Anyways, I reawoke this old dead account (I have since changed names everywhere, here too) so I can link the album and talk about it. Not because I care about appreciation of my photos, but because as an early adopter of the trend, I found it was possible to create the eeriness of today’s ’liminal spaces’ without the ‘lifeless’ characteristics of the Backrooms, House of Leaves, an so on. It’s a lot easier to create that feeling with decay, with monotonality, with cookie-cutter cubicle mazes; and, the theory tends to connect with people more readily as plausible if you include ‘rotted by time and age’ to justify the emptiness as Horizon Zero Dawn and Last of Is both lovingly demonstrated.

But at the core of all of this modern liminal, is portraying human-dense spaces as human-zero, and then confronting the eternal question that haunts humanity: “What happens in the dark forest when no humans are observing?” Whether it’s a cubicle maze or a carnival ride, as the world grows more and more crowded and lonely, it’s no wonder that we want to spy on our busiest spaces after we’ve all gone home for the day. What do they get up to? Where did all the people go? Is this merely a painting of a screaming person on a wall, or is this space empty because they were consumed?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/floatingatoll/albums/721576328...

As of when I posted this comment, most of HN’s discussion of this post is a stellar example of this Internet forum social behavior. Safari asks “tell us what’s buggy and broken, not about recurring feature requests”, and this community is responding with “recurring feature request X, cynical dismissal of intentions”. There are three or four actual real bug reports in this discussion, but they’re drowned out by the non-curious ‘feature’ and ‘cynical’ repetition.

I’m kind of disappointed that they got a hundred plus viable bug reports on Twitter, but only a couple from HN. Given how much so many of us sneer at Twitter, it’s upsetting to see Twitter dramatically outshine us technically. We’re Hacker News, this ought to be a piece of cake.

For example: I wish that Elon Musk wasn’t prideful and troll-y online (these are feature requests that his personality team has refused us), but if he asked me to name a bug in Tesla’s cars that he isn’t aware of, I’d point out that Tesla cars allow you to drive at unsafe speeds when the fog lights are turned on, which is wasting untold megawatts of Supercharger time per year because drivers either don’t know that fog lights aren’t effective above a certain speed and because there’s no chime or automatic-off setting to prevent energy waste. Yes, Elon’s a jerk, and yes, I have feature requests and cynicism about that — but I’d leap for the opportunity to even have a chance at posting one paragraph that cuts all Teslas’ watts per mile by any amount at all. I wish others here found that as rewarding as I do.

I don’t understand why Tor users would be interested in reputation at all, given the implicit identification it requires.

Come up with a way for siteops to block someone and all their sockpuppet accounts, without knowing the underlying identity, and you’ll become a billionaire.

Without that, the only option we have today is deanonymization, which is a terrible option. We ought to do better.