site banner
idio3  2yr ago (text post)   4068 thread views

Not to be a dick or anything, but help me understand some things...

Hi guys, I'm @idio3 from rdrama, one of the main jannies there. I like the idea of you running an offsite, but I'm absolutely floored by the implementation.

Now I get that there are features of the main site that wouldn't be appropriate for you guys, since you're looking for a different sort of discussion and atmosphere than we are. Longpostbot, annoying graphical and user-nerfing awards, bardbot, etc - it makes perfect sense to remove those. But other decisions I just don't understand. Most notably - what the hell is your beef with Marseys? Why don't image uploads work? It's like you guys intentionally wanted to preclude people from attempting to have fun :marseyshrug:, with the changes being essentially limited to cutting out as many of our features as you could get your hands on...

Anyway, if you could illuminate the rationale for these things, I'd greatly appreciate it! :marseyblowkiss:

be mottizens

set up own website

fork dramacode

remove 90% of features

manage to break the other 10% of features somehow

True story

13
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Is rdrama site actually used while looking like this by normal users?

With idiotic contentless images taking 90% of space, sometimes floating over text?

I thought that it is some attempt to filter out people unable to disable this using a hidden settings.

shooo, this website is for the real intellectuals. Commie dramanauts not allowed.

:marseybigbrain:

I actually think images would be a great edition to posts provided: there are rules on relevance (graphs, evidence, demonstrating a point; NOT for humor or emotional effect); they are minimized thumbnails that can be clicked to expand; they are low-res for speed of post loading and max-minning image.

You can even restrict image use to site donators or by age-of-account. If imagery is used in scientific publications then it can add value to themotte and allows us to dunk on Reddit which has poor image implementation features.

I think I big problem is that there's such a thing as an illegal image.

If an unfriendly outsider hacks an account and starts posting CP in threads it's a big deal. Sure mods can take it down quickly, but it's just safer if everyone just has to use imgur or some other external service for their images.

Hi, please use the dedicated rDrama containment thread unless you’d like to post screeds about IQ statistics.

It's like you guys intentionally wanted to preclude people from attempting to have fun

yeah, no shit, this is a site for writing essays about the costs of hospital insurance or 5000 words on how the wokes are taking over movies (grr), people dont want heckin valid images in their essays. same for image uploads

Say hello to Impassionata for me!

Regards forking dramacode, did anyone make a RES for it?

A way to tag and remember who's the rdrama jannie, which crazystraw designer is in that splinter group focused on loops, etc. Augmented Dunbar's.

I thought flairs were turned off?

Hey owner, please change the title to be a color other than black to better fit with different themes, it might be best to have it be black with a white outline.

But why?

It doesn't fit the tone of the Motte at all, but our own marsey derivative would be weirdly appropriate given the reason for the diaspora and the rdrama roots of the place. I mean, who doesn't like marseyposting?

Still in favor of the heavily armed quokka, or other quokka variations

Really what we need is an anthropomorphised castle

...Alexander?

Anthropomorphized castle… a golem?

I proposed this on a niche rDrama–Motte crossover Discord once, but @official_techsupport said he didn't like the (lack of) shading on the generic clip-art castle I found. Anyway, :marseymotte: —

/images/1662357761885546.webp

Not shading, the tops of the towers look like we are looking at them from below, while the castle itself is arranged in isometric perspective. It shouldn't be too hard to draw complementary crenellations--if anyone actually wants to use the resulting image.

It's like you guys intentionally wanted to preclude people from attempting to have fun

Yes, and?

A few answers!

what the hell is your beef with Marseys?

Marsey's your schtick. It's a cute schtick! But it's not ours. If we're going to generate our own culture, we're going to generate our own culture, not start by just riffing off someone else's culture. Our codebase is an offshoot of yours; our community isn't, however. Frankly, while I totally appreciate that you guys exist, you're like the polar opposite of what we want around here; you guys keep doin' your thing, we'll keep doing our thing.

Why don't image uploads work?

A big thing we want here is effortposts. We don't want people to be able to slam down a giant blob of flashy pixels, we want people to write stuff. This is always going to be a text-heavy website, not an image-heavy website; that's the culture we're aiming for.

It's like you guys intentionally wanted to preclude people from attempting to have fun

I mean, bluntly, yes, we are trying to preclude people from having the kind of fun that you guys want to have.

Again, your community's great! I'm glad you enjoy it! But it's not what we're going for here - we do not want circlejerks, we do not want low effort spamposts, we do not want 24/7 memes.

We picked your codebase because it was being used in production and it had reasonably competent moderation features. The extra flashy stuff, as far as I'm concerned, is a negative for our purposes, and so yeah, we're gonna strip it out.

Sometimes your kids don't grow up to be carbon copies of you; we're taking after our other parent :)

it was being used in production and it had reasonably competent moderation features

I actually love how this site works (thanks to you of course, but it seems rdrama has all that core functionality too). It's a leagues better UX than vanilla oldreddit. After adding that custom CSS to cut out whitespace and changing to Win98 theme, I'm almost feeling young again.

Dramatards did a great job.

For what it's worth, native image uploading would be pretty great in the context of some effortposts. I don't know whether the gains are worth the risk of the low-effort stuff that would come along with it, but there are lots of times I write something for TheMotte+elsewhere where my motteversions cut out a lot of the graphs, illustrations, etc I otherwise scatter throughout. Would "image uploads as part of submissions, but not comments" be difficult to implement or worth exploring?

Would "image uploads as part of submissions, but not comments" be difficult to implement or worth exploring?

Then people would include memes in their submissions, and progressively some would make the memes the main point of the submission, and before you know we turned into /r/funny.

How about: you can submit images in posts and comments, but that flags the post and it's hidden until a moderator approves of it?

Tho I also like the idea of "only paying users can post images". Or restricting them to certain kind of subboards / weekly meme threads.

@ZorbaTHut, what do you think ?

I think images should be allowed in comments. If we continue organizing the site roughly the same as the subreddit, most of the effortposts are going to be comments in the CW thread. No reason to make them worse than Posts. Just moderate it the same as text content. Kinda related: it'd be nice to have collapsible blocks of text, for larger comments/posts. Make them not count towards character limit (if there's any).

IMO there shouldn't be too many Posts made about specific things. It'd be better to have several recurring topical threads (CW, 'fun thread', 'media thread', meta thread*...).

* especially now; IMO it'd be useful to try to figure out priority things to do/fix here instead of GH. Plus organizational stuff, like the exact set of perma/recurring-threads. And maybe scope of the community? How it fits in with adjacent spaces?

I find topical threads very annoying to browse. You have to scroll past entire comments, instead of just the title, and you have to open the thread to see if there are new top-level comments. It's hard to keep track of what people are talking about.

I'd prefer having only one active topical thread at any one time, alongside the CW thread, as was the practice back on Reddit. The thread would be reserved for small posts with relatively simple answers, to avoid clogging up the site. (Recall the Pareto principle.) Anything likely to generate a substantial amount of discussion should be posted either in the CW thread or as a separate post.

I kinda like that idea.

I'd also be okay with embedded images being something that comes along with some level of seniority/acceptance; I'm on a Discord where new users can't post images but experienced users can. We already straight-up filter people's posts if they're new, I'd be cool with linking more things to that general progression.

That, and/or making it a permission that can be revoked. I think that the ability to include images is super useful, but yeah some people might just start spamming memes. In that case, warn them and if they don't cut it out take away their image embed privileges.

One thing rdrama does well is use upvotes/downvotes as actual currency.

I'd love to see an implementation of awards in a similar way if possible - not the actual awards themselves (we don't want Mottizens banning or ruining threads), but for instance reporting an AAQC costing, say, 50 or 100 upvotes would be a good idea in part because it'd . A community currency that lets long-established users spend their reputation to highlight things they find good or interesting is a great way to make standing in the community count for more.

It's an interesting idea, but I think I want it more subtle than that. I do like the idea of some kind of Reputation. But I'm not sure I want people actively thinking about this economically, I want people to just be able to say "yeah, this is a good thing! I like this thing" and say so and then [MAGIC HERE] and we figure out what the best posts are.

That said, I do also like some kind of investment. But I really don't want to tie it to upvotes; we don't want to encourage people to pander to upvotes even further, y'know?

But I really don't want to tie it to upvotes; we don't want to encourage people to pander to upvotes even further, y'know?

We fixed this on rdrama in a fairly trivial manner - make both upvotes and downvotes give dramacoin.

This is good for dramacoin - people getting mad and downvoting you is a good thing and so should give those beautiful golden marseys.

I don't think it works here due to differing aims.

I am not convinced this actually makes it better, let alone making it good.

I suppose that's true. Part of the problem is getting an ideal unhackable system is really hard, people optimize for whatever you put in front of them. I think it's the sort of thing that might deserve a trial, though. Even Reddit-style awards that have no impact purchased for upvotes I think would be neat - a way of translating 'the community likes me posts' into 'I am spending my literal social capital to say I like what you've done' I think can help build a community.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats