Let's work together for the betterment of Meh

@f00l

Let’s take mediocrity to the next level though.

@PlacidPenguin cuber armpit farts?

@cranky1950 You’re cranky.

@PantHeist

I don’t want a visual refreshment just for deals though.

As others have pointed out, the Meh community feels like it’s stagnated a bit significantly.

Having a visual refreshment may help encourage (some) growth in communal between mehmbers.

@PlacidPenguin Just a bit? You are being too kind.

@mfladd

Noted and corrected.

@PlacidPenguin If they want more involvement I think there are plenty of places to put the effort which would have a higher return. Daily videos which are actually daily, contests which actually give the promised prizes, or a VMP type deal with silly rewards all seem like a better investment.

@PantHeist

1. Some of the videos are old (because @Matthew is sometimes too busy playing with puppets).

2. There are different departments. There are the buyers, the customer support, the people who frankly I have no idea what they do, the people who fill orders, the puppets, the @Matthew, the coders etc (I.e @kylethephotoguy). They’re all getting paid.
   While we see the results of work done by a lot of these groups, most of the obvious (for the end user) coding done to the site has been slash commands. This thread is more of an attempt to have one of the departments bring about new changes.

3. One of the things I personally look at when using an app for instance is the visual appeal. I’ve switched apps just because they are outdated. Other people look at visual appeal for things like buildings, cars etc. Why should a site be any different. Although I suppose we could go back to using visual cues from the 90s…

@PlacidPenguin I started reading this, but it quickly became clear you weren’t actually refuting my points, so tl,dr

@PantHeist

Tl;dr

Meh has different departments. We need more improvements and more excitement.

---

I’m all for giveaways and contests like how it used to be, but the people who do those aren’t the same as those who do other mediocre tasks.

@PlacidPenguin do they get paid from the same budget?

@PantHeist

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That’s not my department.

@mfladd
@PlacidPenguin

Perhaps TPTB wanna put energy into this. Or not.

I see the rest of us as being a mixed combo among being mental patients, indentured serfs, and luser addicts.

That combo wouldn’t seem to make for political power.

@f00l So we are quirky. They have to work with what they got.

The movement is with us!

@mfladd
You may possibly have that backwards???

I ain’t occupying nobody unless they provide good reserved parking.

Damned Dallas. Damned “valet uptown” trendelirious Dallas.

@f00l If I have to take part in non-post-in to achieve our goals I will do it, dammit! Most likely scenario is that they they will be more happy than sad with my actions. But, I will, dammit!

note to self: movement may want to change sign to dis-occupy meh.

or un-

@DrunkCat

In what sense?

@PlacidPenguin taller, but the other direction

@PantHeist Yeah, like longer but horizontally.

@DrunkCat

OK I see what you mean.
Yeah, not sure why on the main forum it’s like that with the wide spaces on either side.

@PlacidPenguin More mobile friendly??

@ruouttaurmind If only there was a way to detect mobile…

@ruouttaurmind

I was referring to desktop.

@PlacidPenguin I understood. I’m saying perhaps it was conceived the way it is to somehow present a unified appearance across desktop and mobile experiences.

@ruouttaurmind

Except having a unified appearance isn’t necessarily always efficient.

Honestly, when I’m using my laptop, due to the layout of Meh, it sometimes feels like I’m looking at text which was squeezed together into the middle of the screen without a care for the other 2/3rds.

@PlacidPenguin I do not disagree.

@PantHeist And ten minutes after reading that comment to my boyfriend, we’re still laughing

@KittySprinkles

I don’t believe that.

@PlacidPenguin And that’s ok

@KittySprinkles

@KittySprinkles

What? That you laugh?

@PlacidPenguin Whatever you do and don’t believe.

@DrunkCat On my laptop I like them just how they are. They are at a width that makes it fast to skim. If they were wider it wouldn’t be as efficient to read (there is science on the width of a column and distance from the eye, size/type of the font with respect to what you can read the fastest). The white space makes it, in my opinion, faster to find something due to less clutter in one line and the width being (at least on my laptop) around as good as it can get for skimming.

@Kidsandliz To each their own but speed reading only works for me one word at a time. It’s probably at an uncanny valley for me where I’m way less inclined to read anything here as oppose to a traditional forum width. It probably has more to do with the number of lines this narrowness creates which gives the illusion of bigger walls of text that my eyes automatically glaze over.

@ELUNO

@mfladd how dare you!

@mfladd
So it’s @kittysprinkle’s job to fix things?

Uh huh.

@mfladd Don’t get pissy, Batman.

@pooflady

Not really too familiar with deals.woot since I didn’t really go there, but does the fact that people had more obvious thread terms play a factor?

Because that may be more of a search thing or user thing.

@PlacidPenguin I don’t think I ever searched on Deals, just scrolled. Maybe it was the font size that make it easier. Shrdlu (sp?) or some of the other regulars might know what I’m talking about.

@pooflady

Will this picture help you?

@pooflady exact same crew designed both interfaces There was more pixel density in the deals.woot approach and for almost all of it’s life, less activity than here.

@snapster

There’s a difference though with regards to user activity.

Deals.Woot was its own section on Woot. I barely ever went there. (Let alone the other sections on Woot aside from the main Woot section.)

Here however, everything is all together community wise.

@PlacidPenguin Maybe that’s it, that it had its own section, because there’s a lot of threads here that I can tell by the title that I have no interest in, a lot seems silly to me, but obviously not to a lot of other people. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the Deals, but I really liked “Ask the Wooters.” Like my own personal “Go to” group. .

@PlacidPenguin I don’t mean to imply value difference versus raw activity difference. While there was in theory a more narrow topic, it wasn’t that narrow in practice. Mostly just a smaller crowd.

@pooflady

On that note, at least with deals.woot each thread had one prime focus.
Here, that’s not likely to happen (through no fault of Meh, but of its users constantly going off topic in a thread).

@snapster

That’s kinda of what I was referring to. Deals.Woot only had a portion of total Woot users.

Meh doesn’t have subdivisions. (Kind of prefer it this way.)

@PlacidPenguin Off topic? Impawsible!
/s

@PlacidPenguin It could happen. I asked once about mattresses and got quite a few straight answers and opinions. As did someone who asked about buying a house.

@PlacidPenguin I liked the subdivisions inasmuch as I wasn’t interested in T-shirts or wine.

@pooflady

Of course subdivisions are useful. Except a forum which wants to do that sounds need to be in a certain position.

I suppose though that what you would want is 1 deal a day, but a forum with subforums.

@pooflady
@PlacidPenguin
@snapster
@narfcake

First, Deals.Woot had a rather powerful on-site search. Not fast, but lots of switches. Expired vs unexpired, keyword, uid, time frame, etc. I think you could choose whether to search only heading or also include body of post/topic. I forget the details, but it was pretty good. Much much more precise than Google for that site. Google search does not compare to the precise Deals.Woot search, and misses so much.

You searched the Deals side or the Ask The Community side separately.

Second, the posts were separated into Left Side (Deals, which were supposed to be one per post, and could be expired) and Right Side (Ask The Community or ATC), which was where people hung out, played games, shared news, asked questions, and made friends.

Each Deal supposedly got its own topic, and people could up-vote or down-vote and comment. (the down-voting was a constant source of sour-grapes, manipulation, and abuse). Supposedly people would expire their old deals when they were gone - in practice I am guessing that only a small % of Deals got expired. There were few limits on who could post Deals: this is where the spammers took over. The mods never go the rules, the manpower, or the will/authority to gain control.

One thing that should have happened was that deals from Amazon storefronts should have been banned. For every legit deal storefront deal, perhaps 100-10000 garbage deals. Almost all the spam was Amazon Storefront spam.

There were rules for Ebay - such as Buy-It-Now pricing and a minimum # of units for sale. Perhaps there were additional Ebay rules such as minimum seller reputation. Not certain.

I think anyone who had made even 1 purchase from Woot could post a deal? Perhaps not even 1 purchase. Can’t remember anymore. This was also a prob. They should have required a much higher Woot # of purchases minimum, once the spam got started. Basically, once the Chinese merchants found Deals, the decline and death of Deals.Woot was inevitable because of inadequate mod staff and inadequate rules.

Also the revenue from prob almost all Deals site had declined. Those sites were very hot around 2010-2011 - by 2015 many of them had been spammed into uselessness, there were too many other ways to find good deals, and so referral revenue that was supposed to sustain Deals.Woot and similar sites kept falling.

Woot posters got reputation from various actions. Voting, commenting, adding deals, asking questions. Possibly receiving upvotes and comments on your offerings. The reputation and the total # of Woot purchases were visible by mousing-over the username on a post. This helped give an idea who was trying to game the system vs who was for real, and also the reputation became something to whine and moan about, which was mostly fun. Also the top 10% in terms of rep had special topics only they could view. They had nothing to do with secret clubs or bitchy discussion - these topics were for discussing and working out ideas on site tech issues.

You could search the forums (either side) by UID. You could also click on a UID and get a list either of Deals or of ATC topics created, and of Deals or ACT topics that had been upvoted or downvoted. This was pretty useful in trying to track spammers with shill upvoting. But it was even better once you realized a particular user was funny or wise or knowledgeable and you wanted to track down more of what that person had to say.

Both Deal topics and ATC topics allowed for formal keyword tagging. This helped a lot on searches.

Most important to me for going thru the older topics was no infinite scrolling, which is fit only for sites like twitter, who live in the eternal and eternally stupid immediate present. Where news vanishes and facts are fake and reactions are replaced by other reactions, trivia by other trivia, almost all of it just about worthless. Infinite scrolling on any site more substantial than someone’s daily feed is a recipe for hating your browser, and for tilting toward less significance (just IMHO).

Deal topics and ATC topics, either straight-up, or as search results, came with pagination. This made it possible to actually go thru old topics and find stuff. It meant that wise or popular or funny or helpful topics weren’t lost forever. It meant that great tech or householder info didn’t get buried and lost just because you couldn’t remember exactly how to phrase a search to find it. You could just page back and find it instead.

It’s all those old posts which make me regret that the side didn’t get closed to new posts and then be allowed to stay up. I understand why Woot killed it, but trying to find stuff on Deals.Woot using archive.org is much harder. (Thx Thx Thx to archive.org anyway.)

I don’t think I was active during the Beta period. Not sure I even could have used it, since I hadn’t prev been active on Woot. I don’t know the rules for who was allowed to participate in the Beta. I think I found Woot thru either slickdeals or dealnews, just a few month after it came out of Beta.

I came to Woot thru some deal link, found that Woot also had a Deals site, and then got completely fascinated by the ATC conversations between friends. I don’t think i participated much there until I’d been hanging around a few years, and even then my participation was intermittent for a long time. But even when I first found Deals.Woot, I was suddenly spending hours every evening reading the ATC threads. There was so much adolescent bad behavior garbage everywhere on the net, and Deals.Woot seemed instead like a community of people one might actually want to get to know. So rare.

I don’t miss what it was for the last year or two it lived, but I do miss what it was during the early years. That remains kinda an exquisite golden hour of my memory, even if I was one of the barely visible ones. There was much about the site design that worked very nicely. And the ATC topic threads kind of turned Deals into a combo “country store/diner/place to exchange news and play checkers” that you once could see in small towns - the place were everyone came together and kept a community tight and strong.

FWIW, I was far far more emotionally insane back then. However, I may have behaved in public venues in a manner than appeared far more sane. Anxiety-driven protective coloration, or an attempt at it, I suppose. Doubt it worked. : )

Others here could say a lot more about the various virtues. We have many here who had way serious individual cred over there, and also way serious formal reputation (a separate thing).

My $.02 over and out.

@snapster
dream wishes for Meh fortums here:

• get rid of infinite scrolling or allow pagination of topics as a user option. this is huge.

• (wistfully) on-site search. a serious search, similar to deals, where one could actually find all the topics created by a user, or questions asked about e-books.

@f00l What he said.

@pooflady

@f00l 2 cents? That was at least a nickel… (grin)

@f00l I like infinite scrolling and hate pagination. But then again I am using a laptop and not something smaller.

@Kidsandliz

How about an option then?

Having using pagination on Deals.Woot vs infinite scrolling here, I say say that for me, pagination is like 1000 times better. On laptop or phone or anything.

Ever tried to go back 6 months or more using infinite scrolling because you can’t remember what you’re looking for exactly, so you can’t just search for it?

How about 2 years?

Infinite scrolling is fine for the most recent 100-200 or so topics. After that the browser starts to fight you. It’s really a pain even when nothing crashes. You can’t really look at archives when you’re not sure how to search for something, without pagination.

So things just drift away into receding nothingness when there’s really great info in a topic.

We have the option of paginated posts within a thread. Why not the option at least of paginated topics?

Also the google search tends to return only a limited # of results that appear to be selected with a fairly wonky algorithm. So many times I know something’s there somewhere, but can’t get google to give it to me.

@f00l as an option rather than either/or is fine with me. On the other hand I don’t usually go back a zillion posts on here either…

@f00l Maybe if there was a way to ‘favorite’ a particular post for later reference? Sort of like how Amazon allows users to create & organize Wish/Shopping Lists?

@Kidsandliz @f00l

In the past, some threads have been hard to navigate without pagination due to the fact that they were gif heavy (looking at you @mfladd and @kittysprinkles).
I personally keep pagination on at all times due to the fact that too many words at one time overwhelms me.

But yeah, for those people who like pagination, maybe doing the same thing for thread topics wouldn’t necessarily be an awful idea. Especially considering that as @f00l pointed out. Searching for an old thread is kind of hard. If there were pagination for topics, that coupled with last post date would probably make it easier to find some stuff.

---

@f00l
Side note: The fact that the search bar is mediocre at times may not necessarily be the fault of this site per se (although I often have a hard time accepting the count being kept track here.)

@PlacidPenguin I mostly do images. Only done a couple of gifs (partly because most of the time when I copy the url it doesn’t come up as a gif and I don’t know what the issue is, so photos is all I generally look for these days).

Choice of pagination vs scrolling is always good…

@f00l Does the API let you work with the general forum topics at all or just the topic for the current sale?

@PantHeist
Have never messed with the api.

I was a coder once, but having worked in IBM 360/370 assembly language for a few years many decades ago is not a recipe for current skills, and aside from a few scripts here and there, I currently have almost zero skills.

I don’t even know what it would take to work with the Api. Can anyone illuminate what one could do with it?

@f00l I haven’t had a chance to mess with it at all either, but there’s a thread about it here. https://meh.com/forum/topics/meh-api

@medz
I found Deals to be almost my fav place for a few years - perhaps 4-5 of them. I mean hours every day reading the forums. Even after the decline was quite visible, it was a great place for a long time. For a long time held out hope that Deals might come back a little from the nearly-nearly-nearly dead.

increasing AmaWoot attitudes (“we’re Amazon, we don’t care, we don’t have to”; visible a few years after the purchase), a few mods/coders who possessed zero maturity and noticeable vindictiveness, other mods who may not have been hostile, but behaved in arbitrary and inexplicable ways, inconsistent policies, a mod/coder failure to deal with problems (possibly just inadequate staffing), no policies to deal with being spammed by junk posts and junk site manipulation, and declining referral line revenue were the reasons it fell apart (my best guess).

If I had owned Woot and Amz have offered me the big bux, I almost surely would have taken the deal. In the beginning, you don’t know how it will go, and the possibilities of synergy and scale must seem dazzling.

I suspect that if the sale had not happened, all of Woot would be a much better place, and Deals.Woot might still be alive and well.

Note to self: consider carefully before deciding to sell my most precious assets to Amazon. Amazon might ruin them.
What? Wait? I already sold my checkbook to Amazon, and my banking accounts are now wholly-owned Amazon subsidiaries?
Sigh. I don’t know if I have the energy to start out again with new banking accounts, as @snapster and company had the guts to do.

@f00l Why not sell for bajillions and then start over again?

@ELUNO If by bajillions, you mean $110 million and not all of it meant for @snapster. Also minus the part where he essentially told them “fuck it.”

https://techcrunch.com/2010/06/30/woot-amazon/
https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/15/woot-founder-leaves-amazon/
https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/12/five-woot-execs-check-out-as-daily-deals-site-feels-the-strain-under-owner-amazon/

@f00l I still credit blame @snapster for someone else’s comment here:

Twenty-five-year-old Ramy Badie, founder and CEO of TeeTurtle LLC, aspires to turn down — or at least consider — a purchase agreement from Amazon.

@narfcake
well I hope they offer him at least $100M.

@cranky1950

The deal is that while Meh has a department in charge of user experience, it’s been shown elsewhere that often it’s the users who know what they want.

Once other input is added in, the ideas from the users are boiled down to a few things, and from there, changes can come about.

@cranky1950
The Deal:
50% off on crankiness. Today only.

www.crankiness.com

@lumpthar I like this.

@lumpthar
Like.

I also demand that Goats Emeritus have our own incredibly cool uid icon.

@lumpthar good idea but worth noting the icon would only appear then to the person intent on resurrecting the old thread. Once their post was made it would go away. Probably needs to persist much longer or even just not be related to a “happily dead” phase but rather just “very old thread” in general notice.

@snapster Perhaps it would create a “RIP” username badge for anyone that resurrects one, and it sticks around for a week. That way we could know who it is and mock them openly.
That’s what the internet is all about after all.
/giphy the more you know

@lumpthar
Then it would be a RIP contest. I would resurrect so many threads (just 'cause) that there wouldn’t be any left.

@f00l The novelty would wear off eventually.
Then we would settle into an equilibrium.
Even if it didn’t, you would be mocked mercilessly for it, so it would be a win-win.

@lumpthar
I am already mocked mercilessly. And I deserve it.

What’s your point (Besides the one on the top of your head)?
/image conehead

@f00l I don’t remember. It’s all a blur.
I think I just went to sleep and woke up stupid.
/giphy brak space ghost

@lumpthar I never understood why people get upset about bringing back dead threads. Especially when those threads are ranked highly in google search results for the topic- which they usually are, otherwise how else would people be running into them.

@PantHeist It messes with my OCD.
It makes my brain itch when:

1. In a thread where there was nothing worth saying for 6 or 8 months;
2. Some Rando finds the thread through a WebCrawler search;
3. Said Rando comments on said dead topic with something as thought provoking as “Ha yea that totes hapnd to me to once”

@lumpthar
Ha yea that totes hapnd to me to once.

@lumpthar what about when there’s more information to add?

@PantHeist That is okay with me. But you should still get a RIP or Skull icon for the trouble.
Because who doesn’t like icons and badges?
(possibly @f00l and @PantHeist)

@lumpthar Haha I’ve got no problem with the badge, just the animosity towards people resurrecting threads always confused me so I figured I’d ask.

@lumpthar
icons and badges

@snapster LOL - I keep forgetting Meh’s not a not for profit. Sorry about that.

@pooflady The non-profit part is incidental.

@snapster Is pricing still done by dartboards there? Oh wait – I’ll just ask one of the board members.
/8ball Is pricing still done by dartboards there?
Without a doubt

@snapster
Si. Would even do it in Google Spanish.

PS There are other people around who would do a better job…

@snapster If I understand what you’re proposing, sure, I’d post there. I’d love to brag about Meh. And sort of nya, nya, nya, I knew about something you didn’t know about but you’re really going to like it, here’s why.

It only took like 4 people for drone.horse to look popular. We’re half way there! I’ll have to flesh out details as reading this it sounds more lame than I have in mind.

@snapster Have you considered advertising on http://thebloggess.com/ ? Her community seems like it would be a good match for here. If you haven’t seen the page she sends to all the people with bad/shit/nonsensical pitches- Wil Wheaton collating papers, it’s fantastic.

@dashcloud
Good idea. And I love her. And she’s Texan. And her dad was a taxidermist. And she’s wonderful.

I’d post there, but I can’t guarantee I wouldn’t be lame. I also would need to know about it from here. For some reason I check in here almost daily, while i rarely look in at mediocre or other places. But it sounds like an interesting idea, and I already spout off to people irl about Meh.

@djslack And you have just nailed a core problem when trying to transplant people to a second site while maintaining the first site…

@Kidsandliz

Are you talking mainly about how mehmbers might not always be on both?

@Kidsandliz There’s another site?
See? that is the problem. I completely forget there is an entire separate place to watch you lovely, crazy people be witty & snarky, and all kinds of silly. I know I must not be the only derp in the pack.