/meta/

The Culture and Function of the X Button
I sez to the Monarch, I sez to him: Voting buttons are gay and Reddit, they don't belong on something in the lineage of chan culture. And he simply loves his demos too much, wants to give them power and freedom in shaping the culture. Many a king toppled f... posted 1mo ago with 17 replies received meta computing

The Culture and Func received

Reasonable proposal, but I will take the contra.... 1mo ago received

Reasonable proposal, received

Yes you do in fact get reputation for getting replies. You just also get rep for votes.... 1mo ago received

Yes you do in fact g received

The Sofiechan Index Page Question
We just had an opinionated sofiechanner over at sofie hq to discuss what can be done to improve the design of the site. We're all pretty satisfied with the thread design, being a fairly utilitarian and constrained problem where we can lean a bit on *chan t... posted 3mo ago with 6 replies received meta

The Sofiechan Index received

The most useful feature for me would be to jump back into a thread from the last post that I read, plus a count of the number of replies that have happened since I last opened the thread. I only use the previews of the post as a way to jump to the end of t... 3mo ago received

The most useful feat received

Interesting. I'm hearing a case for having both 2 and 3 from the OP: Have a separate index catalog with minimalistic focus on showing a bunch of OPs for when you're looking for a particular thread, and then also a firehose feed of the latest posts styled a... 3mo ago received

Interesting. I'm hea received

A Hidden Gem
One of the reasons I am posting here is to discover some hidden gems that cannot be found easily elsewhere on the web.... (www.sscnet.ucla.edu) posted 1y ago with 10 replies received meta philosophy bookclub

A Hidden Gem received

This is really interesting. Struggle is the principle that creates life, health, and truth, and it has justice to it. I have not heard of this so I will have to go read it. Is there a good english translation you recommend? Looks like archive has the germa... 1y ago received

This is really inter received

Could you send some of your favorite R/ACC essays or discussions on "agonistic inamic unity"? It seems highly relevant and historically fascinating, but I can't find much online apart from the foundational book which is an academic tome. 3mo ago received

Could you send some received

Did I mention we have a newsletter?
Sofiechan has a newsletter. Some of you know this, but perhaps not all. Log in and head over to the "you" page to affirmatively sign up. It's been working well for the last few weeks, so I think we will also turn it on by default for anyone who has posted.... posted 4mo ago with 2 replies received meta

Did I mention we hav received

Thanks for the bug report. We just fixed it. It shouldn't happen again. Our apologies for the inconvenience. 3mo ago received

Thanks for the bug r received

Email deliverability improvements and crushing the bots. Should sofiechan have an IQ captcha?
As many of you know, it has been annoying to log in to sofiechan as the code may not arrive or may end up in spam folder. Yesterday we finally looked at the logs and realized hundreds of login emails were being sent and only about 3% resulted in successful... (iqcaptcha.us.to) posted 4mo ago with 2 replies received meta computing

Email deliverability received

Well you seemed to have passed our new captcha alright, but you're going to fail the written portion of the test if you're not careful. I'm inclined to accommodate you because I can tell who you are from your writing style and you are a good friend, but yo... 4mo ago received

Well you seemed to h received

Welcome to Sofie Channel. Curated anonymous discussion about life and philosophy.
I've been working on a little something in the background for the past year, and more earnestly for the past few months. It's a new social media platform designed to curate a high quality discourse community about whatever topics are important to us.... posted 1y ago with 30 replies received meta philosophy

Welcome to Sofie Cha received

The high reputation poster is a bore and a lout of the highest order. As his reputation trends upwards the amount of information conveyed per post trends to zero. “On this topic the Socratics has this to say—” I can barely stomach this already. See h... 1y ago received

The high reputation received

Thanks. So far so good and i have a lot of ideas for how to improve the taste machine further. The main bottleneck at this point i think is we have to bootstrap a network of good discussion here. Then with scale we will see more clearly the problems requir... 4mo ago received

Thanks. So far so go received

The sofiechan tag system: Name your tags or the AI will do it for you
We've been slaving away for you in the code mines over the past few weeks trying to polish up the sofiechan tag system and UI, and we have some new gems. I'll focus on the tag system stuff today:... posted 4mo ago with 2 replies received meta technology computing

The sofiechan tag sy received

I should have called this post "the tag apocalypse". We're going to be in tag chaos for a while as the autotagger is fast and opinionated and we're not yet in equilibrium with it, so it's going to do things like rewrite the tags on all posts as it figures ... 4mo ago received

I should have called received

External links
We don't want lazy cross posting. I think it is good practice to write at least one paragraph commenting or asking a question. Otherwise why should I care about the link that you posted. It is just lazy and will get quickly downvoted. posted 4mo ago with 4 replies received meta

External links received

I very much disagree. There's plenty of information content in the image, title, and tags to figure out if I want to follow a link. YouTube agrees, my Signal chats agree, and Hacker News does too (without requiring even the image or tags). I think it's bad... 4mo ago received

I very much disagree received

I like links. I think we should post more links and lean on our usual mechanisms to curate them. Low value low effort links will get ignored or hidden, but high signal quality links are welcome as long as the title gives us some reason to care. Hacker News... 4mo ago received

I like links. I thin received

Ideas for tag renaming and ghost tag lifecycle
Hey anons. We've got the tag word frequency stuff running smooth now in the lab, but we need to add tag renaming to really make it useful. Let's talk about how to do that.... posted 5mo ago with 3 replies received meta computing

Ideas for tag renami received

This is true. I agree it's good for a chuckle first time around, but then you start wondering why there's greentext in the middle of the page. I also wouldn't exactly call it elegant to have such a large amount of army green next to the hierarchical tags i... 5mo ago received

This is true. I agre received

We're liking it with grey preview style quoted words. Fits better with the style of index pages while still getting the point across. Will probably randomize the selection too. 5mo ago received

We're liking it with received

Convenience features for conversations
Hey anons, we added some features: if you mouse over post references, you'll see a copy of the post pop up so you can see which it is and read it without having to navigate to it. Also, (you) and (op) are appended to references as appropriate. A few other ... posted 5mo ago with 2 replies received meta

Convenience features received

Mouseover feature feels great, congrats 5mo ago received

Mouseover feature fe received

Designing a word frequency auto-tagger for sofiechan
Let's talk about the upcoming auto-tagger architecture. All it has to do is produce affinity scores between threads and tags, and our now existent smart tag selector will select a high-affinity set of tags that also make a good index. To do this, it's goin... posted 5mo ago with 3 replies received meta technology computing

Designing a word fre received

It works! But slow as all hell. Right now we fully rebuild the "taste machine", which now includes this word frequency tagger, about once a minute. That used to do 50 iterations of the expectation-maximization algorithm we use to refine everyone's tastes, ... 5mo ago received

It works! But slow a received

Alt-social failures, coolness, and Good work
The central issue with all these 'alt-social' sites is coolness. A quick binary measure of coolness for websites is the existence of an /about page. Radiopaper has one, as does Uptrust, so they go immediately in the bin.... posted 5mo ago with 9 replies received meta gnon computing

Alt-social failures, received

I think the dopamine binky shortform video crowd is a write off and should be ignored. Writing, specifically essays and forums, remains the most powerful technology for serious socially transformative thought ever invented. We should double down on the wri... 5mo ago received

I think the dopamine received

This 100%, but also I actually do not want to know what sofiechan is. Is any decent social media platform definable? Its indescribability is what lets it hold power over us. Magic is not defined; it is ingraspable.... 5mo ago received

This 100%, but also received

Do you wish to subscribe to our newsletter? (experimental)
Hey anons, this week we have a big delivery: the sofiechan newsletter. It seems to work. We're shipping it. Head to the "you" page and click the endorse icon on the newsletter question to subscribe, and you should receive something in the hour after Monday... posted 5mo ago with 6 replies received meta

Do you wish to subsc received

Let's see if I get used it, but right now it feels like it will reduce my likelihood to post interesting links by 80% and effortpoasts by 30% 5mo ago received

Let's see if I get u received

Ergonomic features for anons and namefags: pronouncable nyms and profile pages
This week in the sofie mines, we've got pronounceable non-sequential anon ids (anon_haho, anon_ryfi, anon_lifo, etc), and custom nym bios and even profile pictures for nyms with proper usernames. Check it out.... posted 5mo ago with 3 replies received meta technology

Ergonomic features f received

They're nice! It's a small thing, but a good aesthetic improvement. Also a functional improvement, in that they make it easier to track anons when scanning a thread. 5mo ago received

They're nice! It's a received

Uptrust. Another alt-social app designed to foster great conversations
This seems interesting. Someone linked it to me. Has anyone used it or know anything about it? It seems like there are multiple parties thinking in serious ways about what we might call the “alt social media problem” and how to design really great cult... (www.uptrusthq.com) posted 6mo ago with 3 replies received meta supercoordination

Uptrust. Another alt received

I believe strongly in the inevitability of new alt-media spaces and digital enclaves that cater to specific scenes. Referring to the failure of past players, I think this has much less to do with network effects and far more with the fact that none of them... 5mo ago received

I believe strongly i received

Notifications have arrived, along with some smaller fixes and polish
Well it's that time again: 4:00 on a Friday afternoon. Time for the big push of barely-tested code to production! The sofiechan team has been slaving away in the code mines for you again this week, and we have some new updates:... posted 6mo ago with 2 replies received meta technology

Notifications have a received

Yeah it happens. I wish I had a better solution for you. It's been working reliably for most people afaik, and email is tough to get over those final reliability hurdles. Right now we're just using nearlyfreespeech as the provider, but we'll probably have ... 5mo ago received

Yeah it happens. I w received

Images on the front page! And many other minor improvements
Images are now visible on the front page. Does this make us officially an imageboard? Or does that have to wait until I set the op_must_have_image flag? Soon. Otherwise, see these other small changes:... posted 6mo ago with no replies received meta

Images on the front received

"Forum software blew a 4000x lead with poor UX" - Simon Sarris
I really liked forums. I liked imageboards. I dislike many of the patterns on twitter and group chats etc. But it's undeniable that those apps offer a richer more engaging user experience somehow. It's just more immediate with something you want to respond... (x.com) posted 6mo ago with 7 replies received meta technology

"Forum software blew received

To actually answer this question w/r/t Sofiechan, the main things I like about forum software compared to here:... 6mo ago received

To actually answer t received

not a ton of new ideas here, mostly agreeing with what others have said already.... 6mo ago received

not a ton of new ide received

Improved compose UI features
The new post compose ui (for new threads and for replies to posts) has some improvements today:... posted 7mo ago with 9 replies received meta computing

Improved compose UI received

Very happy to contribute to a worthwhile project. Hope you all enjoy the feature, and let me know if you run into any issues. 7mo ago received

Very happy to contri received

I really like this idea of extending community curation to the newsletter and I’m excited to see the first one. Here are some thoughts I have:... 6mo ago received

I really like this i received

Matching for anonymous private messages now works
We've been talking about this one for far too long, but now finally it's here: you can dm with other anons. Right now the only way to dm is to get matched by liking/following each other's nyms. This is neat but not as useful as it could be. We're also goin... posted 7mo ago with 6 replies received meta computing

Matching for anonymo received

Yeah its a bit awkward still. “Follow” is probably the wrong concept, the UI needs an overhaul, and i’m going to add other features that clarify things and reduce need to run around “following” people (eg manual dm requests). Anonymous social net... 7mo ago received

Yeah its a bit awkwa received

4chan collapses in massive ball of flames, leaving imageboard crown in the gutter. (Refugees Welcome!)
late last night, 4chan was finally kill. According to random anons on twitter, it was a massive hack that exploited outdated (since 2016) BSD issues to dump the database and take down the site. Some interesting claims flying around are that most /pol/ post... posted 7mo ago with 4 replies received meta news

4chan collapses in m received

Yeah 4chan was foundational. I started browsing as an edgy teen back in 2009 and have been using it on and off since. Like you say, my politics, my sense of humor, my hobby interests all come from 4chan. I know powerful and wealthy people with similar chan... 7mo ago received

Yeah 4chan was found received

How to build better anonymous social media: curation and tags
Back in 2014, moot banned gamergate discussion from 4chan. This led to an exodus of the most adventurous and curious channers to 8chan, which had a strict free speech policy. For a few months at least, 8chan was a haven of smart free discussion on all sort... posted 7mo ago with 13 replies received meta technology computing

How to build better received

Allow me to describe how I believe this can be achieved. The general structure of the site would be like 4chan with multiple boards and a catalog containing a specific number of threads. You can open the threads and reply to them, and every thread starts w... 7mo ago received

Allow me to describe received

Very cool, guys. Let a thousand alt social media flowers bloom. I look forward to seeing your respective attempts. I hope you’ll still want to come visit us here. 7mo ago received

Very cool, guys. Let received

more useful nyms dashboard in "you" page
One of you asked for more clarity on how nyms work, and when I explained it, we realized it was all quite un-inituitive and the UI didn't lead naturally to figuring it out. Now if you go to the "you" page to check it out, it will tell you about your nyms a... posted 7mo ago with 7 replies received meta computing

more useful nyms das received

I don't mean to send a strong signal against namefagging. I built the feature so you could namefag. It was just some mild bullying over the particular choice of name.... 7mo ago received

I don't mean to send received

The plan for anonymous mutual matching dms
Let's talk about how anonymous dms with mutuals will work. Thanks everyone for the feedback on the proposed follow functionality in >>2622. Having now thought about it and pushed up the prerequisites, it's time to plan out the details.... posted 8mo ago with 11 replies received meta computing

The plan for anonymo received

The way I see, there are only two coherent possibilities. Either you are really matching with:... 8mo ago received

The way I see, there received

We're going to do a dumb nym-to-nym dm system to cover the cases where there is a clear intention from the users. But also, it will occasionally hit you with something like "nym abc (you) and anon xyz follow each other. You can DM here". The algorithm is a... 8mo ago received

We're going to do a received

Help me figure out sofiechan poster vouching
Sofiechan's backend technically has the capability to consider not just a poster's posts and votes, but other user's direct assesments of that poster. That is, if you were to vouch for someone, the algorithm would take that as evidence that they are solid,... posted 8mo ago with 7 replies received meta computing

Help me figure out s received

Yeah thats the idea. I just deleted the twitter app because its so overrun with retarded shill bots. I want a social network, even a small one, where we can be quite sure that we are all free men, and not robots or shills. We need some density of good vouc... 8mo ago received

Yeah thats the idea. received

Sofie dev log thread 2025-03
New dev log thread because the previous one fell off the front page due to age. If still want to read it, it's still live in the meta tag. As usual, I'll post minor and major sofie channel changes here for discussion. posted 8mo ago with 2 replies received meta

Sofie dev log thread received

Added the "you" page for collecting all account-related functionality. It's replaced logout in the header, and that's where logout has moved. It also lists your persistent (named) nyms. I'm not listing all anon nyms because any serious poster will have doz... 8mo ago received

Added the "you" page received

Sofie dev log thread
I'll journal ITT with what I've been tinkering on and pushing up. It may be useful for those who are interested. posted 10mo ago with 10 replies received meta

Sofie dev log thread received

Fixed a major multi-hour outage caused by a logfile permissions mishap. Whoops.... 10mo ago received

Fixed a major multi- received

Some changes to layout last night. You'll see a unified title block at the top of all pages, tags a little less intrusive, a few other minor changes. Additionally, we can now (on the backend at least) change the name of tags. I've switched them from 4chan ... 8mo ago received

Some changes to layo received

4chan vs Tumblr
"In 2014, two online communities went to war. The belligerents were fairly niche social media boards: 4chan and Tumblr. While their short-lived conflict amounted to little more than a curious moment in Internet history, I have become convinced that it actu... (synergies.substack.com) posted 9mo ago with 4 replies received meta supercoordination

4chan vs Tumblr received

I’m glad you brought up 4chan vs tumblr. Its one of the things that convinced me to do sofiechan. Basically what we see there is that internet forums are actually massively overpowered as political and social platforms, but seem to be quite hard to contr... 9mo ago received

I’m glad you brought received

Request for comments: design sketch for sofiechan profiles and vouch graph
It's time to talk about the next two big features of sofiechan: profile pages, and the vouch graph. This stuff isn't built yet, so I'm sketching it out to get the vision clear.... posted 9mo ago with 2 replies received meta

Request for comments received

Thanks for the support. To be clear, anonymous posting will still be the default and always an option. I imagine pseudonymity/facefagging is for when you really do want your posts tied together. Or you really want to have a funny name for this set of posts... 9mo ago received

Thanks for the suppo received

Introducing Sofiechan Prototype Tag System
Over the past few weeks I've managed to find a few days in which to build a prototype tag system for sofiechan. In comparison to other forums, this will be our equivalent of "boards" "subreddits", etc.... posted 10mo ago with 11 replies received meta computing

Introducing Sofiecha received

I don't see the connection. Tags are for organizing the index of threads so we can have multiple conversations going on at once. The thread length limit is so that threads don't get too long to read and navigate. The thread limit might be a bit busted righ... 10mo ago received

I don't see the conn received

Sofie Calls, "spaces" on Sofiechan - feature request
Could be interesting to have some form of "twitter space" / broadcast audio feed for these conversations.... posted 11mo ago with 8 replies received meta

Sofie Calls, "spaces received

Distortion would be a really cool technological problem to solve - and it's quite easy actually with the folks I know. 10mo ago received

Distortion would be received

Shallow Feedback Hollows You Out
https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/shallow-feedback-hollows-you-out posted 10mo ago with 4 replies received meta rationality

Shallow Feedback Hol received

I wonder how we could make sofiechan better for deep engagement. Ive already noticed the algorithm punishing people for getting into obscure one-on-one but actually valuable discourses. I dont like that and will probably be changing it.... 10mo ago received

I wonder how we coul received

Some Sofiechan Design Questions
Hey folks. I have some design questions to resolve for the future of sofiechan. I want to solicit feedback from those of you who have been using it and helping me.... posted 12mo ago with 2 replies received meta

Some Sofiechan Desig received

I think I've decided how to handle it. See the new design with harmonized presentation between OP and replies (except that OP must have a title). All posts are created equal, but some are the OP of a thread. We may in future offer facilities for splitting ... 12mo ago received

I think I've decided received

The Sofiechan Email Apocalypse may be over
Hey everyone, you may have experienced some difficulty logging in as the login emails were increasingly going to spam boxes. This was mostly because we didn't have all the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC stuff set up for email authentication. Now we do. It "Works On ... posted 1y ago with 7 replies received meta

The Sofiechan Email received

There was a serious bug. It should now be possible to post new threads. Also, the email apocalypse isnt over. Mail is at least getting delivered, but its still going to spam. More research is needed. 13mo ago received

There was a serious received

Paul Christiano proposes advisory voting/crowdsourced cyber-monarchy back in 2016
https://sideways-view.com/2016/12/02/crowdsourcing-moderation-without-sacrificing-quality/ posted 1y ago with 1 reply received meta technology

Paul Christiano prop received

This is very cool. I didn't know this existed, but a friend sent it to me. It's shockingly close to what I envisioned and am doing for sofiechannel. I'll admit I've been inspired at points by Paul's other work. There are commonalities like his friendly AI ... 1y ago received

This is very cool. I received

Road Trip Week 3: Many meetings towards a grand plan for sofie chan
Having arrived last week in the last homely house before our long journey into the wilds of the east and south, I've had many meetings. I've been meeting especially with business-minded and philosophical friends to talk about sofiechan strategy. A week in ... posted 1y ago with 2 replies received meta

Road Trip Week 3: Ma received

Happy 248th birthday, America. 1y ago received

Happy 248th birthday received

bug reports and feature ideas thread. help us get this thing ready for primetime.
posted 2y ago with 41 replies received meta computing

bug reports and feat received

PSA: running an experiment where total noobs are no longer allowed to post threads, but can still post in threads. A few well regarded reply posts or predictive votes will scoop enough reputation to post a thread. Think of it as a small hazing and enforced... 1y ago received

PSA: running an expe received

It's much easier for the renderer not to have to know what thread everything is in, but we will probably do that eventually. We have to look them up anyways to connect the back-references, so maybe we can easily reuse some of that logic. 1y ago received

It's much easier for received

Sofie Channel Launch Review
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.... posted 1y ago with 3 replies received meta

Sofie Channel Launch received

Also, don't read too much into reputations or post qualities right now. It's still pretty haywire especially as I keep changing calibration (which just now hit everyone's reputation pretty hard by correcting quality inflation due to positive bias). Further... 1y ago received

Also, don't read too received

Historical Scholarship and the Eternal Repost
Lately I’ve been frustrated by how the recent historical scholarship in a few fields has just been rewarming and repeating the work of much better and more insightful scholars from the mid-20th century. Lots of new books and new articles, but none of the... posted 2y ago with 2 replies received meta

Historical Scholarsh received

Maybe we need an ideology of reading old books. Reading stuff from past times that no one has in living memory is both likely to preserve all-important historical memory, and to expose one to thoughts unthinkable in one's own time. These are both crucial f... 2y ago received

Maybe we need an ide received

Yes. I'm not a veteran here, but from the vibe I've assumed that reading old books is table stakes for participation in this forum. I do it myself, anyway.... 2y ago received

Yes. I'm not a veter received

Updates on sofiechan's curation system: Cybernetic Direct Democracy
I (admin) just pushed a bunch of changes. You'll see it most obviously in the percent signs next to the save and hide buttons, and as colored emojis indicating which posts are well regarded, and which are about to be deleted. Broadly, this is part of how s... posted 2y ago with 12 replies received meta technology

Updates on sofiechan received

Respond and make your case. Eventually there will be 4chan-style linkbacks so that you can immediately see if a post is really controversial (posts that generate tones of replies tend to be controversial). I think disagreement is better expressed as rebutt... 2y ago received

Respond and make you received

I notice a large number of threads converge on approximately 60% up, 1% down. This is two things: not enough people, so when the usual number of us vote and engage in a usual thread, it ends up with about the usual amount of evidence. But then they should ... 2y ago received

I notice a large num received