ZorbaTHut
11d ago
If people decide collectively they don't need to build expertise because they think they can get AI to do everything, they will be worse at using AI
I mean, you're not wrong . . . but you know what would also make them worse at using AI? Not having AI available to use.
At some point there's just a limited amount of time to learn in. Yes, certainly it would be great if I could absorb the entire accumulated knowledge of humanity. But I can't. I don't have the millennia required to do that, especially because there's always a tradeoff between "learning things" and "doing things".
AI removes a bunch of the minimum-training requirements to accomplish many things, while simultaneously making some things far far faster to do. I don't pretend to understand where the new balance will land - that's two giant changes at the same time - but I am confident that in the end, for any reasonable definition of "accomplishment" that combines both quality and quantity, people will be accomplishing a lot more than they were before.
Some people will be doing this by learning the fundamentals anyway, some won't, and I'm okay with that.
ZorbaTHut
12d ago
I guess I don't see the actual conflict here; it feels like it's conflating several things. People don't have to know the internals to know if something works for them, and they don't need to be able to build the internals to describe something that works for them. "They won't even be able to judge if what it has done is desirable" feels just wrong if we aren't including "the internal structure" in the list of things that matter for desirability, and in a world where an AI can rebuild the internal structure at the snap of a finger, maybe "the internal structure" is something we shouldn't care about as much.
ZorbaTHut
12d ago
All? No. There's times when something is so simple that describing it for the AI is actually slower than just doing it myself. And there's still times when AI is not able to do it right and I end up doing it myself.
Overall it's a huge help though. And even in the latter case, it's usually true that it's faster to ask the AI to mock something up first so I can see where the issues are.
ZorbaTHut
12d ago
"At least months"; I would need to get out from under some stuff first, and then, you know
rewrite the entire damn site
ZorbaTHut
14d ago
I realized, so many devs from all walks of life have completely ended their relationship with the text editor and now do literally everything through an agentic prompt.
Yeah, I am now at this point.
I am a very good programmer. I'm good enough that my time is kind of wasted programming. I now work as a tech lead/tech architect, with Claude as my worker(s); I describe what to do, Claude does it, and I rip apart its design and redesign it.
Which I do all the time, I do not vibecode unless it's something I don't really care about. It all gets reviewed.
I've just got better things to do than actually write the code.
I have no idea how the "training" part of this thing ends up working out; I'm good at this because I've done it, I don't know if I ever could become good at it with AI alone. On the other hand, I feel like this is similar to a lot of professions; how many digital artists end up not understanding precise brush usage? There are colors that literally cannot be expressed on a screen and we have an entire generation of artists who grew up never realizing that "violet" is a thing they can do, because they can't - how much of a problem is this?
Weird times, overall.
ZorbaTHut
14d ago
This is basically my plan, yeah, though I wasn't thinking about such a tight coupling; I was considering stuff like "technology" or "gaming" or "aww", then gradually scaling out while intentionally aiming at broad subjects and niche subjects.
I will definitely be asking the community where to start if/when we get there, though.
ZorbaTHut
14d ago
This is true, but it's also reasonable to add it on a list of checklist things to do when the small venture is threatening to no longer be small.
I think if I had to set up a schedule:
- Do the reimplementation
- Deploy it
- Add one or two experimental subcommunities
- If these simply don't work even for the existing audience despite picking the best possible options, okay, this didn't work, can it, otherwise . . .
- . . . LLC time
- Add some more carefully-chosen subcommunities
- See if we can start growing
- If we can't figure out how to grow, okay, this didn't work, can it, otherwise . . .
- . . . time to talk to an attorney
- Keep growing
ZorbaTHut
14d ago
I admittedly hadn't consciously thought of doing an LLC, but you're right, good idea before scaling up.
I've actually got two companies (one LLC-as-S-corp and one C-corp) and am about to start a third anyway, this is ground I am reasonably familiar with so the actual doing-of-it isn't a big deal, and thanks for the reminder that I should do that :)
ZorbaTHut
14d ago
Still, "generate a list of terms where it shows up, sit down and solve all the tags with a hundred uses or more, ask an AI to do a first-pass judgement on the rest and report on any with a very clear answer, put the rest into a quick crowdsourced list".
This feels solvable.
Ah well.
ZorbaTHut
14d ago
Unfortunately the EU is nowhere near this transparent.
The EU doesn't need to be; we do. We can always just explain the reason to the extent that we can.
ZorbaTHut
15d ago
One technical drawback is that an open system requires well-defined protocols and backwards compatibility. If discord wants to push their next step of enshittification on an unsuspecting public roll out a new feature, they can simply deploy their update on their servers and make the clients update. If you want to do the same with E-mail, that will involve industry meetings, and RFCs describing standards which Microsoft then ignores (or not, I stopped paying attention to them in the early 2000s).
While this is kind of true, there's also a lot of room for protocols with a well-defined core and constantly mutating fringes. Google, for example, is constantly trying out little HTML extensions, the bad ones of which die on the vine and the good ones eventually get subsumed into the standard. There's a linux desktop called KDE, running on a protocol called Wayland, and KDE is always adding its own little tests to it with the same result; most of them die unceremoniously and are removed, some of them get nicely polished and turn into official Wayland features.
I've got no problem with that here also. It looks like Lemmy is already using ActivityPub, and I think there are some questionable decisions in this but nothing that prevents us from implementing ActivityPub as core functionality and then layering our own stuff on top of that. Much of which will end up dying and being removed, some of which might become a de-facto or even a true standard eventually.
Another more specific thing is poster authentication. When the motte moved from reddit, it would have been very convenient to take a copy of the user database along, but that was very much not technically feasible. It would certainly be possible to create a protocol where all the information on how you id individual users was common knowledge, but the downside is that this would limit your userbase to the people who feel comfortable creating and using client-side certificates, which is approximately a null set in the space of all possible users. Relying on OAuth only moves the problem. Google will obviously be willing to authenticate users for well-regarded websites such as the motte, but once the Wet Sock Appreciators get kicked out and have to self-host, they may find that Google is unwilling to deal with them, so they could not take their userbase along. (Also, if I had a google account, I would want it nowhere near my quiet_NaN persona for reasons related to opsec.)
This feels honestly pretty solvable; remember, we can always host our own OAuth if we like! We can even use Google's OAuth and then provide a subsidiary of that.
"Export the database" is fraught in many complicated ways but they feel roughly solvable if you're willing to devote the developer time Claude time to it.
ZorbaTHut
15d ago
How are you going to handle European censorship laws?
First step, block stuff in Europe.
Second step, put a big banner saying "this is blocked in Europe specifically" when someone from Europe tries to access it.
Third step, add a citation to the banner, quoting the law and the legislators who enacted it.
Fourth step . . . and this is a very long-term step . . . see if I can start setting up a community dedicated to helping people become politically active and running for government positions, and link that from the dialog.
This context is blocked in Europe. Here is a link to the law that it is blocked under. This law was enacted by [POLITICIAN]. Did you know you're in the same jurisdiction as they are? They're up for re-election in eighteen months. Would you like to join a political party attempting to dethrone them? Click here to join a community dedicated to a political group competing against them.
I am, shall we say, not a fan of censorship.
I don't know how you keep the moderators from going full nuts antifa though. Limiting how many subreddits one person can moderate? Being unmonetized keeps the 3rd world troll spam minimal, at least.
You just boot them, honestly.
I have no problem with moderators moderating a lot of communities as long as they're doing it well. If they stop doing it well, and they don't own the community, you just boot them.
I wouldn't do this name thing you talked about, though. People search by /r/label and you changing the labels would be confusing and annoy people when they lost the community they were looking for.
I'm kind of okay with this honestly. I think we'd include a banner at the top of the page saying something like "are you looking for /r/other-label? They used to be here." but only for a month or two. Beyond that, if you're looking for /r/corn and you went to /r/corn and you got a subreddit about corn, and what you really wanted was a subreddit about how awful mosquitos are, well, this feels like maybe a problem we don't need to spend a lot of time trying to fix.
ZorbaTHut
15d ago
Case in point, we've got a CLAUDE.md on the github project
It really has been useful with solving performance problems. I know the core fundamentals of scalability and bugfixing, and I know them very very well; I don't know Python as well, nor do I know Python web APIs well. So now I can just tell Claude "hey, X seems like a problem, how do we solve X systematically? would Y work? can Y be implemented?" and Claude says "absolutely, Y can be implemented! It uses this little-documented hook that you've never heard of in a software package that we are already using but that you've also never heard of, let me just do that for you" and it does it and finds an entire class of error that we then spend twenty commits systematically squashing.
(This is not a hypothetical.)
It's a fantastic partnership because Claude is great at a bunch of stuff that I'm bad at, and I'm great at a bunch of stuff Claude is bad at.
Since I've given up on winning popularity contests, I will suggest something I've idly-floated for years. LLM-moderation.
I admit I wasn't saying this . . . but I do agree with this.
Not for the hard cases - that's why we have mods - and probably not for bans, either. But there's a lot of reports where we look at it and say "why did you report this, knock it off", and an LLM could dispatch a lot of those very very very quickly.
I think I mentioned elsewhere of moderator force multipliers, and this is an example. We have years of history of how moderators approved or rejected posts, a lot of which is boiled into the janitor system, and we can use LLMs to both exploit and boost that system. It doesn't have to be perfect, it merely has to handle most cases near-perfectly and with no human input, and I think that's very doable.
As you say:
But a lot of the scutwork would cease to be an issue.
and yep. Use computers for the scutwork, save humans for the interesting bit.
ZorbaTHut
15d ago
But if you could create a tool that would allow someone to quickly and easily spin up their own custom site that is (a) open to the internet (b) easily discoverable on google and other algorithmic search engines (c) secure) (d) easy for new users to sign in and comment on (e) for the site owner to customize and monetize... then perhaps we'd see a resurgence in people creating actual, independant websites.
Y'know, in some ways this isn't that big of a departure from what I'm already planning. All it requires is that the person be able to attach their own web domain to the submotte instead of just running it through our main domain. That's doable.
Yeah. And a lot of the metrics that would be naively useful, like whether there's a bunch of splintering or a quickly growing competitor subreddit, are bad to make actual measures because Goodhart.
Worth noting that Goodhart is relatively easy to avoid if you just don't mention what the metrics are. The Motte has always had thresholds for new users to stop getting their messages filtered. Nobody but the mods have ever known the details of those and we've never had trouble with people gaming them.
Yeah, the boorus have definitely made it work. That said, they've also typically had to do so with a very heavy hand and a lot of cruft: you probably don't have to worry about a four hundred line analysis to translate "pussy" to "vagina" (a literal two-year on-going process at e621, still incomplete), but I'd still plan early around a situation where a big fandom coalesced around thirty or so completely unrelated tags, some of which overlap with other intended uses of those same tags.
I'm honestly fine with a heavy hand for some of the larger and more popular tags, and the smaller ones aren't as important.
. . . that said how does it take that long to change one word? Shouldn't that just be a mildly fancy SQL query?
I guess I'm more motioning around the non-porn variants being a problem that will arise, if not one as immediately likely to result in legal threat.
Yeah, this is fair.
I think my answer here is to follow the letter of the law, because I mean, it is the law, but also to make the rationale as public as possible.
"We have removed this due to a legal note from this party."
ZorbaTHut
15d ago
Since getting back into WoW I have found PUG looting culture fascinating as both a functional and ethical question.
I have always found it deeply weird that they set up this giant cooperative experience, and then the instant the boss is dead, slam it straight into a zero-sum PvP experience.
ZorbaTHut
15d ago
Start by re-creating this website, with better architecture and minor improvements, but no major new features. . . . then copy all the data from this site onto the new one . . .
So I'd actually take this a step further; what I'd do would be to freeze the DB schema, reimplement it on top of the same DB, and then make changes from there. No copy required and it lets us do a gradual changeover and even a backpedal if needed.
Do exactly what Reddit has done with subreddits except where you've noticed issues, specifically the ID/name thing.
Yeah, absolutely agreed. I think there are improvements to be made, but Reddit works, we'd just start there.
Accept that this forum may not grow much so there may not be many communities here.
Yep. It's quite possible that it just ends up dying an early death. Such is life.
IMO, most attempts at federation are a "solution in search of a problem". I recommend adding all federation features ad-hoc: only when needed, as simply as you can. In fact, I recommend this for all features that don't already exist on this old site.
So there's a few reasons I really want federation.
Part of it, I will acknowledge, is as a kind of moral pillar. I don't like vendor lock-in. It sucks. I don't want to be part of the problem.
Then another part of it is so I can kick subcommunities off without feeling too bad about it. Getting kicked off Reddit is nearly a death knell; getting kicked off Gmail simply isn't. I don't want to be in charge of delivering those death knells, and the easiest way to avoid that is to make sure they're not death knells.
A third part is that in theory we can link up with other groups like Lemmy. I dunno if that would actually work out, but I like the concept, at least.
Why would people trust you to host their site (instead of Discourse etc.), especially when if they really trust you they can simply create a community?
If they make a "community" community, they don't own it, we do, and we'd be pushing the "foundation" thing. A lot of people will be fine with that and never run into issues! Not everyone though.
But also, it's a single integrated site. A lot of people don't look at The Motte simply because it's not Reddit; they have all their links in one place. There's a number of other forums out there that maybe I would join, but I would never look at, because I don't want to add another stop to my rotation. So "we'll host your site and add it to people's comment notifications" starts looking relatively attractive.
then make your forum software open-source and self-hostable.
Absolutely! :)
The "Foundation" you have on this site can be the default for new communities, but trying to force their moderators to adhere to it is pointless at best, because if the moderators suck the community will fail.
So, a note here. I'm not suggesting having a single metamotte-wide Foundation (well, okay, I am, but not one that specifies rules), and I'm not suggesting holding other people to the Motte's foundation. I'm saying that at some point they are required to write something reasonable - which I'd help with - and that they will then be subject to it. It's not "force the moderators to adhere to it"; it's "if you cannot adhere to it, you will not be moderating this community anymore", and then we elect new users out of the community.
But this is only if they really are breaking the intent of the community. If it's a young community without a foundation, or a private community, fine, whatever, we'll just rename it elsewhere and let someone else scoop up the namespace.
ZorbaTHut
15d ago
Or is the ID part of the thread identifier, and the submotte id only a navigation aid?
This is roughly my plan, yeah.
themotte.org/r/pot means "the current subreddit named pot, whatever that might be"; it is not actually a unique identifier. It's possible that if you go to /r/pot itself, you would get redirected to themotte.org/r/pot/main/102, which will always refer to Subreddit 102, later to be known as trees, even if it's no longer /r/pot. This means that anyone going to "/r/pot" ends up in whatever community we currently have blessed with the name "/r/pot", but a copypasted link gets that specific community even if it has since been renamed.
Thread links don't include a subreddit ID, but they do include a post ID; the subreddit and thread name are completely irrelevant. Reddit already does part of this -https://old.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/1tehscm/theres_a_fox_family_living_under_our_front_porch/ is the exact same as www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/1tehscm/i_sure_do_love_beef/. And while it does validate the /r/aww part for some reason, the comment ID is globally unique. We just have to make it pay attention to that.
Who arbitrates when /r/politics has been taken over by your outgroup, can they fund the inevitable lawsuit or forced arbitration, and what's that look like to normal users?
Well, the buck stops with me, in the end. So, "me, or someone delegated by me to solve these problems".
One thing I'm currently unsure of is how to tell when it needs actual attention; obviously any subreddit as big as /r/politics is going to have people constantly spamming "this subreddit is violating its own rules" reports. But this feels like one of those "we'll deal with that later" things; I can't come up with a solution when I don't see how the problem behaves. It will be a problem, but this also feels solvable.
Part of your alpha is the direct website functionality and the aggregator work, but it also needs to be the services you're offering, which is one of the spots that Reddit/Tumblr/whatever have historically been the worst at. People get committed when they buy in, even small costs, and there's a lot of genuine services that are pretty valuable to users and that traditional social media has avoided.
Yeah, this is fair; I may have to bump "you can make a site" up in priority for the sake of buy-in.
DNS means you can get ARFCOM'd, private messaging or live chat adds a lot of COPA concerns, custom templating rather than rawdogging CSS means support costs.
DNS may be a surprisingly small issue; ARFCOM was due to being kicked off Godaddy, I think? There are much better DNS providers out there who are far less eager to kick people off.
I'm actually not too concerned about custom templating, you can do sufficiently bad stuff with CSS that a real bad actor will find a way to be a nuisance anyway. One step at a time here, honestly.
COPPA is a gigantic pain. I would probably just remove 13-or-younger logins to start with, frankly. This is maybe something I should be doing already though. I am . . . not looking forward to the legal side of this.
There's a couple solutions here. The namespace solution is the obvious coder one
Huh. That's a neat idea.
It is definitely . . . controversy-fraught, let's say. At the same time, if community names really aren't permanent, it feels more adjustable. Something like the Ark situation could be handled by just tossing a thread onto all relevant communities and saying "hey, we want to solve this, hash out what names you'd prefer?" and doing a doge-ish process to come to a sensible agreed-upon conclusion.
(I would fully want to automate the Doge process.)
The other is tag-based. Still have the collision problem, but the bigger issue's whether you allow user tagging -- see tumblr's search for how that goes -- or have to do some work to manage it.
I'm actually not familiar enough to Tumblr to know what's going on here. What did happen?
I think my gut feeling is that user tagging works actually pretty well as long as you have reasonable thresholds for when you officially bless tags. Steam games are technically user-tagged and do just fine; I can also think of, uh, a site with a number in it that has a phenomenally thorough crowdsourced tagging system.
Separation. Even if you don't host images/video, you're going to get content you don't want available to every user
This does tap into one other actual big problem, which is the increasing tendency of governments to want to segregate anything even vaguely adult away from the entire rest of the world.
I can think of a few approaches.
One is to just not worry about it. Reddit still has porn. Deal with it. I feel like porn is less of a problem for communities than it is for community managers without a spine, and I don't plan to be that person.
Another is to have a "everything except the porn" URL, and then an "everything including the porn" URL, using the "everything except the porn" URL pretty much everywhere we can. You want the porn, someone will eventually mention the with-the-porn version; go to that site.
but there's historically been a tendency to threat some forms of content as fundamentally corrosive
Yeah, you're not wrong.
I think there's a point where this can be solved by the biggest whale simply saying "no, we're not going to do that; you can de-federate with us if you want, but other than that, deal with it, because we are not planning to de-federate with other groups". There's a lot of really awful people running email servers that can still send emails to gmail, so this is clearly not an unsolvable problem. And that's not even indirect federation, that's direct sends!
ZorbaTHut
16d ago
The tricky part is figuring out how to scrape that data so we're posting quality links, which is a tough problem in its own right. But, yeah, not necessarily an impossible one.
We can frankly also just leech off Reddit by looking at what's posted there and reposting it :V
ZorbaTHut
16d ago
I've used it successfully, for what it's worth!
Like eight years ago, but still.
But that's been happening for centuries, right? People don't learn as much cursive anymore, people don't learn as much math by hand, when was the last time you used a slide rule? How many people learn machine language or how to spin thread or how to use a scythe? Are people better or worse at hammering nails today than they were before the nailgun was invented?
I guess my feeling is that this is always phrased as a catastrophe and then always ends up not being a catastrophe.
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