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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'd be willing to throw some hours at this, though I'll recognize my area of focus is neither webdev nor the massively parallel http serve optimizations you'd need to have this scale.
My biggest immediate concern is the face value of "What if subreddits had a unique internal ID, but the front-page label was replaceable?" That's a hard problem, and one with a lot of bad solutions. Reddit (and tumblr, and a lot of other social media) overloads the value of 'name'. It's both an identifier for access purposes, a community label, and a navigation and search aid.
So... let's pretend we have /r/trees (id: 101) and /r/pot (id: 102), which are humorously mixed up so that 101 refers to marijuana, and 102 is the horticulture of apple trees. The joke finally got old, and everyone agrees (note: this will never happen) that they need to be fixed so that /r/pot is attached to ID 101, and /r/trees is ID 102. What does that mean, from a technical level?
Is the new link themotte.org/r/101/this-is-a-pot-thread, and all that changes is what themotte.org/r/pot redirects toward? Because humans don't remember even small numbers well, and if the IDs are alphanumeric or GUID, they'll hate it. Or is it themotte.org/r/pot/this-is-a-pot-thread, and any previous links are updated automatically (that seems a database nightmare, and impossible for off-site links)? Or is the ID part of the thread identifier, and the submotte id only a navigation aid?
Who arbitrates when /r/politics has been taken over by your outgroup, can they fund the inevitable lawsuit or forced arbitration, and what's that look like to normal users?
I think there's ways to sell it, but I think it matters heavily what you're selling. People like reddit, tumblr, twitter, yada, because it's hilariously easy to go from a community member to running your own minisite, and the pressure to do so first means that anyone on the fence either jumps or ends up drawn to an aggregator. Even though setting up a XenoForum site is just a couple hours of work, the
Part of your alpha is the direct website functionality and the aggregator work, but it also needs to be the services you're offering, which is one of the spots that Reddit/Tumblr/whatever have historically been the worst at. People get committed when they buy in, even small costs, and there's a lot of genuine services that are pretty valuable to users and that traditional social media has avoided.
But those services are their own fracture point: DNS means you can get ARFCOM'd, private messaging or live chat adds a lot of COPA concerns, custom templating rather than rawdogging CSS means support costs. So tradeoffs, there. And there's a very serious temptation to go full Discord and start upselling useless crap, at which point your customers hate you.
Uh, some non-obvious problems:
Categorization. I'll take ARK as an example: you have /r/playark at the 'official' subreddit, /r/ark as the community subreddit, /r/survivetogether as the 'official' server listing, /r/playarkservers for community server listings, a handful of other subreddits for specific ports, yada, and that's just the stuff that's on reddit. And while ARK is particularly poorly thought out (badum tish), that's not really unique. /r/ffxiv has about thirty related subreddits, and maybe a dozen or so subreddits that are still about FFXIV that the /r/ffxiv moderators either don't want to highlight or actively loathe. This both pollutes the namespace, and it also means finding a list of everything ARK-related or FFXIV-related is extremely difficult, rather than a single existing page.
There's a couple solutions here. The namespace solution is the obvious coder one: r.games.ffxiv.<community> and r.games.ark.<community>, throw a page that lists them with some sort capability (and maybe allow management of that page by moderators for the recognized community), done. (uh, until you think about Prey 2017 vs Prey 2006). And then you think about literally anything other than video games, where the categorization gets weird fast. This is how usenet worked, but it's also why usenet ended up with things like alt.horror.werewolves having a bunch of furries and therians.
The other is tag-based. Still have the collision problem, but the bigger issue's whether you allow user tagging -- see tumblr's search for how that goes -- or have to do some work to manage it.
Separation. Even if you don't host images/video, you're going to get content you don't want available to every user, and you're going to get content that goes together like peanut butter and some of reddit's now-banned infamous subreddits. Smut's the most obvious case, here, but it's also the 'easiest'... and it's pretty telling that Reddit's NSFW marker keeps getting reused for everything from spoilers to gore to trychtophobia to spiders to a million other things.
Search. Good fucking god, reddit, what the everliving fuck.
Federation and the Transitive Property. I'm... not sure if this is a general problem, or one specific to the Mastodon implementation, but there's historically been a tendency to threat some forms of content as fundamentally corrosive, and I don't expect that to decrease. Technical solutions haven't historically been sufficient, in general because of reputation effects, in some cases (the baraag saga) augmented by legal concerns.
This is roughly my plan, yeah.
themotte.org/r/pot means "the current subreddit named pot, whatever that might be"; it is not actually a unique identifier. It's possible that if you go to /r/pot itself, you would get redirected to themotte.org/r/pot/main/102, which will always refer to Subreddit 102, later to be known as trees, even if it's no longer /r/pot. This means that anyone going to "/r/pot" ends up in whatever community we currently have blessed with the name "/r/pot", but a copypasted link gets that specific community even if it has since been renamed.
Thread links don't include a subreddit ID, but they do include a post ID; the subreddit and thread name are completely irrelevant. Reddit already does part of this -https://old.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/1tehscm/theres_a_fox_family_living_under_our_front_porch/ is the exact same as www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/1tehscm/i_sure_do_love_beef/. And while it does validate the /r/aww part for some reason, the comment ID is globally unique. We just have to make it pay attention to that.
Well, the buck stops with me, in the end. So, "me, or someone delegated by me to solve these problems".
One thing I'm currently unsure of is how to tell when it needs actual attention; obviously any subreddit as big as /r/politics is going to have people constantly spamming "this subreddit is violating its own rules" reports. But this feels like one of those "we'll deal with that later" things; I can't come up with a solution when I don't see how the problem behaves. It will be a problem, but this also feels solvable.
Yeah, this is fair; I may have to bump "you can make a site" up in priority for the sake of buy-in.
DNS may be a surprisingly small issue; ARFCOM was due to being kicked off Godaddy, I think? There are much better DNS providers out there who are far less eager to kick people off.
I'm actually not too concerned about custom templating, you can do sufficiently bad stuff with CSS that a real bad actor will find a way to be a nuisance anyway. One step at a time here, honestly.
COPPA is a gigantic pain. I would probably just remove 13-or-younger logins to start with, frankly. This is maybe something I should be doing already though. I am . . . not looking forward to the legal side of this.
Huh. That's a neat idea.
It is definitely . . . controversy-fraught, let's say. At the same time, if community names really aren't permanent, it feels more adjustable. Something like the Ark situation could be handled by just tossing a thread onto all relevant communities and saying "hey, we want to solve this, hash out what names you'd prefer?" and doing a doge-ish process to come to a sensible agreed-upon conclusion.
(I would fully want to automate the Doge process.)
I'm actually not familiar enough to Tumblr to know what's going on here. What did happen?
I think my gut feeling is that user tagging works actually pretty well as long as you have reasonable thresholds for when you officially bless tags. Steam games are technically user-tagged and do just fine; I can also think of, uh, a site with a number in it that has a phenomenally thorough crowdsourced tagging system.
This does tap into one other actual big problem, which is the increasing tendency of governments to want to segregate anything even vaguely adult away from the entire rest of the world.
I can think of a few approaches.
One is to just not worry about it. Reddit still has porn. Deal with it. I feel like porn is less of a problem for communities than it is for community managers without a spine, and I don't plan to be that person.
Another is to have a "everything except the porn" URL, and then an "everything including the porn" URL, using the "everything except the porn" URL pretty much everywhere we can. You want the porn, someone will eventually mention the with-the-porn version; go to that site.
Yeah, you're not wrong.
I think there's a point where this can be solved by the biggest whale simply saying "no, we're not going to do that; you can de-federate with us if you want, but other than that, deal with it, because we are not planning to de-federate with other groups". There's a lot of really awful people running email servers that can still send emails to gmail, so this is clearly not an unsolvable problem. And that's not even indirect federation, that's direct sends!
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