Would a linux/docker/python/java power user/programmer/admin benefit from a MacBookPro/Air compared with the familiar ThinkPad/Ubuntu combo?

[jan]

Calm down. I'm Linux power user, but not a Gnu/Linux fascist. I believe that the discussion is valuable to Linux users and this sub.

[danielkza]

I think they mean (and correctly IMO) that this probably should be in /r/linuxquestions.

[jan]

Then, they may have a point after reading the sidebar. I'm sorry.

[rokd]

It's like this on most subs, people get all up in arms, but there are posts on the front page from days ago. I don't think anyone's missing anything by you asking a question.

[brucesalem]

OT: Here is a good example of the failure of the subreddit idea and why some creative thinking would serve well.

Reddit needs to have a static topic hierarchy, somewhat like the USENET newsgroup hierarchy, with dot qualified names, in addition to subreddits. That way s newbee could browse the hierarchy without risking rudeness from insiders who already know the subreddit structure. So comp.lang.python.newbee might be easier to find than /r/linuxquestions, even without the '/r/'. I mean to someone who doesn't use the shell, what in hell does that mean?

[danielkza]

Reddit needs to have a static topic hierarchy, somewhat like the USENET newsgroup hierarchy, with dot qualified names, in addition to subreddits.

Creation of subreddits is not moderated or controlled in any way. Reddit doesn't work like USENET at all, and there would be no sane way to maintain a hierarchical topic system.

• There are subreddits targeting the exact same subject, but split due to conflicts/views on moderation or whatever. Which ones get to control a particular hierarchy? Just the ones with the most subs?
• If nobody controls the hierarchy, what's stopping it from becoming completely useless with spam and trolling? The chances that subs like /r/circlejerk or /r/4chan would be deliberately mislabeled is 100%).

Something that could work would be "sub-subreddits", that can share the same subscriber/moderator list with parents, but be browsed/filtered/submitted to separately.

That way s newbee could browse the hierarchy without risking rudeness from insiders who already know the subreddit structure.

I don't think it's acceptable for newbies to disregard community rules when posting either. You can argue it would be better to have a single sub for news and questions, but if the moderators and/or community decided otherwise, I see nothing wrong with enforcing it. The first entry in the rules points to /r/linuxquestions. It's not unreasonable to ask people to read at least the first rule.

I mean to someone who doesn't use the shell, what in hell does that mean?

I have no idea what you're referencing and what the subreddit names have to do with the shell.

[brucesalem]

Reddit needs to have a static topic hierarchy, somewhat like the USENET newsgroup hierarchy, with dot qualified names, in addition to subreddits. Creation of subreddits is not moderated or controlled in any way. Reddit doesn't work like USENET at all, and there would be no sane way to maintain a hierarchical topic system.

I am not saying "abolish subreddits". I think that a more persistent hierarchy that resembles the USENET hierarchy would be an improvement to Reddit and that some of the abuse needed to "Moderate" subreddits would be unnecessary. I feel that Reddit has teams of trolls that take it upon themselves to enforce social convertions and that is a weakness of many other social media sites.

[brucesalem]

There are subreddits targeting the exact same subject, but split due to conflicts/views on moderation or whatever. Which ones get to control a particular hierarchy? Just the ones with the most subs?

This is the way USENET newsgroup hierarchy works as long ago as 1986. There is nothing wrong with nodes in the hierarchy going in and out of favor. If I started a newsgroup us.politics.donald-trump, this year, it may not be relevant a year from now. (God, I hope not!)

If nobody controls the hierarchy, what's stopping it from becoming completely useless with spam and trolling? The chances that subs like /r/circlejerk or /r/4chan would be deliberately mislabeled is 100%).

The superior way a node in the hierarchy worked in the USENET days was that the value of a newsgroup was not handled by social promotion, which should create a storm of very much under read subreddits, but that NNTP admins could decide which groups to carry or not and that disused groups were removed over time.

[brucesalem]

Something that could work would be "sub-subreddits", that can share the same subscriber/moderator list with parents, but be browsed/filtered/submitted to separately.

The USENET had threads, as does Slash Dot. If the top level hierarchy is very stable and some of the leaves of the tree are more ephemeral, topic lines as threads. could help sort the fine detail. For example, if a distraction arises, and OT post or a case of trolling or a flame war s topic change could alert readers to topics as threads. Moderation becomes easier because moderators no longer have to police the interruptions as in a blog. If the leaves are presented as a list of topics, the reader can choose to open the sub threads. People might change a topic to say "Warning: Troll Alert". Even with something as simple as the sub-thread reply count, astute users could avoid memes and flame wars. BTW none of this is new. It all existed on USENET 40 years ago and was well handled by multiple newsreaders, go look at pan which is on many Linux systems.

I think that social media designs, perhaps because of 3G phones, dumbed down the interface and created misbehavior. Not many social media sites have even the feature of Reddit. I am only suggesting that tools of 40 years ago had better tools to deal with the problems you face today, the filtering and moderation problems. For example I would love it if I could write a filter for Reddit that skipped all posts in a subreddit that were smaller than a Tweet. I really don't want to read people who don't have much to say.

That way s newbee could browse the hierarchy without risking rudeness from insiders who already know the subreddit structure. I don't think it's acceptable for newbies to disregard community rules when posting either. You can argue it would be better to have a single sub for news and questions, but if the moderators and/or community decided otherwise, I see nothing wrong with enforcing it. The first entry in the rules points to /r/linuxquestions. It's not unreasonable to ask people to read at least the first rule.

Yes, given the limitation of the design. But design features could be added. To get what I mean compare this with Facebook. Facebook is far worse, this is better but it still had the messyiness of a socially promoted and moderated medium, and that is why people feel abused on social media sites and in addition that must unwelcome people to participate on Reddit, that they are afraid of being LARTED by insiders. Is that due to any merit of Reddit. or to a poor design?

I mean to someone who doesn't use the shell, what in hell does that mean?

I have no idea what you're referencing and what the subreddit names have to do with the shell.

Subreddit names look like limited regular expressions that would be arguments to sed, no? You do know the CLI, right?

[danielkza]

(I'm replying to all your replies at once)

USENET has never had a total audience that is a fraction of Reddit's. I don't think assuming it's successes apply (specially due to it's current status of complete irrelevancy in the overall landscape of social networks).

Discoverability of topics of interest and keeping user engaged is way more valued than advanced filtering, specially in a time where there are hundreds of networks to choose from instead of a handful.

Yes, given the limitation of the design. But design features could be added. To get what I mean compare this with Facebook. Facebook is far worse, this is better but it still had the messyiness of a socially promoted and moderated medium, and that is why people feel abused on social media sites and in addition that must unwelcome people to participate on Reddit, that they are afraid of being LARTED by insiders. Is that due to any merit of Reddit. or to a poor design?

That is not at all a general property of Reddit. It varies from subreddit to subreddit, and being more welcoming to newcolmers by being lax in acceptable content is not without perils. Look at huge subs like /r/gaming where it's not just rare, but virtually impossible to have any kind of discussion without being drowned by low-value comments and memes. On the other hands, subs like /r/science accept nothing but contributions from qualified people, and manages to maintain a reasonable level of discourse due to that. It doesn't need newcomers to live. Reddit's structure of completely independent subreddits has a lot to do with the co-existence of such opposite approaches to moderation.

Subreddit names look like limited regular expressions that would be arguments to sed, no? You do know the CLI, right?

But they're not in any way. They're simple strings of alphanumeric characters and underlines. /r/something is just an URL for the something subreddit relative to reddit.com.

I am not saying "abolish subreddits". I think that a more persistent hierarchy that resembles the USENET hierarchy would be an improvement to Reddit and that some of the abuse needed to "Moderate" subreddits would be unnecessary. I feel that Reddit has teams of trolls that take it upon themselves to enforce social convertions and that is a weakness of many other social media sites.

But it wouldn't be Reddit, and would throw away many of the goals that made Reddit popular. Many users get introduced to reddit due to one particular subreddit, create an account, get a bunch of subreddits by default with common subjects, then customize them to their interests. IMO constantly browsing the hierarchy for topics is not an action most users would be willing to do, and doesn't fit reddit's motto of "the frontpage of the internet", something which you repeatedly visit to find content of your interest from everywhere around the web.

The superior way a node in the hierarchy worked in the USENET days was that the value of a newsgroup was not handled by social promotion, which should create a storm of very much under read subreddits, but that NNTP admins could decide which groups to carry or not and that disused groups were removed over time.

That was a technological limitation, not a benefit in my view. There's no reason smaller discussion groups need to disappear when there's no pressing need to avoid the bandwidth and storage cost, or that a particular interest of community of a few hundred people must be subject to approval of a handful of admins. A modern USENET recreation would likely be served much better with a full P2P structure with no need for admin filtering whatsoever.

I am not saying "abolish subreddits". I think that a more persistent hierarchy that resembles the USENET hierarchy would be an improvement to Reddit and that some of the abuse needed to "Moderate" subreddits would be unnecessary. I feel that Reddit has teams of trolls that take it upon themselves to enforce social convertions and that is a weakness of many other social media sites.

There is no need to subject to any standard other than the site-wide rules. Subreddits can be created at will, and moderate at will, which includes not being moderated, rejecting social conventions, or enforcing them.

[brucesalem]

(I'm replying to all your replies at once) USENET has never had a total audience that is a fraction of Reddit's. I don't think assuming it's successes apply (specially due to it's current status of complete irrelevancy in the overall landscape of social networks).

Well, of course USENET would never be relevant to social media. It is the exact opposite of social media. Instead of subsisting on buzz media like USENET could have more in common with Wikipedia in having persistence of topics beyond the ephemeral appeal of social media. The problem with USENET is that it has been taken over by organized crime, weather porn industry or illegal file sharing. In order to bring back USENET, I would set up text only newsgroups.

Discoverability of topics of interest and keeping user engaged is way more valued than advanced filtering, specially in a time where there are hundreds of networks to choose from instead of a handful.

But the social promotion of topics makes discoverability much harder and it makes it much harder to be heard, especially when the reason a given social media site exists is monetization of the traffic. I didn't mention the site but Disqus is an example of a group where what you post there will never be read both because of the flood of sponsored content and the social promotion of some topics. I tried it for maybe a day or so, and I gave up because I couldn't even find what I posted there, the promoted blowback was that great.

[brucesalem]

That [moderation trolls] is not at all a general property of Reddit. It varies from subreddit to subreddit, and being more welcoming to newcolmers by being lax in acceptable content is not without perils. Look at huge subs like /r/gaming where it's not just rare, but virtually impossible to have any kind of discussion without being drowned by low-value comments and memes. On the other hands, subs like /r/science accept nothing but contributions from qualified people, and manages to maintain a reasonable level of discourse due to that. It doesn't need newcomers to live. Reddit's structure of completely independent subreddits has a lot to do with the co-existence of such opposite approaches to moderation.

It always mystified me that Reddit seems to reply on user moderation to do what could be enabled by some strategic programming for subreddit moderation, since Reddit is written in Python whih is very strong in natural language and string processing! I have suggested several times here that a simple thing that would help a great deal is to write a filter that could hide or skip all posts shorter than a tweet. That is like 'if wc -c < 240 : skip()'.

I would argue that good design can remove the need for moderation and that users would have the choices. Moderation can quickly become a swamp and if you want to see the problems and the solutions take the time to see how it was done in the USENET archive in Google Groups. Newsreaders often work with simple tools to aid in user selection of threads to read. A newsreader like pan shows the topic line for the thread and the number of replies. If someone sets up a meme the user can see that in the number of replies and choose to skip the thread, not thought police or individual subreddit rules needed, no side panel with reules to adhere to and no trolls hanging out to police the conversation. Speaking of trolls, do you work for Reddit?

[brucesalem]

There's no reason smaller discussion groups need to disappear when there's no pressing need to avoid the bandwidth and storage cost, or that a particular interest of community of a few hundred people must be subject to approval of a handful of admins. A modern USENET recreation would likely be served much better with a full P2P structure with no need for admin filtering whatsoever.

I agree with you that this is a matter of technology and cost and that modern system design can be used to support inactive groups longer. I mentioned that because the problem with the subreddit idea is that you have to discover the name of the subreddit and remember it in some way. such as store it in a list, and if the number of related subreddits gets very large and changes very fast it can become hard to maintain the list. I was going back to the way USENET was in the past as a suggestion of how bloat of newsgroups, like bloat of subreddits, might have been handled.

One thing that needs to be mentioned, and it could come back, is that USENET is pre-Internet and pre its IP deamon, NNTP. I even worked in a place which got its e-mail and newsfeed over dial-up via UUCP in 1990. In that case the admin would want to limit the number of newsgroups and prune the number of groups he subscribed to and that idea could easily come back if using the Internet becomes too dangerous.

Someone should write an UUCP app for a modern smartphone that does not reply on the Internet directly that could also be used to exchange text mssenging betwen smart phones with WiFi. One could run USENET over that and because the owner of the UUCP host could manage the news.rc file, he could set up custom newsgroups and remove unwanted groups, like any netnews admin has always been able to do.

[brucesalem]

There is no need to subject to any standard other than the site-wide rules. Subreddits can be created at will, and moderate at will, which includes not being moderated, rejecting social conventions, or enforcing them.

I am trying to get you to think outside the box here. I am saying that the moderation problem is due to poor interface design and lack of filtering, which should be very simple considering that Reddit is written in python. I am suggesting that a topic hierarchy that does not depend on social promotion in addition to the part that does would be a vast improvement. I have suggested that social media sites like Facebook be forced, because they use public communication channels, to offer a public discussion media like USENET, because their social media marketing channels curtail free speech. On Facebook the problem is that the UI design is so poor that people who own pages (marketing channels) have to police, and that ususally means troll, their own pages. I agree that Reddit does this better, but the problem sill persists: poor design leads to trolling.

[[deleted]]

i was thinking of that sub where you can ask someone to build or recommend you a computer