Looks like the site is suggesting I delete my account, so I will go ahead and take its advice.
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@lina @pushcx Ha, I forgot all about that site, years ago I requested an invitation and was told point blank that I wasn't smart enough to join them since I'm not a well known developer but "just a boring tech enthusiast". I didn't realize it was basically a job application...whatever, I stopped visiting the site and forgot it existed until now.
There's definitely space there between "this person is violating the rules" and "this person is so unpleasant to be around I would simply rather not engage with a space where they are welcome".
I've used ublock rules to prevent myself seeing comments from specific folk on lobsters before.
@davidgerard @lina @alina @pushcx filtering the "vibecoding" tag has helped a bit, although they really need a "block this particular douchenozzle" feature
filtering "vibecoding" will at least remove all the simonw posts from the front page but it doesn't remove him from any thread in which he could find a way to proselytize slop
@cap_ybarra @lina @alina @pushcx yeah, they keep escaping containment
@lina Sorry you've experienced this 😞 I've seen the thread, it was really, really disappointing to see "hot take" responses aimed at hijacking the argument and ignoring the points you're making.
That being said, I feel like having downvotes will eventually result in dogpiling/brigading.
So, I think maybe there should be a way to block/mute polite assholes there, after all. I feel like the moderator team there is pretty receptive of feedback, so maybe it is worth creating a support ticket/issue to surface that there are multiple people agreeing with "this feature will improve our mental health and experience on the website"
@nina_kali_nina @pushcx Seeing this immediately after that discussion, I'm clearly not welcome on the site so I deactivated.
@lina @nina_kali_nina @pushcx ok, i thought that place was gonna be better, but clearly is just reddit 2.0, to the core
@keyshooter @pushcx @nina_kali_nina Reddit doesn't tell you to delete your account because some people downvoted you...
@lina@vt.social @nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt @pushcx@ruby.social That message seems so passive aggressive. Gives me a real bad taste in my mouth.
@Starcross @nina_kali_nina @lina @pushcx lobsters has always dealt with social problems by centrism
now, you might notice this involves not actually doing anything and ignoring the people leaving in disgust
Essentially, I don't have the energy to argue with these kinds of people forever, nor am I comfortable seeing them free to reply to me with their terrible takes (which are nonetheless "appealing" to some naive readers without context, plus bring in more people like them).
I'd rather just not use a site/platform with this issue.
Technical arguments are fine, but having people with takes like "'large' communities like yours should not exist" ('large' = my 1600 member Discord server) or "Discord is bad and you can just choose not to use it" (using the word "Wintel" in the same comment, while comparing using Discord to drinking lead in a linked past comment... you know exactly what kind of person this is) is just... ew. Gross.
Looks like the site is suggesting I delete my account, so I will go ahead and take its advice.
@lina If moderation problems are found and ignored, nothing of value was lost.
;~;
@lina my theory: the kind of grump who can't understand the value of modern workflows (discord-like UIs) is ALSO the kind of grump who pines for old-school un-ranked internet discussions (usenet/forums).
I don't use lobste.rs but if these users are the target audience then this incentive structure is a feature because the users may truly believe that "controversial opinions are worth listening to"; the lack of downvotes is therefore not a design consideration but a philosophical one.
@lina what's your issue with "discord is bad and you can choose to not use it"????? It mightve been worded in a way more obnoxious way, but on the face of it, both parts of that statement are true.
Discord is both bad as a company, and as a product (abysmal search, zero discoverability for threads, unacceptable laggy UI) + for specific usecase of a large community: linear text channels break down when there are hundreds of people in them.
You could instead host an instance of discourse or zulip instead, both being way better at discovering previous discussions, and better at segregating discussions to avoid the "it is never my turn to speak" blocker that popolous text channels have, discourse eleminating that one completely due to being asynchronous.
@hjvt @laund If your answer to "Discord is bad" is "use Zulip and Discourse" then you, like apparently quite a few people in that thread, have no idea what normal people use Discord for.
Yes, Discord is bad at the things you'd use those tools for. That is not what most people use Discord for.
I don't know where this straw man that "people use Discord to replace forums and support sites and knowledge bases" came from but I'm really tired of it. Yes, some people use Discord for those things, and yes it's bad at those things. The solution is not to use it for those things. That doesn't mean you get to extrapolate from "Discord is bad for one use case" to "Discord is bad".
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@hjvt @laund I just had a support chat with someone using my software on Discord earlier today. It was efficient and friendly and productive. Because it was real time. It was much faster than it would've been on an asynchronous platform.
Is that information going to get lost in the depths of a random Discord server? No, because I'm either going to file and fix the bug or document whatever needs to be documented on the project documentation, where it belongs.
It also turns out that for ecosystem reasons, it's likely that the vast, vast majority of my users are on Discord, and therefore I'm providing a better, easier support experience for them by myself being on Discord. You may not like that, but I'd rather make things easy for my users than die on the hill of using an alternative platform.
And if you don't like Discord, you're still free to file a GitHub issue and go the asynchronous way. It's just going to take longer because I don't keep GitHub logged in on my phone (among others, for security reasons) so I'm not going to be helping you while having dinner, like I did over Discord.
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@lina What you said about a lack of downvotes makes me wonder if the design accidentally encouraged people to get ratio'd without anyone realising that's what's happening. I'd be curious to see user numbers to see if that's lead to them shedding users but thinking everything is okay because the users still on are engaging with each other.
I do agree 1,600 members in a discord server is a large community, but I at least acknowledge my opinion on that might be skewed due to finding Discord servers with 1,000+ people sensory hell. Do I think they shouldn't exist? Not really, but I'm probably getting too into the weeds on something that is besides the point.
@disorderlyf For contrast, the OBS discord server has 244,000 members right now. Around a thousand is pretty typical for "I opened up a Discord and I do mildly cool stuff / have some online following and people joined and liked it there".
I'm currently in ~6 servers with that order of magnitude users which are not project oriented, just personal/group/community spaces of some sort. It's not at all on the upper end. It's just what a successful mostly-open-invite community of people with similar interests looks like.
Now obviously they aren't small either, but saying that size is too large to be viable and should not exist (and even further, arguing down thread that should they exist, communities that size should be managed democratically with a nonprofit or whatever controlling it) is just so wildly out of touch it's not even funny.
@lina Yeah...my definition is definitely skewed then...
244 THOUSAND?! Fuck, I have so much more respect for the engineers at Discord now.
Still, I never said I think groups that big shouldn't exist. At most, I wonder if a community that large would be better served with an in-house solution instead of Discord. You'd know more about that than I would id you moderate a server that large.
@disorderlyf Well, for one, I don't think the OBS project can afford to spend time and resources and money on building out a custom solution (and they wouldn't get much gain out of it). The OBS discord is huge because... OBS is popular *and* the vast majority of OBS users already use Discord.
They do, however, have quite a bit of automation around their Discord to manage it. That's the beauty of these things, you can build that out gradually as the communty grows, without having to require that people sign up for a different service or committing to manage and administer and host all of it yourself.
The calculus for funding stuff like this is quite skewed. My personal Discord server actually has one more boost than the OBS discord, which means people are technically paying slightly more to "directly" sponsor my Discord than OBS, despite the 3 orders of magnitude difference in size (this is because there's incentive to boost to a point, but not much beyond that, regardless of server size). In practice, what happens is people paying for Nitro in general subsidize large servers like that proportional to user count, in a way that would not work if you outright asked them to pay to access it directly.
@lina hot take: you should be able to own all replies to your messages and hide them for everyone
@Profpatsch The Bluesky Way. Sometimes it's really nice, ngl.
@lina oh so not so hot take
@lina i mean trolls will be trolls and haters they wanna be right and they like to win arguments they’re babies.
i used to be on forums with lots of members of which only few were active, i lurk on resetera where many are active, Discord has taken the space previously massively occupied by forums, and should not be mistaken for an IM app.
They’re just farts not worthy of your attention.
@h4890@alive.bar @lina@vt.social @pushcx@ruby.social sweety, where the fuck do you think you are that y-combinator VC bros will seem leftist in comparison?
@magic_smoke This is a blatant alt-right provocateur using a Chinese instance for refuge while spouting as much racist and homophobic vitriol as possible. Block, report, and do not engage.
