English with a limitation to ASCII. There are many words in written English or topics that are not in ASCII, though. Subreply also disallows non-ASCII names with "First name should use English alphabet".
Really, as long as other people make text-only social networks for other languages, maybe that's a good thing. I'm not sure that having all languages on one social network really buys the user anything (esp. since they can switch to other social networks for other conversations).
It buys the company running the social network something, if they're trying to have literally billions of users. But I'm not sure that's a good thing for the users, either.
So if I want to post something in a combination of English and Hungarian and German, for my fairly large set of friends who speak all three, which network should I use?
So... even if it's English-only, I can't quickly refer to a price in £ or € or ¥? Or that it's 90°F out? I can't talk about my fiancée? I can't even use “proper quotes”?
Yikes.
These days, talking about the "benefits" of ASCII-only is like talking about the "benefits" of HTTP over HTTPS, or the benefits of dial-up as opposed to broadband.
No thanks. It's exclusionary and for zero good technical reason. For every reasonable programming language, there are functions to do everything in UTF-8 that you can do in ASCII, with about the same complexity.
In 2020, why are you going out of your way to prevent people from typing the honest-to-goodness useful characters they want to communicate with? In English?! Where exactly does UTF-8 not work, that this site does?
I agree with the overall sentiment of your comment but..
> It's exclusionary and for zero good technical reason. For every reasonable programming language, there are functions to do everything in UTF-8 that you can do in ASCII, with about the same complexity.
At minimum, unicode does come with a lot of complexity in implementation, and a lot of potential vulnerabilities due to that complexity.
Not saying that excuses all websites, modern DBs handle unicode just fine after all, and the browser takes care of the rendering - (although some might crash your computer), and there are usually builtins for serverside web languages to help you sanitise strings... still, things would be way simpler with any fixed word <8bit encoding without glyph manipulation builtin. So yeah, it's complex, but it's usually worth it.
Unicode includes a lot of features that aren't universally desirable in applications that handle text. "Zalgo" text (many stacked combining subscript and superscript characters) can break out of the box it's contained in. Emoji characters render as distracting full-color icons that are easily confused for UI. Directional overrides let you plop an "everything after this should be printed backwards" control character into any string you control, providing endless opportunities to break UI and confuse other users, as in https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/2014/01/the-rtlo-me...
IMO websites like this that challenge the assumption that all modern software is obligated to support all of Unicode are a valuable contribution to the world, if only because they might inspire the creation of a better, more well-scoped character set.
> IMO websites like this that challenge the assumption that all modern software is obligated to support all of Unicode are a valuable contribution to the world, if only because they might inspire the creation of a better, more well-scoped character set.
Oh God no.
We do not need any more character sets.
Most of what you mention can be fixed with a font, and the LTR-override stuff is in the realm of proper escaping which all web apps everywhere in the world need to do at all times absolutely goddamned regardless.
It's genuinely pretty tricky. There seems to be a valid use case in filenames if it needs to include both an English and Arabic or Hebrew component, for example. Which, if you work with bilingual documents between countries, is not unusual.
It's part of a broader question of visual strings having multiple unexpected Unicode representations, including Cyrillic letters masquerading as Latin, etc.
I've never heard of any solution, except for when a text component is supposed to be machine-interpretable (e.g. a file extension or domain), for the computer to display its interpretation in a special way (via icon, showing the extracted extension below the name, bolding the domain, etc.).
They're not great solutions, but there don't seem to really be any alternatives either.
I don’t know if you use Android based phones. It is common for these devices to practically never get updates. I think there are a lot of users stuck on older versions of Unicode?
I don't think it was a technical decision. It sounds like a stylistic choice, I suspect in the sentiment of "everyone on the platform should be able to understand each other, no one should be locked off from interesting conversations due to a language barrier", and from there they selected the lowest common denominator language.
To play devil's advocate, I don't think your exampled limitations are meaningful handicaps. Money can be discussed as GBP or EUR. With context it's easy to understand 90F as temperature, and unicode quotes are hardly a compelling restriction.
MacBooks sold in the UK have a £ sign on them, where a # is found on a US keyboard.
So in the country the English language originated in, you're not allowed to use a character on the default keyboard. (And that's just one -- the € is on there too, among others.)
We're not talking obscure key combos, we're talking characters in use everywhere you go every day. Would you really appreciate not being able to use the $ character on a forum? Every time you type a comment about a price, a key on your keyboard doesn't work, or the comment is rejected for an invalid character, or the character is silently deleted? Forget about it.
It is, as you and everybody you know seems to have worked out, not really worth the effort, unless you are amused in just the right way by such things.
(I did start the French novel influenced by it, but my decades-rusty high school French comprehension was not up to the task...)
> Using the term "extended ASCII" on its own is sometimes criticized, because it can be mistakenly interpreted to mean that the ASCII standard has been updated to include more than 128 characters or that the term unambiguously identifies a single encoding, neither of which is the case.
totally agree with you. i went back and saw that the author wanted a english-only forum. so yes, the service is english only and ascii works well in that case.
> I can't quickly refer to a price in £ or € or ¥? Or that it's 90°F out? I can't talk about my fiancée? I can't even use “proper quotes”?
Those are all totally argument-for-the-sake-of-argument nit-picks, in my opinion.
To be honest, I rarely enough need to refer to UK pounds, Euro, or Yen - that I'd much more likely just type it out like that instead of try to remember/experiment what the magic key combination to produce them properly is. There is no a single English speaker in the world that wouldn't understand "fiancee" - even with non "proper" quotes around it.
> In 2020, why are you going out of your way to prevent people from ...
That argument seems to me to inevitable end with some combination of 4chan-ish image boards (because "people want to communicate in memes") or Snapchat-ish 100% video content (because "people want to communicate in video"). If you want those things - go use those things.
The OP is trying something different. You call it "exclusionary", and claim it's a decision based on zero good technical reasons. I suspect it's better described as "intentionally constrained" and a social experiment.
(And thinking bigger picture, there are totally "benefits" to using http and dial-up or slower bandwidth in some places. I have a pile of ESP32/LoRaWAN boards sitting here. If I want to maximise the range the LoRa radios can achieve, I'm looking at 27kbps or so throughput. If I want to use these on 433MHz where I live, I can't legally operate them at more than 1% duty cycle (due to .au restriction on the 433MHz ISM band and digital transmissions). I don't have enough CPU to do TLS, I don't have much more than about 255 bits per second of bandwidth. I could _probably_ use the OP's software under those limitations, and build a mesh based messaging network that'd work for anyone within ~ 3-20km of you. Totally niche application, but also possibly useful. Imagine a pocket sized battery powered non cellular non wifi multi mile range comms device that'll mesh with the ones your friends are carrying - at a festival where cellular is crushed or not available. Text messaging style social network gadgets for your camp at Burningman, for less then $40 per user? I'd build that...)
> To be honest, I rarely enough need to refer to UK pounds, Euro, or Yen - that I'd much more likely just type it out like that instead of try to remember/experiment what the magic key combination to produce them properly is.
The description says 'english only', not 'US only'. There are quite a few english speaking people all over the world. Not to mention that Britain, which I'd consider pretty english, definitely needs the pound sign quite often. And European keyboards produce the €-sign with ease, I even have it explicitly marked.
I can see your point about intensional constraints and social experiments, but I fully disagree with your point that a lack of UTF-8 is a 'nit-pick' or that is is unneeded for english conversation. You can work around it, sure, but that does not make it great.
> That argument seems to me to inevitable end with some combination of 4chan-ish image boards (because "people want to communicate in memes") or Snapchat-ish 100% video content (because "people want to communicate in video"). If you want those things - go use those things.
Including images or videos is a feature with quite some overhead, while romanizing UTF-8 input is putting in extra work just to disallow it. So this goes in quite a different direction.
Oops! I made an account and logged out from within Settings so I could read over more of the about page, but I got stuck with Internal Server Error on the whole site. I deleted the "identity" cookie from site storage, which was an empty string after logging out. I logged back in and it seems to be working as normal. Other than that, I really like the vibe of Subreply, nice work.
True, but my terminal, web browser, phone, and text editor don't render base64-encoded images in-line, nor is base64 encoding part of the Unicode spec. Emojis behave much more like text than like images.
I've been trying to make something along those lines at podaero.com, and I'm actually trying to get HN users to join some of the small groups... see here if interested https://podaero.com/info/hacker-pod
I did try signing up. The second I ran into the activity requirement quota I quickly got out of there. That's a huge red flag for me, why is there a quota imposed on me? Are you paying users or something? Why expect free work to be done?
I'm experimenting with it and I might get rid of it. It's mostly just to try to keep the group active, because it's a small group and if the activity level dies out, the group dies out.
But thanks for the feedback, I'm making a note of it.
I once watched a livejournal group die in < 24 hours because the mod suddenly decided it was too dead and put in a rule saying anyone who didn't keep up a certain level of posting would be evicted. the thing is, it really didn't matter if no one posted much; posts were aggregated with all the other groups and journals people followed, so when someone did post something it was seen and the large lulls between posts didn't bother anyone. the minute the new rule was announced there was a general stampede for the door and the mod left there saying "but I was only trying to revive the group!"
my general takeaway from that was that people might get annoyed when you tell them what they are not allowed to do on your site, but most of them will roll their eyes and put up with it. if you tell them what they have to do they will simply drop the site and never look back.
I think in this scenario, where some sort of rule is imposed upon a group that's already been established, people would be justifiably pissed off.
I do my best to make the activity requirements clear upfront, so the only people who will be upset are those who choose not to sign up anyway. For me, the far bigger challenge is learning how to define these "rules" in a way that makes the group sustainable over the long run - which is to the benefit of everyone involved. While the idea of having to post once every 25 days may seem unnecessary, if 100 people followed it to a tee, you're going to have a group that remains active indefinitely.
I do see your point, and I agree that if any sorts of hard rules are to be imposed upon a discussion, it needs to be done tactfully.
I just signed up for your hackernews pod. Here is some feedback, if you want it:
1. Why is there a minimum commitment to post? It makes it more difficult to overcome the inertia required to sign up in the first place.
2. Why do I need to write an intro before I can see any content? Without seeing any content, I don't know if it's worth spending any time writing up an intro. This really rubbed me the wrong way. I haven't written an intro yet, although I will probably half-ass one just to get a look at what kind of discussions are taking place.
The minimum commitment of posting once every 25 days is mostly an incentive to keep people active. In my experience, if these groups go a certain amount of time without activity, they're effectively dead anyway.
Regarding the requirement to post an introduction - it's my experience that without this requirement, there's often barely enough activity in the beginning to even get things started in a given group. While I do lose about 30% of people who sign up and decide not to post an intro, the introduction posts are usually the nucleus for all discussion that follows.
As far as half-ass writing an intro - that's completely fine, and a lot of people do that too. I should make it more clear that that's 100% fine - if you want to write "hello, just curious about what's going on here" that works.
What will happen is that people will just post links to imgur/giphy etc like they used to when Twitter came out.
Eventually for convenience they’d start getting embedded on the page.
The tracking implications with embedding media would occur. The media would either be proxied (same/more? bandwidth usage, less storage needed though) or just self hosted and then we’re back to Twitter again.
You assume that they'd support embedding even though they say their MO is to be text-only? I could see them just resisting support for that, and the type of content adapting accordingly
As seen on twitch, letting people put emojis in their name on a black and white site sets up a system where scanning eyes just see those eye-candies and skip over the rest. This is useful on twitch as it highlights the streamer's paying subscribers but here it's just whoever is more obnoxious.
I disagree. Using this thing for an hour, users with emojis are more distinguishable at a glance. I often face this issue with HN where I have to read the user's username to know if they're OP. Twitter usernames with emojis, however, is really obnoxious.
How about adding a `latest top level posts' page? Many posts that you see on the search page don't make sense without seeing the post they're in reply to.
> It might raise the quality of the content on Minichan.
Coming from an imageboard myself, I think about this often. The "serious" users keep comparing themselves to Reddit when they should strive to be more like HN, instead. Now HN is home -- literally; it's my homepage.
Usenet is flooded with spam to the point of being unusable, and besides, having everyone use the same interface and see images alongside is different from having people use a multitude of different clients that present binary attachments in various different ways.
With a decently sized crowd from HN, there could be a lot of interesting content on a Minichan like site. The crowd would be small enough that I don’t think there would be much point in decentralizing it. Besides, with centralization then mods still have a fighting chance of keeping the quality of the posts up to par, if they felt so inclined.
The value of anonymous discussion is that every thread is a fresh start. You can express yourself about what’s on your mind without be constrained by your own desire to make everything you say fit into some bigger picture of an identity of self. If that makes sense. But also, it is different from making throwaway accounts on sites where all other people are using identities. Admittedly on Minichan there are many people that use names and tripcodes. But the ability for threads to exist where everyone is on an equal footing is valuable.
I’m thinking not so much in terms of discussion itself actually but in terms of creative potential. At their peak, chan style imageboards can be amazingly creative.
Imagine an imageboard with people from HN, where people were producing graphics and music like in the Demoscene, but together and for no purpose other than creativity itself. No names or anything. Just pure unfiltered creativity.
Yeah. I was being snarky without enough context to make myself clear there... Sorry.
> Usenet is flooded with spam to the point of being unusable,
What mechanisms do you see in place to stop this being an inevitable result for Minichan as well? It's a social problem not a technical one...
> With a decently sized crowd from HN, there could be a lot of interesting content on a Minichan like site.
Maybe. pg's recent comment about the amount of time and effort it has taken to curate this community into some semblance of civility suggest even "we, the magnificent HM community" are subject to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory as well... (I've had a few "bad days" and needed pulling into line by dang or others over the years...)
> Imagine an imageboard with people from HN
From what pg says, that'll most likely end up closer to 4Chan that HN - without several people in full time (well paid) roles who's job description includes community management/moderation (and who are good at it).
HN is a magical place _only_ because YC values it enough to have people like pg and dang and scott spend as vast chunk of their paid time making it this way. Those of us who benefit from this place owe a debt to pg's vision and YC's commitment, and are lucky it was founded by someone like pg instead of moot. (And at the same time, people who benefit from 4Chan owe similar thanks for diametrically opposed visions there.)
For me, they recur maybe once every 5-10 years or so and last about the same sort of time period?? Here since 2009. Twitter circa 2008 or so. Burningman in the early 2000s. ASR on usenet in the late '90s
Things change, they run their course - and I change and the things I want become different. Some people rant and demand things "go back the way they were", but by then the people who made it "the way things were" have moved on to a new thing, and new people have grown up and started building new things they think are better than the old people had.
Hold on to your dream, but realise that you may have to either chase it around the internet as it moves (and work out how to find it when you one day wake up are realise it's gone from the old place), or make it yourself as part of a team prepared to put in the hard work required to shape it the way you think is right.
(While I personally think 4Chan is a total shit show, I have no doubt moot invested enormous effort in making it or helping it become what _he_ wanted in the world. A whole different sort of effort than pg/deng/scott/YC/others put in here, but I have no doubt moot complained bitterly to his friends how hard it was dealing with things like lawyers and hosting companies and all the other things that become a problem when you decide you need to make a thing like 4Cahn exists in the world...)
Anything with the word -chan never had good moderation. HN is good because of the moderation and the work dang does. He's pulled me up multiple times and it reminds me to keep discussion in-line with the vision of the website.
Look at the top post of that board. It's a different crowd - sure there might be some cross contamination but it's definitely not a site you'd expect to see the same content and level of discourse on.
Bringing back social isn't about getting rid of images and focusing on ASCII text, it's about getting rid of URLs and article snippets, and refocusing solely on user created content. Remember when streams were only filled with updates from old friends and family with things like birthday parties, vacations, graduations, concerts, restaurant meals, etc., and nothing else? (Sort of like Instagram still is, but with text allowed, two-way authorization only and without the "influencers".)
Now you log in (FB, Twitter, etc.) only to find out which of your casual acquaintances are the most gullible, racist, sexist, homophobic, sociopathic or worse by the news items they're spewing into their increasingly extreme echo chamber. Sure, the same thing could be conveyed by a selfie wearing a MAGA hat, but it would happen much, much less often.
All these services would have to do to get back to their social roots is provide a default filter for news items. But they refuse, and in fact are increasingly manipulating your feed instead to increase "engagement" (read: anger and hate).
I'm amazed that a social-only network hasn't taken off yet that provides this basic functionality. It feels like the time is right for something like this.
I'm not the gp, but i like the look and feel of the site. I also love the idea. I've been using group messages (mms) for this purpose and its been working great. It has the advantage that nobody needs to go to a website or download an extra app, but it has the drawback that sometimes people forget that I started a group message and will use that thread to start a new conversation with someone and people get messages that were not intended for them.
I'm interested in the claim that its impossible to share content with someone that doesn't have permission. How do you protect against copy/paste or screenshots?
About the sharing, I am sorry, but I didn't want to claim that it is impossible to share. I will check the phrasing, but the idea is that it doesn't have a sharing feature (like retweeting or the share button on phones). You can't click on a button to forward the content. You still can copy/paste and screenshot normally.
> there is no way to share content outside of the list of who posted it.
I can see how I misunderstood. Still it seems like it might be a good compromise and would get me around the issue I described with mms of unintentional sharing. I'm going to see if I can get some of my family and friends to sign up with me.
> I'm amazed that a social-only network hasn't taken off yet that provides this basic functionality
You'd have a hell of a time making it profitable. It'd have to be run like a charity, which would cost nearly nothing in the scheme of things, but we just don't seem to have any people who want to do good and happen to have enough money to do it.
It'll take a rich rebel who gets tired of billionaire fine dining and says fuck it, I'm for the people who don't have a penny to their name, not you rich schmucks.
I wanted to see how it would handle non-ascii text so I typed 안녕하세요 and it romanized it to annyeonghaseyo. (This is "hello" in Korean). I did not expect that.
I really like the idea of a text-only social network, so I hope this takes off. I think the author should consider supporting other languages though. Seeing romanized text isn't very helpful to people that actually want to read or write in other character sets. It's a cute feature though.
>Subreply was created by Lucian Marin from the desire of a having a simple to use, English only, public forum that has nothing in common with ancient and untrustworthy social networks.
[...]
>Limitations
>480 characters per reply
ASCII only because it works everywhere
I could see this being a xenophobic thing, but I could also see it being more about the limited character set (for minimalism). I'm not making a claim about the motivations, but either way your desire seems counter to his vision.
It could also be a moderation thing. If the people working on the website mostly just speak English, then it will be much easier for them to moderate an English-only website.
> I think the author should consider supporting other languages though
Maybe it's a moderation problem?
I personally wouldn't feel comfortable running a non-english service, as I feel it would be too hard to moderate it effectively (or at least until you rearch the point where you have paid or volunteer moderators fluent in both the "main" language (to communicate rules and policy clearly) and any other supported langage). You can try auto-translating foreign text but you won't necessarily get a good translation, let alone handle cultural references (not Korean, but e.g. [1])and so on.
I tried カレーライス, 高田馬場, ﾀﾃｲｽｶﾝﾅﾆﾗｾ, Llanfairpwllgwyngyll. Results were "kareraisu", "Gao Tian Ma Chang", and error message "Use spaces or shorter words" for the latter ones. Something funky is going on.
239 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadThis should be in the features. It is the strongest selling point of the site as I see it.
Unicode should also work (close to) everywhere.
It buys the company running the social network something, if they're trying to have literally billions of users. But I'm not sure that's a good thing for the users, either.
Yikes.
These days, talking about the "benefits" of ASCII-only is like talking about the "benefits" of HTTP over HTTPS, or the benefits of dial-up as opposed to broadband.
No thanks. It's exclusionary and for zero good technical reason. For every reasonable programming language, there are functions to do everything in UTF-8 that you can do in ASCII, with about the same complexity.
In 2020, why are you going out of your way to prevent people from typing the honest-to-goodness useful characters they want to communicate with? In English?! Where exactly does UTF-8 not work, that this site does?
> It's exclusionary and for zero good technical reason. For every reasonable programming language, there are functions to do everything in UTF-8 that you can do in ASCII, with about the same complexity.
At minimum, unicode does come with a lot of complexity in implementation, and a lot of potential vulnerabilities due to that complexity.
Not saying that excuses all websites, modern DBs handle unicode just fine after all, and the browser takes care of the rendering - (although some might crash your computer), and there are usually builtins for serverside web languages to help you sanitise strings... still, things would be way simpler with any fixed word <8bit encoding without glyph manipulation builtin. So yeah, it's complex, but it's usually worth it.
IMO websites like this that challenge the assumption that all modern software is obligated to support all of Unicode are a valuable contribution to the world, if only because they might inspire the creation of a better, more well-scoped character set.
Oh God no.
We do not need any more character sets.
Most of what you mention can be fixed with a font, and the LTR-override stuff is in the realm of proper escaping which all web apps everywhere in the world need to do at all times absolutely goddamned regardless.
I was in a camp with many other comments here, that this is 21st century and supporting UTF-8 should be a default.
But that malware example makes me almost do a 180. Who in their right mind thought that full Unicode should be allowed in file names?
Is there a middle ground? Text-only bits of Unicode?
It's part of a broader question of visual strings having multiple unexpected Unicode representations, including Cyrillic letters masquerading as Latin, etc.
I've never heard of any solution, except for when a text component is supposed to be machine-interpretable (e.g. a file extension or domain), for the computer to display its interpretation in a special way (via icon, showing the extracted extension below the name, bolding the domain, etc.).
They're not great solutions, but there don't seem to really be any alternatives either.
As far as I know, ASCII is a proper subset of UTF-8. That makes implementation quite natural in most cases (e.g. string replacement).
EDIT:
Looks like Lucian built this site in PHP, which easily handles UTF-8, as well as most DBs.
To play devil's advocate, I don't think your exampled limitations are meaningful handicaps. Money can be discussed as GBP or EUR. With context it's easy to understand 90F as temperature, and unicode quotes are hardly a compelling restriction.
So in the country the English language originated in, you're not allowed to use a character on the default keyboard. (And that's just one -- the € is on there too, among others.)
We're not talking obscure key combos, we're talking characters in use everywhere you go every day. Would you really appreciate not being able to use the $ character on a forum? Every time you type a comment about a price, a key on your keyboard doesn't work, or the comment is rejected for an invalid character, or the character is silently deleted? Forget about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)
It is, as you and everybody you know seems to have worked out, not really worth the effort, unless you are amused in just the right way by such things.
(I did start the French novel influenced by it, but my decades-rusty high school French comprehension was not up to the task...)
But the one I was referring to is La Disparition by Georges Perec - with the letter e four times... :shrug:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunoia_(book)
There might be a good social reason, though.
It's by no means a perfect fit; some of us need to resume work on our résumé, from time to time.
Those are all totally argument-for-the-sake-of-argument nit-picks, in my opinion.
To be honest, I rarely enough need to refer to UK pounds, Euro, or Yen - that I'd much more likely just type it out like that instead of try to remember/experiment what the magic key combination to produce them properly is. There is no a single English speaker in the world that wouldn't understand "fiancee" - even with non "proper" quotes around it.
> In 2020, why are you going out of your way to prevent people from ...
That argument seems to me to inevitable end with some combination of 4chan-ish image boards (because "people want to communicate in memes") or Snapchat-ish 100% video content (because "people want to communicate in video"). If you want those things - go use those things.
The OP is trying something different. You call it "exclusionary", and claim it's a decision based on zero good technical reasons. I suspect it's better described as "intentionally constrained" and a social experiment.
(And thinking bigger picture, there are totally "benefits" to using http and dial-up or slower bandwidth in some places. I have a pile of ESP32/LoRaWAN boards sitting here. If I want to maximise the range the LoRa radios can achieve, I'm looking at 27kbps or so throughput. If I want to use these on 433MHz where I live, I can't legally operate them at more than 1% duty cycle (due to .au restriction on the 433MHz ISM band and digital transmissions). I don't have enough CPU to do TLS, I don't have much more than about 255 bits per second of bandwidth. I could _probably_ use the OP's software under those limitations, and build a mesh based messaging network that'd work for anyone within ~ 3-20km of you. Totally niche application, but also possibly useful. Imagine a pocket sized battery powered non cellular non wifi multi mile range comms device that'll mesh with the ones your friends are carrying - at a festival where cellular is crushed or not available. Text messaging style social network gadgets for your camp at Burningman, for less then $40 per user? I'd build that...)
The description says 'english only', not 'US only'. There are quite a few english speaking people all over the world. Not to mention that Britain, which I'd consider pretty english, definitely needs the pound sign quite often. And European keyboards produce the €-sign with ease, I even have it explicitly marked.
I can see your point about intensional constraints and social experiments, but I fully disagree with your point that a lack of UTF-8 is a 'nit-pick' or that is is unneeded for english conversation. You can work around it, sure, but that does not make it great.
> That argument seems to me to inevitable end with some combination of 4chan-ish image boards (because "people want to communicate in memes") or Snapchat-ish 100% video content (because "people want to communicate in video"). If you want those things - go use those things.
Including images or videos is a feature with quite some overhead, while romanizing UTF-8 input is putting in extra work just to disallow it. So this goes in quite a different direction.
It was MY comment. Don't like it? Don't respond to it.
See? Not a very useful way of going about things. ;)
The End.
( ･_<)┏ ﾊﾞｷｭｰﾝ! …———o (that ones a pistol)
...and we're right back where we started from.
I have no use for social networks of any kind, but I guess if you want a non-cancerous Twitter, this looks like one.
But thanks for the feedback, I'm making a note of it.
my general takeaway from that was that people might get annoyed when you tell them what they are not allowed to do on your site, but most of them will roll their eyes and put up with it. if you tell them what they have to do they will simply drop the site and never look back.
I do my best to make the activity requirements clear upfront, so the only people who will be upset are those who choose not to sign up anyway. For me, the far bigger challenge is learning how to define these "rules" in a way that makes the group sustainable over the long run - which is to the benefit of everyone involved. While the idea of having to post once every 25 days may seem unnecessary, if 100 people followed it to a tee, you're going to have a group that remains active indefinitely.
I do see your point, and I agree that if any sorts of hard rules are to be imposed upon a discussion, it needs to be done tactfully.
We'll send a single warning email before removing people from the group, to give them a chance to post again to stay active.
1. Why is there a minimum commitment to post? It makes it more difficult to overcome the inertia required to sign up in the first place.
2. Why do I need to write an intro before I can see any content? Without seeing any content, I don't know if it's worth spending any time writing up an intro. This really rubbed me the wrong way. I haven't written an intro yet, although I will probably half-ass one just to get a look at what kind of discussions are taking place.
The minimum commitment of posting once every 25 days is mostly an incentive to keep people active. In my experience, if these groups go a certain amount of time without activity, they're effectively dead anyway.
Regarding the requirement to post an introduction - it's my experience that without this requirement, there's often barely enough activity in the beginning to even get things started in a given group. While I do lose about 30% of people who sign up and decide not to post an intro, the introduction posts are usually the nucleus for all discussion that follows.
As far as half-ass writing an intro - that's completely fine, and a lot of people do that too. I should make it more clear that that's 100% fine - if you want to write "hello, just curious about what's going on here" that works.
Eventually for convenience they’d start getting embedded on the page.
The tracking implications with embedding media would occur. The media would either be proxied (same/more? bandwidth usage, less storage needed though) or just self hosted and then we’re back to Twitter again.
Twitter added features for a reason
Also, there’s an argument to be made for emojis adding tone, albeit lazily. Grayscale sounds like an interesting middle ground.
For example, see this mobile friendly image board:
http://minichan.org/
I’d like to see more of the HN crowd come there. It might raise the quality of the content on Minichan.
Coming from an imageboard myself, I think about this often. The "serious" users keep comparing themselves to Reddit when they should strive to be more like HN, instead. Now HN is home -- literally; it's my homepage.
https://github.com/Minichan/Minichan
It’s open source and MIT licensed.
Usenet is flooded with spam to the point of being unusable, and besides, having everyone use the same interface and see images alongside is different from having people use a multitude of different clients that present binary attachments in various different ways.
With a decently sized crowd from HN, there could be a lot of interesting content on a Minichan like site. The crowd would be small enough that I don’t think there would be much point in decentralizing it. Besides, with centralization then mods still have a fighting chance of keeping the quality of the posts up to par, if they felt so inclined.
The value of anonymous discussion is that every thread is a fresh start. You can express yourself about what’s on your mind without be constrained by your own desire to make everything you say fit into some bigger picture of an identity of self. If that makes sense. But also, it is different from making throwaway accounts on sites where all other people are using identities. Admittedly on Minichan there are many people that use names and tripcodes. But the ability for threads to exist where everyone is on an equal footing is valuable.
I’m thinking not so much in terms of discussion itself actually but in terms of creative potential. At their peak, chan style imageboards can be amazingly creative.
Imagine an imageboard with people from HN, where people were producing graphics and music like in the Demoscene, but together and for no purpose other than creativity itself. No names or anything. Just pure unfiltered creativity.
Yeah. I was being snarky without enough context to make myself clear there... Sorry.
> Usenet is flooded with spam to the point of being unusable,
What mechanisms do you see in place to stop this being an inevitable result for Minichan as well? It's a social problem not a technical one...
> With a decently sized crowd from HN, there could be a lot of interesting content on a Minichan like site.
Maybe. pg's recent comment about the amount of time and effort it has taken to curate this community into some semblance of civility suggest even "we, the magnificent HM community" are subject to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory as well... (I've had a few "bad days" and needed pulling into line by dang or others over the years...)
> Imagine an imageboard with people from HN
From what pg says, that'll most likely end up closer to 4Chan that HN - without several people in full time (well paid) roles who's job description includes community management/moderation (and who are good at it).
HN is a magical place _only_ because YC values it enough to have people like pg and dang and scott spend as vast chunk of their paid time making it this way. Those of us who benefit from this place owe a debt to pg's vision and YC's commitment, and are lucky it was founded by someone like pg instead of moot. (And at the same time, people who benefit from 4Chan owe similar thanks for diametrically opposed visions there.)
For me, they recur maybe once every 5-10 years or so and last about the same sort of time period?? Here since 2009. Twitter circa 2008 or so. Burningman in the early 2000s. ASR on usenet in the late '90s
Things change, they run their course - and I change and the things I want become different. Some people rant and demand things "go back the way they were", but by then the people who made it "the way things were" have moved on to a new thing, and new people have grown up and started building new things they think are better than the old people had.
Hold on to your dream, but realise that you may have to either chase it around the internet as it moves (and work out how to find it when you one day wake up are realise it's gone from the old place), or make it yourself as part of a team prepared to put in the hard work required to shape it the way you think is right.
(While I personally think 4Chan is a total shit show, I have no doubt moot invested enormous effort in making it or helping it become what _he_ wanted in the world. A whole different sort of effort than pg/deng/scott/YC/others put in here, but I have no doubt moot complained bitterly to his friends how hard it was dealing with things like lawyers and hosting companies and all the other things that become a problem when you decide you need to make a thing like 4Cahn exists in the world...)
Look at the top post of that board. It's a different crowd - sure there might be some cross contamination but it's definitely not a site you'd expect to see the same content and level of discourse on.
Now you log in (FB, Twitter, etc.) only to find out which of your casual acquaintances are the most gullible, racist, sexist, homophobic, sociopathic or worse by the news items they're spewing into their increasingly extreme echo chamber. Sure, the same thing could be conveyed by a selfie wearing a MAGA hat, but it would happen much, much less often.
All these services would have to do to get back to their social roots is provide a default filter for news items. But they refuse, and in fact are increasingly manipulating your feed instead to increase "engagement" (read: anger and hate).
I'm amazed that a social-only network hasn't taken off yet that provides this basic functionality. It feels like the time is right for something like this.
I'd love to have your feedback if you care to take a look: https://www.quidsentio.com
I'm interested in the claim that its impossible to share content with someone that doesn't have permission. How do you protect against copy/paste or screenshots?
About the sharing, I am sorry, but I didn't want to claim that it is impossible to share. I will check the phrasing, but the idea is that it doesn't have a sharing feature (like retweeting or the share button on phones). You can't click on a button to forward the content. You still can copy/paste and screenshot normally.
It is not built-in, so not encouraged by design.
I can see how I misunderstood. Still it seems like it might be a good compromise and would get me around the issue I described with mms of unintentional sharing. I'm going to see if I can get some of my family and friends to sign up with me.
Btw, I just changed that line to:
Also, there is no feature to share content outside of the list of who posted it.
You'd have a hell of a time making it profitable. It'd have to be run like a charity, which would cost nearly nothing in the scheme of things, but we just don't seem to have any people who want to do good and happen to have enough money to do it.
It'll take a rich rebel who gets tired of billionaire fine dining and says fuck it, I'm for the people who don't have a penny to their name, not you rich schmucks.
Everyone wearing a MAGA hat is "gullible, racist, sexist, homophobic, sociopathic or worse"? Maybe you're the one in an extreme echo chamber.
I really like the idea of a text-only social network, so I hope this takes off. I think the author should consider supporting other languages though. Seeing romanized text isn't very helpful to people that actually want to read or write in other character sets. It's a cute feature though.
(I wonder how it would tell the difference between Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian though?)
For maximum confusion there are also cyrillizations, how would it go with that:)
>>> probabilities = {x.lang: x.prob for x in langdetect.detect_langs(text)
Works for me, for differentiating Russian and Ukrainian text.
>Subreply was created by Lucian Marin from the desire of a having a simple to use, English only, public forum that has nothing in common with ancient and untrustworthy social networks.
[...]
>Limitations
>480 characters per reply ASCII only because it works everywhere
I could see this being a xenophobic thing, but I could also see it being more about the limited character set (for minimalism). I'm not making a claim about the motivations, but either way your desire seems counter to his vision.
For example, each english word has ~7 ascii chars, but each chinese / japanese / korean words only has ~2 unicode chars
Maybe it's a moderation problem?
I personally wouldn't feel comfortable running a non-english service, as I feel it would be too hard to moderate it effectively (or at least until you rearch the point where you have paid or volunteer moderators fluent in both the "main" language (to communicate rules and policy clearly) and any other supported langage). You can try auto-translating foreign text but you won't necessarily get a good translation, let alone handle cultural references (not Korean, but e.g. [1])and so on.
[1] https://www.italki.com/article/92/the-dark-meaning-of-5-chin...
Looks simple enough that someone could clone it to run "Subreply for Korean."
IMO: I find mixed language social networks and threads difficult because I usually don't understand the other language.