[Drama through the Ages] The fall of a power user. Kleinbl00 tells African charity in r/favors to take a hike.

thedevilsdictionary · 2012-02-07T04:09:30.145045+00:00

Hi, everybody. Appreciate the spotlight. Gives me a chance to clear the air.

Something that didn't become public at the time (it didn't fit the narrative) is that I didn't ban lawrencejamie's post. Note that I didn't approve it because it was then, and is now against the rules of the subreddit. I also didn't overrule anomander, nor would I. I did, however, tell lawrencejamie that I wouldn't approve it.

I regret what happened next. I should not have been rudeto lawrencejamie. Even I recognize now that my apology comes off as half-assed and insincere and, at the time, it was. Reddit is a difficult place to navigate and the rules are often arbitrary. The fact of the matter is, lawrencejamie in particular and /r/favors in general caught the brunt of my frustration with the Reddit Admins' inaction against a certain cadre of trolls. These same trolls eventually took over /r/catholic and whom, upon being modded by violentacrez in /r/jailbait, caused the admins to ban the entire sub.

Moderating is a tedious and difficult task and one that doesn't suit everyone. It certainly doesn't suit me. I've stepped down from virtually all of my moderating duties (the DoesAnybodyElse thing was voluntary; p-dub and RageX left with me); I'm still at the top of the pile in /r/favors to ensure that when we next elect moderators in march all goes smoothly but haven't done any moderation whatsoever in /r/favors since. I suspect that once this new shift goes through I'll feel comfortable handing the whole thing to whomever the community elects. The team running things there now are doing a great job.

My bottom line, however, is that now that Youngluck is out and capable of tending to his own problems, I no longer need to run interference for him. Frankly, most of the circlejerkers moved on as well. The whole thing is tired, but some people are stuck reliving the glory days.

samgaus · 2012-02-06T23:12:53.339237+00:00

That's not the argument.

The argument is that there is scant indication that thorium would be any better than what we have now, not that since no one has done any research no research should be done.

Suppose I can turn lead into gold using phlogiston. the lead-gold conversion ratio is around 2:1 and it creates a peck of vitriol. This is known, this is politicized, this is a known quantity.

Suppose someone suggests that lead can be turned into gold using aether. Back when alchemy was new, aether was one of the substances suggested for research but was quickly outpaced by phlogiston. However, phlogiston has now become a sticky wicket and people are looking for a way to get away from phlogiston.

It would be one thing if preliminary research indicated that aether had a ratio of 4:1 and produced half a peck of vitriol. However, the research done at the time indicated that at best, aether would have a ratio of between 1.8 and 2.4:1 and produce between 3/4ths and one and a half pecks of vitriol and the scant research done since hasn't indicated anything more optimistic.

So the question becomes: are you going to spend your limited alchemy budget on improving your yields with phlogiston? Or are you going to start from scratch with aether?

samgaus · 2012-02-06T18:00:14.571205+00:00

My best friend's dad has been an energy policy/physics research administrator for the past 40 years. I asked him about thorium reactors a couple years back. I'll paraphrase his answer:

Nuclear energy research is polarizing and involves a lot of red tape, so if you're going to put up with the red tape you want it to be worth it. The mainstream let thorium reactors slip by the wayside because it didn't show as much promise as other methods. To justify further thorium research now you would need it to be safer and more efficient than current technology and the dearth of research on the subject demonstrates that this is easier said than done.

Note that weaponization wasn't invoked in the conversation, despite the fact that this man has been an administrator at Brookhaven, Los Alamos, Sandia and CERN.

YoureOnABoat · 2 days

thedevilsdictionary was the /r/circlejerkers mastermind behind taking over /r/catholic and re-tasking it as a place to post porn for the lulz. He's also one of the people violentacrez added to mod /r/jailbait that caused the admins to shut it down. He's butt-hurt over the fact that I pushed them out of their treehouse. The rest of them have largely moved on, but he longs for the glory days.

It's best not to encourage him.

YoureOnABoat · 2 days

Oh, no doubt. It has a lot of similarity to Mitt Romney's "I don't worry about poor people" comment. I don't care if you think it. I don't care if you believe it. There aren't many circumstances where uttering it is going to help you. Doing so is going to be a colossal fuck-up.

Everyone has at least a few "colossal fuck-ups" in them.

YoureOnABoat · 2 days

You're my kinda fan, AndyRooney.

Right...and thats unavoidable (and happens everywhere else, especially in the media) so it is what it is and Im not going to censor what I say and right posts to meet every exacting standard of what the densest reader might interpret.

Nor should you. My point is that if we're going to talk about "Reddit's" behavior, we need to account for the behavior of the herd because it's a herd, not because it's made up of individuals. There are ways to shape herd behavior that are completely unlike the ways we shape individual behavior, and I don't think many people consider them.

As to whether they're unavoidable, I disagree. I think it's a lot like broken windows theory. If someone doesn't clean up the graffiti, what keeps it from spreading?

I guess I don't understand your take on the whole thing....I thought you were being critical of somebody asking that question to a celebrity.

I'm critical of the fact that the culture of IAmA is to pounce on weakness. Reddit is a magnifier of behavior, either good or bad. Without everyone making some attempt to emphasize good over bad, Reddit will be equal parts horrible and wonderful. Your question is not to blame - and I'll bet if I go cliff diving in that post I'll find several similar to it. What's to blame is Reddit's natural tendency to go "awwwwww YEAH" and get out the popcorn.

There will be shadenfreude. I just think that with a little cultural effort, there could be less.

YoureOnABoat · 2 days

It disturbs me that I have "fans" but I guess they're radically better than "haters." Be that as it may:

I did not accuse him of statutory rape and I did not even expect the question to get all that attention (nor do I believe what he did was all that horrible....just a bit creepy and sleazy. No big deal.).

I get that. If I somehow implied otherwise it was an accident and I'm sorry. Something few people understand is that "what you say" and "what Reddit reads" are linked only by your ability to be concise and even then, the connection is tenuous. A simple search for the term "Woody" reveals that your "no big deal" assessment did not translate to the greater hivemind. Not your fault - but very much part of the problem. Whenever we face imperfect information we fill in the blanks from our own experience and in any group, "our own experience" becomes part of the group narrative. You are most assuredly not to blame for things veering off into a decidedly tangential direction. Nobody is, individually. That's one reason why most people who deal with this sort of interaction professionally have the word "manager" in their title. Note that /r/IAmA has no "management" it has "moderation."

Also totally disagree with your stance re celebrity AMAs....these guys are actors and not heads of states. And this isn't a press junket...it is what it is and we shouldn't change it or behavior just because a "celebrity" (like a give a fuck about celebrities) demands it or expects it.

I guess if I would TL;DR what I said above, it would be "Reddit's expectations and Woody Harrelson's expectations did not match." I'm not sure what you think my "stance" is - for the record, my "stance" is that when someone who has never interacted with Reddit before sets out to do an AMA they better be quick, agile, be prepped for abuse and have a sense of humor. I think we can all agree that Mr. Harrelson didn't know what he was getting himself into.

An analogy: Woody Harrelson walks into a Chili's with a megaphone and says "I'm Woody Harrelson. Who wants to hear about the movie I'm working on?" Woody would likely expect some awkward stares, a few tentative questions, and a number of suggestions that he put down the megaphone. More than that, he'd likely expect things to deviate from the movie pretty quickly. Most importantly, he's not likely to walk into Chili's with a megaphone unless he thinks he's going to get something out of it.

In this example, Chili's sits a shade under a million people and every single person under that roof has a megaphone, too. More than that, they've grown accustomed to asking deliberately invasive questions just to see the reaction. Finally, the only tool the manager has to keep things civil is taking away people's megaphones... which he has to do on the sly lest all the Chili's patrons turn on him and threaten to murder his kids.

It didn't look to me like Woody even knew he was walking into a Chili's. He looked like he was walking onto the stage at Kimmel.

dfekt · 2 days

Depends: are you ever going there again?

I'm a "multi-modal" kinda guy. Depending on the day, the job and my mood, I'm either on foot, on a skateboard, on a bicycle, on a motorcycle, or in a car. Some of these modes of transport work out just fine with a GPS (I use an iPhone, which is pretty much all the bad of a GPS with none of the good). Some of them - particularly the motorcycle - don't. And the way I figure out where I'm going depends on how I'm getting there.

If I'm taking the car, I'll usually look it up in Google Maps on my laptop to get an idea, then un-fuck Google's notion of how to get there based on what I know (Google, in Los Angeles at least, insists on putting you on the most clogged roads imaginable at all times of day). I'll then make sure I have the address in my phone and throw myself in the car. My memory as to how to get there is zero once I've dealt with the first few (nav-free) steps.

If I'm taking the motorcycle, I look it up in google maps, then get out the sharpie, the tape and some post-its. I then scrawl out my very own cryptic turn-by-turn directions in letters 3/4" of an inch high and tape them to my gas tank. When I need a reminder of where I'm going, I stare not-quite-at my crotch and there I am. My memory as to how to get there is entrenched - if I needed to do it again the next day, I don't need the post-its. If you dropped me off halfway through, I could give you the other half in either direction. But give it a week and I've forgotten.

If I'm walking, biking or longboarding, though, I pretty much get a sense of "go that way" and get moving. If I don't know what to do next, I look it up and "go that way." And I know how to get there better than if I'd driven or ridden the motorcycle. And I'll still know a month later.

My uncle used to navigate for rallies (much like the guy talking on the left in this video). Long before GPS, when navigation involved a stopwatch, a Curta and a piece of paper with "Rand McNally" on it, his method of learning a route was to map it out, note the landmarks, and then go look for them. When he needed to teach someone else a route, he would tell them the landmarks before he'd tell them the street names. And once you learn stuff that way, it stays learned. He pointed out to me, over 20 years ago, that you'll never learn where you're going if you just get in the car and someone tells you where to turn.

The "finite resources" argument, in my opinion, is one that holds water, though. Do you need to know how to get to that party again? Do you need to know where to pick up your sister after that one-time passport photo? Yeah, you need to know where to pick up your dry cleaning, particularly if you do it every week... and if you deliver pizzas for a living, the quicker you can ditch the GPS the more efficiently you can do your job. But we face more information than at any point in human history and the useful intelligence we gather is directly proportional to our ability to filter it.

I think it comes down to this: if you're going to need to find it again, you should be aware that using a GPS to do it is hindering your efforts. If you're not, though, plug in and focus on other shit. Lord knows we have enough sloshing around in our brains without having to remember to turn left on Hauser.

YoureOnABoat · 2 days

I'm sure they are 100% in agreement with you at this point.

YoureOnABoat · 2 days

Also so surprised that things haven't moved on much with PR, old dogs, new tricks maybe?

They're busy trying to figure out what the fuck to do next.

YoureOnABoat · 2 days

YoureOnABoat · 2 days

Oh, I did all that. I read his responses. What I'm saying is that when I saw "I'm Woody Harrelson, AMA" early yesterday morning my first thought was "I don't really need to hear what Woody Harrelson has to say." It didn't interest me.

I have since observed the trainwreck that was the AMA. I just didn't do it in real-time. Do you understand the distinction?

YoureOnABoat · 2 days

could you in laymans terms expand '"two screens" paradigm"'?

Sorry, it's ad-speak. I'm not sure who coined the phrase, but basically it acknowledges that lots of people are on the internet while they're watching TV. The idea is that if you're going to give them a TV show, you need to give them an internet experience that buttresses their TV experience for "synergy" or some other equally buzz-tastic non-word. It's an evolution of "three screen marketing" which was television, computer and mobile... but 3-screen became "so 2010" when marketers discovered that it didn't really matter if you were on a computer or a phone, you were doing the same thing.

I think its a mistake for any publicist to just throw one of their clients into an IAMA even if they are answering by proxy, but your comment on an 'AMA didn't fit with NBC's strategy'? Someone must have bad advisors, or advisors that don't understand how a couple of hours work speaking to their supporters or fans from the comfort of their living rooms, maybe getting a goofy 'I {> reddit!' pic and getting someone to bake them a cake, isn't a great, relatively cheap media plan.

I was disappointed. My thought was that since we were there, and since we had a little time, we could do it Colbert-style: people ask questions, then Cee Lo would have answered them on camera, which NBC could have hosted on their site. I figured this would have made NBC/Endemol happier because they get the pageviews, they control the environment, they can monetize it. But then, that was probably part of it - it's one thing to show up and talk to fans. It's another thing to form a mutually-exclusive short-term pact between NBC-Universal and Conde Nast. The more "officially" you do these things, the more inertia you have to contend with.

I think it would have been a cool AMA. That said, I don't blame anyone for not pushing it further. They get paid to make those decisions, and that's what they did. All I can do is speculate as to why and recognize that there are plenty of good reasons not to do it.

YoureOnABoat · 2 days

Again - this is a situation where someone wanted to talk about a movie, instead he got accused of statutory rape, and then garnered ~100 downvotes for saying "thanks."

All I'm doing is expounding on the ways it could happen. I think just about anyone whose paycheck depends on their popularity will tell you the junkets are worth it. But again - "so... an unspecified time ago in an unspecified place you banged a girl at my high school and then didn't call her - defend yourself" is simply not the sort of question one usually gets, even in an AMA.

YoureOnABoat · 3 days

It's fuckin' rugged. When you've seen someone on Stop 6 out of 24 and they already look like they've spent the past six hours trying to catch a bus, you feel for 'em. Even though they're making more sitting in that chair than you make in a week.

Especially when you consider that they're on camera, they need to be "up" and their performance will, in no small part, dictate their ability to continue in the lifestyle to which they're accustomed.

YoureOnABoat · 3 days

Reddit calculates karma in severely fucked up ways.

When Reddit got its RAEG hard-on for me, and people went back through 14 screens of my posts to downvote them, I netted something like 800 comment karma for the day. I think it counts the upvotes towards your total, but the downvotes it hits a backstop at like -100 for 24 hours. So individual comments can get skunked, but as far as overall karma is concerned, spending a day as a massively controversial troll will actually earn you net points.

Welcome to Reddit.

YoureOnABoat · 3 days

I wasn't there. Didn't follow it at all. Don't know what happened.

But I know people with publicists, and I've worked press junkets.

If it weren't even Woody Harrelson answering the questions, it wouldn't be the first time such things have happened. And if he's in the middle of a press junket, and someone has carved out an hour for this and he's got to be somewhere at the end of that hour and the PR coordinator for the film is over his shoulder saying "c'mon, man, time is valuable, wrap this up" and he's in a hurry, he's gonna type "my time is valuable" because he's doing information triage and what you hear is what you type.

I did a junket last month for a movie you could go see... over Valentine's Day, I think. We're at the four seasons, and we're in a ballroom, and it's divided in fours, and each quadrant has an EPK crew just like mine, with three cameras, a crew of eight, a film liason and a site rep. And we got there at 8am, and we're scheduled to have 15 minutes to get all our shit shot between 10 and 10:15, and we all know that we won't even see the actors until noon because that's how these things go.

And there's six other ballrooms. And they look just like ours.

That crew is making ~$600 each. Each ballroom is burning about $20k in human resources, not including the room. Times six ballrooms. For a bunch of people to ask the same inane questions over and over and over again.

And it's considered unbecoming for journalists to say "so, I hear you banged a high school girl once upon a time. Confirm or deny?"

YoureOnABoat · 3 days

Some long-winded perspective

So... back in 1992 I was an extra in The Cowboy Way. Haven't seen it? You're not alone. Even if you did, you didn't see me; the production company was desperate for extras so even though we were supposed to be dressed like "rugged cowboys" and instead dressed like "New Mexico hippies in springtime" down to the Lennon Specs and tie dye, they seated us smack-dab in the middle of rustic "characters."

Every time I watch a crowd scene, I inwardly hear some editor, somewhere long ago, cursing me and my two friends for ruining every single pan that didn't make it into the opening of that movie.

That said, Woody Harrelson was also in that movie and while we didn't exactly hang out, Mr. Harrelson did come out and sign autographs and pal around and take pictures and what-not for a good hour while Kiefer Sutherland sulked in his trailer. He was a genuine and friendly fellow.

Fast-forward 18 years and I'm working on a little show called "The Voice." My part of the gig involves hanging around more than a little with Cee-Lo Green and, as we're working, our "social media consultant" is tweeting away. I get to talking with her and mention that a Reddit AMA with Cee-Lo would be a pretty spectacular way to get an audience that might not watch it otherwise interested in NBC's new show, and besides, they're pushing pretty hard into the whole "two screens" paradigm and Reddit might be a perfect fit. She asked me to write her up a proposal, and I did... including a thumbnail sketch of what it is, who else had done AMAs, the kinds of questions Cee Lo might get, etc. Cleared it with the admins and everything.

Ran into the social media consultant a couple days later. An AMA did not fit with NBC's strategy. No harm no foul.

But that was before Reddit got written up in Slate as "the Web's unstoppable force."

You are now seeing an onslaught of celebrities whose managers, agents and PR specialists have all read that Slate article. Many of them understand it. Many of them don't. Some of them have researched how to do this. Some of them haven't. Ali Larter's publicist has.

Woody Harrelson's...

So while Woody Harrelson may very well have "antagonized all of Reddit" let's not pretend that Reddit isn't astonishingly easy to antagonize. Let's also acknowledge that simply showing up should be worth a lot. And can we please, in passing, note that saying "thanks" shouldn't be worth 64 downvotes?

youngluck · 7 days

Mission accomplished.

In all honesty, I'm sitting here in the dark, listening to School of Seven Bells, a little drunk, trying to decide whether to delete my account or buy more Reddit gold.

It's just sand in my eye.

linam97 · 7 days

Having been on the receiving end of 50- and 100-vote downvote brigades, not at all.

To the best of my knowledge, I'm the only person who has had the troll filter in both /r/mensrights and /r/2xc tripped.

Sarkos · 12 days

I guarantee that if you gave my aged father a camera, showed him which button to push, and set him loose in a pretty landscape, he'd be able to take at least one attractive photograph that a stranger might enjoy.

Cameras, of course, being invented right about the time of GarageBand and equally familiar to your father.

Since you're clearly getting lost in the analogy, shall we say "a child's 8-note pentatonic xylophone" instead? Anybody can put a single line on paper, how many are in museums? Paintbrushes are ubiquitous yet we still celebrate painters. Pencils are ubiquitous yet we still celebrate writers.

I'm not sure what stock photography has to do with anything other than level the playing field. I spent two hours searching for a dragonfly recently and lo and behold, the better images still cost more. About the only difference is that the market is no longer controlled by Getty and Corbis.

Sarkos · 12 days

being famous in any sort of field more often than not is rather down to politics, who you know or who you sleep with. rarely with any form of 'expertise'.

That's... quite a statement to make. Would you care to defend it?

Sarkos · 12 days

If by "music" you mean "a hit single" or "a symphony destined for greatness" and by "photograph" you mean "a collection of colors and shadings that represents some aspect of reality" then you are correct.

If, however, "music" can be stretched to include "random clips automatically beat-matched in GarageBand" and "photograph" is limited to "something that strangers who know nothing about the subject still enjoy" then you are wholly incorrect.

Photography is the skill of turning perspective into art. Anyone can take a picture, yeah, but anyone can bang on a piano, too. Funny how the only guy who ever got famous for banging on a piano was John Cage.

You exemplify exactly the problem outlined in your link: you do not recognize expertise. I've made money in both industries and I'm ready and willing to list a whole bunch of people who are much, much better at what I do than I am. Much as our photographer points out, however (the "bride paradox" is the best description I've ever heard), most people will like anything with their friends in it more than everything without their friends in it. Can anyone take that picture? Sure - provided the friends are around.

The world isn't snapshots. There were landscape photographers before Ansel Adams, there will be landscape photographers after Ansel Adams. But we remember Ansel Adams because he was exceptionally fucking good.

Here's a snapshot of alpenglow on Mount Baker, chosen at random off google, taken by a person that I'm sure is very nice and I'm certain is quite proud of this photo. It's not a bad photo.

Now here's a shot of alpenglow on Mount Baker by Lee Mann (taken from here.

Which would you rather hang on a wall?

kleinbl00 · 13 days

Before you ask:

Dante called me on Friday, having arrived in LA. We didn't get to speak for long; he was going to call me that evening. Plans didn't quite work out, as is often the case for things prison-related.

I received this over email earlier today. Dante tells me he should have regular computer access some time next week.

Secret Santa 2011	Inciteful Comment 2011-08-04
Secret Santa 2010	reddit mold
Best Comment 2011-03-20	Well-rounded 2011-02-25
Three-Year Club	Verified Email
Beta Team IndexTank Search	reddit gold Charter Member
Charter Member	Fantastic Voyager
ComboLinker 2009-11-18

Best Comment 2011-02-16	Best Comment 2010-12-31
Inciteful Comment 2010-12-15	Well-rounded 2010-11-19
Best Comment 2010-11-09	Well-rounded 2010-10-17
Well-rounded 2010-08-25	Well-rounded 2010-08-19
Well-rounded 2010-05-26	Well-rounded 2010-04-29
Well-rounded 2010-04-25	Well-rounded 2010-03-23
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Best Comment 2010-02-23	Well-rounded 2009-11-18

kleinbl00

TROPHY CASE

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