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devtesla wrote

Hi, my name is devtesla and I ran most of the subforums with casual posting that apparently drove you off the site? There was a big effort by me and the admins part to keep that stuff separate from the rest of the site. I'm sorry that it seemed to not work? I didn't know there were people so bothered by people having fun online.

Anyway, what really killed the site's growth was technical issues like the time we had to reboot the forums of scratch, the fact that logins don't always work, and the fact that our mobile site isn't very good. I have had a lot of fun there though, so this post was a trip to read lol.

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sudo OP wrote

Hey devtestla, sorry that this was how you were introduced to raddit. I appreciate that you made an effort to isolate the shitposting; I was going on what I remember from the site a couple of years ago (shortly after greenduch's ragequit is when I stopped lurking). Did you try to confine it to just_post? Also, it's not that we're bothered by people "having fun online;" it's that thefempire's definition of having fun and mine are quite different. Apparently the people there enjoy low-effort shitposting, whereas I don't (and I really don't think I'm alone on this one). A constant silly circlejerk isn't appealing to someone who comes to see serious discourse. I would go to a feminist reddit clone to see a lot of serious discussion about feminist issues, and the occasional (non-shitpost) meme. To your credit, the ratio of serious articles to shitposting seems to have improved in the last couple of years, but the discussion still seems to be mostly banal.

I can understand how technical issues could hurt the website, but I don't think that's the only thing that alienated some potential users.

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devtesla wrote

It was isolated to just post and few other subs I moderated. Like, killallgames didn't have quality standards, but games did. We only removed posts that were otherwise harmful, like racist and sexist and stuff.

They're largely recreations of subs I made on reddit, in general because I was trying to get away from the overbearing moderation on SRS subs. There's a lot of people who have interesting things to say, but feel intimidated by large lists of rules and community expectations. I feel that encouraging low effort posting (I won't call it shitposting) is a great way to get people involved who might otherwise be lost or bored. It is about inclusivity.

It's funny that you mention there being more serious articles now, as we've actually stopped moderating for quality at all.

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Defasher wrote (edited )

The 2 sites should merge. fempire seems to have an active (reactive) userbase, but no contributions for them to engage with, while this site has lots of contributors but little engagement.

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devtesla wrote

There's more posts than you might think, sort r all by new.

I don't think we're gonna merge the sites if y'all don't like low effort posts tho.

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ziq wrote (edited )

personally, low effort is the motto I live my life by

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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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trimma wrote

not for our capitalist masters at least, amirite?

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theblackcat wrote

How did you scale down reddit's source code? Is it a bandwidth hog?

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devtesla wrote

I'm not the guy to ask. To be honest I don't think there was a scaling down at all, which is probably the root of our technical problems. No one involved really had any business running a site as complex as this.

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ziq wrote

When we were making raddit, we looked into using reddit's source code and it was a huge dead end. That code is bloated as fuck.

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