Almost all the constant complaints I see fall into a couple categories:
1. forced reduced-functionality or questionable UI choices on a project
2. imported the buggy, unexpected behavior of previous Windows releases into the Linux world.
I also think it is a conflict inside a changing culture surrounding Linux.
Exclusive homosexuality analogous to human homosexual relationships is rare in nature. There are animals that are extremely promiscuous and have sex with anything else regardless of its sex, and there are animals that form homosexual relationships in the absence of enough sexual partners, and revert to heterosexual behavior when partners become available.
That didn't sound like a Sarah Palin speech, not even remotely. What it sounded to me like was Richard Nixon, who proposed a similar thing for similar reasons, but couldn't get the proposal past the Senate:
Why didn't it happen, in the words of Canadian Professor Eveyln Forget (of the University of Manitoba, Canada) “The political right is afraid people will stop working and the left doesn't trust them to make their own choices.”
Honeywell stated a couple things that clearly violate consent, and could reasonably be described as rising to the level of legally actionable. I was very critical of some of the weak discounting of the possibility of JTRIG-style character attacks, but when notable, reputable people in the community come forward with specific relevant first-person claims, I believe it's important to take it more seriously.
It's impossible to draw any conclusions without a fair trial. Apart from saying we should assume innocent until proven guilty. It's a really good idea that seems to have been marginalised in the age of the web.
How many of those people left the country permanently because of constant harassment by government agents? How many lost their girlfriend when she got freaked out because a guy with night vision goggles was spying into their apartment in the middle of the night? You're writing this off like it's a simple statistical unlikelyhood without making any consideration into specifically what has happened to Appelbaum before.
I'm not even defending him, I just think you're doing a crap job of dismissing the concern.
>in the US, I’m fairly certain I’ve had a black bag job on my apartment, my mother was arrested and jailed supposedly for unrelated charges, and – at at least two points – interrogated about my role in WikiLeaks. I’m fairly certain that my partner woke up with night vision goggles pointed at her by unknown parties outside her house. And here in Berlin I’m certain there’s a similar amount of spying, but I don’t feel it in the same way. It’s the ability even for a moment to imagine that I’m not basically treated like an enemy of the state or a dissident of some kind; I couldn’t really pretend that in the United States.
Here he talks about it explicitly in testimony to the European Parliament. Maybe you should watch this whole thing where he talks about what he knows about his own surveillance because of mistaken lack of redactions in government documents:
You say that the vast majority of security people are not being targeted severely by the government, so it's statistically very unlikely that a sex abuse claim against Appelbaum, along with a coordinated PR attack by "the victims" (which is an explicitly documented method used to discredit people, per the Snowden leaks) is a government operation to discredit him. I say the statistics do not matter, because there is sufficient evidence that HE SPECIFICALLY IS TARGETED. Therefore you CANNOT simply wave off the possibility.
I just read your comment again, and you're lying. "Tricked by an obvious parody article." That's compatible with "stupid" but not with "uninformed". You were also being a smartass about it, which is rude.
You're not wrong, but you've got a political blind spot if you don't think there are people on the left that do the same thing re. repackaging and resubmitting ideas, or if you don't see the contingent of the left that is against free speech.
There's part of the Right which is against free speech too. Has been for decades. All those campaigns against "immoral" literature, movies, music, television. The "Watch what you say" Bush Administration. The Republican-led state governments who prevent their own scientists from talking about climate change. The right-wing religious colleges which police not only what is said and done on campus, but also heavily regulate off-campus behavior as well. Even the heavy censorship and downvoting in online right wing communities and subreddits. Why these groups get a free pass from many people who yell at the left about free speech, I'll never understand.
Maybe the response will be something along the lines of "The Right is so big and covers so many people you can't blame all of them." But you could say the same about the Left. Covers many, many ideologies and sub-ideologies.
Generally nobody has to be reminded that many on the right aren't fans of free speech. But people have to be constantly reminded that there are people on the left that aren't fans of free speech.
Of course, there are opponents of free speech on the left and the right. There are also proponents of free speech on the left and the right. And when speaking strictly of the US political spectrum, it's fair to say that the neither side is more opposed to speech than the other.
I'm not sure what the "left" or "right" are these days. Certainly these definitions have changed in such a way as to leave the impression that there's only one axis and that there are only 2 sides. I have plenty of ideas and beliefs that now would fall on the right of the political spectrum.
I don't deny that there are people on the "left" going against free speech. As somebody born under communism, I have a similar level of disdain for extremists of all colors.
That said, you know that old saying "Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins"? Well, I think this also applies to freedom of speech. No freedom should be absolute, not when it goes in conflict with other human rights that are just as important, like the right for fair treatment and for being innocent until proven guilty. This is why the constitution of many countries, including my own, grants the freedom of speech only for as long as it's not hate speech targeted at groups based on race, ethnicity, nationality or religion. And I happen to agree with that.
I don't know how to phrase this in an HN-approved positive way, but I think it needs to be said: the graphics are disturbingly infantilizing if this site is supposed to be for anyone over the age of 9.
Everything about their homepage seems to signal that it is in fact a social network for 9 year olds (or people with the social maturity of 9-year-olds).
* "Fun" graphics? Check.
* Cartoon characters? Check.
* Whimsical name? Check.
* "Safe space" marketing? Check.
* Close control of who can access it? Check.
Literally the only thing they need to add to be a children's website is a note about parental controls.
“To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. ... When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” - C.S. Lewis
Cute whimsical silly graphics are fun. Feeling like I've walked into a padded room/kindergarten when I hit their homepage due to the visual/copy combination is not fun.
We made something that makes us happy. Will it appeal to every single human being? No, of course not, nor should it. And that's okay! Nothing on the internet has that power. Not even cats.
We chose to go in this direction because it made all of us happy to go to work every day, and whenever we showed people different versions of our site, whether it was family and friends or in more formal user testing, people tended to like it more with the dinosaurs than without. It's okay if you don't like it, or even if a lot of different people don't like it.
Though, fwiw, once you got off that page it looks more like a regular site and there aren't as many dinos.
If this is the Reddit for 9-year-olds, spot on! I also think there are some other (older) demos who would be attracted to a space like this, but I'm interested in who you think it is.
Also, I'm sorry for the negativity (some of it from me). While I largely agree with the commentary here (that the world doesn't necessarily need a safe space community), I know how hard it is to put anything new out there and commend you for trying to improve upon Reddit. I genuinely wish an HN for "other things" existed and hope you can succeed.
It sounds like there's definitely some stuff we could be doing to improve our branding--we're new and we're learning, and the word "positive" seems to have been misconstrued by everyone from what we meant it to be to who we are as a company.
One thing, just as a note, is that we're not trying to be a "safe space" community, and we're not trying to censor disagreement, remove negativity, or even get rid of all hate and mean comments. Those all have a purpose, and without them it becomes an empty echo chamber and there's no point in actually talking.
Also, the fact that we're trying to take a stronger stance on harassment is just a tiny, tiny bit of what we're doing differently. We're not trying to be a safer Reddit, or even trying to be a direct Reddit competitor.
What we've built is in response to issues we've seen in all different platforms--Reddit, sure, but also Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Patreon, and more. We've tried to build a really broad, flexible platform that makes it so communities can do all the things they want to in one place, with a developer platform to make sure that's possible. We've built in a payments system. We've designed it to be more user and mobile friendly instead of an outdated forum style. Those are honestly the things that I care most about, and the possibilities they open are what I think will have the biggest impact on hopefully making Imzy a really viable community platform that I want to work on, not the things that we're trying to prevent.
> we're trying to take a stronger stance on harassment
Do you believe it's possible for Anti-GG people as well as GG people to harass?
I ask because the prevailing culture at Twitter and Github is that harassment only comes from one direction: from white men. They don't want to act on claims of "reverse-discrimination".
However, many other people like myself believe that there is an equal or greater amount of harassment and threats from the Social Justice world.
I'm genuinely interested to know your attitude about this.
Yes, absolutely. Everyone can get too entrenched, and it's really easy for anyone to divide it into an "us" and a "them," and once you do that, it's too easy to really villainize the other side. Once you decide that the other side has absolutely nothing positive to contribute, then communication breaks down and it turns into snowball throwing that can escalate into grenade throwing.
It doesn't matter if it's GG or anything else. People tend to have valid complaints on both sides, regardless of how small, and both tend to have some guilt. People on both sides oversimplify the arguments of the other side and overgeneralize their actions as all black people this, or all white people this, or all men this, or all women this, or all... etc. And when that happens, it's bad regardless of who the group is and which side they're on, because it's guaranteed to be inaccurate about a vast number of people who are being unfairly characterized as something they're not.
There's a reason the term "social justice warrior" has come into existence, and it's because the people on what might generally be seen as the "good" or "right" side of the issue can also become way to militant, and when you become militant, you stop trying to work together to fix things, get people to see your way, and bring the sides together and start just trying to kill off the other side in order to win. (Now, I do think that term gets thrown around WAY too loosely for anyone who does anything you don't like and is often not accurate, but that goes back to the above paragraph.) Social justice is good. Social justice warriors are not.
Sorry for lots of rambling. It's hard to talk about such a complex issue concisely.
Honestly, I don't even think there is consensus on what social justice is. If you asked ten people who love social justice to define it, you'll get twelve answers, especially if you ask about specific reforms and initiatives.
And you'll get glaring omissions. Complex tax codes and opaque regulations are great for the powerful and awful for the little guy. Fixing them isn't considered social justice for some reason, though.
> Though, fwiw, once you got off that page it looks more like a regular site and there aren't as many dinos.
IMHO, I feel like you are doing it the wrong way around. When I open a website for the first time, I usually only have a very general idea of its purpose. When I see the home page of Imzy, I do not think “Oh this is ridiculous, no serious general purpose forum for good conversation should look like this”, but rather “Oh, I guess it's more targeted at children-specific topics, like simple games, learning a first language, and basic maths, at most. Probably not for me, I'll go look elsewhere.”.
OTOH, if you have a less ambivalent home page, I do not really care what the actual website looks like, as long as it is usable (design is first about usability). So, sure, dinos all the way!
I see you have put a few screnshots that illustrate the kinds of topics that should interest the Imzy's community. However, most users won't ever bother to scroll, and those who will, won't scroll that far. Putting the examples so that they are visible with no scrolling (and maybe including discussions in addition to article/self-text) would go a long way
Also, your <noscript> elements (that you use for storing sending static data to the client) are visible when Javascript is disabled. I see you have a CSS rule to hide them and it seems to work well in Chromium 49.0.2623.108, but not in Mozilla Firefox 45.0.2
I'm legitimately sorry for singling you out, in isolation it's not that big of a deal at all, sites can try different things and that's great. My complaint is more that this seems to be happening a lot lately, and there is already a pervasive criticism that "safe spaces" (which in principle I approve of) are infantilizing people (I think they often do.) If it's just a fun theme, that's cool.
No worries! Thanks for the kind words. I do think the dinos set a happier tone, which probably helps people to converse in a more civil way, but we definitely don't want to infantilize people. We just like dinos ourselves. :)
Also, just as a note, "safe space" was the author's words, not ours. We're taking a stronger stance on harassment, sure, but there's still plenty of room for negativity and disagreement. You can read more in my other comments if you care to hear more about our philosophy.
I'll make the politically incorrect sacrifice for you:
The internet was not built to be, or should it ever be, a safe place for every single human being on Earth. Contradictory and radical ideas are a necessary part of progressive discourse and they will make people feel uncomfortable and angry. Deal with it.
I disagree. I think the extreme stance of "safe places" we have today are rather stupid, but I would much rather these people make their own communities and exclude those who are deemed undesirables, than try to take over an existing platform.
1. forced reduced-functionality or questionable UI choices on a project 2. imported the buggy, unexpected behavior of previous Windows releases into the Linux world.
I also think it is a conflict inside a changing culture surrounding Linux.