u/SuperFLEB

There’s more to forming any point-of-view than passive casual listening.

But you've got to admit-- if we're talking Trump, even casual listening should be enough to get someone over the threshold.

I guess we have different definitions of the word "morally".

I'll give you a hint-- Mine's a shitty definition.

"Big Mermaid"?

If they called it "Little Mermaid 2: Big Mermaid", I'd see it. Of course, anyone who'd do that would probably make a better movie with the name.

Wow. Imagine if they made sequels to The Matrix. Why would you even bother? It's not the sort of thing you can sequel. Good thing nobody ever stepped into that trap.

My off-the-cuff take is that you just can't blow a mind twice with the same thing. The first movie was so fundamentally unique, in everything from plot to execution, that a sequel just couldn't deliver, because none of the wow factor was new any more.

They're still doing that? I thought we were on to auto-tuned country stars listing off rural stuff.

Okay, okay... But someone told you how Trump was bad, and that's why you hate him, right? Ha! Derangement syndrome!

All right, Trump himself told you how he was bad, in his own words and that's why you hate him. Ha! Derangement!

Hey. Even if it was Trump who said it, it still doesn't change the fact that someone told you something and now you hate him. You say it's not blind hatred, but the only difference between justified hatred and blind hatred is that you're looking when you do it. And is that really that much of a difference?

Yeah, but it doesn't have that "hands tied behind your back" aspect. One significant aspect with SO is that you aren't meant to talk freely so you don't have the social pressure, and any mechanical pressure is locked behind status, so if you take a beating, you're left taking it with your hands tied and no way to even subtly guide it back to your needs.

I don't even think that's asking too much. It's kind of the corollary to "If you're getting something for free, you're the product."-- "If you're going to make your users the product, you'd better give them something for free." They wanted people posting questions so they could get high-quality questions out of those, but weren't willing to adequately accommodate people posting questions.

I'd wager it's a small number of personal experiences amplified by anecdotes that back up those first impressions. Like "They didn't spit in my food, but given how they treated me, I'd believe they would."

I've replaced your entire stack with something different because it's a better way to solve this one problem.

It's a Q+A site.

"But also fuck Q."

I need to do X because someone saddled me with circumstances where I can only do X. If I could do YZ I would, but I can't, which is why I'm asking.

That's great if it's actually the wrong way to go about it. The problem is more misunderstanding "it"-- when the respondents don't read the question and knee-jerk pattern-match it to a common misconception, or when they don't believe that the questioner might be intelligent and aware but living in a less-than-perfect world where their absurd restrictions are restrictions nevertheless.

The ire is well-deserved too, though. It's a "beggars can't be choosers" infraction, at the core.

While it's understandable that they only want top-tier questions, that's a want that fits their plans alone. They get it by trading, though, and there's too little recognition that there's someone else on the other side of the deal, doing work for the platform ostensibly in exchange for meeting their own needs. That exchange gets rewarded with nothing but disdain and dismissal when it doesn't quite fit their aims, though.

If SO was explicitly an insular curation project for good questions, they'd be doing it honestly but they'd be suffering under the fact that that's a harder job, a rarer niche, and people don't have time to participate. Instead, they offer up question-answering to appeal to a broad audience, but don't actually back that up. There's not a well-considered pathway for accommodating the inevitable less-valuable questions, and the social means they use is notoriously obnoxious.

And there's this culture problem that the aggressive moderation is aimed at question askers but I never see it applied at the people who "answer" in the most negative and demoralizing way possible

I'd guess that's because hard power-- the ability to moderate, comment, edit, and such, goes to answerers because answerers get points that move them up the ranking.

That's the kind of neighborhood where you roll up your windows when you go by.

What's not to get? Doritos Corporation is like Ticketmaster met Nestle and they took the worst parts of both. They've got a monopoly on Doritos, so they're just out there charging whatever they want. Meanwhile, Doritos are food, and food is essential to life. It's as morally offensive that OP can't afford Doritos as OP stealing them would be. If you need to put food on your family, I'm not going to shed any tears for the Doritos corporation.

Yeah, it's a pretty simple picking method, but the intent was more for a brainstorming "pool generator"-- something where you could spin the wheel until something rolled off the tongue. (Cop-out excuse? Sure. But I did make this as an itch-scratcher for brainstorming.) You're not the first person in this thread to say it, though, so I'm definitely thinking of meeting it in the middle with some more filtering features and reconsidering UI and wording to make that more clear and expected.

The region names? Guilty as charged (and why I didn't make them terribly prominent). It was a last-minute feature addition with a hasty assume-ChatGPT-knows list. That's definitely ripe for a revisit.

The call letters-- like the ZIP codes and the phone numbers-- are intentionally nonexistent, unused call letters, since the idea is a toolkit for fiction that won't collide with facts. The K/W split is maintained correctly, but that's the only real-world factor.

I wouldn't feel bad about just stealing Doritos off the shelf. They're food, and everyone knows that food is morally okay to steal. They've got a monopoly on the Dorito's brand, too, so it's not as if they're playing fair themselves.

Just keep hitting the "Keep Going" button in ťhat case. It's a random selection of "every place name not in Massachusetts" (the same for every state-- it's one pool of place names that gets filtered to "not in this state").

In that sense, it's more of a brainstorming aid, more of a "spin the wheel, look through, and see what pops out" than a definitive list.

It's not localized like that, no. I'd considered the idea, but it was a whole level of complexity above what I was aiming for with this. I was thinking I might be able to get location coordinates in the mix and have that influence it, though that falls short in the most notable places, just because they're unique, and would probably also exclude a lot from places that are more geographically dispersed than culturally varied. If I wanted to get really deep, I suppose you could do enough comparison to make a "this state is like that state" table, ranking state pairs based on how many similar names they do have, and using those to inform selections from mismatches.

I suppose that a middle ground would be an ability to pick where you want to select "donor" names from, so you could tune it accordingly, or even permanently attach those selections to states and build up a body of opinion on the matter.

And I'll admit that the strategy as a whole suffers when you're aiming to fill places like, say, Hawaii, Alaska, or island territories, where the names are different enough to not have many analogs elsewhere.

For now, though, it's just "ignore those and spin the wheel again".

I can't say much about the cut of her jib, but I do like the strait of her moose.

It's not shortages, but imagine if it was. It's not socialism, but imagine if it was. It's not happening under their government, but imagine if it was.

Now I'm so mad! We've got to fix all the things that aren't broken that they didn't break!