81–90 of 177 posts
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on the topic, I dare ask for an invite to lobste.rs if someone has one lying around. I promise I won't be an ass. (Cause a week ago I reached the threshold of wanting to leave a comment enough times)
invite just sent..
The cliché is that humans are fundamentally social creatures, and I think one of the primary ways we maintain the high engagement in a discussion thread is by becoming interested in the other participants, not just the topic. That's usually a good thing, because it motivates us to respond and care about the discussion, but it also means that people will go off-topic, get into heated arguments, or bring up memes and social topics.
If it were possible to strictly enforce rules against off-topic or non-technical discussions, I suspect engagement would drop very quickly. Learning is a strong motivator, but I doubt it provides the same semi-addictive feedback loop that the social aspects of a site do.
(I don't have any evidence beyond my own gut feelings based on web forums over the years --- happy to be proved wrong! A high-engagement non-social discussion forum would be an interesting place.)
4chan's /g/ board is pretty good, but at times brutal.
The text /prog/ board has some interesting discussion, but there's a lot of "Have you read your SICP today?".
And both those boards have some deeply NSFW content.
Some of the other chans are better, but still risky and with a lot less traffic.
There is a great bit of copypasta about installing Linux though.
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What are the main reasons you want an API?
Building more powerful clients for desktop and mobile. Think user tagging, comment filtering, custom sort order, interface improvements.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
on the topic, I dare ask for an invite to lobste.rs if someone has one lying around. I promise I won't be an ass. (Cause a week ago I reached the threshold of wanting to leave a comment enough times)
invite just sent..
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"and you're more likely to have a good comment downvoted." This has never made sense to me. On some subreddits that focus on disciplines (like AskHistorians among many others), you can easily get downvoted (ie "dissapeared") just by asking a question, let alone answering one. Other times you'll won't get upvoted nor downvoted when you've actually contributed to the discussion. In these instances I lurk even when I ca…
Reddit's voting system has two issues: (1) Lots of strategic downvoting. That's why no thread stays above 75%. It happens to comments as well as threads. Some of it is spammers trying to improve their own ranking, and some is probably just trolls. (2) "Stalker" downvoting, which is when a person retaliates to a comment by downvoting that person's contributions en masse . I wonder if they've put any machine learning m…
There are also some small safeguards in place against (2). If you literally go to someone's user page, and start downvoting every post, reddit will start ignoring your votes towards that user in actual score calculations.
Does any RSS/Atom client exist which can subtract feeds? So you can for example add HackerNews feed and subtract feeds from /r/politics and /r/worldpolitics so only link mentioned on HackerNews and not mentioned on /r/politics or /r/worldpolitics would pass?
This is how it works: You tell intigi what sources (RSS feeds and twitter accounts) you want to follow. Then you provide intigi with what's basically a lucene query that you want articles to match. Intigi then monitors your sources, indexes the article's title and full body, and delivers to you only the relevant results.
You can black list sources, domains, terms in the article. The advantage of this approach is that you can look through attention grabbing headlines and find fresh information that matters to you. You could also optimize for precision or for recall...
A well set up Google Reader account can do wonders... but it takes a while to get to that point.