Haha, thanks! Feel free to use it as you see fit. It's our only weapon against those alleged clairvoyants!
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Social Media/Forum Pet Peeves
- Thread starter Mac'nCheese
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Haha, thanks! Feel free to use it as you see fit. It's our only weapon against those alleged clairvoyants!
Another 10 points. Alas, they aren’t good for anything but an ego boost. 
- People who just learned what logical fallacies are and (sometimes incorrectly) point them out in discourse by simply saying the fallacy's name. (E.g. responding "AD HOMINEM!!1!!" to "Only an idiot would think…")
- Ending a post with a single emotive word. (E.g. "… Sad." "… Liar!")
- EDIT: +1 posts. Why not just up-vote or explain why you like a post?
- Last one is MR-specific: purporting to know what Apple's late CEO would never allow. If we can pretend to read minds, there's no reason to provide balanced logical criticism; you can always say something isn't what someone else thinks it should be. It's a pet peeve that's impelled me to create this stock image response:
Agreed; the book cover is brilliant.
In fact, it should be used as a sticky on some threads.
The only thing that bothers me on forums are walls of text, looking at you @LizKat and you @Scepticalscribe bullet points are a wonderful thing you should try them out
People who think they’ve won an argument because you can’t be bothered wasting your time debating their childish and ill-thought out nonsense when they’re never going to change their mind anyway. Why give them the opportunity to desperately spout off rubbish?
Oh, and people who blindly hate on subcultures they’ve never even met a member of.
Oh, and people who blindly hate on subcultures they’ve never even met a member of.
Users who make untrue assertions as if they were fact simply because it may be true in their situation or because they believe it to be true.
Following along with that is when a user's untrue assertion manages to include me. This is especially irksome when I do not happen to be in agreement. Qualifying your assertions goes a long ways.
And true of every forum I have ever been in (but not true of every forum) are those users who by virtue of their time or post count become "know it alls". These users spend their time delivering proclamations of truth (even when not true) and expect their words to be the final say on the matter. Challenging them is a prelude to an argument.
Conversely there are plenty of users who are unable to recognize those with true knowledge and refuse to be corrected.
One last pet peeve are those users who fall into the trap of perceiving the less than sociable as rude, mean or abrasive. Granted, a lot of people could do with some character and delivery upgrades but if a user is debating your arguments do not confuse that as being a personal attack - even if the tone is less than gracious. Also, if the answer is not what you want to hear it doesn't make the argument invalid.
Users of various viewpoints can get along and be involved in reasonable and respectful debate without resorting to personal attacks. But those engaging in personal attacks have nothing left to contribute to the debate.
Just my two cents.
Following along with that is when a user's untrue assertion manages to include me. This is especially irksome when I do not happen to be in agreement. Qualifying your assertions goes a long ways.
And true of every forum I have ever been in (but not true of every forum) are those users who by virtue of their time or post count become "know it alls". These users spend their time delivering proclamations of truth (even when not true) and expect their words to be the final say on the matter. Challenging them is a prelude to an argument.
Conversely there are plenty of users who are unable to recognize those with true knowledge and refuse to be corrected.
One last pet peeve are those users who fall into the trap of perceiving the less than sociable as rude, mean or abrasive. Granted, a lot of people could do with some character and delivery upgrades but if a user is debating your arguments do not confuse that as being a personal attack - even if the tone is less than gracious. Also, if the answer is not what you want to hear it doesn't make the argument invalid.
Users of various viewpoints can get along and be involved in reasonable and respectful debate without resorting to personal attacks. But those engaging in personal attacks have nothing left to contribute to the debate.
Just my two cents.
It was an eye opening moment when I first realized something similar to this. Somehow the thought, that the more posts (or earlier join date) a user has, the more they must know was a given for me for a long time. I've noticed the same thing with f. ex. Reddit karma, likes / retweets etc. Given how easy it is to accumulate, and purposefully inflate the number of all of those, there's a certain amount of critical thinking that should be applied to everything you read online, especially written by people you don't know.
Which is why I do my best to steer clear of any hot topic -discussions online. It's a fun pastime for me to converse with at least somewhat like minded folks on the internet, but I've never been comfortable tackling so called serious topics when I can't even see the person I'm talking to.
I have seen long time idiots and genius newbies. Universally is the problem that the newbies get drowned out while those that shouldn't be talking can never shut up.
The only approach I've found that works is asking a question. It appeals to their ego by allowing them to impart "information" to the 'uninformed' but also forces them to have to consider their assertions and marshall their arguments. When they are wrong it's pretty evident and many do not respond because to do so publicly humiliates them. At the same time it also gives them an out to admit they were wrong and retract their statements gracefully. Very few of those I've encountered have failed to take that out. The ones that don't aren't worth dealing with and now they've been publicly outed for it.
It's just better no matter how much time or how many posts you have to deal with people as you'd like to be treated. You just never know how much or how little someone actually does know.
As far as hot-topics…well that's another peeve. I've seen way too many forums break down because people got wrapped up in their positions and everyone chose sides. I may have an opinion, but I just don't get involved.
One of the reasons I tend to stay out of PRSI around here.
You sound like a reasonable person. Like many others here in the Community discussion -section. Which is why I like it here.
Have a good one!
It was just a call back to my post about over using LOLs since you used one. For some reason, I remembered you from this thread when I saw your LOL....I don't get it
My new pet peeve applies not just to social media sites (which tend not even to deploy this annoyance) but to any site that fancies itself either so special or so pursued by bots that they need to add a Recaptcha challenge to their login process.
Man I hate those things. I've been known to bail out of a login after being challenged to pick out images of "fire hydrants" after already picking out "store fronts" and "bicycles". Sometimes the images are grainy enough to challenge even the vision of a 7-year old, never mind these aging eyeballs.
I managed to persuade one publication to bypass that requirement on my account... on my serious threat of unsubscribing. The NYT is next. The next time they ask me to try again when I've already demo'd I am at least a smart bot and can distinguish most pictures of a bus from those of a fire hydrant or an empty stretch of freeway or someone's driveway, it's back to Reuters for me where I don't have to sign in. I happen to lack the skills to notice if the ads are any different when I'm not paying more directly to read the content.
Someone should tell these outfits that good bots are probably constructed by programmers smart enough to tell the bot to call a hacking module to bypass the Recaptcha process if the bot's first go at picking out "bicycles" versus "traffic lights" doesn't work out well enough to get logged in with purloined or illicitly borrowed credentials.
Man I hate those things. I've been known to bail out of a login after being challenged to pick out images of "fire hydrants" after already picking out "store fronts" and "bicycles". Sometimes the images are grainy enough to challenge even the vision of a 7-year old, never mind these aging eyeballs.
I managed to persuade one publication to bypass that requirement on my account... on my serious threat of unsubscribing. The NYT is next. The next time they ask me to try again when I've already demo'd I am at least a smart bot and can distinguish most pictures of a bus from those of a fire hydrant or an empty stretch of freeway or someone's driveway, it's back to Reuters for me where I don't have to sign in. I happen to lack the skills to notice if the ads are any different when I'm not paying more directly to read the content.
Someone should tell these outfits that good bots are probably constructed by programmers smart enough to tell the bot to call a hacking module to bypass the Recaptcha process if the bot's first go at picking out "bicycles" versus "traffic lights" doesn't work out well enough to get logged in with purloined or illicitly borrowed credentials.
Yep, I've spent my fair share of time trying to figure out what exactly, in their opinion, constitutes a picture of a "car", "lamp post", "street sign" or whatever, and at some point one starts to wonder if it's all worth it.
Many times, I'm noticing, it is not.
The jury is still out on that for me.
I've run across some decent mods and some I rather did not like. I've been checked at least three (maybe four) times since I've signed up and two of those times were my fault if I'm honest.
One of the mods was decent enough to answer my direct question when I assured him that I wasn't trying to argue or evade the warning.
I know another long-time user here that would agree with your assessment though.
PS. I long ago learned that if I am posting an eBay auction link to qualify to the mods in my post that the link is not MY auction. That seems to be highly frowned upon (posting links to your own eBay auction).
Oh, yes, by the bleeding nails of Christ, I hear you. Oh, yes, I hear you - couldn't agree more.
I loathe, loathe, loathe "Recaptcha" - absolutely loathe it.
And yes, for exactly the same reasons as you have so eloquently expressed: My ageing (bespectacled) eyes find normal stuff hard enough to handle, - but when asked to identify "cars", or yes, "garages", or "awnings" or "shop fronts".
The Financial Times and I had a discussion - a strong disagreement in fact, - when I brought this issue to their attention, as, unable to log into my subscription, - and constantly tripped up by this....sanguinary...l Recaptcha, I phoned them. They chose to blame my Apple computer, but did - the threat of cancelling a subscription, worked, as, given that I had paid for it, I thought it not unreasonable that I be in a position to read it.
They attempted to argue that they were doing me a massive favour by by-passing all of these things.
Now, strange to relate, The Financial Times phoned me today to ask (very nicely) how I found the publication and their customer service, and we had a lovely chat.
I'm considering creating a second MR account just to up vote this again… but I better not on the chance that they've implemented a Recapcha.
Trying to delineate where "fire hydrants," "store fronts," and "bicycles" end and the next adjacent frame begins is enough to induce existential crisis. What is considered a traffic light?! Are the photons they emit that hit the CDC inside the camera that took the terrible compressed photo each a unit of traffic light? Am I traffic light now for having looked at the image?! ****
Related: I kind of want to feed Recaptcha images into some image-recognition API, like CloudSight, just to see how much they even help.
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Yes!!! The edges of items that cross frames are really exasperating: how many pixels of a bus image have to be in a Recaptcha adjacent frame before the app figures yeah that's "also" or "still" a bus? When I have to spend more than 2 seconds to get out of the challenge, that sort of thing is usually part of the reason.
I can be pretty literal minded sometimes, so I often have trouble with the Recaptcha challenges that ask for things like "street signs" or "traffic lights"... is it just the sign, or the cables and poles they hang on or sit on... that's usually when I either refresh the thing hoping for "store front" or else just curse and figure I didn't want to log into that site today anyway.
Somewhere I read that there are certain circumstances where recaptcha modules can be set to deliberately make images grainier or anyway tougher to meet the challenge. This could be for instance if you frequently clear your browser (which of course then means if you do revisit a site and have cleared your credentials, you'd have to log back in). Apparently frequent logins to the same account can make the module think you might be a bot so Recaptcha doubles down and asks for another go-around or fetches up fuzzier pictures.
That seems pretty ironic, since clearing a browser is often a security-oriented suggestion that many sites offer up when you're signing out of a banking or billpay session etc. The other irony is that bots have apparently become better than humans at fishing images out of murky backgrounds.
The darn bots probably spend all day practicing on Google's humongous universe of pictures of everything.
Yes!!! The edges of items that cross frames are really exasperating: how many pixels of a bus image have to be in a Recaptcha adjacent frame before the app figures yeah that's "also" or "still" a bus? When I have to spend more than 2 seconds to get out of the challenge, that sort of thing is usually part of the reason.
I can be pretty literal minded sometimes, so I often have trouble with the Recaptcha challenges that ask for things like "street signs" or "traffic lights"... is it just the sign, or the cables and poles they hang on or sit on... that's usually when I either refresh the thing hoping for "store front" or else just curse and figure I didn't want to log into that site today anyway.
Somewhere I read that there are certain circumstances where recaptcha modules can be set to deliberately make images grainier or anyway tougher to meet the challenge. This could be for instance if you frequently clear your browser (which of course then means if you do revisit a site and have cleared your credentials, you'd have to log back in). Apparently frequent logins to the same account can make the module think you might be a bot so Recaptcha doubles down and asks for another go-around or fetches up fuzzier pictures.
That seems pretty ironic, since clearing a browser is often a security-oriented suggestion that many sites offer up when you're signing out of a banking or billpay session etc. The other irony is that bots have apparently become better than humans at fishing images out of murky backgrounds.
It's easy to imagine a bunch of hapless folks who aren't tech-savy constantly refreshing their Recaptcha'd pages in the hopes of getting an image that's less noisy only to keep pushing them further to inscrutability. Recaptcha is the online equivalent of quicksand; struggling will only pull you in deeper.
It's also interesting to think of all the established tech conventions that are actually making people less secure. Nearly every modern website requires that your password contains a number and capital letter, but it's harder to remember which character in a password is a number or capital letter, so as a result, people make shorter passwords with a couple obligatory extra characters. The goal was to increase bits of entropy, but in reality, having a simple sentence-based password like "iquiteenjoybrowsingtwitter" sans any confusing characters would take hundreds of years to brute force.
A vaguely related website pet peeve, depicted in a gorgeous animation I wish I'd thought of making:
It originated in a Twitter post as a video, but the creator is unknown.
Wonderful to see that there are a number of us here , who share my utter loathing and total detestation of that Recaptcha thing.
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But, such a system should not be designed in such a way as to enable it to be navigated successfully by young people with perfect eyesight and fast reaction times.
I've had @LizKat's experience; wondering whether something had leached into another image, wondering what constituted the noun in question, wondering what percentage of the designated noun constituted the image in question - as many of the images are anything but clear.
I didn't say otherwise
In fact, I clarified some are terrible - my point was they're a necessary mechanism for many online systems, so the focus should be improvement, not removal.
I didn't say otherwise
Fair enough.
However, to be candid, I can handle the ones (tests) that feature letters and numbers, (although sometimes one is obliged to peer very closely indeed in order to distinguish between a capital letter and a number), but the images present an often insuperable challenge.