There’s no greater satisfaction as a writer than putting your finger on some aspect of the zeitgeist. You sense a mood that’s just below the surface in society, you do your best to express it, and if you do a good job, the truth of it is reflected in people’s comments. In my article, The Cult Of Worse-onality, I wrote about the damage social media is doing to our discourse (and our minds). I argued that it’s become a breeding ground for cynical, narcissistic grifters who will say anything, however dishonest, to keep our eyeballs focused on them. And I pointed out that we can make better use of this incredible tool if we each take responsibility for our worst instincts.
Hilarious that she lists herself alongside two of Medium's most hysterical and tunnel-visioned grifter-provocateurs, Jessica Wildfire & Umair Haque. She should have thrown Marley K in there and it would have been the perfect trifecta of toxic bullshit peddlers.
This did not start with social media. The entire internet is allows some astonishingly malevolent and cruel people to get their jollies. A few cases I've read about:
* trolls getting on suicide support groups and posting cruelly discouraging arguments for readers to go ahead and take their own lives
* trolls posting strobing GIFs on epilepsy support groups, triggering seizures in people who see them
Needless to say there are no consequences for people like this.
I could make some noise about the role of anonymity in enabling this but what would be the point? We all know it, and we all know nothing will ever be done about it.
As with television, social networks had great potential but the good possibilities have been completely swamped by bad actors.
And I would not protest the presumption of tribal syndromes, it far more true than false, especially on the MAGA side. Our side is more open to a la carte collections of viewpoints, e.g. my own strident liberalism coupled with disdain for wokeness. That someone who professes to believe the Big Lie will also be an AGW denier and a bigot may not be true for absolutely everyone but it's a statistically defensible presumption.
I have no solutions to offer but I appreciate your attempts, futile though I believe them to be.
When I was active in gay politics I wrote all the time against the confrontational belligerence that was mainstream there and only succeeded in arousing hatred ("internalized homophobia") and misery.
"We all know it, and we all know nothing will ever be done about it"
I think most social media is taking things like this seriously, no? At least banning users who do it. Policing the internet for speech is just an incredibly difficult and fraught job.
There's literally no mechanism, other than some futuristic AI, that could prevent me or you or anybody from saying something truly awful on social media right now. And it would be easy enough to find somebody vulnerable like a child or somebody who was suicidal, to target.
The only real preventative measure is human decency. I know we have differing degrees of faith in this quality, but regardless, without that, everything falls apart. Not just social media, not just the internet, the entirety of human civilisation rests on most of us displaying some amount of this quality. So giving up on it simply isn't an option.
And in the case of gay politics, for example, though I don't doubt for a second the belligerence you describe, there was that blissful period before the current toxicity of the trans debate where I don't think anybody thought of toxicity when they heard the letters LGBT.
I have never advocated giving up though I have repeatedly expressed despair. Some of us have never abandoned decency.
Twitter and Facebook have if anything promoted the savagery, with only perfunctory discouragement of dirty words and some ham-handed banning under the selection of non-English speakers. "Oh, drop dead" is a death threat? In German "break an arm and a leg" means "good luck," and Thelma Ritter's "kill the people" would you banned while Trump's four years of stochastic assassination was tolerated.
Medium's enforcement serves only to support the "trans" activists, making the platform worse.
Any actual enforcement would disproportionately ban the MAGA crowd and derail the quest for civility into political grievance.
At least Twitter blocks COVID misinformation. Small mercies.
I mean, it's very obviously not a death threat, but it's equally obviously not productive. I don't think you can compare it to the theatrical "break a leg," in anything even approaching good faith.
I've been arguing with trans people on Medium pretty regularly for around a year now. I'm sure some of them would like nothing more than to see me banned. Yet I'm still there. I think you underestimate the importance of the way you phrase things.
Maybe it's my advanced age but I remember "drop dead' as, at worst, an expression of mild derision, and often almost comical. A few years ago I was *banned* from Twitter for it.
If you have been arguing "trans" people on Medium and have not been banned yet it is only because none of them has seen fit to report you for "transphobia." I have solid evidence that only one such report is required and the offending response will not be read before throwing the switch.
I have a bad habit of staying on forums I no longer enjoy out of vain pride and not wanting to be driven away. I was on a WaPo community that existed within one of its blogs; all the people I had enjoyed reading were long gone and those remaining had cliqued around a woman I didn't like* and who despised me enough to invent lies about me. Another time I remained on a board where there were only two people I liked out of ten remaining.
Bad habit. Life is too short.
I like this place but if I started feeling combative I would just vanish. I do learn, though sometimes it takes me a while. Like, most of my life.
* this woman was "patriotic" and when the news came out about Edward Snowden's revelations it was a topic of active discussion. She posted about thirty times "I'm so mad I can't even talk about it!" This made me mad. She can't talk about it but she can talk about it by repeating the same sentence, exclamation point and all, over two dozen times. After that I didn't like her anymore.
I can handle the thumb up/down emoji, but I can't handle the faces. I think they have done a lot of damage. I know some people use them here because I occasionally use another browser but I have all emoji blocked in Chrome. I am in much better temper if I don't see them.
An unambiguous comment is better and even thumb up/down is better than the little faces. I notice that YouTube now hides the thumb down. The thing about thumb down on YouTube is that before they hid them I often wondered what kind of asshole thumbs down good music.
Ummm, one person's good music is another persons turd coil. Nearly all female vocalists give me splitting headaches, and the grating harmonic simplicity of most pop is just intolerable. But that's what most people like. Four chords, not tempo or key changes, peculiar whiney singing.
YT probably hid the thumb down because it isn't Happy.
I'm considering Fred Sokolow's zoom, "Learn a Million Songs in 90 Minutes" chord progressions class tomorrow just because they are so useful for jam sessions.
At my level, jam sessions are a social event, rather than fine music, but social events can be a good thing, especially as we age.
Sure, we all have our musical tastes. If I like it, I give it an encouraging thumb up. If not, I scroll on kind of like at a live event I walk on rather than shout, "you suck!"
I've listened to your music, and I like it. As a child I listened to classical music and as a young man listened to quite a bit of jazz. My hearing no longer supports it and I now listen to "Americana" and some world music. Vocals are another musical instrument since I often can't understand the words. You might not like some of the musicians that I like but I don't know that you'd give them a thumbs down.
I can tell the difference between "it sucks" and "it's not my cup of tea." Jazz was a rough one for me, I heard so much lousy jazz before I found some performers I liked ... later I figured out that jazz never "takes out the trash," you don't see mediocrities fade out as they do in classical. You've probably never heard of Meyerbeer but he was more played that most late Romantics you have heard of. Light opera, forgotten.
Musical tastes are odd. I'm not much into blues but there are some like Johnny Winter (RIP) I am crazy about.
Ha ha ha! I know who you're talking about! Tessa Schlesinger. She blocked me last year and I was genuinely mystified why. I had a small exchange with her but I'd call it polite, however, she got mad that I disagreed with her on some minor point. No flaming, no vulgar words, no sarcasm - I thought it was a comfortable exchange with someone I was eye-to-eye on in some cases, but she blocked me. She's for sure quite humourless and takes herself *way* too seriously. Since I couldn't tag her, I don't know if she ever found out the article I'd commented on that resulted in her blocking me, inspired an article by me she probably would have liked. I mentioned her name but after I reproduced it on my blog after getting kicked off Medium I took it out.
I guess she's now among the more notoriously crackpot writers on Medium - a real shame as all three of these writers used to be good. I followed Umair for awhile until he started sounding like the loons on the street arguing with the voices in their heads, and I used to love Jessica Wildfire until she started going down 'the world is ending' rabbithole. I continued to read her a bit because I'd been gone from the US over fifteen years at that point and I'm never sure whether my fucked-up view of the US is because I rely on the news too much and don't live there, or whether the Americans still there who say it's not all that bad are merely in the eye of the storm. I still haven't figured that out, but I'm worried about my brother and his wife retiring to North Carolina in a few more years. I really don't think they've thought this thing through.
Anyway... plenty of crackpots on Medium now, including, unfortunately, formerly really good writers. And yes, it's juicing narcissism big-time. I guess Tessa has slipped some since I left. It's a shame.
Nicole, I figured the same thing. Tessa has a mean streak in her and hunts for people to practice her mean upon. Looks like Steve QJ was her latest prey.
Agreed about Umair. For a while I thought he was refreshingly candid and direct, they he got wearisome. I think he's more truthful than 90% of the people who write about the same issues but reading too much Umair is like eating Hamburger Helper for a week. I've never run into the other two.
I left Tizathy in 2010 and it seems more and more like a foreign country. I doubtt I could handle the compulsiveness of the woke.
The Hamburger Helper analogy is one I keep in reserve because it's so potent. When I discovered the stuff I thought it was great, and once in a month it really is. But on the third day I had to give it to the dogs.
This is what I think of as the monolithic tribe assumption. You express a view on something that is widely considered to be associated with a tribe. That means that they think they can be certain that all of your views are in alignment with that tribe. No need for you to express those views, they attack you for unexpressed views because they just "know" that about you. For them, it's war and all is fair in the effort to crush you like a bug. Your reply that you said none of that fell onto deaf ears.
This dynamic you describe bums me out so much. Everyone's expected to adopt the whole package or be seen as a traitor. You can't be anti-vax and pro-masks. You can't be anti-Trump and pro-free speech. You can't be pro-trans and question puberty blockers. Everything is all about "which side are you on" with the ideological check-list created and policed by Twitter blue-checks. Good lord it truly makes me grind my jaw in frustration every day.
I think there's a lot of truth in this essay about how nasty, unproductive and intellectually dishonest so much social media discourse. Steve, I think you may have opened the door to some pushback by using the word "all" here: "They all make their money by saying things they don’t believe because their audience wants to believe them."
"I think you may have opened the door to some pushback by using the word "all" here:"
Ah, no, that's just because the sentence is out of its context. Preceding that sentence I'd listed a few different types of bad-faith actor on the internet and was referring to "all" of these different types. Not all social media users in general.
Got my comment started and the smoke detector went off in mid-sentence! We are using our new air fryer for the first time. I'm back now. Umair is very much too negative for me, whereas Jessica is thought-provoking, and I always try to find arguments to rebut what she writes. Sometimes I can —sometimes I can't find any...
Tessa is a known issue on Medium. I don't think it's possible to have a sane conversation with her. Whenever she pops up in.my comments I ignore her. She truly is a reflection of what is going wrong on the internet
I follow both Jessica and Umair and I sift through what they write carefully. Nuggets of truth and actual facts are always in there, but they get fogged over sometimes by the histrionics.
Yeah, it's been a while since I read either of them to be honest. I truly don't know how Umair in particular manages to keep "predicting" the collapse of civilisation and our imminent descent into fascism on a daily basis. I just don't see the point.
Who is Tessa? Am I supposed to know who she is? And where is her comment? I went to the original piece and her name is nowhere to be found. I suppose that it's a lost cause to try to understand the nuances. Probably shouldn't bother with the internet at all, really. It's no fun anymore. Too many pompous pontificators polluting the place.
Yeah, it looks like she deleted the comment entirely. I thought she'd only deleted my part of the conversation. Apparently she thinks everybody knows who she is😅
The internet is still worth a shot. You just need to be selective and read a range of sources. It's sad though, in theory the internet could have been so great for humanity socially speaking as well as the information it offers.
I was indulging myself, because the phrase "pompous pontificators polluting the place" happened in my brain and I just couldn't resist posting it. But you're right: had we had a bit more restraint at the get-go, were we following the precautionary principle (which really is such a sensible approach to innovation), we might have anticipated spammers, and trollers, etc. and instituted some kind of restraints when all this began bubbling up in the late 90s. But noooo. We trusted the free-market to regulate technology and the internet. And this is what we got. I remember some half-hearted attempts to right-size Microsoft and maybe some other big companies, but nothing much came of it.
I worked ten years at Microsoft, six gigs between 1989 and 2009. It would be hard to describe how full of themselves they actually are and be believed.
One person I knew had been extended an offer but had found another place to work (oh, those glorious days of choosing between four offers!) and didn't like the guy who was going to be his manager at all (I had numerous managers lie to me in interviews). When he told the HR droid he was turning down the offer, she sputtered, "but ... but it's *Microsoft*!!" She acted like it was choosing hell over heaven.
I was always hearing jokes in meetings about how "customers are our beta testers huh huh huh."
And one in a division meeting, about 800 people, I interrupted the speaker, a David Stockman clone, who had just told us that memory leaks were just a fact of life. I faced him down and said they were inexcusable sloppiness. Managers looked daggers at me, trying to decide if I was being impudent or promoting excellence. Then they talked to my manager and learned that I actually did produce leak-free code. Time after time.
C is the brown paper bag language for many, including me. With it you can do anything, but you also must do everything - garbage collection. Memory leaks can be disastrous. One of my mentors, when auditing code searched for mallocs and their associated free up of memory first - more important than algorithm elegance. Given the nature of the code I wrote for testing electronic hardware, readability and the ability to explain it to the hardware design and system engineers was more important than elegance for elegance's sake when it obfuscated the purpose.
I don't know about Microsoft, but lice comb code reviews are rare. Flight safety demanded a thorough review of my code when the hardware and system engineers were struggling for something to charge time to and had more time than normal and they all piled on. Project Management (purse string keepers) crapped in their pants when the charges rolled in. I'm thinking that might have something to do with Microsoft pushing weekly system updates on users. I was always happy to have my work reviewed.
For one project they imposed ADA, a strongly typed 1000 line "hello world" language. That never happened again.
Now that I've retired my home utility programming (quick hacks) is often in python which does cleanup for me or spreadsheets when they will serve the purpose.
Code reviews are like threat models or unit tests: checking a box. People come to the meeting straight from the printer and are seeing the code for the first time. They quibble
over formatting and consistency.
I usually worked on servers where memory was allocated in processing a request, so each time one came in I created a custom heap, did all my allocation for the request out of it, then freed the entire heap at the end without bothering freeing the individual allocations.
I started with servers that had to be restarted every four hours to recapture leaked memory and turned out servers that never leaked a single byte.
It takes a long time to write a big project in C but at least you can see everything but the stack operations, right in front of you. The JavaScript I am working on now bears no discernible relation to the page it implements, I can't even find where a checkbox or a button is coded. I hate browser work.
An interesting and strong solution, put the allocations in a big allocation.
When people are already working ridiculous hours to meet their schedule, expecting real code reviews is nonsense. Sadly, the best code reviews that I did was tasked with resolving problems in someone's released code where I was not punished for spending time on it. Justification for your quest to fix software development.
"One of the reasons I spend so much time engaging with people in my comments is to remind myself that smart, reasonable people can and do disagree with me. "
Hate to be the bearer, Steve, but this part is not working out so well. Most of these reported discussions are with dramatically dishonest and unstable people who all end up blocking you. You have noble impulses here but you are trying to debate with people who have no interest in reachint truth or finding common ground, only in scoring gotcha points, which they do ineptly.
This Tessa person is one of the worst yet, presuming you to be an AGW denier.
Am I right to presume these discussions are on Medium? That place is going downhill with the accelerator pressed to the floor. I mostly read the software articles and their quality is abyssal. Truly awful. Actually I don't see this on Medium, did Tessa delete the whole thing?
"Hate to be the bearer, Steve, but this part is not working out so well. Most of these reported discussions are with dramatically dishonest and unstable people who all end up blocking you."
Actually, only a tiny percentage of my conversations end with the person blocking me. I'd guess less than 1 or 2%. And Medium, as toxic as it can sometimes be, is far better than somewhere like Twitter, for example. Plenty of people there have an interest in more than scoring gotcha points.
Online discourse is difficult. No sane person would deny that. But it takes two people to have a fight. The way people talk to you is absolutely a reflection of the way you talk to them. And when you come across the occasional, inevitable idiot, somebody has to be the grown up in the room. Either that, or recognise the conversation really is a waste of time and just don't bother replying.
But yeah, though people rarely change their minds dramatically mid-conversation, I have quite a few commenters who started out antagonistic and have slowly become more reasonable and thoughtful. Or who have understood that there's more to consider about an issue than they initially thought. And some of them have done the same for me of course.
This is possible. No matter how many times you try to tell me that it's not. 😄
"And it seems to me, not keeping count mind you, that a lot of your reported conversations on here end in blocks."
I decided to have a search after you said this as I had no idea! I think 5 of the conversations I've mentioned here ended in blocks. Plus one where I blocked the guy. And two of those weren't even conversations. They were replies to other people's articles where I got blocked because my criticism of what they wrote was true and got too popular.
A lot of the time people don't reply if they realise they're wrong. Again, it's vanishingly rare that somebody admits it during a conversation, but those people never block me.
How do you find this out? In my last Medium backup in the Blocked folder there's a list of people who I'd blocked (less than ten) but nothing about who blocked me. How can you tell?
You can't get a direct count as far as I know, but you always know when somebody has blocked you because you get the "Unknown User" notification on Medium.
I always go back to copy/paste the conversations that I paste here, so I'd know if any of them had blocked me. But it happens really rarely. I think Tessa just blocked me because she realised she was being silly and her ego couldn't cope.
No, there are a lot of intelligent, rational people on Medium who disagree with folks like Steve as well. I used to get them too. There were some I had tagged in my brain as, "I disagree with this person a lot but s/he is worth taking seriously." Elle Beau was one of them. She's too far-left feminist for me and too much a tool of the trans-patriarchy but her articles on patriarchy and misogyny were usually pretty good and well-researched so I always took her fairly seriously, except when she parroted trans-whacko talking points. Another was Argumentative Penguin, I still miss him :)
Hilarious that she lists herself alongside two of Medium's most hysterical and tunnel-visioned grifter-provocateurs, Jessica Wildfire & Umair Haque. She should have thrown Marley K in there and it would have been the perfect trifecta of toxic bullshit peddlers.
"She should have thrown Marley K in there and it would have been the perfect trifecta of toxic bullshit peddlers"
😂
This did not start with social media. The entire internet is allows some astonishingly malevolent and cruel people to get their jollies. A few cases I've read about:
* trolls getting on suicide support groups and posting cruelly discouraging arguments for readers to go ahead and take their own lives
* trolls posting strobing GIFs on epilepsy support groups, triggering seizures in people who see them
Needless to say there are no consequences for people like this.
I could make some noise about the role of anonymity in enabling this but what would be the point? We all know it, and we all know nothing will ever be done about it.
As with television, social networks had great potential but the good possibilities have been completely swamped by bad actors.
And I would not protest the presumption of tribal syndromes, it far more true than false, especially on the MAGA side. Our side is more open to a la carte collections of viewpoints, e.g. my own strident liberalism coupled with disdain for wokeness. That someone who professes to believe the Big Lie will also be an AGW denier and a bigot may not be true for absolutely everyone but it's a statistically defensible presumption.
I have no solutions to offer but I appreciate your attempts, futile though I believe them to be.
When I was active in gay politics I wrote all the time against the confrontational belligerence that was mainstream there and only succeeded in arousing hatred ("internalized homophobia") and misery.
"We all know it, and we all know nothing will ever be done about it"
I think most social media is taking things like this seriously, no? At least banning users who do it. Policing the internet for speech is just an incredibly difficult and fraught job.
There's literally no mechanism, other than some futuristic AI, that could prevent me or you or anybody from saying something truly awful on social media right now. And it would be easy enough to find somebody vulnerable like a child or somebody who was suicidal, to target.
The only real preventative measure is human decency. I know we have differing degrees of faith in this quality, but regardless, without that, everything falls apart. Not just social media, not just the internet, the entirety of human civilisation rests on most of us displaying some amount of this quality. So giving up on it simply isn't an option.
And in the case of gay politics, for example, though I don't doubt for a second the belligerence you describe, there was that blissful period before the current toxicity of the trans debate where I don't think anybody thought of toxicity when they heard the letters LGBT.
I have never advocated giving up though I have repeatedly expressed despair. Some of us have never abandoned decency.
Twitter and Facebook have if anything promoted the savagery, with only perfunctory discouragement of dirty words and some ham-handed banning under the selection of non-English speakers. "Oh, drop dead" is a death threat? In German "break an arm and a leg" means "good luck," and Thelma Ritter's "kill the people" would you banned while Trump's four years of stochastic assassination was tolerated.
Medium's enforcement serves only to support the "trans" activists, making the platform worse.
Any actual enforcement would disproportionately ban the MAGA crowd and derail the quest for civility into political grievance.
At least Twitter blocks COVID misinformation. Small mercies.
"'Oh, drop dead' is a death threat?"
I mean, it's very obviously not a death threat, but it's equally obviously not productive. I don't think you can compare it to the theatrical "break a leg," in anything even approaching good faith.
I've been arguing with trans people on Medium pretty regularly for around a year now. I'm sure some of them would like nothing more than to see me banned. Yet I'm still there. I think you underestimate the importance of the way you phrase things.
Maybe it's my advanced age but I remember "drop dead' as, at worst, an expression of mild derision, and often almost comical. A few years ago I was *banned* from Twitter for it.
If you have been arguing "trans" people on Medium and have not been banned yet it is only because none of them has seen fit to report you for "transphobia." I have solid evidence that only one such report is required and the offending response will not be read before throwing the switch.
I have a bad habit of staying on forums I no longer enjoy out of vain pride and not wanting to be driven away. I was on a WaPo community that existed within one of its blogs; all the people I had enjoyed reading were long gone and those remaining had cliqued around a woman I didn't like* and who despised me enough to invent lies about me. Another time I remained on a board where there were only two people I liked out of ten remaining.
Bad habit. Life is too short.
I like this place but if I started feeling combative I would just vanish. I do learn, though sometimes it takes me a while. Like, most of my life.
* this woman was "patriotic" and when the news came out about Edward Snowden's revelations it was a topic of active discussion. She posted about thirty times "I'm so mad I can't even talk about it!" This made me mad. She can't talk about it but she can talk about it by repeating the same sentence, exclamation point and all, over two dozen times. After that I didn't like her anymore.
I wish substack had a sad face in addition to the heart.
I can handle the thumb up/down emoji, but I can't handle the faces. I think they have done a lot of damage. I know some people use them here because I occasionally use another browser but I have all emoji blocked in Chrome. I am in much better temper if I don't see them.
An unambiguous comment is better and even thumb up/down is better than the little faces. I notice that YouTube now hides the thumb down. The thing about thumb down on YouTube is that before they hid them I often wondered what kind of asshole thumbs down good music.
Ummm, one person's good music is another persons turd coil. Nearly all female vocalists give me splitting headaches, and the grating harmonic simplicity of most pop is just intolerable. But that's what most people like. Four chords, not tempo or key changes, peculiar whiney singing.
YT probably hid the thumb down because it isn't Happy.
Speaking of the same four chords. https://youtu.be/zIXlz5Pt1Dc
I'm considering Fred Sokolow's zoom, "Learn a Million Songs in 90 Minutes" chord progressions class tomorrow just because they are so useful for jam sessions.
At my level, jam sessions are a social event, rather than fine music, but social events can be a good thing, especially as we age.
Sure, we all have our musical tastes. If I like it, I give it an encouraging thumb up. If not, I scroll on kind of like at a live event I walk on rather than shout, "you suck!"
I've listened to your music, and I like it. As a child I listened to classical music and as a young man listened to quite a bit of jazz. My hearing no longer supports it and I now listen to "Americana" and some world music. Vocals are another musical instrument since I often can't understand the words. You might not like some of the musicians that I like but I don't know that you'd give them a thumbs down.
I can tell the difference between "it sucks" and "it's not my cup of tea." Jazz was a rough one for me, I heard so much lousy jazz before I found some performers I liked ... later I figured out that jazz never "takes out the trash," you don't see mediocrities fade out as they do in classical. You've probably never heard of Meyerbeer but he was more played that most late Romantics you have heard of. Light opera, forgotten.
Musical tastes are odd. I'm not much into blues but there are some like Johnny Winter (RIP) I am crazy about.
But modern singing styles make no sense to me.
Ha ha ha! I know who you're talking about! Tessa Schlesinger. She blocked me last year and I was genuinely mystified why. I had a small exchange with her but I'd call it polite, however, she got mad that I disagreed with her on some minor point. No flaming, no vulgar words, no sarcasm - I thought it was a comfortable exchange with someone I was eye-to-eye on in some cases, but she blocked me. She's for sure quite humourless and takes herself *way* too seriously. Since I couldn't tag her, I don't know if she ever found out the article I'd commented on that resulted in her blocking me, inspired an article by me she probably would have liked. I mentioned her name but after I reproduced it on my blog after getting kicked off Medium I took it out.
I guess she's now among the more notoriously crackpot writers on Medium - a real shame as all three of these writers used to be good. I followed Umair for awhile until he started sounding like the loons on the street arguing with the voices in their heads, and I used to love Jessica Wildfire until she started going down 'the world is ending' rabbithole. I continued to read her a bit because I'd been gone from the US over fifteen years at that point and I'm never sure whether my fucked-up view of the US is because I rely on the news too much and don't live there, or whether the Americans still there who say it's not all that bad are merely in the eye of the storm. I still haven't figured that out, but I'm worried about my brother and his wife retiring to North Carolina in a few more years. I really don't think they've thought this thing through.
Anyway... plenty of crackpots on Medium now, including, unfortunately, formerly really good writers. And yes, it's juicing narcissism big-time. I guess Tessa has slipped some since I left. It's a shame.
Nicole, I figured the same thing. Tessa has a mean streak in her and hunts for people to practice her mean upon. Looks like Steve QJ was her latest prey.
Agreed about Umair. For a while I thought he was refreshingly candid and direct, they he got wearisome. I think he's more truthful than 90% of the people who write about the same issues but reading too much Umair is like eating Hamburger Helper for a week. I've never run into the other two.
I left Tizathy in 2010 and it seems more and more like a foreign country. I doubtt I could handle the compulsiveness of the woke.
They can write well, but as you wrote, the same story every day becomes a squeaking ceiling fan
The Hamburger Helper analogy is one I keep in reserve because it's so potent. When I discovered the stuff I thought it was great, and once in a month it really is. But on the third day I had to give it to the dogs.
This is what I think of as the monolithic tribe assumption. You express a view on something that is widely considered to be associated with a tribe. That means that they think they can be certain that all of your views are in alignment with that tribe. No need for you to express those views, they attack you for unexpressed views because they just "know" that about you. For them, it's war and all is fair in the effort to crush you like a bug. Your reply that you said none of that fell onto deaf ears.
This dynamic you describe bums me out so much. Everyone's expected to adopt the whole package or be seen as a traitor. You can't be anti-vax and pro-masks. You can't be anti-Trump and pro-free speech. You can't be pro-trans and question puberty blockers. Everything is all about "which side are you on" with the ideological check-list created and policed by Twitter blue-checks. Good lord it truly makes me grind my jaw in frustration every day.
Attitude syndromes
What if?? Keep plowing that fine line of truth, Steve. Some of us are listening. And contemplating.
I think there's a lot of truth in this essay about how nasty, unproductive and intellectually dishonest so much social media discourse. Steve, I think you may have opened the door to some pushback by using the word "all" here: "They all make their money by saying things they don’t believe because their audience wants to believe them."
"I think you may have opened the door to some pushback by using the word "all" here:"
Ah, no, that's just because the sentence is out of its context. Preceding that sentence I'd listed a few different types of bad-faith actor on the internet and was referring to "all" of these different types. Not all social media users in general.
Got my comment started and the smoke detector went off in mid-sentence! We are using our new air fryer for the first time. I'm back now. Umair is very much too negative for me, whereas Jessica is thought-provoking, and I always try to find arguments to rebut what she writes. Sometimes I can —sometimes I can't find any...
Tessa is a known issue on Medium. I don't think it's possible to have a sane conversation with her. Whenever she pops up in.my comments I ignore her. She truly is a reflection of what is going wrong on the internet
I follow both Jessica and Umair and I sift through what they write carefully. Nuggets of truth and actual facts are always in there, but they get fogged over sometimes by the histrionics.
Yeah, it's been a while since I read either of them to be honest. I truly don't know how Umair in particular manages to keep "predicting" the collapse of civilisation and our imminent descent into fascism on a daily basis. I just don't see the point.
Who is Tessa? Am I supposed to know who she is? And where is her comment? I went to the original piece and her name is nowhere to be found. I suppose that it's a lost cause to try to understand the nuances. Probably shouldn't bother with the internet at all, really. It's no fun anymore. Too many pompous pontificators polluting the place.
Yeah, it looks like she deleted the comment entirely. I thought she'd only deleted my part of the conversation. Apparently she thinks everybody knows who she is😅
The internet is still worth a shot. You just need to be selective and read a range of sources. It's sad though, in theory the internet could have been so great for humanity socially speaking as well as the information it offers.
I was indulging myself, because the phrase "pompous pontificators polluting the place" happened in my brain and I just couldn't resist posting it. But you're right: had we had a bit more restraint at the get-go, were we following the precautionary principle (which really is such a sensible approach to innovation), we might have anticipated spammers, and trollers, etc. and instituted some kind of restraints when all this began bubbling up in the late 90s. But noooo. We trusted the free-market to regulate technology and the internet. And this is what we got. I remember some half-hearted attempts to right-size Microsoft and maybe some other big companies, but nothing much came of it.
I worked ten years at Microsoft, six gigs between 1989 and 2009. It would be hard to describe how full of themselves they actually are and be believed.
One person I knew had been extended an offer but had found another place to work (oh, those glorious days of choosing between four offers!) and didn't like the guy who was going to be his manager at all (I had numerous managers lie to me in interviews). When he told the HR droid he was turning down the offer, she sputtered, "but ... but it's *Microsoft*!!" She acted like it was choosing hell over heaven.
I was always hearing jokes in meetings about how "customers are our beta testers huh huh huh."
And one in a division meeting, about 800 people, I interrupted the speaker, a David Stockman clone, who had just told us that memory leaks were just a fact of life. I faced him down and said they were inexcusable sloppiness. Managers looked daggers at me, trying to decide if I was being impudent or promoting excellence. Then they talked to my manager and learned that I actually did produce leak-free code. Time after time.
C is the brown paper bag language for many, including me. With it you can do anything, but you also must do everything - garbage collection. Memory leaks can be disastrous. One of my mentors, when auditing code searched for mallocs and their associated free up of memory first - more important than algorithm elegance. Given the nature of the code I wrote for testing electronic hardware, readability and the ability to explain it to the hardware design and system engineers was more important than elegance for elegance's sake when it obfuscated the purpose.
I don't know about Microsoft, but lice comb code reviews are rare. Flight safety demanded a thorough review of my code when the hardware and system engineers were struggling for something to charge time to and had more time than normal and they all piled on. Project Management (purse string keepers) crapped in their pants when the charges rolled in. I'm thinking that might have something to do with Microsoft pushing weekly system updates on users. I was always happy to have my work reviewed.
For one project they imposed ADA, a strongly typed 1000 line "hello world" language. That never happened again.
Now that I've retired my home utility programming (quick hacks) is often in python which does cleanup for me or spreadsheets when they will serve the purpose.
Code reviews are like threat models or unit tests: checking a box. People come to the meeting straight from the printer and are seeing the code for the first time. They quibble
over formatting and consistency.
I usually worked on servers where memory was allocated in processing a request, so each time one came in I created a custom heap, did all my allocation for the request out of it, then freed the entire heap at the end without bothering freeing the individual allocations.
I started with servers that had to be restarted every four hours to recapture leaked memory and turned out servers that never leaked a single byte.
It takes a long time to write a big project in C but at least you can see everything but the stack operations, right in front of you. The JavaScript I am working on now bears no discernible relation to the page it implements, I can't even find where a checkbox or a button is coded. I hate browser work.
An interesting and strong solution, put the allocations in a big allocation.
When people are already working ridiculous hours to meet their schedule, expecting real code reviews is nonsense. Sadly, the best code reviews that I did was tasked with resolving problems in someone's released code where I was not punished for spending time on it. Justification for your quest to fix software development.
"One of the reasons I spend so much time engaging with people in my comments is to remind myself that smart, reasonable people can and do disagree with me. "
Hate to be the bearer, Steve, but this part is not working out so well. Most of these reported discussions are with dramatically dishonest and unstable people who all end up blocking you. You have noble impulses here but you are trying to debate with people who have no interest in reachint truth or finding common ground, only in scoring gotcha points, which they do ineptly.
This Tessa person is one of the worst yet, presuming you to be an AGW denier.
Am I right to presume these discussions are on Medium? That place is going downhill with the accelerator pressed to the floor. I mostly read the software articles and their quality is abyssal. Truly awful. Actually I don't see this on Medium, did Tessa delete the whole thing?
"Hate to be the bearer, Steve, but this part is not working out so well. Most of these reported discussions are with dramatically dishonest and unstable people who all end up blocking you."
Actually, only a tiny percentage of my conversations end with the person blocking me. I'd guess less than 1 or 2%. And Medium, as toxic as it can sometimes be, is far better than somewhere like Twitter, for example. Plenty of people there have an interest in more than scoring gotcha points.
Online discourse is difficult. No sane person would deny that. But it takes two people to have a fight. The way people talk to you is absolutely a reflection of the way you talk to them. And when you come across the occasional, inevitable idiot, somebody has to be the grown up in the room. Either that, or recognise the conversation really is a waste of time and just don't bother replying.
But yeah, though people rarely change their minds dramatically mid-conversation, I have quite a few commenters who started out antagonistic and have slowly become more reasonable and thoughtful. Or who have understood that there's more to consider about an issue than they initially thought. And some of them have done the same for me of course.
This is possible. No matter how many times you try to tell me that it's not. 😄
Yes it is possible and I have had my own successes but most of the time they turn out to be correcting presumptions, not changing minds.
And it seems to me, not keeping count mind you, that a lot of your reported conversations on here end in blocks.
"And it seems to me, not keeping count mind you, that a lot of your reported conversations on here end in blocks."
I decided to have a search after you said this as I had no idea! I think 5 of the conversations I've mentioned here ended in blocks. Plus one where I blocked the guy. And two of those weren't even conversations. They were replies to other people's articles where I got blocked because my criticism of what they wrote was true and got too popular.
A lot of the time people don't reply if they realise they're wrong. Again, it's vanishingly rare that somebody admits it during a conversation, but those people never block me.
How do you find this out? In my last Medium backup in the Blocked folder there's a list of people who I'd blocked (less than ten) but nothing about who blocked me. How can you tell?
You can't get a direct count as far as I know, but you always know when somebody has blocked you because you get the "Unknown User" notification on Medium.
I always go back to copy/paste the conversations that I paste here, so I'd know if any of them had blocked me. But it happens really rarely. I think Tessa just blocked me because she realised she was being silly and her ego couldn't cope.
No, there are a lot of intelligent, rational people on Medium who disagree with folks like Steve as well. I used to get them too. There were some I had tagged in my brain as, "I disagree with this person a lot but s/he is worth taking seriously." Elle Beau was one of them. She's too far-left feminist for me and too much a tool of the trans-patriarchy but her articles on patriarchy and misogyny were usually pretty good and well-researched so I always took her fairly seriously, except when she parroted trans-whacko talking points. Another was Argumentative Penguin, I still miss him :)