I don’t think this is off topic. It’s a good case study in concrete community building, and there are some potential technical aspects to discuss, such as how to keep naughty content hidden. How does one build a site for people who don’t get along?
A lot of the recent reddit drama regarding who get fired and why wouldn’t (edit: would) be off topic, but we shouldn’t lump everything into the same bucket.
It’s funny you say that, because I actually think the exact opposite. =) This is trying to recover from half a decade of failing to do any community building or management, and it reads as incredibly wishy-washy and vague—certainly not “concrete"—to me.
The community lessons aren’t relevant to lobste.rs because we have a small, focused, managed community to begin with and (as far as I know) no plans to suddenly expand it. Reddit’s failed community is something we’ll never have to face without a serious change in direction.
Ah, by concrete, I mean it’s a real site with real wishy-washy rules. It’s not a blog post wherein someone explains how some hypothetical site would maintain law and order and peace and love.
This, I think, is off-topic. It’s just Reddit internal politics (and, IMO, the Reddit admins doing an extremely poor job of curating their community—but I digress). The previous Reddit community post on lobste.rs was slightly less off-topic simply because it seemed there was a possibility of Reddit having a meltdown and other sites (including this one) seeing a sudden surge of new users (in particular, very undesirable new users), but it’s now clear that won’t happen: the more volatile elements of Reddit’s userbase will get very angry but not do anything about it.
I don’t think this is off topic. It’s a good case study in concrete community building, and there are some potential technical aspects to discuss, such as how to keep naughty content hidden. How does one build a site for people who don’t get along?
A lot of the recent reddit drama regarding who get fired and why wouldn’t (edit: would) be off topic, but we shouldn’t lump everything into the same bucket.
It’s funny you say that, because I actually think the exact opposite. =) This is trying to recover from half a decade of failing to do any community building or management, and it reads as incredibly wishy-washy and vague—certainly not “concrete"—to me.
The community lessons aren’t relevant to lobste.rs because we have a small, focused, managed community to begin with and (as far as I know) no plans to suddenly expand it. Reddit’s failed community is something we’ll never have to face without a serious change in direction.
Ah, by concrete, I mean it’s a real site with real wishy-washy rules. It’s not a blog post wherein someone explains how some hypothetical site would maintain law and order and peace and love.
This, I think, is off-topic. It’s just Reddit internal politics (and, IMO, the Reddit admins doing an extremely poor job of curating their community—but I digress). The previous Reddit community post on lobste.rs was slightly less off-topic simply because it seemed there was a possibility of Reddit having a meltdown and other sites (including this one) seeing a sudden surge of new users (in particular, very undesirable new users), but it’s now clear that won’t happen: the more volatile elements of Reddit’s userbase will get very angry but not do anything about it.