The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I'll miss you, for what it's worth.
Yeah, I acknowledge this is a problem. We're running into various problems with long-term shifts, and it's unclear how to fix them; I have some ideas that I'm going to be trying out, but the core issue is just that value drift is hard to deal with. And I haven't come up with a good solution besides "frequent new mods who haven't value-drifted yet" or "clever tricks".
Honestly, maybe I should be doing Doge elections much more often and turn moderation into more of a rotating duty. It's tempting.
I don't see how this is supposed to help. It's not about the moderation, or the rules, it's the zeitgeist. We've been through too much to pretend everything is fine, we're all in the same boat, and just trying to figure life out.
I say give people something to do that is not culture war. Any of you degenerates want to mod a game, or something?
The idea is that you pick people who aren't jaded, and as they get jaded, they get rotated out. If you want to remain stationary but you're standing on a slow-moving train, you walk in the opposite direction of the train.
This honestly makes me tempted to set up Reddit-esque subreddits. I'm not sure it would work, but it's tempting.
(The codebase did have this functionality, but we pulled it because it was completely bitrotted. Wouldn't be too hard to reintroduce it though.)
I think part of the problem is that we desperately do need a constant influx of new members, else we will turn into an echo chamber, but the problem with that is Eternal September.
And right now everywhere (not just in the USA) is polarised and drawn up in battle array on both sides of the Culture War, so the temptation is there for one-liners, cheap shots, building consensus, and the rest of it - among the old-times and the new 'uns.
I don't know the solution to that, apart from an influx of the Holy Spirit and the grace of God.
I don’t think there’s been a single CW thread yet that I would describe as having an insufficient amount of disagreement.
I’m not sure what all the doom and gloom is about tbh. I think this place is fantastic the way it is right now. The only thing I would want to see change is more essayposts about a wider variety of topics (your Narnia post was an excellent contribution in this regard).
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Yeah, and it's really really hard to figure out how to get new members. There are a lot of places that would simply ban us because we allow witches to participate, and the places that wouldn't do that are entirely full of witches. This makes it hard to build a community whose signature property is "some, but not all, witches".
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Yes!
I brought it up some time ago (was checking out the codebase, and saw some tables set up in the database), and was shocked we're not using it. If I did the work of reintroducing the feature, will you release it, or would you need to think about whether you want to do it or not?
Well, the core issue is that there are a lot of questions about what exactly "the feature" is. We don't have any support for non-admin moderators, for example, so do we want to implement that? Suddenly the work is like three times harder. Or do we want the existing admins to take the load of entire new communities? I don't want to do that. Who gets to make new communities? Who gets to edit community pages (which right now are just hardcoded .html)? If someone is a moderator of multiple communities, do they get to see shared usernotes? Can someone be banned from one community and not another?
If you did the work of reintroducing the feature then, hmm, I'd have to run it past the mods, let me know if you're seriously thinking of doing this, but yeah I think we'd probably figure out a way to get it going. But I think "the feature" is going to prove to be a lot of work.
Yeah, I already figured there'd be questions like that we'd need to answer, and there might be a lot more work involved than just reverting a commit. I can't promise I'll get it done in a timely fashion, but I'd like to take a stab at it at least, so yeah I'm serious about it.
Join the Dev discord if you haven't already. That's where development discussion mostly happens, and that's also where the people who took it out originally hang out. I think the first step here is to just come up with a list of stuff that would have to get done.
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It would have to be pretty seriously restricted, if it existed at all, I think. Having one megathread in which most things are happening helps with engagement, and separating things out would dilute attention and decrease activity, at least under my current mental model.
If you allowed this at all, I think you'd need to restrict the ability to do so pretty heavily, and it would have to be kept to being fairly separate domains (the modding a game example is probably a good example of something disparate enough not to cause things to fall apart). To keep the community functioning the way it has been, you'd also want to try to make sure that what's currently going on (or rather, an idealized version of what's currently going on) would remain the central thing, with the others more fun side things—the Sunday, Wednesday, Friday etc. weekly kilothreads are probably a good example of that happening currently. That leads me to the question, how do you think subreddit-equivalents would work versus a megathread?
This is definitely true . . .
. . . if you assume that users are kept constant. It may be that splitting things up actually attracts more users because people can join communities that are better-suited for them. This is the transition that Reddit made, several times, with great success.
Are we at that point? No idea, which is why if I do this I want to ensure that I have ways to undo it and good metrics on what's going on. But it's at least something I'd be willing to try.
That's a good point. The attracting users might have to be done carefully—users won't stick to one community, and if culture war things are our core thing, we'd hope the new users wouldn't make that too much worse…
Really depends on what sorts of users it might attract.
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It helps with engagement for things that go into the thread (culture war), but it sucks the oxygen out for everything else. Having non culture-war subs would probably help engagement, because people would have other reasons to come here.
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