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josephdunphy

Last seen: 26 hours ago

Joseph is a guy from Chicago, Illinois, USA

Politically Moderate, Underemployed Jewish Applied Mathematician / Electrical Engineer tutoring all knowing freshmen in Mathematics. This profile, like most of the Web, is optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, and must be viewed in Internet Explorer. A more complete listing of posts, including archived ones, can be found on the introduction page for this site, and is backed up on this page at Googlegroups, with occasional commentary found on Stumbling into the Void on Tribe.

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  • josephdunphys blog - StumbleUpon

    Rated Dec 14 2008 • 7 reviews • stumblers • stumbleupon.com






    Hi, again. I'm in the process of turning this profile into something that will be more of a blog. A recurring theme will be my attempts to build on what I've seen on some of the sites I've reviewed; what did I learn from visiting them, what subjects did they touch on, etc. You might have noticed the continued post format I was playing around with on the Draka and Steak Porn Video reviews; expect to see more of that, with some of the short, one-liner reviews moved into the spaces between the essays. What I'm trying to get away from is the idea of Stumbleupon as a bookmarking site, as I move toward making this into a site that one can simply sit down and feel comfortable reading; more like a magazine and less like a phonebook, or something like that.

    Comments about Stumbleupon related drama, past and present, can be found elsewhere, if you really want to read about that for some reason.




    Browser selection - Please pardon the imperious tone in my comments above, but Stumbleupon surprised us by changing the background color on our pages. In IE, my blog has a black background, and you can see the links. In Firefox and Chrome, the background is white, so you can't, unless you have logged into Stumbleupon, in which case you might see a black background even after you log out, again. Very silly. I can't imagine what they were thinking about, when they did this. It definitely damages the functionality of our pages, and causes a needless headache for visitors to SU.

    I regret any inconvenience, but would point out that this wasn't my idea or doing, and that unlike the SU staff, I have no say in it. If you'd like to know when this will be fixed, they're the ones to ask. I wouldn't have the faintest idea, myself.


  • Created Dec 14 2008 •





    [ continuing ]




    If, to consider a very different case, I come to the site and the video so embedded is uploaded nonoriginal content which isn't about the site owner or those associated with the site owner, then that I would almost certainly very much hold against the site, enough so that I would pretend that I hadn't seen it.

    In the case of the Gordon Ramsay video (Steak Porn), if that gets taken down off of Youtube and reposted, I might consider reviewing that video if there are no objections from StumbleUpon, because I had already invested a significant amount of time and effort into reviewing that video before I ever thought about that issue, and I am loath to walk awy from that work. I don't feel that would be a reasonable thing for me to ask of myself and there is a greater social good to be served by exposing abusive charlatans like Ramsay, a good that is not served by destroying pre-existing work that was made in good faith, before the personal establishment of the principle under discussion. Linking to and reviewing to such a replacement video puts that work in context, and helps the reader understand it better, and so I'd probably do that.

    Some of the same points apply to the far more pleasant Draka video. Truly new videos, yet, ones which I have not reviewed and am not invested in, are going to have to meet the originality test. I don't care how good the footage is, unless this is exposé time or something like that, if it's nonoriginal material, posted by somebody other than the creator, I just won't write a review of it and I will thumb it down, and I would urge others to consider doing likewise for the reasons given. Places like Youtube can be a wonderful resource if treated with respect, and if people taper off on rewarding the abuses of such sites, they may remain to be enjoyed by others for years to come, a desirable outcome that nobody need make any particularly crushing sacrifices to achieve.

    Give and take. Yes, I'm helping to keep a limited collection of pirated videos alive in the sense of making visitors aware of them by talking about them, at least if I'm allowed to do so, but the number of nonpirated videos, ones which I won't hesitate to promote, will climb without practical limit - a finite number of them being made, but so many that the number might as well be infinite. With such incentives in place, if such an argument would be widely accepted, the proportion of nonoriginal material onsite would, at least in theory, tend to decline if posting responded to rational incentives, and the incentive was (as I suspect it is) the desire to have one's postings seen.

    While the ideal is not achieved in perfection, the overall goal - that of nudging the signal to noise ratio on places like YouTube in the right direction or at least providing incentives that would produce such a result if at all rationally responded to, would tend to be approached in the limit as time goes on. The more participation one sees in this sort of response, the more desirable nudging one gets. The idea is not premised on the unreal condition of universal participation. For that reason, philosophically, I think that this is a reasonable standard to apply in such cases, and submit it for your consideration.