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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: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05, @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, @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...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday December 06, @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, @08:26PM
Blue theme looks a lot like outlook mail...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 05, @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.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05, @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, @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.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday December 06, @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, @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]
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Touché) by Reziac on Tuesday December 06, @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, @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, @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, @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, @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, @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.