It does damage because it wastes time that could have been spent doing something productive. (Akin to the old Broken Window fallacy.)
But I agree with you about the thicker skin being a GOOD thing. Today's internet users are, on average, so thin-skinned it's a wonder they aren't one solid mental bruise all the time, and they're often so protected by today's heavily-moderated forums that they're encouraged to be hypersensitive over even the smallest (and often unintentional) offense, so they wind up behaving like spoiled brats. I sometimes think we were better off when BBSs and Usenet made us all grow up and develop an elephant's hide.
When I've been downmodded, it's almost invariably because I posted something in opposition to some prevalent or vehement groupthink.
My own policy is to always mod UP, and sometimes I will mod up a disagreeable viewpoint because otherwise the discussion lacks either balance or information.
As to the Wikipedia problem, maybe this: if someone has a history of bad edits, require that their revisions be modded up before they go live. That way you don't need to ban anyone; they just need a number of positives before anyone sees what they wrote. The more offenses, the more +MOD points would be needed before their edits are accepted. Alternatively, they could cite sources to get a waiver.
While this won't do anything against anonymous IP-shifting vandals, it should help with the identifiable repeat offenders, who from the discussion at the Wikitalk link, seem to be the major problem -- basically being attention-whores.
Sounds like a fair idea to me... Same principle might radically alter criminal cases too, since as it is now, the gov't (prosecution) has effectively unlimited funds, while the defendent doesn't (and is unlikely to get equal value from a public defender, either). Would likely put an end to the trick of using the plea-bargain system to get a conviction against shaky evidence.
And even if it were a purposeful incitement to violence --
Who is truly responsible there -- the person urging violence, or the people who actually take it upon themselves to commit the violence that is urged??
Are we all so stupid as to do everything some twit exhorts us to do??
It is interesting to ask whether speech protections should include the right to say, "Give an opinion that I don't like and I shall call for your death."
That's the single most insightful (and perhaps inciteful) comment in this whole discussion.
What would be wrong with including both in the gum, so as to create a two-pronged attack? Seems to me it might be a great addition to hit the bacteria that Xylitol doesn't.
Seriously, I think there are more of us "WTF is wrong with simple?" types around than most would believe. Now, stop wasting mental energy channeling it to me, and start workin' on a few of those nonbelievers!;)
PS. to your tagline: noticed the CA election, didja?:(
Damn... all is explained. Thanks for the link. I'd wondered just why the hell all that crap was on YouTube... Now I'm wondering when Google and Demand Media will have a merger.:(
I wonder if a return to no weighting at all, other than an obvious "filter trash" option (which might be achieved by filtering against junk sites that try to be all responses to all queries), might actually be more useful than the current SEO-gamed results.
It does seem to me that search results went downhill much faster AFTER Google started doing more weighting of results -- IOW the cure was worse than the disease.
Right now, results from other search engines aren't really any better, you just get a different array of trash, which I suppose reflects their own search weighting algorithms.
Actually, yes... well, mountains and high rocks, anyway, and very long views. Not sure if you can see the spaceport, tho, since Mojave is at the edge of where the north fragment of the Antelope Valley gives way to rough country.
That would be about the time I refer to -- when Portal Madness took over just about the same time Google, then about 2 years old, began being more useful than the rest anyway. Everything came together at the right time for Google's success.
But that certainly wasn't the case in Google's first year or two. Back then I used Hotbot as it had both the simplest interface and gave me the best results (as you say, AltaVista wasn't very good then either) -- but Hotbot went downhill after being acquired by Lycos in 1998, and that induced me to dabble in Google. But it was another year or two before the dust settled and Google's results became consistently superior. I remember the frustration over a failing Hotbot and a mediocre AltaVista, and the several others that were trying various "special features" at the time but were even worse.
So, yeah, by 2000 Google was in the lead and pulling away. But it took 'em a couple years to get there.
Hey, remember the deadtree "Internet Yellow Pages"?? I still have a copy here somewhere. Imagine printing today's website index...!!!
YES!! that's become a nasty problem. Sometimes you can convince it to respect your quotes IF you prepend a + sign, but why in the hell should I have to know to do that?? I said "exact phrase" with my syntax already!!
Well, that sublink works, but going to the main page w/o JS did not. Same browser, same setup. I don't know what the diff is, and so far the latency and results are both too poor to care. I wish all Google's competition well at the moment, tho... geez, I'd settle for just google giving us "plain old google a la 2002 or so".
Also, it needs to be something quick to type (I don't want to be mousing or tabbing around all the time either). "duckduckgo" ain't it. Duck, duck, duck, greyduck.
I've gone so far as to have my own local version of Google's main page, which at least cuts the initial annoyances.
But that doesn't require that I fuck with it every damned time I use it (or navigate away from it), or rely on their cookie sticking, etc, etc. I get real tired of ticking JS on and off, and changing their fucked-up font as well (their stylesheet is messed up in SM), just to do a quick search.
Thanks -- saved for reference. -- Oh, I see this is the same as what you now get if you turn off JS entirely.
However, it only works in a modern browser; in an old one, the map image is just over an inch across and cannot be resized. Used to be in an old browser without JS, you got a prior incarnation of this mobile thing.
Good tip. I hadn't installed noscript because my solution to other nuisance sites has been to use a primitive old browser that don't know no JS (this works better than using Moz without JS) but the day may have come...
An AC says, "I hate the same things you hate, so I just don't run their scripts. Google work fine without them and becomes exactly what you and I prefer. I actually don't understand why everybody* isn't doing that. It makes the internet so much safer and nicer. Yeah ok whitelist your bank or whatever, but for general browsing, it's insane to run scripts by default these days."
Because more and more sites are ensuring that there's reduced or absent functionality without their scripts (Google maps are a fine example of that). Of course without the scripts, most of the advertising doesn't work either. Do you sense a connection??
Slashdot Mirror
Yep... I used to read kernel-dev occasionally. Lordy, what a bunch....
It does damage because it wastes time that could have been spent doing something productive. (Akin to the old Broken Window fallacy.)
But I agree with you about the thicker skin being a GOOD thing. Today's internet users are, on average, so thin-skinned it's a wonder they aren't one solid mental bruise all the time, and they're often so protected by today's heavily-moderated forums that they're encouraged to be hypersensitive over even the smallest (and often unintentional) offense, so they wind up behaving like spoiled brats. I sometimes think we were better off when BBSs and Usenet made us all grow up and develop an elephant's hide.
When I've been downmodded, it's almost invariably because I posted something in opposition to some prevalent or vehement groupthink.
My own policy is to always mod UP, and sometimes I will mod up a disagreeable viewpoint because otherwise the discussion lacks either balance or information.
As to the Wikipedia problem, maybe this: if someone has a history of bad edits, require that their revisions be modded up before they go live. That way you don't need to ban anyone; they just need a number of positives before anyone sees what they wrote. The more offenses, the more +MOD points would be needed before their edits are accepted. Alternatively, they could cite sources to get a waiver.
While this won't do anything against anonymous IP-shifting vandals, it should help with the identifiable repeat offenders, who from the discussion at the Wikitalk link, seem to be the major problem -- basically being attention-whores.
Sounds like a fair idea to me... Same principle might radically alter criminal cases too, since as it is now, the gov't (prosecution) has effectively unlimited funds, while the defendent doesn't (and is unlikely to get equal value from a public defender, either). Would likely put an end to the trick of using the plea-bargain system to get a conviction against shaky evidence.
And even if it were a purposeful incitement to violence --
Who is truly responsible there -- the person urging violence, or the people who actually take it upon themselves to commit the violence that is urged??
Are we all so stupid as to do everything some twit exhorts us to do??
FuckingNickName says,
It is interesting to ask whether speech protections should include the right to say, "Give an opinion that I don't like and I shall call for your death."
That's the single most insightful (and perhaps inciteful) comment in this whole discussion.
What would be wrong with including both in the gum, so as to create a two-pronged attack? Seems to me it might be a great addition to hit the bacteria that Xylitol doesn't.
Do the voices in my head bother you? :)
Seriously, I think there are more of us "WTF is wrong with simple?" types around than most would believe. Now, stop wasting mental energy channeling it to me, and start workin' on a few of those nonbelievers! ;)
PS. to your tagline: noticed the CA election, didja? :(
Damn... all is explained. Thanks for the link. I'd wondered just why the hell all that crap was on YouTube... Now I'm wondering when Google and Demand Media will have a merger. :(
I wonder if a return to no weighting at all, other than an obvious "filter trash" option (which might be achieved by filtering against junk sites that try to be all responses to all queries), might actually be more useful than the current SEO-gamed results.
It does seem to me that search results went downhill much faster AFTER Google started doing more weighting of results -- IOW the cure was worse than the disease.
Right now, results from other search engines aren't really any better, you just get a different array of trash, which I suppose reflects their own search weighting algorithms.
Actually, yes... well, mountains and high rocks, anyway, and very long views. Not sure if you can see the spaceport, tho, since Mojave is at the edge of where the north fragment of the Antelope Valley gives way to rough country.
[I live about half an hour away]
All very excellent, but ... what's their destination?? They must have a private planet tucked away somewhere.
One is indeed tempted to misdirect would-be spaceport visitors to the nearby aircraft boneyard. ;)
And how to do so is SO simple and obvious, that ... here we've got thousands of geek types complaining about the mess it's become.
However, I did like another poster's solution, which does indeed do away with the mess:
http://www.google.com/custom?hl=en&client=google-coop-np
That would be about the time I refer to -- when Portal Madness took over just about the same time Google, then about 2 years old, began being more useful than the rest anyway. Everything came together at the right time for Google's success.
But that certainly wasn't the case in Google's first year or two. Back then I used Hotbot as it had both the simplest interface and gave me the best results (as you say, AltaVista wasn't very good then either) -- but Hotbot went downhill after being acquired by Lycos in 1998, and that induced me to dabble in Google. But it was another year or two before the dust settled and Google's results became consistently superior. I remember the frustration over a failing Hotbot and a mediocre AltaVista, and the several others that were trying various "special features" at the time but were even worse.
So, yeah, by 2000 Google was in the lead and pulling away. But it took 'em a couple years to get there.
Hey, remember the deadtree "Internet Yellow Pages"?? I still have a copy here somewhere. Imagine printing today's website index...!!!
Whoosh twice. ;)
Now get off my lawn!!
Excellent! thanks very much, this is vastly more like the google we remember.
YES!! that's become a nasty problem. Sometimes you can convince it to respect your quotes IF you prepend a + sign, but why in the hell should I have to know to do that?? I said "exact phrase" with my syntax already!!
Well, that sublink works, but going to the main page w/o JS did not. Same browser, same setup. I don't know what the diff is, and so far the latency and results are both too poor to care. I wish all Google's competition well at the moment, tho... geez, I'd settle for just google giving us "plain old google a la 2002 or so".
Also, it needs to be something quick to type (I don't want to be mousing or tabbing around all the time either). "duckduckgo" ain't it. Duck, duck, duck, greyduck.
Requires javascript. Also had rather poor results on a quick test.
The site takes a good 20 seconds to come up at all, and my test search brought up more bogus results than I'd ever thought to see.
I've gone so far as to have my own local version of Google's main page, which at least cuts the initial annoyances.
But that doesn't require that I fuck with it every damned time I use it (or navigate away from it), or rely on their cookie sticking, etc, etc. I get real tired of ticking JS on and off, and changing their fucked-up font as well (their stylesheet is messed up in SM), just to do a quick search.
Well, yeah. People obviously wanted simple and fast.
Thanks -- saved for reference. -- Oh, I see this is the same as what you now get if you turn off JS entirely.
However, it only works in a modern browser; in an old one, the map image is just over an inch across and cannot be resized. Used to be in an old browser without JS, you got a prior incarnation of this mobile thing.
Good tip. I hadn't installed noscript because my solution to other nuisance sites has been to use a primitive old browser that don't know no JS (this works better than using Moz without JS) but the day may have come...
An AC says, "I hate the same things you hate, so I just don't run their scripts. Google work fine without them and becomes exactly what you and I prefer. I actually don't understand why everybody* isn't doing that. It makes the internet so much safer and nicer. Yeah ok whitelist your bank or whatever, but for general browsing, it's insane to run scripts by default these days."
Because more and more sites are ensuring that there's reduced or absent functionality without their scripts (Google maps are a fine example of that). Of course without the scripts, most of the advertising doesn't work either. Do you sense a connection??