anon 0x1b5 said in #1410 13mo ago:
Thank you everybody for coming by and having some fun discussion for the launch of sofiechan! We had a big spike of users and activity, but things are quieting down again. Hopefully some of the new folks will stick around.
For the launch I basically wanted to get a larger crowd to stress test things a bit, learn a bit more about how we should develop the platform and algorithm, and recruit a few more longer-term posters. The jury's still out on that last part but everything else went well. We didn't have any serious bugs or performance issues, got some good feedback, and revealed some stuff to polish and investigate. I was pleasantly surprised by how well behaved everyone was. And now we can be encouraged to share links to sofiechan threads without worrying about preempting a proper launch.
I want to give you guys a bit of a heads up on the development roadmap from here out and get your thoughts:
* The algorithm seems to basically work but there are some weird points I want to investigate. Part of that will be building more transparency on how you're doing with the algorithm and why. I don't want to make karma-farming too attractive; the point of the algorithm is that it should just work for high quality good faith posters without having to think about it. That said, you can expect some kind of summary dashboard explaining how your posts and votes affected your reputation.
* In the short to medium term, I'll be polishing sofiechan as a (so far) single-board forum and group blog. This will mean some minor design changes, but mostly just refinement on the current model.
* One of the bigger divergences from the model so far will be to allow posting with a named profile. This will allow you to build up a more "transportable" human social reputation, and import more of your reputation from elsewhere to here. This will also make it possible to do something like a blog from this platform. Of course you will always be able to post anonymously, using your full reputation as far as it is understood by sofiechan.
* I may also increase the visual media aspect and lean into being an imageboard a bit more, optimized for aesthetics and inspiration. This would mean more design changes, like indexing the best images from each thread on the front page. However, it's not clear how well this synergizes with the more intellectual groove we've got going. I'm interested in arguments and ideas on this.
* In the long term, the goal is for sofiechan to become a great platform for many communities of overlapping interest areas, membership, and authority, retaining overall coherence as a sort of digital polis. This is going to be part of what the tag/taxonomy system does. But before we go from one to N, we have to go from zero to one.
Going from zero to one isn't a software problem. In the medium term, we will need to actually do our philosophical project successfully, and use sofiechan for it insofar as it's a good platform for it. I've been very encouraged by early enthusiasm for what I see as many of the right topics, but we need to really develop a body of thought that takes this from a set of threads of curiosity to a well articulated system that we can start to build on. This is what I hope to turn my attention to in earnest later this year.
In any case, thank you everybody for your participation so far.
For the launch I basically wanted to get a larger crowd to stress test things a bit, learn a bit more about how we should develop the platform and algorithm, and recruit a few more longer-term posters. The jury's still out on that last part but everything else went well. We didn't have any serious bugs or performance issues, got some good feedback, and revealed some stuff to polish and investigate. I was pleasantly surprised by how well behaved everyone was. And now we can be encouraged to share links to sofiechan threads without worrying about preempting a proper launch.
I want to give you guys a bit of a heads up on the development roadmap from here out and get your thoughts:
* The algorithm seems to basically work but there are some weird points I want to investigate. Part of that will be building more transparency on how you're doing with the algorithm and why. I don't want to make karma-farming too attractive; the point of the algorithm is that it should just work for high quality good faith posters without having to think about it. That said, you can expect some kind of summary dashboard explaining how your posts and votes affected your reputation.
* In the short to medium term, I'll be polishing sofiechan as a (so far) single-board forum and group blog. This will mean some minor design changes, but mostly just refinement on the current model.
* One of the bigger divergences from the model so far will be to allow posting with a named profile. This will allow you to build up a more "transportable" human social reputation, and import more of your reputation from elsewhere to here. This will also make it possible to do something like a blog from this platform. Of course you will always be able to post anonymously, using your full reputation as far as it is understood by sofiechan.
* I may also increase the visual media aspect and lean into being an imageboard a bit more, optimized for aesthetics and inspiration. This would mean more design changes, like indexing the best images from each thread on the front page. However, it's not clear how well this synergizes with the more intellectual groove we've got going. I'm interested in arguments and ideas on this.
* In the long term, the goal is for sofiechan to become a great platform for many communities of overlapping interest areas, membership, and authority, retaining overall coherence as a sort of digital polis. This is going to be part of what the tag/taxonomy system does. But before we go from one to N, we have to go from zero to one.
Going from zero to one isn't a software problem. In the medium term, we will need to actually do our philosophical project successfully, and use sofiechan for it insofar as it's a good platform for it. I've been very encouraged by early enthusiasm for what I see as many of the right topics, but we need to really develop a body of thought that takes this from a set of threads of curiosity to a well articulated system that we can start to build on. This is what I hope to turn my attention to in earnest later this year.
In any case, thank you everybody for your participation so far.
Thank you everybody