I don’t believe that it’s possible for me to run a poll that everyone will accept. There will always be something it can be accused of.
I believe that the poll results show that there is broad support for staying read-only in order to protest Reddit’s actions. However it’s clearly not unanimous and many people feel strongly that the r/Haskell should reopen regardless of what Reddit does.
ironic how one of the arguments was made for re-opening the reddit to “re-unify” the community, however the discourse is now more active then ever. I think the split occurred when we opened the discourse, but kept the sub reddit open.
But there’s also clearly a 1/3 of users who wish to continue using r/haskell either because they don’t care about the protests or they think the loss of r/haskell is a bigger deal than the reddit drama. That’s not some fringe minority that’s a solid block - the exact sort of situation that raw, majority rules democracy is known to fail.
To be precise, many people want to reopen given what reddit has done/is doing so far. That doesn’t mean we’d want to reopen no matter what.
The problem here is that if we say “as long as a minority wants to keep /r/haskell open then it stays open”, we lose the ability to do collective action.
One can argue about whether this particular collective action is good to do, and one can argue about whether collective action is even a legit sort of thing to try in this kind of situation. I think reasonable people can disagree on both of these questions.
And as long as people do disagree, I accept “we voted and the outcome of the vote is that those of us who want to stay on reddit can stay on reddit, but we have to make a new sub” as a compromise. I don’t like it, but I accept it.
I don’t even understand how the counting happened and many users on the thread seem confused as well.
Even if there is a 2:1 in favor… that seems like a pretty biased decision.
I personally would have expected “overwhelming majority” for any such decision to happen.
Let’s say we suggest to drop stack from ghcup/HLS etc. and get a 2:1 majority. Are we good to go?
Communication is part of our tooling.
I don’t even understand how the counting happened and many users on the thread seem confused as well.
As I understand it the counting happened by looking at the number of upvotes each of Taylor’s comments on that post received.
The poll has left an incredibly sour taste for me. I have no idea how the decision to keep /r/haskell read-only has been taken, considering that:
What a bloody joke!
Is it possible that the highest scoring answer (to stay read only) which received around net 60 votes was actually around 90 upvotes and 30 downvotes?
As of now, which I realize is after the decision has already been made and might not perfectly reflect the vote tallies at the time of the decision, the top taylorfausak comments from most controversial to least controversial are:
Statistically, this seems a bit difficult to reverse engineer. I’m tempted to try at some point, because it seems like an interesting problem, but I have doubts that it will be possible to generate a robust estimate of what the community truly wanted as a whole.
The algorithm that determines the “controversy” score is here. I think the algorithm that determines whether to mark the comment with a cross is here. I’m not sure what the values of the relevant constants actually are, but in the example configuration the minimum total votes is 7 and the upvote-to-downvote ratio is in the range 0.4–0.6.
I think the extremist choice is very Haskelly (“Avoid $ Success At All Costs”), but it’s useful to maintain a presence, as well as to acknowledge that Reddit has declared war on its users and moderators.
TBH, if TaylorFausak and parts of the Haskell community wants to make a stand against Reddit, it’s fine, especially because the subreddit is going to be taken-over eventually and because we’ve seen a welcome burst of activity on this relatively pacific Discourse.
Even if the subreddit is “recovered”, I won’t boycott the subreddit and will use it alongside this Discourse, because the subreddit is good advertising. However, I will acknowledge Reddit’s declaration of war and will be supporting any and all Reddit migration attempts.
Perhaps I’m too pragmatic to be a real Haskeller.
Is an official Lemmy instance up for debate ?
I can see it was mentioned a couple times on Discourse, but quickly dismissed because the way Lemmy handles images makes it easy to abuse and hard to moderate.
Those issues have been addressed recently though, and ultimately it looks like Lemmy could be the closest equivalent to what we had with /r/haskell.
(As an aside, at least some maintainers of popular third party Reddit apps are making a move to Lemmy, and I personally would like to keep supporting them now that Reddit is giving them the finger.)
I don’t understand how, just because reddit isn’t for you anymore, it is somehow not for anyone else either.
I grew to love Haskell through reddit as a student. Haskell gave me a career I love and has provided me with a lot of meaning and joy.
It might sound odd, but the reddit has meant a lot to me at times.
Others will miss that opportunity to find community like I did. It’s very sad 
I’m not sure what is best for the community, however is keeping r/Haskell read-only not a form of cyber squatting ? Afterall nothing stops anyone to create a new haskell sub on reddit with a different name (this is already the case with r/haskellquestions) so it won’t stop people using reddit for Haskell. The only things it does it’s stopping people to use the name r/Haskell.
If the moderators of r/Haskell aren’t happy with the situation why are they not just leaving instead of taking r/Haskell into ranson (unless of course it is a form of protest which is waiting for resolution).
Yes, the vote was to “Stay read-only until some condition (such as setting reasonable prices for API access) is met”. I don’t expect this to happen any time soon myself, which is part of why I voted to reopen, though it’s not clear exactly what the condition is or what counts as reasonable.
(I’d be interested in people who voted for this saying whether they do expect it to be met and when, or whether they were basically voting to stay read-only forever.)
Given the uncertainty of how the votes were counted (as demonstrated in previous posts) I think it’s fair to question that the decision reflects the opinion of the community.
If anyone wants to open the sub under a similar name, please do so and we can petition haskell.org and other resources to point to the new sub (e.g. here https://www.haskell.org/community/).
…and if the “read-only” vote was 100%, there would still be complaints about it not being legitimate e.g. because not everyone voted, and other such nonsense!
…because they’re going to value the opinion of a small rabble of discontents experiencing “Reddit withdrawal” symptoms over a group of individuals who have collectively spent person-decades making r/Haskell the thing said rabble is all clamouring for?
More importantly, why aren’t there any unhappy remarks being directed towards Reddit-the-management appearing here? Or are they blameless in all of this?
In all my years of contributing to r/haskell, I’ve been fully conscious about Reddit being a privately-operated website, able to incur whatever terms and conditions they like, and content with it. It’s bizarre to blame an independent private company for not serving your personal needs. You can obviously just vote with your feet.
The recent changes to Reddit are not detrimental for me as a user at all. I understand that the existent moderators find that it makes their work too difficult, and I appreciate their decision to put r/haskell to read-only mode, because this is better than leaving it unmoderated. Huge thanks to the team and @taylorfausak personally for their prolonged effort! However, given that several people in this thread volunteered to be new moderators, I don’t see a reason to keep r/haskell read-only.
The way the poll was conducted does not sound solid to me: users could vote on multiple items, both up and down, and only some top-level comments were accounted for. If there is anything it demonstrated clearly, it’s that a significant portion of the community would like to carry on with r/haskell fully functional.
Many people have lost something valuable to us. Dismissing our pain this way feels hurtful and disrespectful.
The reason we aren’t ripping into Reddit is because
An analysis of the situation in order to have a greater agreement.
Parties:
In general there is no remuneration between the parties, hence the relation between them depends on trust.
According to Wikipedia, “in April 2023, […] Reddit announced its intentions to charge for its application programming interface […]. The move […] threatened accessibility applications and moderation tools”.
Reddit was not legally bound to permit all accesses to its API, and likewise nor are the moderators bound to refrain from protesting against such changes.
Conclusion:
It is essential to have a calm, friendly and respectful dialog with the moderators. They may feel consternated after years of unpaid work in which there were many risks and responsibilities, nevertheless they are still receptive.
The remaining users may feel bothered too, but it is undeniable that more is impinged on the moderators.
A Lemmy community (or more than one) may be a good option if it protects everyone in case the same problem happens again.
