There's a pretty big set of changes coming down the pipe. These shouldn't have much impact on users - it's all internal bookkeeping - but there's a lot of it, and if there's bugs, it might cause issues. Let me know if anything weird happens! Weird, in this case, is probably "comments you can see that you think you shouldn't be able to", or "comments you can't see that you think you should be able to", or anything else strange that goes on. As an example, at one point in development reply notifications stopped working. So keep your eyes out for that. I'm probably pushing this in a day or two, I just wanted to warn people first.
EDIT: PUSH COMPLETE, let me know if anything goes wrong
Are you a software developer? Do you want to help? We can pretty much always use people who want to get their hands dirty with our ridiculous list of stuff to work on. The codebase is in Python, and while I'm not gonna claim it's the cleanest thing ever, it's also not the worst and we are absolutely up for refactoring and improvements. Hop over to our discord server and join in. (This is also a good place to report issues, especially if part of the issue is "I can't make comments anymore.")
Are you somewhat experienced in Python but have never worked on a big codebase? Come help anyway! We'll point you at some easy stuff.
Are you not experienced in Python whatsoever? We can always use testers, to be honest, and if you want to learn Python, go do a tutorial, once you know the basics, come join us and work on stuff.
(if you're experienced in, like, any other language, you'll have no trouble)
Alt Accounts: Let's talk about 'em. We are consistently having trouble with people making alt accounts to avoid bans, which is against the rules, or making alt accounts to respond to their own stuff, which isn't technically against the rules, and so forth. I'm considering a general note in the rules that alt accounts are strongly discouraged, but if you feel the need for an alt, contact us; we're probably okay with it if there's a good reason. (Example: We've had a few people ask to make effortposts that aren't associated with their main account for various reasons. We're fine with this.) If you want to avoid talking to us about it, it probably isn't a good reason.
Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is not set in stone.
Single-Issue Posting: Similarly, we're having trouble with people who want to post about one specific topic. "But wait, Zorba, why is that a problem" well, check out the Foundation:
The purpose of this community is to be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs. It is to be a place for people to examine the beliefs of others as well as their own beliefs; it is to be a place where strange or abnormal opinions and ideas can be generated and discussed fairly, with consideration and insight instead of kneejerk responses.
If someone's posting about one subject, repeatedly, over and over, then it isn't really a discussion that's being had, it's prosletyzing. I acknowledge there's some value lost in removing this kind of behavior, but I think there's a lot of value lost in having it; letting the community be dominated by this behavior seems to lead to Bad Outcomes.
Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is also not set in stone.
Private Profiles: When we picked up the codebase, it included functionality for private profiles, which prevents users from seeing your profile. I probably would have removed this if I'd had a lot more development time, but I didn't. So it exists.
I'm thinking of removing it anyway, though. I'm not sure if it provides significant benefit; I think there's a good argument that anything posted on the site is, in some sense, fair game to be looked over.
On the other hand . . . removing it certainly does encourage ad hominem arguments, doesn't it? Ad hominems are kind of useless and crappy and poison discourse. We don't want people to be arguing about the other person's previously-stated beliefs all the time, we want people to be responding to recent comments, in general.
But on the gripping hand . . .
. . . well, I just went to get a list of the ten most prolific users with hidden profiles. One of them has a few quality contributions! (Thanks!) Two of them are neutral. And seven of them have repeated antagonism, with many of those getting banned or permabanned.
If there's a tool mostly used by people who are fucking with the community, maybe that's a good argument for removing the tool.
On the, uh, other gripping hand, keep in mind that private profiles don't even work against the admins. We can see right through them (accompanied by a note that says "this profile is private"). So this feature change isn't for the sake of us, it's for the sake of you. Is that worth it? I dunno.
Feedback wanted! Again!
The Volunteer System is actually working and doing useful stuff at this point. It doesn't yet have write access, so to speak, all it's doing is providing info to the mods. But it's providing useful info. Fun fact: some of our absolute most reliable and trustworthy volunteers don't comment. In some cases "much", in some cases "at all". Keep it up, lurkers! This is useful! I seriously encourage everyone to click that banner once a day and spend a few minutes at it. Or even just bookmark the page and mash the bookmark once in a while - I've personally got it on my bookmark bar.
The big refactor mentioned at the top is actually for the sake of improving the volunteer system, this is part of what will let it turn into write access and let us solve stuff like filtered-comments-in-limbo, while taking a lot of load off the mods' backs and maybe even making our moderation more consistent. As a sort of ironic counterpart to this, it also means that the bar might show up less often.
At some point I want to set up better incentives for long-time volunteers, but that takes a lot of code effort. Asking people to volunteer more often doesn't, so that's what I'm doing.
(Feedback wanted on this also.)
I want your feedback on things, as if that wasn't clear. These threads basically behave like a big metadiscussion thread, so . . . what's your thoughts on this whole adventure? How's it going? Want some tweaks? Found a bug? Let me know! I don't promise to agree but I promise to listen.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
You're correct that his evidence isn't very strong towards "these were real people who were murdered in this specific way," but it is much better towards "these were real people who died." You don't really address what happened to them aside from "not murder" even after he specifically emphasized the question of what you thought happened to these people.
You are correct that a name and a passport is not proof that someone was murdered. But, assuming that it is a legitimate passport, it is evidence that the person exists. And if we find no later evidence that the person exists, given the amount of record keeping going on, it's reasonable to assume that there's some reason they don't appear—either a name change, or they're somewhere where they wouldn't be producing records we'd find, or yes, maybe they're dead. Especially when there's much more evidence that those who were listed as survivors continued to exist. (I will note that this argument isn't perfect, as evidence of their still being alive is much of why people are classified as survivors in the first place—perhaps the proper way to measure would be to look at how much people who were not involved in the databases show up in later data.)
@faul_sname offered you a couple of ways that it could be shown that his analysis was bad.
You didn't give any idea if any of those were the case, or any other suggestion as to what's going on in those lists.
Do you think those people never existed? That they existed and survived, and there's data many of them, and people just didn't dig to find it? That they existed and survived and there's not much subsequent data for them for some reason? That they died, due to other causes? It can be a mix of causes, of course, but what's the modal way that people wrongly ended up in those databases? I still don't know what your hypothesis is, aside from "a name and a passport is not proof."
Here is Yad Vashem's description of the origin of the Victim's Database:
Does a call center collecting names from over-the-phone testimonies to add to their database, 60 years after the fact, seem to you a scientific way to build a database of murder victims? In any other context, building a database of murder victims containing no evidence that the people you are adding to the database were murdered would get you laughed out of the room. Of course, in building a database like that, proving the person existed with a document is not the most important part- providing some sort of evidence that the people in your database were murdered in the way you are saying they were murdered would be expected in any other context except the Holocaust, where an Israeli calling a hotline and giving a testimony listing names of people he lost contact with 60 years later is good enough to prove a series of murders with absolutely no physical or documentary evidence that such murders actually happened.
This is not a scientific source, it's a cultural and propaganda project.
My hypothesis is that this isn't a scientific source, it's not a database of murder victims. It's a post-2000s propaganda campaign meant to fill the gap in the physical and documentary record with a crowd-sourcing approach of uncritically collecting testimonies and names 60 years after the fact.
Okay, it has lower sourcing standards than is normal. Sure. Based on that, I can totally believe that there are many people who are in there who shouldn't be. But that still doesn't address how unreliable it is, which was what @faul_sname was trying to do.
That's not an answer. You gave a non-answer before, and you just did so again. I don't get it. All you have to say is "I think a bunch of the purported people never existed (either mistakenly or deliberately)" or "a bunch are still around, they just never checked their data, and they probably left subsequent records" or "a bunch are still around, they just didn't leave records in places we can find them" or "they died around that time, but from other causes."
Our standard for asserting that people were probably murdered doesn't have to be that we actually witnessed it, or dug up graves that are definitively there. A whole lot of people vanishing is itself evidence. (It is not, of course, evidence for the method of their death, and does allow for their deaths being incidental rather than intentional—e.g. if they all died from being overworked, that would still explain the "people vanished.")
To be clear, I don't actually myself know how extensive genealogical databases (for example) are, but you haven't actually attempted to answer the question that faul_sname was posing to you. My complaint isn't so much that I'm sure he's right on this, because I don't have the time to figure out how best to verify and assess that. But he clearly put in some effort as to seeing whether the database results were consistent with what they were described as, out of a random sample they seemed to be, and you have not been willing to give any account of your own about what we should find if we tried to investigate the people in the database, nor what actually happened. Once again, the reason that I bring this up is not because I think there's no way you could prove him wrong. It's that he provided evidence and effort to an extent that, if you could not respond to it, it seemed fair to say that you got shredded, as Amadan so delicately put it, made it pretty clear what sorts of things would be relevant responses and what he was actually arguing, and you didn't respond in a way that addressed his arguments, even when repeated more emphatically. That felt like it was a relevant example, and it still feels so.
I would think that the names should be verifiable. If I have a name, I can cross-reference it against other databases. If you have a guy who up until date X (which in this case is at minimum a deportation), is working, paying taxes, buying things on credit, etc., than afterwards simply drops out of all records, it’s pretty simple to assume that they died during that deportation. Do that with enough samples and honestly you could reasonably establish that said group of people were likely to have been killed deliberately.
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