I am curious to hear everyone's thoughts/ideas on submitting aggregate stories vs finding and submitting the primary sources of news/articles/stories/studies/etc.

E.g. Today, Eurogamer published an article about Fortnite driving headset sales up which is basically just a rearrangement of quotes from the original source, an article in Variety. So even though the Variety article is a few days old now, I decided to just submit that instead.

But that situation brings up some interesting questions:

Do we care if the submissions are "hot off the presses", when the newly published aggregate article doesn't add anything substantive to the original, older source material? Should we just post the original source material despite it being dated by the time we stumble upon it, if the subject is interesting enough?

What about aggregate "breaking" news/politics articles that take the more "dry/clinical" original source reporting and "spice it up" with opinions, add additional context or focus on a more "important/interesting" part of the original source's subject matter?

What about science reporting, which is often shoddy, inaccurate and/or outright misleading? If there are no good aggregate sources should we post the shoddy one if the subject is interesting, or should we hunt down the original study from a peer reviewed publication and submit that even if it's locked behind a hard paywall?

Where should we draw the line on these sorts of aggregate articles? How far back to the original source should we go if doing so means potentially locking people out of actually reading it (through paywalls) or even stripping all the useful context out of it (e.g. the first tweet that mentions an event)?

Should we simply combine all the sources, megathread style, and maybe even let users submit new ones to it as they come out? If we do that, how do we maintain any semblance of usefulness to the comments section, especially at scale and for events that are ongoing? IMO, most of Reddit’s megathreads outlive their usefulness after just a few hours because of that and sorting the comment by new doesn’t really help.

IMO, if ~ wants to focus on quality submissions and discussions then these questions are ones we need to carefully consider before any policies or systems regarding them are implemented. So I am curious if anyone here (mods especially) have any experience dealing with these issues, how they did and if anyone has any ideas on how ~ can do it better.

Okay, okay. The default site theme is now less beige/tan/yellow. This was a bit of a quick-and-dirty way of doing it, so the other colors are all still the Solarized ones for now, but I may change them around some later.

The other themes are still available, and can now be selected on the Settings page—if you want the beige back, that's "Solarized Light". I also added a theme with a full-black background (I don't think it looks very good, but it's there).

Currently, Tildes user pages only show one "page" of the user's history—their most recent 20 topics and/or comments. This wasn't really a deliberate choice, I just haven't added pagination yet (it's a bit tricky because of the combination of topics and comments). But I wanted to talk about the general idea of being able to look through users' histories and see if there's anything we should consider doing differently.

In some ways, being able to look through user histories is nice. Sometimes I find a user that makes good posts, and I like to go back and see what else they've posted. However, a lot of people use it in a malicious way, going back through people's posts to find "dirt", or even sometimes using it as a way to doxx them. This happens a lot on Twitter especially, where attention will land on someone for some reason, and people will dig through years of their previous tweets to find things to attack them with.

Even reddit (unintentionally) puts a limit on how much history you can look back through because of their 1000-item limit on any listings. That's not a limitation that I'm going to have, so adding pagination will mean that it's possible to view all of any user's previous posts.

Do you think we should add some restrictions to how much history is visible to try to reduce these bad uses, or is that futile/unnecessary?