Haven't been on much for a few days, so this may have been discussed, but I think it would be really nice to have the ability to have multiple subscription groups per user (I'd be happy to work on this once the code is open-sourced if people are interested).

The reason I suggest this is that I was realizing earlier that sometimes when I log in I'm just looking for computing, tech, and science stuff while at other times I'm looking to engage in some longer conversation about current events. I think it would be very nice to be able to have multiple subscription groups so that, depending on what I'm looking for during a given visit to the site, I could focus on that but still change it to something else easily next time I come online.

Can we get an Edit history on posts (also potentially comments).

This is sparked by a post a few days ago in which a poster asked a question about people's standpoints on gay marriage and then published their standpoint as well, heavily against gay marriage.

I made my comment here questioning them on their standpoint and they edited their post without any evidence, making it look like I was jumping to conclusions.

Post history would prevent this kind of thing and would also equip commenters with the ability to see what OP has changed.

Please let me know if you agree or disagree for whatever reason, I am interested to hear other people's thoughts.

Edit: The poster in my comment link was banned shortly after that post. Linked by @Jedi here.

Currently on the home page I have the list of my subscription in the sidebar, but if I click on ~tildes for example, they're all gone. I think it would make sense to see ~tildes.official in there, to make navigation easier.

I'm currently using 24 hour sort, and it's great, minus one thing - threads older than 24 hours just disappear. Perhaps a better implementation would be to keep the threads showing up underneath the <24 hour ones, but prevent them from being bumped up by new posts.

Example - if I go to ~comp right now, there are only 5 posts. Older ones, imo, should still be visible, just no longer bumping.

Currently the subscribed groups list is only shown in the sidebar of the index page, but given that the sidebar isn't currently used for much else and doesn't take up much vertical space, it would be nice to have the group list persisted across at least the individual groups if not threads themselves, to make navigation easier without having to go back to the top level to check a different group.

So I've been really excited about this page, but lately I keep coming here, glancing at the front page, and then leaving. I think it's in part the minimalist design and the way the colour of the clicked links is very similar to the colour of the unclicked ones, making it unclear at a first glance which threads one has visited already.

Since the pace of debate is moving much slower than on Reddit here (which I think is a good thing), it would be very useful to have some kind of a 'my discussions' page that you could save threads to - either threads you are participating in or just threads you are excited to see the responses to. This would make it much easier for users to return to interesting discussions without having to browse around ~ for ages trying to find that one interesting topic.

I just thought that it might be useful for a person to see how many posts and comments they have made on ~. As that data is already available for manual collection it might be nice to have it available more easily on that profile.

I don't know if I'm the only one here but sometimes I want to say something but I don't want it tied to my account, my reasoning being the more details I let slip eg:

I've worked in IT

I've lived in that town

I own a labradoodle

..these things all piece together till you can profile it down to one person, you essentially de-anonymize yourself the more comments you make. Being that this is a public forum anyone can scan this information now or in the future building a profile on users possibly identifying them as a person, this is an unintended side effect as we don't post online comments expecting them to be traceable to our person. Consider the fact that advancing computing power and AI may eventually make it trivial to do such a thing.

Sure you can regularly create new accounts but then you reset the trust system.

My suggestion is having the ability to post a comment but not display your username, you would still be accountable to the trust system it's just that outside Tildes's server you wouldn't be identified. This would still discourage people from being a jerk because they're still affected by the trust system.

Hey all,

One thing I always hated about Reddit was that a -20 post could have a +500 response, but the entire comment tree would be placed at the bottom of the thread.

I think it would be very cool if the value of child comments bubbled up through to the parent comment for the purpose of sorting.

Pros:

High quality responses to low quality posts would be more visible

Posts that provoke more discussion would be sorted higher than ones that don't, and posts that provoke high quality discussion would be sorted higher than low quality joke threads

Cons:

High quality posts that didn't provoke a lot of discussion might be pushed down

Probably abusable with coordination between multiple users

I apologize if this has already been planned or suggested before.

Thanks,

Urs

TL;DR: First impressions and suggestions: infinite scrolling; comment box position; collapse comment button too small; comment previews; vote button position; search function; expandable images/videos; remembering collapsed comments; spoiler tags; saving comments/posts; ninja edit; and keyboard hotkeys. Really enjoying my time here! Tildes has been growing on me.

Been browsing the website for a couple of days now and wanted to give my first impressions. To begin with I wanna say I'm enjoying Tildes a lot. At first I thought it was a cool idea, but thought I wouldn't really get into it too much since I'm quite fond of mindlessly browsing Reddit for simple funny content. This being more discussion oriented didn't really fit my usage. Turns out I was wrong lol Of course I had to force myself to use the website initially, but I quickly started browsing Tildes naturally and participating in threads and discussions. While I still browse Reddit, I've been coming over to Tildes whenever I can pay a little bit more attention to what I'm reading. Anyways, without further ado, here are my observations as far as features go:

• First thing I noticed was the lack of infinite scrolling (having to click "next" to go to the next page).

• As I found my way to the introductions post, I came across the comment box position problem, which has been discussed at length.

• Browsing through the comments, I found that the button to collapse comments is too small. I think extending it vertically so that you can click anywhere on the left side of the comment to hide it would be ideal. Many subreddits have done that and it works great. Here's an example from /r/Overwatch (you can click anywhere on the yellow area to hide the first comment).

• I also think a comment preview would be really useful and I've seen some other posts about it too.

• Here's a potentially controversial one: a more obvious vote button. As I browsed more, I got to read more about the intentions behind Tildes and where its efforts are, so I can see how this would go against the general mindset of not turning this into a high score game. That said, this is a first impressions post and so it deserves mentioning.

• Obligatory search function mention. I know everyone is aware of this, I'm just going through my list.

• Another controversial one: expandable images/videos. I've read the discussions about it and I'm aware of the Reddit-ifying potential. With that said, I wanna play the devil's advocate here and say that images/videos are not necessarily low quality shitposts (case in point, the image I linked above to illustrate a suggestion). They are bound to be used and linked anywhere on the internet and I think this is a reasonable feature to have. In my mind, it's not the use of silly images that make a community low-effort, but the other way around. With the mindset we have here, I'd argue that images and videos would probably be used "appropriately".

• Eventually, when I went back to threads I had already visited, I noticed the comments were all expanded again. Remembering hidden comments is something I consider really important, even more on a discussion focused board where you often go back to old threads to keep the conversation going.

• I might have missed this one, but spoiler tags are definitely needed. I tried poking around to see if Markdown had built in spoiler tags, but I didn't find anything. If this already exists and I just overlooked it, I'm sorry.

• Another important feature for me is saving posts and comments for future reference.

• Pretty minor, but having a "ninja edit" feature would be nice. A grace period after submitting a post/comment where you can edit it without it being tagged as edited. This is useful for correcting typos or when you immediately change your mind about the wording of your post.

• Another minor one would be keyboard hotkeys. I use RES hotkeys all the time to browse Reddit. Voting (which might not be particularly desirable here), hiding comments, expanding images (not very relevant unless this gets implemented), saving posts/comments (damn, none of these are relevant with the website as is) are all great to have mapped to the keyboard.

This ended up being a longer post than I expected. To finish things off, I'd like to say I'm really glad someone is willing to put time and effort into this. I like the ideals behind Tildes, the privacy concerns and the non-profit choice. If this takes half as much of my free time as Reddit used to, I'll definitely drop a donation!

When something big happens, there are often a lot of different posts, which results in the conversation being scattered all over the place. Is there any policies on users creating megathreads for these big events, or if there will be some kind of megathread system build into ~ in the future?

At the moment the groups page shows a full list of groups with a button beside each: either Subscribe or Subscribed. It's not very clear, at a glance, which ones are subscribed as there is no colour difference and the terms differ only by the last letter. I personally think it would be better if it showed 'unsubscribe' for the ones you're already subscribed to, and even better if this were in green.

I've found that it's difficult to keep track of threads I found interesting but are no longer highly active, especially without a search function. My suggested solution is the ability to subscribe to updates on a topic/thread (whatever you want to call it) and enable easy access to checking up on the thread for updates without having to receive a direct reply to my comment on the topic. If this already exists and I'm just blind, let me know!

We know how it gets on reddit during the summer holidays and I don't think anyone would suggest making an age restriction for the site, but if something is upvoted by 99% kids then it's probably not interesting to me.

So I guess the question I'm posing is:

'How do we filter out stuff that's blatantly outside of my demographics interest'

I'm guessing my suggestion of age filtering is going to run against Tildes ethics about not collecting user data, so perhaps someone will have a better solution in the comments.

One of the things I dislike about Reddit is how the username is something very easy to gloss over. Unless a user is super prolific, you don't ever remember a person on Reddit. I feel this is a big part of what makes Reddit so unpleasant - you are just one voice among many, a cog in the machine, so every time you post it's not that different to just posting from a throwaway. Generally, I think this really contributes to the feeling that on Reddit, you are just an opinion, not an actual person with thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Additionally, it protects people who post toxic comments, because it's easy to forget their username and so when you encounter them again, you can't easily tell they are the person from before, unless you check their post history.

On smaller subreddits, this problem is partially solved with flairs. The problem with those is that they do not stay the same across Reddit (which I guess is a matter of personal preference, participating in Reddit as a whole vs a bunch of separate communities), and they often serve as a way to add relevant info about the user, so they are just generic groups that a lot of people share.

I think ~ could really benefit from having some kind of way to tell one user from one another better. Either by making the usernames more prominent somehow, by adding flairs, or possibly even avatars (I know, that's so incredibly retro, but it does help see you the other person as a person and not just as an opinion on the internet).

I just showed up yesterday to this great experiment, and find myself with some fresh-minted drama over politics and bans to ingest. While I wouldn't presume to propose a solution to the issues raised in and by those threads, I found myself looking to the comment tagging system and finding some space to improve conversation.

My intent (as I believe is the intent of this community) is to help foster constructive discussion without outright banning inflammatory topics. I believe that simply ignoring controversial issues because of the problems they raise is at best stifling potentially useful discourse and at worst intellectually dishonest.
Tags I'd like to see:

• "Citation Requested" As a tag, it would be a more constructive way of saying "I don't believe you"
• "Disreputable Source" / "Source Disputed" is a civil way of pointing out issues
• "Reported" would be a tricky implementation, but useful as a way of flagging comments for removal. Should ideally only be applied to eg. doxxing or incitement

There should also be a moderation feature for removing tags that are no longer relevant or incorrectly applied. Alternatively, the display of comment tags could be reliant upon a critical mass of "reputation points" which would allow for, say, 100 people with 1 "troll-tagging rep" to get a comment flagged, or 2 people with 50 troll-tagging rep to do so. This of course is dependent upon the reputation system being fleshed out and has the very real danger of creating power users

EDIT:

@jgb pointed out that this is a lively discussion see these

Tags I missed that came up in other discussions:

• "Insightful" as a positive, almost a super-upvote
• "Solved" for a comment that resolves an issue

And, according to @cfabbro, @deimos is working on a public activity audit that can then be built upon to improve moderation

I think having the theme settings be universal as long as you are logged into your account would be nice. For example, if I log in on my browser I have Dark Theme set. However, if I log in on my phone it defaults to light theme.

I assume as more settings are added (e.g - turn off custom group stylesheets if those are added) it woud be nice to not have to go reconfigure settings on various devices.

I've been using ~ on mobile to try it out, and although it's great, there's one major inconvenience.

If I'm reading through a long comment, I want to instintively collapse it so it won't distract me. But on mobile, I have to scroll a long way up to do that. It's even worse with comment chains.

Can we have a collapse button at the bottom as well? Or a swipe, like on the Reddit app? Or do we have to wait for the development of the app before mobile users get good UI?

We already show who invited us on our profile page, so could we show who we've invited on our invite page? There is no need to hide this information.

This way we could easily get in touch with people we've invited.

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?