Fuck yourself.

If you were king, and this were your kingdom, on a scale of "go fuck yourself" to "well, i mostly agree with you, but there's one point in particular that i'd like to raise here...", where would you land Hubski?

Some fuel for that fire.

There's a few things that could be done. Whether they would work to the result you, or many other users, will consider positive remains to be seen. I find fatalistic approach to system design rarely beneficial.

Here's one suggestion:

Clear fuckin' everything. Remove all content from this forum, and all users. Have all users that are still interested in participating in a new format (TBD) re-register, using previous or new usernames. No archives, no links to previous threads, no saved settings. Reboot.

Then have the users wait for a month without being able to engage with Hubski at all. (Ideally that would also mean not engaging with the same people from the previous Hubski via external contacts, but that's an honor-system contract not everyone would sign, so you can't rely on it.) No messages to mk, no posts, no comments, no chat.

Then you let users come back. Maybe you tweak a few things about the forum engine, maybe you don't. Fresh start. Clean slate.

Here's another suggestion:

Only ever open Hubski to interactions once a week. Host Pubski on that day, let users post links and make comments. Once your timezone-based 24 hours are up, hope you said everything you wanted to say, 'cause it's Monday o'clock, the bar is closed, and you're on the curb.

Not one thing will work if you, a member of the community, is willing to give it a shot.

Complacency is the mind-killer for places like these. Change is good.

"Does <this factor> play a role?"

"Now here is what plays a role..."

How does one receive an answer to a simple question without getting diminished in the process?

The Dota 2 community was recently shaken by a wave of accusations of sexual harassment towards a lot of male analysts/commentators/casters in the Western scene. If you go to /r/Dota2 and sort by "top of month", you're gonna see a lot of posts on the matter.

A handful of high-profile commentators have already left the scene: GranDGranT, RedEye, TobiWan... The scene is very small. The three of them leaving means there's a big personality vacuum.

At least one high-profile commentator was falsely accused: Zyori. It took some time to sort out what happened (the accuser went a little too hot on the ways to describe what had occurred), and now Zyori is back to casting matches.

Those three, though? Pummelled into the ground by the Internet army. Rightly so, it would appear: they were all accused on multiple accounts, from respectable sources, with independent confirmation by fellow commentators. There was still a lot of support for them, though. Some thought the loss of a prominent figure in the community justifies not doing anything about the accusations: as if the community itself would be damaged by the loss of these men.

I guess harassment of women on the scene – good casters in their own right, not some eye candy for the horny teens – would be a reasonable expectation for some.

I don't know much about cancel culture – the whole concept it still one I'm yet to read up on – but I've been watching the shitstorm of opinions and facts and defenses and counter-accusations... When the storm had settled, the genuinely-good people of the community stayed good (Slacks, Purge, PFlax, syndereN, SUNSFan...), and I hope the women who had to experience the bullshit got a little relief their way.

On those rare occasions that the Internet army acts against sexual predators, it feels good.

If that stage is in any way televised, I would spend no time addressing Trump and instead moving my gaze towards the audience.

Before the happening, which would surely be held a month or two in advance, I would do my level best to prepare a long list of mistakes Trump has made that affected his target electorate.

Given that I only have five minutes, I would pick the most juicy of those and appeal to these people's baser instincts, in order to present them with the evidence of Trump's negative effects on the country and reasons why these people should care about them.

I would look into addressing those issues on as personally-relatable a level as possible.

"That black cashier at your nearby grocery store. She works for minimum wage. Would your grown son who still lives with you do the same? Could he do the same? I think we both know the answer. So that black cashier is pretty much your main and only source of product that is within your reach that doesn't step on your comfort and the business of your life.

"Without her, you may no longer be able to get your produce, because no one else is willing to work for that little money. So far, President Trump..." – and would go ahead and attach an argument to it.

(That wasn't the best example, but I have not taken a month to come up with it.)

I would also make concetrated effort not to mention any of the core tropes of the political narrative of the recent times. I would not mention Democrats or Republicans, I would not mention Obama, Bush, Reagan, Nixon, or even Teddy Roosevelt, who seems to be a universally-accepted hero of the crowd. I would not mention Barr, Flynn, McConnell, or any other of the recent figures of non-news news reports, FOX style.

By doing so, I would seek to avoid engaging with the established mental traps that have been embedded into Trump's electorate's heads by the talk machines on TV, radio, or the Internet. Snapping the trap would only trigger an emotional response and prevent any further information from getting in.

Instead, I would do my best to keep to the story I want to present: that of Trump as an ineffective, counterproductive, malicious, corrupt president without mentioning any of those descriptors by name. I would treat it as a very short lecture, university-style, where I have to present information in a certain light for it to connect and start making sense.

No matter how seething I would be during this delivery, I would do my utmost best to remain calm, composed, and collected. Emotion transfers to the audience. People watching – at home or in the audience – will be able to tell that I'm angry and upset. More specifically, they will be able to tell that I'm angry and upset about something they've embedded into their personality. As such, it would seem an assault on their values to them. As such, I would fail very quickly if I don't make an effort to compose myself.

Addressing Trump has 0% chance of changing things. I've lived with a narcissist: any mention of ill results go past their ears that otherwise attend to everything.

Addressing Trump's core audience? 0.5%. The slimmest of chances.

Given the opportunity, I'll take the shot. It may end up changing something.

They were okay tracks, I just had to break them apart into partial archives for size.

Britney Spears - Toxic.part1.zip

Britney Spears - Toxic.part2.zip

Britney Spears - Toxic.part3.zip

I used to pack 1.44MB archives onto stacks of diskettes to get a handful of new tracks back to the home PC.

Let me guess: Hacker News?

This off-topic comment got three shares in less than 20 minutes.

Something tells me my research won't go fruitfully in this thread.

I don't disagree with you. It's just... I asked a simple question.

Neither.

Does the antagonistic nature of "you vs. the employer" play any role here? I'm sure I'd be hurt to be sacked, but "fighting back" against something that wasn't of any harm does not come to me as the first natural step.

As absolutely fucking terrifying as all of this is... I find it a magnificent source of inspiration, as far as dystopian works of fiction go.

Also: if you have any, please supply available reading material with that sort of stuff.

As a secondary, more reasoned reaction: I want to know what your analyst friends have to say.

Needless to say... None of this paints a pretty picture.

I just want to be able to appreciate these feudal bratva dealings from the outside.

So, Russia's constitution is changing today. Putin's aiming to the God-President for Life, at this rate.

I'm saying "is changing", even though the votes are not in yet, because... Well, you know why.

May I say, in the least eloquent fashion possible:

> and guards waiting to escort them to their cars

That's fucked up.

I'm guessing it's "cases as in somebody's going through the gamut of symptoms", rather than "cases as in the person may or may not have contracted COVID-19" (including all the asymptomatic cases)?