I'm resurrecting this saga so that I can use it to link to this post about Blaseball from @lori

https://hackers.town/@lori/111007234002566380

Go and read that omfg, it's long but you won't regret it

Community Management Thread housekeeping, Things To Keep In Mind Edition:

1. It's a LONG ASS THREAD, and Mastodon's web interface is STILL broken for reading long posts, so you'll want to periodically click on a date if you want to see it all. Android users, try Subway Tooter.

2. I'm rereading some of it now, and while the advice still holds up, the tone kinda doesn't. My internet voice changed a bit in the last couple of years; early on you'll see a few words I've been trying to stop using, words like "stupid" and "crazy" and "nuts" and stuff like that, so be prepared. It was y'all's gentle encouragement and positive examples on Fedi that ended up changing my voice for the better, and I thank you for it. Even if it did happen to coincide with a period of history where people were eating so much horse deworming paste that the shops literally ran out, which I found... Challenging

3. The original thread was just a kind of "Something pops into my head so I add it to the thread and a few days later I come back and go AND ANOTHER THING" situation, and if you read it all at once it feels Rather Rambly And Disjointed, I can only apologise and gesture sheepishly towards the timestamps in hopes that when you come across a complete non sequitur you'll go "Oh that was like a week later"

4. I don't know if I have a whole lot more to say on the subject, but I bet stuff'll come up, and when it does, this third server has a 50,000 character limit lol

Online Community Management Thread: that time that I put a Friends List in my browser game

So on my game you can buy a Monthly Memento for a tenner, which is a thing that does something special, different every month. Lately I've been preparing for a server move and that's involved going through lots of old code and being reminded of past mistakes, so lately the Monthly Mementos have been themed around having the player character ascend a set of stairs into the Problem Attic and pull out a randomly-chosen dusty old relic from the past.

I thought you might enjoy this descriptive text in which I talk about that one time we thought adding a Friends List was a grrrrreat idea.

-----

You spend a few minutes finding a flat bit of ground and unfolding and extending the legs and in general bollocking about trying not to get your fingers pinched by anything, until you have what's basically a tiny portable shelter made out of an old wooden door. But you know that's not where this ends, oh no; you twist the knob and dodge the ladder that rushes facehungrily downwards as you open the door. An observer would see you ascend the ladder and disappear into thin air; you see, in the non-space past the door, the dusty attic where Improbable Island keeps its old junk. You furtle around for a few minutes and emerge with...

A List of Friends
Oh haha, man, that was a feature. Back in the six months in which it looked like every game was destined to have a defined social graph, our eyes turned into dollar signs as we gibbered "I'll bloody 'ave some o' that!" and we fermented up our very own Friends List feature, which would let you know when your friends were online.

The problem was, people generally know who their friends are. There wasn't really any need to write software that collects names into a list and stamp each one with the word FRIEND; in fact, when you think about it, that's pretty fucking weird, isn't it? Normally you'd see a person, think "Oh it's my friend Jimmy Crumbles" and that's enough, you don't need to record that data anywhere, getting software involved doesn't really make much sense in most contexts. Plus, being friends with someone isn't necessarily a binary, there can be a whole bunch of wibbly squibbly soft nebulous stuff in between "Yes we're friends" and "No we're not friends." There's acquaintances, and people you work with, and people you see often and chat with but don't know their names, and people you enjoy in small doses, and all sorts of not-friends-but-not-not-friends in your life, including the vast category of "People with whom I enjoy playing this specific internet game."

Of course we didn't think too much about this, we were just adding social features because everybody else was doing it and making loads of money in the process, so we spent like three weeks writing a really nice Friends List feature and stuck it online and then took it offline again not even 12 hours later.

For a brief, glowing moment, Improbable Island had all the social weirdness of facebook, without the context in which one might be accustomed to facebook's various weirdnesses; the nebulous "Is this person my friend?" question wasn't allowed to have its answer evolve gradually and normally over time, it became a binary, yes or no, are you my friend or aren't you, you must answer right now and if I think you're my friend and you don't then what happens to us then, and what even is a friend in this context anyway, does anybody know and do any of us agree, and this is a browser game for Christ's sake people are going to treat their Friend Count the same way they'd treat any other stat. Why is that one lady going around Friending literally everyone on the whole site? Why is that one guy refusing every Friend Request? What's the story with those two people who were roleplaying with each other every day, surely they were friends, right? And now they're suddenly the bitterest of enemies? Is being my Improbable Friend the equivalent of maintaining prolonged eye contact? Does it mean that we nod at each other in the pub, or does it mean that you're going to come to my house and stay on my sofa for three weeks? Does this mean we're married now? Why is the guy who I did a brief scene with two years ago now acting like he's just bought us a tandem bicycle and matching waistcoats? Should this feel like I'm sitting down on the bench next to the lady I've RP'd with every night for the past week and rubbing up against her like a cat going "How are you today, fffrrrrrieennnd?"

The worst and most ironic part of this whole weird "Making a list of your friends" Thing is that even though nobody agrees on what adding someone to your friends list means, everybody knows that something baaaaaad is going on when you remove someone from it.

Did you ever spend throw something in the bin so hard that the bin fell over and the Thing rolled out and then you had to go over to the bin and set it upright and chuck the Thing in it again but then you change your mind and pick up the whole bin with the Thing inside and stuff it into one of those big thick black contractor bags and knot it shut and throw it out into the cold black night? Yeah. That.

Ahahahaha oh no somebody submitted Improbable Island to Hacker News

I haven't updated this thread in ages lol

Here's the latest thing:

...Mastodon doesn't do italics because it's shit, but imagine this next sentence italicized:

_Everybody is talking about my CoC_

The best thing happening in the Hacker News thread is the people complaining about the CoC and saying they won't join the community because of it.

You know, you go through life, you see enough people thiiiiis close to Getting It, you start to wonder how many things you yourself are This Close to getting

Oh man it's been ages since I did the Online Community Management Thread but I do have one little thing to add

Way earlier, way way earlier, like two accounts ago, I said most websites treat nazis like spam and delete without giving them any thought (a handful of shit American websites let them stick around, but sincerely, genuinely, it is Not Normal to have nazis on your website unless you're running a nazi website) and that tickled a neuron about the difference between trolls and spammers

I've had someone occasionally making an account to shout slurs at me lately, but it's literally just that, all-caps "SHUT UP (slur)" and some folk, especially folk in the media, would call this trolling.

It's not trolling, it's spam! The people who call this sort of behaviour trolling have either never encountered a troll or they've been actively getting trolled for a long time and not noticed lol

Someone who blunders into your mentions to call you a Whatever isn't the same as someone trolling you. That first person is just noise, you flip a switch and you're done. It takes then more clicks to make a new account than it takes you to block them, so, y'know, big deal. It's not trolling, it's spam.

The difference between shouty sweary spam and actual trolling is like this; you flip on the stereo and it's not tuned in and you have a horrible moment of staticky noise and you go OO NASTY SPAM so you twist the knob and find a station and it's playing a song you like, so you make a nice cup of tea.

When you get back, the song's still going, maybe it's some kinda weird radio edit, whatever, you're only half paying attention. As you sit drinking your brew and soldering your boards or whatever the volume increases, slowly, imperceptibly, and you vaguely notice that the song's finished and there's now some kind of interview or chat show going on, about some contentious topic or another, and at first the interviewees are pretty civil but one of them keeps winding the other one up until they're screaming, and you think "What the hell is the presenter playing at, letting them scream into the mic like that," and you look up from your iron and Actually Listen for a sec and that's when you realise they're arguing about you.

THAT's trolling.