Here in Russia we have a popular platform for long-form tech blogs called Habr. It's basically the go to platform for software and hardware engineers (for example, it's where Flipper Zero started). Usually, to have a good article, especially if you represent a company, you need to spend quite some time on editing your post to perfection, because the platform also has karma. Karma is important for corporate blogs - it's good for the image (Habr also has Habr Career - if readers are interested in your posts they may apply for a job at your company). Previously, when our company maintained its blog a few years ago, we even had to hire a copywriter to proof-read our posts, and a designer for the pictures. The main problem was that it took a lot of time of our engineers to write a single post (plus the back-and-forth with the copywriter/designer). We also had difficulties with finding employees who want to spend time on all of that. Not long ago Habr introduced short-form posts, exactly to allow individual writers and companies write "rambly twitter threads" without investing too much time in it (while still providing value, in small bits). This year we want to restart our corporate blog - we had a call with Habr staff a few days ago and they recommended to try the new short-form format. We haven't tried it yet, but it sounds like the both formats have their place.
just a practical question, Russian doesn't have a letter H (or rather, they unwisely decided to make it sound like N :) with the result that Hitler is called Gitler. Is Habr called Gabr? or more like Khabr with the X letter?
It's an old rule from before the 20th century which is not really active anymore. While it's still true for old names due to convention (Harry, etc.), new foreign words with h- in it are now often rendered with kh- (letter Х). Originally, h- was rendered as g- because at one point, the educated pronunciation of "g" was influenced by Kiev's accent (as it was the capital of Rus) which always spells g- as h-. So the closest representation of h- was "the educated G". However, people outside of Ukraine were later misreading g- in such names as "hard G" because they weren't aware of the original pronunciation, hence H => G for old words.
Habr has been utter garbage, for a long time. For people who are interested in it, I highly recommend to switch to russian content in the top right button and use google translate to see what are some of the opinions average user there exhibits. Forming that kind of obnoxious audience was a long process, first "woke" people were massively downvoted and banned, then people who thought women deserve same rights as men, then anyone who criticized government. At some point into that everyone who previously wrote any interesting piece of content just... left. The current state of the platform is what happens when you go the "no politics please" route.
>"woke" people were massively downvoted and banned, then people who thought women deserve same rights as men, then anyone who criticized government
Interesting, the poster below has the opposite view:
>Owners and moderators of Habr despise Russia
>they always optimized the karma system to stimulate the authors not for posting original interesting content but to stimulate those who hate Russia and downvote those who love their country
My take would be that Habr is OK with the both views and people only notice the bans/downvotes when posts which align with their political views are banned/downvoted.
That post was a reaction to the war and a lot of people trying to talk about it and getting banned for it. It was one of the major exodus triggers after which the site was practically empty of engagement for months. Here's a link to comments, the gist is a bunch of people are mad that admins are choosing the "no politics" route:
People who like to talk politics absolutely everywhere have ruined every single social network I know. "No politics" is probably the most intelligent way to go.
> I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions.
> As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums?
> What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone's an expert.
> Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.
The problem is that what is considered “politics” has vastly expanded over the past decade or so. Most controversial topics today wouldn’t have been considered “politics” in the past.
In context of habr, even asking "why'd my internet/corporate vpn stopped working?" or "why did I suddenly get summoned for a medical checkup to enlistment office?" are politics.
No politics is only feasible if your life or your existence isn't considered political in itself, or maybe if you can hide how you challenge the status quo without harming yourself.
Maybe our company is not representative, but the only engineers I know of who left Russia (about 5 people out of ~150) - I wouldn't say they were the best engineers at the company. They only left after the mobilization started (feared of being drafted) and they already were a minority group of vocal Putin critics before. So to say that the best engineers left Russia is not true, from my perspective: it looks like it better aligns with people's political views, not their expertise. Maybe it's different in Moscow, which is less conservative (we aren't Moscow-based).
I live in Central Asia, and we have huge influx of Russian engineers here. I did not ask which city they are from, but they all are good. Better than average I think.
