Thoughts on permanently limiting the number of people who use tildes?
It used to be considered an honor to become a default subreddit. Then when it was seen what happens when a sub became a default (tons and tons of people came flooding in filling the threads with what were often mediocre comments and destroying the sense of community) becoming a default lost it's shine. The same can be said about Reddit as a whole though. It's extremely impressive that it's become such a huge website, but at the same time, it's not a small, quaint town. It's now just another place for the masses to congregate (both for better and for worse).
Right now Tilde is a small website. And a smaller website means a stronger sense of community. smaller threads means that your comment is more likely to be read. less upvotes (or just votes in this case) but when you do get one or two it means more. Smaller also means that you're more likely to talk to specific people again and again (as opposed to just a new totally random person each and every time).
Tilde said no NSFW. No porn. I agree with that. A bajillion porn sites out there, no need for another one. Well...There's a number of massive social media websites as well out there as well. The number of users on them are puffed up by bots, but they're still going to have millions upon millions of actual users.
I put forth that same basic question here as to what Tilde should become. If all it does is say no to NSFW stuff (essentially the exact opposite of voat) then, to put it bluntly (and kinda cruelly) it will in time just be some Reddit clone. If however the makers decide to keep it very small, and permanently so, I think we could foster something special and unique. Not something that's exclusive (I don't know about any of you but it's certainly no amazing prize to have a one on one interaction with me :-P) it would just be a way to create a small community that I get the sense that a lot of people on here desire. less memes, less sh*tposting, less a lot of stuff that doesn't actually contribute to any sort of actual interesting conversation.
Please don't tear my head off, but I look forward to seeing what people think of this.
Reddit's problem is their steadfast refusal to evolve. I maintain the reason the site sucks is not because there are millions more users there now. It's because the site failed to create the kinds of content management and moderation systems that can handle that sort of activity level. Reddit isn't interested in better community governance. They just want cash. Also, let's face facts - they have exceptionally bad standards of behavior. Just enforcing better standards would help them immensely.
Tildes is hoping to build those better governance systems. I certainly wouldn't want everyone coming here until they are built and we can show that they work, though. That's the best part of being invite-only - a control lever on growth.
Exactly. If reddit hadn't been there and had all of these issues, we wouldn't know what the next steps look like and what possible solutions are out there.
Personally I don't think it's possible to have proper scaling without involving the userbase in moderation (via sortition, or some sort of meritocratic process, see this thread for some discussion).
Without proper scaling I think the moderation either fails to do its job, or need to implement automatic, brutal measures (think youtube automatic moderation) that don't work well or render the place sterile and unwelcoming ("ho, my post that took me 30 minutes to write got nuked by a bot").
I get the impression that what's typically meant by "scaling" here is roughly "person-hours of paid labor scales sublinearly with the number of users". And in that case, I agree - of all the major social networks right now, Reddit's model is the only one that can theoretically enforce any kind of sitewide community standards without a content-moderation staff proportional to the userbase. (Not that, to anyone's knowledge, they've ever acknowledged that they even need a dedicated content moderation staff at all, let alone scale it up as the site continues to grow.)
But I'm not sure that kind of scaling is necessary. Facebook and Twitter both have roughly one employee for every 100,000 users. I wouldn't be surprised if they could both solve their content moderation problems by hiring one additional remote employee per 100k users to review user-flagged and auto-flagged content for 10hr/week at $20/hr, and that surely would not dramatically increase the price of doing business.
By scaling I mean linear scaling, i.e. the number of moderators per 100 users being constant. And you would do that by enroll a percent of your user base in moderation duty.
Another aspect of handling this problem is to build tools into the site that can amplify the effects of the moderation labor that you do have. Tools that would for example allow a community to program behavior, automate busywork, educate, etc.
We definitely need a lot of people donating moderation labor, but we also need a lot of good tools to amplify the effects of their work at scale. Literally all large corporate social media platforms simply ignore this aspect of the solution.
In a way that's what I'm suggesting. a very simple (lol perhaps overly simplistic in some respects, like cutting off an arm when only the pink is gangrene) and effective governance system that's basically guaranteed to work. Reddit has moderators. But even if they went crazy with banning...if you just go around blocking repeat content and people who are constantly adding anything to the conversation with their comments, I think you would be putting an absolute ton of effort into...basically having what tildes currently has, which is a small community. You'd be letting in some more people then you would otherwise but at a tremendous effort. Do you have any idea about those governance systems that you could tell me about? Because right now all I can imagine is banning users, temporarily banning them, and shadow banning them as reddit currently has. And using those tools, or tools very similiar to them (shrugs).
You know honestly I dont see reddit as something that sucks. I'm actually going back and forth between reddit and tildes to be honest. But I do see reddit as something that is very large. Tildes is not and has some strengths (as well as some weaknesses) as a result. And it seems to me that no matter what you do, that once the size of tildes gets large enough that some of those strengths will be lost.
Your argument seems to be (from my take) that the focus wont be on fostering community as much as "just" quality posts. A very very tricky thing. a ton of work would need to go into limiting who could post (and maybe who could post on what threads).
Oh yes. There's this old rant that covers the basics, and if you dive through my post history here on tildes you'll find plenty more. The 'end of eternal september' section gets the basics across, though. Most of what's in my head has been shared on the relevant threads in tildes.official. You can also read my responses in the tildes truereddit thread.
That siteideas link was incredible. Simply hitting "Vote" here doesn't do that contribution justice.
Slashdot solved many of these problems decades ago using a similar set of tools. Comment tags (insightful, funny, etc), comment scores capped at 5, only some users got voting privileges at any one time, meta-moderation allowed other users to review moderation decisions to ensure they were made in good faith. The site eventually (mostly) died due to its own monoculture when the old guard got bored and left, but that wouldn't be a problem for a site hosting many individual communities. If you're a member of many well-moderated communities, the activity in those communities should reflect the overall interest in the topic, rather than being gamed like Reddit, and it's less of a loss if one (out of many) dies down due to lack of interest.
Yes they did, and I'm always amazed how nobody took that lesson with them when going on to design other sites.
CmdrTaco actually goes on to explain a lot of his rationale behind Meta Moderation (moderating the moderators) in this podcast. The one thing I gleaned from the interview was that any discussion forum needs a lot of human moderation to stay one step ahead of trolls looking to game whatever automated moderation exists.
Is there any good description with examples of how this worked at Slashdot? I never was a frequent poster and never got mod points. Maybe we can bring it to Tildes.
Slashdot's base moderation system
Taco's announcement of the meta-moderation system
Despite my years-long fascination with classic Slashdot, I don't really feel that Tilde's vote system needs to be torn out and rewritten. Like the siteideas link, I view it as a collection of potentially good ideas. Slashdot is more rigorous, but the Reddit system is definitely more fun and participatory.
Unrelated question: does Tildes track all of a user's votes internally? I wonder if it would be possible to use a ML classification system on voting patterns. When a user is banned for abuse, perhaps offer a list of other users with statistically similar behavior to review?
I'm kinda hoping that when we turn comment tagging back on we can turn it into something rather like slashdot, but more versatile and powerful. As an example...
If we create a [offtopic] tag, you'll see it under every comment. Click on it, and you mark that comment (and by association, all of the replies) as offtopic. If that comment gets enough people clicking on the 'offtopic' button, it collapses that comment tree in the default view of the comments. We could set the threshold at 5, or 10, or for a place like askreddit maybe it's 100. Let the group mods set the number.
It's not removing anything, but in theory it'd collapse and clean up the views discussion in a crowdsourced-way. Users should be able to opt-out of doing the tagging (opting out of moderation), and set a default preference for this that overwrites site and group defaults if they want for their own reading.
That's the sort of evolution we can play with - what tags do we want, and what are their effects? Who gets access to which tags and at what levels of trust? What do you think would happen if mods could create their own tags and the site could take actions on those tags when the tags hit a specified threshold?
I'm intrigued by the idea that tildes could have, for lack of a better term, subjective rules for different topics, but I do worry that we'd end up eventually seeing discussions like this, where moderators have imposed rules for reasons that are perfectly valid from their perspective (in this case to deal with some rather obvious limitations in reddit), but are relatively unpopular with the user base.
Granted, your example likely wouldn't attract that sort of ire, and mine likely wouldn't occur if a system was in place that wasn't so likely to overwhelm moderators if enough content is present, but I do think tildes might wish to tread lightly with any system that empowers group mods to alter the user experience from the site norm (I'm a big fan of the principle of least astonishment/surprise).
I'm much more in favor of 'group norms' than 'site norms' for most topics. Here we might even have hierarchy norms as well, since the hierarchies are meant to contain similar content up and down the chain. There's no such thing as a one size fits all solution for communities, because different topics give rise to different content management systems. The 'site norms' on Tildes are the basics - don't be an asshole, the hierarchy mechanics, voting, tagging, etc. The group norms for a debate forum are different from a music forum and those are different from a creative writing forum. They simply have to be. What works in /r/changemyview is not what works in /r/listentothis or /r/politics or /r/nfl.
The problem described there in your link where the mods are basically banning questions (to keep content quality high, in their minds) would be handled here by tags and filtering, by spinning off sub-groups, and bubble-up mechanics. One of reddit's biggest failures is that there's no way to reliably reach new users to inform them of the group's unique guidelines. We definitely need to work on that here.
I'm a fan of testing systems by trying them out. No matter how good the theory behind an idea is, we can't know how people will use any given mechanic until after it's live and we observe what behaviors emerge. If a feature isn't achieving the desired goals, we have to go back and look at why, and make changes to it until we get it right - or roll it back completely, if it turns out it doesn't work at all in practice.
I definitely want to see groups that have their own unique systems, culture, and norms, all tailored to the content. Reddit does nothing to facilitate that process. They force mod teams to resort to draconian measures. All you can do on reddit is remove a post. Title editing alone would help immensely, but reddit won't trust mod teams to do that. Form-based submission pages with the rules clearly displayed would solve a lot of problems.
I think with the size of mod teams becoming larger here, and with systems to both inform the users of the rules, and help a community discuss and implement its own rules (like quorum polling), we won't get into this mess we see on reddit with adversarial mod teams making policy for their groups in a vacuum.
Larger mod groups, and ideally mod groups that aren't simply self-selecting, should help with some of those issues. Not sure you'll ever get a true consensus on those types of decisions (i.e. the ideal way to handle logic that affects discussion), but as long as someone is willing to put in the work on these features they're well worth testing out. I didn't mean to imply that different groups shouldn't have their own norms/rules (though it certainly came out like that on review), but I do think having the way voting and/or tagging works change from group to group has the potential to be equal parts incredibly useful and frustrating (for users). I'm going to leave it at that, as I feel like I'm coming off a bit negative on features that are only being discussed, and that doesn't seem useful at all. Definitely looking forward to seeing how all of this works in the future.
The federated trust access may actually help with some of that confusion. A new user account isn't going to see much more than what we have here as the basics right now. All of the other stuff showing up in the UI is going to require some level of trust, so they'll be on the site for a while and get used to it before other elements show up. Even then, those elements are only going to appear in the communities that user participates in, as they earn access to them.
Aha, I've been vaguely wondering if there was more detail than the future mechanics page somewhere. I can't find anything relevant in your post history on tildes because it's not paginated for me yet. Should I hunt back through tildes.official or just tildes?
It seems useful to me to have a live discussion of the technical goals & possible implementations details of the user rep and weighting system until such time as it's implemented. Maybe that's being done somewhere private? If so good stuff & please let me know when I can read it.
I'm assuming the vote weight numbers in the link above are just examples drawn from experience moderating? It does seem very... moderator centric? If mods can still nuke topics & ban users and vote weight only gets you to 5x a fresh user then all users in optimal standing can't wrest a community from an evil mod team and they also probably can't defend a community with lazy mods from a competent astroturfing effort. It's possible that Tildes goal is to have hand selected mods be the final arbiters but if so I think that should be stated somewhere?
Don't worry, any feature will get discussed ad nauseum before being implemented, and will probably be improved and altered by those discussions. That's one of the reasons we're looking for a good userbase here during alpha phase - all of this stuff has to be discussed and run by everyone so we shake out the flaws in the ideas and give people a chance to improve on them.
A lot of us have been talking about 'new reddit' concepts for years, ever since /r/theoryofreddit was created. While Deimos was writing the Tildes bedrock here we were all talking about it in slack, and I'm surprised we didn't drive him mental. @cfabbro and I would go back and forth on specific concepts for hours/pages, we both love having someone to argue this stuff out with. Honestly so much of it is still floating around in people's heads.
We're not going to have 'evil mod teams' here. If mods go rogue, the admins will do something about it, unlike reddit. Larger teams are harder to corrupt as well... and it's hard for a team to be 'evil' if that team is the group's own top users. The trust system will create the mods from the best contributors in any given group. The tagging and report systems should take most of the work out of the mods' hands - I'm really hoping mods here end up more like curators at a museum than cops and janitors. We need to make mod work fun rather than a classic dirty job.
I really just want to see other peoples ideas and perhaps eventually bounce some of my own into the mix. The rep & weighting system also seems a relatively complex undertaking algorithmically. Getting at the very least specific details of the system goals seems quite high priority. Even if only so you can point new eyes at it in topics like this one. You're more likely to catch potential flaws in the system if more people see it.
I'm also a massive geek wrt this stuff. I had a crack at re-creating reddit/HN with a weighted reputation voting system in 2010 (Worked on it for a year or so). Mostly I just want to feed my geeking out, nice to finally find people who care about this stuff even more than me! :)
Anyway if this & the future mechanics is the level of technical detail to which things are specified that's cool but I wish you'd just say so!
The most coherent writeup of the concept of the trust system is in this old rant I wrote for reddit's admins, back when I thought they actually gave a damn about the site. Deimos is just as much of a geek for this stuff as we are which is why I'm so excited about the future of this project. He actually gets it, and he's an ace coder too.
lol jeeze this is a lot. thanks. I'll check it out later.
You really need to read the official documentation about Tildes. I have a feeling half your questions will be answered there. If you also spend some time reading through the posts in ~tildes and ~tildes.official, most of the rest of your questions will be answered.
In short, if you're looking for a small tight-knit site where you can bond with people... you're in the wrong place. Tildes will never be as big as something like Reddit, but it is going to grow much bigger than it is now. I've seen people talk about having hundreds of thousands of subscribers in a group.
As for moderation here, it's going to be a lot more nuanced than just bans. There'll be tagging posts, and moving posts, and reputation, and super-votes, and reputation loss, and so on.
I think reputation is an interesting idea. I think to get it to work it also might be necessary to require an email so you can't spin up a bunch of accounts and use their voting power to make new power users as the site grows. The way it's implemented on Stackoverflow is really effective I think. That community has its shortcomings, but overall the content there is pretty good.
I will miss when this community isn't tight-knit though a bit. It's cool recognizing users here.
Speaking of which, just curious, are you a mod person here or something? Sorry if it's a dumb question, I'm totally new to this, I just see you posting everywhere.
Like @Amarok says, there are no mods here - the code for this website doesn't support moderation tasks yet. (EDIT: Apart from Deimos himself, of course. Deimos performs moderation tasks. But he hasn't finished writing the code to allow other people to perform moderation tasks.) Deimos does have some helpers: @Amarok is one, @cfabbro is another, and I'm pretty sure there are a couple of others. They've been discussing concepts for Tildes for many months, and they answer questions here.
Me... I'm just an overly helpful, interfering, busybody. :) I have 6 years' experience moderating on Reddit, and I've worked as a Business Analyst - and I like to help. Having been here for 2 months now, I've read a lot of what Deimos and his helpers have said about Tildes, and I'm able to repeat what they've said before when users ask questions.
I don't know the details of your busybody tasks but since I highly respect the way you think, I'm sure it helps keep things well grounded in rationale.
There are no "busybody tasks". A "busybody" is not a body that is busy with work. A "busybody" is "a meddling or prying person". It means I keep interfering, like when I answer questions that weren't asked of me.
Cool, thanks for helping out here so much and thanks for the detailed answer :)
Right now Tildes has no mods at all - just one administrator, Deimos. Once we're entering 75k user territory, mods will start to become necessary (at least, if reddit's problem numbers hold).
I think 75k is an optimistic over-estimate.
While we might not need many punitive actions early on, there's a lot of editing and curating actions that need doing right now, such as editing topics tags and moving topics to different groups. That's just janitorial busy-work, but it does improve the functioning of Tildes and maintains a good user experience for everyone here. As the traffic here grows, the need for these janitorial tasks will only continue increase. It won't take long until Deimos finds himself spending more time just fixing topics than writing fresh code. This will have a serious impact on the growth of Tildes.
Also, everyone on Reddit knows that the threshold for a subreddit going bad is lower than 75,000 subscribers. I've seen estimates ranging from 10,000 to 40,000. That's the point at which a single moderator can't handle the workload any more.
I think the need for moderators here (even just proto-mod janitor types) will arise much sooner than 75k users.
I'm being optimistic that our site culture will delay the decay a bit. I have seen some subreddits last that long without needing heavy moderation, through it's pretty rare and they tend to be pretty niche and narrowly focused.
"In short, if you're looking for a small tight-knit site where you can bond with people... you're in the wrong place. Tildes will never be as big as something like Reddit, but it is going to grow much bigger than it is now. I've seen people talk about having hundreds of thousands of subscribers in a group."
A shame because I feel like I'm in moderately good company seeing other people post on here. They're not quite as "extreme" as me...but there certainly seems to be a bit of a desire to keep the site site small/controlled by controlling the number of users coming in and not just with moderating tool. It's going to be weird and maybe interesting to see what they can do. In the end, there are just a few sets of basic tools that the mods will have to control their users. That fundamentally boils down to whether the user can...or can't. Can the user post? Can the user not post? Can the user submit a new thread? Can they not? You can get into some gray areas like (for example, just making something up) saying that they can't post for a few minutes, or causing their post to auto show up at the very bottom of the thread every time. But you're either cutting back the users in some overly complicated fashion (rather than just doing something simple), or doing stuff that won't do anything.
I think there are other ways to diminish the adverse effects of scaling without closing the drawbridge permanently.
For example, from the perennial Clay Shirky post A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
Notice that the reference to MetaFilter was at the time of the post, i.e. aroud 2003. At that time it was open-registration, but the mods temporarily suspended new user creation when flooded. Then it changed the barrier to uncontrolled scaling to the $5 registration fee. This is just an example from a well-know reference piece about online community, and I don't mean we'd take it literally as a model for Tildes.
(BTW I think Deimos surely must be familiar with the article by Shirky, and I think in his design of the current Tildes and its future roadmap there's much agreement with the article's messages. But this is not really the place to discuss all the topics mentioned there.)
He is indeed, see the daily discussion thread on it
Model it like private trackers work? As in, most start out being open sign-ups (at least if things are past beta-stage), allowing most everyone in, and at a certain point (and this is a tricky balance) they close the gates, allowing people who are in already to invite other users, or periodically if the user # dips too much they allow either open sign ups again or some sort of "ask for an invite" procedure with some sign-up form answering some questions. It's not a black/white thing, there's a gradation that can be had too.
I like this, maybe have open invites but let everyone currently on the site vote and require 5 votes for an acceptance? This would only work if we could make sure people aren't making 4 alts to approve people who shouldn't be approved, though. Give a spot to write a short (250 char) reason to be accepted, and just have a ~invites or something where we can vote up applications
I think this is an interesting idea. Would looking at a users history on other websites such as Reddit be a part or this process? I can see it as a useful tool (I remember reading a thread mentioning something about this a while ago), but at the same not everyone may want to share their previous accounts. The problem is that someone working a short reason to be accepted doesn’t necessarily mean much, as it doesn’t give much to judge people on.
I think an interesting alternative would be to have the majority of the website approval-only, and having a small part be public. There could be a minimum time using the public side before you could apply to get full access. This would give something to judge users on.
Not a fan of a hard limit as users will come and go over time while still leaving accounts on the site. Gradual growth is probably the best thing to aim for.
Personally I think it'd be good to stay with an invite system permanently. But have invites automatically generated by site metrics with some tweaks from admins, then have those invites randomly assigned to trusted users.
HackerNews isn't a particularly small website, but they do limit content to startup culture, and the tech sphere, whilst enforcing a series of rules aimed at increasing discussion.
They haven't devolved into just another Reddit clone. The quality of discussion tends to remain high.
With the more limited number of groups on Tilde, they can surely enforce quality, and aim to increase discussion in the areas that are available. It doesn't have to inevitably become a clone.
Whoa, is there another Hacker News I wasn't aware of...?
I'm probably isolating myself, as I steer clear of the more polarising topics like JavaScript and cryptocurrencies... But where else can you have Walter Bright (author of the D programming language) and Steve Klabnik (Mozilla Engineer, notably a lead on Rust) discussing the various methods tree-shaking involved in compiler optimisation?
There are good parts and bad parts; there was a pretty awful thread yesterday where people started arguing over how warm they each would like their office to be, which of course went nowhere because everyone has different temperature preferences.
No, they don't. Lot's of people think that, but it's not enforced by the mods. Here are the first two paragraphs of the guidelines:
As an example I remember quite well (6 months ago though??) there's Tea if by sea, Cha if by land which has 0 to do with hacking, tech, or anything like it, but got upvoted a whole lot.
Now I have not been on hackernews too much, but I dont think the discussions on there would appeal nearly as much to the wider audiences. Tildes on the other hand covers all of the basic subs well enough for that not to be the case though.
I think the limitation of subs would keep some people to reddit, but not many. The niche subs are, after all, the niche subs. Those people who are passionate about some obscure thing tend to be small in numbers. I think If you opened the flood gates tomorrow you would actually keep more people away simply by the fact that tilde isn't all the different from reddit. However, my bet would be plenty would come in, see it as a small website, and decide to stick around for that very feeling. However, I believe that more than enough would stick around for that element of the website to actually be lost. It's speculative of course but (shrugs) at the very least you have to call it a reasonable enough fear.
The thing about quality is that it's also a curse.
How do subreddits get big? Simple. The early 5k subscribers post so much quality content that the place starts generating buzz and attracting attention. Before you know it, you're at 25k after just a couple links from other places.
That'll happen to Tildes, and I think we're vastly underestimating the draw of a quieter, more intelligent place like this. I think once Deimos opens it up to viewing without accounts so the rest of the 'net can read it, we're going to get brutalized with invite requests and traffic. The press loves any excuse to bash reddit, and they'll gladly use us as a weapon to that end and draw a shitload of attention to us doing it.
Well, as long as we're invite only, what's going on off of the site won't affect what's going on here. We'll probably end up with a lot of people reading, but they can't contribute until they've been invited. On reddit, a subreddit's population could double overnight, throwing the community into chaos. That can't happen here unless we make it happen.
Until we have the trust system fully in place, we have to rely on all of us being careful who we invite to the site. This hasn't been an issue so far - when we were processing those monster invite threads on /r/tildes, we invited almost everyone, I'd wager less than 20 people were rejected in total. We've had a whopping three bans out of around 5500 people here. Those are far better numbers than I was expecting when we started this. People really are willing to become better community members.
If those invite threads had gotten reddit front-page action I imagine that ratio would have changed considerably. It's not going to stay this simple once Tildes gets some limelight. We need to remain careful, patient, and calm, not chasing after 'big growth numbers' like everyone else is.
When something generates a massive burst of attention for Tildes, we need to go into ghost mode, close down invites, and wait for the attention to pass over and go away. Once that's done, the people who remain interested days later and are still asking for invites are the ones we want. They weren't just interested in the 'neat new thing' as the latest distraction - they stuck around and came back later.
That's why for example we only post the invite threads in /r/tildes when it's quiet, not when there's a truereddit post with 2k upvotes bringing in hundreds. Let the traffic pass by, and pick up the people who stick around and come back later.
I think open registration is far in the future. We can't really allow just anyone to sign up until we have the trust systems in place and prove they work. We only get one shot at that. I'll wager it'll come in phases, too - not always fully open to sign up. Think more like private trackers. Registration will open for a month, we'll get a lot of new users, and then registration will close again to give everyone time to acclimate and integrate. Then it'll open up again, and the process will repeat. Meanwhile the invites will still be there, always active, so all users will always be able to recruit on their own.
I also think that when Tildes gets a big mention in the press or other massive attention, registrations will be closed. They'd open again after the hubbub dies down, just like Metafilter does it.
Going into permanent fully open registration later on will require the site to have a firmly established culture and thousands of mods, curators, editors - and more full time administrators. Once that sort of manpower exists we should be able to handle the issues as they arise. For all of this, we'll be playing it by ear, there are no firm schedules. Knowing the right thing to do and the right time to do it isn't something you can effectively plan for in a chaotic online system like an internet forum.
Open readership is probably right around the corner, though. People will be able to read Tildes without accounts, but they can't submit or comment. That'll be the 'buzz generation' phase of the launch.
so I think I am coming at this slightly differently then others. Quality of the posting to me is a side effect of having a smaller community. There are of course other benefits too though of course. Recognizing users simply because you've talked to them in the past. conversations are grounded, more thought out. posts aren't be resubmitted over and over again for karma/votes and the big companies aren't making posts on here in order to hype people up for some upcoming movie.
You start getting into the high tens of thousands (certainly the hundreds of thousands) and all of that goes away unless you just simply whip out the ban hammer and either ban people or just dont let them comment which just takes us to some warped version of the smaller community that we currently have.
See I could imagine a case where commenting is SUPER SUPER restrictive...and that could kinda work. The Lurkers would love it. Nothing but comments by well informed people and maybe a couple of jokesters and media people who know what the average person would like to see said. But I don't get the sense that thats what the goal of this site is. It's supposed to be a (not trying to be a jerk to the developers of tildes here) a quieter reddit. And I think that's entirely about population size. Note that even the lurkers upvote and downvote. And that's a factor in what threads get to the top and what comments rise in threads.
Let me hit you with an idea for fostering quality content we've discussed before on tildes. It's probably buried in the 60-day old parts of ~tildes.official.
We were talking reddit gold and about how that little gold icon makes things fly up the page. We were also talking about what to do for AMAs because the mods of /r/science had just gotten into a kerfluffle with reddit admins over their lack of AMA visibility. That sparked some ideas.
The [tags] on this site can be more than just a visual text indicator. The tags themselves can actually change the behavior of the submissions and comments they are applied to. For the AMA issue, if the [ama] tag applies a vote multipler effect, it'll help active AMAs outpace other content and climb up the page (which is usually an objectively good thing).
But what about really good content?
Same idea, something that applies a vote multipler effect. We were calling this the 'exemplary upvote'. The idea is that this is a limited-use system, you'd get something like one super-vote a day, maybe be able to store up to three of them (or five or seven for heavily trusted users).
When you use one of these, you don't upvote. You change the post's vote multipler. Then when other people vote it up, their votes are heavier, and it climbs faster. This keeps it distributed and democratic, especially if the effect is small (like +0.10 per exemplary vote applied). If you get ten people to hit the post with the exemplary vote / gold, the multipler is now +1.0, so every vote counts as two votes.
This way, we can allow people to use these limited-use tokens to distinguish really groovy content much like people now use reddit gold to get that little gold icon and catch people's eyes. Enough exemplary votes and we could have the submission auto-level up from ~music.metal.progressive to ~music.metal for example.
This is a very rough idea, but I think it's the beginning of a voting mechanic that can actually select for quality rather than popularity, and do it in a distributed democratic fashion so it's hard to abuse. We don't have it yet of course, but the concept is tantalizing just the same.
I've seen something like this mentioned a few times, but the explanation was that this "exemplary upvote" or "super upvote" would apply to your own vote. You, yourself, could apply a super-vote worth 5 or 10 points to a post. Of course, only trusted users would have this ability, and even they would be limited in how often they could use it.
This ability to multiply other people's votes is something I haven't seen mentioned here before.
That's two different systems.
Your own normal vote gets heavier in places where you participate and earn trust. If you're at the top tier of trust in say ~politics.healthcare, your vote may count as 2-5x more than a new user who just arrived today. Not sure if this will extend to comments or not.
The exemplary upvote meddles with the multiplier, independently of the normal votes. People only get a couple, trusted users get a couple more, like one a day, save up to three - the more scarce it is, the more likely it won't be used frivolously. Maybe it comes with a visual indicator like a golden vote box, maybe not.
Not that we've built either of these yet, of course. The weights should help the people who build a group retain some level of influence over the content in the face of lots of new users. The exemplary vote should work somewhat like 'gold' does on reddit - most of the time, the gildings are used on good posts (or at least above average for that subreddit's content). That seems to be a natural aspect of a limited-use token, people save it for stuff they really like.
We'll need to carefully work through the details before these are ever implemented, that's for sure. I don't think a system like this has ever been used before, and it's likely to have unexpected effects. We'll have to watch it and tune it. The weights might even be settable per-group based on what the mods decide.
The kicker is making sure you can't use this stuff to boost yourself. Make a submission, there are no votes on it (starts at 0) so your own weight isn't counted. We should probably make it impossible for a user to use exemplary votes on their own submissions as well. That should stop the 'power submitter' problem that killed digg from happening here, which is a risk using this kind of system. Power has to come from the aggregate, not single individuals.
Interesting. Thanks for explaining. That does seem like a novel approach.
Could I suggest that, for clarity's purpose, you use "multiplier vote" instead of "exemplary vote", to differentiate this concept more strongly from the simpler "super vote"?
I would wonder whether this multiplier vote should also have a time limit: it applies only to votes added in the next 6 or 12 or 24 hours, for example. I assume the point of the multiplier-vote is to give prominence to topics that are high quality and relevant to a group - to give them a bit of a boost. One might not want this multiplier effect to be active days or even weeks later. We'd end up with a lot of zombie posts which all keep acquiring votes at a higher rate than normal posts.
That's a really good point, it should definitely be on a timer.
Not to add a low-quality post, but you've essentially just described Medium. I don't think we're attempting to create a platform for a uniquely privileged set of curated posters, but a place to share and elaborate the knowledge and experiences that make us all unique.
Don't know anything about Medium so maybe that would be a place for me. I will say that I addressed point in my initial write up though. Wasn't saying that I think tildes should be some super exclusive and privileged thing...no more than any random middle of nowhere no name small town is. Just something small and comfortable. Like the internet equivilant of the Cheers bar so to speak.
You’re what we’d call a NIMBY, Bot In My Back Yard. You found it first and you don’t want to share your new toy. If tildes were to be kept small, surely there should be a criteria to what should keep you here. What’s the magic number of active users? What about semi-active or just lurkers? Is it all about seniority or votes or activity? What about people that do just enough to not get the boot? Does Deimos get all the choice or is it a democracy, oligarchy, etc?
ABSOLUTELY! I completely recognize the hypocrisy in my own post. Going along with NIMBY, I would say that a small town that wants to remain a small town still has to have SOME people in it.
Honestly, I would keep it simple. A few thousand users. 1000 - 5000 maybe. It's a totally made up number with not much rationale behind it. Simple has its problems but so does an overly complicated system so getting into who to keep when to kick people out etc etc, aren't topics that I wouldn't be getting too much into. If an account is dead for maybe a year (again made up number) make the account so that it can no longer be signed into and allow someone else to sign up. I will say that I think with numbers like that I think you would have enough lurkers, commenters, and posts submitters to keep the site healthy. But I also don't know how big the total population of tildes currently is and I'd be interested to know.
Everyone who signs up for Tildes at the moment is automatically subscribed to all groups and sub-groups. They can then unsubscribe from the groups and sub-groups that don't interest them.
The group that people are least likely to unsubscribe from is ~tildes.official - where Deimos posts his official updates. If you look in the sidebar of that group, you'll see that there are currently 5,374 subscribers there. That means there are at least 5,374 people signed up to Tildes, but probably not too many more than that.
I don't necessarily agree that limiting the amount of users will lead to a superior experience on tilde, but I do think this is something we need to talk more about (the success of the site) before it gets too large. We need some case studies!
I mean...whats your take on this? limiting comes off as shitty but keep it small somehow? If so, I take your point. But I'm glad that you see where I'm coming from and are open to really get the dialogue going. as for case studies, interesting point. But it would really need to be another small reddit like site (also I feel shitty referring to tildes as a reddit like site...they're trying to do their own thing here and I get it).
If you're looking for case studies, the reddit alternatives list on reddit is probably a good start.
I don't think we should limit the number of users, but I do think it should stay somewhat hard to get an account,like keeping the invite system forever, for example, or having a waiting period.
This makes moderation stronger (makes bans a bit more painful), and makes sure people who are here at least made an effort to earn it.
Problem with the invite system in perpetuity is admin cost and time.
Processing invites could easily become a full time job, possibly for more than one person. I used to mod a private subreddit that got mentioned a few times in big threads and the number of people asking for access was overwhelming for a day or two, and it wasn't even a difficult process, just tedious. Replying to many many access request emails with codes in a timely fashion is not something many people would find enjoyable.
I meant user-distributed invites, such as the ones currently distributed on tildes. In the future it could be made clear that admins do not give out invites.
In general, as many have said, one day Tildes will have moderation mechanisms that will prevent the Eternal September effects. One of the main reasons why Reddit has become what it has become is that when there is a decision to monetise, then fluff becomes more lucrative than quality content. However, as is stated in Tildes' footer,
Now to the following point:
Well, you are a bit wrong about Voat. While Voat formally allows everything, the way it functions is such that incumbent users may easily downvoat any user they do not like to oblivion (e.g. the downvoated user will not be able to post topics and will not be able to comment more than 10 times per day). Voat was overtaken by a bunch of people sharing certain values, and many of them (surprise?) oppose NSFW. It was on Voat where I first saw that ridiculous “there is plenty of porn in the Internet, why should it be here as well?” argument.
I mean, there's a time and place for things. There has already been talk about whether or not to allow NSFW content on tildes and I agree with them not doing that. Just as netflix doesn't have a porn section (though they do occasionally have one or two really raunchy movies).
Thought I'd add my two cents to the sea of copper.
I think it's better to have it as an open signup, but give users tools to keep the site feeling small - which I feel is the direction tildes is going in anyway.
Just want to add to this:
I think the most important will be good filtering system effectively keeping the site small and tailored to yourself; also easy quick disabling of filters is part of it.
This is a very great website and I love every article I choose, just like any other site not all the content is for me but this is the only site where I feel I’m getting real uncensored posts. Everyone here wants to post and see real stuff, and real news that you couldn’t see most other places no matter how many times a “user” posts it. Whether the number stays small or not I think this will stay if it’s kept on an invite basis and open enough as it is now to get one. But I love not seeing shit posting or bits. And if I want memes I’ll go somewhere else. All over 10/10 so far guys