sour grapes; snake oil; corporate trolls

I have been wrestling with the idea of getting rocket mass heater stuff into more brains.  Years ago I shared something to reddit and it got (I think) millions of views.  I can try that again.  Maybe it won't get as many views, but maybe it will.

I posted to r/iama with the subject "The solution for the heating shortage is embarassingly simple. I'm paul wheaton, an expert on rocket mass heaters. Ask me anything."

A rocket mass heater can be built in a weekend and heat your home with sticks or paper/carboard waste. The exaust has the same amount of smoke as burning a candle - because the smoke is also burned as a fuel.

If that wasn't enough, the average american adult carbon footprint is 30 tons per year. The average montana home heated with electricity is 29 tons. 20 tons for natural gas and 0.4 tons for a rocket mass heater (although some people argue it is zero because the material burned is part of the natural carbon cycle. And a few have strong positions that it is carbon negative).

For the first hour, things went well.  250 upvotes and more than a dozen questions.  My answers had a few upvotes or maybe a dozen.  

Suddenly a bunch of trolls showed up doing what trolls do.  But the odd thing was:

   - the votes for the whole thread went from 250 to something negative.  Within a few minutes.

   - about a dozen troll comments appeared at about the same time and within minutes they each got more than a hundred upvotes

   - each troll comment instantly had dozens of supporting comments, each with dozens of upvotes.  I saw one buried comment that was 3 minutes old with something like 35 upvotes.

   - all of my comments went from 2 to 12 upvotes to instantly having 25 in the negative.

I tried to stick to answering wholesome questions.  

When the thread was three hours old, it was deleted and I was banned from r/Iama.

----

I start with the thought of "why don't more people know about rocket mass heaters?"  And now it is clear.  It is a threat to the profits of ...  somebody.  Somebody really big.

Apparently, political stuff is gonna leave some people very cold this winter.  And they don't know about rocket mass heaters.

I have a dozen rocket mass heaters.  

This is my ninth winter with a rocket mass heater in my house.  

I have heated with conventional wood stoves through many winters at different places.  I am amazed at how little wood i need to heat a home with a rocket mass heater.  

There are people in europe that have built rocket mass heaters.  They know.  My guess is that they each show a few dozen people every year.  But 99% of the people in europe that are about to be very cold have probably never heard of them.


So, what is the silver lining here?  I guess we learned there is a barrier.  I think the only way that people are going to learn about rocket mass heaters is if a thousand more people build them - and they show a few dozen people each.  And then a thousand more.  And more.  Etc.  

Most people will only take action when the pain of inaction exceeds the pain of action. When they start to get cold, they will start to do some research. Until then, like touching fire, they are going to have to learn the hard way. When they do, we will be here for them.

Sky Huddleston wrote:Most people will only take action when the pain of inaction exceeds the pain of action. When they start to get cold, they will start to do some research. Until then, like touching fire, they are going to have to learn the hard way. When they do, we will be here for them.

At that moment we will go from "fucking nuts" to "why didn't you tell us sooner?"

Most of the houses I lived in (and still do) have no thermal mass inside an insulated umbrella. When the heat goes out, they cool off very quickly.

The joy of a Rocket Mass Heater is not just the clean burn, it's in that magical "mass", that keeps on delivering heat when the fire is done. However, that means the people need to be near the mass, interacting and doing things together, instead of being glued to their screens looking at a virtual reality that many won't actually attain. Then they will loose their interest in retail therapy, which will ruin the economy (which is actually already badly cracked if you care to look closely), and all the people who are making a *lot* of money from the way things are, will have to slum it down with us folks who grow their own organic food and chat with the bees in their gardens, and admire the birds helping control the bugs, and find many ways to enjoy life with what they have, rather than what the corporations want them to buy.

I'm not at all surprise you attracted trolls - many of those trolls fear any change, as it may be the change that puts their cushy job on the line!

When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home,
Let him combat for that of his neighbours;
Let him think of the glories of Greece and of Rome,
And get knock'd on the head for his labours.
To do good to mankind is the chivalrous plan,
And, is always as nobly requited;
Then battle for freedom wherever you can,
And, if not shot or hang'd, you'll get knighted.

George Gordon Lord Byron

Weirdness

I thought rocket mass heat stoves were nifty to save money and make dent in pollution.  But for individuals and not many people can install this technology because rules and stuff.  Maybe 1-10% of the western world?  No real threat to big oil or whatever.

But if people with big resourses troll when you talk about this special wood stove, maybe this technology is bigger than my imagining.  Why else they troll you to keep this tech secret?

I will re-look at rocket mass heaters now with this new information.  

I'm one of the people that doesn't see maliciousness where stupidity (or apathy or fear) will suffice.  I could very well be wrong, but I don't think a cover-up is as likely as the fact that people just don't know about rocket mass heaters, don't feel they could build one, don't have the confidence to try.  I'm going to make learning this a priority this winter.  I really think having an example that people can see right in front of them and experience is the key.  I've never seen a rocket mass heater "in real life", don't know anyone personally that has built one, don't know anyone outside of permies.com that really knows they exist.  I'm not confident that I can do this, but I'm hoping it's like many things I didn't know I could do.  I've accomplished a lot of things I wasn't sure I could do by just trying.  I usually find out they aren't nearly as hard as I make them out to be ahead of time.  I just need to make a concentrated effort to learn this, and Wisconsin winters leave plenty of time for learning new things.

I said in some other thread somewhere that RMH could break into the US residential market by making inroads into the new home construction and renovation\remodel markets.  

Yeah, we need to convince individuals, but if one or two construction companies can be convinced of the beauty, cost, ease of construction(?), in other words, the benefits of RMH over conventional heat systems, then they can help turn the home insurance industry in our direction.  As discussed in this thread, many individuals want to use an RMH but are prevented from doing so because the landlord, insurance company, or residential association (fill in the blank), won't allow it.

In these situations, individuals are notorious for NOT having any clout. There are squillions of us for every Warren Buffett. Can we at least put a squad of people on the prowl for the enlightened home builder? Dare I ask that some of the money from the current Kickstarter be set aside so that Permies can demonstrate the RMH at Home Improvement conventions?  I'm sure there are people smarter than me who can figure this out.

If I were you, I would be contacting homesteaders of America, and go on YouTube and searching for homesteads. Homestead videos are all the rage right now, and there are tons of them. They all try to do some form of organic growing, permaculture, sustainability and food preservation. I have yet to find a single one who doesn’t have a wood stove for heating. They are also mostly big families who wants and needs to save money.
Lastly they make their channels to show DYI projects, so getting one of them to build one and film it, would give you a lot of free advertising. I would try three rivers homestead first. She has complained about how hard (on your body) it is to start their stove, and how happy she is that her kids now do that chore.
Those are your customers or target group if you talk advertising. I am pretty sure you would have been a hit at the  Virginia homestead conference last month. If they would let you, you should be there every year.
I have written to those I already know, but hope you see you at the conference next year. Helen would have been a great speaker for that conference too.

Barbara Manning wrote:  As discussed in this thread, many individuals want to use an RMH but are prevented from doing so because the landlord, insurance company, or residential association (fill in the blank), won't allow it.

I think there's another issue that might weigh on RMH adoption: the need to manually feed them. In a world accustomed to thermostatically controlled and automatically fed furnaces, boilers, and electric heating, wood fuel (unless pelletized) seems messy and requires daily tending. That doesn't trouble most of us here, but even without regulations and insurance to consider, the pool of prospective RMH users is relatively small.

David Wieland wrote:I think there's another issue that might weigh on RMH adoption: the need to manually feed them. In a world accustomed to thermostatically controlled and automatically fed furnaces, boilers, and electric heating, wood fuel (unless pelletized) seems messy and requires daily tending. That doesn't trouble most of us here, but even without regulations and insurance to consider, the pool of prospective RMH users is relatively small.

It's not just a degree of willingness, it the physical capacity to store the wood needed to season. Our woodshed here in the UK is the size of some entire city flats. Many people have literally no outdoor space, so no matter how good the stove is, it won't be appropriate for them.

Barbara Manning wrote:I said in some other thread somewhere that RMH could break into the US residential market by making inroads into the new home construction and renovation\remodel markets.  

Yeah, we need to convince individuals, but if one or two construction companies can be convinced of the beauty, cost, ease of construction(?), in other words, the benefits of RMH over conventional heat systems, then they can help turn the home insurance industry in our direction.  As discussed in this thread, many individuals want to use an RMH but are prevented from doing so because the landlord, insurance company, or residential association (fill in the blank), won't allow it.

New home builders won't touch new technology if it hasn't been properly tested/certified/authorised by some external regulating body. Installing something "illegal" would be a massive business risk, and would probably invalidate their insurance and make it harder to sell the properties.

We keep coming back to the issue that these stoves are "illegal". Once this is properly sorted there will be a path to bring this to the mainstream; insurance companies will be required to approve it, builders will be more willing to include it etc...

Paul seems to talk in terms of "it's so good that it's illegal to build these" as though that is anything but a barrier to people adopting it. Removing barriers seems a good, if unglamorous, route to take. But this is problematic with RMH because each build is a handcrafter one-off. You can make 100,000 the same and guarantee that they will behave the same way. So testing becomes much more difficult.  All the threads we have seen about troubleshooting stove builds is a testament to the difficulty of getting a "type based" approval for RMH.

Well that sounds shitty. Sorry it happened to you.

You need approval and a physical check for every "fire" in s house here in Germany. I am pretty sure home built ones would be hard to impossible to get approved. Although we do have historically valid versions of solid fuel heaters with "storage" such as the Kachelofen (I have one!). But still conventional burn. I suppose the "approved" more modern option is a wood gasification boiler.

I kinda think it's probably ok thinking that people can't build any old crap and set fire to their families and neighbours. But there does need to be some updated thinking.

paul wheaton wrote:
Suddenly a bunch of trolls showed up doing what trolls do.  But the odd thing was:

   - the votes for the whole thread went from 250 to something negative.  Within a few minutes.

   - about a dozen troll comments appeared at about the same time and within minutes they each got more than a hundred upvotes

   - each troll comment instantly had dozens of supporting comments, each with dozens of upvotes.  I saw one buried comment that was 3 minutes old with something like 35 upvotes.

   - all of my comments went from 2 to 12 upvotes to instantly having 25 in the negative.

I tried to stick to answering wholesome questions.  

When the thread was three hours old, it was deleted and I was banned from r/Iama.

Very interesting- the question of online censorship has become a topic of conversation for a lot of the social media platforms, but I had not heard anything about reddit. I don’t use it, but I thought it was a free for all, didn’t even know banning was a thing.

So, let me ask - did the troll comments sound human, or like bots? Were most of them coherent? I am just wondering if there are actual humans being paid to watch for certain keywords.

Second, was being banned from the forum based on getting too many downvotes? Or was there a person/software who made the decision based on content?
It is interesting to know the “shape” of the opposition. It is certainly a clever way of controlling online dialog, especially if the comments look human written. If you hadn’t been watching, you would never have realized that the speed of the negative comments and downvotes was too fast to be organic. And even then - you can’t be entirely sure. If it had been anything more controversial than a stove design, you might think it really was a lot of people feeling strongly about the topic.

Hi,

You could try this:

1- design and produce an expensive, standardized and very appealing RMH
2- design and produce an effective, low cost version of n.1
3- introduce a few low-cost RMH for free in a place where winter is terrible, people is in difficulties and a place which has a lot of media attention (Ukraine?)
4- sell a lot of expensive RMH to rich countries
5- translate and give away free copies of RMH building books to poor countries. Especially in country n.3

n. 4 should finance n.5.

Just an idea  :-)

It would be supreme to see screenshots of this scenario regarding your reddit post, but far more supreme to see the widespread construction and use of rocket mass heaters in dwellings everywhere it gets cold enough to warrant the need.  I'd like to see it in rented dwellings where it's been said that it's impossible because of insurance and yada yada.  

we own , and are interested . but would not want to void our homeowners insurance, permanently damage our flooring  or buck building codes . so for me a unit that could be installed like our fireplace insert then removed returning the living room to the original configuration should a new owner want that would be perfect . at 75 and 63 we are more conventional and are aware that in a matter of years we may be down sizing . so we have to be aware of property values .

Little-known and creepy fact: "bots" can be humans. Human labor is still more accessible than AI technology, so factions pay human employees to interact with social Web sites according to their agendas. Think of it as the new-age telemarketer.

an article about how to discriminate man from machine by long-time AI programmer, Janelle Shane:
https://slate.com/technology/2018/09/how-to-tell-whether-a-bot-is-really-a-human.html

Rumor has it, Russia is very keen on employing and savvy on deploying human bots all across the Web.

Now, Michael Cox makes very valid points about logistic obstacles to widespread RMH use. This is not trolling. This is content that belongs within a Reddit discussion. "To troll" is to throw curveballs - emotional responses, irrelevant responses, "joke" or "ironic" responses that are often disguised as ignorance or obtuseness, and also spamming downvotes on the Original Poster, and upvoting the troll posts. In other words, productive, relevant argument furthers the conversation, while trolling is an attack upon the conversation itself.

Reddit is not and never has been a free-for-all. The closest thing we've had to a free-for-all on the standard Web (i.e. not the Dark Web) is 4chan. I still don't think it's a true free-for-all because nobody really knows how 4chan's moderating and post-promotion functions, unless you are a moderator (which I am not and I've never met one).

Also, r/IamA is an interesting choice for this content. I very seldomly go on Reddit, but I'd suggest spreading the RMH propaganda across multiple subreddits (but word it differently to cater to each one so you are not spamming). Also, put the RMH propaganda on 4chan, see what happens. And you could include the fact that you got anti-shilled on Reddit. This could be good content for 4chan's /pol/ board (or it, too, may disappear into the depths of 4chan thread limbo...!).

Susan Doyon wrote: so we have to be aware of property values .

I'm coming to the opinion that this is a *huge* part of the housing crisis in North America. Sometime in the last 100 yrs, housing stopped being "a place to live" and became an "investment". Housing stopped having regional differences that were at least in part based on weather systems and became cookie-cutter across the land regardless of whether the major risks were flood, drought, wind, wild-fire, earthquake etc.
Humans have a huge need to "belong" and to be part of the "tribe". There are a lot of industries dependent on that. If someone's willing to consider an RMH, what else might they be willing to consider - forgoing electricity? forgoing a front lawn and a paved parking spot? forgoing Industrial Ag in favor of home-grown better than organic veggies and fruit in season?

Paul's reddit post clearly poked someone's hornet nest! The question is whose?

paul wheaton wrote:
I start with the thought of "why don't more people know about rocket mass heaters?"  And now it is clear.  It is a threat to the profits of ...  somebody.  Somebody really big.

The trolling blowout you described is disturbing. Do you know of others who have experienced such a thing? It certainly sounds organized -- but by whom?

It doesn't seem plausible to me that any corporate "competition" would feel threatened enough to bother. It's puzzling, but I wonder if the troll storm was a test of a nefarious tactic for disrupting a social media platform and you were just a random target.

corrado de cesare wrote:Hi,

You could try this:

1- design and produce an expensive, standardized and very appealing RMH
2- design and produce an effective, low cost version of n.1

https://permies.com/wiki/29596/Podcast-Updates-lab-part-rocket

https://permies.com/wiki/29885/Podcast-rocket-mass-heater-shippable

https://permies.com/t/31100/Rocket-Mass-Heater-Shippable-Core

https://permies.com/t/31050/Shipable-core-idea

https://permies.com/t/28385/Ernie-Erica-shipable-core-questions

r ranson wrote:

... list of links ...

I recall looking at those ideas before for shippable cores. It's certainly a step in the right direction to have the certified for regular use. But as far as I am aware that certification has not actually happened?

Michael Cox wrote:
I recall looking at those ideas before for shippable cores. It's certainly a step in the right direction to have the certified for regular use. But as far as I am aware that certification has not actually happened?

The liberator has UL certification (to my knowledge useful in talking with insurance).

There is an exception in the EPA requirements for Masonary Heaters and some RMH installers have been able to use it for local inspector and insurance approval.

There is a group of Masonary Heater and RMH installers that have been working with the EPA on getting certification, but as most governmental things it is a slow process and even more so over the last couple years.

I truly don't see any kind of corporate troll behaviour in that reddit thread. Instead I see people talking at cross purposes, who when they have misunderstood what is being discussed have reached erroneous conclusions. And then as is the nature of social media they have voted according to what they perceive. In this case they thought they were dealing with a snake-oil salesman, and voted accordingly. But this is because of the fundamental disconnect between the language of the two "sides".

People who are promoting new technologies, especially where they make grand claims for benefits, need to work hard to fine tune their message to make it palatable by the audience they are speaking to.  Here Paul chose to approach a demographic he was unfamiliar with, and who were unfamiliar with the ideas he was discussing. And he went in heavy on the benefits, as he sees them, but left them just with increased scepticism.

The spate of down voting is a natural consequence of the circumstances, and not a grand conspiracy.

My fear is that talking about it as an us-against-them conspiracy may excuse "us" from actually addressing the communication problem properly. And if we collectively don't learn how to communicate these ideas in an way that is palatable then we will remain stuck.

What really has my attention right now is Twitter. I'm interested to see just what is going on with all the bots and shills and trolls there. If a man is willing to pay $44 billion for it, I suspect he had some pretty strong conviction that the problem was pretty serious, and he has the capital to seriously vet his convictions before taking action. The massive layoffs make me wonder if the problem permeated virtually the entire system. I would bet there's a lot of similarities between it and all the other social media platforms.