Replicating Reddit's best feature on other forums
77 points by xavdid
77 points by xavdid
Arbitrary RES tags are even better--then it isn't just friends, and you can remind yourself of people who aren't worth the grief of engaging with.
Rolodex actually supports that! You still need to regenerate / re-paste the CSS, but it adds a little hover element with your note.
I didn't want to clutter the blog post, but I can also document it better.
Not what I thought it would be at all; Makes me want a Better-Lobsters-Suite or such too. The ability to see how often you upvoted someone is super useful too.
Yeah, apologies for the sort of clickbait title. There was only so much info I could include 😅
But yeah, that's a great class of software! I think the maintenance burden is fairly high, but they're invaluable for patching features that don't get mainlined
TIL that feature.
But as someone who is generally good (or very good) at remembering names/handles and avatars, it's not really a problem, ever. Unless you had pseudorandom 4chan-handles with numbers (not exactly sure, every time I see a screenshot I need to concentrate to understand the non-content parts). Also don't ask me to remember to buy milk without a shopping list, my memory is just weird, not good.
My reddit account is 14 yrs old, and I was a user for quite a while before I signed up. I had no idea this feature existed.
I really liked slashdot's friend/foe system. Though one interesting thing about it (that it was all public) might not make it a very good dynamic anymore. (Friends being public was. I'm less sure foes being public ever was.)
A possible anecdote about public foes: there are forums where ignore-lists work, and «why would you expect me to notice your comment about XYZ, you were talking to ZXC and I have ZXC on ignore» is a comment that gets posted. So kind-of public kind-of foe declarations do sometimes happen organically even without support.
Scale matters, though.
It's not quite the same thing, but the handy UTags userscript allows me to annotate any link. RES was great for Reddit, but it's in maintenance, and increasingly doesn't work as well, even on old.reddit.com.
I use UTags to add little notes to username links on Lobsters and HN. It's great for tracking and avoiding awful people.
this is really cool :) i love small utilities like this that make the web feel friendlier and more personal. my one suggestion for lobsters is to support the highlighting in comment sections, so that you can see the people you've friended at a glance in long comment sections. otherwise, this is really fun!
Ah, the fact that doesn't work is an oversight! It works in threads on tildes. I'll get that fixed over here soon.
You can subscribe to this GH issue, which i'll close when it's done: https://github.com/xavdid/rolodex/issues/1
is it just me, or is this website really rather unreadable :(
I didn't have any trouble reading it, and I think I'm very inclined to notice and complain about that kind of thing. What made it challenging for you?
It must be something in my regular browser. There is a circuitboard background that makes the light font completely unreadable.
I opened it in a different browser, and didn't see that circuitboard background. No idea what's going on, but it seems to be on my end!
I hear this very occasionally from people who use darkreader-type extensions! My site already does light/dark mode and there's some bug where when your device is in light mode, but the extension forces dark, everything works except the background.
I did a rewrite recently and am realizing I didn't include the line that disables it (falling back to native dark mode). I've just re-added it. Does it look any better now?
Otherwise, does disabling dark reader help?
I'm doing that, although I would have called it "fark's best feature", where it's not just about friending another user (sorry, "farkying"), but also about adding some kind of remark, done simply with an ::after style.
There aren't that many users this applies to, so I haven't done it with an intermediate step yet, I just edit the userstyle in the stylus editor.
Stories like this always make me a bit sad about how Web Extensions are implemented (or mechanics to interact with data shown in the browser in general)
Multiple times I was about to propose extensions for art projects, e.g. to mark up the net worth of commentators or have people leak the usernames of their most antisocial millionaire class classmates from back when, for a grant that dealt with promoting class consciousness.
But then I always have to remind myself, how critical I am towards adding any extension for privacy and performance reasons, not to speak of the amount of friends who are amazed when I tell them that adblockers are a thing and ask me from time to time to install them on their new PCs.
But maybe I am too pessimistic about the willingness and competence to use web extensions in the general audience?
hmm that's actually a neat idea! I could add it to storyden, though so far it's only used in fairly small communities where everyone already knows everyone, but a big 10k+ member site could definitely benefit from it, though UI wise it seems like a desire path to make usernames/avatars more prominent so you already recognise your friends...