Laxaria

As another example, the Path of Exile community moved off onto their own community-run wiki domain, but the Fandom variant (which is woefully out of date) continues to be one of the top results when searching for a PoE wiki page.

In some regards that's inevitable, but it clearly shows what Fandom's priorities are.

Fandom purchasing Gamepedia and moving everything onto Fandom Wikia was so awful. I'm so upset the Dota2 Gamepedia wiki is now on Fandom, and I'm sure many other communities feel that way for their own community run and community led wiki pages.

Not that I was particularly warm about Gamepedia either, but at the bare minimum I didn't feel like the page was all ads and no information. Fandom wikis are explicitly set-up to drive as many eyeballs as possible onto advertising and engagement, and are holding actually relevant information for the visitor as a hostage to get those eyeballs. It's information masquerading as a social media site.

The Runescape community convincing Jagex to cover the hosting costs and moving all their wiki pages to their own set-up has been such a huge boon for their community. It is super unfortunate that for many communities, the community-led wiki pages are a huge trove of information but the companies/games/groups these communities coalesce around have shown little to no interest in merely just financially supporting the endeavor.

TVTropes is what I sink my time in when I want a good laugh and have absolutely no motivation to do anything but doomscroll through text. Pick a favourite series you don't mind spoilers on and read through all the tropes for a good laugh or to reminisce over what was good or bad about the series.

The key difference between manifest V2.0 and V3.0 with regards to uBO is in V2, the extension has direct access to the browser's process in making web requests and can make direct changes to those requests. V3 instead requires the extension to declare a list of urls and the browser will act on the extension's behalf. This is a very simplified explanation that isn't in any meaningful depth and misses a ton of nuance.

The outcome though is V3 makes it significantly more difficult for uBO to achieve its goals for its users. It is a downright and explicit downgrade, and when Chrome fully moves to Manifest V3.0, uBO's ability to serve its core functions will likely be diminished.

The Osaka sequence overstayed its welcome, more so when it's meant to be an establishing introduction for its characters but not all of them get seen after the sequence ends.

The long panning shots, the stunts, the combat choreography, a lot of that is pretty cool, but visual eye candy is not the only thing that makes a movie and the film falls a bit flat as a result.

Probably not the intended audience for it.

What a thinly veiled way to insinuate that she won't participate in good faith, given that good faith participation intrinsically means recusal.

The "numbers" are called Discriminators and served a variety of purposes:

• Identity wise it meant multiple people could have the same username text. If you wanted to be John, you could be John#6754 and someone else could be John#1298 and both of you could be John! Now there is only one john.
• It provided parity. EVERYONE had it, therefore no one is better or worse than other excluding particular number combinations. If you were John#5363 and hated the discriminator, well everyone else had one, versus someone behind john, and then someone having to be john_87 because there's already a john

You argue that being able to use effectively the same username everywhere is a good thing. The unfortunate reality is the rollout Discord used alongside the limited number of permutations (combinations?) of short usernames makes this impractical. For example, a friend largely goes by a 4-char username, and the switch by Discord means they can't use that 4-char username on Discord anymore. It's easy to say like "well, just add something to the end", but that is exactly what discriminators did.

At the end of the day the benefits weren't as compelling as the losses (it would suck to have one's identity impersonated or username stolen, or now most folks with short usernames have to stop friend requests cause they are getting spammed with them, or the fact these accounts are valuable and can be sold).

It is understandable that some people don't really care about the matter and that's fine, but it doesn't make the frustrations others feel less important.

Right there is inherent inertial momentum with upvotes.

I'm still on the fence, because understandably the potential (and actual) for abuse makes downvotes very unproductive as a feature, but there are also situations where they are very powerful.

It takes significantly more effort to refute a wrong position than it takes to make it. Downvotes serve as an explicit balancing point against that in ways that a well written response does not. Additionally, nested comments usually get less upvotes than their parent comments.

It is what it is I guess.

Reddit doesn't (at least as far as I know) store a history of edits, so what is saved on the database is what your comment literally is. The reason people suggest overwriting comments is because the comment itself has value (for a variety of reasons), so overwriting the comment with something valueless (in the sense that it has no value for Reddit) is better, so the database itself is updated with that valueless comment.

After that whatever you do with the account is up to you.

I in general find lay people have a very weak understanding of how research functions. This is a very generic statement, but everything from IRB processes to how science is reported in manuscripts and everything in between tends to be a quagmire, and this is absolutely with recognition that some of this process is mired in red-tape, bureaucracy, and endless administration.

For example, there's a long-standing idea that IRBs are the gatekeepers of research. In reality, any IRB worth their weight (and really, all of them are for compliance) should be viewed as a research stakeholder. They should be there to make research happen and let scientists do the best research they can with the minimal amount of harm to participants. Sometimes this involves compromises, or finding alternatives that are less harmful, and this is a good thing.

Another common example is scientific studies are frequently criticized about sample sizes. Yes, a lot of research would definitely benefit from better sampling and larger samples, but narrowly focusing on sample sizes misses a lot of the other considerations taken for evaluating statistical power. For example, if one wants to know whether beheading people results in injuries incongruent with life, one doesn't really need a large sample to come to this conclusion because the effect (size) is so large. Of course more numbers help, but past a point more numbers only add to the cost of the research without measurably improving the quality of the statistical inferences made.

In this topic about IRBs, A/B UI/UX testing for the set-up that Reddit did it, and being run out of an university setting? That's hyperbole. I don't like businesses doing aggressive user-focused testing without informing the user, particularly with UI/UX changes I dislike (looking at you too Twitch with your constant layout changes), but at the end of the day these kinds of testing generally don't ever rise up to the threshold needed to be a particularly meaningful blip. Insinuating otherwise vastly mischaracterize how research is done in formal, structured settings.

Reddit violates ALL of these example rules.

No.

minors use reddit and there is no indication that reddit experiments exclude them. Minors are not prohibited on the site and there is no tracking of age other than the vague “show me NSFW results” checkbox

Strictly speaking, COPPA prevents Reddit from collecting information from users under the age of 13. While there are no explicit guarantees that a person on the site isn't 13 or older, and also recognizing that age of majority is typically 18, then in a general literal sense yes there are minors involved, in so far as the activity discussed is research.

intervention is not brief, has lasted a week or more

A research intervention is an intervention in so far as it intersects with the participant. A drug trial that lasts for 10 weeks total but only gives doses to participants for 2 weeks (and then results monitoring during, 2-weeks post, and 4-weeks post) does not mean that the "intervention" lasts 10 weeks.

In most practical terms, running an experiment for 2-3 weeks is very common to collect sufficient data. However, the intervention itself may be quite brief (for example, a short 45-minute interview with a participant would be the "intervention" for a 2-3 week long study interviewing physicians on their concerns about organizational capacity for change).

For a repeated measures experiment, the intervention usually involves the actual experiment encounter and maybe some additional time between them.

For the case of A/B testing, usually the "intervention" in this case is the A/B test as it applies to the user at the moment, and not the entire duration of when the testing is taking place for all participants.

interventions having harm

Once again, to iterate, you are equating the inability to view the content of a website without logging into an account with such substantial emotional and psychological harm that is comparable to being verbally derided in public, for a week, shamed on a public channel, and/or comparable situations. You are not going to convince an IRB that being able to view the content of a website without logging in, then subsequently going to a different community to ask for help, and then hypothetically ruminate about the matter for weeks, is going to exceed the kind of everyday ordinary harm to qualify a risk level above minimal risk.

the subject was deceived and was definitely not informed prospectively that deception may take place, neither has agreed to it; subject was not informed even retrospectively other than some random admin suggesting they were part of an experiment after they complained online; for that matter the subject was not informed that an experiment would be taking place at all and has never agreed to anything, other than possibly in the ToS.

Deception goes beyond simply "lying" to or "not informing" the participant. Duke University gives some good considerations here:

• If, in order to counter the demand effect, researchers cannot disclose their research hypotheses, the failure to disclose is not considered deception.
• General statements about the purpose of the research, as well as a full description of the research tasks and activities, should be provided in the consent form. (emphasis, should, not must).

Additionally, a waiver for utilizing deception in research has to:

1. The risk must be no more than minimal.
2. The rights and welfare of the subjects will not be adversely affected.
3. The research could not practicably be carried out without the waiver. This does not mean that it would be inconvenient to conduct the study without the waiver. It means that deception is necessary to accomplish the goals of the research.

Satisfying #1 and #2 in an UI/UX A/B testing regime that Reddit used here is pretty easy. You are specifically hung up on the implicit harms involved but in reality they are of no particular serious concern.

#3 is particularly interesting, because effectively what that means is you need to demonstrate deception is necessary in experimental design for the experiment to actually work. If you are seeing whether a person will interact more with a site or not if they are blocked from seeing content without logging into an account, telling them ahead of time could already bias the outcome. This is in very specific consideration that #1 and #2 are already met: being unable to view a website without logging into an account is not anything more than minimal risk. And even then, it is important to emphasize that the failure to disclose the research hypothesis to counter the demand effect is NOT deception.

The kind of UI/UX A/B testing Reddit employed in this specific instance is absolutely not equivocal to the Asch conformity studies.

To be very clear here, when YOU operate under the belief that being unable to view the content of the website, then posting about it elsewhere and potentially being ridiculed for it is sufficient of a bar to meet beyond minimal risk, then we have very different definitions of what "minimal risk" entails. Since we cannot come to consensus on this particular topic, and instead you've gone so far as to associate this kind of activity's harm of equivalent to the Asch conformity studies is frankly ludicrous.

If we cannot agree on this, then so be it. However, I will repeat (with added finality): YOU running the same A/B experiment Reddit is doing on an university-sanctioned website will NOT get you run out of the university by the IRB. In a real-world scenario. you would likely discuss this experiment with an administrator or similar at your department, then maybe send an e-mail off to the IRB for any clarification, would likely have some back-and-forth, and then would ultimately receive a determination that it is exempt (at worst), or not considered human subjects research at all. I can see a few circumstances where such an effort might merit an expedited review, but to do this would involve some torturous twisting of the situation that could be easily avoided (for example, running this testing on a page that has instructions for performing the Heimlich maneuver).

The Asch conformity study experiments are absolutely not equivalent to doing A/B testing on a wide scale with regards to how users interact with a website when presented with a pop-up preventing further interaction without logging in.

I think there are two different kinds of blackouts here. Most subreddits have opted to fully blackout by going private, but some have instead decided to not take the subreddit private but instead prevent new submissions and instead have a stickied submission explaining why no new comments/submissions can be made.

Larger subreddits might prefer the latter because it allows them to have one submission rise up through Reddit's /r/all or /r/popular, increasing visibility. Going fully dark by going private doesn't easily elucidate the reason as well as having a single submission doing so, and does a decent job when a number of the exact same submission flood the front page and nothing else from those communities.

This isn't to condone what a particular subreddit is doing or not doing but mostly opining about some of the ways different communities are participating