tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2135301473915671680.post560729759278921144..comments2023-12-14T18:17:52.957-08:00Comments on The Train Wreck Love Life: silver bullets in the jukebox, spin another roundEmilly Orrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07245643246821826101noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2135301473915671680.post-50109700311910566692012-01-31T18:23:32.728-08:002012-01-31T18:23:32.728-08:00Ouch.
And see, that's the problem with my ema...Ouch.<br /><br />And see, that's the problem with my email, too: prior to Gmail's arrival, I had, oh, about eight different emails, depending on which 'persona' I was in that setting. I dropped all but one for Em's account, and, for the most part, have codified most of my online life under Em's banner. In a sense, Gmail enforced cohesion--rather than eight (or more) scattered handles, each with their own set of behaviors, I lowered it basically to two, and even with those two, I end up checking Gmail and interacting as Em 98% of the time.<br /><br />Even more? Em's grown from a simple email handle into an alternate name, with behaviors that model my own, because--shock!--she <i>is</i> me. Unlike many other handles chosen (especially in the early days of the net), what I say as Emilly I'd pretty much say as me, in virtually any circumstance.<br /><br />So the thought of losing Gmail access? Turns out to be far more frightening to me than anticipated.Emilly Orrhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07245643246821826101noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2135301473915671680.post-80756964296412271052012-01-31T10:41:40.742-08:002012-01-31T10:41:40.742-08:00It is as I thought. I managed to get both G-Mail a...It is as I thought. I managed to get both G-Mail addresses linked via my Android tablet (major "D'OH" on my part there). Not sure if there is a way to unlink them. If not, I may have to face migrating to totally NEW e-mail address for both. Something I am otherwise loath to do.<br /><br />-iDIcterus Daggerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05540131959894781663noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2135301473915671680.post-7313132180396876712012-01-30T18:18:45.114-08:002012-01-30T18:18:45.114-08:00Icterus,
You're not wrong. Even in criticizin...Icterus,<br /><br />You're not wrong. Even in criticizing them, I'm shaken, because I've made no bones about Em being a character in SL--while there has been (maybe unavoidable) RL overlap, for the most part, this is still a blog whose history goes back to the grid. Even though my name is more conventionally "name-shaped" (and I've actually met a person for whom Emilly Orr <i>is</i> their RL legal name), that doesn't make it any less a pseudonym. (In fact, that's likely a detriment--if each person gets a unique identifier that must at least resemble a real name, what happens if that Emilly gets a Google+ account? And if each person isn't being held to a unique identifier, then how are they telling John Smith from New Jersey from John Smith from Antwerp from John Smith from Poughkeepsie?)Emilly Orrhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07245643246821826101noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2135301473915671680.post-32052628095399670452012-01-30T18:15:05.612-08:002012-01-30T18:15:05.612-08:00I'm still thinking I want to pull these commen...I'm still thinking I want to pull these comments into their own entry, but I will say that's maybe the best quote out of the entire thread:<br /><br /><i>So, interesting thing: when we first launched G+, we thought that people would be total bastards if they weren't tied to their own, very durable, identity. (Which was one of the drivers behind the original names policy) As we got more miles on the system, this was replaced with the concern that people are total bastards, period.</i><br /><br />I kind of want that as wall art. :DEmilly Orrhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07245643246821826101noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2135301473915671680.post-25899407387310960732012-01-30T04:32:47.133-08:002012-01-30T04:32:47.133-08:00Regardless of any "tweaking" that might ...Regardless of any "tweaking" that might be done, I'm effectively shut out of G+ because when I set up my GMail accounts (one for RL one for SL), things ended up confused in some fashion or other, and I cannot be certain that if I join G+ through my "RL" address, my "SL" one won't get napalmed by Google. I am certain "Icterus Dagger" will trigger their blunderbuss of a solution to pseudonyms and be wiped, which is not acceptable. This really sucks, as more and more groups of people doing interesting and informative things are using G+, and I can't fully participate now. Way to go GOogle. There' more than one way to be evil, you know.<br /><br />-iDIcterus Daggerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05540131959894781663noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2135301473915671680.post-77593404094735019832012-01-28T23:05:34.825-08:002012-01-28T23:05:34.825-08:00After a meeting on Friday the 27th, he also had th...After a meeting on Friday the 27th, he also had this to say: <br /><br /><b><i>"Name-shaped pseudonyms should Just Work. Pseudonyms which don't look like a name in any culture are going to be the hard case. These do seem to be genuinely rare -- most people who use handles use them in addition to names, and most people who use pseudonyms use ones which look like names. That doesn't mean that they aren't important, just that from a prioritization perspective we wanted to help the most people first. What we need to develop is some way for people to emerge non-name-shaped pseudonyms on the service, but that's a harder problem."</i></b><br /><br />And acknowledged at least some of the work still to be done: <br /><br /><b><i>* Still no support for titles (Doctor, Reverend, etc) in names. This is really important in some communities. Fix known, we just have to do it.<br /><br />* Show the nickname in a wider variety of places. The priority of this depends a lot on how people start actually using nicks.<br /><br />* Mononyms. :) Right now these all trigger the "handle" check, and that isn't going to scale well in, oh, say, Indonesia. Real fix needed.<br /><br />But before we do any of this, we want to get this launch right, adjust the thresholds and so on so that legitimate users aren't being kicked, and so that the overall PITA factor for those people who are affected by this goes down. Expect some trial and error, and a lot more of me going around and asking people questions in the near future."</i></b>Alexandra Ruckerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00293068479980875034noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2135301473915671680.post-45610033534508259322012-01-28T23:04:37.686-08:002012-01-28T23:04:37.686-08:00One observation that does tell me Yonatan "ge...One observation that does tell me Yonatan "gets it", over some of the other googler posts I've seen a few months ago: <br /><br /><b><i>"...Generally, if you know at least one person who has an unusual name, you're likely to know a lot of such people; i.e., people with unusual names travel in tightly-connected clusters. That's largely because these names tend to be tied to particular subcultures. The problem we're really encountering here is of culture clashes: people from one culture absolutely freak out when they encounter people from a very alien culture. That's actually a very deep problem which affects a lot more than names, and it's one that I'm spending a lot of skull sweat on lately...."<br /><br />===============<br /><br />"One of the underlying principles which was driving this policy was that handles are dangerous to the service. (Which is, I think, a flaw of the service not yet being able to moderate cultural interactions effectively enough) That led to a policy built around "name-shapedness." A second principle, which hasn't really affected the policy yet at all because it only came up here, is that core identities are something which should be protected, and peripheral identities less so. A practical limitation (not a principle) is that it can be hard to tell unusually-shaped names from handles, and as a result we end up with manual reviews, proof of identity or following, and so on. A second practical limitation is that we can't yet moderate interactions well enough, and the cost of the bad interactions to the service as a whole was high, which led to the Draconian solution of simply cutting the smaller of the two groups out of the system – i.e., rejecting names which don't fit a certain mold.<br /><br />None of this is what I would consider optimal, not by a longshot. I think that if we can solve the cultural interaction problem, we should be able to open the doors wide and not have a names policy at all. But that's conjecture, and based on solving that problem."</i></b>Alexandra Ruckerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00293068479980875034noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2135301473915671680.post-9174773026335919462012-01-28T23:03:45.026-08:002012-01-28T23:03:45.026-08:00This is my takeaway after reading the zomg thread ...This is my takeaway after reading the zomg thread of doom: <br /><br />That they're trying to build a community with as low a noise/troll ratio as possible. (We'd ALL love to see that, I think.) <br /><br />They originally thought that requiring real names would reduce the troll potential, but have learned now that asshats will be asshats, regardless of what name or nick they're using. <br /><br />(Yes, this IS something that #nymwars has been telling them for months....now they have their hard system data to back it up at this point, whereas they really didn't when they started, because they figured their method would be different than the rest.) <br /><br />So it comes down to, now they're reassessing that position, and trying to find ways to allow more "nice people" come in, without increasing the amount of trolls/noise, AND while simultaneously reducing the troll/noise level they have NOW. <br /><br />Due to the size of the network, I *don't* believe this is a trivial thing to do, and I understand that it will take time to implement and PROPERLY tweak to make the bulk happy in the end. <br /><br />Yonatan Zunger, the G+ chief architect, had these things to say (among others) in that thread alone: <br /><br /><b><i>"So, interesting thing: when we first launched G+, we thought that people would be total bastards if they weren't tied to their own, very durable, identity. (Which was one of the drivers behind the original names policy) As we got more miles on the system, this was replaced with the concern that people are total bastards, period. We are therefore putting some nontrivial work into hunting down general antisocial behavior and dealing with that directly, quite independently of names."<br /><br />===============<br /><br />"...We thought this was going to be a huge deal: that people would behave very differently when they were and weren't going by their real names. After watching the system for a while, we realized that this was not, in fact, the case. (And in particular, bastards are still bastards under their own names.) We're focusing right now on identifying bad behaviors themselves, rather than on using names as a proxy for behavior...."</i></b><br /><br />((Breaking this up into several comments because of some arbitrary comment size limit *grumps*))Alexandra Ruckerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00293068479980875034noreply@blogger.com