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flagamuffin's comments
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user-inactivated  ·  1360 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Soon we’ll all be cancelled

i don't contribute nearly as many pageviews to hubski as i did 5+ years ago, so i probably do not represent the consensus opinion on the state of the site. that said, it is clear that some of my (and your, i think) favorite users have drifted away, despite still being friendly with various people they met through hubski.

probably for a few different reasons.

it is partially the medium's fault. interesting people just don't post on forums much. i figure that's what happened to most of the best users here; they're interesting, and therefore busy. there was a guy who posted a lot of supreme court stuff that was great. was it francopoli who had the astronomy updates? etc.

others were driven away by a few loud users who dislike people having opinions they don't agree with. some even in this thread. but that's a separate problem and certainly not unique to hubski. (although its small size makes it uniquely vulnerable.)

a couple of years ago i unfollowed all users and began screwing around with tag/domain-based use of the site to see if i could land in a bucket i find more useful, but the signal to noise ratio is still not good enough for me to justify spending much time here. (i also found that this wasn't too easy to do... domains, sure, but what's the point, i can just rss; tags, often too scattered.)

for one thing, the norm in the early days of hubski was to post the absolute most interesting stuff you found, and the average poster's age was higher than most of the internet, which meant stuff off the beaten internet path got posted. now when i skim the home page from time to time, there's a higher number of "news item" posts, i.e. ones where nothing beyond the headline is particularly relevant. there's no point clicking on those -- unlikely to breed good discussion, and no additional info in the article. that's just a reddit post. scroll and move on.

(this, at least, includes a degree of personal preference: there are a lot of subjects i find less interesting than i did in 2017 or 2014, and if those are still found interesting by the majority of the userbase, then the site is serving its purpose. but #goodlongread used to be one of the most popular tags, and i don't think it is anymore.)

--

so, i think the short version is basically signal to noise. i'm still pretty sure there's a way to slice and dice things so that nearly every post i see in the home feed is interesting to me, but i haven't bothered because i don't really care about the comments on any of those posts, and there are other ways to get the raw content itself.

user-inactivated  ·  1361 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Soon we’ll all be cancelled  ·  

i think hubski was a great idea and i respect you for creating it as an experiment. its failures, however they might be defined by any of the users who have quit in disgust over the years, or by me, or whomever, i believe are mostly inherent in the medium.

that said, i still encounter new, interesting ideas on the internet fairly often, and none of them come from here (anymore).

user-inactivated  ·  1596 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: November 13, 2019

alternatively, did you consider automatically deleting any post which contains a tweet

user-inactivated  ·  1288 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Do not get arrested challenge 2020
user-inactivated  ·  1548 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Got any New Year's resolutions, Hubski?

keep improving. more exercise, another 60-70 books, travel to places i've never seen. keep it locked in lads

user-inactivated  ·  1336 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: BFV - Weekly music thread -- Thank you (ASK HUBSKI)

user-inactivated  ·  1263 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: I Did It. // (OC/Linocut Series)

haha, i thought you had illustrated your peacock's little mind getting blown by whatever it's looking at, but then i realized peacocks just have a dumb tufty thing coming out the top of their head all the time.

user-inactivated  ·  1337 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Climbing One of the "50 Classic Climbs of North America"

that those pictures shouldn't disappear into the void

user-inactivated  ·  1337 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Essay on ancient Mediterranean farming
user-inactivated  ·  2366 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The five extra words that can fix the Second Amendment - The Washington Post  ·  
user-inactivated  ·  1695 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Ask Hubski: I’m going to Paris in October. What should I do?

d'orsay beats the louvre any day. less kids playing on the priceless egyptian shit, more van gogh.

not like anything i come up with will top what ooli suggested, but i really loved montmartre -- just avoid the moulin rouge neighborhood, it's a dump now

user-inactivated  ·  1294 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: September 9, 2020

now for wrath, now for ruin...

user-inactivated  ·  1304 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Mining the Code

i do not particularly like the way casa heiwa looks.

i have been enjoying https://www.reddit.com/r/ArchitecturalRevival/ lately -- it might inspire some jumping-off points into street view.

user-inactivated  ·  1315 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: August 19, 2020
user-inactivated  ·  1957 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: My kid just started doing arithmetic with negative numbers, no one has ever taught her anything about them

i don't think seven year olds normally know the word infinity!

user-inactivated  ·  1373 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name, So I Am Deleting The Blog

fortunately the times' editors are working off of a strong precedent! the last time they interviewed a therapist about his second career/hobby horse, they used his real--

they used--

    But for someone who has launched a political campaign largely based on garnering publicity, Mr. Moss has taken great pains to protect his real identity. He is frugal with the details of his life, saying only that he is in his 40s and comes from Massachusetts. Like other anonymous crusaders — Batman, say, or Banksy — he claims he feels most comfortable acting under an alias: one that in his case blends a penchant for apocalyptic bombast with the crustiness of a curmudgeon.

    A therapist and a writer, he says he is worried that clients might object to his activism.

they used his real--

uh--

user-inactivated  ·  1375 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 387th Weekly "Share Some Music You've Been Into Lately"

i listened to every social distortion album this weekend

user-inactivated  ·  2459 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: North Korea launches ICBM

at least they didn't launch an autoplaying video

user-inactivated  ·  1646 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Nancy Pelosi Plans Formal Impeachment Inquiry of Trump
user-inactivated  ·  1400 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Ask Hubski: Are you easing back in to less distant socializing?

cross-country road trip babyyy the traffic was a tad better than usual, but if otherwise unaware i would not have drawn the conclusion that something was rotten in the state of america.

nice time for a cannonball run record, i guess

user-inactivated  ·  2478 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Young Men Are Playing Video Games Instead of Getting Jobs. That's OK. (For Now.)

sometimes in those video games you play as a person who has a job

user-inactivated  ·  2515 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Benjamin Fraser - You Drank Some Darkness (flac's first album - it's finally done!!)

took me about thirty seconds to decide this was worth more than five bucks

user-inactivated  ·  1442 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: April 15, 2020

tell me more! do i download the nike app, or the thing called headspace, or some other completely unknown quantity? i usually struggle through my miles with muse or the killers or something and it's worn out its welcome (in 2015)

edit: "nike run club"?

user-inactivated  ·  2489 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pesky whippersnappers are now destroying Applebees, apparently.

I Do Not Identify With The People In Their Commercials

user-inactivated  ·  2500 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski needs an unfollow all

by the way

what does related tags know about me that I don't

user-inactivated  ·  2366 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Job Interview in two hours... USE YOUR MAGIC

he got hired because he's tight af

i assume

user-inactivated  ·  2003 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: THESE TECH COMPANIES WILL NEED MORE WOMEN ON THEIR BOARDS

the resentment is from everyone

"it took a law to get me on this board that i should have been on etc etc"

"she's only on this board because of a law"

not like corporate boards are brilliant salons to begin with so who cares

i just want to know how drop-dropbox.com will respond

user-inactivated  ·  2035 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Stem Cell Benefits May Let You Cheat Death

live forever... without a pension. hard mode

user-inactivated  ·  1176 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Lab-Leak Hypothesis

here is what razib has to say

https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2021/01/05/on-covid-19-origins-and-conspiracies/

i too remember when talking about this was racist. thank god we moved on from that!

user-inactivated  ·  1870 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 300th Weekly "Share Some Music You've Been Into Lately" Thread

i am incredibly disappointed in bfv for spreading this nonsense,