We have somehow survived another move.
I feel like a broken record here, but, seriously, good job everyone, and thanks. While the moderators of a community are important, the community simply doesn't exist without its members. Y'all came over here and kept on posting, and that's exactly what we needed.
With luck, this is going to be the last move we ever need to make; we have our own domain and servers, we're no longer really existing with any specific other person's permission.
We are, however, not out of the woods.
I mentioned during some of the original Reddit-exodus posts that I had a serious medium-term worry about userbase. We've cut ourselves off from the Reddit pipeline and that means we're in danger of slowly eroding away; people will always leave the community and right now we don't have a good way of getting new users. We wouldn't be the first community to do so! Every community needs an influx of people, and now we need to figure out the right way to manage that.
So I now have a few requests, ordered roughly by how comfortable I am asking it.
First: Send links to people that you think will be interested. If you know someone looking for political discussion, send them a link to the site as a whole; if there's a specific post you think they'll be interested in, link that. Remember that we have The Vault, which has unfortunately gone a bit neglected while I worked on this changeover. Please don't spam anyone - I don't want anyone just posting links to our front page on a hundred subreddits - but if you have a good opportunity, either regarding friends or communities that you're an established member of, take it.
Second: Propose places that might be willing to do a link trade. I'm planning to reach out to a bunch of subreddits shortly and see if they're willing to crosslink, especially places that are serious-political-discussion-adjacent in the hopes that we can draw off that section of their population and both be better off for it. If you have personal connections you can bring it up to them yourself, otherwise just let me know and I'll see what I can do. I expect a low success rate but even a low success rate might be pretty dang valuable.
(And don't limit this to subreddits! There's a number of good communities out there that aren't on the big social sites.)
Third: If you have time, help out. We have a dev server that you can join if you want to work on a huge number of pending issues, and it's thanks to the people on this server that we've had such a constant flow of updates, fixes, and tweaks. If you're less programmery but more editorial, we do have a lot of Vault-related editing that we'd like to get done; this goes faster than you might think. If there's some other skill you have that you think might be valuable, hop on the dev server and send me a message.
And finally, fourth, which is the one that I really hate to ask, but I'm doin' it anyway.
I've set up a Patreon to take donations. If you have spare cash and think this is a worthy destination for it, please chip in.
I'm not sure what this whole "money" thing is going to end up looking like. At the very least this will pay for server costs; any income above that will go into making the site better, in whatever way seems most valuable. I've been thinking about taking out ads in an attempt to pull more users here, for example, and that isn't cheap.
This is going to be very experimental and will probably involve false starts. I'd love to hear suggestions on good ways to spend money on the site - if you have any, let me know - but note that in order to hire programmers we would need a lot of money.
For those who are more crypto-minded, I'm also taking donations via Ethereum (0xa97e126DCEcC7Ea3AF05d252B49c03ae35547dD9) and Bitcoin (bc1qnj0mvg90dfawjq3kxq4wdvcq0ejksgyf2m0xnq). All of these links are on the new (and very primitive) Support page.
I know there's going to be people who think that we left Reddit just so I could cash out. I frankly suspect that even if I just pile all of the results into a giant sack with a dollar sign on it and walk off while cackling evilly, I still won't be making minimum wage, so this would be a terrible plan :V No, I do actually like this community a ton, and want it to keep going, but I can't fund an indefinite amount of stuff on my own. And part of this push is to figure out just how useful this site is to all of you, in order to see what can be justified and what can't be justified.
So there's the ask! If you have connections, use them; if you have time, contribute it; if you have money and want to put it towards this, please provide financial support so I can figure out how to keep the new-user pipeline going.
If you don't, that's cool! Keep on posting and I hope you enjoy your time here.
Finally, this is the new Bugs/Suggestions/Small Comments thread. If you have feedback, post it here! A lot of the stuff in that Pending Issues link up above was submitted by users, and we're getting through it slowly.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Any chance we can have the net upvotes for comments display next to the poster's handle or timestamp, i.e. at the top of a comment?
This is more of a benefit for very long comments or viewing on mobile. I've occasionally spent minutes reading a comment only to realize halfway through it's just word salad without anything interesting to say, and that becomes obvious once you see the negative score at the bottom. I've been burned by this sufficiently that for long comments, I often scroll all the way down to ensure it's not a negative post before scrolling up to read it, which makes for poor UX.
Counterargument is this may promote groupthink by encouraging people to only read high-upvoted comments and skip possibly high-quality new comments or contrarian opinions. That is a risk, but I think an important goal of the site should be to encourage readership retention, and some users who find themselves continuously frustrated by this QC problem may simply stop reading, and that to me is a bigger loss.
I actually prefer having the net votes at the bottom of a post because I can start reading the comment from a neutral point of view. On reddit when the votes are at the top I feel like it influences me to read the comment from the point of view of it being good or not based on the number of up or down votes and I'd rather choose for myself whether the post is good or not.
Whoops I forgot to respond to the original comment. But yeah, @vpn, this is part of the justification; forcing people to go to a bit of extra effort to see the total score when reading a comment.
(Our entire relationship with votes is one of the things that might get a serious overhaul, note, this is just what was available at the time.)
If I may dig into that logic a bit more, then would it stand to reason that neutrality also calls for even the identity of the poster to be ideally placed beneath the comment? Over time, readers become more familiar with usernames of quality posters and can use it to approximate the likely votes. But I don't imagine most people would support demoting the username...?
I don't think this is particularly persuasive, but one of the things I dislike about ACX is Scott's disabling voting for comments. I can see why it might make sense for him, given he has a brand to protect, to avoid making it too obvious for outsiders to try to gauge the partisan leanings of his readership, in case comments that go against the narrative are too highly voted and vice versa. But to me that's a bit of an unfortunate side effect of protecting the golden egg, very understandable but also regrettable (and a bit reminiscent of online newspapers disabling comment sections). I understand it's probably justified publicly using the same neutrality rationale, but I'm willing to bet imaginary internet points that the majority of his readership, if given an actual choice, would prefer to see comment votes than not.
Huh. Maybe, yeah :V
One problem here is thread organization; it's really useful to be able to see whether a respondant is the original poster or not. I don't have a good fix for this offhand.
I also do want to build up a community, and knowing the other people involved is really helpful for this; this is part of why I've left user avatars enabled (really gotta set up my own avatar soon.) But yes, I would agree that this clashes, to some extent, with asking people to vote based on content and not on person; it's a tradeoff.
You're not necessarily wrong here, but it also doesn't factor in much to my decisions, I'm afraid. Note that I come from a game development background, and one of the big things you learn in game development is that most players will happily optimize all the fun out of a game and then complain that the game is bad. "People want X" is, to me, something to be considered, but by no means a slam dunk in terms of whether it should be done; it's amazing how often a game is improved by ignoring user requests and doing something else.
I appreciate your thoughtful replies. I would dispute that my requesting having votes above comments fits with your analogy of users optimizing the fun out of a game, however. My objective for reading The Motte is to absorb high quality content, and knowing the community ratings of content seems very aligned with that. I suppose you could argue that in the long term, my overall enjoyment could benefit from having unwitting exposure to contrarian views (as signaled by net negative voted comments). But that would mean the community here is actually fairly poor at discerning content quality and would vote high-quality but contrarian comments into the net negatives. I don't believe that, do you?
Regardless, I understand you have plenty of more impactful feature requests, so arguing about this is more a rationalist exercise in optimized design than a wholehearted push for turning this into reality.
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Actually I like the idea of demoting the username to the bottom of the comment too. I would prefer that over moving the votes to the top.
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