I’m installing an update to the software running the site, as well as some general OS updates, etc. Expect some downtime, but I’ll try to minimize it as much as possible.
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Update complete. There may be some initial slowness as everything reaches an equilibrium point, but should smooth out pretty quickly. Let me know if you notice any significant issues.
We jumped a few versions this time, here’s the blog post for the latest version:
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We’re still not sure megatopics are ultimately healthy for communities, but we also want to provide reasonable support for communities that feel they “need” longer ongoing topics
Oh fuck off, Jeff.
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A few years ago we ran into a technical limitation where we send down a list of all the post IDs in the topic when you enter the topic
So, um … don’t do that?
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Reading his preachy “you’re holding it wrong” replies are just infuriating. I agree with some of the mega thread criticisms, but I also don’t think saying “well, use chat instead” is a solution.
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in design and also the backend technical stuff, it’s always “we do it this way because we do it this way”
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Megatopics are often users expressing a desire for a chatroom. There’s nothing wrong with the desire for a chatroom, but chat works best in actual chat software, which is designed to host impermanent, rambling, neverending conversations about anything
It seems that he’s explicitly missing the idea that sometimes you don’t want such discussions to be “impermanent”. So things that are said can be referred back to later, or updated with new information, etc.
Though he’d probably just respond with “use a wiki” or something.
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I posted this over at “Well, this is interesting:”
https://twitter.com/volcanoes_nps?prefetchtimestamp=1608582254171
and in the preview I got
First time I’ve seen this. Is this new? It’s just a twitter thread so I’m surprised it happened – usually tweets show up. Maybe I’m just doing something wrong.
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Playing around with it a bit, it looks like that link isn’t to a specific tweet, but to a starting point in an account’s timeline. It seems like it’s not sure how to get a description/image for a link to an account.
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A link to a tweet will have the word /status/ in the URL, like
https://twitter.com/COVID19Tracking/status/1340810037149618177
which would onebox if I weren’t intentionally stopping it
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I wish I could give you more than one like for that.
But since I can’t here’s a GIF that accurately describes my response to Jeff.
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I thought the URL didn’t look quite right.
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I do too, but I have to say I don’t feel like “automatically close any big thread” solves any of them… except for making it so he doesn’t need to worry about solving the problem of handling the big threads.
His assertion that no one new is going to read through a big thread, for instance… yes, it’s a definite problem when a thread gets long, but if the thread is suddenly closed and a new thread opened then you’re pretty likely to have people in the new thread responding to old history that’s now locked away in a separate place. So you’ve solved the issue of people not wanting to read one thread by… making them read two in order to know what’s going on. Yay?
(I also have gone back and read through some pretty long threads before… it can take quite a while, but with the board remembering what message I last read, it doesn’t have to be a matter of reading the whole thing in one massive slog. Though if you want to participate at the same time it can cause some problems.)
Some established communities even take pride in having single topics that are both huge and long lasting.
These communities are dead and dying. They just don’t know it yet because they lack self awareness.
Ok, I don’t think I’m gonna bother reading the rest of that thread.
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Funny, last time I looked at the other place, it was dead but for the zombies, the ads, and the shouting.
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