A devRant Update!

Hey everyone,

We thought now would be a great time for a devRant summer update on what we've added recently and what we've been working on.

Highlights since our last update:

- We launched devRant++, a supporter program for people who want to help us cover our costs while getting some cool extra features (a supporter badge on rants/comments/profile, reserved spot on our in-app supporter list, ability to edit rants/comments for up to 30 minutes instead of 5, and thanks to immediate user feedback, we also added the ability to post a rant every 1 hour instead of 2, and post comments that are up to 2,000 characters instead of 1,000!) We are extremely happy and thankful for the great response the program has gotten and we plan to continue to improve it using your feedback.

- We added the ability to subscribe to a user's rants. This makes it so you get a notification whenever that user posts a new rant!

- We added an "active discussions" feature (available in the "more" tab on the right). If you're looking to join a conversation happening in the moment, then this feature will help you discover those rants. It shows rants that have recently been commented on so if it's a topic that interests you, you can easily get in on the discussion!

Some stuff we have in the pipeline:

- More fun avatar stuff, including fun new OS/language-themed pets
- More perks for the devRant++ subscriber program - if you have anything you'd like to see, please let us know and we will try to make it happen!
- We will be testing some stuff to help classify rant types (rants, jokes, questions, etc.) in order to create a more personalized experience
- On that note, we're also going to take some more time to do some work on the algo as we haven't done much in terms of improvement since the initial smart algo launched
- Community projects page update - we've been slacking on updating the page and apologize for that. If you have created a devRant-related project and it's not on the community page, please resend it to david@hexicallabs.com (even if you sent it already) so we can make sure it gets added. Sorry about that!

A note on community etiquite regarding voting on content:

We've always believed that one of the most important and awesome experiences on devRant is getting your content noticed and appreciated by others. If you enjoy a piece of content, you should upvote it. If you enjoy 500 pieces of content, you should upvote them all. People really appreciate others enjoying their rants and comments so let them know if you do! If you don't like content, you can downvote it with the relevant reason. What we don't encourage is voting on content that you haven't actually looked at or spamming upvotes in mass for content you're not even actually reading/viewing. While we don't encourage that, it's not explicitly disallowed so we won't impose any penalty for it.

What is strictly prohibited and enforced is using scripts or automated procedures for voting on content. Anyone who is caught doing that will have their account deleted without warning. While very rare, we caught a couple of people doing that this week and both accounts in question were immediately deleted once discovered. To be clear, this is the practice of explicitly using a script or automation to mass vote on content. You will NEVER be banned/deleted for voting on a lot of content manually, even if you vote quickly and on lots of stuff. We just want to make that clear becuase this is not meant to discourage people from voting, it is only regarding votes not placed by humans. So if you're a human voting on content, you have nothing to worry about, we promise!

Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions or feedback on any of this. We love constructive feedback and in the past it has gone a very long way to improving and advancing the devRant community. And as always, thank you to everyone who contributed to the community in any way, we really appreciate it and want to keep making your experienfce better.

Happy ranting,
~David and Tim (Team devRant)
@dfox @trogus

I'm curious: which do you like better? Atom or VS Code?

What would you change if you were the owner of a site like devrant?

I've been in devrant for weeks now and the thing I like the most of it is the community (at least most of it).

If you are going through a bad time, they wish you well.
People here also seem to have very decent work experience.
In general, they seem to be open towards other technologies and honest about their shortcomings.

I also like that the site (for better or worse) is not insanely moderated.
For example, in reddit, it's very easy to get a post removed because it doesn't abide to the rules. They can be rudiculous strict, and mods can be trigger happy.

I'm not denying the existence of any moderation here, but for example I've seen some pretty graphic sexual comments, and I appreciate that anything goes (except being a dick ofc).

And I guess that the fact that the community is so chill has to do with that, there's not a huge need for moderation (unless I'm totally oblivious).

But how do you keep a community like that?

I've seen people complaining about the influx of new users and the spam of shitty memes.

How do you keep devrant cool while letting new people join?

I think a necessary thing is that you separate the people into 'universes' and each universe has a limit of x users. And somehow the users are distributed in a way that the average level of 'user likes the universe they're in' is maximum.

Now, how do you create that? Not sure, maybe you let users vote whether they like the other users or not (such votes being hidden to others ofc) and let users switch unis if they don't like them.

What ideas do you have?

!Rant
Finally my quest is complete! I have joined the sticker club!

Vote now! What's your favorite devRant sticker?

Use ++ to vote for ':/ devRant';
Use ++ to vote for ':/ bubble';
Use ++ to vote for 'new Rant("fml")';

In all seriousness though, what's your favorite sticker in your collection?

Anyone care to show off their collection?

Share in the comments.

Done and redone but it's been a long time coming and it's my turn : fuck you StackOverflow.

I've been a member for a few years, and I hate the elitist idiotic community. Some people are there to help, most of them are just there to wank on their reputation.

Whenever you ask a question that is tiny bit specific, you are almost certain to have a vote to close it because "it's too vague" -even though I spent 30mn writing it with comprehensive examples, clean formatting and other users understood it perfectly as demonstrated by their comments trying to help- or any other reason that scream "I didn't understand the question or don't have the answer therefore it's a bad question"

If you are "lucky", a power user will just mark it as duplicate of another question that barely uses the same stack as yours and has one keyword in common because this illiterate fuck couldn't bother to read the full question detailing why it's not a duplicate but, oh surprise, the question they referred yours too already has an accepted answer by themselves. Abusing their reputation-bestowed powers to reference themselves for some more reputation.

Now that I am over 1k in reputation and have all 3 colours of badges, it seems like it warrants a bit more attention from the swarm and it doesn't happen as often. Which is appalling in itself, basically if you don't have enough shinys, your are considered a worthless piece of crap barely tolerated to ask questions.

The fact that big reputation users have so much power and can absolutely not be held accountable for their abusive behaviour is a recipe for power abuse

Let's have a poll about $$$.

Vote and add other options if you like in the Comments

Update on my devRant client SwiftUIRant:

I’m experimenting with some UI changes compared to the official app.

* vote buttons are laid out horizontally and placed above the rant to not waste space on the left side.
* comments count shows 0 comments instead of disappearing.
* rants are not cut off but visible in full length (I plan to add a toggle setting for that)
* creation date/time is present in the feed
* date/time formatter uses the current system region and the language english. So no more awkward American dates for non American users.

What do you think?

If you can see yourself experimenting with an early alpha programming language to provide feedback and perhaps contribute, what feature would you expect from the get go? (Up)Vote in comments, add if missing

Hey, you, my new colleague, you are annoying. I have reviewed your PR and left about 50 comments on your mess. I even explained to you why half of your code is shit in a very polite way. I have explained why you have to rewrite that and even how to do that in the best way possible. Result? Half of the code is gone, it works as before but without the overhead.

Now you're annoying cuz I have to go again on conventions and best practices. I totally understand that you've been doing it differently and throwing buzz words at me won't help. Just stop and do it as it's needed in this project, don't reinvent the wheel only because you can.

You know what? Fuck it! I'll approve all your PRs, anyway I am leaving soon. There is no benefit for me to teach you stuff. You're one of those guys that I voted against in interviewing process. But guess what? My manager decided to hire you anyway! Ha! I rarely vote NO and you were a one of those...

Your confidence doesn't impress me. That works on people that have no clue on what you are doing. Your just average at best, not a superstar.

Fuck it, you're on your own now!

Hello all,

Did a MASSIVE spam down vote action..

If you've watched the algo-list you kinda had an idea how much spam there was. In exception of rants, it also down vote the spam comments posted under regular rants. Also made a progress with historic rants.

I think I leave it at this for now, gonna do some machine learning for spam and will apply that as filter in the future.

Site is now clean enough now to not encounter spam just browsing the site.

Our new frenemy Buffon gave as tip the no index tag what is a great idea for users not having reputation < 5 or so. Will contact dfox if he's willing to do this small change.

Before I dip my toes on machine learning, let me leave some silly comments so I can laugh at myself in the future.

Let's make geth.

1. The model will spit out layer definitions and the size of sample data for training, children models are trained with limited computational resources.
2. Child models are voters that only response in terms of yes/no. A simple majority wins and then the action is taken.
3. The only goal for master models are to survive. i.e. To prevent me from killing them.

Questions:
1. How do models respond to a random output size? (Study GPT-3, should take weeks/months but worth it.)
2. How to define actions for voters to vote? Sounds like the boundary between actions should be blurry and votes can be changed from tick to tick (i.e. responding to something in a split second). Therefore
3. Why I haven't seen this yet? Is this design a stupidly complex way of achieving the same thing done by a simple neural network?

I am full of curiosity and stupidness.

Most beautiful phone designs.
Vote now in the comments!