https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/14kb9y7/rhaskell_will_remain_readonly/
After a week of discussion and voting, I am keeping the r/Haskell sub-Reddit read-only. I am directing people to this Discourse instead.
A question for those who voted âre-openâ & (I assume) would like/prefer to talk Haskell on Reddit:
Is there any interest in a new subreddit? /r/haskell is obviously taken. But, say, /r/haskell2 and /r/haskellers arenât taken.
I think I would be unwilling to create that subreddit myself, but Iâd join it if it existed. I donât really expect it to succeed very well, though my tentative guess is it has a better chance long term than either discourse or kbin.
(Iâd also like to hear how people who voted to stay closed would feel about this. Like, would that feel like a betrayal/defection/something like that, or not? Iâm not saying that someone who wants to create the subreddit should necessarily let a close-voter veto that. But it seems good to hear their perspective regardless.)
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(Also, conditioning on this subreddit getting created, the name should âobviouslyâ be /r/haskell' which would be rendered either /r/haskellprime or /r/haskell_prime.)
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Somebody is going to wrest control of /r/Haskell back anyway. I donât think thereâs any need to come up with a new name for it.
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âŚor the three of you could put the preverbial âbig-people pants onâ, and be the new moderators for r/Haskell - after the veritable âbrow-beatingâ they took from the likes of you and others experiencing âReddit-withdrawl symptomsâ, they would probably even accept your generous offer. As a bonus, the three of you can let the rest of us know how well Redditâs new offerings/alternatives are working for you :-D
But if that all seems too difficult, the Reddit mods youâve all (collectively) been critical of recently would probably almost agree with youâŚ
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The hostility is uncalled for. I am using the âwillâ phrasing because admins will not give moderation powers to anybody else for at least 30 days.
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they would probably even accept your generous offer
I donât believe they would. And in fact, I did previously offer to be a mod. The offer stands, for whatever itâs worth. (Though Iâd be reluctant to mod a new sub, at least in the immediate future, for the same reason Iâd be reluctant to create it.)
the Reddit mods youâve all (collectively) been critical of recently
I disagree that Iâve been critical of the reddit mods recently. Feel free to point at something Iâve said where you thought I was. Itâs certainly possible I could have come across that way. But it wasnât my intent.
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Was /r/haskell a high maintenance place to mod? The people were mostly civil (unlike some sports subs I use lmao) and it didnât get much traffic. Iâd imagine thereâs the usual internet nonsense of scams and offensive content.
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FWIW, I would also be willing to mod. I donât know how hard it is and therefore cannot promise that I can keep up, but it seems like we should be able to keep adding mods until there are enough, right?
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If a group of redditors feels Reddit is worth sticking with and wants to start a subreddit for discussing Haskell, I donât think thereâs much of a case for standing in their way, nor any reasonable means to prevent it. I just think the community, broadly speaking, should carefully consider how much to rely on Reddit in the future.
(N.B.: While I ultimately didnât vote for permanent closure, I have no plans of going back to r/haskell or any successor of it, so my two cents are perhaps somewhat relevant to your question.)
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I donât think itâs that easy, no, though Iâm not sure exactly why. One thing I guess is when you get that many mods people start to disagree about what needs to be done in a given situation and then you get drama. Or maybe you just appoint someone who shouldnât have been appointed and then you get drama. Another thing I guess is that some component of the work scales with size and doesnât really parallelize well.
(I actually am a mod in a sub with lots of us. But thatâs an unusual case and most of us including me basically donât do anything as mods there.)
I canât figure out the best time to submit a subreddit takeover request. On one hand, Taylor doesnât seem to have much Reddit activity outside the subreddit. If the âtop mod of a subredditâ is still active, one takeover process is used, according to the sidebar on /r/RedditRequest. If they arenât, another is used. Itâs hard to decide whether it makes sense to wait even longer and have the subreddit exit peopleâs home pages, just so that we could demonstrate to the Reddit admins that the subreddit is active. One could argue that Taylor has already committed to killing it, so why even wait?
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Canât the sub reddit be rename to lets say âpreStrikeHaskellâ or something, so that people who wants to can restart a r/haskell. People seem to be posting on r/haskellquestions now, which means it will becomes the defacto haskell subs âŚ
Or just open a new one. It is ok to disagree with actions taken, but nobody owns anyone else a name.
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Renaming the subreddit would break all links to posts in it.
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@taylorfausak Sorry, but this âpollâ was not well executed (not a real poll, all sorts of comments floating around etc.) and the result still looks deeply split. I donât understand how you can make a decision based on that. This is not transparent.
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(Mostly off topic: this doesnât have to be the case, since the post id is unique. Short links to posts like https://redd.it/14kb9y7 already donât contain the subreddit name. Right now if you have a full URL and change the subreddit name in it you get a 404, but it could be made so that it redirects to the actual post. I suppose they donât want to do that because then I could link to a post in /r/nsfw and pretend itâs a link to /r/haskell. But if reddit wanted to support renaming subs, they could keep a record of the subâs old names and only redirect if the link is to one of those.
But in any case, I believe reddit doesnât support renaming subs. So it doesnât matter how theyâd do it if they did.)
It wasnât a close call, there were about twice as many votes for staying read-only as for reopening. We can argue about what a better execution would have been (an actual poll would have had advantages and disadvantages compared to what we had), but I donât currently believe it would have changed the results enough to flip a 2:1 margin.
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