I'm not sure if this goes here or in ~talk, so if it needs moved, that's fine.

I've been thinking a lot, lately, about why I use Tildes.

As noted in my bio, I left Tildes for an extended period of time, after getting embroiled in some heavy arguments that, in the scheme of things, didn't matter. Such arguments consistently make me feel worse; I get into them on this account, too, though I do try to use uBlock Origin and the tag filter to keep out of the threads that will most obviously affect me.

But I can't seem to leave Tildes entirely. Even when I log out on all devices, I keep opening the site. Even when I had no account, I kept typing til<Enter> in the address bar and coming back.

So, why?

--

First, Tildes is what I love about the web. It's complete but uncluttered; it's featureful but not bloated; it uses client-side interactivity to improve the experience but does not break or reimpement default browser functionality. Overall, it's a good piece of software, designed to create, catalog, and discuss documents, like God Tim Berners-Lee intended.

Second, and more important, Tildes is a community. It's a community like my college dorm was a community; I know people here, and while I definitely don't like all of them, I recognize the personalities behind the names. Leaving, and diving mostly back into the world of Twitter and Mastodon where conversations are short, ephemeral, and deeply restricted, feels like losing relationships, no matter how damaging and negative some of those relationships are.

I don't know if gaining this understanding means I'll be able to - or even want to - drop the site again. We'll see. But I would love to know why y'all use it. Is it a community for you, too?

After using this method to block a user on here I can no longer see the number of votes a comment or a post gets.

I can see it fine when I switch to a browser without uBlockOrigin, but not on FireFox.

Any reason for this?

Edit: I also can't see anyone's username in the comments.

p.s the difference between this post and this post is that I want to ask questions and get people's opinions and answers in this one more.

Here's a few examples, last one being an argument between a few people where most people, including Deimos agreed with this idea.

Personally, I find this idea almost terrifying because it implies social media in it's current form cannot be fixed by changing or expanding human or automoderation, nor fact checking, because moderation can't reasonably occur at scale at all.

However, I have 2 questions:

1: If large social media platforms can't really be moderated what should we do to them? The implied solution is balkanizing social media until the 'platforms' are extended social circles which can be moderated and have good discussion (or more practically, integrate them to a federated service like mastodon which is made to be split like this or something like discord.) An alternative I've heard is to redo the early 2000s and have fanforums for everything to avoid context collapse and have something gluing the site's users together (something I am far more supportive of) or a reason for invite systems and stricter control of who enters your site but doesn't explain the idea that once your site hits a certain usercount, it will inevitably worsen and that is something that stems from human nature (Dunbar's number aka the max amount of friends you could theoretically have) and so is inevitable, almost natural.

2: Why is moderation impossible to do well at large scales? While I think moderation, which I think is analogous to law enforcement or legal systems (though the many reddit mods here can definitely give their opinions on that) definitely likely isn't the kind of thing that can be done at a profit, I'm not entirely sure why would it be wholly impossible. A reason I've heard is that moderators need to understand the communities they're moderating, but I'm not sure why wouldn't that be a requirement, or why would adding more mods make that worse (mods disagreeing with eachother while moderating seems quite likely but unrelated to this.)

I was reading this thread and thinking about my experience with political stuff on Tildes. It seems that issues proposed by the thread often have more to do with individuals than a topic or group.

It's a little less obvious now for two reasons 1) usernames are only visible within "link threads" 2) you can only see a limited sections of posts on other peoples profiles.

I'm not knocking those choices I just want to point out that it makes it less easy to general sense of who is posting in a way that you find to be lacking substance or inflammatory.

I would be happy if I could rely on filtering groups from the home page but unfortunately it doesn't take much guile for an individual to politicize virtually any topic that arises in a way that triggers distracting or unpleasant emotions around a discussion.

My questions are:

• Do we have that option to filter out users right now?
• Would that option make your experience on Tildes better?
• Would it be useful to filter a users posts while choosing to allow their comments on other threads?

I would like a current active user Count for the whole site. I find them very useful for knowing when people are on I’m not a fan of group specific ones but one that said how many people where currently on I would like

Right now, there are 10,000 subscribers to ~tildes.official, meaning that Tildes as a whole must have more than 10,000 users.

We've passed a milestone!

Congratulations to @Deimos for making this happen.

Suppose you want to participate in an old post with hundreds of comments. You made your fresh new comment, injecting your thoughts and effort into it and hit the post button with hopes and dreams.

The post is bumped to the top under Activity. Other tilders saw the old post on the top, they are intrigued, perhaps as much as you are and wonder what you can add to the discussion, but they couldn't find your comment.

Why is that?

You replied to a thread with a very old top-level comment.

As Tildes is still relatively new, this isn't much of a issue now, but one that I feel needed to be addressed eventually as the site grows. It is certainly a low priority issue for the time being.

Sort by new only sorts comments by the time when top-level comment is posted, which is an inherent characteristic of comment threads. If my last years of memeing on redditting has taught me anything, it is that a new post gathers the most views in the first few minutes when it was posted (This might be a few days on Tildes).

Bumping helps extend the longevity of a given post if the thread gathers enough attention and discussion value to warrant a comment, but that alone would not alleviate the fact that new comments is seen by less and less people as the post gets older (as indicated by votes). If we want to make high-quality comments seen by more people, we need to make comment age a less limiting factor.

Tildes needs to help its users to discover new comments.

A few solutions come to my mind.

1. By presenting comments in a linear fashion like the good old bulletin board does without any hierarchy such that sort by new would truly be sort by new.

2. By highlighting ( or whichever other means ) comments that meet certain criteria (Comments that are among the latest 10 or comments that were posted within the last hour, this can vary depending on the activities of the comments)

3. I would like to propose a novel solution to this problem by compacting the comment threads to a forest of trees with navigable nodes. This sounds totally outlandish, it might very well be, but its an idea that I think worth sharing.

The editing is rudimentary but I hope the idea is communicated well.

Cheers!

Currently, we can filter posts based on topic tags, is there any chance we could get the same based upon users? Preferably for comments and topics. There are times when I might be interested in a sub-tilde group, but for one reason or another, not a specific user's content in that group. Is this a bad idea?

I know the trust system is far off. However, I think a really interesting point to include could be the ability to "vouch" for a user via a profile button. Generally, this should be if you know them off-site or you recognize them as a great contributor here.

There shouldn't be any indication to the user that someone has vouched for them-- that makes it easy to manipulate, allowing for more of a tit-for-tat with randos.

There should also be a number of factors involving the invite tree here (user 1 is the person whose profile button was clicked; user 2 is the clicker vouching for the other person here)--

• Did user 2 invite user 1? If so, it's worth a little
• Did user 1 invite user 2? If so, it's not worth much
• Are users 1 and 2 completely unrelated in the tree? That's worth the most.
• Older accounts provide more trust when vouching.

This way, it's harder to manipulate, too.

What do you guys think about this? Obviously it'll be a lower priority than the primary trust system, and will take a while to get the mechanics sorted, but I think it will be a worthwhile addition in the future

e: meant to add that trust given should be directly correlated to the trust of the person vouching; new users shouldn't even have an option to vouch, at least until their trust is x or they've been around for a few weeks.

Hey guys,

Deimos gave me a bunch of invites to give out and I have a post on Reddit where I’ve been giving them out.

So far I’m looking at each persons history to make sure they aren’t a troll, and have posted generally positive and insightful content.

What do you guys think we should be vetting?

Since I’m assuming Tildes won’t be Invite-Only forever, is this just delaying the inevitable?

There have been many, many, many threads over the past few weeks in which users (some new, some with a few posts under their belts) ask questions or make suggestions about items that are explicitly discussed in the documentation. Additionally, the documentation contains a lot of thoughtful items discussing the goals of the site and the mechanics for achieving those goals. The documentation is an integral part of this community, yet many people don't seem to be reading it.

How can the community help ensure that users read and understand the documentation prior to becoming a member of the community? A potential solution could be to have a short quiz based on the documentation, which would ensure that users at least skim it.

Any other ideas?

On Reddit it's easy -- Redditors. Ending in a vowel, Tildes makes that a bit less straightforward. This obviously is not a super high priority question, but I had the thought a few minutes ago. Are we Tilders? Tilds? ~rs? Anyone have any ideas that are a bit more creative and easier to say?