Slate Star Codex

> Aside from the fact that much of the code that was “released” was sub-par, the very act of putting code out into the world implied (whether intentionally, or not) a willingness to participate in a social contract with those who chose to use it for their own purposes.

Not to disparage the 100:10:1 method, but I do disapprove of this implication. I don't want people to refrain from putting things out there, just because they don't want to feel obligated to support them.

I have a public blog, where I try to maintain quality, and a semi-private blog where I try to allow myself to post stuff I'm not sure about, stuff that's not interesting to anyone other than me, stuff I don't necessarily want associated with my public persona, and so on. I know others do similar things.[1]

I think there's no particular mechanism to do that with open source, but it might be valuable. Perhaps I could have two github accounts, one where I'll put anything I feel like, and one where I put stuff I'm proud of and want to remain proud of. If something's on my "real" github, I'm saying that if you ask for support I'll try to help you, if you report a bug I'll try to fix it. If it's on, let's call it my shithub, there's no social contract. Take a look if you want, and feel free to report bugs, but I might just say "yeah, that's a bug". Or even just "not interested in that project any more, I'm not going to bother confirming this".

Then, if you want to follow this method and also want to make most…

> It's quite possible to create a community in an IRC channel.

Sure, but it didn't used to be the norm. The usage of IRC has shifted over time, from "channel-as-place" to "channel-as-community", with many of the original "channel-as-place" IRC networks now dead or virtual ghost-towns. The big reason everyone is in a love-fest for Slack but can't quite enunciate is that it's IRC but with multiple channels for each community, which encourages people to distinguish the two concepts further.

> I would not call that a feature unique to the "newer" Internet.

I didn't mean to imply it was, but rather that the first-wave of BBSes was a unique time because there was very little of that; everyone was their full self, in all their horrible glory.

It may have helped that many Internet users up through the early 90s were nerds without enough emotional intelligence to see the point in putting up a face; and that the great number of these made it easier to drop one's own face without being judged for it.

You can still see this effect on e.g. 4chan, where it's impossible to feel "excluded" in any ongoing sense, because of the lack of persistent identity. Anyone who says that "4chan's anonymity is valuable, because it generates a lot of Original Content" means specifically that people dropping face enables for some uniquely-interesting interactions.

> What has been lost on this "newer" Internet is the ability to have an ideological conflict remain purely ideological.

This still…

This sounds about as effective as medical ethics codes:

> Listen up, this will be on the test. You need to help patients, not hurt them. You need to be responsible. Try to avoid being irresponsible. Try to act professionally, and to be a positive asset to society. Don't abuse nurses. If someone asks you do to something unethical, tell them you won't. Did I mention you need to help patients, and not hurt them?

> If reading that paragraph seemed like a waste of your time, imagine how I feel after attending the three hour lecture version.

That's from Against medical ethics[1], an early post by psychologist Scott Alexander, who has since started writing at http://slatestarcodex.com/

People writing this sort of software either don't think they're causing harm, or they rationalize it. If the writer of malicious or deceptive software doesn't realize they're doing harm, no programming ethics course will help. The same is true if they rationalize their behavior with reasoning like, "If someone is dumb enough to get this spyware, they shouldn't be online." or "If I stopped doing this job, someone else would take my place tomorrow."

I'm not sure what the best solution is, but ethics codes seem like a complete waste of time.

1. http://squid314.livejournal.com/285785.html

> would appreciate a few recommendations

I'm reluctant to give my best recommendation, because it's a fragile community, but hopefully this thread is far enough along that it doesn't have a lot of traffic at this point.

Currently, the discussion at http://slatestarcodex.com is the best that I've found on the internet for hearing intelligent views from people I otherwise disagree with. The "open threads" are very long, and contain a lot (50%?) of dross, but there are also a lot of gems within them. Post-Floyd, I was surprised by how many people whose opinions I generally respect were at least conditionally supportive of burning the police precinct office in Minneapolis.

If you are interested in this question, you could pose it there. It would be considered "culture war", and thus only acceptable in the "fractional" open threads. That is, the ones that end with ".25", ".5", or ".75". To reduce visibility, these aren't officially listed on the front page, but are available from the Recent Posts or from the Archives link. Create an account, post the question there in as fair and open-ended a manner as you can, and I think you'd get good responses.

Agreed (and upvoted). I think HN has a generally high quality of discussions (except on certain political or fanboyism-related topics where only one side of the debate is tolerated). But, the best discussions on sites I frequent are on blogs that simply sort comments by time and thread, and where the host encourages open and intelligent discussion. Scott Alexander's (https://slatestarcodex.com) is a good example.

The flipside is that "report" buttons can become surrogate downvote buttons, and the lopsided volume of reports leads to inconsistent enforcement of rules, so commenters unpopular with the crowd or mods are more and more likely to be banned, while discussion devolves to groupthink, cliquishness and sycophancy towards the locally-powerful. IME BBSes are the most prone to fall victim to this; the communities are small enough that you can't be "anonymous," and with threads that can continue and be bumped to the top indefinitely, there's no mechanism besides moderator intervention to stop a flame war. Blogs and HN/Reddit-style aggregators do better because old threads are quickly buried.

Scott Alexander's 2014 essay, Meditations on Moloch, explains why we ended up in this rat king of human misery rather than a utopia. I recommend it:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

basically, we can blame greedy corporate overlords, and that's cathartic, and somewhat correct, but we can (and have) ended up in a hell of our own making even with every individual wanting to do better. the boss that wants to let workers have the day off can't afford to, because the competition makes workers do 8x5. the competition lays off workers to pay for more tokens, because their competitors are. it's a bad game equilibrium.

labor laws are the reason we have the five day work week. we needed overtime to dissuade employers from defecting from the policy. we need coordination to keep AI from turning out like children working the bobbins in old-timey textile factories.