A Short Summary and Introduction Before the Actual Content of This Post:

A site—especially a small one, like Tildes—is going to have growing pains. That's natural. It's also natural, and to some extent, necessary, for users to raise issue with remedies for these growing pains. However, there's a spectrum of correct ways to do this, and a way to not do this. If you aren't interested in—or think you already have a firm grasp on the subject of—this post, you might want to skip it.

Tildes has reached its first major streak of growing pains, as I'm sure everyone active or lurking's noticed. We've also reached our first few incorrect methods of handling these. There are a few obvious things you shouldn't do, and everyone knows that—tantrums, slurs, personal attacks, etcetera—I'm going to be discussing a less realised one, and ways you could handle it instead.

Now, onto the good stuff.

Repeatedly, when handling issues, Tildes has seen a recurring circumstance. User makes post, upset. User namedrops and or subposts a user (the most apt description I could think of for a term lifted off of Twitter—subtweet—for example, "I'm not saying it's Garfield I'm talking about, but there was a suspiciously large orange cat with a mild food addiction with a fondness for lasagne who really pushed my buttons!" and etcetera). User hits "send." The targets of it feel offended, and the poster gets yelled at by the community for hurting people. No one wins.

The trick to fixing this: stop going out of your way to call out users, directly or indirectly. If you have issue with something someone said, either take it to an administrator, or directly message the user in question (politely, of course.) There's no reason to air dirty laundry in public, and there's no reason to bring personal grievances into the public eye for minor things.

If you notice an issue, do the above, and nothing changes, wait a short while before making a post on it. There's a fair chance it will resolve itself. If you end up feeling the need to make a post, do not mention individual conversations. Do not give examples from actual conversations; make an analogous example and put it into quote blocks. Never name a name or names, don't allow hate to be directed at anyone.

We're all (presumably) adults (or close enough,) here. If you have any desire for Tildes to flourish, act like an adult. Passive aggression isn't the behaviour of one. Aim to have better behaviour than the docs recommend; you might slip up sometimes, but you'll never fall too far if you keep that in mind.

Anyway, if you ended up reading this; thank you for taking the time. I appreciate it. I've spent a lot of time handling large forums, and in comparison to most of you, fairly small, incredibly high-volatility subreddits with immeasurably close communities. If you can't get a community to do the above, or something close to it, it's more or less going to be a death warrant for it. We'd all prefer not to have that happen to Tildes, so I—and presumably, most of us—would really appreciate if people made an effort to stop that from occurring.

Hate to copy reddit's slogan, but really:

Remember the Human.

Thanks again,

Eva.

If you missed it, Reddit recently announced some major planned changes to Reddit Gold. It's pretty vague and confusing, but my summary was:

The current gold system is basically:

• When you have reddit gold, you can disable ads and have access to a few extra features.
• You can buy gold for $4/month or $30 if you buy 12 months at the same time. You can also buy "creddits" for the same prices, which are basically stored months of gold and can either be used on yourself or to give gold to other users.
• Giving gold to other users is called "gilding". You can gild individual posts on the site, which puts a gold icon on that post and gives the author a month of gold.

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Now, from what I can understand, this is the new system:

• Reddit gold is now called "Reddit Premium". You can buy it for yourself for $6/month. There are no bulk discounts any more, so a year of Premium will cost $72. Existing subscribers can keep their current pricing as long as they're subscribed before the change.
• When you have Reddit Premium, at the beginning of each month you will be given some amount of "Gold Coins". These Coins can be used to give "awards" to other users' posts.
• You can give 3 different types of awards to a post, which each cost a different number of Coins:
  • Silver Award - costs the fewest number of Coins; adds a silver icon on the post; the author receives no further benefits
  • Gold Award - costs more Coins; adds a gold icon on the post (same as current icon); the author receives some small number of Coins (not Premium)
  • Super Gold Award - costs the most Coins; adds a "spectacular" icon on the post; the author receives a month of Reddit Premium
• Gold Coins will be purchasable in bundles separately from Premium, pricing not announced.

Today they released more info in /r/lounge (here's the post if you have reddit gold to be able to view it). The summary of the new post is:

• "Super Gold" has been renamed "Platinum"
• If you have any creddits, you have the choice to convert them to months of Premium membership before Sept. 10. If you don't, they'll be converted to 2000 Coins per creddit.
• You get 700 coins per month for having Premium.
• The awards that you can give to posts have these coin costs/benefits:

And there will be the following "Coin Packs" available for purchase:

Increasingly over time, I've been seeing reddit less and less like the cool startup I used to think it was and more like a business. Not a day goes by where I don't see a post breaking the site wide rules, but Reddit does nothing. And that's on top of other hate subreddits like r/The_Donald that break the rules every day. Occasionally you'll hear about subreddit mods getting PMed by admins asking them to control their users in the same way Winrar tells you your free trial is about to run out. The worst are when the admins are clearly only banning to appease their user base, like banning r/incels just for it to come back as r/braincels and the admins once again ignore it.

Since the moderator community here is quite large, I figure we would have quite alot of interesting perspectives over here in Tildes. Feel free to chip in even if you're not a moderator, or god forbid, moderate such subs as T_D. Having a range of perspectives is, as always, the most valuable aspect of any discussion.

Here are some baseline questions to get you started:-

• Did your subreddit take strict measures to maintain quality ala r/AskHistorians, or was it a karmic free-for-all like r/aww?

• Do you think the model was an appropriate fit for your sub? Was it successful?

• What were the challenges faced in trying to maintain a certain quality standard (or not maintaining one at all)?

• Will any of the lessons learnt on Reddit be applicable here in Tildes?

There was a discussion yesterday about if adding "Trigger warnings" was something we should do on Tildes. One of the things that I noted is that we don't have a general consensus on what actually constitutes a trigger. I thought it might be a good idea to have some discussions on what triggers are, so that we can have an effective discussion on the matter.

I'm attempting to refrain from editorializing, and I'm open to revising how this is presented to meet that goal. I will editorialize in the comments, though.

Accepted Psychological Definition. From Psychcentral.com, a generally accepted psychological definition of a trigger. The article I linked is a quick read, and I recommend you check it out, but if it's too lengthy:

A trigger is something that sets off a memory tape or flashback transporting the person back to the event of her/his original trauma.

Tumblr Definition. Some people are using a softer version of what a "trigger" is, and the definition is something more like this one, from mashable, discussing Tumblr

... a trigger is defined as content that could make someone upset, uncomfortable, or forced to remember or relive a past trauma.

Another definition direct from Trigger Warning Guide on Tumblr:

trigger or content warning, or TW and CW for short, is used to warn people of content that might illicit a strong or potentially harmful emotional response.

Meme Definition. Other people didn't even understand that "trigger" actually has a real, psychology definition; they seemed to be more in line with an Urban Dictionary-esque definition (this is unpleasant, but important):

A word used often by idiots on Tumblr to justify their bitchy attitudes, most of whom don't know what a real traumatic experience is.