I hated discourse at first and now I hate sites that don't use it - LOL

I really like the QT3 incarnation of Discourse. The many tweaks that @clay et al made to the default look ‘n’ feel make a massive, massive difference. I unabashedly like it much better than even XenForo now.

I mean it’s aight

I enjoyed your post, good sir. You could even say, I “liked” it.

Here, @arrendek, have some

Don’t you bring up that demon site, sir!

So I have some thoughts on likes and Discourse.

I do not like infinite scroll and I think it’s a bad design. It makes it incredibly difficult to come back to a thread you’re reading on a mobile device after you switch tabs or apps when that device insist on reloading the page when you return thereby losing your place in the thread.

Having recently returned from a place that has likes I can honestly say that I want them to die in a fire. My perspective on likes is that they become a form of bullying that encourages people to like-brigade.

If someone agrees with something I consider it better to join the conversation. The like button ends up allowing a small number of very vocal posters to create an orthodox echo chamber by doing the speaking for everybody else. Instead of getting a variety of shades of opinions, people just click like and move on.

In my opinion it becomes a way to bully and silence the people who are posting and very conspicuously NOT receiving the likes.

So infinite scroll can DIAF but likes deserve to be shot and then burned. :D

No such thing happens in Discourse in either case. Try it yourself. Position is retained.*

Also w/r/t likes is this because you’re a christian fundamentalist, possibly even a Trump voter, on Broken Forum? That would be … difficult. Not judging you, just an observation about culture. There’s a lot less politics here, and I think the site is better for it.

* caveat: you must be logged in, of course!

I dislike likes, but I like this thread.

DOES NOT COMPUTE ERROR ERROR ERROR

Yes, position is retained. As you scroll through a thread in Discourse the URL actually changes dynamically. So when it reloads, you end up right where you were.

Well I would not describe myself as a Christian fundamentalist because that particular label has certain connotations about doctrine and belief that I am opposed to.

I am however a bible believing confessional/conservative Lutheran and I think most non-religious people would find my religious beliefs to be almost indistinguishable from American Evangelicals or Fundamentalists though I would never call myself either of those terms and I think that in general the communities that do use those terms to describe themselves are getting a lot of subtle but critical things very badly wrong.

But other than one or two people on one or two occasions, I never got any bigotry from people ate BF over religion.

As for being a Trump voter, I would never ever have voted for Trump in a million years for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is that I think he simply is totally unqualified for the job. I do not personally hold any animosity to the average Trump voter and I think the tendency to absolutely tar all Trump voters as irredeemably racist is wrong and counter-productive to boot. But I had very few real political disagreements with people at BF.

Ironically, the thing that made me quit BF was that it almost didn’t matter what people posted over there, there was always a chance that the uber-mind would descend on you and berate you until you just gave up. Basically how you were treated when you showed up and apologized for some remarks you’d made a year earlier. (P.S. If I said anything unkind to you in that thread I heartily apologize though I mostly remember trying to calmly explain that people were still frustrated with you and that it was cool if you wanted to be part of the community but not as cool if you were just there to gather research on Discourse.)

The thread that made me leave BF was actually a thread in which I suggested that because of the insane degree of partisan stratification in the US that we might be on a way way road toward a future dissolution of the country due to a total inability to work together across the partisan divide, and I suggested that people might look back on the Trump candidacy (he hadn’t won yet and I considered it almost an impossibility) and agree that it was the beginning of the end of the United States. This was perhaps an overblown suggestion but several folks took it upon themselves to call me names and tear me a new one.

The nastiness in the No Man’s Sky discussion over there was another example.

In my opinion, the founding principle of BF was the idea that a standard of conversation should be enforced by the owners and moderators of a site that prevents trolls and jerks from dominating the conversation. In reality however it turned out that in Animal Farm style, some animals are more equal than others and the rules and norms I thought applied weren’t real (or perhaps degraded.)

So I’m back here after a three year hiatus because I didn’t know where else to go to post my random thoughts :D

As for infinite scroll, I don’t think it’s working 100% like you guys are suggesting because I have lost my place in a thread. Not sure what to say…I literally had to give up reading a thread because of it. I don’t know what happened but I don’t think it’s as fool proof as you guys think :)

Love this subject header. I feel the same way. Also, it makes life so much easier running the forum. How did I ever put up with vBulletin???

I couldn’t be happier to hear this. You’ve been missed, Mr. Chop.

-Tom

I went back and apologized because I was kind of an asshole in retrospect. It happens.*

BF is certainly an interesting place. 😉

  • It’s heavily political over there
  • the depth of the borderline personal snark allowed (even implicitly encouraged) is … excessive in my view
  • pigeon dating sims, man

None of these choices is wrong, but in combination it’s, uh, a lot. Every place has its own culture, of course.

One of the mistakes I made back in the day was to (correctly) judge that BF is a place where snark battles are glorified, so I responded in kind. But ultimately there are no winners in snark battles, and once you add the significant political bent… it’s just too much, way over the top. When everybody’s a snarky asshole, nobody’s a snarky asshole, sort of thing. I got tired of being an asshole, so I apologized.

Not even birth control works 100% Spoofy. If you can provide more details and specifics I can troubleshoot it, but we go to great lengths to retain position.

(One thing I can think of, if you are browsing backwards (upwards) in a topic full of a lot of images, that is a bit of a worst case scenario because it’s hard to go backwards on height calculations, and it can become especially problematic if the images don’t have dimensions set leading to “bouncing” of height.)

* wumpus was an asshole? don’t look so shocked, damn you

Love Discourse but really do not care about why you left BF or about politics in this thread. Please don’t drag this here.

My apologies. Wumpus asked and I answered :)

I’ll leave it out of this thread.

I could swear I’ve had a similar issue, where, for example, there was a thread I had been reading and keeping up with daily. On my next visit to the site, the thread was unread, as it started me over at the very first post. This happened a few times to me. It was rare, and totally inconsistent, and I can’t prove it.

And of course now that I’m looking for an example to screenshot for my anecdotal evidence, everything is displaying absolutely perfectly. In fact, it hasn’t happened to me at all lately.

And maybe it’s all in my head too. My old computer’s hard drive died again, and I bought a new rig a few weeks ago, but I don’t think that info was stored on the HD anyway. It’s all related to your account and saved on Discourse, right?

In other words, nevermind. I have nothing concrete to add.

I will say though that Discourse has been extremely easy to adjust to, even for an oldster like myself, and in most cases, a pure pleasure to work with.

I think it is worth addressing because in my experience likes work just fine over at BF despite what Spoofy said. And I am not… shall we say… “popular” there. Now those likes absolutely reflect the culture of BF, which you legitimately may not care for, and may disagree with, but that is a very different argument.

Bottom line, if you don’t care for the culture of a site, adding likes is going to amplify that feeling.

(And if you do like the culture of a site, likes will amplify that feeling as well.)

I still find the infinite scrolling awkward. Post number, time, and date don’t stick with me but “top of page 27” is easy. Admittedly some of this might be because I loath the small right hand scroll bar for threads. I would much rather use the normal left hand scroll bar in Firefox that I use in every other site.

I was very comfortable with BF for many years and never thought much about the likes for a long time.

You do the forum thing professionally nowadays and you’ve thought a lot about it, but I honestly believe that likes, upvotes, etc transform the interaction from conversation to conversation+signaling.

When you reply to somebody and actually use words to engage with them it creates conversation. When you upvote/downvote or like/withhold like, you merely perpetuate a simplistic signaling system that is much less nuanced and much lower stakes. It doesn’t add to the conversation, it only layers signaling on top of the conversation and personally I came to see that set of signals as being toxic to the conversation.

I think the effect is subtle but very crappy and I really hope it doesn’t get added here. :P

I think you are reflecting a deeper long term growing dislike of the culture.

It is simplistic to blame cultural problems expressed over years of experience on a single feature, particularly when I have seen that feature amplify positivity and empathy on dozens of other sites. It is “yes, and…” not “or”.

That said, I too would be deeply unhappy if I regularly hung out at BF. Not because they are bad people or anything, but because the culture of the site is just not a good fit for me, personally. Primarily because it is extremely political there, and I am… not.

Can we get Forum Licks activated for the “What have you cooked lately (that is interesting)” thread? They’re like Likes, except they’re completely different.