Hooray, actual user research and data!! This is what I tell all my clients: "We can speculate all day long, but we don't have to. The users will tell us the correct answer in about 5 minutes."
It's amazing that even in a space like this, of ostensibly highly analytical folks, people still get caught up arguing over things that can be settled immediately with just a little evidence.
Yeah, imgur had very simple & humble origins and fostered a surprisingly active, reddit-like community (though I'm sure imgurians would resent that particular comparison), and then holy shit it just turned into a bizarrely bloated overstuffed hodgepodge of fire-garbage. I just looked at the homepage for the first time in forever and—wait, what? "Arcade"?
Kind of funny to find this on the front page of HN. Makes me wonder what percentage of today's HN readers didn't live through the Slashdot era. (I'm aware it's still around.)
It's sad to see its decline. I started reading right around 2000 and even noticed that it started to decline even as early as 2008, after and around some of its redesigns. I know I quit regularly stopping around there probably around that time too.
Yup, around 2008 is when I noticed that many of the Slashdot front page submissions were discussed on this new site called Hacker News 1-2 days prior, minus the trolling and the comedy threads. It was a pretty easy switch at that point.
Yup, me too. What’s funny is that your slashdot account can make friends (or enemies!) with other accounts, and there’s a limit of 200. Sometimes I spot comments of friends I made like 20 years ago.
Slashdot was the shiznitt back in the day of ye olde web. Great submissions and great personality amongst the admins and commenters. On occasions when I’ve brought that attitude here I’ve been slapped down by dang…
It certainly had an impression on me in my younger days -- moving over to Firefox and later messing around with Knoppix and becoming an open source geek probably stemmed in large part from seeing all the "Install Linux, problem solved" memes.
Slashdot was somewhere between a well curated tech subreddit and Hacker News.
It had its own in-jokes like: This is finally "the year of the Linux Desktop" and Jonathan "CowboyNeal" Pater, the site's moderator who often posted polls and commented.
In the late 2000s, most migrated their Slashdot reflex to Digg - and then eventually the YC-backed Reddit when there was a disastrous rollout of Digg v4 (in 2010)
Reddit then became less of a technology-focused site as it gained popularity, and HN became the defacto "tech news" aggregator with a well rounded comment section that resembled the early days of Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit.
What I really miss was the moderation system. There was a simple 1-5 score and a main trait (insightful, funny, flamebait, underrated, overrated...). To moderate you had to earn points which would you then spend, so careful consideration mattered. The result was that you could filter for 5+Insightful and get the core of the discussion, or 5+Funny and have a good time, etc.
Ignoring what Slashdot was like specifically: A lot more optimistic, a lot of hope and positive views of what the future would bring. The internet felt bigger, as if there was more to discover, even if it's larger now. More stupid, more fun. May it was just because I was younger.
It was a lot like HN, but more curated and with a more complex (and arguably better) moderation system. More focused on Linux and open source than HN, but still a technology news site with comments.
To be honest I never liked the community much. But back then I still stubbornly clinging to smaller, more specialised communities (plus OSNews.com haha)
OK, I want to meet these guys. This writeup has several breathtaking (if you will) passages. Like:
> "We found different scents by steering the beam over ~14 mm (20 degrees at 4 cm radius). The distance between freshness and burning was ~3.5 mm."
> "The olfactory system potentially allows writing up to 400, if not 800 due to two nostrils, dimensions into the brain. That is comparable to the dimensionality of latent spaces of LLMs, which implies you could reasonably encode the meaning of a paragraph into a 400-dimensional vector. If you had a device which allows for this kind of writing, you could learn to associate the input patterns with their corresponding meanings. After that, you could directly smell the latent space."
This just makes me grin with total delight. Completely freaking fascinating.
Yes, to simulate pheromones and related stimulus, that too, but I'm sorry if you already don't know this but a faint smell of urine would be a big deal to a non-trivial amount of men for immersion, without going into too much detail "squirting" fans and all the ecosystem around such kind of fetishes.
> Some shows and movies seem harmless, initially, but then we noticed in so many kids movies (e.g., Zootopia, Sing), they're always yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards one another.
Although there are definitely a ton of kids shows that I find 100% garbage and would never let my kids watch under any circumstances, none of the 'name-brand' kids movies I've seen in the past 10 years struck me as unacceptably negative in the way you describe.
On the contrary, I get the impression that at least some of these movies are attempting to depict feelings and situations that some kids are feeling in a way that helps them understand 1) they're not alone and 2) their feelings or situations aren't wrong or abnormal.
Like, I took my kids to see Elio when it came out. BAM, right off the bat, dead parents. Anger. Frustration. Fear. Power struggles with parental figures.
This is all intentional—to the point that it's formulaic. A 2021 study found that slightly over 61% of the 155 animated kids features of the last ~80 years had no mention of the child protagonist's biological parents. There are a lot of reasons for this. The simplest are that it's way easier to come up with challenges and conflict for the protag(s) when their parents aren't around.
A more charitable reason is that there are all too many kids who, well, do have absent or fucked up parents. But it doesn't have to be that specific case either—any kid eventually has feelings of anger, fear and frustration, and seeing depictions of this in stories is important (for everyone, of any age, at any time).
I overall doubt that watching those stories causes kids to act angry and frustrated even when they're not angry and frustrated. I'm well aware of how profoundly mimetic human children are (and why that's important), but it doesn't happen with everything 100% of the time.
But this is also age-dependent in various ways. An 8-year-old can absorb a movie depiction of a fight between child and parent in a way that a 3-year-old can't. Are some toddlers going to act out because they watched that? Maybe? Probably?
Anyway, it's tricky to have these discussions because every child is different, even though there are broad anthropological patterns to humanity. But I've been more impressed than annoyed with lots of animated kids movies that I expected to loathe.
My mother used to call it the "Disney story," due to it's utter prevalence in their media. Be it death or divorce, seems like you cant throw a rock at the Disney catalog without hitting it
This is interesting; I always assumed that the Grimm's tales and all kinds of folklore throughout cultures and history were responding to anxieties about, say, super-high rates of infant death.
It would be, in a way, hilarious if it was all just lazy writing the entire time.
Seriously. I always hated that mall hanging was organized around an icon of capitalism, but we don't even have those anymore (in many places). The US just doesn't consider public space a thing.
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