I might have one worse on ya: During my latter High School years I worked for a telemarketing company. It was a depressing job, but it was also the only one I could ride my bike to in the farming town I lived in so that was that. At the time I was incredibly timid and couldn't sell worth beans. One of our "campaigns" (that sometimes overlapped) was Direct TV and I had a call where I went through my spiel and, to my delight, the guy seemed highly interested! He kept asking questions and I was happy to answer, but when we had run through pretty much everything and I tried to actually sign him up he stalled for time and I eventually asked "You aren't actually interested in purchasing the service, are you?"

His response, which I will always remember, was: "No, but you sure have a purty voice!" As a self-conscious teenage male who had already passed the majority of puberty, this was fairly devastating; I thanked him for his time and hung up.

I lasted at the job for three months total. I would probably use the same tactic myself these days, but since I haven't a landline I never get telemarketing calls.

This comment pre-dated an extremely relevant example by a week, one I felt necessary to mention before the comments go into archive: Former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has been hired by "small independent investment bank" Moelis & Co. "Moelis & Co.’s new vice-chairman and managing director will get a $3.4 million pay package between September and the end of 2015."

Dude lost the primary because he was too focused on federal matters (and that whole immigration thing...) and, as punishment, he gets a job where he will likely do jack all (to my knowledge he has no experience in investment banking)--except, perhaps, talking to the current crop of Congresscritters about how to best pass laws that help banks--for the tidy sum of $3.4 MILLION for just a bit over a year's work. Jon Stewart does a nice rip of him over this.

You have to be careful; if you browse at 5 you'll get a venerable circlejerk. +3 or +4 seem much better (if you set up a negative funny modifier) for getting worthwhile discussion that also has dissenting opinion.

Fark's style of moderation is more about control than actually taking care of jerks. IMO, if there are going to be specified moderators their only job should be to get rid of the outright spam and nefarious links (to malware sites etc.) I help moderate a 4chan offshoot, and my job as moderator has three parts:
1) Get rid of spam/illegal content (namely child porn)
2) Get rid of content that is not relevant to a board (posting about fighting games on a train discussion board, for instance)
3) Get rid of spammy trolls, the ones who will hop thread to thread posting irrelevant opinions or otherwise trying to derail every thread

That last part is censorship, yes, but is only done when something or someone seems to quickly fouling the entire community. I try to use it as rarely as possible; an IP or tripcode has to show a history of such antics before it's even considered.

I was a TFer long, long ago for many years (ending in the year 2008/9 or so) and we had moderation on the paid side, too. I personally earned a (warranted) 24 hour posting ban for being a dipshit and submitting an inappropriate link. However, the moderation seemed to be more lax than on the "Lite" side, likely because advertisers didn't care about TF (and advertisers are often the source of a site implementing censorship of any kind). When it was applied it seemed a bit uneven, which is a reason I eventually let my TF account lapse.

I imagine this hasn't changed in general, and the rules will be applied there as well (though not as tightly.) I don't know that it would be necessary; back then TF was a fairly solid community and, while you would have cliques, a misogynist would be shouted down by members. I doubt this has changed much, either.

(Will Drew still allow Farkers to say "UFIA"?)

Once self-driving cars reach critical mass, I think that it will become uncommon to actually own a vehicle (why own something and deal with maintenance/insurance/etc. when it will sit around doing nothing for 10-20 hours a day?). Instead you'll be part of some sort of "Auto Club" or other, where you pay a monthly fee and are able to summon a car (the number of times and priority you get will depend on the level of service you purchase). Insurance companies will then charge these guys, who will pass on the cost to members. If someone manually controls their rented car (if even possible), the car would log this and they would likely pay an extra fee due to insurance premiums.

Until that point we'll have a lot of schisms with insurance and self-driving cars. This will probably be much like the early 20th century when cars were gaining broad adoption and were sharing the road 50/50 with horse-drawn wagons and so forth. Was there horse or auto insurance back then? If so, does anyone know how the companies reacted to the changing road?

Indeed. Things like "Ignore User" are only useful when it's one half-hearted troll. When you get a dedicated troll or, worse, a mob of trolls, it's a stop-gap measure you can use to plug holes in the dam as the wall falls down around you.

A better option would be to allow users to auto-ignore accounts that are under a specified age (perhaps with an option to exempt "verified" accounts). This doesn't completely preclude multi-account attacks--either through hacking existing accounts, buying botnet accounts, and/or creating a cache of accounts for future use--but will make it extremely prohibitive for trolls to attack in the heat of the moment, as they did Zelda Williams.

To deal with the zealous troll, then, you would have a final defense: an account lockdown where the only messages you see/receive are from users you've personally friended/followed. (So none of that bullshit like Pintrest making you a follower of a few thousand accounts; why is that even a fucking thing?) It would be nice to have a complimentary system where you can grant other accounts (either people you trust or, for larger celebs/businesses, paid staff) the ability to whitelist individual messages so you aren't completely cut off from fans/followers in general (and the morale boost they might bring.)

I've always thought that a way to curtail that would be to have some sort of "+0 Agree/-0 Disagree" modifier. It would be shown along-side the regular score and also give an idea as to how Slashdot (or just the moderators of that day) perceives an opinion without actually drowning out.

That won't stop people from using the Troll option to penalize those they disagree with, but hopefully it would decrease it a perceptible amount. (Of course, metamoderation should be helping the system choose people less likely to use "Troll" as "Disagree", but people are less interested in metamoderation than moderation and if the person metamoderating is of the same mind, it won't help the quality of moderators.)

I believe the conspiracy theory goes that when marijuana was first banned, a farming industry (cotton? can't remember) lobbied/convinced Congress that hemp was also a massive part of this "drug craze" in order to shut down hemp farmers who were able to produce better quality textile material at a lower cost, thus making it harder for these farmers to sell their own crop.

(Oh-ho, a former Fark admin? My condolences. I remember my days as a TFer fondly, but I eventually got fed up with the over/slanted moderation and cliques.)

I'm going to the model of 'invitations' where you have to know someone already in the community to get an invite -- because then if we get someone being an ass, we can suspend their friends' accounts, too (giving them some external pressure to not be a dick), or prune the whole tree of accounts if that doesn't help.

Even if that helped with trolling*, this is an excellent way to create an echo chamber/circlejerk. Since your friends likely have similar opinions to you, the site will maintain a steady consensus about topics for some time. By the time invites branch out to people who have opinions that are very different (but still reasonable), they'll be awash with mob mentality the moment they make their first counter-consensus post and likely just leave.

If you're not trying to have a serious discussion site or are going for the insular angle, that would be okay, though.

* I think that once you hit a certain (fairly low) threshold it will become nearly ineffective against trolling. "Friend" will become "anyone who asks me for a referral"/"uses the referral codes I post on another site", much like the early days of Gmail and pretty much any invite-only site, and trolls will use this to not only cause the general site anguish, but extra special and indirect harassment upon the person who gave them the invite

Considering Jezebel's reason for existing, I'm wondering why they're only dealing with this now. I would have thought that such troll antics would have hit them years ago (or at least as soon as the Kinja commenting system allowed images without a moderated queue, which I believe has been far longer than this troll has been at it.)

Heh. In the gaming circles I run in, if anyone links to Kotaku the link is ignored and the user posting it belittled. They are very much pandering for clickbaits; I can recall seeing links for a few "outraged" pieces that the entire rest of the internet (except the SJW side of Tumblr) had no problem with (sadly I can't think of a specific example at the moment aside from the Dragon's Crown thing.)

And, while we're bringing up nasty habits of Gawker, I'd like to remind Slashdot about Gizmodo's CES 2008 TV-B-Gone incident. I think that's when a lot of people on the internet realized that Gawker, in general, is trash.

The lone exception is Lifehacker; while they do a lot of the "blurb 'n' a link" stuff, they do have some detailed articles that can be useful. Like Slashdot, their major usefulness tends to be in the comments (except that they're stuck with that horrible Kinja system.)

unfair genetic advantage

Why does it have to be "unfair"? Why can't it be "(pseudo-)luck"? If someone else wins the lottery and I don't, it would be quite silly for me to call the whole thing unfair.

(I added "pseudo-" because genes aren't completely random, and what potential there is for gene development is based on what genes the parents pass along. I, with my predominantly German/Scottish heritage, could not have "lucked" into being born with Asian features.)

I'm on vacation right now doing business from my hammock, and I'm more productive than I usually am in my office

A bit off topic, but if you're doing business from your hammock you're not on vacation. Telecommuting, sure, but not vacation.

Please stop thinking you are, the acceptance of that idea by you and others is ruining life for a lot of people.

Most of the rest of us enjoy doing things in groups

If by "groups" you mean a number of friends/relatives, you would still have a far superior experience at home if everyone pooled the money they would spend on tickets and instead bought a large and very nice TV(+sound system.) Can't find hard data on a quick search, but this suggests that even the lowest per-team ticket average is $106; so amongst 5 friends you can get a 50" TV, or a 40" and decent sound system, according to a quick check from Amazon. You don't have to compete with surrounding noise to talk, snacks/drinks are all to your liking (with the only limit being supply), people aren't in a single line and have to shift around to talk to someone else, and you save money on gas. Added bonus: Nice TV afterward (you could raffle it off amongst those who paid, or sell it and split the proceeds amongst those who chipped in; it's not like you can take the stadium seats home with you after the game, so you're not out anything more.)

I can understand a sense of camaraderie with fellow fans might enhance the enjoyment, but I don't consider merely being around people of like mind "socializing", and from my (admittedly limited; 2 or 3 games in my life) experience attending people don't really strike up a conversation with someone next to them.

buy an automated car

I agree with you except this (extremely minor) point. When we get to the point where automated cars are simply another part of life, I believe that car ownership will stop being a normal part of life. Instead, most people will belong to auto clubs or co-ops and pay a nominal monthly fee (likely tiered for miles/month + other perks) and call for a vehicle from their club ahead of time that will be sent to their location to pick them up and drop them off. Only gearheads, rural folk, and the rich will actually own cars--and then rarely automated cars, outside of collectors of early models--because it will be far cheaper to belong to one of these than pay insurance+gas/electricity+loan payment+maintenance while living in the city or even suburbs.

Sure, it might mean you wait, but if these clubs are run properly then unused vehicles will be parked in a distributed manner so you're only waiting 2-3 minutes. Need to go somewhere right fucking now? The clubs would have allowances for X priority calls/month, with high charges if you go over without setting up something ahead of time. The clubs could even have agreements with local city that their cars can have an "emergency" mode (enabled by club dispatch), where it gets priority in traffic for, say, getting a woman in labor to the hospital or to a dying relative.

This also helps with suburban sprawl and city traffic, because now most people don't need a garage, drive way, or parking spot. Bus terminals could be expanded for pick up and drop off of passengers of these cars (and perhaps even storing them), with most streets having a "quick stop" lane that can be used during lighter traffic.

We're probably 20-30 years out from this being standard, but when it is the whole auto-buyer thing is going to have a huge upset (if dealerships are only concerned about Tesla's direct sales now, they haven't seen anything yet...)