Fuck yourself.

If you were king, and this were your kingdom, on a scale of "go fuck yourself" to "well, i mostly agree with you, but there's one point in particular that i'd like to raise here...", where would you land Hubski?

Some fuel for that fire.

There's a few things that could be done. Whether they would work to the result you, or many other users, will consider positive remains to be seen. I find fatalistic approach to system design rarely beneficial.

Here's one suggestion:

Clear fuckin' everything. Remove all content from this forum, and all users. Have all users that are still interested in participating in a new format (TBD) re-register, using previous or new usernames. No archives, no links to previous threads, no saved settings. Reboot.

Then have the users wait for a month without being able to engage with Hubski at all. (Ideally that would also mean not engaging with the same people from the previous Hubski via external contacts, but that's an honor-system contract not everyone would sign, so you can't rely on it.) No messages to mk, no posts, no comments, no chat.

Then you let users come back. Maybe you tweak a few things about the forum engine, maybe you don't. Fresh start. Clean slate.

Here's another suggestion:

Only ever open Hubski to interactions once a week. Host Pubski on that day, let users post links and make comments. Once your timezone-based 24 hours are up, hope you said everything you wanted to say, 'cause it's Monday o'clock, the bar is closed, and you're on the curb.

Not one thing will work if you, a member of the community, is willing to give it a shot.

Complacency is the mind-killer for places like these. Change is good.

"Does <this factor> play a role?"

"Now here is what plays a role..."

How does one receive an answer to a simple question without getting diminished in the process?

The Dota 2 community was recently shaken by a wave of accusations of sexual harassment towards a lot of male analysts/commentators/casters in the Western scene. If you go to /r/Dota2 and sort by "top of month", you're gonna see a lot of posts on the matter.

A handful of high-profile commentators have already left the scene: GranDGranT, RedEye, TobiWan... The scene is very small. The three of them leaving means there's a big personality vacuum.

At least one high-profile commentator was falsely accused: Zyori. It took some time to sort out what happened (the accuser went a little too hot on the ways to describe what had occurred), and now Zyori is back to casting matches.

Those three, though? Pummelled into the ground by the Internet army. Rightly so, it would appear: they were all accused on multiple accounts, from respectable sources, with independent confirmation by fellow commentators. There was still a lot of support for them, though. Some thought the loss of a prominent figure in the community justifies not doing anything about the accusations: as if the community itself would be damaged by the loss of these men.

I guess harassment of women on the scene – good casters in their own right, not some eye candy for the horny teens – would be a reasonable expectation for some.

I don't know much about cancel culture – the whole concept it still one I'm yet to read up on – but I've been watching the shitstorm of opinions and facts and defenses and counter-accusations... When the storm had settled, the genuinely-good people of the community stayed good (Slacks, Purge, PFlax, syndereN, SUNSFan...), and I hope the women who had to experience the bullshit got a little relief their way.

On those rare occasions that the Internet army acts against sexual predators, it feels good.

If that stage is in any way televised, I would spend no time addressing Trump and instead moving my gaze towards the audience.

Before the happening, which would surely be held a month or two in advance, I would do my level best to prepare a long list of mistakes Trump has made that affected his target electorate.

Given that I only have five minutes, I would pick the most juicy of those and appeal to these people's baser instincts, in order to present them with the evidence of Trump's negative effects on the country and reasons why these people should care about them.

I would look into addressing those issues on as personally-relatable a level as possible.

"That black cashier at your nearby grocery store. She works for minimum wage. Would your grown son who still lives with you do the same? Could he do the same? I think we both know the answer. So that black cashier is pretty much your main and only source of product that is within your reach that doesn't step on your comfort and the business of your life.

"Without her, you may no longer be able to get your produce, because no one else is willing to work for that little money. So far, President Trump..." – and would go ahead and attach an argument to it.

(That wasn't the best example, but I have not taken a month to come up with it.)

I would also make concetrated effort not to mention any of the core tropes of the political narrative of the recent times. I would not mention Democrats or Republicans, I would not mention Obama, Bush, Reagan, Nixon, or even Teddy Roosevelt, who seems to be a universally-accepted hero of the crowd. I would not mention Barr, Flynn, McConnell, or any other of the recent figures of non-news news reports, FOX style.

By doing so, I would seek to avoid engaging with the established mental traps that have been embedded into Trump's electorate's heads by the talk machines on TV, radio, or the Internet. Snapping the trap would only trigger an emotional response and prevent any further information from getting in.

Instead, I would do my best to keep to the story I want to present: that of Trump as an ineffective, counterproductive, malicious, corrupt president without mentioning any of those descriptors by name. I would treat it as a very short lecture, university-style, where I have to present information in a certain light for it to connect and start making sense.

No matter how seething I would be during this delivery, I would do my utmost best to remain calm, composed, and collected. Emotion transfers to the audience. People watching – at home or in the audience – will be able to tell that I'm angry and upset. More specifically, they will be able to tell that I'm angry and upset about something they've embedded into their personality. As such, it would seem an assault on their values to them. As such, I would fail very quickly if I don't make an effort to compose myself.

Addressing Trump has 0% chance of changing things. I've lived with a narcissist: any mention of ill results go past their ears that otherwise attend to everything.

Addressing Trump's core audience? 0.5%. The slimmest of chances.

Given the opportunity, I'll take the shot. It may end up changing something.

They were okay tracks, I just had to break them apart into partial archives for size.

Britney Spears - Toxic.part1.zip

Britney Spears - Toxic.part2.zip

Britney Spears - Toxic.part3.zip

I used to pack 1.44MB archives onto stacks of diskettes to get a handful of new tracks back to the home PC.

Let me guess: Hacker News?

This off-topic comment got three shares in less than 20 minutes.

Something tells me my research won't go fruitfully in this thread.

I don't disagree with you. It's just... I asked a simple question.

Neither.

Does the antagonistic nature of "you vs. the employer" play any role here? I'm sure I'd be hurt to be sacked, but "fighting back" against something that wasn't of any harm does not come to me as the first natural step.

As absolutely fucking terrifying as all of this is... I find it a magnificent source of inspiration, as far as dystopian works of fiction go.

Also: if you have any, please supply available reading material with that sort of stuff.

As a secondary, more reasoned reaction: I want to know what your analyst friends have to say.

Needless to say... None of this paints a pretty picture.

I just want to be able to appreciate these feudal bratva dealings from the outside.

So, Russia's constitution is changing today. Putin's aiming to the God-President for Life, at this rate.

I'm saying "is changing", even though the votes are not in yet, because... Well, you know why.

May I say, in the least eloquent fashion possible:

> and guards waiting to escort them to their cars

That's fucked up.

I'm guessing it's "cases as in somebody's going through the gamut of symptoms", rather than "cases as in the person may or may not have contracted COVID-19" (including all the asymptomatic cases)?

Shame.

Thanks for the actual answer.

You know what this reminds me of? The first time we talked on Hubski.

I asked for film recommendations. You mentioned a few that were off the mark, given the constraints of the request. I said "You misunderstand". You waved around just how many awards are in your cupboard and how fuck no you didn't misunderstand. I told you to go fuck yourself, and we haven't spoken for a while.

I'm a newbie when it comes to writing. I don't know as much about theory as you do. I offered my point of view for you to confirm or decline, hopefully with an explanation. You went on a rant about worldbuilding as a kind of writing (as opposed to worldbuilding as a way to populate the world with living, breathing things so what you show in your story doesn't feel two-dimensional), and then gave one single paragraph answering the question at hand.

I just want to know if this is how my asking something about the craft is gonna go from now on.

> Harry Potter is "there is magic in the world but there is a conspiracy to keep it secret".

Would that not be the worldbuilding part, rather than storybuilding? There's very little in the films or the books about opening up to the Muggles, compared to the greater threat of Wizz War Two.

Would a better example be "If it's exploring new lows of the human nature, it must be a horcrux"?

I think it works well with the `45ch` limit. I think what you have now in your regular app works better with articles and such, like Medium or Ghost, where texts could be long.

Of course, I'm not the high authority on these matters; if people tell you that the column is too narrow, do take their voices into consideration: that's how you become better as a developer and a designer.

> I also wonder if you have some ideas on places I could potentially advertise to

I'm not much for a marketer. I just make things.

If I made an app that I wanted to present to the world, I'd look for places where there's demand for what I made. If I make an app that's good for writing long texts, I'd show it to writers, journalists, bloggers, script writers... – anyone who could use such a thing. Seems like a reasonable thing to me: you want those to see it who could engage with it meaningfully.

So my guess is: figure out what kind of an audience you want, and what kind of an audience Midnight's best suited for, and show up there with the app in hand.

For scale, you could advertise to Product Hunt and post it as an alternative to other products.

I didn't need another item on the list of food stuff to buy when in the US, but by god, I'm taking it.

Oh, I meant like quarter of the loaf tall, in jest. In reality it's closer to 0.75 inch.

Neat, thanks for the tip!

I think discoverability is a good motivation, especially for an app that has network, community, and the shared discussion as its pillars. Given the size of your audience at the time, however, I don't think it should be the main problem to solve.

Go deep first: make sure all of the existing systems work well, and upgrade what is before going for what could be. Midnight is in alpha: people will forgive even drastic changes to the app, as long as you treat user data (Entries, References, profile info etc.) with respect.

One idea in particular I've been following for a while: that most UI design on the Web is list design. The bottom line is: if you nail the list, the rest of it comes along easier and quicker because you've figured out the core of your design. It's even more appropriate in your case: you have a list of Entries, where each Entry is a "list" of contents.

With a single-column design – any, not just yours – it's very much about expectation. You expect stuff to flow down around a single axis, and if something stands out, it must be important (like an error message), or it shouldn't attract that much attention (like a "Log out" prompt far into the corner).

One thing that stands out to me is the fact that, without a scroll bar to the right (if the Entry is shorter than my screen height), the whole column shifts suddenly to the right. This is natural for such layout, but it's still a minor issue: people don't like it when things suddenly jump a few pixels away, especially if nothing changes from their perspective.

My suggestion is to calculate scroll bar width if the scroll bar is present (i.e. if `offsetWidth` of `window` is greater than `clientWidth`), and add a special class to `<body>` if content height (plus whatever vertical padding and margins you may have set) is shorter than `window.clientHeight` (i.e. the viewport). That way, going between a long list of Entries on the main page and one particularly-short Entry won't shift its content visually. Naturally, don't forget to remove the special class if content height is greater than the viewport height.

As a sidenote: consider replacing pixel-based width for content columns with `ch`-based. `ch` is the width of the font's `0` character ("advanced measure", I'm obligated to say, but for Web design concerns it's almost always its width). As Eric Meyer points out, it's not quite as precise as "the width of a character", but given that you're working with text, it's better than sizing with pixels.

It's been suggested that the optimal length of a line (which, in our case, is also the width of the entire column) should be somewhere between 50 and 75 characters. Given Eric's observation that, on average, characters in fonts are ~25% wider than its corresponding `0`, and assuming we're aiming for the average of 60 characters per line, consider setting the width of your column to `45ch` and see where it leads you. Remember that it's all in service of readibility, so if it consistently feels off to you, tweak the values until reading is pleasant.

I'd also like to leave this Nielsen Norman Group article here. It's a list of issues many applications have. No context for it, I just figured you might extract useful information for it.

> nor are you supposed to let the dough rise

Pizza dough from the Russian recipes is bread. :P

Thin and solid. Yep, those are the memories.

When you talk about the order of ingredients: are you saying you're supposed to start with cheese?

I figured you must've had more important things to do than anxiously consider replying to that one guy on the Internet. It's all good. Hope you're well.

> I went ahead and updated the username length to 20 character maximum. Let me know if you think I should increase that.

So, apparently, emails allow up to 64 characters for the username (the part before the @-sign). Twitter now allows 50 characters, with its previous 15-character limit based in its previous nature of being SMS-driven. I see no reason not to up the limit to somewhere up in that range.

There's also the concern of the minimum username length. Is there any particular reason to set it as high as 3 characters?

> I would love to get your feedback on other parts as well if you are interested. :)

I was going to write out a short list initially, but it didn't seem necessary. Now that you ask...

1. There's no immediately-obvious way to sign up, as there is with signing in. Whether registering an account right now is easy is irrelevant: it's best to provide the user with the initial opportunity to do so. User comes in, sees that registering is possible, tries it out – maybe they find the message of "Midnight is in alpha, key is required", but at least they know where to go.

1.1. Consider using two different terms for registration and logging in. There's this confusing-ass trend of "sign in" + "sign up" where you have exert effort to focus in order to distinguish which is which because the two look similar enough for your brain to mix them up unless they're in the focal point of your vision. Consider distinct wording. Apparently "log in" + "register" is not cool anymore, even though it works very well. How about "sign in" + "make an account"? "Log in" + "Make a blog"?

2. The main screen is in two-column layout, while Entries are single-column. Consider making both single-column, to avoid post-switch confusion: it's temporary but unpleasant.

3. The "midnight moon" symbol in the corner of the page is excellent. It even scales with the zoom level, which is a very nice detail. Keep it, whatever you do, unless you come up with something that's decidedly better.

4. Make sure to distinguish Entry body from whatever reference it makes. At the very least, mention that these are the references made by the Entry: this gives immediate clarity at very little cost otherwise.

4.1. Also make sure that the "next"/"previous" links are meaningful. You can't immediately tell what the "Previous" link is to when it's below References: is it the previous Entry? is it the previous page of References? is it previous on some form of bookmark list? Minimalism is good and all, but when it obscures meaning, you may want to consider employing a different practice. You want knobs and bells that most users can easily and immediately tell apart and use intentionally.

5. I would advise separating body text from Entry titling. Let users make in-Entry Markdown titles that don't affect the Entry's overall title. While I can see the appeal of using top-level heading from the body, there isn't a structure in the Entry making (as far as I can tell) that makes good use of it. It's a feature that dangles in the air, and it's confusing by default: I'd expect to have a separate input field where I'd name the Entry I'm making, and I'd also expect to be able to use semantic leveling in the body of my Entry starting from the top level (single #), rather than from level 2 (##).

6. Consider giving multiple inputs a meaningful amount of spacing, perhaps like this, with `0.5em`.

7. The HTML structure could use a little polishing. You're using `<section>` elements for simple pocketing of content, which is not its purpose. `<section>` is meant to be the foundation of semanic HTML structuring; while there are no tools to use it yet, it is its stated purpose, along with many other HTML5 elements, like `<main>` or `<header>`. Don't use it where you simply want to group two elements together, like in the sign-up page's `<form>`: use `<div>` for that.

7.1. The way I understand it, the best way to use `<section>`s is by making it a wrapper for related contextual elements. You can use `<article>` to hold the body of the Entry, and use `<section>`s for each heading-separated part of the text: `<section>` → `<hN>` + `<p>` + `<img>` + `<blockquote>` + whatever other content element there is.

7.2. Avoid empty elements for spacing. Add margins and padding to `:first-child`, or `:first-of-type`, or `:last-of-type` pseudo-elements, or to the wrapper elements themselves, or to the next element after the one you want to add space after (e.g. `section + section`).

8. Consider using `<time>` element for dates.

9. Consider adding some form of subtle delineation between Entries of a list. Fading out is good, but there's order in knowing where exactly it ends when you're faced with two Entries one after another.