I get a lot out of browsing Tildes and all the conversations here. This is in keeping with the Tildes philosophy of high-quality content and conversation.

In the spirit of quality discussion, context is everything and reference points matter. I have found my own thoughts nudged many times here, and often the comments and points of view lend entirely new perspective to the content (and are sometimes more interesting).

While I appreciate the discussions, there are often links to an article, a video, a blog, or anything really, with no context and little description.

So in the spirit of conversation, I'm asking if there could be "conversation starter" comments for posted links. I'd like to know why this video or that blog is different from just randomly finding some link online. Why is this link on Tildes? What makes it interesting or important? What are we talking about? Where is the quality conversation?

Is that too much, or would that be reasonable? Thoughts?

It transpires that after the first time changing my username, I didn't learn my lesson about using a possible deadname in an online identity. Well, I changed my name in real life for the second time earlier this year, and now /u/deimos has helpfully changed it for me here. When I was at Uni, my friends and I had a long conversation about what our Matrix-style hacker names would be. I picked Hex back then, and it feels fitting to bring it back in some form now. So with that in mind: Howdy, I'm h3x :)

If you were a character in the Matrix, what would your super cool hacker name be?

I was looking through some old posts this afternoon and noticed several users posted but had since been banned. I was wondering if anyone knows the approximate number of users that have been banned and what the most common reasons were.

Hey tilderinos,

Self-described resident roboticist here, Not really sure if this is needed, but as people tend to quote/@ me on threads semi-regularly, you might notice @drannex has disappeared, but you can find me at @macleod now. Thanks @Deimos for the change!

Drannex is a really old username that I've never really enjoyed since I stopped being twelve a rather long time ago, much longer than joining here. So it's dead now.

I'm most known online as tumblr user @macleod anyway, and my website is macleod.ee to match. Homeowner has a meow in it? Glitter coffee? the dress meme? yeah, that was me (or partially). I'm sorry. Plus, it's my irl name anyway and I rather like it (muh-kloud).

Anyways, consider this a reintroduction or notice that my username has changed.

cheers, and remember, there can be only one ⚔️.

It only now just occurred to me after reading the username thread that people actually recognize each other on Tildes by username. I certainly recognize a few of the "big" usernames but otherwise I kind of have username blindness. I was absolutely shocked to see someone tag me and more shocked to see that someone remembered even a single thing I had ever posted.

I'll start:

@cfabbro is pretty on top of things around here. Super knowledgeable about various topics and a stickler for the rules in a really positive way that demonstrates their love for the community and their desire to keep it special. One of the most important Tilderinos (or Tildos, which is my personal favorite that someone suggested a while back). Thanks for all that you do, and if you're the one who has to go though and fix my god-awful tags then a double thanks and a sincere apology.

@boxer_dogs_dance, like cfabbro has a very wide range of interests and is quick to share interesting tidbits of information that a lot of people may not know. I think I have disagreed cordially with boxerdogs a few times maybe? But I have a good impression of them overall.

@deimos is a bit like God, which I think works on multiple levels. The highest power, behind-the-scenes, hard to prove his existence. I have a conspiracy theory that he uses alt accounts to participate anonymously, which I think would be a really smart thing to do. Joking aside, I think Tildes' resiliency and ability to maintain its small town vibe while being quite large is due mostly to his political/philosophical genius. The guiding principles for this site and moderation style have made this a pretty awesome place to be. Case in point: The few times I saw people complain about Tildes' moderation on other websites, I was able to immediately see why that person wasn't a good fit here. They were people who didn't even understand that they were being antisocial or were playing coy when they knew exactly what they were doing. Keeping Tildes more or less free of that stuff is one of the greatest internet achievements I've ever seen.

Disclaimer: I don't quite know how to address the topic, so I want to state I'm trying to approach this with sensitivity; I hope this might lead to a helpful and insightful conversation on a potentially difficult issue. Apologies if I don't quite get it right!

I noticed the absence of a name I'd become familiar with on Tildes and wanted to start a discussion on how the community should handle situations where a person of community renowned abruptly departs.

The user in question is @daychilde, who is one of the users I'd seen around quite a bit. I've been on Tildes for quite a while now, and would like to think I've had a positive - if not vast - contribution. Overall, I probably read more than I respond; I bring this up because I am aware that I probably represent the voice of a significant portion of the userbase here: I'm figuring stuff out as I go and probably am not in the loop on the majority of stuff going on on Tildes. All in all, I don't recognise a lot of names on Tildes, but @daychilde is/was a character who stuck out and seemed to have a significant impact on the community.

From what I deduce, @daychilde has been banned some time in the past week, and I thought it worth discussing given there are at least a couple of things left in the lurch as a result that people might seek information on. The ones that have crossed my vision are the following:

https://tildes.net/~tech/1od9/personal_offer_do_you_have_a_website_based_project_youve_been_wanting_to_do_but_worried_about_cost
and
https://tildes.net/~life/1n7e/daychildes_walking_thread

At the risk of broaching a difficult topic - I'm not looking to cause drama or speculate - we should probably discuss the fallout of a situation like this. Hopefully at the very least this topic might be something others can find if they also become aware of the departure of a notable person and are looking for confirmation or where might be appropriate to discuss any fallout that might occur.

For @daychilde in particular, this website seemed to be a resource that helped him manage his life. I wonder if we should consider whether there is some duty of care to users to depend on Tildes in some capacity?

There are also people who might be looking to discuss the hosting that he had offered/agreed, and might now be left in the lurch.

Unfortunately I don't have solutions, but I didn't see any discussion or information on this kind of a topic, nor any precedent for this kind of a situation!

Between Meta announcing that its AI, Meta AI, reached 1 billion users[1] and Google saying that AI Overviews are used by 1.5 billion[2], I’m curious to know how many of these people intentionally use the feature, or prefer it to what the AI replaces.

AI Overviews appear at the top of searches, with no option to turn them off. Meta AI, I suspect many people trigger accidentally by tapping that horrible button in WhatsApp, in search results across its three core apps, or when trying to tag someone in a group by typing an @ symbol.

It’s very easy to reach enormous numbers when you already have a giant platform. I don’t think that’s even part of the discussion. The issue is trumpeting these numbers as if they were earned, rather than imposed.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/28/zuckerberg-meta-ai-one-billion-monthly-users.html
[2] https://www.theverge.com/news/655930/google-q1-2025-earnings

I'd just like to say that I never make meta posts like this one, but for some reason this topic has really struck a chord with me on this Wednesday evening...

We recently lost a user from Tildes. I don't know which day, but I'd already noticed they weren't around a few days before I did some digging into it. The names here are not important. But this user had been a prolific poster over the last six months. As someone on Tildes who does a lot of tagging, they were high up on my 'user interaction list' in the passive way that comes from amending tags can do.

Some departing users leave all of their contributions behind, along with their username, never to be seen from again. Perhaps they regenerate with a new handle or perhaps they find pastures fresh elsewhere. Some users take all of their topics with them, along with the conversations, the ideas, the thoughts, and in my mind a little piece of the Tildes community. The latter is what happened here with our prolific user.

This has made me unusually sad. There are lots of users I miss on a personal connection level, whether that be the status they held in the community, or simply missing the elegance of their prose. Sometimes they return and I smile at my keyboard. Sometimes I check how they're doing by looking on Reddit. The sadness here comes from a feeling that when a prolific user leaves with their topics, it feels like a library user leaving the country with their borrowed library books. I've never been very good with analogies.

People talk about link rot and video game preservation and the walled gardens of the internet and it feels like this mourning over lost information from a link aggregator with a close-knit community bound up in it fits in there somewhere in the discourse.

In a comment to this topic I'm going to link to as many of the lost topics as I was able to find. These will be direct links to the articles, not to the Tildes discussion. I don't want this act to feel like grave-robbing by linking to deleted Tildes pages.

This is the end of my hopefully only foray into meta posting. I don't think I have the wordsmith-ery for it.

Someone on the server mentioned that they struggle with keeping track of converting MC usernames and Tildes usernames (and I do too at times). So if you are playing on the server comment your username for both Tildes and MC so that other players can reference who is who and just bookmark this thread

Edit: Tea mentioned that you can use the command /realname tildes_name and /fakename mc_name commands as well

Hey everyone,

I'm currently getting close to releasing a piece of software and I think that engaging users and collecting their feedback to inform the development of future features is valuable. So, I am currently evaluating different specialized solutions to see which one is best.

Does anybody have a preference for a particular tool, or otherwise know which tools are the best in terms of functionality etc.?

Thanks in advance for your input!

I'll go back to comparing options and I'll check back in here later on. Have a nice one.

Edit: To clarify, I am looking for an end user-facing tool for a (currently closed-source) SaaS (I may eventually open-source it, but I'm a bit on the fence-I would have to weigh the pros and cons).

It seems like Tildes is not going to ever get a block user function.

But it would be really handy if I could get a filter to auto-ignore any topics started by certain users. Would this be something that Tildes would ever implement?

Take a look at the Tildes Statistics site. Couple things:

1, and most obvious: there has been a decline in users over the past few days for the first time that I'm aware of.
2: (I was going to make this point before the user decline occurred but it's probably moot now) Due to the scaling of the Y-axis, it appears that there is healthy user growth in the site. But if you look at the numbers, we're talking about user growth of roughly 60 people over the past month.

I know we want controlled growth, and I know we don't want to open it up to the masses. But we also want this site to succeed (i.e. provide interesting discourse and keep people coming back on a regular basis). I don't believe success can happen when growth is stagnant (or, declining!)

I don't think that the conversations are necessarily stagnant per se, in fact there's an impressive amount of thoughtful discussion relative to the size of the user base. But if a given topic is too niche (e.g. MLS football or MUDs, two of my interests), the odds of finding like-minded users to discuss with is obviously lower.

Is it time to consider some sort of growth campaign (one that is not reactionary a la the Reddit API changes) in order to infuse some new life into this awesome site?

I've been thinking about the arguments that are increasingly common when dealing with tech: "it's too complicated" and "I just want something that works".

My father gifted a used computer to me and my brother when we were kids. Ours to use, ours to take care. He would pay for the eventual screw up, but we had to walk several blocks carrying the tower to get assistance.

I messed up a lot over the years, mostly because I wanted to explore the little that I knew and learn more. I had some magazines that expected everything to go well if instructions were followed and no access to internet forums to ask for help. I was limited to just one language as well. I had to find a way out. Nowadays things are much more simple and really just work, until they don't and I can't really fix them.

In this world, what people can do is complain. Or offer a report of how things went wrong and wait patiently. It's not even that common for people in general to just go back to the version that worked. There's no version, only the app we use or can't use and it's not our responsibility any kind of maintenance.

I have to confess I was going in another direction when I started, but things are really limited from a consumer's point of view. In part, it's our fault for not wanting to deal with the burden of knowledge, it inevitably takes the control away from us, but big tech really approves and incentives this behavior.

As with so many problems I see in the world, education is the solution. And educating ourselves might be the only dependable option.