Simon Willison’s Weblog

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21 items tagged “community”

2020

A List of Hacker News’s Undocumented Features and Behaviors (via) If you’re interested in community software design this is a neat insight into the many undocumented features of Hacker News, collated by Max Woolf. # 6th June 2020, 5:36 pm

I’ve found, in my 20 years of running the site, that whenever you ban an ironic Nazi, suddenly they become actual Nazis

Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka # 8th January 2020, 4:11 pm

2019

This is when I pull out “we don’t do that here.” It is a conversation ender. If you are the newcomer and someone who has been around a long time says “we don’t do that here”, it is hard to argue. This sentence doesn’t push my morality on anyone. If they want to do whatever it is elsewhere, I’m not telling them not to. I’m just cluing them into the local culture and values.

Aja Hammerly # 5th August 2019, 3:59 pm

Lots of people calling for more aggressive moderation seem to imagine that if they yell enough the companies have a thoughtful, unbiased and nuance-understanding HAL 9000 they can deploy. It’s really more like the Censorship DMV.

Alex Stamos # 21st April 2019, 4:36 pm

2011

What are good websites to post online content about an event?

For posting slides from an event, http://www.slideshare.net/ is definitely the most popular. http://scribd.com/ is a good choice too.

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2010

What is the story of Advogato?

There’s a Google Tech Talk about Advogato: http://video.google.com/videopla...

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Is the 90-9-1 rule of user participation a myth?

Anecdotal evidence from crowdsourcing style projects I’ve worked on tend to support the basic principle (if not the exact ratios). The vast majority of the work on projects I have been involved with ends up being performed by a tiny subset of highly active users.

[... 60 words]

Does Quora have the same problem as Stack Overflow?

Quora isn’t one community, it’s thousands of separate communities—a community for each tag, and then a community for each user comprising their followers. As such, I think it will scale much better than the Stack Overflow community did, without needing to split out in to separate verticals.

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2009

Welcome to Django Dose. Launched at DjangoCon, a new Django community site designed to be a successor to TWiD, still with (shorter) podcasts but also featuring more news, articles and screencasts. # 21st September 2009, 6:21 pm

4chan’s /b/ forum, which gets called things like the Mos Eisley spaceport of the web when people are being polite, and the asshole of the internet when they aren’t, is energetic, anarchic, barely moderated, crude, irresponsible, vindictive if crossed, peculiarly creative, and full of hackers. It inspires loyalty in its core users, and makes everyone else nervous.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden # 29th July 2009, 1:39 pm

What I’ve Learned from Hacker News. I’m always fascinated by online community war stories. # 25th February 2009, 11:16 pm

2008

The Price of Anonymity: Our Principles? Alex Russell calls for a constructive step towards better gender balance in open source: make it clear that misogynistic, offensive and lewd behaviour will not be tolerated by open source communities and bake that policy in to community codes of conduct. # 28th July 2008, 12:44 am

RefactorMyCode.com. Neat community for discussing improvements to code snippets. Login using OpenID. # 28th June 2008, 11:46 pm

Reputation patterns in the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library (via) Pragmatic advice from Yahoo! on encouraging community participation. # 10th June 2008, 11:49 am

Django San Diego. A real-life meeting of Django developers in San Diego, as a direct result of profiles on djangopeople.net. Victory! # 8th February 2008, 10:20 am

Linkherd—django. Linkherd is a Django-powered startup that offers sub-reddit style functionality. I’ve set up a Django site there as well. # 26th January 2008, 11:58 pm

Django sub-reddit. Reddit are trialling the ability to create custom sub-reddits, so I put one up for Django links and discussions. # 26th January 2008, 11:56 pm

Symfonians (via) Similar concept to Django People but for Symfony developers—coincidentally launched within the past week as well. # 25th January 2008, 4:15 pm

Community sites on Django People. Small new feature: I can now add community sites to individual country pages. If you know of any regional community sites that I’ve missed, let me know in a comment or by e-mail. # 25th January 2008, 12:40 am

Django People

I’m constantly surprised by the number of people I run in to at conferences (or even in one case on the train) who are using Django but are completely invisible to the Django community. It seems that this is the downside of having good documentation: many people just read it and start building, without ever showing their face on the mailing lists or IRC.

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2007

Flickr: [what was with the pirates?] Garrrrhhhh! (via) It’s fascinating reading all the complaints on this thread—partly due to different international senses of humour, and partly just because as Flickr became more mainstream it attracted users who never picked up the sense of fun at the center of the Flickr brand. # 20th September 2007, 9:35 am