My Thoughts on What's Wrong with Saidit

submitted by Nemesis from self.whatever

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[–]magnora7 17 insightful - 6 fun17 insightful - 5 fun18 insightful - 6 fun -  (4 children)

Thanks for the suggestions. I need a programmer to help do any solutions because I am basically doing this whole site on my own now. D3rr will help restart if the site goes down, but it appears he's done programming this site, and he quit being a content admin over a year ago.

Limit link posts per day, nobody needs to make 10 link posts unless they're kharma farming. If these people had 3 a day, they would pick quality links, and actually stick around in comments to defend the content and explain why they felt like sharing it with everyone else.

I think that's a good idea, I'd support that. Although any troll will just make 10 alternate accounts to bypass this, let's be real.

It's too much to expect you and d3rr to wade through acres of shit and sift out diamonds while simultaneously working to maintain and improve the site.

Thanks, and d3rr doesn't help with the content administration, he does backend and technical stuff on occasion, so the content administration is really just all falling 100% on my shoulders. I need help, but no one wants to actually put in the effort to help, it seems. Vantafount is the only one other than d3rr who has really stepped up to help, rather than just complain, and has actually taken things off of my plate instead of putting more things on it.

I want the site to be better, but I simply cannot do it alone, and I don't have anyone to help me build new features anymore, so I'm basically overloaded and getting paid nothing for 3 years now... I'm doing my best, but what we've got now is about as good as it's going to get unless someone actually wants to put in the time and effort to help improve the site through programming.

I've also been thinking about just leaving saidit like it is, and launching some more sites, one focused on no politics with admins who enforce that, and maybe another focused entirely on the top of the pyramid of debate (rather than being a sort of catch-all like saidit has become). I do think one of the problems of saidit is that it's trying to be a high-quality "pyramid of debate" place while simultaneously trying to be a reddit catch-all replacement. These two goals were not conflicting when saidit was small, but now that we're established, these two goals are constantly at odds with each other. I've long believed the best way to have the most free speech is to have multiple sites each with different rules, so I think that may be the direction I will try and take things, and start a network of saidit-related sites, each with different goals and rules. I can seek out people who have proven themselves on saidit, to be the new admins of these new sites. A big part of the reason I don't enforce the pyramid of debate harshly on saidit is because we're trying to be a catch-all at the same time and help out free speech. But a new site that is pyramid of debate focused, wouldn't have this restriction, so we could really push it hard and have a high-quality place.

Anyway, that's how things look from where I'm sitting. I'm trying my best, but there's just too much to do, and I simply cannot do it alone as I'm already overloaded just keeping this thing afloat, much less building new features. And I'm doing this all for free 24/7 for literally years now, simply because I believe in free speech and the power of alternatives. Realistically if we want to see saidit improve beyond where it is, someone is going to have to step up to program (it's python/postgresql), or to pay for a programmer to help who is actually capable (maybe from fiverr or something). Or we will launch the partner sites with different rules. Those are the long-term ways forward that I can see.

Thanks for discussing this and bringing it up, I'm glad people care enough to want things to improve.

[–][deleted] 4 insightful - 3 fun4 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 3 fun -  (3 children)

I'll help you launch sister sites, and if there's a clear desire by this userbase for new features, I'll most likely help with those as well. But we've got to take a step back- this post isn't about technical features, and neither is this finding of yours which I agree with 100%:

I do think one of the problems of saidit is that it's trying to be a high-quality "pyramid of debate" place while simultaneously trying to be a reddit catch-all replacement. These two goals were not conflicting when saidit was small, but now that we're established, these two goals are constantly at odds with each other.

This conflict and its repercussions led me to stop being admin, and has soured many others. Their expectations of the site didn't match reality and that's 100% a saidit problem for not clearly communicating.

We've got years of "might help" saidit features lined up, but after doing that for years only to get our clocks cleaned by ruqqus, it begs the question of why are we here and what is the point. If there's no product market fit and this site doesn't make us happy/fulfilled, then it's time to reevaluate.

[–]magnora7 3 insightful - 3 fun3 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 3 fun -  (2 children)

Thanks for the offer, I appreciate it. I strongly think I'll be launching a couple more sites over the next few months.

Their expectations of the site didn't match reality and that's 100% a saidit problem for not clearly communicating.

I agree expectations didn't match reality. I don't think it was a problem of communication though, I think it was a problem of having opposing goals that were logically conflicting at the root.

Saidit tried to be both the catch-all reddit alternative, and also the higher-quality place that wasn't voat. And these conflicting goals worked for a while but it led to this thing where some see saidit as purely the former, and some see it as purely the latter. And so some people's expectations were broken when I leave up things that go against the pyramid of debate, and other people who see it as a purely free-speech site have their expectations broken when I remove things that go against the pyramid of debate. So it's like two separate, mutually-exclusive visions trying to happen at once.

I tried my best to find a happy medium between those two goals, which I long believed was possible, but it ended up kind of just causing the site to suck at both things. The free speech people are worried stuff will be removed, and the pyramid of debate people are worried that the site culture is going bad. And what sucks is they're both right. So instead of succeeding at finding a happy medium, I think what happened was saidit kind of half-failed and half-succeeded at both goals.

So I think I have to make sites more catered to each goal individually. And if you want to run the free-speech-focused site, I'd be glad to get out of your way and let you run it. I'm going to make a new site focused hardcore on the pyramid of debate to go strictly for high-quality discussion. And another site that is "no politics" since I see that requested a ton.

I'm honestly still confused about why ruqqus blew up so quick after it launched. But their alexa rank is doing the same thing as ours right now, we're really peers in the same boat, at about the same level. I do think they paid for reddit advertising though, they generated word of mouth in a way I was never able to despite my best efforts. Maybe the flashy new site design helps too. Maybe they happened to have better timing of their launch. I don't know, honestly. But if we step back and reevaluate like you suggest, I think making more sites with more focused goals on each site seems to be a clear way forward, and I think would probably re-invigorate public interest in the saidit software project as well.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I tried my best to find a happy medium between those two goals, which I long believed was possible, but it ended up kind of just causing the site to suck at both things.

That's because the "muh freeze peech" trolls you should've been removing, that effectively spam the place with the lowest possible quality of content, are the exact same Voat trolls that drove away anyone interesting from Voat in the first place as well. You should have strictly stuck to the concept of a pyramid of debate and immediately shown those people the door, but in spite of repeated insistent requests to do so you didn't.

Why you ever thought you'd be able to tolerate such a hostile userbase while also pretending to have a pyramid of debate still baffles me. The answer was clear from the start: They don't care, they're actively here to trash the place, go back to Voat. You chose not to. This isn't just "trying to do two things at opposite ends", this is actively bending the knee to a particular kind of user that just wants to have yet another place to fling poo from. You flatly just did not enforce what ANYONE expected from the central thesis you published in the FAQ, and as a result almost everyone who actually cared about that up and left after REPEATEDLY requesting you enforce it and your REPEATED refusal to do so, until it bit you in the ass the exact way everyone warned you it would.

Basically the question is this: Why would anyone care about your future or ongoing projects when it's clear from this one you refuse to enforce your own website guidelines the moment something gets popular? In fact you're only now talking about it because you're bleeding that same popularity. Had you cared from the start none of this would've happened.

[–]magnora7 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yes I'll just do the exact opposite of what my co-founder wanted, what could go wrong? /s

I'm not operating in a vacuum here.

The series of decisions I had to make to create a userbase were more complex than you're assuming, I had a lot of divergent expectations to manage. This is why another site is a good idea.