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.
Yes, welcome back!
This forum needs a like button!
22 posts were split to a new topic: Should the back button move you back in the topic, or back to the previous page?
Spoofychop - I do most of my QT3 on a mobile device now and I never have the issues you’re referring to in your first paragraph responses. I mean if you join a conversation late in the game you just grab that bar and insta-pull it down. It’s so easy. Then when you’re done there’s no having to scroll back up a ton of forum texts to get back to baseline to find your next post.
I still find it much less user friendly that every other forum I visit daily. I hate it.
However, I put up with it because I really like the people here and the tone of conversations, etc. ;)
There are a couple of features I really like: quoting replies and the way search works? Unfortunately both are a mess on my tablet right now.
Yup! My thoughts exactly. When you have likes, I think that it honestly does color the conversation because there is an inherent “score” in conversations. I think that a “like” system makes things more confrontational. I think it is a subconscious human thing that is triggered by likes.
Of course, I could have just liked your post too, but that wouldn’t have continued the conversation.
Three things on likes based on my experience:
- They’re actually pretty fun, moment to moment, for the user. Hey, someone liked my post! Yay, I have value!
- Boy do they end up boosting attention-seeking and drive-by posting.
- They absolutely do enforce more ideological purity.
To use a QT3 example I am personally familiar with, would we have had the quality of Civilization V discussion here if the “fuck this game and the AI it rode in on” contingent had a constant barrage of 20+ likes on their posts, and 3-4 people manning the barricades on the other side seeing very little reinforcement? (I’m not saying that’s how the population would necessarily split, but when a popular poster or admin is on one side of the argument, that’s often how it goes.)
I mean, maybe? Or maybe people would have gotten discouraged one by one to see their Internet friends giving Internet high-fives to the people being dicks to them in the thread and bailed on the discussion, and it would have quickly spiraled into a hate-filled circle-jerk about how Jon Shafer eats babies. (He doesn’t. Ribs are more his thing IIRC.)
I’m exaggerating for lulz here, but I’ve seen that cycle play out a whole bunch. It’s not good for conversation, intellectual stimulation, or community. And there are plenty of positive-reinforcement scenarios as well, to be sure. But I’m not convinced that Likes, as fun as they often are, are a net positive for a community.
Not that it matters as long as Tom runs QT3, heh.
All I can tell you is that your fears about liked posts are not born out at HomeTheaterForum.com (where I happen to be a moderator). We certainly have our share of issues but passive aggressive liking or brigaded likes or attention whoring for likes are just not happening.
Take a look at how they are used there, it works very well. Maybe the Q23 culture is different, dunno.