This is neat! Thanks for compiling everything and posting it, @LockeCJ
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This is very cool to know.
I have never really been a gamer (I tried desktop D&D way back in the early 80’s, and certainly no math wiz, but I do find the whole thing fascinating.
So, thank you very much for this.
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Y’know, I’m the exact opposite.
I like the fact that most of what those contributors on TOS would bring are still brung (?) but are now folded into existing topics.
Like Thom Dunn, who would post almost exclusively about music - here you’ll find it in the “What are you listening to” thread or the RIP thread, among others.
Or Carly, who would post mostly gentle fluffy stuff - go to Odd Stuff, Found Randomly or Unicorns instead.
Don’t get me started on Ellsworth Toohey!
There was a lot of doubling-up over there.
I use a laptop to access this site, so I don’t know if there’s a difference with the mobile experience but, on the whole, I’m quite happy that there’s not a new topic every ten minutes.
I have my favourites - HCR, Political 'toons, I won’t name them all, and I have had a couple weeks away from the keyboard, so even those topics are stretching my capability to keep up.
As for contributors - I think the folk here are doing just a splendid job.
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Honestly, I like this place better.
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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.
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My strategy is something like this:
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.
Anyway, that’s my perspective.
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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!
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you knew it was under there.
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I find that it works best to approach it like a buffet. Don’t try to get everything you want all at once, save some stuff for your return trip.
Also, don’t be afraid of making tactical choices.
Imagine what it’s like being the one who created that topic?
For anyone unfamiliar, there’s a bell at the bottom of each topic that you can use to control whether you get notified about it:
I’m just going to borrow something @mindysan33 shared over in my favorite topic:
My wife will ask “Did you hear about the latest thing?” and I’ll reply “No, I’m still a few hundred posts behind…”
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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 . . .
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(Also, thanks for everything you do here.)
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Thanks!
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.
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Me too. I like being able to see the range of numbers on the low and high scale, and this shows it all, but it’s harder to parse.
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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.”
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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 
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