And one that many Usenet groups went down before that

Post #15,630 by ben_tilly 10/29/01 9:05:10 PM Reply	And one that many Usenet groups went down before that As I have said in a number of forums, popularity kills the ability to have a healthy online community. I also suspect that the recurring technical problems on the original IWE were a filter that helped keep the quality up... Cheers, Ben
Post #15,645 by static 10/29/01 10:44:59 PM Reply	Yes, I was also thinking something along those lines. "All around me are nothing but fakes Come with me on the biggest fake of all!"
Post #15,657 by kmself 10/30/01 12:08:41 AM Reply	Have to admit The goal behind K5 is to be able to scale beyond the limitations of other forums, notably Slashdot. Currently K5 traffic is about 10% of its big brother. All told, the comment quality level is pretty good. But there are [link\|http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?KuroshinSubmissionQueue\|significant problems with the K5 submission queue]. The site also needs filters (eg: don't display posts below n score (with other variants). I consider the site moderately successful -- the portions I've had a hand in, namely the comment moderation, work well -- good content is promoted, bad content sinks, middlin' stuff gets a middlin' score, very unlike Slashdot. Moreover, there are reasonably few trolls and mindless posts -- levels now at a few per day, but they tend to weed out quickly. Submissions more or less suck. WRT Carnage4Life, he's been part of the K5 community since September, 2000, if not before. I might note we've got [link\|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/user?userid=23\|our own Microsoft mole] here. C4L's not made a secret of his affiliations, though he could well have been more open about them. The commentary in his article was reasonably balanced last I checked, and he's got the ghost of a point. `-- Karsten M. Self [link\|mailto:kmself@ix.netcom.com\|kmself@ix.netcom.com] What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?`
Post #15,658 by static 10/30/01 12:20:01 AM Reply	True enough. For it's volume, yes, the comment quality is pretty good, as is the signal-to-noise ratio, etc etc. It is indeed the story queue which needs some work. That Wiki page looks interesting... I'll go add some thoughts to it. Wade. "All around me are nothing but fakes Come with me on the biggest fake of all!"
Post #15,660 by ben_tilly 10/30/01 12:36:18 AM Reply	An admission of my own I don't know how well K5 does or does not work since for some reason its discussion has never interested me. Perhaps it is just the wrong mix of stories for me. Perhaps has to do with the audience attracted. But in several tries, I never once found myself being drawn back to the site and its discussion, and so I never became a regular there. Cheers, Ben
Post #15,679 by rusty 10/30/01 2:30:03 AM Reply	No hard feelings I still think you're a Perl God. ;-)
Post #15,698 by ben_tilly 10/30/01 9:28:00 AM Reply	Decisions, decisions Do I bask in the undeserved glow, or do I point out the chasm between myself and someone like [link\|http://www.yetanother.org/damian/\|Damian Conway]? Cheers, Ben
Post #15,731 by wharris2 10/30/01 11:43:34 AM Reply	Are you on the high side of the chasm? Since the site displays dark green on black on my monitor, and since I can't read a bloomin' think on the site, I can't tell whether you're ridiculing him or praising him. "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
Post #15,739 by ben_tilly 10/30/01 12:07:35 PM Reply	A more readable version [link\|http://www.yetanother.org/damian/b+w/\|Is here]. And no, I would not call myself on the high side of someone like that. I mean, I can make Perl mostly do what I want, sure. But you don't find me deciding that I want to make Perl into Latin, turn Perl into a quantum computer, turn my error messages into Haiku, autocorrect typos in function names, etc, etc, etc. Take a look at his projects list. Those are his current projects while on a sabbatical paid for by Perl people who want him to have more time to flabbergast the rest of us... Cheers, Ben
Post #15,751 by wharris2 10/30/01 1:09:30 PM Reply	Much better "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
Post #15,668 by marlowe 10/30/01 1:34:20 AM Reply	Leading to an unpleasant dilemna. Popular sites devolve into mindless crap. Unpopular sites are, by virtue of their unpopularity, irrelevant. The overall level of intelligence on IWETHEY is much higher than the norm for the general online population. Even the people I disagree with here impress me as being smarter than some people I agree with elsewhere. But I can't escape the feeling I'm caught in some debating club here. Are we making a difference? Are we at least limiting the power of dumbocracy? Or are just chattering amongst ourselves? Just recently I've reviewed my reasons for rejecting Objectivism all those years ago. They're still valid, but the fact that I even needed to review them is disconcerting. Also, they all seem a little less important now than then. My sense of proportion is shifting. The appeal of Objectivism to the intelligent (which are not necessarily non-stupid) is that it's an expression of anger at the invincible stupidity of the masses. It's no real solution to the problem, but at least it acknowledges the problem. I'm smart enough that I can manipulate stupid people for my own amusement, and keep them distracted enough that they do less damage. I've done it before. But I felt bad afterwards, as if I'd debased myself somehow. There are lots of people throughout history giving that sort of thing a bad name, and nobody giving it a good name. What I want is a solution. Powerlessness sucks. It's no fun being right when you're not the one making decisions. I might just settle for small acts of revenge, such as: #include <stdio.h> int main(void) { while(1) printf("\\t\\t\\b\\b\\b\\b\\b\\b"); return 0; } [link\|http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe/index.html\|http://www.angelfir...e/index.html] Sometimes "tolerance" is just a word for not dealing with things.

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