So I noticed the entire front page getting clogged with "question" type posts, ranging from "what are your favorite..." to "pls help me choose..." type posts. This might be mainly due to "activity" sorting (sorting by votes is a little better), but that's still the default and doesn't change the general dominance. I took this screenshot earlier and I did not see a non-question post without scrolling. None of them were from ~talk, either.

I know people have different views on this, but I remember from my brief time moderating that it's generally a good idea to restrict these types of posts, for the simple reason that people love to dump their "favorite" lists, which makes these types of threads dominate the frontpage, while they tend to produce always the same responses (intuition might suggest they produce great discussion but that's usually not the case). They're best pushed into specific subreddits (subgroups?).

I think this is a rather small and specific issue, but it might be a taste of future difficulties with voting/moderation. Banning content for being disruptive/abusive is one thing, but the best places I know for discussion also ban via more subtle rule sets. They take measures into account (often at the cost of facing a ton of backlash from users seeing their posts removed for "unfair" reasons) that keep one type of post from taking over the frontpage, potentially drowning out more interesting ones. I'm still trying to picture how this would translate from Reddit's moderation model to Tildes'.

One way would be to open up a subgroup for any sufficiently large category of posts and give moderation the option to move posts to a subgroup that people can opt-out from. Another is very diligent tagging and filtering. My concern is that neither could produce the complex, fine-grain type of moderation that distinguishes really good subreddits (yea, they exist!) from spammy ones. "Hide all posts tagged 'question'" could hide "what's your favorite...?" type posts but also posts that ask a really deep and interesting question. So would you filter "question && favorite"? That turns filtering into almost a scripting job. It doesn't seem reasonable to expect users to put this much effort into content filtering and it wouldn't help "shape" discussion culture, as the default (no filters?) would keep most users jumping from one "favorite game/band/movie/programming language" post to the next.

So far, it seems rules are set site-wide based on mostly removing blatantly off-topic, bad faith or trolling content. As the groups grow, however, I believe it's absolutely vital to also allow more subtle policies (think "only original sources for news articles" or "only direct links to movie trailers", etc). As groups branch off into further subgroups, it might suddenly also be reasonable to have very specific rules like "no more individual posts about hype topic X, keep discussion in the hub thread until Friday".

The only way I can see this work out (and maybe I lack imagination) is via a "meta" section for each group that allows whoever is decided to be part of the moderator group to decide upon and clearly formulate rules specific to it. It could be a wiki-like thing, it could involve voting on changes, maybe automation via "default tag filters", etc. Other users could see the policies mods have decided upon and maybe even "opt out" from moderation actions being considered in filtering, to have no reason to be paranoid about "censored" content.

Am I too pessimistic about tagging/voting solving this on its own? Am I too stuck on doing it "the reddit way" (albeit with hopefully better tools)? I just really believe it's subtle moderation like this that might make or break Tildes in the long run.

TL;DR: How would more subtle or group-specific moderation policies be decided? Just tags+votes? Should there be a "meta" sections for each group where mods can agree upon specific rules?

One thing I ended up realizing is that for e.g. code challenges in ~comp, there could be threads with a lot of code blocks that could easily take up a ton of screen real-estate. Something like the following isn't so bad:

/*
    This is a short multi-line example that doesn't
    take up much screen real-estate at all.
*/

But, what if the average comment for a particular topic has several of these with 100 lines or more? This could make navigating the comments really cumbersome as the number of comments grows. In the case of code challenges, lengthy code snippets could be very common, and collapsing the comment threads may not be the desirable course of action--in collapsing the thread for navigational convenience, you lose the ability to view and contribute to discussions. Hosting the code elsewhere risks links expiring or becoming lost or broken, and it feels like a clunky workaround to try to avoid inconveniencing other users.

With that in mind, what are your thoughts on having these code blocks display in a collapsed state by default with only a preview of the code block showing? Is there any support for this idea? If so, should this be implemented as part of Tildes itself or as a client-side extension of some sort? Are there any concerns about this?

(If there's general support for the idea, but opposition toward adding it to the Tildes code base, I may get off my lazy ass and try to hack something together.)

So I'm not really sure about this one. It's AMC.

I had read something about it several weeks ago, and I expected more. It's, apparently, the story of this overweight woman working as a writer for a fashion magazine. She's very dissatisfied with her appearance and doing whatever she can to lose weight. She seems more resigned than depressed.

It looks like the main topics are self deprecation, self empowering, fat shaming, the-beauty-inside and I guess feminism. There is a second plot regarding a mystery that will surely be developed in later episodes.

All in all, for a 2-episode premiere, I thought it was pretty slow and felt like not a lot happened. The characters were a bit flat and stereotypical for my taste and dialogues weren't brilliant. I think there were probably some good insights here and there, but nothing really engaging for me. There wasn't a lot of tension and I can't really point any algid moment. There was just a funny line I think, and the dramatic scenes were very soft key.

I might give the next episode a chance, but probably only when I have nothing else to watch.

I'd say 5/10.

Tags [noise, troll, flame, off-topic] got abused and used as an "I disagree" function. What if Tildes requires an explaination/argument for why the comment/post is either noise, off-topic, trolling/flaming. This way we can hold taggers responsible and accountable for the tags and to some degree see if the tag is reasonable or misused. All the reasons for the tags can be gathered on a "discussion" page for the thread, a bit like Wikipedia's talk pages for each entry.

If you've made it this far I'd love to hear your thoughs, reactions and critiques.
And for those who've made it this far: Enjoy this photogenic cat

Are users supposed to be able to continue to comment in topics that have been deleted? Once deleted, topics are no longer visible to the group, but the topic is still accessible by URL and users can continue to comment. I just want to clarify if this is the intended functionality or a bug.

Example: https://tildes.net/~test/280/deleted_topic

Hi folks,

I've seen a few posts and comments discussing "what is tildes.net all about?" or even "what does Tildes want to be about?" and I thought I'd throw in a related topic I've been thinking about recently. I am interested in the medium of communication itself, in addition to the goals and general philosophy of Tildes.

To start, the question of "what makes Tildes different from Reddit?" is interesting. One concern about Reddit is the huge proportion of either low-quality posts or attention-chasing memes. And a lot of Tildes users seem to be asking why that is the case; and whether a site like Tildes can be different.

Some say that Reddit is a victim of the profit cycle. As a commercial entity, Reddit must aim to bring in as many users as possible, thereby increasing advertisement revenue. And lowering the bar to new user entry means that you get more and more people who aren't really concerned with making thoughtful, high-value contributions to the discussions.

And there's certainly some truth to that. So by this model, Tildes should be different. It is non-commercial, not profit-driven, and it has mechanisms in place (and in development) that are specifically designed to weed out low-value contributions/contributors.

But still, even at this early stage, when the userbase is small and has been more selectively accumulated, some users are expressing concern that Tildes is showing signs of becoming just another Reddit. True or not -- I don't know.

Beyond the profit goal, another dimension for analysis is the medium itself. "Medium", as in the tools of communication; as in radio vs. print vs. television vs. web forum, etc. In 1985, Neil Postman wrote an interesting book called "Amusing Ourselves to Death" that reiterated Marshall McLuhan's idea that messages are partly shaped (and constrained) by the medium over which they are transmitted. And by extension, some media are better at communicating some types of ideas than others.

Postman was writing in 1985 when television was the dominant medium. He argued that the image-oriented medium of television was best suited for entertainment rather than rational argument or intellectual discourse. And thus the use of television (particularly commercial television) as a medium drifts away from thoughtful, intellectual engagement of the consumer, and toward gripping, decontextualized video clips that imprint ideas on the viewer and keep them coming back for more.

Television is just not as good as print media for communicating deep, complicated ideas that the consumer can engage with. (This isn't to say tv can't do it, but it's just not as good at it.)

So what about web forums like Reddit and Tildes? This is what I've been thinking a lot about recently, and I wonder what other Tildes users think about it.

Web forums are different than television for sure, in that they are mostly text-based, and users can interact with them by both posting text and responding to what others have posted.

But web forums are different from ye olde fashioned books too, in the sense that web forums seem to eschew longer, more highly-structured arguments. (Speaking of that, I hope this post isn't too long!) There seems to be a "king of the mountain" syndrome in web forums, in which posters vie for attention, while watching as posts rise to the top and are quickly replaced by newer, catchier posts.

Is this the fundamental dynamics or metaphysics of web forums? --the rapid turnover of attention-seeking, short posts?

If so, will Tildes get pulled down into that same whirlpool?

I don't think it has to be that way, but I believe it is a strong warning that we have to think hard about how the structure of the medium itself channels the type of content we will see here.

--
Stepping back further in Postman's argument is his deep concern about the effect of the dominant medium on popular discourse in a society.

When mainstream media is reduced to commercial jingles and quick, entertaining memes, the very foundation of liberal democratic society is at risk. People become uninformed about the important issues of the day, and become disengaged from the democratic process. As that disengagement increases, special interest groups (read: corporate lobbyists) fill the void of providing direction to governing bodies. Citizens then become more disillusioned and even more disengaged. This is a well-documented phenomena called "the death spiral of democracy", and it scares the shit out of me.

When I first read Deimos' "Announcing Tildes" blog post, I saw a motivating philosophy that I feel is one of the most important issues of our time. We don't live in a perfect world right now, but we're in a world that appears to be on the edge of tragic yet avoidable decline; a world in which the values I assume many Tildes users would like to promote are being paved over by entities that only value profit.

I think that Tildes can be really, really important, and it needs the user base to deeply engage in the analysis of what will make it work. What is it about the web forum as "medium" that shapes the content we are exposed to here? And how can we devise the mechanisms that prevent it from degrading into another Reddit? Is a shared motivating philosophy enough, or do we need to re-engineer the medium itself?

So into the discussion of "what should Tildes be about?", this post is a long-winded way of saying that I think part of it should be about discussing how we can we construct a sustainable new form of media that improves society and supports our highest values. What does this next generation medium look like?

--
Note: just to be clear, Deimos has already put a lot of great thought into this (cf. https://docs.tildes.net/). I'm just arguing that the topic of the medium and the mechanics of the medium should be a topic that all Tildistas engage with.

One of the things I absolutely loved about Hacker News was the technical, and generally high quality discussions about technology. That is something I also really appreciate about Tildes right now. But as the years progressed I went to HN less and less because I found just about any topic related to PHP, JS and Node were filled with toxic low effort comment/jokes about the language.

I don't feel it is constructive to replay the exact same tired jokes about the exact same warts everyone has known to exist and avoided/worked around for years now. It's okay to not like these languages or technologies, but can we try to be better and a little more inclusive and constructive in our community? I feel like it's going to be a losing battle as the site grows if we're already stooping to these levels.

I know the site is still in its infancy and cross-posting won't be much of an issue at the moment, but I was interested to see what other users thought about cross-posting, whether we should allow it and if so how it should be done?

Personally I am in favour of cross-posting but I think some site mechanic should exist that doesn't allow two separate threads to be created. Instead, the cross-post should link directly to the original thread so that discussion of the topic can be kept in a single location but the topic itself can reach multiple tildes. For example, say an article about music being created artificially by a robot was originally posted in ~music. Someone may want to cross-post this to ~tech, and to do so would only have to click some sort of cross-post button and select the tilde they want to cross-post to. Anyone browsing the ~tech tilde would see the post, but upon clicking it would be taken to the comments page of the post originally made in ~music. Some indication of where the post was originally made could be given as well when viewing the cross-post on another tilde.

I was reading a discussion about this on here earlier today, and I've already lost it! 😬 Sorry if this is just creating more noise, but we clearly need better ways to find content. The search feature will go a long way, but here are some other ideas:

Tag search. On any topic with tags, the tags should be clickable links to URLs like https://tildes.net/tag/elder+scrolls. This page would show all topics that use that tag, with sort and filter options. There should be a way (maybe built into the search form) to type any tag and jump straight to this page.

Recently viewed topics list. Reddit shows a sidebar listing the last n posts you viewed. It's admittedly a little creepy seeing your history displayed like that, but it's a useful way to jump back into conversations for follow-up later. The old Reddit design had a "clear" button to delete the history, but curiously that is no longer present in the redesign. (Privacy features like that should not be overlooked here.)

Saved topics. Another feature from Reddit. Every post has a "Save" link below it, that adds the post to your personal saved posts list, which can reached from your profile. Saved post lists are only visible to the users that own them.

Repost detection. I really like how Ask MetaFilter helps posters make sure their content is fresh before they publish it. The submit button under the new post form is labeled "Preview" and clicking it shows what the post will look like before publishing it. This gives posters the opportunity to proofread and ensure their text formatting is correct. More importantly, the site scans the content of the post and displays a list of five possible existing posts that match it:

The following previously-posted questions might be related to the question you're asking. Please take a look before posting to see if any of these answer your question.

This flow adds an additional click before you can actually post, but I think it's for the best. The slowdown politely nudges you toward considering the quality and originality of what you're about to say, without being overbearing. The main MetaFilter site also checks all URLs you enter to see if anyone has posted them before. Note that these tools don't prevent anyone from posting, they just empower users to avoid reposting and reinforce good posting behaviors.

Repost flagging. I have a half-baked idea about allowing users to flag topics as reposts, but I haven't seen this implemented before. This would be separate from voting. A user wishing to flag a topic would be asked to provide the URL of an existing topic it duplicates. This wouldn't affect the topic itself, other than to add a small banner to the top of the page: "n users flagged this as a repost of the following topics: [list of links]". Then anyone would have the ability to [agree], [disagree], or append a link to the list. Public consensus would affect the future of the topic... if enough others agree the topic is redundant, it could be auto-deleted or just algorithmically prioritized lower than non-reposts. If enough disagree, the flag could be auto-removed from the topic. The usernames of the flaggers should be public, and there should be a way to view both a user's frequency of flagging and whether consensus agreed with those flags. Accountability would be important for this sort of system.

Ability to subscribe to users. I saw the other feature request for a "friend" mechanic. I agree with the commenters who said it would be too much like a social network. However, I could see a use case for a "Subscribe" button on a user's profile page, just like the ones on group pages. This would cause all topics posted by that user to be included in your main page, even if they are in groups you aren't subscribed to.

I'd be interested to hear your feedback on these suggestions, as well as other ideas specific to increasing content visibility.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no good fit for topics ranging from personal finance, investing, portfolio management, budgeting, running a business, markets, etc. Seems ~finance or similar could be a catch-all for a massive category of topics that don't have a place currently.

Let’s imagine two women: Millie and Bonnie.

Millie has a body-wasting disease. Her body is slowly breaking down, organ by organ. The only organ which is untouched is her brain. However, the body that supports that brain is deteriorating, and she is near to dying.

Bonnie is a healthy person who suffers an unfortunate accident. She takes a sharp blow to her head which damages her brain, killing her instantly, but leaving her body intact and healthy.

Due to the magic of non-existent futuristic medical technologies, doctors transplant Millie’s brain into Bonnie’s body.

Who is the resulting person? Who is walking around? Is it Millie because it’s her mind, or is it Bonnie because it’s her body? Or is it someone else?

For legal purposes, we identify a person by their physical attributes: fingerprints, retinal patterns, dental history, face. According to that methodology, this person is Bonnie, because she has Bonnie’s physical attributes. If she used Bonnie’s passport, she would be able to travel because her face and fingerprints match the photo and fingerprints in the passport. She would be accepted as Bonnie.

However, this person does not have any of Bonnie’s knowledge or memories. She remembers Millie’s life and friends and education. If we asked her to sit an academic exam about a topic that Bonnie learned, she would fail, but she would pass an exam about a topic that Millie learned; she is therefore entitled to use Millie’s academic qualifications as her own. Her encephalograph would show Millie’s brain patterns. She would recognise Millie’s family and friends.

If Millie and Bonnie each committed a crime before the transplant, should the post-transplant person be held responsible for either crime, or both, or neither? If she was in court, a witness would identify her as Bonnie, who was at the scene of one of the crimes. However, she would not remember committing Bonnie’s crime, but would remember Millie’s crime. Can she be held responsible for a crime she doesn’t remember committing (that brain is now dead)? Can she be held responsible for a crime noone saw her commit (that body is now dead)?

So… who is she? Is she Millie or Bonnie, or is is she some new composite person: Minnie?

Partly inspired by a couple of science fiction works:

• 'I Will Fear No Evil', by Robert A Heinlein

• The Star Trek DS9 episode 'Dax', by Peter Allan Fields and D.C. Fontana

I'd like to suggest site search as a Tildes feature. It would be useful to know if a topic has already been discussed by people on the site. For instance I don't know if a search feature has already been discussed.

Or perhaps I noticed a topic I wanted to follow up on later that I can't find now. Or I there was a reply that said something interesting I wanted reference, etc...

So I've been having a slightly off-topic discussion on a thread here and figured this would be a good subject to have wider input on.

I don't think markdown adds anything to Tildes and I think it actually degrades the experience for new users. Right now we're mostly old experienced reddit users and mods, but that hopefully will change. To me, markdown adds a not insignificant hurdle to formatting. Markdown has very few uses besides reddit and Github, and even then there's a few different types.

I suggest a WYSIWYG text box with a tabbed HTML option for those who want to use code formatting. Let's use something that's standard and encourages users to learn useful code.

Tell me why I'm wrong Tildes!

Edit: I primarily use mobile, so maybe that's part of the disconnect here. But it seems I'm the only person who cares and still thinks markdown is almost useless. I'm fine being in the minority. I still feel it's a good idea to look beyond the bleeding edge to the time when there's 300,000 or 3,000,000 uses.

Have a good day everyone!

I'm currently using 24 hour sort, and it's great, minus one thing - threads older than 24 hours just disappear. Perhaps a better implementation would be to keep the threads showing up underneath the <24 hour ones, but prevent them from being bumped up by new posts.

Example - if I go to ~comp right now, there are only 5 posts. Older ones, imo, should still be visible, just no longer bumping.

I posted about it three days ago but in these last three days I really worked my ass off to include lots of functionalities and feel like the community is missing a lot of topics...
So, sorry, I won't spam this for the next days every three days but I felt like it deserved to be "bumped" in the activity feed at least once now that the default is just 24h.

As of today, the features are:

• management to choose which links top open in a new tab
• button to quickly jump to new comments in a topic
• button to quickly get back to the top of the page in topics (no, there isn't one to go to the bottom)
• live preview of the reply/topic box
• load external CSS to customize the UI
• add label to users

I'll just link to the original topic so you can have some context if you want, otherwise these are just the links to download it:

• Original Topic: https://tildes.net/~tildes/1oa/browser_extension_tildes_extended
• Chrome: chrome.google.com
• Firefox: addons.mozilla.org
• Source: Github (feel free to do modification and open pull requests if you'd like!)

I need feedback to know what else you'd like to see implemented or what have bugs or could be done in a different/better way!

So I've been really excited about this page, but lately I keep coming here, glancing at the front page, and then leaving. I think it's in part the minimalist design and the way the colour of the clicked links is very similar to the colour of the unclicked ones, making it unclear at a first glance which threads one has visited already.

Since the pace of debate is moving much slower than on Reddit here (which I think is a good thing), it would be very useful to have some kind of a 'my discussions' page that you could save threads to - either threads you are participating in or just threads you are excited to see the responses to. This would make it much easier for users to return to interesting discussions without having to browse around ~ for ages trying to find that one interesting topic.

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?

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?

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.

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 know subgroups are still a very new thing, but this seems (to me at least) like an obvious one, with ~comp currently seeming to act as "~tech, but advanced". The topics are very similar, with ~comp's most active post right now being about machine learning and ~tech's being about open source code, topics that could easily be swapped between the groups and still fit in.

Author's note: I posted this a couple days ago in @Kat's WIP thread, but I felt it was a little too tough of an ask to put there. This is probably going to take a more serious time commitment to review than the average submission, so I want to make sure everyone knows what they're getting into (such as through that nifty word count that will appear in the thread title). To that end, let me lay out some context so you're more grounded as to what this is, where I came from, and how serious I am about it.

For starters, I wrote this as part of a complete manuscript (about 63k words total) over a couple months late last year on a challenge from a friend. Liking the direction it was going, I then spent much of the early part of this year fixing and tweaking and revising because it turned out I liked it so much I decided to plan out three more independent stories set after this one.

So what is this? This is a first-person science fiction story of a test subject within an ongoing science experiment. It is set in not-too-distant future, 60-80 years give or take--I didn't want to be too specific for World Building Reasons. The nature of that experiment is unknown to the subject. I need to work on my blurbs.

What type of feedback am I looking for? Any you're comfortable giving, and I've got a very thick skin (many calluses from toxic league of legends players, I'd joke if it weren't true). This is the fourth-or-so draft and I could use fresh eyes on the little things. I also highly value emotional feedback, like what something is making you feel, whether you found something upsetting or funny or confusing. This is an unreliable narrator, so there should bit of each. Endgame-wise, I am probably going to look to publish this somewhere somehow, but I want to make sure that I'm not barking up the wrong tree before putting too much more energy into this.

If this isn't a great format for this sort of work (and I get it. This text is twelve pages on a good day), I am open to suggestions on how it might be easier to consume and respond. I've used my markdown wizardry to mimic the format of my word doc, which I'm not planning on uploading directly. So please forgive weird formatting things like inconsistent italics. I tried to catch them all, but it's like playing a game of whack a mole over here.

Editor's note: The following text came to us within encrypted song files in specific order. We were also provided an executable file that decrypted the text so that we could publish it. The relationship between these songs and the narrative is often not clear. To allow readers the opportunity to judge any potential relationship for themselves, we have titled each bit of text with the correct song file it was encrypted within. The order was preserved.

Prologue

"Yesterday”.FLAC

I'm not breathing. I'm dead. Is this hell? Heaven? I’m in a white room with Adam and Eve in white robes as the gatekeepers. Why is the room tilted? It’s not a hospital; it’s far too dirty. Will I recognize anyone? Am I dressed for heaven? The grime makes me think maybe this hell. That’s the breaks then, huh. But why would demons be in lab coats? And what are those tops? Is that a scarf? Indoors?

Oh shit, they're staring at me.

Hi. Am I dead? Did I say that? Can I speak? I can’t breathe.

They looked at each other. Did I say anything? Maybe I'm not dead. But I'm not breathing. I’m not just not breathing, but I can’t breathe. I don't feel like I can move. Why can’t I breathe?

Holy shit, I don't have any legs. My arms aren't mine. They're someone else's. Some hairy darker bastard too. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. What the fuck is happening?

You're not dead, but you did die. That has all the clarity of a Taoist monk. I think the woman said it. She stepped forward a little bit and tilted her head to the side with some mouth flapping to match the words. Did I really hear it? How can I not be dead? Whatever happened in America froze you. Like, we talking cryogenics frozen? Disney movie Frozen? The Iceman cometh frozen? Even frozen people should be able to breathe, right? They needed to replace my arms? What was wrong with my old arms if I was frozen to death? You’re in a new body. Those arms are yours now.

Yeah, the woman has to have said some of that. She started leaning in during the mouth-flapping like she was talking to a child. Now she’s straight as a country boy at church. I’m going to have to track her specifically. This is tedious.

Asian woman. If you can hear this: sorry, I’m new here.

“My name is Nadia, not ‘Asian woman.’ Can you tell us your name?” She glanced back to the man before looking back at me, with her hands clasped like she was pleading. Do I need to be pleaded with? She put her hands back to her sides. Where am I?

“You’re in Istanbul.” That’s not Nadia. Her mouth didn’t flap. I think it’s a voice, and I think it’s the man’s, but I couldn’t see him flap. Nadia was blocking the view. I think she’s like two feet away or something. Just out of arm's reach, but close enough that I can’t see the man anymore. Now she’s backed away. Why does she do that? The timing is weird.

So I'm in Istanbul. My legs are gone. My arms are fake and way super hairy. I'm not breathing, but I'm not dead, though I did die. I felt my eyes roll. I guess you two did something to me then.

“Well,” This is the other voice. Now that Nadia has backed away I can see the man’s mouth flapping, but he’s barely doing anything else. Not even a simple hand-gesture. I thought he was just wallpaper. Breathing wallpaper. Or is it mine? Maybe mine is the mouth that’s flapping.

“The frozen you died, but your brain was intact and incredibly well-preserved by whatever happened. We transferred the data that your brain contained into an android unit we designed for this purpose, and here you are." Yep, not mine. It’s got to be the dude, especially because he did a weird, body-length bobblehead bounce the entire time that voice was happening. Wait--

“You designed an android not to have any legs?” I heard that one. That’s me. Okay, I'm getting better at this. That explains the breathing, I think. It at least explains the arms. I'm not dead, but I'm also not alive. This is fun. I'm having fun. “So what did you do to me and how the fuck did I get to Istanbul?”

Whatever script these two had, I'm sure I've deviated from it. They're spending a lot more time looking at each other in silence than mouth-flapping. Okay. Fake-breath. What didn't I notice? The recorder is a little black thing on a little spot at the bottom of the mirror. Oh, I'm laid on this weird chair thing that has me positioned to look across the room. That’s why everything at an angle, I guess. Well, let’s just get off of that. I can just lean against this wall. It’s drywall, but that’s fine so long as I’m not throwing myself at it. I’ll have to lean because my ass is rounded with holes where legs should be. If I imagined legs there, I’d probably look like I have a nice ass.

The room looks like a room you use to interrogate someone mixed with a kid’s idea of wall-design. The wall behind me and to my left are drywall, looks like. The opposite wall with the door and the wall to my right with a mirror are concrete. Not even brick, like just solid concrete. I didn’t even realize that was still code. If this is a hospital, I’m reporting a lot of code violations. This place looks like a pigsty, one that not even the hired help cleans up. Though, that might just be those concrete walls. I’m especially complaining about the lack of legs.

"We felt it was a safety risk to give you legs." Safety risk? Safety for whom? I can’t breathe. Who is this guy anyway? "I'm Mehmet."

"Wait, how did you hear that? Have I been saying everything?" I'd rather have a little privacy at some points, you know?

"Well, you haven't exactly been silent." Huh. That's going to be a problem.

"You should be able to create a subroutine for the thoughts you want to save without speaking." Nadia to the rescue, but how would I do--oh, I see. That's new.

Let's restart this, then.

"Mr. Roboto".FLAC

Goooooooooood morning, subconscious! WELCOME TO THE FUTURE! Cue audience applause and cheers. I'm your host, Mr. Android! As you know, we’ve been off the air for a while. There’s a lot to catch up on. That’s why we’re bringing in two special guests to help reintroduce us to the anxiety of life: Mehmet and Nadia! We got a great show for you tonight, so stay tuned because you have no choice anyway.

Before the break, Mehmet, you were saying that you felt it was a safety risk to give us legs?

"That's right, Mr. Android. The design team and I thought that if you had legs, you'd be likely to use them.”

You’re damn right. Cue audience laughter. What’s wrong with using legs?

“If you had that mobility, we don’t know what you’d use it for. You could do anything a normal person could do, even walk right on out of this building.”

I presume you wouldn’t like it if I walked out right now. What if I just wanted a coffee from our proud sponsor: BB's Coffee™?

"First, don’t drink coffee. Don’t drink anything. That mouth wasn’t designed for drinking."

We’ll see about that. Cue audience laughter.

“Second, we need you not to walk out because we’re trying to monitor you to make sure you’re safe, as well as try to figure out what happened around your death.”

We'll have to come back to that, Mehmet. First, tell us a little bit about yourself.

"Sure. I was born and raised here in Turkey, but my grandparents were studying tornadoes in Oklahoma when everything went down."

Your grandparents? How long ago are we talking about here?

“It’s been a bit more than a half-century.”

Alright, what is ‘everything’ and how did it impact your grandma?

"Well, whatever happened to kill you. No one is really sure what caused the incident to happen. The best we could make of it at the time is that there was a large eruption near America's capital, and after that almost the entire east coast was some form of an infected mess. People who didn't die immediately had their immune systems too compromised to handle any other serious illness. That killed most of them within a few years." A moment of silence fell on the stage.

How bad was the devastation?

"Most of the coast was gone. Flights were stopped by the US almost immediately, so people in those areas were stranded. One flight got out to Montreal and it wiped out nearly a quarter of the city’s population. Cities along in the infected area lost an average of 75% of their population within a couple weeks.”

How far did it get?

“Atlanta was the northernmost city along the coast to weather the outbreak. A well-timed storm system kept the illness from spreading further west than it did. The mountains usually marked the furthest west it got. People who flew from those areas in the moments before the quarantine were tracked down and quarantined forcibly.”

Did anyone come to help?

“Sure, if a vulture helps a corpse.” Cue audience laughter. Audience might not laugh. “No one dared try to go near the infected areas, but Mexico declared a relief effort. That really was an attempt to annex most of the west and Great Plains under what it considered its historic claim to the land. The locals did not see things the same way. It turned into a classic occupation situation. They were resisted.”

So Texas is the new Palestine? Or would Crimea be a better analogy? What did your grandparents do?

“It was something like that. My grandparents just wanted to keep studying meteorology. There really wasn't a place in the United States safe enough to do that anymore. They applied for refugee status in Turkey and moved here. From there, they had a typical immigrant story. They earned enough money to start a restaurant and set their children up with a good education to be successful in Turkish society." Cue audience awe and applause.

Fascinating stuff. Nadia, it's your turn. Tell us a little about yourself.

"Well, I'm from Saudi Arabia. My parents were in California until about a decade before I was born. My mother was German-American, from Oregon. My dad was second generation Chinese-American, Californian born.”

California was impacted by the incident?

“Indirectly. After the incident, California tried to maintain some semblance of normalcy, but there were too many other nations that wanted to claim California for it to keep that dream alive for long. Russia, Canada, Japan, China, and Mexico each fought the other and the Californian government as they tried to claim it for their own.”

So they were the prettiest gal at the ball. Cue audience laughter. How did they deal with that sort of peer pressure?

“California had to start a mandatory draft program to keep up with the military needs of the new environment. Every citizen was theoretically part of the military’s reserves. After a few decades of near constant skirmishing at sea and especially in the north where most of the invading forces fought, California was out of resources and friends and collapsed after a military coup. Turns out if you can’t pay the active service personnel, you can’t keep a country.”

Intense. How do your parents fit into that?

“My parents saw the writing on the wall and applied for visas to work and live in Saudi Arabia a few years before the government collapsed. Saudi Arabia’s requirement for immigrants were twofold: it has to be a family and the man has to be educated, so here I am." Cue audience applause.

That's wild. Turkey and Saudi Arabia are refuges for the educated for more than two generations. How much more than a half century are we even talking here? I feel like a Twinkie from a time capsule. Cue audience laughter.

“It’s been about 60 years.”

You heard right, subconscious. We've been dead and 'incredibly well-preserved' for about 60 years. Everyone you knew is probably dead. Everything you know doesn’t matter. Your parents are statistically 99.99% certain to be dead even if they did survive and were outside the zone impacted. You're a man out of time. Are you even really a man anymore? Oh well, at least you don't have to put up with that breathing nonsense anymore, right? That sure was a drag*.*

Tune in next time for an interview with Toto. What is the matter with Kansas? Find out what Dorothy's breath smelled like as we ask Toto about his upcoming tell-all biography: Help, I'm A Dog And My Owner Takes Me On Tornado Rides.

"Clint Eastwood".FLAC

Oh good. There's a way to combine these tracking subroutines with living in the present. Now I don’t have to live in mortal fear of every errant thought becoming vocalized.

"Thanks, Nadia. That was very helpful." I’m a bit surprised about how my voice sounds. It’s tinny and higher pitched than my voice. Almost nasally too, but that doesn’t make any sense. There’s no nasal cavity for this voice to work through, right? There is no booming echo that I’m used to feeling when I talk. I have a strange confidence that I hear my words exactly as they sound, with no perspectival shift involved as the one saying them. No sense in telling them about that. I don’t even know for sure what we’ve been talking about.

I can tell that they've started to ease up. Nadia’s doing less of that leaning-to-the-children thing and Mehmet’s shoulders aren’t as far back as it’s humanly possible to bend them. He almost looks relaxed now. The bobblehead days might be behind us. Still, I think their increased comfort is more because I was off in that other subroutine most of that time. It feels like coming out of a blackout. Damn I'm going to miss alcohol.

"You're welcome, but a lot has happened in 60 years that we should get you caught up on." Oh, we've moved on. I thought I was just making all that up. I guess not. Weird. She’s hovering near the recorder like she turned it on recently. Or maybe turned it off? That wouldn’t make any sense though.

"You know what, Nadia. I think that's a lot to soak in. Unless there are more subroutines that help me process stuff like world events or that give me some newspaper articles or stuff from the past 60 years or something, I think I'm okay moving on from that for now. It's more interesting to me to talk about why you've revived me and what it is you're hoping to get here."

"Are you sure? I made a presentation for you outlining the biggest trends and current ongoing conflicts around the world." This woman is a nerd. I like it, but damn. Calm down. I hope she didn’t make any spreadsheets. For her sake.

Speaking of calming down, I should probably take a moment myself. Let’s see. The room isn’t nearly as white as I thought. I should have been either dead or in a hospital. This place doesn’t make sense. These people don’t make any sense. They’re not in any lab uniforms I’ve seen. They look rather like they’re about to go clubbing.

Nadia is average height. She looks like she's in her late twenties or early thirties. Her look matches a mix of her parents’ heritage: half Chinese-American and half German-American. I wonder what part of China. Brown hair, brown eyes, olive skin. Now that I think about it, I’m not actually sure what about her face strikes me as especially Asian. Maybe high cheek bones are what do it. Small noses really don’t mean much to me. It’s just a holistic thing, I guess. She could easily be mistaken for just about any ethnicity. She’s wearing jeans and no burka, so hurray for Saudi progressivism. I bet she might even be allowed to drive! She’s wearing a traditional white lab coat, but it’s open and I can see a black flowy thing that is tucked into the front of the jeans. She is joyously well-prepared to talk about shit that’s in her wheelhouse. Then again, I do seem to be these people's lab rat and I know these two are just the ambassadors of a much larger team of scientists. Preparing for this moment is probably their job.

Mehmet is probably in his thirties or forties. I can never tell age with men. Once you're over 26, you could be as old as 45 before I notice. He's maybe about six feet tall or six one--although this is Istanbul, so height is probably in centimeters here. What even would that be in centimeters, 181 cm? Anyway, he’s also wearing the open, white lab coat. Under it is a blue and gray checkered button down shirt with his jeans, and this tiny yellow argyle scarf. It isn’t long enough to protect your neck from winter, so it’s weird. Boots are yellowish. He's got sandy brown hair and ocean blue eyes. They look radioactive. They have to be fake. Eyes aren’t that blue. He also doesn’t have much of a tan. For a Turkish boy that’s awkward as fuck, but I guess his grandparents are from Oklahoma so maybe he's just a traditional, melanin-challenged, white American type. He didn't say anything about his other set of grandparents, but that's not related to what they want from me. Maybe Germans. Turks and Germans always had a close relationship going. Probably best to assume that Germans are part of an experiment like this anyway. They’re always getting into shady shit. Viva la Nuremberg.

"I'm sure, Nadia. But we can go over your presentation later. Or maybe there's some way for me to watch it on my own time, or something. I don't know. You designed this thing." I hope there isn't. Call me old fashioned, but I don't like people messing with my thoughts.

"Oh there is. Yeah, I'll upload it later." Great. Thanks, Nadia.

"To your question about purpose, we revived you because we don't know what happened 60 years ago,” Mehmet, as usual and fitting the German thesis, is stiff and blunt with his delivery. He doesn’t make hand gestures as he talks, which I never realized someone could accomplish. He barely moves. Makes me wonder who’s the real robot here, you know? “It was an important historical moment. We want to understand what happened to put it into a broader context of how the world changed since the fall of Imperial Era America." I'll let that label slide. Too many things to focus on to let a naming convention derail things.

"So you're hoping I can fill you in on the details."

"Exactly, at least what you know," he says.

"It would be a lot easier to put things into context if I had some idea of what context to put them into. Aren’t there like relevant stories or movies or something you can show me? Or anything that makes me feel a little less like a lab rat?" Mehmet winced, and Nadia glanced at him again. It’s especially noticeable because Nadia is almost always closer to me than Mehmet, so she has to turn around to look at him. Something makes them uncomfortable about me. Am I deemed unnatural? Is this entire experiment sacrilegious? Wouldn't be the first time for either. I goddamn hope there are some ethical qualms here.

While I was searching for an answer for their perpetual discomfort, Nadia chimed in. "We have a list of topics that we agreed as a team to discuss. I hope you'd understand if we took your suggestion to the team before agreeing to it? If we give you too much context we might skew your presentation. It’s just something we’d need to carefully plan out with the team."

"Sure, of course. Makes sense to me." Why are you even asking me though? I don’t have any power in this exchange, physical or emotional. Hell, you've even made sure I can't run at you. Oh shit, they’re about to leave.

“Hey, before you head out, is there a way I can be positioned so I can see that mirror over there? I’d like to see myself. I don’t even know if I make facial expressions.”

Nadia responded much faster than either of them have been up until now, “Oh you make facial expressions alright.” Fuck. She’s chuckling under her breath too. What have I been doing? If there were any blood in this husk, it’d all be in my cheeks right now. I used to cosplay as a tomato when I’d get the least bit worked up. I have that feeling right now.

Mehmet moved in closer to the table I’m on for the first time. Unlike Nadia, who often looks to him, he doesn’t look to her before grabbing a side of the table. He looks to her after though, and gives her a nod. I can’t tell if that’s workplace hierarchy or respect or just a man in the workplace or what. "Yeah. We can move you. Could you get away from that wall?" Without responding, I slid away from the wall as he suggested. Made sense if they were moving the table with me on it.

“Hang tight,” Nadia said, but she didn’t need to. I had already grabbed onto the edges of the table. Mehmet and Nadia lifted the table a couple inches and walked it slowly to the wall that was to my left. I’m not under any illusions about what this mirror is. It’s a one-way with a team watching on the other side. There’s no way it isn’t. The wall the mirror sits in looks like they broke through it just to put the mirror in; it’s got all sorts of chips and cracks like somebody actually chiseled the hole out. The important thing here is that I can see myself now.

They certainly had an eye for detail. My face has a bigger, more squished nose than I'm used to. It’s all olive, which of course I imagined from the arms, but to see it brings a new depth to this place. Is this actually me now? The dark brown eyes are new, though they are probably contacts anyway. I bet they look red when the light catches them. That’ll be a test for later. They should be light-brown things that would look yellow in the light. They’re not. I can’t believe I miss them assuring me I’m going to be blind by the time I’m 50. Eyebrows are just as thick--like caterpillars resting on a face. They didn't bother with hair on the top, but that's understandable. Hair is hard and they put all their hair energies in the arms and eyebrows. For some reason they put on a light stubble all along my jawline. Why would they want to show I could grow a beard? That was never true before. I'm not really crushed it still isn't true now. They replaced all my freckles with a simple mole just under my left eye. They thought to put on a mole? Can androids even get skin cancer? It looks like real skin, except it doesn't play as much. They must have made me to look like the most stereotypically handsome, bald man in society, with a mole to make it all seem real. I'm okay with that. This body looks good. I’d date me. Now let's see those pearly whites. Holy shit, nevermind. This mouth is fucked. The teeth are perfect, but everything within it is this wiry abomination that probably didn't get enough design time.

I realize now that I'm too busy gawking to think much about how this all must look to the people behind the mirror. Of course, this was after sticking my wire cage pretending to be a tongue out at them. Nadia and Mehmet are near the door now, watching me look at myself.

I put on my best smile for them. Got to show a good game face, right? "Thanks. I was just dying to marvel at my own newfound good looks." Both Nadia and Mehmet smiled back, but it was Mehmet’s reaction I was after. It wasn’t a very big one, but it’s good enough for me. Hopefully that means he can react to a bad pun, but he could have just been smiling because I smiled. That’s a thing with meatbags. Though that smile didn’t move up an inch. It was one of those horizontal smiles that you give when you just want to be polite. This guy must have taken a martial arts class in self-expression because he does not react more than he has to.

I want to ask them what the endgame here is. If they're just going to turn me off again after bringing me back from the dead to have a good chat, then that's kind of a bad thing for me. If they're planning on keeping me around, it's not clear what use I can be outside of this experiment. Maybe they want to have proof that they can bring people back from the dead and put them into androids? A new technology that gives people (who can afford it, or are deemed worth it) immortality and further leads to the singularity and domination of all humanity by robot people. It doesn't seem like there's any way out of this mess that can be good for me. God damn I need legs.

They’re still here, watching and waiting. I might as well voice some of my appreciation for this body. "I have some hairy arms here. Oh, and I feel these washboard abs. I'm guessing that design choice was you, Nadia?" I felt myself wink. We're back. Breathing crisis resolved. “Were there some legs in the works for this project too? Are they a hairy match for these arms?" And what are the hair trends in porn these days? Is everyone hairy? I can’t ask them that. Incidentally, and unrelated: this mirror shows that this body can, in fact, blush. Not as red as I’m used to, but the cheeks do change color slightly. How did they do that?

"The legs were in development because we didn't make the final risk assessments until after the base android design was tested and showed that the legs performed far better than expectations." Dang, Mehmet. That sort of response really goes beyond what I'd think the team would want you to say. I hope you don't get iced for that. I'm starting to like your blunt, no nonsense style.

"Cool.” I nodded to make it seem like I was deeply offended. “Are there any questions you wanted to get into right away or did you want to talk with your team before moving forward?"

"I … ” Nadia held that like she was interjecting on a conversation she wasn’t in. “I think it's probably best if we talk to the team first and give you some time to get adjusted. I'll also add that video to a list you can access internally while you wait. You already have access to some music, both contemporary hits for you and more modern tunes. There are also some other things that we put together." Nadia smiled gently as though she had done me some great service, but I’d prefer to find my own way thank you. They can’t know what I like or don’t like. They don’t know me. What happened to the internet? Can't I just access that or would that be way too much of a security risk? Fuck. They're gone.

Well, might as well get a better look at this thing resembling a tongue.

I browse by activity, like most of us, but every couple days I give a look to the most voted topics to see how the community is shaping the consolidated content because once we are at a more finalized code (trust, tags, etc) I think that the most voted content should reflect the most high quality as well.

I just realize that the default timing is 24h timespan. This means that the list show the most voted, created in the last 24h.

It is my opinion that on tildes we should give content more time to be consumed. We don't need the frenetic feeding of Reddit. Some people could just not open tildes today but maybe tomorrow, and lose good content with this default timespan.

I suppose registered users will be able to customise their home page default filtering but as "soon" we should open for reading without login, we should think about who just come by to read and is not registered (yet).

What's your opinion on this?

I guess there has been a lot of deliberation on the ramifications of reddit's upvote/downvote system, and voting for topics.
How do you all feel about the way reddit aggregates karma and shows totals for users?
How does this impact submissions and and commentary?
How does the voting system here change post and comment visibility?

Interested to see everyone's take on this.

I'd like to suggest that the default view for topics look something like the image below, with expanded top level replies, and collapsed lower level replies. And have an option under each reply that would expand the next level of replies below it, continuing this behavior on down to the lowest level comments. There could even be an "Expand all below this comment", although I don't show that in this illustration.

That would all readers to quickly read through many or all of the direct responses to the topic before deciding which responses to dig into deeper. It would also help direct responses which aren't listed near the top get more exposure. The site could even be coded to delay loading lower level comments until an expand link is clicked, reducing page sizes and improving load times.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0u6vuopufierijp/TildesDefaultThreadDisplay.png?dl=0

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.

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

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!