This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It's not a question of the amount of code. This is the exact type of feature that will quickly turn into a clusterfuck if you don't carefully think through how you want it to work.
Do you mean a technical clusterfuck or other kind of clusterfuck? If the former, you'd want to check that everything still worked first, but it'd probably be fine and if not fixing it is easy. If the latter ... how? That we have weekly threads at all instead of just toplevel posts is mostly a historical accident, and then i guess trying adapt to reddit's weaknesses.
A clusterfuck for the developer as they take a stab at implementing it, but as the feature is not well-defined they implement it in a way that does not quite do it for the users, and they gets swamped with follow up requests to adjust it. But a user experience clusterfuck, performance issues, or weird bugs are not out of the question.
Right now the forum has a pretty clear hierarchical structure. You have posts, and comments. Comments belong to posts, or to other comments. To render a thread, you get the body of the post + all the comments you can chain up to it. So to get what you want:
We need to define a relationship between posts, so the next week's thread knows where to get the previous thread's comments from. That's not really a biggie, but it means we're altering the database, and for me that automatically takes us beyond the "just a bit of code" territory.
Ok, we can link posts now. We should probably find a way to automate that for the Culture War thread, otherwise we'll have to wait for a mod to show up, and link the threads together (and to let them do that, we need to add that option to the mod interface which is also work).
Ok, the posts are linked, how are we displaying the comments? Are doing "get me the top X comments from the previous thread so this one isn't completely empty, and have them be pushed out by new comments once they arrive"? Don't like it, users will be confused they saw a comment in a thread, but it disappeared after a while. Ok, how about "append all comments from previous thread, no matter what"? A lot clearer, and easier to implement, though I'm going to bet you'll have at least some people thinking "wait, I'm sure I clicked the new thread, why am I seeing old comments here?". Alright... so we can add some border with a "starting here, you are viewing the previous thread's comment" sign.
Gee, I sure hope the comment submission form only needs the unique parent-ID, and does not rely on the post-ID, or that it will be easy to pass both IDs down to the page template without causing mixups.
Finally, are we really really sure this is how we want it to work? We are not going to get anyone asking "wow, this is cool, but what would really be cool, is if it worked in a way that is superficially similar to the end-user, but would rely on completely different assumptions from the data structure / logic side".
Lol. "Checking if everything still works" is it's own task, and best done by a completely different person.
On one hand it's not rocket science, but it's not something you'll put together in 15 minutes either.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link