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10 votes
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Tencent announces offer to acquire full ownership of Funcom
12 votes -
The Hamilton Hustle
5 votes -
Breaking down the controversy around "American Dirt," an Oprah Book Club pick that's been called "trauma-porn melodrama"
6 votes -
Holding a city hostage is ‘peaceful’ now? I’ve been to peaceful protests before. The gun rally in Richmond was not that
21 votes -
A battle for the soul of Marfa, Texas: What happens when a wealthy patron wears out his welcome?
5 votes -
Challenging projects every programmer should try
11 votes -
Ronald Reagan’s “October Surprise” plot was real after all
16 votes -
New microscopy technique shows cells’ 3D ultrastructure in new detail
7 votes -
I'm planning to enable the "mark new comments" feature for everyone - any major concerns?
Something that's come up in discussions a few times recently is how important it is to have good default settings. Even users who are quite technical and involved don't always explore which...
Something that's come up in discussions a few times recently is how important it is to have good default settings. Even users who are quite technical and involved don't always explore which settings are available, and that's totally fine—they shouldn't need to. The default setup should be as good as possible, with changing settings mostly for specialized cases.
One particular place on Tildes where this isn't currently being done well is for the "mark new comments" feature, which has always been disabled by default. I think it's one of the best features on the site and makes it much easier to follow ongoing discussions here than on other sites with similar comment systems, but overall, not many users have enabled it.
For example, Tildes got some attention on Hacker News again yesterday, and about 80 new users have registered so far from that. Only 9 of them enabled "mark new comments", even though the welcome message strongly encourages it. Looking at longer periods of time, this seems typical: only about 10% of users ever enable it.
As it says on the settings page for the feature, my reason for disabling it by default was out of privacy concerns. However, I've been doing some review of the data that Tildes stores lately and realized that this was kind of misleading and inaccurate. Because I have HTTP request server logs and some other related data (which is all only kept for 30 days), I effectively have topic visit records from the last 30 days for all users anyway, whether they have the feature enabled or not. The data is more convenient to access for users with the feature enabled, but it's available either way.
Because of that, and because the data will be very useful to combine with some of the upcoming changes I mentioned in the last ~tildes.official post, I'm planning to enable this feature for everyone. Here are the general plans:
- Data about which topics' comments pages a user visits will be stored (for 30 days), along with when and how many comments were there at the time. This enables displaying which topics have new comments since your last visit, and marking those new comments.
- There will no longer be a setting to disable this, but you can still choose whether previously-seen comments are collapsed when you return - the same as the existing checkbox on that page for "Collapse old comments when I return to a topic".
- I will probably implement some sort of "stop informing me of new comments in this topic" feature (separate from the new Ignore one) to stop having the info about new comments in a topic showing up for you.
Please let me know if you have any thoughts or concerns about this. If nothing major comes up, I intend to make this change later this week.
82 votes -
Group AMA with developers from the Half-Life: Alyx team
9 votes -
A shipwreck off Florida’s coast pits archaeologists against treasure hunters
4 votes -
Utah has voted to ban LGBTQ+ conversion therapy for children, becoming the 19th US state to outlaw the discredited practice
18 votes -
Netflix announces The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf, an anime film from Studio Mir
@nxonnetflix: The rumors are true, a new Witcher story is in the works! The anime film, The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf, will take us back to a new threat facing the Continent. Brought to you by the Witcher team @LHissrich and @BeauDeMayo, and Studio Mir the studio behind Legend of Korra.
10 votes -
Can you defeat the privacy chicken?
16 votes -
The Dreadnought Diaries - A new series of development diaries following upcoming projects at Ninja Theory
3 votes -
Establishing a type scale and hierarchy
6 votes -
American Psycho: An oral history, twenty years after its divisive debut
7 votes -
What have you been watching / reading this week? (Anime/Manga)
What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was...
What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.
If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!
10 votes -
For years, Microsoft has moved billions in profits to Puerto Rico to avoid taxes. When the IRS pushed it to pay, Microsoft aggressively fought back in court, lobbied Congress and changed the law
21 votes -
The audacious effort to reforest the planet
4 votes -
Belarus started importing oil from Norway on Tuesday after Russia, its main oil provider, suspended supplies earlier this month
9 votes -
What programming/technical projects have you been working on?
This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's...
This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?
17 votes -
Terry Jones: Monty Python star dies aged 77
15 votes -
Copenhagen crowned Europe's healthiest city – factors included things like life expectancy, the percent of GDP allocated to healthcare and the cost of fruit and vegetables
7 votes -
If you could make any event(s) in history not happen, which one(s) would you pick?
I didn't know tildes has trending topics. I'd either pick the rise of the bolsheviks in Russia (You can replace them with the mensheviks, who wanted to abide by democracy.), The division of the...
I didn't know tildes has trending topics.
I'd either pick the rise of the bolsheviks in Russia (You can replace them with the mensheviks, who wanted to abide by democracy.), The division of the HRE (A united germany in 900CE would be very consequential.) And the rise of the hapsburgs in what would be Austria-Hungary, since it meshed a dozen linguistic groups together.
13 votes -
Iceland didn't hunt any whales in 2019 – and public appetite for whale meat is fading
6 votes -
'Spoons are so brutal!' Paris Hilton's cooking show is a rare work of comic genius
17 votes -
The Netflix documentary Cheer shows viewers that all kinds of people become cheerleaders, for all kinds of reasons — and some are profoundly changed by it
8 votes -
America’s radioactive secret: Oil-and-gas wells produce nearly a trillion gallons of toxic waste a year
10 votes -
Every Google result now looks like an ad
@craigmod: There's something strange about the recent design change to google search results, favicons and extra header text: they all look like ads, which is perhaps the point?
27 votes -
New browser on the block: Flow
23 votes -
How would you kill Hitler?
The mission You have been tasked with the mission to kill Hitler. The mission is mandatory and you cannot decline it. You have access to a state of the art time machine: a simple Casio wristwatch...
The mission
You have been tasked with the mission to kill Hitler. The mission is mandatory and you cannot decline it. You have access to a state of the art time machine: a simple Casio wristwatch in which you enter the time, date and location where you wanna travel to. It can travel to any point in past Earth's history, and it is programmed to automatically and safely return you to the present time as soon as the mission is completed.
You have access to all weapons available to humankind in the present day, but you can only take what you can carry.
You also have access to technology that will make you look ethnically German complete with Nazi uniforms, and a perfectly functioning universal translator.
How this thread will work
I will try to come up with a negative outcome for every answer in jackass genie style. Others are welcome to do the same!
22 votes -
With neither tyrants nor fascists: An anarchist analysis of the growing fight against anti-gun legislation in Virginia
12 votes -
Which are your top five computer programs?
In terms of Utility: It is useful! Reliability: It will always work when you need it to! Uniqueness: It gives you the option of doing things that would never have been necessary before it came...
In terms of
- Utility: It is useful!
- Reliability: It will always work when you need it to!
- Uniqueness: It gives you the option of doing things that would never have been necessary before it came along.
- Aesthetic: It satisfies your sense of beauty: It gives you the same kind of feeling a painting or a poem would.
- Transcendence: It transcends the zeitgeist and is the simplest it can and thus ought to be.
Mine are:
32 votes -
California's new groundwater law explained
9 votes -
A decade ago, a new spirit of tolerance of the avant garde blossomed in Russia. But these days, it’s impossible to know where the lines are—as the country’s most celebrated director discovered
7 votes -
The two types of randomness
8 votes -
In Paris, the rebuilding of Notre Dame is being shaped by history, myth, and Emmanuel Macron
10 votes -
Smartphones have blurred the distinction between different spaces by turning anywhere into a place you can work, watch TV/videos, talk with friends, and more
10 votes -
Half-Life and Half-Life 2 (including both episodes) are free to play on Steam until Half-Life: Alyx launches in March
14 votes -
Plans and vision for the future of Stack Overflow
15 votes -
International Money Fund World Economic Outlook update - January 2020
3 votes -
I scratch-built and kit-bashed this spaceship
22 votes -
Hades | The Long Winter update trailer
10 votes -
Wine 5.0 has been released
14 votes -
First case of new coronavirus detected in US
17 votes -
Farming insects – to feed animals
5 votes -
Glenn Greenwald charged with cybercrimes in Brazil
15 votes -
Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI complained
21 votes