/r/StarTrek founder and primary steward from 2008-2021

Currently on the board of directors for StarTrek.website

  • 6 Posts
  • 87 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • As a former mod of a large community I hated that small writers and creators bloggers were lumped in with the spammers. You want to know why Reddit became generic and boring? Why the internet doesn’t feel boundless and weird anymore? Because over time only large established websites were permitted to be linked to without getting immediately IP banned.

    When /r/StarTrek was small and I was trying to grow it, I invited several Trek bloggers I liked to post their writings. These weren’t “blogspam”, they were just people who just loved writing. They would always engage with the community in the comments under their posts. Over time they all were banned and their domains were blocked from being shared by any account on Reddit.

    I agree with you that the system is working “as intended” but the intent sure feels a lot like forcing anyone making OC to be platform-locked to Reddit or risk having their entire domains be labeled as “spam”.








  • More mods and admins on Fedi need to step up and take bolder action, imo. Whether intentional or not, a mods inaction will often set the tone for a given community more than their actions.

    Imagine the community you mod meets in person and someone is being obnoxious and disruptive. A new attendee is not going to speak up, they’re going to look to you for guidance. If you allow unwelcoming behavior to persist, then attendees learn that being loud is how to get noticed, and if they don’t want to be loud (as many of us don’t) they’ll just stop going.













  • KDE is the easiest for coming from Windows, you almost never never need the command line or anything “extra” to customize it (beyond what even Windows will allow).

    GNOME (especially in Ubuntu) by default is more Macintosh-like which might appeal to some people, it’s “simpler” but any customizations will require navigating the add-ons (and in my experience inevitably the command line too).

    I think KDE is the one for most people who just want a functioning PC. GNOME could be good for the PC you might make for your parent. Bonus points for an immutable distro which are even harder to break.