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from the I'm-so-meta-even-this-acronym dept.
jcd writes:
"I'm rather excited to get going with Soylent and to watch it grow. Nay, help it grow. I have lurked in /. for more than a decade (note: I'm not the same username over there, I know, how sneaky), and always wished I could have been involved with the beginning. So this is a great opportunity, and I joined as soon as I saw what Soylent was doing. Not to mention the fact that I felt right at home with the old style. It's very comfortable.
So here's a question for everyone. Are we going to be the same as slashdot? A clone that focuses as entirely as possible on tech related news? Or will we branch out to other topics? I'm interested to see either way. I posted a comment to this effect in one of our two existing polls, and it may be a community-wide assumption, but I do think it merits a discussion."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by istartedi on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:45PM
What we have created is a reaction against "UX", "superfluous design", "Web 2.0",
"kewelness", "excessive eye candy", or whatever other name you want to come up with
for it. It's about more than the front end of course; but that's the most visible and
obvious facet. The roots run deeper. I've been drawing an analogy to TV lately.
What's developing here might be like a PBS for the Internet. When the Internet started
it was all researchers and government. Even after it was commercialized it retained
an intelligent flavor. Now it's been popularized to the point where it's dominated
by the masses, and that doesn't suit our particular segment. Of course the old Internet
was always there; but what happened to Slashdot is that the new, least-common-denominator
'net intruded on the old 'net. That made us more aware.
There were many rumblings of the backlash of course--Digg4, Flickr, Windows8, Unity,
etc. For me though, this little revolution marks a turning point though. It seems like
the first time that users have actually banded together to create a replacement for what
was lost, as opposed to moving on to the next thing that was just likely to have the same
problem.
Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. We don't know if Soylent can hold up against the
forces aligned against it. Only time will tell. It will be interesting to see though
if maybe, just maybe the "mainstream" web will wake up and realize that you can't just
throw the existing users under the bus and put a lot of shiny CPU and bandwidth hogging
crap on your site.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by lennier on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:59PM
(Wish I had a 'quote' button...)
Yes, 'UX' is a good description of what I'm personally rebelling against. And as you say, it's not about the superficial eye-candyness of modern sites. It's about something deeper: the 'curated design' philosophy which is fundamentally, deeply, anti-democratic and disempowering.
'Design' has become a monster. It's about a few, self-appointed control freaks setting up systems which give them all the power and the users none. It's about the users being reduced to passive 'content consumers'. It's the disease which raged at Apple since the Macintosh (the opposite of the hacker-friendly Apple II), which has now spread to Microsoft and Ubuntu. It's about user forums where all the users shout saying 'we can't use this interface! It's broken!' and the designer comes back with 'I don't care, I went into space, I know better than you, you have no voice.'
'Design' is code for authoritarianism, actually. And this is about whether we want to tolerate hardcore authoritarianism as the template for computing for the next century - or whether we can create democracy.
Delenda est Beta
(Score: 1) by linsane on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:17PM
"forces aligned against it"
Is there any evidence of this? Surely the beauty of SN (and ./ for that matter) is that in the main it is self-healing
(Score: 2, Insightful) by lennier on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:15PM
At a surface, technical level, yes. A crowd moderation system is 'self-healing' in that the moderated discussion should (if the system works) accurately reflect the current feeling of that crowd.
But I think the 'forces aligned against us' problem is real. Those forces are deeper than merely technical issues. They're societal and psychological. They're emergent features of a chaotic system that's hurting.
See, we're in a Prisoner's Dilemma situation right now with regards to openness and democracy online: individually we're all making small rational choices to maximise our personal, temporary enjoyment or money. Collectively, however, they add up to social outcomes (forces, if you like) that we indidually DO NOT WANT.
We want personal mobile computers that we control, that respect our privacy, that are inherently secure, that let us publish and curate and share our own collections of interesting data. But we buy iDevices and use social media networks controlled by companies that fight against those freedoms - because there aren't a lot of current better options. Incrementally, we gain a little more freedom by buying these devices rather than boycotting them. But on balance, we lose a lot of future freedom by pouring money and personal information into the likes of Facebook and Google. We're just heavily discounting that future freedom in our buying choices so we don't think it's a big deal. The investors know better.
The forces aligned against user-created, user-supported social media like Soylent are not just the big companies who are carving up and selling off our shared data commons. They really are _doing_ evil, but they're not composed of people who _are_ individually evil. Instead, lots of tiny marginal slightly-good-slightly-evil decisions add up to big social forces - like a flock of butterflies making a hurricane. And it's our own individual acts that empower this evil.
This is what 'the banality of evil' is about. It's ordinary people just doing their jobs, checking out emotionally, distrusting their hearts. It's even people who _are_ passionate heart-followers who even so may be slightly incorrect in their beliefs. All of this adds up to bad stuff that we have to change. We can all be wrong. We probably mostly are. But we need to do our best to try to do the right thing.
And right now, the right thing is to support freedom, openness, privacy and the flame of user-created media online. We have to keep relighting that flame every decade or so, it seems. Otherwise people forget.
Don't be angry. Anger doesn't help. People aren't our enemy. But do be creative. Create alternatives. Create great communities. Support each other. Dream. Pray, if you lean that way. Be proud when we see our dream emerging. Critique the parts of the dream that don't work, and sponsor alternatives.
Eventually, we'll win.
Delenda est Beta
(Score: 1) by kbahey on Tuesday March 11 2014, @09:29PM
Man, you are so right! Love this analogy. Might add: with a science/technology angle ...
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning [2bits.com].