Right now there's a lot of discussion ongoing about community culture, building Tildes' attitudes as a community into something that is solid enough to withstand waves of new users without being disrupted too heavily by newcomers that have yet to learn the culture.

But what of mod culture?

This topic isn't only for those that have mod experience, there are plenty of users with experience talking to mods that have their own negative stories. Over on reddit the actions of one mod team affect the brand-image of all modteams on the entirety of reddit. One bad action by a mod that occurs in a default subreddit backed up by the other mods in that subreddit becomes (in the eyes of users) the behaviour of all "reddit moderators".

Often I see mods making things far far worse by being one of the most combative and hostile in-groups on the site. Talking to users in a manner that is best described as the way the worst teacher in school talked to teenagers as if they were 4 year olds, not listening to anything a user is actually saying and dismissing them outright because they're the user and they're the moderator. I understand some of it comes from difficult interactions with genuinely toxic individuals that waste enormous quantities of time better put towards better things. However what I see are moderators approaching every interaction with every user with criticism as if they are almost certainly the same-old toxic user. This is not the case.

This is exceptionally important here on Tildes because it won't be a mistake to take the actions of one moderator and have it colour your image of other moderators on the site. When the site holds responsibility for moderator actions due to oversight and control then the actions of all moderators are going to be considered the actions of the site and the rest of the mods.

So, how do we want our mods to talk to users? How do we want them to interact with users? What controls can be put in place to appreciate quality moderation? What can stop quippy mods that shut down valid discussion with 1 line reductive answers? Etc etc.

What is good moderation and what is a good moderator?

Personally what I try to apply to my own behaviour is to actually LISTEN to people and act as an equal, or at least present the appearance of listening. The thing that bothers people most feeling like something they care about is dismissed.

What are the many issues that you've see in moderator behaviour (in front and behind the scenes) and in what ways can Tildes go about things differently to stop them?

Right now it seems like a pretty happy and active alpha community.

But even if you set aside all the Russian-bought advertising during the last US election, all social media sites currently have a problem with propaganda. You can call it by other names: hail corporate, shills, AstroTurf, bot armies, sockpuppets, etc. But it eats quality discourse, kills genuine community, and at the most extreme can serve to radicalize the young and marginalized.

What pieces of Tildes are currently in place or planned fight this scourge of digital communication? What are the pitfalls and what are the successes you've seen? Because I believe if we ignore this eventuality, something really special will die.

I do this a lot. I did it just now. I wrote about five paragraphs on a topic, deleted it and started over, wrote about five more and did the same thing. Got frustrated. Some thoughts that went through my mind:

• "this is not concise at all. It's disorganized and needs to be re-done"

• "this is going to trigger an emotional response and that will filter how they read it, so I'll be less likely to get interesting responses"

• "maybe I should just do this as a journal entry and keep it private"

• "these thoughts are worth something, and even if they aren't super cogent, maybe they can be a starting point for a collaborative thinking process"

• "that's dumb, nobody cares about my ramblings anyway. everyone has thoughts like this, mine aren't more important"

• etc.

So what usually ends up happening in instances like this is I just don't post. Other times, I get wrapped up in trying to make a post super-high quality and it comes across as over-produced... and if I've somehow triggered an emotional response then that aspect becomes an avenue for attack.

Does anyone else experience something comparable to this? Is it a good thing for helping to maintain quality content and discussions? If not, what are strategies to improve situations like these?

There is a user I do not wish to mention to prevent a witch Hunt or if I am wrong. In the past two days I have seen them post two topics with fairly contentious topics, but nothing was wrong with the topic itself. The user however, has a flame bait sentence in each of these posts, ex. "I am against homosexual marriage". He then waits for a few heated responses and then edits out the flame bait sentence.

This makes it look like an innocuous post is suddently full of hot heads immediately starting fights based off their assumptions and not what the user posted.

How do we deal with what seems like a troll that operates like this? I won't be posting on his posts anymore as you shouldn't feed the troll, but he definitely got me the first time and it's unreasonable to expect everyone to always be on the lookout for this.

Edit: to everyone saying I am jumping the gun by accusing him of being a troll. That may very well be, which is why I declined to name the user. Even if it's not intentional, it's causing problems if we want this to be a place for high quality discussion. Messaging @deimos has been suggested as an option and is probably the best choice for now but will not scale. What should be our solution to this issue going forward that scales?

One of my biggest hobbies is collecting flashlights. I guess I don't really "collect" them as much buy ones I want and sell ones I stop using.

Is anyone here also a flashlight aficionado, or would like to be?

Most religions base their beliefs on the Bible. If so, where was the bible based on? Clearly, the bible was written by a bunch of men. Men. Humans. Humans are prone to corruption. We cannot tell whether these authors corrupted or even invented stories? So, why should we base our virtues on a thick book when we don't really know if it's accurate or not?

Science has already proven that Adam and Eve didn't exist. Evolution does exist. And Science have evidences. The bible said the Earth was FLAT and have 4 corners and sides. Science said the Earth was spherical, and it proved what it said. Science seeks evidence. Science seeks the TRUTH. The bible? It was just created by men many years ago to answer questions they cannot answer.

There are tons of wars and crusades that were religion driven, whether we had holy wars or wars because of terrorists following inhumane beliefs, many people ultimately died. Just like wars almost eradicated humanity, that is what should happen to be Religion. Become eradicated. Adding on to that we see many deaths every day just because of religious differences.

The bottom line is, The holy book is repulsive and its repulsiveness creates a huge barrier to development. The world would be a better place without religions. Religions claim themselves right. And because of that, people around the globe were divided by awful beliefs. It's really sad to think that people do good things because they FEARED the awful HELL and because they wanted to go to the fictional HEAVEN. Religious people were driven by a 'holy' book which cannot speak and collect evidences for what it says. We should wake up. Be united by an accurate tool that seeks truth. Science. We should base our virtues on our intelligence and common sense.

Greek mythology was once a religion, and it flopped and became a myth. Religion in the US is now declining according to surveys. With our eyes, watch and see how will religion disintegrate through the years while the development, peace and stability of the world integrates. To add to my initial statement, I can provide sources for every argument against religion and the "holy book"

Having surfed reddit for several years, I've always had the impression that its voting system cannot handle controversial topics well. Although it's an official rule that comments shouldn't be downvoted in disagreement, downvotes are very often used that way. This sometimes leads to less "valuable" content being on top of threads, for example jokes.

I think that it's beneficial for discussions to have good controversial opinions in higher positions as they are now on reddit. But I understand that people want to state their disagreement and don't always want to comment to do so. Also, I think many disliked that the public upvote/downvote counters were removed.

Something that could help with all of that would be a disagree button for each comment together with a counter that shows how many people clicked that button. The button wouldn't have any effect on sort sequence.

What do you all think of this?

Edit: Added clarification that there wouldn't be an effect on sort sequence.

I think having a button to expand media on the main page. I've seen it on Reddit, and think it could be useful instead of clicking on the link to view the entire post. It gives you a way to skim things. The only downside I can think of is it might limit engagement since you won't see the comments.

Guide can be found here

Right now, the guide assumes you aren't dual booting. This is because I've never really dual booted off a single HDD, so while I probably could include it in the guide, I don't feel comfortable without first testing the process.

This guide also sets you up with BTRFS, but you can still use ext4, just requires changing two lines.

So, it might just be that I'm older and notice these things more, but it really seems to me that fan groups are becoming more and more toxic overall. It feels like over the past 5-8 years specifically fanbases are reaching toxic levels faster and faster.

I remember when bronies became a thing, it took them like 3-4 years before the dangerous, threatening, and assholeish behavior really began to become common. Then Steven Universe came out and it only took them like 2 years to start sending death threats to people who didn't support their head-cannons. Rick and Morty went toxic in under a year and a half.

Then there's the shit in long-running franchises. Star Wars has had multiple of the actors shutting off social media from the toxic bile being shot at them. Chris Pratt is getting hate for what Star Lord did in Infinity War.

There's memes too, weirdly enough. Calarts is the biggest example I can think of. People made a dumb joke about how all the cartoons look a like today and someone pointed out how a few of the artists went to this one school in California and it became a catch all term for the shitty artstyle, and then within like 4 weeks the school has to go into lockdown because someone made a tongue-in-cheek threat of shooting the school up. A few years ago trolling attempts would be things like ordering a bunch of pizzas to the school or something annoying and dickish but overall harmless like that.

I know toxicity amongst fanbases has always been a thing, but it really seems to me that they're reaching unseen levels and doing so faster and faster. I mean Rick and Morty fans rioted over fucking dipping sauce, there are the aforementioned Steven Universe death threats, the directed attacks of actors on social media, fucking joking about shooting schools up because you don't like the art-style a few of their graduates used in a time where we've seen like 6 school shootings in half a year, there was that whole Voltron incident where a fan stole storyboards or something and threatened to release them to the public unless the creators of the show made their favorite gay ship a thing.

I guess what I'm getting at is what the fuck is happening that's poisoning every single community online? It's like everything has suddenly devolved into Youtube comments. How did we get to this level of toxicity? Or am I just more aware of this shit now and it's not really all that different from how it used to be?

Hi all,

In light of our recent conversations re quality, I'm sorry that this is more of a "nothing" post. But I trust you all and I think you could give me some good advice. I've tried Googling, but it's hard to find anything I feel is trustworthy.

I'm searching for a few tablets on which I can have employees view training videos and or SCORM training content. I believe all of this will be sourced from web-based companies with mobile platforms built-in. I know very little about tech stuff, so I don't know if a basic tablet would do, or if I need any certain specs.

I believe our wi-fi is good enough to support this. We'll be purchasing 2-8 of these for intermittent trainings.

Needs:

• Cheap-ish
• Durable (We will be buying industrial Otter-box type cases as well)
• Good volume/accessibility (Avg employee age is 52)
• Standard video playback (don't need super hi-def anything)

I posted in ~talk rather than ~tech or ~comp because I didn't think it would fit there. Thank you!

It's common in my job - and likely many jobs - to require learning and correction. I've noticed that people who have stronger self awareness are more likely to improve and learn from projects/mistakes/correction etc. I can say a lot more about the value of introspection, but I'll get to the point: I'd like to gauge someone's ability to do this by having a conversation with them.

If you were interviewing a candidate to work for you, what would you ask them to find out how self-aware they are? I figure if you asked: "how self aware are you?", each candidate would respond "in addition to my strong organizational skills and quick learning, I am also incredibly self aware." So I'll need to sneak up on the idea a bit.

Today seems to be crawling by. I'm sitting here daydreaming about what I'll be doing this weekend, which hopefully includes a lot of sleep.

Who has exciting or pleasant plans for this weekend? What positivity is coming your way?

Well, there comes a time in every community's existence where someone gets an idea for discussion from another thread he wishes were better framed. So buckle in. This discussion is intended to sit at an uncomfortable cultural crossroads.

In the EU, gay spouses are now able to have the same freedom of movement rights as straight spouses. The Supreme Court in the United States ruled that a baker was treated unfairly by a Colorado regulatory commission when they tried to suss out if he discriminated against a gay couple who wanted to purchase a wedding cake.

In Brazil (you thought I was going to let this one be), courts have explicitly allowed conversion therapy to continue.

In Chechnya (a part of Russia that I always seem to struggle to spell), you could be hunted down and tortured or killed if you were gay, with people turning their own family members over to the local government. The local government, in absurdity, claimed after the purge that there were "no gays" in Chechnya, so there could have been no purge.

The point I'm trying to make here is that LGBT+ discrimination is an issue that should touch just about everywhere.

Before we get too deep, a point on terms. Discrimination, strictly speaking, is separating one thing from another. It is not necessarily a hostile act. If I say "you can drive only if your vision is good enough to read signs while you drive," that is discrimination on the basis of your ability to see, but most people aren't likely to say it's unreasonable discrimination (there is a rather obvious safety implication, for starters). Similarly, if you tell women to go to the bathroom in one space, and men to go to the bathroom in another space, that is discrimination based on gender. Is it reasonable discrimination? That might depend on if you're trans, and what state you're in.

This topic has to be more limited than this set up implies it will be. We won't be able to narrow things well enough to have a meaningful discussion otherwise. Today, we're just going to touch on the simple (ha!) matter of whether baking a wedding cake is art, whether refusing a wedding cake to a gay couple is discrimination, and what a government should be expected to do about it. So, the questions:

• Is making a custom wedding cake for a wedding "art"?
• Is refusing a custom wedding cake to a couple because it would be for a cause you do not support discrimination on the basis of that couple's identity?
• How should a just government resolve a dispute between a couple who feel unreasonably discriminated against and an artist who feels compelled to use speech for a cause they do not support?

And a bonus question:

• What role should a judicial branch have in advancing various groups' rights? Does relying on this less democratic method for securing rights open a movement up to counter-reaction or is the counter-reaction simply an inevitable consequence of a movement's success?

I don't want to start a flame-war around this, but I am curious to hear about other peoples opinions.

I've been working in 'the cloud' for a few years now and love how convenient and easy it is to build on. My work is 100% cloud-based, and we host absolutely nothing. From internal tooling (slack, payroll, email) to what we sell (kubernetes, orchestration, some custom-tooling).

I'm not sure what side I stand as I still run all of my own tooling myself on a dedicated box. I love being able to have my own server to tinker with, and run my own websites/rss-aggregators/VPN servers/etc.

Having used AWS/GoogleCloud, I can see huge value in the automation and reduction in overhead that they provide when it comes to setting up and managing infrastructure.

I am genuinely interested in different opinions and viewpoints on the way computation and data are managed, especially with companies that deal with sensitive information.

As an aside, I would be interested in opposing ideas regarding containerisation (ie. Docker/Rkt).

Edit: I realise this probably should have been posted on ~comp

Warning, this is a rant. Feel free to criticize me.

1. As ESL speaker, there's a "butt" in the name.
2. SSB is the protocol, you have to download client called "patchwork" which is not an attractive name either
3. After setup patchwork, idk what to do next except staring at a blank "timeline" something
4. So I grabbed documentations (you need manuals to use a god damn social network software), obviously you have to join pubs to dive in.
5. After joined pubs, you start to stare list of "pubs followed you/someone else joined the pub" message explode.
6. After a awkward self-post on "#new-people", I learned that you have to follow others to get content. So am I supposed to follow thousands of strangers on the Internet for a good degree of influx content?
7. After several rounds following, I still dont get how to make new friends. I mean by what? I cant judge if I should follow someone because of random recent posts.
8. So I started to search for stuff. The search is mostly broken, the results are not in chronological order, only English alphabet works, I dont know if reply someone's 2 year old post is polite or not. Engaging a conversation but expect no response feels wrong.
9. The only way to tell if a "channel" is popular or not is through the search box. The "all channels" page does not show numbers at all.
10. Channel names are a mess. The plural form and alternative spellings are killing me. I always feels worried that I might miss good content by not thinking of what creative "channel" names people invent. When making posts it gets worse, you have to paste dozens of bullshit channel names just in case.
11. There's no way to tell if the software is functioning or not. Sometimes it took up to ten minutes busy downloading stuff, the rest times it's totally static. F5 does not work, Cmd+R reloads the whole electron app frame.
12. When downloading stuff, I totally do not want old posts. There's not way to filter that.
13. There's an "Active Channels" on the left side of the software, it jumps indefinitely for no reason. When I click one of the channels, I see old posts without any "activity". Again, you have to follow people in that channel to get fresh content.
14. There's search for name tag function. Maybe there are people social with each other just by lookup Internet IDs. Since names can be the same on Secure-Scuttlebutt, you have to use public keys to identify people accurately.
15. It's written in Nodejs/Javascript. I lost my motive to contribute.

TL;DR barrier of harvest is wayyy too high.

Anyone else using/tried secure-scuttlebutt? What are your thoughts?

Hacked together a simple markdown live preview, which works for both comments and also new posts submission.

To use, just install the extension and start typing on Tildes, you will see live preview. No settings to configure.

The code is open source and released under MIT. I am not really a JS dev, so any feedback is welcome.

Chrome extension - link

Firefox addon - link

Source code - link

I've been consuming a ton of media about the world wars lately. There seems to be an inexhaustible supply of historical fiction, records, memoires, and documentaries. But so far, very few things have come close to painting a cohesive picture.

Most of it focuses on hot spots like Verdun, Pearl Harbor, Dunkirk, Normandy, the haulocaust, the atomic bomb, enigma, u-boats, the luftwaffe, Stalingrad... And I can see why. Even on a microcosm level, the conditions of the stories are unimaginable.

The issue I'm having is that I feel like our cultural memory of these events his been eroded over time. We have these impressions of what we think it was like, but not an overarching understanding of the complex series of events throughout the 20th century. We have an overabundance of records, photographs, film, and documentation in general, but maybe it's the overabundance that makes the digestion such an insurmountable undertaking.

What are your experiences with studying this time period? How do you feel about the quality of your understanding? And finally, do you have any recommendations for myself and others?