I just asked to look at the potential benefits (and drawbacks). If you have some evidence that it is a bad suggestion I would love to hear what those drawbacks are so we can make an informed decision as a community and as individuals. If you can refer me to the academic studies that you know of, that would be great.
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Yes. Maybe there is not enough granularity? People use the ‘like’ button for so many different things ( “I’ve seen it”, “that is an EBT perspective”, “that fits with my interpretation”, “I sympathize with you”, “I found that beneficial”, etc.). I don’t think it’s very meaningful on this forum at the moment and it may well be driving greed and hatred like it seems to do on other social ‘platforms’.
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I think you don’t get it, like button is bad and should be replaced with a full blow star rating system people should be able to rate content like how they currently rate their apps or their shopping cart , it’s obvious that a 5 star content would be better than a 1 star content it’s not even debatable , it’s obvious, isn’t it ?
The question is when will we implement this system
Research shows that star rating is the best system to filter out bad politician from getting elected we just need to expand this to contents too
What kind of content rating system do you want ?
- Star rating
- Rank choice voting
- Like dislike combo
- The current system is good
0 voters
Quite probably. I’m not known for my searing intellect.
Possibly. But is it better than not having content rating at all?
I can’t help thinking that we might not have MN1 with a star rating or down-voting system. After all, the mendicants gave the Buddha just 1 star for that discourse. 
172-194.30That is what the Buddha said.
172-194.31But the mendicants were not happy with what the Buddha said.
Research seems to show that people don’t use rating buttons just for a dispassionate assessment of content. Here’s some content from one of the outlets that you use.
A team of researchers, for example, found that users in the United States often chose to like something for bonding purposes rather than simply liking the content.
Another study of Facebook users found that the ‘like’ button is used to maintain relationships with existing friends or to develop new relationships.
People may use the ‘like’ button as a way to publicly show closeness to another person, or even as an effort toward dating someone.
The point being that the ‘like’ button does far more than just express how much a person likes a particular picture or post.
Research has also shown that the ‘like’ button is not entirely harmless.
While social networking sites are powerful tools for building relationships, research has shown that certain social media features can adversely affect users.
For instance, a study found that impersonal gestures such as the one-click ‘like’ communication may not promote user well-being.
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I definitely understand your position on “likes” and they’re something I feel a bit uneasy with myself. I don’t use social media anymore (outside of this forum), but when I started using this forum I tried to approach it with some mindfulness about the problems that likes had caused for me in the past.
One practical thing I did that was extremely helpful was to turn off notifications for people liking my posts. I will still check from time to time to see if a post has gotten likes, and I see that mostly as a way to read the room… since I’m relatively new here, it’s useful to have some feedback about if my participation is contributing positively to the forum.
Giving likes is ambiguous, as you point out, but I’m not sure that’s a big problem for me. I use a like online exactly as I’d use a smile IRL, I’m just trying to communicate general positivity and good will. If I want to be more specific, I’ll write something more specific.
But the inherent uneasiness in giving and receiving likes is something that can really strengthen practice, if approached in the right way. If something I write doesn’t get any likes and I notice feeling disappointed, there’s a lot to be learned by examining why that feeling arose. Or if something I wrote gets a lot of likes and I notice feeling a lot of pleasure from that, there’s so much to learn about ego in that moment. Examining the decision to like or not like something someone else wrote yields rather a lot of information as well, about how skillfully I’m relating to other people and how external stimulus can lead to internal cravings and aversion.
6 Likes
Yes. I only found that functionality recently, and very good it is too. For those who don’t know it’s:
- Click on your avatar
- Click on the little person icon on the right hand side
- Click on ‘Preferences’
- On the left hand side click on ‘Notifications’
- About half way down there is a setting ‘Notify when liked’
Point taken, but not everyone uses the 
in that way, so as a communication tool I think that these single click reactions are still problematic. Even a selection of emoticons would mean so much more. 
That’s certainly very true and very valid. But in those times when it is not approached in the right way (those days where our mindfulness is a bit below par), do these 's lead to more strife in the community and more work for the moderators? Is it worth encouraging unwholesome behaviours in those of us who are not so mature in the path with an ambiguous messaging system? I don’t know the answers, I’m just asking questions at this point. What I do know is that there have been some excellent contributors who have left the forum over the years due to argy-bargy, so it is entirely possible that we can do better by using communication tools that don’t drive (those of) us (who don’t know our minds so well) into unwholesome directions?
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I actually really like Discourse the way it is (it was a great choice), and my only slight gripe with it, is that I wish they improved the mobile experience. (Like maybe a dedicated mobile app, which can handle switching between accounts at several different discourse sites)?
I use a laptop as my “daily driver” BTW, not a phone. I only advocate a mobile perspective, because many Buddhists I know, especially the younger generations, have a mobile-first philosophy, and generally don’t seem to care about privacy. Actually, it’s probably better described as a “sour-grapes” situation: since they can’t have privacy (to go along with all the access and convenience they feel a sense of entitlement towards, including the benefits of Network Effects, as @Khemarato.bhikkhu mentioned), they decidedly don’t want privacy. You know, the old “I’ve got nothing to hide” line. That’s sour grapes.
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I appreciate more traditional Content Management Systems like Wordpress (much more heavyweight, and have a backend database), but there had better be someone who is on-call to apply Security Updates! (Or automate such updates, then check on them).
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Bhante, what kind of mobile device are you using (I figure it must be Android, but is it on the smaller or larger side regarding screen size)? There can be an issue with the keyboard taking a large piece of screen on smaller devices, but there are compact keyboards that help with that.
On a bigger screen I have at least top 50% of the screen available for the composer and can see roughly 12 lines of text while typing.
On Android the keyboard also hides automatically by pressing the Android back button, which enables me to navigate to other posts in or outside the topic and select and quote text as needed.
Actually, one of the things that impressed me the most was that Discourse came equipped by a usable mobile experience from the very start, unlike some more popular forum software, which is absolutely horrid on mobile (flat infinite scroll beats paginated nested replies any day).
I also use mobile devices exclusively (5.7" Android and 10" tablet) for both content creation and administration, with 90% of the time using a mobile phone (I can even do SSH to the server from Android if needed, but I do use a tablet for most of the back end administrative tasks and for some of the more complex posts).
Although this is not a native app which would enable viewing content on each Discourse forum (it can, but it uses Chrome tabs, so it is basically still Web client), it is primarily a hub which enables one to add multiple forums to the same interface (using separate credentials for each forum), with a general overview of new and unread posts for each forum
as well as a cumulative notifications view over all connected forums
I usually set each Discourse forum as a PWA (PWAs created from Chrome are available as ‘native’ apps on Android) and set URLs for each forum to open in its corresponding PWA (works on Android, not sure about iOS), and then I can access the content for each forum directly from the hub (each forum opens in its own PWA ‘native’ app).
A native (mobile OS or Desktop specific) app was requested (and even developed) by some users in the past, but it is very unlikely that the Discourse team would develop official one, though. There are good reasons for it: different forums can be extended by numerous plugins and themes, which couldn’t be rendered by a generic app, because these are server and client dependent (each forum would have to produce its own native app for something like this to work).
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I have an Android 11 phone with a 6" screen. No tablet.
I’m trying your suggestions: Chrome (not my fav, but OK), save PWA to home screen, plus I’m using a Bluetooth keyboard. It’s a passable experience, yes. Thanks.
There are some decent keyboard shortcuts that work this way too, like selecting text while holding shift, Ctrl + B to bold, etc. This overcomes tiny things to tap on.
1 Like
Agreed, Github is super generous to allow Jekyll hosting, even with custom domain names. Thanks Microsoft! I’ll give Microsoft credit where it’s due there.
Non-geeks should ignore the next paragraph:
I went with my own paid-for VPS, where I run Debian as the OS, and nginx as the web server. I had to use some sophisticated nginx configuration, because I use the “clappr” web-page embedded video player a lot on my site, and it developed a tough-to-accommodate fussiness: clappr doesn’t like it when you embed videos which are not located within your own domain, or sub-domain! I had to very carefully think through the DNS record setup, and nginx configs, to make clappr happy, and simultaneously avoid storing large binary blobs, namely .mp4 Dhamma talk videos, within git.
2 Likes
One thing we haven’t discussed yet: what about a non-evil payments system?
PayPal is one of the uber-evil companies, being founded by the Facebook board member Peter “freedom and democracy are incompatible” Thiel, who is quite possibly the most dangerous man alive. The founders of PayPal went on to create, among other things, Palantir (aka the seeing stone; see also “Valar Ventures” and “Mithril Capital”) which runs data analytics for spy agencies and the military, and Glow, a “fertility app”. Totally not creepy!
SuttaCentral uses Stripe, which when we started was a pretty clean startup. It’s grown a lot since then, though. Recently they announced they were looking at launching their own crypto, so I am looking for other options. I don’t want SC’s finances to be handled by a company that believes in fairy dust and wishes.
But that’s the problem, isn’t it? Actually all these companies do plenty of good things. Well most of them! We can point to individual problems and behaviors, but at the end of the day, the underlying issue is not the specifics, but the very idea of companies that large and with their fingers in so many pies. No private organization, especially not ones operating with so little oversight, should have that much money and power.
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Indeed, there are so many fingers in so many pies, it’s pretty much impossible to keep track of which fingers are in what pies of varying degrees of good or evil.
That’s another reason why I like using my own little Frankenstein-esque Open Source-based website: yes, it took longer to understand and set up, but then it pays off in the longer term, because I know each piece of the puzzle well, and these pieces change very little over time. There aren’t these fluctuating corporate reputations and gradually darkening shades of morality underlying everything, much more subject to the turbulent changes in market conditions, marching to a ruthless drumbeat toward the endless need to keep growing and performing economically.
Open Source lets you step outside those uncontrollable market forces to a large extent. Having said this, you do step inside a wild-west of choosing from many competing open source projects, so it’s a little like robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s still worth it, because the overall morality underlying the Open Source world is much cleaner, by and large (albeit, not perfect).
PS: here in Canada we have a good online payment system called “Interac eTransfer”, which is just sort of like conventional banks allowing payment from one Canadian bank account to another, based on the recipient’s email address. Only works within Canada, unfortunately. Maybe Australia has something like that? It’s too bad it isn’t a global system.
3 Likes
I do much of the technical bits for the Wisdom and Wonders project - wiswo.org which is mainly a WordPress site, although the MettaShelf book web app MettāShelf Library is an attempt at me learning a bit of vanilla JavaScript. The code is a mess, but I’ll get it together by the time it reaches v1 I promise. 
We don’t really produce any video at the moment, but I think that will change over the coming years and I’m looking at a plan about how/where to host these.
Thanks @musiko for the LBRY recommendation, I’ve put that on my research list.
Are there others that I should put on the list?
Does anyone have any comments to make about joinpeertube.org ?
For background, so you know where to pitch any answers ...
I have also acquired a computer science degree in my travels through life (a long time ago in the pre Linux/WWW era). My experience is architecting the non functional requirements (TA) for mission/life critical systems, but for the nitty gritty I relied on the skills of network, sys and db magicians… I mean ‘admins’. So, very far away from the weird and wacky world of WWW development. A whiteboard and marker pen are my main design tools.
I do have a raspberry pi (SBC) hanging off my home router on which I’ve installed a LEMP stack, some letsencrpt SSL certs and a couple of public facing WordPress sites so I can share development and testing with the other wiswo project members. So I can do that sort of thing.
I don’t use GitHub, but it’s on the (ever growing) list. Maybe it shouldn’t be?
As far as using, working for, encouraging, and investing in GAFAM, let’s just say I’m probably going to hell. But that’s nothing compared to the damage that I’ve caused to people and nature by enabling GAFAM clients with the systems I’ve helped them to build. But at least I’m done with all that now. It’s safe to say that I’m not mendicant material. 
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Thank you venerable for the link to the video about Facebook - it is quite shocking.
However, ethical choice about Facebook use depends on a situation. There are other reasons than being misinformed about Facebook or not knowing of alternatives, why at least some people, stay with Facebook – it is due to a group effect or a kind of network effect. This may apply to some monks and nuns, not just lay people like me.
For many older people to give up Facebook would mean giving up membership in all Facebook private groups they joined. Effectively it would also mean cutting off information on group real life meetings, outings and opportunities to continue cultivating such friendships, and give others support in good social projects, and feel supported too.
Would cancelling Facebook membership benefit them or other people in their groups? I don’t know. But personally, at present, as far as I see it would neither benefit me or benefit others in the 2 groups I am in if I got out, but in the future maybe.
Similarly, for some parents and grandparents, to leave a Facebook private family group – would mean to reduce connection with the loved ones and opportunity to learn about their activities at least to some extent, when not able to see them directly. In the past, most grandparents lived with their families, and children were protected and guided through their help in various ways. Now many family members are far apart, and children listen less to parents, let alone grandparents after they reached teenage years. They chose the social media their friends use, not what their parents or grandparents would like them to watch or read.
Would that really help my family if I cancelled my Facebook account? At present no, and the future depends on them too.
I have been using computers all my adult life, and it has been a gradual process, from learning about computers and binary system and simple programming at school in late 1960s, to later using them at university study, work and at home for many years – from math workstations and the DOS, to first versions of Windows and Office, early computer languages and Intranet to finally Internet with its innovations. So, I have been aware of the gradual changes and impacts of computers on my mind and on others I know personally for more than 50 years. I was never really interested in using computers for entertainment, but as a marvellous tool and library. So I feel saddened to read and hear stories of misuse of those great inventions – misuse by chains and networks of software developers, business wholesale and retail and broad range of users.
I think Facebook organisation is like other big multinational business for profit that is just supplying demand of consumers, following the same old business model as many governments who aim for ongoing economic growth and measure progress using money.
If all science and IT graduates had to pass a subject on ecology and global ethics and then also sign an oath of ethical conduct, before they received their degrees, then I think social media and both global physical and social (mental) climate would change to the better more rapidly .
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That’s possible. But for IT, I’m not sure how much it would help. Because of the ever-increasing redundancy of computer science degrees. You can’t be a doctor without a degree, so the oath holds weight. But becoming a self-made programmer isn’t much harder than getting a comp sci degree.
If you can demonstrate that you know your stuff, you may actually get ahead of people with degrees. I have a comp sci degree, and I’d say 90% of my fellow students never learned how to code. It’s one thing to get good grades and write code that simply does things. It’s a completely different thing to really understand how to write good code. You can’t learn that from most universities.
Public interest and education would go a long way. So many people simply don’t understand the importance of protecting their data, nevermind how to do it. Which probably can’t be changed quickly. But mandatory classes on Internet & privacy in high schools would be a good start.
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That’s a commendable idea. Here’s one thing I can share when it comes to better ethics: back when I was in Uni, learning Linux was optional (and I did so). Today, at the same university, same program, learning Linux is mandatory. You can’t even get into your first Comp. Sci. class until you’ve gone through “Linux Boot camp.” So the better ethics that come along with Linux effectively gets enforced today (at least, at the Uni where I went), as a required part of the curriculum to be learned.
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That connected goodness isn’t inherent to Facebook, it’s inherent to wherever the network effects happen to accrue. In the medium term, the Network Effects could similarly accrue someplace else, someplace with better ethics, then you and your family could get the same connected goodness there. Facebook doesn’t own the patent on “friendships”, nor “family togetherness.” They’ve just managed to garner, by hook or by crook, the Network Effects at this time in history.
Yes, but that is not an issue for me and probably is not for many other people. The Facebook private groups I joined (with some hesitation) on invitation by group members, by real friends whom I trust. I am not in a position to change those real groups to different social media platforms.
Here I share one as an example - Nan Tien Campaign 2030 - Spiritual Environmental Community of Practice. One founder of the campaign is a lay Buddhist and another is monastic. And they advertise the group monthly Zoom events via Facebook and share good information to support the group members and inspire others. I am not in the position to influence the choice of their social media platforms and I don’t want to upset anyone.
Earlier this month Bhante Sujato joined a panel discussion at our monthly Zoom event, on a topic ‘How do you know things’. It was advertised both on the Lokanta Vihara website and on Facebook NT Campaign 2030. He is much more informed about social media platforms than I and in much better position to influence Buddhist group decision makers.
So please share here a link to a viable alternative to Facebook that Bhante Sujato would recommend as well, so I can then share it with the Nan Tien group at our next meeting along with the link to video about Facebook corruption scandals. Thanks.