site banner

Friday Fun Thread for January 10, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

1
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

@lagrangian covered some of it: the fault tolerance you need as your system scales up. At that scale, freak incidents happen everyday. I still remember the chaos in my office when Google services dropped for a few hours.

Consider also the kind of bugs you start to get when you have users worldwide, all expecting to use their own language and writing system, and expecting UI and help to be available in that language.

Then moderation. If you’re building an up and coming social media, sooner or later someone is going to livestream a beheading or use it to send plausible death threats, and you’re going to be forced to deal with that.

Of course, most startups fail, so these are problems you want to have. But still problems.

Then moderation.

"A webform I can paste content into for others to see? Guess I'll programmatically post enormous amounts of child pornography into it."

Scott had a point about witches overrunning communities. He was right. The devil and his followers notice your website and have endless amounts of suffering children to show everyone.