I ran a Lighthouse audit for performance and accessibility on a comments page (specifically this one); the results are pretty good on the whole, but there are definitely a couple of things I think ~ could do better.

Performance

IMO the performance of ~ is fine; Chrome thinks that the time to first meaningful paint is a bit high (3.1s on a simulated 3G connection with CPU throttling), but I don't know what you can do about that without doing things like inlining all the CSS, which would make the very first page load faster but hurt every request after that. Maybe minifying the CSS/JS would help? I don't know if the performance benefit would be enough to justify the increase in complexity to handle the minification, and you'd also lose the easy legibility of the source (which I personally really like).

Accessibility

There's some really small text on ~! The Lighthouse audits I ran don't catch it, but the SEO audit does, and it's not hard to see it with your own eyes either. The suggested minimum size for easy reading in that audit is 16px, which is the current size of all post and comment text on desktop, although mobile only gets 14px (I don't know if this is actually a problem, since you probably hold your phone closer to your face than your monitor).

Edit: posting this from my phone - yes, the 14px font on mobile is definitely harder to read than 16px would be. I don't know if that's just me (I have a fairly severe visual impairment), but I would definitely prefer 16px text everywhere, not just on desktop.

There's also a good amount of text that doesn't have a great deal of contrast (even using the default white theme – I'm sure it's much worse with Solarized). This is mostly all the grey text, although Lighthouse also complains about the links when they're on a grey background (especially the "visited" colour, which is much closer to grey than the normal colour).

Some specific examples: The timestamp and "Link" text for each comment is only 10px, which is a bit small for me, especially with the low contrast on "Link". Similarly, the post timestamp is a bit hard to read.

The worst offender by far, though, is the "Comment deleted by author" notice (example). It's tiny and grey and incredibly easy to miss, and is directly relevant to the flow of the conversation, unlike the timestamps. I'd really appreciate it if that could be bumped up to at least as large as usernames are currently displayed.

There are no downvotes (which is a very good idea) and we are sorting by activity anyway. So what if we took the next logical step and got rid of the entire voting system? Please hear me out! :)

(1) Up-voting does not encourage quality postings (see, for instance, https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/data-mining-reveals-how-the-down-vote-leads-to-a-vicious-circle-of-negative-feedback-aad9d49da238 ; yes the article also covers the up-vote).

(2) Anecdotally, up-voting discourages quality postings. I have often been frustrated because well-thought-out comments (by me or by others) got one hundredth of the up-votes of a strategically placed "lol" or something similarly trivial. People upvote things that evoke an emotional response, not things that make them think. (Source lost, unfortunately.)

(3) Up-votes are time-critial. Being the first one to comment often assures getting the most up-votes, which can lead to (2), to "first" posts, and to quick posts instead of well though-out comments.

(4) (Edit!) Up-voting can create an echo-chamber, because quality if measured by popularity.

All in all, voting is just a social media habit without any benefit and with the possibility of a large detrimental effect on posting quality. Old-school Web fora and Usenet worked fine without it and quality was (arguably) superior.

Would you really miss the option to vote? Is it worth the detrimental effects?

Please discuss!

Edit: fixed the link to the article. Thanks!

Wouldn't it be great if you could schedule your watch face by the time of day? If I am at work I want certain complications and if I exercise after work it would be great if another watch face for that purpose appears.

Of course no one likes microtransactions (I feel dirty for typing that), low-effort cash grabs, and all the funny stuff 'early access' games have done. Tell me about things that you're certain everyone but you likes, or maybe not even something you don't like but don't agree with.

What a great way to get rid of these. Hit me with a comment or PM and I'll send you the code. Claim like 5 at a time if you want, there's just so many.

e: If it's still up here, the key probably isn't claimed.

• A bunch of AwesomeNauts YogsCast Packs

• Bezier

• Bomb Defense

• Chainsaw Warrior

• Chime Sharp

• Clusterpuck 99

• Dimension Jump

• Filthy, Stinking Orcs

• Offensive Combat: Redux!

• Painters Guild

• Scanner Sombre

• Team Racing League

• Tiltagon

• Wasted Pizza

That's it! Have fun!

Some suggestions I think would improve navigation a bit:

1.Comment votes. I think comment votes should appear at the bottom of the comment. The reason for that is is to avoid "copycat voting" (I'm sure there must be another term). I think it's a common effect: you see a comment, you see it has 5 votes while the rest you've been reading have 1 or 2, you start being predisposed to see it as a valuable comment even before reading it, you end up voting it too, etc. Similarly to why the top level reply box is at the end of the thread, I think having comment votes at the end of the comment (or even hidden under an expandable menu, but maybe that's too much) would help users reading comments more open-mindedly. I would even argue that putting the user name at the bottom would be a good idea as well, especially since the user base now is small is easy to adscribe more credibility to some user names than others, which is not bad by itself, but might push a type of "authoritative bias".

2.Top level comments count. If we understand top level comments as the main ideas discussed in a thread, maybe it would make sense to show that in the post. Right now, what we get in the submission listing is the title, username, the ~, the tags and the comment number. I wonder how important is having the total comment number shown here. I guess it's an indicator of activity, but maybe it'd be more interesting having the top level comment number, indicating the ramifications of the topic. Total comment count could be maintained as well, or not, or just when entering the submission, etc. New comments could still be shown in the listing. After all, if we are ordering by activity, we care that there is some activity, and total number of comments is not that relevant.

3.Cascading tags. Not so sure about this one, but I though I'd mention it. When marking a comment Off-topic... I think most usually all comments under that one will also be Off-topic. Maybe it'd make sense that from that point on all comments would be marked as off topic automatically, and possibly collapsed. Right now it seems when there is an off topic comment thread, you just keep seeing off topic tags down the line, which is a bit distracting and probably unnecessary since they are almost surely going to be off topic, so it's probably not necessary for user to try and judge that. Maybe, if it makes sense, this would better be done when the tags are more developed.

4.Parent link for context. Thank you for adding the parent link! Much needed. However, wouldnt it be better if when tapping a parent link, the end page would be the parent comment (obviously) plus the comment where you tapped the link? What I mean is, to provide better context, I think it'd be better to show the parent and the comment I was reading, with all other comments under the parent AND above the origin comment collapsed. I don't know if that's clear...

5. Reply - Tag - Vote. Probably a bit nitpicking here, but I think inverting the current order of the Reply and Vote buttons would be a better fit. Since most people are right handed, and the action of voting is (probably?) more common than replying, having the vote button on the right side might be a minor enhancement in usability.

6.Highlighting OP's comments. Right now, OP's comments are marked by "(OP)" next to the username. I think it'd be better to make the indication more evident. For example, displaying OP's username in a different color or marking the comment with a different color (as with new comments in orange or own comments in purple). I would prefer the username color since it's less invasive while still being easy to spot.

Anyway, just some ideas I've had in the last few days, hopefully not too ridiculous or confusingly worded.

EDIT: Sorry for the generic title, I forgot to edit it before sending...

I'm not a native speaker, but from browsing reddit, understand 95% of what I read / hear. I also watch TV Shows exclusively in english. However, when i write a comment or something in english, it always feels like it doesn't really "flow".

How can i, or other non-native speakers improve our writing skills?

I always like to hear peoples stories on their favorite car. Be it one your dad had when you were younger, or that rust bucket you could do anything too without a care in the world. It really is the experiences that make a car so great to some, not the power under the hood.

In short: What was/is your favorite car and how did it earn that title.

Just wondering if anyone else around here plays Factorio. I got it a few weeks ago and am having a wonderful time of wasting hours upon hours building massive spaghetti factories :)

I'd swear that I'm not completely addicted but that would be a lie.

Their twitch page is live and their twitter header has changed, both referencing fallout very heavily. I don't remember how to do links properly, so I'm just gonna throw them in here at the bottom.

https://twitter.com/bethesda
https://www.twitch.tv/bethesda

EDIT: the stream crashed literally as I posted this. Great job bethesda.

Personally, I feel like I'm in between. I started off as a Manufacturing Engineer, and something just didn't feel right. I sort of fell backwards into Health and Safety, and I love the field, but it's yet another job where you've got to be the bad guy. My mission is to have people believe that I really care about their safety, not some arbitrary numbers.

How about you? What's your favorite part of your job? Least favorite?

I've been thinking about messing around with Z80 ASM for a while with the end goal of doing interesting things with one of my old TI calculators. Finally got around to doing some googling, found this guide to the basics, and thought I'd share it for anyone else who might like to read it.

What regrets do you have in your life, minor or major?

Personally, I regret signing up to a new cool website without name changes and NOT just taking the name Scar or Whom, instead making my name long and awkward.