I'm announcing the end and results of my experiment that's been running for 6 years. The nature of the experiment was to evaluate the objectiveness of the SN community by picking a username such as this one I decided on and then just being constructive and seeing how the karma winds up. When I first started it was a very very very difficult battle to get beyond my username in discussions and I had to work at least 10 times as hard as normal to not be discounted immediately as a troll. But I stuck it through and over a long enough time and with enough work I established myself and the karma went from miserably poor to nearly perfect.
Why wasn't it absolutely perfect? That was mostly my fault. I engaged in trolling very occasionally and such trolling activity was correctly labeled as such. That wasn't a part of the experiment that was just me making bad decisions. The troll votes were fair and I should not have done that no mater how satisfying it was because I was frustrated. That's why we have moderation I think.
And so time went on and 939 comments did happen and we get to today. I don't like what I see going on around here. Despite my username I don't particularly enjoy fighting with people nor do I want to see ugly things. Fighting and ugly is occurring a lot lately and as best I can tell it went from a background level of crap to a prominent feature of daily life at SN around the 2016 elections. The deep division that is building in the United States became well represented here and its been low grade conflict ever since. What a waste of time and energy.
This particular comment in the last couple days really resonated with me a lot:
The reason I'm telling you this is that it feels like this site is becoming more Reddit-like by the day. I don't mean that in terms of ideology, but in terms of inauthenticity. Instead of people making genuine statements openly engaging with one another, there's an ever larger number of inauthentic comments such as yours which I assume you thought would be clever, but which came off with all the authenticity of a [modern] Hollywood script. This leads to a system where there's an immense amount of noise, yet ultimately next to no genuine communication. It also trends towards echo chambers because how does your comment contribute to a discussion or, perhaps convince me that my views are somehow flawed? It doesn't. It's just the sort of comment that gets upvoted by those that ideologically agree and ignored by those that ideologically disagree. Except for the occasionally weirdo determined to actually *talk* to people they disagree with, such as myself.
There are 2 important points in here: not engaging in constructive discourse and inauthentic people. That comment was next to some of mine in a thread but the note about ineffective discourse rang so heavily I owned up to non-constructive behavior I had just engaged in out of frustration. Though in that instance what I did wrong was attributing motive into another person which is the exact behavior from others that has got me so frustrated. I'm starting to devolve and I'm going to put a stop to that.
The second more important topic I think is the ones about in-authenticity. I don't know how a segment of the population has decided with such conviction that they know when another person is being authentic or not. The problem here is that one person says another is being in-authentic and then of course the only response is to assert authenticity. There is no mechanism to prove it one way or another. Except for the case of when someone tells you how authentic you are. I've been called in-authentic so many times now that it's quite clear to me: you bozos have no idea what you are talking about with me. Since I can easily prove you are wrong in those assertions it's an easy logical conclusion to form that you don't get this stuff right. And you don't care. You've constructed a system where innocence is impossible. You suck.
I really do have a friend that is an ex East German and is still a communist and I've talked to him about the conflict going on here. He quite clearly told me that no one from the left (his version of left where our democrats are quite right wing) would come to this place except to fight. I didn't even think about something like that but what's going on around here sure looks like it. As stated before: I'm not interested in fighting.
Back to the experiment: in the last year or two my username is being used as evidence against me again in addition to the calls of in-authenticity. It's fascinating to see that happen and who the demographic is: almost always AC and I think always from the left. This is telling me that objectivity is being lost around here because the ACs used to be much better behaved and I'm not interested in going through an enormous amount of effort again to continue to run this experiment. I'm cutting my losses, keeping my karma, saying that it lasted 6 years and Trump broke everyone so bad it disrupted the delicate state I had to make for this experiment.
Was that ever a good idea? I dunno, it was an idea. What would make it a bad idea is if my username is causing undue heat and noise and I think it is anymore.
And that's my recap of the experiment. I'll also be retiring this username and in the future I'll post AC. Lastly I'm going to wonder off and go die from coronavirus to the absolute joy of the rabid ACs. Come here rabid ACs let me give you a hug before I leave. *cough*
---
Follow up: It looks like I made a lot of fans. Some of my fans have started asking if I plan on restarting my career after retirement. I do not. I've already hung the jersey on the wall and I've got my certificate of effort and my certificate of participation. I am quite satisfied with the 6 year long run I had here.
Be assured that any form of $adjective Troll or Knowledge $adjective are tribute bands. They are not authorized licensees of Knowledge Brand Trolling nor are they officially recognized by Knowledge Troll Enterprises, Knowledge Troll Partners, nor Partner Troll Enterprises, or Enterprising Trolling Partners.
The Knowledge Troll Experiment
I'm announcing the end and results of my experiment that's been running for 6 years. The nature of the experiment was to evaluate the objectiveness of the SN community by picking a username such as this one I decided on and then just being constructive and seeing how the karma winds up. When I first started it was a very very very difficult battle to get beyond my username in discussions and I had to work at least 10 times as hard as normal to not be discounted immediately as a troll. But I stuck it through and over a long enough time and with enough work I established myself and the karma went from miserably poor to nearly perfect.
Why wasn't it absolutely perfect? That was mostly my fault. I engaged in trolling very occasionally and such trolling activity was correctly labeled as such. That wasn't a part of the experiment that was just me making bad decisions. The troll votes were fair and I should not have done that no mater how satisfying it was because I was frustrated. That's why we have moderation I think.
And so time went on and 939 comments did happen and we get to today. I don't like what I see going on around here. Despite my username I don't particularly enjoy fighting with people nor do I want to see ugly things. Fighting and ugly is occurring a lot lately and as best I can tell it went from a background level of crap to a prominent feature of daily life at SN around the 2016 elections. The deep division that is building in the United States became well represented here and its been low grade conflict ever since. What a waste of time and energy.
This particular comment in the last couple days really resonated with me a lot:
There are 2 important points in here: not engaging in constructive discourse and inauthentic people. That comment was next to some of mine in a thread but the note about ineffective discourse rang so heavily I owned up to non-constructive behavior I had just engaged in out of frustration. Though in that instance what I did wrong was attributing motive into another person which is the exact behavior from others that has got me so frustrated. I'm starting to devolve and I'm going to put a stop to that.
The second more important topic I think is the ones about in-authenticity. I don't know how a segment of the population has decided with such conviction that they know when another person is being authentic or not. The problem here is that one person says another is being in-authentic and then of course the only response is to assert authenticity. There is no mechanism to prove it one way or another. Except for the case of when someone tells you how authentic you are. I've been called in-authentic so many times now that it's quite clear to me: you bozos have no idea what you are talking about with me. Since I can easily prove you are wrong in those assertions it's an easy logical conclusion to form that you don't get this stuff right. And you don't care. You've constructed a system where innocence is impossible. You suck.
I really do have a friend that is an ex East German and is still a communist and I've talked to him about the conflict going on here. He quite clearly told me that no one from the left (his version of left where our democrats are quite right wing) would come to this place except to fight. I didn't even think about something like that but what's going on around here sure looks like it. As stated before: I'm not interested in fighting.
Back to the experiment: in the last year or two my username is being used as evidence against me again in addition to the calls of in-authenticity. It's fascinating to see that happen and who the demographic is: almost always AC and I think always from the left. This is telling me that objectivity is being lost around here because the ACs used to be much better behaved and I'm not interested in going through an enormous amount of effort again to continue to run this experiment. I'm cutting my losses, keeping my karma, saying that it lasted 6 years and Trump broke everyone so bad it disrupted the delicate state I had to make for this experiment.
Was that ever a good idea? I dunno, it was an idea. What would make it a bad idea is if my username is causing undue heat and noise and I think it is anymore.
And that's my recap of the experiment. I'll also be retiring this username and in the future I'll post AC. Lastly I'm going to wonder off and go die from coronavirus to the absolute joy of the rabid ACs. Come here rabid ACs let me give you a hug before I leave. *cough*
---
Follow up: It looks like I made a lot of fans. Some of my fans have started asking if I plan on restarting my career after retirement. I do not. I've already hung the jersey on the wall and I've got my certificate of effort and my certificate of participation. I am quite satisfied with the 6 year long run I had here.
Be assured that any form of $adjective Troll or Knowledge $adjective are tribute bands. They are not authorized licensees of Knowledge Brand Trolling nor are they officially recognized by Knowledge Troll Enterprises, Knowledge Troll Partners, nor Partner Troll Enterprises, or Enterprising Trolling Partners.
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