In light of @Deimos mentioning that we have a lot of "favorite" topics going around, how about something a little meatier?

I've seen it a few times already around threads that someone uses the word "guy" to refer to a poster and the response is "I'm not a guy". I'm not trying to invalidate this stance, but rather make this argument in the same way I argued for a singular "they". Consider the following:

• the plural form, "you guys" is already neutered. I can walk up to a group of women and ask "How're you guys doing?" and it doesn't draw any ire
• we've similarly neutered "dude" in both the singular and plural, but it's especially casual and almost familiar
• "gal" sounds like something out of the forties, "girl" is diminutive, and "person" is clinical / formal
• we don't have another common, non-gendered, non-specific term that fits the "sounds right" criteria and fits in the environment like the one we have (wherein users are getting to know each other and don't know exactly how to address one another).

I realize that this is probably masculine-normative and therefore problematic, but my main goal here is to stimulate discussion on a meatier topic (gender) without having it be an incredibly serious topic.

[EDIT]

I want to clarify a few things, as this reads a lot more trolly than it did 6 hours ago.

generalizing "guy" is a sexist idea because it attempts to make the masculine the generic (what I called "masculine-normativity" above). However, there isn't a term that adequately replaces "guy" but is neutered (@Algernon_Asimov brought up that "dude" fits, but is as more casual than "guy" than "person" is more formal). [Edit edit: I'm an idiot. They pointed out that "dude" as I had defined it earlier in my post would work just as well, but they did not agree that it has been neutered]

Instead of bringing this up as purely a matter of diction, I set myself up as an antagonist to see what would happen. And for this I apologize.

That said, I feel like there is some good discussion here and do not want to call making the thread a mistake. More that mistakes were made in the manner of its posting.

I went through the topics and did not see a previous on on this, so I am curious what your current favorites are, from both a single player experience offline (no pvp or multiplayer mode) or MMORPG wise?

Bonus points for new MMORPGS and undervalued titles which are just fun and engaging to play. I have to have the ability to get up and walk away at a moments notice for work purposes, so pvp and requirements that I spend a lot of continuous time are hard to find in a fun game, even if I do not get called away like that for days at a time. I am into strategy more than FPS, but all are welcome!

So it all begun as a [something]monkey script but I decided to give it a try to web extensions after several years of not touching it.

If you don't care about the yada yada, skip right at the bottom now.

Why

So the whole thing revolve around a simple concept: I'd like tildes to remain as lightweight as possible with a simple and clean interface and not too many user settings.
We don't know the full structure of the code yet but, by experience, frontend and backend require quite an effort to be kept in balance so that one or either don't becomes a mess.

From this idea, the next step has been quite obvious. Users that would like a more advanced frontend experience could just download an extension (probably an app for mobile once it becomes possible).

What

Right now the extension does some simple things. It is basically just a porting of the script I made some time ago so you'll get non-tildes link in a new tab and a button to jump to new comments in a topic you already visited.
The extension don't retain any user data. it doesn't care who you are or what you browse. If you're unsure you can check the source code (below).

Future Goals

The immediate priority is to create a "settings" page so you can customize how the features should behave. As an example, about the links in new tab, letting you decide which kind of links should behave like this: all / comment's / text submission's / etc etc. I'm still thinking which are reasonable use-case

After that, I want to try and implement a user's labelling system and that is the reason for the app already requesting access to storage data on the browser. I've yet to figure it out but the gist of it is that I'll store something like username:tag duplet in your browser localstorage and on load of a page, check for usernames match and add the label you choose.

Additional Notes

I know the code is dirty. As I said, I didn't touch extensions since... I think more than 6 years ago. Maybe more.
On top of that, I went for jquery and am more of a modern framework JS developer with a strong preference and background as backend developer, so... you know.
I still think I'll stick to jquery because the syntax is quite clear and I want even non-technical people to be able to understand what's going on in the code if they want to double check.

If you want to contribute you're more than welcome but keep in mind that most basic things are still missing. To mention just a couple:

• settings page
• proper isolation of content scripts
• guidelines or at least a sample to use to implement new features

if you have any resource that you used to build something similar (web extension or the like) please share them as I've a goddamn long commute every day and have time to read :)

Links

• Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tildes-extended/
• Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tildes-extended/dinimcigfnjcblajimodbacmbknmicgl/related
• Source: https://github.com/theCrius/tildes-extended

It should work on any fork of Chrome as well.
I can't assure the same for future development.

Current features:

• Link in new tabs management
• Button to jump to new comments in topics
• Add custom CSS from external URL
• Markdown Preview
• Add User's labels

A well known issue of reddit (and most of the internet these days) is gifs as a fundamentally more popular way to consume videos. There are good reasons for this in the current makeup of the internet with mobile browsers dominating the online space. Voters are likely to be using mobile browsers and mobile browsers are likely to be the dominant browser. Gifs have no sound which is preferable out-and-about, they also tend to load better than videos, especially if a user doesn't want to switch to a dedicated mobile app that will load that video or popup a "open in" notification. Even many PC users simply don't like the extra time it takes to load videos over a gifv.

This is however not preferable for a high-quality site. It results in content creators not getting views for their work. It results in sources of content not being posted at all on many occasions, even in comments. Many of the game subreddits have people that create gif clips of a video just because it will be more popular, then post the source video that it's from in the comments. It's not ideal.

How can this be solved?

I encourage everyone to answer this question using the wildest of fantasies, even if you think the idea might be unfeasible at a technology level. Let the people working with the code decide if its feasible or not, put forth your wildest idea to solve it.

I'll start: Perform processing of video to gif as a function of the site. Provide users with the ability to choose a preference of gif vs video. Give people the section of the video as a gif clip but also provide the content source with a view of the clipped section (somehow) so the source actually does get a view of that video in that section for its clipped part.

This potentially unfeasible suggestion provides the best of both worlds, providing the user with the type of clip they want (gif/video) which will be better for their browser while also providing the source creator with a view on their video even if the user views the gif. At the same time this also ensures that a majority of gif content (at least for videogames/twitch/youtube, the majority) actually does have the source because it used the site's own clipping tool to set the gif. No need to use anything else if it is site integrated.

Other ideas and thoughts on this topic? Programmable ways to solve it? Preferences? Moderation?

The post about group CSS got me thinking, if the identity of groups are allowed to develop enough it could become like reddit were you can't expect a consistent experience across the site, you'll have to know the etiquette of each group you visit, do they allow jokes here, only links or only text, not going off topic etc.

How far should/will it go?

I've read the docs and I personally have not seen this topic come up yet.

I've been weary/afraid to post any more of my own content since my very first post here on ~Tildes. Are there currently any unofficial rules for self-promotion? We all know Reddit once had that stupid 10:1 (or was it 5:1?) ratio rule before they chucked it. I don't want to feel like a selfish person or a spammy person if I submit content that I created and/or links to accounts that promote myself as a brand.

I've been doing some thinking and concluded that in it's current form, tildes design has a fundamental problem that is going to make high-quality discussions nearly impossible.

Assumptions

I'm relying on four assumptions here:

• A discussion's quality is proportional to it's exclusiveness. In other words, the more wide the audience participating in a discussion is, the worse the discussion gets. It's not hard to see this. A discussion about a discovery in cancer reasearch on a news site will be much lower quality than among cancer reasearchers. This has also been shown to be true by reddit's /r/all.
• tildes get more specific, the "deeper" they are in the hierachy. ~sci.biology.cancer is more specific than ~sci. ~sci also a has more subscribers.
• tildes.net wants to use this specialization to foster high-quality and qualified discussions on specific topics.
• tilde submissions "bubble up", as they currently do

The Problem

You might be able to see what I'm getting at. I think these three together are a fundamental problem for the quality of discussion in subgroups:

• Highly upvoted posts from specific subgroups will be exposed to wider audiences, thus lowering the quality of discussion.
• More generic posts have a higher likelihood of receiving upvotes from the more general groups above them, thus lowering the quality of submissions.

A Scenario

Let's simulate a scenario using my above assumptions. This might be unhelpful, since it's very easy to poke holes in such a specific scenario. This is more intended as an overall picture of the incentives the users have.

We have three submissions to ~sci.biology.cancer, about the news of three different discoveries:

• A link to an original scientific paper with it's original title
• A link to an original scientific paper, with a modified title
• A link to a news story in a popular tabloid newspaper, with it's clickbait title

So, how would these fare?

• The first submission would be upvoted by ~sci.biology.cancer subscribers, who understand the paper and topic, but are low in numbers.
• The second submission would be upvoted by ~sci.biology, who are familiar enough to understand the modified title.
• The third submission can be understood by anyone, and would be upvoted by the whole of ~sci, slingshotting to the top.

Let's take at the result in ~sci.biology.cancer:

The highest ranked post is now a clickbait article of no significant interest to anyone actually knowledgeable about the topic, filled with unqualified discussion. The second ranked post is slightly better, but still less useful than the first post, which is being drowned out by other submissions.

Conclusion

As a submitter with the current system, instead of submitting high quality content that interests the subtilde, it is in your interest to submit a post that will appeal to the lowest common denominator, the subtildes above you. This will significantly decrease the quality of specialized subtildes.

Ideas

I believe the bubbling up mechanic must be modified in some way to prevent this unfortunate systemic issue. I don't really have a good solution, but here's some ideas to get the brainstorming going:

• No participation (voting/commenting) for users higher up the chain. This would be very extreme.
• users don't see comments made higher-up the chain. ~sci.biology would not see ~sci comments. This would be extraordinarily confusing and have weird edge cases.
• Votes would be counted separately for each part of the sub-tilde chain. A post might be highly upvoted in ~sci, but only receive a few upvotes in ~sci.biology. I like this idea in general, but it does not solve the problem of the low-quality responses landing in ~sci.biology.cancer too. Maybe that's just an acceptable trade-off, though.

What are your thoughts on this?

I'm young, I'm looking to understand more ways of looking at the world. What books do you recommend people to read that had profound impacts on your world outlook, character, or anything else like that. Future me says thank you.

Edit List (Books listed so far by Title):
"Accelerando" by Charles Stross
"A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess
"A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn
"A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson
"Bardo Thödol" by Padmasambhava
"Brave New World" by Huxley
"Book of the Dead" by ?
"Cain" by José Saramago
"Capital vol.1" by Karl Marx
"Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold
"Collected Fictions" by Jorge Luis Borges
"Crime and Punishment" by Dostoyevsky
"Die Grundlage der Allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie" by Einstein
"Divine Comedy" by Dante
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick
"Don Quixote" by Cervantes
"Daughters of the Dragons" by William Andrews
"Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card
"Ethics" by Spinoza
"Fables" by Aesop
"Fahrenheit 451" by Bradbury
"Faust" by Goethe
"Flowers for Algernon" By Daniel Keyes
"Fragile Things" by Neil Gaiman
"God and the State" by Mikhail Bakunin
"Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas R. Hofstadter
"Good Omens" by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
"Great Books" by David Denby
"Harry Potter" by J.K. Rowling
"Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams
"History of Violence" By Édouard Louis
"Homo Deus" by Yuval Noah Harari
"How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie
"Illiad" by Homer
"Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn
"Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami
"Le contrat social" by Rousseau
"Les fleurs du mal" by Baudelaire
"Leviathan" by Hobbes
"Maus" by Art Spiegelman
"Naked Economics" by Charles Wheelan
"Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss
"Neuromancer" by William Gibson
"Odyssey" Homer
"On the Origin of Species" by Darwin
"Paid Attention" by Faris Yakob
"Personality-Shaping Through Positive Disintegration Processes" by Kazimierz Dąbrowski
"Player Piano" by Vonnegut
"Poetics" by Aristotle
"Republic" by Plato
"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari
"Shogun" by James Clavell
"Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut
"Tao Te Ching" by Lao Tzu
"Tales of Power" by Carlos Castaneda
"Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science" by Peter Godfrey-Smith
"The Ancestor's Tale" by Richard Dawkins
"The Bible" by :contentious_topic_here:
"The End of Eddy" By Édouard Louis
"The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt
"The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood
"The Lucifer Effect" by Philip Zimbardo
"The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes
"The Prince" by Machiavelli
"The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins
"The Singularity Is Near" by Ray Kurzweill
"The Stranger" by Camus
"The Tao of Pooh" by Benjamin Hoff
"The Three-Body Problem Trilogy" by Cixin Liu
"Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" by Wittgenstein
"Traité d'atheologie" by Onfray
"Treatise of the Three Imposters" by ?
"Where Mathematics Comes From" by Lakoff and Nunez
"Where I'm Calling From" by Raymond Carver
"1984" by George Orwell

For me, its Arrested Development and South Park. I love AD for its meta-humour and inside jokes. However, I liked only the first three seasons. Here is a great video explaining what makes AD different. South Park for great satire and taking the humourous approach on complex topics. This video explains better than I could.

So, which are your favorite comedy tv shows and why do you recommend them?

We're Here, We're Queer, Ask Your Questions Without Fear

I noticed that there was a lot of QUILTBAG/LGBT related education being requested in threads where it wasn't really on topic. Clearly there's a lot of curiosity. So I thought: why not make a thread specifically for that? Whee!

Please note that it's a lot of labor to ask of someone in a minority to explain themselves, as it's often the case that they feel like they have to justify existing on a daily basis anyway. Hopefully this provides more of an opt-in experience where curious folks can learn about queer issues in a respectful manner. ** Also: No one is required to answer your questions or engage with questions they don't feel comfortable with. **

I am decidedly not an authority on the subject (I don't think anyone really is) but I do fall under the umbrella- NB (nonbinary) and bi. This means that I am attracted to either gender and I do not identify as having a binary gender myself. I actually would more precisely be described as pansexual as I would date a nonbinary person BUT for identity politic reasons I prefer the term bi. As for the acronyms above, LGBT stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans. I prefer QUILTBAG: Queer, Undecided, Intersex, Lesbian, Transgender, Bisexual, Asexual, and Gay. It's more fun to say and it expands the acronym to include concepts that folks might not have heard of.

A brief list of definitions:

• Queer: To my understanding this is sort of a catchall term for anyone that is not straight up cisgender/heterosexual. Once considered a pejorative term, queer has been reclaimed by some QUILTBAG people to describe themselves; however, it is not a universally accepted term even within the QUILTBAG community.

• Undecided: Folks who just don't know what they identify with.

• Intersex: Folks born with anatomy that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies. This can be a wide range of natural bodily variations.

• Lesbian: A woman who is attracted to women exclusively.

• Transgender: A term to describe folks who do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.

• Bisexual: Folks who are attracted to both binary genders.

• Asexual: Also known as "ace". An adjective to describe folks who do not experience sexual attraction.

• Gay: A term to describe people who are attracted to the gender they identify as. This is often used to refer specifically to men who are attracted to men but can be used to refer to women who are attracted to women too.

This list is by no means exhaustive! Here's a (more) comprehensive list of terms and labels: http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/sexinfo/article/glossary-sexual-orientationgender-terminology

There are many terms and labels out there! I encourage you to research to your heart's content.

Also just to give some perspective, cisgender is an adjective for folks who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.

So, what nagging questions do you have about being queer? Have you been questioning your own identity and would like to hear the thoughts of people who have been in the same situation? Post here and let's see if we can't find some answers.

New group, new topics, this is all so exciting. I'm a chef myself and enjoy discussing the business and philosophies of what I do. I'm wondering if other people in the industry have found their way unto Tildes at this point.

It would be neat if typing '@op' inside a topic resulted in a link to the profile of that topic's poster. So, in this topic, @OP and @elf would be equivalent.

Also sorry @deimos for spamming ~tildes with suggestions (not actually sorry though.)

I think it would be fun to have an ~anon group, with the feature that all topics and replies are shown as being posted by 'anonymous'. It might need more active moderation than other ~groups though, and it would need to develop its own identity so it isn't just an anonymous replica of the rest of ~s.

Adjacent open tildes tabs are confusing to browse.

The tab for every group is named Topics of ~group instead of just the name of the group.

I've been accused of nitpicking on very minor first world problems. I agree. I really like the site, and it's so well-designed that I have no complaints apart from very few minor pet peeves with the design. I'm just discussing the features and enjoying the conversations that stem from my feedback.

I've been browsing Tildes a bit today and, overall, am enthusiastic about what I've seen. However, while reading a thread, a thought popped into my head that was evocative of an issues Reddit and other tree-based systems suffer from — thread freshness and activity over time both decay quickly.

While reading the thread, I thought "I would comment, but there already seem to be a lot of comments here. If I reply to a specific tree, then that limits people who might see it and respond. Even a top-level comment probably won't be likely to get much of a response."

On Reddit, this leads to repost after repost of the same content in brand new threads, as the activity level of a thread decays and the thread is lost. It looks like one way you intend to combat this is with different sorting methods (Newest, Activity) over various time periods (all time, last 3 days, etc.). Do users feel that this will be effective enough itself, or do they have other ideas to combat this issue?

The way I generally see it, linear threads often beat out tree threads when it comes to keeping threads alive without users having to read through a lot of crap to figure out what the current topic of discussion is, and where it's taking place. (Linear threading models to think of are phpBB, vBulletin, IP.Board, and their ilk. Tree threading models are sites like Reddit, Slashdot, or Shacknews. There are also hybrids, like Metafilter. Please share other examples and their pros/cons.)

In a tree system, I've often experienced the following sequence:

1. Read all top-level replies
2. Read most sub-level replies
3. Find where in the tree the most recent discussion is occurring
4. Realize it's not coherently taking place in one tree
5. Decide not to reply

While in a linear threading system:

1. Read past 2–3 pages of replies to get caught up
2. Add a reply

Alternatively, the linear threading sequence can also be:

1. Read entire thread to see how it's evolved over time
2. Add a reply

An added benefit that is usually concomitant to a linear threading system is that threads are easy to "reactivate" (AKA gravedig) — simply add a new reply and the thread gets bumped up the stack for all users. This is not an exclusive benefit of a linear system. It could likely be made to work with a tree system too. The Activity sorting method may be related, though it's unclear how this functions.

The podcast threads have been chock-full of high-profile, well-known podcasts. I definitely enjoy some of those but I also like listening to smaller, more "homemade" podcasts if they're interesting.

Do you make a podcast that you want to share with the group?

(While technically self-promotion I'm genuinely curious at the answer. I'll pull the topic if it is out of bounds.)

It appears that the visited links do not persist between the homepage and individual groups, for example if I click a topic in ~tildes, then go to the home page page and view said topic, it won't be purple, and vice versa.

I just showed up yesterday to this great experiment, and find myself with some fresh-minted drama over politics and bans to ingest. While I wouldn't presume to propose a solution to the issues raised in and by those threads, I found myself looking to the comment tagging system and finding some space to improve conversation.

My intent (as I believe is the intent of this community) is to help foster constructive discussion without outright banning inflammatory topics. I believe that simply ignoring controversial issues because of the problems they raise is at best stifling potentially useful discourse and at worst intellectually dishonest.
Tags I'd like to see:

• "Citation Requested" As a tag, it would be a more constructive way of saying "I don't believe you"
• "Disreputable Source" / "Source Disputed" is a civil way of pointing out issues
• "Reported" would be a tricky implementation, but useful as a way of flagging comments for removal. Should ideally only be applied to eg. doxxing or incitement

There should also be a moderation feature for removing tags that are no longer relevant or incorrectly applied. Alternatively, the display of comment tags could be reliant upon a critical mass of "reputation points" which would allow for, say, 100 people with 1 "troll-tagging rep" to get a comment flagged, or 2 people with 50 troll-tagging rep to do so. This of course is dependent upon the reputation system being fleshed out and has the very real danger of creating power users

EDIT:

@jgb pointed out that this is a lively discussion see these

Tags I missed that came up in other discussions:

• "Insightful" as a positive, almost a super-upvote
• "Solved" for a comment that resolves an issue

And, according to @cfabbro, @deimos is working on a public activity audit that can then be built upon to improve moderation

Hi, first post - be gentle. I don't know whether this has been mentioned but I couldn't find it anywhere else.

I worked on a hierarchical tree before (for customer support scripts) and after a while the wealth of material became increasingly complex. One problem that presented itself was the difficulty of 'multiple points of entry'. There are many ways of approaching the same topic.

In the context of Tildes, I would give a simple example of music (since that was used already). If you have a top level called ~music, your next level may be .folk, then say .Macedonia. This is how you categorise the topic.

However, if I'm in ~Macedonia then I should be able to visit .music and then .folk but arrive at the same discussion group as above.

By default, any two groups with the same set of identifiers, whatever the order, should point to the same location. In fact, there should be an infinite number of ways to get to any group, in theory.

Do we want a group called ~history.Renaissance.artists.Italy.LeonardoDaVinci and also have a different group ~science.engineering.history.LeonardoDaVinci, along with 50 others about the same individual? An ability to merge disparate tildes might be useful.

In addition, I would imagine trying to perfectly map the world of ideas and discussion into a single hierarchy is a Quixotic task, that way madness lies - especially for the nitpicky Reddit crowd. I've seen plenty discussion on this already. If it was a bit looser, we'd get to the discussion quicker, without all the 'meetings to decide on a working group name'.

Just throwing it out there for discussion. Thanks.

It seems to me that link topics don't directly engage the user, we're just putting something out there and hoping for a response. And who is the user responding to when they comment on the topic?

Shouldn't the poster have the option (at least) to express something - aside from in the title of course - about the link they are posting be it a statement or a question, to elicit a discussion in response?

I know that when I see a link topic my first thought is usually 'What are you trying to tell me?', so I just pass it by. Whereas if there was a question attached to it that I could respond to, or a statement attached to it that I can engage with, I don't think I would be so quick to dismiss it.

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!

I've been enjoying reading peoples conversations on Tildes. There's been in-depth discussions and debates and open dialogue with a genuine attempt at understanding the other side's opinions. I really enjoy discussing spirituality with all angles of beliefs, so I thought it could be fun to try that here :)

I think it will be important to understand while discussing this that we all have different understandings and definitions of loaded words when referring to things that, by definition, are indefinable. I think it'll help to keep that in mind. One person may use the word "God" and have a picture in their head of a literal being in the clouds with a robe and beard. Another may use the word "God" and it means something else entirely. Like the creative power behind the ongoing evolution of the universe.

Two very different things.

I'll start with a little bit about my own beliefs, and where I'm coming from.

I was raised conservative christian, being taught to believe in a literal 6-day creation, with God resting on the 7th. And we took the commandment to also rest on the 7th day very seriously. Seventh-Day Adventist. We were right in our interpretation of the bible, and everyone else was wrong and in danger of going to hell, including all other religions.

I had an experience about 7 or 8 years ago that shifted my perspective completely. Essentially, I fell into a state of samadhi, had a kundalini awakening, became one with god. Whatever the words used to describe it, or the belief structures that have been built around it, I was there. My body and mind fell away into stillness, and it was just conscious awareness of Peace and Love. No thoughts about it, or physical sensations in my body, just awareness of.

Since then, I've been opened up to an understanding about the universe that's bigger than beliefs. I see my experience and the "Truth" reflected in all sorts of religious texts and beliefs, as well as in non-religious things. I've said to many people while talking about these topics that I believe there are atheists who have a closer "relationship" with god. Looking into the makeup of the universe with curiosity. It's great. I don't believe anyone needs a belief in god or religious theology to be headed in the "right" direction. And at the end of the day I think that's where we're all at. Headed on a path. We've all got our own personal journey and having compassion and love for others where they are at is what Jesus was talking about and trying to teach to people who had no understanding of that level of understanding.

My wife and I are reading a book right now called Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today - by John Spong

My wife was raised conservative christian and is just starting the exciting journey of questioning all of it. We're reading it together. So far the author's understanding of spirituality, god, etc. seem to line up closely with mine.

In the book he speaks about the inability to use limited human language to discuss this sort of thing, and why christianity has gotten it so confused over the years, as it's hard to put into words, and then have others read it and understand it. Experience vs Belief. Very different things.

Anyhow, I think I've rambled enough. I'd love to see the kind of discussion we can get going about such a typically decisive topic :)

Tell me what you know...

One of the very frustrating things for me on reddit is the way crossposting works, essentially making it a karma whoring feature more than anything else.

Can crossposting be simplified? For example: I just posted a topic in ~tv, however I realize it applies more to ~comp (sorry, I was premature on posting it somewhere - maybe it can be moved?) but could fit in ~tv as it's related, even if being a 3rd cousin from the groups intent. It would be nice to be able to pick the groups I'd like to publish it to, so the discussion is centralized and consistent - if that makes sense?

*Removed a word

I'm fairly new to the site as I came in from the hackernews post a fortnight ago. I enjoyed the fact that this site doesn't have downvotes. However, when I am reading through posts I am seeing the noise tag on multiple posts that don't seem to merit it, with examples linked below. The comments aren't literary masterpieces by any stretch, but they are concerning the topic on hand. The noise tag appears to be getting used as a downvote or "I disagree" button.

I know the user that was the first ban also used the noise tag this way, but this seems to be a more wide spread issue than one user. We can't prevent a de facto downvote tag from appearing organically everywhere. Eventually sub communities will form around a tilde and adopt a tag as a downvote, the same way all online communities change the meaning of some word or tool they already have. I don't think that we want this to be a standard tildes wide behavior however.

How should we go about preventing the use of tags as downvotes like this? Stricter moderation? Removing tags with negative connotations? Making tags visible only if they reach a certain threshold?

https://tildes.net/~talk/105/mozilla_to_remove_meritocracy_from_governance_docs_because_its_problematic#comment-6kb
https://tildes.net/~talk/105/mozilla_to_remove_meritocracy_from_governance_docs_because_its_problematic#comment-6mh
https://tildes.net/~misc/10r/furries#comment-6pq

Some suggestions I think would improve navigation a bit:

1.Comment votes. I think comment votes should appear at the bottom of the comment. The reason for that is is to avoid "copycat voting" (I'm sure there must be another term). I think it's a common effect: you see a comment, you see it has 5 votes while the rest you've been reading have 1 or 2, you start being predisposed to see it as a valuable comment even before reading it, you end up voting it too, etc. Similarly to why the top level reply box is at the end of the thread, I think having comment votes at the end of the comment (or even hidden under an expandable menu, but maybe that's too much) would help users reading comments more open-mindedly. I would even argue that putting the user name at the bottom would be a good idea as well, especially since the user base now is small is easy to adscribe more credibility to some user names than others, which is not bad by itself, but might push a type of "authoritative bias".

2.Top level comments count. If we understand top level comments as the main ideas discussed in a thread, maybe it would make sense to show that in the post. Right now, what we get in the submission listing is the title, username, the ~, the tags and the comment number. I wonder how important is having the total comment number shown here. I guess it's an indicator of activity, but maybe it'd be more interesting having the top level comment number, indicating the ramifications of the topic. Total comment count could be maintained as well, or not, or just when entering the submission, etc. New comments could still be shown in the listing. After all, if we are ordering by activity, we care that there is some activity, and total number of comments is not that relevant.

3.Cascading tags. Not so sure about this one, but I though I'd mention it. When marking a comment Off-topic... I think most usually all comments under that one will also be Off-topic. Maybe it'd make sense that from that point on all comments would be marked as off topic automatically, and possibly collapsed. Right now it seems when there is an off topic comment thread, you just keep seeing off topic tags down the line, which is a bit distracting and probably unnecessary since they are almost surely going to be off topic, so it's probably not necessary for user to try and judge that. Maybe, if it makes sense, this would better be done when the tags are more developed.

4.Parent link for context. Thank you for adding the parent link! Much needed. However, wouldnt it be better if when tapping a parent link, the end page would be the parent comment (obviously) plus the comment where you tapped the link? What I mean is, to provide better context, I think it'd be better to show the parent and the comment I was reading, with all other comments under the parent AND above the origin comment collapsed. I don't know if that's clear...

5. Reply - Tag - Vote. Probably a bit nitpicking here, but I think inverting the current order of the Reply and Vote buttons would be a better fit. Since most people are right handed, and the action of voting is (probably?) more common than replying, having the vote button on the right side might be a minor enhancement in usability.

6.Highlighting OP's comments. Right now, OP's comments are marked by "(OP)" next to the username. I think it'd be better to make the indication more evident. For example, displaying OP's username in a different color or marking the comment with a different color (as with new comments in orange or own comments in purple). I would prefer the username color since it's less invasive while still being easy to spot.

Anyway, just some ideas I've had in the last few days, hopefully not too ridiculous or confusingly worded.

EDIT: Sorry for the generic title, I forgot to edit it before sending...

On Reddit, the reply notifications come with a "context" button, which will bring you to the topic and show a limited set of replies, to establish the context in which the new comment was made. From what I can see, there's no such feature on Tildes (yet). I'd like it if we could get a feature like that so I can easily read back what someone replied to, so I can understand the context behind it, and possibly reply again.

The default "activity" sorting means that topics which lead to a lot of conversation tend to get bumped to the top. It seems like, in the long run, controversial topics will end up drowning out topics where the link itself is interesting but doesn't provoke people to react with a comment. I find that a lot of the most interesting links for me on other sites are the ones with the fewest comments.

I think it could be worthwhile to experiment with different default sorting, or even different mechanics. For example, Everything2 has a feature where, at a certain rank, users are able to add pages to a "Cool User Picks!" sidebar.

The current solution, custom sort ordering, doesn't seem like it will scale very well. People will tend to vote on the posts they see; if most people sort by activity, most of the votes will go to the most active posts anyway.

Anyway, just food for thought. I don't think this is super urgent, but it seems like something that would be good to think hard about and get right in the long term.

My wife just found a candle that was gifted to her by a coworker that contained this phrase and it caused somewhat of a debate about its destiny, which made me wonder... are we discussing religion and/or the lack thereof here? /r/atheism became a circlejerky hive of scum and villainy, can we do better? Or is a topic so inherently divisive inherently beyond reproach? Can emotion and anecdotal experiences ever compete on even footing with logic and reason?

We currently have ~tildes for meta topics. What about a similar mechanism for meta-discussion, scoped to specific group hierarchies? I imagine something like ~tildes.gaming or ~tildes.gaming.leagueoflegends, mirroring the structure of the groups itself. This draws a little bit from how StackExchange does it, if anyone is familiar with that, but they do not have any nesting. They just have a "meta" site for every regular one for discussing the site itself.

An alternative would be to discuss those things in the group itself. This might be reasonable as well, but since we already separate it out for the top-level, that approach seems somewhat inconsistent.

To me one of the biggest problems on the internet is the lack of a "hub" or somewhere it sort of centralizes. In my opinion the current "staleness" of the internet is due to a lack of central hub.

So i thought about how I could solve this problem. You see without a central hub, starting anything is a problem.

Imagine I am a new user on the web, and I want to learn 3D modeling. Where do I go? This is a problem I am facing right now, like which site do I goto to be part of a community. I don't want to make an account on facebook and join ragtag groups with no real activity. There is no sense of community or anything, just random noise. All I can do is google, and youtube videos to learn 3d modeling. If I goto forums, they are all very stale or "dead" and I leave cause I don't know what to do there.

I basically wanted to have a starting point where I knew for a fact that everyone knows this place and starts here and belong to a community. Two months, and I still have the same problem. I don't belong to a community within 3d modeling or feel like I belong there. Just hardly any chitchat, irc channels barely anyone speaks. Days go by without a new thread.

The biggest problem I notice is that everyone is spread apart, some devs on twitter only, some on that certain site only. No one is really connected or rather there is no central hub. Still using 3d modeling as an example, I noticed that without a central hub, there is no real "right" way to do something. I mean this, no one has any idea on what software to use. I keep asking myself am I using the right software, what is he using, what are they using. It turns out they all have this question, I'm still not sure. NO ONE IS. So if no one is sure, then the communities unintentionally keep closing themselves off.

But There is one rule that must be set

YOU CANNOT EVER ALLOW A USER TO CREATE A GROUP. Do not make this mistake.

Have Things constant at times, I'm tired of unlimited everything. A limit creates a sense of belonging.

Why?

Reddit's biggest flaw and strength is the subreddits and it made a mistake when it allowed anyone to create one and you are seeing the cascading effects now. When you can make a new group, you are no longer a tight nit community with set focus. You are separating the community on a large scale, right off the bat and as you can see on reddit, subbreddits clash which leads to drama and ultimately the destruction of the site from within.

So what am I getting at?

We go back to a tried and true method and something that we know everyone will like. Something that Appeals To Everyone ish.

YOU BRING BACK THE GEOCITIES NEIGHBORHOODS AND KEEP THEM NAMED AS GROUPS.

Have 29 Groups, or let the community decide the # of groups and lets start naming them. No petsburgh please

Simple Short Descriptions. and the name creates an INSTANT connection with someone who might have an interest in that group.

The Only Time You Add A Group is every 6 months to a year and ONLY THE OWNER CAN. Community Decides the name.

YOU HAVE TO HAVE A SET # OF GROUPS. This creates unique culture.

List of IDEAS:

1: Add a count for the amount of posts in the group list if you can, might be database heavy.

2: Everyone is subscribed to all the groups but can unsubscribe.

3: A list of trending "topics" or call them "marks" or "underscores". (Suck it twitter)

I noticed when opening my notifications that they are missing a link to the originating thread.

EDIT: just discovered that the # at the end of the header line is a link back to the topic. Maybe making that a bit more obvious then?

It's been an interesting couple of weeks while we all decompress post-reddit and think about the future of democratic online forums. Most of the relevant topics have already been discussed in multiple threads, and rather than having repeats, I'd like to invite everyone to comment on these threads themselves - and to read the comments that are already there. You'll find most of the solutions we've been thinking about explained in some detail, and we do want your feedback on these ideas to help make them better.

I suggest you bookmark this page. This thread is getting a bit lost in the shuffle, and it's really the best nexus of information about tildes we have at the moment. It'll take you quite a while to read all of this, so since we don't have 'save posts' here yet, a bookmark will have to do. We're also updating the links here as new discussions form. If you think a discussion should be added here, please reply to this thread with the link and I'll take care of editing it into the main post. When you see new users asking repeat questions, please link them to this post. Thanks for your patience while we work through all of this. :)

Let's get started.

• A group is its own worst enemy. This will help you think better about online community management. Also, if you haven't yet, play The Game Of Trust.

• Community Moderators? How do we moderate effectively, and fairly? Do we moderate at all? (everyone should read this monster) Also, see round two.

• How do we handle communities that get too big? It's a doozy, the inverse of reddit.

• Do we allow Fluff content? Just how do we select for quality instead of popularity, or even define quality, anyway?

• Do we allow for political content? How do we handle one of the most heated categories of discussion? Also see the followup.

• What do we do about "Fake News?" And you thought politics was hard? :D

• Can we create new ~groups? Will users be able to create them? Yes, eventually... but it's not that simple.

• How do we stop bots from wrecking the place? What about the bots that are useful?

• Why exactly is my comment box at the bottom, rather than the top? We have reasons. ;)

• Anonymous posting? You betcha. Privacy is not just a buzzword.

• Can we think of a better name than votes? Not really, not yet. Got any ideas?

• Funding - how do we pay for all of this? Nothing is free, after all. No ads, no pay to play, but what else could we do?

• Tildes Gold? No, something much better - the exemplary upvote, because you need a limited use vote to highlight the things you think are top quality. If we all use them together, it just might work.

• What changes need to be made to the comment tags before they are re-enabled? It's a tough problem.

• Should we make the site publicly visible? For users without accounts to read.

• Moving the vote count to the vote button. It's the little things.

And, of course, our first ban. In fact we're up to two now.

It's not all serious, though!

• Drop by and introduce yourself. Also see round two and round one.
• Where are you from? Quite the diversity in countries already!
• Our first Trump thread. Went better than expected.
• What about cultural exchanges? Great idea there.
• First impressions? Once you've slogged through all this, tell us what you think about the site. ;)
• Some simple user scripts. It's not RES, but it's a start.

Please do take some time to browse through everything in ~tildes. It's a cross between theoryofreddit, ideasfortheadmins, and announcements. That's where we talk turkey. There's a new discussion there every day.

I also want to make one important contrast about what this site intends to be.

Reddit and Voat: Democratic republic based on popularity. 'Free speech' forums.
Tidles: Democratic meritocracy based on quality. 'Civil speech' forum.

Enjoy yourselves, post some content, make some new friends. This sweet honeymoon phase won't last forever, and it's one of the best parts of a new site. Remember, as long as you're civil here, you are never going to have any problems.