Should we post on Reddit or Discuss?

Which one is more adapted and for what.

I think a diversity of fora is important, and I think anything to get off reddit is a plus, given their direction. So i’d be pleased if this became the nexus of kakoune related discussion.

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Different venues are better for different kind of things.

My impression in that this forum has more Kakoune contributors and a higher average level of Kakoune experience, while r/Kakoune has more Kakoune users and a lower average level of experience. So, if I want to ask how something works, or ask for feedback on an idea, I’ll come here. If I want to tell people about a cool thing I’ve found or made, I’ll post to r/Kakoune.

Of course, that’s just for posting. I’m happy to reply in either location.

Over on the welcome page (Welcome to Discuss Kakoune), I tried to outline some goals and non-goals, so let me reference the relevant parts here.

Goals:

  • Be the hub of the Kakoune user community.
  • Be a place for long-form discussion, time-shifted discussions on everything that doesn’t fit well in a github issue.
  • Reduce dependency on the IRC Channel due to it being real-time and lacking a historical record.

Non-Goals:

  • Become the homepage of Kakoune. That is kakoune.org.
  • Become the hub of the Kakoune developer community. The hub of the developer community should remain the wonderful Github project and specifically the great issues.
  • Become a “recent news” type of place, the kakoune reddit can be that – we really hope to foster conversations about kakoune.

So, basically what /u/Screwtapello said. :slight_smile:

basically, the only advantage of this place is the ability to reply by email. Everything else that was listed in your comment can be done with Reddit, and Reddit suits this task better, because it is a mass of communities that can intersect with each other and share experience, it’s more popular, and has became a something like second stackwhatever.com for many people, because it is easier to use.

This hub is pretty much self-existing, and hard to be discovered, because it doesn’t mentioned anywhere but kakoune.com which looks like some fan-made site, not an official page. It should be mentioned in pinned post at r/kakoune, and at kakoune.org if you want more people to discover this place. But in my opinion, Reddit is more than enough to be hub for Kakoune users, and if it will be popular it would be able to show other people that community is strong. discuss.whatever.com doesn’t seem to be really popular, and usually more specific for developers community which isn’t a goal.

To summarize what I meant: the less popular community hub aggregator was chosen over one of the most popular community hub aggregator because of ability to reply by email.

@andreyorst a lot of your comment is colored by an exceptionally positive view of Reddit, which I think is far from universal. Some love it, some consider is a dumpster fire to be avoided at all costs. I personally like it but think it doesn’t tend to lend itself to long-form discussions. Karma farming and memes, hot takes and what just happened tends to be its nature – and I don’t see much interesting discussion happening on it. God knows I tried (I moderate /r/vim, stepping down soon as I now use Kakoune full time).

This hub is pretty much self-existing, and hard to be discovered, because it doesn’t mentioned anywhere but kakoune.com which looks like some fan-made site, not an official page.

It is a fan-made page. Building a community like this can take years, and I am more than willing to do the time to build trust in the community by being up consistent, having no heavy handed moderation and just doing the job I set out to do. I don’t care if it is a 2 month plan or a 10 year plan. I was in the vim community for over 2 decades, and owned/moderated #vim for over 15 years (transitioning away as I use Kakoune full time)… I was moderating #vim before Reddit was even in beta. It didn’t exist in any form.

It should be mentioned in pinned post at r/kakoune, and at kakoune.org if you want more people to discover this place

Agreed, ask has been made by multiple people (including myself). Had pushback from some people (for IMHO a bit unfair reasons), so I will simply let this site exist on its own until it either naturally becomes the place for communication about Kakoune, or it fails and I will point it to kakoune.org. I have no ego in this, I just found the options (including Reddit) to not work very well – the IRC is the most active place and it is fleeting and not time shifted. I felt being a part of the community was made harder by having a (seemingly dead / no replies) sub-reddit and an IRC channel you could only participate in if you were on at the right time or have a bouncer.

Reddit is more than enough to be hub for Kakoune users, and if it will be popular it would be able to show other people that community is strong.

I disagree (obviously). Please point me to you favorite tool subreddit that you feel has a good community having interesting conversations. Your view of a great example to emulate, and then if you find that – dig into the moderation structure, how do they do it? Is it a few inactive moderators and a default subreddit featureset – or is it actively moderated? Again, I moderate a fair sized community (75,000 or so users) on Reddit – and I haven’t liked the experience one bit. Again, I don’t care where the great community hub is – I just want it to exist and be time shifted and accessible (so not IRC).

To summarize what I meant: the less popular community hub aggregator was chosen over one of the most popular community hub aggregator because of ability to reply by email.

But it was only chosen by the users, it has received zero official support, it has zero advantages, and gets less direct linkage than any of the others. @mawww is an admin on here, and I told him if he ever wants the domain it is his. He has taken a very hands off / light touch. He has only ever used it as a user, same as you or anyone else, it is new – takes time to build up any sort of trust.

I think on a longer timeline than you might be thinking of – a community place like this will show its value. But I think it makes sense to look at the timeline in terms of years rather than months.

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I also did not get bribed by @robertmeta to post here rather than on reddit, I just think the forum-style discussion model is more appropriate than the reddit-style, partly because we can have longer-lived discussions. Note that I don’t care about the email-posting feature.
reddit also makes it less obvious who you’re communicating with, which I think is slightly detrimental in a small community like ours

Tool subreddits usually do not have interesting conversations, but r/vim and r/emacs, both constantly contain interesting posts. (it’s strange to me why do you ask for it, as you’re one of the moderators of r/vim, which is “tool subreddit” so you should know, Vim advent calendar was a thing last year). As for moderation – I never seen any, I’ve had fun rants with u/romany in r/vim, and there were lots of rants from me in r/gnome but all I got was down-votes which is fine. For example in r/linux there are constantly stupid posts, or r/rust subreddit is constantly confused with r/playrust, but there isn’t any problems, because it is community of tech people, rather than a community of trolls, where moderation is really hard.

Reddit is insanely huge thing, so of course everything that big can have both bad and good points. I just ignore bad communities that can affect reputation of whole reddit, because they are not interesting to me. I agree that there are people who think of reddit, as a trash of stupid stupidity, but we are talking about text editors, there are basically no bad subreddit built around text editor.

That’s great, but this also means that you know how useful reddit can be, because reddit should be a major step forward from simple IRC channel. There may be reasons why you don’t want to maintain a community, because you know something, what people who never moderated reddit, but I saw no fair points (besides email) not to use it. Sure, I know, Reddit has stupid shadow bans, it archives discussions, and does lots of other stupid things, which may not be great for a community, but again – all other text editor based subreddits are in fine condition.


I’m not against discuss at any means, I just don’t see major advantages of it over reddit. Maybe I just dislike the colorscheme :smiley:

Tool subreddits usually do not have interesting conversations, but r/vim and r/emacs, both constantly contain interesting posts.

Because I am the moderator is why I ask, I don’t consider /r/vim anything like what I would like the make the Kakoune community hub, I consider it a personal failure, I got in very late and could not make it much better than it was… I loathe the tools available for moderation and it makes doing anything on it absolutely obnoxious.

Vim advent calendar was a thing last year

Yeah, I was one of the ones who set it up (with romainl) – it runs on this server. That small success was also an absolute failure. We couldn’t get 24 articles up, despite a community of 75,000 and months of notice.

I’ve had fun rants with u/romany in r/vim

I assume you mean romainl (who is a friend and awesome, and also who did the advent calendar with me) and will argue until his last breath on /r/vim or #vim. :slight_smile:

because reddit should be a major step forward from simple IRC channel

Bluntly, I don’t think the Kakoune subreddit was, it felt like a corpse of a subreddit to me. Also, Discourse was born long after Reddit because of shortfalls of Reddit (and similar) for community building for many of the reasons you mentioned and more (archiving, horrible search, threading, shadow bans) and those big text editors have other tier 1 communities (mailing lists).

all other text editor based subreddits are in fine condition.

I vehemently disagree with this point, and I know other tool subreddit moderators (at least a few I know personally) also consider their subreddits failures, and like me – could not find a good way forward. You can’t even do like easy voting and other basic things on reddit, you can rig something up but it is always going to be Reddits rules, never what the community wants to build. I see more and more tools taking control of their communities using discourse to great effects: https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/latest is a good example.

I’m not against discuss at any means, I just don’t see major advantages of it over reddit. Maybe I just dislike the colorscheme :smiley:

Yeah, I just looked at https://forum.breadtopia.com/ and love how it looks, might be time to get rid of this damn blue.

EDIT: Example of when not archiving is amazing: https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/t/getting-the-path-of-currently-selected-file-in-finder/1507 – 2015 to 2018 – still alive, one of most viewed.

EDIT2: The smaller the community, the less you can throw away value, let posts die because of age or otherwise. Look at some of the ancient but still valuable github issues.

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Oh, on this – I changed default to white for the moment. But you can select light, dark or blue under: preferences / interface and then the theme dropdown.

@andreyorst another huge feature is being able to split posts, merge posts, and reorganize posts into the right sections after they are up and active. I can take some parts of this post and split them into other categories and sections and put this post elsewhere. Post organization is a massive feature for long term health.

I put this under FAQ because it will be a common question!

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Yes, mistyped his username. He’s awesome :smiley:

Well, after reading your thoughts, I feels like discuss is really a better choice for community hub. There was nothing that I could compare it with, but now I have.

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@robertmeta How about Discord vs IRC for the historical records, pins, etc.

It could also be fun to audio with actual Kakoune users. xD

I feel like Discord is more game-oriented service. They have a game store and audiochat for gamers. Not sure if it is sutable for non-gaming communities.

@alexherbo2 Discord and Slack are interesting newcomers in the space, and as they both add features they start to look more and more like the other. Both have similar control issues to Reddit, and have sort of a stream of thought immediacy in terms of active conversations (but as you rightly point out, have a history).

Slack actually has sort of a “talk about this comment” feature now for sort of post-like abilities, but it is really clumsy and I have yet to see an organization really using it. Neither Slack nor Discord allow for the “old guard” to work in their “old way” (via IRC) without a lot of pain (I actually wrote a long article about this pain -> https://www.robertmelton.com/posts/weechat-all-the-things/ … I got it all working, then gave up on it) … as @andreyorst pointed out for some people having the mailing list mode is a “critical feature” because they are on many mailing lists and that is how they work.

But, it is an interesting and fair point about having a place to talk on voice, it is extremely humanizing. Text loses context and allows us to treat others as well – “others” rather than actual humans who deserve respect. This is even more prone to happen in the tech communities where text is sometimes the only medium you have for years.

A Kakoune discord is something I would join, maybe you should set it up @alexherbo2? If not, I could toss one up, just takes a few minutes to setup – throw a Kakoune icon on there, and maybe setup a backup moderator or two and we are off to the races!

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I hope you never stop pushing back – and if this place sucks in some way – always speak up. It only gets good with involvement and pushback so thanks to you and to @alexherbo2 for (inadvertently) starting a great discussion!

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@mawww can set up it as the creator – he was active on IRC 2 days ago; it would be fun lol.

You can transfer ownership of Discord servers after the fact, so make it known that if he ever wants it, that it is his – but don’t make him do the legwork. This domain for example is his if he ever wants it as the benevolent dictator as are all the backups so he could setup this site on another server of his choosing, but I will save him any of the legwork, he has an editor to be coding!

You seem passionate about it, no harm in trying it out and seeing how the community feels about it. I will add it to Kakoune.com landing page at the very least and put it in the community sticky post.

As @robertmeta mentionned fairly quickly here, I dont really want to manage Kakoune’s community.

My goal with Kakoune has always been to have a tool I enjoy using for my day work, although I am very happy a community appeared around it, I did not start the project with that goal.

I dont think it is necessary for me to manage the community, bless this or that way to discuss about Kakoune… Especially as I dont exactly have a lot of free time nowadays (those damn kids, stealing our free time). If I see/get notified of a community effort, such as this site, I am happy to join and participate in the discussions, if it gets popular enough we can add a link to it on kakoune.org, but I am not really keen on trying to set-up those myself.

As said before, I dont think there is any need for me in particular to set those up and manage them, anybody can do it, and I’d rather dedicate my Kakoune time to the dev side.

So, all that to say, be my guest, set-up a discord server if you’d like, tell me and I’ll make sure to show up there. In a way I think a community gets really mature once it does not rely on a few key people to exist anymore.

Hope this makes sense, I’ll take this opportunity to thanks @robertmeta on his community effort, much appreciated, and thank @alexherbo2 who probably was the first member (besides me) of the Kakoune community itself.

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I absolutely agree, and there are no shortcuts to that. It takes time and consistency, and if the place and the community is good, it will slowly attract even consistent detractors, or at least survive perfectly happily without them.

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