OAQ: How do I change the background on one of my posts?...
Rated • 0 reviews • internet, stumbleupon • google.com
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josephdunphy/stumbleupon
Last seen: 6 days 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.
Please click on "list" to see this blog the way it was meant to be viewed. You can return to your ring here.
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The Blog Name Incident - Stumbleupon and eBay |...
Rated • 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 namedjosephdunphy'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 titleThe 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
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StumbleUpon.com: Personalized Recommendations to Help You...
Rated • 1480 reviews • stumbleupon • stumbleupon.com
Yes, I gave a thumbs up to a site I'm subscribed to. There's a shocker.
This is fun. Hit the stumble button and randomly pull up sites that you never heard of, surprisingly many of which turn out to be pretty good, and most of which are at least entertaining. One drawback to the site is that the owners have jumped on the rel=nofollow bandwagon, going so far as to deny their users fully operative linkbacks to their homepages. Go to my "about me" page, unrender it and look for the piece of code with the string "mashable.com" in it and you'll see what I mean. Experience has taught me to be wary of the establishment of effectively unreciprocated links within my sites, that these seem to provide a sort of trap for the search engine spiders, the nonreciprocating pages soaring very much at the expense of my other pages, so this means that I'll have to insert some rel=nofollow tags into the links to my Stumbleupon profile where I can and cut the links elsewhere. Most disappointing.
Disappointing enough to greatly reduce my usage of the site, but not enough to get me to abandon it. For the most part, by Internet standards, it seems to be a very friendly kind of place, with far less trollage than I've seen elsewhere, offering an abundance of delightful surprises to go with the less delightful ones, like the absence of a logout button in the location where one would expect to find it. To log out, one needs to click on "tools" on the Stumbleupon navbar and choose "sign out" out of the dropdown menu; be honest - is that one of the places where you'd look first?
I can only hope that some users were careful about setting up their account on shared computers, especially if their roommates were a little mischievous, because until their mildly bewildered friends succeeded in discovering where the logout option had been hidden, those roommates would have been able to post to the site as the unlogged out users, raising so many possibilities. Somewhere I know that even as we speak, there's a headbanger trying to explain to his buddies why he wrote that homage to Pat Sajak's homepage. I can't imagine that's going to go well for him.
