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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

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So what is the intended usage pattern here? Are we supposed to keep 99% of the posting in the round up thread or treat it more like a typical reddit sub/forum?

We should keep it the same. Other offshoots have tried the topic-per-thread usage pattern; it doesn't work. There's something magical about the megathread. One thing I'll be keeping my eye on is how the thread performs when the number of comments gets high. Sometimes reddit doesn't load all the comments.

I agree that this seems like the best usage. Keeping all the activity in one thread also encourages more activity purely by concentration and interaction. Diluting posts and commentary across several threads would result in overall less activity.

It might be cool to have more stickies though, like having the round up, wellness and off topic threads perma-pinned.

I agree. Though I do think I prefer to have them staggered like they are now. Culture War on Monday, Wellness Wednesday, Fun Friday, etc.

At the moment, I'm planning to have:

  • Culture War pin

  • Rotating weekly post pins (Wednesday/Friday/Sunday)

  • A spot for the latest Meta post, if there has been one in the last few weeks

This is very much in flux, though.

At least for now, we're stickin' with the same behavior we had before; Culture War posts go in the roundup thread, non-culture-war posts can go elsewhere.

I think there's actually good reasons to keep this format and ugh ask me some other time I have been doing way too much typing today. But seriously, ask me if you're interested.

Can you fix the css and reduce all the spacing? I have a massive monitor, and on the most zoomed-out zoom settings, there are ~ 5 short comments total on my screen.

Do we know how this new system will handle 2k comment posts? And is there any way to change the number of comments that load?

Note that Reddit itself doesn't handle 2k+ comment posts all that well. Sure, it never stops loading the comments page at all or crashes the site. But it's often basically impossible to see more top-level comments once you load the first 200 it lets you. It usually lets you load more at the top level once, but I've never seen it work more than once. Other options like using depth=1 seemed to be broken 3/4 of the time, with no clue when it would work and when it wouldn't.

Another reason to be eager to get off Reddit was so that the behavior of large comment count threads is at least consistent and fixable instead of constantly broken in unpredictable ways.

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.

Sounds good. I do recommend not rocking the boat until we're sure it otherwise floats. Introducing too many changes at once can make it hard to separate the good from the bad, so a steady course for now sounds wise.