One of the /r/haskellquestions mods got back to me; they were speaking only for themself, not the other mod, but it seems they’d be on board with expanding the remit of the sub if and only if Taylor wanted that to happen, which I don’t currently expect. (I wouldn’t be shocked if Taylor had no objection, but I don’t expect him to actively desire it.)
I’m not sure how I feel about reopening /r/haskell through a reddit request. I’d prefer to respect the community decision - but it’s hard to do that when the decision included a reopen condition and we don’t know what that condition is. I think that I’d be unwilling to make that request myself, but if it does get forcibly reopened I’m not going to refuse to be there.
I don’t think this is an abuse of power, but I do wish this had been handled differently. I am interested to hear what if anything the foundation says.
On a practical note, ignoring whether or not it’s a good idea: I don’t think it’s obvious that a reddit request will be successful any time soon. In theory the policy is
Subreddits are considered eligible in the event that none of its mods have been active anywhere on reddit in the past 30 days. Anywhere on Reddit means anywhere! Solely logging in does not count towards activity.
So e.g. the Hask anything posted yesterday maybe counts as activity. (Based on timestamps I think it was automated, so maybe not.) The “will remain read-only” post from four days ago certainly does. And this is just Taylor’s activity, I haven’t looked at the other mods.
But in practice, I don’t know what to expect. I don’t particularly expect reddit to adhere to their stated policies, maybe they’d grant a request sooner than they would normally. (Note: this seems likely to stir up even more bad feelings.) But also I assume they’re kinda busy right now and might be delayed in responding to these requests.
I’m not opposed to resigning as moderator and appointing a new one. I appreciate those who have volunteered in this thread. However the Haskell Foundation has reached out to me to discuss this situation. I’m waiting to meet with them before doing anything like that.
I think we shouldn’t be too quick with judgement of intention. Social media has recently degraded massively with various odd agendas. I can understand that people are more than a little upset about it.
I think the Libera IRC migration was an excellent demonstration on how an entire network can migrate in days to an alternative if it’s done with high confidence and swift technical solutions that are on-par with the original. It was marketed and communicated properly.
I don’t think the Libera migration is comparable. That migration was (for the average user) as easy as pointing their IRC client at a new server (and possibly reserving a nick). It was a painless migration, not only due to the community, but because there was no meaningful change in user experience.
For migrating away from reddit, it’s not as simple as just going to a new URL, since every new platform will have a different user experience and thus the community that were “happy” with the reddit experience will fragment based on what features they considered most important.
I think the main reason the migration from freenode to libera was so easy is that IRC is federated and a rich history of open source tools. That makes it easy for people to set up new servers that are exactly the same as the old servers.
One big difference between IRC and Reddit is that Reddit is asynchronous and it persists information. So it is extra challenging to migrate to a new server and take all existing information with us. That ties into one of the reasons I’ve chosen Kbin over Lemmy. The main kbin developer aspires to support easy migrations.
I would only prefer Haskell Foundation re-seizing /r/Haskell if someone manages to successfully seize /r/Haskell.
I think the taylorfausak vote was sincere, and represents the will of the community, but there’s obviously a pragmatic reason that this vote might not be respected.
I would much rather wait for someone to try to seize the Reddit (and I wouldn’t encourage this) before doing anything else, as well as for taylorfausak / Haskell Foundation talks.
Haskell Foundation, likewise, could not be at war with Reddit (what if Reddit were to switch to Servant? ), but it’d restore service on the Reddit platform.
Won’t the location of that poll skew results? I’d wager that there’s a fairly strong correlation between thinking closing r/haskell is destructive and having a twitter account.
Since I have no Twitter account (and no desire to get one), not only can I not participate in this poll, I cannot even see the question or the results. The Reddit poll may have been nontransparent, but at least it could include everyone with a stake in the results!
Twitter has made some rather controversial decisions in the past year, similar to the ones reddit has made. If reddit’s current direction bothers someone enough that they think killing off r/haskell is a good idea, I’d have expected them to have left twitter months ago (if they ever had a twitter account).
If, like me, you’d prefer communities use more open platforms that are managed by the stakeholders (like this discourse), you’re probably not on Twitter (although you might be part of the fediverse if that’s your thing).
It does seem silly to me that you can prefer open communities and use that as a motivation to forcibly kill closed communities people actually use isn’t the open thing to do to live and let live?
I’m very much glad that Discourse is more active than ever, since we’ve now lost one of the most active parts of the Haskell community, and it will help mitigate the damage if one of the less active parts can step up a little. But the fact remains that Discourse even in its “more active than ever” state has only a fraction of the activity that /r/haskell had on a slow day.
yeah, I changed my mind, unification of communities is a dubious goal to pursue anyway. The internet is ruled by niches and trying to shoehorn everyone into whatever platform is trending this decade, will only shave off those on the peripheries. If peeps value the haskell sub despite being abused by reddit staff, let them be.
Is all that activity good, though? The actual reason I’ve used Discourse much less is because I feel that Discourse posting expects a much higher quality than /r/Haskell posting.
I think it’s part of the platform; Reddit has a relatively low median of quality when it comes to post quality (attracts cheap asides and bon mots), whereas this Discourse is primarily an artifact of the Haskell community and follows Haskell averages and medians.
That is ironically a reason that a /r/Haskell-like platform is useful; i.e, it’s a way to dump lower quality posts that the Haskell community would only tolerate, not enjoy.
I think it would be easy to mix up “low quality” and “low barrier for entry” here, but I think that would be a mistake. E.g. the monthly Hask anything have a low barrier for entry, in that I don’t feel the need to do lots of research and try exhaustively to solve my problem and think of a descriptive title before I post to them. And I think you get some high-quality things there that wouldn’t have been posted to discourse or even as a reddit submission, so I think it’s good to have a space like that.
), but it’d restore service on the Reddit platform.
isn’t the open thing to do to live and let live?