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    1. Daily Tildes discussion - how can we maintain quality without drifting too far into "gatekeeping"?

      The daily discussion from Friday about the site's activity level has been great, with a ton of solid insight, feedback and suggestions from many different people. Today I want to continue...

      The daily discussion from Friday about the site's activity level has been great, with a ton of solid insight, feedback and suggestions from many different people. Today I want to continue discussing one particular theme that came up in there multiple times: a number of people seem to feel like they're not "worthy" of posting on the site, with it seemingly exacerbated by seeing complaints about the quality of other people's posts.

      This is a bit of a tricky thing to balance: we want to try to keep the quality of content on Tildes up, but it can be unwelcoming and discouraging if people feel that they're likely to get berated for posting something that isn't "good enough". By its very nature, being more selective about content means that we have to discourage (or remove) some types of content, but how can we do it in a way that doesn't feel quite so antagonistic to the people submitting?

      A good way of thinking about this is to try to consider it from the submitter's perspective. If you were to post something that wasn't really suitable, how would you like to be informed of that? And (just as importantly), how would you not like to be informed of it?

      As always, all thoughts and suggestions are welcome. Tildes is still going to require a lot of growth, so it's important to figure out how we'll be able to integrate people into the site's culture over time without feeling overly hostile towards new users.

      60 votes
    2. Any D&D players around? How'd your last session go?

      (First post on Tildes, feel free to blast me if I screwed something up posting this.) So, as the title says, I'd love to hear about how your game is going. Also, if there's a lot of D&D...

      (First post on Tildes, feel free to blast me if I screwed something up posting this.)

      So, as the title says, I'd love to hear about how your game is going. Also, if there's a lot of D&D discussion, we might talk the admins into going ahead and making us a ~games.dnd (wink, wink).

      Disclaimer: If anything cool happened, I may or may not steal the idea. =]

      19 votes
    3. Suggestion: when clicking on an external link, open it in new tab

      It would be nice to have that functionality (at least as an option), so that the thread doesn't close. I personally instinctively close the tab after I am done reading instead of going back, which...

      It would be nice to have that functionality (at least as an option), so that the thread doesn't close. I personally instinctively close the tab after I am done reading instead of going back, which can be really frustrating after the realization I have nothing to read now (yeah, I know, CTRL+SHIFT+T, reopen last closed tab etc etc, but it's much more convenient to hit CTRL+W and be back where you stopped reading the thread).

      30 votes
    4. What are some Blind Spots of your political compatriots?

      There's lot of academia out there that suggests that everyone has blindspots, topics and issues that we take with so much certainty that we would not even think to question them, people who so...

      There's lot of academia out there that suggests that everyone has blindspots, topics and issues that we take with so much certainty that we would not even think to question them, people who so rarely enter into our concerns that we do not think to consider their needs or concerns, etc.

      It's hard to know exactly what our own blindspots are because by their very nature as soon as they are identified they lose some of their power. This sort of self-awareness is difficult even on the best day, but it allows us to more reasonably address people who don't hold our views, so I think the exercise is justified.

      This topic is intended to be introspective. Wherever you identify politically (left, right, moderate, anarchist, libertarian, the works), what are some topics and groups that your political people tend to struggle to focus on?

      13 votes
    5. Programming Challenge: Construct and traverse a binary tree.

      It's that time of week again! For this week's programming challenge, I thought I would focus on data structures. Goal: Construct a binary tree data structure. It may handle any data type you...

      It's that time of week again! For this week's programming challenge, I thought I would focus on data structures.

      Goal: Construct a binary tree data structure. It may handle any data type you choose, but you must handle sorting correctly. You must also provide a print function that prints each value in the tree on a new line, and the values must be printed in strictly increasing order.

      If you're unfamiliar with this data structure, it's a structure that starts with a single "root" node, and this root can have a left child, right child, both, or neither. Each of these child nodes is exactly the same as the root node, except the root has no parent. This branching structure is why it's called a tree. Furthermore, left descendants always have values smaller than the parent, and right descendants always have larger values.

      12 votes
    6. What are some of your favorite lightweight websites?

      By lightweight, I mean sites that are compact, that load quickly, that aren’t loaded with tons of scripts. Personally, I’m a fan of lite.cnn.io. No ads, very minimalistic. Edit: Oh, look, I found...

      By lightweight, I mean sites that are compact, that load quickly, that aren’t loaded with tons of scripts.

      Personally, I’m a fan of lite.cnn.io. No ads, very minimalistic.

      Edit: Oh, look, I found a list.

      29 votes