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Everything world-editable is eventually filled with depictions of genitals and N-words. Must be a theorem.
by qsort 5y ago
Everything world-editable is eventually filled with depictions of genitals and N-words. Must be a theorem.
- majkinetor 5y agoAnd everything that has avatar and chat will be used for mingling eventually.
- kabdib 5y agoQuick story. As I understand it, the UI folks at Nintendo who were working on the Wii controller did user testing, of course. In one test, they would hand a new user a controller wand with instructions to "Just draw stuff on the screen" using a simple drawing program. The metric Nintendo came up with was called TTP, or the how long in minutes and seconds -- sometimes, only seconds -- before the user drew the inevitable male genitals. "Time To P-n-s". Averaged something like two or three minutes. Every new vista humankind opens will be so decorated. And so, World of Text: QED. :-)
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoIt's ok to write out penis, we're all adults here.
- djrockstar1 5y agoIt should also be okay to write words in a censored form if the writer wishes.
- bobmichael 5y agoGP didn't imply it wasn't!
- scubbo 5y agoOnly by a strictly-literal, context-free reading.
- Symbiote 5y agoIt seems odd to write "genitals" but not write "penis". H-w f-- -an we t-k- wr--i-g -ord- in a -ens--r-d f-rm?
- scrollaway 5y agoNot if it prevents the point from being made. Which in this case it has. And then detracts from the post altogether. Which it also has.
- cto_of_antifa 5y agoIn what ways?
- DharmaPolice 5y agoI think we should be discouraging that kind of self-censorship for all but the worst words. Not only do people start to use it for ridiculous political posturing (e.g. "wmen" or "gmers") but it just makes what you're write ever so slightly harder to understand. And for what benefit?
- DeusExMachina 5y agoHow is the original comment harder to understand? If there is one freedom people have is to control their language, wether to avoid certain words or to utter words that other find silly.
- DharmaPolice 5y agoCensored words are much more likely to be ambiguous. I wasn't referring to that specific example but now you mention it, p_n_s does take a fraction longer to understand than penis. And no-one is talking about taking away people's freedom. You can write all your emails in all caps if you want, but we can discourage people from doing that.
- philovivero 5y agoIn a previous sentence they mentioned TTP, then they mentioned P-n-s. I thought this was another acronym of sorts. Like "Posts not sexy" or whatever. I spent a couple seconds to figure out what it meant, failed, and just moved on. Figured out what it was supposed to mean from the replies.
- Kranar 5y agoThey are welcome to avoid certain words, and I am welcome to criticize it.
- boomlinde 5y agoIs it really censorship, though? You insist on conveying the meaning of the word, which is what is offensive if anything. By omitting a couple of letters you've only saved us from its exact spelling. For example, "fuck you" is offensive because it's rude, vulgar and expresses contempt, not because of how exactly "fuck" is spelled. "F-ck you" is still rude and vulgar because it conveys the exact same meaning. The only difference to the recipient of such a request is that it's slightly more annoying to read, an annoyance that is surely dwarfed by the offense taken to the rude and vulgar meaning, and its intent as an expression of contempt. It's better described as the exact opposite, a sort of a censorship circumvention; you can omit or replace a few letters to get past dumb word filters or comply with poorly worded courtesy policies and still convey the meaning to humans. Where no such filters and policies are in place, it's pointless. A scary thought is that we may be so conditioned by machines and machine-like policies that our means to circumvent them now occur to us naturally even in contexts where they don't make a difference.
- I_complete_me 5y agoI would like to upvote this comment for it's clarity of thinking.
- sumtechguy 5y agoThis sort of censorship has been going on for a long time. For example 'oh fiddlesticks'. They are still swearing. But some sort of odd self censorship happened. It is an interesting exercise for me. Try not to swear. No substitutes allowed. It is oddly difficult for me.
- samsolomon 5y agoI took the comment that ‘Time to PNS’ was a kind of code name for the metric at Nintendo. Honestly, I think that’s hilarious. Edit: TTP is the metric name. Sorry, it’s early.
- kgwgk 5y agoCould also have been TTPP
- checkyoursudo 5y agoIf my children are remotely average (sometimes I wonder) then kids know about penises as well.
- jrochkind1 5y agoheck, around half of them even have one!
- schnebbau 5y agoUnless he meant PUNKS, and people have been drawing dudes rocking out with spikes and mohawks?
- mysterydip 5y agoI'm honestly surprised the first astronauts on the moon didn't draw one with their finger in the dust.
- nerdponx 5y agoMaybes there's a patch of the moon dust that they all agreed to never photograph, where they drew all the boobs and dicks. Imagine: aliens get the Arecibo message but don't quite know what to make of it, until they see the boobs and dicks drawn on the moon and they correlate it with their own crass fascination with reproductive organs, and only then do they recognize humanity as a self-aware species. That, or they just smudged it out after doing it.
- tmalsburg2 5y agoHow do you know they didn’t?
- globular-toast 5y agoDid they only test it on men, or do women draw penises too?
- Laremere 5y agoReddit's /r/place is perhaps an interesting counter example. It started that way, but as space on the image grew tight and contested, all of that kind of stuff went away. Towards the middle and end, the only significant images were those which could get enough people on board to maintain, and people tend to care more about other stuff, it seems. I'd say it comes down to the balance of (# of people who make a positive impact * difficulty of positive impact) vs the same for negative impact. Wikipedia is another example. Sure plenty of people make stupid edits, but enough effort is put into detecting and immediately reverting the vandalism that the effort required to properly vandalize it quickly goes beyond the effort most people will go for a stupid joke.
- Retric 5y agoFor good or ill, I don’t think Wikipedia qualifies as globally editable anymore.
- chalst 5y agoNot all pages are, and quite a few IP ranges are blocked, but there is plenty of content being added by non-logged-in editors.
- Retric 5y agoYes, editable != globally editable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy On top of this, bots such as ClueBot will most dong postings on even less trafficked locations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClueBot_NG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClueBot_NG
- earthboundkid 5y agoMy vandalism from 2011 is still up though, thanks to being protected by a bogus citation. :-)
- tptacek 5y ago
- smitty1e 5y agoThis is a Rule 34 corollary. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_34 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_34
- jhgb 5y ago> Everything world-editable is eventually filled with depictions of genitals and N-words. Must be a theorem. Boltzmann's Black Dick?
- pelagicAustral 5y agoOddly enough, the first thing I saw was a giant ASCII penis saying "good morning citizen, do you want to be my friend?"
- rpastuszak 5y agoAh the famous MTTP (mean time to penis) metric!
- Karawebnetwork 5y agoThis page seems to says that users can claim parts of the grid and make them members only. This would prevent some trolling. https://www.yourworldoftext.com/~Help/3 https://www.yourworldoftext.com/~Help/3