ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Seriously, how many new things don't have the occasional hiccup? How long did it take the JWST to launch?
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
That's a good question!
Part of the reason I did that is because it was the most I could do. Reddit's vote system is kind of terrible and I really wanted to just disable it, but that simply wasn't possible on Reddit.
Here, I can just make the vote system less terrible. So I'm probably going to be aiming in that direction.
Expect something to show up in a few weeks on that :V
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
It's an interesting idea, but I think I want it more subtle than that. I do like the idea of some kind of Reputation. But I'm not sure I want people actively thinking about this economically, I want people to just be able to say "yeah, this is a good thing! I like this thing" and say so and then [MAGIC HERE] and we figure out what the best posts are.
That said, I do also like some kind of investment. But I really don't want to tie it to upvotes; we don't want to encourage people to pander to upvotes even further, y'know?
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Not zero, but definitely less than rdrama, and carefully chosen nonsense.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
We did some performance tests, and the answer is "not amazingly, but not terribly either", which is much better than most of the alternatives. It should hold up.
I don't think there is; ping me in a week, once I've seen what a big thread does to server load, and I'll look into it.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Alright, I am just going to go ahead and say that this is not the kind of username we want around here. I'd offer you a username change but we don't have a way to do that right now; instead I'm going to ban you and tell you to make a new account.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
That's fair, somewhat, but note that I'm also used to video game launch requirements, and "you tried to launch but nobody could play the game for hours" would definitely count as rocky.
Not catastrophic. But rocky.
This will all be forgotten in a few days, you're totally right there.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Huh, neat.
But yeah, I'm fine just telling that person to come back with a better name.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
I'm testing it out in the UI and honestly 25 characters is already a bit longer than comfortable. I think I'd prefer to stick to 25 characters.
Maybe someday this'll become a Trusted User thing.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
I definitely plan to go over the comment theme and make a bunch of changes. It wasn't the priority - the main page was worse - and then I ended up not getting to it before the launch.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
The full server infrastructure right now is around $50/mo, which I'm just paying out of pocket. I do plan to set up a donation system at some point, but 24 hours ago I couldn't - Reddit doesn't allow it - and I suspect I'm going to have more important things on my plate for a while.
A related question, are there any concerns over site integrity that we as the rank-and-file can help with? I assume reporting bad actors and using the vote system responsibly are a good start.
Yep, definitely a good start :)
If you're a coder, or visual designer, joining the development server and contributing would be helpful. Otherwise, post stuff that's good. The site doesn't work without people, and people don't show up without content.
If you want to go the extra mile, try posting links to the site, ideally to specific relevant posts, in communities with a similar tone. We really do need a source of fresh blood and that's going to be our biggest long-term struggle, I think.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
I recently played through A Short Hike, originally just to see if it was appropriate for the kids (conclusion: "more reading than they're really ready for, but we'll see how they do" - Alex has gone absolutely wild for it), but then afterwards just because it's a good cozy game. Fun times.
I think next up is Monster Hunter.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
It might just be an early-entry age thing. Alex is the old one and she's 4 years old; she loves unicorns and sparkles and bouncing and talking to literally everyone. She also likes video games because I kept showing her what I was playing ("see, these are bugs! they're trying to stop us from getting all the gold") and sitting her down with a controller until she started Getting It.
Cass is 2 years old and sometimes I can convince her to hit buttons on a controller, but that's where Alex was at 2 years old also.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
It's varying(20000), which basically means it's a length indicator and a big variable-length blob, but limited to 20,000 characters. It should be really easy to change - it's literally just relaxing the size limit - but not a change I wanted to mess with right now.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
We need to get the rest of them up on the site, but everything in the last few years is copied to our own infrastructure already, it's just a process of editing which I have been mostly ignoring while I work on this site.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Now that you can speak freely, can you spill the beans on what was going on with the reddit admins/AOE?
Who knows, man.
Here's an example post that they removed, with three posts of context:
I remember starting my career a couple of years later with the earnest belief that I might have only two or three years of employment left before the AI apocalypse came for bankers too
Probably the most baffling thing I've ever seen from you.
Now, it appears we mean different things by «bankers». For you it's clerks, probably all white-collared personnel. For me, uh, the ultimate proprietors – and it's clear no AI can replace that.
Okay. You're fine. I get it, you aren't a Nazi.
In America, Nazis do this when referencing Jews. It is very much not our "quotes". But I understand that in your culture putting <> is done in a different also valid manner.
But good God, it looks like an American internet Nazi naming the Jew when referring to <>.
Nazis do (((this)))
But « thiis » is just a different type of quotation mark used in French, German, Russian and so on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillemet
That last one - naming the Guillemet - got removed by the admins.
I've got a small list of such similar posts. We had a post removed for listing some global age-of-consent laws. We had a post removed noting that the 6-million Holocaust death toll is dubious because it's built out of many numbers that, themselves, have been readjusted over time but the overall total has never been questioned. We had a post removed comparing the lifestyle of 1880s black slaves in the US to the sub-Saharan continent and to other contemporaneous instances of slavery. We had a post removed noting some weird sentencing laws involving child porn (and similar weird laws regarding the definition of child porn).
These are all things we want to be able to discuss. If people start just berating their outgroup, well, that's uncool. But this wasn't that! These posts weren't as innocent as the quotation-mark one, I'll acknowledge that, but they're still nowhere near the stereotypical Stormfront screed.
Anyway, eventually they sent us a nastygram saying, paraphrased, we were having too many posts removed and saying that we should do something about it before they had to do something about it. They also said that if we had questions, we should send them over. We wrote up a pretty-well-phrased set of questions, sent it to them, and they just ignored it.
In fairness, they never said they'd answer those questions.
And so that's where we were; "go fix this stuff, our censors are inconsistent and overzealous, and we won't give you any answers regarding what's going on."
From there it's just a matter of time until we get booted.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Response posted!
For what it's worth, I originally thought they got banned for a pretty-innocuous post they made on The Motte. I'm not sure "we went to draw a cartoon cat on Place, so they banned me from the entire site" is better or worse.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
I actually rather like this idea.
Lemme put it on a TODO list; my plate is absurdly full right now.
Big worry: I don't want to split conversation up too much, especially given that we're likely to take a population hit.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Yeah, I think this is a bigger problem than I thought. I'll see what I can put together.
I kinda like that idea.
I'd also be okay with embedded images being something that comes along with some level of seniority/acceptance; I'm on a Discord where new users can't post images but experienced users can. We already straight-up filter people's posts if they're new, I'd be cool with linking more things to that general progression.
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