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    1. Do you collect questions? What are some questions on your list?

      I read an interesting comic a while back about someone who collects questions that they don't have immediate answers to. (That is, things you can't just Google.) I'm wondering if anyone else...

      I read an interesting comic a while back about someone who collects questions that they don't have immediate answers to. (That is, things you can't just Google.) I'm wondering if anyone else actually does this and if you have any questions that you'd like to share?

      33 votes
    2. Proposal: Community Sourcing

      The Problem A large problem in internet communities is internet debates that devolve into metadiscussions on credibility. This likely isn't bad, because the default alternative is generally...

      The Problem

      A large problem in internet communities is internet debates that devolve into metadiscussions on credibility. This likely isn't bad, because the default alternative is generally large-scale misinformation campaigns.

      Examples

      Tildes hasn't been free of this, naturally; for a (very) recent example, see this thread on Andrew Yang's climate change proposals.

      I, personally, have partaken in a thread that seemed as if it might head in the same direction; take a look at this thread, on gun suicides of a certain population & aggravating factors of them. A third-party delivering a breadth of sources seemed to have stopped it in its tracks, however.

      Solution

      It does seem to me like something that could be solved—or at least mitigated—at the platform level, with a feature that would allow other users to cite sources for a comment in question, ideally with community ranking of those sources.

      Getting rid of the question of credibility in casual discussions in a way that doesn't interrupt the flow of dialogue seems like something that would undoubtedly help The Conversation™ flourish, while simultaneously preventing disinformation catastrophes.

      17 votes
    3. Active YouTube channels in "dead" genres?

      What are some good YouTube channels still currently working in genres which aren't currently popular because of algorithm shenanigans, the natural cycle of trends, or whatever else? I'm thinking...

      What are some good YouTube channels still currently working in genres which aren't currently popular because of algorithm shenanigans, the natural cycle of trends, or whatever else? I'm thinking like sketch comedy, original animations, serious short films, etc.

      14 votes
    4. Weightlifters: your stories of pain?

      I was feeling great in the gym yesterday and switched up my normal deadlift by using the hex bar. It requires a slightly different posture than the straight bar deadlift but felt so good that I...

      I was feeling great in the gym yesterday and switched up my normal deadlift by using the hex bar. It requires a slightly different posture than the straight bar deadlift but felt so good that I kept adding on weight and, evidently, speeding up. What happens when you get a little too enthusiastic under load? Zzzlip! There went my back. So I’m home from work today, barely able to hobble around. Ibuprofen is not enough. I sneezed earlier and it felt like someone had inserted a power drill into my lower spinal column. Yep, I’m feeling stupid today.

      Weightlifters, what are your stories of pain? I’m sure there are some good stories out there.

      9 votes
    5. Moving out tips

      I'm moving out: in the coming weeks I'll move to an apartment in Ankara, Turkey. This is the first time I'll have a home of my own, and the first time I live in an apartment as opposed to our...

      I'm moving out: in the coming weeks I'll move to an apartment in Ankara, Turkey. This is the first time I'll have a home of my own, and the first time I live in an apartment as opposed to our detached family home. I wonder if any of you have tips for a 25yo master's student moving out and changing city!

      31 votes
    6. I think formatting is broken inside expandable "<details>" sections

      UPDATE: It is actually NOT broken, but it seems that a blank line is required after the <summary> tags for it to work. Therefore, this does not work: > Interstellar - just watch it I like this...

      UPDATE:

      It is actually NOT broken, but it seems that a blank line is required after the <summary> tags for it to work.

      • Therefore, this does not work:

         > Interstellar - just watch it
        
         I like this movie a lot. BUT, it bothers me that
        
         <details>
         <summary>spoiler</summary>
         a story so grounded in hard science fiction chose an unjustified book
         metaphor to represent a dimension that would be, for us, absolutely
         unknowable. I much prefer the choice made by Kubrick in *2001, A Space
         Odyssey*: to represent one abstraction with another, preserving the
         alien character of an inhuman reality.
         </details>
        
      • But this does:

          > Interstellar - just watch it
        
          I like this movie a lot. BUT, it bothers me that
        
          <details>
          <summary>spoiler</summary>
        
          a story so grounded in hard science fiction chose an unjustified book
          metaphor to represent a dimension that would be, for us, absolutely
          unknowable. I much prefer the choice made by Kubrick in *2001, A Space
          Odyssey*: to represent one abstraction with another, preserving the
          alien character of an inhuman reality.
          </details>
        
      7 votes
    7. What have you been watching / reading this week? (Anime/Manga)

      What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was...

      What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

      If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

      8 votes
    8. Some <details> about more <small> updates (you'll get that in a minute) and general Tildes feedback/questions/comments

      Similar to the last topic, I've got some more minor updates to let everyone know about. It's also been quite a while since we had a general feedback topic, so let's do that today as well—feel free...

      Similar to the last topic, I've got some more minor updates to let everyone know about.

      It's also been quite a while since we had a general feedback topic, so let's do that today as well—feel free to ask any questions or give feedback about Tildes overall.

      Here's what's been happening:

      1. @Algernon_Asimov's major reorganizing and rework of the Docs is now live on https://docs.tildes.net. A decent number of changes needed to be made to be able to support having the pages in categories/folders, dealing with some formatting changes, redirecting old urls, etc. Some of these changes have started being integrated back into the wiki on Tildes itself as well (and I'm still gradually working on it). For example, the pages in the ~tildes.official wiki are somewhat organized into the same folders, even though the UI doesn't handle it very well in a lot of places yet.

        If you want to help edit the Docs at all, all of the pages (except site policies) are available in the ~tildes.official wiki, and I'll review and transfer any edits to the Docs site. If you don't have access to edit the wiki, send me a message and ask and I can give you access to edit (and you can edit the other groups' wikis too).

      2. Some new HTML-exclusive formatting capabilities are available when writing posts:

        • <small>: lets you write a section of text in a smaller font. Good for "side notes" and such, and much better than using superscript, which some people were doing previously to get that effect.
        • <details> and <summary>: lets you make "expandable" blocks in your comments. This is useful if you want to do things like hide a large block of text or code and let people expand it if they want to read it. @hungariantoast used it immediately in his comment here, if you want to see an example. The current state of it isn't great for use for spoilers (but probably better than just writing them in plain sight), but I may make an adaptation of it specifically for use for spoilers.
      3. There's a new site theme available, "Zenburn". It's a fairly low-contrast, and used to be one of my favorite color schemes. I had to do some work on one of my old sites that was using it last weekend, and it reminded me how much I liked it, so I added it. Here's the official screenshot of the vim color scheme for it, if you want an idea of what colors it uses. You can change the theme on the settings page if you're logged in, or there's a dropdown at the bottom of every page if you're logged out.

      4. @deing has added a small warning to try to let people know when they're about to reply to an old comment or topic, since it seems fairly common for people to accidentally "necrobump" old threads without realizing. For now, the warning shows up when the topic/comment is over a week old. I set that threshold based on pulling out some stats and seeing that only 1% of comment replies and 2% of top-level comments were replying to anything that old, so it should be quite rare for anyone to see anyway.

      Other than that, I haven't forgotten about the new group proposals and should be adding some new ones this week. I wanted to finish some backend changes to the group system first to help with that, and it's... gotten more ugly than I was expecting. Sorry for the delay, hopefully soon though.

      Let me know if you have any thoughts about any of those changes, and as mentioned, feel free to use this topic for general feedback/questions as well, since I'm sure there are some things that people want to give feedback or ask about that might not feel like they're worth starting a thread in ~tildes for. As usual, I've also topped everyone back up to 10 invite codes, which you can get here.

      59 votes