Currently, when someone registers on Tildes they're automatically subscribed to all of the existing groups (except ~test). I did this because while the site is this small, it seemed like the best way to try to get reasonable activity in a wide range of the groups, but I absolutely don't want to keep doing it for long.

I think it's very important that people should need to seek out groups that they're interested in, instead of being defaulted into them and needing to opt out. Here's a really old post I wrote on reddit about how being a default subscription made it impossible for /r/gaming to ever be a quality gaming subreddit, but it applies to all defaults.

So, how should we decide when the site's starting to get active enough that we can stop the auto-subscriptions? And once we do, what do you think is a good way to start people out so that they're able to find groups they're interested in? Maybe, as mentioned in another thread earlier today, we should have a "welcome / getting started" page that new users end up on that goes over some of the important settings and helps them look into subscribing to groups?

Tildes has a feature that marks which comments are new in threads since you last visited (kind of like a combination of the similar gold comment-highlighting and RES features on reddit), but I've noticed that not many people are enabling it so far.

I think the reason is that I made the label/description of it a bit too scary, and it sounded like it was some sort of tracking for the sake of tracking, without explaining the actual benefit enough. So I've updated the info now, and added a small image that shows what it does to its settings page. If you didn't already have the feature enabled because I scared you off about it, please take a look at the Settings page again and see if it makes more sense now.

Alright, not so much a particular "discussion" today, but there are already a couple of other good ones going on in ~tildes as well.

As I'm sure many of you have noticed, I've started actively promoting the site around some reddit places today, and I'm sure it'll probably spread some more from there too. In support of that, I've given all the current users 5 invite codes that you can give to others if you'd like to invite anyone. You can get to these on the invite page, which is linked from the sidebar on your user page.

Also, in case you missed it, I fixed the invite process the other day so that you can have multiple active codes now, so you don't still need to invite only one person at a time.

As always, let me know if you need more invite codes or have a particular suggestion for ways you'd like to invite more people. Hopefully we can keep some momentum going for a bit now and get the activity to a self-sustaining level.

Whoops, forgot about posting a daily discussion until pretty late today, sorry.

Simple topic since it's late: what do you think about adding "expand inline" functionality for topics that point to sites that provide embeds (like YouTube)? There's already the ability to expand text topics, and it can certainly be useful for other types as well. It's a bit dangerous for things like images though, and if we do allow it we'll need to be careful about whether it starts tilting the site towards "quick" content.

Any opinions?