The comment-thread UI is weird and unwieldy on desktop - I can't scroll up to see earlier stuff, I can only scroll down.

Even a scrollover requires that the user be actively trying to explore the site on a meta level - and the mobile-based UX has made finding the sitenav bar a nontrivial endeavor! I would at least put it as the 'before you start typing' background.

r/ChangeMyView is, by its' very subject, going to dodge most of the reasons a forum would need to enforce policies like this. The approach also seems quite dependent on moderators.

Hacker News has the best debate policy I've ever seen. I do have a soft spot for snark, but I can live without it. Thank you for introducing me to it!

Quora looks so elitist. 'Correct' grammar and punctuation? No-explanation 'hate speech'? Also, most of their content policy is only incorporated by linking it, which is a huge pet peeve of mine. (I'm the sort of person who tries to actually read any contract I agree to, and lying about how long the TOS is feels so disrespectful.)

This was very interesting, thank you!

Bunch of visual accessibility stuff. In particular:

*Night mode.

*The ability to make textblocks narrower for smaller saccades and thus easier reading. (I'm not sure this is more comfortable for everybody, so a variable-width widget like Royal Road or Fanfiction dot net have at the top of their display pages might be optimal? This might require experimentation.)

*Ability to change text size.

*Better visual distinction between widgets like the Tags, Post, Pingback, and Comments. Panel borders? Width variation?

On another note, I'm using uMatrix, and it's blocking 14,000 scripts - most of them Google stuff, I imagine; that aggressively-hegemonizing adware megacorp is fingering a downright inappropriate number of pies right now. Might be worth fixing?

Okay. Biggest concern: If this is meant to be forum rules, it's not where it needs to be. I have not seen a TOS or a set of rules before I got an account, and as a forum veteran I was looking for those.

Second-biggest concern:  Social norms are not universal. Netiquette varies by website. What exactly do you mean by 'rude'?

Finally, this looks like it could be compressed a lot. (Bolding sections so you can skim more easily is actually a bad sign.) I like rules a lot better if they're concise - fitting into one screen.

Oh, that's clearly what it's meant to come across as. But to me it reads more like  a Materialist Immortalism sermon delivered by someone who really ought to know better in context.

Also I'm a little irritated that Death has apparently literally never felt the need to justify itself before, but does this time. Human history is deep, like 'the time of Christ until now is like the most recent ten percent' deep. How, among the untold billions who have died, has Death never encountered a mage capable of making it experience shame and/or guilt until after Melbourne came into existence?

Did magic only recently become possible? Is the Death we see younger than King Arthur? Is magic a skillset so encouraging of hubris that this witch is literally the first magic-user in history to both desire endless life and have a clue that repentance is important?

I love the frame idea of a debate with Death while a mage tries to imprison it, but if it's a frame for a philosophical debate, the philosophy could use a lot more development.

Hi there, I'm a writer and I critique stories I like. The intro is solid, interesting, beautiful. The first memory gave me such feels that I had to get up and walk around in order to process them. And then we get to... this.

“Omnia mutantur,” they said, reaching for something they’d been told long ago, “nihil interit.”

The witch rolled her eyes. “Latin, right? Unfortunately, I was too busy talking to the living to learn a dead language.”

Death almost rolled their eyes in return. “It’s a quote from the Roman poet Ovid. Everything changes, nothing perishes.”

“Very profound. And do be assured that I mean that in the worst possible way. It’s the sort of thing that sounds wise, as long as you don’t, you know… actually think about it. I mean, it’s fine as a line of poetry, but what can it mean between two people who know that no spirit transcends death? Sure, maybe Ovid’s atoms are drifting through the air; maybe a molecule of water from his body is in my coffee. But Ovid was not his atoms or his molecules, and only someone who wished to hide from the truth might find profundity in the idea that he lived on in hydrogen bonded to carbon or oxygen.”

“I liked Ovid,” Death replied, which they had to admit, didn’t add much to the conversation.

 “Then it’s a shame that he changed into dust.”

Pardon, but. Did Ovid not just speak with Death's voice? Serious philosophical question.

Even setting aside questions regarding the definition of identity and personhood, this is a setting with at least one ancient magekiller robot and/or anthropomorphic personification running around, where magic appears to be a vocational skill, and where magic can certainly encode consciousness.

Even if the afterlife looks more like 'suspended animation in the akashic library' than 'personal minecraft server', it seems deeply premature to conclude that there isn't one.

(I will be editing in the rest of my review as I continue reading.)

Interesting!

I don't have the money to buy up secondhand GPUs, but that's absolutely an underexploited market. Mainly because my pop-culture side hears 'GPU' and thinks 'gaming computer', rather than 'the sort of computer part that can help biologists and filmmakers'.

I may need to start a hardware tech company.

I think I have been wildly misinterpreted somehow?

I'm not into cryptocurrency; I just know protein folding and gene sequencing and suchlike is a thing molecular biologists (e.g. vaccine researchers) sometimes need supercomputer time to do.

Given how much the Crypto market relies on supercomputers at the moment, I'm assuming that some of the people who've done well on it own supercomputers that could be repurposed.

Okay, so this looks pretty familiar from the perspective of someone who was banned from LessWrong for being both concise and direct about my religious beliefs, and also deeply irritated with how negative karma works. I don't mind being praised inarticulately, but shunning and criticism are not good synonyms for each other.

Secondly, Effective Altruism as a forum is a bunch of people who have built their collective identity around Doing Good. This is not a bad thing, but burning the candle at both ends leads to burnout, and self-care is very much a Good thing. "Love thy neighbor as thyself." Not more, not less, and not even quite the same way, but the same amount. Love in absolutes.

You have permission to hate things. You have permission to dislike things. You have permission to be spiteful and vindictive and cranky, if that's what it takes to enforce your boundaries. This world is mortal; you do not owe it your soul.

But. You also have permission to forgive. To remember, and reframe, and refocus, and realize, and repent, and rejoice in that act of self-improvement. And to forget your hurts, except when you want to want to wear them.

Why do people drink alcohol, if not to mourn? So it is with sorrowful memories. Put the cup down, go home, take a shower, hug yourself, take up a tactile hobby like wrestling or origami or barefoot hiking, eat food when you're hungry, drink water when you're thirsty, sleep when you're tired. Take joy in all the gifts your Heavenly Father has given you - including those sorrows, if you like!

Count your many blessings; every doubt will fly away. You are not inherently evil, nor are you particularly incompetent. There are others to bear the load while you rest.

:)

Thanks for the prompt! The answer is that everyone here is interested in Doing Good, and so instead of having a meta-level discussion about Doing Good, I'm trying to have an object-level discussion about specific things to optimize.