great deal more language that needs to be analyzed but these two examples in particular reflect specific complaints GamerGate had about how Gawker Media handle their affiliate link disclosures. I know of no other group of people who were vocally complaining about this specific practice to the FTC. In addition, the FTC emails from my previous posts confirm that, yes, the FTC tailored part of their new guidance because of frequent complaints sent by GamerGate.
That's only scratching the surface of the FTC guideline updates directly attributable to Gamergate (follow that link for plenty more), but you get the idea.
Yes, you're free ignore the disclosures on Gawker articles if they bother you, or don't care . . . but they will be made available to you, by law . . . just as Gamergate wanted from the very beginning of the journalism scandal. Deal with it.
Put another way: If the Reddit leadership wants the mods' valuable labor to remain free as in beer, then they'd better allow it to remain free as in speech.
https://archive.is/ppes2
The admins didn't realize how much we rely on Victoria. Part of it is proof, of course: we know it's legitimate when she's sitting right there next to the person and can make them provide proof. We've had situations where agents or others have tried to do an AMA as their client, and Victoria shut that shit down immediately. We can't do that anymore.
Chooter didn't allow anyone to do fake third-party AMAs, nor did she allow anyone to pay money to do an AMA. She practiced what she preached:
http://blog.prspeak.com/blog/p...
My comment from Reddit's banfest a few weeks ago:
Reddit has unbelievable traffic and reach, so stuff that earns popularity there gets spread to virtually everywhere and everyone.
It's exposure that marketers (of anything: products, politics, whatever) would kill for. They want to buy their way in, but not if some dirty peasant can tell the truth and (through sheer merit) get voted up and be taken just as seriously (or more seriously) than their bought & paid for message.
So Reddit sees advertisers chomping at the bit to throw money at it, but first Reddit has to demonstrate that it can crush contrary opinions at will.
IMO redditors are right to be suspicious that Reddit suddenly removed (without explanation) the only person whom they trust to expose fake/paid AMAs.
No, we don't know why she was fired. But even if it was for cause, what the mods and community are most angry about is the lack of communication from admins (lots of them were left hanging for scheduled AMAs, with no word from Reddit). You see this lack of communication cited over and over again in the explanations on the subreddits made private. They say it's been a problem for years, and yesterday was just the tipping point.
Reddit's rationalization of its recent taste for censorship is that they want to create "safe spaces" to prevent abuse, harrassment, threats, terrorism, earthquakes, etc. But that is clearly a lie because they never provide evidence of such harrassment and they allow much worse subreddits like SRS to exist, and many other subreddits have been banned since FPH without even the pretense of a "harrassment" excuse, and there are other examples of uneven enforcement (e.g. the admins told KiA (the Gamergate subreddit) that they can't post public company contact info, which appears to be a "rule" unique to KiA).
Saying the wrong thing (especially criticism of Pao) can easily get you shadowbanned, which means you can see your own posts but no one else can see them. This feature can only be used by admins (not mods), and its only legitimate use was against spammers and bots, but even that's no longer the case because tech-savvy users (e.g. spammers) know how to test for it. Now it's just a sneaky way they censor with the hope of avoiding a confrontation and backlash.
Of course none of these unique and secret and biased rules and enforcement policies have been communicated to the community or mods either. This is almost always the real root cause behind every Reddit leadership fuckup with corresponding mod/user uprising, and this time even they and their friends in the corrupt, colluding tech news media--you know, the ones who hailed Pao as a hero of women for her frivilous failed lawsuit--can't hope to spin this user/mod revolt into a "redditor harrassment" narrative. It all started over Reddit's firing of a universally-beloved female employee, for fuck's sake. Redditors would trade
Are they touring the Space Shuttle Cock? Really?