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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   7008 thread views

Bugs, Suggestions, Small Comments, And Site News

Have you found a problem in the site? Do you want to make a suggestion on improvement? Do you just want to say "hi everyone"? Post it here!

If you'd like to help with development, check out the Github and the dev Discord. We have a practically infinite list of small things that need to be fixed or changed.

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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...

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

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;

}

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 **.

Petition to merge all the lighter or more personal secondary sticky megathreads (wellness, friday fun, small-scale questions, etc) into one.

I might do this just to help traffic, yeah.

I assume Reddit-style

code blocking with

four spaces

engages the monospaced font,

1234567 123 1234567890 1234,

and I assume

putting two spaces

after a line doesn’t join them

the same way putting two lines

together without two spaces still joins them

into a single paragraph?

(All of my little experiments work in the wysiwyg preview, but when saved & posted, code blocks have monstrous whitespace between contiguous lines, as do bulleted lists, and numbered lists grotesquely use the numbers themselves as whitespace. Also, contiguous normal lines without end doublespaces are joined like on Reddit in the preview but unjoined when saved and posted. If a codeblock with four leading spaces is the first line, those spaces are ignored and the first line is ruined in the display.)

  1. This is rather disconcerting.

  2. Bilbo Baggins, The Fellowship of the Ring — 'I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.'

  3. Space Shuttle ants, The Simpsons — “Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!“

Bulleted list:

  • .45 ACP

  • .380 ACP

  • .6.5mm Creedmoor

  • .308 Winchester

Yeah, the bulleted lists are too spread out. Looks like monospace is also.

We've got a pending half-finished fix for the ordered list spacing; I've added a bug for the monospaced issue.

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

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

Agreed! Helps with sorting by new.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The report function should have a list of available rules and decorum violations, a spam option, and a troll/gore/garbage option. As it is now, it's just a textbox.

I absolutely agree; right now it's just a coder time issue.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 ;)

It seems like there's a ton of whitespace, both within and between posts, and even in between commenter name, comment text, and the interactive buttons below the comment. It makes the reading experience feel weird in a way that's hard to describe. I think it's slower because it requires more scrolling.

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 :(

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!

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).

Thank you for all your hard work?

Dare I report another bug? 2FA is giving an error, when I go to add it to Google Authenticator via QR, I get an error that says incorrect password. I also get the error when turning it off. Not very critical, but annoying.

Sounds like the plumbing was easier!

So I filed a bug, and the general consensus is "maybe you did something wrong?" I don't know what's happening; try again?

Went to enable TFA. It looked like it worked, but the error message says " Invalid password or token. " Went to turn it off, got a 500 error. Damned if ya do, damned if ya don't...

It would be nice if more comments loaded before you had to click load more comments.

In your settings, in the content tab, you can choose how many comments to see at once. The largest value is 100.

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.

Yeah I think that's actually a bug, and a pretty bad one. I'll get that fixed.

The text on the new site is too sparse. Can they be made as compact as they appear on Reddit?

I do actually like some whitespace, but this is a bit much even for me. That said, I'm also going to be focusing on the comments soon; I did the front page (it was a lot worse!) and the comment page really does need some work.

The site loads slow sometimes

Yeah, it totally does. I honestly haven't gotten to the point where I even have a way to benchmark this.

This is a very minor issue but on iOS mobile devices with a screen notch, the notch area is shaded hot pink regardless of login status and theme settings. On rdrama, the notch area shading is tied to the theme color setting which appears to have been hidden/disabled on themotte.org's profile settings page.

Otherwise fantastic job on the site and thank you for all the time you put into this.

as many others have already said, i'd prefer a more compact view with less empty space between the comments and more (top level at least) comments loading at once.

i'd also like an indication of how many replies a comment has; when i browse the the culture war thread i tend to save new top level comments that look like they might spark a lot of interesting discussion for later and come back when to read it when I see it has X replies

edit - also comments previously collapsed staying minimized though i haven't checked yet if there's a setting for that in the user options

Is there any way to see what replies have been made to your own comments?

Notifications cover that, new replies are highlighted in light blue.

Is there a public list of moderators somewhere? It's not where it was in the Reddit CSS, if it exists anywhere.

I actually don't think there is. There probably should be, but it's not critical enough for me to prioritize it.

It's the same mod list that's on /r/TheMotte, minus the bots and inactive mods, plus @cjet79 who is helping out.

Edit: https://www.themotte.org/admins ! I don't think it's linked anywhere though. We'll fix that.

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.

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.

deleted

You tell us who it is, basically; private messages don't yet have a report button.

If it's who I think it is, they're already shadowbanned, it turns out that just doesn't apply to private messages and we have to fix that.

Edit: Shadowbanning should apply to private messages; if you're still having trouble with a user, send me a PM.

Keyboard navigation, expanding/hiding comments in a style like Reddit Enhancement Suite in "old" Reddit would be awesome.

I seem to have been shadowbanned already - if I'm not logged in I can't see any of the comments I've made. This is only my 4th comment; how did this happen? I had such high hopes!

I can see this.

New users are filtered until the mods take a look at their posts, in a (surprisingly effective!) attempt to curb trolls. Just give it a few hours and we'll get to it; as I'm writing this, your other comments are buried in the queue but I'll get to them in a few minutes.

The "new user" threshold is going to be adjusted pretty frequently, but right now it's set really low, so you should get out of the filter soon (and then possibly back into it later.)

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 :)

The verification email doesn't say how quickly you have to accept before it expires, and it seems to last a very short amount of time (it was expired after only a few hours). If I visit a verification link which has expired it would be useful to have a link to request a new verification email, or a link which takes me to the view from which to request a new verification email. Finding the location of where I could request a new verification email took me at least 5 or 6 clicks since it's reasonably well-hidden if you're not familiarized with the UI.

Oof, I never would have thought to check for that. Bug filed; this one might be a bit, I'm afraid.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or even something that can be fixed, but when typing a comment yesterday I clicked Formatting Help since I'd forgotten how to post links. I was promptly redirected, and lost my entire comment when I came back. Very irritating. I guess I just expected it to work like reddit, a drop down box and not a redirect

The lines to the left of comments are still hot pink. Didn't you say you want to remove the pink stuff?

I think this is only on mobile, I don’t see it on desktop but I do on mobile

Is there any way to display replies to your own comments? I'm having a hard time keeping track of conversations.

I was under the impression that the "Posts" tab would do it, but then I checked and the only responses to my comments are showing up in "All."

Is this site able to do RSS feeds, like Reddit does?

It would be nice to be able to follow comments or threads with this feature.

Any prospect of getting a signal-boost from Scott in a links post?

I can't recall his exact relationship with the sub post-ACX, but I do seem to remember him linking datasecretslox at some point.

Edit: as mentioned on the other sub, this might be a good tactic after the initial trolls confused individuals have died down.

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.

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

Same here.

Bug filed.

I appreciate you guys creating a website!

Random comments start as collapsed for some reason when entering a thread. They seem to have positive karma score, so what gives?

I think we have now fixed this!

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.

Any way I can get a feed of multiple online communities in one place, e.g. this one, rdrama and cumtown?

You're asking for something generally known as "federation", which is the ability for various sites to work well to form a somewhat-decentralized network. Email works this way, as an example - you can send email to people regardless of which email provider they're using.

I really like federation!

The problem is that there's no well-known standard protocol for it, and our codebase doesn't support it. I'd actually love to add support to it, but it won't be useful if we support it and other sites don't.

There is a long-term plan I have in mind that might result in this happening, but I want to emphasize "long" and "might"; this is the kind of thing that maybe we start slowly working towards in a few months if this place hasn't just collapsed into flames, and it's going to be a lot of work to get it running at all.

Sure is a cool idea, though, isn't it? I'm right there with you.

Sorting comments by top only sorts the top level comments, replies are still in a different order

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

If a top level post is deleted, I appear to be unable to minimize the thread.

A workaround is to click the vertical bar to the left and minimize it that way. The button beside the profile pic isn't working, as you said.

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.

I hit the "subscribe" button on a couple threads and now I'm getting notifications for my own posts.

Hah. Yeah, I can imagine that.

Bug filed!

Some suggestions:

  1. It would be nice to have the user's own comments differentiated somehow, e.g. with a vertical bar or collapse button of another color, to readily see parts you've participated in when scrolling. (Or am I blind?) Also, where's my cumulative good boy score.

  2. We could use a general Unfinished Conversations thread, to continue specific old discussions from Reddit. E.g. I wanted to give a high-effort response to /u/Lykurg480 there but now would rather proceed here. It'd also serve to incentivize the transition of fence-sitters («hey so I responded on the other side, you're totally Wrong btw, but will not elaborate in the AEOville, ciao» – less flippantly but...)

  3. I actually agree with dramatards that some tasteful multimedia support would be nice, at least for OPs. The culture and moderation would preclude excesses, probably.

  4. We could also strap on a library, a book club, a gym, an Urbit Star, a Matrix chat, an Ygdrassil Network support and a kitchen sink. Seriously though, we need more fallbacks. And public keys in bios.

It would be nice to have the user's own comments differentiated somehow, e.g. with a vertical bar or collapse button of another color, to readily see parts you've participated in when scrolling. (Or am I blind?).

Oh that's a good idea, yeah. I've got a Comments Page revamp coming up, and you'll know it when it happens; I'll try to add it, but if I forget, feel free to pester me.

We could use a general Unfinished Conversations thread, to continue specific old discussions from Reddit.

I get the idea, but I think this may not be worth the effort; maybe it would have been a good idea a few days ago but I think we're already past that window.

I actually agree with dramatards that some tasteful multimedia support would be nice, at least for OPs. The culture and moderation would preclude excesses, probably.

I do indeed have a note that we should add image-upload support for OPs. I'm not worrying about this in the short-term however, we didn't have it on Reddit and it's not going to help that much.

We could also strap on a library, a book club, a gym, an Urbit Star, a Matrix chat, an Ygdrassil Network support and a kitchen sink. Seriously though, we need more fallbacks. And public keys in bios.

The only way we get evicted from the Internet at this point is if we somehow get as bad as Kiwi Farms. I really would not worry about this. I own the domain and none of the server infrastructure is tied to any specific provider, it's a matter of a day or two to get it all spun up somewhere else if I need to.

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?

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

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.

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

Bugs under the skin and constipated opinions here.

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.

Can someone please explain what the hell rdrama is and how it’s related to this community? I’m out of the loop. And visiting their site just makes me more confused.

It was sub dedicated to observing and sometimes stirring up drama on the internet. That drama is easily extracted by slaughtering the sacred cows of the blue tribe and this sub was more than willing to do so although not out of any real allegiance to the red tribe left it afoul of the reddit moderation staff. While /r/drama was getting pushed off reddit some volunteers made use of some freeware website software to build rdrama.net, and to everyone's surprise over a year later the site is thriving proving a model for how communities can leave reddit and survive. Some of the relationship is just dramanaughts being happy that others are escaping reddit's gravity and some of it is because there was always a surprisingly large overlap between the user base. /u/Tracingwoodgrains being a well known example but many people you wouldn't even assume had a drama alter ego. It makes a kind of sense, culture war happenings are pretty dramatic and dramatic things often touch on the culture war, both places have a kind of anti-dogma ethos that holds appeals to authority in contempt.

Hey, great job with the site! One request though - can you please make it easier to click upvote instead of the ellipsis? Move the ellipsis to the left a few mil or something? It's not a huge deal, but it is a little annoying.

Also re the vault, earlier in the thread you were saying it needs reviewing and coding, and is currently on the back burner while you sort out the main site. Which is totally understandable and for the best. But I bet there are a lot of motters who could and would be happy to do the reviewing - maybe you could ask one of your mods to take command of it now and get people who couldn't or don't want to help with coding the main site to start reviewing posts in the vault?

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?

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.

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.

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.

Could we have a general thread for site outages and other major issues? The site was down for a while today and I'd appreciate reading about issues / improvements in general. Not blaming you, these things happen. Just thinking it'd be nice to have a main thread while the site is still in development.

Y'know what, that's a good idea. This is now that thread.

(Being able to edit titles is neat.)

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.

I still have not managed to fix that settings issue. Grr. Back to the drawing board on that one, I'll probably be trying it again later.

Edit: Alright! Solved, I think!

Quick site news:

I've put in a hack to reduce whitespace. Might be too much :V But I'm also working on a real improvement starting tomorrow; bear with me another day or two.

Admittedly turned out a bit tighter in the context of multi-paragraph comments than I thought it would, though I distinctly remember someone getting a decent number of upvotes for advocating * { margin: 0 } in Custom CSS, so at least we're not quite that tight. People will surely appreciate whatever you come up with.

It's perfect for me, now.

Few suggestions on quality and engagement

  1. Instead of sorting use basic visualization/statistics widget. I don’t know how burdensome it is to maintain, but even trivial tags cloud, thread graphs with key words – would do better than srting (not even speaking of fancy plots, powered by nlp embeddings). In general, it’s a market design problem, where we want to match commenters based on their expressed opinions and avoid monopolies (people who get most attention due to their positioning)

  2. Not sure if this fits the ethos, but I’d like to see more purely empirical stuff, like discussion of econ or polscsi papers (many of them could be deployed in CW battles anyway). If we speak about empirics, then we can maintain a pinned list of “solved”, open and controversial questions so that anyone can benefit from the common, opensource knowledge; anyone can find the question he wants to attack/contribute to; anyone can take pride in her contribution.

@coffee repeatedly suggested similar "community engineering" techniques.

Voting specifically

  1. Votes as a negative feedback is tricky. False-negative rate is high – I often see comments I agree with, which are net downvoted. Downvoting w/t explanation might lead to withdrawal or unnecessary antagonism.

  2. Voting for sorting is harmful, I believe. In reddit it clearly gave advantage to early responders and popular messages, creating a sort of oligopoly, where outsiders struggle to get noticed. When no one replies to you, it feels even more discouraging, than being downvoted but engaged with.

  3. Votes as a positive feedback are important for people to feel their effort valued and opinion agreed with

If anyone wants to leave voting in place, at least it should get more granular. Among others @FiveHourMarathon suggested there should be better incentives to vote. @DaseindustriesLtd mentioned (ibid) quadratic voting - ironically or not, but I like the idea: if you have a limited (and expiring) number of votes, you would "dispense justice" more stretegically, and this erodes monopolies.

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?

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.

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?

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!

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.

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

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.

I wish there was a way to hide child comments, preferably by default but also with a button like Reddit (or maybe it's a RES feature) has at the foot of a comment. I found the big thread increasingly difficult to read and I didn't understand why and after going back to Reddit I realized it's because I have the settings to hide child comments and only click to have them appear.

So, I can click each comment thread and read it individually and slowly open each thread to follow each comment chain. As it is now, hiding comments to make earlier comments more readable doesn't really work because you have to hide the initial comment to hide the ones below it.

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.

If I reload a page I last visited an hour ago, comments in the past hour are highlighted. Great.

If I reload a page twice by accident, then I missed that window, and only comments in the past few seconds are highlighted.

Can I undo that? Any way to change what the "seen since" value is?

EDIT Also, any way to step through just the "new" posts?

upper right corner, the little word balloon button next to your profile icon gives a page with comments listed chronologically, no threading.

Whoa, cool.

It is comments from all threads, which is neat. But can it be restricted to comments for one thread?

Should threads be bump-able by new comments, like in a traditional forum? The benefit to this is that it keeps conversations going throughout the week, instead of dying out after a day. The detriment is that it de-prioritizes novelty. But there could be a good formula for balancing the two: novel threads always stay first for some hours, and older threads require increasingly more participation to be bumped to the top.

+1 to adjusting how the thread structure is used

I do really like ideas like this, but it's gonna take a bit to get there; right now we're dealing with a lot of fundamental issues unfortunately.

I'm putting it in my list but I might forget about it; I encourage you to mention it again in a few weeks :D

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.


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!

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