Ok, this is less than a half-baked idea, but here goes.

I just got here, but I really feel like you all “are my people.” I know there are possible issues with this, echo chamber, etc.. but darn it, I like this group right now. I may like it even after lots of user growth. But.. what if there was some magical way to use the site in the future as it was in the past.

My initial thought was what if we “forked” the user base at different times. Here is my best thought on how that might be implemented.

What if there was a user setting called Shrinkage, Time Machine, Good Ole Days, or something. It would be a date field that had a minimum value of your tildes birthday, max value of now. You could set it to n whenever you wanted and then you would see the site with only the posts and comments of the users that existed prior to n + 1 day (so your are included.)

I think other folks will have this same “good ole days” feeling even when they sign up years from now, they could always go back to their original community.

OK, I think that this implementation is pretty harmless. Shoot me down. What unintended consequences did I not think of? Do you see any value in this?

edit: missing word

Hey everyone!

I was recently exposed to a new website called Song.Link. You can search for songs, albums, or artists that you like, and generate a link that provides access to the music you found in all of the major music streaming services.

Song.Link

I think it'd be great if we could make it standard to post a song.link when possible!

Edit: learning to markdown

Instead of a tree hierachy, perhaps groups would be better off based on a DAG - a Directed Acyclic Graph. This would allow groups to have multiple parents as well as multiple children. For example, ~mazda might have ~cars and ~japan as parents, and ~tolkein might have ~fantasy and ~linguistics as parents. I think this could maintain the benefits of the hierachical system while making it easier to find a group that suits the post.

While potentially complex, a good UI which effectively visualised the DAG to allow a content submitter to hone in on the correct group-node, and potentially create a new one on the fly if none was appropriate, could make this concept reasonably intuitive. This problem has already been tackled by creators of git GUIs, so perhaps some ideas could be adapted from that space.

One issue is that a node in a DAG is much harder to identify with a text string than a node in a tree-based hierachy. One solution would be that the submitter could choose a 'primary path' which would be displayed to readers, which, upon being clicked, would display the full DAG, including all the potentially numerous paths which would lead to that group-node. For example, I might choose ~linguistics.tolkein.quenya as the primary path, but upon clicking, the reader can discover that ~fantasy.tolkein.quenya and ~linguistics.conlangs.quenya and ~writing.worldbuilding.quenya all lead to the same group-node [edit: ugly illustration]. I feel that this solution could potentially be powerful enough to remove the need for tags entirely. Viewing the homepage of any particular group-node on the DAG would aggregate posts to all child groups, meaning that the effects of community fragmentation are mitigated. Even a post to a really specific group-node, like ~cars.mazda.mx5.na, will still enjoy the same status and priority to the readers of the ~cars homepage as a post made directly to the ~cars group-node.

It seems like blocking is the basic bit of functionality that is standing out the most for not existing on ~ at the moment, at least for those of us who have ran into a reason to want it. Is this something we can expect soon, if at all? I know just reporting things to @deimos works for now for things that are rule-breaking, but there are plenty of situations where you don't want to continue interacting with a person for reasons that may not even take place on this site (I'm sorry if the person this is in reference to sees this and recognizes me...I don't really have a way of avoiding that...hence this post), and there isn't really a way to take care of that.

Sorry, I know feature requests and suggestions are being piled in really fast, but at least for me and some users I know, this is pretty essential.

Not because this is a problem yet, but because it will be.

We're all familiar with the flavour that some usernames have, when someone with the name I_RAPE_CATS invites people and they are entirely unaware of this being on the userpage forever and ever it's going to become something people will want.

My invitees so far have both remarked "Looks like I have you on my userpage forever" which is fine, but for some it won't be.

I'm grateful for being invited and I'm happy to see the community enjoy a smooth ride so far.

I really hope the platform does not follow in the footsteps of Reddit's karma mechanism. I find that this cumulative store of points attached to each user to encourages them to seek more points, regardless if they steal content or repost their own old material for another karma-harvesting run. Instead, if users can be appreciated by the actual number of posts they've submitted much like the bulletin boards of old, it would be more fair in my opinion. It'd be a measure of the effort and contribution made by a user, not only what others think of them.

For example, my profile would say "Eyehigh posted 20,000 posts" instead of "Eyehigh seemed to impress 20,000 people enough for them to leave an upvote, so here's the 20,000 upvotes."

What do you think?

It would be neat if typing '@op' inside a topic resulted in a link to the profile of that topic's poster. So, in this topic, @OP and @elf would be equivalent.

Also sorry @deimos for spamming ~tildes with suggestions (not actually sorry though.)

I think it would be fun to have an ~anon group, with the feature that all topics and replies are shown as being posted by 'anonymous'. It might need more active moderation than other ~groups though, and it would need to develop its own identity so it isn't just an anonymous replica of the rest of ~s.

It's kind of awkward to have to go to the main tildes page then click to one of the ~groups to navigate between groups. Either having the home bar under the group bar on the right, or having a list of other ~groups on the top (possibly customizable, RES style?) would fix this.

I don't think this is super high priority, but it'd be nice to be able to escape the ~ or @ symbols so that something isn't automatically turned into a link to a group/user. For example, I noticed in a comment I made that ~ers gets automatically turned into a link to the non-existent 'ers' group. I think if I write \~ers then it should not be linked. (E.g. ~ers)

I'm not sure if it's a vanilla reddit feature or if it comes from RES, but I've become reliant upon the preview that shows up under a comment box that renders your response through markdown so you can see the formatting before you post it. This doesn't need to be real-time, since that would likely detract from the "lightweight" technical goal, but I feel like it might be useful

One of the biggest things I liked about Kuro5hin was the ability for content to initially be posted in edit mode, which encouraged edits and disallowed voting. In this way, it allowed a contributor to publicly draft out a story prior to the story being judged.

The editable story would go into a separate, opt-in view mode so that people could select whether they wanted to see (and give feedback on) immature stories and then shift (time trigger or manual publish) into the main story feed.

With Tildes' comment-tagging system, we could probably just tag all comments made during edit mode as "edit" and allow them to be merged (or not) with the mainline commentary. I'd suggest (based on experience 20 years ago :) that the edit mode comments be not initially merged into mainline discussion.

Automatically* dammit auto-correct!

I often use the notifications to reply to comments directly, opening the context link in another tab if needed. I after replying I have to explicitly 'Mark as read'. I think it makes sense to automatically mark a notification as read when replying to it.

If this is a common use I will happily create an issue for it on GitLab.

So this is based on experience from Reddit. I see there is ~talk , which is great, but talk is distinct from advice I think, which is more focussed and potentially a bit more serious. You could consider ~talk.advice but i think you might have a culture/trust clash between them a bit. I think having them distinct allows for ~advice to be given in a safer space while ~talk stays more open and flexible.

I suspect, from my experience, that you would have different behavioural patterns, conventions and broad rules in the two trees of tildes.

At the bottom of this thread, there is a deleted comment. It appears there is no way to collapse all of its children. So, two suggestions:

1. Allow users to expand/collapse deleted comments children
2. Start deleted comments collapsed

Suggestion 1 seems like either a bug or just not yet implemented. For 2, I can imagine differing opinions on this, any other thoughts?

I may have inadvertently created the first repost in Tildes in ~comp and was wondering if there are plans for a notification on posting a new topic that has already been posted.

I know that this sort of check is easily 'bypassed', but personally, had I know it had been posted already I would have voted & joined the existing discussion.

I think if we could detect the same URL, at least in the same group, maybe even with a time modifier of within the last week, it would help consolidate the discussions.

Tipster tags for comments?

I was going to post this on the daily discussion about tag, but I'm not sure it's something "easy" to implement or even worth considering. Some feedback would be appreciated.

I was thinking there could be a special type of tag or report that goes directly to the poster in a private way (like a "whisper" tag, similar to the whisper comments someone suggested).

This could be useful especially in polarizing topics, I believe.

The idea is something like this: a (somewhat) trusted user sees a comment that is worded in a confrontational or maybe aggressive manner or its unsubstantiated and foresees conflict, but instead of tagging it like "flame" for everyone to see, they tag it as "rephrasable" or "sounds confrontational?" or even "citation needed" (I'm sure you guys can come up with better names and ideas, but you get the gist, something that communicates that it could be worded in a softer, more objective way or using a source, etc.), only the OP sees this tag on their own comment and can thus react appropriately (or maybe ignore if it seems unfounded, or discuss -privately?- with the anonymous reporter) by editing their comment (possibly leaving some kind of trace of the change or acknowledging the report).

too long/didn't understand: allow giving the poster a private warning that someone thinks their comment is problematic before things get too heated!

This is of course already possible with base 64 encoding and some work on the user's side, but adding the ability to encrypt messages as a native feature would better encourage this as a security measure. This is a standard feature on a lot of darknet markets. Tildes could allow users to upload a public GPG key. Then a private key could be held entirely client-side in session storage to be used by JavaScript.

This feature would probably add too much complexity to the site's simplistic front end. But I'd be interested to have a discussion on the pros/cons.

Hey there! I'm pretty new to this whole website, but I figured I would chip in on suggestions I have as I go along. I will likely be editing to add more suggestions to this as I go.

1. Put the "leave a comment" box at the top of the comment section, not the bottom.

2. Something I noticed as I am writing this, I don't see any sort of formatting guide. While there may not be any sort of formatting yet, like italics (maybe that's italicized?) or bold, if I remember right, markdown is something besides just plain text, right? If I'm just doing a big dumb here, lemme know, haha.

3. When I was automatically logged out from spending some time away, I found that when you log in, you aren't redirected back where you were attempting to go, but rather, back to the tildes homepage. It's be nice to be redirected to your original destination.

Edit: 4. When you reply to a comment in your unread page, it should be marked as read.

One of the very frustrating things for me on reddit is the way crossposting works, essentially making it a karma whoring feature more than anything else.

Can crossposting be simplified? For example: I just posted a topic in ~tv, however I realize it applies more to ~comp (sorry, I was premature on posting it somewhere - maybe it can be moved?) but could fit in ~tv as it's related, even if being a 3rd cousin from the groups intent. It would be nice to be able to pick the groups I'd like to publish it to, so the discussion is centralized and consistent - if that makes sense?

*Removed a word

Hi all. Registered several days ago and this is my first post.

After reading around this group and the blog, I'm very excited for the tildes project. It's not just another reddit-style forum but actually one of its own taste and style. I have some suggestions for the project and would like to share them with the community. They are the result of years of redditing with numerous frustrating experiences and few shower thoughts.

1. Voting power should not be taken for granted. The ability for me to vote must be in some way tied to my contributions to the discussion. This can be implemented in a sort of formula that takes into account the user's 'score' and 'activity' which results in a finite number of votes at the user's disposal. The more you contribute the more voting power you get, and the more quality you provide in your contributions the more votes you get to use.
2. Deleted posts or comments must be reflected in a user's score. One of the bad effects of having a user score is the tendency to 'karma whore' in order to increase that score no matter what. The result is low effort posts and comments. Having a system in place that removes from the user's score if their posts/comments get deleted would act as a constant reminder to the minimum level of quality required.
3. Mods should not have dictator power over their groups. Sure they must have elevated accounts to run their groups, including the power to remove or ban, but they should not be invisible. There has to be an approved system where users can have the collective power to revoke the elevated account powers of a Mod if they reach a certain threshold. Not sure how to implement this exactly, may be through voting by the users of a group who have high scores or reputations. One of the cancerous ailments of reddit is the invincibility of Mods.
4. The availability of formatting tools and embedding in posts. This is 2018 and inserting a photo, video, table in the body of a post should be easily implemented. Constrictions on the use of certain attention-grabbing formats (eg. large fonts, ascii art, emoji) should be also be implemented to deter low effort contributions.

Here's to hoping this project flourishes into a much-needed hub for quality content and discussions on the internet.
Cheers

Edit: Not sure why the first point is indented or how to fix it.
Edit2: Fixed.

I spend quite a bit of time on the NASA Spaceflight forums and r/spacex and r/space on Reddit, and I was wondering if anyone would be in favor of creating a ~space group or something similar here.

As things stand now, I feel like ~science would be the most appropriate place for talk about space, space tech, and rocketry, but the general feeling of that group seems to be multidisciplinary science discussion and news, rather than the cross of news, science, engineering (and a bit of nearly-corporate-espionage if it's r/spacex...) that one usually finds in a discussion/forum about space and rocketry.

Would the creation of such a group be something others would like to consider? Do you have other thoughts on the matter?

Would there be any way to tag users so people you've interected with would pop out a bit more in a thread as their name would have a teg beside them or you could tag your friends so even if you forget their name it could pop up somewhere and you'd know it.

On Reddit, the reply notifications come with a "context" button, which will bring you to the topic and show a limited set of replies, to establish the context in which the new comment was made. From what I can see, there's no such feature on Tildes (yet). I'd like it if we could get a feature like that so I can easily read back what someone replied to, so I can understand the context behind it, and possibly reply again.

Having notifications only go away when clicking Mark As Read is a really cool feature. However, once you start to get a large amount of these notifications, this can become a pain.

Could a 'Mark All As Read' button be added that solves this feature?

To me one of the biggest problems on the internet is the lack of a "hub" or somewhere it sort of centralizes. In my opinion the current "staleness" of the internet is due to a lack of central hub.

So i thought about how I could solve this problem. You see without a central hub, starting anything is a problem.

Imagine I am a new user on the web, and I want to learn 3D modeling. Where do I go? This is a problem I am facing right now, like which site do I goto to be part of a community. I don't want to make an account on facebook and join ragtag groups with no real activity. There is no sense of community or anything, just random noise. All I can do is google, and youtube videos to learn 3d modeling. If I goto forums, they are all very stale or "dead" and I leave cause I don't know what to do there.

I basically wanted to have a starting point where I knew for a fact that everyone knows this place and starts here and belong to a community. Two months, and I still have the same problem. I don't belong to a community within 3d modeling or feel like I belong there. Just hardly any chitchat, irc channels barely anyone speaks. Days go by without a new thread.

The biggest problem I notice is that everyone is spread apart, some devs on twitter only, some on that certain site only. No one is really connected or rather there is no central hub. Still using 3d modeling as an example, I noticed that without a central hub, there is no real "right" way to do something. I mean this, no one has any idea on what software to use. I keep asking myself am I using the right software, what is he using, what are they using. It turns out they all have this question, I'm still not sure. NO ONE IS. So if no one is sure, then the communities unintentionally keep closing themselves off.

But There is one rule that must be set

YOU CANNOT EVER ALLOW A USER TO CREATE A GROUP. Do not make this mistake.

Have Things constant at times, I'm tired of unlimited everything. A limit creates a sense of belonging.

Why?

Reddit's biggest flaw and strength is the subreddits and it made a mistake when it allowed anyone to create one and you are seeing the cascading effects now. When you can make a new group, you are no longer a tight nit community with set focus. You are separating the community on a large scale, right off the bat and as you can see on reddit, subbreddits clash which leads to drama and ultimately the destruction of the site from within.

So what am I getting at?

We go back to a tried and true method and something that we know everyone will like. Something that Appeals To Everyone ish.

YOU BRING BACK THE GEOCITIES NEIGHBORHOODS AND KEEP THEM NAMED AS GROUPS.

Have 29 Groups, or let the community decide the # of groups and lets start naming them. No petsburgh please

Simple Short Descriptions. and the name creates an INSTANT connection with someone who might have an interest in that group.

The Only Time You Add A Group is every 6 months to a year and ONLY THE OWNER CAN. Community Decides the name.

YOU HAVE TO HAVE A SET # OF GROUPS. This creates unique culture.

List of IDEAS:

1: Add a count for the amount of posts in the group list if you can, might be database heavy.

2: Everyone is subscribed to all the groups but can unsubscribe.

3: A list of trending "topics" or call them "marks" or "underscores". (Suck it twitter)

We currently have ~tildes for meta topics. What about a similar mechanism for meta-discussion, scoped to specific group hierarchies? I imagine something like ~tildes.gaming or ~tildes.gaming.leagueoflegends, mirroring the structure of the groups itself. This draws a little bit from how StackExchange does it, if anyone is familiar with that, but they do not have any nesting. They just have a "meta" site for every regular one for discussing the site itself.

An alternative would be to discuss those things in the group itself. This might be reasonable as well, but since we already separate it out for the top-level, that approach seems somewhat inconsistent.

I noticed when opening my notifications that they are missing a link to the originating thread.

EDIT: just discovered that the # at the end of the header line is a link back to the topic. Maybe making that a bit more obvious then?

Can we get a tag next to usernames for Tildes staff? Kind of like an admin tag, but might as well just call it staff or whatever you prefer. For example in that donations thread I was unsure if it's an admin posting that or not at first glance. Would apply to comments too.

(Are red titles from staff? But that doesn't apply to comments I guess)

To give you an example list:

• Everyone should be able to add tags to topics, not just OP in creation
  Tags are useful but only if they are correct.
  OP could not get the right tags but the community as a whole could fix it over time. That would help browsing tags that actually reflect the content of the topics.
• I should be able to tag my own comments. Sometimes you know you're posting off-topic or just a joke.

I think the option to save a topic or comment would be a good addition. For example, I have had a ~music topic about music everyone's listening to open for over a day so that I can pick a new group to listen to each time I do homework. Sure, I could write them all somewhere, but I think it's a nice QoL improvement nonetheless.

Edit: I'd like to add to this @Ganymede 's idea of following a topic to get notified of new comments inside it. Maybe this could apply to a specific comment chain, too, since a whole topic will be a lot once the site explodes. ;)

Hello,

I saw in another thread being mentioned that there is no use for API for real users other than bots. So wanted to voice some real API uses that I would be interested in:

1. When I post a new blog post, if I find it worthy of sharing here, it would be nice to mirror the comments I get here back on my blog post. I can imagine using API to fetch all the comments from a tildes thread, including the hierarchy relationship. The API would return a JSON with Markdown and/or HTML like the XML that Disqus exports (but JSON). When people want to comment on that post, they can come to tildes to do so, or if they don't want to create an account here, or if they don't have an invite, they can comment via other means that I have (Webmentions, Twitter, email).
2. Second use is make something like hnrss possible.

Original post here

What if subgroups were totally dynamic?
ie:

If I post to ~music with a post tagged [hip-hop] [instrumental], that post could exist in ~music.hip-hop.instrumental, ~music.instrumental.hip-hop, ~music.instrumental, ~music.hip-hop. Is there a benefit in structured hierarchy? Users could sub to the root ~music for everything, if they want, or they could sub to specific hierarchies that they enjoy (ie: i'd sub to ~music.instrumental but not ~music.hip-hop.instrumental.

This would also drop the need for specific moderation teams or support structures for larger subgroups. Additionally, it creates an interesting structure where posts aren't relegated to single groups, allowing for more discover-ability.

I just can't bear aggregators without it any more. (for reddit you can do it with RES, for HN there is also a browser extension ("Hacker News: Mark All Read") )

The only problem: you miss out on some later discussions. For this the HN extension I use has a "follow comments" toggle inside the posts, which excludes those posts from being hidden.

It also totally fixes the problematic of balancing the "freshness" on the frontpage.

The fact that my cursor has to touch the edge of the screen to be able to access the site docs is not only a little awkward to use, but also looks a little cramped when compared to the consistent and compact nature of the rest of the site. I do see that increasing the padding or the general size of the footer would break the consistent design of Tildes, though. Perhaps spacing the footer <p> elements so they occupy the same y-level without changing the current dimensions of the footer could help?

This is a tiny niggle and it likely only affects me, however, so please do swat me down if this is unnecessary.

—Edited as I forgot to escape characters!

Make it possible to donate in exchange for placing a monocle, sticker or gold star cough on a comment. It's karma and it's an instant way to donate to keep the site afloat.

Also donating could give the donater a special sticker on their username like "supporter" or something.

That silly number on someone's account. One that means nothing but is a weird goal people seek out.

Karma can be used to encourage user participation. Karma can also be bad and can cause someone to post with the intent of collecting karma instead of discussion.

Karma can be earned different way;

• the reddit way, you get karma for how many upvotes you get for things you post
• the gamefaqs way, you get 1 karma point for each day you log in

I'm not sure of any other ways, but I like silly numbers. Perhaps the 'trusted user' thing in the docs can somehow tie into a karma system.

What do you think about karma and how it could/should/would play out here?

Hi there!

First things first, I just want to say thank you for the invite, but more importantly, thank you for taking the time to create this platform. I, as I imagine most people on here, have a love-hate relationship with reddit. Clearly the site has had a tremendous impact, in many ways positive, but with many things structurally and fundamentally holding it back. I've been a subscriber to /r/RedditAlternatives/ for a while, and there have been very few sites that have compelled me to learn more and actively take part in them, and yours is of course one of them. I just got done reading all of the articles on your docs page and was very pleased - "finally", I thought, someone who's taken into account all of the articles on the internet that have been written about designing and building communities, from both a social and technical perspective, and put it into practice. You've addressed many issues that are often ignored by the platforms themselves and done it in a brilliant way so as to ensure that our voices are heard first and foremost, and I think that's just awesome.

Okay, now that all the praise is out of the way... :P

I did notice something that was not addressed in the docs pages, so I'll be blunt and simply ask: how do you plan to address the filter bubble, or rather, do you plan to address it at all? Maximizing user freedom regarding which communities you want to see content from seems obvious, but that inevitably ends up with users being stuck in their own bubble. reddit already has an infamous reputation of being an echo chamber, and gives users tools to make it an even bigger echo chamber. A long time ago, there was a commonly held belief that the internet would bring us closer together because it would force us to expand our worldviews and interact with people as people, not knowing where they're from or who they are (the "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" saying about anonymity). As reddit moves more and more toward becoming a social network like Facebook and less like the pseudonymous and anonymous internet discussion forums of old, this problem has only gotten worse, to the point of having real-world political and social consequences (especially with the increasing deluge of so-called "fake news"). I'd really like to hear your take on it.

I do have other concerns, namely: scalability, and the stance on free speech. The donation model has worked well for Wikipedia, but, well, they're Wikipedia. They're an incredibly important resource and people have clearly valued their resource so as to have sustained their model, mass donation drives with Jimbo Wales' face plastered all over the site notwithstanding. If tildes becomes the Wikipedia of internet discussion platforms, I am sure many people will find it valuable enough to donate to, though I am still not sold on how sustainable it really is.

The stance on free speech in the announcement blog post also has me concerned. As you mentioned, it is a difficult topic; that much is clear. I am mostly just curious as to where the lines are drawn in regards to how "threats, harassment, and hate speech" are defined. With an absolutist position like "we are 100% pro-free speech", things are very clear and simple, whereas any other position, I believe, comes down to the whim of the moderators/admins. Certainly most people will generally follow the golden rule and abide by basic common sense and decency (i.e. "don't be a dick"), but when discussions get heated I think it's important to not have a reasonable fear that you're going to get permabanned because you hurt someone's feelings (just as an example).

All these issues aside, I am very excited about the development of tildes and hope you & the community can come up with excellent technical and social solutions to these difficult problems.

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

(p.s. apologies for not posting this in the daily discussion topic, thought it warranted its own topic)

edit: formatting

When I upvote a post, it just goes form dotted border to solid border and a very slight change in color which makes recognizing if you already upvoted a post a little hard.

Maybe inverting the color of the box would be more suitable?

Currently you can only do one or the other, but I feel that this results in low efforts posts where a user simply post a link and walks away. If we can post text along with a link to, say, a news article, the OP could then start some sort of discussion around that article without having to go into the comments and post whatever they were going to say.

Other people can tag my posts as jokes, but I can't. Is there a good reason for this to be the case? Obviously I'm not going to tag my posts as Noise, Troll, or Flame, but Joke and Offtopic aren't necessarily negative.