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ZorbaTHut  5d ago (text post)   2594 thread views

Site Backend Changes

Hey there! For complicated reasons, some of which I will explain later, I'm in the middle of dong a pretty gigantic revamp to the Motte codebase. Right now, this means "fix a bunch of small bugs". Later, other things will be happening.

The immediate goal of this is not to massively transform the site or do a Digg v4/New Reddit thing. Frankly, if the site remained exactly the same (but with fewer bugs) I would be happy.

The long-term goal isn't going to be quite that static, though. The long-term goal is to set things up to allow more subcommunities, similar to how subreddits work. This will be a larger set of changes. These changes will not obsolete The Motte itself; I am absolutely aiming for a site that can comfortably keep holding The Motte. I've talked about this before if you want to go read about it - this is still the same plan, for what it's worth, it's just now being (slowly) executed.

I will be posting more, and asking questions about next steps, when actual site behavioral changes are in the queue. This just isn't that! This is infrastructure work.

 

tl;dr: The site backend may be a little wonky for a bit, sorry about that, please report any bugs.

(and mods, feel free to unsticky this in a few days if I forget)

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and now it's in tech too

"Now"? Tech is one of the earliest and hardest hit sectors.

Wasn't my experience. I mean, tech has been always kind of leaning leftwise, but aggressive wokeness and Nazi-calling was not common, people usually behaved professionally even if they disagreed politically. The idea that you can't use certain library/platform/software or go to a conference because it's "Nazi" was not common. Something like what Mozilla or GNOME are now would be completely alien in early 2000s when it all started. It began to turn sour with CoC wars, and then it got progressively worse (pun intended) but I remember the period where the cancel culture was already rampant around but the tech was still relatively unaffected. It couldn't last and it didn't.

would be completely alien in early 2000s when it all started.

Your timeline feels off to me. I've seen some people point to the late 2000's as the start, when you could see a few tempests in teacups in some nerd communities, and I've seen people point to the 90's or 60's as the earlier waves, but the early 2000's was when this stuff was trending down, if anything.

but I remember the period where the cancel culture was already rampant around but the tech was still relatively unaffected.

Relatively compared to what? Like you mentioned there were the CoC wars, people in tech were getting canceled, projects started renaming their master branches. I think you'll be hard pressed to find a professional sector that went more woke sooner.

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