r/Haskell is going dark

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#22

I don’t know if Lemmy is a good idea. The way Lemmy handles images is pretty bad, and that makes it hard to moderate: Allow all admins to purge content · Issue #2976 · LemmyNet/lemmy · GitHub

Last I checked, whenever you upload a image to Lemmy, Lemmy just gives you a url to the image. You don’t even have to publish the post to keep the image uploaded. That, and there isn’t any way to trace the image back to its original post or even user.

A couple of times (that I know of) what happened was one of the main Lemmy instances (lemmy.ml?) was being used as a cdn for csam under the admins’ noses and one of those times got them taken down for a couple of days due to an automated report.

3 Likes
#23

The lobste.rs forum is open source.

#24

Why is the subreddit closure being forced upon users who don’t believe there is anything wrong with the API changes? Reddit is a company after all, and they are entitled to do with their website, app, API, etc. as the see fit.

If anyone is unhappy with the platform for whatever reason, they can resign (if moderator) and/or leave (if regular user) without impacting the rest of us, who either don’t care or completely understand the financial/business point of view of Reddit’s decisions.

TLDR: please reopen the subreddit; if you as an individual want to leave, do so without bringing others unwillingly with you.

8 Likes
#25

Why is the subreddit closure being forced upon users who don’t believe there is anything wrong with the API changes?

You could start your own Haskell-related subreddit, I guess?

#26

Haskell is just a hobby/interest for me, and considering I already participate more actively in other communities, I wouldn’t be able to moderate a hypothetical /r/haskell2 so I don’t see how that’s feasible, although I do believe new subreddits being created will be the most likely outcome in many cases should they continue with a permanent blackout.

I’m not being confrontational about the issue, I just believe that regarding the API pricing reddit can charge however much they want. When you go to a restaurant or shop and find an item too expensive for your taste you don’t boycott them or cause a scene in such a way that you impact other people eating or shopping, you just leave.

#27

By the same argument, can’t the Reddit mods and community do whatever they want with the community they’ve built over the years? Granted, presumably not every Haskell Reddit participant wants it to go dark but it seems like most are content with that policy.

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#28

I mean they are able to do so, as in have the capacity, but I find it ironic they are complaining about imposed changes and then taking a non-consensual action in the form of making the subreddit private.

I don’t presume to know every /r/haskell user’s opinion on this, but, in other subreddits, e.g., /r/embedded or /r/freebsd, the “keep open” option is supported by a non-negligible amount of people, in some cases more than those in favour of a blackout (and that’s discounting the many lurkers who feel indifferent about the whole thing).

1 Like
#29

A point of information may be relevant here. A discussion on the matter was held (because of the blackout you won’t be able to see it unless you’re a subscriber) and there was very little dissent to participation in the blackout. Indeed the top rated comment, in support of the participation, had 138 upvotes.

4 Likes
#30

For comedy purposes, /r/cpp, /r/cprogramming (if I recall correctly), /r/java, /r/python, /r/javascript, and other major languages are also on strike.

/r/clojure, /r/rust, /r/fsharp, /r/elixir, are scabs; i.e, languages that are too fringe (with the exception of /r/rust) to afford a Reddit closure.

So, this shouldn’t be seen as merely a blackout by the /r/Haskell moderators.

While I think people here wouldn’t have objected if /r/Haskell had moved alone, I would be sympathetic if /r/Haskell had done so, but given that everyone’s bombed their reddit interfaces, a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what’s the problem?

3 Likes
#31

Sorry Liamzy, I didn’t want to give the impression this only has to do with /r/haskell, I’m only focusing on it as this is the alternative discussion forum which was displayed when I attempted to access the subredit. I’m also present in #haskell on libera but the type of information/discussion is very different due to the inherent differences between irc and a forum.

Regarding the subreddits that are open/closed there are numerous cases on both sides; that I visit:

  • open: /r/rust, /r/reactjs, /r/kotlin, /r/c_programming, /r/androiddev, and the ones I listed earlier.
  • closed: /r/haskell, /r/javascript, /r/java, /r/linux, /r/math, /r/machinelearning.

To tomjaguarpaw’s point, I don’t visit the subreddit daily, more like a couple times a week, so I didn’t even see it. About votes, as I said, their representation is by definition going to be biased towards people that visit daily and/or are more vocal.

In any case, I don’t want to seem ranting about it. I’m saddened about the closure, and I sincerely hope the subreddit reopens because if communities segregate across many different forums, websites, they will all require a different account and will be isolated from each other.

#32

FWIW, you don’t seem to be ranting to me. You’re entitled (and I hope encouraged) to share your opinion!

#33

From what I have seen, most of the avid/contributing participants were pro-blackout (only suggesting read-only at worst). IIRC, tbe post has been up for like 5 days, and it was quite popular as well. I suspect most of the participants indeed took a look and expressed their opinion via voting.

2 Likes
#34

Thank you Taylor. One of the unintended consequences is that non-subscribers who posted/commented (like myself) can no longer see our own contributions, so re-opening in read-only mode would be useful.

2 Likes
#35

I’m not sure whether this description correctly categorizes the MathOverflow site. Yes, it used to be independently hosted and operated, but in 2013 it integrated into the StackExchange network, and is now largely treated as a topic-specific member site like any other. Yes, they are independently moderated by community, but so is every other SE site. They are also subject to SE staff actions, like any other member site. They do retain a legal right of separation, which no other member site has, but until they exercise it they’re not as separate as you are suggesting. They are currently debating SE rule changes around AI, and how it negatively impacts their ability to do their job, and they are participating in a moderator strike. Quite similar to reddit, actually.

1 Like
#36

Can’t we actually move off reddit once and for all and use this Discourse instead?

The discourse-topic-voting plugin may come in handy to replicate reddit’s link voting model (in a dedicated Links category or something).

#37

The only downside of Discourse for me is that threading is terrible (or rather, non-existent).

3 Likes
#38

Had the same thought but there’s several issues going against Discourse for reddit users.

  • Voting, as you mention, is still an issue even with a plugin that adds the functionality because peoples’ presuppositions about Discourse. That is, they won’t know that the Haskell Discourse has voting because by default Discourse doesn’t have voting. There needs to be a bit of marketing to get people to try it out.
  • Threaded comments. This is a huge feature that I think is what originally made reddit popular. A 1,000 comment thread on reddit is easily readable. A 1,000 reply thread on Discourse is totally unweildy.
    • Here’s an example of a Discourse thread on the Twitter Developers discourse with 1,200 replies. Without an indication of what the “top level” replies are, it feels totally unreadable.
    • There appears to be a Summary view but it isn’t the default and it doesn’t seem to appear on most threads. Not sure if this is a plugin or an out-of-the-box feature.
    • There’s a disourse-post-voting plugin that appears to be under development that helps with some of this, but it’s not ready for prime time. See link below.
  • Somewhat related to the above: the reddit layout (especially the old reddit layout) is far more compact than Discourse, once again making it difficult for high volume usage.

To be clear, I really like Discourse and I personally would love to see it used more. But from a UI/UX perspective, it tries to optimize for different features and functionality than does reddit, and it is a hard sell to get people to change to this UX.

3 Likes
#39

Discourse founder Jeff Atwood’s views on threading.

I settled on the fact that that Discourse and HN/reddit are trying to be two different kind of beasts.

1 Like
#40

I worry that everyone following or supporting the strike is oblivious of the fact that “going dark” is akin to privatizing contents which some of us have offered other Reddit users under Reddit’s Terms of Service. No matter how well intended this privatization is, it happened without the consent of contributors and certainly didn’t give them enough time to back up.

It’s a bit disheartening to see the same mistake done over and again: if you want to call out an injustice, by all means do it, but do not do so by creating another injustice along the way. This is sad because the community is not made up of just moderators, but moderators and contributors, and I see no reason to think of moderators as representing the will of users. The effect of this is that some users like me, who would have happily supported the blackout all other things being equal, now have a dilemma forced down their throat: either accept that their contributions are privatized through a violation of Reddit Terms of Service; or be impatient that Reddit will just force the hands of moderators so that contents are restored.

I wish no one had to face this dilemma, and I hope that @taylorfausak agrees that re-opening – even as read-only is the right thing to do.

5 Likes
#41

Taylor has already committed upthread to bringing it back in read-only mode.

2 Likes