There's a pretty big set of changes coming down the pipe. These shouldn't have much impact on users - it's all internal bookkeeping - but there's a lot of it, and if there's bugs, it might cause issues. Let me know if anything weird happens! Weird, in this case, is probably "comments you can see that you think you shouldn't be able to", or "comments you can't see that you think you should be able to", or anything else strange that goes on. As an example, at one point in development reply notifications stopped working. So keep your eyes out for that. I'm probably pushing this in a day or two, I just wanted to warn people first.
EDIT: PUSH COMPLETE, let me know if anything goes wrong
Are you a software developer? Do you want to help? We can pretty much always use people who want to get their hands dirty with our ridiculous list of stuff to work on. The codebase is in Python, and while I'm not gonna claim it's the cleanest thing ever, it's also not the worst and we are absolutely up for refactoring and improvements. Hop over to our discord server and join in. (This is also a good place to report issues, especially if part of the issue is "I can't make comments anymore.")
Are you somewhat experienced in Python but have never worked on a big codebase? Come help anyway! We'll point you at some easy stuff.
Are you not experienced in Python whatsoever? We can always use testers, to be honest, and if you want to learn Python, go do a tutorial, once you know the basics, come join us and work on stuff.
(if you're experienced in, like, any other language, you'll have no trouble)
Alt Accounts: Let's talk about 'em. We are consistently having trouble with people making alt accounts to avoid bans, which is against the rules, or making alt accounts to respond to their own stuff, which isn't technically against the rules, and so forth. I'm considering a general note in the rules that alt accounts are strongly discouraged, but if you feel the need for an alt, contact us; we're probably okay with it if there's a good reason. (Example: We've had a few people ask to make effortposts that aren't associated with their main account for various reasons. We're fine with this.) If you want to avoid talking to us about it, it probably isn't a good reason.
Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is not set in stone.
Single-Issue Posting: Similarly, we're having trouble with people who want to post about one specific topic. "But wait, Zorba, why is that a problem" well, check out the Foundation:
The purpose of this community is to be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs. It is to be a place for people to examine the beliefs of others as well as their own beliefs; it is to be a place where strange or abnormal opinions and ideas can be generated and discussed fairly, with consideration and insight instead of kneejerk responses.
If someone's posting about one subject, repeatedly, over and over, then it isn't really a discussion that's being had, it's prosletyzing. I acknowledge there's some value lost in removing this kind of behavior, but I think there's a lot of value lost in having it; letting the community be dominated by this behavior seems to lead to Bad Outcomes.
Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is also not set in stone.
Private Profiles: When we picked up the codebase, it included functionality for private profiles, which prevents users from seeing your profile. I probably would have removed this if I'd had a lot more development time, but I didn't. So it exists.
I'm thinking of removing it anyway, though. I'm not sure if it provides significant benefit; I think there's a good argument that anything posted on the site is, in some sense, fair game to be looked over.
On the other hand . . . removing it certainly does encourage ad hominem arguments, doesn't it? Ad hominems are kind of useless and crappy and poison discourse. We don't want people to be arguing about the other person's previously-stated beliefs all the time, we want people to be responding to recent comments, in general.
But on the gripping hand . . .
. . . well, I just went to get a list of the ten most prolific users with hidden profiles. One of them has a few quality contributions! (Thanks!) Two of them are neutral. And seven of them have repeated antagonism, with many of those getting banned or permabanned.
If there's a tool mostly used by people who are fucking with the community, maybe that's a good argument for removing the tool.
On the, uh, other gripping hand, keep in mind that private profiles don't even work against the admins. We can see right through them (accompanied by a note that says "this profile is private"). So this feature change isn't for the sake of us, it's for the sake of you. Is that worth it? I dunno.
Feedback wanted! Again!
The Volunteer System is actually working and doing useful stuff at this point. It doesn't yet have write access, so to speak, all it's doing is providing info to the mods. But it's providing useful info. Fun fact: some of our absolute most reliable and trustworthy volunteers don't comment. In some cases "much", in some cases "at all". Keep it up, lurkers! This is useful! I seriously encourage everyone to click that banner once a day and spend a few minutes at it. Or even just bookmark the page and mash the bookmark once in a while - I've personally got it on my bookmark bar.
The big refactor mentioned at the top is actually for the sake of improving the volunteer system, this is part of what will let it turn into write access and let us solve stuff like filtered-comments-in-limbo, while taking a lot of load off the mods' backs and maybe even making our moderation more consistent. As a sort of ironic counterpart to this, it also means that the bar might show up less often.
At some point I want to set up better incentives for long-time volunteers, but that takes a lot of code effort. Asking people to volunteer more often doesn't, so that's what I'm doing.
(Feedback wanted on this also.)
I want your feedback on things, as if that wasn't clear. These threads basically behave like a big metadiscussion thread, so . . . what's your thoughts on this whole adventure? How's it going? Want some tweaks? Found a bug? Let me know! I don't promise to agree but I promise to listen.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Can you make your point clearer about what you mean by "one specific topic?" Mods here frequently sneer at discussion surrounding "Da Joos", and that hurts their credibility in my view when it comes to vaguely hinting at something they don't like. If you have a specific complaint in mind, why not just say it and be clear? I can see @Amadan confirm the complaint is directed at me, so I ask for clarification on what you want me to stop doing.
I can't seem to find an easy way to filter for top-level comments, but browsing my history for the past 6 months suggests that most of my top-level comments are not related to "one specific topic". My top-level comments include the most upvoted top-level comment in this community so far. My second-most upvoted top-level comment is indeed about Da Joos in that it was about the ADL's propaganda campaign intended to pressure Congress for more federal DHS funding.
Would you consider that post about the ADL and my recent posts about Superman/Captain America to be posting about "one specific topic"? I don't think so, any more than posting about some propaganda campaign by a BLM organization and then analyzing the cultural influence of Rap in another post would be posting about "one specific topic." By the way, anybody interested can compare my analysis there of Superman to this coincidentally-timed Rolling Stone article about the first Jewish actor to be cast as superman- I thought about posting a top-level comment in order to elaborate on my thinking surrounding the connection between cultural myth-making and collective moral consciousness, but I decided not to due to the growing complaints from the mods directed at me, so you can count me as at least partially-chilled even before you made this post.
Lastly, the complaints about "Da Joos" are begging the question. If I'm right about the things I post about, then they are clearly worth frequent discussion in a community dedicated to the Culture War. By saying the topic appears too much is asserting that it isn't a topic worth the weight it is currently given in community discussion, which like Hoffmeister said is not overwhelming by any means.
I'm bemused that you think this is "vaguely hinting."
Well, first of all, if you were actually discussing whether or not you were right, it might be more legitimate, but I have observed you get absolutely shredded over and over again by people willing to engage with you point by point, and your tactic is to simply do a quiet fade and then come back a few days or a week later with a slightly altered version of the same argument.
Secondly, you have admitted that your purpose here is recruitment (boasting about all the people DMing you for more info) and not actual engagement beyond sticking to the same talking points.
As for "being right", that can still be annoying enough to reach "egregiously obnoxious" levels. Let's take the famous 13/52 statistic. Everyone knows it's basically true. You don't get modded for referring to it or using it in an argument. But in the past we had a couple of people whose entire reason for being here was to grind their racial grievances, and they did nothing but post about black criminality. They got told to knock it off, and not because the mods don't like racism or because we were trying to hide "the truth" about black criminality.
To use the same example offered to Zorba, yes, if someone was doing nothing but posting about AI safety, particularly in the tones of a crusader with an agenda, and just coming back with the same talking points over and over, they would eventually reach a point of "enough is enough." The fact that we don't censor topics doesn't mean everyone gets to go on about anything they want as much as they want any way they want forever because the rules don't say you can't neener neener. The fact that your particular obsession touches hot buttons and that you are coy about your true, unfiltered agenda makes you a bit more annoying that most single-issue posters, but you aren't the only Jew-baiter here and no one is proposing anything like "You can't criticize Jews" or even "You can't question the Holocaust." But contra Hoffmeister, no, this place is not your (or anyone else's) personal soapbox to use as you see fit.
It would be reasonable to accuse SecureSignals of using this forum as a “personal soapbox” if he simply blasted his opinions out as top-level comments and then did not respond or participate in dialogue about the views contained therein. This does not describe SecureSignals’ behavior in this forum.
You yourself acknowledge that he actively argues his case; your entirely subjective assessment that he gets “shredded” when he does so is irrelevant. (Frankly I think it’s a dicey look to have a mod weighing in this aggressively on whether or not a particular user “won” or “lost” a particular argument.)
I can think of a particular ex-mod who fits this description to a tee, but I’m not campaigning for him to get banned or modded when he does so. I see no reason why somebody on this forum should be punished by mods for posting things that I personally find annoying, tedious, or repetitive. Again, my proposed punishment for bad takes is to be downvoted and argued with vociferously by other users. Especially because my personal view on what makes a take “bad” very obviously is not shared by the community as a whole. Yours isn’t either, and just because you’re a mod doesn’t mean you should get to bring the mod hammer down on people who post things that you find annoying.
Well, it's not about what you, or I, or any one person, finds annoying or doesn't. That you keep accusing me of wanting to "bring the mod hammer down" on people I find annoying shows you just aren't really paying attention. I assure you, the number of people I find annoying is vastly greatly than the number of people I mod.
I’m referring specifically to this proposed policy. I’m not saying that you have displayed a pattern of capricious modding up to this point. I’m saying that this specific policy - I don’t know to what extent you personally are responsible for conceiving of it and proposing it - is the equivalent of dangling a mod hammer over something that seems to be nothing worse than something that annoys you (and Zorba) personally, but which does not harm the overall epistemic health of the community.
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