I miss the lounge.
I think a fair number of them eventually made it over.
I second what @John_DiFool Johnson said, and I’m not doing it out of groupthink. We’re supposed to rebut and debate with solid arguments. Oner at [redacted]’s site, people will defy logic in preference to deliberate bad-faith interpretation and give themselves an outrage bump by downvoting anything, read or unread.
There’s a huge difference between having like buttons and having like and dislike buttons.
It’s moot since we can’t have any of it, but like buttons aren’t the same as being able to downvote the unrighteous.
You guys make Discourse sound like Scientology.
In a forum for a game I follow in development there are “like” buttons and that’s it. They aren’t disruptive and don’t mean much.
There used to be a “like” and a “LOL” button. The LOL button was intended to be for appreciating a joke or humorous observation but it became a de facto “dislike” button as people used it to indicate “this is so stupid it’s funny”. They got rid of it.
So I guess I have two contradictory points from my experience at that board. One is that like buttons can be fine (assuming it’s not tied into an official reputation system). The other is that a community can find a way to make something innocuous into something toxic.
People tend to think in binary terms. If you give them two buttons for reactions, one will become good and one will become bad. Doesn’t really matter what they look like.
On Facebook in science news topics covering concepts that in any way contradict Young Earth Creationism there are always many trolls that use the laugh reaction the same way.
Where Is @discobot hiding?
Hi! To find out what I can do, say @discobot display help.
What is this “tutorial” that you’s speak of?
Send a PM to discobot. The subject can be anything. Put “@discobot start tutorial” in the body of the PM. You won’t be able to do some of the tasks so reply to those with “skip” the first time and “Skip” the next time (it doesn’t like two replies to be identical).
Repeat with “@discobot start advanced tutorial”
Thanks, yes. It said that, but the next item was a request to use a flag option apparently no longer available, and when I told it to skip that one too, it basically exited me from the tutorial.
ETA - thanks again, I just saw your work-around in your later comment (not to use exactly the same text twice).
Regarding removing old posts being abused, do you mean because it leaves a big hole in the conversation?
One of the Discourse-run places I frequent has twelve button options. None of them has been turned into a “dislike”. That said, I agree with your binary take - if there had been just a “like” and a “LoL” button, that would have been easy to turn into an up/downvote situation.
Generally the hole isn’t a problem. That happens when a Mod removes spam posts too. I don’t recall the exact fuckery that someone was doing. It had something to do with deleting the OP of threads that they started but bumping them first.
The way we thought it worked was that users had 15 minutes to edit their posts or delete it if they changed their mind. We weren’t told that the way it actually worked was that users could delete one post per day, regardless of whether the 15 minute timer had expired or not. We noticed that it wasn’t working the way we thought it was when someone decided to delete their entire posting history, one day at a time.
It kinda had a Streisand effect though. Every time they would delete one of their posts, Discourse would show the thread as recently changed, bringing all of their threads to the top of the list. When we noticed what was going on, we changed that setting and restored all of their posts, again bringing every single thread back to the top of the list.
vBulletin sorted threads by the last visible post. Discourse sorts threads by the last change, regardless of what is visible to users. It’s a bit annoying since people will often see zombie threads with no obvious reason why they’ve been bumped, since a spammer actually bumped the thread and was removed.
Thank you!
Particularly when folks degenerate into a personal tit-for-tat bicker, posting something inflammatory, getting a hostile response, then deleting or editing your provocation to make the counterattack appear unprovoked is a standard play.
We don’t need to enable that crap.
In fact, back in the long ago days 15+ years ago in our much more verbally aggressive and less moderated past, all editing of all kinds was disabled. When you clicked [send], it was for eternity, tpyos and all. Precisely to prevent the “bait then camouflage” play that was very popular before the edit lock went into effect.
< Like >
That was a legit typo that I noticed before hitting [send]. I fixed it, then thought better, and unfixed it. Then hit [send].
Glad you liked it; I hoped someone would. 