13steinj's recent activity

  1. Comment on When will there be a group for photographers? in ~tildes

    13steinj
    Link Parent
    Yes, but this kind of voting requires a post of the material, which won't exist as much because of the lack of acceptance to posting that material in the first place.

    Yes, but this kind of voting requires a post of the material, which won't exist as much because of the lack of acceptance to posting that material in the first place.

    1 vote

  2. Comment on When will there be a group for photographers? in ~tildes

    13steinj
    Link Parent
    I know full well that's what he said, but at the same time the feedback loop argument still applies. Which again, is why I think groups should be able to be created, and when deemed unnecessary,...

    I know full well that's what he said, but at the same time the feedback loop argument still applies.

    Which again, is why I think groups should be able to be created, and when deemed unnecessary, merged. Rather than people being wallflowers on the platform.

    5 votes

  3. Comment on When will there be a group for photographers? in ~tildes

    13steinj
    Link Parent
    Right, but the problem is there's a decent chance that the reason why there aren't a lot of photography posts in ~creative is because people are too afraid to do so since they find it off topic....

    Right, but the problem is there's a decent chance that the reason why there aren't a lot of photography posts in ~creative is because people are too afraid to do so since they find it off topic.

    Organically forming groups and subgroups have the problem of an endless feedback loop stopping groups from being created.

    If anything, perhaps arbitrary groups should be able to be created, but if the participation (via some score) falls under some percent for the first X time of its creation of the parent group's score, it becomes merged.

    4 votes

  4. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~tech

    13steinj
    Link Parent
    Not really. Reddit as it was had a separation between private and public code. Everything already public is safe, so then a git diff would drastically minimize the amount of effort needed. I'd...

    Opening sourcing the site again

    As much as I would like this too, this is an insane task for them because they'd basically have to comb through their entire source code making sure there's nothing private, for each individual component in the entire infrastructure... That would at this point take months if not years.

    Not really.

    Reddit as it was had a separation between private and public code. Everything already public is safe, so then a git diff would drastically minimize the amount of effort needed.

    I'd even argue it would take one month tops (3 weeks for manual analysis, 1 week for review).

    1 vote

  5. Comment on When will there be a group for photographers? in ~tildes

    13steinj
    Link Parent
    The problem is I think the current method of community divergence is (intentionally or not) inhibiting the platform. There are a lot of topics that technically fit into something like ~creative or...

    The problem is I think the current method of community divergence is (intentionally or not) inhibiting the platform.

    There are a lot of topics that technically fit into something like ~creative or ~tech, but at the same time just don't.

    Now, someone can spam sub topic related things into the larger topic, but that hurts their cause rather than helps. So people end up sitting and not posting.

    I think topics should be able to "vote" on the creation of subtopics/related topics at minimum, if not just letting people make topics arbitrarily.

    Because the longer it takes for topics to diverge, the less community interaction will occur. When out of alpha, there will be no point in joining if the topic doesn't exist, and in alpha it limits people's posting.

    Hell it's the reason I lurk.

    1 vote

  6. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~tech

    13steinj
    Link
    Okay, yeah, now that's just plain shitty. Operating systems shouldn't intercept user experience. I mean they've been spamming me to use Edge every time I open chrome for a while now, but actually...

    Okay, yeah, now that's just plain shitty. Operating systems shouldn't intercept user experience.

    I mean they've been spamming me to use Edge every time I open chrome for a while now, but actually putting a weak barrier around the install is messed up.

    1 vote

  7. Comment on Unpaid and abused: Moderators speak out against Reddit in ~misc

    13steinj
    Link Parent
    They never were truly open source. It took months to get to a single PR. I had PRs collecting dust for 2 years.

    They never were truly open source. It took months to get to a single PR. I had PRs collecting dust for 2 years.

    3 votes

  8. Comment on Unpaid and abused: Moderators speak out against Reddit in ~misc

    13steinj
    Link Parent
    On the other hand, I stopped caring because of a lack of tooling. When I was a mod on reddit, I modded a single subreddit and I loved it. Over time the community turned to shit and I decided to...

    On the other hand, I stopped caring because of a lack of tooling.

    When I was a mod on reddit, I modded a single subreddit and I loved it. Over time the community turned to shit and I decided to call that out-- and got removed.

    The community died less than a month later, and is perpetually on it's last legs now.

    I decided that instead I would help where I could-- CSS, and then noticed that why stop there when I could help with the system itself-- /r/ModSupport was recently created and I got very, very bored of doing CSS work because I'm not a designer.

    When I found out reddit was open source, I was elated, and started making pulls and implemenations of things moderators wanted left and right.

    According to @agentlame, apparently I became a mod-meta fixture overnight.

    There was even some point when @Deimos pmmed me asking to check in with him or the other admins before making PRs because of the amount that I was doing and (iirc) he didn't want my work to be going to a complete waste.

    The reason I declined, whatever it was, was a mix of stupid and smart. I'll have to really dig through my pms to find it, and I can't do that on mobile (travelling), but whatever it was, it was also the fact that I felt as if I would be limited in what I would be doing that way.

    I did not do what I did for "glory" (as some people strangely though), nor to "stick it to reddit" (as others thought)...I was just bored and in a rut and wanted to improve the platform I cared about.

    Eventually my pull requests started collecting dust, so I stopped in my tracks with my last one, which was a report muting and anonymous conversation system (muting was finished, not the anonymous conversation, the labels weren't hashed because I was still debugging during that gif so I made the hash function an identity function).

    And then six months later reddit stopped being open source.

    Guess it sucks to suck, eh?

    11 votes

  9. Comment on Is there any way to view what ID user we are? in ~tildes

    13steinj
    Link Parent
    Lots of APIs use user ids to facilitate their client side extension abilities. Simpler than using a username generally speaking. Also allows fetching of items by ID, like reddit does via /api/info

    Lots of APIs use user ids to facilitate their client side extension abilities. Simpler than using a username generally speaking. Also allows fetching of items by ID, like reddit does via /api/info

    2 votes

  10. Comment on I feel like XSS is gonna exist in ~test

    13steinj
    Link Parent
    There have been bypasses to CSP in the past, but even disregarding those, not all browsers support CSP (ex IE9, Edge < 14), and some users are locked into these browsers due to improperly placed...

    There have been bypasses to CSP in the past, but even disregarding those, not all browsers support CSP (ex IE9, Edge < 14), and some users are locked into these browsers due to improperly placed restrictions by organizations and other educational institutions.

    And some people are just...well, don't update.

    1 vote

  11. Comment on Daily Tildes discussion - what do we need to change to make comment tags reasonable to re-enable? in ~tildes.official

    13steinj
    Link
    The idea of tags is a perfectly fine one, but regardless of what tags exist, one will always turn into the "this is garbage, here's my downvote" if they directly count torwards one category. I...

    The idea of tags is a perfectly fine one, but regardless of what tags exist, one will always turn into the "this is garbage, here's my downvote" if they directly count torwards one category. I don't think it's avoidable.

    At the same time, I don't think positive-only responses work either. If all responses are positive in nature (vote, tag, or otherwise)... this causes a negative bias torwards new comments, being treated the same as the filth.

    In that sense I like StackOverflow's system of 4 types of values: postive up, negative down, moderator tags (off topic, duplicate, etc, though I don't think these should be restricted to those in power for a general message board), and "approval of submitter" (but this also doesn't work for a general, non question message board).

    Because of that I think a proper solution would be as follows-- have a set of descriptive values (whatever these may be, ex "news", "thought provoking", "funny"), where each tag affects all categories (ex, a "joke" tag subtracts some amount of points from news and thought provoking but adds some to funny).

    From there each category ("news", etc) can be listed and sorted as a page.

    This will mean that the values of everyone elses tags would have to be hidden, though, to not skew anything.

    In regards to a binary vote,

    • if they exist, either count them as torwards all categories or as a separate category that is weighted separately from the rest

    • if they don't, they don't, but this limits the usefulness of "this should be talked about", imo.

    Of course, this will limit groupes like "news" from existing or from the "news" category from being as valid in that group-- because it's all supposed to be news. If people continue to use the tags regardless, it will however cause those posts to be "more newsworthy" than others in ~news.

    7 votes

  12. Comment on I feel like XSS is gonna exist in ~test

    13steinj
    Link Parent
    No yeah of course but it's kinda difficult to disclose something responsibly without trying to throw everything at it. CSP doesn't protect against everything though, especially given the ability...

    No yeah of course but it's kinda difficult to disclose something responsibly without trying to throw everything at it. CSP doesn't protect against everything though, especially given the ability to use direct html tags. I don't know the current filtering method which is why I'm kinda just getting ready to throw everything in one go.

    1 vote