Instead of starting a poll in the governance forum (which is hidden, it would be better if it were more visible), a decision was made by 1-3 people to go along with this banner ad idea with the goal of paying those 1-3 people an unknown amount of money, with no plan to ever cap those payments in the future.
When users finally find out about the ads, one of them complains and is told if he doesn’t like it he can leave and also he’s a dick for even bringing it up in the only thread about it.
I was trying to get the right reference, I think I have it. You’re like the House of unstuck, while Cuddy is the composite of the people running the hospital err website
You could try laying off the Stalinist coup accusations. Essentially anyone could have been part of this and as far as I’m concerned still can. In fact I would happily transfer my responsibilities to you.
Like what is the end goal here? Is it to be a self-contained, sovereign residence for the former inhabitants of 2p2 Politics? Or is it to be something more?
It seems like this place is trying to be all things to all people. We want diverging view-points, just not the normal right-wing bullshitters. We want a socialist experiment, but someone has to take charge.
What was really the problem with the old place? It’s been made very clear that all the effort behind this wasn’t made altruistically. What’s the deal yo?
I think this is worth discussing a bit. I would like to see the site grow too but I’m ambivalent about how because while it would be cathartic to attract and then dunk on morally rudderless internet dorks, do you really want that element unchained (so to speak) here? I’m not saying it’s impossible to break through to some of them, but jesus is it bad reading like 99% of the time.
For example, I had an idea here about starting some threads dedicated to specific podcast episodes (don’t have to be political) and then whoever cared would try to listen to the episode and we take a deeper dive in the thread; you drop something about Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson in the title I gotta believe google or bing will direct us some dorks. Go to a deplorable reddit sub, drop a link, etc…
I didn’t make this decision unilaterally, and the only reason I ended up as one of the admins is because nobody else was willing to do the work. Do you want to take over for me instead? Because aorn it’s a pretty god damn unrewarding job. How quickly can you get up to speed with Discourse, not to mention Rails, Ember, Docker and Nginx? You can probably skate without the Ruby and JS, but you’re definitely going to have to know the other two if you want to keep this site up.
Also required:
Basic Linux sysadmin
Coordinating with some guy you don’t know in CA who registered the domain, and managing the DNS entries
Setting up SPF and DKIM so the domain doesn’t get spoofed for spam and get blacklisted
Configuring one of your own personal email accounts to work for site emails to avoid extra costs
Paying the fucking bills out of your own bank account
Manage multiple SSL certificates
Setting up linked Google and Twitter accounts for logins
Registering with and monitoring search engines
Dealing with endless shit like this thread
Managing backups and updates
Monitoring Exiled to make sure some asshole doesn’t change his avatar to include frontal nudity and put our biggest source of traffic at risk
That’s just off the top of my head. There’s definitely a lot more. Do you want the job? lmk. PM me a resume.
Yeah, I am to some degree. Has anyone stopped you from doing anything? Have you tried to do anything? Have you asked if you could do something? Have you done anything on your own and asked anyone to help? As far as I know, not a single person was excluded.
It’s past my bedtime and I’m well past done for the day, but for me none of this is about the revenue per se, it’s about building something bigger. I believe there is potential for a lot more from this community and I want to help create a platform that makes that possible. A neccesary part of that imo is that this site be allowed to try to generate income. Without that there’s going to be a very low ceiling on what can be accomplished.
These are fair questions but if you want to grow the site this place is yugely better, I suggest never bringing up the old place again, I’d echo Tone’s sentiment here:
Just the other day, before the ads, I was browsing the site enjoyably and I thought to myself, “this is great. This is a community forum with fantastic posters discussing interesting topics that I enjoy reading, and there are no ads, there’s no need for ads because we’re funded by donations and members donating their skills and time”
And then the ads show up and I was a little bothered but not that bothered. Then as I was browsing I thought of a product I hadn’t considered buying in months. I didn’t do a search for it, I didn’t even say it out loud, it was a thought fully contained within my brain. And yet somehow, though this pernicious Google ad algorithm, an ad for that product popped up at the bottom of the page. It unnerved me. Not just because it reminded me that google has completely owned my mind, but it felt like an even greater invasion because I was seeing it on a site that I felt was as a safe haven from this kind of capitalist bullshit.
So from my perspective the ads are fucking with my user experience.
I then read the thread about the ads and I see a post from zz saying “we’re just trying to get paid for our time”. Which I didn’t think they would do because they’re not professionals and they resisted paying outside professionals to work on the site in the past. So I asked how long we have to put up with these ads and the response was thuggish, like, “we don’t have to answer to you”, and it just reeked of corruption. There’s no oversight, there’s no plan to limit the payments, the whole model for the website shifted from a community to the same type of business that i thought we all hated at 2p2. Where now I’m producing content that one or two people are making money off of. And they’re good guys, they’re great guys, they’re not Mason malmuth, but I still don’t like it.
What greg said. I’m not going to try to block this, but my feeling is that donations are pure donations expecting nothing in return and giving money is not something that makes someone a better member.
Some people felt the old site had problems. I wasn’t really one of them, but I do think this software is better.
There have been vague goals, but who knows? It’s just stuff happening. It’s not that no one has thought there’s absolutely no possibility that this becomes a big site with lots and lots more users, but no one thinks that’s very likely. Zikzak in particular wants it to be possible that people doing the software stuff can get paid a reasonable amount for their work, though he has certainly said publicly and in PMs that he doesn’t think it’s likely. I have had some thoughts that tangential software efforts could make some money - like hosting other unrelated Discourse sites, using our experience. Cuserounder has thoughts about using it to help launch some podcasting.
All of this has been discussed very publicly and more than once.
idk, did Zuck have some significant percentage of his existing users express interest in expanding their audience with an outwardly focused platform and growth? Because we have that.
We also have a few people who just want what we already have and are extremely averse to change.
One of these two groups has to lose. We can’t do both successfully.
Chopstick? I think of him as being pretty political for OOT.
I think it might be a good idea to set some kind of hourly rate for work done and let it count as loan to the site when there isn’t enough money to pay it and people shouldn’t be shy about claiming hours, but that’s just me. I’m not sure anyone else would agree.
If there’s ever much money I’m not looking forward to being in the middle of figuring out where it goes.