What if you were able to make changes to devRant, what would it be? What features are missing / could be better?

Also, if you were tasked to make the site popular again, how would you do it?

*overengineers in head, says nothing* are programmers even real tho

@jestdotty I often think you're in a really dark place.

@whimsical how to make devrant more popular? Absolutely no idea. Things like that is what I totally suck at.

As for improving and adding features, I already did most of that in JoyRant ^^

But I‘d really like to have more options for text formatting. Quotation, code blocks, etc.

@whimsical I am. I dont mind dark places and enjoy them but this dark place is society telling me I don't deserve to live and should die. that I have issue with

you can give me dystopia for days and as long as I can still have somewhere warm, comfortable and clean to sleep, access to clean non-smelly showers, and good food I am a happy camper

but my life has taught me my life is worthless, increasingly over and over again despite me fighting every step of the way, making excuses for that behaviour thinking it's just a fluke or exception, but it just keeps happening with no exception to the pattern. to the point I have to accept it now and I just don't know what to do about that, with that realization. if my life is worthless then I want a nuke everyone else's lives. and if I say that then people will take issue with it. yet they don't take issue with my situations? so I guess slave away for others and we don't give a shit about you, take it bitch. fuck you, got mine. that's humanity

@Lensflare you make it more popular by advertising

you also should have features that differentiate it from other alternatives

you also need to have community managers of some sort whose job is it to steer the culture so that it is appealing to people who stumble upon it. these can be accidental active users but the culture needs to be appealing and not toxic, or if toxic it needs to be toxic that's a payoff to people. people will join on the basis of the payoff, so you'll get more of what you're displaying

-

for marketing you need a target audience then go to places where that target audience exists. and people need to want to switch to your platform because it offers something the people on the other platform can't do

I know there's programmers on twitter. you could try Facebook groups from computer science colleges and universities. there's that hacker news and y combinator stuff, lobsters. could do irc. does stack overflow have forums? warez forums, hacker forums. discords

job faires. freelance forums. there's 3d printing communities, AI communities like hugging face and whatever. arduino type communities

there's programming games like screeps and hacknet and whatever else

are game developers considered programmers?

what about game modding communities?

what the hell are those Linux mail lists stuff? idk even

-

I ended up running a 600 user discord server once by pure accident. a marketing guy made it. his parents grew illegal weed in B.C. but he ended up specializing in marketing I guess. I wouldn't join discord even tho my friends were on it, but this guy found random comments on reddit that mentioned specific keywords and then DMed each person with a compliment (that he made up and wasn't genuine ofc but you wouldn't know that) and then invited you to his discord community. in 2 weeks he had a discord server with 600 people, hundreds active every day. highly effective. he didn't even wanna run it so I ended up being given it lol

@jestdotty yup, advertising is what I suck at

@Lensflare you can literally an markdown renderer supplying all those features at once.

I am bad at selling too. But we are devs by heart keeping a barely living platform alive. We just have different motivation.

@whimsical I wanted to do that but there are two issues with that:

It would only be visible in JoyRant. Most people wouldn’t use it.

Devrant uses ranges to provide formatting information for links and mentions.
If you‘d add a markdown render on top of that, it would break the system.
The renderer wouldn’t be able to render the links because they are not markdown, and the links would break because the ranges wouldn’t match anymore because of the markdown syntax.

@Lensflare rantii has it all working I guess. Check it.

@whimsical

I don’t remember what rantii is. Link? ^^

If you want to test it, try posting a code block followed by a link an/or mention.

Something like that:

```
while(true) {
shit();
}

```

Motivational code snippet for @b2plane
And then also some link https://shit.happens.org/wtf
There you go, happy testing.

I'd start by making the site work well, once again.

> 'But I‘d really like to have more options for text formatting. Quotation, code blocks, etc.'.

Yes.

> 'Also, if you were tasked to make the site popular again, how would you do it?'.

No clue. What's 'marketing'?

/jk

You'd have to find something most developers crave && offer them that. Perhaps some drama, /* check */ consistently released new content /* Umm... sure, check. */, etc.

Basically, like offering James Woods pieces of candy. https://youtube.com/watch/... .

> 'are game developers considered programmers?'.

Yes.

@Lensflare Here you go: https://rantii.molodetz.nl/ .

> '```

while(true) {

shit();

}

```'

Is that a b2plane summoning incantation or something?

/jk

How about fix the app and the servers? Id start there