as if I don't have enough software bugs, I have actual bugs

02:46jangomandalorian Hey @pushcx , long time no see
Pardon? Starting a minute late. Oh, that was me. Almost spilling my nice big glass of water across my entire desk. Wouldn’t that have been a great distracting way to start stream when I’m already running late. Oh, boy, frici Oh no, starting stream with a keyboard bath is never a good idea HahaSweat
give me one second. It’s only a splash. But if I get it off of shit, here we go. All right. Hello. Hello? Yeah, it was very, I don’t know if that came through on the mic, but you might have heard the whole, like pint glass of water wobbling on the surface of the wooden desk. I, was moving something out of the way and caught it and it, it thought about tipping over and just barely didn’t, it probably would have gone straight into the keyboard too. Oh, boy. Luckily, you know, even that wouldn’t be the end of the world because there are several spare keyboards around. I got into, mechanical keyboards. Gosh, I don’t know, seven years ago. So I’ve soldered a few. I’m not sure there’s one within arm’s reach that uses Cordy though. Yeah, it’s been a couple of years but I was using the Norman layout and it’s lovely. But I never did get the, it, the speed back. So let’s not allow that guess I missed closing something there. I don’t know if the, five seconds of rock came through there. All that aside. Nice to see you for C Django Mandalorian and then for everybody else. This is the lobster’s office hours stream where twice a week I take any kind of questions that folks have about the site, the community, the code base. And when folks don’t have stuff, I work on the site usually that’s code. But my plan for the day absent questions is more writing, which is why this stream started 20 minutes late. There was the big meta topic last week around the brave browser. I just left a comment that is about that and I’m just not a particularly fast writer, especially when I’m trying to be clear about contentious stuff. So I was working on that comment and then working and working and working and I realized it was just gonna be better to pause the stream than wait another couple of hours cause it’s already been a couple of days of reflecting on it. So that’s about that.

05:50How are folks doing? I see a lot of familiar names in the the user list. Thanks for coming back. Although I understand it’s rude in twitch to call individuals out. So I won’t, my, my general plan was to talk about story merging, which has come up on the stream a couple of times. I guess that’s part of why it’s in my head is maybe three streams ago. We talked a little about the U I of story merging, which is this item here. frici Now you got me curious, time to find out what the large stream blocker comment was 👀
But I’ve got a couple of couple of reasons I think it’s worth spending some more time on story merging.

06:37 Yeah, we can just here. I can find the link real fast. It’s whatever my last comment was, which the Threads page should have. Some were down here, pushcx https://lobste.rs/s/iopw1d/what
many big threats. It’s this one I’m talking about. So let me grab this link. Oh, yeah. What is this? Like 600 words?

07:13Yeah, I learned in college writing papers that I could write a good paper at a rate. Almost exactly one page per hour. So if I had a five page paper to write, I could just block off five hours and I would write it and it was always, always that amount of time and I would get really good grades on papers. that was pretty consistent but then just I am such a slow writer when I’m going for quality. obviously silly comments. I can bang out pretty fast. But having worked with jmiven hello!
professional journalists, I mean, I was a professional journalist at the Washington Post but like I did, I built sites that went along with news stories rather than directly writing articles myself. And, yeah, I guess the other thing I did that was journalism was, I built the, the Tech Crunch job board and did some other stuff in the early days of Tech Crunch. I had a contract with the New York Times that didn’t work out anyways. I gotta get in gear. I’m, I’m distracting. but I was always impressed by the, espartapalma Hi Hello, folks
bsandro VoHiYo
the pros journalists will call them who could just bang out stories so fast because I would look at the stuff they would write and I’d be like, oh, that would take me two hours to write and they’d write it in literally 15 minutes. Professional writers. Pretty cool. Ah, hey Jay Ivan, that’s part Biss Sandra. Welcome back, folks. Nice to see so many familiar faces. I didn’t actually expect that for lobsters hours that there would be, you know, a nice little core group that returns, but that’s been super pleasant actually. So absent meta stuff. The other meta stuff is story merging. I had talked a little, oh, because it’s such a usual stream fixture. I should maybe mention there’s been no movement on any whole request since the last stream. So I’m just not even gonna go there. The pushcx https://github.com/lobsters/lob
this bug that we talked about on stream a little while ago and I’ll throw the link and chat

09:46was kind of funny because let’s, let’s actually have that open on a tab for an example of story emerging because not that guy. Which one was it? Yes. Not this thread. Didn’t I put it in my notes. Yes.

10:22pushcx https://lobste.rs/s/skds9f/redu
So this comment is where I did a big write up of story merging a while ago. And let’s get rid of that highlighting for contrast, the, the funny bit that popped out at me was saying, oh, if the saving feature doesn’t work properly on merge stories, that’s a bug and please file it. And if saving is broken prob hiding probably is as well. So I wrote that September of 2019 and then August. So almost exactly five years later, we had this bug reported that. Oh yeah, if you hide a story, it doesn’t actually hide all the comments on the story. So the the gist of the way story merging works is it’s kind of a bug factory. So here’s a really small example of merging stories where there was an official blog post and then also someone submitted. I think Keygen created this fair source thing. These were the two things. So they announced that they were becoming fair source and then they created this fair source group. So since they were the same topic from the same company, I merged the two stories together. And so you can kind of see an example of, well, there’s two headlines and then this text is a little funny and then if we dig down somewhere in the ah yeah. So like here’s some comments from the merged Story, they get this icon on the front and they have the title of the story on the right. And if you’re just skimming along it, especially for the top level comments. So like this one, a consistent thing that comes up is basically people miss this U I, they don’t notice this title. And so actually this is a great example because this person says, 02 years, so they are responding to something that is in the article. But if you’re just browsing this story, it’s not super clear which of the two links they’re responding to people just they missed this part of it. And this U I is not super useful inside of a story because so we reuse this template for comments and every place that we print comments, we use this template. So this links to the story, but on a merged story, this just kind of like links to the page and it tells you it’s merged, but it’s not clear. Oh If you want to understand why this person is saying two years, you have to click the second link, not the first.

13:34jmiven just as a note before I forget: if I'm not mistaken, yawaramin is waiting for a comment in PR #1383 :)
So the way merging is implemented a note before you forget. Oh, they’re waiting for a coming to the pull request. That’s that’s worth interrupting for cause otherwise, I was just gonna go into story emerging for pretty much the whole time. So,

14:00all right. So there was this, I reviewed it. Oh That’s great.

…28How, how long was that sitting? That I missed it? Two weeks? Oh man, I must have clicked in and accidentally cleared that little blue line that notes that it’s new and then I just never looked back.

…48It’s indenting a good idea. Honestly, people miss the indented message for editing titles. Let’s find that code to refer to it. We use that before. Aren’t that? So that’s over in location. Js has the what is it called? Delimiter? No separator. Yeah, here we go. The check story title has a really simple bit of code that just says if you see one of these punctuations, the dash, the colon and then like the N dash, the M dash A pipe A dot A different dot or the word by. We’re probably seeing a title where someone that was automatically fetched from the page and it’s something like cool things in Python pipe blog by Alice Smith. And we don’t include the blog by Alice Smith on the end of titles. It’s just a style issue. And so there’s this really simple title reminder that says, hey, look, if we have one of those, just that is the best time to tell people this, which is what is that over in the story form. Yeah, it says please remove extraneous com components from titles such as the name of the site blog section and author. This is pretty much lifted from the story guidelines, but those appear below the story and they don’t show up all of the time. Usually the the guidelines are collapsed. So it’s deliberately echoing that text.

17:46How does that answer? See Yah Warman is kind of implicitly asking what the message should be here. So speaking of slow writing.

18:09Yeah. So the thing that I wanna see out of this message is that it is clear to the submitter that we just replaced the thing they pasted because so their example here even is kind of similar like it’s a short Euro, but it’s very often the the last part of the URL that has changed. So here it’s just a trailing slash, but sometimes it’s a dot html or a dot PHP or a something else way out at the end of the URL. And when I say way out at the end, I mean, some URL s are so long, it’s off to the side in the box and when people are tabbing along in this form, the next field title is right below. And as soon as they out focus this title typically within, I mean, it it depends on how fast the we can round trip to the target server, but typically in like 50 or 100 milliseconds, we prefill the title. So people’s eyes tend to like just snap down to that next line of the form. And so they’re going to be looking away specifically from the URL and when the human eye moves from one place to another, unless it’s tracking a moving object, it moves in what’s called A CCA. That’s actually pretty cool topic if you don’t know it.

19:56pushcx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S
So the eye basically snaps around. Yeah. So it’s saying what I was saying of if it’s following something that’s moving smoothly, the eyes move smoothly, but otherwise the eyes do a quick simultaneous movement of both eyes. So when people are looking from the URL, they just pasted and then they snap down to the movement. I’m not gonna read the whole Wikipedia page to you. But the useful thing to know there is people are functionally blind when they are Cicada bsandro is it when brain puts a picture into your memory and you think you saw it?
and you can see this yourself. So is there a way of I’m never gonna have a diagram. Let’s make a terrible diagram. This is one of those, this is a little bit like that. What was it called? the card test that I did. That’s an example on screen a month or two ago of, can you recognize which of these cards to flip over in a logic test? B Sandro? I think you’re thinking of like Pariah Dola or bsandro nono
which is when people see faces in things or then there’s another one, I’m not remembering less tracking.

21:59bsandro when you move your eyes quickly to the object
bsandro your eyes can't see anything on the move but your brain can't interrupt the "video stream"
I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking well enough to say if it’s the same thing because, you know, I read about this stuff because I think it’s neat. I’m not any kind of expert on the brain or the visual thing. So as an example let’s see. Let’s make some art, ask you art about it.

22:28All right. So bsandro so once you focus on the image it puts the same image into your memory, and it is uninterrupted - feels like
yeah. OK. So this is a ask your art version, your eyes can’t see anything on the move but your brain can’t interrupt the video stream. You focus on the

…48that could totally be how it works. But I don’t know. My understanding has been that bsandro that's why if you look at the analog clock second hand it often feels that it stays there longer than a second
when you are Cicada, you generally can’t see things and your brain is just used to it and covers the gap like you don’t notice that you have a blind spot in the middle of your vision. Oh Yeah, that one about the, when you first look at a clock, it feels long. Yeah, I know that one. But

23:25bsandro yeah it is a terrible brain hack :D
so here’s ask the art, this is you top down. So assuming you are not where somewhere someone is gonna give you weird looks if you put your arms out to the left and right. So that’s actually here we go.

…55Let’s get a the pipe and a carrot. So I want you to always face straight ahead. Your chin should be pointed directly ahead, say towards your monitor. And then if you lift up your left and right arms and you hold them out and keeping your chin pointed perfectly straightforward, move your eyes all the way to the left and put your left hand with one finger up. You can choose your finger, put your hand with one finger up. So you just see it with your eyes. All the way to the left and then put your right hand, keeping your chin forward, do the same thing. So if you look all the way to your right, you can just see one finger up on your right hand without moving your head, look at your right finger and then snap your eyes to your left finger. It is the longest possible CCA you can do all the way from left to right and it is long enough and slow enough that you may see sort of a bit of blackness in the middle and it’s not really blackness because your inner eye is not a movie camera, but you may realize that in the middle when you’re doing this exceptionally long CCA, there’s kind of a feeling of blankness, you just don’t see what’s in front of you, which is what you would naively expect if your eyes were tracking from left to right. And so if something changes in front of you in that, I don’t know what that’s gonna take. I think the longest CCAS are around 100 milliseconds. So 1/10 of a second, if something changes right in front of you, you’re not gonna see it. And there is a smaller version of this bringing it back to the form where something appears down here and your vision snaps from the URL down. And if the URL changes at the same time, you literally cannot see the change. So that’s why I’m especially careful around forms that change things for people because naively, it feels like they’re looking straight at it. But if they are in the process of moving to the next field or there is an animation happening somewhere else that their attention snaps to, they are blind to the change. So that is the very long way of saying I would like this message to be clear about what happened. And so let’s say

27:00I would like to say canonical, but it’s jargon that people won’t know.

…14So I’m trying to start with the noun of the thing you are caring about and we’re just thinking about.

…58Is there a good?

28:04See, I’m just hoping MDN has a page for it.

…13Is there a ah it’s kind of a shame this talks about search engines. That’s a little distracting and is not why we use it. We use it because we use it for a similar reason, which is there are often many URL S and we want to avoid getting duplicate URL s submitted.

…39That is probably enough. All right,

…51let’s see if that’s reasonable

…59to will be given by the server. I’d like the message to start with the URL as the subject because it’s what the user was just thinking about. Explain an active voice that it was changed when I say active voice. the URL above. No, but then the server is the subject. The URL is the object. Yeah. So I’m not even being grammatical.

29:59Yeah. And I do try pretty hard to write messages in active voice. But in this case, I think it’s clearest for the user if they see the object that they were just paying attention to anyways. Thank you, Jay Mi I I appreciate you bringing up the pr that was hanging around. I didn’t realize it was waiting for attention.

30:35So coming back to story merging, but with the reminder that if you have stuff you would like to talk about on stream, you can just bring up questions most anytime I will either stick them in the dock and come back to them in a few minutes or just jump into them.

…57So we’re talking about how story emerging there is this feature that’s been hanging out where users can submit, suggested title changes, which is very often removing things like the name of the blog or the author of the blog because people don’t always catch that in line help or tag editing where they’re like. Yeah, you know, this is about a programming language and you just tagged programming generally rather than Python or what’s the other one that’s real common? Yeah, I’m not sure there is one that’s quite as ubiquitous as folks leaving and stuff that we take out of titles

31:52so users can do that, but they cannot suggest story merges. And that one is also it’s been there was a discussion on the site. I don’t think this one, the other merging story guy that I clicked by and I closed it. But there’s like in a narrow technical sense, allowing users to set the merged story ID column is the exact same functionality as allowing them to suggest title. And it’s just as easy to reverse. But then like the resulting UU I of merged stories is a little bit clunky and it’s not clear to submitters what that means. We’ll talk about that in a minute. And so I’ve been reluctant to pick this up even though it’s been an obvious feature for 6.5 years. And I noted down here today when I was reviewing before the show that we talked about the story controller yas application to lean more into rails by splitting up the story controllers actions like allowing users to suggest or allowing mods to edit into their own controllers. And it would also benefit from the reactor refactor in 1298 which is already open. It’s the bug from the bug factory where a feature does not interact well with story emerging because story merging is implemented as each story has a column in the database called Merged story ID. And so the story table and Rails is very table oriented. It makes the story table kind of equivocate between whether a story is a single link or a single text. And then the alternate thing it could be is a merged story, which might mean the group of all stories that were submitted to make this one entry, which is kind of how the URL thinks of it or the target for all of those merged story ID columns, which is again an individual link, but that one that becomes kind of special and I call it the Bug factory because as I put it on the post leading up to the stream, if anybody follows me on blue sky or Mastodon story is a God object and then everything that interacts with it has to have the complexity of checking the merged story ID column in both directions. Both is this story merged into others and are other stories merged into this? And then it’s not clear. So the way the hidden stories table works is it is a very small join table from user ID. In this case, Gustav who is here sometimes I think to story ID and so in the extra step of looking up comments, it doesn’t respect the story merging and it, yeah, it really should.

35:53So maybe last stream or the one before where to go.

36:07I’d have to look back at the scratches. We talked about some options for how to factor this and how I was kind of blocked on what to call the two entities resulting. And after sleeping on it for a few days, I really come along to doing the opposite of what I wrote in this issue and having a headline which is the item that can appear on the front page. that, that seems nice. And then a story is the individual link or text and or text if we want to be pedantic and then features like hidden stories becomes hidden headlines and they are forced to say, oh yeah, someone has hidden this headline. So we are merging, you know, all stories listed on it and the common case is going to be that there is exactly one. But every time there’s a merge, we’re gonna merge the others or include the others. I hope that’s clear how we factoring this would, would solve the bug factory because then every story, regardless of whether or not it’s merged has the same database structure and it’s not strictly needed for fixing some of the UIs stuff, but it always seems nicer to fix database issues before U I issues.

37:57So we’ve talked about the bug factor, we’ve talked about features, we don’t really have the other feature we don’t have that people kind of want is down here for. But my exposure, so especially when people are self promoting or trying to rebut something that they are really disagree with. They get pretty unhappy about seeing their link submitted even when they are very explicitly submitting it to respond to an existing story. And we merged to keep our discussions together to avoid having to rehash things. But people feel like they are missing out on exposure and this is kind of an uncharitable way of putting it. But my exposure, I don’t have a better way to put it because people don’t usually explicitly say that they feel entitled to one of the 25 slots on the home page, but that’s what they want. And it’s not obvious because the story disappears from slash newest when it’s merged into something else. And that’s one of the ways that people read the site. But those discussions do show up on slash active. So if any story in emerged story and I don’t, are there any on the page here, Firefox, is that why is there a, this is one of those stories that sounds like it’s gonna be about using software instead of actually making software, which is not a super strict distinction on the site for topicality. But I think about it a little bit,

40:02Firefox is also a developer tool. So yeah. Oh, here we go. Here’s a merged story. So it’s not obvious from this list, but this one has had another link merged into it and it’s ordering on slash active is the latest comment in any of its merged stories. So the exposure is there and this is why I put slash active like literally next to the logo. The top thing in the upper left, this was only about pushcx https://lobste.rs/s/ltwlfp/comp
2.5 years ago and so on a regular basis, long time users still notice slash active for the first time. Yeah, I’ll throw this one in as long as I’m sharing an example, Mert’s story and then in the where are we in the notes here? I will throw in that we have a couple of examples

41:11and no discussion of merged stories would be complete. Speaking of examples without the most merged story in Lobster’s history. Does anybody know what it is offhand? This has come up on the site? I know it’s come up in the chat room maybe two or three times over the years.

…37The story and Lobster’s history that includes the most links merged into it bsandro hehe
is Microsoft acquires github. I think that’s the title that ended up getting used.

42:04Yeah, here we go, Microsoft to acquire github for 7.5 billion. frici holy…
So this one has pushcx https://lobste.rs/s/zknzmj/micr
123456789, 1011, 1213 linked into it. Yep, that is the most and I included because I think it’s always useful to have these kind of outliers to understand. Well, what’s the most extreme version of this? bsandro hah even ddevault is there
And I think it is to the site’s benefit that all of these got merged together. Oh, there’s actually like 1/14 link that the original submitter put into the story text. Yeah. So one of the places that merge stories are especially useful is hot take responses. Like a bunch of these are like this one. Floss rambling on Microsoft buy github has sold us out like these are people who have moralizing quick responses rather than very deep. What does this mean kind of reflection? Because if we went and looked at these dates, so 649 15 and then the first one that kind of sounds like response is 64, 1255. So like in 3.5 hours, did this user think extremely deeply on it and come up with not user author, think deeply on it and come up with something not, not really you frici I remember avoiding those stories cause I figured they would be rambling and fighting more than things I could learn or reasonably discuss about
you’re not gonna come up with something deep in three hours, but a lot of this stuff just kinda poured in in the first couple of hours.

44:00frici but i never looked if or how they got merged LUL
This one is also a pretty good example because some of these I didn’t see instantly for the merging. Yeah. And so they had pretty good threads on them. Oh It’s funny, I I just randomly scrolled in here and landed on people talking about story merging. And so then it became some amount of confusing rehashes. People are like, wait, which story are you responding to? Cause again, people just don’t see the part on the right.

…48Yeah. One of the benefits of merged stories is and this one Microsoft to acquire github that is straight up business news, right? Everybody knows it. And I would remove, I have removed many acquisition stories. I left this one up because just get how this ubiquitous we obviously need to talk about it by the fact that it was submitted 14 different links. I think it was worth bending the rules on topicality. A little there. And Fritchie, what you’re saying really gets to one of the benefits of story emerging is if you don’t want to get into it, you can ignore that story. You can click hide on that story. Well, not that it works perfectly, but it mostly works and you can move on with your life. A lot of the times there’s lots of stuff where you’re like, you know what I’m not required to have an opinion on this. How’s that that Seneca quote? Go

46:07oh yeah, there it is. Oh, not Seneca Aurelius, I guess I got close enough. We have the power to hold no opinion about a thing and to not let it upset our state of mind for things have no natural power to shape our judgment. So meditations is a series of notes that Aurelius wrote to himself. So you can read this as someone saying like, dude, you don’t have to carry about every bit of news that passes by. You don’t have to have a hot take. You know, that would be the modern translation. You can just let events go by. And if you don’t have an opinion on this kind of thing, you can click hide on the story and move on as opposed to if we didn’t have story merging, it would have been basically the whole front page for two or three days. call it half of the home page. But story emerging, one of the things it does just by existing is it is it encourages people to post in comments. Oh, there’s a topic. Yeah, put that in the notes.

47:22So I just shoved that in the scratch scratch file, but it encourages people to leave comments with links instead of starting more stories. So I’m not gonna go through this one. But if we didn’t have story merging, and this was the first time we’ve had story merging, we probably would have seen at least five or 10 more links as people were responding to stuff and then linking in comments instead of submitting top level stories. As I recall the next two or three days, the hacker news home page was just all Microsoft buying github and I think our programming was similar. pushcx https://lobste.rs/s/skds9f/redu
So that’s one of the benefits of story merging. Speaking of the benefits of story emerging.

48:20So five years ago, this person said they quoted the about page and said a lot of what we’ve talked about where there are downsides to story merging, where it feels like they vanish from the home page. Oftentimes in the middle of active discussion, this might even be where I picked up the word active because at the time of this post, we did not have active up in the top level merging, disrupts the comment threading where it’s really unclear by the U I and then this one relevant and interesting news effectively get hidden from a large part of the readership that is kind of the first post. Again, I think maybe the difference is, or first point again, I think maybe the difference is no, I don’t know another way to put that besides it’s about exposure.

49:27I guess the and their example here is breaking news that had developments and breaking news is especially prone to having pretty rough discussions as people both rehash what came before the the news and then react to the title. And when we have stories where people react to the title, which mostly is paywalls, but then also happens a lot with news, we have more likely incendiary discussions and don’t really get anywhere interesting, which is why paywall stuff gets removed.

50:22Yeah, save stories is the bug.

…29So I left a there was a, a solid discussion about this one arh68 so may I ask: how many merges have there been, like total ?
and I improved the description of merging on the about page based on it, but in the years since cause it has been five years. I’ve come to think that arh68 is it like 1/week or smth
how many mergers have there been like total? Let’s check. Oh A Rhi was wondering if I’d see you. We had a weird event maybe two days ago. Yeah, it must have been Sunday cause I was Yeah, well, Sunday, someone submitted a story about Mozilla rebranding and they had a user name similar to yours. And oddly enough, they submitted a story and then like an hour later came back and deleted their account and it was a, it was all done by the time I saw it, but they had just gotten a couple of anodyne comments about branding and then arh68 huh kinda weird. not me tho
I was really puzzled by it. I was hoping it wasn’t you, but they did have a user name similar.

51:48arh68 1 username's enough for me
OK. Well, glad you’re still with us.

52:03So when you say how many mergers have there been?

…12I wanna make sure I’m making this join in the right direction. Where’s that other example? That one was also too. So, so a Rh for your query, would you count this as one or would you count this as 13? arh68 oh like 13
Well, I mean, just the one target rather than the 12 that were merged in? arh68 the # of merge icons basically
OK, 13. So do you wanna include arh68 1 + is fine<br>the top level one or just the ones that emerged? Number of merge icons? Sure.

53:06What is it? Banana and come here? Oh, red line.

…19not deleted that, I guess it is deleted and it just didn’t wanna autocomplete for me. That’s or not is known.

…42OK. So we’ve had 754 in the life of the sight

…57and then just for a ballpark, this is just top level, there’s 100 and 6000, 237 or maybe a better overall denominator would be 100 yeah, rounded to 100 and 7000. So that’s what,

54:36arh68 1% kinda higher than i'd thought
yeah, 0.7% I mean, it’s almost your user name, right? 0.69 instead of 68.

…57And we get roughly lately,

55:07it feels like we get about 20 or so 20 to 30 links a day. I would have to check. And so that’s a, a story gets merged every couple of days, you know, call it two times a week. I can query out the exact numbers, but that’s just kind of my ballpark.

…45arh68 how is un-merging .. possible ? like is that a mess
So emerging is

…52it is and isn’t a mess. arh68 do votes get moved from mergee to .. &c
It isn’t a mess in the sense of on any given story, you could update that merged story ID column right out to another. You could just update that to know and those comments, like you see this very first top comment, it has the story ID for the Bloomberg one which was reporting. And so if on this Bloomberg story, I clicked on merge this comment tree would move over, but at the same time, and I’m not logged in. So you don’t see the comment box. But if I were logged in and I was mostly wanting to respond to the Bloomberg story or one of the comments and I left a new top level comment, it would always go to this with this story ID rather than say Bloomberg or as somebody else pointed out, Drew de Vault’s response. And so in that sense, it would kind of be a mess. There is no site feature for arh68 how did the story only get 26 upvotes lol
moving threads from one story to another and I could do it in the database. But it would, boy, that would be just dangerous because there’s no, no guardrails if I go to the database and then I have to manually write moderation messages. arh68 i'm losin frames 1 sec
So that 26 up votes is bsandro yeah me too :C
so let’s see. Yeah, it got 31. So it’s air, it’s net 26. So it got 31 up votes and then four flags. But you’re losing one frame one second. I am not getting any kind of error out of arh68 F ?
my streaming setup. BS thinks it hasn’t dropped any frames and the stream health graph is still green.

58:32No. Now the stream, now that I reload the dashboard Twitch says the stream is unstable. Thanks. Twitch.

…49pushcx Twitch says 'unstable', let's give it a sec to clear up…
OK. Are you right? I shouldn’t put this in chat. I should just put it on the screen. Right.

59:18The only

…26a rich, what are you asking about? F pushcx arh68: What are you asking about F?
I don’t know if I’m audible.

…47arh68 F means stream died
arh68 i'm just askin if it died for y'all too
Oh F in the chat f to pay respects. All right. Just took me a second to get there.

…57gtfrvz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P
Yeah, it’s just gone to hell for no discernible reason. It didn’t even rain today. Ah, hey, again, GTFRVZ. Yeah, that’s, that’s the meme. I didn’t how funny to see a, a meme page on Wikipedia instead of on know your meme.

01:00:37Yeah. The situation is really frustrating and I don’t know if it is on Twitch’s end or my end. Probably mine. Right. But s doesn’t show any issue.

01:01:00Hm.

…10Are the Am I audible cleanly or am I? Is my voice also dropping out? Is it just that the video is behind? Because if it’s just that the video is behind, arh68 i think i can hear ya. could you pull up a clock like time dot gov
I can be a little slower jumping around between things and we can keep rolling. But if I’m not audible, I should just stop whether that’s a pause or a give up for the day. Ok. Pull up the clock. Yeah.

…44So let’s bring that in. Mhm.

01:02:03dr3ig it seems to be fine now;it was pretty much unlistenable for a minute
arh68 all good here SeemsGood
chamlis_ after a refresh I think you're good for me
bsandro voice is ok
Seems to be fine now. Ok, good. Yeah, the so Twitch has a little stream health graph that is not always responsive after refresh. You think you’re good. Ok, so please refresh if things are awful and let’s keep rolling. Shameless. Nice to see you again.

…31jmiven only 30s late here and voice is ok
Alrighty, only 30 seconds late and the voice is ok, chamlis_ hi! doing some admin so not paying 100% attention
30 seconds is a lot more delay. Usually the delay tends to be in the 5 to 8 2nd range. I did notice that folks are responding a little slower in the chat. But yeah, so anyways having broken out of that, I will do a, you know, a station bumper that this is the lobster’s office hours. And if you want to talk about the site of the community, frici its 2.30s for me but it can get far more delayed if your side is playing up and we lose frames.
you can pop up anytime with questions and we will talk about it. We are working on otherwise a project to help the site understand itself better, which is to say to talk about what story emerging is to how it works, how it’s implemented, how it can be buggy. Hm. F for, are you saying 2.5 minutes or are you saying like 2.3 seconds? jmiven I think 30s is usual for me and my european DSL link
frici 2.3 seconds lol
Cause 2.5 minutes is a hell of a lot. Nobody’s ever said that much delay before.

01:03:53Hm. 2.3 seconds. Ok. Just, you know, the number was either big enough that it was surprising or small enough that it was surprising.

01:04:10So, in this meta thread I had just kind of drifted into, hey, here’s the virtues of story merging and this was longer than the value of

…32longer than the, the text I added to the about page which we should click over and look at that.

…51So I believe, oh man, so the last couple of streams I have talked about writing stuff and then run to get blame and then no, I didn’t write it or at most I tweaked it a little. So I’m gonna avoid putting my foot in my mouth again about the history of this bullet point.

01:05:16I just actually when I just roll right into it, I wanna say we had like this short sentence and I wrote the later stuff. Oh And I linked a couple of example stories like I’m pretty sure this was me. Yeah. Well, there’s the large example that must have been me because it came well, after J CS left or not left, step down. So

…52I’m basically saying, where is this link to? So this links to J CS S original description of story merging. And I would like to replace this link with a full page description. So it would live at something like lobsters slash story merging or lobsters about slash merging rather than there’s a little blurb here that links off to this kind of out of date thing I say kind of cause like the core of this is the same but this also points to some of the issues or it doesn’t cover some of the issues is maybe a better way to say it. So,

01:07:17so given that nobody has piped up with more site questions. What I was basically gonna do is take this figure out where to stick a page and look at categorizing the existing story merges which I did years ago for ah so many tabs. I can’t keep track of where stuff was, which I did roughly for this where I made a tab separated value of all the merge stories. So we could see the scope of the topic and I kind of skimmed it. This is certainly still true. I really appreciate efforts to try and build a shared foundation for discussion. Remind of that slash about note that I run queries. This is the same kind of impulse that led me this year to start doing these office hours because a big chunk of what I feel is my responsibility as a moderator is to help the site understand itself and sometimes that means you have to run queries against the production database to understand that story merging happens 0.7% of stories. And if we look at the moderation messages for all of the merges, we can get themes of. So the other thing I wanted to include in a document is the practices around story merging. So I believe with that giant github thread that the Bloomberg story was released first, they they beat the press releases into publishing by a couple of hours, maybe less. But we merged into Microsoft’s announcement because it’s kind of the official primary source. And so most of the time we prefer to link to the primary source if it’s going to make enough sense to have context and honestly, the only place I should stop should stop rambling and start making notes, right? So, all right. So the topics here, let’s, there we go. So here’s kind of those

01:09:56topics emerging.

01:10:05It’s a pain in the week timeline. Practices prefer primary source, but for technical write ups to what’s the term here? So if we have, if we have two stories submitted about the same time that are on the same topic, and one of them is like the cnn.com version and one of them is Bob’s deeply technical blog. I would prefer to make Bob’s deeply technical Ball blog the primary write up because the CNN one is gonna spend a lot of time it’s not gonna go into his depth and it’s gonna spend a lot of its time on other stuff rather than the real valuable part for us. So, I guess just two general news sites I try and discourage general news, but that’s neither here nor there. The other thing I was gonna say is for primary sources and this comes up very rarely, maybe every two years in the, except in the case of legal proceedings. And this one has not been a universal practice but stuff that’s come up in the last year or two has driven home the value of it because

01:11:47legal documents have a heck of a lot of jargon and they have a heck of a lot of assumptions and a naive nonla reading of them kind of rounds to worthless. And I say that as someone who has worked closely with lawyers on different products and on contracts for my consulting, I learned many times that my non lawyerly understandings of documents were often just hilariously wrong because I was missing stuff, missing assumptions that they teach in the second year of law school or missing that something was a particular jargon. And so I would interpret a term like reasonable person to just be like, yeah, ok, I know what it means to be reasonable. It’s somebody who’s not flying off the handle. No, actually, that’s a term that’s a legal standard with like 19 big pieces of case law and is a major open doctrine in us legal proceedings. So one example of that, yeah, I don’t think we need to dive into examples and I really don’t wanna like if you’ll pardon the pun litigate those examples.

01:13:20And so for legal matters, we tend to have really pretty good discussions actually when we have a lawyer writing for non lawyers. And that’s happened with, I think the Dino suing Oracle over the Javascript trademark. That’s just happened in the last week or two. And then the other one is there’s somebody who writes about software licensing and I’m blanking on his name. Is there a blue in his name?

01:14:04jmiven kemitchell
jmiven ?
Bye, Ke Mitchell. Yes. J Ivan. That is exactly who I’m thinking of. And is that a, I wanna say he might even be a user on the site? Yes.

…30What’s his site name? Rating dot Ken mitchell.com? Not Ken Ke, I swear there is someone that had the word blue in the title of their name of their

…51Yeah, Blue Oak. That’s what I’m thinking of.

01:15:02That’s a lot of

…12jmiven yeah they are involved in the blue oak thing
this might be just going back to Ke Mitchell again. So this one, there’s a, oh, yep, here he is. Here’s Ke Mitchell again. That’s exactly why I was coming back to it. So, yeah, sorry. This one is writing dot Ke michell.com. So if we swap that out to say pushcx https://lobste.rs/domains/writi
these have been pretty consistently some of the best writing on software licensing that has appeared on the site and software licensing is pretty hot topic. Like, as you can see, by 80 47 37 32 you know, when our median number of comments on stories is like six or seven, we tend to have fairly large discussions and even though these are licensing, they don’t tend to turn into flame wars. I’m not gonna say they haven’t, I’m not gonna say they haven’t gotten contentious because people have a lot of strong feelings about licensing and I don’t wanna dismiss those. But, hm Kyle Mitchell, there is part of what informs this opinion of mine that when we get a lawyer who is explicitly writing for non lawyers, we have our best chances of having a really fruitful discussion. And that is always my north star for the site is, are we having healthy discussions where people are sharing interesting things and forming opinions and feel safe asking questions and building on one another’s knowledge and connecting with people who have shared interests. When we do that, it is the best of an online forum. It is why running Lobsters is so satisfying for me. I love being able to, I don’t know, be the the party host who helps those discussions happen. So that’s why I say the primary source except for law because as a bunch of, you know, programming teaches you to be nitpicky and teaches you to rely on the written word and you kind of we drive into the ditch and I, I say this knowing I, I drove into the ditch many times trying to discuss legal stuff when I just don’t have the training and experience to be able to talk about it with the confidence that is very tempting just from a career spent in programming because they’re, ah, they’re so similar. It’s, you know, it’s writing, made real writing that changes the world. Ah, that’s the whole thing I do as a programmer. Right. So then this other kind of guideline of preferring technical write ups to general news sites, that one’s pretty obvious.

01:18:44jmiven if people haven't seen this article, it's a must-read: https://writing.kemitchell.com/
The mit license line by line. Which one is this?

…57Oh, yeah, this is a great post.

01:19:08I have been occasionally tempted to actually go to law school for dealing with software licensing and other IP issues. Not quite so much. I’ve actually done it, but if there were a remote law school, especially one that allowed me to move at my own pace, I probably would go do that. I’ve looked a couple of times and they all are very oriented around the idea that it is a three year program. There are really only a few law schools that are not full time in person or like night school in person. And that’s really hard to fit into being well into another career and not actually wanting to change careers, just wanting to have a deep understanding of the topic. And the other option would be to find the curricula for a law school and hire some tutors and just do the studying and not the structure. But I don’t know. So where was, let’s grab this link to because this is useful.

01:20:35What is happening here? Clipboard hassles.

…52So let’s go look at these merged stories, right?

01:21:03So we’ll grab that and then we will say what I really would like is, yeah, I better do it at the console interactively and then I’ll dump it to a TSV to look at like the other time that we reviewed all the moderation decisions. All right. So we want to starting from stories. Let’s select the short ID, the title from stories where merged stories ID is not known.

…48I’m gonna say limit 10 just to make it reasonable. Wanted to get wrong here. OK. Open the wrong console. Let’s try that again.

01:22:11It’s merge Story Singular. So here are offhand. These are probably the 1st 10 and

…31

…40OK, so there’s the merges and that’s gonna also include Unm Meges, right?

01:23:01That’s I didn’t mean that.

…09Oh I see. We wanted to say there was a, now the action column is just the whole thing. I keep expecting there to be a verb column on the moderation, but we we don’t actually have that. All right. So we want the ones whose action starts with merged into and that mer has been consistent. We’ve never changed that description.

…47So let’s join against.

…57It’s not story ID, it’s stories dot ID and I’m just building up a table of all the examples where merge story is not me and action is like merged into.

01:24:22I actually wanna see that. It’s the reason I won. There we go. First couple not too informative. All right.

…48Say order by stories ID. Desk limit 10 just to look at the most recent 10. Yeah, this is stuff I’ve written as reasons.

01:25:22All right. So let’s take off the limit

…33and then just to count and I’m not allowed to sub query like that. I just wanted to grab the number of lines real fast. That’s fine. So this is my query and I already can tell I’m gonna have red line hassles in two seconds, but that’s ok.

01:26:01Good. And we’ll dump that into slash T MP slash merges dot TSV. Let’s look at that. All right. Looks good.

…31Almost want to sound.

…43So duplicate links. You know, we’ve already seen it just scroll by a bunch in the last 10. That’s most of them.

…55I know that’s a reason. So if I said

01:27:05712. Ok. Huh. That’s actually a pretty big drop from the 777. It shouldn’t be possible for a story to get merged without a moderation. So there shouldn’t be a left out or joint kind of thing, should it? It’s easy enough to check.

…34And I’m into fighting red line, which I really don’t enjoy doing.

…52Yeah. That’s ridiculous. But it worked.

…59That’s still only 712. Hm. It’s like a 10% difference between 7, 12 and 777. Do you think that’s worth investigating?

01:28:28arh68 deleted ?
gtfrvz VoteYea
Yeah. Deleted. I didn’t in neither query did I, well, maybe it is deleted. Do you know stories? Just don’t arh68 idk seems like the number would go up HahaThink
if a story is merged it’s almost never deleted.

…59Come here.

01:29:13Yeah. There have only been seven of those. So this isn’t deletion.

…27dr3ig does "action like 'merge into'" filter down?
So this gets us 745 does action like merged into filter down? Yes. Yeah. You know, I was doing the the left outer join. So if I said Count Star, this should be the number we already saw. Yes. And then if I get rid of the merged into, oh, I think I know what this might be. Now we get 779. OK. So it’s Sam for a while for the longest time story emerging was sort of a special operation and the controller for stories was written so that if the moderator merged a story, the other edits on the form were ignored and this was the source of many hassles. So if I said select re from Moderations where action like merged into and action not like merged into. And so the net effect of this is the action will contain the phrase merged into, but it might not be the first thing because the action is generated from all of the edits that the moderator makes And so if the moderator edits a title and merges, it might say that they updated the title comma merged into blah. So let’s say limit 10. Yeah, so here’s, oh no, that’s the I wanted the action field, but you can see actually me doing it of remove story text or story text is not for summarizing or. So this is me changing the title or changing the story text as well. Yeah. So these are changed description from and then where is it out at the end? Yeah, two, no description changed markdown description because it’s so redundant and then comma merged into art. So it’s just the potential for it to be. So if we said count Star and get rid of the limit, it’s only 34 out of the, what was that? About 60. So there’s half of our story

01:32:52Castro Moderations.

01:33:09So if we change this to say action like merge into the start or action like percent comma merged into percent that gets us up to 744

…40I see even there, there’s like a half by one cause it was 7-Eleven plus 34 and we ended up with 744 like I’m not gonna track down the last 7% but I feel like we’re or the last 1% but I feel like 5% is maybe worth it.

01:34:03Let’s take a look at these.

…14The only way I can think of to diagnose this is to do just a big giant joint of find me everything in the first query. That’s not in the second one.

…35stories where merge merge story ID is not, no, not, no. And sport ID is not in select short id dot dot dot And then thanks red line. All right. So here’s a handful. I’m going to grab this short ID and open it off screen so I can just do it as a logged in moderator because maybe there’s something weird here. So yeah, this one was indeed merged and it was just a some kind of alternate link or somebody wrote it up.

01:35:44So how is there? Let’s,

01:36:20so there is a moderation

…31and it’s a dupe like I noticed this, this title here matches this. So did we just get this one, URL submitted multiple times? Cause that actually does happen fairly often with merged stories where either the, the dupe detector doesn’t fire because there’s some slight difference that it didn’t normalize away or something else happened. And so then there’s duplicate for dinner. The action here is that I deleted the story.

01:37:25This must be the

…33this must be that hassle with if you change the merge ID stuff doesn’t change. There was another one where if I click delete on a story, it wouldn’t just set deleted. A it would throw away the other edits in the tab. So that might be these other what? 30?

01:38:03It’s weird that there’s a moderation for un deleting this story, but not for deleting this story.

…38Ok. So it was only submitted once

…45if I would by idea.

…58Yeah, there’s an un delete, but nothing else. Now, how is that possible? It’s possible the original submitter removed it. Right. Yes, actually, and this story was posted seven years ago. I am sure not gonna remember that. Let’s look at a newer one.

01:39:42So we’ve got HTSSPG.

…57So this is a story about ah some kind. Yeah, I think, and if I said,

01:40:16let’s find all the Moderations related to it,

…27that’s

…35so this was a year ago. This is weird. It shouldn’t be possible for this story to have the merge story ID set without there being, without there being a moderation to match. You know, I look at it. I’ve got it come here. There’s something else that pops out. I’m gonna bring it up here. So this story, nothing too exciting. You know, something about compression and text classification. Something that catches my eye is that Hunter merged this or Hunter submitted the second link and Hunter is a site moderator and the story form is weird about moderators.

01:41:38So let’s grab these submitter names.

…46Stories cause if these are all moderators that would explain it the story form. Yeah, it’s all, it’s all callbacks, it’s active record callbacks and I’ve hated this bug and it bit me even two weeks ago. Join users on stories dot user ID equals users dot id. Let’s get rid of this desk or limit 10 because we’ve only got 30.

01:42:27Ok. So all, but three of these are site moderators. So what’s happened here is I hate this bug. I don’t think it’s even in the issue tracker, although I know which bug it goes on. So, where am I here? We’ve talked about how the story’s controller is overloaded and does a lot of stuff. Well, there is one edit form if and when you host to it, you get the form and then when you submit the form, it calls the update method. When you call the update method, it checks if you’re allowed to edit it, which is to say, are you the person who submitted it and it’s only a few hours old or are you a moderator? And then it sets this virtual attribute story editor. And the thing that’s missing here is boy, where does the moderation get created? Well, it’s not in the controller mo story instead before save the log moderation hook calls. And the moderation hook says if this is a new record, well, if this is a brand new record, we don’t have to log in moderation because it hasn’t been persisted. And if you are not editing from suggestions or you are the submitter, oh, you are editing your own story. And so the concept of is a moderator editing, this is implicit in the false path through this giant bullion. And so what the short version is when a moderator edits their own story, it doesn’t create entries in the mod log. And so the other unmarked stories there r the ones where a moderator submitted a story and realized it was a should be merged into a story that was already submitted and did so themselves. Oh So that’s the bug factory. But this one, this one has the the different fix. The different fix for this one is splitting up the story controller functionality because the story controllers form handles both users editing their own stories and moderators who have different permissions and different things they’re allowed to do and different timing and then the moderation logging happens after in a callback. So let’s just note that

01:46:15moderator edits plural. It’s harder for me to type because they can’t just curl up in my lap.

01:47:22All right. So with that bug run down, I think we’re good to go ahead with the TSV.

…39We wanna say, oh, red lying. Why are you doing this to me? We wanna say like this

…58to catch the ones where it’s not the first thing and then I need to write parenthesis, some unknown number of characters.

01:48:21Oh Looks like I got it in the right place, right? All I did was hit right there. I was like spelled this out. So it was like 61411, you know. OK. And then how many lines are in this still only 712 that should have gone up to like 740 oh, because I missed the closing percent.

01:49:05Now we got 745 and the reason it’s 745 instead of 744 is it has a header line. So there’s that off by one error and then the rest of these are gonna be moderators doing things. So I feel pretty good that we’ve got something accurate

…35you want? Let’s grab that

…43and I’m gonna fire up Libre office. So we’re about to switch from dark mode to light mode.

01:50:00I’m gonna open this off stream because I’m gonna have to like browse files and stuff. So that’s code lobsters merges dot TSV. Good. So here’s the dialogue. So we have the short ID, the title and the merging response. So this all looks pretty reasonable and hit, ok, and bring this back on stream. All right. So arh68 ahhh GUI PopGhost
this clearly there was some long ass reason on something. I’m gonna shrink that down so we can fit on screen. If folks want to tell me how the font size is. gy, yeah, I know I could probably use what’s the name arh68 font is a lil small but it's fine
like visit data or data set. But as neat as I think those things are, I don’t actually have them installed and know how to use them. Font is a little small, but it’s fine. I’ll, I’ll nudge up a little bit and we’ll just kind of chop more off of this and this. Correct. So here there’s a quick way to say I don’t want the text to overhang. I don’t want to rap.

01:51:47Just I see that there’s like this one is overhanging into here and I want to hide that because I know it’s when I skim it’s gonna be hard to see.

01:52:03What’s the view.

…14There’s something. All right. Well,

…24form out these cells dr3ig It's weird that moderation is created as a callback in the story model. Intuitively it should depend on who performs the editing action, and so occur in the controller.
and I say, yeah, not that one. It’s a rap. It’s weird. The moderation is create as back in the storm. Yeah. Drag it is. it is just one of those slightly hairy places where arh68 uh maybe fill R10C4 with content ? or wrap with fixed 1.0L height
it is some of the first functionality written in the code base by someone who wasn’t very familiar with rails and it wasn’t as clear as,

01:53:07yeah, that’s fine. We got a couple extra lines, but

…18all right. So

…24now what I would love is if it was possible to do a multi cursor thing and select every line that included like merging response

…44as far as I know, I can’t actually do that. And I try and be really consistent in these messages. I wasn’t super consistent at first but then arh68 mmmm ya Excel kinda wins there. i stil like libreoffice
sort of built out a set of standard messages and I have Firefox set to remember the form, input on the story form. So those are pretty repetitive, which I think helps. So if I said merging write out,

01:54:25yeah, honestly, I could do this and be easier couldn’t I for some of these? All right. Hold on. Oh, don’t open a new one. Let’s just add a tab. arh68 M-x butterfly SeriousSloth
And so for everything that says

…51so what’s a, what are useful categories? MX Butterfly? Yeah, I don’t know that one. Not an emacs guy never have been. So there are 99 of those.

01:55:24Yeah. Don’t need two there.

…35And if there are 99 it’s just easier to do it by hand than write the macro and also give me a chance to kind of skim some of these others.

01:56:04Ok. So the other one is very clearly merging reply because I’ve done that a bunch.

…25It hopes if I spell things right though, where spots only five of those anybody else. So this idea of dupes, how many of these, we have 62 dupes? All right. And I’m gonna do another search in a second for the word duplicate because there surely will be some

01:57:09and just hitting these, these most popular ones real fast in vim, it’s easier than churning through them in the Libre office because we have, you know, 740 some rather than, like the last time I categorized stuff where it was 100 or something and we didn’t actually need to use all of them. Oh, no, it’s saying more than 99. 0, no. So I actually maybe should have. What line are we on? 621? All right, we’ll get in the home stretch, but there may be responses that I missed. All right. So where was that last search? So, if I went down and searched up, yeah, here’s a couple.

01:58:22Come on. You just rapping on me. Thank you.

01:59:12Go ahead. Cat. Make yourself at home. Knock my stuff down.

…32How are there so many? Oh, I’m only at line 400. That’s how, so lots of responses.

02:00:04Oh, there we go. There’s my limit. So the other one I know I’ve used a few times, especially if I’m grumpy and I’m expecting that I’m gonna be cleaning up after nonsense. Is I have sometimes said merging Hot take and I am gonna go ahead and categorize them as responses because they are. I was just grumpy about them and feeling a little spicy myself. The, hot takes rarely add much two stories. This is a sort of a personal opinion more than a, professional opinion. Oh, that’s interesting. This one is both a dupe and a roundup. I am just, it’s a hot take and a dupe and around all. I’m just gonna leave that one as dupe. Yeah. Oh, this one, this one is me correcting an error,

02:01:24which is going to be a response to this one. Let’s check. One of these is just gonna be a moderator error.

…42I’m pulling up that ID. Yeah. So this is a, this story being angry at Chromium. So this one, wait, no more Google that one. Is a response. Tom is a ***.

02:02:23All right. So, somewhere there is a, and I, it’s not so many that I want to break them out into

…44their own section. So

…51let’s find the rest.

…58738. Ok.

02:03:08So another thing that’s pretty common here is if something is a write up, so we got 30 of those and sometimes I call that an alternate link, I guess. So that’s, those are especially common on security stories like this open W RT. So the write up is some sort of technical news site wrote about it. But we also had submitted the original link of the security researcher, an alternate la alternate. Well, actually, yeah, there is a distinction. So a write up is third party and an alternate link is first party. And the thing that pops out at me is Tickle TK nine. I don’t even have to pull up this story. I remember someone submitted like the the github releases page and then also their blog post where it was like the blog post and the download page, something like that. So that’s when I use the phrase alternate link. And I guess if we’re being fair to the criticism that story merging is confusing, I should split out those primaries versus third party. So what do we want to call those? The write up would be, it’s not a third party response. We’ll just call it right up, right.

02:05:12dr3ig I think you've put 'response' or 'dupe' on newlines a few times (or it may be just wrapping)
I think you’ve put response or dupes on new lines a few times or maybe wrapping, it’s mostly wrapping. But those will stand out pretty clear once I pull it back into Libre office. So I’m not too worried about it.

…33There’s also the possibility of accidentally put two categories on something because I’ve moved real fast on some of these text edits. And again, that’s gonna stand out in Libre Office. So I’m not too concerned about it.

…53So for alternate links, I’m just gonna say alternate and we’re gonna remember that that means it’s from the same source and I’m gonna pull all of these unique reasons into the scratch file or into the the draught to explain.

02:06:30It looks like a reply. Just one of those. All right. So I think that might be enough. Oh Yeah, into primary. How many mobile links do we have? None? So this one’s just a dupe link. I remember this one where the site has a like m.whatever.com or you know, question mobile equals one. And then it just provides a different view. Then some of these are, these are gonna be responses or write ups.

02:07:27This one is an alternate link emerging, right? This one is an alternative. I remember that

…44tagged S

…57oh Yeah, there was a lot going on in that one. I’m gonna call that one. A response

02:08:13takes our responses about this one. Yeah. Merging plagiarism into primary source. I remember that one. There was I wanna say it was even submitted before the primary source, which was kind of gross but somebody just copied a post. I think I might have ended up banning the plagiarism site for this one. I don’t recall instantly, but they just knocked off the blog post. But we had already had some comments on by the time it got. So what am I gonna call that? Don’t wanna just say plagiarism make it its own category. It’s real rare. It’s like a maybe once a year thing.

02:09:11Hm

…18I’m gonna classify it as a write up cause there’s so few. I don’t know that it’s worth breaking out and I’m not gonna be so I’m, I’m not trying to be ontological complete here. The goal is what’s useful for writing this document for users and I don’t think it needs to call out. Hey, don’t submit plagiarism. This one’s a write up

…52that was already done. Done. Done.

02:10:07Come down. Du du du du,

…16that’s a write up and I was grumpy about if I called it content marketing. Oh Free node, man. You know exactly which week that was what like three years and change ago. There’s another one that had a bunch of merges was frici Oh what a time…
when free note was taken over.

…49Yeah. Come here.

…59frici i missed the /s there
That’s a response. That’s also a response because those are a couple of hot takes and then these are write ups

02:11:18Merging into the same story as one I should do right. Run through here in a minute. Oh, yeah. This one X NSA Hecker drops New Zero Days Doom for Zoom. Not only was it a dupe, it was a, like a general news site and we had already had the primary source submitted that’s real common for security news because somebody sees something interesting and security is just sort of always a little emotionally salient. Like, it kind of grabs you. I found a bunch of the times where I’m like, wow, like, not only is it already posted, it’s not actually a ton of interesting stuff. Like the only interesting thing might be who is the victim rather than how

02:12:21write ups dope

…32handled response response.

…40I’ve wrapped around. Ok. So this into s story. These are like half responses and half write ups, jmiven there's also some "Same story"
more, more complicated. They also can be. There’s also some same story. Ah, yeah. Good Eye. I see it up here at the top, a different kind of CT log. So some of these, there are a couple of things so they are third party write ups. This post mortem one. I think I would call it an alternate because it was from the same source and then some of these are responses. So we’re gonna have to look at those individually.

02:13:53arh68 could you explain the "This one is a little backwards …" action
Yeah, I think all of those I’ll have to look at individually.

02:14:01Let’s make all those links. Could you explain that this one is a little backwards?

…14Oh, so Nintendo is suing the creator of switch emulator y you. This is a little backwards but to keep together links on the same story in one week emerging, the third party right up into the more recent and decisive primary source. So this is I bet there was a time gap between the first one which was a third party write up and then the first party source. So usually that’s not in the notes, That’s a good one. So, so this one is 34 at 2 p.m. and this one is 228 so six days earlier and that’s why I kind of called it out as a little backwards cause arh68 ah I see. thx
merge into the earliest submitted rather than the latest submitted. But here it was intention or with this idea of preferred primary sources. So maybe we’re seeing some kind of priority order. So good eye. Yeah, actually on these like technical write ups, I think. Yeah. So really what’s going on here is like there’s this practice and then just the question of deciding which will be the primary story. And this is kind of the decision tree of first, is it the primary source? Second, is it the earlier one? And this one, this honestly is a little fuzzy and we could go through them. But I think,

02:16:17you know, if it’s an hour or two, especially if there’s just one or two comments, I’ll go ahead and merge an earlier news story into the technical right up. But if it’s days, well, no, actually, I think that’s, I think that’s pretty consistent as kind of the tiebreaker. So the earliest submitted. All right. Right. So great questionnaire Rich. Thank you.

02:17:30This is sort of an ultimate take on this and then merge in responses, merge in updates. Like I haven’t categorized many as updates, but that’s part of what these same story ones are.

…55All right. So, oh, this one, I remember this one. It was a oh I don’t know if it was first or third party, so I have to pull it up later. All right. So another thing that pops out at me. Oh, wait. Did I finish the primary sources? No, because here’s what I missed. Maybe I just missed it.

02:18:33I think that was a write up. Let me double check that one

…43and I’m fighting the cursor. Come here,

…54just grabbed the tab at the end of it. Oh, yeah. This one is third party. Yeah, I like that guy’s blog though. So that one was a write out

02:19:19and then this, I sure don’t remember. Looks like I just missed one or two in the middle because all the rest of these are done. Strip to the bottom. Look back. Oh, it looks like we’ve got some of these safe stories. Same stories.

…49Yeah. Looks like there’s plenty actually. All right. So I lost my place investigating that one. We’ll just start from here.

02:20:28Can I search for, hang on primary source and then

…40any character that’s not a tab.

…51So say no tab star to the end. There we go. That cuts out all the ones that have already been looked at. So this was right up. That one. I don’t know. This one is an alternate.

02:21:21What’s this? This one was a write up. This one was a response. Only 14 of these left and then we can get back to Libre office and sear your retinas.

…50This one’s all right up.

…57This ones are right up. This one’s I guess I’d call it an alternate. So it was the same story. So same story also just means an independent thing. So like in this one, there was an exploit called Checkmate where at the same day there was the original announcement and then there was another interview with the author and I wonder, I think I could just call that an alternate cause it’s an interview with the primary source. Yeah, I think that’s fair.

02:22:43This one’s a, this one’s a response.

…58This one was this a fish because it’s an alternator or a write up. I don’t recall looking at it off stream. Oh Man. Many duplicates. So this one was titled Getting Started. So it was from medium. So it’s just some quick follow of here’s how you do the thing. I’m gonna call that a response. This one is the alternate. So like a H I called it out here of merged mailing list archive and a story from primary source posted later. So this was, we had somebody’s mailing list post and then probably a few hours or a few days later, someone submitted the actual announcement.

02:24:05This one was a write up.

…14arh68 ah like they leaked it lol
This was a write up, less that they leaked it and more that’s just where somebody happened to hear of it. So, on the mailing list, you know, if someone was subscribed to the mailing list and they saw the announcement, they might immediately submit that where we probably would do better with a like actual product announcement, product, not necessarily a product but a version announcement, blog post because, you know, sometimes the mailing list post is just a change log or is otherwise written more for internal consumption and then like a blog post is better to start a discussion from. I don’t remember what that one is. We’ll have to look at it. This one’s a write up.

02:25:15That was all right. No, this was a response.

…24This one was a ready go. That’s a write up and that’s all the way around. OK. So anything. Oh, press release. So those are gonna be alternates. Only seven, not too bad.

02:26:00And then anybody else popping out.

…18arh68 you got some same story left
This one’s a right up and it’s about lobsters jmiven official announcement?
every once in a while. So like part of being a moderator is being the no fun police. But I figure like once a year this kind of like

…41it’s the lobster emoji, which is not super topical, especially because it was just, some guy fighting over being the gold sponsor, Lobsters, our site was the silver sponsor for that emoji. in any case. Oh, I see. Je, and you’re suggesting that that’s a pattern we’re sipping through. Come here. Let’s do that. jmiven yes, sorry
I’m gonna reuse that.

02:27:21Ok. Looks like we got eight of those. No, it’s enough for me to go on. So, so these are gonna be write ups because otherwise I would not have referred to those as the announcement. All right. So there’s those,

…48that one’s right up. Hey, look, here’s the the day of the Microsoft acquisition and you can just kind of see a bunch of them. All right.

02:28:09There is a bunch down here where J CS did not write reasons for his merges. Oh, and he liked calling them dub instead of dupe. All right.

…31OK. I think that’s probably enough to get back into Libre office, which is there a reload? Cancel all changes? All right. So I’m gonna have to shrink this back over. Can I just format all of these as links right now? Oh, are you format anchor? No data? Yeah, I guess I’ll just copy and paste instead of click on them. They’d head over to my personal browser anyway. So I was gonna have to. OK. So could shrink that in. And this column is category

02:29:35And if we take all this and can I just make a, yeah, here we go. So, here if we sort ascending, here’s everybody that’s marked. So that was roughly half of them categorized. That’s not bad for the amount of time it took.

02:30:17Oh, mosquito. Excuse me. The noise compressor should have kept that from being too bad. But, oh yeah, there’s a place where I slipped on to two lines. This one was a duke and then I have to delete the rows.

…40This one also

…47probably just get these pretty easy by using the control down. jmiven 369 also
Yep.

02:31:05369 also. Did I get it in the time? Oh, yep, you got it. I did not get it. Oh, not in sir. Rose. Delete. I can see this one. I wonder if these came in before I I shift the lead to I control the lead. I could use a shortcut for deleting the row

…46but there isn’t one. So I will just have to use the mouse back in the eighties. Oh, man, I thought I would only goof these on two or three. This is like a bunch.

02:32:13Here’s the four sp

…22response. Guess I was moving pretty fast on those responses.

…36All right. That’s all of them. This one is a dupe. This one is a write up. This is an alternative. This is a write up

…57more definitive length. This is probably a write up as are these do remerge. Yeah. The the U I on merging is not quite as helpful as you might want. And so it is, you basically as a moderator just have to open the tabs and copy out of the URL and paste the story ID as opposed to the form, having any kind of feature in there to help. Huh? Old news. And I think that’s the, the one that’s down a little ways. So I’m curious if that’s a merged that happened way more than a week later. So the first one was 2, 16, second one was 224. So only six days. All right. The way it said that I thought it was gonna be a link down to one of these down here. But I guess get host by name and get adder info or not. It got some blanks.

02:34:14frici I'm surprised how all this time libreoffice calc doesn't have a delete row shortcut…
These are write ups.

…25That’s stupid. It’s all right up. That’s right up actually. No, that’s a response.

…56All right.

02:35:05frici you can do it with "Ctrl -" but you still need to confirm what deletion you want. which doesn't necessarily need the mouse but its also more hindering but helpful
Oh, these are write ups. Very topical advent of code. Oops, what did I just do come here? You can do it with control minus, but you still need to confirm. Let’s see what that looks like. Oh, yeah. Then I would still need to. So the the pop up appears off stream because new windows on my desktop automatically appear off of the area of the desktop for streaming just to minimize how much I’m flashing stuff up.

…52These are write ups.

02:36:10frici yeahas you saw it still needs you to ckick the radio for "delete entire row(s)"
frici yeah as*
Mhm Yeah. Yeah. So the radio appeared off stream and I didn’t just drag it in.

…22Oh, here we go. So I was looking for one of these. Please don’t submit stories as a super reply to other stories. Just link them in a comment. So let me pull this one up because it’s not gonna be too spicy I don’t think which is convenient cause it, you know, pushcx https://lobste.rs/s/jlrwng
so someone submitted this article that was, yeah, let’s just throw the link in the chat if you’re curious increase test fidelity by avoiding mocks. And then how, how much later couple hours 31, 2051 32. OK. So five hours later, six hours what a sad about six hours later a thing that people sometimes do infrequently, but it happens is they see an article and either they disagree with it or they feel like it is a narrow window on a topic. And in response they say, you know what I saw an excellent post about this, I will submit the excellent post and in this case, the excellent post was from 20 years ago. Yeah. Can remember when this came out? Oh, it’s gone. I guess I’m dating myself there and very often I don’t know if it’s the case here, but often the person who is submitting a story. Yeah, so you can see it doesn’t have the merged I URL here. So non crab, there’s actually a really, really lucky example because it’s very clear from the fact that non crab left a comment on the target story that they are replying to the story. And they said this paper makes this point. jmiven ah yes it's the Freman-Pryce-Mackinnon paper
So

02:39:06jmiven Freeman
I read them not as rebutting something they disagree with as expanding on something that they feel was limited. Yeah, mock world is not object is such a, a classic story. I actually, I now would say, yeah, we’re getting distracted into what it’s actually about but yes, good paper. So not to put, I am speaking more for the general case than the specific. Although it’s kind of clear what happened here is someone felt that the rebuttal or the alternate explanation on the same topic was so much better that they wanted to have a thread that was just about their link. And it’s sort of a way to use a story as a super comment. And I think I’ve called it a super reply or a super comment. And this is not a great term because it’s clear to me what I mean, but it is not automatically clear to people who see it in the mod log because people ask about it in the chat room or I get a puzzle DM about it of why did you merge my story? And it’s because we are trying to keep the discussion together. And if we split the discussion up into multiple posts, we end up rehashing a lot of the same stuff. And in this case, like these replies to the paper would not be visible on the paper story if it were an independent link. So this is strongly one of the values, one of the most significant values for story merging and maybe also one of the more contentious because when people do this, they are often, you know, I don’t wanna cast aspersions because this is such a a case by case basis. And I can’t always tell what somebody’s goal is. But it’s often that they feel that the alternate link that they are submitting is so much superior that it should have its own discussion. That’s just about it. And sometimes definitely not this case because this one’s not even an argument. Sometimes that is with hot takes especially it’s like, well, I want a story thread that’s just about how everyone agrees with me and we’re gonna have a whole threaded discussion that’s gonna start from my favorite blog posts. Hot take on these events. And then I will get what I want, which is a thread full of people agreeing with me, less than a thread full of people discussing the topic.

02:42:24So this is one of those practices that needs to get explained. Don’t use stories as a super reply link in comments and I don’t know how to say it better than to call it a super reply or a super comment.

…51But I hope the the general outline of the practice is pretty clear there. So let’s say half. And I said super oh this guy doesn’t library office isn’t gonna give me a quick version of let me save the TSV. And then come on, let’s go.

02:43:21So there’s one for supercomputer. So there’s the items. So super response looks like we got four of those and super comment one of those. So it’s not a thing I say very often. It’s I might also have said super reply, mightn’t I Yeah. So one of those two super reply, super comment. Oh super response. All right. So we got a three variance. So this one is

02:44:16let’s put it in the scratch which I guess this all should just be in the scratch because we’re getting towards time

…35and if I write slow, it’s definitely not getting written today.

…46Great super reply. Super comment.

…57So it’s not just that I only do this on average one time a year cause if there’s like seven of these, that’s one time a year.

02:45:11Yeah, it’s not super clear to people.

…22And I think actually if I search for comment, I might have found alternate ways to say it. Yeah, please don’t submit stories to be a super response. Super comment arh68 "ratio"ing that's the phrase i was trying to think of
unrelated. No, I’m searching for come here

…48ratio. Oh yeah, yeah, that’s arh68 when you post reply B to get more votes than A ya
the Twitter or blue sky version of it. Yes. Yeah. Oh I did find an alternate way to say it. I knew there was something. Please don’t use stories to reply to stories, just post a comment. Yeah. And that’s why I was trying to be careful about the, the casting Aspersions part was, it’s sometimes it’s just, I’m really excited arh68 ya I think a lot of time they think it's more polite to move the disagreers Over There
and I have a great link on this topic and then sometimes it’s, I want a thread where everyone agrees with me and I wanna kind of show you up and I arh68 so Story A ppl can chat amongst themselves w/o like dual brigading
move the disagrees over there. Yeah, it could be. That is certainly a more charitable explanation. I, I like that. I would hope it is more often that on the other hand, our community is small enough, it can’t really brigade itself in the way that arh68 but it seems the Lobsters "politeness" is to keep it 1 party instead of parties of 1
that could be an issue on Reddit or could be on hacker news cause they are enormously larger than us. And when I say Reddit, I’m really referring to like a specific programming subreddit. Yeah, that’s also part of why so on that topic of disagrees. That’s also part of why I characterized lobsters in that meta comment maybe a year and a half ago as it’s like a big backyard barbecue. I think lobsters is at its best when it’s a bunch of people who are sharing discussion around a topic rather than people who are trying to win a fight about a topic. There’s very rarely a lot of progress in the public understanding of a topic that comes out of fights. It, it and I’m speaking here just of stuff on our site. It’s when people are having really hard disagreements. Even if they don’t get into flame wars, arh68 experts are still unclear as to what, exactly, SKUB is HahaHide
they don’t tend to be able to, when you focus on winning, you almost can’t learn. I think that’s just, yeah, s oh, there’s a good reference. You should please drop a link for that one because some of these are, are kind of deep cut memes and I guess it’s becoming clear on these streams that I’m extremely online that I’m getting most of these memes log for J was not the one that got a lot of merges I think. arh68 https://pbfcomics.com/comics/sk
And I wanna say there was like three weeks of stories about it where there were three threads. Yeah, it was PB F comics. That’s right.

02:49:15So the two guys people,

…28yeah, it’s just human nature that if things are different people kind of wanna find which one is better

…42and obviously the one that I like more is better, right?

02:50:03This once in A I turn it,

…24this one’s right out. Stalin’s got cancer. I don’t think I knew that. I mean, this is me merging it but didn’t register.

…45All right.

…54So I’m gonna save this and since I just labeled a few more things, let’s resort it. Oh Look at that type Bos

02:51:15386 out of 745. So that’s pretty close to half. Yeah.

…30Is there a way to get, I guess I could just say come here. So if I filter this to how many of them are alternates

…49and then like, I’m just trying to get some rough ideas of statistics. So, so far that’s 28. And then if I replace with Dupes, oh, yeah. Looks like there was one where I had two things. So Dupes, there are 64

02:52:27let’s say, let’s say responses. So responses is 100 and 98. If there’s 200 out of 350 that’s the bulk of it. And then write ups are the other 100. OK. So responses are most popular and then write ups and then dupes and then alternates. I kind of wanted to eyeball that because I’m wondering, are those numbers gonna change much if I actually go through the other half of this list

02:53:28looks like there’s one more category of updates. So like these, this one like these two are, but this one is as well where someone submitted a whole bunch of like a, a series of blog posts. Yeah, I search for series.

02:54:02Yeah.

…08Oh Yeah. Or here is another one that just happened to show up of merging update into earlier submission. So sometimes that’s someone breaks up a blog post into multiple posts, you know, f series Gear Selector. Part one, the idea and then part two, the breakthrough. But they only come like two days apart. The other one is someone submits part one, they get a bunch of responses whether on our side or somewhere else. And then they write a part two like a day later.

…54That’s a write up

02:55:04any more serious nights. I got the ones,

…31jmiven "this week" seems also common
I guess that’s a reason

…38because this one is so we’re coming up on the end here of Lobster’s office hours because I only wanna run for about three weeks. And I realize if I start writing this up, I’m not gonna get anywhere meaningful on stream. So I’m gonna punt that part to the next stream. But the two things I thought were worth writing a little more about and saying a little more about have come up. The two things are

02:56:16a couple of things are tied together,

…24clarity in which story comment is replying to

…34super replies and then kind of the inverse of super replies is highlighting best links in a story. And so what that becomes is what if a comment could be promoted to a story? So we have a story submitted like I’m reading off of the spreadsheet. Let’s just use that that testing title. So actually, this is, this really is a great example. The the one about increased test fidelity by avoiding mocks and then non crab submitted a comment that was largely saying, hey, this paper was great. Let’s talk about that too. This week also seems common. Yeah, that’s me. That’s the other thing that I there is to talk about. I’ll come back to that in just a sec. So

02:57:51if non crab or users could have said you know, this comment include a link to something that we haven’t seen before. You know, that’s not, not, haven’t seen before. Actually, never mind that part. If it includes a link, what if there was a way for the author, comment, author or for readers to say, I think this should be promoted to a story. And part of the reason I think that is, this display is real confusing and it only gets more confusing when there’s a whole bunch of stories merged in and I guess I closed the ones, but when there’s like four or five, it’s especially strange that the links for this one are after all the others, right? So if we go to, you know, the most extreme example, this top link is Microsoft’s press release and then this is the metadata for that one and the metadata for these others is just kind of in line which is weird. And then stories from the merged links have this tag that people miss. And so I guess what I’m saying is bye, commenter reader, Mad or readers. And then also rather than so hang on, I’ll say two things clean up the metadata on links at the top of the page. Confusing display first items. Meta appears last low merged stories, right? But then also in comments, what if we repeated each stories title and thread title as a section header for it’s comments. And I say it’s in quotes because the value of story emerging is that we keep the discussion together if we have a section header. And so we said, rather than organizing all of the comments by score. So yeah, rather than organize top level comments by score, they’d be in there story sections and possibility of continuing to vote on individual stories

03:01:16to sort comments. So this would be a pretty big change to the way merged stories get displayed, but it would make it clear that they’re responding to different aspects to different stories under that headline. If we went with headline as the top level title, it kind of rolls in a whole bunch of things and it makes the line between stories and comments a little permeable

03:02:10a while ago. So I’ve been thinking about this for Oh man a while. Right. So that’s the draft and then this is also there. So if I go to Tig app models link, I thought about this for a while. But I created this link model in July. Oh, it’s been kicking around in my head for at least a year. And the idea of the link model is it reads story texts and it reads comment bodies and it finds all internal and external links. And the idea for internal links, it figures out the the foreign key relationship. There’s a fucking mosquito. I don’t know if I got it. Excuse me, as if I don’t have enough software bugs, I have actual bugs. So there it is

03:03:42this link model, I want to use it to interlink, comment to interlink stories and comments a bit so that you might even see metadata on a comment. So if what are we up to Carol? If Carol leaves a comment in February about mock and then in July, Dave writes a comment and happens to link to Carol’s. It would be nice if looking at Carol’s comment showed you that there was a later response in another story from Dave or not necessarily a response, a reference. And so that would be nice for internal links. And I’m slowly working towards that functionality. But the other part of it is it pulls out external links as well. So if a comment links off to actually let’s just go right back to our working example. This comment has an associated link record in the database, we don’t do anything with it yet, but it’s there that links to this and I think there’s a, there might be, since this story was submitted, I might have tweaked the story submission form to look for those and say, hey, actually, yeah, I did, I did, didn’t I, where is it? Yeah, so when checking to see if someone is submitting a duplicate URL, I checked to see if they’re, they are linking to something that was recently in the comments and you what war per and then they get this message that says, hey, this comment just time ago in words, which might be 10 minutes or two days. Also linked to this story, please grow the existing discussion rather than splitting up the discussion. Adding a comment will bump it to the top of the active stories because I wanted people to see you’re going to get the exposure you want. If you re respond, if you reply to the link that has already been submitted, instead of trying to use a story as a super reply. And this one has been a minute, right? So to blame analog app views stories form errors. So this one has been there two months and so let’s jump over to live. It’s a good time to check in to see if there have been fewer merges in the last two months because of it.

03:07:16I need a kill.

…28The numbers might be low enough that there’s nothing clear here, but we’ll see.

…52So over the weeks of the year. Here’s how many we have? 124, 14 and then what it was eight weeks ago. 12345678. I don’t see a strong pattern popping out at me. The numbers on either side of the date look pretty samey.

03:08:23arh68 more missing rows near the endd, but ya
Yeah, the numbers are small enough. It’s not worth trying to, work towards any kind of epistemic rigor, but it’s the kind of small nudge change that I hope has an effect like that.

…44All right. arh68 seems like it nips that in the bud
So Jay Mivan, you said over here in the scratch seems like it nips that in the bud it does. Oh Were there missing rows at the end? Wait a minute.

03:09:13Oh, you’re right. I missed it. There’s no 44. Well, maybe it did work then 49 there’s only one like some of this is gonna be really influenced by if something spicy happened. But you’re right. These are contiguous and there is a gap here. So we had a zero

…45oh and 48 is missing. OK. That’s, that’s enough that I’m gonna tip it over to say, yeah, it did improve the situation. I am doing fewer merges since adding that, you know, I’m not gonna try and pretend that there’s enough data here to have any kind of rigor on it. But as you know, like a stick your finger in the wind kind of thing. Yeah, it helped a little. That’s great. Thank you for catching that. A Rh So Jay Mivan, you pointed out that this week also seems common. It shows up a bunch in descriptions because I’m trying to explain what the behavior is merged into other intro from this week, merging this week’s rust async stories, this week’s terraform story. So some of what’s happening is I am trying to explain people to people what the merging rules are. And when I say this week, at least people can figure out, oh, I should expect that stories will get merged in the span of a week. And when I reiterate what that rule is, those individuals who submitted the merge story are a little less likely to do it again, not 100% likely, but fairly less. And then also people can see it in the mod log and go oh It’s a this week kind of thing. Some of these are

03:11:45a big news story happens that carries on for weeks and the because I merged stories that are submitted within a week of the original. Well, eight days later, it’s time for a new thread. And so that’s why you see the this week’s story a bunch

03:12:10and I wrote Pin in this.

…20What do we call them here? Like merged candidates submitted are within a week of original get merged after a week. Why am I doing the arrow thing here after a week? The first next story is the target for future merges. This is mostly good. So like there is a limit to how often we’re gonna merge stories and we don’t wanna merge forever. And there’s kind of a kind of a balance. Yeah. Well, not kind of, there is a balance happening here between keeping discussions together and exposure a hassle though is

03:13:35site traffic is strongly cyclical. We’ve seen it in a few quarries on the stream here where Monday is the busiest and then Tuesday is almost as busy. You know, Wednesday falls off. Thursday falls off Friday, falls off and then Saturday, Sunday are what 20% of Monday. So, you know, it’s like a gentle slope and then clunk down to Saturday, Sunday and jump back up for Monday. This is, this is every site, by the way, almost everybody looks like this unless you know, you have a Taco Tuesday restaurant, everybody looks like this. So when a real interesting story is submitted on a Thursday, it gets about a day and a half of strong discussion and then a little over the weekend and then Monday, Monday is a new week with a lot more traffic than Thursday had. And so the Monday submitter may not even be aware of the Thursday story because it’s certainly fallen off the home page by then. It may even have fallen off s slash active by then because the week is so weekend is so quiet

03:15:17Thursday.

…33So this is also a little hard for mods to keep track of. So story merging only happens in 1% of the time, maybe less now that I put in that link model. But I have a mental list of stories I’ve seen in the last week and especially when it’s something like Thursday to next Wednesday, people seem especially surprised by the merge. So maybe story merging week should be a calendar week.

03:16:27It’s something I’ve been kind of kicking around in my head and especially riding a doc, a big part of arh68 merging like ASAP seems best
rules is they have to be predictable. Someone has to be able to look at an action they’re considering and run the rules in their head and say, am I about to break a rule and hopefully they do that and hopefully for them, the incentive is follow the rule, not get a thrill out of breaking the rule. But it is really hard for anybody who doesn’t really closely read the site like a moderator or a major power user that they won’t know 234 days later, especially if there’s the weekend in the middle. I mean, part of my goal for the week is weekend is to not think too hard about the work day, right? And kinda reset, refresh, come back clean.

03:17:48not a lot easier, but it is easier to explain, more likely to be seen, builds on natural rhythm. So this would be a change, but it’s one of those places like that book Badass by Cathy Sa that I keep referencing where if you can’t understand what’s happening, people can’t understand it and feel competent and follow the best practice and do the good thing and be their best self. So that’s about the end of the topics that I had to talk about. This has been lobster’s office hours. If you have questions about this, feel free to pipe up. And when I say this, I mean, either the story merging stuff we’ve done or anything else on the site because I’m coming here to the end of the stream and I will take this spreadsheet and I will attach it to the stream archive page. So this is the arh68 PopGhost VoHiYo cool beans
20 24-12 dash nine stream. And I will tie in this TSV file if you want to download it and play around with it. You’re very welcome to because I want the site to be able to understand itself. And if you wanna look at this and figure out, oh, maybe we do want to go through the other 350 you can pipe up and tell me that very explicitly. Otherwise I think I’ve categorized enough to feel like we’ve seen all of stuff. Weird. Why did so this one is obviously response. What’s going up? All right, there must have been a case against op and then it got these two responses. It is so hard not to rabbit hole looking at this stuff because it’s like, oh, it’s a whole list of things I’m interested in. I’m just scrolling past 700 things that are all pretty neat. Github has sold us out. Ok. Speaking of hot takes, sometimes you can spot them from the title.

03:20:20All right. Well, thanks very much for hanging out. Folks. I really appreciate that some of you were helping read over my shoulder and helping categorize them. You all asked. Either you caught useful errors and distinctions or you asked really good questions that get at what’s going on here. And then hopefully we can on the next stream, take all of this stuff that we figured out from the site’s history and me getting forced to brain dump, what I am actually doing from the gut and put it into words and we can write up something that is much more helpful and much clearer and much easier to follow. And once that’s written up, maybe that becomes a, all right. Well, we could improve the U I, we can improve the practice and very hopefully we could do that. oh, I didn’t paste it in here. But the the stories controller thing that we keep coming back to, like I had been kicking around that around in my head, but since I wrote up the github issue for it, I just keep seeing things like the moderator, editing their own story. That’s like, oh yeah. Well, if we cleaned up the controller that wouldn’t happen. All right. Well, given no questions. I’m gonna roll out. frici cool, thanks for the stream1
arh68 take it easy y'all DinoDance
Thank you all very much for tuning in and I will see you Thursday morning for our next regularly scheduled lobster’s office hours. But feel free to message me on the site or email me or grab me on Irc or whatever is handy. Talk to you later, take care.