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 -
I would have requested it for sure, and it would have made me less likely to nuke everything. But I don't want to promise that I still won't. I am rather paranoid.
My username is a generic ratsphere pun that I don't use anywhere else. And it is surprising how much you can learn about contributors just by getting some bits and pieces of information from them here and there. For example, I am 90% certain that one of my former colleagues used to be a prolific poster here.
I am not saying that my fear is completely rational, but the admittedly rather far-fetched threats I have in mind are:
One of my rants pisses off the wrong person and they start playing internet detective.
Future AI scraping tools use style detection to create profiles on every internet commenter, everywhere.
Having a private profile helps a little bit against both.
I'll note one thing to keep in mind when dealing with this sort of fear. Specifically, AI is getting better at a lot of things, including directly reading minds via microexpressions and/or straight-up van-Eck phreaking. If HR is that concerned with ideological conformity and they get around to deploying that, you lose anyway.
That is both terrifying and comforting.
Right. A lot of the work in prepping, at least if you're trying to do it efficiently, is to work out when X won't be useful because in the situations where you need X you are screwed anyway for other reasons. I'm scared of nuclear war, but I haven't stockpiled food. This is because I live in a city (though not one big enough to be nuked, for this exact reason), which means that if society breaks down for long enough for me to starve, hungry mobs will take any stockpiles anyway. I do have two 10L water bottles, because thirst is much faster (so thirsty mobs taking it are less likely to find me before dying, and even if they do I'd still get use out of it) and because water supplies could end up intact but contaminated by fallout (circumventing the thirsty mob entirely, as without some kind of tipoff they'd just drink the tap water and be poisoned rather than searching for preppers).
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Off topic, but I have to say it's a brilliant pun and makes me smile whenever I see it.
Thanks! Appreciate that.
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I share your fears about a sufficiently powerful AI easily de-anonymizing me, but at this point my prior infosec was poor enough that there's no real hope of going back without shedding all the online personas I'm attached to.
I don't think the private feature will do anything to help though, since anything that scrapes the Motte as a whole intentionally or incidentally will already be able to view all of your comments, with your pseudonym already attached to it.
As such, I have to disagree and would prefer the private feature to be removed since the annoyance it causes me outweighs any marginal decrease in risk of being outed.
Some inconveniences for the scrapers is better than none. The most extreme action would be making The Motte accessible to only registered users, which, in my opinion, should be the standard for all forums.
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