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Charlie Stross is a hard science fiction author, I believe his works (like Accelerado) have been quite influential and inspiring for many hn users. I believe it
by elkos 5y ago
Charlie Stross is a hard science fiction author, I believe his works (like Accelerado) have been quite influential and inspiring for many hn users. I believe it could be interesting to discuss his (pessimistic) take on this year.
- zestyping 5y agoAnd decade.
- rcarmo 5y agoHe is by far one of the most interesting bloggers on my RSS feeds, and I would also recommend reading the comments - in which he participates actively.
- 41b696ef1113 5y agoFor anyone else who went hunting for the feed[0] [0] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/atom.xml http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/atom.xml
- jodrellblank 5y agoHe's also a HN user: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross
- maxerickson 5y agoHe'll block you on twitter for politely quibbling with his presentation of facts.
- noah_buddy 5y agoIs there a deeper meaning to take from this? Some people block anyone negative on Twitter. He's free to use the platform as he pleases, I see no reason why someone should feel obligated to have or present an externally valid reason for blocking others.
- cwmma 5y agoStross just blocks nazis and terfs even when they are polite about it. This pisses some people off who see JUST ASKING QUESTIONS!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lazyasciiart 5y agoPolite about……being nazis? Good for him for not lending credence to the idea that civility makes anything acceptable.
- maxerickson 5y agoNo, I'm just petty and small minded. On the other hand, when someone confidently opines about a lot of things and then rejects mild corrections (I literally just said something like "thing isn't part of B, it's owned by the same parent company"), you wonder what facts are feeding into those opinions.
- lazyasciiart 5y agoYou didn’t though, you said something much much less useful than that -“you’re slightly wrong, here’s a Wikipedia article for you to read”
- toyg 5y agoSome people also have a quixotic definition of "facts", and figuring out if that's the case can be exhausting for popular users with thousands of followers.
- bigiain 5y agoAnd you know, from random strangers, who gives a fuck even if their facts are correct? You owe them precisely nothing for their “contribution” to your discussion. If you block them, it means you don’t want to hear from them any more. They can go butt into someone else’s discussion and see if they are more receptive to “corrections”.
- evgen 5y ago
- maxerickson 5y agoI don't really understand your tone. I think you are mocking me, but I'm not sure why you think you have the necessary context to do that in an effective way.
- tome 5y agoIt doesn't read as mockery of you (or anyone) to me. It seems like criticisms of "random nobodies" on Twitter.
- legutierr 5y agoI don’t know. Personally, I don’t think that anyone should be referred to as a “random nobody”, whether they be Twitter users or not.
- tptacek 5y agoWe're all randoms to some people (most people, in fact). It's the notion that people have an obligation to pay attention to us that I find more alarming.
- dijit 5y agoThis is literally the thing twitter was designed around.
- user982 5y ago'I am forever advising people, "Why hit Reply when the Block button is right there?"' - jwz
- ceejayoz 5y agoI’ve seen this going around lately. https://twitter.com/mrfilmkritik/status/995446576536530944 https://twitter.com/mrfilmkritik/status/995446576536530944 > When someone disagrees with you online & demands you prove your point to their satisfaction by writing a logically sound defense, u can save a lot of time by not doing that. > Dude, I’ve known u for ten seconds & enjoyed none of them, I’m not taking homework assignments from you.
- kjs3 5y agoOh, man...thanks for this. I need these words for tragically large numbers of my on-line interactions.
- ska 5y agoThat may be a bit harsh, but nobody owes you a conversation and people with a ton of followers have to do something to manage the SNR. It's not obvious what the right answer is, and almost anything you do will have false positives.
- maxerickson 5y agoThere's nothing in my comment that implies I think anybody owes me a conversation. I can see hitting mute on accounts that make uninteresting comments, I'm not sure why you'd block someone that comments on ~1 tweet and isn't being persistent or otherwise antagonistic (I suppose it can be better curation to block).
- fragmede 5y agoBecause it's not one tweet. Or at least, it's one tweet from you, but a popular author like cstross probably gets hundreds a day from randoms.
- ceejayoz 5y agoThis? https://twitter.com/maxerickson/status/685506107695972352 https://twitter.com/maxerickson/status/685506107695972352 Anyone with that many followers is likely going to disengage with low-effort replies of that nature. It adds nothing of consequence to the lengthy post it is correcting.
- maxerickson 5y agoMute though. And I learned something about his concern over accuracy. For instance, reddit hasn't quite lived in the shadow of Conde Nast in the meantime.
- tome 5y agoYes, muting seems far less aggressive than blocking to me. For one thing the mutee doesn't even know it has happened. I don't quite understand why some Twitter users seems to take delight in announcing they have blocked someone.
- wombatpm 5y agoMuting saves you from the annoyance, but still subjects your followers.
- eproxus 5y agoBlocking on Twitter is such a meaningless feature. You can just log out to access the content someone who blocked you. It’s like the feature only exists to make people feel good about signaling their actions to the blocked party. Muting fulfills all the goals those features are supposed to solve. Does blocking actually add anything sensible on top that I missed?
- jazzyjackson 5y agoI guess it prevents them from participating in the replies to your tweets, so it prevents your access to the parent’s audience. A tweet is kind of like a stage, you might have a million followers, everyone who replies is also seen by your audience. Blocking is like preventing people from getting up on your stage.
- tptacek 5y agoMore people should block on Twitter. Blocking is far preferable, in an environment like Twitter, to pointless hostile misunderstanding. It's a bad look to dunk on someone for blocking you; just let them block and get on with your life. Pay it forward when someone pokes you on Twitter with a question you can tell is going to pull you into a time-wasting cortisol spike.
- maxerickson 5y agoI don't think I was dunking. Griping at the most (and I've made the block vs mute point). I agree that it's time wasting and I've tried to pull out of this thread so as to not waste more time of other people.
- LAC-Tech 5y agoLOL, enjoyed the turn of phrase. Time-wasting cortisol spike is about how I classify the original article.
- rektide 5y agoIts a shit rubbish reality that the only moderation option is infinite, is forever. Sever ties. End it. Write someone off as garbage. Your comment is way way too cancel culture for me. It hurts a lot having one bad exchange & having the door slammed in your face. Especially if it's some topic you feel strongly about, that you were trying to engage in. You may be right that it's a better tact than engaging. It's a shit system though, deeply dehumanizing ways of treating each other.
- krapp 5y ago>It's a shit system though, deeply dehumanizing ways of treating each other. The system was already deeply dehumanizing. "Block early, block often" is simply the inevitable and, frankly, only reasonable reaction to years of dealing with psychopaths, assholes and trolls on the internet. I only wish Hacker News came with its own killfile. Mine would be hundred of entries long by now.
- 5y ago
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoI'm not a twitter user, but this is the equivalent of "I'm not interested in being notified if this person contacts me again" right? Like me putting a Gmail rule in place to move messages from a specific source, say a specific mailing list thread that I'm not interested in out of my inbox. Is this considered taboo on Twitter?
- tptacek 5y agoIt is both a primary, first-class feature of Twitter and something a lot of people feel should be a taboo.
- maxerickson 5y agoThat's mute. Block prevents the blocked user from seeing your tweets from logged in contexts and ability to reply to any of your tweets and so on. That it sort of curates a feed by limiting replies can go in both directions of course.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoWhy would anyone want to block, rather than mute? I suppose it's more 'honest' in some ways but the implementation as described almost feels designed to create drama. Is it easier to block or to mute? Which one is the de facto default in the UI?
- sangnoir 5y agoMute is self-curation by the author. Whereas Block is the closest thing to moderation for ones' followers. People have different thresholds for both actions.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoThis makes sense, kind of like kicking someone from a chat room or subreddit you control because that's not the kind of discussion you want. It seems most people who use twitter don't understand this though.
- astrange 5y agoGood. You should block everyone who replies to you on Twitter. It's the best way to use it. (This includes compliments. They're bad for you.)
- chongli 5y agoI say: don’t bother trying to talk to minor celebrities on Twitter. If you want discussions, HN (and other well-moderated forums) are the place to go. Twitter is just the Internet version of that scrolling celebrity soundbite bar on cable TV.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
- eu 5y agoprogrammer in a former life
- BlueTemplar 5y agoSpeaking of Accelerando, here's a similar retrospective of his about 2018 : https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/the-crazy-years.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/the-cra... (The first chapter of Accelerando is about a two decades in the future 2018.)
- Ostrogodsky 5y ago