some guy sharing his thoughts

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pretty cool places that I moderate:

  • 43 Posts
  • 46 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Thanks a ton for the update Ernest! It’s great to hear from you, and I hope your health improves soon.

    That being said, I do have a few things I’d like to suggest.

    --

    In February, I spent my time visiting doctors and undergoing treatment with medications, which often had very unpleasant side effects. Therefore, I decided to hold off on any major updates to avoid causing even more chaos.

    If I’m interpreting this correctly (i.e., that you chose not to give any updates as to prevent people freaking out), I don’t think this was the best move. I understand where you were coming from, but (if you were able) some sort of small status update would’ve been preferable to a month-long silence (especially since you’d previously said that you’d be unavailable for only 2–4 days). A simple “Hey, I’m currently not doing well. I’ll get back to things as soon as I’m feeling better,” would’ve at least let us know that you were alive and that the project hadn’t been abandoned.

    --

    Just because it’s not visible that something is happening doesn’t mean I haven’t been doing anything during this time. In fact, two really significant things have been successful, which I’ve been working on for a long time and which I intended to announce soon once I recover.

    I don’t think this whole “holding off for a big announcement” thing is a great approach, at least not now. There are currently several issues that we’re waiting to see fixed, and we have no idea which ones (if any) are being worked on. If you must wait for a big reveal though, at least telling us, “I’m still working on stuff” would be better than nothing.

    --

    And finally, I really suggest getting some more admins for the instance. You’re absolutely correct to prioritize your health over Kbin; nevertheless, it’s far from ideal for your absence to mean that spam piles up, moderation requests lie unanswered, and accounts can’t be deleted. We’d all appreciate it if you could have at least one extra person on deck for whenever you’re ill or in need of a break.

    --

    Thanks again for all you do for Kbin, and I hope things get better!





  • When I was going through redesigning all of the U.S. state flags, this is one of the first designs I made. Here’s the symbolism:

    • The colors are reminiscent of the orange, white, & blue pattern used in many of New York’s state flag.

      • The blue has been replaced with the purple of the Iroquois flag.
    • The white shape in the center holds several meanings.

      • It resembles a crown to represent New York being the Empire State.
      • It points upward to represent New York’s motto: “Excelsior” (“Higher”).
      • It looks somewhat like tall skyscrapers because duh.












  • When I made this flag, I used red to symbolize the violent history of the Kansas Territory, a yellow stripe at the bottom to evoke a wheat field (given that one of Kansas’s nicknames is the Wheat State), and a sunflower at the top left. I didn’t notice the communist connotation of a red flag with a yellow symbol in the canton until someone pointed it out back when I posted this on Reddit. I still really like how the design looks, though maybe it’d be best to change the red to blue.














  • While that’s definitely a notable downside, I think the upsides outweigh it.

    For one, being able to see upvotes & downvotes seems to have made a lot of people a bit more thoughtful with handing them out. This obviously isn’t the case for everyone — there’s still a good bit of downvoting people for disagreeing with the hivemind — but I and others have observed that downvote quality is a lot better here on kbin.social, and I think that vote visibility is a big part of that.

    It’s also just transparency on kbin.social’s part. If votes federate, anyone can set up an instance to view your votes or just go to one that shows them. Someone could literally make a website listing downvotes throughout the fediverse, and there’s nothing stopping them. Kbin.social is being transparent about the fact that votes on the fediverse can be accessed by the public, and I have no issue with that.

    EDITː Removed a stray asterisk