This is a silly request, but it has been my white whale for a while. For the past few years I've set up every proof by contradiction with "Presume, foolishly, ...". I thought I got it from this series of stories, but every once in a while I give them a close read and fail to find anything like it. Maybe I saw it in an HN comment? Anyone remember something like that?
The appeal of the show is drag queens are entertaining. Literally... that is their job. Drag queens are paid entertainers. It's a show about entertainers, entertaining.
Okay... thanks for the effort, at least. I've been meaning to get somewhat into early-ish burlesque, Brecht, that kind of thing. Maybe then I'll be able to watch drag shows with vague understanding.
You've got the downvotes, flags and comments from everyone from the mods on down telling you your commentary is indistinguishable from low-grade, transparent trolling. If the problem is everyone misunderstanding you, it's on you to fix it.
Somehow, making something simple ornate and complicated neither appeals to me as a main story point nor as a writing style. I just find it really grating.
Agree 100%. It's heavy-handed in the way that bible fables are heavy-handed. Crisp prose doesn't imply dull prose.
It also channels worst kind of self-indulgent Haskell type-level programming that I've see in real-world projects. That isn't funny when you have to rip out the guts of the system because the head developer left for an even better Haskell gig.
You couldn't come up with a better example of why we have the HN rule that says "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait". The title of this story is "Typing The Technical Interview". The editorialization this submitter added absolutely steps on the joke.
Well apparently I need an AI to tell me what's ‘trolling’ on HN, because gym and leather don't mean ‘dumb flamewar’ to me. If mentions of gym and leather trigger HN's crowd, I don't see how that's my fault.
Your comment didn't say anything about "gym and leather". But the nudge-nudge-wink-winkiness of "peculiar set of interests, and I don't mean [whatever]" was guaranteed to set some people off.
The word 'trolling' is more useful in terms of effects, not intent. (That's why I linked to https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Most of the posts that troll people, in the sense of triggering them into thread derailery, aren't intentional trolling—but they might as well be, because of their effects.
The current thread is an example. You posted 10 (!) comments touching on sexuality and sexual identity in some vague insinuating way that no one understood because you didn't clarify it, and then when you predictably got a range of bewildered and/or angry responses, you fueled it by posting more of the same, acting like you had said nothing provocative and the reactions were everyone else's problem. All of this was already offtopic and then you started a whole other "I'm just asking" provocation about drag queen shows, heaven help us.
Perhaps this was all an innocent communication failure despite perfectly benign intent, but from a moderation point of view it doesn't matter, because the effects are the same as if you were deliberately trolling. As a moderator I can't observe your intent but I can observe these effects, and since what I care about (qua moderator) is the themselves, it makes sense to moderate based on what is observable.
Btw, I don't discount that your intent might have been benign, because comments depend on context. If the context is
an in-person conversation between friends (i.e. people who already trust each other), slight provocations on touchy topics can just be normal playful interaction. But when you're broadcasting to thousands of people, which is what you're doing when commenting on HN, that's entirely different. You can't presuppose a high-trust audience that takes your benign intent for granted. On the contrary: you can expect a large, diverse spectrum of hearers, none of whom know you from Adam nor have any reason to trust your intent. In that context, the trollish effect of your comments was predictable. The same statement ends up having a very different meaning because of the context switch.
People sometimes get confused about this because commenting on HN feels like an intimate conversation, when in fact it's public broadcasting. If you go by that feeling, it's easy to end up playing by the wrong set of rules and then wonder why you get such harsh reactions. And of course we want HN to feel like an intimate conversation—that's one of the best things about it—but at the same time commenters need to learn how to post in a way that has good effects, not bad, and in that sense this flamewar was indeed your "fault".
Turns out the gym and leather photos are simply not there on Aphyr's twitter anymore—there were a lot of them a while ago, but apparently run-ins with Twitter moderation didn't work out in their favor, and all that's left are infrequent text posts on LGBTQ.
So yeah, quite a blunder.
By the way, it feels like the ‘fault vs responsibility’ theory might help with the moderatorial musings—but I'm having trouble finding a serious source, since Will Smith happened to say something on it. Not even sure if those are the words used for it in academy.
