I can tell you that the average person in the last 30 years hasn’t wanted to learn shit. I suspect it goes back far longer than that but I was too young to pay any attention.

People like us have always been around but we are not the norm. We thrive on challenge on the advantages of doing things different and better ways. But the vast majority of human history is primarily people just wanting to get by. They spent their extra time shining their floors or waxing their cars. Maybe getting that last decoration up in the foyer. That’s why we have so many databases running in Excel, It says easy as possible while just barely skirting by danger.

Yes, it didn’t re-sort by default. You can, however, hide based on score. so kinda?

They also used to (maybe they still do) have meta-moderation where you could flag things as funny or insightful. I always considered that a nice touch but it didn’t allow sorting either. .

I usually wouldn’t take the time to dissect and explain the issues I have with someone’s writing, but since you’re posting this on multiple platforms and called it an “effort piece”, I assume you’re looking to gain readers and for positive feedback. I misread the article and got upvoted by others who also didn’t read it fully, so I feel obliged to offer some help and encouragement. Ironically, this will end up being long and boring, but it’s meant for you, not for general readers.

Starting with setting the stage is usually a good approach, but nine paragraphs is too long before getting to your point. You need an early hook to keep readers interested.

The first sentence of the second paragraph is missing a word. It reads as if the people are the rage. Also, “whoever” is used for a subject and “whomever” for non-subject usage. Consider starting with “For whomever” to clarify the subject has yet to come. It’s a minor grammatical error, but it makes readers re-read the sentence to understand it. This isn’t a big deal, but it’s early in the article, and the text is lengthy with no point or summary in sight. Many readers will just close it and upvote someone who half-read it (like me).

I skimmed down to the bullet points, assuming the earlier paragraphs were a detailed history I already knew, and the points would be concise. But terms like “executive costs” and “discoverability was too onerous” make readers think too much about their meanings. You should make your points clearly and use simple language, like early high school or late middle school dialects. After making your point clear, you can elaborate further, perhaps even get a little flowery. Remember, this is a non-technical post for the general public, so it should be easy to read if you want it to be popular.

In the first set of bullet points, in #2, you start a subset with (1) but never follow up with (2). This makes readers feel like they missed something and adds to the difficulty of reading.

After your first set of bullet points, you returned to your chronological account, then broke into another set of bullet points. It’s not clear that you’re setting up a contrast here. Including a line like “in contrast” would help readers follow your thought process and transition more smoothly.

At the end of your second set of bullet points, you reference the 4th item from the first set, which makes readers think they missed #4 from the second set. It would be better and more readable to add a #4 to the second set and include the concepts in that paragraph.

I agree with the ideas you present, but it’s hard to grasp them with so many snags in the article. Proofreading it out loud might help. If English isn’t your first language, it might not help as much. I ran it through Grammarly, but it can’t fix the context issues I’m mentioning here. It catches a lot of the easier errors, but most of its recommendations don’t improve the thoughts you’re trying to convey.

Running your opening paragraphs through a readability calculator, your average score is “very difficult” to “extremely difficult.” This isn’t ideal for a weblog opinion piece. If you were writing a technical document or research paper, it would be fine, but for general consumption (which IMO is where this piece belongs), you should simplify it. Think of a New York Times article. The piece i’m writing here to you will gauge as very difficult as well, but that’s to be expected on an instructional piece.

As much as you might hate this suggestion, please try it: Run your drafts through an LLM like GPT-4/Copilot with the prompt “make this simpler [your text here].” Don’t just copy and paste what it says, but look at the changes in wording and see where the changes are significant. This can help make your writing more approachable.

Here’s an example

Yours:

“Whoever didn’t like the real-time nature of the IRC livechat, forums were all the rage and I admit they had a wonderful charm for the upcoming teenager who wanted to express themselves with fancy signatures and some name recognition for their antics. Each forum was a wonderful microcosm, a little community of people with a similar hobby and/or mind-frame.”

Theirs:

“For those who didn’t like the real-time nature of IRC live chat, forums were very popular. They had a special charm for teenagers who wanted to express themselves with fancy signatures and gain some recognition. Each forum was a small community of people with similar hobbies and mindsets.”

I’d take the advice up to the first comma, take out upcoming it’s not pertinent, add in gain, for the sake of readability, I’d take out microcosm, it’s a proper term, but it’s just duplicating the same thought and really doesn’t add to the comprehension or visuals while making it harder to read.

Mine:

“For those who didn’t like the real-time nature of the IRC live chat, forums were all the rage. and I admit they had a wonderful charm for teenagers who wanted to express themselves with fancy signatures and gaine some name recognition for their antics. Each forum was a wonderful little community of people with a similar hobbies and mindsets”

Also of note: maybe do lay into every person who gives you negative criticism, If your goal is to have people read your thoughts, some of these people may have viable critiques or real misunderstandings you can adjust your writing style for and draw a more substantial audience.

Best of luck!

that Discord was the viable option, even though it didn’t have the features you needed unless you dropped $200 in microtransactions?

It was a discord for a game.

I’m sitting here trying to figure out why you’re coming out on the attack so hard, it’s your own blog. That makes perfect sense.

LLM? no, I skimmed it because it’s extremely long and very fluffy. I mistook some of the fluff, my apologies. I’ll go back and thoroughly read it when I have time later today and give you credible feedback. Off the cuff, I’d recommend you try to tame the writing down a little, you’re obviously very excited and feel strongly about the topic, but that doesn’t always translate to a good read for others.

Saying that I mentioned paragraphs from the actual article … yeah.

They also make it incredibly difficult to even pay for their service. I needed to fund one for work a few years ago It was a pain in the arse. I had to buy $200 worth of boost packs. Just give me a single line item premium server and be done with it.

Article claims the forums were expensive and difficult to maintain. I thing it more likely that Facebook groups are epopular because people are already there.

Discord has done an amazing job at convenience. It’s free, they have a rather generous API. The communities have created fantastic bots. But it’s important to remember discord isn’t a forum it’s a live chat. Two people having a live discussion is a very different thing than two people carefully curating their responses in a forum.

Reddit and Lemmy are curated knowledge repository wrapped in discourse. Which brings an advantage over old forums.

More or less I would argue that the article is missing convenience as a driving factor.

Edit: I poorly skimmed this article and mistook some of its points. This comment deserves no upvotes and I’ll circle back later and give some credible feedback.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the map, The 2/3 of the names on there don’t really do the subject of the communities justice.

Sure, they make a new product get more venture capital shut down the old product, then wash, rinse, repeat.

Just split the difference and give me PWAs. Let The matrix tell my brain the steak is chewy and delicious.

The problem isn’t making monetization available, it’s having sufficient pull in the market to make it viable.

And then the next problem is being able to scale the network big enough to handle the traffic and storage requirements for hosted video. When let me runs out of go juice The traffic can easily be handled by a few inexpensive servers. When we’re talking about video storage those petabytes start getting really expensive.

Don’t worry, it’ll sort itself out when it becomes truly painful.

They are assuming that the developers are in on it, you’re assuming the developers are not in on it.

Realistically, big breaking changes are a source of serious pain for open networks like these. They’re not going to be compelled to fix it until it’s an active problem when there are a lot bigger problems sitting around that are easier to fix.

I love writing tests, It’s all the shit that comes after that that sucks.

Those first few pushes that all come up green feel like magic. That first red that points out something you missed, you go back and make a quick change and it’s now green and it’s the best thing you’ve ever seen.

It’s sooner or later, you throw a couple big red bois on a production build that don’t make any sense. You start digging through the code of some guy that only writes comments in haiku and has the impression he gets paid by the number of layers deep he can nest a ternary.

Sooner or later you figure out it’s just an edge case there’s nothing actually wrong. You’ll need to refactor one of the systems but you still have production to push to fix a critical bug, so you hotwire the test and write it off as P1 tech debt.

Eventually, you end up with unit tests that aren’t P1 and they fail. If you’re understaffed, or overscoped, sooner or later you just have a bunch of half-assed zombie test sitting around. Unless you can convince production to let you go back and clear up your tech debt it’s just a unit test graveyard. It still has the big bumpers in place so something serious can’t fail. But you never seem to be able to get back to make everything bright new and shiny again.

It would but then that bath water comes with the baby.

I can get people talking about piracy but it comes with Russian propaganda, Hitler love, fat shaming and homophobia.

It would be kind of cool to have a client where your communities come from specific instances where you want them. If an instance goes down have it pick a backup instance and pull the community from there. Of course it would require separate accounts in separate communities with separate subs on each instance, making each user weigh many times there normal cost for lemmy operation.

There’s always self-hosting, but it has its own discovery pitfalls. When you’d like a pie hole and public rated block lists where you can tell it what you do and don’t want to see

I want to love Skyrim so much. I own it I’ve tried a bunch of mods I’ve played it probably 5 or 10 hours. I just eventually wander off looking at something neat the distance get lost, end up getting stuck in the terrain somewhere, get bored and find something else to do.