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I hope that no single organization replaces Reddit. Let a billion independent forums bloom. For the sake of discoverability, it would be nice if a decent subset of them implemented more or less the same API that search engines could call from the outside and that their UIs could expose to users so that users could easily move from forum to forum. But discoverability is double-edged - it builds size but it also brings Eternal September and homogeneity.

As for structure, I think that forums and image boards that are basically just chronologically ordered items of text where each item of text can have either implicit or explicit links to previous items of text are in a sense superior to tree-based forums like Reddit anyway because directed acyclic graphs are a superset of trees.

As for upvote/downvote mechanisms, I have never seen a forum that was improved by them. Such mechanisms are probably good for driving engagement but from the point of view of stimulating thought, I think that as opposed to having an outside algorithm preference certain comments over others, it is better when users have to either manually go through a flat chronologically ordered list of comments or implement their own search functionality on top of that list in order to find comments that they want to engage with. If a forum provides advanced tools to search and sort comments, that is good, but I would prefer that a forum not build any given sorting other than chronological into its default UI.

Reddit, at least, still allows users to sort in ways other than by "best". In my experience and according to my taste, large subreddits usually are often pretty useless unless I sort by "new" or "controversial". Sorting by "best" all too often - not always, but all too often - just brings the least common denominator up to the top. Another good method for using Reddit is to make note of any individual users whose writings you find interesting and to then just read through their Reddit histories - this can also be a good way to find interesting subreddits that you might not have come upon otherwise.

My sample size is small so this might be way off but here is my guess:

Companies fundamentally want* to be able to treat software developers as completely fungible assembly line workers. The company's dream is to be able to fire and replace all of the software developers at any moment and lose little by doing so. This partly explains the heavy emphasis that tech companies place on process, project management, and so on even if the developers dislike all of those things. The company must pay for recruitment - there is no other choice because the company must get employees in. However, to pay for retention would contradict the fundamental company dream of making all of the software developers completely replaceable. Basically, retaining the employees is not one of the more significant company goals. Companies' actual goal usually is to make it so that the developers are as fungible and replaceable as possible. Companies want to be able to treat the engineering team kind of like an abstract arbitrarily scalable asset in a video game. Want to replace all of the engineers? Sure, push a button and it happens - you might lose 10% of this quarter's numbers but that's acceptable. Want to scale your team up and go from having 15 developers to 30 developers? Push a button! Want to go up to 60! Boom, do it - the point is that the company has the process that makes the developers fungible - to focus on retention would be silly, the company's goal is to focus on recruiting and then turning the new recruits into replaceable and fungible assembly line workers who are part of an arbitrarily and abstractly scaleable team. Companies don't dream so much about hiring amazing developers - they dream more about setting up a process that will let them hire developers at scale and plug them into a money-making machine that keeps going no matter how retention is going. As a developer working for a company, the end-users are not your real customers. The management and all of their politics are your real customers. What they want is to not think about you. If I go to a restaurant and order some food, generally I do not want to think about how many people are working there or what exactly they are doing - I just want my food. Same with companies and developers - what they want is to just be able to turn the development team into an abstract source of software development. Focusing too much on retainment would tie them too much to a given set of developers. They do not want that. What they want is to set up a process that lets them treat the engineering team as an abstract and arbitrarily scaleable machine that creates software.

*When I say that companies want something this is of course anthropomorphizing a process but what I mean is that the overall totality of the people in the company operating according to various incentives lead to things happening that might in short be described as the company wanting certain things.

Well hold on man - why tackle it? So many things genuinely suck that negativity is quite understandable. If what you really mean to ask is "how do I prevent my negativity from hurting my ability to gain power in society?", then we can talk about that. But that is a bit of a different matter.

I agree that it is arguable, but I would say that React is a framework for this reason: usually you do not decide when to call React code, instead React code decides when to call your code.

100 years ago: "legal alcohol is hurting our children"

70 years ago: "atheists and communists are hurting our children"

35 years ago: "drugs are hurting our children"

25 years ago: "violent video games are hurting our children"

Now: "social media is hurting our children"

All were/are probably true to some extent in some cases, but that does not mean that it necessarily made/makes sense to try to turn society against the risky or dangerous thing. Skateboarding hurts some children. Does that mean that we should ban TV shows that celebrate skateboarding? "It is for the sake of the children" is a time-tested way to get people to support authoritarian policies.

Very calm in tone. In Zuckerberg's place, I would have been tempted to instead write something like this: "Hi, censorious ninnies. In the 50s you would have been blaming godlessness for hurting children, in the 90s you would have been blaming video games for hurting children, now you blame Facebook. Please take your desire to police content on Facebook even more than we already police it and shove it up your own ass."

I have no love for Facebook, but my problem with it is not that I think they police content too little, it is that I think they police content too much. No, I do not want to police content on Facebook to save children. Similarly, I do not want to ban controversial books, I do not want to ban extreme sports, I do not want to ban fast food, and I do not want to ban many other things that sometimes hurt people. If I have to choose between, on the one hand, Facebook with all of its shadiness and, on the other, puritanical moral busybodies who want to control what people see "for their own good" - well, I choose Facebook.

Yes, I do not have any problem with it whatsoever. There are probably plenty of books that also cause some percentage of people to develop suicidal thoughts, but I do not want to start banning those books.

I disagree - I think that it should be completely legal to sell cocaine drinks as long as you inform the customers that the drinks have cocaine in them and I think that is should be legal to use even the most psychologically manipulative marketing techniques imaginable. I would rather that it be the responsibility of consumers to avoid getting addicted than to use government power to ban things. Similarly, for example I think that it should be legal to sell skateboards even though people sometimes injure themselves while riding them.

>There should be no question, that what FB is doing here, while not illegal, is highly dubious ethically.

Why, what exactly are they doing that is ethically dubious? So far based on what I have read of this whistleblower's revelations, I do not have a problem with Facebook doing any of it.

Politicians who want to de-anonymize the Internet should first do a trial run of de-anonymizing all of their own financial transactions, Internet browsing, use of the post office, and so on. Maybe for a year or so. Then after they have done that, maybe we can get together and see whether they still think that it is a good idea.

To be fair, if China spent several weeks bombing a country that the US did not want it to bomb and, as part of that bombing, China bombed the US embassy there and then said that it had been an accident, I think that this incident would be well remembered in the US 20 years later and many people in the US would doubt whether it had really been an accident.

I think that most people who generally support cops and soldiers but who also contemplate violent resistance against the US government have already thought through this issue and their usual resolution is "I generally support cops and soldiers for now but if they cross certain lines then I am fine with fighting against them". I do not think that there is nearly as much cognitive dissonance or hypocrisy on this topic among those people as you might think there is.

Psychologically I think it is very easy to resolve any possible contradictions. "My side are the real patriots - their side are false patriots who are actually bootlickers/oppressors/occupiers/traitors/etcetera."

Yes, it likely means killing people who think of themselves as patriots. However, many people who work for oppressive governments genuinely think of themselves as patriots. I do not see why it matters whether using firearms against a government means killing patriots or not. Many of the people who worked for Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union to oppress their fellow citizens were patriots by the standard meaning of the word.

In some cases, it probably is a deterrent. It is hard to know for sure because there is no way to A/B test a country. I think that some people probably overestimate the degree to which it is a deterrent, but I think it would certainly be wrong to say that it is not a deterrent at all. In some situations it can probably be a very effective deterrent.

It possibly does stop things from getting worse, but it is hard to know whether it does or it does not because there is no way to make a copy of the United States, remove private gun ownership in the copy, and then see how things play out.

Officials being democratically elected does not necessarily mean anything - in theory, a majority of the population could vote to literally enslave a minority of the population. I think that it is fair for a minority of the population to have some threshold beyond which they are willing to use force if necessary even if by doing so they are going against the wishes of the majority.

I am just a layman when it comes to this kind of thing, but I notice that many articles online claim that variable bedrock depth explains why Manhattan's skyscrapers come in two distinct clumps. If this is true, then it seems strange to me that NYC professionals would ignore bedrock depth in SF out of pure ignorance.

>There's been a lot of research, and internal studies, done at many companies that show pretty impressive benefits.

I would need to look at the research and studies to see whether I actually believe them. I have seen how politicized and tribal technical decisions can become at a company and can easily imagine that there might be confounding variables.

>When really questioned most engineers just say "I know my code works" or "I test my code, I don't need automated tests". That's the mentality I just don't understand.

If I do not write automated tests and then my code works fine in production 95% of the time, and out of the 5% of the time that it breaks, 99% of the time it is a problem that is easily fixed and causes no major problems, and even the few major problems are of the "lose a manageable amount of money" kind and not the "people get injured or killed" kind - meanwhile if, on the other hand, writing automated tests would add 50% more effort to my work - then the cost/benefit analysis might suggest that I should not write automated tests. Keep in mind that I could spend that 50% more effort instead doing things that will make my code less likely to break but that are not automated testing. "not adding automated testing" is not the same thing as "not doing anything that will make the code less likely to break".

>If it "makes things hard to change" just delete the test? You'll still get the benefit of knowing XYZ are broken/altered.

If I delete the test then I will have wasted part of the effort that went into writing it. Usually when I change code I already know that things will work differently afterward and that things might break, so this would not tell me anything I did not already know.

>You can also automate end-to-end and black box tests which should absolutely not require any modification if you're just refactoring.

Agreed - I am much more friendly towards end-to-end tests than towards unit tests. I still would not advocate them dogmatically, but I find them to be more useful than unit tests.

>If you are working something that is allowed to fail, then sure, you don't really need to care about what practices you do. It's a very end-all-be-all argument to say "it's ok for my things to break". That argument goes just the same for all of these things:

I think that you might be seeing things in too binary a way. The vast majority of software products are allowed to fail, but not all of them are allowed to fail to the same degree. The practices do matter and there is no one-size-fits-all approach to testing. The context matters. What rate of failure is acceptable such that to try to prevent failure beyond that rate would actually be counterproductive? What specific impacts would more vs. less testing have on the development process? How do the relevant pros and cons fit into the overall goal of the organization? Etc.

I am not saying "it's ok for my things to break", nor are probably most people who question automated testing dogma saying "it's ok for my things to break". We are saying that there are tradeoffs. Sometimes adding more automated testing does not actually add value. Again, it depends on the exact context.

Regarding the rest of what you wrote: I am not disputing that automated testing can bring lots of benefits. I am just saying that I think some people are too dogmatic about it, see it too much as a magic pill, push for its use too broadly, and do not take the relevant tradeoffs sufficiently into account.

Or maybe those people know what they are talking about and the truth is that many people who are big fans of automated testing tend to overrate its value when it comes to many areas of software development. Testing takes effort and makes it harder to change things. In an ideal world where testing came for free then sure, more testing would be better. In the real world there are tradeoffs. If I am writing code that controls a spaceship then it makes sense to spend a huge amount of effort on testing. On the other hand, if I am adding a feature to a web application then in my personal experience, most of the time adding automated testing is a waste of effort.

It does seem gross and I do not think I would feel good about the idea of working in the industry. That said, I wonder - is it worse than the loans not being available at all?

I used payday loans a few times back in the day - not for anything large, just for like $300 or so at a time. Getting those payday loans really helped me and I never experienced any negative consequences from taking them. I never thought of them as being a scam. I knew what sort of interest rates I was getting into and I took the loans fully knowingly. Personally I did not experience any predatory practices unless you count the interest rates themselves as predatory. That said, I always paid the loans back pretty quickly so I do not know how the companies behave if people are slow in paying.

Got it, thanks for explaining so clearly. The way I see it, because of nuclear weapons, no other country can actually conquer the US, so I much prefer free speech to any sort of propaganda initiatives meant to strengthen the US against other countries. We are already basically almost completely protected from other countries by our nuclear weapons. We do not need censorship and propaganda to add any sort of meaningful further protection.

US citizens' desire to fight in WW2 perhaps largely came from propaganda to begin with - maybe in the absence of propaganda most of them would have been fine with doing nothing to help Britain, France, etc. About 60% of US WW2 soldiers were drafted, not volunteers. So it is not so much a question of no propaganda in the past versus propaganda today, it is more of a question of more tightly controlled propaganda in the past versus more diverse propaganda today.

Much of this is not about JavaScript itself but is really about using JavaScript in a web browser context.

As far as I know, JavaScript the language is not connected to web development in any essential way.

Research into "misinformation" is often used to justify politically-motivated censorship. If this research was intended, by its funders and/or the researchers themselves, to further politically-motivated censorship, then I have no sympathy for the researchers.

>But if you do have to work, slogging away in a common place with friends is more compelling than sitting behind a computer.

Not for me. When it comes to work, I would rather sit behind a computer at home and talk with my friends on another computer at the same time than sit behind a computer at an office and talk with my friends there in person.

Are you sure that this attitude is the minority?

I can easily go have fun with people outside of work, so I have no incentive to put up with the annoying parts of office work just to get to interact with people.

There was an effort to convince people not to vaccinate, but I think the bigger cause of anti-vaccination sentiment was contrarianism against and distrust of the effort to convince people to vaccinate. Years of government and media lies ranging from the Iraq War to distorted and propagandistic reporting of things that Trump had said resulted in millions of people justifiably feeling that the mainstream media, the government establishment, and the supposed "experts" that the media and government often trot out are all to be distrusted. It is a boy who cried wolf scenario.

If I wanted to and could find the funds, would I in practice (as opposed to just in theory) be legally allowed to create my own financial services organization that would provide financial services like payment processing and banking to people who have been banned by other financial services providers for their theoretically legally protected speech? Honest question - I do not know the answer.