I know this doesn't happen often, but I've seen it happen a few times and I think it would be useful to have a notifications page for edited comments. When someone replies to me I get a notification, I can reply to it and/or mark it as read, and forget about it. Sometimes the person that replied to me edits the comment to add extra information, but since I've already marked it as read I may never see the added info. I'd like to receive a notification whenever one or more editions are made to a reply I received that I've already marked as read.

I originally posted this as a comment here but thought it might deserve it's own discussion.

I think that the rise of megathreads/ultrathreads/collections of threads on reddit has been a large detriment to the site.

I'm a mod for a few large subreddits that utilizes them (and I know a good portion of people reading Tildes right now are as well), and as time goes on I've started to dislike them more and more.

At first they were great - they seemed to silo off all the posts and noise that happened around an event, and made the lives of mods easier. Posts that should've been comments could now be removed, and the user could be pointed towards the megathread. Users could go back to the post and sort by new to see new posts, and know that they'd all have to do with that one topic.

I believe that this silo actually hurts the community, and especially the discussion around that original megathread, more than it helps. As modteams I think we underestimate the resilience of our communities, and their ability to put up with "noise" around an event.

The fact that we are in a subreddit dedicated to that cause should be silo enough - each post in that subreddit should be treated as an "atomic" piece of information, with the comments being branches. By relegating all conversation to a megathread we turn top level comments into that atomic piece of information, and subcomments into the branches.

But that's just a poor implementation of the original! There are some edge cases where this might make sense (take /r/politics, it wouldn't make sense to have 9 of the top 10 posts just be slightly reworded posts on the same issues), but I think this can be remedied by better duplication rules (consider all posts on a certain topic to be a repost, unless the new post has new or different information).

There is something to be said about the ability to generate a new, blank sheet of conversation with a post, that is not marred with previous information or anecdotes. New comments on a megathread post don't have that luxury, but new posts do.

Additionally, I feel like the way reddit originally conditioned us to view posts is to view them then not check them again (unless we interacted with someone in it or got a notification). This prevents potentially great (but late) content from gaining visibility, as a non-negligible portion of the population will still be browsing the subreddit, but will never click the post again.

I think it's cool to see who invited a user on their profile page, but who have I invited? Is there a page I'm missing? I think it'd be cool to just see that stuff.

Some sort of public user tree would be pretty neat too.

Side question- after public release, will the invited by section on old profiles continue to stay? I think that'd be a pretty cool way to show alpha testers imo.

When something big happens, there are often a lot of different posts, which results in the conversation being scattered all over the place. Is there any policies on users creating megathreads for these big events, or if there will be some kind of megathread system build into ~ in the future?

What are some of your favorite videos that explain deep topics in depth?

I've recently been on a 3blue1brown binge (youtube) and am looking for more videos of that ilk. Doesn't have to be a series or a consistent uploader, one off videos are sometimes the best. Just thought I'd ask ~comp if there's anything in particular that comes to mind.

This is in part inspired by the video posted by /u/Deimos in the Technical Goals section of Tildes, titled Simplicity Matters

song.link

Not sure how many Rezz or even electronic music fans there are here, so I'm interested to see the response.

Rezz released this single from her upcoming album yesterday.

I'm a huge Rezz fan, and this song is awesome, but I kind of hope that the full album will have some more variation. I like the song, but it came on autoplay earlier today and for a second I questioned whether it was from Mass Manipulation. It seems like Rezz is rehashing the same formula just a bit too much. Sure, every artist has their sound, but I kind of expected something a bit different.

A new, relatively unknown artist that I think has been incredible so far is 1788-L. He sounds like a mix between Porter Robinson and Rezz. I hope Rezz can add some more variation to her distinct sound to make it a bit different, similar to 1788. Maybe the upcoming deadmau5 collab will be promising in this regard?

What do you guys think? Again, overall, great song.

Obviously this assumes you agree that humans have a soul, but even if no one agrees on what the soul is – if you agree that people have them at all, then when did they start having them within the historical context of human evolution?

There are a few ways this question could be approached depending on which frame of reference you choose to use, so I'm curious to know which frames you guys find useful and most relevant.

I think this site is a really neat concept, especially because the quality of discussion on Reddit has really deteriorated (which has happened concurrently with Reddit's shift from discussion and news to "repository of Internet culture"). I like online discussion, and IMO this site's design is better than Hacker News, so I'm probably going to start using this site. Is there anything I should know about this site? This is my first post and I'm not too sure how things work.

About 6 hours ago, I posted a thread with the suggestion that "guy" should be turned into a nongendered term. I did this after reading @Deimos' thread about how much of ~talk is "what's your favorite" type posts. So I took something I had noticed a bunch around here -- how the term "guy" gets tossed around a bunch, often to be corrected with "I'm not a guy," and I figured I'd make a post about how there really isn't an adequate word ("person" just sounds too formal to be a replacement for the gendered "guy").

Instead of saying "Hey, what word can we use in this instance," I framed it as a "Let's just use 'guy' for everyone, change my mind" and listed the ways the word "guy" already fit the bill. I did this in an effort to make the thread engage more than just the language nerds. This is where I feel I crossed the line into trolling, and regret having done so in this manner.

I did try to point out the problems with generalizing a male-gendered word, but a few commenters have pointed out that it read euphemistically. It was meant to be upfront about the issues inherent to what I was suggesting, but reading it again now it reads at best like a wink to the people who are already on the side of the argument I was hoping for and at worst it reads like a disingenuous ass-cover.

The thread blew up.

There is some good discussion in there. In fact, most of it seems to be, like most of the discussion on tilde, constructive and respectful. And all of it was genuine, or at least appears to have been so.

I won't try to walk it back and say it was satire, or a social experiment, or even a mistake. Mainly, it was something I felt clever for thinking of (and something I was to curious to see unfold). Sure, the thread got a lot of comments, but it also rustled some jimmies. And I think there was at least some subconscious part of my that recognized that as I was typing it.

I'll edit the OP with the clarity of 6 hours' hindsight, but I wanted to make a separate post apologizing for presenting an argument in an inflammatory manner. I've been a member of this community for a couple of days now and am very fond of it, and do not want to contribute to its degradation.

As things get going and we start getting more specific branches coming off of the main groups, posts are supposed to bubble up the branches as they get enough votes. So that a post in ~games.boardgames wouldn't initially be visible to someone who is only subscribed to ~games, but would become visible if it gets popular enough.

There is a danger of branches becoming so popular that they overwhelm the main group.

I'm thinking that it might be a good idea to "weight" the branches inversely to the number of subscribers it has. Meaning that a post in branch with 10,000 subscribers would require more votes to bubble up than a post in a branch with 1000 subscribers.

Thoughts?

Many occupations are set to be automated in the near future: truck(lorry) driving, cashiers, and various other service sector jobs. See the full paper here[PDF].

Will such a reallocation of labour be a net positive or net negative?

Will societies around the world adapt by offering ways to retrain those that lost their jobs, or by providing temporary assistance in some manner?

Or, perhaps, will those people who lose when the next automation wave comes just be ignored, as they would negatively affect the capitalists bottom line.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is stepping down, and there are rumors he intends to run for office and possibly the presidency. A frequent Trump critic, he would presumably be running as a Democrat if he entered the 2020 race. He seems to be staking out a position in the center of the party, criticizing the idea of a government jobs program or single-payer healthcare.

Would you vote for him in a primary or general election? Does America need another businessman (albeit a successful one) president? How economically progressive should the Democrat's candidate be? Discuss.

I've somewhat recently become vegan and am looking for more recipes to cook. I love pretty much all kinds of food, especially kinds I haven't tried before. If anybody has any great recipes that are vegan, I would love to share.

Movies, TV shows, and newspapers are just a few examples of the traditional media designations that dominated the 20th century. However, the digital revolution (and the internet in particular) has rendered them mostly meaningless now because the analog boundaries that separated them are no longer relevant.

Given the present-day proliferation of platform-agnostic content, what new designations or delineations do you think the world will (or should) adopt in the next century once traditional media is dead?

I've found that it's difficult to keep track of threads I found interesting but are no longer highly active, especially without a search function. My suggested solution is the ability to subscribe to updates on a topic/thread (whatever you want to call it) and enable easy access to checking up on the thread for updates without having to receive a direct reply to my comment on the topic. If this already exists and I'm just blind, let me know!

At the moment the groups page shows a full list of groups with a button beside each: either Subscribe or Subscribed. It's not very clear, at a glance, which ones are subscribed as there is no colour difference and the terms differ only by the last letter. I personally think it would be better if it showed 'unsubscribe' for the ones you're already subscribed to, and even better if this were in green.

My personal theory is that this is similar to the phenomenon of "Don't Stop Believin'" having a surge in popularity in the late 2000's. I know that was commonly attributed to the song's use in the finale of The Sopranos, is there a similar usage of "Africa" that triggered its sudden prevalence in popular culture? What did I miss?

(Not a complaint, it's reminded me of how great 80's music is and I'm listening to an 80's station right now).

The one good thing, imo, that iOS does is its continuity and handoff with other devices. What are the best ways you've found to emulate this on your devices? Like if I'm actively working on a document or on web pages how can I seamlessly continue using them on my tablet/phone without having to re-open all the tabs or docs again?

Has anyone found a better way?

At the moment I get around this a couple ways:
-Google drive is my primary basic filesystem on all my main computer (desktop/documents/downloads/pictures/videos folders)
-Google Photos on all devices
-PulseSMS for the texting
-Google Chrome which offers a somewhat fix to webbrowsing

But the actual feature of my devices popping up and letting me "carry on" with what I was doing exactly where I was doing it with the click of the button isn't there. Also, the Google Chrome "continuity" is simply the ability to let me go see recent tabs open on my devices and click to reopen them. If anyone knows a way to sync tabs across all my devices (desktop/laptop/phone/tablet) and make them open/close altogether that would be great.

Some games were just magical to play and yet have never really had something come out which rivaled them or even recreated that experience to some extent. Which games would you say provide that for the following, if any?

• Black & White / Populous (Good God games are hard to find, and Godus was just disappointing)
• Xwing vs. Tie Fighter (Nothing so satisfying as capital ship destruction!)
• Master of Orion 2 (All around fun dynamics)
• Star Control 2 - (Tons of Humor, interesting back stories)

What do you wish had a modern day equivalent, and does it?

In three months I will probably start studying law. It's the second time starting university for me, since I left the university where I studied IT about 5 months ago because of depression and I guess I didn't really like programming that much.

My question is: Say I finished the uni and got a law degree. What are the jobs I could do and what do I really have to do there? I have a slight idea from the movies, but I don't really know any people in person to ask this from.

I got my hands on a copy of Rise of the Tomb Raider recently, and while playing I noticed that Lara would "helpfully" try to push me toward the correct solution to a puzzle, often while I was simply looking around to make sure I wasn't leaving any loot behind. Worse still, it could be literally every 10-20 seconds or so that she would repeat the same hint. It got infuriating after a while, and I was horrified (okay, I'm exaggerating, but whatever) to find that there wasn't a setting available to get her to shut the hell up.

I loved Tomb Raider games because you had to solve the puzzles yourself. Having the game hold your hand the entire way kind of defeats the point of that. It was really disappointing knowing that I couldn't play the game without either having a puzzle spoiled for me or having the obvious repeatedly pointed out to me. It was like having Navi from Ocarina of Time nagging me all over again, but worse, because at least I could ignore Navi and just deal with the occasional "Hey, listen!".

This sort of hand-holding seems to be getting increasingly more common, at least in my experience. The form often differs--e.g. in Skyrim you have quest markers that not only guide you all the way to a dungeon, but all the way through it--but it's there. I feel like the worst of it is that gamers don't get to actually play the game autonomously or at their own pace, and that this sort of thing violates a basic principle of "show, don't tell".

Am I just really unfortunate with the games I've been playing lately, or is this really as common as it seems? What examples of hand-holding have you run into that you found disappointing?

As some of you may know, Tildes is written in Pyramid. I've done some OSS work in Pyramid and Flask, but my paid web dev work the past few years has been mostly in Django. There are some newer frameworks out there like Sanic or Falcon, and some older ones like Zope, CherryPy and Turbogears, that I've played with but have no real experience in.

Personally, I like Django for its "batteries included" and its big ecosystem, Flask for its minimalism and Pyramid for its elegant design. There's no single framework that fits all needs and all have their share of annoyances - Django can be quite difficult to swap out things like the default ORM or template system (though these have gotten better in recent versions), Flask has some architectural issues with request and other global variables, and Pyramid perhaps suffers from a relatively small ecosystem and lack of "one way to do it".

What are your experiences and preferences?

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.