I get that, for sure. Sometimes I’m scrolling through the list of topics and see that I haven’t checked in on the Elon Musk thread for like 327 posts. Or a number of other topics that happens with, and sometimes I think, “Oh yeah, I forgot about that thread. I should catch up.” Or sometimes, I want to post something, and it might take me a bit to figure out, and find, which topic I should post it in.
But…to be honest, the slightly chaotic nature of this system works, I think. It kinda reminds me of earlier days of BBS’s and forums (fora? formapodes?). I kinda like it. You have to have some intention to post something here, and I think that actually helps filter out the fluff.
For threads I am particularly keen on/active in, I set them to notify me when there’s activity. That way it always shows in my notifications view and I don’t have to go hunting for it.
For everything else, I just scroll through recent activity and decide on the fly whether it looks interesting or not. (Or if I’m bored I might just poke my head in anyway.)
YMMV.
Yeah, I hear you. Sometimes I just throw in the towel on those super busy topics and skip to the end to view the most recent comments. There’s always a risk of FOMO there but I’ve learned to cope with it.
I recall that we as a community discussed something like this early on, and I think the idea was eventually abandoned. It wouldn’t be hard from a logistical level to have a #boing like area that has topic restriction limited to a set of writers, but I don’t personally feel that something like that really fits with the site’s ethos and purpose. If someone wants to write long-form stuff, anybody is free to do this and tag it appropriately.
TOP was a message board bolted onto a highly visible and curated blog. The BBS community grew organically from that into its own unique and special place. Despite all of this, the site’s elites never let us forget that we were at best considered tolerated guests. Some were openly hostile to the BBS community, which was in no small part how this place came to be.
This place has always been community first and foremost. A labor of love to allow a bunch of weirdos to talk to one another. It wasn’t a sink meant only to drive engagement and traffic toward something that made money for the elites. I hope this never changes.
So, like, 90 minutes or so? Some of these (Goddam Trump Administration being the biggest one) accumulate posts at an amazing rate. I try to keep up, but sometimes real life gets in the way!
For my sanity I just stopped reading some of the political topics, right after the US election. But there are other topics I’m not interested in. That’s how I cope.
I think creating a new topic is a good way to do this. As a first comment, one can write a short reason or excuse or whatever to explain why. I’ve only started two that have been moderately successful, the 3D Printing thread and the Musical Humor thread.
That first smudge looks exactly like a screen defect about a half inch from the right side of my 2008 monitor, that appeared several years ago. I finally replaced the monitor last week. For a horrible moment, I thought the old monitor had infected the new one . . .
So far, I’ve gotten by well with the bookmark function, as much for when I want to post in a thread as for when I want to catch up with what’s been happening there. That list of my bookmarked threads is so much easier than using the sometimes wonky search function.
Log scale is great for certain visualizations but when I don’t realize I’m looking at a graph in log scale is when things get annoying. “Hey these patterns don’t look all that bad”, flip the switch to linear view, “holy shit.”
I just rewrote the graph plotting stuff for our engineering software product at work, and even the engineers don’t find log scale very intuitive or helpful most of the time. They want the option there but admit it will rarely be used.
The product manager (an engineer) also admitted when he wants pretty graphs for a presentation he’s going to export the data to Excel anyway, so all my work was basically to make the product look a little more professional at a surface level
Same. I stopped “Watching” the T**** administration thread for quite a while, but I picked it back up just because there is so much I miss otherwise. I rarely add new notifications even for some threads I contribute to. It just gets to be too much.
yt shows me lotsa headlines both from MSNBC, PBS, and the big network news channels, and those individuals* on yt I like who do heavy research & know what they’re talkin’ about. I don’t click on many of them these days, and when I do, I gen’ly don’t can’t watch alla way thru. When I see stories in the recommends I do not want to see over and over again in that feed, I tell yt I’m not interested, that I’ve already watched it.
When I need a video palate cleanser/amuse bouche of sorts for my head, I watch funny animal vids, esp from Rufus the Couch Kangaroo, and Cooper the Naked Bubble-Killer Cat at Sphynxnille, and SaveAFox; old cartoons, esp Tex Avery and old the B&Ws; Big Clive; Backyard Racing and the like (wonderful, complicated AF Hot Wheels tracks in backyards); Ozzie bat vids from Megabattie, Batzilla the Bat, and Baby Bats and Buddies - and a few others. They do help.
There’s always a risk of FOMO there but I’ve learned to cope with it.
