Step 1: Start the āNew User Tutorialā
āThere are two ways to kick this off:
āThe Automatic Way: When you first join, check your Inbox (click your profile icon in the top right, then the envelope icon). You should have a message from discobot titled āGreetings!ā
āThe Manual Way: If you deleted the message or it didnāt arrive, you can start it by sending a private message to the bot.
āClick your Profile Icon \to Envelope Icon \to New Message.
āIn the āAdd Userā box, type @discobot.
āIn the body of the message, type: @discobot start tutorial
I have seen that too, I assumed it was a caching limitation rather than a break. It will freeze refresh and then carry on. I guess you could call that broken, I would call it a feature
I actually donāt think that is broken, If thatās what youāre referring to.
Iāve used several forum platforms over the years, and the only two that I can tolerate long term are phpBB and Discourse.
Discourse is pretty nice IMHO. Although specific forums will be configured differently, etcā¦
The tutorial isnāt particularly groundbreaking and if youāre tech-savvy, it should be a bit superfluous. But still, you get a nice badge and reading the manual is always a good idea.
In this case, the problems with discourse are well documented and the complaints are consistent. Yes, you can overcome them by acclimating yourself to the interface. No, I donāt think that is acceptable when the design decisions are not actually helpful to the user. Infinite scroll does nothing that users want, it is an sort of an ideological position held by the creator based on the fact that infinite scrolling increases engagement according to their data. Which I find stupid, because I donāt want to be more engaged, I want to get what I want from the thing I am using, which is not having it suck my attention from me, but providing a result as a tool I use. If you read the linked discussion you can see this is all mentioned and not disputed by the creators of the platform.
Some of you know my past, and my understanding of manipulationā¦ That was the explosive container that broke the camelās back so Iām following the AIās advice.
I really enjoyed the depth of the longer storytelling and the humor in your previous videos. It is a shame that ShitTok has influenced attention spans to the point where formats must be shortened.
Iāll miss the old style, but I wish you the best of luck with the new videos.
I donāt think thereās any overt manipulation going on here I think itās literally the fact that most interfaces are now phones which are conducive to scrolling versus clicking and tapping. If you compare pagination with scroll on a mobile device, Iām going to get pretty fucking tired of tapping next next to see more stuff.. scrolling is intuitive and the end result is more engagement. This thread alone would not survive the way it has with pagination. I can quickly scroll past stuff I want to skim over and slow down or pause to read things I want to read.. having to click something to see the next tranche of posts would deter me from bothering.
There are people on the hacker news thread you linked that say that the entire thread should be loaded all at once to avoid pagination or scroll issues, but thatās insane, especially if you consider the inclusion of images and media. That might work for something like hacker News where itās text only and you have over 12,000 posts in a single thread and itās still not that much content to have to push through the interweb pipes.. but when Iām paying the cost of bandwidth I sure as shit donāt want to pay for all those cdn hits for basically getting someone caught up on the last few posts of an insanely long thread. Donāt even think about mentioning thread management.. thereās no point in curtailing the number of posts per thread.. thatās basically tantamount to censorship in my opinion.
As for the ctrl-f find function, again people on The hacker news thread seems to indicate that this was not standard and having to learn how to use a double control-f to use the built-in browser find function is asinine, however this is actually standard and Iāve seen it used in many cases where a website specific search function is engaged with ctrl-f and if you want to use the browsers find function you just hit it again. It makes sense from a usability standpoint and allows websites to implement their own specific search features but not preclude the user from opting to use the browsers to find feature.
Ultimately I have come to appreciate Discourse and how it chooses to operate. Of course it might be nice if the user could choose pagination versus scroll.. Iām always in favor of offering choice.. but given the current climate and percentage of mobile devices versus desktops or laptops accessing forums like this one, infinite scroll makes sense IMO.
I agree that search could be better, but given the fact I can pop out to Google or even various AI engines at this point to perform search, I find Iām not often using the built-in search features anyway.
Step 1: Start the āNew User Tutorialā
