... exactly the same as the old name.

Yep, "lgbt" won the vote from this thread. That may not be a surprise to many people, but this has still been a worthwhile process to go through. There were some concerns expressed about the name, and it was only fair that we gave everyone a chance to have a say.

Of course, not everyone will be happy with this outcome. I saw a variety of voting responses which made that clear. At one extreme, I saw a couple of responses with "lgbt" marked as #1, and all other names marked as #N/A. At the other extreme, I saw a couple of responses with the other seven names ranked from #1 to #7, and "lgbt" marked as #N/A. Someone else marked any name which even included as "lgbt" as #N/A. So, there are definitely strong opinions for and against "lgbt".

But the vote was convincing. Nearly half of all people (43 out of 87) put "lgbt" as their first choice, two-thirds of people had it as their 1st or 2nd choice, and more than three-quarters of people had it as their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd choice. As I checked the results occasionally throughout the period of voting, "lgbt" consistently had about 50% of the first choices. And, counting all the ranked votes, "lgbt" got a final score of 6.98 out of a theoretical maximum of 8. The next closest names - "lgbtq" and "lgbtplus" - were scored at about 5.5 out of 8.

Here is the published result on Survey Monkey, and a screenshot of the detailed count.

Prologue: Feeling cranky, trying to be civil.

I posted a link to an article, in the ~news, about two of the top US dairy producers declaring bankruptcy ... and Someone moved it to ~food.

Harumpf.

~food is "check out this new latte recipe" or "how to survive the vegetarian keto diet" (yes, that's a thing; I'm on it. May be why I'm cranky).

My post was ~news, about the US economy, shifting societal norms, potentially about climate change.

But forget about this specific categorization issue. This is the first time I've bumped into Tildes' moderation methodology.

I don't subscribe to ~food, so for me, my post just vanished, w/o notification or explanation. Took me a few minutes to find it. I don't see any way to ID who moved it (may well have been @Deimos, for all I know), nor any way to challenge the move.

Have I overlooked some 'moderation dispute' button, or some such? Or is moderation here beyond dispute?

ETA: For anyone visiting this post down the line, here's the official/original statement on this ...

https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/53r/users_can_now_be_manually_granted_permissions_to_re_tag_topics_move_them_between_groups_and_edit

Not-So-Secret Santa Is Live!

Sign-ups for the group itself will NOT close and will continue to be available on an invite-only basis.

IMPORTANT EDIT: It is more than okay to join the group even if you do NOT intend to gift games to others! Please join if you want to receive games. Gifters love to have an eager audience to gift to!

For certain events (such as Not-So-Secret Santa) gifting is necessary for those choosing to participate, but these are always optional. Membership in the group and accepting freely given gifts requires no burden of gifting on your behalf.

ALSO IMPORTANT EDIT: Not-So-Secret Santa has a buy-in of under $5 USD. Though gifters can certainly choose to gift a more expensive game if they prefer, each participant is including at least one game on their wishlist that is less than $5 USD in order to minimize the people who are priced out of participating.

With @Deimos's permission, I have started the Tildes' Steam Game Gifting Group and am beginning its first event: Not-So-Secret Santa!

In proper Tildes' fashion the group is invite-only at the moment, so if you would like to join, please reply here or PM me with a link to your Steam profile or your Steam username. I'll have to friend you to send you the invite, but you don't need to keep me on your friends' list after you've accepted it if you don't want to (I promise I won't mind!).

I envision the group being used for specific events (like Not-So-Secret Santa), random giveaways, and group-limited lotteries (using the platform Steamgifts).

People have been using song.link links on Tildes a lot as a way to effectively link to the same album/song on all the different streaming services.

It looks like, as of today, they've changed their name to "Odesli", and their site is now https://odesli.co.

This tweet is about the only information I can find so far, I don't know if there's anything more anywhere: https://twitter.com/songlink_/status/1183919368058499073

I apologize if this is a topic that has been covered before. I haven't really been able to find anything and I'm not really sure what a good search keyword is. But I noticed this as part of the Hearthstone player ban thread.

On a traditional bulletin board forum it's not really an issue because the conversations unfold chronologically anyway. When you have the atemporality of threaded comment chains that gets disorganized fast.

Basically, it's a "still developing" story where more events and news keep happening that's germane to the discussion. As the news comes up, people who already read the thread might not see the comments being posted about subsequent developments and be able to follow it because each piece of additional news or info. ends up happening in a comment/sub-thread that ends up arranged in fairly arbitrary, rather than chronological order.

The Democratic Debate threads have been similar, where the reactions and consequences of the topics being discussed can keep a discussion going for a long time, but it all happens in sub threads that people are unlikely to see. Many of these developments don't really merit a thread of their own, but after a few days or so it gets hard to actually have a big-picture discussion because the news has overtaken the scope of the discussion thread.

In a thread with an active OP, I've noticed what tends to happen is the OP will steadily edit new developments into the main post to update it. I think this has actually worked pretty well BUT edits don't bump posts as far as I can tell. Also, the people posting the updates aren't necessarily getting as much credit (in terms of votes, exemplary labels, or whatever) and, insofar as that matters to people that's a thing. Do you think this is adequate as things scale or would some novel design or subcomment system be needed?

The Problem

A large problem in internet communities is internet debates that devolve into metadiscussions on credibility. This likely isn't bad, because the default alternative is generally large-scale misinformation campaigns.

Examples

Tildes hasn't been free of this, naturally; for a (very) recent example, see this thread on Andrew Yang's climate change proposals.

I, personally, have partaken in a thread that seemed as if it might head in the same direction; take a look at this thread, on gun suicides of a certain population & aggravating factors of them. A third-party delivering a breadth of sources seemed to have stopped it in its tracks, however.

Solution

It does seem to me like something that could be solved—or at least mitigated—at the platform level, with a feature that would allow other users to cite sources for a comment in question, ideally with community ranking of those sources.

Getting rid of the question of credibility in casual discussions in a way that doesn't interrupt the flow of dialogue seems like something that would undoubtedly help The Conversation™ flourish, while simultaneously preventing disinformation catastrophes.

Now that a good portion of people have had accounts here for over a year, it seems fitting to ask: are there any interactions that have particularly stuck out to you? Anything that's caught your eye? Maybe changed your life, at the polar end of possible positive results?

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

Following this previous thread in which we shared our suggestions for the name of this group, you can now vote for your preferred name(s) on Survey Monkey.

Voting is by ranking. You will be presented with a list of 8 suggested names. You need to drag-and-drop these names into your preferred order, from top to bottom. (After you've dragged one name into place, the list will then number itself and you can manually number each option if you don't like dragging-and-dropping.) Put the name you like best at #1, the name you like second-best at #2, the name you like third-best at #3, and so on to the end of the list.

If you do not like an name and do not want to vote for it at all, tick the "N/A" box beside it. This will remove it from your submitted vote and give it a zero weighting in the count.

The names will be displayed in a random order for each person.

Make sure you click on "DONE". "OK" is only the first step. You must submit your response by clicking
"DONE" or it won't be counted.

Vote counting will be done automatically by Survey Monkey. The algorithm allocates a weighted number of votes to each option, based on its order in your list. If you vote for all 8 names by preference, your 1st preferred name will receive a weighting of 8, your 2nd preferred name will receive a weighting of 7, your 3rd preferred name will receive a weighting of 6, and so on to to your 8th preferred name which will receive a weighting of 1. Here is an explanatory video for anyone who's interested.

The survey prevents multiple responses from the same device. However, I've set it to "anonymous" so that IP addresses are not included in the results (why would that even be an option?).

Here is the survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZKD76FS

Happy voting!

There has been occasional concern about the name of this group: ~lgbt. Some people believe it's not inclusive enough, some people think it's a bit clinical, some people think it's not expressive enough, and so on. Nothing major, just minor concerns here and there.

However, Deimos has said he'll rename this group if we want to.

So I'm here to find out what we might want to change the name to.

This will be a two-step process. This thread is for gathering suggestions, and discussing the pros and cons of the various suggestions. After I've collected a list of everyone's suggestions, I'll then post a second thread with a survey in it, for us all to vote on those suggestions.

But, for now... what do you think this group should be called? (And it's okay if you think it should be called ~lgbt!)

The current list of suggestions:

• ~lgbt
• ~lgbtq
• ~lgbti
• ~lgbtiq
• lgbt+ [not usable for technical reasons]
• ~lgbtplus
• ~gsm
• ~queer
• ~rainbow

I've posted a few lengthy topics here outside of programming challenges, and I've noticed that the ones that seem to have spurred the most interest and generated some discussion were ones that were directly related to code quality. To avoid falling for confirmation bias, though, I thought I would ask directly.

Is there generally a greater interest in code quality discussions? If so, then what kind of things are you interested in seeing in those discussions? What do you prefer not to see? If not, then what kinds of programming-related discussions would you prefer to see more of? What about non-programming discussions?

Also, is there any interest in an informal series of topics much like the programming challenges or the a layperson's introduction to... series (i.e. decentralized and available for anyone to participate whenever)? Personally, I'd be interested in seeing more on the subject from others!

What's this?

This post contains all entries of the "a layperson's introduction to" series. I will keep this thread up to date and sorted. This means this post is an excellent opportunity to try out the bookmarking feature!

Physics

Quantum Physics

Basics of quantum physics

Material Science

Classical physics

Thermodynamics

Computer Science

Artificial Intelligence

...and if you think about it, people need to actively unsubscribe as this is one of the standard groups on here.

Maybe we should work on what gets posted here — focus less on links and more on healthy discussion and text posts!

~talk seems to fit this criteria, but as I browse Tildes to my dismay the majority of content is re-posts of links from external sources. Obviously, there are also quite a few posts which are more than simply URL pastes, and even in the comments of a URL post, there can be healthy discourse happening.

But I am interested to discover whether anyone here knows of any other platforms that are entirely dedicated to written discussion and communication, where external links do not play a big part in that ecosystem of discourse.

Got it up and running, currently will do fine with about 25 players.

It's not set up locally so the hosting fee is $6/month, I'll leave it up for at least one month.

Currently running vanilla 1.13.1, will modify if requested.

167.114.73.187:25565

Have fun and please don't grief spawn!

Since we are currently discussing tagging conventions in other areas of ~ I thought it would be useful to start one in this group.

The 'football' tag is currently used for both association football and American football. This is not a surprise, but we should agree on how to handle this from now on, in order to not hinder the tagging functionality (ie people wanting to filter out one of the sports).

Here are some ideas, to kickstart the discussion:

• Use soccer for association football and football for American football

• use football for association football and other terms (like NFL, NCAA) for American football

• don't use the football tag and use association and American football instead.

• Use tag groups to solve this issue, ie football.association and football.american

They don't have to be significant in any way; just threads you personally enjoyed.

The ones that immediately come to mind for me are:

Chasing the American dream has got me jaded - started by @dodger.

https://tildes.net/~talk/29a/chasing_the_american_dream_has_got_me_jaded

and

grab some tea baby, it's midnight. this is today's slam thread. - led by the fantastic @earlgreytea.

https://tildes.net/~creative/3gt/grab_some_tea_baby_its_midnight_this_is_todays_slam_thread

Neither of them had hundreds of comments, and neither of them were particularly active; I just find myself particularly fond of them for whatever reason.

So, as a followup to the music tagging thread from a few days ago, I would like to propose the following for discussion.

1. Should all musical posts be tagged with at least one high-level musical genre?

The consensus from the last post appeared to be a yes on this. Please note:, this doesn't mean that anyone who submits a track is required to go look up / determine the best genre themselves. If they choose not to, one of the tag mods may do so for them while browsing. Further, we seemed to reach a consensus last time that in the future it would be best to automate this step as completely as possible.

2. Which tags do we want to use?

I / @Whom have done some digging and found several different schemes we might use as a basis. For convenience, I've reproduced them in a table for you below:

I think ideally we will be able to come up with (say) a list the size of wikipedia, allmusic or discogs such that determining the right genre isn't much of a burden on tag mods. In the future, we could expand this or even start inheriting the RYM genre hierarchy (e.g., Ska -> 2 Tone, Jamaican Ska, Spouge, Third Wave Ska)

So with that out of the way, I think the best way to proceed is for each of you to either:

A) Build a list of your own with one of these as a basis. We can count up how many people include a genre an count as a vote for it's inclusion.

Or

B) Argue for / against a specific genre's inclusion.

Sound good? Did I miss anything?

As mentioned here @Kat has made a wiki for our communities to be able to have some resources, and something to point at.

There's the ~tech bit to it, that I've started working on a tiiiiny bit. I was curious what sorts of topics you'd like to have there. Not just things that you know a lot about (by all means, if you have knowledge throw it in there!), but also if you need more info or something, or would like more resources! Maybe we can help each other out a bit in this thread, and codify things into the wiki if there's some resolution?

EDIT: Alright, this ended up veering off in the direction that I was hoping it wouldn't. My apologies if I pushed things in the wrong direction from the outset.

I want to make very clear from the outset of this post that I am not calling anyone out for posting this type of content, and I do not want to criticize any individuals for making such posts. This is intended to be a high level discussion of what general types of content are worthwhile here, to see if we can define some of the community specific goals about relevant content. And I know this comes at the risk of being yet another meta post about tildes content (feel free to move this post elsewhere if others think it is better suited, I mainly chose to post here to work on being more community specific about our goals).

This question comes up because a quick glance at the current ~movies page shows a whole bunch of movie trailer posts. The majority of them have zero discussion. Of the ones that do have discussion, most of that is pretty low effort. So part of the question to address is: do movie trailer posts ever generate good discussion in the first place? Looking at reddit, the answer is almost always no, and the posting of movie trailers is often a race among karma farmers with little actual interest in what they are posting. Part of the problem I see there is that it primarily leads towards a discussion of the movie itself rather than the trailer. Since the movie hasn't come out yet when the trailer is posted, that discussion is entirely speculative, and leads to some sticky situations like with the Ghostbusters remake, where more outrage was generated over the female leads casting than any discussion of the film's own merits.

There are, very occasionally, trailers that are in and of themselves interesting pieces of artistic expression; so part of me says that a universal ban on trailers being posted would be overkill. But in those cases it may be beneficial to enforce that the discussion should focus on the presentation of the trailer itself. Though countering my own argument, trailers are fundamentally designed to draw attention towards the movie, so perhaps isolated discussion does not make sense. But that would again point to a desire to simply omit all trailers being posted. Possibly unless it is for a movie that has already been released, in which the trailer could serve as merely a marker to open discussion on the movie itself.

So what does everyone else think? I'm totally okay if everyone says they like seeing the movie trailers on here, but I thought it would be a good time to discuss it.

Not sure if anyone will remember by now, but a few months ago I made a philosophical discussion thread in ~talk since a group like ~humanities didn't exist yet. I was super excited by all of the great discussion that I was able to join in, and now that we have ~humanities (thanks @Deimos!), I'm wondering how people would feel about some threads for more general discussion of various questions as opposed to the mostly link-based discussion that's gone on here so far.

Would anyone else be interested in that sort of thing? I'd be more than happy to start a few threads up over the next few days if people are interested.

In my opinion, part of what makes places like /r/music so mind-numbingly boring is that outside of news, there's just individual tracks and question threads that beg for individual tracks.

There's some value in this and if that's the way you consume music, then cool. But as someone who primarily listens to albums, I rarely want to discover music like this. Like maybe if I'm looking into a new genre, it's cool to get an introductory song to get what it's all about, but beyond that it's kinda a haze.

So others who value any kind of music listening outside of singles + loose tracks, what do you think we can do to shape this community into something that includes us a little more? Discussions on DJ sets? Album reviews? Games like the survivors done on artist-specific subreddits? I don't think this is something that just naturally gets fixed through the hierarchy system or something, like many of the other problems with /r/music. What can we do?

I feel like there's so much going on back at the mothership.

The whole vibe and color scheme of this place is just so relaxed, and everyone so far seems so polite and actually interested in genuine discussion. Like if there was a ~writing or something like that, I could settle down in a sweater with some of my username and just flip through this place for hours.

thanks for keeping the place awesome!

As you've probably noticed, ~music is kind of dead compared to a lot of the other tildes. There's been a grand total of 3 posts that have gone over 10 upvotes in the past week. I'd like to try and change that.

The purpose of this thread is to collect interesting music discussion prompts. Don't worry about if it's a super high quality prompt or not, this is just brainstorming. If you ever notice that there hasn't been a decent discussion for a while and you don't have any ideas of what to post, go ahead and grab a prompt from here that hasn't been posted yet and post it. Try to start off the discussion with your own thoughts on the prompt if you can!

Also, we should try and keep any responses to the prompts themselves out of this thread — it'd defeat the point if we have all the discussion here :)

Of course no one likes microtransactions (I feel dirty for typing that), low-effort cash grabs, and all the funny stuff 'early access' games have done. Tell me about things that you're certain everyone but you likes, or maybe not even something you don't like but don't agree with.

I'm from Belgium. Belgium is one of the two countries in the world, along with France, that uses AZERTY. The big problem with an AZERTY keyboard is that there is no tilde key. So, in orde to use the key or tag a sub (ex. ~fantasy, like you'd do /r/fantasy), AZERTY users have to manually copy the tilde every single time they want to use it. Usually this isn't that big of a problem, but when the tilde is such a key feature on a website, I think it does become a bit of a problem.

For reference, France has a population of 67M, while Belgium has around 11M.