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Comment by sodapopcan | Hacker News Reader

> discussion has collapsed

I used to be extremely active on Elixir Forum. It was the main place I would interact with people online, and HN was a bit of a distant second. Now HN usage has spiked a bit and I now have a... ugh... reddit account. There is still some decent discussion there, but it's largely library announcements (many vibe coded), some blog posts (that are often about AI), and news posts. Questions about the language itself have, unsurprisingly, pretty much completely halted. I think around a month ago someone asked a syntax question -- it was a bit of a jump scare!

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It doesn't help that the default page changed from the form to whatever the fuck it is now that requires multiple steps to see comments.

I'm not a huge fan of the changes myself, but discussion collapse was in full effect before the change (and had started happening long before it). But ya, I think I agree that it doesn't help. The change was made in good faith in order to try and boost it, but I can't objectively say if it's good or not since I always skip and go straight to forums.elixirforum.com now. My biggest annoyance is that I now have to type `fo<enter>` instead of `e<enter>` in my address bar to get there.

I agree in general, but I suspect that the change adds friction to commenting in a way that is counter productive.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks the new default page is absolutely horrible in terms of usability.

I've noticed less comments on posts, but this is probably also the result of more AI-assisted Elixir projects being announced, not just the change in UI/UX.

Second this, some of the worst UX I’ve seen in a long time and a classical example of why you shouldn’t fix what isn’t broken.

I still have no idea how to use that abomination of a page. Any obvious clicks lead to some weird states and places that are completely unobvious.

I need to get to the list of topics in a forum, or to comments on a post damnit

I'd complain over there but it's historically been pointless.

Hey, post author here, just to say that I've appreciated your presence on the forum a lot since I started using Elixir. You are one of those who brought a warm tone there :)

Oh Lucas! Ha, I searched your name on the forum before even reading the article but did so hastily, a thread for a talk which I guess you commented on came up, and I thought you were the guy from the talk and was like, "Nope, don't know him" and closed the page.

Anyway, thanks, and back at you, and hi, and nice article :)

It was a nice place pre-LLMs. One of the better communities imo.

I think so, though I didn't spend any near that amount of time on other language forums, though I guess that's saying something. It's cool having José, Chris, and other big community leaders participate often. Same goes for frequent participating from the Erlang core team, in fact I think it got to the point where we'd hear from them even more often!

But ya, was a fun place. I loved reading it, I love helping on it and the more general chats. I even made some friends and found a job through it!

there is a running joke among a part of the community that goes something like "0 days since last persistent workflow orchestration library announcement".

I feel like Elixir community is a bit too nice to call out obvious slop (some folks straight out post LLM-generated blog posts every week or so), so instead we could focus on elevating human effort. Recent Oban release for example had a note that all the docs a human-written. We should praise this!

Glad somebody noticed and appreciated that! Human written long form content is extremely important (to us, but I think for the world).

Every single email and issue reply is also 100% human authored. People deserve to interact with humans online, especially when they have reached out for help and real interaction.

Every single time I interact with Oban, it's a delight. Glad to see you guys continuing to put in the work and sticking with human writing.

I've got a production service largely backed by Oban Pro and last month alone it handled running heavy ML tasks against ~200,000 long-form video files. Each analysis has multiple steps, all handled with Oban's dependent jobs feature, so there was something like a million unique jobs, and I don't think we hit a single production issue with Oban. Being able to connect into the cluster and directly manipulate things with Oban is a superpower.

> there is a running joke among a part of the community that goes something like "0 days since last persistent workflow orchestration library announcement".

Ha, I missed this! I rarely click on any topics anymore, but I have noticed a trend of similar-sounding libraries being posted. Other than one person whose blog I already read a bit, I don't click on any of the blog posts anymore. It's not a conscious decision, I just open scan the topics, usually nothing looks interesting and a close the tab.

I feel you! I still try to share/comment on human-written posts even if they're not fully up my alley. Pangram extensions helps a lot with that. But yeah, in general it's just crickets and a buzzing noise of tokens floating around

> Pangram extensions

Was not aware of these. Thanks!

Ha, I feel attacked: https://github.com/agoodway/pgflow

^ this one is pretty cool, pgmq does most of the work.

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