Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
I think this site has a real chance to be greater than the subreddit. Just a few thoughts/concerns —
There should be good security involving user IPs given the content of posts published. Bad actors will try to steal user IP histories if the site gains in popularity. We should go so far as to crowdsource funding for a 3rd party IP-related security assessment ( I do not know personal security experience of admins). This has added benefit of being a marketable tag on, “you can feel safe regarding your IP address”, etc.
Pages instead of “view more comments”. This is easier to see how many top-level posts in the thread have been missed, as well as navigating to old threads. (Also, is there a way to “favorite” threads and receive notifications when it has been updated?)
It might be a good idea to label this site a beta version with a later official launch date in six months, as they do with video game releases. Why? It gives new users a feeling of exclusivity while excusing new site mishaps and beginning retention problems.
The weekly threads should be every other weekly, to boost the number of “total comments” counts, to retain and increase user retention. Reddit did this by increasing upvote counts artificially. In facts, giving each user a +5 points per upvote (and perhaps one daily +10 ability for well-liked comments), while difficult to implement, is a great way to increase engagement subconsciously. We should not shy away from using the full weight of psychology to make his site better than Reddit, for many utilitarian reasons, not the least of which is fuck reddit.
TheMotte on Reddit should advertise the new site with daily posts, maybe “best ofs”, not threads, with screenshots of the new site, to remind and entice subscribers on Reddit to move to the new location. Emphasize ease of signing up (20 second sign up).
If this site eventually develops a filter mechanism for new users, ie we want 100 people to try the site and 20 to stay, there are lots of ways to attract new members. The problem with, say, subtly talking about this forum on a philosophy forum to attract new members is that you don’t want to be overrun by bad posters. So, while it’s not best to do this now, in the future if we want site to grow in popularity, a kind of “new user filter” would be great. Something like “one allotted post per day” for new users until sufficiently upvoted over the course of a week. Just an idea to think about later on, when site is fully colonized by original users.
Great advice here, from someone with sales experience. The piece about the beta I especially like, although I could see it being controversial.
I'd like to see perhaps an optional flare/avatar for moving over in the first X amount of days, or being for instance in the first 1,000 unique accounts created. Of course then you may incentivize people making more than one account... Perhaps a karma threshold instead.
Overall I think now that we can control more aspects of the site, we should strongly incentivize joining the site, and helping create high quality content here in this critical period.
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I'm not up on the current state of the art here, but I think VPN companies have been pushing a lot of scare mongering regarding IP addresses and how easily they're tied back to individuals. They can pretty easily be tied to ISPs, and sometimes to unique clients within an ISP, but it doesn't map to an individual. At best it would map to a single customer network, but even if it's a home network my understanding is that ISPs don't generally reveal IP-to-customer mappings without a subpoena, and I don't really expect postings here to rise to the level of legal involvement. And even then, the public IP logged on the web site might well be hidden by carrier-grade NAT, which is IIRC pretty common in mobile telephony. If you're really concerned, I recommend finding public WiFi without unique login credentials (your local Starbucks or the library) or using a VPN (although some VPNs keep logs). Bonus points for using a device that scrambles MAC addresses on a per-connection basis, which I believe the iPhone and some Android devices can be configured to do, and even Windows supports.
This used to be an issue with peer-to-peer filesharing users, and may continue to be, but I don't really travel in those circles these days. Also watch Zorba's warrant canary on the Contact Us page.
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