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August 3rd, 2008

sqbr: pretty purple pi (existentialism)
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 10:31 am
I've been thinking for some time about writing a post about the various techniques I've used to get around the difficulty of communicating with people on the internet when you're tactless.

But I've realised that before I can post that I need to lay out the necessary basic principles which I think underlie successful communication on the internet so that I can refer back to them.

I'm probably going to go back and add to this post as I go, but for the moment here are the principles that have come up, with links to clarifying posts where I felt they were necessary.

A lot of these are going to seem really self evident, but perhaps due to my background in pure mathematics I like having the principles I'm working from made explicit.

Basic Principles:


Sub-principles


I am, as always, totally up for people pointing out any flaws or inconsistencies or expressing a different opinion.
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sqbr: pretty purple pi (existentialism)
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 10:32 am
Freedom of speech is a nice concept, and one worth fighting for. It's not something you can assume you have a legal right to on the internet, especially when you consider all the different countries' legal systems involved (my own country offers pretty patchy support) Sop when I say "right" here I just mean in the non-legally binding moral imperative sense.

But even when we consider the principle, what it means is that you have the right not to suffer legal consequences for expressing an opinion, and the right to have public spaces in which you can express yourself.

It does not mean you have the right to avoid social repercussions. If it did, wouldn't you complaining about the people complaining about you be a violation of their right to "free speech"?

Secondly, just because something is publicly visible doesn't make it a "public space". If a private individual or organisation is in charge of a space (and this is true of pretty much everywhere on the internet) then they have the right to completely control what is said there, and that includes deleting content and banning contributors. Which is not to say that this isn't sometimes a bad thing for them to do if they are inconsistent or overly harsh, but they still have that right to dictate both the general nature and specifics of what is and is not said.

If you want to say something they don't like, say it somewhere else.

On the other side: if you are in charge of a space (the comments to your blog, say), while in principle you have the right to run it how you like people will be justifiably annoyed if you act inconsistently or (in their opinion) overly harshly.

For further discussion on the specific issues involved with blog comments, you might like to read my post POLL: When is it ok to edit a blog post?.

This post was written as part of my General principles of internet communication.
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sqbr: pretty purple pi (existentialism)
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 10:36 am
In any place on the internet where multiple people get together to talk (forums, communities, or even the comments to a blog post) there are going to be rules of communication. As I discussed in my Freedom of speech doesn't mean what you think it does post, the owners and maintainers of these spaces have a right to expect you to follow those rules, whether it be no posting pictures, no swearing, or no straying from the given topic. You should always check the rules of the place you're posting to before posting: these should be laid out in the "About"/userinfo etc section. (If they're not then you should try to rely on commonsense and hope for the best)

These rules tend to be pretty straightforward and easy to follow, but the one that can cause some issues is "Stay on topic", since the definition of "on topic" can be quite ambiguous. I'm going to start from the obvious and work my way to the more difficult cases, since I think this makes the basic principle more clear.
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So in short, don't post:


The place for these posts is either your own blog/site etc or a more appropriate community.

The one exception, I suppose, is when you feel that the very existence of that community is an affront to everything you hold dear and you feel the need to confront it's members directly (like an "I love Nazis" community) But keep in mind that you are guaranteed to immediately alienate everyone by posting something against the community ethos, even those who might otherwise have listened to what you have to say, so it's probably the worst way to try to really engage with those people and should only be used if you genuinely don't think they deserve any respect at all.

This post was written as part of my General principles of internet communication.
sqbr: pretty purple pi (femininity)
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 01:25 pm
So this site guesses your gender by checking your browser history and seeing whether or not you mainly go to "male" sites or "female" sites.

My result?


Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 35%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 65%

Site Male-Female Ratio
youtube.com 1
livejournal.com 0.68
last.fm 0.96
icanhascheezburger.com 1.04
theonion.com 1.2
abc.net.au 1.11
escapistmagazine.com 2.08



I'm inclined to think his data is skewed by him not including Revolutionary Girl Utena femslash sites in his analysis :D