BU's obnoxious PC thread.

[Buster's Uncle]

I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to find that my own post was the last one before the Great Forum Outage.  And that then and now, I had exactly the same wonderment about what "PC" meant.  I assumed perhaps I should avoid it as Buster's "politically correct" thread, being something like politics in a foul mood.  But no, a Program Counter, er I mean a Post Count thread!  I had forgotten the explanation.

So now I wet, lather, rinse, repeat.  I am additionally surprised that in a Post Count contest, I have a shot at taking the #2 spot.  I've never tried to engage any forum anywhere as a contest of that sort.  I'm just long winded.  If there was a Post Length contest, total number of characters typed, I bet I could put a lot of people under the table.

Agreed.

[bvanevery]

I see what you did there.

But I don't think anyone could conceivably dislodge your #1, so why even go through the motions?

[Buster's Uncle]

I don't think you DID see what I did there - I was agreeing that you're long-winded.

[bvanevery]

I didn't.  That was one of my short posts.  Seriously, if our picture sidebars are much larger than the text we deliver, it's a big waste of screen space.

[Buster's Uncle]

Sure, but I don't feel any obligation to remedy that.  Short posts, if you can manage brevity, actually get read in full.

AC2, BTW, was way faster getting off the ground than I predicted when we got serious about it - but that summer was still slow, and I got post count supremacy locked up forever (largely posting science articles, which are time-consuming to format right and link pics, lousy-as-spam, for lack of any better way to build post content on slow days) by the time activity picked up in the Fall of 2012...  This all really IS just a joke; I got that out of my system as a poison newb in mid-2009...

[bvanevery]

I'm really more ruminating on ideal forum UIs.

Reddit does it wrong, from a community rather than capitalist pig perspective.  You have no way to be a consistently and easily identifiable person on Reddit.  People don't have distinct personal icons for themselves.  Almost no one uses anything resembling their real name, or even a consistent pen name.  People use third party tools to make disposable accounts, either for reasons of personal privacy and fear, or to avoid moderators actually moderating their behavior.  There's no value in you existing on Reddit as, say, Buster's Uncle.  That kind of identity is alien and suppressed.  There are no signatures to shill whatever small amount of stuff you think is relevant to you.  Reddit wants all that screen real estate for their agendas, not yours.  They'll squeeze you into the smallest anonymous package they can get away with.  There is no community on such a basis.  Especially when user counts become larger and larger, the endgame is always noise.

I wonder if the ideal UI would have more of a text flow layout, like a newspaper somehow?  Or maybe there's a small bar and large bar version of your identity.  If you do a one liner, like "Agreed", maybe you just get small bar.  This might incentivize people to type more, to get a larger bar of their stuff, their personal details.

Another way to look at it, is we don't need the full sidebar for every single one of a person's comments.  As long as the most recognizable part of identity, say the personal icon, tracks across all comments, then people can figure out it's the smaller or larger version.  And the smaller version could have a popout to make it temporarily larger on the screen, if someone really feels they need to know.  One of those /[+/] style expansions.  (Dangit I cannot figure out how to escape those characters properly.)

[Buster's Uncle]

Not a bad idea, as such, but too much sugar for the tech nickel it would take.

[bvanevery]

True here, in the present circumstances.  However I have contemplated whole cloth forum server design.  To the point of exercising some due diligence on available piles of open source code out there.  Including checking out the Fediverse and their evolving technical infrastructure.

There is a fundamental big problem though.  Coming up with the tech is hard work and not enough by itself.  You must also have a substantial community that uses the tech.  We both know how much work that is, even if you don't have to manage technical anything at all.

The only way I can see personally justifying the effort, is if I finally make and ship a SMAC-like game.  It makes me money, and then I'm doing the website forum in order to run the gaming business.  Which still has perils because as a one man band, I have to also keep my game alive and kicking.  It's a lot of ambition to take on.

So it's sort of a backburner problem I joust at from time to time, without any serious elbow grease to move forwards on it.  Like if even the Python crowd won't use Python to solve their forum problems, it says something about doability.

I feel the technical world is mostly held hostage to capitalist pigs operating out of Silicon Valley and a few other places.  There are technical trajectories that were possible, but not pursued, because they weren't good for capitalist pigs.

SMAC as a game is semi-exemplar of that precept.  Firaxis never tried to do narrative heavy content again.  They seem to have "learned a lesson", went back to straight historical Civ, and have been milking it various ways ever since.  With each incarnation, the shameless capitalist milking gets more and more obvious.  They have been a corporate stooge outfit for a long time now.

Forum software tailored to actually build communities, and especially the matter of democratic self-governance, instead of command and control businesses, has been on my mind for several years now.  The Reddit moderator revolt made me think heavily about it.  The Fediverse unfortunately doesn't provide an answer, because they have fundamental issues of archival stability.  Can't really have content I make go POOF! because a network of amateur hour servers ceases to function properly.

[Buster's Uncle]

Reddit moderator revolt?  That sounds like there's a story.

[bvanevery]

Yes it was a big story.  Moderators on Reddit work for free.  There's explicit policies against anyone getting paid to do it.  Reddit owners decided to tighten down on third party tools that aided moderation efforts at scale.  They wanted everyone to be forced to use only first party Reddit tools.  So that you'd have to look at their advertizements their way, and also pay fees to use developer APIs.  There's a term for this corporate process and Reddit is definitely going through it.  The 3rd party tools were created in the 1st place exactly because Reddit owners lack competence at designing and implementing the forum management tools needed to function at scale for $0.

Many moderators revolted by making their forums private, refusing to process new posts, converting forums to Not Safe For Work to ruin advertizing revenues, etc.  It was like a general strike.  The labor issues are similar to those of a strike, with the moderator cadre trying to function as something like a union.

I didn't personally black out my r/GamedesignLounge sub, as I was far too tiny to have any traffic at all.  I knew I would not make any difference in the advertizing traffic levels or final outcomes.  I did advocate for solidarity with most of the moderators though.  Certain subs I participated in that were very small, I proposed moral permission to ignore the situation, on the basis of our lack of financial impact.  Like a 4X gaming sub, or a small group of programming language design nerds, we just don't have the audience to affect Reddit's bottom line.

The revolt did succeed in harming Reddit's valuation, which was quite relevant as all their slime tactics were about preparing for an IPO.  There were major media articles about the revolt and its impact.

Reddit reacted by purging moderators.  This wasn't something they could do quickly, as they didn't have a lot of goons to just go in and replace real dedicated people who do actual work.  Imagine if you, BU, were to be sidelined in such circumstances.  You are absolutely right about why you should never trust your community's future to Reddit, no matter how much Green may goad you about its "efficacy".  There is none.  It is unacceptable strategic risk.

Some people decamped Reddit for good.  Some tried to migrate to the Fediverse to find better watering holes.  I researched it and stuck my foot in it slightly, but mostly I saw crickets chirping.  The Fediverse is formative and the infrastructure is unreliable.  It also has strategic threats of Meta trying to coopt it as their own platform.  I concluded that you could try to find a good traditional server website, not the distributed Fediverse per se, and rely on high quality centralization to sustain a community.  If that community actually talked about things you cared about.  I didn't find one, so I stopped trying.

I reacted to Reddit's tactics by minimizing my footprint on that site.  Any sub that I wasn't a seriously dedicated part of, I unsubscribed from.  I have my own r/GamedesignLounge.  I have a big presence on r/birdfeeding and am tight with the moderators there.  I continue my participation in r/4Xgaming, I'm a regular.  I contribute intellectual energy to r/truegaming, one of the few subs with a strong moderator cadre actually forcing quality content to exist.  They don't put up with usual crowd dreck, such posts get removed.  This makes the occasional person mad, but it's quite clear that at million user scale, you must lay down the law about what community standards are.  If you don't, you will not have a community anymore.

That's pretty much it.  There are a few minor subs that are so small, that they're not really affected, and don't get lots of talk.  r/ThePrisoner, r/WarriorTV, a couple other TV show things, r/truevideogaming an offshoot from the strike period that's kept going some.  I specifically ditched some subs whose content was nominally interesting to me, but weren't actually advancing my life or cause in any measurable way.  Gotta have less distraction in front of my eyeballs.