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Well, it's been a bit of time since the last time I posted, and well, I had to think a fair bit on the comments I received. It's become very clear that while I'm still willing to at least help in technical matters, the effort to reforge SN is much higher than I expected. In addition, given the, shall we say, lukewarm response I got to my posts and journal entries, well, I'm clearly not the right person for the job.
I think at this point, it's time to figure out who is going to lead SN going forward. After my de facto stepping down in 2020, the site has, for want of a better word, been a bit listless. At the moment, no one on staff really has the cycles to take that position on. A few people have expressed interest in the position, and I've talked with Matt, who is co-owner of the site about this. By and large, whoever fills the seat will have to figure out what, if anything, needs to change in regards to moderation policy, content, and more.
If you're interested in potentially fulfilling the role, drop me an email at michael -at- casadevall.pro, with the subject of "SN Project Leader", and include the following:
- Who you are
- What you want to do with the site
- How you intend to do it
- Why do you want to get involved
I'll leave this call for candidates open until December 14th, at which point Matt and I will go through, and figure out our short list, I'll talk to editors, and solicit more comments from the community. I'm hoping to announce a successor in early January, and formalize the transition sometime in February, which will be the site's 9th anniversary.
(Score: 5, Informative) by PiMuNu on Monday December 05 2022, @11:59AM (55 children)
Just to say, from what i saw most people were grateful for your intervention and effort. I certainly was (and am).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Kell on Monday December 05 2022, @12:42PM (52 children)
I'll echo this. It's been quieter since The Troubles but the SNR is higher. Running any public service is hard and often unrewarding, but it need not be a thankless task.
Ncommander: Thank you for your hard work on our behalf. Even if this place wraps up, I'll still be glad to have been here for the past 9 years. 9 years! Can you believe it? In comparison, the green site is 25 years old - that might seem like three times as long, but in context we've lasted more than twice as long as fucking Dice's control of /. I've not logged back in since Buck Feta - I haven't needed to. Y'all helped make that happen.
Good Soylentils: We should not let this thing we all created go into the long night. I don't know how, but it's worth fighting for.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Monday December 05 2022, @01:05PM
Indeed. Thanks for all the hard work and good results, Ncommander. The skill, effort, and results are truly appreciated.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by cosurgi on Monday December 05 2022, @01:09PM
Nine years! Incredible. Feels like yesterday to me.
#
#\ @ ? [adom.de] Colonize Mars [kozicki.pl]
#
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 05 2022, @01:48PM (48 children)
I have a thought, and I acknowledge the shortcomings before even describing this, but...
If the Soylent editorial crew were willing to moderate https://old.reddit.com/r/SoylentNews [reddit.com] that would instantly solve the technical hosting issues for zero dollars, but at the costs of:
Loss of control of the moderation system (though there is a decent moderation system in place)
Loss of control of the commercial free configuration (though my own low volume subreddit doesn't seem to ever show sponsored content, of course that could change at any moment, but it hasn't in 10 years so far.)
Discontinuity in the posting history (though the existing Soylent News history could be maintained as long as desired...)
Loss of the domain address access (though soylentnews.org could redirect...)
I had other thoughts, but was just interrupted for 30 minutes and only have a few before going away for hours (demonstrating why I am reluctant to take any position of responsibility in the community...)
Anyway... The idea is hereby floated. Love it, flame it, ignore it, I don't mind. The fact that I was able to claim /r/SoylentNews just now shows that it likely hasn't been considered at all before.
Oh one of the lost thoughts: story selection and publishing could be an area for automation if anyone is so inclined, in fact the existing Soylent subs queue might be retained as a way to feed the subreddit until something less kludgy is created (if that ever happened...)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Monday December 05 2022, @02:21PM (19 children)
The owners of the orange site are even worse than the owners of the green site in regards to suppressing discussion of free and open source software, open standards, and technology policy. Anything positive and/or useful gets flagged and hidden post haste. They go as far as to strip posters of the "subreddits" they have created without pointing to a single TOS violation if they gain too much traction for FOSS and related topics. It is not even in the same category. Seriously a moderated mailing list would be better, but moderation would induce unreasonable delays.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 05 2022, @02:29PM (17 children)
I, personally, have not experienced this, at all... (assuming you are referring to reddit.com as "the orange site.")
As far as my 10 years of (admittedly limited) experience has run, the only moderation or banning I have experienced has been at the hands of the sub-reddit owners. There is some sitewide moderation and banning, but as far as I can see: subreddit owners have the option to ignore that if they choose. Subreddits can also be invitation only, or varying degrees of privately controlled.
I would picture r/SoylentNews as being limited to links posted by the editors, with comments open to members - possibly members only.
As far as reddit quashing of FOSS, I am not a "regular" but I have been in-and-out of various Raspberry Pi, Ubuntu, Gnome, and other FOSS oriented subreddits which seem to be pretty deep with helpful content and community. Maybe I missed an era where FOSS was bashed by the site owners, maybe that era has passed?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday December 06 2022, @03:21AM (16 children)
I got banned from Reddit for several years, having made ONE post. (And this was well before the Great Subreddit Banning.)
What did I post? told someone how to make the New Green Site look and behave like the Old Green Site.
This did little to encourage me to love Reddit.
And even at its best -- I don't want another Reddit. I don't much care for how the interface operates.
Appreciate the floating of the idea, tho.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 06 2022, @03:32AM (15 children)
> banned from Reddit for several years
The whole site? And was it your IP address, or just the one nickname? Because creating a new nickname takes about as long as logging in with an old one... I get the burn, I was banned from /r/LateStageCapitalism for discussing an issue with one of the mods and not agreeing with everything he thought. Their loss, I never bothered to create another nick for that, I feel no need. 6 years later my 10 year old nick is still banned as far as I know.
I'm not a reddit super-fan or anything, I just have found it to be growing some interesting and valuable little niches over the years. The /r/all front page is another thing altogether, and usually not very interesting. The trick is to learn to ignore the noise, which is pretty easy to do in a lot of it.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday December 06 2022, @04:05AM (14 children)
The whole site, yes. And the nick, not the IP address (that changed radically when I moved, and was still banned). Then after some years (I checked once in a long while), I found myself mysteriously unbanned. Yeah, could have done the alt-nick thing, but wasn't finding myself sufficiently attracted to get exercised about it. I think I've made like 25 comments there total, over however-many-years.
It's easier to ignore the noise here, as frankly I think we've got a better S/N ratio.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 06 2022, @11:12AM (13 children)
You must have rubbed a site mod the wrong way... My nick is still banned after 6+ years from a single sub-reddits, I would bet that I could appeal to them if I cared enough and probably get it restored by now but I just don't care enough to bother.
I agree that the S/N is better here than reddit in general, but if you focus specific sub-reddits, particularly those with mods who care even a little, I think the S/N is actually better there. Yes, that is due to censorship (as the good S/N is here too), but... when you are the subreddit mods you get to choose how that looks, at least until you start showing up on /r/all, and there is a mod setting to keep the subreddit off of /r/all and similar high exposure things if that is what you want.
Bottom line, does the community care enough to do the work to maintain the site on an independent platform? If not, there are several options out there that reduce the work, for various prices. IMO, reddit would be a decent community experience for this community as it realistically stands today. It lacks some of the ideals that being independent embodies, but those come at a price that it seems like this community may not be willing to pay.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday December 06 2022, @06:36PM (12 children)
Ya know why I think I was banned? Nothing to do with my one post (which was basically, "Disable javascript, and voila, old Green Site.") I'd also subbed to a political subreddit that was later banned wholesale (but had not posted there. Just the one post, as noted.)
Tells me which way the site mods like to be rubbed, all right.
I'm sure there are good communities there. I'm sure there are good moderators. But I don't have the time or interest to dig them up, and when I see threads where the majority of the posts are "deleted" this does not inspire confidence.
My learned expectation for "r/SN" would be that any comment not in line with The Mods That Be would be deleted.
Also, as others note the interface is not really geared toward conversations, but rather toward drive-by commenting.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 06 2022, @08:12PM (11 children)
>I'd also subbed to a political subreddit that was later banned wholesale
That sounds more likely...
>any comment not in line with The Mods That Be would be deleted.
Their system does lend itself to that, although after a few downvotes comments become visible only when clicked on, so that might actually work as well or better than the current SN system without requiring mod involvement.
Bigger point: I would expect the mods of /r/SN to be the same mods we have here.
>as others note the interface is not really geared toward conversations, but rather toward drive-by commenting.
I don't agree with this, except: this place has the "two minute nanny" which does discourage the drive-bys... Checking here: https://old.reddit.com/wiki/automoderator/full-documentation [reddit.com] they have a body_longer_than criteria, but nothing about timeouts. And... in practice, a lot of posters do make drive-by comments, and the nature of people means that the drive-bys tend to get more upvotes than tl;dr long thought out discussion.
In other words, I see nothing preventing conversations at all - but they also don't "censor" the drive-by comments with timer requirements, etc.
Choices...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday December 07 2022, @12:18AM (10 children)
" I would expect the mods of /r/SN to be the same mods we have here."
Meaning every logged-in user? I thought Reddit was more a set pool of mods.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 07 2022, @03:15AM (9 children)
Hell no. I am the one and only mod of /r/deer (don't laugh, it's a semi-long story). I also control /r/SoylentNews at the moment, but would hand full control over to NC if he would prove control of a reddit username to me.
If you create a subreddit, you are the mod, with the power to invite other mods (something I have never done in practice, so I don't know how a committee of mods works, but I bet it's reasonably manageable.). And, creating a subreddit is about as easy as signing up a new username.
You can recruit mods from your readership if you want, I think that is the common thing.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday December 07 2022, @04:10AM (8 children)
Well, the problem is that mods would be the approved pool, not everyone who cared to log in. And it's too easy to skew an approved pool. If SN's intent was to steer all one way, then you'd be set.
Well, here's an experiment: mirror stories over there, then compare discussions...
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 07 2022, @10:38AM (7 children)
Yeah, I think that would fail miserably until the original SN either died or did a redirect.
It would be possible to run a bot to mirror the comments too, but I can't even keep my Weather Underground station link up at what I would call acceptable uptime ratio for SN...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday December 07 2022, @05:23PM (6 children)
Likely so. I expect most of us are =here= because we prefer =here=, for whatever reasons may be. We've all got our rocking chairs on the porch, and we ain't movin'. :)
So what's the issue with your WU station? just went and looked, had no idea they'd become such a complicated Thing. Back in my day, you had a couple basic instruments and a yellow pad and a pencil...
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 07 2022, @05:48PM (5 children)
Yeah, so, the cheap / easy solution involves hooking the indoor display to a Windoze box via USB. I got that setup in a VirtualBox on our living room multimedia PC (Ubuntu host) and when the power flickers, the PC reboots, then I have to kick off the VM manually... I could automate loading of the VM, but for some reason Windoze won't auto-log me in anymore since its last update, so I would have to go into the VM and login anyway, then there's update roulette where you never know if you'll be able to do all that in 30 seconds or have to wait 3 to 23 minutes for the update to finish before you can finally log in. Given all that, and some nagging trust issues around having all this running in the first place, after a power fail I just manually kick it off when I have the time.
Once it's up, it appears on the Wundermap: https://www.wunderground.com/wundermap [wunderground.com] and they keep a little better history than the Acurite cloud service does - plus, I can check my weather vs the surrounding neighborhood with the single wundermap interface. The history is fun for passing hurricanes and such... at least until the power fails.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday December 07 2022, @06:33PM (4 children)
" when the power flickers, the PC reboots"
Oy. Get the poor thing a UPS. That flickering is hard on the components, aside from being annoying when you have to restart stuff.
Here in the Northern Wastes, the power flickers a lot, but all my PCs are on UPSs, so they never notice. This'un hasn't even had a restart in going-on 14 months. (Also too old to do the update roulette... but last time the Win11 netbookish-thing did an update, it downloaded a whole new monkey... and I'm not sure I want to know what Fedora is doing back there....)
[puts on weather freak hat, goes off, looks at WU map]
Wow, some of these people need to get the weather station away from their house, or out of the sun... I have some really strange microclimates right in my own yard (like, pouring rain out front while dry out back), but I guarantee you it is not 35F at the top of the hill when it's 11F at the bottom and was 0F last night... there's one over on the Jefferson River that was reading 30F all winter, when just up the road I was at -40. Turned out I could see the weather station from streetview, and it was RIGHT NEXT TO the river, which does not freeze over.... ooops!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 07 2022, @07:25PM (3 children)
>Get the poor thing a UPS.
I have had the thought a few times, but since about 1993 I have had at least a dozen UPSs, several of which never experienced a flicker or blackout to serve their purpose before the battery died (which isn't a bad thing). Maybe three of those I tried battery replacements on, with just about universal frustrating / disappointing results - high cost of the compatible battery, high effort to find it (relative to purchase of a new UPS), and maybe psychological but it seemed that the replacement batteries almost universally didn't last as long as the originals. They do make nice portable power supplies to run an electric drill or similar in places too far from an outlet for practical extension cords... I would have pulled the trigger on a new UPS for this arrangement if I had found a reasonably priced LiFePO4 based unit, but so far I haven't. We've been in this house for 9 years, the first 4 years had no power flicker issues, then there were hurricanes in rapid succession, and lately we've been getting a flicker a month or so, I had a similar experience at my first house in Miami.
>That flickering is hard on the components
What really kills (Intel NUCs) is dust-packing in the cooling fans. A lot like the UPS battery replacement, cleaning the fan is a lot of effort and they seem to re-pack with new dust after a clean about 10x faster than when new. This is the 3rd i5 NUC in the media center role, first was already 4+ years old when transplanted here, second died in a massive lightning strike (that a UPS would not likely have helped: strike traveled in on the cable connection, literally shattered the insides of the cable modem, took out just about everything wired to the network. Yes, surge protectors on ALL wired network connections now...) Every time I consider a new NUC I try to talk myself into a fanless model, but it's a hard sell at the price ratio... Did pick up a fanless Celeron N5105 (10W) mini PC recently for about $220, it's no 3D gaming machine, but it plays HD video just fine (as does a RaspPi Zero 2 W for $15 & about 2W), it's a bit sluggish as compared with the i5, not quite ready to be the main media center PC, but unlike a RaspPi it does have enough oomph to drive a (now available @ $150 & down) 2TB USB external SSD, so I _finally_ have my main file backups in a separate location (on the Celeron) from the primary 2TB drive, which is over 10 years old spinning platters and survived that lightning strike.
> I have some really strange microclimates right in my own yard
Yeah, mine is on a pole about 3' above the garage's shingle roof, barely peeking over the crown for sort-of clear wind readings (still can't read wind very well due to surrounding trees...) My temps run lower when cold and higher when hot than most of my neighbors. It does measure rainfall, and that varies a lot by location microclimates around here, which shows on the Wundermap too.
Around me, when they're reporting, most of the stations report fairly consistent temperatures (+/- 5F or less), you can actually see cold fronts pushing through & similar. Location scattering is of course random, but there's generally less than a mile between stations near me.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday December 07 2022, @08:03PM (2 children)
Or why I don't buy expensive UPSs, but rather the $100 CyberPower from Costco (and each one will easily support several PCs). They reliably last about two years, they do the job, and the battery can be replaced, but it's about the same to just get another (often they die just inside the 2-year warranty, and Costco replaces 'em for free). ESR says the problem is nowadays they all overcharge the battery, which prematurely ages it; he has a project going toward a UPS that is better behaved. I can tell you in the old days, before however-it's-now-regulated charging, the batteries lasted ten years or more. But now I consider it a consumable. :(
When I lived out in the desert... my nearest neighbor (quarter mile or so) had a lightning strike on the transformer pole in front of his house, and it rebounded as far as my house (I was very end of the line). It smoked the surge unit plugged into the wall, and killed the UPS plugged into the surge unit (you can do that, but NEVER do it the other way round), but the PCs attached to the UPS survived unscathed.
Hadn't thought to use a UPS as a portable power source for corded equipment, thanks for the idea! Now, to find a mule to lug the durn heavy things...
I haven't had my hands on an Intel NUC but they look like nice units. My PCs tend to be more like Johnny Cash's car...
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 07 2022, @08:28PM (1 child)
>they die just inside the 2-year warranty, and Costco replaces 'em for free
That's the deal, however... We had a Costco membership in Miami, then in Houston, then there was no Costco in Gainesville FL so we got a Sams' Club membership - then they started jacking up the annual fee to the point that we really weren't saving money anymore unless we crammed ourselves with more product from there than we really wanted, so we let it drop - probably 12 years ago now. We're pretty heavy Amazon users now, which saves all kinds of travel _and_ provides an ample supply of cardboard to burn... but it's not a great way to purchase products with big chunks of lead in them.
>a UPS that is better behaved.
That's what I was hoping for... more like a 5 year or longer service life on LiFePO4 cells. That and a smaller form factor, space is a little limited around the HTPC.
>lightning strike
Our "big one" shattered the tallest oak in the yard, guessing 70' tall. Threw 8' to 12' long splinters 40-60' across the yard, one hit the garage and knocked a hole in the hardi-plank siding. It smoked a GFCI outlet in the garage which I replaced almost immediately. It also took out the neighbors' cable TV box. We're both on about an acre, houses about 50' from the struck tree. Then, about 3 days later, a similarly huge strike hit something in the neighbor's backyard, took out the new GFCI I had just installed and the neighbors' new cable TV box. No strikes around us for 2 years since (or 7+ years before) then.
I became a NUC addict shortly after they came out, around 2010 I guess. They are powerful enough and the form factor is the killer feature. I have two on my desk for work right now, but could easily add two more if needed for any reason. Some people get a large format "powerful" desktop and then load it with a bunch of VMs, I normally only need 3 - maybe 4 - machines at a time and I find it a whole lot easier to _not_ deal with the VM headaches (most of the time) and just stack NUCs as needed - 4 NUCs take less space than most desktop machines, VNC is a great way to access desktop OSs in the stack, and whatever you're interacting with the most can get the physical KVM hookup.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday December 07 2022, @11:27PM
Sam's Club is now $45/year for a two-card business membership. I don't do their whatever-they-call-it where you get rebates, because I don't buy enough there to justify it. I do at Costco, tho (you know you've spent too much too often when the store manager literally chases you around with the form for the Executive membership). I lived out in the sticks so long that buying everything in bulk is just how it is, cuz every trip is a PITA. We have both clubs in Billings and nowadays a shorter drive, so I'm thoroughly spoiled. :)
The strike on my neighbor's pole split it down to the transformer and started a fire just above that... looked very strange, wish I'd gone back and got the camera. Had the oversized poles along there due to being a fire department trunk and the wind taking 'em out (every ten years regardless), so it was fairly impressive. Your tree was goin' for a good one too! Holy mackerel.
I have space for however many PCs, but yeah, VM is not usually worth the bother, I just stack up PCs and KVMs. Only VM I run regularly is WinXP on the everyday linux box, because it won't reliably play nice with the network, so I use XP to schlep files. I did eye those NUCs with some envy, tho... just from the sheer number you could pile up. :D
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 05 2022, @03:28PM
One further thought: there may have been a period of time when (corporate sponsored?) anti-FOSS shills trolled reddit and gave it that flavor.
I could be wrong, but I feel that you can do pretty much whatever you choose, in your own subreddit(s).
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2022, @02:37PM (14 children)
Always good to brainstorm new ideas, thanks for the Reddit comments.
My personal experience with Reddit for a special purpose has not been good. I'm part of a college engineering competition community (I'm a judge and mentor). Many years ago (20+?) a traditional web forum was set up for use by students and professionals, it's now full of useful information. While not very pretty, the format of a couple of lines of text for each subject meant that 20+ threads were easily visible on the home page. Just thinking about it, the home page of this forum looks kind of like the Submission Queue page here on SN. That format promoted long discussions, often re-opened when new or related questions were posed in later years, the owners/moderators would make the high volume topics "sticky" at the top of the list. Some of the topics have a couple of hundred replies, going back 15 years.
However, ~5 years ago there was a mass migration of the students to a sub-Reddit for reasons I don't fully understand. There was one "self-appointed moderator" who was a bit of a jerk, but easily ignored. Perhaps the students had thin skins and didn't like his comments? Anyway, the community is now on Reddit.
I hate the Reddit format. Each post takes up a major chunk of real estate and no more than a few topics can be seen at once. There are adverts (that deceptively start with the appearance of a post) stuck in after every 2 or 3 posts. The screen is cluttered with bright colored (and useless) things, there are popups, even to see answers to a post. The whole experience is distracting and the chance of any post being seen after a couple of days is almost nil, so no continuing discussion ever happens. The longest thread I've seen in the past few years has been 15 answers.
Personal peeve--I use a somewhat older version of Firefox, Reddit doesn't even work with that, so I have to open Chrome to view it.
SN VT100 mode (green text on black) forever!! (yes, I have contributed to SN over the years).
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 05 2022, @03:21PM (2 children)
> "self-appointed moderator" who was a bit of a jerk, but easily ignored.
Don't underestimate the ability of a jerk-leader to severely degrade the quality of the community. He has the power to ban users, remove posts, decide what gets stickied, etc.
> There are adverts (that deceptively start with the appearance of a post) stuck in after every 2 or 3 posts.
I really only see those on /r/all and other very high volume subreddits, and while they do look deceptively like a post, they are also pretty easy to mentally filter - most of them have much better thought out and lengthy subject lines than the average post. Price of free hosting, IMO.
> The screen is cluttered with bright colored (and useless) things
The subreddit CSS is under the control of the moderators. It is all too easy to customize it as you describe, so that happens a lot (the MySpace effect, essentially.) It can also stay relatively plain.
> there are popups
Maybe it's the age of my account there, I have never - ever - seen a popup on reddit, anywhere. Or, maybe I have popup blocking turned on in Chrome and it just works 100% there. Either way... And, I do get popups on that same instance of Chrome where they are necessary for my work sites to function. Whatever it is, I haven't touched popup blocking configuration in years...
> the chance of any post being seen after a couple of days is almost nil
The subreddit I have been running for about 10 years now is, admittedly, lower volume than SoylentNews, but... my subreddit's front page has the 25 "top" submissions which span the past 9 days at the moment. Even in the default "hot" sorting, the posts are mostly in chronological order - they range around 10 to 150 upvotes, typically. When I want to find something in /r/Gnome or similar, I'll use Google search, it works pretty well to find specific content.
> no continuing discussion ever happens.
It is rare, I have followed up on reddit posts I found through Google that were 2-3 years old and the posters were shocked to hear from me. So, while it's possible, the "community" at large doesn't generally do it. If that's the kind of thing you want to do, I'll say that it's at least possible in reddit, whereas it's literally impossible in facebook.
> SN VT100 mode (green text on black) forever!! (yes, I have contributed to SN over the years).
I _think_ that's something we might lose on reddit: the ability to customize the CSS on a per-user basis. My Soylent CSS is set to blue, I get quite the shock when it comes up brown. Tried GREEN on black for a while, but it just didn't feel good to me. Maybe a CSS & cookies guru could work out a way for the users to select from a set of CSS styles...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday December 06 2022, @06:40PM (1 child)
I use a Stylish/Stylus prefab called "Soylent News Night Mode Red" -- makes this place absolutely gorgeous.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 06 2022, @08:26PM
Blue theme looks a lot like outlook mail...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 05 2022, @03:30PM (5 children)
One further thought: I specifically browse old.reddit.com, not the new default reddit.com format. I wholeheartedly agree: the new format is.... unpleasant.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2022, @05:48PM (4 children)
> ... old.reddit.com
I'll have to look there, don't recall ever using old Reddit. Thanks for followup comments to my Reddit rant.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 05 2022, @06:59PM (3 children)
Just to reiterate, have a look here: https://old.reddit.com/r/SoylentNews/ [reddit.com]
That's a screen grab of the SN site logo and a copy-paste of about 8 lines of CSS to color the top banner accordingly - then a copy-paste of one of today's stories, comments would be in the comments...
I don't dislike the SN 5 point moderation system, but I don't think it's the be-all end-all solution to easy browsing in the comments.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday December 06 2022, @06:44PM (2 children)
[plaintively] Is there a way to turn it dark??
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 06 2022, @08:21PM (1 child)
There's a thing called Reddit Enhancement Suite, and it has a night mode that I used to use all the time.
Then I decided to review my browser plugins and remove all non-essentials, which included RES - I sort of miss night mode sometimes, but not enough to restore RES - yet.
The subreddit can have a custom (CSS) stylesheet, which most do, I would think with enough tweaking in there you could get whatever theme you want, but it would be a question for the /r/css community whether or not you could easily let your users cookie themselves to their preferred style sheet look and feel: https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003000471-Edit-Stylesheet [reddithelp.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by Reziac on Tuesday December 06 2022, @10:28PM
I was surprised to see there's no default dark mode, since it's been on the main site for a while. Ah, well, I'll just disable color in the browser, and turn it a nice restful grey. :)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday December 06 2022, @03:28AM
Yeah, I don't know what they did to it, but about the time of the last big PHP update, Reddit mostly stopped working in my middle-aged SeaMonkey too. I don't especially care. My main use for it in recent years was finding some jerk had attached my email address to their account (this was, um, taken care of by changing the password on =that= account). I still get random sub-notices because of that, but not enough to get exercised over.
At any rate, tho it's an interesting idea, SN-on-Reddit would pretty much cause me to fade away. Pipedot is still up, we could go there...
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday December 06 2022, @05:14AM (3 children)
I only fairly recently started looking at reddit, and mostly to search for useful tech advice. To me the discussions kind of have a culture of their own, and I'm not kewl enough to sling the lingo (and have no desire to, if that's not obvious by now). There are certainly interesting things there, crazy / funny / whacked out videos.
That said, I mostly browse reddit with Old Opera, and javascript and images OFF. So I don't get anything annoying.
AND, like JoeMerchant said, always old.reddit.com. Many links leave off the "old" so I have to correct that. Trying to figure out if I can force the browser to rewrite www.reddit.com to old.reddit.com.
It'd be interesting to learn more about the mass migration. My hunch is just that: it's basic animal herding instinct, follow the crowd.
I hate Chrome and won't run it. I don't mean to be a shill, but I found and use and pretty much like Vivaldi. Maybe a bit of a learning curve to get everything set right, but that's the thing- you can really customize it, and it keeps getting better (and bigger and bigger and...)
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday December 07 2022, @12:20AM (2 children)
Doesn't Greasemonkey have a URL rewrite function?
Could you redirect it in HOSTS?
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday December 07 2022, @04:42AM (1 child)
Thank you, I don't remember ever hearing of "Greasemonkey". I'll have to look into it.
You've stumped me on the hosts file. My understanding is it's the first stop in DNS- any server name is mapped to an IP address. That will fail when a webserver serves many hostnames under one IP address. IE, the webserver software looks at the packets, sees which of the potentially many websites are being requested, maps the correct html (and php and whatever else) files, and sends them to the requesting client.
I hope that made sense, and of course, if not, I'll try to 'splain better. :)
I tried it, and I still get www.reddit.com, even when directed at the old.reddit.com server's IP address. Again, server software sees www.reddit.com inside the packets and well, so it goes.
Another factor: large sites like reddit have load balancers at the front end. So your request packets go into a sort of distributor machine that sends your packets to one of many actual (virtual is okay) web servers. So, even if old.reddit.com is one physical machine, you probably can't get to it directly.
You'd need a browser plugin that would change the outgoing packets. That may be possible, and maybe with Greasemonkey or some other existing plugin / extension. Problem for me is I'm using "Old Opera" and there were very few plugins made for it. I'll have to do some research...
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday December 07 2022, @06:12AM
Reasonable explainin', thanks :)
search terms:
use greasemonkey to rewrite url
and a bunch of StackOverflow discussions come up.
And I'm getting blocked popups every time I come back to this page. Somethin' wrong here... also as someone else complained, my mod points did not reset tonight (should have happened about 8pm).
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Mykl on Monday December 05 2022, @08:44PM (12 children)
I think a move to Reddit would eliminate the sense of separate community that exists here on SN. I kinda doubt that we'd survive the move.
Besides, I'd then need to accept being a Redditor.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 05 2022, @09:05PM (11 children)
Oh, I get that... however, if you really believe the tagline: "Soylent News is people" then the platform shouldn't really matter, it's the community - starting with the stories and building from there (which is something I've never seen on reddit, but seems like it's not a very hard thing to do...)
And, you'd only be a "real" Redditor if you started reading /r/all and similar mainstream filters which would expose you to the community memes. Remember buck feta? Pepperidge Farm remembers...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Kell on Monday December 05 2022, @09:44PM (10 children)
It's true that the people are soylent news, but part of what makes us work is the fact that we are relatively unfettered in our interactions here. Ironically, that was the source of recent drama: certain types of freedom empower certain types of people to be destructive and obstructive. With a site hosted by a for-profit company, we're just trading the dictates of the green site for some other overlord. I would not make the switch.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 05 2022, @10:29PM (9 children)
So, again, I get the sense of independence that comes from logging into an independently run site. It has been a hook that keeps me coming back as well.
On the other hand, I have been using reddit and moderating a (single, low stress) subreddit since slightly before Beta, and what I have experienced in those years in my little corner of reddit tells me that reddit doesn't bother to be overlord, nor really disruptive at all, of the many thousands of small sub-reddits. That may change at any minute, but after 10 years it seems unlikely to. Reddit hosted forums undeniably lack a feeling of independence, but they also lack hosting headaches and expenses.
Now, if /r/SoylentNews were to blow up to maybe 100x the readership we have peaked at over the last 9 years, then we might start looking back to an independent hosting solution to regain that total control before reddit gets obnoxious with targeted advertising. I doubt that is a likely reality.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday December 07 2022, @12:30AM (8 children)
I think the sense of independence comes from the fact that we are SN, and no other. We are not surrounded by other communities, or other moderation policies, or any corporate anything; we're beholden to no one but ourselves.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 07 2022, @03:26AM (7 children)
I'm pretty sure that moderation policies are pretty much up to the subreddit mod(s). Actually, in 10 years of moderating, I haven't kept up with all their mod guidelines, but they are there for you to read and see if you find anything objectionable.
I think the main gist of their guidelines is: don't leave the garden too un-tended. I think the main way you might get unwanted attention from reddit management would be if you have users abusing each other on a large scale and some start complaining with abuse reports that you ignore. Never been a problem on /r/deer. I did have one user telling stories elsewhere on Reddit of sex with deer and another user suggesting I ban her, I explained that I wouldn't be banning anyone for things they do outside my domain... And nothing further came of that. Otherwise, I remove a couple of T shirts for sale posts a week and maybe ban the posters, dull, boring, the kind of thing you can run for a decade without thinking about it much.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday December 07 2022, @04:17AM (6 children)
Do, a deer, a female deer... ;)
You'd still wind up with a pool of moderators, not the "everyone can play" we have here. And that makes for a different ambience.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 07 2022, @10:47AM (5 children)
Well, everyone "mods" the comments with up/down votes. It's not limited to 5 points, and you don't get the "touche" or whatever labels (though they have badges or something that that I haven't really bothered to understand... I know it started with gold badges which cost money to support the site, then there were free ways to "give silver" then it proliferated and I haven't kept up...)
So, the limited pool of "mods" can ban users, I think they can run the forum private and approve users by hand if they choose - never tried that - and of course they do invitations to the subreddit mod pool, but, like digg before it, every user can up/down votes comments. Usually every user can post stories, but that's not the flavor of SN and I believe that's something subreddit mods can take control of too.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday December 07 2022, @05:26PM (4 children)
Yeah, it's not the up and down votes that are an issue. It's that only the Select have the right to say if your post stays or is deleted.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 07 2022, @05:52PM (3 children)
>It's that only the Select have the right to say if your post stays or is deleted.
Is that any different than how SN runs now? I don't fully understand "the algorithm" but, with just a few net downvotes I believe the posts go invisible, like low rating comments in SN do too.
I suppose there's a lack of karma influence in the reddit rating process, too... for whatever that's worth.
>I expect most of us are =here= because we prefer =here=, for whatever reasons may be. We've all got our rocking chairs on the porch, and we ain't movin'. :)
I get a strong sense of that, it's just an expensive porch in terms of manpower to keep it from collapsing, and we seem to be more rockers than carpenters.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday December 07 2022, @06:16PM (2 children)
I don't know of posts going invisible here; even egregious spam is still there at -1, if you care to look.
And the carpenters are already busy, while the rockers lack carpentry skills anyway... I have nothing to contribute but my appreciation for the carpenters.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 07 2022, @07:04PM (1 child)
Well, that "if you care to look" mode is what I'm calling invisible - as opposed to deleted.
I browse SN at +3 and up, but then I frequently open trees if anything looks interesting.
In reddit, it's more rare that I'll open an invisible (downvoted) thread, but that's because most of reddit is barely worth skimming through in the first place.
I'm a (figurative) carpenter in my day job, a literal carpenter (kitchen remodel) in the evenings, and family time snags big and little chunks of time as well. I get a fair amount of time to rock on the porch, but that's mostly stolen moments that just aren't enough contiguous time to get "real work" done.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday December 07 2022, @07:48PM
Ah. I browse here at 0 (tho at 2 on the Green Site; our S/N is that much better) and have become fairly skilled at judging when to peruse the -1, from whatever it replied to. If I'm skimming in a hurry, I may only look at parent posts. Most days I skim down through threads and posts until either I lose interest or they achieve some predictable stasis. I do find a lot of score 0, and the occasional -1, that I deem worth an upmod (I almost never downmod). So some of what you read at 3 may be a little bit my doing. :)
The ability to build useful or beautiful things is always admirable, and earns you a bit of rocking time. :)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Opportunist on Monday December 05 2022, @02:55PM
The SNR is way better here than on the greener pastures.
Especially during election times.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday December 05 2022, @04:01PM
I thought exactly the same thing but we must be a drop in the ocean compared to all his youtube subscribers.
Thanks NCommander, you're awesome.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday December 06 2022, @09:45PM
Agreed.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org