Perhaps an "Off Topic" or "!=Zig" category?

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TLDR: Some eggshell-walking vibes are starting to crop up amongst Zig enthusiasts. It might be healthy to have a no-eggshell zone.

I’ll just type off the top of my head here, so bear with me.

I’m a lurker, I’ve been playing with Zig since 0.11 or so, and reading these boards, the repo issues, etc.

I had a really nice interaction on the one thread I created where andrewrk chimed in he was super nice, every single reply was worth reading, and everyone was terrific to me, some FNG with a new account.

That said lately, I’m not going to bother mentioning specifics, we’ve obviously had a little hoopla here and there within Zig. Ziggit has shown some signs of some of that stressy outside stuff creeping in.

My observation of communities like this is that as they grow, and the members have more stake in the primary subject, two things are needed to maintain stable and productive discourse:

  1. Members bonding outside of the specific topic at hand
  • Why? 'Cause if you go to sleep after having a nice back and forth with some folks about your shared interest of kayaking or yo-yo’s or cars or whatever and then wake up and see a thread you vehemently disagree with you’re not just bickering with a username – (not an AI em-dash I just write like this) you’re bickering with your yo-yo buddy.
  1. Pressure release valves.
  • Give folks a place to get mad at each other within reasonable bounds of civility. Contain the drama. We’re not on Reddit here, we won’t get the kind of amplification or drive-by posting that turns a community having an in-the-family argument into genuine destructive chaos.

I don’t want the technical threads being diluted or gunked up with irrelevant replies, I don’t think Ziggit should become a social network, nor do I think we should let genuinely malicious personal attacks be tolerated.

I do think that this could be a place with a specific little section for what is an overWHELMINGLY positive group of people who all are passionate about a shared interested to let their hair down a bit and just… relax.

As always, I’m very open to being told to shut up when I’m way off base, so feel free. :hand_with_index_finger_and_thumb_crossed:

  • Jas
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It is a nice idea, but there are plenty other places for such chat, and I can’t imagine the extra load that would put on the moderators. But for me, I come here for a pure human-made-with-love Zig experience :slight_smile:

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The social discussion group on the Zig Discord is sufficient IMO.

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…other places that don’t have this group of people. If people want to connect on topics that aren’t strictly Zig (in addition to Zig), I don’t see a problem with it. It may also give a place for moderators to put split threads that have diverged from the original topic in a thread.

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It is ultimately at the discretion of the mods but I don’t think other forums with leisure talk channels are the same thing OP was thinking about. The vibes are different between switching channels and switching forums.

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@WeeBull and @VoilaNeighbor you both really captured the spirit of what I’m proposing.

The goal is to give everyone who uses Ziggit to have a zero friction way to access a zero eggshell social environment to get to … bond, for lack of a less cheesy word.

For example – I’m a hobbyist programmer and my actual expertise is in audio engineering. It’d be cool to be able to talk about DAWs with people who are in a Zig state of mind.

It gives threads that are not hostile or toxic but just kind of have gone off topic after a while a place to be moved as well. This lets people keep an organically developing discussion active without clogging up the technical channels.

@pachde that is true, but I’m suggesting Ziggit has potential to have something nice for the community that requires more than a “sufficient” environment. It requires a pleasant one.

I’m also just sort of philosophically burned out with “Go to the Discord” or “Go to the subreddit” as the solution to community building when the usernames, post history, threads to link/cross reference, etc are already all living happily on a nice clean forum platform.

I really doubt it’d suddenly crank up the mod workload, but with all due respect they’re not air traffic controllers we can run a little experiment and see if it goes wrong here. :wink:

  • Jas
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Sounds like a good idea. Especially, for thoses cases you mentioned where a long discussion slowly goes into a different direction after a while like “changing topic”

I support this suggestion

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I don’t want to come across as ignoring this. I have a few questions. I have not gotten the sense that the community is walking on eggshells, but I could be being oblivious. Do you have any more concrete examples of what you mean. You don’t have to give specific situations, but maybe kinds of interactions that you’ve observed that indicate the up-tightness you are describing.

I’ve been opposed to adding off-topic categories/sections for a couple of reasons:

  1. Extra Moderating Burden: All of our moderators are volunteers. They do it for the love of the community. That being said, moderating does take time. Thankfully the ziggit has a high caliber group of individuals, that make it much easier to moderate, than say a reddit or discord (IMO). That being said it can be difficult. Adding an Off-Topic category makes the moderation effort much more difficult, as it allows a whole new order of magnitude of topics that are deemed OK to be discussed.

  2. Community Creation: While I can see the benefits of having a place to relax with a great group of people who share a common interest (zig), the problem with having a deliberate off-topic channel is that it will accrue members who are only here for the off topic discussions. This can lead to an odd effect where the community becomes more fragmented. I believe the zig discord had an issue with this in the past, where most of the users in the off-topic channel didn’t participate in any of the other channels.

  3. Maintaining Purpose: I think this problem is actually addressed by your idea that it should be separate/not dilute the technical discussions, but i wanted to mention it still. Ziggit should be a community for zig developers. If a new user comes to ziggit, and sees a bunch of Off topic posts as the most frequently posted talks, it could be jarring. I think one of the benefits that keeps ziggit so high caliber is that the discussions focus on Zig and zig adjacent discussions.

For those reasons, I have always advocated for keeping ziggit “off-topic” free.

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That could be good for community building and make the connections people make here more personal and rewarding. I think feeling good about the spaces where the language is discussed and having side channels for conversations that are off-topic but still may be useful is an advantage for everyone.

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If viewing and participating in an off-topic post was restricted to people with trust level 2 would that ease #1 and #2?

For #1, the restriction would act as a natural filter for bad actors and would mean people discussing in off-topic are already somewhat integrated into the community.

For #2, the restriction would mean that the people participating in off-topic posts would have participated in on-topic posts for a period of time.

It would also address #3 and @IceGuye 's concern about new users only seeing off-topic posts.

It feels sort of gatekeep-ey though which I don’t like. It may also create a sort of echo chamber situation where only those who agree with the zeitgeist and choose to stick around are speaking in the probably more serious and more political conversations. Maybe trust level 1 would be an adequate deterrent for ragebaiters and lax enough to allow for a diverse discourse (pun intended).

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An alternative (not sure how easy or hard this would be) is to simply exclude the off-topic category from appearing in the global / site-wide latest feed at all, at least by default.

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I definitely agree that if this idea is implemented, it should be opt-in category to be displayed, not what a new user sees when they login for the first time. I also agree with @jmstevers idea about trust levels.

While I personally have little interest in it, I have nothing against it it stays out of my way, others can enjoy if they choose to do so. I am unsure how beneficial it is to have a unrestricted off-topic category though, it seems like it should be at least tangentially related to computing/technology as a whole. I think there is a difference between chatting about NVIDIA DLSS 5, mathematical algorithms, or GTA6 compared to people using it to share their dating profile or argue over politics, religion, and other divisive issues.

I assume moderation wants absolutely nothing to do with the latter.

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I am asking myself what the goal of this category would be, what purpose does it serve?

Because I don’t see the points 1. and 2. stated by the OP as something that really makes sense in the context of an international programming online forum.

It maybe would make sense in the context of a local (connected to some place) community programming forum.
Why I don’t see these as really worth the downsides:

I don’t think it makes sense to deliberately try to make real life friends who are potentially on the opposite side of the earth across from you, that you then share interests with but are more unlikely to actually meet or go kayaking with.

  1. and

Having a group of close friends that you can (occasionally) vent to is great, but I think that only works between close friends, because venting to other people is draining to the people on the receiving side and when it happens too often, or isn’t a fair exchange, it eventually erodes the relationship, because sooner or later somebody gets tired of the constant complaining.

In the context of an online forum, I don’t see how such trash-talk / shit-posting (in the worst case), wouldn’t eventually lead down a negative path (where the people who are tired of the negativity leave) which reminds me of the black pill described in this talk: Andrew Kelley: Don't Take the Black Pill

Also I don’t fully buy that opening the door to such topics wouldn’t attract more new drive-by posts.

It isn’t necessarily the responsibility/purpose of an online community to provide a place to let of steam/pressure release for individuals, that is how you end up with places like reddit, where the community has to pay for the individuals that ruin the place and make it an less-enjoyable place to participate in. I think a lot of our users like this place exactly because it isn’t like reddit.

You could have a bunch of rules about topics needing to be wholesome on some level or staying away from certain topics (to nudge things more towards the good cases) to keep it less reddit like, however here is:

What I would recommend instead:

Connect with people from the community in real life by joining some event (or organizing):
zig.day
Meet

That way you can actually meet people you can hang out with, more easily talk about other stuff and find friends that would join you to go kayaking.

So basically I question the purpose of such off-topic category, because I think its benefits don’t measure up to the alternative of instead engaging in local area meetups, which are much more likely to result in some great experiences, instead of collecting a bunch of pen pals that are much more difficult to visit or become friends with.

I am sure that there are many great people all around the world that share some of the interests that I have, the main point that I want to make is that you should give yourself a higher likelihood that you actually end up with friends in your area, so that you could easily share a meal or some hobby with them.

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Perhaps a “social” category would make more sense than a generic “off topic”. We’ve already seen many posts about not zig related things (like people sharing articles of a rust bug causing a huge problem and then all the comments are like heh zig better). We’ve also seen posts of people asking about which countries they’re from, their gender identity, what languages they speak etc.

Edit - there is a “community” thing already but it’s not a first class category.

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