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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   3709 thread views

[META] A Whole Host Of Completed Minor Changes

This is essentially a followup to the last meta post.

Big scary updates are done and seem to be fine, but our volunteers have been going absolutely mad with minor updates. Which is great! We have a bunch of people contributing tons of valuable tweaks and fixes and improvements to the codebase, thank you, I literally could not do this without you.

I'm just gonna repost this again because it worked the last time:

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)

Rules Changes

Thank you for discussion on the rule proposals! Here's what we ended up with.

 

Courtesy: Keep to a single account

We strongly discourage people from making alt accounts without good reason, and in the absence of a good reason, we consider alt accounts to be bannable on sight. Alt accounts are almost exclusively used for mod evasion purposes and very rarely used for any purpose that helps the community; it makes moderation more difficult and it makes conversation more difficult.

If you do feel you need an alt account (most commonly, if you're a well-established user who wants to post something that can't be linked to their public persona), please ask the mods.

If you don't want the mods to know about it either, be aware that there's a good chance we'll find out about it anyway.

 

Content: Post on multiple subjects

We occasionally have trouble with people who turn into single-issue posters, posting and commenting only on a single subject. We'd like to discourage this. If you find yourself posting constantly on a single subject, please make an effort to post on other subjects as well.

This doesn't mean you need to write megaposts! This can be as simple as going to the Friday Fun Thread once in a while and posting a few paragraphs about whatever video game you last played. But this community is fundamentally for people, and if a poster is acting more like a propaganda-bot than a person, we're going to start looking at them suspiciously.

This rule is going to be applied with delicacy; if I can find not-low-effort comments about three different subjects within your last two weeks or two pages of comments, you're likely fine.

 

These are still prototypes, if you have objections they can still be changed, without objections they'll get added to the Official Rules probably in a week or so.

Private Profiles

Again, thank you for discussion! I refined the planned system a bit (original plans: "remove private profiles".) The current system is that private profiles are available to established users or on request. We're leaving "established" intentionally vague, but it's basically a measure of how much you've been contributing. If the system considers you established, the checkbox will be in your settings; if the system doesn't consider you established, it'll be there, but grayed out and have a link to contact us.

(This is using roughly the same standard as our filtering system, but with much bigger numbers.)

We've also grandfathered in everyone who had a private profile, even those who don't meet the bar. This was definitely a carefully-considered decision! It has nothing to do with me not wanting to write the SQL query to revert profiles.

That said, if you're a newbie account that gets yourself banned, don't be surprised if a mod also resets your private flag.

Long Comments

A while back there was a meta post where I proposed relaxing the comment character limit. I came up with a proposal, people on the dev discord convinced me to relax it even further, then it just sorta sat there and moldered in the Issues queue for a bit because it wasn't the priority. Then I wrote an effortpost and said "shucks, this is over the limit! Okay, I'm going to just go and implement that long-comment request now so I can post my megapost for the good of the community. Aaaaand also so I can post my megapost."

Then one of our volunteers, without any knowledge whatsoever of the above decision, sniped it out from under me and implemented it, like, two days before I was going to sit down and do it.

Anyway, it's in now! The new limit is . . .

. . . a little more complicated.

The new limit is 50,000 characters if you don't want to be filtered. Are you okay with your comment being filtered as if you were a new user? Well, good news, the new limit is 500,000 characters. Yes, this is literally enough to post an entire novel, albeit a short one, as long as you're OK with the mods seeing it before the rest of the userbase does.

This is experimental; if it gets abused, don't be surprised if this gets changed.

This is now a general-purpose feedback post. Let me know how things are going!

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How well is this forum doing at keeping the influx above attrition?

Not as well as I'd want. I need to wire up the quality contributions to Twitter in an attempt to attract more people.

It's not catastrophic or immediately existential, but if it's not solved, that'll probably be what kills this place in the end.

I just marked a very long post on the Gaza megathread "neutral" while doing janitor duty. It's the first time I shirked and didn't read the post, and I'm feeling guilty and conflicted about that. I skip lots of posts on here, but when I click on that otter who says he needs me...

Well, I've never let him down before.

Mostly I just wanted to say that since the aftermath of the Hamas attack is something I don't want to read about but also one of the most important issues in the world, I found the megathreads incredibly useful and really appreciate the mods putting them up. Thank you.

It occurs to me that it might be useful for moderators to have a moderator-specific badge, so that you can tell whether a user is a moderator without having to (1) see him make a moderation action or (2) go to the separate page that lists all the moderators. I think that, currently, the only badge is for having verified your email address.

One of the things I've always kinda tangled with, without a good answer, is how much moderators should be part of the community. I think there's good arguments in both directions; they should because it sucks if it feels like moderators aren't really part of things, and they shouldn't because it's hard to treat "debate with a mod" the same way as "debate with a non-mod", there's always the fear the mod is going to take something personally and ban you.

(We have a sort-of informal rule that mods shouldn't moderate responses to their own comments unless they're really horrible, but there's plenty of places that have stronger rules that are completely ignored regularly, so I don't blame people for being worried about this.)

Not having a moderator badge is sort-of intentional in that I think I'd rather lean towards "moderators are just community members".

It's also sort of coincidental because they didn't have badges when we forked the software and it's easier to not add them than to add them.

Having just returned after a while, I notice that theres no easy way to find recent quality contributions posts from the front page. I know to look on reddit, but maybe we would want them more prominent for new users?

Yeah, you're not wrong.

I think the entire Quality Contribution display thing is slated for some kind of a revamp, though I haven't started on that yet.

Bug: when collapsing a comment chain, the page moves down

Accessibility issue/personal complaint: animated gifs for user badges are crazy fucking distracting.

Bug: when collapsing a comment chain, the page moves down

Is this when you're near the bottom of the page, or does it include when you're in the middle or near the top?

Accessibility issue/personal complaint: animated gifs for user badges are crazy fucking distracting.

I've honestly thought of just turning animation off but haven't had the time to do that. There's probably an easy way to do it.

:)

Gimmie a moment I'll find something to change it to that has a nice red and blue contrast.

I consider obnoxious avatars a moderation issue rather than a code issue tho, I wanted to see how long it would go before someone complained after putting it up and realizing that animated avatars were indeed a thing.

Edit: There we go, space kook to subway wizard.

I do have to ask that you try and solve things interpersonaly before going to authority tho, there needs to be some level of self-regulation

Animated gifs for user badges are crazy fucking distracting.

You can hide user profile pictures by adding the following line to the custom CSS in your account settings: .profile-pic-20{display:none!important;}

Bug:

After you submit a reply to a comment, the reply is normally shown.

However, if you submit a reply to a comment, and the reply happens to be at exactly the level that would trigger "More Comments" if it had been normally displayed, you neither see the reply nor the "More Comments"; instead, the submit of the comment seems to endlessly hang until you reload the page, which then shows the "More Comments".

Dangit, I thought we fixed that one. Bug re-opened.

Whenever I click on the janitor duty link, it takes me to a page with a 505 error. I'm using Chrome on Android.

Should now be fixed! Thank you for the report, it would've taken me quite a while to discover it on my own :)

Same here, for Firefox on mobile and desktop

Should now be fixed!

I appreciate putting the upvotes at the bottom of posts.

Minor suggestion:

Extend the upvote count delay to 2-3 days, or make it require more effort to see them. (Like clicking on a spoiler box) I don't care for the dynamics that having votes visible by default engenders.

It still would be nice to find someway to do a smaller format thread. Perhaps the sub needs to grow. And I get the issue of not wanting that because the long form version would probably be dominated by a few topics.

There are a lot of times I read a tweet and want to discuss it. Not worthy of a top posts. And twitter is either dunking on each other or everyone affirming your thought. Plus, my twitter is my actual self so I can’t say true thoughts.

And not all things are culture war. I’ve at times been a decent fed/macro watcher. I have workspaces for that which often are someone posting a tweet of data/timiraos/market sage.

An experiment along these lines at some point could be worthy.

@ZorbaTHut

Thoughts on transparency and accountability for "subsequent edits"

I often edit my posts a couple times within the first hour or two. Mostly typos and grammatical fixes, but sometimes adding a paragraph or removing something regretful. When done in good faith, this is typically not a problem. My historic norm is to create a new section with a big "EDIT: ..." at the front, just to demonstrate good faith.

Edits in bad faith can be very powerfully bad. For example, posting an adorable puppy pic to /r/awww and then editing it to GOATSE after a couple hours worth of upvotes. More relevant to a space like this, goalposts can be shifted or snark inserted to ridicule subsequent (but pre-edit) replies.

Some thoughts:

  • Earlier edits are cheaper than later edits, with a grace period

  • Tiny edits should be numerous and cheap

  • Large edits should be few and expensive

  • Pay for edits with internet points

  • By default, surrender all internet points on the prior content for any edit

  • Rings or Tiers of Whitelists, if the post has no replies

    • 10% for grammar / typos
    • 20% for word change
    • 30% for sentence edit
    • 50% for paragraph replace
    • Something like that, by some metric

  • Big penalty if the edited post has already been replied to

  • In the edit UI, have a score that shows how much karma the edit costs

  • Show on any edited content:

    • how many edits
    • the current edit "distance" or score
    • how much karma the edits have cost
    • the last edit time

EDIT: added @Gdanning in show of good faith ;)

I think honestly showing any edits made after a reasonable grace period would fix most of that. If you’re editing after 10-15 minutes, the odds that you are just fixing typos is pretty small.

This is the EZ button and I agree!

I've wanted to have a Display Edit History option, with the ability for someone to hide a specific revision if they want, but it still shows up as a revision, just without the full text visible (except to the mods). This is probably a better solution than trying to gamify things :V

But it's a dev time issue, mostly.

Can we add an iterator over new comments since the last time a user loaded a thread? They have their own unique CSS class, looks like, so the server-side logic already exists to detect them. This might even be doable purely as a client-side bit of JS.

If someone wants to code it up, go for it, but it is definitely niche enough that I'm not gonna direct our volunteer time to it right now.

This might even be doable purely as a client-side bit of JS.

You can ctrl-F for "new" right now. Its only failures are for deeply-nested comments and if someone (like me, right now) includes that string in the body of their comment.

That'll do. Thanks!

Is it possible to make it so I won't get posts from people I have blocked when doing the janitor duty thing? I mean, I support the right of people whose day is not complete without whining about the Joos to whine to their heart's content, and having blocked them, I don't care about it any more. But when my whole janitor duty screen comes out composed of whining about Joos, it really doesn't make me happy to contribute my time to it (which I am otherwise happy to). Also, the Joo-whiners probably won't consider me a fair arbiter of the quality of their contribution anyway, so it's better both for me and for them if I don't score their posts.

Hrm, that's an interesting one.

I'm tempted to say "no, intentionally", because I want to know what you think about specific subjects; if people really are posting too much on one subject, in a way that's against the rules, I want people to be giving the appropriate feedback.

On the other hand I don't want people driven away from volunteering because of that . . .

. . . but if it's that much of an issue, maybe that needs dealing with on a level that isn't the volunteer system.

Multiple spoilers on one line are broken.

If you have first spoiler|| and ||second spoiler, then it splits it into multiple lines on the comment preview, but merges all of the spoilers in the real comment.

Oops, they sure are.

Bug filed!

Feature suggestion: buttons to add text hyperlinks. Whenever I'm on mobile I try to add them with parentheses and I always seem to mix up ( ) and [ ]

Sorry for the slow response here >_<

I'd like the option of a WYSIWYG editor at some point, but right now it's a lot of work and we have a bunch of other stuff that needs to be dealt with first. Including fixing up our markdown, it's got a bunch of weird issues :/

The ( ) is a parenthetical remark that explains what url you want to link to - and parenthetical remarks always come after the text they modify!

When someone replies to me now. I have trouble figuring out what they are replying to unless I go back and find it in thread. I see their response but not what I wrote they are responding too.

Am I doing it wrong and missing something?

There's a "context" button on the message toolbar, at the bottom (right next to the vote buttons and the Copy Link button). That's the best way to find what they were responding to.

I'm not really happy with how the response list works, but right now it is at least Reddit-standard and things don't get lost.

Where do I find the volunteer link from the main page? The previous posts says to "click the banner" but the only banner I see is an image of some spiky objects. Clicking it brings me to the main page.

I'm on a mobile browser if that makes a difference.

It'll show up near the top of any post page if there's stuff to be done; it says The Motte Needs You. You can also go straight there, though.

Just went to do volunteer duty, and a slot for a post in the list has the radio buttons but no actual post: https://imgur.com/a/AJogzPc

The other two posts in the 3 post list were perfectly normal, just the third one was completely blank - no content, date, or links.

Hah, I bet that was a removed post that we're not detecting properly. Will fix, thanks!

I want to reheat this spat I had with @Amadan about moderation, in the context of someone calling an outgroup artist a "leftist creep". At the time, I was quite taken aback by Amadan's assertion that this is in fact considered to be within the rules, and if it now is, I want to propose changing the (interpretation of the) rules so that it is not. I don't think it's hard to derive a prohibition of this from "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary", or "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion", and my understanding of moderational standards at some high points of the Reddit era is that it would have been.

Generally, I feel like we have been drifting away from the "police on tone, not on content" ethos that had made this community great. On one hand, policing on tone has become anemic, as can be easily told from the near-complete absence of the formerly ubiquitous subthreads where people complain about having been policed on tone when their tone was more than justified by the ABSOLUTELY OUTRAGEOUS conduct of the outgroup (a good sign that something is being done). On the other hand, community sentiment and moderation conspire to increasingly channel us into what feels like a consensus position for some sort of "bourgeois rightism", which affirms common right-wing social and economic positions and muscularly asserts its aesthetics while putting a lid on tendencies (excessive HBD and antisemitism, but also the idea that elites are above the rules) that are seen to mark the threshold of a slippery slope towards intemperance and extremism. This window is bounded to the right by actual moderator action (like the latest crusade against "JQ-posting"), and to the left by the anarcho-tyranny of giving the existing majorities a lot of slack in bending the rules when responding to deviants.

That being said, I do not even get the sense that this was at any point decided as explicit policy. Rather, it seems like it simply arises as a blind spot, because our moderators, while generally doing a genuinely admirable job of keeping their personal opinions concealed, have personal positions that are close to the space described above, which removes the first-line instinctual response towards casual "microaggressions" directed at the outgroup. Moreover, the community has already self-selected so far in the same direction that any opposing feedback tends to come from people who are at the threshold of flaming out like I have been for the past few months, and therefore don't come across as the most level-headed dispensers of advice. Please, assuming you still want conflicting opinions, try to at least consider this as a plea to allocate a few more cycles to imagining the experience of the community for someone who is at odds with the above whenever you make a policy decision.

I agree in principle but call for a carve-out localized to this specific matter, (which I suppose is obligatory for someone who actually did it). I chose the word creep because I spent about 10-20 minutes looking through his Artsy page and that's the word that most fittingly described it in my mind. I challenge anyone to spend 20 minutes looking through the pages of his work and thinking this a normal person. Now maybe artists in general aren't 'normal'. But Cleon is pretty abnormal. There's a kind of malign energy that seeps through his work and it's not just hidden in the subtext.

Furthermore, I didn't raise the topic in the first place! If I had put that on the top-level, then sure, it's boo-outgroup. But it was someone else who raised it. The original post is now deleted which I think is bad play but it was defending Cleon as an apolitical surfer bro or saying he could be interpreted in an altright way! This is a huge deception, which I was rather unhappy with. Maybe that's why the post was deleted. In the now-deleted context I think my post was reasonable.

If we have a rule against doing what I did, then can we at least have some kind of rule against deleting posts, or at least deleting toplevel posts (mods excepted).

Yeah, I think I agree with you; I'd be much more fine with "I feel like Cleon Peterson is a leftist creep" but I think this is too far. Gonna talk to the mods and see what they say.

Automod posted the Culture War Roundup thread on the subreddit.

I'm actually really curious how that happened; when we left, I changed it to Post Every 10,000 Weeks because there wasn't a Disable checkbox and I didn't want to delete it until we had things solidly working elsewhere. Then I forgot about it, of course. But, I mean, I haven't done the exact math on this, but I'm pretty sure it hasn't been ten thousand weeks since we left. Maybe I ran into some weird overflow bug?

Anyway, post removed, recurring posts actually deleted.

Would it be maybe good to have it post every so often... more often than every ten thousand weeks anyways?

I thought there was some concern about admins removing the sub for inactivity?

I've heard nothing from the admins since we closed it, and we do actually post quality-contribution roundups there. I wouldn't put it past them to yank it away from us, but I also don't want to spend much time on it, so that's a risk I'm willing to take.

If I fat finger press the left portion of a comment it minimizes the comment chain. Can only the top level post minus symbol minimize a comment chain?

I enjoy the bar minimizing subthreads on mobile, but accidentally minimizing a whole comment chain is too common, so I support removing the feature for now.

Just to throw in my vote: I personally love the ability to hit the left portion of the chain to minimize on mobile. I use it constantly. Don't care much about it on desktop.

The problem with it on desktop is that the left-most vertical line is invisible for some reason. Consider this example. Doesn't it seem intuitive for a reasonable user to think that both pro_sprond and Quantomfreakonomics made top-level posts? You have to mouse-over the invisible line to even see that it's there!

Reddit (old reddit, new reddit, and RES) and most other websites like substack, etc. are more sensible, displaying the top-level line at all times.

Dang, that makes things more complicated.

Might end up needing to make a poll or something.

I agree with the folks saying it's too easy to press the collapse comment icon without meaning to on mobile.

But, it's a useful feature that I use frequently enough to have trained my thumb to hit reliably despite the diffuculty.

And I in turn like this, no need to scroll back to top to collapse large tree.

Are you doing it on mobile or on desktop?

Desktop

Excellent, that doesn't change my plans :D

It's really easy to fatfinger on mobile, so currently we're thinking about making the minimize-bar not touchable on mobile devices and instead increase the hitbox of the -/+ symbol. Desktop will continue to behave the way it does right now.

This is my most hated "feature". If I slightly miss a finger press it minimizes everything or loads a different page rather than posting my comment. It's so fragile.

https://xkcd.com/1172/

Maybe a setting for it would be nice, then?

The problem with settings is that they dramatically complicate testing; we're already not doing a good job with testing, adding more settings just makes it worse. This can be justified in some cases but it's not an automatic thing.

deleted

This should now be fixed, although thanks to another bug, they won't be able to respond. But that'll be fixed soon :)

The reason would be that you've found a bug :V

I'll see what I can do!

When accessing the site on mobile, there is an "Install the Motte webapp!" nagware banner with a tiny close button neatly covering up the top right controls, including the notification bell that would tell me about any post responses. Do we really need that, and does it need to be in that location for any non-dark-pattern reasons?

Whoops, yeah. I should get rid of that or move it or something. Issue added.

Doin' a fkn bang-up job, yo. Thank you.

Shame that existing private profiles get grandfathered in, I really wanted to read everything pedofascist guy was up to.

Well, there's always googling the username with site:themotte.org and then control-f.

I put mine on private because there is no way to purge a profile!

I've realized I've spilled enough personal details for someone who knows me irl to id my account.

I don't think it needs to be the hill to die on that it is atm. Of all places commenting history to should minimal relevance to other comments on the Motte !

I agree, excepting bad faith actors (who you learn to recognize anyway), it’s good to treat each comment as its own opinion without biasing yourself by stalking their post history.

(1) We strongly discourage people from making alt accounts without good reason, and in the absence of a good reason, we consider alt accounts to be bannable on sight.

Gosh durn it, now I sort of want to spin up an alt. Poe's Imp of the Perverse at work again. Though I would also be interested to see if a new persona would get me to express myself in a different way.

(2) if I can find not-low-effort comments about three different subjects within your last two weeks or two pages of comments, you're likely fine

tugs at collar nervously Ahahaha, well I'm sure this won't apply to me at all, not like I only tread the well-worn ground of a couple of the same topics! Hahaha!

(3) Are you okay with your comment being filtered as if you were a new user? Well, good news, the new limit is 500,000 characters.

😲 You may regret this decision, given that I regularly seem to hit up against the old comment limit. Now - now I could write... a manifesto!!!!! The doors of perception are blown wide open! Nobody can shut me up now! 🤪

tugs at collar nervously Ahahaha, well I'm sure this won't apply to me at all, not like I only tread the well-worn ground of a couple of the same topics! Hahaha!

For what it's worth, I browsed your post history and I cannot even tell which well-worn ground you think you're constantly treading :V There's Hinduism, Hunter Biden, trans issues, and you're even talking to some weirdo about Star Trek. Who even makes posts about Star Trek today? Bizarre.

I would not worry about this at all.

You may regret this decision

I am simultaneously excited and terrified to see whatever people use this for.

As somebody who regularly rewatches old Star Trek (just finishing DS9, can't wait to see how they are going to deal with that Dominion thing!), I definitely do not object to people making posts about Star Trek today.

Who even makes posts about Star Trek today? Bizarre.

From the age of seven onwards, before Enterprise first punched me in the gut and then DISCO! pissed in my face, I was such a Trekkie. But they drove me away with sticks, so they did (no, I am never forgiving what idiots made it freakin' canon that Vulcans think Humans literally stink and have to wear special nasal filters when around us. Oh I'm sure you thought you were so funny with that killer joke that you had to write into the scripts so that once broadcast it becomes part of the canon universe and hence lore, you microcephalic nuisances).

I think most Hollywood writers can’t write worth anything anyway.

I'll write the SQL query to revert profiles!

I can actually do SQL, unlike python.

you underestimate the depths of my laziness

Honestly I would've just asked Chat-GPT to do it, but I sorta just don't want to mess with it. I'm fine with the general policy of "if the bars move, you're grandfathered in"; it feels like a reasonable policy to stick with.

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