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ZorbaTHut  4d ago (text post)   2419 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!

I upvote this post.

Joke aside, I'd add another vote for removing the votes entirely. The information they provide is too vague. I get that some people feel they need the votes to actually motivate themselves to post at all, but IMO engagement, i.e. follow-up discussion, is the metric one should pay attention to, not zero-effort clicks.

Maybe my 4chan biases are showing here.

I upvote this post

Don’t you dare. A true agreement would downvote this post in solidarity.

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