ZorbaTHut
11mo ago
Yeah, it was literally a clone of that because we were under time pressure to get this up and running and didn't have a better solution.
I actually do have a better solution upcoming, just, y'know, "up".
Also, the better solution will still be based on post quantity and quality.
ZorbaTHut
11mo ago
Sheesh, you're better at that than I am :V
So the tl;dr is that unsurprisingly the vast bulk of posting users (about 1000) signed up on the first two months. I'm not sure how meaningful this is, of course, because the site was new and obviously most people would sign up then, and we probably had a good number of people who saw comments about it, signed up, made a comment, and never came back. It looks like we're picking up consistently somewhere around 50 users per month since then.
Ignoring the first-month users, "average daily comments per user" is extremely chaotic but hangs out in general around 0.01 - 0.08, and yes, that range covers almost an entire order of magnitude.
This does make me think I need to return to focusing on getting new users (which has unfortunately gotten harder, I was thinking about setting up a Twitter bot to post quality contributions and obviously that ain't happening).
ZorbaTHut
11mo ago
Yeah, the app itself sounds perfectly fine and, on a personal note, probably better-suited for me than the others. The site itself is also phrased quite reasonably. I got no problems there.
The author's description of it is kinda painful, but, y'know, journalism.
As irritating as it is, I don't think "journalist turns a niche product into a culture war issue" is particularly notable.
ZorbaTHut
11mo ago
I will admit I'm actually not sure what you mean here. Sorry. Can you rephrase?
ZorbaTHut
11mo ago
Hah, probably just isn't decorating that mouseover properly.
I'll put that in the bug list, thanks!
ZorbaTHut
11mo ago
If you feel up to writing a developer-friendly bug description and either have or don't mind getting a Github account, put it straight on the Git page.
If you want to talk to developers and either have or don't mind getting a Discord account, come hang out in the dev discord (and if you know Python we can always use help :V).
Otherwise, honestly, here is fine, I don't mind getting bug reports!
ZorbaTHut
11mo ago
I think there's a lot of definitions of "utilitarianism" and they get kind of incorrectly smooshed together. On one level there's "human pleasure is the only goal and we should optimize for human pleasure". If you're optimizing solely for the short run, yes, it leads to that; if you're optimizing solely for the long run, then in the long run it perhaps leads to that; but sort of counterintuitively, if you're optimizing solely for the long run, then in the short run it reasonably doesn't lead to that, because in order to have the most humans to eventually be happy we need to accomplish a lot of other things before exterminating humanity.
Another thing that it's used to mean, though, is "any philosophy that optimizes for something", and there's plenty of somethings that don't result in that at all.
ZorbaTHut
10mo ago
I think the core issue is that you have to heavily subsidize the very concept of childraising. Having children is horrendously expensive, to a point where you can't simply subsidize it by giving money to the people having kids, you have to build systems that make childraising cheaper. And that's not just expensive in a monetary sense, that's expensive in a time sense and an effort sense.
I think, if I were going to try this, I'd be aiming at essentially building an entire new culture around larger familial units; "houses" specifically designed for ten to twenty families living together, with a designated subsidized night caretaker and one or two full-time employees to handle things like food and cleaning. Make it clear that living in these places is easier, in a way that extends beyond simply "having money", but that they're available only for people with kids.
Honestly, this would kinda be aimed at a modern reinvention of tribal living.
For myself, all women with white collar jobs get two year’s entitlement to WFH after every childbirth in addition to parental leave, in which they can’t be required in the office more often than 1x week.
The problem is that people today want careers, and what you're basically offering here is the government guaranteeing that you can cripple your career for your kids if you want. I'm not going to say that's bad - having that available would help - but it doesn't really solve the problem, which is that people don't want to cripple their career for their kids.
ZorbaTHut
10mo ago
Beautiful idea on renovating living spaces. I’d even add in playgrounds, libraries, hell maybe a gate in certain neighborhoods/cities where there’s a lot of crime. The hidden costs of childcare are often overlooked in these discussions, as you mention time is a big one.
I think if I was going whole ham on this, I'd be putting multiple of these megahouses together with a playground in the middle.
You could also create stores specifically designed to supply children that are heavily subsidized by the government.
Ironically I don't even think you'd have to; if you're in a house with twenty other families that you get along with, hand-me-down clothes are going to be traded back and forth constantly.
Baby food and diapers, though, absolutely - bulk delivery helps a lot there.
(I will note that Amazon has done a spectacular job of providing cheap diapers.)
ZorbaTHut
10mo ago
What about, you know, having the grandparents living with their adult children, maybe unmarried siblings as well, or at least extended families living in relatively close proximity so you can go visit your sister/aunt/cousin and their kids and you get advice, help, and child minding where it's not you and your partner on your own with your first baby and only freakin' self help books to tell you what to do?
Sure, you could do this.
But this only kind of helps in some ways, and really hurts in others. Kids play well together; like cats, the difficulty of taking care of kids scales up nonlinearly. And many many people have iffy relationships with their families. One of the strengths of US life is that you don't have your parents breathing down your neck, which lets you make your own life and forge your own path and not constantly be taking care of your elders.
Finally, this exists in many parts of the world and empirically it is not working. If we're trying to solve the fertility problem, then I don't want to waste time and money on solutions that already aren't working.
The idea of "solve this problem" by making it so that a bunch of unrelated strangers all live in an apartment block is making me shake my head here.
The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb. It doesn't take too much raising-children-together for those people to start feeling a lot like family; the tricky part, I think, would be figuring out how to match those people up in the first place.
ZorbaTHut
10mo ago
I dunno!
I think one answer to that, honestly, is just to not worry about it all that much. Consumption is always going to be idolized, and providing ways to have a good life for cheap is always going to be looked down upon, but is that a good argument for not doing so? I'd say we do so, and thereby improve the reproduction rate of people who don't idolize consumption, and maybe that's fine.
Note that the only part we're subsidizing here, by this description, is a small number of permanent helpers, kind of similar to how apartment buildings have janitors and maintenance people. Maybe if this gets off the ground, that subsidy can be removed and just make it a part of the group community.
ZorbaTHut
10mo ago
it rounds to being either a mass dormitory(which westerners don’t want to live in)
I'm not sure there's really an option for this - how many places are really set up for multiple families to live? Mass dormitories, in my mind, map to "row of bunk beds in a room, low quality food", not "each family has three bedrooms and a private living room, plus there's a kitchen for every four families". And apartment complexes are generally set up without coherent common areas; you step out of your room and you're in a hallway whose sole purpose is to be a hallway.
As an extremely rough example, I'm kinda envisioning something with this basic concept. Bottom-left chunk is one family area, with three bedrooms and a private living area; there's four of those surrounding the common area (pretend that's copy-pasted, I couldn't find a copy-paste tool on this site), common area includes kitchen and relaxation areas and play areas. Maybe stack two to four of these on top of each other. The proportions are completely wrong and also I didn't put in, like, bathrooms, so obviously this is not a finished version, but that's the basic idea; get people interacting together.
(I'd probably want to set up some way that people could easily open their Private Living Area to the main area if they wanted, like, maybe just turn that into a sliding wall or something, I don't know. Something to make it feel less like a wall with a door in it but still closeable for privacy. This is not an easy thing to solve.)
(edit: this specific plan comes out to ~10,000 square feet for four families, which is actually not as far off from "reasonable" as I'd expected)
ZorbaTHut
10mo ago
Sadly the link is a 503 error. If it's back up when you see this message, let me know and I'll take another look. But I did do a Google search, and, yeah, it seems similar at least.
I think a big problem with things like this, on a small scale, is that there isn't really a good way to find compatible people. If you're looking for someone to date you can choose from millions of people; if you want to form a baugruppen, assuming you're even aware such a thing exists, you not only have very few people to choose from, you probably have to convince people that the idea even makes sense. If there were exactly one person in the world interested in romance, what's the chance you'd be compatible with them?
So if this were done on a national scale, if we said "yes, we will build a hundred baugruppen in every major city, here is the big online matchmaking system we have built, there are major incentives to be involved with this", then suddenly you're going from Only One Other Person In The World Is Interested In Romance to Online Dating Sites Now Exist. Which makes it a lot easier to find, in the metaphor, a partner, and outside the metaphor, compatible families.
Which is not to say it'd work, but rather, I don't think the spotty success of the times it's been attempted is good evidence that it wouldn't work.
ZorbaTHut
10mo ago
I'll miss you, for what it's worth.
Nowadays, I cringe when I get a comment. I feel anxious when I see a lit-up notification bell. Frequently the sort of responses I engender seem not to be positive or helpful engagement -- often just dismissive one-liners, low-effort commentary that half-makes a point while being maximally personal or inflammatory, without any empathy for other perspectives or attempt to try and understand where I'm coming from.
Yeah, I acknowledge this is a problem. We're running into various problems with long-term shifts, and it's unclear how to fix them; I have some ideas that I'm going to be trying out, but the core issue is just that value drift is hard to deal with. And I haven't come up with a good solution besides "frequent new mods who haven't value-drifted yet" or "clever tricks".
Honestly, maybe I should be doing Doge elections much more often and turn moderation into more of a rotating duty. It's tempting.
ZorbaTHut
10mo ago
I don't see how this is supposed to help. It's not about the moderation, or the rules, it's the zeitgeist.
The idea is that you pick people who aren't jaded, and as they get jaded, they get rotated out. If you want to remain stationary but you're standing on a slow-moving train, you walk in the opposite direction of the train.
I say give people something to do that is not culture war. Any of you degenerates want to mod a game, or something?
This honestly makes me tempted to set up Reddit-esque subreddits. I'm not sure it would work, but it's tempting.
(The codebase did have this functionality, but we pulled it because it was completely bitrotted. Wouldn't be too hard to reintroduce it though.)
ZorbaTHut
10mo ago
Well, the core issue is that there are a lot of questions about what exactly "the feature" is. We don't have any support for non-admin moderators, for example, so do we want to implement that? Suddenly the work is like three times harder. Or do we want the existing admins to take the load of entire new communities? I don't want to do that. Who gets to make new communities? Who gets to edit community pages (which right now are just hardcoded .html)? If someone is a moderator of multiple communities, do they get to see shared usernotes? Can someone be banned from one community and not another?
If you did the work of reintroducing the feature then, hmm, I'd have to run it past the mods, let me know if you're seriously thinking of doing this, but yeah I think we'd probably figure out a way to get it going. But I think "the feature" is going to prove to be a lot of work.
ZorbaTHut
10mo ago
Sure, go for it :) If it's successful that's honestly good incentive for getting something like that going.
ZorbaTHut
10mo ago
Join the Dev discord if you haven't already. That's where development discussion mostly happens, and that's also where the people who took it out originally hang out. I think the first step here is to just come up with a list of stuff that would have to get done.
Having one megathread in which most things are happening helps with engagement, and separating things out would dilute attention and decrease activity, at least under my current mental model.
This is definitely true . . .
. . . if you assume that users are kept constant. It may be that splitting things up actually attracts more users because people can join communities that are better-suited for them. This is the transition that Reddit made, several times, with great success.
Are we at that point? No idea, which is why if I do this I want to ensure that I have ways to undo it and good metrics on what's going on. But it's at least something I'd be willing to try.
ZorbaTHut
10mo ago
I would honestly be happy if this whole site somehow changed so that culture war things weren't the core thing. I'd be happy if the general concept of Tolerate Disagreement was the core thing, and Tolerate Disagreement About The Culture War was merely a niche.
Hard to get there from here, of course.
(I'd be less happy if doing this required completely eliminating Tolerate Disagreement About The Culture War, I probably wouldn't take that tradeoff.)
ZorbaTHut
10mo ago
I think that's generally true, but pretty much everything is politics-adjacent now and then. That doesn't mean everything needs to be all politics all the time though. Certainly Reddit has a problem where the moment anything becomes political, it turns into Hivemind Central.
I admit I haven't attempted to quantify that. It's an interesting question, and I'd like an answer except I do not have time to do the work required to create an appropriate database query >_<
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