Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social

hypothesis: by filtering out posts on social media that conspicuously incorporate the word "y'all", you can eliminate a huge chunk of content that's not worthwhile

hypothesis #2: new popular stances against lurking and lurking behavior (e.g. "not approving follow requests from accounts without a bio"), is partly responsible for (or at least has a common cause with) what we perceive to be the tendency to toxicity associated with social media; people are selecting for strong ego and (over)confidence—and selecting against meekness and thoughtfulness

Among the few things that I find incredibly exasperating to deal with: watching people who managed to make it into the second panel of the glowing brain meme (1) encounter some third-panel thinking, (2) struggle against it, and then finally (3) deem it to be nothing more than some first-panel shit.

Reading through the comments is tantamount to having to slog through the brilliant output of StackOverflow's best and brightest.

Surprising how much bad play this is getting on HN: <https://tomcritchlow.com/2021/01/14/new-browsers/>

Someone could break into your workplace, tie bricks to the end of every pencil on every desk; when you point it out HN will be there to tout the virtues of learning to use pencils with bricks attached to the ends, call you lazy, and generally strawman the shit out of you—replacing in their heads whatever it is you said with whatever it is that they want you to have said instead, for their convenience/self-image

At one point, both parties were (strenuously!) arguing points that were in opposition to the ones each had staked out at the start. Anyone but them could see that they were now both arguing for the *other's* original case. Not to worry, they both managed to make it back, somehow—but seemingly unaware what had happened.

This matches a lot of what I see nowadays. People adopt and abandon principles when it suits the moment. It's hard to believe many actually believe anything they're saying.

Too many people are committed to the act (thrill?) of arguing, and not their arguments.

Once about 10 years ago, I stood watching as two people argued both of themselves in a circle. It turned a 5 minute routine meeting into one that took 45 minutes (and achieved nothing).

(1/2)

A distressingly small amount of people seem to care about primary and reputable secondary sources. Not what I expected—pretty much the opposite, really, of what I thought widespread access to information via the Internet was going to bring.

I expected organic, non-academic reactions like, "Damn, this is *way* better than the way we've been operating up until now," and that it would finally "click" for ordinary people what all the fuss in class about citing sources is all about.

Nope.

The thing about services/platforms that are billed first as being secure (usually as an alternative to some mainstream, dominant player) is that if I worked for an org in business of surveillance, and we wanted to ensnare a bunch of security- and privacy-conscious tech types, then the first and obvious thing to do would be to set up a reverse honeypot for them.

And that goes double or triple for stuff like Protonmail with dubious security guarantees to begin with—arguably verging on snake oil.

Side note: Languages sometimes follow rules that are absorbed rather than being spoken and taught. I grew up saying "y'all" in environments where it was common and then trained myself out of it as a a young adult. Most occurrences of "y'all" that I see on social media fail on the unspoken "rules" about correct use and placement. They instead read as very strained and unnatural. Most of these instances are ostentatious in a way that completely goes against the casual "spirit" behind the word.

hypothesis #2: new popular stances against lurking and lurking behavior (e.g. "not approving follow requests from accounts without a bio"), is partly responsible for (or at least has a common cause with) what we perceive to be the tendency to toxicity associated with social media; people are selecting for strong ego and (over)confidence—and selecting against meekness and thoughtfulness

hypothesis: by filtering out posts on social media that conspicuously incorporate the word "y'all", you can eliminate a huge chunk of content that's not worthwhile