The freedom to digress is, of course, your great signature, and I was thrilled that you put it in footnotes, because every generous footnote now is a blow to reclaim footnotes from the judgment of an ill-informed audience that believes that David Foster Wallace invented them and therefore no one else gets to use them. This in a world where Nicholson Baker plainly invented the footnote.
There is no such thing as an average kid anymore. You’re either gifted or you’re learning disabled.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Q&A Sites
I can only speak from experience. I get invites to Quora. But I use Stack Overflow, sometimes without even realizing it.
This Stack Overflow question illustrates how, for now at least, Stack Overflow appears to be a direct descendant of MetaFilter. By contrast, Quora presently seems like the love child of The Well and Uncle Plaxo.
After using Quora for several months and seeing the myriad ways to game the system to get more upvotes, I’ve also seen a dozen ways to reduce the amount of gaming that is going on. Given the intelligence of the quora staff, I assume they probably have two dozen more on the table, but they are not being implemented. I doubt they’re even being tested.
Why?
Because more upvotes means more opportunities to stroke the ego of people answering questions. The more ego stroking, the more answers posted. The more answers posted, the more SEO, tweets, and shares. The more SEO, tweets, etc., the more users.
Here’s just a small sample of easy to implement things that could (maybe, maybe not) reduce the popularity contest:
- Make upvotes decay so that popular older votes have a better chance to be overcome by new, better answers (the Hacker News method)
- Make all answers anonymous until voted upon so that the identity of the answerer doesn’t influence the voter
- Don’t allow upvotes in the stream without taking people to the page so they can see some of the other answers
- Look for suspicious voting behavior like someone voting down every answer on a page (so theirs floats to the top)
- Only allow a user to vote up one answer on a page
- Require better identification by disallowing registration by solely twitter accounts (or simply weigh votes)
- etc. etc.
I wonder if any of these recommendations get picked up? I like the decay idea, and limiting upvotes (like GetSatisfaction) makes real sense.
What’s interesting is there is no internet generation. Obviously younger people are better or more adept at it, but everyone’s on this damn thing.
Eco Hustler: WackA$$ Four Loko Recycled Into Ethanol...
Finally a good use for Four Loko after the FDA issued warning letters to four companies on Nov. 17 saying the beverages’ combination of caffeine and alcohol can lead to a “wide-awake drunk.” The agency called the caffeine an “unsafe food additive.” Warning letters were sent to Phusion…
Four Loko, literally, gasoline.
Most of us did not even notice, since we were able to tell ourselves that the funny animal vids we were watching on YouTube were a better use of our time than, say, America’s Funniest Home Videos would have been two decades earlier. After all, we were ‘curating’ them ourselves.
I love being on a corner. People just spot the place and stop in. It’s shocking.
Feliz NaviKwanzikkah Joyeux Weihnachten NataleAlegreand a Happy New Year!!!
Two bits I am looking forward to reading this weekend are the alpha nerd takes on Wikileaks that landed this week: Jarod Lanier’s “The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy” at The Atlantic and Bruce Sterling’s “The Blast Shack” at Webstock.
Serious stuff no doubt. But when I first read this Sterling excerpt over at Stowe Boyd’s tumblr, I burst out laughing. Begun, Wikileaks has.
Unfortunately for the US State Department, they clearly shouldn’t have been messing with computers, either. In setting up their SIPRnet, they were trying to grab the advantages of rapid, silo-free, networked communication while preserving the hierarchical proprieties of official confidentiality. That’s the real issue, that’s the big modern problem; national governments and global computer networks don’t mix any more. It’s like trying to eat a very private birthday cake while also distributing it. That scheme is just not working. And that failure has a face now, and that’s Julian Assange.
The FDA finally reveals how many antibiotics factory farms use - and it’s a shitload
Fries, a vanilla shake, and a dose of animal-grade oxacillin please…
A New Way to Rent Movies: A USB Drive Kiosk
FlixonStix. The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly. The Good: Indie film makers selling one-time views or short-term rentals. The Bad: Millions more semi-useful usb drives heading for landfills The Ugly: Another proprietary set top box play. Really? Boxee should just copy this. Maybe it would be a way to get Redbox customers to grok Boxee.
Watched this Graeme Taylor clip while standing at a crosswalk in Herald Square.
Note to self: there may be a larger point here that you are missing.
courtesy of Swiss Miss and Capn Design
zadi:
11-year-old Birke Baehr presents his take on a major source of our food — far-away and less-than-picturesque industrial farms. Keeping farms out of sight promotes a rosy, unreal picture of big-box agriculture, he argues, as he outlines the case to green and localize food production.
Best quote from this kid: “Some people say organic or local food is more expensive. But is it really? … It seems to me that we can either pay the farmer or we can pay the hospital.”
Very true.
![rebeccalando:
thedailywhat:
Food Pyramid of the Day: Now that’s more like it.
[biotv.]
This is pretty much exactly what I’ve been doing with the awesome homemade sriracha Stryker gave to me.
Example of food pyramid in real life](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lbs7uy2KBd1qzpwi0o1_500.jpg)
