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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   7036 thread views

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  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?

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

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.

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.)

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.

I apologize if any of the following suggestions have been brought up downthread, but I've been engaging with the new site significantly less than I did when we were still on Reddit, and this pretty much comes down to readability issues. I should note that I mostly browse The Motte on a desktop computer and have only checked out the mobile site once, so these comments concern issues with the desktop site only.

The biggest issue that I've seen users here complain about so far is that it's difficult to follow threads and their various subthreads. The line you introduced separating parents in yesterday's prototype helps, but it's really a band-aid solution to a much bigger problem. If you look at old Reddit, the parent comments were all justified hard-left, at the edge of the screen, without any kind of margin. This acted as a sort of straight-edge; the top-level comments were always aligned with the edge, so it was easy to quickly tell where they were. New Reddit moves them farther toward the middle, but this is countered by not one but two visually distinct margins—a dark grey margin covers most of the sides on a widescreen monitor, and a margin color unique to the individual sub covers the area immediately to the left of the thread. Again, this provides a distinct demarcation between margin and content. Here, though, there is a margin but it is the same color as the body text background. Post's positions within the hierarchy are determined by how far they are indented from the edge, and when the edge is well to the left of the highest level everything is just sort of floating in space. Coloring the margins in or running the body hard-left would greatly improve readability.

The second big issue involves line length. Most professionally typeset materials aim for a line length of between 45 and 90 characters. Old Reddit had a max line length of about 110 characters, which is on the high side but still reasonable. New Reddit reduced this to about a hundred, again, a little long, but at least within Microsoft Word's default settings. Here the lines are a whopping 185 characters long. To put this in perspective, in Microsoft Word, in 12-point Arial with default (1") margins this is going into the third line, and could be well into the third line depending on where the breaks are. The effect of this is that once a reader gets to the end of a line his eyes have to move quite a ways back to get to the start of the next one, and by then it's hard to tell where he left off. It's not like he's always consciously losing his place, but after a while the small, frequent adjustments get fatiguing.

Finally, there are a couple minor things that could be tweaked. I don't have numbers, but the font size on Reddit seems slightly larger, and that can increase readability without sacrificing too much space, provided the adjustments are made judiciously. Second, I've never been a fan of Helvetica and it's various clones for body text. Helvetica was designed for things like signs and advertisements, where large amounts of text weren't going to be read in one go. The old rule-of-thumb was that sans-serif fonts were better for viewing on a computer, but this is obsolete advice from the days when everyone was using 72 dpi CRTs. With the ubiquity of high-res monitors, either serif or sans-serif fonts can be used comfortably. But either way, Helvetica was never a good choice for body text; the shapes are too similar and legibility is affected. Reddit uses Verdana, which was commissioned by Microsoft specifically to be used as body text on old monitors, and, while not my personal favorite, it works fine and is a much better choice than Helvetica. Open Sans and Fruitger also work well.

That's all I can think of for now. I had a couple big posts in me and one continuing series that I had been meaning to contribute once we made the move, but I'm having such a tough time staying engaged that I don't know if it's worth the effort at this point. I appreciate all the hard work you've been doing to make this place possible, but I can't argue with my eyes and fight through the tedium for a pursuit that is really just entertainment for me. Thanks and I hope to see at least some of this addressed.

Font updated, incidentally.

It’s wild how less “pinched” it feels.

Yeah it's absolutely ridiculous how impactful small changes can be. It's annoying, too, because it can be a nightmare trying to figure out what the problem is, even if you know there's a problem.

Thanks! Already a 100% improvement. This actually made a much bigger impact than I thought it would have.

Yeah, it's a good change :D I think I need to reduce the bold weight on a few elements, but that's not a big problem.

Thanks for pointing it out, I don't know how long it would have taken me to recognize it.

About the child comments format I suggest to make the line besides the comment a different color according to its depth level. I've seen this in the mobile app for reddit "Slide" and it's a good feature in my opinion, don't know if it's necessary (or good) for the desktop version, but for mobile seems a good feature.

The only drawback is when it has too many comments at many levels it didn't work as a reference because the colors started repeating. Nonetheless, here's a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/i2vxAoQ

I'll add another good feature on this one is the button at the bottom (middle), you can configure to which depth level do you want to move (with the up and down arrows at the side). So on the culture war threads I'd switch to child comments and I could comfortably browse first child's comments.

Huh, that's kinda nice. I'll try that out (although . . . I'm not sure how to do it yet. But I'll figure something out.)

Coloring the margins in or running the body hard-left would greatly improve readability.

That's a good idea, yeah. I'll see what I can manage on that.

The second big issue involves line length.

I completely agree. I actually wanted to put a fix in for that, but I got sick right after doing the initial changes (which are now live) and decided to just push these instead of delaying the entire thing a few days while my brain came back. I'll be working on this soon.

I don't have numbers, but the font size on Reddit seems slightly larger, and that can increase readability without sacrificing too much space, provided the adjustments are made judiciously. Second, I've never been a fan of Helvetica and it's various clones for body text.

Hah, I just figured out what's going on here; I've been doing my dev on Linux, and for whatever reason, both this site and Reddit end up resolving to the same font on Linux. So I didn't realize there was a difference.

Yeah, I'll change it over to Verdana. The font size is actually the same on both sites, I suspect the difference in font size is entirely due to the fonts themselves.

That's all I can think of for now. I had a couple big posts in me and one continuing series that I had been meaning to contribute once we made the move, but I'm having such a tough time staying engaged that I don't know if it's worth the effort at this point. I appreciate all the hard work you've been doing to make this place possible, but I can't argue with my eyes and fight through the tedium for a pursuit that is really just entertainment for me. Thanks and I hope to see at least some of this addressed.

Keep feeding me this info! Most people are not giving me much feedback on legibility issues, and this kind of thing is really valuable. We'll get there.

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?

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

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.

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?).

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.

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

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

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.

Visual design change feedback requests!

Before: https://i.imgur.com/hbl021t_d.webp?maxwidth=9999&fidelity=high

After: https://i.imgur.com/ZtvjwBx_d.webp?maxwidth=9999&fidelity=high

This is the kind of thing where I'm pretty sure I'm going to wake up tomorrow and see three major problems, so don't treat this as set in stone. This is also the kind of thing where I will never come up with a design that satisfies everyone, so don't expect me to keep working on it until absolutely everyone is happy. But I do want feedback; let me know what you think.

edit: hah, so apparently if you paste in an imgur link it mangles the URL. Fascinating. Bug filed.

I personally like that top level posts are now visually distinct and the horizontal line that separates them. In the current design I always need to double check if it is a top level post or a first level comment to the previous top level post.

Yeah, I think this is the kind of design that makes a lot of sense for our site even if it's pointless for other sites. I'm pretty happy with how that turned out.

Also, you see the collapse-comments bar for non-top-level posts, that you can click to collapse that branch? It's actually there on top-level posts too, it's just invisible unless you mouseover it. No loss of functionality.

That sounds just fine -- your take looks nice to me, and the 'invisible collapse' seems nice enough. Limiting the width of comments at each level in a reddit-like way (not the substack/wordpress approach of mashing them all up against a hard right margin in deep threads) looks like all that's missing at this point.

Definitively an improvement, but I think it would benefit further from putting all the command links that currently take out an extra line at the bottom of each comment at the top as is done by my current custom CSS setup (perhaps right-justified to enforce more of a gap from the username and recency line).

I actually really like having the vote number at the bottom :V

Can you post a screenshot of your CSS setup, though?

I keep looking at the top of the post instead of the bottom...

I like these changes a lot. Things are clearer and subjectively less cluttered.

The new layout happens to be very similar to one that I came up with myself in writing HTML files for fun.

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?

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.

/images/16636937808690078.webp

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

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

Load more comments (39 replies)

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

Collapsed comment threads don't stay collapsed when leaving and re-entering a thread?

Yeah, there's no database storage for that. I've got a feature request for that but seriously no promises this is happening soon.

Might be easier to just store it in the browser's localStorage, though that has the issue of not being shared across multiple clients.

Might be, but it's still a significant amount of coding work. If we're doing that we may as well put it in the DB.

Wouldn't a simple permalink-to-boolean mapping do the trick?

EDIT: Or just an array of permalinks actually

It's not a hard thing to describe, it's just a bunch of work to implement. Like, yeah, you need that! And now you need to change all the SQL queries used to build the page to ensure that they're efficient. And now you need to make sure the page works well. And now you need the API entry and you need to ensure your rate limiting is appropriate.

Is it doable? Absolutely! Is it more than a few days of work? Absolutely not! But meanwhile we have 64 issues and rising; maybe this just isn't the juiciest fruit available, y'know?

Oh yeah I was talking about a localStorage approach. Unless the show/hide logic is done server-side and hidden comments aren't loaded. If the logic is all client-side then depending on the architecture (and JS framework) it could be a few lines of code and a 15 minute job.

It's more performant to get the clients to store that information, and handle filtering posts, rather than your servers storing that N*M mapping and doing various joins. I don't care about sharing across devices, but I do care about it staying collapsed on one device! (and of course your server costs. If you implement it server-side, then it can only slow down your comment-loading queries even more).

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!

This is obviously a very very low priority nitpick, but the current favicon is bad. Obviously not worth pulling meaningful resources to fix, but when it is possible I would say that just a bolded M in any bright color would be an improvement from the current version.

You can generate a letter based favicon easily from somewhere like this https://favicon.io/favicon-generator/

I'm not saying that the product will be good, but I think like a black M on a grey background might still be an improvement.

I'm not brave enough to actually select a font though.

What is a favicon? Is it the “admin” microphone icon?

Its the tiny image that shows up in tabs for the site.

The favicon is the little icon that shows up in your browser's list of tabs or list of favorites/bookmarks.

I prefer the current favicon over a letter. It could maybe be more of a stereotypical castle though - like a rook chess piece.

That would be good!

I'm neutral on the current image being the favicon or not, but I will say I do like it as the site's header image, especially with the current header font and style.

(It's a subjective aesthetic feeling so I'd be hard-pressed to explain why. To me it's a nice look. It feels stately and sharp but modest and grounded. 100% subjective here.)

I don't have a problem with the image in other contexts but it is objectively a bad candidate for a favicon. It just looks like a brown smudge when shrunk down to that size.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

Curious if/how to scale up font size? Also hide comment threads?

Should we have a separate sticky thread for small ?s like these?

You can scale up font size by putting a space after a hashtag.

one hashtag

two

three

four

five
six

You can minimize comment threads by clicking the minus sign left of the username.

Sorry to be clear I was referring to whilst reading text, not posting! This is on mobile.

Edit: Also thanks for the tip about collapsing threads. I am used to a mobile app for reddit so I was doing a different method.

I’m not sure I follow 😩

This right here lol

/images/16623998155597434.webp

You can change the font size of the comments and posts by changing your custom css for the site.

#post-text, .comment-text, .comment-write, #post-text p, .comment-text p, .comment-write p {

font-size: 20px;

}

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.

first unhideable-in-bulk comment

second 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.

Could we make it so that the comment box automatically disappears after we post a comment?

Already merged https://github.com/themotte/rDrama/pull/252

Sweet! Everyone is putting in excellent work on the site, thank you.

ETA: Would it be easier to put suggestions directly on Github?

Maybe? Maybe not? I'm not really sure; this way has the advantage that I can rewrite them for Github.

If you wanted to drop suggestions on Github, I'd say go for it, and I'll triage them as they come in :)

I've already got a checkin for that to be true in replies, I'm just waiting until tonight to push it.

An option to hide the banner picture at the top? The ferrofluid one.

There's definitely a CSS hack that could be done. Otherwise, not right now; I actually want to set it up to rotate through multiple pictures at some point.

Just no pixel-by-pixel scrolling banners, please. Some sub-reddits have them, and they chew up CPU.

No worries here, I don't want anything that visually distracting :)

Go to your Custom CSS and add .primary_banner { display: none; } if you want ;)

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.

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.

Fixed! Ty

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.

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.

  1. At least on my browser, I have to log in at least once a day, sometimes more. If there is something on your end that you can do about it so that I can stay logged in for as long as possible, that would be awesome. (I apologise if this is actually an issue on my end...)

  2. I suggest that people (doesn't have to be mods...) periodically post on the Motte subreddit with a link to this website, so that every possible user is regularly reminded of this website's existence. People could even link directly to quality contributions, so that it's not "self-promotion spam", although I think that self-promotion spam would be totally fine!

BTW, I am hugely impressed at how excellent this new forum has been, especially the fact that it could be so good, right from the start! I even aesthetically prefer it quite a bit when compared to new reddit AND old reddit, which is surprising!

Do you have some kind of cookie blocking going on? That could be preventing the site from making a persistent session. I haven't seen this problem over a number of browsers that I use regularly for different things -- maybe try logging in in some completely stock/updated browser and see if it sticks?

You're right, that's the issue, thank you so much, and thanks to /u/ZorbaTHut as well!

At least on my browser, I have to log in at least once a day, sometimes more.

I think this is an issue on your end; at least, I haven't had to log back in at all, either on this account or on a test non-admin account. But I also don't know how to debug this; feedback from other users welcome!

I suggest that people (doesn't have to be mods...) periodically post on the Motte subreddit with a link to this website

I'm probably doing a monthly Meta thread refresh, which may or may not be enough. It may be a bad idea to turn the subreddit into something that could be perceived as spam :V

BTW, I am hugely impressed at how excellent this new forum has been, especially the fact that it could be so good, right from the start! I even aesthetically prefer it quite a bit when compared to new reddit AND old reddit, which is surprising!

Thank you! We've had a lot of help from outside contributors - without them, it'd be nowhere near this developed :)

Data point: I've been logged on here from multiple machines for many days with no issues. MS Edge in case it's relevant... but from another dev, it really sounds like a client issue.

Avatars are suddenly yuge for me this morning -- like, full size of what ever image people are using!

Anyone else seeing this? Do we even want avatars? Seems suspiciously "fun", but does help with user recognition.

Any chance you have custom CSS styling on .profile-pic-25? After the recent style changes, switch that over to .profile-pic-20. Think the -25 variant is totally unused now—in part because it seemed a bit too large for the dense Motte style, like you point out.

There was (scale: .25), but removing that line still leaves inconsistent sizing (some way too large) for me; I'm very happy with display:none on .profile-pic-20 however!

Thanks for the tip!

suspiciously "fun"

Think of the Dramanauts watching us, they can only cringe so hard.

They have not yet begun to cringe -- not sure if the issue is localized to me, but I just blocked all motte-hosted images and readability is much improved even over the thumb-sized avatars; they just take up too much space.

I suppose there could be a "more fun" switch in user settings?

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

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!

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.

I'm finding all the pictures in comments very offputting. Can we ban that?

Can you link to what you mean? I don't think I've seen any of these.

Like this: https://www.themotte.org/post/2/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/3940?context=8#context

Some people seem to be having a problem where user icons are really big. Maybe you're getting hit by that?

I'm not sure what's going on there - can you post a screenshot somewhere, and tell me what your web browser is?

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.

It would be nice to have more of a division between top level comments in the mega thread, so that I can easily scroll between topics and easily find the start of each new topic.

Agreed. Also, top level comments should not have the collapse bar on the left (we already have the expand/collapse icon). It's very difficult right now to find the beginning of new topics.

Disagree -- it's very useful to be able to collapse a thread once you've read into it a ways and discovered that it's not worth continuing -- bigger separation between the toplevel lines would address your concern I think.

It's very difficult right now to find the beginning of new topics.

The Reddit app Baconreader gives different tiers of the comment hierarchy different (cycling) colours so it's easy to find a given level. I.e. different coloured collapse bars.

Did anyone else get cold sweats, shivering and nausea since this morning? Just me?

Bugs under the skin and constipated opinions here.

What, do you think we all got a visit from the alphabet firms?

I decided to hold off on joining until 2 or 3 kinks were worked out, having been annoyed by new sites in the past that necessarily deal with growing pains at launch.

Also, I consume enough nicotine, caffeine and alcohol that you'd have to make me quit all 3 at once for me to deal with withdrawal symptoms from other stuff.

This may sound ridiculous but I got stuck on the developer site for a few minutes looking around for the culture war thread. Maybe we should put a sticky thread on the developer site to direct people to the new website?

I have no idea how you did that :V but sure, easy enough!

(but it'll take me a few to get to it, I need to eat breakfast)

Heh I'm not the brightest crayon in the box apparently.

I made that mistake too - it's because my browser helpfully autofilled the dev site when I typed themotte...

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'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.'

I guess you can just try posting it?

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.

Suggestion:

-Cultural War Thread should have topics (ie: economics, war, us, europe, etc.), these can come and go as they are used more and less, would be good for combing through threads.

-Reddit (I presume this is some backend thing not actually native to Reddit itself) allows 2 sizes for line-breaks (return+shift smaller, return is larger) which is nice.

-We should have a small history of TheMotte written up somewhere.

-We should have a plan for what to do if something similar happens to us as happened to a site (BananaPlantation) that's been in the news a lot lately (don't want to name it).

I'm meh on topics - the fun of the Culture War thread is that you never know what you'll come across next, could be any of the above! And you're free to bounce around topics on a thread if it makes sense.

Re migration plan, I think we're about as prepared as it's reasonable to be. DB has automatic backups (uhh right?) and hosting is a standard k8s cluster, as offered by many providers and build-able by hand on any host with a bit more work. Naturally any more details will be held close to the chest - if anyone was trying to attack us, a public plan would just give them their next target in advance of actually migrating.

It's probably a bigger help that we don't go out of our way to ridicule or attack people, unlike Drama or the Kiwis.

DB has automatic backups (uhh right?)

It does!

I haven't tested them, but we have them!

(yes this is on my list; in my defense, this is also the same backup tool that I use for Paperclip Perfector, and I did test that one, so it's probably fine)

We should have a small history of TheMotte written up somewhere.

Good idea, The Motte's very own Bayeux Tapestry :)

We should have a plan for what to do if something similar happens to us as happened to a site (BananaPlantation) that's been in the news a lot lately (don't want to name it).

Admittedly I am worried about the potentially far reaching consequences of the recent saga concerning that site, but consider this: we are a hard sell as a new "internet boogeyman". We aren't particularly relevant, even among the very online activist circles that seek out and dismantle dens of thoughtcriminals. If we did however attract the attention of the eye of sauron, we would still have much more of a fighting chance than KF because we can't easily be framed as "website that doxes and stalks and harasses". I think the worst anyone could throw at us would be the "this website platforms hate" argument because we allow discussion and criticism of sacred cows. I'd be more worried about our neighbour site rdrama becoming a new boogeyman once KF is taken off life support, that could potentially get the motte into a whole mess of guilt by association.

There is no way to report direct messages.

Also is it allowed to have a particularly inflammatory username like "BURN_NIGGERS_RAPE_NIGGERS"? Got a weird DM from him.

Yeah, if you get nasty PMs, just send us a mod message.

Taken care of 'em.

I also got a message from that guy. What a wierdo.

Would it be possible to extract the exact CSS or whatever from an old.reddit.com comments view and implement the exact same thing here, ideally as the default? The tiny text, oceans of whitespace and unfamiliar UI widget placement here makes it difficult for me to use this forum.

Not really; the underlying HTML is extremely different.

Please be patient on this one, I'm going to be working on the comments page within the next few days.

Probably just eliminating the (redundant) icons under each comment plus some css (I'm using the template somebody posted because I'm lazy) to remove excess vertical whitespace would go pretty far -- I think Reddit has a bit more horizontal whitespace between the sidebar and the comment text, which is nice for desktop users. (ie. landscape)

Re: another comment, I actually like the up/down vote buttons better on the bottom -- maybe it will encourage people to, like, read the comment before voting?

Best luck with the config, things seem to be going very well so far IMO.

I'm not sure if you're using the reddit-like CSS that I posted (there are no redundant comment icons when in desktop mode), but if you are, since then I fixed a few bugs, made it work with the new sidebar, and generally improved it. However, it's now over 4000 characters long, and has to be pasted in compressed form.

Please add and pin a bare links repository. Theres things I want to talk about but can't be arsed to make a effortpost about, Im sure others are in that position as well. This would take some traffic off the CWR but I think on net activity will go up because right now its bottlenecked by only the effortposters posting.

I get that this is a popular request, but:

Theres things I want to talk about but can't be arsed to make a effortpost about

this is exactly why we removed the bare links repository in the first place.

Ofcourse you know what you (and the other mods) did better than me.

But as far as I can recall, the primary reason the BLR was removed was that it was eating up too much traffic from the CW thread.

However, now might be a good time to experiment? It might breathe new life into the website, yada yada. I'd wager that it being its own pinned thread instead of its own comment nested within the CW thread might change how people interact with those two threads.

Basically my suggestion/idea is to foster two different communities within the website, one that comes for the BLR, and finds their way into the CW thread. And the current resident CWR posters. The ruleset for the BLR can be slightly relaxed to ease in newcomers. Sort of like a CWR lite to create a pipeline of the type of posters you want, train and vet them before letting them reign free in the CWR.

With admin level control you can limit the comment length in the BLR (max 300-400 words maybe?) to prevent cannibalization, if they REALLY want to talk about it, they can take it to the CWR.

The quality was actually the major problem! This post was what got me convinced that it needed to be solved, and here is where I did the actual removal.

Basically my suggestion/idea is to foster two different communities within the website, one that comes for the BLR, and finds their way into the CW thread.

I think we maybe just don't want the people who come for the BLR? At least, we don't want the people who stay in the BLR, and we don't want people to leave the main thread for the BLR, and we don't want the problems caused by people posting low-quality stuff in the BLR.

Hi all,

Firstly, well done to the mods and everyone who contributed in getting the new site off the ground. It's a relief to finally be off Reddit and out from under Big Brother. I've lurked in this forum for years, since it was still a part of /r/slatestarcodex and I'm glad to see it continuing. I do have a question though. Prior to the move, I remember one of the points in favour of remaining on Reddit was that it allowed for a steady trickle of new users which kept the community from stagnating. Is there any plan to try maintain a steady flow of new visitors to the site?

P.S The irony of my first comment on my new account being one fretting about the potential lack of new accounts isn't lost on me haha.

Is there any plan to try maintain a steady flow of new visitors to the site?

There's a few!

I'm hoping to contact a few other similar, or we-would-be-similar-if-they-wanted-to-deal-with-this-mess-but-they-don't, discussion sites and get crosslinking going with them. I don't know if I can actually succeed on this, but I'm going to try.

I'm hoping to get us posting weekly quality-contribution lists, one way or another, to make that easier to draw people in. I'd also like to get that up on the Vault, and I'd also like to attach that to a mailing list.

I'm trying to figure out any sane way to make "post things you enjoy on your relevant social networks" a thing that people do regularly. I don't know if that's going to work.

I'm going to see if I can convince Scott to shill us in an Open Links post, though I suspect that'll be a one-time thing at best.

I'm hoping to set up a donation system, and I'm going to at least experiment with spending some donation money on ads, though I suspect this won't be worth the money.

I'm also really tempted to set up a referral system so people can get bling on their username if they refer people.

That's kinda my TODO list right now. I'm not sure it'll be enough. More suggestions welcome. Obviously a lot of these are shots in the dark.

Yeah, the pipeline's going to be tricky.

I support crosslinking. Prior art for that would be the weird "imageboard federation" of ~2019 involving, say, https://trashchan.xyz/boards.html (sorry for blowing up the spot?). We could try finding friendly Lemmy instances, although that might be tough.

The Vault is good. Maybe it should come with a cover page linking directly to some of the more accessible/popular ones?

We could try more traditional things like having events or competitions, or other easy on-ramps into the community. That would pair with analyzing existing larger communities we could advertise in. Just like (he said, perhaps descending into self-parody) some scientist once said there's a farmer somewhere in Africa who would do his job twice as well, there are definitely people on Facebook (or even more cursed and corporate venues, like the clocksite) who have no idea any of this exists but would be better contributors and participants than me. The fun part is getting them here.

The Vault is good. Maybe it should come with a cover page linking directly to some of the more accessible/popular ones?

I'd love to! But this takes review work and coding work, and right now we're really limited by volunteer time :/

We could try more traditional things like having events or competitions, or other easy on-ramps into the community.

I think the issue here is that we have to get people here before they're aware of events and competitions. And once people are here, the hard part is done already.

Not a bug or suggestion, just being thankful - being able to view precise upvote/downvote numbers, and thread-view numbers, is a big quality-of-life improvement.

I'm not totally convinced that's going to stick around, for the record; I think Reddit-esque upvotes/downvotes are a good way to end up with echo chambers. That change exists because it's what the new site does and I haven't changed it back, but if anything I'm probably going to go even more abstract than Reddit did, which I know is going to make some people unhappy.

I appreciate the forecast and explanation. I disagree with removing votes, but only weakly. Votes reflect (among other things, and poorly) the effort level of a post, and thus showing higher-voted comments first improves the reading experience of the site. Votes aren't necessary for an echo chamber: ideological conformity can be enforced with social pressure (by getting lots of disagreeing replies). Without votes, we'd rely on mods more heavily to police low-effort comments. (Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, I suppose. Informally, most votes on the current CW thread look like the sort of votes you're trying to avoid.)

Other sites have various technical bodges that I hope might suffice instead of removing votes entirely. Hacker News and Lobste.rs require a fair amount of karma (500 for HN) to unlock downvotes, and Lobste.rs requires reasons to be selected from a menu for downvotes on posts. Furthermore, HN prevents you from downvoting direct replies to your comments or comments more than 24 hours old, and has a minimum score of -4 (beyond which downvotes don't change the score). Slashdot's M2 system offers a different route, perhaps one far too baroque for current Internet users. For an even wilder idea, maybe we could cap comment scores at +1/-1, and have all scores start at 0? Anyway, I think, but can't justify, that voting and tree structure go hand-in-hand, and I worry about removing one but not the other.

For what it's worth, I'm not planning on removing the concept of votes - I wrote more about that here, but the tl;dr is I think they're a great way to get people invested in the site. But I might add some extra abstraction between "I pushed 'up' or 'down'" and "this made the number go up and down by exactly one".

Those are actually some pretty interesting ideas. I'm gonna write those down and maybe adopt some of them.

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.

Part of what's making comment nesting difficult to visually parse is that your brain includes the expand/collapse control in the "box" occupied by a comment when you're looking at the top of the comment (because the control is at the top), but not when you're looking at the bottom of the comment. Since you're judging nesting by looking at the bottom of one comment vs. the top of the subsequent comment, the visual effect of this is that there's barely any indentation.

This image demonstrates the issue, with red lines drawn to show the edges your brain is paying attention to when judging nesting. Visually, there's only 4-5px of indentation.

This could be fixed by indenting more, by greatly reducing the visual weight of the expand/collapse control (e.g. by making it light gray), or by explicitly drawing boxes around comment bodies, which your visual system will latch onto in place of drawing its own boxes. Here's an illustration of the last approach, as implemented in my current custom CSS.

(New Reddit incidentally has the same problem, except with its avatar images instead of an expand/collapse control.)

Any opinions on whether this is better?

Yeah, that's definitely an improvement.

Huh, that's a good point.

I want to avoid boxes because boxes are a lot of visual clutter, but I agree that this is a problem and I'm not totally sure how to solve it. I'll work on it.

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.

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.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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