Yeah. Looking at the old links, they actually link to these Discord-hosted images. Pretty sure the links broke because of that thing Discord did a while ago where they made Discord links expirable, to... prevent people from using Discord as an image-hosting service? Or something. (At least, I recall peripherally hearing something like this.)
Yeah, that was the motivation Discord provided for the decision. And it's fairly likely to be true, since, you know, embedding an image from discord on another site costs discord resources without providing any value - even indirect, like activity metrics - in return.
The way it works is that whenever a discord client loads an image (as in, you click on a channel, or scroll around, and it fetches the image from the server) it generates a special tag on the spot. You can't view the image without one of those special tags, and they expire after a few hours. So you can view on discord itself easy as can be, and you can load it up in a browser to look at it there if you choose (I often do that for large images), but after a few hours you'd have to go back to the client to load another special tag if you want to look at it again.
In theory, one could make a bot that scans through a discord client every few hours and updates the embedded images with the new tags, but ToS issues aside that's easily more inconvenient than just uploading to a site like imgur anyways.
What if the only planmaker is in on it? To be perfectly clear this is the exact behaviour which has pushed me out of the quest. The 'accepted' planmakers alone are disinterested in an idea, so they refuse to put it in a plan despite popular support. I'm far from the only person it happens to, but it appears I'm the only one willing to make a stink about it.
Here's the exact link to him and several of his friends discussing not understanding my ideas, but finding them ridiculous regardless and purposefully including every single idea the thread had outside of mine. Before you say 'but Twinn, you can always write your own plan!' I did. They got no votes. In part because the guy I blocked didn't block me, and frequently continued to trash talk my plans and ideas!
While I wasn't a direct part of either of the conversations you linked here to try and communicate the idea that your research path is being unfairly suppressed, as someone who does at least
read all of the discussion I do not agree with the notion that its unpopularity is the result of bad actor manipulation.
In my honest personal experience as someone who has honestly done my best to try and understand you, your explanations of seikyuu are unclear and do not feel like they have adequately considered their underlying assumptions. That is, to be clear, not necessarily a critique of seikyuu itself, it is a description of my personal experience attempting to understand you when you argued in favour of it, even and especially when you were attempting to be as clear as possible.
If, in the face of people saying your explanation is unclear and doesn't seem to make sense, your follow-up explanation is still unclear and doesn't seem to make sense, that's not a very heartening picture on my end. And again, this may not be a problem with seikyuu itself, maybe it really does work in the end and this is all just communication issues, but...
...but you can see how I might not want to talk more about seikyuu after the Nth conversation where I honestly try to understand what you're saying and fail yet again? You can see how I might not want to vote for a research plan that, in my personal experience, nobody has even been able to clearly explain to me? It may seem unfair that I think this, if it's perfectly clear in your head and this is just a communication issue, but at a certain point I really do have to cut my losses and save my spoons for other things. Especially these days, I have fewer and fewer spoons to spare.
I think this line of thought, or something similar to it, is shared across many of the other hivemind members who currently have reservations about seikyuu. After all, if I had been able to coherently grasp the explanation and underlying assumptions I would have been more than happy to help communicate that to everyone else. If someone else had been able to pare it down to its nuts and bolts, I also imagine they would have joined the effort to help dispel the confusion. That the confusion still exists speaks to me that others probably feel a similar way: after all these explanations and attempts to be clear, the topic is still murky and unclear, and that does not inspire confidence.
I know this is a sucky situation. You really truly believe this idea will work, but I ran out of spoons and stopped listening. It must feel like we never gave you a fair shake, and I'm sorry for that. But it remains true that, from my own honest attempts to understand your idea, I've failed to be convinced and don't have the energy to engage further. I was not pressured by Stompy or anyone else, explicitly or implicitly, into this position. I still would like to think that had we enough time and energy we could root out every ambiguity and every assumption until we're both completely on the same page, but in the end this was already my best effort.
And while I can't speak directly for anyone else, I feel others have similar stories too. I'm hardly the only person with limited spoons these days, after all, and just as I do not believe I have been pressured by anyone into this position I have not noticed anyone else be pressured into opposing seikyuu. It appears instead to me that those others have, for their own reasons that may or may not mirror my own, independently evaluated your idea and came to their own conclusions, just as I have.
www.forbes.com
