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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   7800 thread views

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Mr THut can you please do the needful and kindly revert whatever change you made to make usernames directly link to profiles instead of showing the profile card? Right now it does both (shows the card for a split second and then loads the profile page). It should be one or the other. I can't open an issue as I am banned from github. Thank you sir.

If I recall correctly, we had a problem with the profile-card code and did this to fix it. We actually have a pending fix to make popups work but it's not quite working either, unfortunately. So, in development.

I'm happy to see the new reporting dialogue, but it's not letting me click submit. I can choose different radio buttons and type in the "Other" reason box, but the Submit button remains disabled.

https://www.themotte.org/post/86/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/10754?context=8#context

Should be fixed now!

I really got used to how Reddit’s Context and Permalink works: one comment tree, reaching backwards through its parents, without any siblings. If I wanted to read more of what led to a particular comment, I’d hit Parent until I saw what I needed.

Any plans to make that a user switchable setting?

We're actually just planning to implement that; not switchable, just behave-like-that-by-default. I think one of our devs is actually working on that at the moment (though I wasn't expecting it to take this long, either it's more complicated than we thought or they've just been busy with other stuff, which is entirely possible.)

That's great. I opened this thread to ask for either that or reducing the default to context=2. Loading the whole thread every time you open a comment in a new tab sucks, for my shitty phone and probably for the server.

Comment minimization is nice, but probably not a good interface in terms of great UX design, it seems janky and 'visible / not visible' doesn't necessarily describe the way I'd want to interact with a comment. Minimizing for navigation at the moment isn't necessarily minimizing for later viewing, doing it manually is annoying, and minimizing for later viewing isn't necessarily the action I'd want to take (especially if there are new comments under the minimized one later).

Anyway, bug report: if you minimize a comment and then a reply to a comment you made under it occurs, the reply DM is also minimized.

We've actually had a bunch of people explicitly ask for it because that's how they handle deciding a conversation is no longer interesting; just minimize it and it goes away. I agree this isn't a use-case that I want but it seems to be quite popular.

Can you give a suggestion regarding how you would want it to behave?

Anyway, bug report: if you minimize a comment and then a reply to a comment you made under it occurs, the reply DM is also minimized.

Hah! Totally believable. Bug filed.

I think I misspoke on what the bug is. If you minimize one of your own comments, and then someone replies to it, in the notifications view your comment (and thus the reply under it) are minimized, as opposed if you minimized any grandparent/parent of your comment.

I cannot reliably reproduce this, but I swear sometimes it keeps happening (especially on mobile safari). When I click the "-"(minus sign) at the left side to hide a thread, sometimes its entire parent is hidden instead.

Is it possible you're a little too far off to the left? The bar just left of it will do exactly that, and I can't think of another way this could happen.

(Might justify making the click zone a bit larger though.)

This might explain why it happens usually on mobile

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.

I've got a task posted to increase the click zone, but it'll take a bit to get there. If you either prove or disprove that this is the actual problem, let me know :)

Yeah looks like now that I know the hiding element isn’t just the icon but a whole vertical line, I can reproduce the problem I was having easily

When a conversation gets really heavily nested, I want to pick a comment and make that the new root of my discussion, like on reddit. If I click on "context" I get sent to a page with all the parents still existing.

Example: https://www.themotte.org/post/75/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/8664?context=8#context

We're actually working on this!

Right now there is a comment page you can use, but it's not linked anywhere: https://www.themotte.org/comment/8664?context=8 . This doesn't work like you might want with context - it doesn't show just parents, but all the siblings of those parents. A better solution is in the pipeline but it's pretty big.

Yeah, I was gonna ask for an equivalent to old.plebbit's permalink. Is that what you're thinking too?

Edit: notifications should also not show the entire thread, just the parent comment.

The front page feels disorderly because the stickies aren't bolded (at least for me?). I don't know about others but this frustrates me.

Also, please consider keeping all the regular threads of the week stickied. It has always been a little sad that threads tend to drop off in posters when they get unstickied by the next thread a few days after.

I've been finding that the bar at the bottom of the screen is very easy to accidentally hit with my thumb when browsing on mobile. I'd love if it were moved to the top of the screen or something (or if there were an option in the settings for this, I tried flicking through the different themes but none of them change it.)

Suggestion: Could you add how many comments a post has, particularly when minimized?

Hmm, what do you mean? Can you screenshot where you're looking or something?

Like so. https://imgur.com/A4Zl24U

I think maybe they meant to add a count of how many children a comment has, like it does on Reddit

This, particularly for the "load more comments" button.

I actually can't find an example of that on Reddit, though I'm sure I'm just blind or missing something obvious. Can one of you (ping @dinoinnameonly, @circlecrossrectangle) gimme a screenshot? Here's a link to the last Reddit Culture War thread, if that makes it easier.

https://www.themotte.org/images/16637686202253878.webp

Load more comments (39 replies)

/images/16636937808690078.webp

Aha! Got it. Will add it to the list :D

I'm glad that the transition off of reddit has gone well so far. The weekly threads seem as active as ever. Also the new site, after some of the tweaks the admins have made, is a better reading experience than reddit.

Suggestion: you should fix the order of pinned threads as: current CW thread, current small/wellness/fun thread, others (like this bugs thread).

Currently the order looks random or based on the date, so sometimes the CW is first, sometimes second, and currently it's the third, which makes it easy to misclick.

Yeah, we should. Right now I think this is low-enough priority that it's not happening anytime soon, but I've put it on the list for the future.

Suggestion:

-Cultural War Thread should have topics (ie: economics, war, us, europe, etc.), these can come and go as they are used more and less, would be good for combing through threads.

-Reddit (I presume this is some backend thing not actually native to Reddit itself) allows 2 sizes for line-breaks (return+shift smaller, return is larger) which is nice.

-We should have a small history of TheMotte written up somewhere.

-We should have a plan for what to do if something similar happens to us as happened to a site (BananaPlantation) that's been in the news a lot lately (don't want to name it).

I'm meh on topics - the fun of the Culture War thread is that you never know what you'll come across next, could be any of the above! And you're free to bounce around topics on a thread if it makes sense.

Re migration plan, I think we're about as prepared as it's reasonable to be. DB has automatic backups (uhh right?) and hosting is a standard k8s cluster, as offered by many providers and build-able by hand on any host with a bit more work. Naturally any more details will be held close to the chest - if anyone was trying to attack us, a public plan would just give them their next target in advance of actually migrating.

It's probably a bigger help that we don't go out of our way to ridicule or attack people, unlike Drama or the Kiwis.

DB has automatic backups (uhh right?)

It does!

I haven't tested them, but we have them!

(yes this is on my list; in my defense, this is also the same backup tool that I use for Paperclip Perfector, and I did test that one, so it's probably fine)

We should have a small history of TheMotte written up somewhere.

Good idea, The Motte's very own Bayeux Tapestry :)

We should have a plan for what to do if something similar happens to us as happened to a site (BananaPlantation) that's been in the news a lot lately (don't want to name it).

Admittedly I am worried about the potentially far reaching consequences of the recent saga concerning that site, but consider this: we are a hard sell as a new "internet boogeyman". We aren't particularly relevant, even among the very online activist circles that seek out and dismantle dens of thoughtcriminals. If we did however attract the attention of the eye of sauron, we would still have much more of a fighting chance than KF because we can't easily be framed as "website that doxes and stalks and harasses". I think the worst anyone could throw at us would be the "this website platforms hate" argument because we allow discussion and criticism of sacred cows. I'd be more worried about our neighbour site rdrama becoming a new boogeyman once KF is taken off life support, that could potentially get the motte into a whole mess of guilt by association.

Found a bug with the formatting.

A tilde renders the rest of the text with a strikethrough.

Escaping it with a backslash fixes it in the preview but not in the comment.

Text here. (text) more text. (text)

Text here. (text) more text. (text)

Text here. (\text) more text. (\text)

Text here. (text) more text. (text)

Sigh. Not the first case that's been found; it'll take us a while to get there, though.

I don't know if this has already been reported. I tried to search for it but realized my folly as the only search term that came to mind was "Reply"...

In the middle of writing a post I highlighted text in the parent comment and hit "reply." I was hoping that it would automatically quote that text and add it in the middle of my comment. Maybe that was silly of me. But it completely overwrote my comment, where a better user experience would be a kind of "Are you sure? your comment is not done..." kind of alert. It's a little awkward, because as far as I can tell, this codebase prefers to silently persist drafts when you return to comment (I just now checked with the back button) instead of using alerts at all.

That's reasonable, yep.

It's going to take a bit to get to this one, I'm afraid, but it's on the list.

Can we have a separate roundup thread for LOTR/similar media? Not only to avoid disappointment when yet another new top-level comment turns out to be about that, but also because this new site tends to lock up on those huge threads more than reddit did, so keeping the CWR thread smaller would be beneficial.

I'm not actually sure this is worth the thread right now; it's been In The News, but a lot of other things have also.

Note that while the site is slow on big threads, it's not slow based on the number of comments total, but based on the number of comments displayed. We ramped this up because people were (reasonably) grumbling about not being able to see a lot of text. The result, though, is that splitting a too-big-to-show-everything thread into two too-big-to-show-everything threads isn't actually going to speed anything up.

Ahh, bummer. 'more comments but it occasionally hangs' is preferable to 'manually loading more comments.'

I guess you can just try posting it?

When I highlight text that is in the top ~10% of my browser window, the screen immediately begins to scroll up. This is kind of annoying since I often absentmindedly double click text as I'm reading.

Is there an equivalent to "AUTOMOD_MULTIPART_LOCKME" (or whatever it was called), for keeping long effortposts in order? Since the character limit is 10k here (same as on reddit, I think?). (I apologize if this is a repeat question.)

Not at the moment, sorry. I'd like to set up some way for people to make ultralong posts but that's waiting on backend code stuff.

Or, would it be better to publish super-long things as a standalone post, instead? (Although, in that case it might be nice to have a character limit of more than 20k...)

There is no way to report direct messages.

Also is it allowed to have a particularly inflammatory username like "BURN_NIGGERS_RAPE_NIGGERS"? Got a weird DM from him.

I also got a message from that guy. What a wierdo.

Yeah, if you get nasty PMs, just send us a mod message.

Taken care of 'em.

Is there a way to disable the annoying and weird flairs next to usernames? they remind me of forum signatures the way they bloat up the text and spam the same sentence over and over every time someone comments

As a temporary workaround, you can adblock them (at least in Ublock Origin). That's what I did for all of the awards in Reddit.

Thanks, I'll work on that

The rule I created (that seems to work, but I haven't thoroughly tested) is:

! 2022-09-19 https://www.themotte.org

www.themotte.org##bdi

and the reddit one I mentioned is:



! 2021-08-04 https://old.reddit.com

reddit.com##.awardings-bar

To create filtering rules like that, rightclick on the offending element, choose "Block Element" from the contextual menu, then play with the two sliders until you have a rule that looks general enough without removing parts that you want.

Pretty much any feature from the Reddit Enhancement Suite would be a good add-on here. One that springs immediately to mind would be the ability to track upvotes/downvotes by user (so someone I've upvoted consistently would have a big green +112 next to their name, while people I downvote might have a red -22).

Another useful feature is the ability to add custom tags to other users, that exist only in your view of the site. Since I'm Catholic and outspoken Christians are fairly rare in online circles, I had a number of 'Catholic'/'Orthodox'/'Evangelical' tags on other users. Also added a few 'tankie' or 'Nazi' tags as well, just to keep track of who was who. (One nice sub-feature was that clicking on the tag brought you to the specific post that you had added the tag from, if you ever needed to remind yourself).

More sidebar links? I'd like to see a link to the github page, formatting help, and maybe other things.

Small question. Are user reports still semi-anonymous? Do mods still not see specific usernames who make comment reports? I'd never know even if you lied, but I figured I would ask.

We actually do see the full usernames now. I'm not sure what I think about that, but so far I mostly just ignore them anyway.

Any chance we could get "custom JS" in addition to the "custom CSS" tab on the site? Would be useful for doing personal interface improvements and such.

Linking to a child comment currently brings you to its location on the page, without affecting the organization of comments.

For example, this one is structured like:

  • parent comment

    • child 1

    • child 2

    • child 3

      • grandchild 3.1

    • child 4

      • grandchild 4.1

      • grandchild 4.2 (link target)

and I would like it to display:

  • parent

    • child 4

      • grandchild 4.2 (link target)

, similar to Reddit.

EDIT: new bug: multi-level lists display properly on the comment preview, but not in the comment.

Linking to a child comment currently brings you to its location on the page, without affecting the organization of comments.

Coincidentally we actually just talked over how we wanted this to work; I believe TLSM is working on it now, and, yeah, we're basically going with the Reddit solution.

Note that you can get just that comment directly by handcrafting the URL, but if you try increasing the context you also get the siblings which we agree is kind of crummy.

EDIT: new bug: multi-level lists display properly on the comment preview, but not in the comment.

dangit, these lists are going to be the death of me

Bug filed.

Thank you for all the work you've been putting in on the site! I do have a few more suggestions:

I like the +/- comment collapser! Can we maybe have top level comments get a circle around that so I can pick them out of the pack when scrolling quickly?

Or maybe a Next Top Level button to jump to the next top-level comment?

Can we differentiate the shading between quotations and new-highlighted comments?

And I love that comment chains now stay collapsed between refreshes! Could you maybe put the new comment shading under a collapsed top level comment if the replies to it contain a new comment since your last visit? That's incredibly minor though.

If my network connection dies while composing a comment but before posting it, sometimes the page gets permanently stuck and I have to save the comment then reload the page to actually submit it.

Is there any technical constraint making us stick to 10k characters for comments like on Reddit? I think the way we use this community means that long comments are really common and are actually the sort of thing we want to encourage. I think 15k or 20k might be better if it's just a config change. Especially since I don't think we have the functionality to lock the top-level comment so people can only reply to the full comment the way we used to.

(I just ran up against the 10k limit for a comment I posted in the CWR and had to trim it.)

I've actually got a task for that over here; I'm gonna bump it up in priority a little. First I'd want to relax the DB limits, then figure out how far we want to relax comment limits.

I don't think there are any technical constraints. The sql for the db has it set at 10k and there are places where the 10k limit is hard-coded, but it seems like increasing the limit should be relatively simple.

EDIT: although this issue says that the limit is 20k

Can comment scores please be hidden for the first 24 hours like they were on Reddit? I think having scores visible immediately can change how people react to a comment (in particular, it can encourage dogpiling or 'ratio-ing' someone who has expressed an unpopular viewpoint) and I'm really worried that this has the potential to shift the tone and composition of this community over time.

This is very cool forum site, kudos to Zorba et al for their hard work and a smoothish launch.

In the vein of navigating through read comments to new ones, it would be cool to be able to see how many unread comments a collapsed comment has beneath it. Maybe this could be pushed to user-side logic? How does the unread-comment counter work for the thread index page?

Suggestion: Make finding new comments easier.

I believe this is by far the biggest potential quality-of-life improvement over reddit while maintaining the single-thread structure. Specific suggestions, without any real degree of certainty about what would be simple/practical:

  1. Add a "collapse all old comments" button that lets you see new comments only.

  2. Add buttons and/or keyboard shortcuts to jump down the page to the next new comment.

  3. Highlight "More comments" buttons if there are new comments deep in a subthread. I can't count the number of times on reddit I either go hunting deep in comment chains for new comments that don't exist, or just miss new comments entirely b/c I don't want to check every deep chain.

  4. Bring over the reddit gold feature of a dropdown "Show comments since visit" menu that lets you select any one of your last few visits to the page to show new comments from. iirc this one was suggested down below, so I'm just seconding/consolidating.

It's very far from perfect but the best way to find new comments to old subthreads ATM seems to be browsing https://www.themotte.org/comments

Yeah, it has its uses. I've never been able to get used to contextless browsing, though. I like seeing new comments in their original contexts.

This is obviously a very very low priority nitpick, but the current favicon is bad. Obviously not worth pulling meaningful resources to fix, but when it is possible I would say that just a bolded M in any bright color would be an improvement from the current version.

You can generate a letter based favicon easily from somewhere like this https://favicon.io/favicon-generator/

I'm not saying that the product will be good, but I think like a black M on a grey background might still be an improvement.

I'm not brave enough to actually select a font though.

I prefer the current favicon over a letter. It could maybe be more of a stereotypical castle though - like a rook chess piece.

That would be good!

I'm neutral on the current image being the favicon or not, but I will say I do like it as the site's header image, especially with the current header font and style.

(It's a subjective aesthetic feeling so I'd be hard-pressed to explain why. To me it's a nice look. It feels stately and sharp but modest and grounded. 100% subjective here.)

I don't have a problem with the image in other contexts but it is objectively a bad candidate for a favicon. It just looks like a brown smudge when shrunk down to that size.

What is a favicon? Is it the “admin” microphone icon?

Its the tiny image that shows up in tabs for the site.

The favicon is the little icon that shows up in your browser's list of tabs or list of favorites/bookmarks.

How can I have child comments collapsed by default so I can scroll initially only through top level (parent) posts/comments? Is this a clearly worded question?

It's clearly worded, I'm just not sure we have a solution for you. You could code it up in Javascript and apply it via Tampermonkey, but I don't have any solutions that don't involve being a programmer (or convincing a programmer to do it for you.)

Clinking on submitted links goes to "https://www.themotte.org/post/xxxxxxx" instead of the link itself. Getting to the link requires a second click. On reddit you only needed to click once.

I think this one is my fault too.

Bug filed, thank you!

  1. At least on my browser, I have to log in at least once a day, sometimes more. If there is something on your end that you can do about it so that I can stay logged in for as long as possible, that would be awesome. (I apologise if this is actually an issue on my end...)

  2. I suggest that people (doesn't have to be mods...) periodically post on the Motte subreddit with a link to this website, so that every possible user is regularly reminded of this website's existence. People could even link directly to quality contributions, so that it's not "self-promotion spam", although I think that self-promotion spam would be totally fine!

BTW, I am hugely impressed at how excellent this new forum has been, especially the fact that it could be so good, right from the start! I even aesthetically prefer it quite a bit when compared to new reddit AND old reddit, which is surprising!

Do you have some kind of cookie blocking going on? That could be preventing the site from making a persistent session. I haven't seen this problem over a number of browsers that I use regularly for different things -- maybe try logging in in some completely stock/updated browser and see if it sticks?

You're right, that's the issue, thank you so much, and thanks to /u/ZorbaTHut as well!

At least on my browser, I have to log in at least once a day, sometimes more.

I think this is an issue on your end; at least, I haven't had to log back in at all, either on this account or on a test non-admin account. But I also don't know how to debug this; feedback from other users welcome!

I suggest that people (doesn't have to be mods...) periodically post on the Motte subreddit with a link to this website

I'm probably doing a monthly Meta thread refresh, which may or may not be enough. It may be a bad idea to turn the subreddit into something that could be perceived as spam :V

BTW, I am hugely impressed at how excellent this new forum has been, especially the fact that it could be so good, right from the start! I even aesthetically prefer it quite a bit when compared to new reddit AND old reddit, which is surprising!

Thank you! We've had a lot of help from outside contributors - without them, it'd be nowhere near this developed :)

Data point: I've been logged on here from multiple machines for many days with no issues. MS Edge in case it's relevant... but from another dev, it really sounds like a client issue.

Part of what's making comment nesting difficult to visually parse is that your brain includes the expand/collapse control in the "box" occupied by a comment when you're looking at the top of the comment (because the control is at the top), but not when you're looking at the bottom of the comment. Since you're judging nesting by looking at the bottom of one comment vs. the top of the subsequent comment, the visual effect of this is that there's barely any indentation.

This image demonstrates the issue, with red lines drawn to show the edges your brain is paying attention to when judging nesting. Visually, there's only 4-5px of indentation.

This could be fixed by indenting more, by greatly reducing the visual weight of the expand/collapse control (e.g. by making it light gray), or by explicitly drawing boxes around comment bodies, which your visual system will latch onto in place of drawing its own boxes. Here's an illustration of the last approach, as implemented in my current custom CSS.

(New Reddit incidentally has the same problem, except with its avatar images instead of an expand/collapse control.)

Any opinions on whether this is better?

Yeah, that's definitely an improvement.

Huh, that's a good point.

I want to avoid boxes because boxes are a lot of visual clutter, but I agree that this is a problem and I'm not totally sure how to solve it. I'll work on it.

I think it would be useful if the number of comments of threads and subtreads was displayed when you collapse them.

It makes browsing much easier because you can easily tell if there are new comments or if there has been any intense discussion in a thread without having to scroll through it.

Has anyone brought up the banner image yet? It just looks some weird stock photograph unrelated the Motte and makes the site feel incomplete. I would rather not have it at all.

Yeah, a strong +1 to this. @ZorbaTHut - how deliberate is the choice of banner image, and if it’s not particularly so, could we run some sort of banner image contest/suggestion thread to look for one or several better replacements?

Not deliberate at all. I picked it because we needed something to fill the space and the rDrama image that we had wasn't suitable. I agree it should probably get changed at some point.

It would be nice if pinned posts and comments were easier to distinguish visually from others. On Reddit pinned posts are green and that helps a lot; right now we only have the little pin icon next to the post and it's easy to miss.

I'm not sure I understand why top-level comments have a hidden vertical bar under them, as opposed to the visible bar of child comments. Consider this screenshot. I suspect if you show that screenshot to anyone familiar with reddit-style comments and ask whether pro_sprond and Quantumfreakonomics were making top-level comments, they'd say yes.

Am I missing something?

This is a recent change. See https://www.themotte.org/post/30/bugs-suggestions-small-comments-and-site/3975?context=8#context

Almost everyone thought it makes it easier to tell apart top level posts.

But a better solution might be to give them a different color depending on depth. For example shades of gray from white to black. Someone already mentioned it here: https://www.themotte.org/post/30/bugs-suggestions-small-comments-and-site/4612?context=8#context

When I sort comments by top, it’s not like the Reddit “top” but more like the “best”. So newer comments with fewer upvotes are higher up. Is this intentional?

The comment source:


I remembered a recent [story about a woman called Loab](https://twitter.com/supercomposite/status/1567162288087470081):

The resulting link:

I remembered a recent story about a woman called Loab:

What sort of monster would write code to automatically replace nitter links with twitter links?

Oh god, I can't even show where the problem is, because they get replaced even in the text between the ``` marks...

There is an option in settings where you can set it to convert all links to Twitter or all links to nitter. So you can set it to your liking. It is missing an option of no conversion though.

Hah, it even filtered it out in your quote as well. That's kind of hilarious.

Lemme see if there's a good reason for that besides sheer perversity, and if there isn't, I'll get it fixed.

When signing up, I was asked to agree to the rules, but on that page the rules are not visible and there is no link to them. I'd recommend adding a link to the rules on the sign-up page.

Not at this time (unless there's one I'm not aware of.) We can hide all your comments if you want, although given that the above request is half of your comments, this is probably not a big deal for you.

The intro text for the culture war roundup thread still links to reddit's /r/TheThread. That should be moved as well, right?

It's weird, but it is honestly still correct. I'm not very worried about Reddit banning that subreddit, and it never got significant comments anyway, and we don't have a sensible way to create subreddit-equivalents on this site, so . . . I guess we'll just leave it?

For now, at least?

"Open External Links In New Tabs" is inconsistent. I disabled the setting, clicked on an external link (the Forbes link here, if it makes a difference), and it opened in a new tab.

I just tried clicking on http://example.com/ in this message preview, and it respected my settings. (EDIT: clicking it in the message, after posting, opened it in a new tab).

I didn't even realize that existed.

I imagine we're not properly wrapping links; bug filed, may take a bit to get to.

I apologize if any of the following suggestions have been brought up downthread, but I've been engaging with the new site significantly less than I did when we were still on Reddit, and this pretty much comes down to readability issues. I should note that I mostly browse The Motte on a desktop computer and have only checked out the mobile site once, so these comments concern issues with the desktop site only.

The biggest issue that I've seen users here complain about so far is that it's difficult to follow threads and their various subthreads. The line you introduced separating parents in yesterday's prototype helps, but it's really a band-aid solution to a much bigger problem. If you look at old Reddit, the parent comments were all justified hard-left, at the edge of the screen, without any kind of margin. This acted as a sort of straight-edge; the top-level comments were always aligned with the edge, so it was easy to quickly tell where they were. New Reddit moves them farther toward the middle, but this is countered by not one but two visually distinct margins—a dark grey margin covers most of the sides on a widescreen monitor, and a margin color unique to the individual sub covers the area immediately to the left of the thread. Again, this provides a distinct demarcation between margin and content. Here, though, there is a margin but it is the same color as the body text background. Post's positions within the hierarchy are determined by how far they are indented from the edge, and when the edge is well to the left of the highest level everything is just sort of floating in space. Coloring the margins in or running the body hard-left would greatly improve readability.

The second big issue involves line length. Most professionally typeset materials aim for a line length of between 45 and 90 characters. Old Reddit had a max line length of about 110 characters, which is on the high side but still reasonable. New Reddit reduced this to about a hundred, again, a little long, but at least within Microsoft Word's default settings. Here the lines are a whopping 185 characters long. To put this in perspective, in Microsoft Word, in 12-point Arial with default (1") margins this is going into the third line, and could be well into the third line depending on where the breaks are. The effect of this is that once a reader gets to the end of a line his eyes have to move quite a ways back to get to the start of the next one, and by then it's hard to tell where he left off. It's not like he's always consciously losing his place, but after a while the small, frequent adjustments get fatiguing.

Finally, there are a couple minor things that could be tweaked. I don't have numbers, but the font size on Reddit seems slightly larger, and that can increase readability without sacrificing too much space, provided the adjustments are made judiciously. Second, I've never been a fan of Helvetica and it's various clones for body text. Helvetica was designed for things like signs and advertisements, where large amounts of text weren't going to be read in one go. The old rule-of-thumb was that sans-serif fonts were better for viewing on a computer, but this is obsolete advice from the days when everyone was using 72 dpi CRTs. With the ubiquity of high-res monitors, either serif or sans-serif fonts can be used comfortably. But either way, Helvetica was never a good choice for body text; the shapes are too similar and legibility is affected. Reddit uses Verdana, which was commissioned by Microsoft specifically to be used as body text on old monitors, and, while not my personal favorite, it works fine and is a much better choice than Helvetica. Open Sans and Fruitger also work well.

That's all I can think of for now. I had a couple big posts in me and one continuing series that I had been meaning to contribute once we made the move, but I'm having such a tough time staying engaged that I don't know if it's worth the effort at this point. I appreciate all the hard work you've been doing to make this place possible, but I can't argue with my eyes and fight through the tedium for a pursuit that is really just entertainment for me. Thanks and I hope to see at least some of this addressed.

About the child comments format I suggest to make the line besides the comment a different color according to its depth level. I've seen this in the mobile app for reddit "Slide" and it's a good feature in my opinion, don't know if it's necessary (or good) for the desktop version, but for mobile seems a good feature.

The only drawback is when it has too many comments at many levels it didn't work as a reference because the colors started repeating. Nonetheless, here's a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/i2vxAoQ

I'll add another good feature on this one is the button at the bottom (middle), you can configure to which depth level do you want to move (with the up and down arrows at the side). So on the culture war threads I'd switch to child comments and I could comfortably browse first child's comments.

Huh, that's kinda nice. I'll try that out (although . . . I'm not sure how to do it yet. But I'll figure something out.)

Font updated, incidentally.

It’s wild how less “pinched” it feels.

Yeah it's absolutely ridiculous how impactful small changes can be. It's annoying, too, because it can be a nightmare trying to figure out what the problem is, even if you know there's a problem.

Thanks! Already a 100% improvement. This actually made a much bigger impact than I thought it would have.

Yeah, it's a good change :D I think I need to reduce the bold weight on a few elements, but that's not a big problem.

Thanks for pointing it out, I don't know how long it would have taken me to recognize it.

Coloring the margins in or running the body hard-left would greatly improve readability.

That's a good idea, yeah. I'll see what I can manage on that.

The second big issue involves line length.

I completely agree. I actually wanted to put a fix in for that, but I got sick right after doing the initial changes (which are now live) and decided to just push these instead of delaying the entire thing a few days while my brain came back. I'll be working on this soon.

I don't have numbers, but the font size on Reddit seems slightly larger, and that can increase readability without sacrificing too much space, provided the adjustments are made judiciously. Second, I've never been a fan of Helvetica and it's various clones for body text.

Hah, I just figured out what's going on here; I've been doing my dev on Linux, and for whatever reason, both this site and Reddit end up resolving to the same font on Linux. So I didn't realize there was a difference.

Yeah, I'll change it over to Verdana. The font size is actually the same on both sites, I suspect the difference in font size is entirely due to the fonts themselves.

That's all I can think of for now. I had a couple big posts in me and one continuing series that I had been meaning to contribute once we made the move, but I'm having such a tough time staying engaged that I don't know if it's worth the effort at this point. I appreciate all the hard work you've been doing to make this place possible, but I can't argue with my eyes and fight through the tedium for a pursuit that is really just entertainment for me. Thanks and I hope to see at least some of this addressed.

Keep feeding me this info! Most people are not giving me much feedback on legibility issues, and this kind of thing is really valuable. We'll get there.

This should now be fixed, let me know!

I'm realizing how much I miss my RES tags. Whenever someone commented that they had a unique life experience or were from a specific country, I would tag them and would have a better idea where someone was coming from. Maybe people would rather this information not be remembered though?

I'm definitely fine with that functionality being re-added, but it's a bunch of coding work right now. I've already got a bug filed for it but it's going to take quite a while to get there.

The image on the login screen seems quite large -- I have a decent connection normally, but spent 20+s seeing it incrementally load.

Usually you can shrink images signficantly without much quality loss just be encoding differently, e.g. lower quality. I used imagemagick's convert with the following parameters quite successfully (to make 1920px wide image)

convert -quality 65 -resize 1920x> -strip -interlace Plane -sampling-factor 4:2:0

Ironically I've known about this for like a week, and finally had time to fix it, and set up the site update to run and took a look at this page while doing so . . .

. . . and that's when I saw this post. I think you may be the first person to actually say something about it.

Anyway, it is now fixed :)

Nice! And ha, that sounds like a weird variant of rubber-duck-debugging.

At least you know at least one user appreciates it!

  1. The "New comments" counter seems to be browser-specific, not account-specific.

  2. Every time I resize the comment box on desktop it snaps back to the original size as soon as I start typing

The "New comments" counter seems to be browser-specific, not account-specific.

True, and I'm afraid this isn't likely to change anytime soon. Thread collapses are the same way, at least for now.

Every time I resize the comment box on desktop it snaps back to the original size as soon as I start typing

Hey, you're right, it does. That's annoying. Bug filed!

True, and I'm afraid this isn't likely to change anytime soon. Thread collapses are the same way, at least for now.

This is also a problem if you're ever logged out. You go to the site, it updates the new comments date, then you log in. The new comments shows you new comments since you last visited the site, which was a second ago when you visited before logging in, so there are no new comments.

Even if it can't track between browsers, it shouldn't update anything if you're not logged in.

Hmm. My gut feeling is that it should update if you're not logged in, just for the sake of people who are logged-out-browsing. But maybe it shouldn't update the same stuff; that is, each account, including "not logged in", should have its own independent status for what's new.

Does that make sense?

At this point, it's seemed to behave in inconsistent ways, and I no longer have any useful idea about what's going on. All I can say is that I have the problem.

Actually I'm not sure this is the problem, unless something changed. I had all cookies set to session cookies and the problem only happens when I completely exit the browser. Otherwise the read comments are updated when you enter a thread. Just going to the site when logging in doesn't enter a thread, so it shouldn't be updating any read comment dates, and so it shouldn't be the cause of my problem.

(If you store the information on the server, so people can browse from a different location and still know which comments are new, it would incidentally solve this problem too.)

If I'm not logged in, it doesn't show that there's anything new at all, it just prevents it from showing anything new when I do log in.

Is it possible (as a low-priority feature request) to expose the "last viewed timestamp" in a (editable) box on the header?

This would allow one to get around any remaining janky behaviour as to when that updates, and also would have the benefit of allowing users to highlight recent comments (for any given personal definition of 'recent') regardless of viewing/browser history.

Probably, yeah. This could be done entirely clientside, I believe - all you really need is a Javascript snippet, run via something like Tampermonkey.

I don't think this is the kind of thing I'm spending developer time on right now, though if someone really wants to put something together we might be able to find a spot for it.

Yeah it's definitely on the 'nice to have' -- Tampermonkey is a good suggestion, I may dive in and see if I can get some idea of feasibility that way.

The font changes etc. continue to look really good -- it seems like you've increased the chunk size of comments loaded as well? I'm getting more than previously anyways, which is working well performance-wise AFAICT.

it seems like you've increased the chunk size of comments loaded as well?

Yep, went from 50 comments per page to 200 comments per page :)

This did increase page load time painfully, though - it's tolerable for now but it's not going higher until we have better setups for this.

Huh, is that "observed client-side" or some test dealie?

It's not noticeably longer for me (like, I literally didn't notice for a while because it was a lot closer to the reddit experience) and anyways 'one longer pageload' would be better than 'four slightly shorter pageloads'!

Transition is getting pretty smooth (if not better than Reddit in some ways) -- excellent work man!

More comments

Default view on an user's @-page should probably be comments, not posts, since people don't write a lot of standalone posts here.

Yeah, you're right. Bug filed!

Have the mods considered that now that we are off of Reddit, it's silly to cram everything into a Culture War thread?

I mean, I understand why it was useful when the Reddit Stazi were listening in. But now that we have fled the country, jumped over the wall, and escaped, do we really need to cram ourselves so unnaturally into on single thread?

Breathe. Go outside. Let there be many threads with many conversations, controversial ones even!

The rules that were created under oppression should be abolished when we have fled to the new prairie!

“Seven times I have despised my soul:

The first time when I saw her being meek that she might attain height.

The second time when I saw her limping before the crippled..."

-Khalil Gibran

The single thread is at least semi intentional. I personally find it quite inuitive to navigate. But thats maybe because I am used to it.

Has the community already discussed whether Substack would work as a more sustainable permanent home? If so, apologies for the repeat question.

My basic logic is, ACX is thriving as far as I can tell, and its comment section reads fairly similar to The Motte. Scott is probably a higher quality poster than any individual poster here, but collectively the community likely generates a higher total sum of interesting material. Given Substack allows multiple contributors with tiers of privileges, would it be crazy to have a The Motte Substack where pretty much anyone can sign up to be a contributor, and in essence the single culture war thread gets subdivided into something like 20-30 individual posts each week, and then comments can continue in the Substack comment section?

I'm sure there are various minor logistical issues that make this imperfect. But if this site seems to stagnate or even decline from a peak a few months from now due to a lack of new users from Reddit, maybe Substack would be worth a try, given the platform could potentially yield an ongoing stream of new users/subscribers?

I like the basic idea. The problem is curation; we don't really want to just make it a free-for-all where anyone can write under The Motte's name, we'd want to make it a best-of-The-Motte deal. That's basically "the quality contributions and the Vault", and while I don't mind mirroring stuff further onto Substack, we just don't have the personpower for it at the moment.

If I understand Substack's user tiers correctly, contributors wouldn't be posting as The Motte, but rather under their own usernames (as contributor "VPN", for example), albeit to the same subdomain.

Definitely recognize it'd be juggling too many balls at once to pursue this right now. Just wanted to put out there in case a standalone site here that's unaffiliated with Reddit or an alternative like Substack means problems of long-term sustainability.

We actually don't have an official deletion option right now.

At the moment we don't store anything past what you've officially submitted to the site, i.e. no IPs, but that's probably going to change soon. Deleted comments appear to be kept in at least some cases, I'm not sure if this is "all cases" or not.

If you want your account deleted we can easily remove all your posts from the site; if you want it removed entirely from the database that'd take more work and we'd probably tell you that you'll have to wait for a bit until we have tools for that.

More rdrama remnants at https://www.themotte.org/badges

Sigh. Bug filed!

Culture war thread keeps crashing for me.

Your web browser crashes, or something else?

The tab of the web browser was crashing. I use Brave, and it only happens on one device (a laptop).

At some point this becomes "your web browser is broken"; there shouldn't be anything capable of crashing a web browser tab in general. If it's device-specific it may also be a hardware issue.

Is Brave updated? Try that first :) Otherwise lemme know what the exact version is and I'll see if I can figure out what's up.

I saw new comments on the culture war thread (the ones on ethnicity and immigration) while logged out, so I logged in to add something. They were not there; the first post was on Ukraine from doglatine. I made sure it was sorted by new and reloaded the page with no effect. I logged out to see if I was imagining it. They were there. Logged back in, and they were gone. Not sure what's going on.

Also, this site doesn't work for me in Safari (all the text is blank), but is fine in Chrome, other than the missing comments while logged in.

I saw new comments on the culture war thread (the ones on ethnicity and immigration) while logged out, so I logged in to add something. They were not there; the first post was on Ukraine from doglatine.

I suspect we've got a problem with the new-user filter - we're going to be chasing minor issues with that for a while.

Also, this site doesn't work for me in Safari (all the text is blank), but is fine in Chrome, other than the missing comments while logged in.

Arrgh. I don't suppose you know anything about web development? Or have a friend with a Mac who would be willing to spend a few minutes debugging?

I just don't have any way to debug Safari right now >_<

Visual design change feedback requests!

Before: https://i.imgur.com/hbl021t_d.webp?maxwidth=9999&fidelity=high

After: https://i.imgur.com/ZtvjwBx_d.webp?maxwidth=9999&fidelity=high

This is the kind of thing where I'm pretty sure I'm going to wake up tomorrow and see three major problems, so don't treat this as set in stone. This is also the kind of thing where I will never come up with a design that satisfies everyone, so don't expect me to keep working on it until absolutely everyone is happy. But I do want feedback; let me know what you think.

edit: hah, so apparently if you paste in an imgur link it mangles the URL. Fascinating. Bug filed.

Definitively an improvement, but I think it would benefit further from putting all the command links that currently take out an extra line at the bottom of each comment at the top as is done by my current custom CSS setup (perhaps right-justified to enforce more of a gap from the username and recency line).

I actually really like having the vote number at the bottom :V

Can you post a screenshot of your CSS setup, though?

I keep looking at the top of the post instead of the bottom...

I like these changes a lot. Things are clearer and subjectively less cluttered.

The new layout happens to be very similar to one that I came up with myself in writing HTML files for fun.

I personally like that top level posts are now visually distinct and the horizontal line that separates them. In the current design I always need to double check if it is a top level post or a first level comment to the previous top level post.

Yeah, I think this is the kind of design that makes a lot of sense for our site even if it's pointless for other sites. I'm pretty happy with how that turned out.

Also, you see the collapse-comments bar for non-top-level posts, that you can click to collapse that branch? It's actually there on top-level posts too, it's just invisible unless you mouseover it. No loss of functionality.

That sounds just fine -- your take looks nice to me, and the 'invisible collapse' seems nice enough. Limiting the width of comments at each level in a reddit-like way (not the substack/wordpress approach of mashing them all up against a hard right margin in deep threads) looks like all that's missing at this point.

Avatars look MASSIVE when reading site on a tablet (android)

Can you take a screenshot? Also, are you using custom CSS?

Not OP but I have the same issue on my phone.

https://imgur.com/a/qyny4VK

From a recent CWR post. Most avatars are large, that one is pretty egregious. Is there a setting to force them to be a specific size like 64x64 or something?

I don't think I have any custom CSS, but I enabled dark mode it the settings and made some tweaks to link settings.

They're supposed to be 20x20!

Hmm, I wonder if Dark Mode is breaking things.

Edit: Nope, Dark Mode works fine. Hrm.

Can you tell me what your phone is, and what web browser you're using?

One plus 7T pro

Android version 11.0.1.10

Browser: Chrome

I concur it's not dark mode, they're the same size in the motte default theme.

I think this should be fixed now, let me know!

Looks like it's working as intended to me! Thank you!

You're welcome!

I don't think so. We can remove all your comments if you want, then you can just not use the account again.

Please add and pin a bare links repository. Theres things I want to talk about but can't be arsed to make a effortpost about, Im sure others are in that position as well. This would take some traffic off the CWR but I think on net activity will go up because right now its bottlenecked by only the effortposters posting.

I get that this is a popular request, but:

Theres things I want to talk about but can't be arsed to make a effortpost about

this is exactly why we removed the bare links repository in the first place.

Ofcourse you know what you (and the other mods) did better than me.

But as far as I can recall, the primary reason the BLR was removed was that it was eating up too much traffic from the CW thread.

However, now might be a good time to experiment? It might breathe new life into the website, yada yada. I'd wager that it being its own pinned thread instead of its own comment nested within the CW thread might change how people interact with those two threads.

Basically my suggestion/idea is to foster two different communities within the website, one that comes for the BLR, and finds their way into the CW thread. And the current resident CWR posters. The ruleset for the BLR can be slightly relaxed to ease in newcomers. Sort of like a CWR lite to create a pipeline of the type of posters you want, train and vet them before letting them reign free in the CWR.

With admin level control you can limit the comment length in the BLR (max 300-400 words maybe?) to prevent cannibalization, if they REALLY want to talk about it, they can take it to the CWR.

The quality was actually the major problem! This post was what got me convinced that it needed to be solved, and here is where I did the actual removal.

Basically my suggestion/idea is to foster two different communities within the website, one that comes for the BLR, and finds their way into the CW thread.

I think we maybe just don't want the people who come for the BLR? At least, we don't want the people who stay in the BLR, and we don't want people to leave the main thread for the BLR, and we don't want the problems caused by people posting low-quality stuff in the BLR.

The reddit feature I’ve used for at least six months has been the unthreaded view: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ which shows the 25 most recent comments on the whole subreddit, regardless of post, thread, or upvote. It doesn’t allow replies directly from that view, so I click into the permalink or context if I want to reply.

Is there such a feature here?

EDIT: Looks like there is: https://www.themotte.org/comments/

When I return to a thread and sort by Top, comments I have previously collapsed don't stay collapsed.

This actually should be fixed now - someone contributed their fix and it's now part of the codebase :)

Note that it's currently browser-specific, it will not store collapsed status across your account.

One more minor bikeshed: modhatted comments have the poster's username in white on bright red, apparently regardless of theme. While this makes sense for bans and such, the median mod comment on TheMotte has a much mellower tone. I'd suggest either changing the color to the traditional green or dialing back the amount of red color, e.g., underline the username and set it in red with no background.

I like that idea, yeah. I'm actually just sitting down to make a snack and start on those visual changes, I'll roll this into them.

Thanks!

Mods, can you please not shadowban my comments.

All new users get their comments filtered for a bit to cut down on trolling.

Is a filter currently the best way to prevent trolling? After noticing my comment was not appearing, I was discouraged to write any more. Could a keyword- or post-length-based filter work better? But that would probably take too much time to implement, making it not worth it...

We have in general noticed that it's pretty effective. The nice part about a manual filter is that you can't bypass it forever by just learning the trick; every troll that gets banned has to get through the filter again. Forcing people to spend lots of time not-shitposting just to finally shitpost tends to weed out a lot of problems.

It's not perfect, but it's better than the alternatives.

2 questions:

  1. How do we flag a comment as a quality contribution? Back on Reddit we'd do that through the reporting system, but there's no clear way to do it on this site.

  2. What does the "block user" feature do? I remember that causing a lot of issues back on Reddit, and I'm kind of surprised to see return here.

How do we flag a comment as a quality contribution? Back on Reddit we'd do that through the reporting system, but there's no clear way to do it on this site.

Still the reporting system! Type "quality contribution" or something like that in, we'll figure it out. This is not the way we plan for this to work long-term, it's just what we have available.

What does the "block user" feature do? I remember that causing a lot of issues back on Reddit, and I'm kind of surprised to see return here.

It was part of the codebase before and we haven't gotten around to changing it; I need to do a Meta post that includes this issue and ask for feedback on proposed solutions.

Right now it works similarly to how Reddit blocking works, I believe.

Hieronymus' comment is not visible when browsing the whole Culture War Roundup thread logged in. It shows up when browsing the thread logged out. The direct link to the comment works in either case.

I haven't managed to reproduce this but I've heard it before, and I think something really is broken here. Added a bug for it, hopefully we can squash it.

If I click VIEW MORE COMMENTS and a top-level comment has been posted since I opened the page in the first place, the button will load that new top level comment first, and not the one chronologically after the comment immediately above the button: https://i.imgur.com/ZLMYyGY_d.webp?maxwidth=9999&fidelity=high

This seems incorrect to me. It disappears on a refresh, and is properly ordered after, of course, however, the new thread will also be highlighted as unread even if it's been seen via this method (not that this bothers me at all).

Also can you maybe do something like having top level comments have a different coloured circle to the left of them, just for quick distinguishing when scrolling? As an example, I'm using the Midnight theme, so everything is pink-on-black, maybe top level comments could be blue?

Bug registered, will see what we can do.

Also can you maybe do something like having top level comments have a different coloured circle to the left of them, just for quick distinguishing when scrolling? As an example, I'm using the Midnight theme, so everything is pink-on-black, maybe top level comments could be blue?

I've got a pending significant change to the comments page, once that's done we'll see if it's still an issue and solve it.

Could you add a feature where if you hover over a user's name it shows a little window that previews their profile?

A lot of people add a fair bit to their profiles or some important detail that makes it vastly easier to remember who they are/get a feel for them/ build community... and you just never saw that on the Reddit version of the Motte because then you'd have to click on their name, go to their profile, and lose your spot 300 comments down in the thread.

I remember interacting with someone for months on the reddit version, finally thinking to click their profile... and suddenly realizing the person I was interacting with was famous, had an entire body of work, and I'd actually read their stuff but never realized it was the same person.

.

This would also incentivize people to add detail to their profiles, and make the userbase/community that much more internally familiar.

This feature already exists, it was just removed in a clumsy way by turning the username into a direct link to the profile (profile card still shows up for a split second).

you just never saw that on the Reddit version of the Motte because then you'd have to click on his name, go to his profile, and lose your spot 300 comments down in the thread

Or you could just open the profile in a new tab.


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!


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