Hi guys, I'm @idio3 from rdrama, one of the main jannies there. I like the idea of you running an offsite, but I'm absolutely floored by the implementation.
Now I get that there are features of the main site that wouldn't be appropriate for you guys, since you're looking for a different sort of discussion and atmosphere than we are. Longpostbot, annoying graphical and user-nerfing awards, bardbot, etc - it makes perfect sense to remove those. But other decisions I just don't understand. Most notably - what the hell is your beef with Marseys? Why don't image uploads work? It's like you guys intentionally wanted to preclude people from attempting to have fun :marseyshrug:, with the changes being essentially limited to cutting out as many of our features as you could get your hands on...
Anyway, if you could illuminate the rationale for these things, I'd greatly appreciate it! :marseyblowkiss:
be mottizens
set up own website
fork dramacode
remove 90% of features
manage to break the other 10% of features somehow
True story
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Notes -
A few answers!
Marsey's your schtick. It's a cute schtick! But it's not ours. If we're going to generate our own culture, we're going to generate our own culture, not start by just riffing off someone else's culture. Our codebase is an offshoot of yours; our community isn't, however. Frankly, while I totally appreciate that you guys exist, you're like the polar opposite of what we want around here; you guys keep doin' your thing, we'll keep doing our thing.
A big thing we want here is effortposts. We don't want people to be able to slam down a giant blob of flashy pixels, we want people to write stuff. This is always going to be a text-heavy website, not an image-heavy website; that's the culture we're aiming for.
I mean, bluntly, yes, we are trying to preclude people from having the kind of fun that you guys want to have.
Again, your community's great! I'm glad you enjoy it! But it's not what we're going for here - we do not want circlejerks, we do not want low effort spamposts, we do not want 24/7 memes.
We picked your codebase because it was being used in production and it had reasonably competent moderation features. The extra flashy stuff, as far as I'm concerned, is a negative for our purposes, and so yeah, we're gonna strip it out.
Sometimes your kids don't grow up to be carbon copies of you; we're taking after our other parent :)
For what it's worth, native image uploading would be pretty great in the context of some effortposts. I don't know whether the gains are worth the risk of the low-effort stuff that would come along with it, but there are lots of times I write something for TheMotte+elsewhere where my motteversions cut out a lot of the graphs, illustrations, etc I otherwise scatter throughout. Would "image uploads as part of submissions, but not comments" be difficult to implement or worth exploring?
I think images should be allowed in comments. If we continue organizing the site roughly the same as the subreddit, most of the effortposts are going to be comments in the CW thread. No reason to make them worse than Posts. Just moderate it the same as text content. Kinda related: it'd be nice to have collapsible blocks of text, for larger comments/posts. Make them not count towards character limit (if there's any).
IMO there shouldn't be too many Posts made about specific things. It'd be better to have several recurring topical threads (CW, 'fun thread', 'media thread', meta thread*...).
* especially now; IMO it'd be useful to try to figure out priority things to do/fix here instead of GH. Plus organizational stuff, like the exact set of perma/recurring-threads. And maybe scope of the community? How it fits in with adjacent spaces?
I find topical threads very annoying to browse. You have to scroll past entire comments, instead of just the title, and you have to open the thread to see if there are new top-level comments. It's hard to keep track of what people are talking about.
I'd prefer having only one active topical thread at any one time, alongside the CW thread, as was the practice back on Reddit. The thread would be reserved for small posts with relatively simple answers, to avoid clogging up the site. (Recall the Pareto principle.) Anything likely to generate a substantial amount of discussion should be posted either in the CW thread or as a separate post.
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