_{Note: If you think I'm going to make this title longer with each consecutive topic... You're god damn right.}

Hello everyone. After the last topic I posted I garnered some feedback and adjusted the planned 2020 form accordingly. Updates include things like the gender text-box so really everyone is included no matter how diverse, unless your gender longer than maximum limit of JotForms text box fields.

You also have the option to enter your age by decile instead of a precise number. One user had a problem with this last year, so I added the option to make your age more general. As always, none of the fields are going to be mandatory!

I've also changed the political question to the political compass instead of the 8values quiz. I don't know if it's going to be any more precise, but at least it will allow us to create a better visual representation so the results are not going to be all text. Also, all hail r/politicalcompassmemes. There's also a text box to enter how you identify yourself if whatever movement you subscribe to has a name. It would be very interesting to correlate responses to the data from the compass and country, as political convictions are of course very relative, e.g. American leftwing = European rightwing.

Here's a picture of the form in it's current form^{I'm a literary genius}

Another important update would be the following: There's been yearning in the last topic about releasing the data of the census so that fellow Tilderinosnosnos can create their own fancy graphics. I generally do not have a problem with that, and if it were released, it would be the aggregated responses to single questions. For an explanation, see this comment by @hungariantoast, you lovely person.

Releasing data in this form is not any different than creating graphs from it and releasing it this way, just in a more general, more easily machine-readable format. I think this is acceptable, and it would allow more opportunity for data visualization by the community, and as stated, I wouldn't be releasing more identifiable information this way.

If there are any concrete additions you'd like to see, like for example suggestions on how to make the title of the next topic even longer (that's the most important part), now's the time to bring 'em out.

Hello everyone!

Some of you may remember last years census. I did say I wanted to repeat it, and have decided to push the date forward, as last year a few people said that doing it in December at the end of the year probably wasn't the smartest choice, due to well, christmas and new year's eve and I totally agree. Wish I would've seen that earlier, but I guess I'm dumb lol. Summer may give us better stats because more people are on vacation any maybe check in more regularily. Or maybe there's also less people around because everyone's on vacation. Who fucking knows, I don't know. I don't know anything.

Anyway, just like last time, I'd like to organize a preliminary discussion about the census and what questions we should ask this community. As a reminder, this was the 2019 census.

Areas that I'd like to improve: Politics, mainly. The 8values test I think is good, but maybe there's something better out there. We could do it with the political compass and go full quadrant and r/politicalcompassmemes, but of course that's also not going to be very accurate. I honestly don't even know if there's a good solution to this problem.

Other than that, are there other questions you'd like to ask the community? Let's discuss!^{I hope someone replies or this is gonna be emberassing.}

I think those could be real useful especially now. Sometimes I want to share related stuff but they would not warrant a full thread .

It’s possible that they never existed and I’m delusional. In which case, I think they should be a thing.

Disclaimer I was going to post this on ~tildes but thought we could have a more casual conversation about it here.

So how can tildes stop corruption from happening on its platform, it’s no secret that other similar websites have become corrupted the best example of this is Reddit they do what advertisers want them to do or who ever is giving them money, only a couple of days ago I saw this video about a guy who was running a cult on there recruiting vulnerable people and they did nothing because he was buying thousands of awards a day.

Tildes doesn’t have advertising and is a non profit with no investors so those are 2 big places it can’t get corrupted from. One place I could see problems is donations I would be interested in if all donations are Anonymous I should probably have looked into them before writing this but maybe someone else knows the answer, if they aren’t what is stopping big donators getting special treatment?

My main reason for this topic is the video mentioned above but I also thought it would make an interesting discussion on here.

Intro

Hello everyone.

Due to @Kat’s ever-failing health, I will be analyzing the data instead of her this time around. If you have no idea what this is about, see the demographic survey that was posted on the day of Tildes’ half-year birthday. She’s done this before, so let’s see what's new.

The original survey was answered by 404 people, while the half year survey was answered by 293. Though the total number of replies was lower, the completion rate was actually higher: 293 responses from 422 unique visitors, or 69.4%, up from the first year’s 404/599=67.4%. The decrease in answers is most likely attributed to the change of the default sort from “Activity, all time” to “Activity, 3 days”: the response rate held fairly consistent for the first three days, then plummeted after the third as the topic stopped being able to gain any publicity. Though response rates on the original were not high after the first three days, there was a steady trickle up until the survey stopped accepting responses.

While the numbers are relatively big (for a community of this size), do take anything found with a healthy dose of scepticism. Even though the original dataset she shared with me does not contain any identifiable information (all I can see are randomly-generated user strings) the specifics of that data will not be posted, as was mentioned during the original survey. This is because I am unable to be certain I can sufficiently anonymize it. Typeform has created a summary of the data on a per-question basis with substantially more datapoints than this thread, which you can find https://themeerkat.typeform.com/report/H2TtYg/rVf75AqbKaPncy6y.

Explanation

I will compare the statistics with a similarish reference set based on the six most common territories, all of which are above one percentage of the survey answers. That means when I compare on the general populace, I will base it on numbers from USA, Canada, UK, Australia, the Netherlands, and France.

This means it will be weighted like this:

I’ll clean up my data sheet and post it in the comments later. You all are absolutely encouraged to fix it because it will most likely contain errors.

The interesting stuff

What has changed in the first half year?

Age

This time around an age range was used instead of an exact numerical input, but if we were to assume that everyone is aged in the middle of their age range (so 20 for 18-22 year olds, for instance), the average age of a user would be 26.84 years, or 26 years, 9 months, and 4 days old (roughly). So we’ve grown a bit younger than last year, on average.

Gender and identity

Gender distribution seems to be roughly the same. We see a small decrease in percentage of heterosexuals, divided roughly evenly on the remaining categories. We also see a significant increase in the amount of transgender users, but since the amount reported is small, that could also just be statistical noise. The percentage of polyamorous people has remained exactly the same. For pronouns, there are only three users who prefer it/its, and zero who prefer any neopronoun set: every “Other” was offering commentary on the question rather than answering it. Similarly, almost all of the “Others” for orientation were expressing that they didn’t understand the specifics of the options given.

All in all, little has changed.

Territorial

In both surveys, three options dominated: the USA, the UK, and Canada. On that end, little has changed, though it seems that all of the Swedes disappeared, with zero answering the half year survey as compared to eight for the first one. Wonder what they’ve been busy with.

Native language

Unsurprisingly, about everyone speaks English. What is more surprising is the lack of native multilinguals: fewer than 6% of Americans who natively speak English also natively speak a second language. For comparison, that’s 10% for Australians, 21% for Canadians, and 13% for the UK. This represents an overall decrease in geographic diversity, with users coming from 36 different countries as compared to 42 the first time.

Religion

Compared to the world at-large, we sure are a god-denying folk. A whopping 52% of us consider ourselves atheists, whereas the sample data puts it at 12.1%, so we’re far from the norm of our fellow citizens.

We got a few interesting answers in the “other” section of the religion part of the survey. We got a few interesting ones I had never heard of before, like “Discordian”. But generally speaking, around half of them were either “none” or one of the actual options. Two stood out to me though.

To the one Chinese user who filled it in as “The heck is chinese traditional”: I have no idea either.

To the one Australian user who wrote “Left-hand path Heathen”, you be yourself, mate.

Politics

The average has barely moved in the last half year—we’re still slanted very much to the left. Unlike the first survey, there was no freeform input this time around, so the specifics are hard to discuss.

Computers

We have seen a drastic fall in the percentage of Windows users. It was at 60%, and is down to 43%. Nearly all of this has gone to Linux, which is now at 38%. That’s quite large, especially compared to the reference data, which has Linux use among web users at 1.23%. It’s like a herd of penguins in here.

Mobile phones

Compared to half a year ago, not many of us have switched mobile OS. Compared to the calculated data, we like Android slightly more than average. 62% vs 72%.

Not much interesting in the “other” section, though I will give a salute to the one American user still holding out on Windows 10 Mobile.

Work

We have a pretty even distribution with three exceptions. “Computer software”, “Never employed”, and “IT”. Nearly 3/4 who answered “Never employed” are currently students.

Among the students, we only have one student that proudly smokes and has no interest in quitting. The campaigns seem to be working.

Tildes usage

If we look at the users who visit Tildes multiple times per day, we see a few interesting trends. Nearly all of them use Android, and nearly all of them are employed. Beyond that it all seems surprisingly… average.

Overall, people rated Tildes as a platform as-it-stands a 5.7/7 (0.81), and their optimism for the future of the site at a 5.4/7 (0.77). The most important reason they use the site (of the options given) is “Minimal, fast design” at a 4.6/5 (0.92), with “Privacy-consciousness and lack of trackers” right on its heels. 20.8% of users have ever contributed money to Tildes (surprisingly high, compared to most donation campaigns), with about half as many making a recurring donation.

Despite @Kat’s insidious attempt to influence the data, “waves” as a demonym only received 5.5% of the vote. The leader for that, overwhelmingly, is “no demonym at all”, with a combined 49% of the votes and 18.5% of respondents strongly preferring the site not to have a demonym. Second place, the generic “users”, only has 15.8% in comparison. The first Tildes-specific demonym present is Tilders/~​rs, with 13.4%.

Most notably, about ⅔ of users would prefer Tildes to be remain invite-only long-term.

Freeform questions

The survey had three freeform questions: “What do you like most about Tildes, thus far?”, “What do you like least about Tildes, thus far?”, and “What is the most pressing missing feature/‘pain point’ for you about Tildes in its current state?” All the comments fill over 30 pages, so it seems like we really have a lot to say. You can download and look at all of the raw answers here, if you’d like. They’ve been shuffled to ensure privacy.

Likes

A large majority of the comments boil down to “a quality of discussion where disagreement is discussed in a respectful and level-headed way”. A very significant amount also point out the lack of “low effort content and trolls” as a good thing. A significant amount also mention the simple and quick-loading interface. We also have one user who believes he can find a twerk team on Tildes.

So on this, @Deimos can feel proud for what he has done. Though you know what really makes the site good? There is one comment that properly gets it: “The people, d’awwww.”. Yes, that includes you.

Dislikes

But not everything is perfect, though negatives about Tildes seem to be a lot less unanimous than the positives. There are a few that repeat a bit more often than others: the biggest one is “left centrism in discussions” or “echo chambers”, though in a close second, as with any political discussion, is its exact opposite with complaints about “too much discussion about left-centrism in discussions”—notably, though, in the question “Do you feel as though Tildes has a good mix of political opinions, for your personal preferences?”, the leading answer was “Yes” with 63%. A small amount of users also think we have too many software developers.

Beyond that, the main complaint that stands out is “lack of users and content”, which I am sure will improve in time.

Missing feature/pain point

This too is very varied. A lot of the comments are actually about features that have been introduced since the survey was done, like bookmarking. Honestly, it’s not that many complaints compared to just likes and dislikes.

The “majority” seem to be on a lack of tag autocompletion, USA-centrism, and the lack of a mobile app.

There was one more section: “If you would like to offer any long-form commentary, criticism, or feedback regarding Tildes, you may do so here.” Due to its nature, I’ll let you read through them yourself in the raw data, if you’re interested.

Closing words

First of all, to everyone who took the time to answer: thank you! I hope this post and the survey has brought some fun to everyone. If there’s an interest, I am sure that Kat, myself, or someone else will make another one at the one year anniversary. We already got some feedback in the previous thread, but we’re always open for more.

I will do some additional data comparisons on request. I might be a bit occupied this weekend, though, so that will come when it comes.

I think it's clear that all tildes political discussion leads to intractable arguments. Considering tildes was created to foster high quality discussion, I was wondering if it's even possible to have nuanced political discussions online. In person discussions work for me because I have base levels of respect for all the people I talk to, but that's quite difficult to get online. Are we doomed to snark and condescension filled megathreads, or is there a better way to structure the conversations? Are there additional political ground rules that need to be set up?

Hello everyone, it's 00:16 my time and I'm finally fucking done making all the data pretty for you after about 4 hours of coding to parse all those juicy CSV files cause guess what, the excel files that JotForms gave me WHERE FUCKING GḀ͒ͬ̓ͦͅRͤ͊̔́B̴̼̫̟͍̅̆A̩̽ͮ̂̏͡G̸̭̜̑͑̃Ȇ͈͙͈̠̖̋́̌ͭ͂ͧ^{help me}

Anyway :) Let's give y'all a brief rundown of the current Tilde demographics, and some highlights, CAUSE NOW I HAVE ALL YOUR DATA AND THUS INFINITE POWER TO MAKE JOKES^{did I mention I've been doing for half the day and I'm really hungry? AND TIRED?} Honestly you owe me this moment of insanity considering I'M RUNNING ON GREEN LEAF JUICE AND HOW MUCH DATA I WADED THROUGH AHHHH-.

Also, most of these will be pictures because honestly I can't be asked to not pretty paste these figures into markdown tables or I'll legitimate go insane. Anyway, this post has plenty of sass, don't take this shit too seriously please, gracias.

The 2019 Census

Anyway.

This year we got 249 responses in total, which really annoys me cause 250 is way prettier to look at at. However, one was completely empty and the other two are... Fishy. More on that later.

Personal details

Age

When it comes to age, Tildes is heavily skewed towards people in their 20s to 30s, 45% of the responses came from people between 20 and 30. Overall, late 20s to and early 30s dominate the demographics. (before anyone screams at me about the proper use of graphs, don't worry I also took Statistics at uni, but the histogram in Excel refused to work and honestly go make your own census) There is also some statistical noise, which I'm not sure how it happened. Most likely someone typed too quickly.

Our youngest user is 11! And either very intelligent, cause they also speak 9 languages, or a fraud. If you're not a fraud, I apologize and wish you luck on your future path in life, which will surely be extremely successful, if you really speak that many languages at such an age.^{Hint, this was one of the fishy responses}

Our oldest user is 70! I really don't know what to say, cause that's a pretty high number for an internet user. How was uhh... The cold war?^{Holy fuck I should stop I need to eat}

Geographical... Stuff

Overall, the Tildes demographic hasn't changed much. US and Canada still lead by quite a lot, but we have acquired quite the little diverse userbase.

All I can do is salute my fellow other Austrian user. Can you say Oachkatzalschwoaf though? THAT'S THE SIGN OF A REAL AUSTRIAN.^{NONE OF THIS STARTING WORLD WARS SHIT}

Language

Predictably, a large number of people does not speak a second language besides English, however, due to geographical diversity, a large number of languages is represented, most of them from Europe, which is Tildes' second largest userbase.

Gender & Sexuality

Tildes is heavily male-dominated, probably due to its IT-focused population and the fact that most of us came from Reddit.

Of the 248 responses, 17 people hit marked that they were trans, pretty much all of them MTF (which is apparently the majority of trans people, Wikipedia tells me.) 3 preferred not to say and everyone else is cis.

Now, let's get to the sexy stuff. And by that I mean the point where the numbers rub together in fantastic ways.

The majority of Tildes is really fucking straight, though we have some fun sexualities represented, my personal favourite Still figuring that out. You do you mate, you'll get there eventually. Also, whoever wrote down O-Sexual also wrote X-Treme Wiccan as their religion, and at this point in I'm too afraid to google what any of that is. Clearly, we need more straight people, after all, we're in the 20s.^{Before anyone yells at me, THIS WAS A FUCKING JOKE} For now I've defined that person as Fish numero dos.

Religion

So, here's a doozy. To that one person (probably part of the 9% of <20 year olds), WHO DECIDED TO WRITE THE WONDERFUL ANSWER atheism and angosticism are not religions, can you PLEASE read the question properly next time. FUCK.^{Honestly that is such a 14 y/o thing to write, by the Ǵ͙͔͔̻͖̜́ͅO̶̱̘͡D͓̞͉̲͓̥S̢̲͙̙̟̯̙͓̱͟}

Anyway, religion is probably the thing with the most diverse answers, honestly. There are words in there I have never read in my life before. Like what is Apatheist.1? Is there some sort of ranking? Does it work with natural numbers only? Is there a Apatheist.3,51? It can't be a typo, people take religions way too seriously for that.

Politics

I averaged out the scores of everyone who answered the political questions and got the following answers (remember, these are based on the 8values quiz):

Economy - 7,02
Diplomacy - 6,9
State - 3,8
Society - 7,48

Only economy is really surprising here, though I'd also have expected diplomacy to be a little lower as well. Maybe the leftist skew ia bit of an illusion?

Work, education and really everything else these sections were a terrible idea

When it comes to education, Tildes is pretty university focused. Almost half people replying have a bachelor's, a good bunch are working or have aquired their master's. Also one (maybe soon-to-be) MD and a few PhDs. The Craftsmen and tradeship people barely balance us out, we need some more COMMON FOLK IN HERE.

IT people, rejoice! WE STILL REIGN SUPREME^{Everyone else will remember that} All jokes aside, shoutout to the stay-at-home dad, proud of ya'. And to the disabled person, I hope life goes as well as it can for you. That goes for the longterm-unemployed person as well. Someday, you'll manage mate, someday.

And to the person who said their job is a waste of time in exchange of money... Mate, you need someone to talk? I'm here. We're all here.

Surprise section about technical shit and Tildes

OS usage is as expected, due to Tildes' heavy skew into IT and the fact that Apple doesn't nearly dominate as much in other countries as in the US, it's to be expected.

Due to said IT dominance Linux has almost caught up with the leader, Windows. Though my personal favourite is Anything cool that comes into existence, like can we make a Linux fork that is called literally that? You'd be the perfect match.

When it comes to Tildes specifically, y'all need to chill out. Most people who answered the census visit Tildes multiple times a day, like the content here doesn't even move that quickly? WHAT ARE YOU ALL DOING? IS THERE SOME SECRET CULT I SHOULD KNOW ABOUT?_{If it's a LSD cult I'm totes in lads.}

As expected, most people who answered the survey have an account, and most likely due to the heavy IT skew most people are visiting from their PC. But I have also seen some people requesting a mobile app in the free form questions, so maybe that would go up if a native app were to be created.

The freeform questions

Well, in all honesty, not much has changed. Most people like the dedicated community, site design, in-depth discussions (though that was sometimes a point on both sides), etc. and dislike the heavy domination of IT topics and US/Europe news & politics. Also, multiple people simply said @Deimos when asked what they like most about Tildes. Get a room, y'all. Though it's well deserved, I think we can all agree on that.

Complete list of positive feedback: https://pastebin.com/KYCYLWP1

Complete list of negative feedback: https://pastebin.com/Eng6jjay

Complete list of ideas for change: https://pastebin.com/eery3mCt

Why am I posting these? Cause in all honesty, freeform feedback like this is hard to analyze and summarize, so I'd rather just post it all so everyone can form their opinion. Also, I'm tired.

Special mentions

Someone was nice enough to add the mention in parantheses that I should add them to the bisexual list instead if no one else marked pansexual. Well lucky you, exactly one other person marked it! You two can go find yourselves a room with lots of sexy pans in it now and have some fun.^{This is how it works, right?} Or just, slide into each other's DMs or something and talk about your love for pans. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

I also appreciate the one person who entered their religion in the languages section on accident. That's fact now, you speak Raised Catholic, now spiritual/atheist now, no shh, no talking back, that's your language now.

To that one person that said that Tildes is too serious, this one's for you.

And cheers to Deimos, without whom I couldn't be so silly on this overly serious but fantastic platform.

Anyway, Grzmot out, I need sleep. I'll come back in 8 hours or so to regret the shit I just wrote down at 2 AM. Please don't ban me.

Hello everyone, it's me again, that guy who can't create online forms reliably.

As some people might've noticed, the last attempt backfired on me in two ways:

1. The form itself was... Lacking, as numerous comments told me
2. The wonderful, privacy conscious form creating site I used physically broke after about 70 responses, meaning I lost the entirety of the data collected thus far and any future response. As I couldn't view the responses individually either, this means that the previous attempt was a complete failure.^{Please hurl your insults at me in the PMs to not clutter these comments.}

This has lead me to create a new form on a new site: JotForms. As this is commercial site, it shouldn't break after a handful of replies and also is still privacy conscious. They do not save any data as the recipient of the data (me) is declared as the controller. Be assured that I will use all collected data solely for the census (i.e creating fancy graphs and analysing it).

The only positive aspect here is that at least I got to address valuable feedback you guys gave me. I've updated the political section and expanded the work and education section. I'm sure it can still be improved though.

The currently only problem I have is that on the free tier of JotForms, you're limited to 100 submissions, which we'll surely exceed based on the numbers of the last census. Buying the premium for one month (actually subscribing and then cancelling it) would cost me USD 19. That's not the world to me, but would you guys be fine with me appending a paypal link to send some voluntary donations my way if you think I'm doing a good job? I don't want to make a profit, I'd just like to recoup the cost.

Currently, the form is still in editing, you can view a picture of it's current form here. Nothing is set in stone, and I'm open to all suggestions.

So someone asked about which themes are used the most, and I went to check this
survey and then realized it was deleted and that no new surveys have been done since.

So are most of us interested in this becoming a formal and regular thing?

Now that a good portion of people have had accounts here for over a year, it seems fitting to ask: are there any interactions that have particularly stuck out to you? Anything that's caught your eye? Maybe changed your life, at the polar end of possible positive results?

~movies.horror?
~life.parenting?
~creative.poetry.limericks?
~comp.dev.games.godot?
~tildes.taxonomy? ;)

The possibilities are, of course, endless. Right now, with few users, we're all still living in top-level land, but I think it would be interesting to see what everyone's more specific interests are, as well as how some people would tackle defining a hierarchy. (e.g. ~games.overwatch vs. ~games.fps.overwatch vs. ~games.multiplayer.fps.overwatch etc.).

Furthermore, what content would you like to see in your specific subgroups? What types of posts would make having them worthwhile?

Just got curious as to how other people ended up here. Personally, I came across Tildes through random searching on the internet (ADHD) and then learned more about it through Reddit. That said, as a follow up question - What site or platform do you use the most?

Haven't been here long, but I can already tell that there's a great community here and it's a site I will frequent the most. Plus I like the simplicity/layout and the intentions of the developers.

Firstly, I'd like to dismiss any claims of pandering or fishing here. I need to say this and I need to write it out.

I was a reddit user for 8 years. I thought it was 5 but another commenter reminded me what it was. It put me into a bit of a reflective mood. I thought about some of the more meaningful insightful interactions I've had, and some of the more bitterly memorable ones where I was at best annoyed but more recently feeling attacked, shot down, rudely treated. It was profound as a sensitive human being to receive these things, to be made to feel through text, written for you by someone else. These weren't friends, people you held at arms length as you got to know them, they were complete strangers. And these people could be brutal. Make you feel so small. And yet I am a grown man, this environment I spent easily 30% of my waking time on for the best part of a decade was interacting with people and how much I enjoyed it. It was more than a website it was a place that I called home during bouts of depression, social drought and personal hardships. I found myself seeking help and for the most part finding it.

I have learned something valuable that I want to share here and I had to learn it the hard way, through hypocrisy, through mistakes, through mis-spoken words and harsh tongue thrashings both ways. I have realised for the first time that the people reading these things, the people writing them, the sentiments involved and the content/context is important. They are real, they are human, they feel, they are like me.

We are seeking some assembly, some community, some lectern from which to state our case. My whole life I looked for togetherness online and thought I found it in the early days of reddit. That is gone now. Even intelligent well thought out research style posts cannot culminate properly, they do not ascend, the public discourse is dead. I see now first hand the destruction of community the facebook exec spoke about. Our actual confident, open, readily invited opinionated perspectives are being replaced by circle jerks and shallow agree/disagree type statements. Upvotes have become likes. Now I see how it is broken.

Someone saw me having a meltdown and invited me here. I was told it was invite only, and that it was made by someone who had the same feelings as me. I don't want to be surrounded by likeminded people, thats not what I joined reddit for. I joined because open and honest perspectives based on experience were readily available; academics, workers, parents, billionaires, could just shoot-the-shit they didn't need to cite sources or write something popular. But upvotes were reserved for contributors, not jesters or people ridiculing/attacking/berating others. The reddit bandwagon has become savagely toxic in many respects. It is (sorry was) frustrating.

So here I am. Fresh off the boats as a reddit refugee. I hope than I can find my place here and contribute to the discussions, help build the site, build something that hopefully cannot be corrupted by growth, investors and advertisers.

We discussed in the hundred or comments attached to my meltdown that the lowering average age of the site population and possible the general dumbing down of internet users happening the past 10 years was largely responsible. I can imagine previously mentioned factors also drove it over the cliff. What is the current hope for Tildes future? I read the announcement post and it mentioned that a baseline level of activity will ensure that topics cycle regularly and user engagement is high enough to stimulate people coming back. Or that is at least what I think the baseline is for.

I hope this topic starts a discussion and doesn't get moderated away. But the lack of real debate, insight, coupled with a responsive and welcoming attitude is something the whole internet is missing right now, this is where we could make a positive change to the current online environment.

cw: discussion of specific types of bigotry

I used to kind of think that Reddit's bigotry was relegated to the hate subs (TD and friends), and that you'd only find it if you went looking. But wow, Tildes has made me realise that it is EVERYWHERE.

Whenever I take a trip back to Reddit, I'm always blindsided by the fact ordinary threads about unrelated topics are so hateful. For example today I was on an r/movies thread about the new Terminator movie and there's queerphobia, transphobia and sexism all highly upvoted, right near the top of the comments. I guess being immersed in that environment for the last seven years of my life made me a bit desensitised to it, but now I'm horrified everytime.

Reddit is a far worse cesspit than I realised, I'm glad Tildes exists and I hope it keeps getting better and better. The internet needs it.

A common topic I've seen so far on Tildes is what exactly differentiates it from other online communities. This doesn't just encompass vision and meta-rules, but also the current state of the forum, and it's userbase. I wanted to propose a possible metric for gauging the quality of a forum, and would love to hear feedback on it. The metric is as follows: when all the content on the platform is no longer realistically consumable by any given member of the community.

I feel like Tildes is still currently at this state, but is somewhat quickly getting to the point where it's unrealistic for any one user to absorb all the content on the site. Once this tipping point arrives, the community has to change. The choice will be between whether one should start consuming all the content on specific sub-forums, like ~talk or ~comp, and ignoring the discussions and other subforums one cares less about, or accept that one will only ever see what is popular overall within the site.

I feel like this falls into 3 main categories: Community, growth, and that "magic" feeling of nascent internet communities.

I think it's important to define what I mean by "information" or "content". Information is meant in the more information theoretic context - it's a more abstract representation of content. It's context specific information that can be manifested as an image, a post, a comment, or even a set of rules. Information is, broadly, what makes up the discussion. If anyone has read Information: A history, a theory, a flood, I mean information in the same way it is defined and used in that book.

1. Community:

When every user is able to see what every other use posts, everyone involved has a singular point of view into the content of that community. It's never sharded or split - the information is distributed evenly, and everyone has close to 100% of it. Everyone might not agree or interpret content in the same way, but the very fact that everyone is seeing the same content, and the information is presented identically, makes it so that there is a very dense set of common ground. It's nearly impossible to "miss" big events - these being singular, really well written comment chains, unique posts, or thought provoking ideas. The sense of community is there because no one is excluded due to sheer amount of information - if someone puts in the effort to see everything, and it's still possible to see everything, they're almost automatically a part of that community.

Once a forum becomes so large that any one person can no longer realistically consume all the content it starts straying towards the lowest common denominator. These are posts that share common ground with everyone, which unfortunately means that you lose that unique community. Most people one site will no longer have seen every single post. You no longer run into posts or comments that are as thought provoking, simply because there is so much content only that which appeals to everyone will make it to the top.

2. Growth:

This ties in closely with what I mentioned above - the growth is what spurs those changes. Once you no longer have that feeling of community, you interact with it differently. You no longer can rely on the same people seeing your content, and the content itself starts decreasing in quality. This isn't due to "dumb" people joining - it's due to the sheer amount of "Information" being generated. The idea of Eternal September is tangential to this - you're not just losing out on community due to a lot of new users, it's also a loss of community due to sheer amount of information.

3. Magic internet moments:

I don't have a good definition of this but I think most people will know what I mean. Every popular online community has these moments - they're the random acts of pizza, randomly encountering someone else from the same site in real life, crazy coincidences, etc. These are often what kick start the crazy growth in the previous post - they're just really cool events that happen because of the internet, and specifically happen on that site. The new reddit book We are the nerds goes over a ton of these in the early days of reddit, and how they propelled it to what it is today.

I wanted to ask the current Tildes community what they thought about this, whether they had any major disagreements, and if anything can be done to remedy this./

This is something I've been grappling with for a while. For context I'm a long time mod on reddit, primarily of r/IAmA, r/damnthatsinteresting, and r/churning. I've helped grow and curate these communities over time, and each is drastically different. The most relevant here is probably r/churning, though.

It used to be that there was a core set of users that contributed all the content. They were known by name, everyone that visited knew who they were, and they built up the hobby to what it is today. All the things that I mentioned above started happening there - the content started skewing towards the trivial questions, new members weren't properly acclimated, and the sheer amount of information caused the mods at the time to implement fairly drastic rules to combat these issues. Once you could no longer realistically consume all the content the community aspect sort of fell apart, and it became more akin to a Q&A subreddit, with new users asking the same questions.

Do you believe there is something unique/special about those "early" users, and what changes have you noticed historically once that "content" tipping point arrives?

Everything I said was heavily downvoted, even though I was making valid points and 90% of the replies were mockery or useless dribble. The few people that attempted to engage in discussion with me were either just has heavily downvoted as me (even though their views were opposing mine) or were unable to do it in a logical or civil manor. It wasn't even a really controversial topic, my opinion is just something that is in contrast of the greater "hivemind".

I know we are not where I think most of us would like to be just yet, but I had not been back on Reddit for a while and I feel like I made a good decision by distancing myself from the Reddit community. I really enjoy the community we are building here.

Anyway, I kinda just felt like I needed to post this. I know it's not really high quality content (and I honestly had no clue where to post it), but I wanted you guys to know I appreciate all of you.

❤

Tildes' guiding principles are laid out in its announcement post:

• Non-profit, no investors
• No advertising, user-supported
• Open, honest, and open-source
• Minimal user-tracking, better privacy
• High-quality content and discussions
• Limited tolerance, especially for assholes

I'm interested in other projects that line up with some or all of these principles. It doesn't have to be a site with the same function as Tildes, just the same feel. What else is out there that we should know about?

I've tried using search (both by keyword and by tag) but I couldn't find anything about this. What's Tildes opinion about posting old news that haven't been discussed yet? I'm not talking about your regular news post from a newspaper that is already too late to be discussed about, I'm talking about things such as software releases or old blog posts that have never been posted but would be interesting to discuss about. How would one tag them? Where should we post them if allowed?

Edit: I'm sorry but I won't be here for discussing this tomorrow or during the weekend. I'm not staying at home, but I hope I can come back to some good responses next week.

Do you sometimes find yourself typing up a joke reply typical of Reddit but then remember this is Tildes and stop? I do it quite often (less and less the more time I spend on the site, however).

I'm even doing it less and less on Reddit itself. Like, yeah, the puns is one of the things I used to love about Reddit the most when I first joined. But that's sort of the problem.

There's always new people joining and finding the beaten-to-death jokes hilarious and so they upvote them. Which means, after one year or two 90% of Reddit jokes are old to you and have been repeated ad nauseam.

Not only that, but since they're a quick and sure way to gain others' approval (via karma) people often try to force them anywhere. No matter how inappropriate they are at that time, how forced and out of place they look. To the point that they're often the first child comment of serious comments asking serious questions.

Which means that if you're interested in reading the serious answer to that question you have scroll down past the joke, and that's even provided there's an actual answer. And I'm pretty sure many questions are left unanswered because whoever has a relevant serious answer won't feel like wasting their time typing up a reply no one will see because it will be buried under the joke reply.

With that said, what do you think of “silly” or “witty” jokes on Tildes? Do you think they should be encouraged? Discouraged? That nothing should be done about them? What about the ones that get repeated ad nauseam, are they even controllable?

I also just remembered there was talk about introducing a “joke” tag that would allow users to not see them if they don't want to or to see only jokes if they so wish. What do you think of this tag proposal? I think it could be very, very useful.

Disclaimer:

There is a chance that some users will interpret this post as some form of rant or an attempt at policing the site even further. I just want to state that my objective with this post is to spark a general and open discussion about this topic, to gauge the opinions of other users and get a feel for what the general community thinks about them (if there's an overwhelming majority that shares an opinion, or if the community is highly fragmented with regards to the topic and if so, in what proportions... etc), to see if there's anything that we can do about it or if there's anything that should be done at all, for example. I am not trying to spark controversy or drama and I mean my post to be one that's constructive, friendly, in good faith and respectful and not on that's toxic or negative or disrespectful.

Got it up and running, currently will do fine with about 25 players.

It's not set up locally so the hosting fee is $6/month, I'll leave it up for at least one month.

Currently running vanilla 1.13.1, will modify if requested.

167.114.73.187:25565

Have fun and please don't grief spawn!

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.

They say downvotes don't mean anything. But I disagree. To me, it feels like a stranger coming up to you on the street, slapping you in the face and walking off. All the while you don't even know why and just stare in confusion.

Like, I'd get it if the person was being rude, or impolite, or aggressive, or insulting, or racist, or misogynistic... Hell, even a very bad joke. But simple, innocent comments just casually sharing an opinion or a personal experience just get so aggressively downvoted. Why?

The particular sub that inspired me to make this post is r/android. Very simple comments without presenting judgement or making claims... just sharing their personal experience on a smaller topic about a certain phone will get a downvote. Why? As if to tell this person that their experience is wrong? That this didn't happen? I don't get it.

And this extends to the whole community, or at least most of it. It's just so toxic, immature and petty. Like, if you hate what someone said so much, why not at least tell them, so maybe they won't do it again or at least so they know why they're getting spat on the face.

But the lack of explanation and the mere booing from a faceless crowd is just so hearbreaking. Like, this is how crowds behave. That's why lynchings and mass rapes in war times are a thing. And it's just such a shameful aspect of the human character.

On Tildes, if you don't agree with someone, you cannot just downvote them to shut them up and hide their comment for others to see. No, rather, you have to tell them how it is you think they're wrong. And, while this has the potential of leading to nasty arguments, it also has the potential of leading to productive discussions.

How many of those comments that you often see downvoted are just innocent remarks that were completely misinterpreted by a first person and then the Hivemind just took it from there?

I mean, even if someone is saying something that is downright not true, but their tone doesn't come off as aggressive or rude, why downvote them instead of telling them? A downvote won't send them a notification. So they're likely to move on with life without knowing that that thing they think is true isn't. If you tell them, however, you can help this person learn something and combat misinformation.

By replying to this person, you're giving them a chance to better explain themselves. It's a lot less hostile, while being more productive and positive.

Plus, if upsetting and trolling people is what they want (like those few “professional reddit trolls” who just try to amass downvotes instead of upvotes) then they're out of luck in here. If their comment is obvious trolling, they'll just get ignored. Or well, maybe they do upset someone and get a heated discussion, but without the fishing for downvotes.

People cannot just downvote you to prove you wrong and go about their day feeling all superior and righteous. They have to tell you how they think you're wrong (or how they think your comment is irrelevant or how they don't like it) and in doing so expose their views up for external judgement.

The lack is probably the main reason that attracted me to Tildes.

By the way, I'm mostly referring to discussions way down in the thread between two people. I mean, how petty and aggressive do you have to be to downvote someone on an inactive thread just two minutes after they added their comment and just before you reply to them? I mean that way you're making it clear that it was you who downvoted them. So you're intentionally setting up a hostile atmosphere before the discussion even starts. That's just so toxic and emotionally draining.

How do you feel about downvotes on Reddit and their lack on Tildes?

For me, I was just browsing a random thread and somebody complained about a reddit-specific thing and then another user linked them to r/tilde with a message implying that Tilde was better about that issue and I checked it out and decided to follow to see how development went with the site. I never actually actively followed news about it, just mostly waited for invites to be handed out so I could see for myself. I like it so far, it feels more communal.

I have been using Tildes for about a week now. I have come over from Reddit where I am primarily a lurker. I lurk because I often feel my thoughts and opinions on topics and discussions have been touched on because discussions are already hundreds of comments deep by the time I arrive. The biggest positive with Tildes is the fact that the community is currently small and I read the post/sarticles that interest me instead of jumping straight into the comments to be given a synopsis. I now read more than just the headline.

I still have not found my 'voice' in regards to posting comments related to articles/stories that I have read. I think it is because I haven't found a discussion that I am really interested in. I have posted a couple of news articles that provide information about the part of the world I am in but, while they interested me, I didn't feel the need to discuss their contents further so I didn't add any comment to start a conversation to the post.

Regarding providing some more content to the site. My hobbies include, like everyone else, traveling, reading, and photography. I am no where near being an influential voice in any of these! I am not interested in having a travel blog or a website but I would like to provide information, incase someone else here is interested or has experiences too. For example, I recently took a short weekend trip from Bangkok, Thailand to Ayutthaya, Thailand. I rode the train, visited the sites, visited a bar, ate some food, and stayed the night. I want to provide a write up on my experiences and thoughts of this trip. Is a post in ~hobbies with the tags of: thailand, ayutthaya, bangkok, train the way to go?
What do y'all think?

Sharing photographs - Taking pictures is another hobby I share with everyone else. I enjoy sharing pictures I am proud of. I tend to post to r/nocontextpics, because I like their rules of no back story in the title. I also post to location specific sites. I do this to show off my pictures and to feel good from earning points. I do not post pictures to facebook very often because I like having the feel of anonymity. I don't want to be perceived as a pretentious twat. How does everyone feel about picture posts in ~hobbies with the tag(s) like: location, device used, etc..

My problem would be not 'spamming' photos. With the age of the site, and my brief interaction with it, no one wants to see 2+ picture posts from one user in the ~hobbies group.
Any thoughts on etiquette or rules for picture posts? Allow: Yes/No?

The other day, I made a comment regarding our political climate that a number of people reacted to with anger. It is ironic because it is the very thing i was commenting on, that I wanted to avoid causing more emotional distress in that segment of the populace in my country which is right now very upset. I made my comment without taking into consideration that the very environment on tildes was no different than the environment I was commenting on.

It is something that has caught me off-guard in the past on this site as well, where I said something that I thought of as innocuous, which some people reacted to with extreme emotions. When I was told to police myself more, I felt indignant and infuriated. I thought I was already trying to walk on eggshells enough!

I don't think anything I've said or done on Tildes is objectively offensive or inappropriate - and I recognize that sometimes people see things from a completely different reality than I experience. I want to make a solid effort to get along with people here, and that appears to mean that I need to learn how to communicate in a way that doesn't provoke discord.

So how do I do it? What can I do to make sure that I'm not pissing people off here just by conversing and expressing my thoughts or feelings? What specific strategies can I employ to filter my self so that it is safe? Cfabbro and Deimos both have told me that I'm doing it wrong, but i want to know how to do it right. Please teach me.

I feel like there's so much going on back at the mothership.

The whole vibe and color scheme of this place is just so relaxed, and everyone so far seems so polite and actually interested in genuine discussion. Like if there was a ~writing or something like that, I could settle down in a sweater with some of my username and just flip through this place for hours.

thanks for keeping the place awesome!

I've seen a few remarks here and there that have implied sort of matter-of-factly that places like /r/The_Donald have no redeeming value, the community members are awful (and undesirable to have here), their ideas are all reprehensible, etc. I assume that this is mostly just due to the demographic coming primarily from popular reddit mod teams where being anti-Trump is sort of an unspoken requirement - but I don't really know for certain.

It reminds me a little of this woman in a class i had once, who spoke to me about atheists, assumed I was christian just as a matter of course. It's kind of an awkward situation to find yourself in. I don't identify as an atheist, but if someone is mildly insulting atheists, it's uncomfortable. You have to be a covert conservative (or covert center-right, or even left-leaning Trump voter) or else you risk being blasted/flamed/mocked/etc. in places like reddit.

Part of what attracted me to Tildes was the sales pitch that it is to be a community for civil conversation, no hate-speech/bigotry. I think that's a perfect environment for political discussion - far more than shit-flinging and nuclear downvoting on /r/politics. So even if I'm the only MAGA person here, maybe there's a chance we can actually have civil conversations on topics we might initially disagree on...?

Edit: wow! Really happy to have these conversations with folks. Sad that i haven't encountered any fellow (public) Trump voters/supporters yet but very pleased that things have been civil as advertised. ;) Apologies for slow responses, trying to give proper thought and consideration to all the comments!

Edit2: gotta head to bed. sorry to anyone i haven't responded to questions from. feeling a bit like a novelty "And here's our token Trump voter. ha ha, he sure is a quirky one, isn't he, that crazy dictator-enabler!" xP. I'll try to answer any questions I've missed tomorrow. Sleep well, all (well, all who are going to sleep before I get back).

Edit3: Thanks for the open engagement, all you people who live in a different reality!

Still a bit bummed there aren't any MAGA friends here yet, but I've been blown away by how cordial most of you have been (i hope we can retain this culture into the future of the site). For those who are just coming in and don't want to read everything, I'd say a tl;dr of the conversations I've had below is:

• most people here want to engage with others on important topics without the shit flinging,
• some people express disbelief that someone can not be a bigot or racist and vote for Donald Trump,
• I've been repeating in various conversations the Laurel and Yanny thing is a great metaphor for the polarized camps experiencing different realities, seeing different movies on the same screen.

I'm continuing to try to reply to questions, and in the spirit of not provoking heated emotions I have been trying not to argue any of my political beliefs except that both sides are seeing different realities.

Seeing as we're still a small community, I see a lot of familiar faces in every thread.

So if you want to know what other people noticed about you, comment on this post. And reply to others with description of them. I'll try to be active here for several hours also.

Hi everyone, I'm a frontend developer and do a bit of backend work as well. I'd really like to contribute some of my downtime to helping build this site. I've checked out the issue tracker on gitlab and some of the docs, tech goals and announcement, but I'd like to start getting my hands dirty and contribute some code.

• Is there a roadmap for development?
• A feature list to implement?
• Bugs to fix?

How can I help out? What's the best way to get started?

Also for all non-devs, what is the best way that they can start helping out?

... and we're only a few bunch on an alpha website.

While actually the fact of being a small group could be playing a big role in this feeling, it just feel good to realise that some unrest I was feeling in the last months was just due to lack of meaningful discussions.

I was finding myself checking Reddit over and over (the meme about Reddit as an empty refrigerator feel terribly apt today) while I check here a couple times a day and get some interesting insight every. Single. Time.

So, enough rambling and just tank you @Deimos to put this up, that mod from reddit/science that made me discover this platform and every single one of you for providing some quality conversation :)

Keep going on!