You Make Money With That?

As folks who know me know, I work from home.  “From home” often means “not from home, from someplace else which has wifi connectivity.”  One of those places is McDonald’s.  I was working in the McD’s on 44th near Clyde Park, doing my thing, whatever, when this ostentatiously well dressed guy sporting a couple gold rings approached me and said, “Hey, you make money on that thing?”  I said yes, I sure did.  He was thrown off his stride by that statement.  When he un-confused himself, he launched into a brief spiel about this business thingy that he was involved in and recruiting for, and which he wanted me to know was not a pyramid scheme.

I nodded and smiled; after a few minutes he gave me a card with his name and a website and a guest password I could use to get in and look around.  I haven’t gotten around to it yet.  I think I still have the card.  You know, just in case I want to make money with my computer doing some kind of business which is described only in very vague terms but is not a pyramid scheme.

OK. Back to making money.

Reddit

Thinking aloud about reddit.
I have a love-hate relationship with news site reddit.com. It contains a ton of interesting links, many of which I’ve reposted here.  It is a reliable place to read about new appalling things done by the government, and to read about offbeat programming languages like Python and Lisp (both of which have at different times been used to run the site itself).

The site has the wonderful feature that you can moderate sites up — like “digging” on digg.com — or down. Somebody posts something stupid, you can hit the thumbs-down arrow and nuke the guy’s karma.  Post something awesome and you get karma.  (What is karma good for?  Nothing, really.  It’s just a number.  It doesn’t affect you in any way except as a badge of honor or something.)

The “new appalling things done by the government” thing is maybe a bit more than I need right now.  I’ve been getting political on the blog again, which is a danger signal to me that I’m maybe not feeling very well depression-wise, you know? There’s a lot of that on Reddit. (To be fair, there’s a lot of that all over the news too.) I could limit myself to just the Programming Reddit I suppose… But part of the fun of Reddit is that you get all kinds of stories on it.  JUST the programming — well, for that I’d just go to lambda, the ultimate weblog. In fact, many highly rated links on reddit are things I saw two years ago on lambda, the ultimate.

I’ve played the “submit links to reddit” game and accumulated some karma.  I never know though what’s going to be wildly appreciated and what will be loathed. Watching my karma take hits from people who don’t appreciate my link-posting GENIUS is a little stressful. Watching similar topics come up again and again on the front page — even when I might have appreciated those topics the first half-dozen times –  is way tedious.

But absorbing.  It’s like a video game you can’t win, you can’t even get past this one level, but you can’t quit either.  Grr.

I think I may have to cut myself off.

Will I have to wean myself from Metafilter too?  They have a lot of stuff that depresses me too.  And they have that hateful habit of posting sentences where every single word (if not every single letter) is a different link.

Maybe I’ll have to go back to bOINGbOING…   Or pick up Table of Malcontents… Or even (I’m not proud) fark.com. I dunno.  I learn a lot of neat stuff from Reddit’s links, but man.  The voting, the karma, it’s a bunch of nonsense that sucks you in. I don’t need that.
Oh, btw — concerning Digg, this is the secret formula:  digg : reddit  :: slashdot : kuro5hin.  Just so you know.