Howdy. Things are still very busy (which is why I'm falling behind on plans like getting the code open-sourced). The TrueReddit thread yesterday went very well, and I still have hundreds of invite request emails piled up from it. We're also now up over 2000 registered users, and activity is very high for such a new site - there have already been over 100 new topics posted today alone, and over 2000 comments.

As part of that, one of the things I'm trying to get done very soon (in the next few hours, I really hope) is splitting off these "official" posts into their own dedicated group, so people can feel free to unsubscribe from ~tildes without worrying about missing important announcements. There's a ton of activity in ~tildes with suggestions, bug reports, questions, etc. which are all great, but I understand if people would rather not have that filling up their home page and only go to check on it specifically when they feel like it.

On a similar note, since I asked everybody to read a super long, in-depth talk transcript yesterday, I'll keep it simpler today:

Do you think the "activity" sort is still a decent default?

I feel like it's working pretty well (and you can change to other sorting methods and time periods if you like, though it doesn't save your choice yet), but it's definitely leaning the site more towards "forum-like" activity, with the threads more towards the "discussion" end than links, articles, and so on.

So is this still good for now, or should we think about switching the default over to "newest" or "most votes", and let people just pick "activity" on their own if they're interested in that more forum-like experience?

First, thanks for the great discussion yesterday about "fluff" content. There's a lot to consider, and a lot of people made great points (and are still making them), so thanks for all your thoughts in there. On a side note, that was the first topic on Tildes to get over 100 comments (and there's now already a second one). That's a pretty neat milestone to be hitting already.

For today, I want to talk a bit about my general plans for this week and see if anyone has any thoughts. Maybe this would be a good thing for me to try to do every Monday?

I'm planning to focus on a few things this week, in no particular order:

• The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect this Friday. A lot of sites and people are panicking too much about it, and I think Tildes should generally be fine, but it's still best for me to try to make sure I'm doing things properly before it comes into effect. I've definitely missed at least one thing, and want to spend some time seeing if there are any other updates I should be making in advance.
• Since you've all certainly read the Tildes Privacy Policy, I'm sure you all know that it says Tildes will delete various types of data after 30 days. Even though the site only started opening up more over the last week or so, I did originally set the server up on April 26 and that's when the earliest data is from. So this week I'll need to do some work to make sure that all of the relevant data is actually going to be getting cleaned up when it reaches 30 days old. A decent amount of this is already done, but I need to verify and finish building some other cleanup code.
• The next big priority is to try to get the site's code open-sourced. I've had a ton of offers from people to help with development, so I'd really like to start making it possible for people to contribute very soon. This shouldn't be too much work overall, a lot of it is just writing up information that will make it easier for people to get involved.
• Outside of that, I'll probably also just be doing some general fixing and tweaking of different issues that people have pointed out. Thanks for all the feedback, bug reports, and suggestions so far. If I have time, I'll try to work on some larger features that are already becoming more important with the activity increasing—things like basic search.

Finally, in the interest of trying to keep momentum up, I've also given everyone 3 invite codes, so you can invite some other people to join the site if you'd like. You can get them from the invite page, which is linked from the sidebar on your user page.

Thanks again for being here, it's really exciting to see so many people using the site already.

I am curious to hear everyone's thoughts/ideas on submitting aggregate stories vs finding and submitting the primary sources of news/articles/stories/studies/etc.

E.g. Today, Eurogamer published an article about Fortnite driving headset sales up which is basically just a rearrangement of quotes from the original source, an article in Variety. So even though the Variety article is a few days old now, I decided to just submit that instead.

But that situation brings up some interesting questions:

Do we care if the submissions are "hot off the presses", when the newly published aggregate article doesn't add anything substantive to the original, older source material? Should we just post the original source material despite it being dated by the time we stumble upon it, if the subject is interesting enough?

What about aggregate "breaking" news/politics articles that take the more "dry/clinical" original source reporting and "spice it up" with opinions, add additional context or focus on a more "important/interesting" part of the original source's subject matter?

What about science reporting, which is often shoddy, inaccurate and/or outright misleading? If there are no good aggregate sources should we post the shoddy one if the subject is interesting, or should we hunt down the original study from a peer reviewed publication and submit that even if it's locked behind a hard paywall?

Where should we draw the line on these sorts of aggregate articles? How far back to the original source should we go if doing so means potentially locking people out of actually reading it (through paywalls) or even stripping all the useful context out of it (e.g. the first tweet that mentions an event)?

Should we simply combine all the sources, megathread style, and maybe even let users submit new ones to it as they come out? If we do that, how do we maintain any semblance of usefulness to the comments section, especially at scale and for events that are ongoing? IMO, most of Reddit’s megathreads outlive their usefulness after just a few hours because of that and sorting the comment by new doesn’t really help.

IMO, if ~ wants to focus on quality submissions and discussions then these questions are ones we need to carefully consider before any policies or systems regarding them are implemented. So I am curious if anyone here (mods especially) have any experience dealing with these issues, how they did and if anyone has any ideas on how ~ can do it better.

Hey folks, thanks for trying things out so far. I know it's in a bit of an awkward phase right now where everything is inactive, but this should improve as more people join. Unfortunately I've had some bad timing today with fun things like a surprise early-morning trip to the vet, so I haven't been able to pay as much attention today as I wanted to.

Anyway, a few updates:

Site mechanics

I did manage to spend some time writing up a page that explains some of the basic site mechanics, which is here: https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics

Hopefully that helps explain things a bit better, since so far you've just basically had to try things to figure out what they are. Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts about the info on that page.

Issue tracker

There's not much there yet either, but I set up an issue tracker here on gitlab (which is where I'll host the site's code eventually): https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues

I'm not expecting anyone to register on there and submit issues or anything, but that will be kind of the "formal" location for issues and plans (and I'll transfer things there that get reported on the site itself).

Invites and other plans

So far, I've only invited people that already knew what I was working on and that I've been talking to about it. Today and over the weekend, I'm going to start inviting some more specific people that I'd like to have involved but I haven't previously talked with about Tildes. While doing that, I'm also going to be working on the things mentioned in this post yesterday: https://tildes.net/~tildes/a/high_priority_things_to_fix_add

If any of you have suggestions for people you'd like to invite (who won't be turned off by an inactive site), please let me know. I can contact them or give you some invite codes.

Early next week, I'd like to start trying to get some public attention and expanding more quickly. This will probably include posting the announcement blog post to some places, as well as giving you all some invite codes. I don't have very specific plans yet though, so again, please let me know if you have any suggestions.

Thanks again, and please keep posting a bit just so we can get some base activity going - if you read an interesting article or anything, just take a minute to post it here as well. Like I said, I know it's a bit awkward for now, but it will get better.