posts by admin

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 3d ago with 2 replies meta

Convenience features

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 1w ago with 3 replies technology meta informatics

Designing a word fre

Yeah i originally was going to use embeddings but all the off the shelf embeddings were confusing and huge, and i failed when i attempted to train one myself. I may revisit but i suspect this keyword system is going to be fine for our purposes. And the spa... 1w ago

Yeah i originally wa

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, ... 5d ago

It works! But slow a

in thread "Supercoordination: A Specific Strategy":

Can you say a bit more what you mean by “the original thread” and “not able to reply”? Sometimes long threads are closed to comments by new users but there may also be bugs. 1w ago

Can you say a bit mo

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 2w ago with 6 replies meta

Do you wish to subsc

I also turned on “op must have an image” and increased reputation required to post a thread to a nonzero level. Happy to hear arguments either way on this but wanted to try out the slight taste and investment test to see how it affects posting. 2w ago

I also turned on “op

in thread "Alt-social failures, coolness, and Good work":

Ok I'll bite. Why shouldn't we add a side bar? Not that we have any plans for anything like that, but I have considered it in the past. The current design is driven by necessity and elegance. I don't forsee a need for sidebar type stuff, but I'd love to he... 2w ago

Ok I'll bite. Why sh

Wrong thread, but we're big fans of pink obviously, and radial symmetry is cool. It's an eclipse. I've heard all serious modern software companies need such a logo. 2w ago

Wrong thread, but we

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 3w ago with 3 replies meta

Ergonomic features f

How are you guys liking the new pronounceable nyms? It's feeling a lot more comfy IMO. A bit goofy but they just work. Curious for feedback. 2w ago

How are you guys lik

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 1mo ago with 2 replies meta

Notifications have a

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 ... 3w ago

Yeah it happens. I w

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 1mo ago with no replies meta

Images on the front

"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 2mo ago with 7 replies technology meta

"Forum software blew

what's the value of a shoutbox and would that work for us? Is that just a live chat feed for low-stakes chat comments? I have always found such things to be awkward and gimmicky and have never used them. I think the best platforms have their attentional fo... 2mo ago

what's the value of

fwiw, things actually don't fall off the board right now. They fall of the front page. Dig around in the tags and necrobump your favorite finds. I thought about the stuff you said and I'm sympathetic, so I tried a few different solutions and currently have... 2mo ago

fwiw, things actuall

Improved compose UI features
The new post compose ui (for new threads and for replies to posts) has some improvements today:... posted 2mo ago with 9 replies meta

Improved compose UI

The RSS feed was a different anon who may or may not still be reading/around. We’ve had it for at least 6 months but i never announced it i guess. I dont really get RSS so im not even sure it still works.... 2mo ago

The RSS feed was a d

I guess we're going to have to build our own newsletter at some point here. Basically there should be an option on the account page to add an email subscription that notifies you of new posts, or best posts weekly, or something like that. Also DMs. When we... 2mo ago

I guess we're going

For what it's worth, "best rated" posts already includes a term for "most discussion from different people" (basically we count unique posters per thread weighted by their reputation), though perhaps we could improve that by putting more weight on it and a... 2mo ago

For what it's worth,

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 2mo ago with 6 replies meta

Matching for anonymo

Fyi theres no notifications yet so you might miss that you matched or got a dm. Check the “you” page to see dms. 2mo ago

Fyi theres no notifi

I've already matched with a few people (under multiple names even). Or at least I think it's a few people. Maybe it's just one of you. No way to know. This is fun! I find myself expecting a lot of great content to be posted to the private channels, and opt... 2mo ago

I've already matched

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... 2mo ago

Yeah its a bit awkwa

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 2mo ago with 13 replies technology meta coordination

How to build better

Yes the current implementation of the “eigencommunity” of good posters is closely related to pagerank: your authority as a voter is a function of how much value (positive and negative) you have produced, with value being the revealed opinion (votes and... 2mo ago

Yes the current impl

Also, i’m not going to hellban/heavenban everybody. Besides being rather more expensive (several orders of magnitude, naively) than computing a single canonical community perspective, the difference between different possible authorities is not as large ... 2mo ago

Also, i’m not going

Well as you noticed yourself, tags are naturally closely related to “simcluster” feeds. Whats the difference between a named feed and a tag page? I think what you’re proposing with respect to the current tag scheme is that users should should perhaps... 2mo ago

Well as you noticed

Yes I've been thinking this. I don't think you even need an LLM. Good old fashioned bag-of-words document embeddings would probably work fine (and be lots more efficient). But also, the tags are going to be populated and maintained by human posters, and th... 2mo ago

Yes I've been thinki

that's a cool idea. You can post your blog on your own page, but all discussion is inherently public. With likes you're basically going back to the older twitter model of non-algorithmic retweet-like-curation, if I understand correctly. So if I understand,... 2mo ago

that's a cool idea.

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. 2mo ago

Very cool, guys. Let

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 2mo ago with 7 replies meta

more useful nyms das

yeah good ideas on how to use the nym feature. I look forward to seeing what you guys come up with. Some of it might end up having to be nerfed but for now go wild.... 2mo ago

yeah good ideas on h

cool i switched my nym color to pink from that ugly green I had at the cost of revealing myself as admin on one non-admin post that had the good color. Thanks for the idea. I don't think there's any downside to allowing this...... 2mo ago

cool i switched my n

that there is a BUG. On it. 2mo ago

that there is a BUG.

Fixed the zero bug. De-naming yourself should work properly now. 2mo ago

Fixed the zero bug.

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.... 2mo ago

I don't mean to send

Sofie dev log: new tags header and index selection algorithm
A few more visible changes for you today. You will see at the top of any given index page a list of tags. These are the "nearby" tags that have significant overlap (Jaccard similarity > ~0.05) with the tag you're looking at. For the root index, that's the ... posted 3mo ago with no replies meta

Sofie dev log: new t

It is the will of Gnon that we shall fill the stars and subdue them. Jim solves the great filter, rejects copernican principle.
https://blog.reaction.la/science/it-is-the-will-of-gnon-that-we-shall-fill-the-stars-and-subdue-them/ posted 3mo ago with 1 reply gnon metaphysics

It is the will of Gn

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 4mo ago with 11 replies meta

The plan for anonymo

I had a good discussion with someone about this earlier today and came to this thought: we should have something like an option to be open to other people requesting follow-back (and thus an open channel of communication). So I follow you and send the requ... 4mo ago

I had a good discuss

Thinking further, there seems to be a tricky combinatorial problem in the match algorithm. What if I like many of your nyms, and then you like one of mine? Which ones match? What if you then like another?... 4mo ago

Thinking further, th

That requires specifying which nym is doing the following in each case, and reduces probability of match drastically. Match takes two user-to-nym follows and produces a nym-to-nym match. One such match can be produced without any complication. It's what to... 4mo ago

That requires specif

Interesting points anon. Maybe we don't need any such concept as matching, given dm requests. Maybe it's too tpot. I will think on that. But first, I must present the solution to the matching problem assuming we want matches:... 4mo ago

Interesting points a

Well I got it working on the backend. It finds matches. But we don't have the code yet to actually support notifications or private threads. Nor have I built the manual matching mechanism. This is all going to be monstrously complex. Several hundred lines ... 3mo ago

Well I got it workin

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... 3mo ago

We're going to do a

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 4mo ago with 7 replies meta

Help me figure out s

Yeah I'm getting more excited by the matching aspect the more I think about it. As for algorithmic inequality, I don't think I believe that the value of an anonymous board is equality per se. It's rather that you are insulated from third party censure. No ... 4mo ago

Yeah I'm getting mor

To be clear, most of the algorithm is already and still what you are calling "rapport". That is of course the backbone of anonymous reputation. But let's talk about an anonymous "mute". What could that mean? We could make it so that you literally just neve... 4mo ago

To be clear, most of

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... 3mo ago

Yeah thats the idea.

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 4mo ago with 2 replies meta

Sofie dev log thread

Just pushed up the first functionality of the follow/mute UI. It doesn't do much yet, just impacts the reputation of the person you're following a bit. Coming soon is the part where we reveal threads with people you follow, and match you with mutuals for d... 4mo ago

Just pushed up the f

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... 4mo ago

Added the "you" page

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 5mo ago with 10 replies meta

Sofie dev log thread

Fixed a major multi-hour outage caused by a logfile permissions mishap. Whoops.... 5mo ago

Fixed a major multi-

New taste machine version (the part of the system that determines who has how much authority, and how valuable or offensive posts are considered to be). You will see that the value indicator numbers are now integers counting "votes". It's not quite as simp... 5mo ago

New taste machine ve

Major outage today as I had a subtle concurrency bug that blew up the whole system because of lack of defensive coding somewhere else. Details not that interesting: basically syncing the taste machine wasn't threadsafe but the webserver is multithreaded so... 5mo ago

Major outage today a

Added a "profile page" feature where you can click on a nym and see everything they have posted (under that name) in one place. Right now this is pretty useless because nyms are unique to threads, but as we add ways to interact with nyms (dm, vouch) and ad... 4mo ago

Added a "profile pag

You can now name your nyms. If you give two nyms the same name, they will be merged. See how I am now "admin". When posting new threads, you can either use a fresh anon (as previously) or one of your names. As always, you can at any time for any post spin ... 4mo ago

You can now name you

If i vouch for both your nyms, the system assumes those are independent signals, so they both count. But there’s a limit to how much we can count even very large numbers of vouches, with strong diminishing returns. I’ll adjust if people start gaming it... 4mo ago

If i vouch for both

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 ... 4mo ago

Some changes to layo

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 5mo ago with 11 replies meta

Introducing Sofiecha

That is precisely the plan. In fact it is basically already the case. There are only a few minor things left for full integration of the tag system into the advisory voting taste machine. Basically all of you have enough signal to more or less unilaterally... 5mo ago

That is precisely th

Yeah basically this is what i was getting at when saying tags should index content that otherwise isn’t well indexed. The corollary is that it doesnt count towards that tag’s utility if it is duplicative. The vector embedding idea is interesting. We’... 5mo ago

Yeah basically this

Its very important IMO that users be able to define their own “feed” and reason about it. A problem with current social media is that the feed algos are opaque, not something you can reason about and discuss. I want to solve this with the tag system fi... 5mo ago

Its very important I

Yeah maybe when you tag something it should appear under that tag for you, with the community default following from the consensus on that.... 5mo ago

Yeah maybe when you

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... 5mo ago

I don't see the conn

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 28 replies meta philosophy lifestyle

Welcome to Sofie Cha

Yes, more or less. If a group of posters are only liked by each other, but others don't like them, they will all lose authority eventually to the point of even losing posting privilege. There may be additional vulnerabilities, but I won't speculate for obv... 1y ago

Yes, more or less. I

Good post anon. Updooted 1y ago

Good post anon. Updo

All in good time gentlemen.... 1y ago

All in good time gen

you can always bully them anonymously, and are never stuck with nameposting... 1y ago

you can always bully

welcome. don't let the flame go out. 1y ago

welcome. don't let t

Nope. The only difference between "Anonymous" vs "Numbered" is whether your posts are visibly associated with each other in the thread. It's just to make discussion easier between anons, while also allowing you to dodge association with your own posts if y... 12mo ago

Nope. The only diffe

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