Removed all counters, replies, following/ers, timestamps, from textlog
Comments
djray
stagas
Re: timestamps, feel free to vote[0] on the matter!
Re: design, a lot of people seem to like it the defaults. If you make an account you can customize theme, color scheme, font face/size, and more. If we’re missing a more contrasty theme it should be easy to add.
techjamie
I like the rationale you have behind trying to be anti-addictive with the design. I wish more places around the net had that sort of mentality. Though I am curious, why remove timestamps?
stagas
To resurrect old discussions. The hot algorithm makes old engaging posts stay a little bit longer, and with the timestamp it introduced bias that you might not want to answer a very old post. My instinct was right as users are engaging with those old posts more often now.
vector_spaces
The irony here is that modern social algorithms actively conceal these for exactly the same reason. Social feeds want to show you a steady stream of content that you are likely to engage with. They are incentivized to frame content as literally timeless and impose a continuous, never-ending present on the user, since they don't want recency to get in the way of engagement. But the time-context in which a piece of media was produced is a fairly important detail in critically evaluating it and situating it in an actual, human conversation.
Did this piece of writing with common AI smells get posted before or after 2021? Did the author write this piece about someone they admire and aspire to before or after the murders became public knowledge? What was the expert concensus on the topic when the author wrote about it? What meaning did this slang have back then?
What technologies were commonplace? He said he needs help with something I'm an expert in -- can I help him, or was it over a decade ago?
What was happening culturally when this was written? What was the weather like? Did this collection of posts with a dour tone get posted during a global pandemic when mostly everyone was self-isolating? Did he write this post about his loved one before or after her death?
I mean hopefully I don't need to sell you on why this information is useful and actually antithetical to addictive, low nuance, engagement-driven social media. We need more media literacy, not less, and de-emphasizing critical details like this seems problematic
I do sympathize with the challenge and know that there aren't really easy answers here, and every possible change is likely to ruffle someone's feathers, but I have a feeling there is another way to achieve what you're after.
sodapopcan
> Did this piece of writing with common AI smells get posted before or after 2021?
Textlog didn't exist before 2021, did it? (though you are probably making a general point)
> Did the author write this piece about someone they admire and aspire to before or after the murders became public knowledge?
This is a really good point.
> What was the expert consensus on the topic when the author wrote about it?
Also a really good point.
> What meaning did this slang have back then?
True, but many people just don't care (unless you are talking 10 years in the future).
I'm not going to bother writing every quote-reply, but in this spirit, I wrote in another comment that I think I'm pro not having timestamps but now maybe not. I'm liking the suggestions of having very low granularity. To throw in an idea: rough labels such as: fresh, day-old, recent, this year, last year, 2/3/4/5 years ago, years old. Maybe even whole threads could become "stale" after a large amount of time, like a year. Very much spitballing here.
stagas
A solution here that I’m considering is revealing the historical information after a post has reached past a certain age. This will bring context to the post while also reduce bias on recent posts.
I do feel reluctancy answering to a post even a few hours ago thinking my answer might not be applicable to their context anymore. But not knowing, I believe keeps the conversation going for a while. I see it actually taking place.
So, what is the right thing to do here? More engagement and lack of information, or more information and less engagement? Not an easy answer.
VorpalWay
> I do feel reluctancy answering to a post even a few hours ago thinking my answer might not be applicable to their context anymore. But not knowing, I believe keeps the conversation going for a while. I see it actually taking place.
First time I hear about textlog today, seems interesting (and good to remove likes etc). But if there aren't other comments that already address whatever point I would want to make I dont care if it is 10 minutes old or 10 days old (now, 10 years might be different and probably should be different).
Maybe that is due to my background in forums focused on solving technical problems (troubleshooting, programming, etc), but even if the original poster helped by my input any longer, someone else might be even if that is years down the line, so answers are always useful.
Of course context is everything, and if it is someone talking about what they had for lunch, that is irrelevant 10 days later (but I also wouldn't be interested in that content to begin with, even if it was 10 seconds old).
So in conclusion, I think having a timestamp is useful, and definitely for older posts (but for newer posts I think you are overestimating the problems of having them).
DiscourseFan
You could have a feature that users could turn on in their profile to display if they are online or when they were last online, and have a setting to restrict it to certain times, so that other users can know if this person would respond to a post/needs response to a post. And then a "follow" feature, that just displays the timestamps for users that you "follow" in particular (because I imagine that if you follow someone you might not care about the age of their posts). Lastly, you can just have it as an option for any post "include timestamps," so that a user can let others know the temporal context of one (or all) of their posts. I think these 3 features together would solve all of the issues with timestamps while still retaining the engagement strategy you are looking for.
pamcake
Less granularity could be a middle ground.
Show the date but not h/m/s.
pschastain
Gotta say that I agree with @evnm's reply on the original post that timestamps are fundamental to microblogging and maintaining a timeline. I love the philosophy behind textlog but I do disagree with this particular aspect; seems like something the author of a note/post should have choice and control of.
jasongi
I'm pretty sure The Guardian (UK news website) have a dynamic image preview that says how many years ago the article was written for this reason - often old articles are reposted or recirculated by people trying to stir up drama or spread misinformation. Think of someone sharing a news article about vaccine side-effects from 2014 in 2021...
spullara
TikTok does this so they can reuse popular content to game engagement.
forgotmypw17
Does anyone else see this error, and/or know what it is about?
>Secure Connection Failed
>An error occurred during a connection to textlog.cc. SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length.
stagas
Yes, your client is trying to connect using IPv6 and failing. This is odd however because we had this problem and then we’ve configured it properly and it was working. This must be some upstream issue from our hosting provider.
Edit: I’ve opened a ticket and waiting for their answer. Thanks for the report!
deathanatos
I'm curious, but how/what is the actual problem there? I can connect over IPv6 just fine, and IPv6 shouldn't make a difference to TLS¹?
(¹in this case)
stagas
I’m not an expert on networking but that’s the verdict I get when pasting this problem to ChatGPT. We did have this and went away when we activated IPv6. Firefox and depending on your network/OS you might access the site via IPv6, in which case it will fail if it’s not accessible. I still have problem accessing it locally, curl fails, it works when I am in the network, so I don’t know what’s the case here. It works for some and not for others? Super weird.
deathanatos
Well, that sounds hallucinogenic; v6 & TLS should basically not interact. But like, what error does curl give?
I'm sort of wondering if it's more cert store weirdness. Curl & Firefox, I think, will use different stores. I think FF uses Mozilla's cert store, always, whereas curl will default to the local machine's store. The site is also using the LE YE1 cert — i.e., it's using an EdDSA cert, which is a bit unusual. It's also serving the root cert itself, which it shouldn't do, but also shouldn't be fatal. (But that also results in a whopping 4 certs sent by the server, which is also quite unusually high, but again, shouldn't be fatal.) But EdDSA is also odd enough I could see it fouling something up, and TLS libraries and path building is source of so many bugs.
jmesmith
same for me in zen browser fwiw
sodapopcan
I've had textlog open in a tab for a few weeks now. Was iffy as I've never really used anything like Twitter before. I finally made an account as I really like this change. I already embarrassingly posted my bio as a note.
I'm on the fence about timestamps but I don't think it's inherently bad, and could be good. It depends on the goals of the platform. I'm actually overwhelmed by how both freeing and extremely weird it is not to see any numbers. But I will say that I think it's great to be able to respond to a thread with zero stigma or worry if you are "necroing" it or not. I think I'm learning more toward no timestamps.
knorker
I disagree with removing timestamps. It's extremely frustrating to read some technical post somewhere only to finally see that it was written in 2008.
The very first thing I read now on that site when looking for a good example of this was "Which Linux distribution do you like, and why". You know, it REALLY matters if that discussion is from 1995 or 2025.
Nowadays I tend to close articles if they don't have a year listed. Without the context of knowing if it's from last century, it's often less informative than not reading it at all. It could still be relevant, but the context is very important.
To add insult to injury, some unhelpful people write month and day, but not year.
abanana
Fully agree - see also Stack Overflow's relative date display for comments. They all just say "Over a year ago". Mouse over and find it's from 2012. You need that context especially for e.g. web dev, where CSS and JS have moved on a great deal in that time.
stagas
Might bring them back for historical posts, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49425728
knorker
I also find it useful to see someone's progression. Newer posts on a topic from the same person will usually have clearer thinking about it.
sanqui
The late Cohost also lacked like, reply, and follower counters; it was generally regarded positively. It did have an unread notifications counter though, so you knew you went viral when that read 99+.
stagas
Oh we have it, that counter is still there, obviously that one is necessary. I removed everything that I considered noise and not contributing much.
forgotmypw17
Just to help with the troubleshooting, I tried a few different browsers on Windows:
Google Chrome, Brave, Waterfox, Waterfox Classic, Firefox: error
qutebrowser: site works fine
stagas
Thanks! I think you meant to answer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49425349 instead of this thread.
chanux
Looks like login/signup(?) emails are not delivering.
There is a discussion on it but cannot figure out if it's new or not.
stagas
Touché, yours got bounced, I checked, others’ are getting delivered. Funny how Resend doesn’t have a “resend” button in their UI. Just retry.
a1o
Timestamp is not mentioned in the linked text. Timestamp is useful, I wouldn’t remove timestamp if possible. I don’t know why it made into the title though…
mofosyne
Wonder if textlog have an ssh interface as well
Groxx
Generally the correct default, I think. And sometimes the correct non-option too.
I personally prefer to have them in many social media things (it's a hint for "this is popular enough that they won't even notice my contribution" vs "likely ~nobody else has seen this, maybe I should spread it"), and I think I manage to avoid the addictive parts pretty well... but it does still affect behavior (e.g. above, do I boost it or no?) and sometimes that's a net negative for the ecosystem.
(unintended but fittingly: ^ above is just barely under their 500 char limit. though this addition is not. I generally don't like small char limits, but to each their own)
rf15
We are reverting to a more forum-like data shape, which is hilarious. (and good)
surgical_fire
I had never heard of this.
I always sort of hated social networks. Even the ones I eventually participated in, such as Reddit or HN (although I tend to see those more as forums).
I navigated a bit on textlog, and I found it strangely compelling. I will give it ia shot.
I agree with removing the obvious dopamine-related signals, but removing timestamps is a mistake, as they are vital for technical and news-based posts. They're a valuable relevance signal in many cases, not 'noise'. At least make them available on-hover or as a user option. Yes, you could try with a 'limit to historical posts' option, but that's going to be difficult as some topics move a lot faster than others, e.g. current affairs versus web standards.
This sort of unilateral action-before-asking is imo not a great signal to send out if you're trying to grow a platform. If you're going to run experiments, let people know first.
Could I also suggest making the comment text size larger (it's smaller than CSS 'small'), changing the typeface to be proportional, and most importantly making sure the contrast between foreground and background elements is WCAG-compliant? Most of the text is less than 3:1. Currently the site may be quite challenging to access for a visitor with visual impairments, and I think many such users would enjoy a site such as this if it were more accessible. Thanks.