I pulled it apart already for CashewGuy, take a look at my response to him.

I thought I made it pretty clear that I wasn't actually asking to be excused, I was merely throwing a little jab his way. Apparently not! I don't actually want his excuse or approval, I want to offend and insult him, because I believe he insulted the community.

If I intended to stick around, or still needed to deal with Ben, I might have gone with a guilt trip or an honestly empathic response - Both stand a better, albit still negligable, chance of changing his mind. But I don't intend to stick around, so a burnt bridge isn't a problem - And letting him know I saw through his bullshit (If my reading of his reply is correct) and letting him know I detest it, both of those things please me.

"unknown party" - You know, you're right. More accurately, I should have used 'arbitrary' for both. It's still got the catchy ring I was going for, but it's more correct in the second case. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that!

Cheers!

I understand where you're coming from, CashewGuy! I responded with open hostility to someone who I felt was displaying veiled hostility, and the veiled hostility is arguable. I'll explain myself a bit, more to show you where I'm coming from than to try to change your mind. My anger is not because the site isn't immediately bowing to my wishes, but rather due to the nature and wording of the response.

So there are three quotes I feel are important, in not-quite chronological order.

The mute feature isn't going anywhere.

Our hope is that we can go back to using the site to share and discuss interesting and provocative content, as that has always been the intent of hubski's continued existence.

FYI, I will not be responding to any comments on this post, as my headache grows worse with every comment about muting, ...

If I'm honest, this insult was the one I was most strongly replying to. If you're going to engage the community, engage the community - Don't just sit up there in your ivory tower, handing down pronouncements.

and I officially consider the matter closed.

On a public forum, an issue is closed when everyone agrees it is - Otherwise someone will just start the conversation right back up again. Believing that won't happen is a belief contrary to reality.

Alternatively, he could be saying he'd take action to silence anyone bringing up the issue again - From what I've seen of hubski, pretty unlikely, but a common enough solution on other sites.

So he's probably just throwing a baseless insult, like the last few - "Shut up about this, guys, I don't value your input."

There have been some decent suggestions that we will discuss internally...

But why does it clash so badly with everything else he's saying? He's suggested, time and time again, that he doesn't value this discussion, would like it to stop, and won't listen to anyone talking about it. But he's going to consider the issue?

There's a couple different ways to read that. Maybe he's playing it straight, and bad at PR - He wants us to shut up, but will consider a couple of the better suggestions to fix the problem. That's your reading, I think, Cashew : )

I read it more cynically, though. I've heard this kind of patter before - "We're conducting an internal investigation". "We will discuss the events at a future date." Almost invariably, nothing happens from sentences like these. They're just a way to give the illusion of potential change, when none exists.

I'd love to be wrong about that. Here's hoping I am!

Basically, I feel like Ben there is insulting the community as a whole - Those in favor of large changes, small changes, and those who want things to stay the same. Everyone involved in the discussion. And if there's one thing that gets my dander up, it's someone being hostile towards other people.

Cheers!

That's an exceedingly politely worded 'Fuck you'. I certainly return the sentiment, Mr. Ben. Don't enter a discussion you don't respect and don't want to be a part of.

The matter will be closed when you close the site, or you change the feature enough to be unrecognizable. That's just the way community sites work - Saying "You consider the matter closed" is literally meaningless. May as well talk about how your colorless green dreams are sleeping furiously.

I'm ready to give up on this site, given the power users and mod team's response - It clashes with the stated goal of the site, utterly eliminating the possibility of thoughtful discussion. I can't trust that any discussion I see contains unbiased opinions from varying sides, because each discussion is censored for unknown reasons by an unknown party.

I appreciate the hope the site gave me, for a few days, that it'd be somewhere where freedom of expression and thoughtful discussion would be lauded. I'll keep looking. I advise the rest of us to do the same.

Sadly, Dirkson

PS. Seriously, fuck you, Ben. I find your comment very rude, so I hope you'll forgive me being rude back. Or, y'know, don't.

There are also other concerns floating about - Near as I'm aware, I'm not muted, haven't muted any non-spammers, and am unlikely to be muted by the majority of posters. But even given all that, I see muting as a horrible, horrible thing, and have been speaking out against it consistently.

On his posts, and his alone.

Ahhh, there's a point of difference. Ownership! You have a very defined sense of ownership - I suspect it's pretty obvious to you who owns what. I think it's pretty clear to you that the original poster owns their post.

But my concept is... much muddier, much harder to pin down. As an example, I couldn't even tell you who owns my house. I have a certain level of interest in it. So does the bank. So do the rest of the people living in it. So do my neighbors, and so does the city as a whole. When I make decisions, I try to balance the wants and needs of all of these groups.

But just like I couldn't tell you who owns the house, I couldn't tell you who ought to own a post. Clearly the original poster has some interest in it, since he took the time to post it. But then it flies out into the community, and the community adds content to it, votes on it, etc. By the time all this is done... Who has majority ownership? It's likely that the time spent working on it by the community outweighs the time spent by the original poster.

Don't like his curation? Don't follow him. Don't like the fact that some people can't comment on his posts?

A certain amount of curation is good - Put the posts largely thought good near the top, allow the rest to drop down.

But here we're talking about something else. Here, a single person gets to pick and choose what I get to read. I don't want that from anyone. Doesn't matter if I agree or disagree with them, like or hate them as a person, or whatever. I want to hear what people besides that one person have to say. That's why I'm on a site that allows comments!

Oh, and the PM thing is silly - I have no such list, and even if I did, it doesn't allow others to chime in after the muted people make their points, or allow upvoting, or any of the nice hubski features which helped bring me here.

translation: "God, I really don't like your metaphors, and so I'm choosing to believe they reflect on your character" ???

Hey, more words in my mouth! They're tasty, but I'm a bit of a picky eater - Mind if we leave 'em on the plate in the future, so I can just pick out the ones I agree with?

Klein's urine metaphor didn't make a huge amount of sense to me. We're talking about something whose value is widely disagreed on by many people, but urine is almost universally reviled. Maybe graffiti art would have been a more apt metaphor. So you're right in that I didn't much like his metaphor : )

But when I say I'm not sure if it reflects well, I really do mean that - I can see a multitude of reasons for choosing urine for free speech. Some are innocuous, but most are less so.

For example, maybe he just sucks at choosing metaphors - That's pretty innocuous.

Or maybe he could revile the concept of speech uncurated by himself. That'd be a pretty unpleasant opinion. Perhaps he thinks that what he reviles is universally reviled - That at least shows a certain inability to think outside the box. Or, a small step better than that, perhaps he thinks what he finds disgusting matches up exactly with some other subset of humans, who will follow him.

But the truth is likely to be more muddled, a confusing morass containing bits of each of those, and many more I couldn't think of.

So yeah, I'm not sure!

Make your own damn post.

Well, ok, but since I have a problem with all mutings, I guess I'd have to copy and link every piece of content that comes along. That seems like a lot of repetitive work - Maybe we should set up a bot for that.

Oh, but a bot seems silly, when we have a responsive site dev. Maybe we could have him stick the muted comments on a separate page, and link them from the main page.

Oh, but that still doesn't allow muted comments to be made easily in response to other people's comments. Maybe we should just hide muted comments by default, and allow each user to switch them on and off at will.

Oh, shucks, we've just arrived at wasoxygen's suggestion!

Cheers!

Whew, that's dense! Let's break that down a little!

MUST be entitled to control who can and cannot contribute to that content.

Well, no. Doesn't follow. I'm curious about your justification for that, though!

Don't want to be muted? Don't be an asshat. Muted for being an asshat? APOLOGIZE.

And you and you alone are the perfect arbiter of who is and isn't an asshat? Naw, let the people contributing to your threads come to that conclusion themselves, dole out points to the unasshats, and put the asshats on ignore. I can tell you for certain that your idea and my idea of what a good commenter is are a bit different - And that's likely to be true of nearly everyone you're currently curating for!

all the been-here-for-20-minutes Redditors

[un-muting] feels better

I... How... nice for you? I really don't understand why you've brought this up - Good moderating has very little to do with whether doing something feels good or not. You keep the best interests of the community in mind, reasoning and making educated guesses about what the best course of actions to take are.

Do you know how good it feels to unban someone? Do you know how good it feels to be un-banned?

A few years back, I ran a Minecraft server. We probably had a comparable number of daily bans, although fewer unbans and drastically fewer active users. I know what it feels like to ban and unban people - Although I wouldn't qualify either one as a good or a bad feeling.

I know less about the other side of the coin - My behavior is usually innocuous enough that bans are rare. On the few occasions it has happened, though, I haven't been inclined to try to change anyone's mind about the situation.

Because you think you have a "right" to urinate on whatever street corner you want.

My goodness, what tasty words you've put into my mouth!

I'm not sure why you keep comparing unrestricted speech to urine, but I'm not sure it reflects well on you.

I've run places without restrictions on freedom of speech - Any forum for public discourse I'm in charge of, I generally provide explicit "Free speech enforced here" rules. Biggest examples of that are the minecraft server I mentioned, and the (still quite small) community for the game I'm coding. In both cases, the community has ended up being mature, varied in age, varied in type of people, etc. etc. Heck, the community on the minecraft server turned out so well that it lived past my involvement - Still running with my original pro-free-speech rules, last I checked.

Cheers!

You're arguing about the ignore function, not the mute function.

Ignore hides what person X says. Pretty uncontroversial option, and pretty required on any community site.

Mute silences people from everyone, whether they're talking to you or not. If you've muted someone, they cannot be heard on anything you post.

No one's saying that your ears should be offended by things they don't want to hear. But a few people are saying that you don't have the right to curate their experience so that they don't hear things you don't want them to hear.

Unambiguous spammers, and no one else, ever.

Assuming I stick around, I will consistently push for the elimination of mute as a feature. This website is based around open, intelligent discourse - Silencing speech you dislike is exactly the opposite of that.

Cheers!

Hubski allows us to curate our own experience. What a wonderful idea! We can follow individuals, making their posts appear more often for us. We can filter individuals, making sure we never see them. We can follow or filter topics, too. And of course we can silence others.

Wait. One of those things isn't like the others, is it?

As a new user, I am upset by the mute feature. Censorship is the opposite of open discourse, and this website is based on open discourse. The massively pro-mute leaning of the comments makes me want to pack up my ball and go home. I'm not sure that's particularly constructive, but it's honest.

Alternatively, maybe we should go hog wild with the mute feature. I'll mute all the pro-mute people. They, I'm sure, would be happy to return the favor. Maybe we can even get MKR to mute everyone here. No one gets to talk! I'm sure that'll make for an excellent website.

Cheers!

Good question! But I don't think it matters - The actual interesting-looking bits are likely to be on top, with the person paddling the boat sitting in the, er, hole. The underside of the boat would be analogous to the interior of the person, and therefore doesn't have any 3d modeling - Most likely it'll end up being something pretty traditional for a boat of this size.

This is great. Japan, even more so than the rest of the world, has some warped ideas about the permissibility of bodies, (AKA "Those things we all have") particularly if those bodies happen to be female. Censorship is rampant, even in pornography.

It's a weird way to highlight the problem, but it obviously works - I've seen the vagina-boat on a couple different websites so far. I hope most people get what she's trying to do.

Cheers!

Edit: Hey, she successfully made the boat! ...And was arrested for it.

A list of corporations doing public harm? Oh, hold on a second, I saw that the other day... Ah-ha! Here it is!

You know, you say that... But many of them do. Take a look at the "Silk Road" an onion site dedicated to this very concept. People buy and sell drugs using bitcoins.

Crazy world, eh?

Near as I can work out, Verizon is saying that there are no congestion problems, except those congestion problems Verizon is causing.

Verizon is failing to operate according to net neutrality, demanding money from those transit providers to build enough of a network to support the traffic the transit providers are sending. The money they take in from consumers is supposed to pay for these network upgrades, but they want to get paid at both ends.

Screw 'em. If you've got Verizon, call and complain. If you can, switch to a better, local ISP (Yeah, I know you can't). You paid for the damn internet; Verizon should supply the internet to you.

Cheers!

Why not? Because the money you're saving is actually money you're paying anyway.

Although it seems free to you, merchants have to pay a rate to the plastic-processing companies to accept your card. Usually between 3% and 10% of the purchase price, depending on various factors.

And when merchant costs go up, the cost of the product they're selling goes up. So prices today, in the age of plastic, are inflated slightly more than they would otherwise be. Your reward points are just the card company sharing some of its gains with you, to encourage you to push their product.

So here we have a tragedy of the commons - Individuals are better off defecting, so that they can partake in the rewards. But society in general is worse off as individuals defect, because now goods cost more than they otherwise would.

Cheers!

Oh dear... My brilliant post was actually pretty darn stupid.

I had managed to grab a completely erroneous figure for the surface area of the earth - I didn't check my units, and used square miles instead of square meters.

You're absolutely right about light falling on the surface of the earth proportionally, and thus you're absolutely right about that being the correct way to math this all out.

First off, let's correct my own math, accounting for the new, proper usage of units. Keep in mind that all of this is wrong, due to light falling proportionally.

Wattage supplied to the earth by the sun: 1368 * ((5.101 * 10^14) / 2) watts = 348,908.4 terawatts

99.9% efficiency spillover: 68,000,000 / ((5.101 * 10^14)/2) * 0.001 = 266 watts.

Time to boil cube of water: N/A

99.999999% spillover: N/A

Ok! Now let's do the math while taking into consideration Klein's point about the proportionality of light falling on earth:

Wattage supplied to the earth by the sun: 1368 * (3.14159265 * 6378100^2) watts = 174,831.071 terawatts

99.9% efficiency spillover: 68000000 / (3.14159265 * 6378100^2)*0.001 = 532 watts

Wow, what a difference! 532 extra watts, while over 1/3rd as bright as the noonday sun, definitely won't blind you instantly, and definitely wouldn't boil you or any water nearby! Your question about what it would look like is entirely valid, and I can't give you an answer better than "bright."

It would probably still kill us all, eventually - Assuming it runs day and night, it'd add the equivalent of 1064 extra watts of daylight to every square meter on earth. My knowledge of climate suggests to me that nearly doubling the amount of heat supplied to the earth would be "bad" - Basically defeating the whole purpose of installing the giant light death beam in the first place.

Another fun thought experiment would be to imagine what would happen if you pointed this "engine" at another, earth sized planet. 68000000 / (3.14159265 * 6378100^2)*0.999 = 531,547 watts per square meter. Assuming half of it is infrared, that's enough energy to boil everything on the surface of the planet in less than a half hour, even assuming an average starting temperature of 0C/32F. (Again using some mathematics from my game) While I suppose it makes an acceptable engine, it makes a truly terrifying weapon.

Anyway, I guess this all just goes to show you - Don't instantly believe the confident guy, particularly when he starts spouting math! Check his claims out and see if they hold water.

Cheers!

It would blind you instantly, kill you, and probably end all life on the planet, so maybe what it looks like is less important than ya' might think.

So earth receives about 1386 watts per square meter under the sun at full brightness. Let's assume, (Although it's a bad assumption) that exactly half the earth gets that at full blast each day. The math of that is: 1,368 * (SurfaceAreaOfEarth/2) = 0.1346796 terawatts

Cool. So each day earth receives nearly 1/5th of a terawatt from the sun.

In order to be able to see the output of our 68-million-terawatt rocket, we have to assume it's not 100% efficient - If it were, no photons from it would end up striking the object we're trying to move. (AKA "The Earth") Assuming less than 100% efficiency is usually good practice anyway. So let's assume an efficiency of 99.9%. That seems pretty good, right?

So 1/10th of 1% of the output of the rocket is going to strike the earth. I wonder how its brightness would compare to that of the noonday sun? Let's assume it strikes half the planet evenly again, just to make out math easier. 68,000,000 / (SurfaceAreaOfEarth/2) = 690,705,942 watts. Per square meter. 500,000 times the brightness of the sun.

Ok, so maybe that's not all bad. I mean, sure, it's going to blind us all instantly. But it's not like it's going to cook us alive, right? Right? Well, let's assume, for the sake of ballpark estimation, that is has the same spectral characteristics as sunlight. That means about 50% of its output is going to be in the infrared.

Due to my day job, I happen to have the energy required to heat a meter cube of water right here. Assuming the average water temperature was 18C (~64F) a cubic meter of water would boil away in less than a second. You are much warmer than that, and much smaller than that - You wouldn't last nearly as long.

Ok, so maybe 99.9% efficiency is too low. Maybe we need to design our rocket a little better. How does 99.999999% efficient sound? That's one photon in each million striking earth! Well, let's do the math: (68000000 / (AreaOfEarth/2)) * 0.00000001 = 6907 watts per square meter. Hey, that's only five time the brightness of the midday sun! We're blind, but not instantly dead!

I mean, it's still going to kill us all eventually. It's still dumping enough spare energy to boil about a cubic meter of water every day. I doubt it'd actually boil off much water - Most of the extra heat is going to get spread around the volume of the planet more rapidly than it comes in. But with global climate change, we're worried about a few degrees on average over a century or so... This change would produce far, far worse effects over a far shorter time frame.

It's really more of a doomsday device than a way to save the earth.

Cheers!

EDIT: I completely failed at math here, but corrected myself in the comments. Turns out the rumors of earth's demise were greatly exaggerated!

As a new user to this site, less than a week, I have a list of a few niggling annoyances. Here it is in full:

I LOVE THIS PLACE CHANGE NOTHING.

Thanks for listening!

EDIT: I discovered the mute feature. Either that feature needs to go or I do.