howrar

This community has been around for a few months now. How do we feel about it? Are things working out? Any plans for further growing the community?

This is one of the topics I’ve been thinking a lot about quite a bit for the past few years (i.e. how to set up a community that values discussions with diverse viewpoints), so I thought I’d share some of my thoughts in relation to what I’m seeing here.

1. I think such a community necessarily needs to be a full self-contained instance, or else you’ll get very little activity. Think about how these discussions usually start. Someone posts an article/meme/question/etc, a few people show up and comment with similar thoughts about it worded in slightly different ways, then another shows up and goes against the grain, everyone dogpiles on them, and that’s when the real discussion starts. Very rarely do people go out of their way to ask “what do you think of X controversial topic?” And even if you do, that only leads to a very high level discussion that very quickly gets stale. If you get discussion in the context of specific events, then these discussions can be grounded in reality and lead to more unique context-dependent takes each time it comes up.

2. Regarding upvotes/downvotes: as stated in the rules, they should be used to measure whether a post/comment is a positive contribution to the discussion rather than the number of people who agree with your viewpoint. I don’t believe there’s a way to actually enforce this with the voting system we currently have, but I also think a relatively simple change can fix it. It will require a bit of coding.

   My proposal is a voting system with two votes: one to say that you agree/disagree, and another to say good/bad contribution. With this system, you can easily see if someone only thinks posts they agree with are good contributions, and you can use that information to calculate a total score that weighs their votes accordingly. It’s also small enough of a change that I think most people won’t have a problem figuring it out.

Thoughts?

Also, thank you Ace for taking the initiative in creating this place. It makes me happy to see that others want to see this change too.

There's many posts here with the purpose of convincing people to support electoral reform. Not so much that's actually actionable. What do we do if we want to change things? For a start, does anyone have information on who's responsible for the election system at each level of government in each of the major cities?

I think it's generally agreed upon that large files that change often do not belong while small files that never change are fine. But there's still a lot of middle ground where the answer is not so clear to me.

So what's your stance on this? Where do you draw the line?

I suspect this is a problem with posts that have extremely long bodies like this one: https://slrpnk.net/comment/8035803

I'm trying to scroll down to the top first comment and inevitably overshoot. When I i try to scroll back up, it suddenly jumps back to the middle of the OP's body.

I was looking up when babies can safely start eating untoasted bread and one of the images led me to this website that sells... stuff? Are they selling me the question? Who knows.

Then if you scroll down to the related products, you can buy a basketball club for $30, down from $15!

I'm guessing this is some phishing website looking to steal credit cards. I also still haven't found an answer to my original question.

Is it possible for posts to show the domain (TLD and SLD) of link posts?

Use case: I don't want to watch videos so I want to avoid clicking YouTube links. I would like to know that they are YouTube videos without having my phone spend the next minute trying to open YouTube.

By metadata, I'm talking about things like text descriptions of a photo/video and where they come from, or an explanation of what a certain binary blob contains, its format, how to use it, etc.

The best solution I have right now is xattrs, but those are dependent on the file system, and there's no guarantee that they will stay when the files get moved, especially if the person moving them is unaware of its existence. The alternative is to keep a plaintext file with this metadata alongside every photo/video/binary/etc, but that would be a huge pain to keep in sync since both files have to be moved together.

So my question to you: do you keep this kind of metadata? If so, how do you manage them?

With the rapid advances we're currently seeing in generative AI, we're also seeing a lot of concern for large scale misinformation. Any individual with sufficient technical knowledge can now spam a forum with lots of organic looking voices and generate photos to back them up. Has anyone given some thought on how we can combat this? If so, how do you think the solution should/could look? How do you personally decide whether you're looking at a trustworthy source of information? Do you think your approach works, or are there still problems with it?

Is there a community meant for anything that doesn't currently fit into the existing communities?