That’s a great, practical point. One anecdote about smart kids though: i knew a number of very smart boys growing up who got bored at school and checked out for that reason, and life didn’t work out great for them - nor did society benefit from the very positive productivity they might have been capable of. I think they’d have done better with appropriate challenges.

I wish very much that explainers of of this kind NOT center around exemplars on the individual level. In practice there is no applicability of political philosophy on the individual level, only absurdity.

Where there is some value to this work is at scale policy. One's only hope for fairness, equity- any qualities of importance- depends on modeling and quantifying. All models are wrong but in these cases it is incumbent to try to make them as useful as possible.

First of all, sex and gender identities are protected in the US and her complaints are about sexism. High level means there should be lots of opportunities, but on the other hand, where does an Amazon exec go if they want to leave? Facebook? As a good faith argument, maybe she saw a personal growth opportunity in the position and also a good-for-the-company growth opportunity to use her experience tap into more talent and/or more of the market. It's easy to stay for a while, even years, if you think you might make things better for yourself and others.

As an outsider, when I got to the part about Ellen Pao I had to think a bit broader. When she was CEO of reddit, in 2014-2015, reddit was practically turning into Ron Paul supporters club. Many users backlashed against her and her decisions (main being banning harassment and revenge porn) and she stepped down. Looking back from 2021, those decisions sure seem good.

I appreciate that you said "Totally prepared for alternate views and am not married to this PoV." It's the main reason I responded after reading the article.

What’s been interesting through the years on the forums that I’ve found to be strange is that as the Internet social media landscape became “free” services that have terrible, low effort, low quality content and users as a rule, SA’s model of having users pay to post is becoming more of a better model to help avoid the poor incentives of most companies to demand more of users’ attention. The posting quality for users that still post in the technical sections is incredibly high as a rule when most other communities tend to need a lot more attention to curate the content. So in an ironic sense, Something Awful is an irony to me in that it’s actually now some of the better community created content on the Internet.

I’d rather have sites more like SA than more Reddits, Twitter, FB, etc. that is and it’s a bit of a pity the business model never really panned out at scale.

> I think it's extremely imported to come up with an alternative to the existing centralized systems; which I believe primarily exist in order to mitigate spam.

I think spam and abuse are definitely significant problems.

The centralized systems are like medieval walled cities.

They exist because, for an average individual, there is no practical way to live outside their walls.

It's difficult to run your own email server. But, while the technical challenge may be difficult, the greater difficulty is in preventing your email server from becoming a bot in a spam network.