Hey everyone!

I was recently exposed to a new website called Song.Link. You can search for songs, albums, or artists that you like, and generate a link that provides access to the music you found in all of the major music streaming services.

Song.Link

I think it'd be great if we could make it standard to post a song.link when possible!

Edit: learning to markdown

The absence of geographic or political groups is notable. Is this because of the early stages of development & growth? Is it a deliberate choice?

I'm as keen as anyone for this place to not become yet another den of intolerance. Does not having those groups help in avoiding such a descent or does it risk becoming a feel-good but ultimately uninformative echo chamber?

Noticed the ability to generate the three invite codes a few days ago (ed: go to your user page and under Misc. hit “Invite Someone”) and started excitedly going through my mind with who I would add. That came to a crawl and then a pause when I started thinking about a few things:

• Do I want family to know my Tildes handle? I’m not doing anything bad here, and certainly don’t plan to, but I may want to ask a question regarding something happening to the family at one point. Hard to know what the future will bring.
• I have several friends who would certainly join, and probably wouldn’t do anything bad/wrong, but more importantly would they actively contribute?
• What about my “fun” colleagues? Well, again do I want them to know my ~handle or would that be setting things up for something awkward down the line?

Lots to consider. To those of you who have already sent invites, what did you think about? What was the final process that worked for you? Or, alternatively, who thinks I need to stop whining and send out the damn invites already?

Let's do it guys! Every good forum/community from Ars Technica to the XKCD forums has had a go taking turns playing the most detailed simulation game I have ever seen. I can generate the world for ideal 44.10 (and hopefully 44.11) settings with my extra adventurer reactions.

Now that dwarves can get angry and stressed again, now is an opportune time. Who's with me?

I recently took up gardening. It's a lot more complicated and requires a lot more planning than I initially expected. So far I've found it to be rather meditative, sitting and pulling up weeds, watering and such. I'm still not sure whether it's a thing I am "good" at but it's exciting to see something you've planned and nurtured grow! Tell me what you all do for fun/relaxation or to challenge yourself outside of your work.

I'm curious to know where ~ users are from!

I live in the United States in the greatest state in the union (Minnesota, of course!) The land of Target, passive-aggression, and wishing Prince wasn't dead. Oh, and 10,000 11,842 lakes.

Edit 9: Super Ultra 2019 Updated Crappy Map of the World

*Edit- If you'd like to be counted, add a top level comment. I've counted all child comments up to this point, but may not catch all of you. Also, I may slow down here pretty quick.

Current count:

Australia: 5
Austria: 3
Belgium: 3
Brasil: 7
Canada: 22
Chile: 1
China: 2
*Hong Kong: 1
Croatia: 1
Czech Republic: 1
Denmark: 1
Egypt: 2
Estonia: 1
Finland: 4
France: 5
Germany: 10
Hungary: 1
Iceland: 2
India: 12
Ireland: 3
Israel: 1
Italy: 3
Japan: 1
Kenya: 1
Kosovo: 1
Lebanon: 1
Lithuania: 2
Malaysia: 1
Mexico: 2
Mongolia: 1
Morocco: 1
Nepal: 1
Netherlands: 5
New Zealand: 5
Norway: 2
Philippines: 1
Poland: 2
Portugal: 2
Romania: 1
Russia: 3
Singapore: 3
Slovenia: 1
South Africa: 2
South Korea: 1
Spain: 4
Switzerland: 1
Sweden: 3
Thailand: 1
Turkey: 1
UAE: 2
Ukraine: 1
UK: 15
USA: 119
*Puerto Rico: 1
Vietnam: 1

Instead of a tree hierachy, perhaps groups would be better off based on a DAG - a Directed Acyclic Graph. This would allow groups to have multiple parents as well as multiple children. For example, ~mazda might have ~cars and ~japan as parents, and ~tolkein might have ~fantasy and ~linguistics as parents. I think this could maintain the benefits of the hierachical system while making it easier to find a group that suits the post.

While potentially complex, a good UI which effectively visualised the DAG to allow a content submitter to hone in on the correct group-node, and potentially create a new one on the fly if none was appropriate, could make this concept reasonably intuitive. This problem has already been tackled by creators of git GUIs, so perhaps some ideas could be adapted from that space.

One issue is that a node in a DAG is much harder to identify with a text string than a node in a tree-based hierachy. One solution would be that the submitter could choose a 'primary path' which would be displayed to readers, which, upon being clicked, would display the full DAG, including all the potentially numerous paths which would lead to that group-node. For example, I might choose ~linguistics.tolkein.quenya as the primary path, but upon clicking, the reader can discover that ~fantasy.tolkein.quenya and ~linguistics.conlangs.quenya and ~writing.worldbuilding.quenya all lead to the same group-node [edit: ugly illustration]. I feel that this solution could potentially be powerful enough to remove the need for tags entirely. Viewing the homepage of any particular group-node on the DAG would aggregate posts to all child groups, meaning that the effects of community fragmentation are mitigated. Even a post to a really specific group-node, like ~cars.mazda.mx5.na, will still enjoy the same status and priority to the readers of the ~cars homepage as a post made directly to the ~cars group-node.

I know similar topics have been discussed, but I'd like to talk about removing the vote count OR, having the count appear after you've voted. To be clear, I'd like to keep the voting mechanism as-is, just reduce the visibility of the actual number of votes.

It's not foolproof, but it might reduce the "bandwagon" voting we're trying to avoid. I realize that vote count could still be guessed based on sorting by "most votes," but I think this is a worthwhile discussion to have.

*Edit 2: Removed the joke I made about spamming as I think it detracts from the conversation.

I may have inadvertently created the first repost in Tildes in ~comp and was wondering if there are plans for a notification on posting a new topic that has already been posted.

I know that this sort of check is easily 'bypassed', but personally, had I know it had been posted already I would have voted & joined the existing discussion.

I think if we could detect the same URL, at least in the same group, maybe even with a time modifier of within the last week, it would help consolidate the discussions.

Tipster tags for comments?

I was going to post this on the daily discussion about tag, but I'm not sure it's something "easy" to implement or even worth considering. Some feedback would be appreciated.

I was thinking there could be a special type of tag or report that goes directly to the poster in a private way (like a "whisper" tag, similar to the whisper comments someone suggested).

This could be useful especially in polarizing topics, I believe.

The idea is something like this: a (somewhat) trusted user sees a comment that is worded in a confrontational or maybe aggressive manner or its unsubstantiated and foresees conflict, but instead of tagging it like "flame" for everyone to see, they tag it as "rephrasable" or "sounds confrontational?" or even "citation needed" (I'm sure you guys can come up with better names and ideas, but you get the gist, something that communicates that it could be worded in a softer, more objective way or using a source, etc.), only the OP sees this tag on their own comment and can thus react appropriately (or maybe ignore if it seems unfounded, or discuss -privately?- with the anonymous reporter) by editing their comment (possibly leaving some kind of trace of the change or acknowledging the report).

too long/didn't understand: allow giving the poster a private warning that someone thinks their comment is problematic before things get too heated!

The trust system is something that I'm looking forward to for several reasons. It allows for community moderation that is "decentralized" to a point. It takes pressure off of the admins to police content. The possibility of being able to ensure that quality content remains the core product of this site. There are also negatives like the possibility of creating a "power user" class that is resented by the rest of the user base or the potential for misuse by those with the power. Along with some more complex issues such as disagreements between trusted users about how to interpret and curate content. These are all things that we as a community should iron out before a larger scale rollout of this system.

What I wanna talk about today is something a little bit different tho. From my experience with other sites that have achievable user class "upgrades", there will, almost no matter what the precautions put in place, be users that will game the system to rise up through the ranks as quickly as possible. From my point of view, as long as there is a system, written or not, about what needs to be done to achieve the "Trusted" status, there will be users that will do their best to get their as quickly as possible. There are a few ways that this can be looked at:

• It's fine because while they may not be contributing for the "right" reasons, they are still acting in what is seen as a positive manner in the community.
• Concern that because they are only working towards the status symbol "Trusted" that they are not going to be acting in the best interests of the website, but in the interests of keeping the status.
• Wanting to keep this kind of behavior to an absolute minimum because want everything should be as ideal as possible.

While this discussion is had on a fairly regular basis, the consensus seems to be that it is a necessary evil to endure because it would be both too much work to police/figure out who is acting for the right reasons (even standardizing what the "right reasons" are is hard).

The way this can be combated by having requirements that would be deemed too much work for most of the people who are just in it for the status and not for the site. The issue with this solution is that it can make it very difficult for those who truly care about the site to maintain the position that allows them to curate and keep the site in the condition that we aim for.

In the end I think that the deteriorating system will solve at least a portion of these problems because those who are just in it for the status symbol are often likely to quit trying after they are achieve the goal they want. This leads to periods of inactivity, and therefore, decay.

I wanted to post this to see what the greater community had to think about this.

As this site is being started because of low-quality content overall on the other sites, it's necessary to do something to maintain that quality. Most sites start out good but don't age well, and the userbase too is responsible for that. Many sites offer points on the content that is shared, but there are no points for contributions towards the sites (?). I think it would be really great if the user gets some points say for reporting unrelated, unnecessary, troll, and other such posts or contents that don't maintain the quality. But those points are not awarded to the user immediately. The user will get points after enough reports about the content are reported and the content is made unavailable.

This point system can be separate from the content submission points that user gets, or it can be summed up all in one.