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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   3725 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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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.

The latter in the long term, the former in the short term, because . . .

I like the idea of adding sub-communities, but I don't know if we have enough people to fill in 7 zillion niches.

. . . 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.

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)?

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.

In terms of server-scaling, I'm going to be hilariously optimistic here and say "the target is eventually reddit-sized".

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.

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?

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.

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.

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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