"Don't read the comments" -- common, often-correct advice when browsing the Internet. But comments are important, if you want to build community instead of just publishing stuff.

The Guardian looked at trends in the 70 million comments they've received. Not too surprisingly, articles posted by identifiable women get more abusive comments than ( Read more... )

When I was in college, some people thought it was a right fun prank to sign other people up for wildly-inappropriate catalogues and suchlike. These days they use the Internet for that. Any site that blithely accepts an email address without sending confirmation email to that address is contributing to the problem, big-time ( Read more... )

I asked a question over on the Community Building site on Stack Exchange and I suspect some of my readers might be interested or even have relevant knowledge: Detecting and preventing hostility to women? Excerpt:
I recently had a conversation with one of the users who stood by during [personal attacks directed at me], in which he said ( Read more... )

I moderate a few online communities, and occasionally something gets flagged as offensive that doesn't strike me that way -- but, in a large heterogeneous community, it can be hard to know whether I don't see it because it's not there or because my own perspective blocks it. Put another way, is that my privilege speaking?

Today I decided to ask ( Read more... )

I've seen interfaith dialogue work really well, kind of ineptly, and really, really badly.1 I've noticed some things that make a difference in where on the spectrum an effort is likely to fall. So, some observations.
To people who are interested in it at all, religion is generally an important ( Read more... )

It's clean-out-the-browser-tabs day:
From gardenfey comes this fun video about what motivates us. The presentation is engaging; I didn't mind at all that it's ten minutes long.
shewhomust posted this item about spoilers and meta-spoilers. Heh.
Big numbers can be hard to understand without some localization. With that in mind, try this visualization ( Read more... )

( gaming )

Everything I know about work, I learned in the SCA, by metahacker.
Pumpkins in prison, a photo by ticklethepear. (Though it looks like they might be able to break out if they really had to.)
dagonell wrote that we show our humanity most in how we treat the weak, such as this aid for an ailing penguin. Neat!
From a locked post (I'll happily credit you if you like): ( Read more... )

When considering law and policy, the dominant factor should be what
is just. When interacting with people, compassion should also be
an important factor. The relative priorities of justice and
compassion go a long way toward defining a political or philosophical
position.

All that said, when discussing law and policy with people, things ( Read more... )

Airfare to Israel these days costs how much?! This may require more thought ( Read more... )