Would it be possible to add a link to the previous weekly post?

For example, https://tildes.net/~comp/rml/what_programming_technical_projects_have_you_been_working_on could link to https://tildes.net/~comp/rhk/what_programming_technical_projects_have_you_been_working_on from the week before.

Bonus points if it can be applied retroactively.

So currently as far as I know the only way to tell the difference between a link or text topic is by the username section if it’s a name it’s a text and if it has a website name/URL it’s a link,

When I’m slowly browsing it isn’t too hard to distinguish them but sometimes if I’m flicking past quick “as I often do” it can be nearly impossible to tell them apart without stopping and looking an each individual topic, could we not make them a different colour or maybe add the word link somewhere just so it’s easier on the eyes?.

Basically, convert Article: 5234 words to Article: 5234 words, 23 minutes.

Not much to explain, I'm lazy and I don't like to do math just to see how much time it would take me to read an article, it would be great to have an estimate similar to how Medium does it. It doesn't have to be as precise, a rough estimate would do the job, for my example I divided the number of words by the average WPM for the english language (228±30 according to Wikipedia).

Additionally, a setting can be added to set a personal reading speed.

I’d like to suggest the practice of posting smaller excerpts. Long excerpts are less likely to be read and resemble articles in themselves.

Their comprehensiveness may render them irrelevant, and demotivate readers from going to the source before commenting.

IMHO an excerpt should generally have no more than two paragraphs, with exceptions for long reads (3500 words+).

For reference (and out of personal choice), 750 characters may be an ideal max, give or take.

This idea is inspired (at least for me, there are probably actual forums like Tildes to draw better comparisons to and take better inspiration from) by Danbooru (P.S: This image is just SFW scenery but the site as a whole is not) , where they have meta tags for stuff like image resolution, if it has commentary, it it's translated, animated, GIF, etc.

Should we consider that but for tags like long and short read or watch, videos, reposts/duplicate posts, spoiler threads, recurring.[ ], maybe news article authors too (also appropriated from Danbooru), since these can supercede any topic or group and will rarely be suggested in any single one of them?

If it's not clear what that looks like, imagine all the normal tags being suggested/typeable at the top and all the meta tags being suggested in a separate search box just below the current one, which are displayed regardless of which group you're in, since they can apply to all the site.

Meant primarily for long threads (35+ comments)

Mainly because sometimes we just want to get to the reply box after reading through a long comment section and checking several times over now that highlighting new comments is a default feature and the fastest way to do that is closing a bunch of threads or tapping the screen a few times/scrolling.

Admittedly it's kinda silly but being able to collapse all the threads and get straight to the reply box seems like a pretty good QoL feature.

I have a UX pain point: From the notifications / new comments (replies) page, if I mark all notifications as read, all the nice, handy links to the threads go poof on the page refresh. So now, I have to manually hunt down all/any of them to return to the OPs and revisit the broader discussions.

Can we make the "mark all read" link do its job without clearing the page? I realize this will probably make things more complicated (a notif that is already seen/read is being displayed on the "unread notifs" page, so how will that work, UI- and UX-wise), but... this is just a pain point that I hit again and again. I thought I could tolerate it (which is why I haven't said anything till now), but it's an issue for me nearly every single time.

In numerous occasions I accidentally deleted comments on mobile. Sometimes I can use navigation history to restore them but not always. This can be rather frustrating. Maybe there should be some extra confirmation that’s not easy to accidentally click in order to delete stuff on mobile

My question is would it be possible to have a user-level preference to not show posts which link to a certain domain?
I want to clarify, this would only affect the user (based on their preferences) and what they see on tildes.

Asking this question after seeing a bunch of posts from intlnewsdesk.org being posted here, and I am not able to find much about this site and would prefer not to provide more traffic to this site. (Seems like the user posting this signed up a day ago and pretty much has posted only articles to the above mentioned site).

The longer I use Tildes, the more I question the effectiveness of ~news.

/r/news made sense on reddit, where they didn't have a robust cross-group tagging and filtering system. I think Tildes be better served by eliminating ~news entirely and replacing it with a news tag with a date property, which would allow for nice chronological filtering for catching up on news stories, especially if the article date could be scraped somehow. Miss a week of news? Search the tag with a date range, get all news stories for last week, perhaps with a minimum comment threshold to see what sparked discussion.

I think ~gov (or politics) would be needed as a replacement, as it's a major driver of most news stories, but there's so much more to politics than just news, and those discussions don't exactly fit anywhere nicely at the moment, esp if it's a random blog post relating to recent events in the news. Almost every other group serves as a nice catch-all for most other common news categories.

The only issue I would see would be when ~gov would overlap with the other categories, which would likely happen a lot..but that happens with the current ~news too. I think that could be further mitigated by having a sort of x-post system blurring the lines of tags and groups even more, where ~gov would take precedence but posts would then also appear in the tagged groups for users not following governance otherwise.

That's actually a foundation of my more insane idea of completely eliminating traditional groups by letting people build their own groups in the form of prioritized tags, but that's another post for another time.

I understand we have ~life but I think something more ~personal would be more beneficial, life could pertain to a lot of different things but personal would be far more effective.

We could also have ~personal.blogs for us to submit our personal blog posts that don't really have a place anywhere else.

Would open and connect the community a lot more, allow for advice, general questions, and more.

The main advantage of this is that updates can be organized and followed daily like on the COVID threads (which is especially useful if you don't live in the US and can't keep track of what's going on) and the main disadvantage is that unlike COVID, we have no idea if this will go on long enough or be dynamic enough to truly merit that. (Although in @dubteedub's COVID post he doesn't discount doing updates every 3 days, which we could do although that conflicts with 7-day weeks)

I’m sorry if this isn’t the correct avenue or if I have missed a previous post about this but I was wondering how new topics could be requested. I think a DIY topic would be great, as a woodworker I think something more specific to woodworking would be great but with the current size of the user base a more broad topic might be better suited.

This is a follow up to the thread from a few days ago, and specifically my comment in that thread regarding the use of a "Escalation" label.

As many users identified in that topic, political discussion on Tildes has the potential to become very heated, very quickly, and often the standards of discussion on these topics is below what we expect elsewhere on Tildes. In that thread, many suggestions were offered in order to remedy the situation, including banning overt political content entirely, more liberal moderation by @Deimos, more liberal usage by the community of labels, addition of new labels, and more. All of these solutions have their advantages and disadvantages, but I want to talk about the one I believe would be the most effective and least disruptive to the site as is: addition of new labels.

Right now, there are two main tags that might be used on a comment that is seen as falling short of Tildes's standards: noise and malice. Users seem to have some variation in how they interpret how each tag should be used, but it seems like there is at least some agreement on the 'noise' tag being used for comments that are clearly low effort. Users seem to have more hesitation to use the 'Malice' tag, however. While it is sometimes clear when a comment is hostile or malicious, this is not always the case. Argumentative is not always hostile, and sometimes topics are naturally contentious. One takeaway from that thread (for me) is that labeling something as malice confers a judgement on intent, and users are not always comfortable doing this as it can be difficult to tell if someone truly meant to be malicious. But in political threads, the intent matters less than the effect a comment has in a discussion. Someone can not be acting maliciously, but still be clearly making the situation worse. This is the point of an 'Escalation' label.

An "Escalation" label should be applied to comments that have made the situation worse.

Furthermore, an "Escalation" label would not only affect the sorting of a comment or thread, but has the potential to halt the discussion if there is too much escalation in a short amount of time. Here is what I envision:

Define the heat of a comment (as in, "ohhh this conversation is getting heated") as follows:

H = k*n ∑ N_i / d_i

where k is a tuning constant, n is the number of escalation tags given to the comment in question, and the sum ranges over the comment's direct ancestors and descendants in the thread with N_i being the number of "Escalation" labels given to the other comment and d_i is the distance from the current comment to that other comment. Here is an example thread:

.
├── A
├── C0
│   └── C1 (N=1)
│      └── C2 (N=0)
│          └── C3 (N=2)
│               └── C4 (N=1)
└── B0
    └── B1

The heat of comment C3 would then be

H = k*2 (1/2 + 1) = 3k

Finally, define the heat H(T) of a thread T to be the sum of the heats of its comments. My proposal is that if the heat of a given thread surpasses some threshold value H_c, replies are locked in that thread only. This essentially shuts down extremely heated conversations before they get out of control and cause an entire topic to be locked.

The above definition can obviously be modified, but it has a few good properties that I think should be retained.

1. It takes into account the relative positions of comments. A thread that is 20 comments long that has a comment with 1 "Escalation" at the beginning, midpoint, and end is probably a better and more controlled situation than a thread with 3 "Escalation" labels in a row.
2. One extremely heated comment (n is large) that generates many okay or slightly heated replies (n~1) is oftentimes just as bad as many comments that each escalate a bit (a long chain of comments, each with n~1).
3. It considers a the whole thread as opposed to on a comment by comment basis. If there is only one person in a thread posting heated comments, even if the replies are measured and reasonable, there is a good chance that thread is not producing a worthwhile discussion. If that one problem user stays problematic too long, eventually the heat of the thread will surpass the threshold and the chain will be locked.

I am sure there are disadvantages that I am not thinking of right now, but I truly think a system like this could be beneficial if implemented and used by Tildes. Furthermore, if two people are genuinely interested in the discussion and want it to continue, it is in their interest to avoid posting comments that get generate a high heat score so that the thread doesn't become locked. If they are not interested and keep escalating anyway, that conversation probably shouldn't continue.

I am interested in your thoughts on this idea. However, I don't intend for this topic to become a repeat of many of the suggestions and comments in the thread linked at the beginning - I don't mean to reignite that discussion.

Apologies if this has been discussed already.

I had this idea of a compromise between Tilde's need to grow, and the desire to avoid an Eternal September. Couldn't we make Tildes open to registration one day (or one week) a year?

This avoids a lot of the problems associated with open registration websites. For example, a spammer/troll can't just re-open an account after being banned. Of course, they could have opened several accounts and re-invite themselves, but I think these could be easier to track (especially with invite tracing).

It would also give time to train new users before the next batch comes in.

Of course, the exact timing could be tuned. It could be a day a month, for example.

What do you think?

This article I posted has been marked as a long read with 2.7k words but this other article I posted has 4.7k words and hasn't been marked as such so what gives?

We should probably also consider a 'medium read' and apply some of these standards to videos as well.

I often come across a topic that I find somewhat interesting, but end up being much more interested in a discussion happening within that topic. I think it would be useful to be able to "watch" a comment/thread to be notified if someone replies to a comment. Thoughts?

Quick one for the Gitlab:

Just how comment submitters get a few minutes of breathing room to make adjustments and edits to their comment before an indication the comment has been edited appears, it'd be nice if the topic history which records title adjustments/tag changes/tilde moves doesn't record history by submitters just after posting?

Usually, I'll forget to add a tag or two, or decide the title can be appropriately clarified further within a minute or two of submitting. Today I made a particularly egregious mistake which is now recorded for all time (and further documented here!) by submitting that post to ~tildes initially!

Usually, edits by the post submitter within the first few minutes aren't of particular consequence, so recording them is a bit much, in my view. This would generally dovetail well with the notion that Tildes discards information if it isn't needed. Thoughts?

This may seem like I'm rambling but, please bare with me, I think I have some point(s) to make.

• I've been trying to locate a common ancestor image to the album cover of Gnarls Barkley's single Crazy and the banner of an interesting talk titled Imagination and it's resistance to chance. I think the resemblance is sufficient to suggest one an ancestor exists and it's not just a crazy coincidence. Can anyone help identify it?

• The same academic conference linked above hosts a fascinating introduction to Intensionality, Invariance, and Univalence. It captures some of the most exciting mathematics going on at the moment. Presumably I should be posting this in ~science tagged as mathematics. Is there some limit at which particular tags become popular enough to warrant their own subtilde? Are there queries users can run to determine tag counts? These questions were prompted by the slight irritating thought of classifying mathematics under science.

• People could respond to many different parts of this thread since I've written so much. However, the points are slightly related, at least in how I present them. If I were to split them up into separate posts, not only would it add to the noise, each point would lose whatever relation they had. So, I wonder if, much like r/IAMA, could there be a better format for conversations where many users are speaking to a particular individual? An expert or celebrity perhaps. Trying to track all the replies of the main user was always a hassle in those IAMA threads.

If there's interest in such an extension to tildes, I'd like to offer my help in implementing it. That's my main point really and why I posted here.

I'm complaining mainly because <these> 2 keys tend to be in the symbols tab on a mobile keyboard and are really annoying to keep going back from and to while making something like a <details> box.

Some replacements I imagine (0 programming knowledge) could be:

>small text here< ( for > to not make quotations at the beginning you could maybe put some unrelated character like ) or ] before it)

^superscripted text here/ (or you could just use parentheses to delineate which text is formatted like on reddit and probably all normal places)

_subscripted text here_ (admittedly I know this messes with underscore being equal to asterisks in formatting, but I don't know which key you could use avoid this that still is intuitive)

{Details
[Summary text here]

Details text here}

Replace the <details> prompt with { and </details> with } and presumably everything should work, right? (The brackets can have the summary functionality limited to within the details box because they're encased within the curly brackets? Admittedly I don't really know.)

@deimos has expressed before his dislike for alt-accounts, a position I happen to share. Alt-accounts makes users less accountable and more prone to misbehavior.

At the same time, deeply personal threads frequently require anonymity to be of any value.

To avoid alt-accounts altogether, I propose an anonymity with caveats:

1. Only accounts older than 60 days can comment and create threads anonymously.
2. Mods and admins can take action against the account that posted anonymously just like with any account
3. For the most part, the identity of the poster will remain a secret even from mods and admins.
4. For practical reasons, in the case of banning a user from the entire website, the identity of the user would have to be revealed to the admin that banned him/her. But that will only happen after the action is taken. This seems like a bad idea.

EDIT: PLUS FEATURES

1. The creator of the thread must tick a box to allow anonymous posts (they are opt-in).
2. Moderators and admins have the power of disabling this permission if deemed necessary.

One thing we take for granted in social media is that any comment may receive a reply from anyone. Maybe we should rethink that? What would happen if it were optional?
For example, for someone posting in "What's a widely criticized thing that you feel is worth defending?" topic, I am not sure that everyone posting there really wanted to start a discussion.
Having replies shut off might be frustrating sometimes as a reader, particularly when something you disagree with gets a lot of upvotes. But it would make the author's intent clearer. If you're inviting further conversation, leave replies on. If you're not, turn it off.
Everyone has the right to walk away from conversation. This would make it explicit. Maybe it would make heated threads less likely, since they'd stop sooner? It seems like it's more difficult to walk away when you're also letting the other side get the last word?

There are three platforms that I'm aware of that are included in the Tildes SiteInfo dictionary—YouTube, Vimeo, & SoundCloud—that support linking to specific parts of a media resource via timestamps. This is useful to reference a particular portion of the video/song during discussion.

It should probably be possible to automatically apply hyperlinks to timestamps in the video (link this) when someone posts a comment with a timestamp-like string inside of it. This would make it a bit easier to share and link to specific portions of what's being shared in the main topic.

This seems like a decent value-add feature for Tildes. Whether it's a good idea to directly edit the comment string, I'm not so sure. I'd probably be in favour of implementing either a post-markdown middleware that added an icon next to the timestamp, kind of like how external links on some sites are suffixed with an icon that indicates the resource is not on the current domain.

I personally think it could be helpful as a group for us to attempt guiding ourselves to cooperate and do stuff like timasomo. Alternatively it could end up being swallowed by petty drama and be really horrible.

Would it be possible to limit the number of posts that are shown on the home page pointing to a given domain at one time? There have been a few times I've come to Tildes to see what's new and there are 5 or 10 posts that all link to different pages on the same site. I think this would help increase the amount of variety in the stories that are showing and make the site more interesting to users.

I would like a current active user Count for the whole site. I find them very useful for knowing when people are on I’m not a fan of group specific ones but one that said how many people where currently on I would like

As someone comes to this site a lot and has toggled this feature on, a sort that shows only the threads where new comments have been posted since I last left would be great so I don't need to scroll down the homepage anxiously looking for new comments on the topics I like.

I'd be interested in a feature where I can have a list of top-level domains that I want to ignore content from. For example, I'm never in a position to watch a video when I'm browsing tildes. So I'd like the option to just not see any link to youtube.com or vimeo.com. Maybe I think all content posted to example.com is inflammatory click-bait, so I just want to ignore those links, too.

Would that be possible?

(Emphasis on Some.)

Could there be a rudimentary auto-tagging system for automatically scraped stats? (Auto-tagging video content as videos, music artists by their names, long reads/watches,individual blogs and YouTube channels?) It could serve as a QoL feature and save some taggers and forgetful posters some time (I almost always forget to tag my videos accordingly and they're only tagged because someone remembers to, which is way too menial a tag to still need be added by humans.)

I think that if we aren't allowed to vote on old topics, we shouldn't be allowed to label them either. Not out of any privacy standpoint, but rather from the fact that this way, people can affect ordering of comments even in old topics, which isn't something one would expect to happen. This is potentially confusing, as newcomers to a topic can affect comments even years after.

hello,

I've been wondering a little bit about what a well-designed voting system on a website like reddit or Tildes would look like, and as I do not have a definitive answer, I do have a suggestion to make. I've originally posted this on another website, but I thought that it could also be fruitful to discuss this here, seeing that efforts have already been made in that direction (similar features have even already been implemented).

Looking forward to reading you!

I was wondering whether Aether should support downvotes or not, seeing that they are often misused on other discussion platforms to suppress content that is disliked rather than non-contributory or low-quality. People may then not view content that was heavily downvoted, even though it may have been high-quality.

Should we rather use some other mechanism to serve that function? If so, what would it be?

Personally, I'd suggest that we experiment with two-dimensional weighted voting.

In a word, it would allow users to express both whether they agree or disagree with (alternatively, like or dislike) a piece of content (and how strongly so) and whether they think that that piece of content is high-quality or low-quality (and how strongly so).

In practice, it could look like this (for users): upon clicking on the voting icon, a square with two scaled axes would appear. One for the quality of content, the other for the level of (dis)agreeance. A user, who had for instance found a piece of content to be very high-quality, but who somewhat disagreed with it, could then express that opinion by click and dragging right to the top of the square, but somewhat left of its center.

That simple mechanism would therefore allow us to distinguish between those two criteria and better capture the intention behind a vote, and help alleviate the issue of seeing deeply unpopular content being buried despite its high quality. It would also allow users to express how strongly they feel about a piece of content by letting them adjust the weight of their vote. Plus, it wouldn't be too cumbersome to use (in my opinion).

(Voting strongly should be slightly inconvenient or cumbersome to do, so as to deter users from voting strongly every time, thereby rendering strong votes meaningless. In practice, that could mean having to move one's mouse only a little for a soft vote, but more and more as the vote gains more weight.
Axes should also be sticky, so as to make it easy to vote with respect to one criterion only (we shouldn't need to try and aim precisely).)

We could also put in place some additional mechanism to let users rate content with regard to other criteria (how informative it is, or impressive, exciting, funny, etc.). I do not expect users to rate all the content they read, but allowing them to do so could still be useful. They may still bother to do it for content they find especially informative, impressive, etc., and that would then allow other users to sort content with regard to one or several of these criteria and find content tailored to their interests.

(We could then also display for any piece of content a chart (that could look like this) showing how it was rated with regard to all these criteria. That's not really important, but I find that cool.

We could also plot the number of votes as a function of vote strength, find the average vote strength and so on... That would also be cool, and interesting.)

What do you think?

Some people only include footnotes on their text after they finish it, or realize that their interpretation of something might not be the same as others interpretation (like what is social media) or source their claims, or detail it after finishing the main body. Admittedly we might want to let the user choose whether their edit is worth notifying to all who replied for the sake of stuff like typos though.

I feel like with our weekly recurring topics, comments are getting posted all over the place. For example, if you want to read about what people think of a particular game, it's going to be spread out among a lot of different topics.

It seems like it might be nicer if in the games group, there were one topic for each game? Similarly for movies or books, or creative projects. This is how we did things on the Well, though there was also a "movies that didn't get their own topic" topic. But it seems like that was a limitation of a system that didn't deal well with having lots of topics in a group.

To support this well, we'd need to make coming back to long-running topics more pleasant to read somehow. With a linear conversation the software can start you off wherever you left off. I'm not sure what's best for threaded conversation?

In short, maybe there should be a way to do things more like forum software and less like Hacker News or Reddit? Or should we just try it out without changing the software?

My use case:
I watch videos (YouTube) and listen to audio (Podcasts) as a major part of my weekly media intake. I would love some sort of generated Tildes Playlist . IANADev, but it sure would be nice if Tildes was able to parse, scrape, and categorize media posted as topics and in comments. Then present them to me with a date filter, and allow separating audio only and video media. Maybe something like tildes.net/?tag= but at tildes.net/playlist. I guess it would be nice to be able to sort media by tag as well.

Possible other use case:
Accessibility?

I see that some videos are already being tagged "videos." So there already is some organic interest in this special category, right?

What do you all think, is this useful?

From a dev perspective, is getting that correct enough difficult? Does Embedly categorize audio only and video?

edit: in the playlist view, there should of course be a link back to the topic or comment where the media was found. Also, @Deimos, I certainly don't want to take Tildes away from the text-first/only direction of the site, but sometimes I am doing stuff conducive to audio/video media intake like cooking, driving, etc. It would be cool to be able to easily consume it then, and come back to comment later.

Tildes is much like Hacker News and Reddit in that article previews are limited to just headlines. (Well, there are tags, but they're de-emphasized since they're hidden by default.)

While they are very concise, a problem with headlines is that we rely on them too much. Even good ones don't really tell you what the article is about. In cases where it's hard to read the article (because it's paywalled or whatever) the conversation can be based mostly on the headline rather than the substance of the article. On Hacker News there are often mini-disputes about whether the headline is clickbait or not, and what's a better headline. "Headline is misleading" is a pretty common complaint.

I'm wondering if we could add a bit more information? One possibility would be a "Subtitle" field. Lots of articles have subtitles that are somewhat more informative, and doing a copy-paste is pretty easy.

Another would be to have a "pull quote" field. This requires a bit of editorial judgement by the submitter about what's the best pull quote, but I think that's okay. It's still copy-paste so at least they don't have to summarize anything in their own words.

For the last few days I've been posting a pull quote as the first comment whenever I post an article, and I think it works fairly well, except that the summary says "1 comment" when actually nobody commented - it's just the pull quote. Also, having an explicit field for the pull quote might allow better UI possibilities, like you could put them under the headline in the topic list.

Right now ~comp and ~tech are getting these kinds of posts, but I personally feel a ~tech_support ~tech.support (or ~tech_help? ~tech.help) group would be a better alternative.

People who love to help would flock to the group, and people who need it would feel safer to ask for help without receiving straight up LMGTFY (Let Me Google That For You) kind of answers.

There could be also a ~help group, wich a much broader scope (probably about Tildes itself).

What you think?

I have lots of thoughts about Tildes that I end up forgetting. This post is my attempt to put them to good use. Some of those were already stated elsewhere.

Introduction

Just to make it very clear: I am extremely happy with the way things are going on Tildes. If that was not the case, instead of drawing criticism I would simply not be here. So, please, let's be civil and avoid taking things personally ;)

I'm also a regular user, so please be gentle with my ignorance regarding the technical reasons why some things are either impossible or unpractical.

1. An Answer To A Common Objection

Some of these suggestions may encounter the following answer: "this should be an extension, not a core feature". To which I might respond:

1. Extensions impact performance and it's good practice to keep them at a minimum
2. Not everyone uses the same browser.
3. Features implemented by the actual developers will probably be of a better quality

2. Golden Rule

Unless explicit or clearly unpractical, all suggestions should be interpreted as to be as optional (and preferably opt-in) as possible for the user. I'll also make frequent use of the imperative mood: please understand that those are still suggestions. The imperative mood is just more practical. Also, notice that this is not my first language.

3. Suggestions

3.1 Keyboard Shortcuts

The majority of Tildes users would probably welcome a good set of keyboard shortcuts. I apologize if such keyboard shortcuts already exist: if they do, there should be a page listing them all.

3.1.1 Vim-like and Emacs-like keybindings

There should be Vim-like and Emacs-like (you could choose which one!) keys all around. Even with things like Vimium, not everyone uses them, and a well-thought-out set of keybindings would be extremely beneficial.

This also applies to text fields.

4. Open Calls For Moderators

Right now, I'm not sure what criteria are being used to give someone moderator powers. I think being a developer or contributor is the main criterion, which makes a lot of sense. But other participants might be up to the task, and giving them a chance could be beneficial.

5. Moderation Action Should Always Present Reason

This may seem obvious and even unfair, but I think when a moderator is in no condition to dedicate the time to justify their moderation action (such as locking threads, removing contents or banning users), then the moderator should wait until this condition is met in order to take action.

6. Heated Discussions Should Be Allowed in More Circumstances

I understand Tildes is, and should always be, a place for politeness, even affectionate discussion, but sometimes heated language, including irony and sarcasm, are necessary to stress a point and take the discussion forward. I understand that's a fine line, and that is usually better err on the side of caution, but I also feel the need to caution my fellow Tilders and Tildes administration against excessive moderation, which could stifle the discussion of sensitive subjects

7. There Should Be a Page Explaining How to Collaborate

This page should be short and to the point, with lots of links. I, for instance, wanna collaborate in the documentation, but the information telling how to do so was in a comment I cannot find anymore.

8. Table of Contents

Tildes markdown should support the automated creation of a simple table of contents, which would be very useful for longer posts. Preferably, there should be a limited set of options, such as:

• title of the table of contents ("TOC", "Table of Contents", "Contents" etc)
• numbered vs unnumbered
• depth of the numbering

9. Search own content

I find very hard to search my own content. Sometimes I must reference something I said earlier, or adapt a previous response to a question I already answered. On these occasions, I have to manually Ctrl+f page after page of my user page, which is tedious and inefficient.

10. Sort my own content

I wish I could sort my own content in the same manner I can with other pages. This would help with item 9, and also help answer faster to comments that were recently made.

11. Notifications

I wish it was possible to op-in desktop notifications for Tildes to show me whenever I get an answer to a thread, a comment or a private message.

Correction: I'm not referring to Email notifications, but desktop notifications. The ones that appear occasionally on your browser or screen.

12. There Should Be Space for Comedy

I'm not saying Tildes should become a place for lazy memes and endless puns, but comedy is valuable content and I don't like the idea of Tildes being a more conversational version of Stack Overflow. I fully agree with @deimos vision for a website for meaningful interactions with a focus on privacy. I just don't think comedy is necessarily a menace to this and all the other Tildes' stated goals. Right now, we're a very serious bunch of folks. There should be a place for humor in Tildes. How would that work? IDK. I leave this open for discussion.

13. Link to Excerpt

It would be awesome being able to link not just to a particular comment, but to a selection of that particular comment. After linking to the excerpt, I would go to the full comment, but the excerpt would be highlighted.

Conclusion

This is more of a collection of thoughts than an article, therefore I cannot offer a proper conclusion. But I'd like to kindly ask my fellow Tilders to give some considerations to my ideas. And please understand that they are not complaints. It's just may to contribute to this great community.

Cheers ;)

If a top-level comment is collapsed by default (presumably due to "noise" tags), replies to that comment will still trigger the "1 new" text on the topic, but won't be visible when you visit the thread - and there's not even any indication that you should expand the noise-tagged comment to see a reply.

Would it be possible(/desirable) to show the red indicator next to collapsed comments if there's a new comment underneath them?

IDK if this is just me, but, in some cases, the dotted lines are not enough. I become easily lost, and have to "manually" retrace the discussion.

I'd like to suggest for Tildes to use even more colors on these lines, kinda like color-schemes do for Org Mode on Emacs.

I could go even further and suggest a major "Org-Modization" of Tildes: IMHO, Org Mode has nailed this kind of structure. I know it's a bold suggestion, but there it is! ;)

Cheers!

Could a reward system be added similar to Reddit coins but instead of buying them you earn them from being active on the website and from the quality of your content maybe by using the voting system and you could buy rewards for posts with them, it could be a bit like tildes own currency in a way, I’m personally a big fan of the Reddit coins but just don’t like how you have to buy them I think they should be something that is earn from using the website

1. The Idea

Counting overall time would be awesome already. In order to avoid overloading the servers, you could just count every 5, 10 hours or something like that.

As a plus (I have no idea how hard this is, please forgive me), there could be graphs showing how much time you spent by day, week, month, year, etc.

This would be a good way to help Tilders prevent Tildes addiction (on the other hand, there would have to be some mechanic to prevent people from gamyfying this...).

This time count would be entirely private to each user by default, but there would the option to display it.

2. The Reason

I find that knowing how much time I spent on something helps me be more productive. It's the entire reason for the existence of tools such Rescue Time, Waka Time and Toggl. If I know how much I spend on a platform, it's easier to control my addiction to it. These other tools are heavy and focused on billing hours. That's not my use case. I know this might seem silly, but it makes a lot of difference for some people. 7.2% of the world's population has ADHD. I happen to be one of them.

In such a fashion that all my threads will open either collapsed and expanded. Ideally, there should be a setting for that. Some people might prefer to always open expanded regardless of their last choice.

IMO one of the major issues with online debates, arguments and heated discussions is that they often tend to escalate rather steadily over time, and as each side gets more frustrated with the other they also tend to slowly get more personal as well. I am admittedly guilty of falling into this trap occasionally myself too, which has got me thinking about ways that Tildes (the site and the users here) can potentially help deescalate unproductive arguments and allow people to disengage more effectively from them. To this end I thought it might be a good idea to have a brainstorming session regarding that.

To start things off, here are most of the ideas I could find related to this issue that have previously been proposed and are already on Tildes Gitlab (click ▶ to read the full details):

Feel free to voice your support or criticism regarding the above suggestions, offer up ideas to potentially improve them, or even propose your own brand new ideas related to this issue in the comments here as well.

p.s. Once again, the point here is to open up the conversation and get ideas flowing freely, so let's please try to keep things positive, and keep any criticism purely constructive and friendly so as not to discourage people from participating.

Previous Unofficial Weekly Discussions:

Week #1, #2

Other relevant links:
Donate to Tildes - Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board - Tildes Official Docs

Despite me still being a little distracted thanks to WoW Classic and somewhat absent from Tildes lately as a result, since it's been a few weeks since the last Unofficial Weekly Discussion topic, I wanted to make sure to get one posted this week. And since it's been a while, I wanted to try something a bit more lighthearted and fun than usual to get things flowing again. So here it is:

What is your most "thinking outside the box", "pie in the sky" and/or "out there" idea for Tildes?

It doesn't matter whether you think it's really a good idea or not, it will work or not, it would ultimately have a net positive or negative effect, or how impossible it might be to implement; Let's just get the creative juices flowing and start throwing out our "craziest" ideas for the site!

p.s. Once again, let's please try to keep things positive, and keep any criticism purely constructive and friendly so as not to discourage people from participating.

Previous Unofficial Weekly Discussions:

Week #1, #2, #3

Other relevant links:
Donate to Tildes - Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board - Tildes Official Docs

A long time ago, there was a discussion about anonymous comment posting. I’d link it if I wasn’t typing at mobile, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find.

How did things about anonymous posting evolve, @Deimos? Do you plan to eventually make something like this?

There are plenty of topics such as this one which would IMO strongly benefit from anonymous comments - I can definitely see much higher participation if that was the case.

Regarding the abuse, I won’t reiterate all the points made in the thread ^{[todo: link]} and purposed solutions, but what about turning anonymous posting on only in some topics, perhaps where the topic author manually turned them on? We could have them for sensitive topics while holding people accountable for their words in all the political topics.

This should be simple fairly simple to explain:

Even though the Vim front is well covered by things like Vimium, Vimium+ and qutebrowser (and it would probably be too much trouble to create a Vim mode for Tildes' text fields - especially when wasavi exists), Emacs-like keys might be a great addition for some people. Tildes seem to have a high number of Emacs and command-line users right now. I frequently find myself hitting keys such as:

• C-p previous-line
• C-n next-line
• C-m for return
• C-a to move cursor to the start of the line
• C-e to move cursor to the start of end line
• M-d to kill word
• C-k kill line
• C-u kill backwards line
• C-b to backward char
• C-f to forward char
• C-b to backward char
• M-f to forward word
• M-b to backward word
• C-w delete-backward-word
  • not a default Emacs keybinding but it's on readline and I think it makes sense

And so on.

There are, of course, alternatives such as Emacs Anywhere and Atomic Chrome, but they require an Emacs daemon to be running and are not a good alternative for quick edits since which switching to another editor is not practical.

So here's my suggestion!

I don't know if this would be only an option when you are creating a comment, or added to the list of tags like "Exemplary" and such, but an option to have a "Spoiler" comment tag that collapses the comment but doesn't affect ranking might be a good edition to the "What is your favorite media/What have you consumed recently/Recommendation threads." It's also something that the site already supports, and most importantly, looks atheistically pleasing to me compared to highlightable Spoiler Script.

For those who haven't seen my essay-length posts in the past, I occasionally like to delve into explaining different programming concepts, particularly with regards to making your code easier to manage. Sometimes this has to do with how you structure you code and projects, and at others it has to do with how you think about the problems you're solving. I've been in the mood to write up on yet another programming subject, but nothing in particular has stood out to me lately during the course of my work.

With that in mind, I figured I would take a different approach and see if anyone here had some specific requests for content they would like to see. Requests from all levels of experience are welcome!

(And for those who are itching to do a write-up on any of the requests that appear here, feel free to call dibs!)

Edit

For those who want to take a dive into my previous submissions, you can now find them in the new wiki entry created by @cfabbro or directly via the programming.code_quality_tips tag here.

I was looking to see if anyone had talked about the TV show Person Of Interest and forgot to go to ~tv before searching.

I know its not a major thing since it only took me a few seconds click to the right place and search there, but it might be nice if you could filter the general search results from the sidebar instead of just viewing the board you clicked.

This thought was brought to you/sponsored by my perception that there's an increasing number of comments on Tildes that attempt to "answer" questions posed in the titles of posts, but don't necessarily demonstrate that the user has read the article before commenting. I won't link specific comments, but I've noticed a fair bit of it as of late. I get that those titles bait people into voicing their opinion, but often it's at the detriment of overall discussion. Should a prerequisite of clicking the actual link in question be a requirement before the user is allowed to post a top level comment? Or perhaps a cooldown period of entering a thread versus commenting may help?

The goal here would be to disincentivise the posting of "driveby" or similarly reductive comments that often don't demonstrate nuance or knowledge that is conveyed in the associated article. Sure, we can't ever know if the user has actually read the article, but it's not designed to be a foolproof strategy, just a discouraging one.

There's a few ways this could be implemented, probably via the utilization of a small bit of javascript that toggle's a user's reading state for a particular post. Thoughts?

Just to clarify since I've edited this post: I mean top-level comments only. Replies are more likely to be in response to the parent comment, rather than the title and wouldn't be affected by this proposal.

Right now, there is number of comments visible when on main/group page. What would you think about excluding comments that are collapsed by default, such as those labeled as noise? I'm disappointed when I see 7 comments at an article, but there is none actually relevant to the article itself. The disadvantage of this is that the site could feel more dead, especially in low-activity groups.

Inspired by @Lawrencium265's suggestion from a few days ago on advanced topic tag filtering:

After the discussion the other day on expanding groups into sub groups I had an idea about topic tags, advanced tag filtering rules. The main argument against sub groups is that it would sequester people away from each other. By allowing more advanced tag rules you could subscribe to topics that you're interested in, but further filter those if they include topics you don't like or allow certain threads that would get filtered out unless they contain a tag you are interested in or are within a certain group. I think this would attract different people to threads that wouldn't normally be and allow more diverse discussion and insight. So instead of having gaming.tabletop you would use the tabletop tag under gaming and those who are not interested in it can filter it out and those who are solely interested in it can subscribe to it, and then if a topic gets tagged in an unrelated group that you otherwise wouldn't be interested inyou will know about. This also has the side benefit if preventing cross posting or duplicates.

I have decided that the topic of this week's unofficial discussion is going to be on the Tildes topic tag system. But rather than make it specifically on topic tag filtering and that idea in particular, I figured we could open the discussion up a bit more and have a community brainstorming session on the topic tag system in general. I.e. Anything related to tag browsing, tag filtering, tag organization/standardization, etc.

Feel free to comment on any of the open "topic tag" related issues on Tildes Gitlab that pique your interest and you would like to discuss more in depth, propose your own new ideas related to topic tags, or even just spitball.

The point here is to open up the conversation and get ideas flowing freely, so with that in mind, let's please try to keep things positive, and keep any criticism purely constructive and friendly so as not to discourage people from participating.

Previous Unofficial Weekly Discussions:

Week - #1

Other relevant links:
Donate to Tildes - Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board - Tildes Official Docs

Since @Deimos has stated he will likely not be restarting the tradition of the Official Daily Tildes Discussions, which is something I and a number of other users greatly enjoyed and miss, I have decided to attempt to take on the responsibility of continuing them unofficially (with his blessing). And since these are not official (so won't be in ~tildes.official, which everyone is subscribed to and probably shouldn't unsubscribe from), I will only be doing them weekly instead of daily, and we now have topic tag filtering (so unofficial weekly discussion can be filtered out), hopefully the people who found the official daily discussions annoying can more easily ignore/hide these unofficial ones.

With the explanation out of the way, on to the topic for this week:

Suggestions/ideas/concerns for future unofficial weekly discussions

I thought it would be appropriate to have the first one of these be a bit of an open-ended, meta-meta discussion on the future of these topics. And to kick things off:

• What would everyone here like to see discussed in these topics in the future? Are there any particular site features (planned, suggested or theoretical), policies (tagging, moderation, etc), or other meta issues/subjects you would like to be the topic in future discussions?

• What would you like us to try to achieve with these discussions? Should we have any specific goals in mind, or should they just be fun brainstorming/theory-crafting/naval-gazing sessions?

• Does anyone have any suggestions for me with regards to how I should handle these discussions? Is there anyone out there who would like to help me with these in some capacity going forwards?

• Does anyone have any concerns regarding these unofficial discussions, and if so, can you think of any ways we can try to address them?

The floor is open, and I am all ears. :)

Tildes Official Docs : Donate to Tildes | Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board

I know that this has been discussed before (I personally participated in some of that), but, to my knowledge, it's been quite a while since it was brought up.

Currently, the three groups that seem to make the most sense for space exploration news are ~tech, ~science, and ~misc. Personally, I perceive ~tech as being best suited for general news about what's going on in the tech industry, more or less "hey, Google released this" or "these researchers are working on graphene batteries". Similarly, I understand ~science as a place for discussing scientific discoveries and "meta" discussion about science as a whole. I think that most would agree with me on those characterizations after looking at those groups when sorted by activity or new.

Space exploration, on the other hand, doesn't really fit in either. It's not exactly ~tech material, and it's also not really the right material for ~science, since much of it isn't about specific new discoveries or studies, etc. If we had an ~engineering, I would say that that would be the correct place for space discussion, but we don't have one.

If you look at what's been happening over the last few months in the realm of space exploration, I think that it's also pretty easy to see that there's enough going on to generate enough content and discussion for a dedicated group. There've been new launches on a weekly or biweekly basis, interesting moves made by different new entrants to the industry, all of the NASA Artemis news, plenty of things from SpaceX, etc.

One thing I really like about Tildes is the exemplary tags for comments. I love being able to let someone know I thought they had a great post, and I especially like that it's anonymous (though I realize some people like signing theirs, which I'm fine with too).

One thing I've found myself wanting to be able to do is give someone an exemplary label not for any one individual comment but for their contributions to the community at large. Maybe they're consistently thoughtful and insightful; maybe they go out of their way to post a lot of content for the community; maybe they're contributing code to the platform. It's less that any one particular thing they've done is amazing (though they often have individually great contributions too) and more that they've demonstrated a noteworthy and consistent pattern of good behavior.

As such, I think having something similar to the exemplary tag but applicable to a particular user could be very beneficial. I realize privately PMing a given user can currently accomplish this, but those are not anonymous, and I really like the idea of supporting others without revealing who I am, since I don't want my praise of others to influence their opinion of me. Furthermore, for the community at large, I think there's a benefit to praise of that type coming from "a voice in the crowd" rather than specific identifiable users, as it promotes community goodwill rather than person-to-person cheer.

Of course, with any type of anonymous feedback the thing to consider will be the potential for misuse. Someone could easily target/harass someone using an exemplary user feature by writing a nasty message, but this is also currently possible with exemplary tags and I don't know if it's been a problem? Nevertheless, it's something to consider. Perhaps a built-in report feature should something cross a line?

Furthermore, if such an appreciation mechanism were to be implemented, I would strongly advocate against any sort of publicly visual indicator on the site (like the blue stripe on comments). I think applying differences to that at the user level can create an appearance of user hierarchy, which is undesirable for a variety of reasons. Instead, I feel like it should be invisible to everyone except the recipient--basically an anonymous PM that they can't respond to, letting them know that they're awesome and why. I also think a similar "cooldown" system would benefit it. In fact, I'd probably advocate that it be longer than the one for comment tags.

Thoughts?

If someone posts on a one month old thread, it shouldn't make it to front page.

If someone post on a new 1 day old thread, if should, but not at top, but... somewhere else. A method of weighting oldness vs liveness should play there.

Comments in a person's history page have a "Link" and "Parent" link on them.

My suggestion is have just a single link to the comment, but all other comments on the page that are not direct parents/ancestors or children/descendants of the linked to comment should be minimized so we can easily see the relevant discussion, but also view them if we want, and the linked comment itself should be highlighted in some way.

You could probably put a "Hide all but direct family" flag in the querystring

This is kind of a question for Tildes as well as a discussion topic on Social Media more generally. For context, "The Right to be Forgotten" is an idea being kicked around in international law and human rights circles. It's kind of a corollary to the "right to privacy" and focuses on putting some guardrails around the downsides of having all information about you being archived, searchable, and publicly available forever and ever. It's usually phrased as a sense that people shouldn't be tied down indefinitely by stigmatizing actions they've done in "the past" (which is usually interpreted as long enough ago that you're not the same person anymore).

This manifests in some examples large and small. Felony convictions or drug offenses are a pretty big one. Another public issue was James Gunn getting raked over the coals for homophobic quotes from a long time ago. Even on a smaller scale, I think plenty of young people have some generalized anxiety about embarrassing videos, photos, Facebook statuses, forum posts, etc. that they made when they were young following them around the rest of their lives. For example, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez had people try to shame her for dancing to a Phoenix song in an amateur music video. An even darker version of this happens with people who might be the victims of targeted harassment. Often doxxing happens by people digging through peoples' histories and piecing together clues to figure out who they are or at least narrow down where they're from, where they work, etc.

In the context of Tildes, this would basically be a question of how do we feel about peoples' comment history lingering forever? Do we care about/agree with this "right" in principle and if we do, what should be done about putting it into practice?

The root of the issue is the existence of archives of data about yourself that is 1.) searchable, 2.) publicly viewable, 3.) under someone else's control, 4.) forever. Even if the ability to delete comments exists, it's infeasible for any individual to pore over the reams of data they create about themselves to find the stuff that might be problematic. The solutions would revolve around addressing any one of those numbered items. Unfortunately, hitting any of those has upsides and downsizes. Some examples:

Some people like being able to look back on old contributions and having them get deleted after a period of time (hitting problem #4) would be a bummer unless there is a system to selectively archive stuff you want to save from atrophy, which would be a function/feature that would take a ton of thought and development. What's more, there is no point in just saving your own comment if everyone else's stuff is gone because comments without context are indecipherable. It could work in a more selective way, so rather than a blanket atrophying of posts, but then you have the context issue again. Someone you were having a discussion with might choose to delete their entire comment history and there goes any sense of logic or coherence to your posts.

We could address the searchable bit by automatically or selectively having posts pseudonymed after a period of time. But in a lot of cases a pseudonym won't work. People tend to refer to each other by username at times, and some people have a distinctive enough style that you could probably figure it out if they're well known and long-tenured.

That's just some general food for thought. I'll yield the floor

I think an excellent addition to tildes would be hiding the username while browsing, this way we can use our account and don't worry about people looking and finding our username. This could be an option.

As the title say, does tilde have RSS feeds for topics? I'm thinking a feed for the frontpage, as well as feeds for each group?

I've looked around but it doesn't seem like there is. Is the feature planned? Has it been decided against? Am I the only one who'd like the feature?

Does or will tilde have RSS feeds for the frontpage and for groups?

This thread also applies to every other annoying website.

Medium is one of the most annoying sites out there. It's slow, cluttered, always greets me with a despicable banner (no, I do not pardon the interruption!) and manages to consistently bypass uBlock Origin. I'm tired of complaining on individual threads (and attracting well-deserved reproach for my grumpiness), so here's my proposal: let's establish an informal rule that every Medium article should be shared in a sanitized version. outline.com seems to be the best tool to accomplish that, but I'm open to suggestions. As a safety measure, in case outline.com goes offline, the original Medium link could be posted in the body of the new thread.

What you lovely people think about this idea?

I don't want to ask this question in "default" groups as peeps that monitor this group will likely know the answer, and I support not making "Tildes a site about discussing Tildes" :)
_{inline-edit: for context this was originally posted in ~test.}

I am probably one of the most heavily mobile-first users here, but when on desktop, I really want ctrl-enter to work everywhere. Is there some way to make sure all "save" buttons use ctrl/cmd-enter across the entire site? Can this be done via a class or something?

If not, I can go through the whole site and find places where it does not work.. first example is in the new awesome edit tags ui.

This was inspired by this post.

I was thinking, as a platform gets bigger we're going to end up with more situations where people are asking for advice about fairly serious stuff. In some cases, that advice needs to come from experts and taking guidance from any random Joe on the street can be risky/dangerous. (For the record, I don't think the post I'm referencing is an example of this, it just got me thinking about it).

In cases like this, I think it's important that the actual good advice get some kind of clear designation that THIS is the guidance you need to take first. I notice this in communities like /r/Fitness a lot where people will post about what sound like pretty serious health concerns and you get a fair number of posts that suggest toughing it out or whatever and the more critical "You need to see a doctor" posts can kind of disappear amid the discussion. Similar things in /r/relationships where you can't always count on "This is abuse. Make arrangements to get your kids and yourself somewhere safe. . ." to be the top post.

Even in cases where the poster themselves is smart enough to take "YOU NEED TO SEE A DOCTOR" type advice to heart, not every schmuck searching the topic on Google will. To that end, it might be good to give certain posts with good, holistic advice or by a known expert some kind of visual indicator that it deserves to be taken more seriously than other posts in the thread. It wouldn't be censoring anything really, just providing a little nudge about what ought to be consulted first or taken to heart.

Now obviously it gets hard to decide how to give a post this attribute. It could possibly be awarded by the OP, though that has some obvious issues where the OP themselves might not be in a position to credibly vet the advice they're getting. We could also just do it through ranking by vote, which is the default paradigm. But like I said, it doesn't always work so well on Reddit. And the Exemplary tag is invisible to others, so that doesn't work either (and the post itself might not be worth giving up your "Exemplary" for the day besides). Moderators could do it, but there may not be enough and the skillset to be a Mod might not overlap with the skillset to know what advice a person needs in a particular situation.

I don't actually have the answers. Maybe it just comes down to creating an attribute for some users to be "wisened elders" or something and empower them to star certain posts to separate good advice from bad. It would basically be a trusted user system. It's got it's own problems, but I guess we can open the floor for other ideas. Maybe it's not a real concern. Maybe it's better addressed by tinkering with the sorting of posts.

Rationale: labels are a valuable way to receive and give feedback, so it would be useful to have more labels-related tools.

This topic deals with labels received by an ordinary user or given by an ordinary user from that user's point of view (as opposed to non-logged-in lurkers, other ordinary users, and users with elevated privileges).

While labels presently only apply to comments, these suggestions would apply to topic labels when they are implemented, and to other labellable content types should any appear.

The “Gilded” page—Issue 423

Suggestion 1. Users can filter their user pages for content labelled Exemplary.

Unlike all other suggestions, this also applies to users viewing other users' pages, and possibly even to lurkers viewing user pages.

I also suggest that users have an option to automatically expand the Exemplary messages when they see their own Exemplary content.

Other labels given TO the user

The common point is that it would help if users observe the feedback given to them by others via labels. In addition, this would prevent label misuse and abuse.

Suggestion 2. Users have an option to observe labels given to their own content along with the label counts.

Suggestion 2a. If comment vote counts remain generally hidden, users should still be able to see the vote counts for their own comments.

Suggestion 3. Users can filter their user pages for content labelled Malice (but, of course, they should not be able to see Malice messages).

Suggestion 4. Users can filter their user pages for content with any label (maybe with further options like All labels vs “Non-major” ones).

Edit: Suggestions 2, 3, and 4 might go with time lags. Namely, labels given to own content are only visible for content older than X minutes (X can be even 1440 or more) and to users with accounts older than Y days.

Labels given BY the user

Suggestion 5. Users have an option to automatically expand the label pane for the content they have already labelled.

Suggestion 6. Users can easily overview the content they labelled Exemplary. (This is basically the “Gilded” page in the other direction.) In addition, users can see the messages they provided when giving Exemplary labels.

Suggestion 7. Users can easily overview the content they labelled Malice. In addition, users can see the messages they provided when giving Malice labels.

P.S. These suggestions deal with the current labels, but they can be extended to future labels, e.g., group-specific ones.

This was inspired by this post where the user tagged the post as "sugges" rather than "suggestions."

Since tags decline in utility with minor spelling mistakes like this, I wonder if there could be a way for nitpicky grammarians, like myself, to just go through an edit broken tags, add relevant tags, prune unnecessary ones, etc.

I guess it would be sort of a moderation responsibility, but I expect we would prefer they focus on content moderation. Tag editing is low-key enough that people with this responsibility probably wouldn't need to be vetted as thoroughly or held to the same kind of community standards of behavior that a mod would be. We'd just have to trust them to not be pranksters or abusive with it (e.g. making tags like "this poster is a doodyhead").

Usecases :

• Recurring posting which can't be done (for numerous reasons) like @hungariantoast recently mentioned
• Trickle-down posting because certain people feel bad when they post a bunch of topics since they feel like it floods the ~groups

There's room for abuse but I think Tildes' "Trust people but punish abusers" applies here.

Could we have a meta-group which is a union of all the available (sub)groups? The purpose of it being having a way to view what the front page looks like without having to log out. IDK what is the general trend but I personally don't follow all groups (e.g. I am not interested in anime, and I try to minimise my intake of politics, so I am not subbed to ~anime and ~news), but sometimes I am curious about what the part I don't usually see is like.

I should admit that viewing the frontpage in a private window is almost there (with the caveat of having to copy links around if I want to comment, which is not much trouble frankly), so this would rather be polishing than some very useful new feature.

This is something I've been thinking about for a while.

One of the future mechanics for tildes is the trust system (see https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics-future). People talk about building it but I think we already have a small part of it in place.

Invites are a form of trust.

By allowing inviting the community is trusting you with the ability to add new members. That ability can be taken away or could even result in the banhammer if you persistantly invite assholes. I know that made me cautious with who I've invited to join.

With there being a clear trail of who invited who, bad actors will have to work harder to get a foothold here. I also think that spammers are deterred with having to get an invite for every new account they make.

A simple analogy is that you're having a party and a friend asks if they can bring a friend of theirs you don't know. Your friend says they're cool and you trust your friend due to past experiences with them so along they come. Now if this person ends up kicking your cat, pissing in the fridge, and then trying to burn your house down then the trust you had in your friend is going to diminish. Next time they want to bring a guest the answer is hell no!

We can use the invite system as an initial way to build trust.

So, this is, in part, in response to the alibaba ban.

I think it's bad practice not to know why someone got banned. Firstly, it may lead to excessives from your part ("I will ban anyone and everyone I want and no one will know"). Secondly, it fails to show other posters that X behaviour will get you banned.

Right now if a post is tagged with 'spoiler', that tag appears in its own color which is good. However, if you are interacting with a user and click through to their profile, there is no indication that some of their comments may have been in these spoiler threads and thus contain spoilers (just happened to me, thankfully for show I don't watch). It might be nice to somehow indicate these potential spoilers on the user page so that they can be skipped over.

It would be nice if one had the option of adding the spoiler tag to all comments containing X.

For example, I haven't watched endgame yet. I would feel safer if I knew that all posts containing the word "endgame" were hidden behind a spoiler-tag.

On Reddit, it's possible to view all the comments in a subreddit by going to the subreddit comments url. For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/tildes/comments/

As a separate request, would it be possible to add a new comment sorting method. Perhaps an option to disable comment nesting and sort by new. It would make it easier to see new comments that are added to a post.

I personally think a friend mechanic which allows you to follow what other people say on the site would be quite nice.

Right now the only way you could do this is by checking their profile every now and then which is... tiring at best.

I don't think there's necessarily room for abuse but I'm interested to see what you all think of this.

Edit : I've made a top-level comment to clarify certain things

It would be nice to have an optional feature that filters out posts that a) you have read and b) don't have any new unread comments. When a post gets new comments it should reappear. That way we could see more unread content on the page, but still keep long running topics going. Have it not affect search, so people can still find posts for reference.

The recent implementation of automatic tag suggestion has inspired another idea for me.

What if Tildes could suggest related tags to the one(s) you've already chosen? You select a tag for your topic, and then Tildes suggests other tags to add to your topic, sourced from tags which have been commonly used in association with that tag you've selected.

For example:

• You tag a topic with "facebook", and Tildes suggests "social media" and "privacy" to add.

• You tag a topic with "world war ii", and Tildes suggests "history", "nazis", and "military" to add.

• You tag a topic with "avengers", and Tildes suggests "marvel" and "superheroes" to add.

The data could be obtained by monitoring the frequency of associations between various tags: if tag B is frequently used in association with tag A, then tag B would be suggested as an additional option whenever tag A is used.

Right now, the search function only works by searching the titles of posts made.

I'd like to be able to search through my comments on an occasion where I'd like to link someone to it to further the information provided. If I'd already written on the subject somewhere, I'd like to be able to provide the source, and add commentary more pertaining to the subject matter if necessary.

Lacking that, is there a way to use Tildes' API to perform automated search myself?