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   Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 18:14:17 JST Dan Luu

   As a follow-up to https://mastodon.social/@danluu/109798007902048311, I wonder why there isn't a serious, well-funded, attempt to create a modern forum

   If you look at Wikipedia's list of forum software, it's all ancient except discourse, and discourse seems unlikely to ever be something great for users

   Its performance is famously terrible. People often point out how unusable it is unless you have a fast phone and the founder's response to this has been to rant about how Qualcomm sucks and need to make faster processors

   • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 18:15:13 JST Dan Luu

     in reply to

     One of the major design decisions was to have no downvotes, which was justified as a way to created "civilized discourse", the idea being that people should discuss their disagreements, resulting in "civilized discourse".

     I predicted this wouldn't work because people sometimes have a very strong desire to express displeasure, and if they can't do it by downvoting, they'll do it by writing nasty comments. You don't even have to have used the internet to guess this, e.g.,

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     Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 18:15:14 JST Dan Luu

     in reply to

     Its backend performance also appears to be quite bad, e.g., they banned Bing from crawling them because they couldn't handle the 0.5 QPS of load that Bing was sending their way: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/981992814824378369.

     But, computer performance continues to improve and discourse will probably be usable on a cheap phone within a decade and maybe servers will also become fast enough that they'll be able to handle 0.5 QPS of load.

     The bigger issue is that the design is strongly anti-user in a lot of ways, e.g.,

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     Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 18:16:28 JST Dan Luu

     in reply to

     if you watch someone who's road raging, they often try to get the attention of their target and they keep getting angrier and angrier and angrier when their target doesn't notice they're being given the finger or whatever.

     If you ever watched a forum migrate to discourse, you can see this exact thing play out. I read the blizzard forums around when I played Overwatch for https://danluu.com/overwatch-gender/ and it was exactly as you'd expect. The number of mean/toxic/jerk-y messages went way up.

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     Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 18:17:19 JST Dan Luu

     in reply to

     I wish I saved the link to this message, because there was a brilliant summary of the problem when someone asked a jerk why they wrote such a horrible reply

     The jerk replied that they needed to let this other guy know they were an idiot an they couldn't downvote them, so they "had to" write a message explaining why the other person was wrong

     It's a common fantasy that no downvotes or forced reply with downvote will make people amicable, but no one who observes people can believe this will work

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     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 18:23:57 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to
     @danluu Reminds me of how modern platforms tend to have near zero moderation tools, like if they had to re-learn all over again on why spam filters had to exist and how their design evolved.
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     Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 18:24:59 JST Dan Luu

     in reply to

     If you actually look at how forums scale up and maintain semi-decent discourse, having extremely highly weighted downvotes/flagging is one of the most effective tools (if you don't want all controversial topics killed, you can do what HN does and have mods manually rescue flagged items at their discretion; of course you can do the opposite and have mods try to chase down every bad comment and discussion, but that's harder to scale).

     Discourse makes exactly the wrong choice in quite a few ways.

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     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Thursday, 14-Sep-2023 18:26:06 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
     @danluu And in a way a downvote button can serve as a Junk folder.
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     Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 25-Jul-2024 16:06:38 JST Dan Luu

     in reply to

     Anyway, the same thing that fundamentally concerns me about the Bing issue is what concerns me about the responses from the founder about Android performance where, in response to comments about performance being bad on many Android phones, the founder has numerous rants about how the real problem is that Qualcomm sucks. He sometimes says the engineers are terrible at their jobs and deserve to lose their jobs.

     I did a quick Bing search to find some examples and he's still doing this in 2023.

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     Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 25-Jul-2024 16:06:38 JST Dan Luu

     in reply to

     The Apple CPU org has, along with DEC in the StrongARM & Alpha era, one of the best executing CPU design teams ever assembled (and not coincidentally, they share a lineage via DEC->SiByte->PA Semi->Apple) and Qualcomm is at, what, maybe 75%-95% of the single-core performance?

     If only managing to get to 75% to 95% of the performance of an all-time-great team makes you a clown you deserves to lose their job, man, I have news for you.

     Of course I don't agree with this —

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     Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 25-Jul-2024 16:06:38 JST Dan Luu

     in reply to

     I've repeatedly pushed back against Casey's rants on how the developers of X are bad because they don't produce code that's as fast his code. There are often reasonable reasons for slow code

     But if you're ranting about how people who are 75%-95% keeping up with an all time great team should lose their jobs while you're making slowest-in-class software, maybe 0.0001% of optimal, come on dude

     In response to customer issues, Discourse leadership has repeatedly written angry rants about a "vendor"

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     Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 25-Jul-2024 16:06:38 JST Dan Luu

     in reply to

     Yeah, the Bing issue is fixed because Bing came from the Microsoft lineage/culture of fixing issues that impact end users even if the problem is obviously a technical or product issue that comes from outside of Microsoft.

     But in other cases, the "vendor" being ranted at either can't or won't fix the issue and end user gets stuck with the problem, although they do get some nice rants about how Qualcomm engineers deserve to lose their jobs, so at least there's that.

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     Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 25-Jul-2024 16:06:39 JST Dan Luu

     in reply to

     because customers are charged so much for crawler traffic that they're leaving the platform.

     And also that if anyone wants to change it, it's trivial to change the defaults and Discourse has a lot of weight to throw around because people usually don't change defaults.

     Bing ended up fixing it because they were the adults in the room. When people pointed out that Discourse's change would cause problems for people, leadership responded with nonsensical angry comments: https://meta.discourse.org/t/handling-bingbot/84659/22.

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     Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 25-Jul-2024 16:06:39 JST Dan Luu

     in reply to

     Why not just not charge people for a trivial amount of crawler traffic? If the backend is decently fast, it should basically be free to eat the load and not charge customers for it (and yes, I know the 0.5 QPS was for one site and it will add up; even so). My CDN doesn't charge me for getting DDoS'd because that traffic isn't really "my fault" and that could easily be orders of magnitude more traffic than all crawler traffic for all crawlers across every discourse instance.

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     Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 25-Jul-2024 16:06:40 JST Dan Luu

     in reply to

     Since discourse employees are now dropping in to inform me that the Bing thing is fixed, with the implication that Bing was at fault because Bing fixed the issue.

     I know. The thing about the Bing issue is that, in response to Bing crawling at 0.5 QPS, leadership banned Bing and, in response to comments that this would cause problems, said things like "No, the nuclear option is what we want here."

     The justifications were that 0.5 QPS of crawler traffic was causing discourse to lose customers