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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.
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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