Twitter Might Punish Users Who Tweet 'Learn To Code' At Laid-Off Journalists (reason.com) 418
According to a report from Reason magazine, Twitter users who comment the "learn to code" advice at journalists who just lost their jobs might be treated as "abusive behavior," which is a violation of the social media site's terms of service. The rumor comes from Jon Levine, Media Editor at The Wrap. From the report: The Wrap's Jon Levine said representatives for the social media company had backed away from the position they related to him earlier, which was that the phrase "learn to code" itself constituted abusive behavior. The new position seems to be that "learn to code" is not de facto harassment, but could be considered harassment if tweeted aggressively as part of campaign to intimidate a specific user, in accordance with Twitter's somewhat vague abusive behavior policy. In an email to Reason, a Twitter spokesperson said: "Twitter is responding to a targeted harassment campaign against specific individuals -- a policy that's long been against the Twitter Rules."
Last week, journalists from BuzzFeed, HuffPost, Yahoo, AOL, and others, were let go. BuzzFeed founder and CEO, Jonah Peretti, said the company "would reduce headcount by 15%, or about 250 jobs, to around 1,100 employees globally," reports The Guardian. "At the same time, Verizon said it would trim 7% of headcount, about 800 people, from its media unit, which includes HuffPost, Yahoo and AOL. The job losses followed sales or cuts at Mic, Refinery29 and elsewhere."
Last week, journalists from BuzzFeed, HuffPost, Yahoo, AOL, and others, were let go. BuzzFeed founder and CEO, Jonah Peretti, said the company "would reduce headcount by 15%, or about 250 jobs, to around 1,100 employees globally," reports The Guardian. "At the same time, Verizon said it would trim 7% of headcount, about 800 people, from its media unit, which includes HuffPost, Yahoo and AOL. The job losses followed sales or cuts at Mic, Refinery29 and elsewhere."
hmmm.... (Score:2, Insightful)
But it lets Trump abuse people all day long...
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It also lets people abuse Trump supporters all day long. See: literal death threats and inciting violence against MAGA hat kid just last week.
Re:hmmm.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nah we elected a con man. And it sounds like you've bought into completely to the con.
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Is it 'better the con you see than the one you don't' time?
Or did you like it when that all was happening virtually unopposed? Me, I like it when the philosophy I reject is being rejected and overthrown. Those that support that philosophy, though, even resort to direct violence in response. War? Molon Labe.
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Is it 'better the con you see than the one you don't' time?
Or did you like it when that all was happening virtually unopposed? Me, I like it when the philosophy I reject is being rejected and overthrown. Those that support that philosophy, though, even resort to direct violence in response. War? Molon Labe.
Agreed. Good thing the Justice Dept is taking apart Trump's organization one person at a time. If Trump wanted Hillary locked up, he should have hired her to work on his campaign.
Re: hmmm.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Youre confused. Trump isnt the one bowing to foreign dictators.
No, he only takes their word over the assessment of his own intelligence agencies.
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I miss sarcasm and irony tags, so ... you really believe that, do you?
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I voted for Hillary, so you can exclude me, and well, the majority of the people who voted.
"We" did collectively vote for Trump. Despite your personal vote, in a democracy, the winner is who we as a nation voted for. You may not like the result, but he is your President as the result of the election by the rules of the election. Had Clinton won, you'd surely be saying that "we" voted for her and that she's our President. Your bigoted hatred does not make the hypocrisy of your statements any less.
In your attempt to show your superiority, you're showing your complete ignorance. You show comple
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You only win the prisoner's dilemma by defecting as long as you play with someone who cooperates because he learned that this is actually the winning strategy. Once he notices you're defecting, he'll start doing the same, ending up in lower effectiveness for both of you.
I guess we're heading for shittier times.
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There are two good things about Trump: (1) his negotiating strategy appears to be more realistic, i.e. he's very combative and aggressive and (2) he's annoying all the right people.
LOL, Trump gets rolled in every negotiation he takes part in. How's that denuclearized North Korea thing working out? He is certainly combative and aggressive, I'll give you that.
And annoying all the right people? The Republicans really have made spite and resentment their political philosophy.
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Is this not the nation where "All men are created equal"? Ahem.
As long as they are not CIS-gender, white men... Or to the right of Mao or Stalin. Or eat meat. Or ever drove a truck. Or made a comment that could ever possibly make anyone feel uncomfortable. Other than that, yes - we're all equal. Especially if you choose to break 18 USC 1924 and are well-connected, politically - that makes you more equal than others!
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I'm sorry, do you need a safe space so you can talk about it?
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Hopefully you're just being facetious for a laugh, but it's hard to tell this day and age.
But to answer anyway: as far as I can tell, he wasn't shaking, crying, screaming at the sky, or seeking literal counseling. He simply stated the modern day situation as he sees it and pointed out some hypocrisies.
When 'progressives' seriously attempt to equate the two enormously different reactions to 'throw it back in their face' it's just beyond absurd, it's kind of the equivalent to "I'm rubber and you're glue" i
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Because he apparently doesn't like dudes who work with Communication & Information Systems.
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Shh, it's not nice to point out somebody's Hippocratic behavior unless its Trumps. You know, judging him on skin color, appearance, and abnormalities. Or so serviscope_minor would like us to believe. He only wants equality for *his* people.
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Funny how you think it's fine to mock oppression when it's happening to white men. I wonder how you would feel if someone started calling women and minorities delicate for complaining about being oppressed too. No, let's not kid ourselves, I don't have to wonder at all. You would be screaming "Racism!" and "Nazi!" so loud you would wake your neighbors.
But it's okay when YOU do it, right? Cause that's different.
And yet I bet your delicate sensibilities are triggered by something as mild as someone daring to say "It's okay to be white" in your earshot.
It's funny because white men have historically, and in the present, had advantages in society purely because of the color of their skin. Now that their dominant position is being encroached upon by women and people of other skin colors, some of them cry oppression. White men are not oppressed in American society; not by a long shot.
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Ah yes, the famous Whataboutism. Perhaps all people should be held to the same standard. Is this not the nation where "All men are created equal"? Ahem.
Bill and Ted said it best "Be Excellent to Each Other."
There's always time to start.
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In the new sequel they're going to revise it to "Be Excellent to Anyone Higher On The Oppression Pyramid Than You."
The Oppression Pyramid. Awesome - That is my new touchstone!!!
Wait..... I web searched - and it's real. Jezzuz H Kryste.
So many crazy humans - so few Chicxulub meteors.
Covenginton (Score:4, Insightful)
Tweeting "Learn to code" is harassment.
However, giving death threats to high school kids who are attacked by racists is acceptable.
Got it. Punishing people based on political views is acceptable.
Thanks liberals for letting us know how "tolerant" you all are.
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Tweeting "Learn to code" is harassment.
No, it isn't. The summary itself contradicts the flamebait headline:
representatives for the social media company had backed away from the position they related to him earlier, which was that the phrase "learn to code" itself constituted abusive behavior.
So tweeting "learn to code" is not harassment. Tweeting it a thousand times would be. Tweeting "have a nice day" a thousand times would be, too. Whatever else is or is not harassment, this is just /. flamebait describing a complicated circumstance in a trivial way and then claiming a trivial act is being punished unfairly.
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I weep for the future. "learn to code" is just good career advice. It's good advice for those already coding and those wanting to start coding.
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But it's bad advice to someone who has no aptitude or affinity to coding. We already have enough cargo-cult programmers that can do barely more than copy/paste code from stackexchange.
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ALL 8 year olds independent of whether it interests them or whether they think a dump is what they do in the toilet?
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"But it's bad advice to someone who has no aptitude or affinity to coding"
Fucking 8-year olds can learn some goddamned basic ladder logic and be programming conveyor lines for $60K a year. If adult journalists with a better education can't do that, then they're simply fucked.
I find it difficult to believe that you actually believe this. At least, I hope not.
Let's break it down, just in case you do... All 8-year-olds? Nope. Basic ladder logic as a (complete, holistic, everything-you-can-do) skill in demand enough to say that it's a viable on its own? Nope.
How about a little more? Would people with these... ahem... minimal skills make their way into the "non-conveyor-line" market? Probably. Do we see enough "Learn to Code in X weeks!"-type folks flooding the market? Yup. Assu
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I weep for the future. "learn to code" is just good career advice.
There are already programmers sitting around unemployed right now because it's cheaper to hire someone else. I don't think that it is good career advice. Going into psych is probably the best plan, there's a ton of people who want to be reassured that things aren't as bad as they really are.
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thousand times to same guy or different guys?
it's just solid advice..
Re:Covenginton (Score:4, Insightful)
So tweeting "learn to code" is not harassment. Tweeting it a thousand times would be.
Except they aren't banning people who are tweeting that one thousand times, they are banning people who are tweeting it once, which is a lot less than the number of harassing Covington tweets some people have made.
Re:Covenginton (Score:4, Informative)
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Isn't this a bit like a DDoS attack though?
Everyone is doing something that by itself *looks* innocent, but if you look at the aggregate for the receiver it is clear that it is not.
If they have already received 783 tweets with "learn to code", nobody with good intentions will send the same exact "career advice" again.
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You don't know that, because Twitter doesn't explain the precise reasoning behind the ban.
When you look at these accounts you inevitably find them flirting with getting banned over and over again until something finally got them booted, at which point they claim it was the most trivial thing they ever did and nothing to do with all the other shitposting.
Re:Covenginton (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead, I propose that simpler explanation is that Twitter bans people arbitrary, based on instances of snowflake meltdowns and reporting backed up by a hasty review by ideologically-driven moderators that results in very clear anti-conservative bias.
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Not from on-going monitoring, from prior user-submitted complaints. Maybe they have been banned or asked to delete tweets before, that kind of thing.
Why don't you go look through some of the people who threatened/demanded/doxed the Covington kids. Many of them have very long histories of abusive actions(open threats, doxing, harassment, stalking, etc) of other people, that have been reported to twitter and twitter has done nothing. The sad fact is you can without much trouble find user reports against those accounts where twitter "didn't find any ToS violations." All it really says is that the people who investigate these abusive cases are perfectly
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Consider the following hypothetical situation. In an alternative universe Twitter was invented during Jim Crow period and is controlled by "Southern Strategy" types. These people are using biased moderation, shadow banning and so on to enforce their agenda.
Two q
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Well time for a bit of reality. Why is tweeting, 'learn to code to Journalists mean', well, it wasn't that long back I was in Uni and was forced to do computing 101, talk about a gimme subject, well, for some. For the computer literate and plus 125 crowd easy for the rest, well, they were Liberal arts students and struggled and that was it for computer coding for them, oh they wanted too alright, just that they couldn't. Seriously the fake social justice journos, were not journalists at all, just screaming
Re:Covenginton (Score:5, Insightful)
People are being banned for tweeting "learn to code" just once. It's just a lot of people have offered the same advice. And not only to journalists.
And of course this meme didn't come from no where: it's the exact advice these journalists gave to laid-off coal miners a few years ago. So, it's fine when the left dishes it out, but banworthy when the left receives it.
Re:Covenginton (Score:4, Insightful)
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Liberals tend to be more intolerant than conservatives.
Your link neither shows that, nor claims to. It speaks only to political intolerance, i.e. intolerance of political views. But liberals are more tolerant of literally everything else than conservatives. Pay attention!
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In one instance, I fear I will be physically attacked and harassed. In the other, I might get some jeers and scowling looks.
Guess you were never a Top Gear [reddit.com] fan. The South has a long history of violence [wikipedia.org] which you're willfully ignoring, and their intolerance and violence persist to this day [rollingstone.com]. Are you a total idiot, or a useful idiot? There's no third option.
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There's actually a lot of evidence of those screaming for tolerance are the least tolerant. Take saying "Merry Christmas" as an example. Those that are offended by it are offended because they're intolerant of Christians. If you move to a community that is 90% Christian, you should expect that those people will be outwardly displaying their culture. Those that are intolerant of the culture they knowingly inserted themselves in, decide to call the majority intolerant for not giving up their own identities
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When trying to show that certain things are and certain things are not, there are only two possible starting points: Either assuming that nothing is until you show its existence, or assuming that everything is possible until shown to be impossible.
I would suggest the former starting point. Especially if religious, and twice so if monotheistic. Else you're facing the problem of disproving the existence of Ra, Thor, Allah, Krishna, Jehova, Hanuman, Baal Hammon, Toutatis, Xipe Totec, Ashur, Sol Invictus, ...
Of
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So please elaborate on the difference between a delusion, a cult and a religion, aside of the number of afflicted.
Imagine there was no Judaism (or Christianity for that matter), what would you say to someone who tells you that he believes that there is an invisible being that watches every step he does, has some rather bizarre rules to judge you by and will torture you for eternity after you die if you, say, eat shellfish, wear two different fabrics at the same time or eat a cheeseburger?
Re: Covenginton (Score:2)
'Thanks liberals for letting us know how "tolerant" you all are.'
Those people are not liberals. They are corporate progressives. They hate real liberals just as much as they hate everything else.
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Tweeting "Learn to code" is harassment.
Well, no. Even TFS admits that the headline is bullshit.
It can be part of a sustain harassment campaign, sure. Get thousands of followers to tweet it at the target. But on its own? No.
It's worrying that people can't see the difference between a genuinely helpful suggestion made in good faith and trolling. Apparently Twitter can, but TFA seems to be being obtuse to make a non-story into something.
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Get thousands of followers to tweet it at the target.
Do you know what a meme is? No one was coordinating this. Thousands of people just found the same joke funny. Journalists were telling laid off coal miners to "learn to code" just a few years ago, let's give them their own advice now. Karma is such a bitch.
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If it's just memes posted unprompted the fine, go ahead. They do kinda deserve it and it's completely fair. Wouldn't dispute that.
And neither would Twitter I think, given the response they gave in TFA.
Re:Covenginton (Score:4, Insightful)
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Tweeting "Learn to code" is harassment.
How about tweeting "Learn to write"? I swear, if I see another blog entry masquerading as "journalism" that starts with "HAY GUESS WAT?", I will punch someone, not an easy task for an habitual loner.
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*looks left, right, and behind*
*clears throat*
HAY GUESS WAT!!!!!
*Runs*
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Being willfully ignorant about an event that was part of a national discussion for days, and then lying about it on message boards is not okay.
The kids weren't racist, and they "Native person" attacked them (in the sense that he aggressively moved into their space . . . and getting in someone's face and beating a drum is agressive...as well as weird).
Manners, people! (Score:5, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
What? (Score:2)
I feel like I'm missing something here.
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
You probably need the context then. Recently an arseload of mostly left-leaning journalists from left-leaning websites got laid-off (specifically Huffington Post and that bastion of integrity and probity Buzzfeed). Right wing Twitter users thought back to when Obama told laid-off coal miners that they should just learn to code, and decided that what's good for the goose is good for the gander. They then proceeded to start mocking the laid-off journalists with the same advice. The left-leaning journalists got their feefees hurt and started whining to mummy Twitter to make the mean words stop.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether Obama said it or not, the sentiment has been around for a while.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/06/notes-from-the-asilomar-conference-on-beneficial-ai/ [slatestarcodex.com]
It's a hard-hearted lack of sympathy. Working class stiffs from Middle America get told to fuck off and learn to code because the coasts are eliminating their jobs with globalism.
When I was young, most people in the upper half were perfectly willing to respect those in the bottom half, and some people (leftists) practically worshipped them. Today, it is vastly different. Remarks calling working class "deplorables" and worse have become quite common today on the left. Leftists say that working class are racist, misogynistic, intolerant, etc. In reality, they are the bigots and not middle America.
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And when HRC talks about deplorables she's not talking about coal miners, she's talking about coal-rollers -> those douchebags who make their pickups extra pollutey so they can trigger liberals
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Assholes among us, eh? A single car making pollution? Tell me, how many in middle America get to craft industrial policies that harm the planet? How many wars did we start? That's all on you, assholes. And you're getting ready for another war in Venezuela. Good job, I'm sure that will totally turn out just as well as it did for you in Iraq.
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Maybe you're beefing with the voices in your head?
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It wasn't just political handwaving. It's been the standard attitude among economists all along. They've been cheerleading offshoring and other rapid deindustrialization with a message that boils down to people will get better jobs, like coding.
I mean, they're probably right in the long term / macroeconomic perspective (we can have the AI/unemployment/basic income debate later), but almost none of them acknowledged that most existing workers losing their jobs will wind up with worse employment or none at
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Yes, she was call all Trump supporters, roughly half the country, the Nazi sympathising fringe of the Alt-right. That was very much understood, and won't soon be forgotten.
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Abusive Behaviour (Score:5, Insightful)
They should just re-label "abusive behaviour" to "whatever we don't like, whenever we don't like it"
Trash journalists didn't seem to care when blue collar workers were losing their jobs. Besides, everyone should learn how to code, learn how to file their taxes, learn to cook, learn CPR...
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Besides, everyone should learn how to code, learn how to file their taxes, learn to cook, learn CPR...
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
— Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
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My favorite Heinlein quote.
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"They should just re-label "abusive behaviour" to "whatever we don't like, whenever we don't like it""
It's actually "whatever costs us money", which is why corporations are poor stewards without exception. Trump violates Twitter's ToS almost every time he twats (deliberate fraud, harassment, incitement of violence...) but they'll never terminate his account because it makes them more important. And all because they are beholden to stockholders.
Don't want the helpful advice? (Score:2, Funny)
Fine, learn to suck cock then.
Meanwhile feeding kids into woodchippers is AOK (Score:4, Insightful)
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Of course. Twitter is an arm of the prog leftard commie asshole movement.
If you want to sell that line, you'll have to explain why they haven't terminated Donald Trump's account for violations of the ToS. The truth is that twitter is amoral at best, they just want money, so they want views. Any tweet that makes them more money than it costs them is a good match for their corporate values.
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You already answered that. For as much virtue signaling as they like to do, they like money more, and Trump makes them a lot of money.
Virtue signalling doesn't speak to someone's political orientation, only to how they want to appear for public purposes. It doesn't mean what you think it means. There's nothing liberal about Twitter.
Also, because of a very poor court decision, it might actually be illegal for Twitter to terminate his account as it would be violating the peoples right to petition the government.
It wouldn't. The relationship doesn't go in that direction, only the opposite: Trump can't block people on Twitter because he's using it as an official communications medium. If he isn't, then it becomes irrelevant to that argument. Twitter can block Trump, but they can't let Trump block people.
These are the same people (Score:5, Insightful)
That told coal miners "Get a Uhaul and learn to code"
Seems they really don't like having that thrown in their face.
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That told coal miners "Get a Uhaul and learn to code"
Seems they really don't like having that thrown in their face.
I gotta say this very respectfully to everyone here:
If you shit your pants because someone tells you to learn to code, be it MAGA People or thase commie journalists, or get spun up by either.
The USA is ready to be invaded, and subsumed, because we've become a nation of utter weaklings, left or right. So many snowflakes - so precious, so fragile.
Probably all those phytoestrogenes we've been eating.
So everyone chillaxe, take a deep breath. Let's go get a beer.
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The fact some people feel entitled to basically a chatroom full of millions of people is pretty fucking amazing in my opinion, and not grounded with reality. I want a fair, inclusive service for everyone, but Jesus H. Christ, you don't even pay for this stuff... go make your own, it's the fucking Internet, you got booted from a chat room, grow up.
Insightful. Having been around the internet a log time, I'm used to taking all manner of abuse. It's a big world, with all manner of people in it, with all manner of definitions of abuse. As you note, there can be millions in a room. Maybe I'm not the sharpest pencil in the box, but I do understand that there will be a lot of different opinions, and different levels of civility. What-freaking-ever.
This whole article in Slashdot should be part of a psychological study. To me it just shows how horribly mes
Well Obama is fucked (Score:5, Funny)
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https://www.npr.org/sections/a... [npr.org]
Reporter coders? They'll just use stackoverflow (Score:5, Funny)
Reporters learning to code? Given the state of journalism today they'll just go to stackoverflow and copy the top 8 answers into the file and call it done.
"I don't understand why I can't use hashtags to search for code snippets!"
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Bbbbut they'll never get any badges that way
Probably Twitter HR department (Score:2)
"Might"? (Score:3)
It already has. There's documented [imgur.com] proof [i.redd.it] of it.
Rob
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Enough (Score:2)
Can we please route Twitter off the internet? It does nothing of value.
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And Facebook. And Pinterest.
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The real story here (Score:2)
I don't give a fuck about Twitter and its stupid fucking abuse policy. The real story of interest here is that multiple digital news outlets are laying off journalists left and right. They're nontraditional news outlets, but they are major news outlets nonetheless, and most of them are owned by companies who could easily afford to keep the journalists employed. For instance, I would guess that the journalists working for Verizon-- the parent company of several of these news outlets-- represent less than
Great. (Score:2)
Meaningless (Score:2)
If Twitter is going to continue their policy of selectively enforcing rules when the spotlight is on them... this is utterly meaningless.
OK, then... (Score:2)
2) Twitter loses more and more market share.
3) ???
4) ex-twitter employees join ex-journalist at school where they learn to code.
Tweeting "learn to code" is harrassment? (Score:2)
So ... these "journalists" (I'll use the term loosely here) were laid off for harassing people?
This programmer worked at the Associated Press (Score:2)
For seven years, I worked as a programmer at the Associated Press in Manhattan. I met a lot of journalists. It was obvious I wouldn't make a good journalist, because I wasn't interested in the stuff they were interested in. And it was equally obvious they would make poor programmers, for exactly the same reason.
How to learn to code (Score:2)
Code now has a few slight changes. Learn how to read a Code of Conduct (CoC) and what a CoC allows code to be used for in 2019 and beyond.
Select a computer code that is still in use. Has the code got a CoC that allows the results to still make a profit?
Do you have to show your code for anyone to copy and give away for free?
Dont learn a code that makes you give everything you worked on away for free.
Will the CoC make the code difficult to use and make a profit fro
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It's funny. This is the advice that these media supporters of woke corporations gave the people they laid off over the years for the last several years. Now that it's being turned on them, it's abusive. It's funny to see those who dish it out being so unable to take it.
Maybe teach those Lib Arts majors Assembly Language programming for starters, which would avoid getting into concepts like classes, structures and so on, and just deal w/ registers, memories, accumulators and so on
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Well, they already demonstrated that they can't handle irony, that much is at least true.
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I was thinking the same, if Twitter only punishes those that tweet this to journalists, where exactly is the problem?
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If they could assemble statements in the proper order they'd still have a job.
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So. Changed your meds again, did they?