I'd argue that it's equally as impossible to set up trigger warning policies.
While some trigger warning like the ones you mentioned are valid, the term has been perverted to include all sorts of things[0] where you could get in trouble for talking in public about insects or needles.
It's an impossible task to list out and educate people on everything that might possible trouble or offend. Once you open that door, there is no finite end to a list of triggers.
Many news outlets will say "Warning, the following story contains graphic imagery," and people don't think this is unreasonable; nor do they expect more specific content warnings in the future. This tells me it's possible to be considerate of common triggers while still drawing the line somewhere
> This tells me it's possible to be considerate of common triggers while still drawing the line somewhere
I agree it is, but right now it's very difficult to have the discussions necessary to draw those lines—supporters of trigger warnings only want to discuss the cases where they're clearly justified (fireworks & veterans) and pretend all uses are similarly valid, and critics of trigger warnings only want to discuss the cases where they're clearly not (slimy things), and pretend that all uses are similarly invalid. Determining where the lines should be drawn will be a long, complicated, painful discussion, but currently there's no way to have that conversation. If your opinion is somewhere in the middle, most internet commentators will lump you into the all-for or all-against group.
I agree it is, but right now it's very difficult to have the discussions necessary to draw those lines
When something is 1) subjective or very hard to measure and 2) used as an emotional bludgeon then then people are going to call "shenanigans" and even start to exhibit knee-jerk doubt about such things. Often, this is a tragedy, as the issues may well be both real and difficult to discuss.
The quality of such debate and discussion has been hurt by the "Eternal September" nature of online discussion. The internet gives everyone a voice, especially if you have time to waste. Hence, clueless Freshmen and middle-schoolers have disproportionately loud voices online.
That's a good point. Internet commenters tend to overgeneralize. Fortunately, those people aren't strictly needed for a solution. The only party who needs to listen is the content provider (in my example, the news outlet).
> Many news outlets will say "Warning, the following story contains graphic imagery,"
Since blood leads, this is, in my personal estimation, done primarily to increase immediate viewer count, not avoid - and thus retain in the more distant future - discomfiting sensitive current viewers.
> Many news outlets will say "Warning, the following story contains graphic imagery," and people don't think this is unreasonable
Yes, but students shouldn't expect that warning before a class on horror films. If you're unable to see graphic imagery, you should drop the class.
Similarly, students shouldn't expect to be warned about a discussion of slavery in a course about the American civil war. And you really shouldn't be able to get a degree in American history if you're unable to study the civil war.
No that's totally different. Broadcast news programs are often watched by small children. Parents reasonably want to shield children from graphic content which they are too immature to understand. However university students are almost entirely adults and thus expected to have the intellectual and emotional maturity to deal with the real world unfiltered.
> It's very difficult not to dismiss this as infantile.
Which is, in turn, why many people don't take these things seriously. Of course, perhaps there is a justification for "trigger warnings" and "safe spaces" in colleges, but the issue of whether those 1) belong in the classroom as opposed to elsewhere on campus, and 2) should be a feature of colleges at all, is completely derailed by things like this.
At the same time, in a country that values free speech people are allowed to have idiotic opinions. The fact that people are giving those opinions credence because they are "on the Internet" is probably closer to the issue.
Really? You don't think people are capable of being traumatized by pregnancy, death, or insects? Personal injury and insects are among the most common phobias and pregnancy should be fairly obvious as to why it's on that list (I don't want to elaborate because that could be traumatizing).
Maybe you should try having more empathy for oppressed groups and individuals rather than writing off anything you can't immediately connect to your own experience as infantile.
"Maybe you should try having more empathy for oppressed groups and individuals rather than writing off anything you can't immediately connect to your own experience as infantile."
None of the items I listed involve oppression or special subgroups of people. They are basic components of the human condition.
An inability to deal with the basic aspects of being alive is, ipso facto, infantile.
Pregnancy predominantly effects women. If I need to argue that women are oppressed, I don't think we can have a discussion. Phobias effect the neurodivergent and your dismissal of this is ableist.
You're inserting your own value system, via the word "basic." It's indisputable that anything is an "aspect" of "being alive," but whether something is too "basic" to warrant consideration is entirely your construction. It is reactionary to dismiss oppressed peoples' self-descriptions of their oppressions. It would be progressive of you to listen to the oppressed and learn how to be a better ally. Do you want to be reactionary and backwards-thinking or progressive and forwards-thinking? How do you want to be remembered?
Whether or not they can be traumatized is not the issue. If those things traumatize someone, they should be getting personal professional care, not wastefully burdening every institution and individual they interact with.
You don't need a trigger warning policy, necessarily. Just a culture that promotes being aware of common triggers. This notice goes in the opposite direction.
>It's an impossible task to list out and educate people on everything that might possible trouble or offend. Once you open that door, there is no finite end to a list of triggers.
It's not necessary to exhaust the full list. Analogously: it's impossible to list out and educate people on every form of negative externality, but we still have laws to address the big ones, and that helps.
What is really needed is the common sense and personal decision to get help with issues which are distressing so that reminders of those issues doesn't cause anxiety, stress, or a break-down.
>Just a culture that promotes being aware of common triggers.
I'd argue we pretty much already have this. Most people are aware of when a delicate topic is delicate and will treat it as such or avoid it, depending on the context. Trigger warnings seem to be a hammer in search of a nail, or more likely to me, something that was perhaps well intentioned at one point that is now just a means of attention seeking.
> While some trigger warning like the ones you mentioned are valid, the term has been perverted to include all sorts of things[0] where you could get in trouble for talking in public about insects or needles.
This is going to sound like a bad joke.
Fear of needles are more legitimate than might appear at first blush. Those of us with a needle phobia will experience a sudden drop in blood pressure, precipitating unconsciousness. In some cases this leads to death, making it one of the few phobias that can outright kill you.
I had the good fortune to undergo desensitization via allergy shots.
In a word, yes. Spend some time Googling around and analyzing backlink profiles in high spam areas (designer goods, pharma, etc) and you'll see tons of pages propped up by link spam ranking highly. If you are smart about it some automated link building tactics still work very well. It's not sustainable but most people take a "churn and burn" approach and just move on to a new domain if it gets torched by Google.
Usually the linking scheme is more creative then what this article shows though. More tiers and not just linking to every site from every other site. For super competitive terms this still seems like a short term strategy but for less competitive it may still be viable.
I think google has taken steps to stop this from an algorithm stand point but really I think most of there attempts are more marketing based. IE trying to scare people into not doing it anymore.
It also doesn't take exploiting sites to do it. You can just buy some aged domains and throw up wordpress.
"Media-fueled reviews typically violate our content guidelines. One of these deals with relevance. For example, reviews aren’t the place for rants about a business’s employment practices, political ideologies, extraordinary circumstances, or other matters that don’t address the core of the consumer experience."
Agree with their decision. Just because he's a heartless poacher doesn't mean he is a horrible dentist. Plus, there are a dozen or so others who work at the practice. If he goes to jail, this type of social media vigilante justice only harms the innocent.
This reminds me somewhat of reddit's DIY investigation into the Boston marathon bombings. The justice system works well but is slow. Social media vigilante justice is fast but not fair.
"Social media vigilante justice is fast but not fair."
That's because "social justice" isn't about justice. It's about punishing an entity with a real or perceived advantage, in order to appease a victim-mentality group. Righting any possible wrong or establishing true equality has nothing to do with it.
This is what happens when Google actively penalizes sites for something that is totally out of their control (links pointing to their site).
Granted, a large chunk of spammers know exactly what they are doing when they blast 1000s of links into a site, but what about the average webmaster? Or the small business owner who knows nothing about SEO and relies on a cheap "SEO firm"? Or somebody who isn't an SEO expert buying a new domain name?
I've worked on a number of link cleanups in the past and you are basically flipping a coin with Google even if you get all of the links removed. A lot of their search quality team is outsourced nowadays [1] and they provide very limited communication to webmasters who have been penalized outside of "You have violated Google's Webmaster Guidelines." Those who are very much in the public eye like RapGenius or JCPenney can easily recover through PR efforts (RG is ranking highly again for all [justin beiber lyrics] keywords [2]), but there are tons of people out there that are being run out of business by Google and have no idea what is even happening because they don't know SEO.
Low quality links used to only be discounted but since the first Penguin update they can now actively hurt a website. People who follow marketing/SEO closely are aware of all of this, but I don't think your average website owner has any idea.
Negative SEO is a very real thing. You can buy links off black hat forums that are specifically advertised to help knock off your competition.
It's the same with other social media as well. Want to get one of your competitor's fledgling Facebook pages banned? A service will spam out the page link in FB comments for a few dollars. Then when the FB mods come calling, the onus of proving innocence becomes your responsibility.
The ease with which you can spam and hack your competitors online is becoming a little frightening.
> Granted, a large chunk of spammers know exactly what they are doing when they blast 1000s of links into a site, but what about the average webmaster? Or the small business owner who knows nothing about SEO and relies on a cheap "SEO firm"?
There was a cheesy TV show several years back about a group of con artists, I don't remember the name but they had a sort of motto that applies here: "you can't con an honest man."
What exactly is our poor innocent small business owner trying to do by hiring a cheap SEO firm? He's trying to manipulate the google rankings in his favor, and away from what's objectively best for the searchers. Maybe he doesn't know google has rules about or how exactly the SEO firm is going to go about, but he's not an innocent victim.
Well, there is the classic W.C. Fields movie, "You Can't Cheat an Honest Man". It opens with a con where a cashier pretends to be distracted and acts like he is overcounting the change for a customer, who grabs the money and runs. But the ruse is to cover up the fact that the cashier actually short-changed the customer, who, if he had tried to protect the cashier from giving him too much change, would not have been cheated.
It's not limited to a small number of Gmail accounts. If you use some additional search parameters you'll see a ton of compose URLs showing up in the SERPs
Searching:
site:mail.google.com gmail inurl:?to=
gave me nearly 25,000 results. Some have subject lines too.
I am seeing some private emails with subjects AND body, apparently spam but sometimes half-written content like "Dear John,". Someone build a spam bot and left the links out for indexing?
I'd encourage everybody to actually test this on their site before assuming that no social sharing buttons will jump your conversion rate.
Part of the problem with having them on product pages is a lot of the times people aren't too eager to "Like" or share a product page...especially something like snow blowers or heavy equipment.
I've seen sites that sell products that _do_ earn a lot of social traction on product pages that like increase the conversion rate (the one I'm thinking of sells wall art/decals).
Spent a few minutes looking at the site. Looks to me like it was hit by Google's Penguin 2.0 update [1] that targeted sites that had low quality links pointing in to their domain (in particular inner pages).
Probably not the sisters fault, but the site has done a lot of reciprocal linking in the past which Google really frowns upon nowadays. There's prominent page on her site featuring some of those links: http://www.portraitquilts.com/info/links
She also has some links from pages that are selling or exchange links to spam/escort sites:
Again, probably not her fault. Google is doing their job but with so much misinformation about SEO and link building out there it is easy for people to accidentally get themselves in trouble.
The reason (noun).com domains are desirable is for SEO purposes. A few years ago, it was really easy to rank highly in Google for whatever keywords where in your domain name. For example, if you wanted to rank for [digital cameras] your best bet was to buy digitalcameras.com or some variation of that name.
As SEO has gotten more and more complex, exact match domains (EMDs) don't work quite as well anymore but are still a pretty big ranking signal [1].
For somebody worrying about long term brand appeal, an EMD might not make sense but for somebody launching a new ecommerce store or doing affiliate marketing EMDs are still a great asset to have.
EMD domains have lost most of their charm. Google's been giving them less and less preferential treatment over the past year. With a recent update some of my EMD sites took a big hit just for the EMD keyword - went from #1-#3 to second page.
On top of all these other changes, Google's "Knowledge Graph" and other Google-owned properties are taking up more and more of the search results than ever before. Google Shopping, YouTube, Google+ and Adwords all take up more screen real estate with every Google update and design tweak.
I see 20 links to ads and Google owned properties and only 2 to actual 3rd party websites. That's insane. (edit: That's above the fold, on page load...more 3rd party listings if you keep scrolling but most users don't)
It's not surprising that commercial queries produce ads.
"what are telescopes", "astronomy", "skywatching", "how to use a telescope", "telescope construction", and "telescope history" on the other hand are all web results and no ads.
Hand-picking a highly-commercial query and using it to generalize about all queries is kind of BS.
Looking at my past weeks worth of search history there are very few commercial intent queries. And when I was doing commercial intent queries (buying some rock climbing equipment) Google Shopping ads were actually pretty helpful in doing my research because it allows you to rank the results of different retailers together which is something I previously had to do by going to each individual site and checking their prices.
It misses sellers that haven't chosen to advertise on Google Shopping but all of my go-to online shops for gear (Backcountry, Moosejaw, REI, EMS, gearx, gear co-op, Campsaver, etc.) are doing it so it works quite well for me.
Google Shopping ads were actually pretty helpful in doing my research because it allows you to rank the results of different retailers together which is something I previously had to do by going to each individual site and checking their prices.
You browsed ADS, companies have paid to be included there and the price you paid in the end included the Google tax. A company that might have had the best price /shipping options maybe didn't want to advertise on Google or others included their most expensive /high margin items given the advertising cost. You got or will get screwed, because advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
Also, don't you agree that in general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines?
I know I was browsing ads. I said "Google Shopping ads were actually pretty useful". I also didn't say that was the only source I looked at. It just happened to have all of my go-to gear companies in a handy ranked list. Amazon isn't in that list -- I check them manually.
The prices are actually the same whether you get to the vendor through Google shopping ads or not. The company's prices in aggregate are affected by their revenue spent on Google advertising.
Whether I get screwed or not is my problem. I'm saying it was a useful tool to have in my research.
While some trigger warning like the ones you mentioned are valid, the term has been perverted to include all sorts of things[0] where you could get in trouble for talking in public about insects or needles.
It's an impossible task to list out and educate people on everything that might possible trouble or offend. Once you open that door, there is no finite end to a list of triggers.
[0] http://privilege101.tumblr.com/triggers.html