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ZorbaTHut  4d ago (text post)   2420 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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Suggestion: make cast votes visible to OP before 24 hours. So I can see my vote score but others cannot, until 24 hours, and then everything visible. Votes are useful information. If a post is getting too many downvotes, it may mean I am wrong about something or I need to assess my priors.

Other way around, more downvotes means I am actually taking an unpopular stance that people here need to hear more of. Upvotes might give you the pleasure of the crowd, but they change you. Make you crave that narcissistic approval, triggering the base human herd instincts. Upvoting and Downvoting in general is pretty cringe though.

EDIT: the irony of having 10 upvotes, on this. I feel like Abed in the meowmeowbeans episode. Stop it you cruel lurkers!

Agreed, if it were up to me I would do away with the whole upvote/downvote system entirely.

I'd stop posting if that happened. Or at least post much less frequently, as I do in Data Secrets Lox.

I wonder if there's some sort of hybrid system that would keep the dopamine hack while avoiding the way upvotes tend to negatively impact discourse. Like maybe upvotes and downvotes are private and only visible to the OP. Or users get a monthly allotment of private "awards" they can send to people with particularly good comments.

I want to be able to encourage engaging effortposts and thougtful replies to my own comments, but also don't love the way upvotes encourage us (me fully included) to play the popularity game.

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