āIf you want to prove that you understand something, teach it to someone else.ā
Teaching without leaning on video clips with gratuitous gender shaming is even harder.
Yeah, I agree Mark, itās really unfortunate he didnāt make that avatar a male one. But that issue aside, the message of the video is amazing.
And as alluded to in the leadup by Dean:
Since it was 
just Dean and I .
You can decide which of us is Eddie and Crystal, Iām good either way.
Itās not only unfortunate, itās deeply disrespectful.
So walk the talk:
- If you see bad behavior from other men, speak up.
Itās not other peopleās job to make sure that everyone enjoys a safe, respectful, civil environment at work and online.
Itās my job. Itās your job. It is our job.
There is no mythical menās club where it is OK to be a jerk to women. If you see any behavior that gives you pause, behavior that makes you wonder āis that OK?ā, behavior that youād be uncomfortable with directed toward your sister, your wife, your daughter ā speak up. Honestly, as one man to another. And if that doesnāt work for whatever reason, escalate.
Something like āā¦great video, but the [gender shaming] is not OKā in the post is the least you can do.
That is both funny and sad. Hopefully not disturbing. Actually. @beschizza might want to see that.
(edit:this was in reference to a since deleted post, ChuckVs was also a response to it)
Hi there, maybe youāll see this. I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed your podcast discussion.
Discourse really seems to tackle a lot of issues that create lurkers like me. My default is just reading. I rarely participate because it seems like the main thing people want to do on forums is be critical.
Like for instance, your exchange with MarkDow. His contribution was an immediate criticism about gender shaming. I relistened to the beginning of the podcast, couldnāt find the gender shaming.
Then I watched the duet which was really nice. No gender shaming there.
Then read your article about manuals being unnecessary. Then I finally watched the video associated with the article. The guy was kind of sarcastic so I didnāt watch enough of it.
So at this point Iāve read your article, watched the duet. Spent a few minutes contemplating whether capes with scooped necklines and dangly ear rings were gender shaming.
Then I found it. After 3:32 in the video below the fold on your article on game design, thereās a sequence of a cartoon boy hitting a cartoon girl with punching sounds. Uh oh not good.
Thatās why I always end up reading not posting. Because thatās what that guy got out of your hour long conversation was a criticism of another guyās graphics in a video you didnāt make, but linked.
Also bananas.
You should post more! 
Hey great! We want lurkers to be rewarded for spending time reading, visiting frequently, etc. Thatās why a lot of the trust stuff explicitly does not weight posting. (However, it is good to ālikeā posts and we do try to encourage that.)
Well yeah @markdowās comment was a little off topic for this discussion which is why I didnāt want to cover it at length and digress even further.
The meta of it is certainly on topic, though. How do you deal with someone lobbing completely random off-topic (although perhaps valid, I am not a fan of hitting women even in oblique third party reference sarcastic cartoon form) criticism?
I think what Iād recommend doing is telling @markdow to leave that comment on the original post it was related to (e.g. on my blog, which also uses Discourse, and trust me, I see all the posts there), and urging him to comment on some aspect of the actual podcast conversation this topic was about.
Because the best way to prove that you understand something is to teach it to someone else 
Well, on systems which support threaded discussion, itās not such a problem. People who are interested can follow that thread, everyone else can junk it.
I seem to recall a recent codinghorror thread that dissapeared down the memory hole.
Iām not talking about censorship; Iām talking about systems which represent discussions as a tree, make that tree of comments visible to the user, and provide tools to follow or not follow individual branches of the tree of discussion.
Like Usenet in the 1990s, for example, with threaded newsreaders. If someone went off on a tangent, I could junk the thread and not see any of the rest of the discussion. If I was deeply interested in the tangential topic, I could have my newsreader automatically select any new posts that were in the tree of posts resulting from the tangential one.
But it is not remotely on topic here. That is like arguing that any random digression should be allowed, ābecause threadsā. To be honest the only reason I didnāt flag it as off topic is because it is sort of a āhave you stopped beating your wife yetā in that I am definitely not a fan of even sarcastic cartoon parody abuse of female avatars.
To argue that nothing is ever possibly off topic ābecause threadsā is a community discussion anti pattern in and of itself.
There is always āreply as linked topicā in the right gutter; it is there for precisely this reason.
Well, you also described it as
so I wasnāt really sure which was the case.
There were two mitigating factors
-
It references a somewhat germane blog entry about community software design, but for the wrong reasons (incidental aside 3:32 into a linked video from the blog post)
-
There is a distinct āhave you stopped beating your wife yetā aspect to the criticism in that it implies anything but extreme visible disagreement is implied endorsement of a fairly oblique and incidental aspect of the linked video.
You be the judge: did allowing this off topic aside improve or degrade the discussion? Is this discussion something you would reasonably expect / want to read ā if you were someone who listened to (most ofā¦) the audio of the podcast this discussion is ostensibly about?
You tell me.
(also, I think it is unfair to ask readers to bear the burden of having to take action and click to suppress unwanted asides. Writers should bear that burden of being on topic plus or minus 20 percent, not the thousands to millions of readers who follow.)
I get this, and when I comment on your site(s), I will totally hew to it. Easy.
In contrast, here I hew to what I observe, that BBS tends to be on or off topic plus or minus banana percent.
For a brief moment I had Level 4 āpowersā, accidentally, which I used only to split off-topic comments into their own threads. Give a derailer their own rail, very few will follow them down the rabbit hole. and those that do arenāt affecting the original conversation anymore.
I think itās a great strength of the platform, if community moderation heads in that direction then I think youāve made something that can get to conversation within 20% tolerances. Falcor will always be helpful.
I also think maybe the linking of other commenters into conversations might need to be tweaked. Iād love to be able to turn off someone ability to rope me into/ refer to me/ reply to me in conversation individually. Or at least to turn off notifications from a single user without turning off notifications for all users? Some folks grate on each other, and it might help with that if one party has a way to opt out of engagement.
Still listening to the podcast. Pleasantly meta.
edit: because i really did listen to the end: I bought a CODE before I knew of the association. Iāve tried several backlit keyboards, and this is the finest one I have yet owned. Needed a better cable. Has one now.
Probably true. On the other hand, I donāt think Iāve ever seen a side thread in this system. I assume they get shown some way in the original thread that spawned them, right?
If itās true that readers donāt generally follow the off-topic threads, then I think it would probably be a good feature if a comment could be flagged as off-topic, but left intact in its parent thread ā but if anyone else wanted to follow that off-topic thread, the system would then split off a new discussion and move the original comment and reply there. That way you could avoid lots of dead single-post discussions.
IIRC yes, the side threads get a placemarker left (this comment and X replies have been moved to [link] or somesuch.)
Why avoid them? What is the cost of letting them happen? I see a cost to leaving an OT/inflammatory post in a thread and a benefit to giving people an opportunity to learn when people donāt want to discuss their idea, or when they do they have a venue that doesnāt disrupt the original conversation as much as seems to happen on sensitive topics around here.
Theyāll clutter up the list of discussions with stuff that nobody is interested in.
And they will fall quickly off the list of discussions if nobody is taking part. Or they will deserve a spot on the list when people do.
Also, the list of discussions can be filtered by topic. Boing will always bring you to front page article discussions. āmetaā, āgamesā, āwrathā, these are all categories for user generated content, which is encouraged.
They may not be the -original- topic, but they might a topic being discussedā¦ in parallel to the original.
@codinghorror encourages use of the (Reply as new topic) button when someone catches themselves being about to be more than 20% off topic. How about when they donāt catch themself? Iām not sure most of us here in the peanut gallery are entirely sure when someone else is going to see us that way, and rather than āclutter up the list of discussionsā we might chime in slightly off topic in a way that ends up disrupting the original conversation. But if the community had members empowered to say that a subdiscussion is derailing the original, and can press that button after the fact, it could well aid discussion.
Great interview @codinghorror and I love Discourse and the project. I still want to be a part of it and hope my community will figure out how to support what you are doing because itās so perfect and what all of us on the interwebs should be supporting.
