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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   1850 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for June 14, 2023

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

Nowadays, I cringe when I get a comment. I feel anxious when I see a lit-up notification bell. Frequently the sort of responses I engender seem not to be positive or helpful engagement -- often just dismissive one-liners, low-effort commentary that half-makes a point while being maximally personal or inflammatory, without any empathy for other perspectives or attempt to try and understand where I'm coming from.

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.

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?

I don't see how this is supposed to help. It's not about the moderation, or the rules, it's the zeitgeist.

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.

I say give people something to do that is not culture war. Any of you degenerates want to mod a game, or something?

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.)

This honestly makes me tempted to set up Reddit-esque subreddits. I'm not sure it would work, but it's tempting.

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.

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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