Charlie's notebook

Swearing in Hindi

I have no reason to swear in Hindi, and I don't think anyone has ever sworn at me in Hindi, well, maybe under their breath so I didn't notice, but someone influential seems to think swearing in Hindi could be a problem at 7 Cups.

The context for remarking on this is a discussion from August last year that was rekindled last week: The line between safety and insanity +a little bit extra

To amuse myself yesterday, a cold, damp and depressing Sunday afternoon here in England, I had a look for recent changes to 7 Cups' chat censor. I had come across some data from about a year ago for comparison.

In the last year, as far as I can tell, no more words and phrases have been permitted in chats—anything that was banned a year ago is still banned.

For example, this means weirdness such as the following potential offsite contact violations hasn't been fixed:

"Let's talk on Google Hangouts." PERMITTED
"Let's talk on Google Hang_outs." CENSORED
"Let's talk on Google H@ngouts." PERMITTED
"Let's talk on Google H@angouts." CENSORED
"Let's talk on Google Duo." PERMITTED
"Let's talk on Google Meet." PERMITTED
"Let's talk on Zoom." PERMITTED
"Let's talk on Skype." PERMITTED
"Let's talk on Talkspace." CENSORED

And:

"I didn't want my boss to overhear me applying for another job." CENSORED

(I leave working out why as a challenge for the reader.)

Links to the secure, confidential image sharing service, Unsee, are banned. Too secure and confidential? Seems ideal for screenshots, while 7 Cups continues to insist on screenshots.

As far as I can tell, no additional English words and phrases have been banned in the past year.

So what's new?

At some time in the year 44 Hindi words and phrases were banned…sort of.

The big problem is that there are no standard English-alphabet spellings (transliterations) for Hindi, and 7 Cups only censors a few of the possible English spellings, not the many others.

For example, भादवा is PERMITTED. In English it literally means pimp, and the English word is also PERMITTED.

Google Translate transliterates it as either bhadwa or bhaadava, and both of these are PERMITTED. So are the spellings bhadva and bhādavā. But if you happen to write it as bhadava, that spelling alone is CENSORED.

It's the same with many of the others. One or two possible spellings are censored. All others are permitted. The literal translation into English is sometimes permitted, sometimes censored. It's a mess.

To summarize, anyone who has been submitting the Censor Updates form to request improvements to the chat censor in the past year seems to have been ignored, except that swearing in Hindi using just a few of the possible English spellings is now censored.

Charlie

Fun with emoji

An emoji picker has appeared in chats (and in chatrooms, presumably). Predictably, it has some weird features.

Emoji are problematic anyway, because they look different on different platforms. Sometimes an emoji looks fine on your device but when you send it to someone else it doesn't show up at all. Other times it might show up, but it's difficult to tell what the emoji means without copying and pasting it into a search engine.

In this forum I generally avoid emoji characters and use images instead. It's much more likely that readers will see the same image that I posted. And the emoji images I generally post have titles that you can see on a computer by hovering your mouse over the image. On a mobile device a long press on the image might reveal the title (but not all mobile browsers implement this). Here's an example:

In the rest of this article I've posted emoji characters. I have no idea what they will look like to each reader of the article, and they don't have titles.

Search

In the new emoji picker, the search doesn't work well on mobile devices because it tries to search for a capital letter, unless you are careful. For example, it cannot find Smile because the 😄 emoji is named smile.

Worse, some emoji have incorrect names, making them even more difficult to find. For example, Face Savoring Food 😋 is misnamed yum.

Compatibility

Compatibility with existing emoji is poor. Previously, 14 emoji were supported. All of them are still available to type as text.

For example, you can still type <3 and get a red heart: ❤️

But the red heart is missing from the new emoji picker. You can have yellow, blue, purple or green, but not red!

Smiling Face with Horns 😈 3:) is also missing from the picker, which only has Angry Face with Horns 👿.

Frowning face ☹️ :( is missing. If you search for frowning you'll get Frowning Face with Open Mouth 😦 instead.

Nerd Face 🤓 8) is missing.

Crying 😢 is misnamed cry. Kiss Mark 💋 is misnamed kiss. Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes 😊 is misnamed blush. However, Flushed Face 😳 is also in the picker. If you search for blush you'll get the wrong one.

More weird names

There are too many weird names to mention them all. Some of them are obsolete names from early versions of Internet standards. Here's a selection.

Grinning Face with Big Eyes 😃 is just called smiley. If you search for big eyes you won't find anything.

Face Blowing a Kiss 😘 is called kissing_heart.

Face with Tears of Joy 😂 is just called joy.

Loudly Crying Face 😭 is just called sob.

Person With Skullcap 👲 is called man_with_gua_pi_mao. (A guā pí m o, 瓜皮帽, is indeed a type of Chinese skullcap).

Police Officer 👮 is called cop.

Pile of Poo 💩 is called hankey (after Mr Hankey in the cartoon series South Park).

And so on.

Limited selection

The new picker only supports a limited selection of 628 emoji from the several thousand that are available, and those 628 are not the most useful ones.

For example, the picker has various Japanese signs, like Japanese “Vacancy” Button 🈳 (misnamed u7a7a) and Moon Viewing Ceremony 🎑 (misnamed rice_scene), but it doesn't have the more commonly used Clown Face 🤡 or Check Mark ✔️.

No favourites

Well-designed emoji pickers remember your favourites, because most people only use a few emoji over and over again. This picker doesn't.

Overall, I think this is a poorly implemented feature that I haven't ever noticed anyone asking for. Mobile devices have better emoji pickers built in, and for people who use a lot of emoji on computers, a browser extension is a better solution. The one I use is by JoyPixels, and I still prefer it to the 7 Cups attempt.

Charlie

Harvesting phone numbers

A survey claiming (misleadingly) to be an "experience survey" appeared in my notifications. The introduction said:

We're a group of Carnegie Mellon students working with 7Cups to improve your overall experience on the platform. This survey should take less than a minute and all responses are anonymous!

The survey had only one question:

One issue we are looking to address is preventing banned members from creating multiple accounts to continue harassing members of 7 Cups. To combat this, we are considering verifying phone numbers to prevent members from continuing to create accounts. Phone numbers would never be shared, and would only be used for the purpose of preventing a member from creating multiple accounts to harm the 7 Cups community.

How comfortable would you be sharing your phone number with 7 Cups to increase account security?

I replied:

Not comfortable

In the comments section I added:

If 7 Cups introduces this, I will volunteer somewhere else where privacy is respected.

Preventing harassment

I understand that there are members who harass other people, and when they are banned they sometimes create new accounts. This is reasonably easy to prevent without violating everyone else's privacy by demanding our phone numbers, but 7 Cups has always resisted developing the platform so that it serves members and listeners better.

The key to understanding how to prevent the problem is in the phrase: "to harm the 7 Cups community". That is simply paranoia. Members (and listeners) who behave in ways the community finds undesirable almost all do it because they have treatable mental illnesses, or possibly neurodevelopmental disorders that can be managed. Their intention is not "to harm the 7 Cups community"! Stigmatizing them by recording their personal details and then banning them is not a solution in line with our mission.

A far better way would be to redesign 7 Cups in order to manage the risk. Understand that, for example, some people suffer from bipolar disorder and are manic today. Don't ban them for that! Direct them to listeners who are trained to deal with mania. Yes, we would also have to do that apparently unthinkable thing: improve listener training.

Understanding the resistance

Strange to say, this policy of resisting positive change was sort of confirmed officially in the podcast we learned about recently. The host of the podcast, Justin Kan, tried to have a conversation about talking to customers (at 1:06:44):

Like, one of the big values in YC companies is, like, talk to your customers, right?

But Justin's question was ignored. The response to it was a complete change of subject:

I think it’s excellent to have your values down and have them be real, like real, like actually real, and then have your customers, you know, or your users, or for, in our case, our community, like, they can really call you on it if it’s not real.

What if…

What if this ill-conceived scheme to harvest phone numbers goes ahead?

If it goes ahead I plan to leave 7 Cups and volunteer in a similar role with an organization that respects privacy. (In fact I made this clear once before in another thread that I can't find now.)

Charlie

Lines and spaces

It's well known that 7 Cups bans certain words and phrases. Now 7 Cups has banned certain lines and spaces. The reason for this is not obvious. Indeed, it's not obvious that there is a reason at all.

For example, the space and the blue line at the left of a quote are now banned:

Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

And the line above my signature…

Charlie

Smarter Faster Better

With this terrible, terrible title, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business, I would never have read this book if it hadn't been recommended to me. The title makes it look like just another of the seemingly millions of self-improvement books written by wannabe self-improvement gurus hoping to make a few sales in airport lounges.

But in fact the author, journalist Charles Duhigg, is a great storyteller who tells great stories about people who achieved success (mostly) and failure (occasionally), grouped into eight chapters to illustrate some powerful ideas about what works in life.

To show how motivation works, for example, there are stories about a business tycoon who recovered from crippling apathy, and about how the US Marine Corps motivates new recruits. The scientific basis of motivation, it turns out, is being in control and making meaningful personal choices. That's just the opposite of what you might think if you were trying to motivate someone.

Every chapter contains surprising conclusions like that. Successful teamwork, for example, turns out to depend on psychological safety, "a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up." This conclusion is based on research carried out at Google, on research into medical errors in hospitals, and on the team that created the TV show Saturday Night Live:

"Managers never intend to create unhealthy norms… Sometimes, though, they make choices that seem logical, like encouraging people to flesh out their ideas before presenting them, that ultimately undermine a team's ability to work together."

A chapter on maintaining focus is illustrated with the detailed (and harrowing) reconstruction of a plane crash in which hundreds of people died, and then another reconstruction of a plane landing after massive mechanical failure with no injury to anyone. The crucial difference was the pilots' ability to focus on what mattered.

There's much more: how to set goals, solve problems together, manage uncertainty, create new ideas, and turn data into knowledge.

Many of the lessons from this book—perhaps all of them—could be applied at 7 Cups. For that reason I'm adding it to my Listeners' Reading List.

Charlie

It's a long time since I took a break

I'll still look in from time to time.

Charlie

Profile editing, huh?

I'm back from my break, only to find I can't restore my profile because someone has taken away the Source editor in Settings. Who is it who goes around 7 Cups breaking things? Surely it can only be Mordac, Preventer of Information Services!

Fortunately Mordac failed to do it properly, and restoring my profile was an easy hack.

Charlie

Chaos Monkeys

I greatly enjoyed this wild autobiographical tale by Antonio García Martínez describing his adventures in Silicon Valley, first as CEO of a tiny startup, which soon disappeared when it was bought by Twitter, and then as a product manager at Facebook.

His startup, AdGrok, began at Y Combinator in the Summer of 2010, just like 7 Cups did three years later. Many of the situations he describes, both at AdGrok and Facebook, have fascinating parallels at 7 Cups.

The Chaos Monkeys of the title are the tech entrepreneurs:

"society’s chaos monkeys, disruptors testing and transforming every aspect of our lives, from transportation (Uber) and lodging (AirBnB) to television (Netflix) and dating (Tinder)."

Obviously 7 Cups, not so much.

It is barely a spoiler to mention that the author ends up leaving it all behind, first to write his book, then to sail around the world. To write his book he retreats to a small island, where living in a genuine community provides a new perspective on social media:

"Social media has turned preening moral vanity, along with online mob repudiation and trolling, into everyone’s favorite hobby. But in a real community, words have consequences, and must either be followed by actions or require redress in the real world. On Twitter, you don’t have to see that guy you called an idiot in the line at the local grocery store, or in the school line to pick up your kids. In a real community you do, and that restrains behavior. The net effect is that while this faux community might be tearing the world apart socially and politically, in the real version democracy thrives."

A fun and at the same time thought-provoking book. It's going in my Listeners' Reading List.

Charlie

On a Break I am on a self-care break, probably until the end of October. No new live chats until then.

My apologies to anyone using the enhanced editor, which still doesn't work for editing (moderating) existing posts and has some other bugs too. I might be able to work on it while I'm on a break, but I can't be certain.

Feel free to message me as usual, but I might not be able to respond quickly.

Charlie

Forum changes

As a result of recent changes 7 Cups made to the forums, the unofficial taglist service stopped updating. I think I've fixed this. Please let me know if there are further problems.

The instructions for using taglists will still mention the "Post to Thread" button, which no longer exists. The Reply button in the top post should always be used, to ensure that requests don't get lost in the other replies.

The enhanced editor is partly fixed, but editing posts is still broken. I plan to look into this some more at the weekend. The latest version, as usual, is here: Forum inline editor

Charlie