Everyone on reddit has been complaining lately that the quality of posts (both suggestions and comments) has gone down along with the variety of topics. This may well be true, but I don't know that the problem is caused by the influx of ex-Digg users. Rather, I think these new users are just doing what reddit itself has naturally set them up to do. The problem of article variety, in any case, is something that's caused by one of reddit's core features: karma.
That's right, karma.
As a measure of relative importance in the reddit pecking order, karma is something all new users naturally want. And the only surefire way to gain karma points is to suggest articles that other redditors will upmod. The new users (in addition to the fairly homogeneous reddit old-schoolers) almost invariably upmod the same few topics, so new users have every incentive to suggest (as frequently as possible) every new Dawkins utterance, Bush gaffe, or cute cat picture in lieu of seeking out new content and posting infrequently.
Of course, karma is not to blame for all of reddit's problems. The general decline in redditor literacy is indeed a product of reddit's new success, but for me, anyway, that is a smaller price to pay than a decline in the quality and variety of daily stories. Particularly for RSS users, the top 25 or so posts are the most important part of the site and removal of the karma feature (or at least making it hidden from end-users) may help re-orient reddit's downward trajectory.
Labels: technology, web
At times consciously, at times unconsciously, I have been censoring my music consumption. I've been using
last.fm for about a year now and I think I've been too concerned with appearances. At first, I just tried to cut out classical music and podcasts (because I don't think they would really contribute to usage statistics that are meaningful to me - I want to know what people with similar pop music interests are listening to . . . if I want to listen to anything else, I can just ask Kara). But as time passed, I found myself stopping the last.fm plugin when I was listening to music that I thought would "taint" my statistics. I think this admission is probably more embarrassing than the music I listen to, but it needed to be said. So, ironically enough, I'm starting the plugin today with a song off Saves the Day's "Through Being Cool" record. And yes, that "sham" label applies to
me. The truth hurts, sometimes.
Labels: internet, music, sham, technology
I've rebuilt components of other blogging systems here for years, but now I'm finally ready to just use
somebody else's system.
Labels: blogging, coding, technology
Regarding neighbors leaving their wireless access points open for others to share,
Timothy B. Lee, a policy analyst at the
Show-Me Institute - and the guy who invented the World Wide Web,
writes: "sharing your connection is just being a good neighbor. Think of it as the 21st century equivalent of lending a cup of sugar." I think he's absolutely right. So, in the spirit of making my building a nicer place to live, and my sidewalk a faster place to browse the web, I've decided to open my wireless router.
In the two or three weeks before I got my own phone line and DSL, I furtively stole bandwidth from some of my neighbors. I don't know whether they had left their networks open intentionally or not, and I felt more than a little guilty about it. In order to spare any guilt that my neighbors may feel if they borrow some of my bandwidth, I changed my wireless network's name to: "open wifi, please don't abuse."
Labels: technology, wifi
Tom Standage, who is the technology editor for the
Economist, has written a holiday
op-ed contribution in the
New York Times today. He writes that elitism in wine drinking has a long history, but that we should largely ignore the ratings and just drink what we enjoy. That's fine. And then we find this paragraph:
The close association between wine and sophistication in the ancient world contributed to its rejection by Muslims. With the rise of Islam in the seventh century, Mohammed's followers expressed their disdain for the previous ruling elites by replacing wheeled vehicles with camels, chairs and tables with cushions and by banning the consumption of wine. Being devout, they signaled, was more important than seeming sophisticated.
This is the first time I've heard this interpretation of Islam's prohibition on alcohol. As far as I can tell, it's entirely wrong. In fact, the injunction against alcohol is one of the best attested traditions in Islam and it can be directly
linked to the Qur'an. The rest of the paragraph is inaccurate, too. Wheeled carts had been replaced
long before the rise of Islam for
economic reasons, and not class warfare. I'm not sure where Mr. Standage came to have this interpretation, but as the technology editor of a widely respected journal, I would expect him to understand the overwhelming technological benefit of using the camel in the Arabian climate. I don't know the social history of early Islam well enough to comment on his claim about the use of cushions instead of tables and chairs, but again, I would suggest that he is probably wrong and the lack of furniture may have more to do with the dearth of wood in the Arabian peninsula than it does with rejection of the imperial elites.
Labels: alcohol, history, islam, religion, technology
Bruce Reed is positively gleeful as he points out President Bush's low approval rating.
He's not alone. In fact, the
New York Times has been hammering the point home all month. The trouble with this assessment, of course, is that it's just
plain wrong. Don't get me wrong, I think Gilroy goes a bit nuts in his piece, but he's right that all of these rhetorical losses mean very little in terms of political power.
Ladies, do you really dig UNIX?
I ran into
this shirt on ThinkGeek and it made me wonder: how many of the girls in these action shots actually have a computer running some UNIX or *nix OS? I'm guessing the
Google employee probably does. The
cute girl holding the
O'Reilly book probably does, too. The
girl with the stuffed Tux (the penguin) is also a likely candidate. But I'm skeptical of
some of the more
teenybopper-looking photos. Maybe those girls dig
eunuchs. Touché, double-entendre'd shirt, touché.
Rock alert:
I just received an email saying that
Lifetime will be playing in San Francisco in January! I definitely don't listen to the same music I listened to in 1998, but you can bet I'll be at that show. Tickets go
on sale on the 20th.
Lightning rods are the Devil's work.
There is an interesting
op-ed contribution in the
New York Times today about how some Americans have always valued "faith" over reason.
Seasonal Colors
Now that I'm skinning my page (this refers to an earlier incarnation of this blog) according to the terror alert level, I'm hoping that the Department of Homeland Security plans to change the terror alert level according to the seasons (that is, the
natural seasons, not the
electoral ones - another
link), because this yellow/orange color suits the fall, but winter is fast approaching and I wouldn't want my page to go out of style.
Labels: fud, music, politics, religion, technology, terrorism
When I was a teenager, I used to listen to my vinyl seven inches while sitting in an expansive armchair in the bedroom I shared with my brother. We had placed the speakers on the two armrests of the chair, and I don't think the fidelity of any system I've had has been as good as that setup. Granted, it had obvious flaws (in that I couldn't listen to any format but vinyl, for starters), but it had its perks. Later on, when I bought a home theater system with an optical receiver, the quality was very good, but I guess I just never really set it up in such a way that I would be surrounded by its warmth. And now, finally, I have found
a pair of headphones (thanks to
Zack) that sounds as good as my records used to.
In other news:
Whenever I come across an issue on my computer, I try to see if others have the same problem (a Google search can resolve most problems). One problem that I can't seem to find documented anywhere is the instability of
all BitTorrent clients on my iBook G4 12" running Mac OS X 10.4.2. Yesterday, I upgraded to OS X 10.4.3, and the problem seems to have been resolved. It's probably too early to make that call, but I've been running
Azureus since the upgrade and it hasn't made my system unstable. If you're running a previous version of Tiger and BitTorrent clients make your system crash, know that you're not alone. I couldn't find any solution, I guessed that it was probably some system level issue, like a TCP/IP stack bug (because it caused all internal and external network traffic like web traffic and local user authentication to die), but I didn't know how to resolve it. I'll post here if Azureus crashes my system again. Hopefully, the next guy who searches Google for OS X crashing or becoming unstable, or "freezes," or "freezing" for that matter, might end up on here.
Labels: best, music, technology
I've had several recent conversations about the value of "open" web information sources like Wikipedia and blogs when compared to "traditional" sources like encyclopedias, journals, and institutional news sources. In the end, I
do see the value in the newcomers: I do check Wikipedia when I'm not particularly invested in strict attention to detail and I want an overview. Blogs are useful for finding a.) links to institutional materials I have missed and b.) helping me weigh the merits of opposing opinions. But, fundamentally, I value the "mainstream" sources of information. I know they're flawed, I'm not so naive as to believe everything I read. But let's face it: with all their flaws, mainstream news sources can offer two things that the communal web sources haven't come close to touching:
depth and
reliability. Sure, blogs are good for getting a superficial take on nearly every issue, but they're virtually useless when you would like in-depth coverage of any issue, because it is hard for the armchair journalist to make it out to dangerous and far-off locales (where there may be few intrepid bloggers writing in
your language) to write a compelling blog entry.
In the end, I guess all I'm arguing is that while we are right to celebrate these new venues, we need to be careful not to overstate their importance. And we certainly should not be teaching the new generations of netizens that blogs, Wikipedia, and other communal offerings are
replacements for their professional counterparts. If we do, we will increasingly find ourselves limited to only those free communal offerings and without recourse to professional and reliable information. To this effect, you should read (ironically enough) a blog entry from Nicholas Carr's "Rough Type" on the same subject (and its wider implications):
Forced to choose between reading blogs and subscribing to, say, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, and the Economist, I will choose the latter. I will take the professionals over the amateurs.
But I don't want to be forced to make that choice.
. . .
Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.
(The amorality of Web 2.0)
On a completely unrelated note:
Let's hope
Zack is right about where the video iPod is headed. Personally, I think he's being too optimistic. We've all been waiting for flash drives to replace moving component drives for years. It'll be great if it happens in the next 18 months, but I'm thinking it'll take 5 years or so. I do, however, agree that Apple should upgrade my recently purchased iPod.
And speaking of Apple:
I've been meaning to point out that I find it endlessly amusing that OS X Tiger's startup "progress bar" is just a
placebo. It isn't actually measuring any sort of progress at all: it is just there to reassure you. How does it know how long the bar should take until it reaches the end? Practice. It stores how long it took to boot up last time, and times its meter using that rubric. It stores the time it takes to boot (in seconds) here:
/var/db/loginwindow.boottime
Apparently my last boot took 2.253010 seconds. The engineers at Apple must have a sense of humor (or are humorless robots that make humans laugh, anyway) because the application that displays the bogus progress bar is called, of all things, WaitingForLoginWindow! For more information on this and other Tiger tricks, check out
Daring Fireball: Tiger Details.
Labels: blogging, media, technology
I've put together a small site to give users basic information about their browsers (such as their user agent), their IP addresses (if they cannot easily find their external IPs), and the location of their proxies (if they are using an IP in a different country, for example). The site is called
myBrowser.info. Check it out if you're interested.
Labels: technology, web
