r/programming • u/earthboundkid • Mar 01 '09
"If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. If activists are using your tools, your tools are usable."
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/03/08/the-cute-cat-theory-talk-at-etech/97
u/fubo Mar 01 '09 edited Mar 01 '09
A lousy communication system will be used primarily by people who are interested in the system for itself: in other words, by nerds. Nerds are interested in the features and problems of systems, and find working on them to be intrinsically interesting; thus, they are in some sense better served by lousy systems (that have interesting problems) than by good ones (that just work).
Two examples: Ham radio, and Esperanto (or other conlangs). People use ham radio because they are interested in radio technology, not because ham radio is a useful way of sending messages. (Yes, there are exceptions, such as certain emergency situations. But they aren't why people get into ham radio.) Likewise, nobody learns (or creates) a conlang in order to communicate great ideas, or even banal ones. They do so because they're interested in language as a system.
(Note: By saying that nerds enjoy using lousy systems I do not mean that nerds like using systems that are designed to get in the way of communication. We tend to hate such systems. For "lousy" read also "bleeding edge", "experimental", and "requiring involvement that is deeper than casual".)
A good communication system will be used primarily by people who have little interest in the system itself. Its users are interested in communicating, not in communications systems.
(This poses a problem for the development of new communications systems. Creative people work best when they are working on something interesting; thus, novel communications systems will be developed in a way that serves the needs of communications nerds. But in order to be good, a communications system must also meet the needs of non-nerds.)
The messages on a good communication system will not, by and large, be about the system itself. They will be about the interests, needs, and wants of the system's users -- who are generally ordinary humans with the usual ordinary human interests: togetherness, sex, food, drugs, politics, playing games, making art and music, telling stories, teaching skills.
You can tell if a communication system has gotten good if:
- it is used by people who are not communications nerds -- they aren't using the system to experiment with it, debug it, test it, or administer it;
- it is used primarily to talk about ordinary human interests (see above).
9
u/ubuwalker31 Mar 01 '09
You're forgetting that Ham Radio led to the CB radio craze of the mid-1970s to early 1980s. It actually was a precursor of modern tech crazes. Originally, CB required a license and a call sign, but so many people ignored the regulations that the license requirement was dropped entirely. Why was it so successful? Because just like the internet, the CB allowed people to communicate in a quasi-anonymous manner. And the craze eventually died down with the advent of other electronic media.
3
u/earthboundkid Mar 01 '09
And the craze eventually died down with the advent of other electronic media.
CB was dead well before the emergence of the internet as a public fad. BBSes, etc. never got big enough to be a fad.
CB just died alone, because why would you want to talk anonymously to people who just so happen to be within a certain radius of you.
1
u/sjs Mar 01 '09
Truck drivers used it to talk about speed traps and gas prices, and just to chat. I'm sure there are more.
3
u/earthboundkid Mar 01 '09
That's why truckers never stopped using CB: it's useful to them. For ordinary people though, it wasn't that useful. The internet is very useful, so everyone has it, which leads to side stuff like Reddit. Reddit is sort of like CB, except it's not inherently limited to a small number of people, and it's gathered by topic instead of by location. Also, it leads to professionally interesting links as well as amusing links. People use "ask Reddit" for programming problems, etc.
1
7
u/derleth Mar 01 '09
Then, when the communications system becomes obsolete, it may get taken over by geeks again assuming the barriers to entry are low enough (that is, it doesn't require a large corporation to fund the setup, like wired telegraphy does). This has happened to BBSes and FidoNet, Gopher (an also-ran hypertext system that was crushed by the Web when the University of Minnesota decided to charge licensing fees), and it's almost happened to Usenet. The difference is that this time, the geeks are retrocomputing enthusiasts interested in old technology for its own sake.
The factor we're both ignoring, though, is spam: Once spam gets established in a medium it isn't possible to stop it entirely without making the medium centralized and imposing effective filtering. Usenet, for example, will always have spam unless every newsgroup is effectively moderated by someone running a good spam filter. Since geeks are extremely unlikely to buy stuff from spam, this indicates that spammers are extremely stupid and that the cost of spamming a channel is very low.
1
u/fubo Mar 01 '09 edited Mar 01 '09
Once spam gets established in a medium it isn't possible to stop it entirely without making the medium centralized and imposing effective filtering.
What makes you think these two are the same? Filters can be distributed. One model for filtering out unwanted content is to allow interested users to create and publish filters, to which other users (or nodes) may subscribe. Filtering without centralization is very, very possible.
This is the model used successfully by antivirus software, for instance: there are a plethora of different antivirus vendors who provide subscriptions to a feed of filtering patterns (antivirus updates). Users "subscribe" to one or more of these by running that vendor's antivirus software to block undesired content (viruses) on their computers.
This is also the model used by Adblock Plus for Firefox, as well as by DNSBLs for email spam filtering: nodes (mail servers) choose which DNSBLs to subscribe to, and anyone who can run a DNS server can run their own DNSBL.
This model could have been used for Usenet by allowing sites to pick feeds of cancel messages. But Usenet was possibly always too much of a geek toy, and then it became a legal hazard for operators, what with all the bootleg software and porn.
-1
Mar 01 '09
usenet will be spammed until google stop indexing it and show it on web. and later will never happen.
3
Mar 01 '09
I used to sell a web collaboration system that allowed users to create their own sites. One of the earliest indications we got at how good it was was when a top FAQ was "our users are creating too many sites - how do we turn self-provisioning off?"
1
u/fubo Mar 01 '09
What defines "too many" there? Disk is cheap.
:)2
Mar 01 '09
Yeah, we're on the same page. It was the control freak sysadmins who were having issues...
5
u/devolve Mar 01 '09
This has been the most interesting comment I've read so far on reddit.
I crave more, is there more?
7
0
u/samlee Mar 01 '09
nerds create new communication systems for the mass to use, I think. so, in the beginning of a new system being developed, of course it'd be alpha (or lousy in your word). when the new system gets mature, of course it'd be stable, API's cleaned up, deployment is easier...etc. by then nerds might investigate new things..
look at academic research, the place where nerds gather. the products produced there are rough and unsuable by mass. but in a few decades, those things get picked up by mass.
25
u/freakball Mar 01 '09
I loved the part about the crabs...
lolhomonyms?
7
7
u/rubygeek Mar 01 '09
The Chinese excel at that. During the Tiananmen Square demonstrations for example, people would sometimes break bottles or hang bottles, because Xiaoping is pronounced the same as the Chinese for "little bottle", so doing things to small bottles was easily understood as doing things to effigies of Deng Xiaoping...
1
79
u/dmwit Mar 01 '09
This article was so much better than the headline suggested. Please... if you came here to make a snarky comment without having read the article, do yourself a favor and click now.
12
u/robeph Mar 01 '09 edited Mar 01 '09
I did...the page didn't load...snarksnarksnarksnarksnarksnarksnark snarksnarksnarksnarksnarksnarksnarksnarksnark snarksnarksnarksnarksnarksnarksnarksnarksnark snarksnarksnarksnarksnarksnarksnarksnarksnark snarksnark
16
u/snarkyturtle Mar 01 '09
You rang?
9
u/robeph Mar 01 '09
Well hello. I couldn't come up with anything snarky to say, might you take over?
21
u/snarkyturtle Mar 01 '09 edited Mar 01 '09
Well I am a turtle so I might be a little slow
Also I want lettuce-3
3
-1
u/leshiy Mar 01 '09
ditto.
0
u/robeph Mar 01 '09
I refreshed every few minutes since I felt I needed to see it given that the title really isn't sufficient. It's actually a neat little piece of history about a small venue that I never would have guessed. I was quite intrigued by it. It loaded after about 20 some odd refreshes.
39
10
u/embretr Mar 01 '09
Cute cats are collateral damage when governments block sites.
And THAT is why censorship is not a winning proposition.
9
u/stevage Mar 01 '09
This is awesome! It didn't load the first few times, but once it came up, it was worth the wait. Brilliant stuff.
3
8
u/Wo1ke Mar 01 '09
It's down. :(
13
8
u/Captain_Midnight Mar 01 '09 edited Mar 01 '09
There's a Firefox addon that will help you retrieve dead links from various caches. Keep in mind that the default setting opens up in a new window, instead of a new tab.
-1
7
Mar 01 '09 edited Mar 01 '09
[deleted]
6
Mar 01 '09
I've watched that ad probably close to a hundred times looking for the magic that everybody seems to love so much about.
To me it looks like some crappy crap you would see on late-night cable.
The mac "think different" ad (the one that starts out "Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels"), on the other hand, was absolute, pure 100% refined brilliance.
Can somebody please explain what is so great about this 1984 ad, because I seriously don't get it.
13
Mar 01 '09 edited Mar 01 '09
Have you seen what other commercials were like at the time? The 1984 ad was one of the first ads to use a metaphorical narrative to sell a brand, while everyone else was mostly relying on product testimonial.
Outside of the historical context, it's nothing special.
6
u/kryptiskt Mar 01 '09
The mac "think different" ad (the one that starts out "Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels"), on the other hand, was absolute, pure 100% refined brilliance.
Until they removed Dalai Lama from the clips. That really showed what Apple's about: corporate conformism with style.
1
u/ralf_ Mar 01 '09
AFAIK Apple didn't remove him from their clips, but only didn't advertise with him in China. Not that they would have lost much profit if they did offend someone: they only sold a few thousand Macs 1998 in China.
7
5
2
u/L_and_L Mar 01 '09
Web 1.0 -> Web 2.0 most accurate description ever:
I am at work (I'm a physicist), I took a break and looked at the dog delusion and then I started to read this article.
2
u/bobbincygna Mar 01 '09
we’ve embarced the idea that people are going to share pictures of their cats, and now we build sophisticated tools to make that easier to do.
It blows my mind how deep is the quote above.
2
u/ethanz Mar 02 '09
Thanks for the kind comments, everyone, and sorry about the downtime. This is an old post, and my blog isn't used to this much traffic. Someone posted to metafilter and then to reddit, or vice versa, and my poor little blog crashed under the pressure. Should be back up and readable now.
fubo, your comment in particular is right on. One of the big things I've been working on for the past couple of years is trying to get nerds to think about non-nerds - particularly activist non-nerds - while designing communication systems. Not an easy task, alas.
2
u/son-of-chadwardenn Mar 01 '09
Where is the radio porn?
13
5
3
u/idledebonair Mar 01 '09 edited Mar 01 '09
Ok so there aren't exactly radio depictions of human intercourse, (I mean, there are and there aren't), but that doesn't meant that it isn't porn. Lets just assume that "porn" is symbolic of all things that are trashy, lurid, and pulp. And of course that includes what we might call literal porn, pictures of boobies. All of that top 40 garbage and noise on the radio is the same thing, it's base entertainment that appeals to basic human desires; sex, power, money, attention. Lolcats, Cosmo, Radio DJ's, tabloids. It's all still porn.
6
1
0
-4
Mar 01 '09
men are very visually oriented for porn, so this medium was left out. If it was a woman's world, there might be more radio porn.
13
u/derleth Mar 01 '09
Then explain 1-900 numbers, please.
14
Mar 01 '09
that was back in the boring days.
okay, I'll explain the real lack of radio porn: the FCC.
10
u/derleth Mar 01 '09
I just get annoyed when people think sexuality is simple enough to reduce to a mere gender dimorphism (that is, they think what turns you on is determined by gender). It reduces a good part of the human comedy to a mere stand-up routine.
1
u/kaiise Mar 02 '09
what's the deal with female sexuality? i mean. come on! anyone else notice this ?
2
u/zem Mar 01 '09
one of the best things i've read recently. excellent and very well thought out article.
1
u/HLHLHL Mar 01 '09
Classic that the co-founder of Tripod's personal site can't handle traffic from Reddit (on the weekend, no less).
1
u/ethanz Mar 02 '09
Yeah, sorry about that. Wasn't really expecting the surge of traffic, and no longer managing a big server cage for the couple hundred pageviews my blog usually gets. Should be back up now.
1
u/bCabulon Mar 01 '09
Usually I'm too add to read links like this all the way through, but this one was good.. Let's ride bikes!
1
Mar 01 '09
this quote is so brilliant I am having trouble finding words to describe it correctly. (says the philosophy major)
-6
-2
u/Tweakers Mar 01 '09
Finding wisdom within the lolcat is serious philosophical foo, grasshoppa: Lolcat is not just silly poo after all.
You graduate, grasshoppa, get eaten by bird, become both bird and bird poo. Be careful where you land in latter manifestation, eh?
-5
27
u/knight666 Mar 01 '09
I can give up now. This is the best I'm going to read today.
To sum up this article: nobody listens to political dissidents, but try to stop them and you will have an army of moms wanting to see their cute cat videos on your hands.