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.

I know we're not trying to copy Reddit, but their system of just clicking anywhere on the inbox message and it marking it as read is really nice and easy. Having to find the exact "Mark as Read" gets pretty tedious to me.

Thoughts?

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.

I really enjoyed reddit's Place event from April 1st, and the button pressing event was also a rather interesting one. I don't currently have any ideas for what kinds of events could be done (other than another event like the Place) but would definitely like to see some community-driven events in the future.

Anybody have any thoughts on this?

One thing I've been recently thinking about regarding ~'s tags is how much hate "Noise" gets. I realize that it doesn't further the discussion every time, but we also need to look at the context.

I've seen a few posts here tagged as noise when a community member posts something they've made or would like feedback on. In my opinion, when someone says "that's great!" or "I agree" that's completely acceptable. I've heard the "just upvote and move on" argument, but by our own admission, per the posted rules here and on reddit, the vote button does not equal "agree." It only means that the content is of value.

I'd love to tell someone "I really love the way you phrased that" or "I didn't know other people felt that way, too!" for something I agreed with but didn't have a whole lot to add without just being repetitive.

I'm not married to this idea, just something milling about in my head since on ~, it really seems like we're trying to use the vote button not for just "agree/ disagree." I posted on ~talk rather than ~tildes because I'm curious how other people see the issue, and I don't feel the need to lodge a formal suggestion.

Hey folks!

I can only imagine I'm saying something that's been said many times before, but I'm having a bit of an issue with the rendering of the website on desktop Safari.

It seems that everything renders on top of everything else in an ugly way the first time I pull up the site, to the point that I can't read anything. But here's the weird part: if I click any link, then use my back button, everything renders fine. This has to be some kind of wonky JavaScript problem? Maybe? I'm not sure.

Honestly, I just want to know that I'm not the only one seeing this issue. It's very strange, and I'll help to fix it however I can if I can get access to the codebase for the site.

One of mine is the song Existentialism On Prom Night, by Straylight Run.

It reminds me of a time probably about 10 years ago now, late one night, hanging out with one of my friends. We didn't really have anywhere to go, so we just drove around the back roads north of our town, talking and listening to music. We both really liked this song and I remember us singing it in car. Singing it loud, you know?

We've lost touch since then, we don't talk anymore, but anytime I hear that song, or anything by the band, I think about her and us driving around.

So I thought I’d start a little discussion after cancelling my Hulu trial here.

As a devout advertisement-hater and pihole-deploying, block-W10-analytics-at-the-firewall-level neurotic, I went for the more expensive ad-free plan thinking it got me out of the creepy tracking/analytics too. Surprise! It does not- uMatrix lights up like a Christmas tree when you load anything *.hulu.com

I don’t like being the product. I feel being tracked and analyzed etc makes me exactly that.

What do you all think? Is wanting a non-tracked video/tv streaming service too much to ask for?

Edit: Just to help exemplify my point, a little snippet from the Hulu privacy policy:

“For clarity, even if you have not consented to Hulu sharing Viewing Information together with your personal information, we may still share information collected from or about you”

https://www.hulu.com/privacy.txt

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

I've got a server running out of my house that I use to create virtual machines for many different facets of what I enjoy (IE: A Plex Server, Discord Bot, PiHole, etc...). The server runs Ubuntu and is utilizing QEMU I believe for the the virtualization.

I've got issues getting the adapter (currently using one of those Xbox adapters to plug into an antenna and back into the computer) to relay into the virtual machine. On top of that, I'd LOVE to ditch hulu and these others (sling, PS Vue, etc..) and utilize local live television with a larger antenna on my roof, but I'll worry about that once I've got these technical aspects worked out.

I guess I'm looking for some advice as well as anyone with a similar setup and how you are running yours?

I ran a Lighthouse audit for performance and accessibility on a comments page (specifically this one); the results are pretty good on the whole, but there are definitely a couple of things I think ~ could do better.

Performance

IMO the performance of ~ is fine; Chrome thinks that the time to first meaningful paint is a bit high (3.1s on a simulated 3G connection with CPU throttling), but I don't know what you can do about that without doing things like inlining all the CSS, which would make the very first page load faster but hurt every request after that. Maybe minifying the CSS/JS would help? I don't know if the performance benefit would be enough to justify the increase in complexity to handle the minification, and you'd also lose the easy legibility of the source (which I personally really like).

Accessibility

There's some really small text on ~! The Lighthouse audits I ran don't catch it, but the SEO audit does, and it's not hard to see it with your own eyes either. The suggested minimum size for easy reading in that audit is 16px, which is the current size of all post and comment text on desktop, although mobile only gets 14px (I don't know if this is actually a problem, since you probably hold your phone closer to your face than your monitor).

Edit: posting this from my phone - yes, the 14px font on mobile is definitely harder to read than 16px would be. I don't know if that's just me (I have a fairly severe visual impairment), but I would definitely prefer 16px text everywhere, not just on desktop.

There's also a good amount of text that doesn't have a great deal of contrast (even using the default white theme – I'm sure it's much worse with Solarized). This is mostly all the grey text, although Lighthouse also complains about the links when they're on a grey background (especially the "visited" colour, which is much closer to grey than the normal colour).

Some specific examples: The timestamp and "Link" text for each comment is only 10px, which is a bit small for me, especially with the low contrast on "Link". Similarly, the post timestamp is a bit hard to read.

The worst offender by far, though, is the "Comment deleted by author" notice (example). It's tiny and grey and incredibly easy to miss, and is directly relevant to the flow of the conversation, unlike the timestamps. I'd really appreciate it if that could be bumped up to at least as large as usernames are currently displayed.

There are no downvotes (which is a very good idea) and we are sorting by activity anyway. So what if we took the next logical step and got rid of the entire voting system? Please hear me out! :)

(1) Up-voting does not encourage quality postings (see, for instance, https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/data-mining-reveals-how-the-down-vote-leads-to-a-vicious-circle-of-negative-feedback-aad9d49da238 ; yes the article also covers the up-vote).

(2) Anecdotally, up-voting discourages quality postings. I have often been frustrated because well-thought-out comments (by me or by others) got one hundredth of the up-votes of a strategically placed "lol" or something similarly trivial. People upvote things that evoke an emotional response, not things that make them think. (Source lost, unfortunately.)

(3) Up-votes are time-critial. Being the first one to comment often assures getting the most up-votes, which can lead to (2), to "first" posts, and to quick posts instead of well though-out comments.

(4) (Edit!) Up-voting can create an echo-chamber, because quality if measured by popularity.

All in all, voting is just a social media habit without any benefit and with the possibility of a large detrimental effect on posting quality. Old-school Web fora and Usenet worked fine without it and quality was (arguably) superior.

Would you really miss the option to vote? Is it worth the detrimental effects?

Please discuss!

Edit: fixed the link to the article. Thanks!

Wouldn't it be great if you could schedule your watch face by the time of day? If I am at work I want certain complications and if I exercise after work it would be great if another watch face for that purpose appears.