This doesn’t feel to me like a reply to what I said.
I’ve created https://kbin.social/m/haskell which should federate with many Lemmy instances. It already has 96 subscribers. Please do join and participate!
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I think the decisions made by Reddit have been exceedingly poor, and I respect the r/haskell moderators’ decision, but I will mourn r/haskell’s loss.
The gambit the Reddit admins have made is a fairly simple one, and I don’t think it’s entirely incorrect: the value of a social network is the size of its audience. Until people migrate en masse to some other platform with comparable reach, any replacements simply will not function as the public forum that r/haskell was. I know that I, personally, am extremely unlikely to switch to any home-grown, federated replacement because I simply do not expect many other people to, and the value to me of posting things to r/haskell was access to a large community of Haskell developers. (Yes, I recognize this is a “tragedy of the commons” type argument, but it’s a real phenomenon.)
The best thing we have in the meantime is Discourse. I like Discourse, and I think it can be significantly better for free-form discussion and support-oriented Q&A, but I think it is a very poor link aggregator. Reddit-style threaded discussion is valuable, as is the additional signal and crowdsourced curation provided by voting.
If some alternative to Reddit becomes dominant, as Reddit once did relative to Digg, then I would happily switch to it. In the meantime, I think this choice hurts the Haskell community much more than it hurts Reddit-the-business.
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I do think it’s important to note here, as maxigit says, that the mods have been pretty quiet.
Taylor hasn’t said much about how he’s feeling, why he was unwilling to moderate if we re-opened, or under what circumstances if any he’d be willing to re-open after this vote. We can make informed guesses - I imagine for example that he’s upset that reddit’s making his volunteer work harder. But it’s easy to guess wrong, so I try not to do it too much.
And I think this is mostly okay, because (again, I imagine) he’s a busy man and probably also feeling at least a bit frustrated at some of the attacks leveled at him. (I do think some of those have been unfair and unkind, and I’ve tried to push back against some of them.) Like, I think eventually he should say more than he has, but I’m not too upset if it takes him a bit of time.
At the same time, the longer it takes, the more sympathetic I am towards the people who do get frustrated and lash out, who I imagine are also feeling upset and frustrated. I don’t endorse the lashing out, but I’m sympathetic.
Meanwhile I don’t think the other mods have weighed in at all. I don’t know if they’ve been active lately or what their current relationship is with the community.
I predict that any such uproar would have (a) been much smaller; (b) received more push-back from others; and (c) been easier to ignore.
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So far I haven’t seen any opposition to the idea of creating a new sub, not even of the form “that’s your right but I’d prefer you didn’t”. This makes me less reluctant to help create and moderate a replacement sub, than I would have been if I thought I’d upset a bunch of people by doing so.
(I mean, it’s still possible I’ll upset a bunch of people by doing so. Feel free to speak up if that’s you; I’m not necessarily going to treat it as a veto, but I still would rather hear about it in advance.)
I propose an alternate idea: expand the remit of /r/haskellquestions to cover “talking about Haskell in general”, basically like /r/haskell is now. It seems to me this is more likely to succeed, because it already has 6k subscribers and some ongoing activity. (Looks like roughly one post and a handful of comments a day.) And because it’s on reddit, people who are sticking on reddit don’t need to change their habits; there’s not zero tragedy of the commons going on, but I think it’s less than for a new sub or for anything outside of reddit.
(The /r/haskell sidebar links a handful of other related subs; none of them have more than 2k subscribers or a single post in the past two weeks.)
Probably later tonight or tomorrow, I’ll message the mods of that subreddit and see how they feel about the idea.
Taylor, I’m especially interested in your feedback on this. How would you feel about it? Would you be happy having something on /r/haskell telling people to go to /r/haskellquestions?
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I actually think a Haskell subreddit with rules allowing top-level questions (as opposed to quarantining questions in a sticky) but also allowing general talk would be an improvement to what we had! I find “talking shop” about real Haskell with people of different backgrounds and experience levels leads to lots of fun conversations (which is enabled further by Reddit threading - love reading and going down a good Haskell tangent).
The issue with making a new subreddit the new /r/haskell is that the name is not /r/haskell.
In my opinion, when people already use reddit for other things and when they start to learn about haskell they think “huh, I wonder if there’s a haskell subreddit” they will navigate to /r/haskell, not /r/ilovehaskell or /r/haskell_is_fun or anything else other than the plain programming language name (just look at subreddit membership size differences for other languages and their variants to corroborate that this is how people go about it in general), which makes it an uphill battle (which will never be totally won) to make its existence self-evident to people who didn’t know about the subreddit before.
Regarding the below:
I don’t understand how it would be nonsense even in such a case: so what, if it were just a tiny number of people vocal against reddit, why should that affect the rest? That’s what I can’t seem to comprehend, why does what you/whoever think have to affect anyone else’s experience of the platform? Or are you telling me that for example I’m not welcome or that my opinion shouldn’t count because I haven’t been on haskell very long and have participated only a couple times on reddit or IRC (to help others newer to haskell mind you, not even to ask for my benefit)?
That’s what I assume jmcarthur comment meant about leaving, because it’s also what I think: if you don’t like reddit, why didn’t you just close your account/delete it/whatever, but leave the subreddit community intact and pass the moderator mantle to someone who will take it on? For all the complaints about reddit making unwanted changes, it sure is ironic that it is not reddit, but moderators who are imposing their moral choices on other users.
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Yeah, I agree. I’d rather we stay with /r/haskell. But I agree with those saying the community consensus is to close it down, even though I disagree with that consensus. I’ve accepted that, and I’m not trying to convince Taylor to change his mind.
I don’t currently expect /r/haskell to reopen any time soon, so the question is what to do now.
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The Discourse team is adding support for the ActivityPub protocol.
While that doesn’t necessarily imply compatibility with all of the fediverse apps, it would probably meet the needs of users who enjoy consuming content from a single platform.
Could be a nice addition to the Haskell Discourse once it matures a bit.
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I posted there already. The engagement is abysmally low (contrary to the libera IRC move). I’m fine posting on multiple platforms, but what matters in the end is engagement.
So all in all, I think the protest has been an absolute failure:
- no organized effort by the mods to advertise a clear alternative and make it happen, so that we don’t lose engagement
- poorly executed vote on staying read-only that no one can verify
I don’t really think it’s a problem to have many Haskell communities on different platforms. Networking effects will always kick in and end-users decide.
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Rome was not built in a day! Communities grow slowly, like gardens. I am happy that someone with Haskell and its people at heart created this space on kbin.social, please everyone give lemmy and the federation a chance.
This is amazing news, can’t wait for it!
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It’s not clear to me exactly why those who want to close the subreddit want to do so. It’s possibly related to a variety of things
-
concerns about being out of pocket for moderator tools’ API costs
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acting out of solidarity with downtrodden volunteer labour (moderators) and in opposition to the big bad capitalist Reddit
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acting out of offense that Reddit has severely limited the usability of its “power users’” interfaces (old.reddit.com, i.reddit.com, various apps)
What I mean by this is, given that’s it’s not completely clear why the subreddit has closed I think you can be forgiven if you upset a bunch of people by opening a new one.
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I think that a major blow has just been dealt to the whole Haskell community by a bunch of people who fail to see the boundaries of others.
Don’t like Reddit? Stop using it. Tired of modding? Quit. That’s all up to you. Instead the mod powers have been used to impose will on the whole community. That’s a clear abuse in my book.
I believe that to stop the damage the subreddit must be reopened. The people will cast their vote for the best platform by choosing themselves on which to be active.
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No, the Haskell community is not a platform and is not limited to any specific platform, the community consists of people who use Haskell and talk and write about it, and I doubt anyone stopped using Haskell because a certain link sharing website is having trouble.
We’re fine. And it’s also a good idea to keep local copies of papers and blog posts that you care about.
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Losing r/haskell is undeniably a loss of a major Haskell community space.
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We can disagree without resorting to rash judgements of other people’s characters.
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What is worse:
- rash judgement of someone? (where I believe the harshness is actually subjective).
- or non-consensually forcing your opinion/action on someone?
Because it is the moderators that have done the second to us by closing and/or making subreddit read-only, and evasives are given when people are asking to hand off the moderation mantle to someone else.
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I’ve never started a subreddit but I imagine it’s pretty easy. So far there are enough people deploring the closure of /r/haskell that I don’t understand why one of them doesn’t just start /r/haskell2, /r/haskellopen, /r/haskellnew or something. If it would be such a benefit to the community then please help the community and just do it!
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Yes, it’s trivial to create a new subreddit, and there is already an alternative one that remains open, /r/haskellquestions, although it’s mostly dedicated to questions as the name hints.
However, as I said on an earlier post, the problem is that the name is not /r/haskell, which means it’s not easily discoverable; any newcomer isn’t going to randomly guess that since /r/haskell is closed they should navigate to /r/haskellnew. Similarly, existing users subscribed to /r/haskell aren’t notified either that they can migrate to a new subreddit should they wish to do so.
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You’re oversimplifying.
r/haskell was a platform with high engagement and activity. No alternative has been proposed in a timely manner to organize a community move. Now we have a half-dead fediverse, some people being more active on discourse and others just deeply frustrated about how this was handled.
No, we’re not. This has caused real damage. You can see it from the responses here and on the reddit thread.
Actions have consequences. This one was clearly controversial.
I really don’t care about reddit. But I care about engagement. And we lost a big chunk of it for a petty reason.
Even if we were to re-open the existing sub, the damage has been done. It won’t be like it was before. If a new sub opens, it has to build up for years as well.
Was it really worth it?
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