I knew the flask-session bug had killed the site weeks ago by looking at traffic logs, but I did not expect things to become THIS desolate.
Any ideas on how to accumulate users are welcome. I don't want to spam with bot posts, 1 legitimate user post is worth more than 100 bot posts.
On the plus side, programming/design wise the site is currently probably the best state it's ever been in, with all the core features completed and functional. If I had known the project was going to require this amount of work, I would've did many things differently from the start, including not advertising the site when it was in such an early stage.
I don't really want to spam... I guess the best way to attract users is to mention ieddit anywhere relevant whenever the discussion of reddit alternatives come up? When a mass exodus happened from reddit last month, the site attracted a fairly substantial amount of users, but was lacking so many features that the majority did not stay. When something like that happens again, everything will be ready this time.
Howdy, just signed up finally. As someone who's also considered creating a "better Reddit," I don't really know how to get users other than judiciously mentioning the site and waiting for Reddit to inevitably piss off a bunch of users again. But if I may make an observation, I waited all this time to sign up because when there was a relative plethora of users not long ago, it tended to be . . . well, Voat 2.0. Which I started using years ago and also stopped using years ago because it degenerated and flew off the rails into Wingnut Land. I'm not sure how one would counteract that though, other than posting lots of "regular" stuff, but at least on Voat, nothing except nutbaggery ever got upvoted once there was nothing but nutbags to do the voting. Kind of a self-reinforcing cycle. So it's something you have to get ahead of. Thus, while I don't know how to get the users, since there probably is no good way, I recommend focusing on making the site a place that regular users will want to stay at once they do come.
Honestly, even though the site has some unique features like anonymous posting and has a unique design, I think the most significant 'feature' is that the site will never pursue profits.
Regardless of what other sites claim, once they grow to the point where they are beholden to the whims of outside capital (or advertisers), they will be forced to make user-hostile decisions. This will NEVER be the case for this site.
What are your plans if the site blows up and gets astroturfed/controlled by powermods like what's happening on Reddit? This is one of the main things giving people a bad taste about Reddit rn. Let's say for instance most of the political/controversial discourse was controlled by non-admin users who happened to make their way to the top and control all the important "discourse" subs as moderators. Would you manually step in and correct that or would you not do that out of principle.
If there was overwhelming community consensus that x mod/admin are abusing their power, I'm not completely adverse to stepping in and doing something.
Vote manipulation is a more difficult problem, hell reddit still hasn't solved it, but issues handling mod/admin abuse seem like they can be dealt with. An idea would be, just as an example, to hold a democratic vote to determine action, filtering voters to only those most involved (example: top 5% of a sub's users). If there is overwhelming democratic consensus, I would not be adverse to stepping in and doing something.
Overwhelming community consensus cannot be had while a mod or admin is abusing their power. The whole problem is loud power users steamrolling the wants and needs of the community in pursuit of personal ends which might even include 'the greater good'. I think isolating communities to some degree, and maybe even making it possible for individual posts to fork into new subs, are the way to combat that power. Make it easy come easy go and no one can power trip for long. Just ideas.
Yeah, I think that's probably the only real option for accumulating more than a few users.
Avoiding the crazy is a fairly difficult problem for a platform which does not censor. The main way of handling this issue I think is to 'guide' the site toward better content by having various categories of content, while also providing thorough filtering tools for users.
Right now there are a few things implemented which worked well enough, well worked well enough when there were users anyway :) here's how things are designed currently:
1. The 'index' page is a list of posts from every sub that are NOT marked as nsfw. 2. The 'all' page is a list of all posts/comments, nsfw included. 3. There is a third category of posts, and that is what could be called 'quarantined' or 'muted'. Basically, there is an admin feature which allows for subs to be muted, and all posts/comments to a muted sub will not appear even in /i/all, but everything will still work if visiting the sub directly. This preserves the speech of communities many may classify as utterly objectionable, ensuring only those who are interested in such content are exposed to it.
Once there is more site activity, and people aren't subbed to every sub by default, the 'quarantine' option will still show the posts from subs a user is subbed too, even if they are to a quarantined sub.
How are the posts on the main page chosen when someone isn't logged in? Because another thing I remember is that for a while, 70% of them seemed to be some "Imagine blah blah blah" crap, which got really old really fast. As in within seconds; it was like "so this is where I come if I want people to tell me to imagine random crap. Cool. Bye." I would say that the main page shouldn't be monopolized by one sub for users who aren't logged in no matter what the sitewide post patterns look like.
Right now, the default sorting method for posts is literally identical to the reddit 'hot' algorithm, with all non-nsfw posts showing up on the index page.
The algorithm doesn't really work well with low volume.
This place and Saidit are really the only 2 viable alternatives to Reddit. The Flask thing wasn't a huge deal I don't think. Just wait for the next Reddit exodus and people will find this place through word of mouth.
The traffic #s demonstrate that the flask-sessions bug is almost solely responsible for the decline in users, and understandably so. It's unacceptable for a website to have a bug of that severity. Even if it wasn't my code which ended up ultimately being responsible, from a user's perspective it makes no difference.
That being said, even though the bug manifested literally the very first day of whenever I started travelling, it's better for it to have happened now than at some point in the future whenever the consequences would've irreversible. In the grand scheme of things, even the traffic levels then were still relatively low, if that bug had manifested with a 1000+ users instead of 50, the fallout would be enormous.
Plus every time some bullshit like this happens I accumulate more knowledge of flask and it's pitfalls. I'm far, far more knowledgeable/capable skill-wise compared to whenever I started this project, which means in the future whenever stakes are higher, I'll able to handle things pretty fucking decently
You shouldn't be so hard on yourself. I think you've done a great job with the website. As others have commented, this is one of the few decent alternatives to Reddit. Now that the site is more much mature, have you considered posting it to Hackernews? Lobste.rs?
I'm waiting for the site to be feature complete before posting to HN again, which hopefully should be sometime during the next few weeks.
There were a few areas of the code which were an absolute horror show, the worst of which being the sub mod html files I just spent several hours refactoring. This was the first project I had worked on in over a year, and it really shows in some of the early code lol. While the flask-sessions bug may not of been caused by my poor code, there is certainly no shortage of horrible code I am responsible for, especially early on.
If I had to do everything all over again, with the knowledge/practice I've re-accumulated, quite a few things would be different in terms of code structure.
I spent several hours on this commit, and if you pay attention to how things were formatted, you'll see just how truly bade the code was in some places lol.
But yeah, stuff like that I can and will be hard on myself for. Although at the end of the day, users don't give a shit about code structure, only results.
what exactly was the root cause of the flask/session issue? you've probably explained it before somewhere, in which case, if you can link to the explanation, if you have the time and wherewithall... have been wondering about this since.
1. 2 users send a request to the server within the same time window 2. flask-sessions assigns BOTH REQUESTS the same backend server session 3. flask-sessions then, completely ignoring client-side cookie, overwrites client session cookie to match server session it THINKS the request should have 4. BOTH users now have the same client session cookie set
it took me forever to figure out what was going on, but yeah, that's why. flask-sessions isn't thread safe apparently under certain conditions.
I'm waiting for the site to be feature complete before posting to HN again, which hopefully should be sometime during the next few weeks.
There were a few areas of the code which were an absolute horror show, the worst of which being the sub mod html files I just spent several hours refactoring. This was the first project I had worked on in over a year, and it really shows in some of the early code lol. While the flask-sessions bug may not of been caused by my poor code, there is certainly no shortage of horrible code I am responsible for, especially early on.
If I had to do everything all over again, with the knowledge/practice I've re-accumulated, quite a few things would be different in terms of code structure.
I spent several hours on this commit, and if you pay attention to how things were formatted, you'll see just how truly bade the code was in some places lol.
But yeah, stuff like that I can and will be hard on myself for. Although at the end of the day, users don't give a shit about code structure, only results.
I sense that people are just taking a breather from social media as the year winds down, plus Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Years coming up.
The entire country is prepping, waiting for the hurricane shitstorm that is going to be the 2020 election. You are guaranteed increased traffic as 2020 rolls around and censorship on other platforms increases.
You are guaranteed increased traffic as 2020 rolls around and censorship on other platforms increases.
Agreed. This time, everything will be ready.
Just today, I found it extremely frustrating trying to use the kratom subreddit to find a decent kratom vendom due to reddit's asinine rules regarding 'sourcing'. If the kratom discussion was happening here, this would not have been a problem.
It would be better for everybody involved for such discussion to take place here, people just have to be aware of the platform.
You can attract more people by internationalizing ieddit. I18n can bring people from others countries creating their own subs. This way, each time there is a non-english reddit/twitter/etc exodus (which also happen from time to time) people can reach this site.
2 months ago, there was an enormous french exodus from jeuxvideo.com. People get bored of admin dictaturship. Thousands of people erased their accounts and search for a reddit-like alternative. Sadly, there was no real alternatives. I asked Tildes for a french sub and i18n : doesn't care, Saidit had broken translations and won't fix, Notabug/voat are ugly, reddit is even worse dictaturship. There was no redditlike alternative to welcome us. People ended up in obscures Discourse forums and then reopened their account at jeuxvideo.com...
So, maybe YOU are interested of a proper internationalization of ieddit ? It could bring activity in ieddit, which I find simple and beautiful. I can understand that seeing foreign language activity is maybe not satisfying but it can help other communities. I am not a developper but I can help with UI translation if you're interested.
This is a good idea, I've discussed this with people on discord, and I think it's one of the best routes forward.
At the time, the site layout and templates were not nearly finalized enough for internationalization, but I believe things might be stable enough to start focusing on that now.
The only way I believe is to post shit that's not even on Reddit. We can't just rely on content "like" Reddit. Make bots, and post a ton of content. I am really not talking about spam. I am talking about building so many stories that they start appearing in Google searches. Also, we really need to invent a new kind of concept (maybe in the form of subieddits) for Ieddit which is exclusive to Ieddit.
Make bots, and post a ton of content. I am really not talking about spam. I am talking about building so many stories that they start appearing in Google searches.
This was my view initially as well, but after actually writing a bot which does such a thing, I realized it's really difficult to find a balance between legitimate users and bots when it comes to site interaction. At current traffic levels, any bot posts at all completely drown out legitimate users, and it makes using the site pretty awful.
Also, we really need to invent a new kind of concept (maybe in the form of subieddits) for Ieddit which is exclusive to Ieddit.
Any ideas on how to accumulate users are welcome. I don't want to spam with bot posts, 1 legitimate user post is worth more than 100 bot posts.
On the plus side, programming/design wise the site is currently probably the best state it's ever been in, with all the core features completed and functional. If I had known the project was going to require this amount of work, I would've did many things differently from the start, including not advertising the site when it was in such an early stage.
I don't really want to spam... I guess the best way to attract users is to mention ieddit anywhere relevant whenever the discussion of reddit alternatives come up? When a mass exodus happened from reddit last month, the site attracted a fairly substantial amount of users, but was lacking so many features that the majority did not stay. When something like that happens again, everything will be ready this time.