A meme (if that's acceptable)

Actually, in case of ventricular fibrillation he'd be absolutly right.

Im a doctor ... In computer science. Is that the dude from it crowd?

Woah why down vote me? He asked if it was acceptable, and I wasn't offensive. I just said that memes are generally not the best content (Many people get annoyed by them)

@AlgoRythm now devRant has a joke category, no more getting mad

@AlgoRythm why did u delete your down voted comment ?
Also for the meme "what if it's a printer based human ?"

@sam9669 I didnt delete it, it's the first comment on the rant

@AlgoRythm the first from what i see is of @nin0x03

@sam9669 That's weird.

@jhh2450 @sam9669 There's something going on here... I can't even see your comment, jhh.

@dfox are you removing "controversial" comments about memes? Or is this just some weird behavior from the app?

@AlgoRythm we recently added a threshold for negatively voted comments to be hidden after some issues of comments that were heavily downvoted not being hidden.

I agree with @calmyourtities though and I’m not going to remove the downvotes. Enough is enough with the meme comments. We have a post type that is joke/meme. It’s allowed. It doesn’t violate the rules. We’ve had numerous complaints lately from new users who feel unwelcome to the devRant community because of content police/being told their posts aren’t good enough. That’s what voting is for and if people want to downvote those comments I’m not going to downvote ban them.

@dfox I don't think I said anything offensive, I'm very confused. I just answered the question of a new member. Some of the community has a stigma against memes. I enjoy them and upvoted this one.

And, just for the record, you can't quite filter out memes yet, as there is no filtering option yet. I'm aware they are allowed. I didnt even complain about this one. That's why I'm upset my comment got censored.

@AlgoRythm there was no actual question posted in the original rant.

The simple and correct answer is they are allowed. I didn’t downvote your comment but I can see why some might and frankly I think some people are just tired of it.

Many members of the community really, really enjoy that content. That’s their right. It’s your right to vote how you feel appropriate. It’s not fair, IMO, to say “many won’t like it” or whatever or make them seem less desirable.

In this case, the reason why I don’t see the votes as inappropriate is because the comment(s) did exactly that - derail a perfectly acceptable post and create a sense of feeling unwelcomed because some people don’t like that kind of content.

We’ve got personal stories from people who are afraid to post because the content police (who are violating our rules) might lash out at them. That’s the last thing we want here.

And yeah, filtering isn’t available yet, but it will be very soon. All of our post type are still welcome. And if anyone feels differently they are more than welcome to take it up with me and I’m happy to discuss. But on someone’s rant is not the place to do it.

And by the way, we don’t accept censorship and anyone who downvoted comments inappropriately is downvote banned. But in the case of comments that police content or suggest certain non-rule breaking content shouldn’t be posted, I’m not downvote banning those downvotes. At this point they can be considered spam. It’s not censorship. That’s what your vote is for and you’re allowed to express ideas elsewhere, to me, GitHub issue, etc. But on the posts of others is serving to alienate users and creates a sentiment that this community is not about.

@AlgoRythm also, I don’t mean to call you out. I realize that you were just trying to answer and it’s not your fault. But I think it’s just the sentiment that people are annoyed with and really shouldn’t continue to be spread.

The simple fact is, memes on devRant have decreased dramatically as of late and over time.

@dfox His rant says "a meme (if that's acceptable)". There is no need to interpret here, he was clearly unsure if they were accepted in this community. My only intentions when I commented were to tell him they are allowed but that some members dislike them. I never said this post was bad, I never said memes were bad, and I implied neither. Now I feel as if we are censored too much. Especially since @jhh2450 's comment was censored as well, he was defending memes. Things I say being erased because a few people disagree with them is why I avoid Stack Overflow like the plague. I never expected even a single down vote when I commented originally, it came as a shock to me when the system removed it.

@AlgoRythm the downvote reason spam for comments is meant to cover comments that serve to derail a rant or change the focus to other topics.

Like I said, if you thought the rant was a question, the simple answer was yes. Memes are acceptable. If someone asks if pornography/nudity is acceptable, a good answer would not be “it’s not technically allowed, but some devRant members think it should be so it’s probably ok.” Some certainly think it should be allowed but that’s not the rule and it shouldn’t be conveyed as such IMO.

We’re really trying to get rid of stigmas and I think the ironic thing here is you’re talking about censorship while kind of saying a form of censorship (telling what content is not as widely acceptable) is fine.

We’ll review the threshold for comment hiding but right now it’s actually decently high and extremely few are hidden. Like I said in this case I wouldn’t have downvoted, but I can understand the feelings of people who would.

@dfox I deleted the comment and got 1 upvote back (Since nobody can see it anyway, there's no reason to keep it). 12068 -> 12069.

In the end, my main point is our rules are extremely clear on this and everyone gets a vote. We don’t need the loud opinions of a few (who are “anti-meme”) being spread around continually. That’s why they get their votes. Many times those people want more than a single vote which is why they are loud and why they try to police via commenting. And I’m certainly not here to protect the viewpoints of those loud people getting spread around on content that people are enjoying. It’s upvoted for a reason.

@AlgoRythm we’ve had a tradition of not showing/counting negative comment votes beyond -1 but we might change that for clarity. The other vote types also don’t count against score.

And by the way, to be clear, we never hid comments based on downvotes until a week ago. That change itself came from numerous requests and complaints from people saying comments that were downvoted were still showing and requesting that we add moderators which we’re opposed to for reasons mainly regarding censorship.

@dfox All right, one more question, why was jhh2450's comment hidden with 0 downvotes? (as per his screenshot?)

@AlgoRythm it was likely just offset by some upvotes or broke the “not for me” threshold which is higher than spam but still matters. While I disagree more with his being downvoted, again, I can’t refute the spam votes there. We’ve been asked/getting complaints to crack down on people starting irrelevant side discussions on people’s rants and that could certainly be the case there.

What might be best for situations like these is another downvote option “off-topic” which we’re looking into and wouldn’t have the same results as spam.

And by the way, if you ever do get downvote with spam/offensive and think it’s unwarranted, I absolutely ask you to tag me and question it. If it was unwarranted then I immediately downvote ban the people who gave the vote (ex. spam/offensive vote for a simple disagreement). In this case I just don’t agree it warrants a downvote ban.

@AlgoRythm and just to add, since the hiding is fairly new, we do want feedback. I just raised the threshold a bit going forward because I think it might have been too low. We’re mainly trying to account for the case of really offensive/spam comments, not the ones here really.

@dfox "Not for me" needs a lower severity value. Only offensive comments should be removed, otherwise polarized opinions ("I HATE {programming language}") which will attract both positive and negative reactions will be hidden, when it should not be, as people are entitled to their opinions. Especially on a very opinion-based app where the main idea is to share opinions about technologies and their quirks.

I understand and respect the fact that you want to have this community welcome as many people as possible, and I absolutely agree with that, but don't punish opinions. Highly moderated communities are safer, sure, but can be very unattractive. Even if the moderator is an algorithm as opposed to a person.

@AlgoRythm yup, I definitely agree. It might have been a little to reactive to people requesting more moderation (though it was still all vote-based) but I raised the threshold.

I will say though, even up until now it was a very, very small percentage of comments affected since we do look at more than just the spam votes, but now it is closer to what it was originally when we did no hiding based on votes.

@dfox I trust you to figure it all out. You're the man.

👉😎👉

@AlgoRythm thanks and thanks for bringing to my attention. Please let me know anytime you notice any weirdness with it going forward, we are trying to improve the experience so it’s always good to hear feedback and suggestions.

@dfox sometimes I down vote a rant/comment with the "Not For Me" because it really takes a stab at something I really like or do everyday. Is this appropriate use? The others are pretty self explanatory.

@calmyourtities yup that’s appropriate. “Not for me” votes are generally not considered in any kind of impact on the content unless there’s a highly elevated amount.

@dfox also, what is your opinion on moderators? I feel like it would be good to have some of the good accounts like linuxxx, tahnik, alexdelarge? They seem very active and reasonable.

@calmyourtities I think we want to try to stay away from moderators and go with community-based moderation for now (in addition to Tim and I when needed) as moderators introduce a whole new set of issues that could easily lead to a lot more problems than it solves. And that’s in addition to the always controversial issue of who gets to be mods.

@dfox ok, I feel like they would benefit the community because people could just tag a mod to deal with a problem instead of an argument I've seen a few times, I do see it from your point of view as well too, you don't want to promote people ahead of the rest.

@calmyourtities yeah I mean that could be good in the future, but right now they can just tag me or Tim and we’ll take care of any issues.

If a computer/server is going to die, turning it off would be the worst solution. Since its a heart attack, that's a service that needs a restart. Do "sudo systemctl heart restart" and that should work. MEME FAILED!!

@dfox I know this is your baby and I definitely don't want to tell you what to do with your app but I have a small suggestion, I guess. Not really a feature request, just a baby idea that could use your nurturing.

Many other social media sites allow users to delete comments which were made on their posts. While this is an effective community moderation tactic, it can also be very annoying to some users and could be misused very easily.

Just food for thought.

@AlgoRythm that’s something I think we have thought about a little and is definitely an interesting concept. Like you mention there’s some possible issues, but it could be good.

Would you mind creating a GitHub issue for discussion?

@dfox Tomorrow I will. I hate GitHub on my phone.

@AlgoRythm thanks!

turn him off and on !! Does that sound wierd to anyone else ??

@aEEEdev giggity

@dfox just a small question, because it seems more like ask dfox hour, what server hosting service do you use? Is it a commercial one or a private contract or something? I never knew for something as big as dR

@dfox so if a legatimate thread gets hit by like 5 people spamming downvotes on legitimate content than those 5 people can sensor that content from the rest of the people. Who could have potentially loved it and upvoted it. Not to be a developer but 😆😄😅😤😢 censorship by the few wont work. And i can prove it with about 10 accounts i could remove all legitimate content from devrant.?

@calmyourtities we use DigitalOcean.

@skprog no, you couldn’t. Like I said, we downvote ban pretty heavily for any spam/offensive downvotes that are misplaced (comments or rants). And the threshold is pretty high. We’re also introducing vote throttling and some other things so any kind of mass voting (inaccurately) will result in instant account banning. We’re also careful to require a lot more downvotes at a rate higher than the upvotes so downvotes will never directly offset upvotes. Sometimes that serves to promote questionable content as we’ve seen in the past, but there’s not much we can do about that and have played it safe in terms of very little “censorship.”

Simply put, other people’s rants on devRant are not an outlet for unchecked free speech. There has to be a threshold where downvoted comments disappear or are hidden. We can’t have racist/derogatory comments with tons of spam/offensive votes remain perfectly visible like they used to be. It might create some problems, but we’re working to get rid of those too.

@skprog you can also find a discussion here about possible features regarding this: https://github.com/devRant/devRant/...

Jesus, this thread got Foxy!

@iSwimInTheC Har har har 😂😂