Edit: I decided to change it from "Recent activity" to just "Activity".

As mentioned in the post over the weekend, I've added a new sorting option now: "recent activity". This behaves kind of like a forum, where active topics (ones getting new comments) will keep coming back up to the top of the list. I haven't added any specific protections like @cfabbro suggested in that thread, but I will if it seems necessary to prevent excessive "bumping".

I'm considering making this the default sort while the site's overall activity is still pretty low, but haven't done it just yet. Let me know what you think of it, and if you notice any weirdness.

Previously, the invite process was pretty annoying if you were planning to invite multiple people - you could only have one "active" invite code at a time, so you'd have to send someone a code and then wait until they registered before you could generate another code for the next person.

I've fixed this now and it's possible to have multiple active codes, so you can generate as many as you need (up to the limit of how many codes you've been granted). You can do this on the invite page: https://tildes.net/invite

Hopefully this makes it easier to invite people, and as always if you want more codes for a particular purpose just send me a message and let me know.

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.