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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   7006 thread views

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I don't know if there's an existing discussion for it, but I want to ask if we can please remove voting entirely. My frustration with this system is immense, as it allows people to engage in blatantly partisan ways with other people - downvoting due to perceived disagreement. It bothers me when I see someone make an argument that is downvoted and not responded to. I'm not saying we have to respond to everyone, but you shouldn't be downvoting over disagreement, only if you think the post violates the rules.

I agree that partisan voting is a problem, but I think the solution here is to change how votes are calculated rather than removing the concept of voting. Some level of easy participation is really valuable for user retention, and some level of scoring is valuable for ease of finding good comments; we just gotta make it so that it's not a simple public opinion.

This thread is pretty much the only time I use the downvote arrow. (My apologies, I've done so for your post here as well, hoping to let Zorba and the other devs treat this like a prioritized backlog).

TheMotte is far better than almost any other sub is in terms of respecting what up and downvoting is actually for. You can tell this frequently by the fact we rarely have any negatively voted posts. I'll also, by default, upvote anything that is close to zero even if I disagree with it as long as it's a quality contribution. This is one of those changes I just don't think we need to make.

It would be cool to have voting on top-level posts but not comments, if that's feasible.

I kind of sympathize, but for every person who hates the voting buttons there's another who wants more visible voting and even more elaborate ways to vote and track voting.

You're right that votes aren't supposed to be "I agree/I disagree" buttons, but that's just the way it usually works because people are lazy.

for every person who hates the voting buttons there's another who wants more visible voting and even more elaborate ways to vote and track voting.

Really? I'm fascinated by this argument. I understand that if you implement the voting system, then you want lots of ways to vote and visibility into voting. But I can't imagine why someone wants to vote in this context.

I'm a strong advocate for votes in comment systems. I think they provide a clear and fast way to gauge both local sympathies and perception of quality, and they provide feedback that comments cannot. Excellent posts often by their nature discourage responses, because they provide little to disagree with, while drawing widespread voting support. Being able to distinguish "this take is locally controversial and gets mixed votes" versus "this take inspires a lot of pushback but is overall popular" is useful. Being able to signal quickly that you liked something without needing to take up space with a comment is useful. I do very much like the all-votes-are-public aspect from rdrama, but that might be too Dramatic to include here. Regardless, I strongly prefer spending time in spaces with voting systems to ones without.

I don't think so. We can remove all your comments if you want, then you can just not use the account again.

Petition: We are all special snowflakes and we deserve special characters in our user names.

¿Can we please have special characters in our names? I think it would add cool customization to usernames and it ought to (naively) be a simple change to the website.

I kinda feel like this might backfire with people doing weird username masquerading.

Good point:)

I certainly hope not. Although maybe a meme thread infrequently posted, say once a month/quarter, wouldn't be too terrible.

I definitely don't want to have the brilliant posters here wasting their times making memes.

There's a million other sites suitable for dumping silly internet memes and culture warrior blowhard "jokes." If anything, this site should become a high-effort posting comunity where people make well-thought out text posts. I personally think high-effort satire can be extremely funny when done well, and if we're going to post anything for laughs, it should be longform text posts. Like it or not, this site will likely get quite a bit of overlap with the various dispora of MDE or Deuxrama, but it also has the potential to attract lefties as well. I'm here because I want to be able to write more than a few sentances without geting the "words words words" response. (Sorry I don't know the history of Motte, I just got here from the rdrama crowd. Based on what I've seen so far, it seems like it's a dirtbag left or stupidpol type community.)

Perhaps if the site had a subform that had a serious "nothing but your own OC" rule, I could see it as being suitable.

Nice to see that we're already getting new people. Welcome! Many users, me included, were concerned that migrating from Reddit would make us impossible to find.

If you haven't figured it out yet, the culture war sticky is where most of the discussion happens. The one here seems to be a bit slow at the moment, so you can check out last week's thread on Reddit if you want to get a feel for it. There's also a monthly thread highlighting high-quality contributions – the one for August was posted recently.

As for the members' political views, I don't think "dirtbag left" is very accurate. Many people are more traditionally right-wing, though there are all sorts of viewpoints, including stupidpol-type people and even a few more orthodox leftists – some would probably classify them as "woke", but they're able to participate respectfully and are respected in turn.

There's a lot more to say here. (Maybe we should have an intro section for newcomers?) If you have any questions, ask away!

Mr THut can you please do the needful and kindly revert whatever change you made to make usernames directly link to profiles instead of showing the profile card? Right now it does both (shows the card for a split second and then loads the profile page). It should be one or the other. I can't open an issue as I am banned from github. Thank you sir.

If I recall correctly, we had a problem with the profile-card code and did this to fix it. We actually have a pending fix to make popups work but it's not quite working either, unfortunately. So, in development.

I'm happy to see the new reporting dialogue, but it's not letting me click submit. I can choose different radio buttons and type in the "Other" reason box, but the Submit button remains disabled.

https://www.themotte.org/post/86/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/10754?context=8#context

Should be fixed now!

Comment minimization is nice, but probably not a good interface in terms of great UX design, it seems janky and 'visible / not visible' doesn't necessarily describe the way I'd want to interact with a comment. Minimizing for navigation at the moment isn't necessarily minimizing for later viewing, doing it manually is annoying, and minimizing for later viewing isn't necessarily the action I'd want to take (especially if there are new comments under the minimized one later).

Anyway, bug report: if you minimize a comment and then a reply to a comment you made under it occurs, the reply DM is also minimized.

We've actually had a bunch of people explicitly ask for it because that's how they handle deciding a conversation is no longer interesting; just minimize it and it goes away. I agree this isn't a use-case that I want but it seems to be quite popular.

Can you give a suggestion regarding how you would want it to behave?

Anyway, bug report: if you minimize a comment and then a reply to a comment you made under it occurs, the reply DM is also minimized.

Hah! Totally believable. Bug filed.

I think I misspoke on what the bug is. If you minimize one of your own comments, and then someone replies to it, in the notifications view your comment (and thus the reply under it) are minimized, as opposed if you minimized any grandparent/parent of your comment.

I cannot reliably reproduce this, but I swear sometimes it keeps happening (especially on mobile safari). When I click the "-"(minus sign) at the left side to hide a thread, sometimes its entire parent is hidden instead.

Is it possible you're a little too far off to the left? The bar just left of it will do exactly that, and I can't think of another way this could happen.

(Might justify making the click zone a bit larger though.)

This might explain why it happens usually on mobile

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.

I've got a task posted to increase the click zone, but it'll take a bit to get there. If you either prove or disprove that this is the actual problem, let me know :)

Yeah looks like now that I know the hiding element isn’t just the icon but a whole vertical line, I can reproduce the problem I was having easily

The front page feels disorderly because the stickies aren't bolded (at least for me?). I don't know about others but this frustrates me.

Also, please consider keeping all the regular threads of the week stickied. It has always been a little sad that threads tend to drop off in posters when they get unstickied by the next thread a few days after.

Found a bug with the formatting.

A tilde renders the rest of the text with a strikethrough.

Escaping it with a backslash fixes it in the preview but not in the comment.

Text here. (text) more text. (text)

Text here. (text) more text. (text)

Text here. (\text) more text. (\text)

Text here. (text) more text. (text)

Sigh. Not the first case that's been found; it'll take us a while to get there, though.

I don't know if this has already been reported. I tried to search for it but realized my folly as the only search term that came to mind was "Reply"...

In the middle of writing a post I highlighted text in the parent comment and hit "reply." I was hoping that it would automatically quote that text and add it in the middle of my comment. Maybe that was silly of me. But it completely overwrote my comment, where a better user experience would be a kind of "Are you sure? your comment is not done..." kind of alert. It's a little awkward, because as far as I can tell, this codebase prefers to silently persist drafts when you return to comment (I just now checked with the back button) instead of using alerts at all.

That's reasonable, yep.

It's going to take a bit to get to this one, I'm afraid, but it's on the list.

Can we have a separate roundup thread for LOTR/similar media? Not only to avoid disappointment when yet another new top-level comment turns out to be about that, but also because this new site tends to lock up on those huge threads more than reddit did, so keeping the CWR thread smaller would be beneficial.

I guess you can just try posting it?

I'm not actually sure this is worth the thread right now; it's been In The News, but a lot of other things have also.

Note that while the site is slow on big threads, it's not slow based on the number of comments total, but based on the number of comments displayed. We ramped this up because people were (reasonably) grumbling about not being able to see a lot of text. The result, though, is that splitting a too-big-to-show-everything thread into two too-big-to-show-everything threads isn't actually going to speed anything up.

Ahh, bummer. 'more comments but it occasionally hangs' is preferable to 'manually loading more comments.'

Is there a way to disable the annoying and weird flairs next to usernames? they remind me of forum signatures the way they bloat up the text and spam the same sentence over and over every time someone comments

As a temporary workaround, you can adblock them (at least in Ublock Origin). That's what I did for all of the awards in Reddit.

Thanks, I'll work on that

The rule I created (that seems to work, but I haven't thoroughly tested) is:

! 2022-09-19 https://www.themotte.org

www.themotte.org##bdi

and the reddit one I mentioned is:



! 2021-08-04 https://old.reddit.com

reddit.com##.awardings-bar

To create filtering rules like that, rightclick on the offending element, choose "Block Element" from the contextual menu, then play with the two sliders until you have a rule that looks general enough without removing parts that you want.

I think it would be useful if the number of comments of threads and subtreads was displayed when you collapse them.

It makes browsing much easier because you can easily tell if there are new comments or if there has been any intense discussion in a thread without having to scroll through it.

I'm not sure I understand why top-level comments have a hidden vertical bar under them, as opposed to the visible bar of child comments. Consider this screenshot. I suspect if you show that screenshot to anyone familiar with reddit-style comments and ask whether pro_sprond and Quantumfreakonomics were making top-level comments, they'd say yes.

Am I missing something?

This is a recent change. See https://www.themotte.org/post/30/bugs-suggestions-small-comments-and-site/3975?context=8#context

Almost everyone thought it makes it easier to tell apart top level posts.

But a better solution might be to give them a different color depending on depth. For example shades of gray from white to black. Someone already mentioned it here: https://www.themotte.org/post/30/bugs-suggestions-small-comments-and-site/4612?context=8#context

When I sort comments by top, it’s not like the Reddit “top” but more like the “best”. So newer comments with fewer upvotes are higher up. Is this intentional?

The intro text for the culture war roundup thread still links to reddit's /r/TheThread. That should be moved as well, right?

It's weird, but it is honestly still correct. I'm not very worried about Reddit banning that subreddit, and it never got significant comments anyway, and we don't have a sensible way to create subreddit-equivalents on this site, so . . . I guess we'll just leave it?

For now, at least?

"Open External Links In New Tabs" is inconsistent. I disabled the setting, clicked on an external link (the Forbes link here, if it makes a difference), and it opened in a new tab.

I just tried clicking on http://example.com/ in this message preview, and it respected my settings. (EDIT: clicking it in the message, after posting, opened it in a new tab).

I didn't even realize that existed.

I imagine we're not properly wrapping links; bug filed, may take a bit to get to.

Have the mods considered that now that we are off of Reddit, it's silly to cram everything into a Culture War thread?

I mean, I understand why it was useful when the Reddit Stazi were listening in. But now that we have fled the country, jumped over the wall, and escaped, do we really need to cram ourselves so unnaturally into on single thread?

Breathe. Go outside. Let there be many threads with many conversations, controversial ones even!

The rules that were created under oppression should be abolished when we have fled to the new prairie!

“Seven times I have despised my soul:

The first time when I saw her being meek that she might attain height.

The second time when I saw her limping before the crippled..."

-Khalil Gibran

The single thread is at least semi intentional. I personally find it quite inuitive to navigate. But thats maybe because I am used to it.

Has the community already discussed whether Substack would work as a more sustainable permanent home? If so, apologies for the repeat question.

My basic logic is, ACX is thriving as far as I can tell, and its comment section reads fairly similar to The Motte. Scott is probably a higher quality poster than any individual poster here, but collectively the community likely generates a higher total sum of interesting material. Given Substack allows multiple contributors with tiers of privileges, would it be crazy to have a The Motte Substack where pretty much anyone can sign up to be a contributor, and in essence the single culture war thread gets subdivided into something like 20-30 individual posts each week, and then comments can continue in the Substack comment section?

I'm sure there are various minor logistical issues that make this imperfect. But if this site seems to stagnate or even decline from a peak a few months from now due to a lack of new users from Reddit, maybe Substack would be worth a try, given the platform could potentially yield an ongoing stream of new users/subscribers?

I like the basic idea. The problem is curation; we don't really want to just make it a free-for-all where anyone can write under The Motte's name, we'd want to make it a best-of-The-Motte deal. That's basically "the quality contributions and the Vault", and while I don't mind mirroring stuff further onto Substack, we just don't have the personpower for it at the moment.

If I understand Substack's user tiers correctly, contributors wouldn't be posting as The Motte, but rather under their own usernames (as contributor "VPN", for example), albeit to the same subdomain.

Definitely recognize it'd be juggling too many balls at once to pursue this right now. Just wanted to put out there in case a standalone site here that's unaffiliated with Reddit or an alternative like Substack means problems of long-term sustainability.

Culture war thread keeps crashing for me.

Your web browser crashes, or something else?

The tab of the web browser was crashing. I use Brave, and it only happens on one device (a laptop).

At some point this becomes "your web browser is broken"; there shouldn't be anything capable of crashing a web browser tab in general. If it's device-specific it may also be a hardware issue.

Is Brave updated? Try that first :) Otherwise lemme know what the exact version is and I'll see if I can figure out what's up.

One more minor bikeshed: modhatted comments have the poster's username in white on bright red, apparently regardless of theme. While this makes sense for bans and such, the median mod comment on TheMotte has a much mellower tone. I'd suggest either changing the color to the traditional green or dialing back the amount of red color, e.g., underline the username and set it in red with no background.

I like that idea, yeah. I'm actually just sitting down to make a snack and start on those visual changes, I'll roll this into them.

Thanks!

If you go to the site without logging in, and then log in, it shows no new posts even if there are. At least I think that's what's going on; it's hard to tell what I'm doing different from last time. If this is the cause, my guess is that it would be using the last visited time from when you last visited even if you weren't logged in.

Edit: It's happened enough that I'm sure that's the problem. The last visited time should not be updated if you aren't logged in.

The WW thread is showing me a count of 5 comments on the main page, but it only has two total top-level comments and no children.

I believe filtered comments still show up in the total-comment-count, as do deleted comments (yes, even self-deleted.)

I want to fix this but it's not really a high priority right now.

I'd like the option for the first batch of comments from a big thread to be either be width-first or depth-first.

Typing deep in a thread, each time I type the screen moves down 1 pixel.

Bug filed.

Same here.

Where is the feature to switch to dark mode? Thought I read that it existed but I can't find it in settings.

It is under your profile settings, I've just found it.

Yep, for anyone curious it's under 'Website Theme' about 3-4 sections down from the top.

I have "Highlight new comments since last visit" enabled in user settings, but it doesn't seem to do anything -- it's very possible that I'm missing something here, but if not this should be a high priority feature given the nature of The Thread.

It probably depends on your color theme. In the default light(?) theme, I think it colors new comments with this grey background (that doesn't go well with black text).

Pretty sure I'm not getting shit at the moment:

https://imgur.com/a/l63KFjy

Good to know that it's somewhat working for others; I'll do some more troubleshooting and make up a bug report if it's not a me problem.

For me, I think it works when I hit "load additional comments" at the bottom, but not initially, and not for "load deeper threads" loads. On the default theme, it's suble-ish-- a grey highlight. Is that how's it working for you?

For me, it's a very light blue background for the comment.

I could definitely believe someone with different eyes/monitors not being able to distinguish it from white.

If a comment is deleted, it can't be collapsed. This would be useful if it had a bunch of replies that you'd like to hide simultaneously.

Example below:

EDIT: hmm, didn't work? Maybe it's only mod-removed ones, not user deleted.

second unhideable-in-bulk comment

first unhideable-in-bulk comment

Comment removed as requested, and yep, I see that. Added as bug!

Update: it can't be collapsed by clicking the collapse button (the (-) or (+) beside the name). You can still use the vertical bar on the side.

Hotkeys for formatting in comments would be nice. Right now I have to click the icon or type in the markdown to get italics, it would be nice to be able to just hit ctrl + i and summon **.

When a conversation gets really heavily nested, I want to pick a comment and make that the new root of my discussion, like on reddit. If I click on "context" I get sent to a page with all the parents still existing.

Example: https://www.themotte.org/post/75/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/8664?context=8#context

Yeah, I was gonna ask for an equivalent to old.plebbit's permalink. Is that what you're thinking too?

Edit: notifications should also not show the entire thread, just the parent comment.

We're actually working on this!

Right now there is a comment page you can use, but it's not linked anywhere: https://www.themotte.org/comment/8664?context=8 . This doesn't work like you might want with context - it doesn't show just parents, but all the siblings of those parents. A better solution is in the pipeline but it's pretty big.

I've been finding that the bar at the bottom of the screen is very easy to accidentally hit with my thumb when browsing on mobile. I'd love if it were moved to the top of the screen or something (or if there were an option in the settings for this, I tried flicking through the different themes but none of them change it.)

Suggestion: Could you add how many comments a post has, particularly when minimized?

Hmm, what do you mean? Can you screenshot where you're looking or something?

Like so. https://imgur.com/A4Zl24U

I think maybe they meant to add a count of how many children a comment has, like it does on Reddit

This, particularly for the "load more comments" button.

I actually can't find an example of that on Reddit, though I'm sure I'm just blind or missing something obvious. Can one of you (ping @dinoinnameonly, @circlecrossrectangle) gimme a screenshot? Here's a link to the last Reddit Culture War thread, if that makes it easier.

https://www.themotte.org/images/16637686202253878.webp

Load more comments (39 replies)

/images/16636937808690078.webp

Aha! Got it. Will add it to the list :D

Is there an equivalent to "AUTOMOD_MULTIPART_LOCKME" (or whatever it was called), for keeping long effortposts in order? Since the character limit is 10k here (same as on reddit, I think?). (I apologize if this is a repeat question.)

Or, would it be better to publish super-long things as a standalone post, instead? (Although, in that case it might be nice to have a character limit of more than 20k...)

Not at the moment, sorry. I'd like to set up some way for people to make ultralong posts but that's waiting on backend code stuff.

Any chance we could get "custom JS" in addition to the "custom CSS" tab on the site? Would be useful for doing personal interface improvements and such.

Linking to a child comment currently brings you to its location on the page, without affecting the organization of comments.

For example, this one is structured like:

  • parent comment

    • child 1

    • child 2

    • child 3

      • grandchild 3.1

    • child 4

      • grandchild 4.1

      • grandchild 4.2 (link target)

and I would like it to display:

  • parent

    • child 4

      • grandchild 4.2 (link target)

, similar to Reddit.

EDIT: new bug: multi-level lists display properly on the comment preview, but not in the comment.

Linking to a child comment currently brings you to its location on the page, without affecting the organization of comments.

Coincidentally we actually just talked over how we wanted this to work; I believe TLSM is working on it now, and, yeah, we're basically going with the Reddit solution.

Note that you can get just that comment directly by handcrafting the URL, but if you try increasing the context you also get the siblings which we agree is kind of crummy.

EDIT: new bug: multi-level lists display properly on the comment preview, but not in the comment.

dangit, these lists are going to be the death of me

Bug filed.

If my network connection dies while composing a comment but before posting it, sometimes the page gets permanently stuck and I have to save the comment then reload the page to actually submit it.

Clinking on submitted links goes to "https://www.themotte.org/post/xxxxxxx" instead of the link itself. Getting to the link requires a second click. On reddit you only needed to click once.

I think this one is my fault too.

Bug filed, thank you!

Not at this time (unless there's one I'm not aware of.) We can hide all your comments if you want, although given that the above request is half of your comments, this is probably not a big deal for you.

  1. The "New comments" counter seems to be browser-specific, not account-specific.

  2. Every time I resize the comment box on desktop it snaps back to the original size as soon as I start typing

The "New comments" counter seems to be browser-specific, not account-specific.

True, and I'm afraid this isn't likely to change anytime soon. Thread collapses are the same way, at least for now.

Every time I resize the comment box on desktop it snaps back to the original size as soon as I start typing

Hey, you're right, it does. That's annoying. Bug filed!

True, and I'm afraid this isn't likely to change anytime soon. Thread collapses are the same way, at least for now.

This is also a problem if you're ever logged out. You go to the site, it updates the new comments date, then you log in. The new comments shows you new comments since you last visited the site, which was a second ago when you visited before logging in, so there are no new comments.

Even if it can't track between browsers, it shouldn't update anything if you're not logged in.

Hmm. My gut feeling is that it should update if you're not logged in, just for the sake of people who are logged-out-browsing. But maybe it shouldn't update the same stuff; that is, each account, including "not logged in", should have its own independent status for what's new.

Does that make sense?

At this point, it's seemed to behave in inconsistent ways, and I no longer have any useful idea about what's going on. All I can say is that I have the problem.

Actually I'm not sure this is the problem, unless something changed. I had all cookies set to session cookies and the problem only happens when I completely exit the browser. Otherwise the read comments are updated when you enter a thread. Just going to the site when logging in doesn't enter a thread, so it shouldn't be updating any read comment dates, and so it shouldn't be the cause of my problem.

(If you store the information on the server, so people can browse from a different location and still know which comments are new, it would incidentally solve this problem too.)

If I'm not logged in, it doesn't show that there's anything new at all, it just prevents it from showing anything new when I do log in.

Is it possible (as a low-priority feature request) to expose the "last viewed timestamp" in a (editable) box on the header?

This would allow one to get around any remaining janky behaviour as to when that updates, and also would have the benefit of allowing users to highlight recent comments (for any given personal definition of 'recent') regardless of viewing/browser history.

Probably, yeah. This could be done entirely clientside, I believe - all you really need is a Javascript snippet, run via something like Tampermonkey.

I don't think this is the kind of thing I'm spending developer time on right now, though if someone really wants to put something together we might be able to find a spot for it.

Yeah it's definitely on the 'nice to have' -- Tampermonkey is a good suggestion, I may dive in and see if I can get some idea of feasibility that way.

The font changes etc. continue to look really good -- it seems like you've increased the chunk size of comments loaded as well? I'm getting more than previously anyways, which is working well performance-wise AFAICT.

it seems like you've increased the chunk size of comments loaded as well?

Yep, went from 50 comments per page to 200 comments per page :)

This did increase page load time painfully, though - it's tolerable for now but it's not going higher until we have better setups for this.

Huh, is that "observed client-side" or some test dealie?

It's not noticeably longer for me (like, I literally didn't notice for a while because it was a lot closer to the reddit experience) and anyways 'one longer pageload' would be better than 'four slightly shorter pageloads'!

Transition is getting pretty smooth (if not better than Reddit in some ways) -- excellent work man!

More comments

We actually don't have an official deletion option right now.

At the moment we don't store anything past what you've officially submitted to the site, i.e. no IPs, but that's probably going to change soon. Deleted comments appear to be kept in at least some cases, I'm not sure if this is "all cases" or not.

If you want your account deleted we can easily remove all your posts from the site; if you want it removed entirely from the database that'd take more work and we'd probably tell you that you'll have to wait for a bit until we have tools for that.

Mods, can you please not shadowban my comments.

All new users get their comments filtered for a bit to cut down on trolling.

Is a filter currently the best way to prevent trolling? After noticing my comment was not appearing, I was discouraged to write any more. Could a keyword- or post-length-based filter work better? But that would probably take too much time to implement, making it not worth it...

We have in general noticed that it's pretty effective. The nice part about a manual filter is that you can't bypass it forever by just learning the trick; every troll that gets banned has to get through the filter again. Forcing people to spend lots of time not-shitposting just to finally shitpost tends to weed out a lot of problems.

It's not perfect, but it's better than the alternatives.

Hieronymus' comment is not visible when browsing the whole Culture War Roundup thread logged in. It shows up when browsing the thread logged out. The direct link to the comment works in either case.

I haven't managed to reproduce this but I've heard it before, and I think something really is broken here. Added a bug for it, hopefully we can squash it.

Could you add a feature where if you hover over a user's name it shows a little window that previews their profile?

A lot of people add a fair bit to their profiles or some important detail that makes it vastly easier to remember who they are/get a feel for them/ build community... and you just never saw that on the Reddit version of the Motte because then you'd have to click on their name, go to their profile, and lose your spot 300 comments down in the thread.

I remember interacting with someone for months on the reddit version, finally thinking to click their profile... and suddenly realizing the person I was interacting with was famous, had an entire body of work, and I'd actually read their stuff but never realized it was the same person.

.

This would also incentivize people to add detail to their profiles, and make the userbase/community that much more internally familiar.

This feature already exists, it was just removed in a clumsy way by turning the username into a direct link to the profile (profile card still shows up for a split second).

you just never saw that on the Reddit version of the Motte because then you'd have to click on his name, go to his profile, and lose your spot 300 comments down in the thread

Or you could just open the profile in a new tab.

I know a lot of people are asking for less whitespace, but please consider adding a little more vertical space between top-level comments. It would help to visually distinguish subtopics within the weekly threads.

More depinkification opportunity: the user profiles on mobile show the username in pink.

On mobile Safari, iOS current version, iPhone 8, the top bar with battery, bars, clock, etc. is pink.

When does the friday fun thread usually get posted?

Friday, in theory, but we don't have automatic posts available right now so things are a little unpredictable.

I'm divided on this because it also pushes the comment to the side and introduces a lot of side whitespace. On the other hand it is a good way to see when a new comment starts.

I'll be testing this out when I'm doing theme changes. No promises right now.

How long until Julius Bronson finds this place? There have been a few other bad actors the Motte has come across as well (e.g. vintology). Has there been any thought about how to handle them if they were to show up? Should their permabans be continued here or this a chance for everyone to have a fresh start?

The IQ supremacy guy in the culture war thread sounds like the teen rights high school savant guy with the book we've had.

It is easier to keep him out when you have admin powers instead of merely mod powers.

Why does he strike such fear into the heart of rationalists? Just ignore him and downvote

No one fears him. The problem is that his small-dick energy compels him to obsessively troll and set up innumerable sock puppets to convince everyone how smart and superior he is, making him a persistent, annoying pest. He's disliked for the same reason every other anti-social victim of IAmVerySmart syndrome is disliked.

"Just ignore and downvote" is always offered as the solution to bad actors, and while technically this would be the correct solution if everyone did it, you can't rely on the entire community to do that, ever.

Truthfully, I thought he could be funny at times. I think most users found that he wasn't arguing in good faith (he never actually addressed specific counter arguments) and he gave a weird, negative image to the place.

I think fretting about the latter issue was silly but some seem to care (and is it unwarranted given that we are now on a diaspora from reddit?).

They fear the power of the dark side (racism)

Also Julius is far younger (16.5) and more powerful (high IQ) than the rationalists

Some say he even got every question of the WAIS correct while he was still WISC age

Yet this didn't save him from the banny janny. He could anihilate the WAIS at the age of 11, but was powerless to the software dev wagie janny's ban button. Ironic.

This is funny enough that I don't believe it's really JB's alt.

There is a chance for everyone to have a fresh start, mostly because I see no particular reason to just force people to make new usernames. At the same time, we also now have the ability to make tools that make ban evasion harder. We'll see how this all shakes out in the end.

question/feature-request.

There is a setting to "Enable if you would like to highlight comments made after the last time you visited a thread."

Is there a way to also collapse the old comments? If not, can I request that feature?

Am I going crazy? Is there bug in the shadowbanning feature? Or are some posts being randomly disappeared, but are still visible from the firehose feed? Examples:

It is entirely likely there's a bug. Is that /comments that you're finding them on? I think the filter isn't applying there right now.

Yeah, they're showing up now.

When they were still invisible, I also wasn't getting any notifications from responses to my comments under them, and I still don't see either of those chains in my notifications.

Yeah, they're showing up now.

Turned out someone submitted a fix for this very issue overnight. Should now be solved, check again!

When they were still invisible, I also wasn't getting any notifications from responses to my comments under them, and I still don't see either of those chains in my notifications.

This is still an issue, though :( Workin' on it.

Turned out someone submitted a fix for this very issue overnight. Should now be solved, check again!

Oh sweet! Yeah seems fine so far.

This is still an issue, though :( Workin' on it.

I'm swamped with work right now, but I might be able to help out in a month or two.

It seems that "load more comments" is also pulling newly created top comments in a thread, in addition to the older comments. This makes it confusing when you try to read the thread for yesterday but get something posted 3 minutes ago.

The comment preview doesn't match the rendering of my posted comment. Specifically, putting and words typed as:

\ and words

has the preview show a tilde followed by a struckthrough word, but the comment is different.

EDIT: this turned out worse than I thought. [backslash][tilde][space], followed by stuff, followed by [tilde][stuff][tilde] is rendered inconsistently.

Fun times. Bug filed; I suspect this isn't critical, but it'd be nice to fix. Thanks for the report :)

Hi all! I've noticed some of my comments aren't appearing when I'm logged out. Is this a bug?

New users have their comments filtered until they've posted a few things, and a mod has to go through and approve stuff. Takes us a few hours to get to the queue sometimes; I just came back from watching TV with my wife, for example.

We'll get to it, don't worry about it :)

Thank you! I was worried something was broken or shadowbanned.

The collapse comment thread button doesn't work if the post has been deleted by the author.

Yeah, we're on that one. Workaround: you can click the vertical bar to the side of the comment. This is not a great solution but it works for now.

The "clear notifications" button seems to do nothing to clear replies to my comments.

One thing I've found really useful on Reddit is not automatically clearing replies unless I manually mark them as read. It allows me better inbox management. I'd love that same capability here.

Yeah, I really liked that feature on Reddit. We're kind of neck-deep in bugs and tweaks needed, so this may be a while :(

Now that this is our site, could we make it so that on clicking the culture war thread it 'auto-scrolls' past the rules after say the third time you've visited every thread?

In addition I want to second preferring an option to keep collapsed threads collapsed if you refresh or revisit the page.

Any thoughts about bringing over the RES feature of keyboard shortcuts to upvote/downvote selected comments? Believe they use 'a' for upvoting and 'z' for downvoting.

If I collapse a comment then refresh the page I would prefer it to stay collapsed

Agreed! Helps with sorting by new.

I’d suggest reimplementing the dramacoin system, albeit with a different name. “Farts Huffed” is cheeky and self-aware, but maybe not. Either way. karma-like systems allow people to build attachment to their accounts and personae on-site. If you re-add our dramacoin shop but with your own items (since ours are predominantly deliberately obnoxious visual effects or tools you can use to fuck with other users, or give yourself administrative powers), all the better. It would also give you something to incentivize codework with, white hat reporting, posts that drive engagement, etc.

The badge system is extremely useful for this as well. I don’t think that’s been removed from the repo, although you’ll obviously not want to use virtually any of our 130some badges. But badges are great for incentive and building attachment.

And attachment is very important to build. It’s critically important that any platform, however small, offers a superior and markedly different experience to a subreddit or imageboard - because if it doesn’t, why would users not just use one of those? The siren song of free speech grows stale very quickly when that free speech is the primary selling point of the platform and the main reason to stay, as alt-tech startups and big companies have seen repeatedly for several years now but have yet to actually learn from.

tl;dr - meaningful lite-gamification good and features not offered by larger alternatives are very necessary

When I type on my kindle fire I don't get word autofill above the keyboard. I do get it when swiping however. I also dont have autocorrect.

Site ex: https://imgur.com/a/pt6SzB8

Reddit ex: https://imgur.com/a/DItXsAg

Can't see the links, sorry - post on Imgur?

I have no idea what could be causing that but I'll toss it into the todo list.

Fixed! Ty

You really don’t want to host your own images or display them inline. That way lies the madness of having to constantly mod each image for illegal content such as CP.

Yeah, though we do want to host stuff like userimages.

Image hosting is tough. I don't have a good answer for this right now.

I really got used to how Reddit’s Context and Permalink works: one comment tree, reaching backwards through its parents, without any siblings. If I wanted to read more of what led to a particular comment, I’d hit Parent until I saw what I needed.

Any plans to make that a user switchable setting?

We're actually just planning to implement that; not switchable, just behave-like-that-by-default. I think one of our devs is actually working on that at the moment (though I wasn't expecting it to take this long, either it's more complicated than we thought or they've just been busy with other stuff, which is entirely possible.)

That's great. I opened this thread to ask for either that or reducing the default to context=2. Loading the whole thread every time you open a comment in a new tab sucks, for my shitty phone and probably for the server.

How can I have child comments collapsed by default so I can scroll initially only through top level (parent) posts/comments? Is this a clearly worded question?

It's clearly worded, I'm just not sure we have a solution for you. You could code it up in Javascript and apply it via Tampermonkey, but I don't have any solutions that don't involve being a programmer (or convincing a programmer to do it for you.)

This should now be fixed, let me know!

The image on the login screen seems quite large -- I have a decent connection normally, but spent 20+s seeing it incrementally load.

Usually you can shrink images signficantly without much quality loss just be encoding differently, e.g. lower quality. I used imagemagick's convert with the following parameters quite successfully (to make 1920px wide image)

convert -quality 65 -resize 1920x> -strip -interlace Plane -sampling-factor 4:2:0

Ironically I've known about this for like a week, and finally had time to fix it, and set up the site update to run and took a look at this page while doing so . . .

. . . and that's when I saw this post. I think you may be the first person to actually say something about it.

Anyway, it is now fixed :)

Nice! And ha, that sounds like a weird variant of rubber-duck-debugging.

At least you know at least one user appreciates it!

More rdrama remnants at https://www.themotte.org/badges

Sigh. Bug filed!

Avatars look MASSIVE when reading site on a tablet (android)

Can you take a screenshot? Also, are you using custom CSS?

Not OP but I have the same issue on my phone.

https://imgur.com/a/qyny4VK

From a recent CWR post. Most avatars are large, that one is pretty egregious. Is there a setting to force them to be a specific size like 64x64 or something?

I don't think I have any custom CSS, but I enabled dark mode it the settings and made some tweaks to link settings.

They're supposed to be 20x20!

Hmm, I wonder if Dark Mode is breaking things.

Edit: Nope, Dark Mode works fine. Hrm.

Can you tell me what your phone is, and what web browser you're using?

One plus 7T pro

Android version 11.0.1.10

Browser: Chrome

I concur it's not dark mode, they're the same size in the motte default theme.

I think this should be fixed now, let me know!

Looks like it's working as intended to me! Thank you!

You're welcome!

When I return to a thread and sort by Top, comments I have previously collapsed don't stay collapsed.

This actually should be fixed now - someone contributed their fix and it's now part of the codebase :)

Note that it's currently browser-specific, it will not store collapsed status across your account.


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