4 ms·
I find it totally cringeworthy. I read it, mentally, as "diasporastar." It's like if someone types "I <heart symbol> you," I read it as "I heart you," which is
by javert 11y ago
I find it totally cringeworthy.
I read it, mentally, as "diasporastar." It's like if someone types "I <heart symbol> you," I read it as "I heart you," which is cringeworthy.
Do some people not do this?
Also, their URL needs the star, too. Diaspora(asterisk)foundation.org. I just can't stand in consistency. How you do it matters less than being consistent. If you can't put a * in a URL, don't make the asterisk part of your name.
Finally, it made me look for a footnote. That symbol already has a meaning in that context---you can't just re-appropriate symbols to mean whatever you want when they already have an established meaning. I mean, clearly, you can---but it's considered bad form, and for good reasons.
I bet the Diaspora* people are sick and tired of hearing this shit over and over, but you know what? They deserve it.
- c22 11y agoWhy not just practice reading it "I love you"? A more charitable interpretation of the writer's intent and less likely to get you so frustrated.
- anigbrowl 11y agoBecause basic UI functions should not require ambiguous interpretations, charitable or otherwise. I personally read heart symbols as 'love' as in 'I love New York' on the famous t-shirt, but many people say 'I heart New York' and while I find this asinine in the extreme (because 'heart' is obviously not a verb, but hearts are a well-known metaphor for love) it's not going to change because unfortunately there are a great many ill-educated people out there. So now you have a very basic UI component (which is sadly not very innovative, being just a different version of Facebook's 'like' feature) but people are likely to attach two different names to it. Notice, by contrast, how FB constantly reinforces the use of 'like' as the operative verb. You don't hear anyone saying 'thumb-up this post on facebook' even though everyone recognizes the thumbs-up symbol as being synonymous with liking something.
- c22 11y agoI think when someone verbally says "I heart New York" their intent is to invoke the popular-culture graphic as an aide to their point, a (possibly completely) different usage from the more natural phrase, "I love New York". I don't really think of ascii art as a form of basic ui function though...
- egypturnash 11y agoYMMV. Personally my circles (20s-40s Seattleite nerds) say "Hearts" to each other on a regular basis. Depending on context, it expands to either "I love you" or "I love the thing you just said", just as if we were typing "<3" into an instant messenger window. That said, the spurious asterisk in 'diaspora' does look pretty inexplicable, and needs way too much explanation to people who haven't drunk the kool-aide already. Add in the fact that 'diaspora' is never capitalized, even if it begins a sentence, and you're kind of way off into the eccentric orthography zone.
- javert 11y agoBecuase our language is not pictographic, it is alphabetic. So that is wrong. Reading a heart symbol as "I love you" is just as wrong as reading it as "I heart you." A symbol is not a word.
- btdollar 11y agoBreaking news! User javert is resistant to linguistic shift! Stop the presses, because this is a humdinger of a story!