/next/ - Infinity Next

>>1172

Well, no. For two reasons.

1) I'm actually not a big fan of 1-3 character board names because it places emphasis on the shortest ones as being the "authentic" boards, especially if they're from 4chan. I think it would take a lot of fucking up for /v/ and /pol/ to lose their place because of how important those names are. Like, even if Mark decided that no discussion about MMORPGs or Pokemon were allowed, we'd still probably see a 50/50 tossup between something like /vidya/ and /v/ because people are less inclined to leave the board name they've been using for years. It defeats that idea of every board having its own shot at being popular.

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

>In probability theory, the birthday problem or birthday paradox concerns the probability that, in a set of n randomly chosen people, some pair of them will have the same birthday. By the pigeonhole principle, the probability reaches 100% when the number of people reaches 367 (since there are 366 possible birthdays, including February 29). However, 99.9% probability is reached with just 70 people, and 50% probability with 23 people.

With 36 alphanumeric characters, there are 1,457,856 possible permutations of each length between 1 and 4 characters long.

So for fun, I looked up how the pigeonhole principal would apply to this.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=birthday+attack&lk=1&a=ClashPrefs_*MathWorld.BirthdayAttack-

And I came up with 1449 (Though I'm not good at math so feel free to correct me :---DDD)

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1.2+*+sqrt%281457856%29

After 1,449 boards, there is a 50% chance that any input you'd enter would already be taken. Considering we now have over 8000, chances are we'd be at 75% now. You'd be making boards named /qqxz/ or something just to have real-estate on 8chan.

>>1174

Top bar as is gives too much real estate to boards with long names.

Boards have the name but they also have the title, right now the title is a bit superfluous for boards with long names.

All the top boards could easily handle shorter names, furry to fur, gamergatehq to gghq, leftypol to lpol, cuteboys to boys, christian to chst or something (maybe make it a 5 character limit?), baphoment to baph.

Overall I don't like how long board names play out, maybe 4chan nostalgia.

>>1176

Did you completely miss my point that the board names are not centrally controlled and people who want to make competing boards have to use longer names?

And the top bar is disabled by default.

>>1179

We seem to be making two different points, I wouldn't mind a board called /qqxz/.

I'm not a fan of the top bar being disabled by default either.

How about we abolish the legacy board name structure altogether. What value does it bring to the system other than "4chan did it so we have to do it"?

I'd rather you just assign everyboard a short hash/ID like a trip and remove the requirement altogether. Boards should have a name but that name should be an actual title instead of this stupid arbitrary bullshit that hardcodes retard birthday effect bullshit.

I'd really recommend a general auditing of these sorts of legacy (read:4chan) features before you make the mistake of hardcoding in the same troublesome limitations of a decade prior.

This won't be listened to of course because of baby duck effect tantrums and the site will actually die as a result of its awful moderation.

What a waste to make just another 7chan.

>>1185

That's not the point I'm making.

Every board name on 4chan is cryptic, you wouldn't know what they were unless you were familiar with them.

/o/ is cars

/k/ is guns

/u/ is yuri

etc

8chan breaks the 4chan naming convention by having long names that tell you what a board is just by looking at the name, making the title superfluous for boards with short names.

>>1186

>making the title superfluous for boards with short names.

fug, I meant long names.

>>1186

I don't really care what point you're making. This is a stupid feature that shouldn't exist on this site to begin with. It works for 4chan because there is central planning but on a platform like 8chan you end up with tin pot dictators squatting on 4chan board names with essentislly total impunity.

Get rid of these stupid tags. They serve no purpose whatsoever and just handicap the site. All the site will ever be is 4chans cumrag if you're not willing to do something about this.

>but nobody will know where to go or how to use the site

Great! Then they will actually look at the boards on offer and do something besides follow ingrained destructive 4chan habits. Put an end to this madness.

As for you, NZ flag, you're even worse than the current system. You not only want this stupid shit but want to double down on it. Josh already demonstrated mathematically that there is no chance of what you've said ever happening here on this site. The problem is the confinement and the solution is definitely not to make shit more crowded.

>>1185

A sound argument.

I'd propose to retain this abbreviation format, but allow multiple boards to have the same abbreviation by using IDs to identify boards.

Each board would have an ID, a name, and an abbreviation. ID would be in the URL and perhaps shown in the catalogue, a name would be full name (like Infinity Next), while the abbreviation would only serve to avoid long strings in the topbar.

Suddenly you'd be able to, for example, have several /v/s competing each other.

This would break the current crossboard linking system though.

>>1196

I think most users wish to keep the website as it is. The people coming here, demanding large changes are a minority, it's just that most people don't feel like telling you to keep everything the same, since they already expect that.

In an ideal situation, the change to next wouldn't be noticeable for users not paying attention. There should be nothing you have to relearn after the change, if there is, your project has missed it's purpose, which was creating a modern software able to give the classic imageboard experience.

Digg dies because of this shit, please don't fuck it up.

>>1196

Crossbroard linking could be solved by just adding the ID of the board at the end of the board name like this: >>>/v/i12/1023144

The i12 works like this, i means ID and 12 in this situation means that it's the 12th /v/ created. Of course this is just complicating everything that could be solved by just using a different board name, but if you want to it's solved easily (you would have to remember what ID of the board you are cross-linking of was though).

>>1197

>nothing should change

Then nothing will change here and the site will deserve its awful reputation for poor management. Besides arbitrarily sticking to one particular piece of the 4chan aesthetic is there an actual reason why these "abbreviated names" should stay?

The window to make structural changes will close eventually and this will be probably the absolute last chance to stop this mistake from being propagated further. You need to decide whether you want to react to the boards of today or plan for the future. This system is BARELY working today and has caused a great deal of grief in a year already - souring a great deal of people to the site as a whole. Do you really think it will keep working a year from now, how about five? If you're not going to take this seriously or plan long term whatsoever why even bother making this project to begin with?

>but a 5-6 character hash is hard to type!

This is where tags and multi-catogs come in. People will actuat have a reason to click tags and to use the board list instead of just doing the same tired 4chan habits.

Do you want to be something besides "not 4chan"? This is a chance to show your commitment to making a professional website with a well thought out structure.

>but what will it say on the board list

It will say the title and description of the board next to its ID/hash.

>What about claims?

Hopefully this will alleviate a lot of the pressure on the claims system because nobody will give a shit to claim a random hash/id. The community will be the only thing actually keeping people on a board.

>>1202

/g/ is prime real estate but no one uses it.

people will complain no matter what system is in place.

board name isn't as important as you think it is.

>>1204

Except you're 100% wrong. It is incredibly important to remove these tags. There is a reason 4chan board names make up a huge percentage of the top boards here and that's because the habit has been enabled by the tag system. For someone who started this thread to complain about a minot aesthetic limitation of the tags system it's pretty rich to hear that nobody cares.

You argue that /g/ is prime real estate but I would argue it is the best case for scrapping the system altogether. The only reason you even give a shit about the tag at all is because it is a 4chan tag and it is perhaps the only major tag from a popular board (/vg/ doesn't count for a number of reasons that should be obvious) that wasn't squatted on and treated like a personal vanity board by some tinpot dictator. If nobody cares about the tags, why keep them when all they do is cause problems, if everyone cares (which they do as shown by the /tech/ exception and everything that has happened with /int/) then they need to go. Now's the time to trash them so the rest of the site features can pick up the slack and actually be useful. Nobody is going to use "tags" or whatever other features you add for "board discovery" when they don't need to learn anything about the site to know where everything is. It's a pointless structure built onto tinyboard to make some people feel better when in the end it will result in the same shitty 7chan experience we have today. This needs to stop.

>>1206

The idea you brought up occurred to me when I made this thread but I lean on this side >>1197

>>1207

Then don't bother adding any discovery features and don't pretend this site has an actual long-term vision as anything other than a less coherent 7chan.

The only people who want to stick to these sorts of arbitrary things for no reason are those who have not watched this same scenario play out repeatedly across countless "splinter" sites. The interface and structure of the site should fit its purpose, not its geneology.

It would be far better to have a multi-board catalog / multi-board which shows all politics threads ny default than it would be to just funnel everyone into /pol/ and /leftypol/. Subject tags should replace board tags. You could always show just a single board too, or remove unwanted boards from the subject tag by unselecting them in the UI - but there is no reason to continue this worst of both worlds set up where there's all the structures of a centralized board like 4chan with none of the consistency and benefits centralization provides.

The digg comparison is a false one, this UI and software change will be beta tested for over a month, there is no mass migration to reddit, and the site largely produces its own content instead of aggregating (read: stealing) it from other places.

I am aware there's the "epic oldfag here" roleplayers who will scream and cry about literally anything, but they are unappeasable by nature and if this site cannot act to save itself out of fear of this stupid boogeyman reaction that won't even happen, it will die. This is probably the last big chance we're going to get to pull something worth half a shit out of the imageboard ecosystem that can serve as a "mothership" site. Don't fuck this up by being too timid to do what needs to be done, else you are already dead.

Oh man...

I've had several ideas about what should be the next successor to imageboards.

If anything, the constant board drama of 8chan has taught us that keeping the old system of letters as board names goes terribly with the idea of user-created boards, as for historical and practical reasons, some names are considered more prestigious than others. It's not a failure of the idea of board creation, it's just that the two don't go together well.

While I understand that people want to stick to the old system; isn't perhaps time to move on and try to make something new, something better? If we really want to give users the power to moderate on their own, isn't the logical system P2P, where posts are distributed between users who decide whether they want to pass them on or not? And why do we even have to use separate boards; on 4chan, there were those general threads that pretty much behaved as boards on their own, being more or less closed circlejerks, but if one allowed threads to branch, wouldn't that turn a general thread in a board of its own once it grows enough? And why do we need the top bar; the top25 system was removed, there is still the board list, but users themselves could put together catalogues like >>>/dir/, where they point others to quality boards (or branches, if you adopt the "branching general" system)?

It would be a pretty big feat, to think about all the things that could go wrong and try to prevent that in the design, and users would have to learn a couple of things anew, yes. But, as a result, we could create something new and better than the old system! The imageboard, the forum, and the social news system (reddit) have been used for quite a while, with mixed results, but now that they've been thoroughly tested, we can learn from their mistakes.

Just like how 8chan tested the user created boards idea. And it didn't turn out as well as we hoped.

>>1226

Agreed up to the p2p part.

I would propose just replacing a board tag with a subject multi-board tag. Instead of browsing /pol/ by default you browse "Politics" or "Video Games" instead of /v/. One of the sub boards in each would undoubtedly be the boards we know today. The point of all of this being to distribute the moderation risk.

Ideally, I'd like it so in the multiboard catalog you would see what board a thread was made on in a banner over the top of the post, like /all/ on other sites. Then, you would also be able to click a link to the right of it to see the rules, the moderation log (perhaps show last ban: time or how many actions per day) and the number of active users. It would be great if there were some system to review moderators, but I can't think of one that wouldn't need to be moderated itself.

The beauty of this it allows single boards to largely go about their business as they do today, whilst smaller boards can join in on larger topic discussions. In fact, because of the tagging system, someone could make a board just for a particular thread to "moderate their own thread", if they really wanted. It wouldn't be a problem because the topic tag view could easily add boards and perhaps have a setting to not sjow boards below a certain activity setting to deal with spam.

Boards as a result, are encouraged to form rings and users are similarily compelled towards board discovery.

Unlisted or untagged boards are largely left alone by this change and are perhaps even more protected from outside prying eyes.

>>1197

This. Also, existing boards with longer names would be unfairly affected.