LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction (1992) | Hacker News Reader

LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction (1992)

cc.gatech.edu

47 pointsmooreds15 comments

Ah the good ol' New Direction announcement.

Immediately following this was one of the most chaotic times to ever post on an LambdaMOO ARB (Architecture Review Board) *Ballot.

(Mines the one with the prog bit stucking out of the pocket, and 50 poorly parented instances of yduJ's Rubber Duck Tutorial in my inventory).

While trying to dig up more context, I found https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2012/feb/13/reddit/ which linked to https://web.archive.org/web/20131231120008/http://www.shirky... (A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy)

Navigating upward to the class syllabus also shows more of what's going on with the link itself: https://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2001/cs6470_fall/ (The Design of Online Communities by Amy Bruckman). [I think I took a video game course from her, but I'd have to dig out my transcript to say for sure]

> "We started seeing a wider variety of people coming through, I stopped being able to greet each new player personally, and we started having disagreements about what was and was not proper conduct here."

see guys this is what happens when your github project doesn't have an official code of conduct

LTAND established a petition system where passed petitions could then be implemented by a "wizard".

A character named Grump wrote a petition trying to establish a way of moderating content and actions using "Arbitration" -- a kind of binding arbitration using an arbitrator (mutually agreed upon if feasible, or randomly chosen among those volunteering) to hear the sides of the dispute and propose a remedy.

A wizard (admin) named Froxx implemented arbitration, with immediately netative results: when code is law, the devil is in the details.

LamdaMOO was nice tech. It really felt like a huge world. We had one in the Netherlands, a virtual metro of Amsterdam. It still exists today: http://www.demetro.nl/

Of course it was text-only but it was the beginning of the metaverse IMO.

I've been working on a rewrite of the server into Rust, for kicks: https://github.com/rdaum/moor

Unfortunately still lots of work there to be done, and I have no time.

(But it does load and compile an entire core to opcodes, accept connections, and do its best effort at scheduling and executing verbs. Just doesn't get far enough to present anything like a running MOO yet)

This is great! Some friends of mine and I still run a MOO from our college days, and having it exposed to the Internet feels like a dicey proposition these days, even as much as I’ve tried to harden it. I may move it to a Tailscale/Zerotier network at some point just to remove the public exposure.

Thanks for the effort! I’m still a budding Rustacean but will look and see if I can help at all.

Any help appreciated even if it's just writing unit tests and/or finding what's broken. I'm in the labourious part right now (or was when I was last working on it) which is porting and writing all the builtin functions and seeing if they work. If others express serious interest I can start building out task lists / issues, etc.

But there's also some fundamental stuff (e.g. uh, persistence of the object DB, or properly handling permissions, or even how verbs are searched for on objects) that I just keep yak shaving before committing to an approach on.

I'm almost finished with "My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World" which is largely set within the murky unreality of LambdaMOO. I'm not sure how exactly the timelines match up, but the book definitely contains an account of the wizards' withdrawal from being the final arbiters of punitive decision-making.

Recommended reading for sure, the exploration of tinygender/tinysex was especially interesting. Of course there's plenty of more technical dialog as well but I was surprised at how much philosophy there was, especially around sex/gender. Struck me as quite prescient, and very in tune with current events/issues.

Recent and related:

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy [pdf] (2005) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35855988 - May 2023 (51 comments)

Lots more related at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35857102

Past discussion of this particular link:

LambdaMOO takes a new direction (1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22680965 - March 2020 (29 comments)

"I was there, Gandalf, 3000 years ago" comes to my lips; and, yeah, it really kind of feels like 3000 years ago now.

In some other universe lambdamoo has taken another direction and thirty years later the world is not stuck with facebook

Classic post on why active content moderation, and a strong stance on what is acceptable is required to create a functioning and useful community.

That's not really how we saw it at the time. As someone on the sharp end of LTAND, we saw it as the beginning of the end of our freewheeling anarchist paradise. And it was.

I think your statement and mine can both be true :)

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