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josephdunphy

Last seen: 7 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.


  • The Blog Name Incident - Stumbleupon and eBay |...

    Rated Dec 14 2008 • 2 reviews • internet, stumbleupon, trolling • google.com








    The story: I post a suggestion to the Stumbleupon Features forum, proposing that the users at Stumbleupon be allowed a very simple freedom granted to users at many blogging services - to be able to choose the titles of their own blogs. My own blog, for example, instead of being named






    josephdunphy's blog - Stumbleupon






    which, let's face it, looks kind of generic and more than a little shoddy (not even presenting the reader with anything resembling correct English capitalization), would appear under the title






    The Abyss: Joseph Dunphy's Reviews and Commentary at Stumbleupon






    While this was hardly the most radical proposal to have ever been heard in a user forum, it was fought by a group of users who expressed a belief that their fellow users at Stumbleupon would not be up to handling a freedom that simple. Suggesting that said fellow users lacked the intelligence, maturity, and good taste needed to select a few words appearing atop a browser page, our friends were willing to fight to keep their fellow users from enjoying the freedom to choose those words for themselves, in effect arguing that Stumbleupon should treat its own adult users (many of them old enough to be well into middle age or beyond) as if they were children. The argument advanced in support of this were - interesting - to put it gently, and at times, their behavior even more so, as one can see documented in the screenshots accompanying the story; petty, underhanded, and at times, memorably vicious, even by Internet standards.

    This is page that I wrote on the Stumbleupon and eBay googlegroup documenting the story of how a policy decision here at Stumbleupon would seem to have been made in all of its absurdity, complete with screenshots, showing how the DIY moderation found in Stumbleupon's forums made matters worse, not better. Why I will never take part in such a discussion in a Stumbleupon forum, again, and why I would recommend that you think twice before doing so, yourself.


    Note: Lokito, who I see has chimed in, was one of the participants in what passed for a debate on this point, during which our 15 year old friend decided to share with us the benefit of his many years of experience. As you can see, he took great offense at the thought that a mere adult would dare to talk back to him and point out the numerous flaws in arguments that were remarkably poorly thought out, even by high school standards. Somebody had been badly overindulged, but don't take my word for it. Take a good look at his contributions, and decide for yourself just how seriously his point of view deserves to be taken. As he took the time to write on July 3 of this year, "I haven't had someone thumb me up in many months. I'm sort of proud of that, in a way."



    I don't doubt it ... continued