Hi,

I found an SQRL client on F-Droid, it seems like a pretty good concept, any thoughts on this?

Here are the docs https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm

I also opened a issue on gitlab so it can be commented also there https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/304

I'm a big fan of "discussion threads" over on reddit, if you're unfamiliar they're essentially threads a subreddit will pin every day or week where you can post things that don't deserve a full post or are slightly frivolous or off topic. To give an example, a while back I wanted to make a post with some thoughts on Coleridge's "Ode to Dejection", but after typing it out didn't think there was enough to warrant making a thread over it. I didn't feel like doing a more extensive analysis or trying to artificially broaden the scope (ie, doing something like "what's a poem you like?" as an excuse for sharing my thoughts), so I just trashed it.

I like discussion threads because they help save "small" content like that as well as helping to build a sense of community and are just generally quite comfy.

However, I recognize that there can be some downsides:

• May end up being "low quality" in the minds of certain users. I know this is somewhat contentious, since the site culture is still being established, I personally don't want Tildes to be that serious but I know some people do.

• Normal group activity could drop if people opt to use the discussion thread instead of making a post. This is doubly bad because the site is small.

Edit: What I'm asking below is actually already an option, I guess I'm just bad at reading :-/

As of right now, when you choose a theme, a theme cookie is created which takes a simple string value (white, light, dark or black).

It's straightforward and it works well, but for someone like me who set his browser to delete cookies at the end of his session, it's a little inconvenient to have to go into my settings to set a theme everytime I log on Tildes.

It's a low-priority request, obviously, but maybe you could consider it? I do understand that it makes sense to have it as a cookie since a user may prefer different themes on different devices.

In the meantime I think I'll just write a script to set my theme to black automatically.

I wished to set aside some threads to read on my Kindle. I use the Kindle Chrome extension for that, but on Tildes it only captures the main topic, not the comments. I tried saving the page locally but the Kindle app still didn't work. My only option on Chrome seems to be printing to PDF, but that's a subpar solution. I was able to convert the offline page to mobi using Calibre, though, but this is not very practical and the result was not that good.

maybe I should have written conversion friendly, because printing to paper/PDF is working fine

~news will be populated with mainly U.S news and also mainly U.S politics, ~worldnews could be a group for just world news and events.

also there is a sub r/globaltalk which is basically focused around soft-core news events from around the world. An example of this is this post: "Man tries to open plane’s door, thinks it’s way to the loo - Times of India." it is just like interesting news stories that aren't too serious from around the world. Not sure if that would fit here, just a sugesstion

So this might be an unpopular opinion, but I believe Tildes should remain invite only, albeit perhaps with each user having unlimited invites from the start to hand out to anyone.

This approach can allow Tildes to grow but still keep the signal-to-noise ratio as high as possible, keeping a relatively small (compared to reddit at least) community that stays true to how we are now - focused on thoughtful discussion.

Any thoughts on this approach or other ideas to balance user quality with user-base size?

They could be user submitted and the admins/mods could choose a poll to display every week.

I think it would fit well in the sidebar with the percentage of overall votes being shown once your vote is cast.

I think small things like that help build a sense of community and helps keep people engaged. The topic of the polls could be as lighthearted or serious as the mods decide, though i'd personally like a mix of both.

Thanks to whoever fixed the tags, i'm still not entirely sure how to tag topics appropriately.

Whilst I am no fan of reddit's redesign, one of the features I liked about it was the way you could click on a indent line to collapse the child comments at that level. Whilst tildes displays these indent lines, clicking on them does nothing, and you have to scroll up to get to the collapse button. Another possible solution would be to collapse comments under the cursor when a hotkey is pressed, although this could be awkward due to both mouse and keyboard being used.

Tags are tricky-- should they be plural? How granular should they be? How generic should they be?

I think something that could help solve this problem is autocomplete suggestions while typing out tags. As I've been looking at posts and retagging, I've realized a lot are placed in single-post tags. Sure, this is bound to happen, especially on a new site, but autocompleting tags as you type them should help encourage users to tag with the correct one, like academic studies vs academic study.

The main con I can see with such a system would be overtagging. Since tags should actually apply to the topic at hand directly, seeing these tag suggestions could encourage people to use less applicable tags rather than think of them themselves.

Thoughts?

Since activity is the default view when looking at tildes, it seems like bumping a topic all the way to the top after each new comment can get a little abusive after the topic has existed for quite a while.

I'm thinking there should be some sort of restriction that after a topic has been inactive for a certain amount of time, it does one of four things:

1. It closes. New comments cannot be added, but votes can still be added.
2. A warning appears upon clicking the reply or add new comment button, warning the user that this will bump the topic, maybe giving the option of a silent reply. (no bumping)
3. As topics progress in age (think more than a week), new comments bump less and less on the list as the topic becomes less relevant.
4. As a plugin to the trust system, only users with high enough trust can bump topics after a certain date.

https://usefathom.com/
https://github.com/usefathom/fathom

Fathom is a new no nosense analytics platform that is thereby fully GDPR compliant and stores no identifiable user information. It's fully open source, with self-hostable and paid options, and shows great overviews of page views and top referrers.

They have a live demo running the stats for their main site available at https://stats.usefathom.com/#!last-7-days

I've been noticing that people aren't really looking at the group name that a post is sent to. Most notably there's a weekly ~anime post asking what everyone has been watching or reading. Just about every time there's people that post responses that are off topic (not anime or manga).

Here's an example. At the moment half of the posts are not related to anime or manga. It shows that it is something that needs to be considered.

Maybe have a uniquely colored border on the top and sides with the group name in bold perhaps? Also having the same color as the background on posts on the home page?

I'm suggesting a user flair-type option for people to select and display their personal pronouns.

This option would be accessed via a user's settings page. It would say something like "select your pronoun". The user would select their pronoun from a list. The selected pronoun would display discreetly beside their username wherever they post and comment.

The basic minimal version of this option would have three selections:

• him
• her
• them

We don't need to display the longer "he/him", "she/her", "they/them". Most English users know the subjective, objective, and possessive cases for these various pronouns; the important piece of information is the gender itself.

I've chosen pronouns instead of genders because there are many possible genders to include, but only three existing English third-person pronouns.

A slightly more advanced version might show four selections:

• him
• her
• them
• other

The even-more advanced version would include a text box for the user to enter a pronoun:

• him
• her
• them
• other (Please specify: ________)

The user could type something like "zhe" or "hir" in that text box, which would then be displayed beside their username instead of "him"/"her"/"them".

This option would be totally voluntary. Not every user should be required to provide this information, and not every user will want to provide this information. But for those users who want to inform people about their gender, or for those users who want to stop people making assumptions or prevent people having to ask questions about their gender, this would be a handy option.

I have "track my last visit to each topic's comments and mark new comments" enabled in my settings, and it's an awesome feature. One useful aspect of it is I can scan down the page, and the "(X new)" text in red is a line down the page, so it's an easy way to look for "any discussions I haven't seen yet?"

The gap is, if I haven't viewed that topic at all, the "(X new)" marker doesn't show up. So a thread with 50 comments that all are new to me, looks the same on first glance as a thread with 50 comments that already had 50 comments the last time I viewed it.

This all started about 5 minutes ago because I added a link to the EFF story on the post of the Gizmodo article submission about Facebook sharing phone numbers used for 2FA with advertisers, but the more I thought about it in the past 5 minutes since that comment I think it could be more.

There's more information out there and available than ever before. The barrier for for entry on content creation is lower than ever. However this has led to the easy-spread of misinformation. It's not that the right info isn't out there, it's that finding it is harder now.

The idea is to have a site that is essentially a link aggregator. But what makes it different is that if you find a site that talks about the same thing you can tack on the article to the post. Ergo making posts about events, not articles. Bringing sources together and making cross referencing easy.

As a lurker on the somethingawful forums one of my favorite features is a button which will show all the posts a single person has made in a thread. It'd be really handy if someone (like the OP) is answering questions about a topic. It's really nice to have on a more traditional forum website, but I'm not sure how useful it'd be here. Regardless, I thought I would suggest it.

Here is an example: Before and After

Could we have a feature where similar posts can be linked/tagged and showup somewhere obvious, so you can access both posts from each other, linking the two. Something anyone visiting the topic can do.

So there is a link from post A to B but also B to A. You then kind of get a chain of relevant posts, like a further reading list. Maybe only showing topics that are two-three links deep, idk that's just details.

I really like the way r/AskHistorians does it where because of the moderation it's always very easy to find the comment that links previous discussion, but again that solution is not reversible, from the linked topics I can't get to the current topic.

It encourages people to look over previous posts and engage in those discussions, and to participate in a larger discussion across the site. Potentially with one topic link you can get 4-5 other topics.

It should help with answering frequent questions or concerns as it's easy to connect relevant discussion. But also pretty much any other discussion, say nuclear energy is discussed extensively here, and follow the links to the other places people have discussed it, give readers the site context for a topic, and a convenient way to look for further discussion.

I mostly see it being used by a poster who has already answered a question in a previous post and will link the reply in a comment, but this way it's far more accessible to anyone viewing the topic and not lost in the comments. Or maybe someone was interested enough to look further themselves and I've got to believe they would feel generous enough to bother linking the two topics they spent time looking for. Making it just more convenient for everyone.

Take for example this foss topic, I posted basically a follow-up topic about specific foss software.

So a comment can be posted linking the relevant topic but that can easily get lost in the fray and does nothing to link the original topic to the new one. Yeah if someone was really interested they could search the foss tag and easily find it but it's much more convenient with it linked and only one person needs to go through the process of searching.

I kind of like the idea but can see how it's very similar to the tag system and groups. In practice though I just use tags and groups to filter out stuff I don't want to see and sometimes to help with searching.
This would be a feature that focuses to continuing the discussion, and making it more convenient to do so.

I feel like showing the number of votes a comment has gotten will lead to people voting something simply because it's gotten many votes and that must mean it's right. You see it happen all the time on Reddit. Someone will say something that sounds correct, and before someone else can come correct them they'll get a bunch of upvotes. Partly because they sounded correct, and partly because "all these upvotes must mean this is true".

I don't really see any benefit to showing votes on comments.

I realize preventing people without first reading the link or text is impossible, but the least we can do is to not encourage it. By that, I mean the vote counts on the right hand side here shouldn't be clickable if discussions are the priority for Tildes.

What do you think?

EDIT: Just to be clear - I'm not against showing the votes on the front page (though @AllMight below has a fair argument for that).

I've recently gone back to using RSS as a way to keep up with things that I like to follow, and I realized that it could be a good fit for tildes. I'm a developer by trade, so if other people are interested too I could even help with development (though not until I graduate in December, I'm slammed with work and school at the moment).
Any thoughts for or against RSS?

At the moment, my front page (is that what it's called on Tildes) is filled with posts I already commented on or don't feel the need to participate in. So I could really use a hide function.

Do we know when it's going to be implemented?

Sometimes I reply to a comment via my notifications page, then when I go look at my reply in the context of the thread, I see that someone else already addressed my point in a peer comment and I feel dumb.

Has this happened to other folks too?

Any thoughts on possible solutions?

Maybe there could be an indication of other replies to the comment which might prompt you to read them first prior to making your reply?

Until this issue is magically resolved, I feel like I should never reply via my notifications.

Example comment of this happening to me

I think ~culinary would be beneficial to see, it could include areas like;

~culinary.news

~culinary.recipes

~culinary.videos

~culinary.photography

I am a little biased because of my profession (Sous Chef), but I do see a lot of Culinary related posts that are spread out over several different groups. It would be nice to have them organized into their own group.

And if anyone is worried about it being active, I subscribe to several culinary news sites that I rarely post here so It would give me a chance to share some of that stuff. Not to mention giving us a place to share already popular Youtube series and recipes.

I know this content doesn't lend to discussion as much as others, but it would still be high quality.

EDIT: Maybe a solution is to have more of those posts end up in ~food instead of being spread out. Although I feel like the ~food heading is a little more restrictive, so maybe rename ~food to ~culinary?

Tildes already replaces some of the functionality of downvoting with its tags (troll, flame, off-topic). What if we replaced voting with "positive" tags: helpful, interesting, etc.? This would play off of people's indecision when faced with multiple options. A binary decision is very easy - upvoting vs. downvoting. But if you just want to vote on something because it backs up your political opinion you might pause to think for a second if you need to declare the comment "interesting".

The number of positive tags could still be aggregated into a score. Perhaps we could list the positive tags at the bottom of the comment e.g.: "10 x helpful, 5 x interesting".

The new comment-flagging feature is in place and is starting to operate: some comments are being hidden based on tags applied by users.

The irony is that everyone knows a comment is hidden except the person who posted the comment. If someone's own comment is being hidden, they should know that. I assume that part of the motive behind these tags is to teach Tildeans what is and isn't acceptable here. If someone doesn't know their comments are being flagged and hidden, they'll just keep on doing what they're doing.

There should be some mechanism to advise a user that their comment is hidden - like happens when their comment is removed by the admin.

EDIT: It's not just about educating people not to post more shallow comments in future. It's also just letting them know their comment has been hidden, as a courtesy.

Hi, I wanted to suggest the creation of an esports specific group.

The taxonomy would work in a similar way to ~games, however it would home both the business and news side of our industry as well as allowing for the competitive communities of various games to have sub groups. ~esports.leagueoflegends, ~esports.dota2, ~esports.overwatch for example.

Would like to hear other people's thoughts.

Edit: As @Bauke pointed out, apparently this feature already exists via tapping outside of the sidebar. I never even thought to try that.

I'm not sure if this is in the gitlab issues or not, but a cursory search suggested it's not. On mobile, if you tap the link to the most recent comment from the sidebar, you navigate directly to that comment just as on the desktop site, but the sidebar remains open and can't be closed without scrolling all the way back up to the top of the page. This is incredibly cumbersome and inconvenient.

Ideally there would either be a method of closing the sidebar from anywhere, or for the sidebar to close on clicking the link. I would imagine that the latter would be simplest.

I read the FAQ when I signed up and was honestly kind of dismayed to see lack of support for user-created groups (UCGs from here on). I understand the reasoning, but wonder if there isn't some way to allow group creation without cluttering.

Some ideas:

• List UCGs in a different section of the site
• Organize under creator's username (UserName.mygroup)
• Limit number of UCGs one user can directly create (not moderate)
• Group creation approval queue
• Allow private groups (UserName.mygroup) to convert into public groups (~mygroup) with admin approval, good behavior from subscribers, meeting milestone goals (e.g. 5000 subscribers), and no conflicting groups

I'm not sure how any of that would work, logistically, so I'm curious what ideas the community here has to offer.

Repro steps:

• Go to ~foo and click "post a new topic"
• Fill in title, link/text, tags etc
• As you do so, realize the topic would fit better under ~bar

Currently the group you're submitting to is the only thing you can't change from that page. The workaround is that you have to open ~bar in a new tab, click "post a new topic" there, and then cut & paste all the fields you already filled in.

Hi,

I used to browse reddit with the J/K scroll up down the feed or comments keyboard shortcut. Coupled with X for opening media or link and C to get to comments, it was a much more efficient way of navigating the website. As do all vim-like controls like Vimium etc..

There are a lots of more useful keyboard navigation possibilities but i think these are the more needed ones for now.

In keeping with Tildes' general philosophy of supporting budding technologies that have the potential to reform large domains of the internet for the better, I think you should look into Flattr (www.flattr.com).
A Flattr subscriber reserves any set amount of money per month which will then get automatically distributed to content creators on the web, in proportion to an algorithmic estimate of how much the user has used that particular site or resource.

First-tier support for Tildes on Flattr would be as simple as registering an account and connecting the tildes.net domain to it. From then on, a percentage of the reserved amount would automatically get transferred to Tildes' account for every Flattr user who uses the site (I myself have generated 64 "Flattrs" on this site as of this moment, which would lead to a significant portion of my reserved $5 to be transfered to Tildes for this month).

For sites that host content creators, like Twitch and YouTube, Flattr offers a deeper support, where Flattrs go toward individual content creators as well as the host site in itself. An intuitive way to connect Tildes to this feature would be to have each upvote of a Tildes post generate a Flattr for the poster. I believe the money would then be divided between the user who was upvoted (if they have a Flattr account) and Tildes' own Flattr account, but I am unsure about the exact fraction that would get routed to the individual poster as opposed to Tildes itself. I'm sure Flattr's tech support can answer this in detail, though. Flattr is currently owned and maintained by the company behind AdBlock.

What do other users think? Is Flattr's model good? Are there other sites or providers that offer a similar service? A notable difference between for example Patreon and Flattr is that Flattr is indirectly based on a "pay what you want" model, which marks a pretty significant shift in economic control from producers to consumers. This will obviously have both advantages and drawbacks. Personally, I think the model has a lot of potential on an arena like the internet, where the sheer number of potential consumers can make microtransaction-based models like Flattr really powerful.

There is a conspicuous lack of that sort of thing here so far. I get that Tildes might not want to be a repository of "hey what stock do I buy" or "Oh my god MU is still going down" but strategy-oriented discussions around positions in markets and the way changes in the world will effect your financial future seems like high-quality content to me.

I often stumble in to threads with entire comment chains deleted. I assume most people here have faced the same situation as well, either here or on reddit.

I'd like to see a move to locking comments rather than deleting them by default. That would mean no further replies to the comment or any other comment in that chain, no one being able to delete or edit their comments, no one being able to add or remove votes to a comment, etc.

I understand for particularly egregious comments removal is completely necessary (especially when it goes hand-in-hand with banning users), but a lot of times comments are deleted as a means to prevent long argumentative back-and-forth chains that spam and derail topics, as well as antagonize users.

In a lot of cases I feel like deleting the comment only further serves to hide what is unacceptable behaviour (even if that behaviour should be obvious), rather than setting an example for the userbase.

Proposal:
Create a new page where all users can view all moderation actions. This would make transparency a core part of the platform, hopefully avoiding any misunderstandings about mod actions.

A new page, maybe called tildes.net/moderation, is available to all registered users. I am not sure where the link to should appear on the site, maybe on the user's profile sidebar?

This page contains a table of all possible moderation actions. The actions may include: deleted topics, deleted comments, tag modification, moved topics, edited topic titles, banned user, locked topics. (this begs the question, what are the possible mod actions, and that they must be codified.)

Very roughly, the table columns might include: Date, User(being mod'ed), Mod Action(a list of possible mod actions), Mod Action Reason (either a text field, or a list of possible reasons for this action), Link (null if action is a deleted topic.)

I think that the user who did the moderating should not be publicly listed for now, to avoid drama?

Could we have a stickied list of all bans with reasons included?

Daily Tildes discussion - our first ban

^{Please vote for the comment which best reflects your position on this proposal.
As a bonus question, please make a top-level comment if you have general comment about my format of voting on comments. Would you prefer a straw poll on a 3rd party platform? Is there a cleaner way to do this?}

^{Edit: added "banned user" to actions list, I probably missed others, let me know. Also added the obvious locked topics.}

I spend far too much time looking for a reply button before I realise I have to scroll to the bottom.
Also, it'd be a lot less work in big threads, where you might be scrolling for a while to get to the reply box.
Yes, I'm that lazy.
I noticed that sometimes I don't engage if it's a big thread because of this, if the topic being discussed is only of passing interest for example.

I've found that the red (X new) indicator next to a thread's comment count on the main page keeps me coming back to the discussion to see the latest messages. This is a good thing, but the UX for actually navigating through those messages leaves something to be desired.

There are two relevant existing features I'd like to discuss:

• All new comments since I last viewed the thread are highlighted with a conspicuous red stripe.
• The sidebar on any given discussion page has a link to jump to the most recent comment.

I use the most recent comment link in threads that I know only have one new comment. The link takes me right to it. But in threads with more than one new comment, it's a lot less foolproof. My only method for seeing them all is to scroll down the page and stop when I see a flash of that red stripe. This is tedious in busy discussions which both update frequently with new comments to read, and take a long time to scroll through every time I check them. It's also easy to miss something this way, and since comments are considered "read" after you load the page, there's no second chance to see whatever I missed.

I'd like to propose a method for iterating through all unread comments on a page, either in chronological order (oldest first) or in order of appearance on the page. Or if @Deimos wants to get really fancy, some kind of hybrid sort that keeps nested comment chains grouped together for contextual continuity when navigating.

This would require two controls: "Jump to next unread comment" and "Jump to previous unread comment." These could be "sticky" clickable icons on the page, or just some sort of keystroke (like , and . for previous and next, respectively) without a UI at all.

An important secondary feature of this would be a count indicating both how many unread comments are on the page and how many within that set you have jumped to with this mechanism so far:

Viewing 2 of 7 unread comments

This could remain visible or only appear briefly when jumping to the next/previous unread, then fade away. It could also be shortened to something more minimal:

2/7

That on-screen feedback would help prevent getting lost in busy threads with high unread counts, particular if the sequence is not determined by order of comment appearance on the page.

Edit: Whoops, fixed my formatting error I didn't notice after posting.

In the interest of transparency (and a little bit in statistics) it would be really cool to have a master banlist or at least a thread with links to all ban-worthy posts. This would help new users understand what isn't acceptable in the community and allow for community discussion on what could be considered an unjustified ban or a weird influx of bad behavior. This wouldn't be super viable when the site goes public, but would be a neat implementation in Tildes' alpha state.

I don't know if it seems too pedantic but I feel like it would be much more convenient to tag any posts linked to articles as such, so that people could focus in on or filter out articles at their convenience. Personally, I never read articles people post unless the subject matter greatly intrigues me, and in that case, I've read it because of reasons beyond it being an article. I think it'd be a pretty easily enforceable thing, as we have tagmods now and tagging articles (if anybody forgets) would be simple and quick.

I've found that I prefer to see comments sorted by order posted, rather than having the most upvoted as the first item. I'd rather read through the thread before deciding the relative merits of any post, and find that "most upvoted" often isn't necessarily the most insightful, especially on long discussions.

It's not a huge effort to change the view, but I don't want to encourage my own lazy habit of looking at the first post and saying "good enough".

May I request that a setting for default sort method be added?

Sometimes I comment and I'm low effort and jokey or a thread develops that ends up unnecessary... And now we have a whole in joke (sorry Kat, I started it & you earned it!).

Anyway, perhaps it would be nice to add an option to set your own posts to default collapsed? We might also want an option to hide all collapsed in topic? Or do these features just encourage low effort fluff and I should just learn better self control?

Edit> OK This obviously isn't clear:
I was suggesting an option to set one of your comments & it's chain to collapsed for all other users by default.

The idea is to help combat the echo-chamber effect, if a group goes toxic then rational people are likely to leave, further concentrating the negative users left in the conversation.

So the idea is that if there's a large exodus of people unsubscribing then that's valuable information if we can determine the cause. Hence if there's an option to explain why you're leaving it can help flag a group as in trouble, first to the moderators and then to the admins that "are these moderators doing their job".

Now the parties leaving could show their protest in comments or threads, but if they're already leaving then they've already forgone that option. I know on reddit I'm not going to try help a dieing subreddit, I'm just going to leave.

Lately, there's been talk about new priviledges users could gain, either by requesting them (and being judged as fit) or discussing if everyone should gain a new ability like editing titles

The problem with new priviledges is of course that they can be abused by malicious users. One of the overall goals of Tildes is to trust users, but punish abuse, however I don't see this working with a large userbase. Even if this site grows slowly and the community remains mostly small or perhaps invite only, eventually we will reach a tipping point where the mods, if you want to call them that, won't be able to effectively manage the userbase. I feel like if we locked certain abilities (like editing titles, even within a time limit) behind tiers or levels users could achieve with certain actions, we could manage to keep low-effort trolls out and use it a sort of tutorial, where after certain actions for a new user (like writing their first comment or receiving their first vote) a window could pop up, informing them that they now have gained a new ability like voting, simultaniously explaining what the goal with the actual votes is.

I understand that this would gamify the system, but it would stop new users from abusing the system and lock those more dangerous abilities behind things they needed to do, ideally things that require a time investment so they'd feel less inclined to abuse the tools they've been granted (because they'd value their account more due to said time investment). It would also automate some things for the masses, which would make moderating easier.

An example:

A new user joins the site, at first, he can only vote. After casting his first vote, a message pops up, telling him that he can now post comments. Maybe there's a link to the rules and code of conduct there, maybe just a little tidbit about how stuff works on Tildes. Things that require more trust in the user are locked behind more difficult milestones, maybe editing titles is locked behind writing a hundred comments or receiving a hundred votes, maybe both.

What are your thoughts on this?