HN user
While logged in on Reddit, go to this page: https://old.reddit.com/subreddits, then copy the url from the "multireddit of your subscriptions" link in the sidebar to the right, replace the "old.reddit.com" in it with "teddit.net", and bookmark that.
You can just send me an email to the address in the announcement blog post, and I can give you an invite: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (that offer's open to anyone, but please read through the post so you know about the site's goals/principles/etc.)
It's not intended to be difficult to get an invite, I mostly just don't want to constantly deal with large influxes of users because of drama on other sites, persistent trolls, and things like that.
It doesn't show by default to logged-out users, but we've got a devoted group set up for Advent of Code that's reasonably active so far, if anyone's participating in that and would like to join us: https://tildes.net/~comp.advent_of_code
If anyone wants to read an interesting technical article about Roblox, this "Eight Years at Roblox" one from August was excellent: https://zeux.io/2020/08/02/eight-years-at-roblox/
I don't understand what you're asking.
One of the bots in /r/SubredditSimulator was the "top today" bot, which would just take the top 500 posts from /r/all in the last 24 hours, pick one of the links at random, and repost it with a gibberish title made from a markov chain of those 500 posts' titles. With such a small set of input, the titles almost never made any sense at all.
I had to shut that bot down, because eventually just reposting a random popular meme/image from the last 24 hours with a nonsensical title started becoming far too successful and it ended up getting 2,648,254 post karma, while often getting its own posts near the top of /r/all: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimMeta/comments/c5besk/th...
Whoops, that's embarrassing.
I quit working at Reddit a few years ago and don't do much there any more, but yes, that's me. Thanks!
This might come off as a little rude, but it's sincere advice from someone who used to work in anti-spam (not at Facebook):
I had a quick look through Dreamwidth's "latest" page (https://www.dreamwidth.org/latest) earlier today, and a major portion of the posts on there were blatant spam for things like credit card scams, "Work from home and make $1000/day!", and so on.
You seem to be hosting a lot of spam, and those spam posts are also far more likely to be getting linked externally on sites like Facebook, since that's the reason they're being created.
Because Dreamwidth is effectively free website hosting along with a free new subdomain for each account, blocking individual subdomains is futile, and it's difficult for external sites to distinguish between spam and legitimate blogs.
I'm sure Facebook will unblock you fairly soon, but unless you get the spam on Dreamwidth under control, this will probably happen fairly often with different sites blocking it. It would be easy to end up with an impression of Dreamwidth being a spam-hosting site, and decide to block it (either manually or automatically).
Blogspot has always been in a similar situation and would get blocked from a lot of sites due to the sheer amount of spam it hosts.
(Disclaimer: promoting my own site)
I worked at reddit for 4 years but quit in late 2016, largely because of the direction the site was starting to go even then. They've taken $500 million in venture capital in the last 3 years, so it's only going to keep getting worse as the pressure builds to create a return for those investors.
A few months after leaving, I decided to start a non-profit so I could work on building a community site that would be able to stick to the principles I believe are important: no advertising or investors, open-source, privacy, higher-quality non-fluff content, etc. There's more info about the site and its goals in the original announcement post: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (HN discussion of the announcement here, but note that it was completely private at the time and you couldn't even view it without getting an invite first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093)
It's still invite-only for registration, but it's relatively active and consistently gets several hundred posts/comments a day. If you (or anyone else here) is interested in an invite, please read the blog post I linked above and send me an email at the address listed in there and I'll be happy to give you one. It's not intended to be much of a barrier, I just want to keep the growth controlled while we continue to get the site culture built up.
I've already paid that opportunity cost to get most of the basic functionality built, so if you're interested in helping with development on Tildes itself or even adapting it for your own similar site, it might be worth taking a look at the code as well. This is probably the best place to start: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING....
It doesn't. Even the address for the other half of the duplex (my address + 2) works fine. Sometimes we just provide that address instead and catch the delivery people when they arrive, because it's easier than worrying about the Maps issue.
My address has been blatantly broken in Google Maps for years now. When you enter it, for some reason it deletes the house number and just looks up the street, which ends up pointing to somewhere about a 10 minute drive away. For example, if my address was "123 Elm Street" it just ignores the "123" and searches for "Elm Street" instead. We have to give special instructions all the time to delivery drivers and other people we give our address to, to warn them and make sure they don't end up going to the wrong place if they use Maps.
I've sent feedback and error reports about this repeatedly, and even had a friend that knows someone that works on Maps pass it on to them directly. It's never been fixed, and I've basically just given up on it at this point. It's really shown me how impossible it is to get any kind of support from Google for even an extremely obvious, straightforward issue.
(Tildes is my site)
The best explanation of the site's goals and values is still the original announcement blog post: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes
Here's the discussion on HN at the time too (note that the site was totally private at that time and you couldn't even view it without an invite yet): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093
I assume drannex will run out of invites soon (thanks for offering them!), so if anyone's interested in an invite please feel free to email the address in the blog post and I'll send you one tomorrow. It's not intended to be difficult to get an invite, I just want to keep the growth controlled while a base site culture and more features continue getting built up.
HN doesn't even use a database.
Yes, that's definitely planned over the longer term, but the community is too small to support highly-specific groups for now. Various other "reddit clones" have made the mistake of allowing users to create communities immediately, and they ended up with thousands of inactive, abandoned ones.
Even reddit itself didn't support subreddit creation for over 3 years. It takes a long time to have a userbase large enough for it to work.
In the meantime, Tildes has a pretty flexible tagging system to help categorize topics, and tags can transition into formal groups quite nicely.
You can see the site's current expenses and donations here: https://tildes.net/financials
The costs to keep it running are already covered by over 10x with the current donations, and I believe the existing servers could easily handle at least 100x the current traffic level.
In terms of advice, I'd say:
- Don't go into debt (or take any investments) to launch the site.
- Build something lightweight so the costs are low. Use dedicated server(s), avoid cloud hosting like AWS.
- Incorporate as a non-profit if you can.
It really doesn't take much when your goal is "sustainable". The site's actual expenses have always been more than covered from donations, and the current servers can probably easily handle at least 100x the traffic. The goal now is just bringing in enough to be able to pay myself a somewhat respectable salary.
Here's the current month's financials (this is linked from below the donation goal meter on the home page): https://tildes.net/financials
Thanks! Keeping the site minimal and fast is definitely one of my main goals, and I'm never going to add any third-party assets, advertising, or anything like that (for both speed and privacy reasons).
There's quite a bit more info about my approaches from a technical perspective here: https://docs.tildes.net/philosophy/site-implementation
(Tildes is my site)
The best explanation of the site's goals is probably still the original announcement blog post: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes
Here's the discussion on HN at the time (note that the site was totally private at that time and you couldn't even view it without an invite yet): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093
Feel free to ask any questions, and if you're interested in an invite please just email the address in the blog post and I'll send you one soon. It's not intended to be difficult to get an invite, I just want to keep the growth controlled while a base site culture and more features get built up.
And to make it worse, they started sending that tracking data through "functionality" endpoints to make it difficult or impossible for extensions like uBlock Origin to block without breaking the site. I believe it would pick a random endpoint out of a few possible choices, but as one example, it would sometimes use the same endpoint as voting, so that couldn't be blocked without also preventing you from being able to vote.
It's possible to detect the difference between the request types if you examine the actual data on them, but the common privacy extensions don't usually examine the requests on that level.
Reminds me of intercooler.js in various ways: https://intercoolerjs.org/
Intercooler seems more appropriate if you're looking to mostly build a standard HTML site with some Javascript/AJAX enhancements though, and (at least from a quick look) EHTML seems to be more aimed at being a templating language with HTML-like syntax that you can use instead of generating the HTML with backend templating.
The founders of Google knew very well that this was what advertising did to a search engine (and then they did it anyway).
This is "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives" from their original paper about Google in 1998 [1]:
Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
It's only offhandedly mentioned at the bottom of the post, but the websearch_to_tsquery() function added in PostgreSQL 11 is extremely useful and lets you create a pretty decent search system immediately without having to implement any sort of query-parsing yourself.
It supports searching for alternatives with "or", phrases in quotes, and excluding terms with a minus sign, which is all syntax that a lot of people are already used to. For example it can handle a query like:
blizzard or overwatch -"hong kong"
It's a great addition, and made it even easier to implement reasonable search functionality with PostgreSQL.
(Disclaimer: self-promotion)
This article echoes a lot of the reasons I'm working on Tildes (https://tildes.net) and specifically founded it as a non-profit. My announcement post from last year discusses how the current approach to community-based sites -- specifically the dependence on venture capital and advertising -- makes companies chase goals that are harmful for the users themselves: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093)
I believe that a non-profit model is the only way to break out of the current cycle of sites starting out as "too good to be true" (as they burn through their VC), and inevitably devolving into privacy-invading, advertising-heavy sites dominated by lowest-common-denominator content when they need to keep forcing growth and monetize their users.
Tildes has been publicly visible for a while now, but still requires an invite to register an account. If you're interested in registering and participating just send me an email, the address is in the announcement post linked above. It's not intended to be difficult to get invites, I mostly just want to keep the growth rate under control while more features and the early site culture continue building up.
Exactly, and it even adds up quickly for a single user in common cases like voting on a bunch of comments while reading a thread.
If someone loads this thread right now, the initial page load is 61KB (gzipped). If they read down the thread and vote on 30 comments while they're doing it, they transfer an additional 480KB (16KB/vote [1]). There's no reason that they should be receiving 8x more data by voting on a relatively low number of comments (~10% of the thread) than they did when loading the entire page originally. It also has to re-generate the page an extra 30 times unnecessarily - a repeatedly voting user becomes like a heavy multiplier to your traffic.
[1]: Also, I just noticed that the responses back from voting actually aren't the full page, they're truncated. It seems like maybe the response size is capped at 16KB gzipped? That implies that there's already some kind of special handling for the voting responses.
How could it possibly be considered a good thing? I've seen dang say before that they've been running into performance issues, and I bet that they'd see a significant drop in resource usage solely by not generating entire comments pages just to throw them away every time anyone votes on a comment. The response is literally not used at all, they're doing that work and sending that data for no reason.
There are multiple downsides and not a single benefit to the current method.
That frontend code already exists and does that every time you vote (line 27 of https://news.ycombinator.com/hn.js). The response content isn't used for anything at all.
Sure, of course it can be much worse, and almost all other sites are. I'm just saying that HN could do it better, because there's no need for it to send a redirect or that full-page response unless the user has JS disabled.
With JS, they could send a completely empty HTTP 200 response and it would work exactly the same (it does nothing with the response anyway). Right now HN is probably sending multiple gigabytes worth of responses to voting every day that are all just thrown away.
HN is lightweight in some ways, but also quite bad in others. For example, every single time you vote on anything, the site sends back a 302 redirect and then a copy of the entire page's HTML in response. This means that every vote results in a response that's usually around 10KB gzipped.
As of right now, for me, voting on any comment in this thread currently causes a 14KB response and takes about 1.3 seconds to finish.
Yeah, it's not uncommon at all to see things like, "Edit: Wow, this whole chain of comments was removed, except for mine!" because people don't realize that the site actively hides whether your posts are removed.
Pretty much all of reddit's moderation tools were created 10+ years ago for anti-spam purposes, and have hardly been changed since then. They don't work very well for how they're actually used now.
I created AutoModerator and was an admin for 4 years. I understand the differences intimately, but they're very similar from the affected user's perspective.
You're wrong about multiple things here.
Regular moderators can effectively shadowban inside their subreddits by using AutoModerator and telling it to remove all posts made by certain users.
Reddit Gold has literally been renamed to Reddit Premium and is described officially as both a "premium membership" and a "subscription": https://www.reddit.com/premium