Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Granillo: “Rise of the Robot Umpires”
(www.baseballprospectus.com)
It troubles me that the world is just one big rip-off of Ferro Lad.
Read More...We’ve all thought it. Heck, many of us have even said it. Watching the exploits of Eric Gregg, Phil Cuzzi, Jim Joyce, and so many others, it’s hard not to believe it at least once. “We want robot umpires!”
A new project by Dan Levy is working to explore just what might happen if baseball ever heeded that call. Rise of the Robot Umpires is a graphic-style novel set in the not-too-distant future where the commissioner finally ...
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Page 6 of 28 pages
< 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 > Last ›If a list of the most ignored posters were published, I would expect them to take it as a challenge, rather than as a rebuke, and just ramp up the same behaviors that caused people to ignore them in the first place.
Well, if this is the kind of mail that Jim was getting, then I guess I don't blame him. I'd hate to put up with emails like this. I really don't understand this POV. Is it really so hard to not click on a link?
I think it's interesting/odd that Jim see's the site's purpose as an aggregator, rather than as a source of content. To me, the site has very little value as an aggregator.
The issue isn't how hard it is to not click on links, it's how much harder it is to find material of quality when people are intent on treating the site as their own personal pigpen.
And if the site has little value as an aggregator, it's because a bunch of people persist in pissing in the Cheerios and then have the gall to call their discharge milk.
Just admit the Beatles are overrated and we can all breathe easier.
Yeah, he must have been getting flooded with emails such as that. Maybe the path of least resistance for him is just to cater to the people who scream the loudest in private emails.
Sending complaint emails to Jim. Lol. I've never penned a single one.
What BTF really needs to add in are *slide shows.*
Pants are optional in the Lounge.
MUNB
Thanks, Shaker.
Honestly, it's a shame you don't drop into the Lounge more.
Yup. Extolling BBTF as a news aggregator is kind of like recommending Lincoln Center as a nice place to sit outside and eat lunch.
OTOH, I get 99% of my baseball news here. Come for the HOF discussions, get fascinated by whether you should recline an airplane seat, and stay to learn who's hit the waiver wire …
If I hadn't gone by BDC so long, I would totally change my handle to "Brain-Shatteringly Tedious Leprechaun" right now.
If it doesn't get posted here, I just assume it didn't happen.
Also, there's that guy over there who wants to kill me.
Just stay in a different ZIP code and you'll be fine.
Well, Sam, let's not kid ourselves - that hardly makes the lounge a unique place.
People already can easily do it.
And do do it.
You know how I do it? By barely participating in The Mainland. It's long past the point where I can assume, with almost 100% accuracy, that any thread in the hundreds of posts has nothing to do with baseball. I would also guess that the plurality of off-topic threads are dreary political bloviation festivals.
The Jim apparently doesn't want that, he wants people to be able to find relevant baseball discussion. It is his site and his prerogative, and I wish him well, particularly as his goals as site proprietor in this respect correspond to my goals as site jackal. As it is, I find more substantive discussion of baseball in one day of The Lounge than I find in five months on The Mainland.
And note the precision of my verbs -- "I find" is not the same as "There is". I'm willing to believe there's tons of great baseball discussion over here, it can just be cumbersome to navigate to it. Now, I understand how some may say the same of The Lounge -- but, of course, The Lounge is designed for off-topic, not for the baseball discussion. The fact that baseball discussion is frequent and meaningful is a nice bonus, but it is not by design.
Acknowledged and stipulated.
I honestly don't know where he lives, but if I ever travel there for work, I'm totally asking him out for a beer.
He also wants to kill people who make ranch dressing. You can't take his kill-lists seriously.
Believe me, I know that!
I guess I'm still not being clear enough. My question is, which more important to Jim: the number of times a page is served or the number of times someone clicks on a link to get there?
You say that now. But when the police discover the bodies of waiters who have wronged him lying all over his crawlspace, boy oh boy won't you feel silly.
I could see an intelligent baseball fan absolutely using BBTF as an aggregator, even though I do not.
I could also see lurkers (or even posters) who don't like the off-topic threads when they devolve into the "usual suspects" doing their thing again. I get that some of those usual suspects do not see how this would be a problem, but that's part of the problem, wouldn't you say?
I had one guy on ignore for a while because he came across as a complete and total jerk with nothing worthwhile to say, but after a while I took him back off and, sure enough, I realized that he also posts some great stuff. On the big political threads, I mostly just bail when they get out of hand.
I seem to be ignoring 5 people but they are all people who rarely post and are basically subliterate bozos who mistakenly wandered in from their local TV station's comments section. Some frequent posters annoy me a lot but I never thought to ignore them because they are not totally valueless.
Currently the threads on the Hot Topics board are discussing:
- student loans
- um, this thread
- how the Texas Rangers compare to historically great teams
- soccer
- the Rays and how they sometimes do things that go against their positive image
- basketball
- the Braves shortstop position
- QWERTY keyboards
- hipsters
- ground beef
- Eric Davis
- Sam Hutcheson
- the White Sox's problems
- J.R. Richard
This is not great for a baseball site, but only one of them is about politics so you're off by that metric.
I find the links posted with the clear intention of starting off-topic threads to be fascinating. It's clear that to be a community we have to talk about things other than baseball from time to time. We can't have the same discussion over and over and over.
And somebody is intentionally forcing us to have non-baseball discussions. It's working all too well, though not as well as you describe. If we could hide the ones we aren't interested in (QWERTY keyboards, Sam Hutcheson, basketball, hipsters, and student loans, for me), the site would be perfect.
truth.
BUT ICHIRO SO DOES BELONG IN THE HALL OF FAME
truth.
And he'd be a first ballot BTF Hall of Famer if he hadn't pizzened poor Clarine Seymour with all that bootleg hooch.
As Srul said earlier, they usually revolve around other stuff--music, movies, sci-fantasy books, GoT, food, drink, video games, history.
As to the people hungry for "great baseball discussions" who seem to think Ray and Andy and the 15 other guys who like to talk politics are preventing these from emerging, I would suggest that they do what I did when I wanted to talk about the NBA Playoffs and not hijack baseball threads in so doing: Find a sabermetric or other worthwhile article and link it, or, as I did and as was then done with soccer, College football, the NHL, and the NFL, post a thread with a suggested topic of discussion; like say recent studies on catchers' ability to frame pitches. If the discussion doesn't take off, bump it once or twice with a civil, insightful comment. That would take maybe 5-10 minutes--less time than it takes to
a) Complain about DiPerna and Andy multiple times in this thread
or
b) Fire off an angry email to Furtado, who is a very busy man
And would be a useful thing to do both now and after the site is re-organized.
Do you really think that if Repoz didn't post these things, people would stop talking politics? Hijackers hijack. Like scorpions, it is their nature. In the same way that some threads turn into movie discussions and music discussions, others will turn into political discussions, particularly with the very political animals who prowl this savannah.
I have removed some people from the list over time, but all in all, it works well for me.
- student loans
- um, this thread
- how the Texas Rangers compare to historically great teams
- soccer
- the Rays and how they sometimes do things that go against their positive image
- basketball
- the Braves shortstop position
- QWERTY keyboards
- hipsters
- ground beef
- Eric Davis
- Sam Hutcheson
- the White Sox's problems
- J.R. Richard
Links added today:
Trout
Diaz vs Umpire
Dugout
Matt Kemp's hamstring
BJ steal signs
SS change for Braves
Ripken makes burgers
Maddon joins the crowd
McCourt investigated
D-Backs gladly welcome un-convicted rapist
Cubs will trade everybody
Rangers Great
It has been 16 hours since the first thread went up today and no thread beyond the hotdog thread has more than 40 posts and most have half that or less. If people want to comment on baseball it is there. It has always been there but surprise people are not.
I'll say it again, I don't know why people cannot use the newsstand and why the "hot topic" section is such an important thing that it needs to be drastically altered. Do people need to be fooled into thinking something is a "hot topic" in order for them to check it out or post in it? We'll get more baseball talk if the 15th thread in hot topic is from yesterday instead of three hours ago?
WINNING!
<throws down microphone; prances off of stage>
So that's where Smitty went to.
Make a Dictionary with user IDs as keys and a List of blocked link IDs as values:
if (dict.ContainsKey(userID) && dict[userID].Contains(linkID)) continue;
You have ~25000 members, it seems. A small minority are logged in at any one time, and that's pretty small data you'd storing. Obviously I have no idea how much memory your server has or how much of it regular site operations consume but that doesn't seem like an order of magnitude above doable or anything like that.
For the record, I rarely if ever jump into an "long thread" until its lingered in Hot Topics for a few days to a week, has 300+ posts or so, and is clearly going on far beyond the life cycle of your standard "on topic" discussion. At that point, it's like Mayor Gordon has lit up the Rickey-signal.
He wants you back on the main site?
EDIT: It should also be noted that these threads generally evolve once nobody else has anything to say about the topic of the article. For instance, the "student loan" thread -- i.e., the Curt Schilling thread -- is something like the fourth story in a week on Schilling's company's problems. There's not much to say about that topic anymore.
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