Yeap!

Crafting a subjectively terrible one-liner in a good way requires a good amount of experience. It's not enough to just cobble words together to have something that's "objectively" bad writing, but it requires putting together some really disparate ideas together into something that, for the most part, would absolutely not fly in most settings, but are absolutely hilarious in the right one.

The 2012 winner for example is a viscerally disgusting image, but it reveals so much about the character involved (and the narrator, if they aren't the same person).

TVTropes is what I sink my time in when I want a good laugh and have absolutely no motivation to do anything but doomscroll through text. Pick a favourite series you don't mind spoilers on and read through all the tropes for a good laugh or to reminisce over what was good or bad about the series.

Scrivener has been my default go-to but mostly because I've been attached to it for a while. I reckon there's a lot of better tools nowadays though.

You're asking about the same court who found standing for striking down the student debt thing?

in other words, this iteration of SCOTUS finds standing insofar as it fits their political whims regardless of actual legal grounding (unfortunately).

The Osaka sequence overstayed its welcome, more so when it's meant to be an establishing introduction for its characters but not all of them get seen after the sequence ends.

The long panning shots, the stunts, the combat choreography, a lot of that is pretty cool, but visual eye candy is not the only thing that makes a movie and the film falls a bit flat as a result.

Probably not the intended audience for it.

What a thinly veiled way to insinuate that she won't participate in good faith, given that good faith participation intrinsically means recusal.

The "numbers" are called Discriminators and served a variety of purposes:

• Identity wise it meant multiple people could have the same username text. If you wanted to be John, you could be John#6754 and someone else could be John#1298 and both of you could be John! Now there is only one john.
• It provided parity. EVERYONE had it, therefore no one is better or worse than other excluding particular number combinations. If you were John#5363 and hated the discriminator, well everyone else had one, versus someone behind john, and then someone having to be john_87 because there's already a john

You argue that being able to use effectively the same username everywhere is a good thing. The unfortunate reality is the rollout Discord used alongside the limited number of permutations (combinations?) of short usernames makes this impractical. For example, a friend largely goes by a 4-char username, and the switch by Discord means they can't use that 4-char username on Discord anymore. It's easy to say like "well, just add something to the end", but that is exactly what discriminators did.

At the end of the day the benefits weren't as compelling as the losses (it would suck to have one's identity impersonated or username stolen, or now most folks with short usernames have to stop friend requests cause they are getting spammed with them, or the fact these accounts are valuable and can be sold).

It is understandable that some people don't really care about the matter and that's fine, but it doesn't make the frustrations other few less important.

I in general find lay people have a very weak understanding of how research functions. This is a very generic statement, but everything from IRB processes to how science is reported in manuscripts and everything in between tends to be a quagmire, and this is absolutely with recognition that some of this process is mired in red-tape, bureaucracy, and endless administration.

For example, there's a long-standing idea that IRBs are the gatekeepers of research. In reality, any IRB worth their weight (and really, all of them are for compliance) should be viewed as a research stakeholder. They should be there to make research happen and let scientists do the best research they can with the minimal amount of harm to participants. Sometimes this involves compromises, or finding alternatives that are less harmful, and this is a good thing.

Another common example is scientific studies are frequently criticized about sample sizes. Yes, a lot of research would definitely benefit from better sampling and larger samples, but narrowly focusing on sample sizes misses a lot of the other considerations taken for evaluating statistical power. For example, if one wants to know whether beheading people results in injuries incongruent with life, one doesn't really need a large sample to come to this conclusion because the effect (size) is so large. Of course more numbers help, but past a point more numbers only add to the cost of the research without measurably improving the quality of the statistical inferences made.

In this topic about IRBs, A/B UI/UX testing for the set-up that Reddit did it, and being run out of an university setting? That's hyperbole. I don't like businesses doing aggressive user-focused testing without informing the user, particularly with UI/UX changes I dislike (looking at you too Twitch with your constant layout changes), but at the end of the day these kinds of testing generally don't ever rise up to the threshold needed to be a particularly meaningful blip. Insinuating otherwise vastly mischaracterize how research is done in formal, structured settings.

Reddit violates ALL of these example rules.

No.

minors use reddit and there is no indication that reddit experiments exclude them. Minors are not prohibited on the site and there is no tracking of age other than the vague “show me NSFW results” checkbox

Strictly speaking, COPPA prevents Reddit from collecting information from users under the age of 13. While there are no explicit guarantees that a person on the site isn't 13 or older, and also recognizing that age of majority is typically 18, then in a general literal sense yes there are minors involved, in so far as the activity discussed is research.

intervention is not brief, has lasted a week or more

A research intervention is an intervention in so far as it intersects with the participant. A drug trial that lasts for 10 weeks total but only gives doses to participants for 2 weeks (and then results monitoring during, 2-weeks post, and 4-weeks post) does not mean that the "intervention" lasts 10 weeks.

In most practical terms, running an experiment for 2-3 weeks is very common to collect sufficient data. However, the intervention itself may be quite brief (for example, a short 45-minute interview with a participant would be the "intervention" for a 2-3 week long study interviewing physicians on their concerns about organizational capacity for change).

For a repeated measures experiment, the intervention usually involves the actual experiment encounter and maybe some additional time between them.

For the case of A/B testing, usually the "intervention" in this case is the A/B test as it applies to the user at the moment, and not the entire duration of when the testing is taking place for all participants.

interventions having harm

Once again, to iterate, you are equating the inability to view the content of a website without logging into an account with such substantial emotional and psychological harm that is comparable to being verbally derided in public, for a week, shamed on a public channel, and/or comparable situations. You are not going to convince an IRB that being able to view the content of a website without logging in, then subsequently going to a different community to ask for help, and then hypothetically ruminate about the matter for weeks, is going to exceed the kind of everyday ordinary harm to qualify a risk level above minimal risk.

the subject was deceived and was definitely not informed prospectively that deception may take place, neither has agreed to it; subject was not informed even retrospectively other than some random admin suggesting they were part of an experiment after they complained online; for that matter the subject was not informed that an experiment would be taking place at all and has never agreed to anything, other than possibly in the ToS.

Deception goes beyond simply "lying" to or "not informing" the participant. Duke University gives some good considerations here:

• If, in order to counter the demand effect, researchers cannot disclose their research hypotheses, the failure to disclose is not considered deception.
• General statements about the purpose of the research, as well as a full description of the research tasks and activities, should be provided in the consent form. (emphasis, should, not must).

Additionally, a waiver for utilizing deception in research has to:

1. The risk must be no more than minimal.
2. The rights and welfare of the subjects will not be adversely affected.
3. The research could not practicably be carried out without the waiver. This does not mean that it would be inconvenient to conduct the study without the waiver. It means that deception is necessary to accomplish the goals of the research.

Satisfying #1 and #2 in an UI/UX A/B testing regime that Reddit used here is pretty easy. You are specifically hung up on the implicit harms involved but in reality they are of no particular serious concern.

#3 is particularly interesting, because effectively what that means is you need to demonstrate deception is necessary in experimental design for the experiment to actually work. If you are seeing whether a person will interact more with a site or not if they are blocked from seeing content without logging into an account, telling them ahead of time could already bias the outcome. This is in very specific consideration that #1 and #2 are already met: being unable to view a website without logging into an account is not anything more than minimal risk. And even then, it is important to emphasize that the failure to disclose the research hypothesis to counter the demand effect is NOT deception.

The kind of UI/UX A/B testing Reddit employed in this specific instance is absolutely not equivocal to the Asch conformity studies.

To be very clear here, when YOU operate under the belief that being unable to view the content of the website, then posting about it elsewhere and potentially being ridiculed for it is sufficient of a bar to meet beyond minimal risk, then we have very different definitions of what "minimal risk" entails. Since we cannot come to consensus on this particular topic, and instead you've gone so far as to associate this kind of activity's harm of equivalent to the Asch conformity studies is frankly ludicrous.

If we cannot agree on this, then so be it. However, I will repeat (with added finality): YOU running the same A/B experiment Reddit is doing on an university-sanctioned website will NOT get you run out of the university by the IRB. In a real-world scenario. you would likely discuss this experiment with an administrator or similar at your department, then maybe send an e-mail off to the IRB for any clarification, would likely have some back-and-forth, and then would ultimately receive a determination that it is exempt (at worst), or not considered human subjects research at all. I can see a few circumstances where such an effort might merit an expedited review, but to do this would involve some torturous twisting of the situation that could be easily avoided (for example, running this testing on a page that has instructions for performing the Heimlich maneuver).

I would also add there's some inherent inertial component to upvotes. A submission that gets a few upvotes quickly will easily get more upvotes over time because it's more likely to float into visibility by other people, ultimately regardless of veracity.

As the saying goes, everything on the news is supposedly 100% true until it is about a subject matter one is an expert one.

Summarized from a recent call between Reddit leadership and some Reddit-partnered moderators/developers, there will be free non-commercial API access. As you need to provide your own credentials to authenticate when using PRAW, if you qualify under whatever is ultimately defined as "non-commercial use" you may continue to use PRAW.

Now, as to whether Reddit's recent actions bode any confidence for you in putting into any effort leveraging their API and/or other tools, that's a separate (and probably worthwhile) question to ask.

Whether PRAW's maintainers want to keep PRAW maintained in light of these announcements is also a separate question too.