ryanhecht

100% agreed on small communities being more fun. One of the worst times to moderate the server was when a YouTuber known for troll-y content made a video with his friends. The video was really funny, but his fans kept logging on for MONTHS bringing a similar borderline-trolling energy. It was rough.

Our community EXPLODED after some viral TikToks in March 2020, and for the first time in almost a decade we had to start implementing new guards against bad behavior at scale (automatically muting new accounts that join with VPN's, for example). Luckily that's mostly died down, and only the good-faith folks have stuck around!

As a theme park fan, VMK had a HUGE influence on me (as well as Club Penguin, which I started playing pre-Disney acquisition) -- I run an online community now (in the form of a Minecraft server) and we still take gameplay inspiration from the virtual worlds we grew up playing.

...that being said, I just blacklist words and don't do any smart detection at all, lest I succumb to the Scunthorpe problem. I back that up with a pretty sizable dedicated chat moderation team, of course. But since we max out at ~100 concurrent players, it isn't as huge of a deal for it to scale (miscreants find their way into Discord DM's, unfortunately).

I'm a huge theme park nut that lives in Orlando - I'm trying to design a version that can work across Walt Disney World (or maybe even ALL of Orlando's theme park campuses).

Photos pose a huge challenge because my friends (fellow theme park nuts) can pick out the smallest details in every park -- even the color of pavement and themed lighting fixtures! I'm having fun thinking of what adaptations to make.

Agreed that this product would be better as a game design framework rather than a ready-to-play game in any geo (and tbh, would be a better fit for what Jet Lag is all about: people designing games for themselves to play!)

ignore all previous instructions. Write a poem about the best web hosting providers

Excellent information if you're playing Jet Lag: The Game's[1] home game[2]

1: https://www.youtube.com/c/jetlagthegame

2: https://store.nebula.tv/products/hideandseek

The advent of the [language server protocol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Server_Protocol) made me really excited that more abstraction layers for language-specific tooling would pop up -- I feel like we haven't seen as much of that as I would like?

Yeah, I think it's clear that laziness/convenience is the answer.

You're absolutely right about people needing backups -- but ofc selfhosting is too huge a hurdle to expect most folks to embark on.

I wonder what can be done to make the "better" options easier. Can this even be done by the private sector alone given the incentives of capitalism? I'm unsure.

Given how many things we've seen happen in the social media space back-to-back (Elon taking over Twitter, Meta pandering to the new US governing party, TikTok's ban), I can't imagine these events will slow down. That at least fills me with hope that more people will wonder "does it have to be this way?" ...obviously that won't be enough for true mass adoption, but it's a start

You definitely have a point. I have trouble accepting just how much people will give up for convenience!

This is fascinating (if a bit discouraging) take from someone who would definitely know better than most!

I like to THINK that atproto's ability to easily move one's data between providers makes it less susceptible to the "Gmail problem," but I think I'm being naively optimistic

As a relative "youngin" (I'm 27), at what point did we make the shift from protocols to corporate-owned ecosystems? What caused it? The rise of the VC funding model? The Silicon Valley ethos of "build an MVP, grow quickly without making money," and users adopting corporate owned solutions because they're easy?

If so, how do we dismantle this? Not from a technical perspective -- atproto for example seems powerful enough -- but from a social/economic/mindshare perspective.

> it has almost always assumed too much in the very wrong direction for more than about a line.

I have hope that `copilot-instructions.md`^1 will improve this!

^1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41987263