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Emmanuel Macron has been declared the President of France after early vote counts:
France has a new president. Emmanuel Macron – an independent centrist who has never held elected office – has won a resounding victory over far-right, nationalist Marine Le Pen in the most important French presidential race in decades, according to early vote counts by the French Interior Ministry.
In early returns, Macron had won an estimated 65 percent of the vote to Le Pen's nearly 35 percent, according to the French Interior Ministry. Le Pen has already called to congratulate Macron and conceded defeat to a gathering of her supporters in Paris.
Also at The Guardian (live), Washington Post, NYT, Reuters, and The Local.
From CNBC: Euro hits six-month high on Macron victory
CNN editorial: Why Macron's victory is reassuring ... and yet not
BBC has an article about Macron's potential choice of Prime Minister.
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Monday May 08 2017, @03:53AM (15 children)
This site is dying. The constant flamebait and pure hate that spews from the keyboards of drunk uncle (Ethanol-fueled) and others is driving away rational discussion and with it readers.
I don't understand why The Mighty Buzzard works on the site: surely he gets all his reading material from Breitbart. What does he need from SoylentNews?
The rate of posting stories is frequently glacial, with stories frequently posted several days to a week after they first appeared.
This site was created in response to changes at Slashdot, but it has become worse than Slashdot.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08 2017, @05:15AM (10 children)
Yup. The 2016 election year was a massive turning point for this site, and with Trump winning it has only gotten worse.
I've started reading slashdot again, and while it feels a little sterilized and the ads are annoying it still seems to have a better level of discussion. The only real intellectual discussions I tend to see here are the weird discussions that use lots of Latin and references to obscure philosophy. It is like we only get the extreme ends of the spectrum here...
I'm not sure what can be done. Possibly remove the ability to post as AC? I stopped logging in just because I don't care enough anymore to bother, half the discussions seem to be pointless trolling and the rest are like arguing with stubborn children. SoylentNews is to Slashdot as Voat is to Reddit. It has attracted the unseemly elements that are tired of being drowned out by the majority of people who see their views as distasteful, and while I really like the community focus and free-speech ethos it is no longer enough. The barely contained animosity and hypocrisy is just too much, to the point where I am just letting loose on every idiotic post I see. I've lost my own desire to remain civil and strive for decent discourse, that attitude has only resulted in hours of wasted time responding to changing goal posts, straw men, and worse.
Get rid of ACs and allow people to completely hide another user's posts. Give users the freedom to interact with the discussion on their own terms, similar to reality where you could just walk away from someone you dislike and continue a conversation with your friends. I think there would quickly be an uptick in decent discussions and a dropoff in mod wars.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08 2017, @06:02AM (7 children)
For a contrary view, I think it's absolutely critical that people of different views come into contact. You know how many people change their views in an echo chamber? Zero. All it mostly leads to is radicalism.
When the masses are entirely together extreme views one way or the other tend to get squashed. But as people split off into their little echo chambers further divergent radicalism towards that path starts to seem more and more okay. This is a big part of the reason why half the country thought there was no way Trump could win. Places like Reddit don't have minority views "drowned out by the majority" but instead rely on extensive censorship and blocking to present one view as a clear majority, when that's simply not in tune with reality. As an aside if you'd like to see a Reddit thread without censorship and blocking change 'reddit' to 'ceddit' in any URL. It's interesting how many completely innocuous comments get deleted and removed by moderators and bots. Calling the censorship of discussion a slippery slope would be an understatement. The connotation of a slippery slope suggests something might end in something worse. Censorship seems to always lead to that something.
I think it's important both sides are able to see the other side. It's the only way views every change. And if somebody is so far gone into extremism that they're probably not going to be able to communicated with like a human then treat them like a troll. And the number one rule there is don't feed the troll.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08 2017, @08:48AM (4 children)
I'm all for alternate viewpoints, but the worst offenders of trolling / discussion distraction do not listen to reason or facts. It is just denial and misdirection in every single response. When a large fraction of the vocal users here only engage to troll / soapbox it ruins the atmosphere and drives users away. Nothing interesting, just more political flame wars. The offenders are die hard nationalists with large hints of bigotry, and whether you like it or not those are not conducive attitudes for intelligent discussion. After years of seeing these views all it has shown me is that they are incapable of changing their views, and the only thing I've benefited from is the realization that they are actually the special little snowflakes who want their opinions to be validated. The nationalist xenophobic mindset is consistently on the wrong side of history, and I see no reason to give it credence now.
I did not advocate for censorship, but the ability for any user to hide the posts of any other user. 1/100 posts from Ethanol Fueled is worth a damn, and rarely is it actually insightful. The same goes for a handful of other users, in all I would probably only block 3-6 users, and of course there should always be a button for "show hidden posts". It is already baked into the moderation system, it should be trivial to add such a capability. "Don't feed the trolls" is a good motto, but it is not always obvious when someone is trolling and in such cases there will always be someone who pushes back against a shitpost. Asking thousands of people to just ignore a shitty opinion and let it hang around like a turd is a fantasy.
As it stands everyone has a soap box, and moderation does very little especially after the system was crippled. Get rid of AC and have every post start at zero, or watch the site decline further. Bonus for adding the ability to block users.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08 2017, @11:45AM (3 children)
This is a public forum where other people read the comments. I have no problem reading comments or engaging in arguments with people that I disagree with. We discuss, we pick up information and we learn. So much more enlightening than taking propaganda or constructed narratives at face value.
Said the AC? Being able to discuss things anonymously leads to some terrific discussions because people are not afraid of social repercussions for stating exactly what they think. There's little trolling here compared to the glory days of the green site and I suspect most remember some of that nonsense fondly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08 2017, @01:36PM (2 children)
I had a long reply and just realized I'm tired of this. There is no convincing the neanderthals here of anything, and there is little point in trying. There are enough users to correct the horrific dribblings of the neo-cons and radical libertarians. I'll leave the trolls and cavemen to their fun and wish the rest of you the best of luck.
I'm done trying Mr. Troll, good luck with your system of contracts! Maybe you can beg Musk for a ride to the nearest planetoid to try it out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08 2017, @07:43PM (1 child)
I'm not a conservative or a libertarian.
<sarcasm>"horrific dribblings"?</sarcasm>
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08 2017, @11:08PM
It wasn't aimed at you and yes it was reactionary crap aimed at the site's real trolls
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday May 08 2017, @01:36PM
For a contrary view, I think it's absolutely critical that people of different views come into contact. You know how many people change their views in an echo chamber? Zero. All it mostly leads to is radicalism.
While I completely agree with you there, it can also get frustrating when you start to doubt the sincerity of many posters. I'm not going to call out users here by name (I'm sure we all know them), but a number of frequent posters here seem to vacillate between reason/engagement/insightfulness and obvious taunting or even insincere trolling. Frequently it even happens in the same post, which makes moderation difficult. It also makes it difficult to judge where to "don't feed the troll" because it's not always straight "troll-like" behavior for a number of them.
Dialogue between disagreeing factions is great. Arguing with people who may or may not be serious at any given point can be tiresome.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Monday May 08 2017, @05:05PM
The expression "both sides" is still a little bit Cartesian, though.. ;-)
I like what Macron said when he got elected (whether he meant it or not, we shall find out):
(I first found the English translation on BBC News here [bbc.com]; I'll try to find the original)
I think I hit the original here [europe1.fr] (contains video; 1 minute 8 seconds in he says it)
"Je les respecte" Bloody hell he actually said that!
Even more "extreme" :-) 02:43 "Je defendrai l'Europe" :-)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08 2017, @10:00AM
The only real intellectual discussions I tend to see here are the weird discussions that use lots of Latin and references to obscure philosophy. It is like we only get the extreme ends of the spectrum here...
Tu mea anonymous ignave perierunt, nec habent ideam quod sint de! Nonne Latinam in schola studere non habent? Quare non est quod sentire illuminationum barbari possederunt occurrit? Et omnem culpam rant Google Translate. Nescio si quid per eam currere.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday May 08 2017, @01:27PM
The only real intellectual discussions I tend to see here are the weird discussions that use lots of Latin and references to obscure philosophy.
I assume you're referencing this recent discussion [soylentnews.org]. I haven't seen a lot of Latin here or even that much obscure philosophy, though it sometimes happens. And before I engaged with the whole Boethius thing, I actually posted a longer thing on the physics. I agree that there's not always a lot of "intellectual discussion" on a lot of topics, but they do happen. To me, it feels like there's a higher proportion of interesting individual posts, rather than extended intellectual "discussions."
I've started reading slashdot again, and while it feels a little sterilized and the ads are annoying it still seems to have a better level of discussion.
I have to disagree. As someone who never completely "left Slashdot" (you'll still see my occasional post there, though I'm modded up much less frequently), I find the discussion there has been infected by the same 2016 mania as here. It was actually partly my frustration with that which drove me here mid-2016 (where I had previously mostly been an occasional lurker and reader). To me, it seems the bar now is higher to get an "anti-groupthink" post noticed over at Slashdot. I've always been a bit of a contrarian, someone interested in nuance over blanket ideology. But mostly I find I'm just ignored there anymore. Posts that get modded up there are either expressing groupthink or yelling at each other. I'm generalizing, and there are lots of exceptions, but that's how I feel.
Also, the level of editing (which was never great at Slashdot) has gotten significantly worse in the past year or so, I think. I feel like there's a LARGE proportion of clickbait and stories just designed to get people yelling at each other. It used to be a joke there about feminist stories posted on Friday to get people worked up -- now, it seems they seek out such stories daily to keep people commenting and riled up. That, combined with the giant ads, makes it really annoying.
Anyhow, I'm not saying there aren't things that could be better about this site. And it's hard to maintain community. But I find Slashdot increasingly irritating, so I don't check in there very often anymore.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Monday May 08 2017, @06:34AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @01:59AM (1 child)
Yeah, but i killfilled khallow multiple times, but he just keeps coming back to life. Someone said I need to use garlic.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 09 2017, @10:31AM
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday May 08 2017, @01:49PM
The rate of posting stories is frequently glacial, with stories frequently posted several days to a week after they first appeared.
This is a criticism I agree with, though the delay is generally more like 2 or 3 days I think in most cases. Nevertheless, I think it's problem for many users. A lot of "news" really is pretty ephemeral; wait 2 days and nobody cares anymore. For things like new scientific discoveries or whatever, it doesn't much matter if the post comes a couple days later. But for "current events" stories that make a big splash in the media, I kind of wish the editors here would bump things to the front of the queue more frequently. The main opposing argument I've heard here is that waiting a couple days often benefits discussion, because more "facts" are often in than with breaking news. But I think that really only applies to a minority of stories. Waiting maybe up to 24 hours is okay (since the major media outlets will sometimes uncover new stuff), but 3 days after some event happened, you've lost a lot of the interest.
I often wonder if many occasional users or people who have tried using this site end up just going elsewhere when they actually want to discuss current events on the day they happen, which ultimately leads them away.
This site was created in response to changes at Slashdot, but it has become worse than Slashdot.
Have you been to Slashdot lately? I said more in another post below, but Slashdot has also become worse than Slashdot used to be (even in the past year or two).