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Is there any way to view what ID user we are?
Mild shitpost, but I'd be interested to see what my 'user ID' is if such a thing exists. I remember seeing that around 50 people were subscribed to the defaults when I joined, but it'd be kinda neat to have an exact number. I'm hoping this is an utterly trivial question for the admins to answer, but if not, please don't feel obliged to waste any time on this :)
That would just see people trying to out-hipster each other.
I've seen more concern from us users over metrics and reputation systems than we need in a nascent community. Why don't people just enjoy the website?
It does seem a bit weird to panic over ensuring a 'correctly diverse' userbase when the userbase is like a week old, running demographic surveys and shit...
The site will initially spread like wildfire in specific communities that are attracted to very specific phrases in the original blog post too.
Like saying that the site won't fall victim to the paradox of intolerance. That statement will basically guarantee the interest and spread of the community in lgbt communities, a crowd of people that are highly communal and connected in the first place. Why? Because it says "Reddit-like online community minus hatespeech". YES PLEASE is the automatic response of pretty much every lgbt person out there barring some odd minority fringes that seem to enjoy receiving hate for some reason.
This in itself is actually a small problem that probably needs to be minimised a bit because the brand image of the site itself externally could quickly become lgbt. That wouldn't of course be a bad thing, but would slow the spread of the site in non-lgbt if it gets described as an lgbt place to people as that will just say "oh it's not for me" to hetero cis people.
The demographics won't be balanced. They won't even be close to balanced. Saying you're going to hit hatespeech hard is an absolute beacon to some crowds and those crowds (on the internet) are very left-leaning, mostly male.
There's no real need for it to be used these days as long as the usernames are unique. There'd be a row ID in the user database, but I wouldn't be surprised if the front end of the site just uses your username as the identifier. I could be wrong though.
I think @jgb wants to know whether they were the 48th user to join the site, or the 49th, or the 50th, or the 51st...
Oh yeah I know, I just meant we're unlikely to ever see user IDs on this site like you do on some older sites where the user ID was the primary identifier. Older sites had /?user=1321 or whatever in the URLs because they had to, but these days with modern routing and friendly URLs being standard, you'd pretty much need admin database access to find your actual user ID.
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
On Slashdot people used to use the IDs (stamped next to each username) as a way to to "win" arguments.
It could add an extra form of unconscious bias.
Beyond curiosity, I can't really see a positive angle.
I don't think it should be a front-facing, globally viewable UI feature by any means.