Gnome is one of those projects that should be considered "free in license only". While the project is free to hack on as you wish for your own purposes, your chances of being able to influence the development of the main project are minuscule.
To borrow a term or two, it's developed in the bazaar, but run like the cathedral. Maybe an open-air cathedral.
Firefox is another project that I'd put under this label. All the important discussions happen in the back rooms, and by the time something universally unpopular hits the bug tracker, it's too late for users or the wider dev community to have any say.
The problem is that developers and teachers are not assembly line workers, and any performance measurement metric you come up with will be optimized for with poor results.
Grade teachers on their students' test scores? Okay, now you have teachers spending inordinate amounts of time on overfitting the curriculum to the local standardized testing requirements and less time actually ensuring their students are educated.
Grade developers on their lines of code or number of features shipped? Be prepared for needlessly verbose code and buggy garbage shipped out to meet the metric.
Throw these objective criterion out the window in favor of a more judgment-based approach? Be prepared for lawsuits when the mistake is eventually made.
I know this smells a bit too much like conspiracy bacon for many, but you have a valuable point here. At the end of the day, we're talking about an anonymous discussion forum accessible over Tor at the end of the day.
It's not just low risk, it's zero risk. There is literally not one single downside for a provocateur. The worst case scenario for them is that they fail.
That being said, this was not a case of a provocateur. The author went on a murder spree.
I should have added "if you want happy users and not a e-fiefdom". I've been a part of many forums that moderate according to your description, and they're almost without exception, miserable places to be that could be so much better if the mods didn't let petty bureaucrat syndrome go to their heads.
I think these calls to disregard and/or weaking the principle first enshrined in the founding of this country are a greater danger than 3 mentally ill people with guns.
>Due process means people will game your policies.
And? If your policies are liable to being "gamed", then either your policies or your enforcement is insufficient. And I say this with a pretty good deal of forum moderation experience. When you find something that your objectively defined rules miss, you update your rules appropriately and continue on.
Life as a mod is about a million times easier, for both you and your users, when you minimize the amount of judgment calls on edge cases that have to be made.
Nonsense. The kind of hate and prejudice posted on 8chan /pol/ would be deleted in a heartbeat on T_D. The worst you can say about T_D is that they don't like Islam, and given the violence and regressiveness it promotes, I can't blame them.
8chan is basically 4chan, but with a Reddit-esque spin: anyone can create their own sub-board and moderate it as they please so long as the content they allow isn't illegal in the USA.
There are a lot of people in this thread that don't seem to understand the difference between the law and the principle.
The first amendment law protects the principle. It doesn't create it. While these hosts might not be in violation of any law, they are absolutely acting contrary to the principle of free speech.
I always thought a great idea for stepping over this whole problem is a robust tagging/categorizing system, and then make certain tags opt-in to view. That would be the least amount of work and least likely to be upsetting to reasonable people.
That aside, the one worry I share is that the outrage is going to drive a legislative solution that ends up splitting the baby and sucking for all parties concerned. I was entirely serious when I said this situation wasn't tenable, though. Too much emotion/polarization/etc for something to not give soon.
Generate enough outrage and laws can change. While current law recognizes the difference between a publisher and a platform, recent activities could very well cause pressure for publisher-like liability when these platforms begin exercising a high degree of editorial control.
The social media giants' problem is that they want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the editorial control, and they want to be absolved of any liability when they host terrorist propaganda (think ISIL), pedo bait, and other garbage.
There's also the recent court decisions regarding politicians' usage of blocking. That ruling creeps right up to the line of recognizing "private" social media providers as a public square of sorts. The situation we're in is not tenable for much longer.
They are also getting flagged for things that are obviously fair use. The idea that a travel vlogger loses their entire video's monetization because they walked by a restaurant playing music is absurd. The music isn't even a substantial part of the video.
The more realistic fear is what happens if your connection goes away mid-download. While a partial binary won't run, a partial shell script will, and it might just do something bad to your system if you're unlucky.[1]
That said, the chances of your connection crapping out in the second or two it takes to download the average sub-couple-kilobyte shell script is minuscule. The fear is seriously overblown.
>Resorting to a dictionary definition to argue a point is nearly always a sign you've got a weak argument.
Or a sign that your opponent is redefining words to fit their argument instead of using the commonly accepted one. Are you telling me it's unfair to refer to an authoritative source as to the meaning of a word?
In any case, there has to be some kind of definition or else the word becomes meaningless. By defining Farmville as a "game", you could just as easily define twiddling numbers on an Excel sheet as a "game". Where do you stop? Is Farmville a game just because it has a pretty skin?
I've only heard about that at a few big name companies (i.e. EA, Zynga) who's working conditions are legendarily bad. What about some of the other big players? Nintendo? Microsoft? Rare? Square Enix? Valve?