So I browse Tildes, Hacker News, and Reddit, but I'm wondering if there are online communities or hubs out there where entrepreneurial folks discuss actionable business problems and projects, instead of news or memes.

I notice that people will spend endless time online discussing the minutiae of their personal lives, celebrity lives, politics, and son, which are fine. But I want to read about how people are working out the kinks of drone delivery, improving access to and availability of mental healthcare, making municipal permitting more streamlined, and other processes.

tl;dr IDK what happened before, but r/antiwork is public now (again?).

I just stumbled across this tildes thread from 2 weeks ago [EDIT: crap ... 1 year and 2 weeks ago; mixed up my "current year" setting] ... which is right on the border between "keep posting in that thread" and "it's too old, start a new one" ... so here we are.

I'm familiar with the ideas, but never heard of that specific subreddit before. Looking through the Fox interview, I must be missing something, because I don't understand what all the fuss was about. What "mistake" did the mod make in the interview? Why did everyone suddenly hate her? etc. Seemed perfectly innocuous to me (apart from, why even bother with Fox).

But that aside, the previous thread indicates that r/antiwork was effectively bullied into going private. Looking at it this morning, it is not private. I am assuming that they just recently de-privatized it?

On a side-note, top comment on the thread is about not supporting r/cringetopia ... which ... that subreddit is private. Is that also new? It had me confused for quite awhile this morning, trying to figure out which subreddit was actually under controversy and forced to go private.

I don't think this has been much of an issue so far with this community, but I expect that with time people will be more and more likely to not read the linked article before commenting. We've become so primed in general to consume information on the Internet in a way that makes us feel overconfident in our understanding based on just a few details, that I think it would be useful to have a soft reminder to actually read and engage with the things you're responding to instead of offering a "hot take".

I remember I came across it here, probably posted by @Deimos in the course of a thread about Tildes' philosophy. The essence of the blog was that the truly nice, sweet people among us that make online forums a better place with their positive interactions are more sensitive to tensions and negative interactions than the average person, so they'd be likely to leave at a lower level of trolling than most of us would, resulting in a net negative for everyone on the site. Could have sworn I bookmarked it...

I just joined, and although it’s not extremely active, I love Tildes already! Firstly, the user interface. This is what the reddit redesign should’ve been. Clean, simple and lightweight. Loading a post on new reddit takes 10 seconds or so, because of all the useless JavaScript, but posts loads instantly here. And there’s no ads here, which is a nice bonus.

I also like the fact that it’s much calmer here, people focus on through-provoking discussion instead of attacking each other.

To everyone who works on Tildes, keep up the great work! I’m sure this has been asked many times before, but do you ever plan on allowing anyone to register in order to grow Tildes?

Many of you might be familiar with the popular and massively growing antiwork/work reform movement that found a home in the r/antiwork subreddit. Well, recently, the founder of the subreddit was invited on Fox news for an interview and it went about as well as you could expect (We shouldn't support r/Cringetopia) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yUMIFYBMnc

Sub is now private, an offshoot called /r/WorkReform has been launched and everyone hates the old mods now.

At some point we recognized the signs of desperation. My wife and I had been running to the window like puppies for a glimpse of any unusual traffic. We caught ourselves bingeing on news articles, as if saturating ourselves with reporting could somehow make us relevant to a world that saw less and less of us. We even resorted to calling my mother. After listening to 90 uninterrupted minutes of narration regarding her most recent routine doctor’s visit, we broke down. We resolved to end the isolation that was slowly killing us. Then the pandemic hit.

Our biggest stumbling block is figuring out how can we make friends online using only privacy-respecting platforms and software? We would like to see some friendly faces in real time without being simultaneously, you know, mined. Could anyone in the know share suggestions?

Edit: I'm grateful people are considering this. Thank you! I find it helps to ask people what their ideal solution would be, no matter how far-fetched. So, in response to that: My dream platform/venue/project would meld aspects of Lunchclub with The Human Library. I have stories to tell. I would love to video chat with fully-clothed individuals drawn from all over the world, chosen based on their stories and ambitions. It would work the way a good host does. You know, "Greta once had the job of getting sweat stains out of Bruce Springsteen's guitar strap. You two should swap cleaning stories, since you work at that drycleaner's, right, Butchie? Is it true it's a front for the mob? Oh, excuse me, I have to disinfect the pizza guy. I'll leave you to it." Maybe I should flesh this out more.

Feedback here is honest, thoughtful, constructive. This is one of the few places that remind me of the constructive and supportive web I grew up with. I'm just happy projects like Tildes exist. Thank you, Tildes community.

One thing I'm uncertain about Tildes is how informative its posts are meant to be. I've been keeping myself from posting hype threads about upcoming movies (Dune, Ride Your Wave, etc.).
What type of balance is tildes trying to strike? I'm in favor of shitposting, but against images, since I think text encourages the type of discussion I'm looking for a community. So I'd like to see copypasta, but I'm not sure what the general consensus is.

Edit: I'm looking less for general examples than some sort of hard and clear rule. I'm seeing comments which disagree somewhat and leave ambiguities, but I believe the criteria should be better laid out.

As an outsider some gaming communities can appear incredibly toxic. I'm sure some of that is a deserved reputation, but I'm also aware that maybe there's a bit of generalisation going on, and that some communities are lovely but unrecognised.

So I thought I'd ask Tildes: which gaming communities do you like? And why?

(As always, feel free to interpret this question how you like. And, again, I suck at tagging so I'm grateful for any tagging edits. I do read those to try to learn.)

Heya!

The question is rather straightforward. Even though I said smaller, size doesn't really matter for this - the focus is more on the community aspect rather than it being small. Here's my non-exhaustive list (in no particular order):

1. Tildes - This is unsurprising. It's definitely large for a "small" community, but it's managed to preserve it's culture very well, which is rather impressive. It's cozy and has high quality discussion.
2. Various Discord servers and IRC channels. This one is harder to pinpoint, to be honest. As far as IRC channels/Discord servers goes, some of the more niche gaming ones are probably some of the nicest environments. IRC-wise, I really haven't managed to find any particularly active ones, outside of the ones for the next list member...
3. tilde.town and probably the larger tildeverse. Not affiliated with Tildes, but generally just... a nice place to be. It's rather quiet a lot of the time, but their main IRC channel is, frankly, quite great. When it's active.
4. A lot of Mastodon instances, although of course not all. The fediverse is generally a nice place to be, although politics on there is kind of mushy and one sided. Genuine interactions on there, however, are extremely common and sorting by the global timeline is quite nice (most of the time.)
5. rateyourmusic is a nice community of those who are passionate about music. It's quite nice overall, though.

There's definitely a lot I've missed out, mainly because I probably don't know about them.

So, what are some of the smaller (or not) communities that you enjoy?

So we have many communities and everyone gets free *nix shell access, you can ssh into the remote server (mostly ubuntu) and do whatever you want! I mostly go there to talk with other users.

It is all old school, we use the command line and there is no gui that you can work with. You have to use the cli for everything you do (easy to learn).

You can -

• learn programming
• make webpages
• make new friends
• play games
• learn more about *nix

and much more.

See https://tildeverse.org to get started. (https://tilde.team/wiki/?page=other-tildes for more tilde servers)

I'll suggest you to join ctrl-c.club or tilde.town and then try other servers. You can make account everywhere ofc. I am ~cyaniventer on tildeverse, see ctrl-c.club/~cyaniventer

Edit: Not related to tildes.net

I've been meaning to make this post for a while, and it's actually going to wind up being a series of several posts. It's kind of a long meditation on what it means to socialize online and the ways in which the services we use to do that help or hinder us in doing so. Along the way I'm going to be going into some thoughts on how online discourse works, how it should work, and what can be done to drive a more communal, less toxic, and more inclusive of non-traditional (read: non-technical) voices. I'm going to be throwing out a lot of inchoate opinions here, so I'm hoping to pressure test my views and solicit other viewpoints and experiences from the community.

I mentioned in an introduction thread that I'm a policy analyst and my work is focused on how to structure policies and procedures to build a constructive organizational culture. I've been a moderator in some large PHP forums and IRC channels in the old days, and I've developed some really strong and meaningful friendships through the web. So I've always had a soft spot for socializing on the interwebs.

Okay, so that's the introduction out of the way. The main point I want to focus on is the title: Remember the Person. This was the something Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit, suggested in a farewell message as she stepped down from the role in the wake of a community outcry regarding her changes to Reddit's moderation practices. The gist of it was that online communication makes it too easy to see the people you're interacting with in abstract terms rather than as human beings with feelings. It's a bit of a clichéd thought if we're being honest, but I think we still tend not to pay enough attention to how true it is and how deeply it alters the way we interact and behave and how it privileges certain kinds of interaction over others. So let's dig in on how we chat today, how it's different from how we chatted before in discussion forums, and what we're actually looking for when we gather online.

Since this is the first in a series, I want to focus on getting some clarity on terms and jargon that we'll be using going forward. I'd like to start by establishing some typologies for social media platforms. A lot of these will probably overlap with each other, and I'll probably be missing a few, but it's just to get a general sense of categories.

To start with we have the "Content Aggregator" sites. Reddit is the most notable, HackerNews is big but niche, and Tildes is one too. This would also include other sites like old Digg, Fark.com, and possibly even include things like IMGUR or 9Gag. The common thread among all of these is user submitted content, curation and editorial decisions made largely by popular vote, and continued engagement being driven by comment threads associated with the submitted content (e.g. links, images, videos, posts). In any case, the key thing you interact with on these sites is atomized pieces of "content."

Next up are the "Running Feed" services. Twitter and Mastodon are the classic examples as is Facebook's newsfeed. Instagram is an example with a different spin on it. These services are functionally just glorified status updates. Indeed, Twitter was originally pitched as "What if we had a site that was ONLY the status updates from AOL Instant Messager/GChat?" The key thing with how you interact with these services is the "social graph." You need to friend, follow, or subscribe to accounts to actually get anything. And in order to contribute anything, you need people following or subscribing to you. Otherwise you're just talking to yourself (although if we're being honest, that's what most people are doing anyway they just don't know it). This means the key thing you interact with on these sites is an account. You follow accounts get to put content on your feed. Follower counts, consequently, become a sort of "currency" on the site.

Then you've got the "Blogs" of old and their descendants. This one is a bit tricky since it's largely just websites so they can be really heterogenous. As far as platforms go, though, Tumblr is one of the few left and I think LiveJournal is still kicking. Lots of online newspapers and magazines also kind of count. And in the past there were a lot more services, like Xanga and MySpace. The key thing you interact with here is the site. The page itself is the content and they develop a distinct editorial voice. Follower counts are still kind of a thing, but the content itself has more persistence so immediacy is less of an issue than in feed based paradigms where anything older than a day might as well not exist. This one gets even trickier because the blogs tend to have comment sections and those comment sections can have a bunch little social media paradigms of their own. It's like a matroishka doll of social platforms.

The penultimate category is the "Bulletin Board" forum. PHP BB was usually the platform of choice. There are still a few of these kicking around, but once upon a time these were the predominant forms of online discourse. Ars Technica and Something Awful still have somewhat active ones, but I'm not sure where else. These also have user posted content, but there is no content curation or editorial action. As a result, these sites tend to need more empowered and active moderators to thrive. And the critical thing you're interacting with in these platforms is the thread. Threads are discussion topics, but it's a different vibe from the way you interact on a content aggregator. On a site like Reddit or Tildes all discussion under a topic is 1 to 1. Posts come under content. On a bulletin board it works like an actual bulletin board. You're responding under a discussion about a topic rather than making individual statements about an individual post or comment. Another way to put it is on an aggregator site each participant is functionally writing individual notes to each other participant. On a bulletin board each participant is writing an open letter to add to the overall discussion as a whole.

And finally, you've got the "Chat Clients." This is the oldest form besides email newsletters. This began with Usenet and then into IRC. The paradigm lives on today in the form of instant messaging/group texts, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, etc. In this system you're primarily interacting with the room(s) as a whole. There isn't really an organizing framework for the conversation, it's really just a free-flowing conversation between the participants. You might be able to enforce on-topic restrictions, but that's about as structured as it gets.

That about covers the typologies I can think of. Next up I want to delve into the ways in which the UI and design patterns with each of these platforms affects the way users engage with them, what sorts of social dynamics they encourage, and what sorts of interactions they discourage. In the mean time, I'm eager to hear what people think about the way I've divided these up, whether you think I've missed anything, or have any additional thoughts on the ones I put up.

The active development of Tildes and the feedback/discussions about features and mechanisms had me thinking. Is the conscious design and moderation of forums for public discourse a manner of social engineering?

I know the connotation of social engineering is usually negative, as in manipulating people for politics. But it's a double edged sword.

Most recently I was reading this feedback on removing usernames from link topics and while reading the comments I was thinking of how meta this all is. It's meta-meta-cognition in that we (well, by far the actual developers) are designing the space within which we execute our discourse and thinking. To paraphrase the above example: user identification can bias one's own impulse reaction to content, either to a beneficial or detrimental end, so how do we want this?

The moderation-influenced scenario is a bit more tricky because it can become too top-heavy, as in one prominent example many of us came from recently... But I think with a balance of direction from the overlords (jk, there is also public input as mentioned) and the chaos of natural public discourse, you could obtain an efficient environment for the exchange of ideas.

I'm not sure what my stimulating question would be for you all, so just tell me what you think.