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I'm afraid I've been talking on Reddit.
It's goddamn annoying.
I don't know if anyone here is still discussing stuff on Reddit regularly, but Reddit has rolled out a new improved block feature, where someone blocks you and then you can't see them and they can't see you. Of course inevitably this is being used regularly to get the last word in a discussion; that's why our Block feature is specifically designed to make that impossible. But this is happening in straight-up debate subreddits, with some communities slowly polarizing into two parallel communities that can't see each other or talk to each other, talking past each other with everyone else caught in the middle.
Fuckin' sucks.
Let's talk about something else.
One of the very-long-term plans for the Motte that's always kinda been banging around in the back of my mind is trying to expand this community into a serious Reddit competitor. Part of this means opening up community creation in much the same way Reddit has; instead of the mods needing to make every subcommunity, let the community do it. I have a few pages of notes on code architecture and more notes on how to handle site-wide policy and Sketchy Communities.
This has historically been implausible because it's a ton of coding. For . . . reasons I'm not going to describe in detail right now . . . the codebase The Motte currently runs on is a dead-end; by using it, we're in a kind of shaky position, but nobody cares enough about us to shake us, so I've just let it ride. For anything that looks vaguely like "try to become larger" it needs to be nuked and paved, and in the process rewritten to suck less butt (I have opinions on code architecture.) On the other hand . . . AI exists, right? It's really good. A lot of the difficulty of writing something like The Motte is not in the kind of deep architecture decisions that AI is bad at, it's just a shitload of really boring code that AI is great at.
I wrote a video player because there were like three features I wanted. That wasn't even Fable, that was Opus 4.7. Every week, "rewrite the Motte codebase, but less crappy" becomes more viable, and the hardest problems shift away from money and engineering, and towards community management.
Whoops, I ended up talking about the same thing.
Who could have seen that coming.
There's a few problems Reddit has that I feel are kind of knotted up in each other. Be warned, this is going to be long; I don't have time to make it shorter.
Reddit plays these cutesy games with "subreddit ownership" that I've always kinda hated. The mods control a subreddit, completely and unassailably . . . unless the subreddit does something Reddit doesn't like, in which case they replace the owners. But that doesn't mean Reddit condones the subreddits! No, the subreddits are owned by the moderators! It's the moderators to blame if anything bad happens there! Please ignore the points where Reddit interferes. Reddit doesn't interfere because that would make Reddit responsible. That never happens. Except on this subreddit over here, where we have to interfere, but it has never happened before and will never happen again, oh look another one, let's interfere here also.
It's fundamentally dishonest. They're playing both sides of a difficult decision and trying to get the credit for both. Thankfully most people aren't buying into this, but they're still doing it.
This is exacerbated by Reddit's namespacing woes. Subreddits are defined entirely by their subreddit name, which means if you happened to squat on a name, that name is now yours. Sometimes this is funny (hello /r/trees and /r/marijuanaenthusiasts) and sometimes it's actually kind of crappy (/r/worldpolitics, nsfw). (Which admittedly then loops back around into "funny", as per /r/anime_titties, which is surprisingly safe for work.) And then sometimes it's toxic; can you name a community that got taken over by people who seem to exemplify the worst of that community? Or who seem to actively hate the thing it's ostensibly about? If you can't, then I envy you, because you clearly don't use Reddit very often, which is a good decision.
The problem is that Reddit doesn't have the ability to rename subreddits. They never have. So if there's a group doing something questionable - let's say /r/YourIngroup has been taken over by your outgroup, substitute the metasyntactic variables as appropriate - the only levers they can pull are "replace mods", "ban subreddit entirely", or "ignore".
What if "rename" were possible?
What if subreddits had a unique internal ID, but the front-page label was replaceable? So in a world where /r/politics is taken over by your outgroup, an event which I'm sure nobody here has previously considered, it could just be renamed to /r/PoltiicsYourOutgroup and a new neutral politics subreddit formed?
"This subreddit is yours. You can do what you want with it. But the names are ours. Your subreddit has been moved; your subscribers moved along with it; we welcome your success; we just don't welcome your success under that label."
In a hypothetical world where we had this site, what if we were a bit more formal with ownership?
You can just make a submotte and nobody stops you. But at some point the mod interface starts pestering you to make an important decision: is this a community submotte, or a privately-owned submotte? If it's a community submotte, you relinquish ultimate ownership to The Motte; we'll help you define a purpose for the community and then enforce that purpose, in much the same way as corporate ownership works (tl;dr: "you have vast and flexible power as long as you can justify it following the purpose of the company, but the one thing you can't do is violate that purpose or work against the best interests of
the shareholdersthe Motte").Don't want to be ultimately liable to us? Choose Privately Owned; you can pay a reasonable monthly fee and we are happy to keep hosting it. You have full power over it. It's yours! But if you do something that we don't want to host at all, we'll give you a reasonable short warning to export the data and host it yourself, and then kick you off.
I think this sort of relies on federation. Make The Motte a protocol (maybe see if we can twist the Fediverse protocol into working for us, or give up on that and just make our own), provide the sourcecode, and now moving your site off The Motte is easy.
The big problem with the Fediverse is that they treat federation transitively. If you federate the worst community imaginable - which I think we can all agree are the Wet Sock Appreciators, curse those people - then the core Fediverse nodes won't federate you. But we don't have to do that. We can refuse to federate with the Wet Sock Appreciators if we think they're truly unredeemable, but if someone else wants to be a node that federates with both us and them, alright, have at it, we'll allow it.
So if you make a privately-owned Wet Sock Appreciator submotte, and we decide to kick you off (as is obviously deserved for members of such a heinous group), (1) you can just host it elsewhere, (2) your users can just use something capable of seeing it.
I don't think there can be such a thing as truly objective judgement when it comes to something like community dynamics. There's a reason we have the Wildcard Rule, and we don't use it often, but we do use it.
But there are ways to make this better.
One of the best things I did when making The Motte was to write the Foundation. It was meant as the overall north star for the community, so if I had to ask why I was doing this, or if I had to make a hard decision, I could check the Foundation and see if that made it easier. That's why we're here, for the record - when it came down to "move or censor yourselves", I looked at the Foundation and realized that moving was a good chance of death, but self-censorship was death. Maybe The Motte would be a thing that existed, but the Foundation would no longer apply.
I've changed the Foundation once. It used to say "subreddit". When we moved, I changed it to "community". Besides that, it's gone completely unchanged.
So maybe we do the same thing. Maybe we require that communities make a Foundation; basically a community Constitution, similar to the Company Purpose I alluded to earlier. It is what the community is judged on, it is what the moderators are judged on. And if the moderators start violating a community's Foundation, the moderators are removed.
I think it's easy to read this and think "oh gosh zorba is gonna replace everything overnight, everything is going to be destroyed". Nah. That's not happening.
But I've had this box in my brain labeled "Motte plans" for a very long time. That box is full of interlocked gears, and up until lately it was just deadlocked. Now it's feeling like some of the deadlocks are starting to lift, and the gears are slowly turning, and maybe it's time to revisit the box.
This isn't happening today, and this isn't happening tomorrow, and if it happens, it will be very gradual, and with the preservation of this community in the forefront. And let's be honest it's probably not happening at all.
But the word "probably" is doing nonzero work in that sentence.
Do these ideas help?
Would they work?
Would people put up with it?
Do these concepts help enough?
What am I missing?
I have no idea.
Feedback requested.
the donald along with kia2 tried to make a reddit clone but it flopped quite badly. And the donald is much bigger than this place. They are still somewhat alive but engagement outside the core subs is essentially zero.
I think the fact is that few people in these niche subs actually browse a significant other portion of the site, and of those who do, there is little overlap in the other subs they browse. Besides that, I think other big subs are heavily driven by a handful of power users.
Probably the critical part to making a reddit offshoot is surprisingly similar to the alternative streaming platforms: Pay influencers/power users gobs of money to put content on your platform.
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There's a bigger problem here, and it's the perennial story of enshittification: Everybody has a price. The thing you're describing would be worth a lot of money if successful, for various reasons. I say this not as an insult to you but as a description of human nature: what would happen when someone dangled your price in front of you? What about 2x your price? 10x?
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I love TheMotte. Over the years it has quietly become my default reddit alternative for serious political and culture war discussions. I appreciate the hard work of users who consistently put out quality writeups, the moderators for keeping the place true to its founding spirit, and you for keeping the site alive. I’d be happy to chip in financially if it helps sustain the project.
That said, I think the biggest barrier to turning TheMotte into a serious reddit alternative (beyond the coding difficulties, I suppose) is precisely the high standards that make it what it is. Reddit (social media generally) rewards low effort, high engagement content. Outrage coded one liners and tribal signaling are the only things that drive content virality and user traffic. It's human nature. A top comment here on the Iran war might be a detailed, insightful commentary with citations. The reddit equivalent of the same would just be a never ending list of “Fuck Trump” with 10k upvotes.
Mottizens have their obvious leanings, but the upvote system here still rewards effort and substance over pure engagement. I may disagree with the jannies on various points, but you genuinely captured lightning in a bottle with the current crew. Assembling and maintaining a large team of like minded moderators to consistently enforce quality standards while trying to grow the community sounds like an enormous full time job. It’s impressive that it works as well as it does.
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These are some exciting propositions. I also use reddit for a lot of things, but generally, TheMotte is better in most ways; freedom to say what you please, some ideological alignment on my part, pretty decent moderation. If you're asking if users are in favor of this, I am in favor of it.
One of my favorite subreddits these days is /r/DeepStateCentrism for providing a lot of article links, getting you past the paywall, and providing pretty good discussion of it. I wasn't around for the bare link repository, but my imagination says that it was something like that. Perhaps this is a route to get the bare link repository back. And, if what happened to /r/moderatepolitics (takeover by left wing partisans) happens to a muttereddit here (we need to hold a poll of possible names for submottes), or really any number of subreddits that basically got brigaded after 2024, it can just be renamed, which will be far less frustrating than pretending it's always been like that. That might not be scalable, though.
As far as feasibility goes, nobody knows if you'll be successful until you try. As you and others have noted, rdrama and themotte have been pretty wildly successful as far as reddit offshoots go, even if there is no growth, because all the rest of them die off quick. I guess some pertinent questions would be where you plan on getting more users, and what could entice them to leave whatever they're using now. The obvious answer there is reddit, but I imagine it's going to continue a rightward skew, because most of the disillusioned redditors tend to be right wing. Oh well. Hopefully there's enough space for a TheSchism submotte.
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You know, I've also gone back to Reddit a bit recently, and find that even beyond the normal "Redditor complains about Redditors" complaints, AI chatbots have basically killed it for me as a concept
I started playing World of Warcraft Classic recently, which is more videogaming than I've done since, well, I raided on World of Warcraft fifteen years ago. And starting up again, I had a lot of questions about things that I needed answered. Both mechanical questions, like "What stats should I prioritize for a leveling fury warrior, what's a good rule of thumb for comparing the dps from dual wielding 2 1h weapons versus using a single 2h weapon as I level?" and more social questions like "What's good loot etiquette in a leveling PUG 5 man group for needing stuff for a main spec if I'm playing an off-spec for the group?"
These are questions that Reddit is naturally great at answering, but they're also questions that in the late stages of a twenty year old game, nobody wants to answer on Reddit, and Reddit's search function remains intentionally trash for the purpose of avoiding questions being easily answered. If you ask the question, you might get a couple dismissive non-detailed answers ("Just use the standard arms build moron") ("It's a twenty year old game don't you know this already!"), you might get a recurring argument among powerusers that doesn't really answer your question, you most probably get low engagement and nothing at all. Chatbots aren't good at answering these questions on their own, they tend to get lost and make so many mistakes that you would get kicked out of any group if you made mistakes like that ("A lot of Rogues need on Corpsemaker because they want to try out 2h axes for a while!"), and hallucinate things that don't exist ("Hunters should farm Herod in Scarlet Monastery for the Scarlet Rifle rare drop gun").
But combine the two and you have a stew going! Ask ChatGPT or Grok or Deepseek to simulate a /r/classicwowtbc discussion on a scenario like "I was tanking RFK and Corpsemaker dropped, I needed on it because that was the only item I was running for, I won the roll but the Ret Paladin ragequit and tried to wipe the group by pulling adds, was I wrong to do that?" and tell it to simulate it as though there was a lot of engagement, and it will do a good enough job simulating all the replies from different angles and help me understand how players view the question. It's actually a lot of fun, it lets me simulate Reddit if everyone on Reddit cared about what I cared about.
The problem is that whenever I go on Reddit now, DeepSeek does such a good job simulating Reddit comments, that reading Reddit comments, I feel like I'm just reading Deepseek. Even when I write a comment, I feel like I'm just writing Deepseek simulations. What's the point? We're all just going through the motions so predictably, why even bother?
This does present obvious future ecological problems, what are the bots going to simulate if everyone stops going on Reddit because it's too easy to simulate? But that's not really my concern when I'm asking "What are good guidelines for which dungeons to run as a leveling priest?"
You need really weird nonsense to make a forum non-predictable and immune to simulation. Which this place sometimes achieves.
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I remember when I first started using Reddit I considered “neoliberal” to be in my ingroup since well I liked Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman. At some point I found out I believe it was Hillary Clinton was called a neoliberal which is a little true because Bill’s rise did involve before forced to adopt a lot of Reaganism to revive the Dem Party.
But neoliberal Reddit was NOT my ingroup. It wasn’t my nice smart Milton Friedman book club of conservatives. And I was quickly banned from neoliberal for wrong think.
I’ve noticed Reddit won’t let you read it anymore without downloaded app. I’m like all banned from Reddit. Since they became eyeballs for AI public company do they let people back onto Reddit?
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Are you in contact with the rdrama folks? They seem to have similar ambitions on a similar architecture and if this kind of project is to succeed it seems a big advantage to start out with a large and varied userbase. And also them being... often objectionable... provides a kind of trial by fire of how we're going to handle tolerating interlocked communities with different norms.
themotte's current codebase is rdrama I believe. That Zorba opens by suggesting the current thing is a dead-end likely indicates there isn't room for more collaboration there
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Nice to see you outside the Morlock tunnels!
I think one reason we get so much interest in being expanded to a "reddit alternative" is specifically because people want to have a discussion website that isn't hopelessly overrun by ads, AI, and low-effort engagement. The closest thing I'm aware of is StackExchange, but the focus there seems to be clear answers on particular topics rather than discussion (and also for some reason the whole design of that space just seems cluttered to me). Also they are apparently mostly existing to reap profits from AI now? I'm not a coder, y'all probably know more about this than I do.
Anyway my point is that one thing to seriously consider from the outset is organizational structure. Where the data is hosted and who controls it is something that will always matter. Right now the site is functionally a sole proprietorship run on an open codebase (to the best of my understanding) and I think everyone is basically fine with that--as the saying goes, Julius Caesar was a much beloved tyrant. But expanding the community might open you up to publicity that could be easier to navigate if the Motte was e.g. a full-fledged 501(c)(3) with a board of directors and an explicit mission.
Another thing to seriously consider, on my view, is images. Maybe don't host/display them? Ever, or beyond avatars or something? Many of us can remember the rise and... slump?... of Imgur, which basically came into existence because reddit did such a terrible job handling that sort of thing, but then realized it had a business interest in not sending the bulk of its low-effort engagement off to a different website. If the goal of the Motte is not specifically profit, then someone finding a way to profit from hosting images for the Motte does not represent a threat (the way it did to reddit), but rather an opportunity.
I also think that the CW thread was a great innovation as a pressure valve for the old SSC sub and it would be good to have genuinely non-political subs that could say "hey, here's a link to the irradiated zone if you want to peddle that shit." Defining the CW and clearly cordoning CW communities (but for real, not in the "we just ban rightoids/leftoid causes" way) would be a vast improvement.
But broadly speaking, I am in favor of the site developing in this direction.
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I think how best to do this depends a lot on the motivation. Why would we want to compete with Reddit in the first place? What does this space stand to gain from becoming a serious competitor to reddit?
I think if the world had a better link aggregator that was being actively used, it would be a better place.
I will note this isn't for the sake of the Motte, this is a side thing that happens to also work as a hypothetical platform for the Motte (and also kind of feeds off the fact that the Motte exists.)
Why not create a separate site for that purpose?
My first suspicion is that, if you don't, TM as it exists now will be slowly killed.
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I sort of feel like you're just reverse engineering the old Invision PowerBoards days of the internet, when every website would have its own cheaply hosted forum made on the same software with varying levels of CSS editing. And I'd like that, because that was a genuinely better state of the internet.
Subreddits aren't a million miles from this concept, save for the huge catch of all being governed by reddit's rancid piece of shit admin team and their global rules. Which is a lot of the problem with reddit, honestly. Most of the rest of it being the type of moderators who will thrive within those global rules. Getting rid of the name thing will help, because it removes the prestige of having the "official" subreddit for something, and therefore discourages such mods who are only out for control. Having control of the names might invite accusations of bias as to who you rename and who you don't; you could maybe just maintain control of a front-page directory of sorts, a dewey decimal system of forums, and de-list ones which drift too far from their stated purpose.
You're going to get accused of being a witch-lover, and hard. Since the main communities who would make use of this at first are going to be those who cannot exist on reddit without falling foul of the global rules and the tranny jannies. You will be accused of providing a place for nazis to collaborate on terrorism.
But assuming you have factored that in, what you probably want to do is come up with a customisable experience to fit the needs and whims of the communities who might use it. I'm just going to throw a couple of completely not thought out at all things that might make such a system stand out and offer something people might actually take a look at for being different;
Ability to change between forums-style strict chronological comment ordering with quotes, and reddit-style cascading comments section. God I fucking hate reddit comments sections. Wading through all the cruft I already read is tedious. Though I can envision this causing issues as people try to crosstalk between different preferred layouts and miss responses... but with ping replies I don't see it being a big issue.
Topic tags, sort of like flairs on subreddits, except that one topic could have multiple tags, and you can maybe separate them into sections, a curated list of admin-defined ones for easy after the fact searching, and then user defined ones like the way steam game tags work, with topic creator given the chance to add theirs on topic creation.
The ability to replace or remove up/downvotes. I actually like the kiwifarms thing where they have a ton of reacts for a comment. Helpful, funny, and so on. Functionally up and downvotes basically equate to likes and dislikes. This is just adding more options. Here in particular I can see potential for people to rate things as "dislike" but also "informative". Further to this, you can let people set their own filters to auto-collapse or highlight comments that get more than X reactions of a particular type, search the topic for the comment with the most reacts of a certain type ("helpful" when dealing with tech issues...) or what have you.
Public moderation logs. Which mod removed which comment? Which mod changed which tag? which mod banned which user? Well, now you know. If someone is abusing their power, it will be there in black and white. Ideally this would be enforced, data collected by your forum software and sent to your servers, and the mod logs for any forum should be available by plugging the ID into some page you maintain. Mods should not be able to hide this. Maybe you can let them buy you out if you want. You can have the software and none of the oversight... for a fee.
You have no clue how many times I wish I could rate something "informative" on the rest of the Internet.
The only thing about stickers I would recommend is to never send notifications for them, not even as an option. Xenforo has them out-of-the-box and Josh has to constantly deal with users who get negrated and then in turn revenge negrate every single one of the other user's posts. For a while, he disabled notifications entirely, until people complained (completely genuinely) that they relied on the sticker notifications to engage with threads they wanted to keep up with, rather than anything sane like the forum software's watchlist. Also, people were writing userscripts that aggregated all the stickers from their posts after he deliberately broke that functionality. So he begrudgingly re-enabled it.
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wouldn't be the first time
But yeah, this is kinda-sorta the idea.
Note that the initial wave won't be that, because I/we would be creating the communities manually and not opening it up to that.
Eventually, maybe, yeah.
Yeah I'm totally fine with this.
I think there's a lot of room for allowing communities to self-customize to some level. There's absolutely some cost-benefit here - even if this does happen, don't expect it early - but, yeah.
And with federation this gets even easier; the sites have to be able to speak the same metadata language but nothing forces them to present that data in the same way.
Yeah. I think it's absolutely absurd that the only global topic tag is used variously for "will give you nightmares", "a spoiler for popular media", and "literally porn". Can these be three separate tags please?
This absolutely introduces some problems in terms of semi-automated moderation. I think these are solvable problems, but it is worth noting that keeping it to "up/down" does make a bunch of analysis easier.
This gets a lot gnarlier when spam becomes a problem, because you really don't want spammers to have a nice detailed log of everyone removed for spamming and why. I like the general idea but there are some necessary compromises here. I also think this is one of those things where "private communities can hide the mod log" becomes quite justifiable; I also think that maybe tagging actions based on the specific user has some negative effects.
This is one of those "mmm, not convinced, but also I see where you're coming from" deals.
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I'd just like to take this opportunity to once again thank you for all the hard work you put in to make this space possible. You really are the unsung hero of this place, I'm proud to make my monthly Patreon donation, and would encourage anyone else who appreciates the work Zorba puts in to match it.
I appreciate this greatly, and thank you . . .
. . . but direct most of that to the mods, they've been putting in a lot more time than I have for several years. This place would not have survived without them.
I am happy to captain this ship, but it's the crew who deserve most of the credit right now.
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I'm going to sidestep most of the questions you have posed and just say no, they wouldn't work because attempts to replace reddit (or other established social media sites) never work. When moderators threw a fit a few years ago and some shut down their subreddits, no one moved to new options they tried. Ruqqus, voat are the only other ones I can even remember. A ton of people moved to bluesky from twitter, and now it's still slowly dying, trapped in an extremism cycle. And of course this place and rdrama both appear to have done little but stem the bleeding. Perhaps the stats show differently, but I don't feel like there's ever been any growth.
I think the problem is that a lot of these sites just aren't good. They're trying to beat Reddit by being a worse Reddit but with a better set of people. In terms of community engineering, what is it that Ruqqus or Voat or Bluesky did? I would answer "nothing"; they're just reproducing the existing site and hoping they get the right set of people.
I think community engineering is very strong, but most people either aren't trying it, or are trying it in a hyperauthoritarian way, both of which are sorta doomed.
We are definitely not growing. At the same time, we aren't providing any opportunity for growth; "half as much traffic as we had on Reddit, consistently, without access to any other communities on this site" is a hell of an accomplishment. I admit I read Reddit more than I read this, entirely because all the other communities are on Reddit, but if there were opportunities to start getting them here instead, maybe that could work out?
What if we added our own /m/gaming, /m/technology, and /m/humor, all with politics strictly banned but largely open beyond that, for example?
I'll echo what arjin posted below and say that your answer seems to vacillate between technological features and sociological design. I'm sure ruqqus and bluesky all had features and ideas they thought differentiated them from their competitors, but it's one thing to say that and another to prove it.
Like with this example:
What does it actually mean to have politics banned? I assume myself and the majority of motters do understand what people mean when they say they are "tired of politics in video games", but turning that tacit understanding into actionable rules is difficult, and as soon as you start adding in a wider range of people that's going to break down. Like you would inevitably get moderators that ban economic topics because of the crossover with politics, and users complaining about people bringing up e.g. Sony's decision to end disc suport because they consider it a political issue.
If the plan is to recruit only users that are open/smart/conscientious/whatever enough to post on the motte and give them more communities to post in, then fine, but at that point you've just reinvented rdrama with all the same user acquisiton issues.
I think there's a lot of pretty reasonable behaviors mods could have that plausibly follow the spirit of this. I'm serious when I say:
So if people object to how a community's being run, we look at it and talk to the mods. If they say "yes, here is how we are defining 'politics'", then we ask them to put that into a non-foundation rules, and if it seems like it's being vaguely evenly enforced, we shrug and say "looks like it's fine, you are welcome to start a competing community with a different definition". But if they say "yeah fuck that, we don't care" then they get booted; if they say "here is how we define it" and then obviously do not enforce it that way, they get booted.
I think my core answer here is that we allow for any definition that's reasonably defensible as being an implementation of the foundation.
A lot of legal systems work this way; the general concept of "a reasonable person" is woven deeply into the fabric of US law, and there's no formal guidance as to exactly what this means, which means there's a pretty big gray area where people debate over where exactly the line is drawn and the line is often drawn inconsistently. But this is also kinda OK because this means the obvious white cases and obvious black cases get judged properly, and nobody can "properly" judge every gray-area case consistently and perfectly because the very issue is a lack of objective definitions, so whatever, this gives results that are as good as possible and claims to accomplish no better than that.
That's what I'm going for here.
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What exactly are you aiming for - neutrality / culture war banned, or letting people self organize as long as they label themselves clearly? Either one has it's appeal, but your first post seems to be pointing to the latter, and the second the former.
I like the idea of adding sub-communities, but I don't know if we have enough people to fill in 7 zillion niches.
That makes it sound like the bigger concern is going to be technological, not sociological. Do you have a good idea of what you want to do better. How big of a scope we're talking about here (because at first glance it sounds pretty big)?
The latter in the long term, the former in the short term, because . . .
. . . of exactly this reason.
I see communities as something kind of kin to nuclear reactions. If you take a bunch of uranium and spread it out, you have a bunch of uranium on the ground. If you pack it up into a tight little ball you have an infinite energy generator. But in the case of communities, you need to spread it out a little to let it grow.
Walking this tightrope is inevitably the hard part; eventually, a site could get big enough to open up community creation to everyone. But it takes some work to get there.
Practically I think for a while we would be taking nominations, putting them up for vote, and tentatively adding them to see if they got enough traffic.
In terms of server-scaling, I'm going to be hilariously optimistic here and say "the target is eventually reddit-sized".
Buuut . . . it is worth noting that I have been involved in various levels of scalability for a long time. I'm not going to try to start with something Reddit-sized, but I do know roughly how to design the backend architecture so it can scale without horrendous amounts of pain.
(this site isn't it)
And I'm not putting in more than the bare minimum to start with, frankly, if we have an order-of-magnitude of headroom at any given moment we're probably fine.
(we probably do have that right now, honestly)
The thing I really mean by "do better" is the community management part of it.
I was thinking more in terms of work that needs to be done. If this site is as bad as you say, making the switch would necessarily imply having the new platform ready first. On the other hand, you say that we have enough headroom, so maybe not?
Let me put it this way: generally your idea sounds good. The sociological specifics don't sound so important to me, and I'm trying to figure out if / how much I can help from the technical side.
Technically we can do it piecemeal; I'd start by moving non-HTML functionality over (like "upvotes/downvotes"). Some stuff can maybe even be done statistically; shift 1% of upvotes/downvotes to the new platform, look for problems, ramp it up.
I appreciate it!
I'm not totally sure there's much that can be done technically right now; I'm gonna have to sit down and hash out the fundamentals first, and that's going to be a very iterative process of trying things and seeing what I like. This is still extremely in the "mulling it over" stage, note.
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