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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   7013 thread views

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

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...

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

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.

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.

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.)

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.

It's perfect for me, now.

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.

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.

Suggestion: Make finding new comments easier.

I believe this is by far the biggest potential quality-of-life improvement over reddit while maintaining the single-thread structure. Specific suggestions, without any real degree of certainty about what would be simple/practical:

  1. Add a "collapse all old comments" button that lets you see new comments only.

  2. Add buttons and/or keyboard shortcuts to jump down the page to the next new comment.

  3. Highlight "More comments" buttons if there are new comments deep in a subthread. I can't count the number of times on reddit I either go hunting deep in comment chains for new comments that don't exist, or just miss new comments entirely b/c I don't want to check every deep chain.

  4. Bring over the reddit gold feature of a dropdown "Show comments since visit" menu that lets you select any one of your last few visits to the page to show new comments from. iirc this one was suggested down below, so I'm just seconding/consolidating.

It's very far from perfect but the best way to find new comments to old subthreads ATM seems to be browsing https://www.themotte.org/comments

Yeah, it has its uses. I've never been able to get used to contextless browsing, though. I like seeing new comments in their original contexts.

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

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.

Bugs under the skin and constipated opinions here.

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!

Pretty much any feature from the Reddit Enhancement Suite would be a good add-on here. One that springs immediately to mind would be the ability to track upvotes/downvotes by user (so someone I've upvoted consistently would have a big green +112 next to their name, while people I downvote might have a red -22).

Another useful feature is the ability to add custom tags to other users, that exist only in your view of the site. Since I'm Catholic and outspoken Christians are fairly rare in online circles, I had a number of 'Catholic'/'Orthodox'/'Evangelical' tags on other users. Also added a few 'tankie' or 'Nazi' tags as well, just to keep track of who was who. (One nice sub-feature was that clicking on the tag brought you to the specific post that you had added the tag from, if you ever needed to remind yourself).

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.

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.

Is there any technical constraint making us stick to 10k characters for comments like on Reddit? I think the way we use this community means that long comments are really common and are actually the sort of thing we want to encourage. I think 15k or 20k might be better if it's just a config change. Especially since I don't think we have the functionality to lock the top-level comment so people can only reply to the full comment the way we used to.

(I just ran up against the 10k limit for a comment I posted in the CWR and had to trim it.)

I've actually got a task for that over here; I'm gonna bump it up in priority a little. First I'd want to relax the DB limits, then figure out how far we want to relax comment limits.

I don't think there are any technical constraints. The sql for the db has it set at 10k and there are places where the 10k limit is hard-coded, but it seems like increasing the limit should be relatively simple.

EDIT: although this issue says that the limit is 20k

Has anyone brought up the banner image yet? It just looks some weird stock photograph unrelated the Motte and makes the site feel incomplete. I would rather not have it at all.

Yeah, a strong +1 to this. @ZorbaTHut - how deliberate is the choice of banner image, and if it’s not particularly so, could we run some sort of banner image contest/suggestion thread to look for one or several better replacements?

Not deliberate at all. I picked it because we needed something to fill the space and the rDrama image that we had wasn't suitable. I agree it should probably get changed at some point.

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.

I'm glad that the transition off of reddit has gone well so far. The weekly threads seem as active as ever. Also the new site, after some of the tweaks the admins have made, is a better reading experience than reddit.

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.

Suggestion: you should fix the order of pinned threads as: current CW thread, current small/wellness/fun thread, others (like this bugs thread).

Currently the order looks random or based on the date, so sometimes the CW is first, sometimes second, and currently it's the third, which makes it easy to misclick.

Yeah, we should. Right now I think this is low-enough priority that it's not happening anytime soon, but I've put it on the list for the future.

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.

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.

The reddit feature I’ve used for at least six months has been the unthreaded view: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ which shows the 25 most recent comments on the whole subreddit, regardless of post, thread, or upvote. It doesn’t allow replies directly from that view, so I click into the permalink or context if I want to reply.

Is there such a feature here?

EDIT: Looks like there is: https://www.themotte.org/comments/

2 questions:

  1. How do we flag a comment as a quality contribution? Back on Reddit we'd do that through the reporting system, but there's no clear way to do it on this site.

  2. What does the "block user" feature do? I remember that causing a lot of issues back on Reddit, and I'm kind of surprised to see return here.

How do we flag a comment as a quality contribution? Back on Reddit we'd do that through the reporting system, but there's no clear way to do it on this site.

Still the reporting system! Type "quality contribution" or something like that in, we'll figure it out. This is not the way we plan for this to work long-term, it's just what we have available.

What does the "block user" feature do? I remember that causing a lot of issues back on Reddit, and I'm kind of surprised to see return here.

It was part of the codebase before and we haven't gotten around to changing it; I need to do a Meta post that includes this issue and ask for feedback on proposed solutions.

Right now it works similarly to how Reddit blocking works, I believe.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Small question. Are user reports still semi-anonymous? Do mods still not see specific usernames who make comment reports? I'd never know even if you lied, but I figured I would ask.

We actually do see the full usernames now. I'm not sure what I think about that, but so far I mostly just ignore them anyway.

It would be nice if pinned posts and comments were easier to distinguish visually from others. On Reddit pinned posts are green and that helps a lot; right now we only have the little pin icon next to the post and it's easy to miss.

When signing up, I was asked to agree to the rules, but on that page the rules are not visible and there is no link to them. I'd recommend adding a link to the rules on the sign-up page.

Subjective suggestion here, but perhaps change the default theme to coffee. I just think the colours are nice and work well as a light theme without feeling "clinical" like the current teal on white :)

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

When I highlight text that is in the top ~10% of my browser window, the screen immediately begins to scroll up. This is kind of annoying since I often absentmindedly double click text as I'm reading.

More sidebar links? I'd like to see a link to the github page, formatting help, and maybe other things.

Thank you for all the work you've been putting in on the site! I do have a few more suggestions:

I like the +/- comment collapser! Can we maybe have top level comments get a circle around that so I can pick them out of the pack when scrolling quickly?

Or maybe a Next Top Level button to jump to the next top-level comment?

Can we differentiate the shading between quotations and new-highlighted comments?

And I love that comment chains now stay collapsed between refreshes! Could you maybe put the new comment shading under a collapsed top level comment if the replies to it contain a new comment since your last visit? That's incredibly minor though.

Can comment scores please be hidden for the first 24 hours like they were on Reddit? I think having scores visible immediately can change how people react to a comment (in particular, it can encourage dogpiling or 'ratio-ing' someone who has expressed an unpopular viewpoint) and I'm really worried that this has the potential to shift the tone and composition of this community over time.

This is very cool forum site, kudos to Zorba et al for their hard work and a smoothish launch.

In the vein of navigating through read comments to new ones, it would be cool to be able to see how many unread comments a collapsed comment has beneath it. Maybe this could be pushed to user-side logic? How does the unread-comment counter work for the thread index page?

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.

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.

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

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

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

  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.

The comment source:


I remembered a recent [story about a woman called Loab](https://twitter.com/supercomposite/status/1567162288087470081):

The resulting link:

I remembered a recent story about a woman called Loab:

What sort of monster would write code to automatically replace nitter links with twitter links?

Oh god, I can't even show where the problem is, because they get replaced even in the text between the ``` marks...

Hah, it even filtered it out in your quote as well. That's kind of hilarious.

Lemme see if there's a good reason for that besides sheer perversity, and if there isn't, I'll get it fixed.

There is an option in settings where you can set it to convert all links to Twitter or all links to nitter. So you can set it to your liking. It is missing an option of no conversion though.

I'm realizing how much I miss my RES tags. Whenever someone commented that they had a unique life experience or were from a specific country, I would tag them and would have a better idea where someone was coming from. Maybe people would rather this information not be remembered though?

I'm definitely fine with that functionality being re-added, but it's a bunch of coding work right now. I've already got a bug filed for it but it's going to take quite a while to get there.

Default view on an user's @-page should probably be comments, not posts, since people don't write a lot of standalone posts here.

Yeah, you're right. Bug filed!

I saw new comments on the culture war thread (the ones on ethnicity and immigration) while logged out, so I logged in to add something. They were not there; the first post was on Ukraine from doglatine. I made sure it was sorted by new and reloaded the page with no effect. I logged out to see if I was imagining it. They were there. Logged back in, and they were gone. Not sure what's going on.

Also, this site doesn't work for me in Safari (all the text is blank), but is fine in Chrome, other than the missing comments while logged in.

I saw new comments on the culture war thread (the ones on ethnicity and immigration) while logged out, so I logged in to add something. They were not there; the first post was on Ukraine from doglatine.

I suspect we've got a problem with the new-user filter - we're going to be chasing minor issues with that for a while.

Also, this site doesn't work for me in Safari (all the text is blank), but is fine in Chrome, other than the missing comments while logged in.

Arrgh. I don't suppose you know anything about web development? Or have a friend with a Mac who would be willing to spend a few minutes debugging?

I just don't have any way to debug Safari right now >_<

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.

On desktop ultrawide screens, the site currently has no maximum width limit, unlike actual reddit. This makes reading on such screens more challenging given each line spans the whole width.

Compare:

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

https://i.imgur.com/Je2njej_d.webp?maxwidth=9999&fidelity=high

I suggest adding a fixed width limit.

I would suggest setting a max-width for post/comment bodies, rather than for the entire site. This fixes the readability issues with overly long lines in body text while still allowing all available horizontal space to be utilized so that comments don't become too narrow as they're nested a few levels deep.

You could set a custom max-width in css

.container {max-width: [your preferred value]; }

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.)

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!

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."

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

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

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

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 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.

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...

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

Any plans to make that a user switchable setting?

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

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

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

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

This should now be fixed, let me know!

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, it is now fixed :)

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

At least you know at least one user appreciates it!

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

Sigh. Bug filed!

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

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

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

https://imgur.com/a/qyny4VK

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

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

They're supposed to be 20x20!

Hmm, I wonder if Dark Mode is breaking things.

Edit: Nope, Dark Mode works fine. Hrm.

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

One plus 7T pro

Android version 11.0.1.10

Browser: Chrome

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

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

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

You're welcome!

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

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

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

If I click VIEW MORE COMMENTS and a top-level comment has been posted since I opened the page in the first place, the button will load that new top level comment first, and not the one chronologically after the comment immediately above the button: https://i.imgur.com/ZLMYyGY_d.webp?maxwidth=9999&fidelity=high

This seems incorrect to me. It disappears on a refresh, and is properly ordered after, of course, however, the new thread will also be highlighted as unread even if it's been seen via this method (not that this bothers me at all).

Also can you maybe do something like having top level comments have a different coloured circle to the left of them, just for quick distinguishing when scrolling? As an example, I'm using the Midnight theme, so everything is pink-on-black, maybe top level comments could be blue?

Bug registered, will see what we can do.

Also can you maybe do something like having top level comments have a different coloured circle to the left of them, just for quick distinguishing when scrolling? As an example, I'm using the Midnight theme, so everything is pink-on-black, maybe top level comments could be blue?

I've got a pending significant change to the comments page, once that's done we'll see if it's still an issue and solve it.

Please make the search magnifying glass icon clickable.

Bug registered! We have a pretty big backlog, unfortunately.

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.

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

+1 to adjusting how the thread structure is used

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?

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!

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?

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.


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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