I don't post much myself unless I see an interesting comment, or when I want to write a diary talking about current work/thoughts/etc...(which is once a year maybe)
I don't think you're missing much. Trolls and idiots are modding up other idiots and flooding the stories with stupid comments.
Being chased away from K5 is probably one of the best things that could happen to you in the long run. I guess it's better than stagnating along with the site.
Yep, exactly why I left. I was going to leave anyway; it's just that there was that one last bit of harrassment just when I was about to leave anyway, and my reaction to it led to more harrassment, which quickly spiraled out of control. And, as usual, people only want to look at the three diary entries leading up to the end and discount anything I say as ramblings of a drama queen.
rusty's reaction kind of hurt, but then again, he has no interest in actually telling the truth, since the truth would have required acknowledging that the K5 community has gotten perversely dumb and that there's no reason for the sensible users to stay. Not like any of them have, really. I was just more public about leaving than most.
I guess I prefer to fade away into the shadows quietly than make a scene. I can still make appearances from time to time.
But I can understand why you felt the need to defend yourself. Some might say you were whining. Some might say you were creating unnecessary drama. Some might say you were standing up for yourself.
In the end, none of that matters. Because they're going to spin the truth in any way that suits them.
You got out. That's what is important. =)
Yeah. I prefer a quiet exit too, but sometimes it just becomes impossible, especially when the reason I'm leaving gets dragged up in such a way that I'd have left without an opportunity for me to defend myself.
Meh, none of them have a clue. I'll bet none of them have had to endure that kind of flak before. And, if history remembers anything, this isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened on K5 - ISTR that Jin Wicked left over similar stuff. Jeez, how many current K5ers even remember her? Probably just me and ti dave; there aren't too many pre-Great DDOS'ers around anymore.
As someone who's had to endure that kind of crap (not from K5 - locke baron/kate and the real me are pretty separate, but IRL), I know how frustrating that is, and I don't fault you in the slightest. Hell, I'm considering leaving K5 myself. I'd have done so already, but it still serves as a decent dead-day timekiller.
I'm surprised that you and ana don't (or didn't) get the sorts of abuse which I did, considering that I stopped even talking about the issue back when the trolls first started showing up and yet both of you kept on talking about it fairly consistently. For some reason, people seem to have this notion that I'm extremely vocal about it, and that I deserved the abuse or brought it on myself or something. Probably just because I was a "celebrity" of sorts, from being like the third longest-term user on the whole site (the only two longer-term active users being rusty and hulver). One of those stupid inertia issues. "Why does everyone abuse fluffy?" "because blah-blah-blah" "Oh, I guess I'll abuse her too."
I've been around K5 for ages, and I remember the whole Jin Wicked thing. But then, it was only a repeat of those who were chased away before.
This sort of thing happens from generation to generation. People come and go, and the trolls eventually get bored and leave. But the problem has grown with the userbase. I remember when you had one crapflooder per 10 trolls with about 100 users who were intelligent and thoughtful. The crapflooder didn't stand a chance, of course. But now you have floods of them modding each other up and posting crap the the queue as fast as we can vote it out. They think they're trying to prove some grand point that the moderation system is broken and that Rusty needs to fix it. They did the same thing on Slashdot, and really. It's pointless. Every system has flaws. But Slashdot and K5 are still here, so their mod systems can't be all that bad.
They might still be around, but that's only for lack of them not being taken down. rusty has gone the way of CmdrTaco in his indifference to what goes on in comments, and I think that's unavoidable because community simply doesn't scale.
Which was the whole thought process behind my decentralized community proposal - that a large community as a whole cannot scale, but smaller sub-comunities made up of wandering nomads who see what they like based on similar interests can. The reason I think this is twofold:
1. The groups of people reading (and therefore commenting) on any particular article will be much smaller than the userbase of a centralized community (and note that a decentralized community can still be on a centralized server; for example, look at LiveJournal, Blogger, or even Slashdot Journals to an extent), and the people reading the articles will be the ones who have an actual interest in the article (in such a mechanism, it'd be much more difficult for someone intending to crapflood or cause trouble to even find the article to flood on to begin with). Articles don't have to be moderated and screened by a community as a whole, because they're "screened" as an emergent property of the system itself (it's essentially a whitelist, rather than a blacklist).
2. As the community is decentralized, so is the administrative issues. There doesn't need to be a comment-moderation system, because the various blogging systems allow the authors to do their own comment deletion and IP-based comment banning on their own articles (which would have totally saved K5 for me), and some systems (like MovableType) even allow the authors to allow other trusted users to moderate and post articles as well.
I really need to develop a proof-of-concept. It's not like I'm doing a whole lot else with my time these days (except sending lots of resumes to places like Apple and nVidia)...
Decentralized communities are not a bad idea. Each community sticks to a central theme, and people with the same interests join and discuss. K5 was pretty close to that until they tried adding everything but the kitchen sink. Something for everyone is fine. But as you said, communities don't scale. And a site based on technology is very broad to begin with. K5 might have been better off to stick with a programming-only discussion site, or programming and hardware(let the C dorks battle it out with the A+ dorks, lol).
The one problem I can forsee within a strict topic community is the police state-esque atmosphere it can foster. The longer a community has been around, the more of its users create real friendships with others on the site. People want to talk and get to know each other, and that includes sharing other interests. They cannot do that in a strict community. Topics will get old, fast.
In the end, decentralized communities are great for people who like talking about one theme t'ill the cows come home. It's the kind of situation where you're more likely to get a lot of people coming and going, but never many long-time users(afterall, they'll eventually want to discuss other things and move on). A Centralized community has the advantage of fostering long-time friendships and a more loyal userbase, as the users are allowed more freedom to express/create/evolve in their day-to-day conversation.
Case in point: You have a site like K5, where everything can be discussed. The downside is that there is no order, and people are bound to butt heads from time to time. The upside is that they are free enough to discuss anything, and so they make themselves right at home. Time passes, and you have a strong diverse community.
Now look at an IRC software support channel. Sure, you have the ops and a few regulars who stick around because they like discussing that one single topic. They'll also help out the newbies who wander in looking for help. But the majority of users will be just that - Newbies who come and go, never to be seen again because they aren't going to want to discuss the central topic day in and day out.
Both types of sites have their advantages and disadvantages.
Now if we could combine the freedom of an open community with the strict policy of an IRC channel, you would have a pretty nice society. Trolls and assholes are booted, but people can feel comfortable enough that they can curse and swear, so long as they aren't attacking anyone.
"...because the various blogging systems allow the authors to do their own comment deletion and IP-based comment banning on their own articles (which would have totally saved K5 for me), and some systems (like MovableType) even allow the authors to allow other trusted users to moderate and post articles as well."
Having this kind of system for K5 diaries would be worth the subscription fee. It would even save K5 from the hoardes of idiots who reply to diaries just to spam or be an ass.
Ah, but the way I proposed the decentralized community wouldn't require a weblog to stick to a certain theme, because each insular subcommunity forms around articles, not weblogs. The people who end up finding my weblog-wank articles aren't likely to be the same people who end up finding my graphics-coding articles or the Riceboy Saga articles through decentralized community mechanisms (articles would be seeded into the system by the people who have syndicated a blog as a whole, though).
Also, the way I proposed it would allow people to recommend a page based on the category it's in. So, someone could recommend my 'geekery' category, or my 'aminals' category, or whatever, rather than the weblog as a whole. (Of course, they could recommend the weblog as a whole too.)
And it also wouldn't be restricted to weblogs; people could recommend news items or interesting webpages or memetic stuff (like specific Homestar Runner^W^WStrong Bad Email episodes), or even mp3s or images or whatever.
Hm, I just thought of a huge flaw in the system I proposed, though; it'd be very easy to spam sites, by asking an aggregator for its selections, claiming to have the same selection preferences, and then recommending specific pages. Damnit. I'll have to think about that a bit more.
Hm. If similarity metrics were calculated from the md5sums of the URLs/wordvectors/etc. rather than the URLs/wordvectors/etc. themselves, that wouldn't solve the problem because the spambot could still just claim the same md5sums.
Ooh, but here's an idea... the "sites I've historically liked" list could be the md5sum of the URL + the recommending aggregator's URL. So then when the requesting aggregator wants to check a match, it md5-encodes its own URLs with the recommending aggregator's URL to do the matches. Basically use the aggregator's URL as a primitive form of public-key signing.
yeah, I definitely need to write something more concrete up. Maybe after I DDR tonight. (I'm way behind on my regimen.)
No problem. I see the point of this thread entirely - though it's a big bummer to me because one of the main reasons I came back to K5 was to read your diary.
But, that's okay - I'll read your blog instead. :-)
I had a traveling companion, enjoyed the Italian food, and was quite ill at the resturant. Even the Debian discussion wasn't so bad. :-) I tried to get that working reciently, but have the misfortune to have an NVIDIA video card. :-(
That's what I thought. Glad you put the unwarranted attack I made on your character behind. :)
Also, Debian does provide some helper packages for the nVidia cruft, but you still have to build your own kernel. Install the nvidia-glx and nvidia-kernel-source packages and go from there. (Or, if you don't care too much about 3D acceleration, just use XFree's "nv" server.)
Still won't work. :-( Not sure what I'm doing wrong. I need a "Complete fucking idiots guide to getting Debian 3.0r1 installed and working" kind of document.
This is just an idea, one you might have had already. Get together with the other girls who have been trolled and harrassed off the board, like Jin Wicked, for example, and create a fake girl ID and torment the trollers with it.
I'd love to help, but it really ought to be an all-girl thing and I probably wouldn't be very good at it. You could pull it off easily with all the brains you girls have, I'd expect.
It could be fun.. but I'm guessing that's not quite your idea of fun. I don't even know very much at the issue, or 99% of the meta and troll crap that goes on on k5, but I still think it could be pretty funny.
#MT855
Just prolongs the problemJuly 14, 2003 1:04 AM
Look at all the crap people have to deal with on a daily basis there. Look at what they're doing to that poor SamuraiJack bloke.
Well, what I had in mind was more innocuous. I don't really know who Samurai Jack is or what who's doing to him. I was thinking more of just posting a diary with little comment, if any. Diary entries specifically crafted to entice those who would harass you. Maybe it can't be done.. I know I couldn't do it.
I don't see how that would help the problem or anything. I'd rather just have a decent community to interact with, and K5's technology and culture don't lend themselves well to that.
Comments
I don't post much myself unless I see an interesting comment, or when I want to write a diary talking about current work/thoughts/etc...(which is once a year maybe)
I don't think you're missing much. Trolls and idiots are modding up other idiots and flooding the stories with stupid comments.
Being chased away from K5 is probably one of the best things that could happen to you in the long run. I guess it's better than stagnating along with the site.
Yep, exactly why I left. I was going to leave anyway; it's just that there was that one last bit of harrassment just when I was about to leave anyway, and my reaction to it led to more harrassment, which quickly spiraled out of control. And, as usual, people only want to look at the three diary entries leading up to the end and discount anything I say as ramblings of a drama queen.
rusty's reaction kind of hurt, but then again, he has no interest in actually telling the truth, since the truth would have required acknowledging that the K5 community has gotten perversely dumb and that there's no reason for the sensible users to stay. Not like any of them have, really. I was just more public about leaving than most.
I guess I prefer to fade away into the shadows quietly than make a scene. I can still make appearances from time to time.
But I can understand why you felt the need to defend yourself. Some might say you were whining. Some might say you were creating unnecessary drama. Some might say you were standing up for yourself.
In the end, none of that matters. Because they're going to spin the truth in any way that suits them.
You got out. That's what is important. =)
Yeah. I prefer a quiet exit too, but sometimes it just becomes impossible, especially when the reason I'm leaving gets dragged up in such a way that I'd have left without an opportunity for me to defend myself.
Meh, none of them have a clue. I'll bet none of them have had to endure that kind of flak before. And, if history remembers anything, this isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened on K5 - ISTR that Jin Wicked left over similar stuff. Jeez, how many current K5ers even remember her? Probably just me and ti dave; there aren't too many pre-Great DDOS'ers around anymore.
As someone who's had to endure that kind of crap (not from K5 - locke baron/kate and the real me are pretty separate, but IRL), I know how frustrating that is, and I don't fault you in the slightest. Hell, I'm considering leaving K5 myself. I'd have done so already, but it still serves as a decent dead-day timekiller.
Anyhoo, I'd say more, but I've gotta fly.
Heh, I figured that's who you were. ;)
I'm surprised that you and ana don't (or didn't) get the sorts of abuse which I did, considering that I stopped even talking about the issue back when the trolls first started showing up and yet both of you kept on talking about it fairly consistently. For some reason, people seem to have this notion that I'm extremely vocal about it, and that I deserved the abuse or brought it on myself or something. Probably just because I was a "celebrity" of sorts, from being like the third longest-term user on the whole site (the only two longer-term active users being rusty and hulver). One of those stupid inertia issues. "Why does everyone abuse fluffy?" "because blah-blah-blah" "Oh, I guess I'll abuse her too."
Fwee.
I've been around K5 for ages, and I remember the whole Jin Wicked thing. But then, it was only a repeat of those who were chased away before.
This sort of thing happens from generation to generation. People come and go, and the trolls eventually get bored and leave. But the problem has grown with the userbase. I remember when you had one crapflooder per 10 trolls with about 100 users who were intelligent and thoughtful. The crapflooder didn't stand a chance, of course. But now you have floods of them modding each other up and posting crap the the queue as fast as we can vote it out. They think they're trying to prove some grand point that the moderation system is broken and that Rusty needs to fix it. They did the same thing on Slashdot, and really. It's pointless. Every system has flaws. But Slashdot and K5 are still here, so their mod systems can't be all that bad.
They might still be around, but that's only for lack of them not being taken down. rusty has gone the way of CmdrTaco in his indifference to what goes on in comments, and I think that's unavoidable because community simply doesn't scale.
Which was the whole thought process behind my decentralized community proposal - that a large community as a whole cannot scale, but smaller sub-comunities made up of wandering nomads who see what they like based on similar interests can. The reason I think this is twofold:
1. The groups of people reading (and therefore commenting) on any particular article will be much smaller than the userbase of a centralized community (and note that a decentralized community can still be on a centralized server; for example, look at LiveJournal, Blogger, or even Slashdot Journals to an extent), and the people reading the articles will be the ones who have an actual interest in the article (in such a mechanism, it'd be much more difficult for someone intending to crapflood or cause trouble to even find the article to flood on to begin with). Articles don't have to be moderated and screened by a community as a whole, because they're "screened" as an emergent property of the system itself (it's essentially a whitelist, rather than a blacklist).
2. As the community is decentralized, so is the administrative issues. There doesn't need to be a comment-moderation system, because the various blogging systems allow the authors to do their own comment deletion and IP-based comment banning on their own articles (which would have totally saved K5 for me), and some systems (like MovableType) even allow the authors to allow other trusted users to moderate and post articles as well.
I really need to develop a proof-of-concept. It's not like I'm doing a whole lot else with my time these days (except sending lots of resumes to places like Apple and nVidia)...
my grammar are goodly.
Decentralized communities are not a bad idea. Each community sticks to a central theme, and people with the same interests join and discuss. K5 was pretty close to that until they tried adding everything but the kitchen sink. Something for everyone is fine. But as you said, communities don't scale. And a site based on technology is very broad to begin with. K5 might have been better off to stick with a programming-only discussion site, or programming and hardware(let the C dorks battle it out with the A+ dorks, lol).
The one problem I can forsee within a strict topic community is the police state-esque atmosphere it can foster. The longer a community has been around, the more of its users create real friendships with others on the site. People want to talk and get to know each other, and that includes sharing other interests. They cannot do that in a strict community. Topics will get old, fast.
In the end, decentralized communities are great for people who like talking about one theme t'ill the cows come home. It's the kind of situation where you're more likely to get a lot of people coming and going, but never many long-time users(afterall, they'll eventually want to discuss other things and move on). A Centralized community has the advantage of fostering long-time friendships and a more loyal userbase, as the users are allowed more freedom to express/create/evolve in their day-to-day conversation.
Case in point: You have a site like K5, where everything can be discussed. The downside is that there is no order, and people are bound to butt heads from time to time. The upside is that they are free enough to discuss anything, and so they make themselves right at home. Time passes, and you have a strong diverse community.
Now look at an IRC software support channel. Sure, you have the ops and a few regulars who stick around because they like discussing that one single topic. They'll also help out the newbies who wander in looking for help. But the majority of users will be just that - Newbies who come and go, never to be seen again because they aren't going to want to discuss the central topic day in and day out.
Both types of sites have their advantages and disadvantages.
Now if we could combine the freedom of an open community with the strict policy of an IRC channel, you would have a pretty nice society. Trolls and assholes are booted, but people can feel comfortable enough that they can curse and swear, so long as they aren't attacking anyone.
"...because the various blogging systems allow the authors to do their own comment deletion and IP-based comment banning on their own articles (which would have totally saved K5 for me), and some systems (like MovableType) even allow the authors to allow other trusted users to moderate and post articles as well."
Having this kind of system for K5 diaries would be worth the subscription fee. It would even save K5 from the hoardes of idiots who reply to diaries just to spam or be an ass.
Ah, but the way I proposed the decentralized community wouldn't require a weblog to stick to a certain theme, because each insular subcommunity forms around articles, not weblogs. The people who end up finding my weblog-wank articles aren't likely to be the same people who end up finding my graphics-coding articles or the Riceboy Saga articles through decentralized community mechanisms (articles would be seeded into the system by the people who have syndicated a blog as a whole, though).
Also, the way I proposed it would allow people to recommend a page based on the category it's in. So, someone could recommend my 'geekery' category, or my 'aminals' category, or whatever, rather than the weblog as a whole. (Of course, they could recommend the weblog as a whole too.)
And it also wouldn't be restricted to weblogs; people could recommend news items or interesting webpages or memetic stuff (like specific Homestar Runner^W^WStrong Bad Email episodes), or even mp3s or images or whatever.
Hm, I just thought of a huge flaw in the system I proposed, though; it'd be very easy to spam sites, by asking an aggregator for its selections, claiming to have the same selection preferences, and then recommending specific pages. Damnit. I'll have to think about that a bit more.
Hm. If similarity metrics were calculated from the md5sums of the URLs/wordvectors/etc. rather than the URLs/wordvectors/etc. themselves, that wouldn't solve the problem because the spambot could still just claim the same md5sums.
Ooh, but here's an idea... the "sites I've historically liked" list could be the md5sum of the URL + the recommending aggregator's URL. So then when the requesting aggregator wants to check a match, it md5-encodes its own URLs with the recommending aggregator's URL to do the matches. Basically use the aggregator's URL as a primitive form of public-key signing.
yeah, I definitely need to write something more concrete up. Maybe after I DDR tonight. (I'm way behind on my regimen.)
Some of us did stick up for you, and even got Rusty to admit that he handled the situation wrongly, in a public way...
Huh.
Oh, and thanks.
No problem. I see the point of this thread entirely - though it's a big bummer to me because one of the main reasons I came back to K5 was to read your diary.
But, that's okay - I'll read your blog instead. :-)
Which guy that visited me is this, BTW? I'm guessing it's the one from the state which starts with an I, and not the one whose state starts with a C.
I had a traveling companion, enjoyed the Italian food, and was quite ill at the resturant. Even the Debian discussion wasn't so bad. :-) I tried to get that working reciently, but have the misfortune to have an NVIDIA video card. :-(
That's what I thought. Glad you put the unwarranted attack I made on your character behind. :)
Also, Debian does provide some helper packages for the nVidia cruft, but you still have to build your own kernel. Install the nvidia-glx and nvidia-kernel-source packages and go from there. (Or, if you don't care too much about 3D acceleration, just use XFree's "nv" server.)
Still won't work. :-( Not sure what I'm doing wrong. I need a "Complete fucking idiots guide to getting Debian 3.0r1 installed and working" kind of document.
This is just an idea, one you might have had already. Get together with the other girls who have been trolled and harrassed off the board, like Jin Wicked, for example, and create a fake girl ID and torment the trollers with it.
I'd love to help, but it really ought to be an all-girl thing and I probably wouldn't be very good at it. You could pull it off easily with all the brains you girls have, I'd expect.
It could be fun.. but I'm guessing that's not quite your idea of fun. I don't even know very much at the issue, or 99% of the meta and troll crap that goes on on k5, but I still think it could be pretty funny.
Look at all the crap people have to deal with on a daily basis there. Look at what they're doing to that poor SamuraiJack bloke.
Well, what I had in mind was more innocuous. I don't really know who Samurai Jack is or what who's doing to him. I was thinking more of just posting a diary with little comment, if any. Diary entries specifically crafted to entice those who would harass you. Maybe it can't be done.. I know I couldn't do it.
I don't see how that would help the problem or anything. I'd rather just have a decent community to interact with, and K5's technology and culture don't lend themselves well to that.
I wasn't think of helping the problem. I wouldn't know about such things. I thought there might be a slim chance you'd enjoy it.
I'm thinking about starting a new Scoop site devoted to webmasters and bloggers talking about what it is that they do. Would you be interested Fluffy?
Not really.
Oh.. right, also, I thought I might enjoy reading something like that.
It's http://scoopnet.org/ if interested. It's bare bones at the moment.