Tildes already replaces some of the functionality of downvoting with its tags (troll, flame, off-topic). What if we replaced voting with "positive" tags: helpful, interesting, etc.? This would play off of people's indecision when faced with multiple options. A binary decision is very easy - upvoting vs. downvoting. But if you just want to vote on something because it backs up your political opinion you might pause to think for a second if you need to declare the comment "interesting".

The number of positive tags could still be aggregated into a score. Perhaps we could list the positive tags at the bottom of the comment e.g.: "10 x helpful, 5 x interesting".

The new comment-flagging feature is in place and is starting to operate: some comments are being hidden based on tags applied by users.

The irony is that everyone knows a comment is hidden except the person who posted the comment. If someone's own comment is being hidden, they should know that. I assume that part of the motive behind these tags is to teach Tildeans what is and isn't acceptable here. If someone doesn't know their comments are being flagged and hidden, they'll just keep on doing what they're doing.

There should be some mechanism to advise a user that their comment is hidden - like happens when their comment is removed by the admin.

EDIT: It's not just about educating people not to post more shallow comments in future. It's also just letting them know their comment has been hidden, as a courtesy.

Hello, fellow Tildrestians. Having just joined, I found that Tildes was a substantial improvement from the standard Reddit fare. Hooray for substantial conversation!

I’ve always been a long time lurker, and I’ve never been confident enough to start threads. So, ~talk, this is a vent thread for your problems and your worries. Not for the fact that you stubbed your toe, but possibly stuff that might worry you. If this doesn’t go well, then I will probably remove this thread in emberassment.

But if it does, then perhaps we can all propose solutions to others problems. Perhaps we can comfort each other with advice and tips. It could be a stupid idea, which, if it is, let me know, but it could be a chance to actually not be the circlejerking redditors some of us once were.

And if this in the wrong group, also do let me know.

Tildes code of conduct says

Do not post anyone's sensitive personal information (related to either their real world or online identity) with malicious intent.

Can you change that to just say don't post personal info? Even if it's not done with malicious intent it should still be removed to protect people's privacy.

Also while it does say to not post spam on tildes terms of service I think It should say that on the code of conduct.

Edit: I mean posting personal info without consent and not public information.

Telling someone how to contact a company would be fine but not posting someone's address.

I don't want to get too high in the clouds with moderating philosophy. Instead I want to talk about action steps that can be taken in the very near term to improve moderating. Especially so long as Deimos is the only one with most of the moderating tools at their disposal, I think it's crucial to make sure it's as painless as possible.

So far it looks like Deimos has these moderating tools available to him:

1. User bans
2. Comment removal
3. Thread locking/removal
4. Title/tag editing (and this ability is shared by many of us as well)

Am I missing anything?

The three next tools I would hope are coming next are:

• A reporting mechanism, where users can report comments and threads that they think should be removed.
• A feedback mechanism for reports, telling users that a report they gave was acted on.
• A note taking system for the moderator-type person, shareable with all other moderator-type persons at that level, with an expiration date probably around 30 days.

Now I'll talk about why. First, the reporting mechanism. While it's still possible to keep up with everything that gets posted, I don't necessarily think it's the best use of Deimos' time to read literally everything, especially as the site expands its userbase and presumably activity level and depth. The reporting system at first should probably just be a button, maybe eventually with a pop-up field allowing the user a brief description why their reporting, and a queue that gets populated with comments and threads that get reported.

Coinciding with a report queue/option should probably be an easy, rudimentary system for providing feedback to those whose reports led to moderating action. At first, an automated message saying something like "thank you for reporting recently. Action has been taken on one of your recent reports" without any relevant links would do fine, and we can leave the particulars of how much detail to add for later discussions.

The last thing I think should help things considerably in the immediate term is a time-limited user tracking tool for the moderator-type person. As things scale, it isn't always going to be feasible to use mental bandwidth remembering each username and the relevant history associated with their behavior. A good note-taking tool with an auto-timed expiration date on notes would be a good way to address what can easily become a hugely mentally taxing role at almost any scale. This tool should let Deimos take a discrete note for himself (and other moderators at that permission level and higher) connected to a user regarding any questionable threads or comments that were yellow/red flags, or any other moderator action taken against a user within the last X days/months (the particulars don't matter to me as much as that there is an expiration date to these notes). This should let the moderator type person focus on the broader history of the users they're looking at before making a decision, without having to go searching for every relevant comment from the past 30 days. Fewer problematic users at scale should fall through the cracks and more users that might just be having a bad day can be let off with comment removals and/or warnings.

Are these priorities fair? Are there design elements you would want to see in the immediate term that would help reduce the burden of moderating? Are there problems with these tools I'm suggesting that you would want to see addressed?

I often stumble in to threads with entire comment chains deleted. I assume most people here have faced the same situation as well, either here or on reddit.

I'd like to see a move to locking comments rather than deleting them by default. That would mean no further replies to the comment or any other comment in that chain, no one being able to delete or edit their comments, no one being able to add or remove votes to a comment, etc.

I understand for particularly egregious comments removal is completely necessary (especially when it goes hand-in-hand with banning users), but a lot of times comments are deleted as a means to prevent long argumentative back-and-forth chains that spam and derail topics, as well as antagonize users.

In a lot of cases I feel like deleting the comment only further serves to hide what is unacceptable behaviour (even if that behaviour should be obvious), rather than setting an example for the userbase.

(EDIT: Those in the comments have asked me to remove specific names. I have replaced names with emoji that I like.)

We recently had:

• a thread whose OP defended a confederate statue erected by white supremacists on purely apolitical grounds
• a thread whose OP defended scientific racism on purely apolitical grounds

I'm really annoyed. If you really want to defend something that looks to everyone else like white supremacy, please avoid:

• Claiming to be apolitical while disagreeing with someone's politics. If you're telling someone else "your political stance is wrong," you're having a political opinion. "You're being too political" is a political opinion the same way "there is no God" is a religious opinion. This happened like a kajillion times in both threads.

• Granting benefit of the doubt to white supremacists or sources only used by white supremacists. Example: In the confederate statue thread, 🦇 effectively said "OK, so the builders of the statue hired a white supremacist speaker to commemorate it -- but they're not white supremacists and neither is the statue." Seriously, come on. And stop citing the spokespeople of white supremacist groups to prove they're not white supremacists -- they intentionally tone down that shit for the media, which is why you look super tone deaf when people post actual accounts of things they did, like holding town hall meetings about how great lynchings are when they thought no one was looking.

• Claiming you'd agree with whoever's arguing with you, except for one inconsequential fact you never mentioned any other time. Example: In the confederate statue thread, 🦈 said that he wouldn't mind if the statue had been taken down legally -- but every other time it came up he said it was wrong to take down the statue at all, because that was whitewashing history.

• Calling leftists "childish" and "easily-offended." Words like this do have a place in politics, but you've been misusing them. I read both threads front to back -- one or two people ended their arguments with "I'm offended" but basically everyone also said "here's why your view of the world is wrong" or "here's why this is bad and it hurts people." When you start your post by saying "oh, how childish!" and then just repeat the thing you said in the first place, you're basically saying "I'm not listening."

• Accusing leftists of being unwilling to grapple with the facts. Again, this is allowed and fine when it's true, but you've been abusing it. For instance, in a thread by 🦐 on The Bell Curve the original poster claimed The Bell Curve was state-of-the-art, and leftists were ignoring it. That's not true: there was a huge leftist response immediately after it was published, from academics and popsci guys too. Several people linked leftist articles and takedown videos, which he ignored. Maybe the leftists are wrong, but it's not that they ignored it.

Here are some of the ways you were possibly tricked into believing white supremacists:

• They told you their sources were good, and instead of checking, you believed it.
• They told you left-wing sources were shrill and unresearched, and instead of checking, you believed it.
• They told you there was a conspiracy against their viewpoint and that's why the criticism isn't credible. (For The Bell Curve, it's the political correctness conspiracy -- for statues, it's the easily-offended liberal masses.)
• They told you there was more nuance to the situation than it looked like and made an emotional appeal. Intelligent people like to imagine there's no way things could be as simple as they look -- "not everyone would be smart enough to uncover that this apparent act of white supremacy was, in fact, politically neutral!" -- so you believed them.
• You are probably a little bit racist. (Or even a lot racist.) You might not be racist enough to hate black people, but you might be racist enough to find white supremacists more credible than their victims, even though you know the historical facts say their victims were telling the truth.

Here are some preemptive comments:

• I don't want to censor anybody. This thread is not censorship.
• I do want to shout bad opinions down with better opinions. People who support free speech, which I think is most of the people on this website, also want this. This is an example of me trying to do that.
• Yes, leftists can do all the things I listed. (And yes I'm a leftist.) When I go to a site like Twitter or Tumblr I see left-wingers saying all kinds of horrible, unsupported shit they heard from their idiot hippie friends. It's frustrating and sickening and it's a giant part of the reason I don't go on those sites very often. But on this site I only saw right-wingers doing this stuff, not left-wingers. That kinda surprised me because usually it's the side with the biggest groupthink bubble that says really stupid stuff and keeps on trucking.

Thank you and sorry for the long, mean post.

Let's talk about what tags we should be using and how they should be used. For those of you who haven't yet read it here is the doc page on tags.

Here's what I'm looking at so far:

Talk: I removed the talk, discussion, and conversation tags from the topics in ~talk in accordance with "Don't add a tag that's the same or very similar to the group that you're posting in." If you're in ~talk of course you're having a discussion or conversation. (There are exceptions that are about conversation such as "How do you discuss open minded topics with close minded people?"). I tagged some "How was your weekend" type topics with casual conversation.

What do you think about talk and/or discussion tags in other groups?

Question: As I understand it, question should be ask Update: done

Meta: I would define meta as topics about the site or ~ the topic is posted in. Since ~tildes is entirely meta, meta is redundant here. Most of the meta topics elsewhere are about the ~ they are in. As an example of something I think is mistagged, I wouldn't tag the ~lgbt introduction topic meta since it isn't about the ~ . Update: removed meta from ~tildes topics.

I wanted to get some feedback before I continue so I don't make a mistake unilaterally retagging something that I shouldn't.

What are your thoughts on these tags? What other tags do we need to talk about? What strategies are you using for tagging and retagging?

This post will be discussing the nature of political correctness and its ramifications on our culture, intended to analyze current trends and provide a basis for discussion on a very relevant issue in our society. This is a long post, so buckle up.

DISCLAIMERS

Before I begin, I will begin a series of disclaimers, as I’ll be making a lot of claims in this piece, so sorry for the length. For the sake of this post, I will be assuming the role of a neutral character, with no intended leanings towards any political or cultural ideology. Any reference that I make towards a specific side of the spectrum of politics or to social cultures does not reflect my personal opinion on them nor show a bias/prejudice towards that side. I would also like to note that, while I’m trying to make this a quality read about politically correct culture, this isn’t a lecture, a thesis, a Pulitzer article, or even a simple college essay, and is simply very informal essay. A lot of what I say goes off of either whatever comes off the top of my head or things that I find out from a quick search on Google. Some things may or may not be correct, and if they are, please feel free to call me out for it in the comments.

With that said, let’s get into it: Political correctness. Defined by a Google search as “the avoidance, often considered as taken to extremes, of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.”, has become a powerful influence in the media that people consume as more and more creators, fans, and everything in between try to avoid language or dialect that would offend audiences. Our society progressively has become more and more PC (politically correct) due to an increasing attempt to remove toxic or otherwise harmful material, generally rhetoric like slurs or playing upon stereotypes, from media in an attempt to create a safer, more friendly environment and community, especially for those who often feel targeted by such harsh rhetoric. PC culture is inherently good-willed with an unquestionably noble goal fueling it. However, in the act of making more and more things PC, the media that is affected changes, for better or for worse. In the viewpoint of many, PC culture has become increasingly threatening to the quality of the media they consume, as the element of vulgarity that media possesses sometimes is attributed to their success or favorability. An increase in avoiding content that is in any way threatening to a certain culture has upset many because it dampens the reality of the content, affects its strength, or births new weaknesses. In short, people believe that making things more PC is making them less good.

The big question of this post is why PC culture matters to the opinions of those who digest media affected by it. It is a question with a myriad of answers, as its influence has been taken in many directions. As iterated before, some claim that it strips away the reality of the content and provides a false reality or delusional perspective; some claim that it softens content too much and dampens the quality; and others think that it is simply stupid to try to be so friendly with what content they make or consume. The element of vulgarity that political incorrectness adds to content makes things more interesting than what they actually are, ironically because they highlight or exaggerate the reality of what they offer, and taking that away from people or reducing it takes away that precious component by avoiding any sort of offensive material. Take SNL, for instance; their skits like Black Jeopardy plays upon Black culture/stereotypes and is widely acclaimed for the hilarity of their vulgarity, but were it to face a demand for more PCness, it would lose a lot of the charm it had because of the necessary avoidance of content that would offend Black culture. The problem with this is that offensive material is not always a great sin that must be purged away. Material that PC culture can see as offensive encompasses a great deal of things, from simple slurs to stereotypes of cultures and societies. While it is good, even preferable, that things such as slurs or directly offensive comments are censored or dismissed, other forms of content seen as offensive are necessary to provide an ounce of harsh reality to the content that is provided. A specific example of such a case would be how the news handled the increase of refugee crimes in Germany and Sweden since those countries took in more Syrian immigrants. PC culture would try to dissolve the correlation as one being the product of another, but non-PC content would assume that the increase in refugees led to that increase. While it is very offensive to assume that the large intake of Syrians has led to that increase, being too PC by dancing around the issue and saying that refugees from other countries relatively contribute the same amount to the violence would be feigning ignorance to a clear and very possible causality, ultimately affecting the quality of the news piece. The same could be said for many other things, like TV shows, blog posts, etc.; When concerning or including potentially controversial content, avoiding the elements that make them controversial or ignoring them takes away from the media’s effectiveness. In other words, being too PC and removing the gritty elements of something can remove the punch that it has and make it seem fake, uninteresting, or any other dissatisfying adjective.

That’s not to say that offensive material must be in abundance, however; one must never have too much of something, as it may upset the balance of acceptable and unacceptable content. But certain material like social commentary, often in the form of societal stereotypes or portrayals of a culture, is a necessary element to add truth or interest in whatever is being made, albeit it being handled with an utmost delicacy and respect. Saying that the increase in refugee crimes means that all Syrians are criminals, scum of the earth, and a true representation of how shit the Middle East/Islam is would be greatly offensive and also detract from the quality/esteem that that news piece may have. Having the PC to refer to them less offensively, as well as discussing the issue in a manner that doesn’t clearly perpetuate Syrians as the devil, allows for the controversial content to be taken more seriously, basically adding civility to otherwise provoking content. On a gentler note, Black Jeopardy often plays upon the tropes of black culture on relatable, universal grounds, like home culture or the more meaningful discrimination from white people. It doesn’t say that all black people act without genteel to one another or that all white people are evil/stupid, but plays upon familiar stereotypes and experiences shared by many people of both races and enhances their hilarity with their trademark controlled crudity. While this example reflects how PC culture can mitigate offensiveness, it can also bridge gaps between people by portraying them as equals, not separated the nature of their age, sex, race, sexuality, or disabilities. Diversity within a space, such as a profession, a community, or group, is PC culture at its best, for it highlights inclusiveness and unity that political incorrectness would draw borders with. It allows people of any background to pursue the same career choices or interests without discrimination or other forms of inequality, putting forward the message that despite the differences those people may have, they are still human beings, one alike to another, all part of one human society.

Now that we’ve gone over the merits of both PC and non-PC culture, it’s time to evaluate the consequences that they each have on society. I say consequences because the developments both cultures set precedents for how media controls the amounts of PC put into their content as more and more new media juggles the amounts of friendly content they put in and the vulgar content they take out; and of course, vice versa. Political correctness has shown a powerful trendsetting effect in that once an action is called out for not being PC, it creates a rippling effect where all other forms of media avoid that un-PC element. If you take the Me Too Movement, once sexual harassment claims have been made against one big Hollywood figure, a million more followed in its wake, and now many Hollywood big wigs and US politicians reel in the fear of getting “Me Too’d” and losing their job/getting indicted. While it’s not a real presentation of PC culture at work, the Me Too movement’s rippling effect demonstrates how severe PC culture has influencing society, as now the sexually harassed don’t feel the need to cower behind the fear of denial and claims of insanity that would have been used against them pre-Me Too. And while it’s excellent that sexual harassers are getting what’s coming to them, the crossfire catches many unfortunate victims in the rise of Me Too and its anti-sexual harassment waves. James Gunn is a very relevant example of this, as his history of highly distasteful vulgar Tweets caught up to him and led to his expulsion due to Disney’s attempts to be PC. But Gunn’s expulsion has caused a big issue since he’s not actually a rapist or someone who has harassed his actors, but simply someone who made a couple of extremely stupid jokes, jokes which he had already apologized for 6 years ago. Despite apologizing twice, Gunn is still seen as too much of an un-PC person to work under Disney. This presents the problem of PC culture having too high of a sensitivity for things that they think are absolutely wrong and criminal. Gunn’s actions reflect the rising issue of where any hint of vulgarity in the publicity of an individual can be used against them to tarnish their image, something that has been in prudent effect by the Me Too movement. And while social justice demands that individuals like these who have a history of offenses must be reprimanded, the work that they have created shall suffer in quality after losing an essential component of what made them great. This is not to say that all individuals who have been accused and punished don’t deserve their fate, but merely a claim of consequence.

Sensitivity is the name of the game in today’s culture. People are becoming increasingly sensitive over things that present even a hint of harm towards an individual or group, attacking that thing like vultures in order to dispel the negativity whatever comment or element that object has to enforce a positive atmosphere. This particular trend is something associated with social justice warriors, or SJWs for short, which has become something of an internet slur because of the reputation that they carry of being agents of anti-vulgarity. They have become such an issue to many people because they are being claimed to attack the right to free speech that individuals carry, becoming a nuisance to many who now have to watch what they say with extreme delicacy, lest they become swarmed by attacks by those who denounce them for their profane statements. But their actions aren’t inherently bad, they’re just people trying to create a safer environment for people who frequently find themselves harassed by the world around them. It’s simply that they exaggerate their efforts to such a point that their actions carry a negative connotation with them. They even fight fire with fire, attacking individuals and harassing them to get them to stop their offensive comments through brute force. But when you fight fire with fire, it just spreads, and those who are attacked by SJWs and see them as a threat to their experiences will double their anti-PC nature to combat these SJWs, creating a loop of toxicity as both sides wage a war to maintain their ideal community. This is unfortunately the great conundrum of PC vs anti-PC: Two sides fighting for absolutes that can never be achieved. SJWs and advocates for absolute PC environments will never achieve it because there will always be people who want to speak their mind about people and things that others will find offensive, and anyone can get offended by anything. A truly PC environment would have to restrict all forms of communication, otherwise someone will eventually get offended and upset the “harmony” the absolute PC achieves. On the other side of the spectrum, an environment without any form of PC will find itself quarreling with each other all the time as people will lack the restraint to say offensive things and therefore find themselves at ends with whatever group their speech or actions offend. An environment without PC is an environment without rules, and an absence of rules will result in chaos.

Now the question to this is: Where’s the sweet spot? If too much PC and too little are both bad, is the medium the best? In truth, I don’t really think any balance of PC and anti-PC will ever be truly perfect. There will always be advocates for both sides fighting to increase the influence of whatever they fight for, and the balance will always tip to one side or the other. Fortunately for the human race, we have the ability to exercise a lack of care. The reality of this feud is that there will always be something you don’t like, and nothing you or people like you can do will change that fact. You can call out as many sexual predators, societal offenders, and all other forms of anti-PC individuals all you want, but you won’t stop people from doing it. You can label SJWs as thin-skinned and juvenile all you want, but you’ll only be feeding the fire. The only happy solution to this issue is to simply accept the reality that you can’t create a perfect world for yourself by changing everyone else. You can keep fighting the battles and win as many as you’d like, but you’ll never win the war. If you’re someone who wants the absolutes, you’ll never get it. The only semblance of peace you’ll get is accepting there will always be bad.

PC and anti-PC cultures both possess a merit to them valuable to our society: PC culture imposes civility and friendliness to all people, especially those who are frequently discriminated or treated unfairly, ensuring they feel safe, happy, and equal to their fellows; anti-PC culture, however, advocates for the freedom to say what needs to be said, and while it is vulgar, it is real, and reality must be embraced. People may always fight with each other for each side as they get increasingly sensitive, and sometimes even do something that turns the tides for them, but they will never truly defeat one or the other. The balance between them is always shifting and will never really settle, but the beauty of this war is that it teaches us about people, about their experiences and their beliefs, and help us come to terms with reality. Whether we want to change that reality for the better or champion its present merits, it is, and always will be, up to us.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to discuss, criticize, compliment, etc. in the comments.

One aspect of the Writing Prompts subreddit that frustrated me the most was that the submission that got the most responses was often the one that was submitted first. I found that in order to ensure that I got feedback and criticism, I often found myself rushing or submitting sloppy work so that I could submit first. Often times I would ignore prompts I liked because other posts had already taken off.

I’d like to try something here that addresses some of those issues. I imagine it working like this:

1. The first post would be a number of prompts that participants would choose from to be that week’s prompt.

2. After a prompt is chosen, I wouldn’t accept submissions for one/two weeks to give people time to develop their ideas and submissions.

3. A new post would be created for submissions for the past week’s prompt and providing a new list of potential prompts for the following week.

4. Go to 2...

So long as it is practical, I will read and provide feedback and constructive criticisms for every submission.

I hope this encourages people to develop fledgling ideas as they have the time to let their ideas breathe and they have the promise of feedback at the end of it.

Of course this isn’t meant to replace other casual writing prompts.

Edit:

For those interested a few questions:

1. Is one week enough time to write?

2. Would it be better for the writing time to include the weekend?

3. Would you be okay with certain restrictions like 1,500 words? Is that too many words? Too few?

Edit2:

Okay, I'll try to set this up!

Over the weekend I'll think up some prompts. Here's how I see it rolling out right now. Feel free to suggest other things as it's all fluid right now. I'm open to any and all suggestions.

1. Monday, Aug 20, I'll post three or four prompts. I'll leave voting up to participants? Or maybe allow the whole Tildes community to vote on the kind of story or theme they would like to read (hopefully to bring writers more feedback)?

2. Tuesday, Aug 21, I'll announce the weekly prompt. Remaining prompts with good support will be carried over to the following week? Remaining prompts with little support will be removed from the pool?

3. The following Wednesday, Aug 29, I'll open a thread for the past week's submissions and post a pool of three or four prompts to choose from.

Not sure how voting for prompts will work, I'm thinking of posting the possible prompts in the comments and using Tilde's voting system.

Lots of new folks seem to be coming in these past days, so I wanted to make a post that compiles some useful things to know, commonly asked questions, and a general idea of tildes history (short though it may be). Please keep in mind that tildes is still in Alpha, and many features that are usually present such as repost detection haven't been implemented yet.

Settings

First of all, check out the settings page if you haven't yet. It's located in your user profile, on the right sidebar. There are different themes available, the account default is the 'white' theme, which you can change. I recommend setting up account recovery in case you forget your password, and toggle marking new comments to highlight new comments in a thread. There are more features available but you should go look in the settings yourself.

Posting

You can post a topic by navigating to a group and clicking on the button in the right sidebar. Tildes uses markdown, if you are not familiar with it check the text formatting doc page. Please tag your post so it is easier for other people to find, and check out the topic tagging guidelines. Some posts have a topic log in the sidebar that shows what changes were done to the post since it was posted. You can see an example here. Some people have the ability to add tags to posts, edit titles, and move posts to different groups. They were given the ability by Deimos, see this post.

Topic Tags

You can find all posts with the same tag by clicking on a tag on a post, which will take you to an url like https://tildes.net/?tag=ask, where ask is the tag you clicked on. Replace ask with whatever tag you want to search for. You can also filter tags within a group like this: https://tildes.net/~tildes?tag=discussion, and it will only show you posts within that group. Clicking on a tag while you are in a group achieves the same effect.

You can also filter out posts with specific tags by going to your settings and defining topic tag filters.

Comment Tags

Comment tags are a feature that was present in the early days of tildes, but was removed because of abuse. There were five tags you can tag on someone else's comment: joke, noise, offtopic, troll, flame. The tags have no effect on sorting or other systematic features; they were only used to inform the user on the nature of a comment. The tags would show up along with the number of people who applied them, like this: [Troll] x3, [Noise] x5

People used these tags as a downvote against comments they disliked, and because the tags appeared at the top of a comment in bright colors, they often would bias the user before they read the comment. The abuse culminated in the first person banned on the website, and the comment tags were disabled for tweaking.

As of September 07, 2018, the comment tags have been re-enabled and are experimented with. Any account over a week old will have access to this ability. The tagging button is located on the centre bottom of a comment. You cannot tag your own comment. Here are the comment tagging guidelines from the docs.

Currently, the tags are: exemplary, joke, offtopic, noise, malice. The exemplary tag can only be applied once every 8 hours, and requires you to write an anonymous message to the author thanking them for their comment. Similarly, applying the malice tag requires a message explaining why the comment is malicious. The tags have different effects on the comments, which you can read about here, and here.

Search

The search function is fairly primitive right now. It only includes the title and text of posts and their topic tags.

Default sorting

The current default sorting is activity, last 3 days in the main page, activity, all time in individual groups. Activity sort bumps a post up whenever someone replies to it. 'Last 3 days' mean that only posts posted in the past 3 days will be shown. You can change your default sort by choosing a different sort method and/or time period, and clicking the 'set as default' button that will appear on the right.

Bookmarks

You can bookmark posts and comments. The "bookmark" button is on the bottom of posts and comments. Your bookmarked posts can be viewed through the bookmark page in your user profile sidebar. Note: to unbookmark a post, you have to refresh first.

Extensions

@Emerald_Knight has compiled a list of user created extensions and CSS themes here: https://gitlab.com/Emerald_Knight/awesome-tildes

In particular, I found the browser extension Tildes Extended by @crius and @Bauke very useful. It has nifty features like jumping to new comments, markdown preview and user tagging.

Tildes Development

Tildes is open source and if you want to contribute to tildes development, this is what you should read: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

For those who can't code, you might still be interested in the issue boards on Gitlab. It contains known issues, features being worked on, and plans for the future. If you have a feature in mind that you want to suggest, try looking there first to see if others have thought of it already, or are working on it.

Tildes' Design and Mechanics

In other words, how is it going to be different from reddit? Below are some summaries of future mechanics and inspiration for tildes' design. Note: most of the mechanics have not been implemented and are subject to change and debate.

1. Tildes will not have conventional moderators. Instead, the moderation duties will be spread to thousands of users by the trust system. [Trust people, but punish abusers]. More info on how it works and why it is designed that way:

   • Docs on future mechanics
   • Possible levels of trust that users can acquire
   • A long rant
   • Bubble-up mechanics: 1 , 2
   • A group is it's worst own enemy
   • If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault
   • On a technicality
   • This neat game about trust and game theory

2. Instead of subreddits, there are groups, a homage to Usenet. Groups will be organized hierarchically, the first and only subgroup right now is ~tildes.official. Groups will never be created by a single user, instead, they will be created based on group interest ^{[citation needed]}. For example, if a major portion of ~games consists of DnD posts and they are drowning out all the other topics, a ~games.dnd subgroup would be created - either by petition, algorithm, or both^{[citation needed]} - to contain the posts, and those who don't like DnD can unsubscribe from ~games.dnd. There is currently no way to filter out a subgroup from the main group.

3. Tildes is very privacy oriented. See: Haunted by data

Tildes History/Commonly answered questions

I recommend you check out this past introduction post by @Amarok before anything else, it's a bit outdated but contains many interesting discussions and notable events that have happened on tildes. @Bauke also tracks noteworthy events each month on his website https://til.bauke.xyz/. Also see the FAQ in the docs. Other than that, the best way for you to get an idea of how tildes changed over time is to go to ~tildes.official and look at all the past daily discussions.

Below are some scattered links that I found interesting, informative, or important:

• There are 2 announced bans, you can read about them here, and here. There have been more bans since, just unannounced. You can tell if a user is banned from their user page: there will be no private message button. An example. This differs from deleted accounts, which have all content removed and say "This user has deleted their account". An example. Note that when an account is deleted, whether all posts are deleted or not seems to depend on the user's choice. There is no official commentary, but there has been examples of deleted user comments left intact. Example: deleted user, intact post.

• The first group proposal, and the resulting group additions.

• You used to be able to see who invited a user on their profile, but now you can't.

• Past introduction posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

• The very first post on tildes: https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/2/welcome_to_tildes

• The first page of ~tildes.official, if you want to start reading from the beginning (there really should be a chronological sorting option): https://tildes.net/~tildes.official?after=5k

• What should the names of Tildes users be?

• There used to be comment tags, but they were removed because of abuse, and now they are re-enabled again.

• Some tradition that has started to develop:

  • programming challenges

  • music weekly threads

  • black mirror watch thread

  • what are you reading these days?

  • what have you been watching/reading this week? (Anime/Manga)

  • the "layperson's introduction" series

• How do we fund tildes?

• How to handle account deletion

• Anonymous posting

• Demographics survey: year 0 and results, year 0.5 and results

• How should we deal with low effort content?

• Why is the comment box at the bottom?

• How does Tildes feel about bots?

• The Tildes unofficial Minecraft servers: 1 , 2

• The Tildes unofficial wiki (now closed due to inactivity and spambots)

• How will Tildes work with bans?

• Should we have a mascot?

• Scraping Tildes/Statistics

If anyone thinks of a link that should be included here, post a comment with the link and I'll edit it in.

Markdown source for this post: https://pastebin.com/Kbbh7pYU (outdated, and probably will not be updated unless someone explicitly asks for it)

To the rest: have fun!

I've always loved how comics evolve alongside our real world. I have very passing knowledge of the old incarnations of Batman, but know he is quite different today than he was seven decades ago. For example, he used to have a gun, wasn't a crazy paranoid doomsday preper, and wasn't all angsty about his parents' death. He was also way more a detective than a human superman.

Anyhoo, here are some modern Batman characteristics/stories that stood out to me.

Batman vs. Schrodinger's Rapist

A long while ago, I posted Schrodinger's rapist here on Tildes. If you haven't read it, you don't have to. I'm going to take it to the extreme and basically bastardize it a bit for Batman.

Basically Schrondinger's rapist is any stranger a woman meets - he is both a rapist and not until proven otherwise. It comes with a mindset of vigilance and risk assessment. The idea that a woman will evaluate the situation and the stranger for risk and react accordingly to her acceptable level of tolerance. I think this is the perfect characterization of the "trust but verify" Batman. He is hypervigilant, constantly looking for an exit and preparing for flight or fight. Everyone is both trustworthy and not until proven otherwise.

Batman vs. Branding

In the New 52's Batman, Bruce decides branding and expansion is important, and creates Batman Inc. It's a very capitalistic/entrepreneurial take on providing private security, and comes with a tone of "trust depends on branding" and "security requires big money". It may be a good service with good intentions, but has a "selling weapons for protection" franchise-y feel, that I don't think is accidental.

Gordon's Batman vs. Militarizing individuals

I'm going to start by saying I'm not at all a fan of Jim Gordon's Batman. It had potential, but honestly really failed to live up to it.

However, they did do one interesting line, which was Mr. Bloom (New 52, #41-46). I'll try not to include too many details, as to prevent spoilers, but no promises.

Gotham is in it's usual chaos, but oh no, it's extra bad right now, because the real Batman (Bruce) is gone. On the streets there's these seeds that grant superpowers until you remove them or they kill you.

The average lowly citizen of Gotham has felt so unprotected that this seems like a good option. The story starts with gangsters using this and arcs up to normal people using it.

Final thoughts

So what are you thoughts about these points or others? Are there other comics or storylines that stand out as a really good mirror of real world issues and events that stand out for you?

I mainly use my keyboard to navigate around in Firefox so decided to edit UserChrome.css to create a custom, ultra-minimalist "one line" UI for myself and also maximize my screen real-estate by removing the window Titlebar and Tab Bar (using Tree Tabs sidebar extension instead). I also dislike how cluttered the Firefox interface is with unneeded options scattered everywhere, and how much redundancy there is with many options showing up in multiple places for no good reason, so I removed most of that as well. Here is the results:

Main UI (Navigation and "Hamburger" toolbar buttons removed)
Tree Tabs sidebar & More Tools both open
"Find in page" moved to the top, with Menu bar also toggled on
New Tab Page (my Bookmark Toolbar auto-unhides itself only on this page)
My Home Page, set to the FF Library "popout" page (chrome://browser/content/places/places.xul)

Context Menus (with lots of redundant and unused options removed):
Address bar dropdown
Page context menu
Image context menu
Link context menu

If anyone is interested in trying it out themselves, here is the UserChrome.css (which needs to go in the /chrome directory of your Firefox profile).

And if enough people are interested in learning Firefox UserChrome.css customization using the Browser Toolbox with remote debugging, I can always write up a tutorial at some point. There are some decent resources already available over at userchrome.org and reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/ too.

I just saw this post: NY Times defends hiring of editorial writer after emergence of past racial tweets. Now the article is a whole discussion in itself and just to openly reveal any bias I might have I personally do think the comments that were made are very much racist as they generalise a large group of people based on their skin colour in a negative light. I also consider myself a centrist (That's in UK terms, very much a supporter of the democrats in the US), although this information isn't crucial and not strictly relevant I feel biases should be known and taken into consideration.

My issue with the post wasn't with the article that was good and provided good discussion that I feel suites Tildes perfectly, it's a controversial and divisive subject and generally online this would be a atrocious thing to debate. Yet I view Tildes as a place of openness and willingness to debate that doesn't resort to generalisations and sweeping statements. This is the kind of post that would be great for Tildes as it would allow discussion that wasn't a complete mess, it's a rare place where you are able to talk about such topics that are debates not fights.

11 Hours after the post went live it was locked by Deimos.

This is frankly shameful and appalling. Now I don't blame Deimos. As far as I'm aware he's the only one currently moderating so I can only imagine the difficulty to moderate such a topic, yet I feel rather disappointed, I don't see any justification or reasoning for the post being locked and in future I would like some statement explaining why. In a perfect world I would prefer no post to be locked but I'm aware that's difficult with lack of moderators. No post should ever just be locked with no reason given.

Now, I must confess I am unaware of any comments being removed and I must assume there must of been to lead to the post becoming locked which would help be understand as to why it happened, this is purely speculation and would greatly appreciate a direct statement from Deimos explaining why even just a sentence saying there was lots of hate.

Although I think this is a issue I can understand why this happened in the early days of Tildes, it's still being developed on and I get the vibe he enjoys creating a community and a place for discussion not moderating and removing comments. Later on I do not expect or want this to happen.

My main issue though arises from the users. Looking in the comments there was a specific comment that stood out as being especially un-Tildes like:

I think Ms. Jeong's tweets about white people are hilarious. The fact that she annoys conservatives is reason enough to hire her.

Although the first half I disagree with it's the user expressing their opinion, that's OK. My main issue is the second half "The fact that she annoys conservatives is reason enough to hire her" that one sentence alone infuriates me. It's such a ignorant statement. The comment provides little input into the discussion and just feeds the us vs them mentality of politics which thrives in today's political debates everything is now a black and white issue. I view Tildes as a place that looks past meaningless statements like this, the comment also had 7 votes. Thankfully the response criticising this had 20 votes which does suggest the majority of the community dislike the comment as well.

Although I selected this comment as I felt it best represented the problem but there were a noticeable presence of low input comments which merely just resulted in people passively aggressively arguing with each others comments and very little comments focusing on the actual article itself.

Perhaps this is what people want, but it's the first time on Tildes I have seen a noticeable presence of low effort and poor comments. Admittedly maybe I just have the wrong opinion on Tildes and I'm in the minority but to me it felt very much unlike what Tildes should be. It feels there's a growing minority of Reddit like comments. I must acknowledge that a lot of the comments I disagree with had few votes and perhaps there just wasn't enough comments to drown them out, low effort comments are easier to make and more frequent than good quality comments, and maybe once the user base increases so will the high quality comments.

In summery I think locked posts should be clearly shown why they are locked, perhaps it's time moderation increased to prevent this in the future, this is a whole issue in in itself. More crucially I think we need to keep an eye on users that post low quality comment and call them out on it for being un-tildes like, If nothing is done It's a threat to the quality discussion that tildes is based on.

Wondering what’s your favorite self-help book, with the most practical, down-to-earth advice that maybe changed your life.
I’ll go first: I really liked Mindfullness in Plain English, removed all the myths around meditation and broke it down to very digestible concepts allowing me to practice the same on a daily basis.

Looking forward to hear yours!

Someone posted comment, I wrote a response (here), but when I wanted to send it, I got this message: Comment not found (or it was deleted). After I refreshed, the comment was gone, not even something like [deleted comment].

Do someone know how the comment removing work?

I apologize in advance for what's probably going to be a very rambly post. This has been stewing on my mind for a while now and I just need to get it out.

I've been on reddit a long time, 11 years as of today in fact. In that time, I've watched the site grow from a small community of mostly tech nerds to one of the biggest sites on the web. I've also moderated many communities, from small niche subs (/r/thecure, /r/makeupaddictioncanada) to some of the biggest subs on the site (/r/worldnews, /r/gaming). I've modded communities that have exploded in popularity, growing from 25k to 100k to 500k and beyond, and seen how those communities change.

When you're in a subreddit of say, 10k users, there's more community engagement. You know the users, the users know the mods, and you know when people are engaging in good faith. The mods themselves are basically just another user with a bit more control. People coming in just to cause shit are generally downvoted to death and reported quickly, and taken care of - it's a community effort to keep things civil. Modding a community like that is piss easy, you can generally check every thread yourself and see any nastiness easily before it becomes a problem, and the users themselves are more invested in keeping things on topic and friendly. Disagreements are generally resolved amicably, and even when things get heated it's easy enough to bring things back to center.

Then the community starts to grow, and gather more users. Ok, you adjust, maybe add another mod or two, the users are still engaged and reporting threads regularly. Things stay more or less the same. The growth continues.

At 50k, 100k, 250k, etc you notice differences in the community. People argue more, and because the usernames they're arguing with aren't known to them, they become more vitriolic. Old regulars begin drifting away as they feel sidelined or just lose interest.

At 1M a major shift happens and the sub feels more like a free for all than a community. As a mod, you can't interact as much because there's more traffic. You stop being able to engage as much in the threads because you have to always be "on" and are now a representative of the mod team instead of a member of the community. Even if you've been there since day one, you're now a mod, and seen by some as "the enemy". Mods stifle free speech after all, removing posts and comments that don't fit the sub rules, banning users who are abusive or spammers. Those banned users start running to communities like SRC, decrying the abuse/bias/unfair treatment they've gotten at the hands of X sub mod team. Abusive modmails and PMs are fairly regular occurrences, and accusations of bias fly. The feeling of "us vs them" is amplified.

Once you get above 10M users, all bets are off. Threads hit /r/all regularly and attract participants from all over reddit. These threads can attract thousands of comments, coming at the rate of several hundred every minute. Individual monitoring of threads becomes impossible. Automod can handle some of it, but we all know automod can be slow, goes down sometimes, and can't handle all the nuances of actual conversation. You've outgrown any moderation tools reddit provides, and need to seek outside help. Customized bots become necessary - most large subreddits rely on outside tools like SentinelBot for spam detection, or snoonotes for tracking problem users. Harassment is a real problem - death threats, stalking, and doxxing are legitimate issues and hard to deal with. I won't even touch on the issues like CP, suicidal users, and all the other shit that comes along with modding communities this large.

I wish I had some solutions, but I really don't know what they are. We all know the tools we have as moderators on reddit are insufficient, but what people often overlook is why - the community is just too large for unpaid volunteers to moderate with the limited tools we have.

I've been grumbling about many of the things Tildes is trying to address for years. And I'm not alone. OTOH I have seen some sites that do some bits right, and some sites that almost got it right only to fall flat at the penultimate hurdle. Let's try to collect and enumerate what I think is good and bad, both here and elsewhere. I'm optimistic about here because Tildes is a work in progress and some of these are quite readily fixable.

Tildes, the good:

#1, a long way ahead of everything else: Non-profit.
I think Twitter and Reddit and Facebook all amply demonstrate why any general discussion forum that tries to make a profit is doomed to mediocrity and worse. Google+ is an edge case - the service may be free, but Google is watching and measuring your every move. And constantly optimising for their own performance metrics, of which fostering intelligent discussion totally is not on the list and is actually discouraged. See:
'The Algorithm' is Not an Idiot, It Is Actively Deceptive https://plus.google.com/104879277024913363852/posts/51mme29dSMy

#2 Markdown (also a coutny mile ahead of the alternatives) - elegantly simple markup; not too much, not too little. Even if you have technical quibbles with markdown's capabilities, the system is widely-enough known to outweigh them. I honestly can't think of a more appropriate choice.

#3 Clean simple UI (couple of grumbles though - see below)

#4 'Votes' rather than +1s, thumbs up, likes or or other cutesy shite. Elementary good UI practice - say what you mean.

Tildes, the bad including what I hope are readily fixable or just oversights:

#1 Poor display contrast. Don't use light grey text on white, you numpties, just because it's fashionable. If you want this site to be around long-term you'll have people of all ages posting, some with e.g. poor eyesight. There are well-known guidelines for the optimum contrast ratios for online text. Look 'em up and bloody stick within them. If you go for AAA that will be another point where you're ahead of the Google, Apple and other fashion-driven sites. Don't care if it's unfashionable, and if you want to be around in 20 years (as another successful discussion site I'll cite later has been) you should stick with what's usable, not what's currently cool. KTHXBAI. WebAIM: Colour Contrast Checker
https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

#2 Missed opportunity, fixable:

You can look at activity from the last hour, day, 3 days etc, or enter a flexible range. But you've only made the range one-ended!! So how are you supposed to find a post from 'about 6 months ago' without scrolling through thousands of entries? Again, if you're interested in longevity, you have to ensure that it's possible for humans to refind older posts, and to check back to a specific date range that may eventually be months or years back. My 'long-lived site' inserts markers with month and year so that you can tell where you are in the feed without having to peer at some tiny date in light grey on lighter grey.

#3 Vague datestamps

Use dates FFS. 'About 2 hours ago' is a moving target, duh. How are you supposed to refind a post timestamped 'about 2 hours ago' on a fast-moving thread that was left sitting unrefreshed on your laptop for half a day while you were disconnected from the internet? Useless. For short periods, yes, some users may prefer a vaguer indicator, but once a post is more than about 12-16 hours old, just use the date and time, OK? Vague timestamps, while superficially user-friendly, are a superb and subtle way to disrupt the serious discussions Tildes wants to foster. That's why Google+, for example, does it, and that's why you shouldn't. Also, if the date's in a predictable, stable form, you can search for it. Load a shit-ton of posts going back months, then try searching for a post made 'two months' ago; then search again in a couple of weeks and the same search will give different results!

#4 Preview and save button

Where's my post preview button? I would have like to preview this screed before posting it. And given how long it is maybe saving it as a work in progress would have been useful too!

Missing feature: effective filtering/killfiling
Long-term, if the site gets big, it will live or die on this. Seriously.
You need to be able to filter users, posts, and thread and groups temporarily or permanently.
That includes being able to temporarily hide people you follow and like just to get their posts out of the way. So, mute for an hour, mute for a day, mute for a week, mute for a month (maybe), mute permanently. Applicable to every possible category on the site you can think of. dredmorbius (who is also here) goes on about this a lot. The ability to filter stuff out is far more important than the ability to 'find' stuff. Just filtering out the stuff you don't want helps the stuff you do bubble to the surface!

Saveable filters (long term feature)

When I want to collect cat memes, non-cat memes are noise and I need to filter them out (see above). When I want to read about other sutff, the cat memes are noise and I need to filter them. I don';t want to have to keep creating and discarding filters. As soon as your filtering system is powerful enough to be useful, it will be too much work to keep redoing, so make 'em saveable and organisable. There's uses for all of whitelists, greylists and blacklists.

Post auto indexing (long term feature)

I have to manually write and maintain my own damn post indexes on G+, otherwise all my old posts just vanish into limbo, inaccessible unless you know a unique search phrase from that particular post or are prepared to scroll for hours. [But the Goodle internal servers can access and analyse them all just fine.] My post index, with some comments: https://plus.google.com/104879277024913363852/posts/XoWoRujTBun

Rapid browse mode, paginated

When you're reading in depth, it may be OK to have a Google+-like UI with only half a dozen posts on-screen at once. (Tildes is currently shopwing me ten at a time, which ain't enough of an improvement to be worthwhile.) But this is hair-tearingly inefficient if you want to scan a lot of posts rapidly. You need a dense display format that shows large numkbers of posts so people can skim and find things quickly. With thumnails for images and indicators for links. Paginated, with the pages staying at consistent points. That way you can keep track of you place when you're browsing back in the archives, and even bookmark old stuff. Sometimes you want leisurely mode, but sometimes you want to jump back a way before switching to leisurely. Having only a slow browsing route is very effective at killing access to older discussions. Anything older than a few days or a few dozens of posts is effectively lost.

Soft auto-lock for old posts
Posts should auto-lock after... about 3 months of inactivity is a good number IME. But ideally it should be a soft lock, which means people can resurrect them. If you post on a soft-locked thread, you get a warning, or the owner gets to decide whether to unlock the thread and let your post appear. So consequently you need a preference setting so that post owners can indicate whether they want a soft or a hard lock on a post, and the time till it triggers.

Per forum thread/post limits
If you've got a forum with 1,000 active threads, you haven't really got one forum. You've either got several, in which case they should be split up, or you've got one forum with a lot of noise. So there might be something to be said for limiting the number of discussion threads in proportion to the number of users; for example, if ~dogs.chihuahuas has 5 users, let them have the default of 20 threads. Of which they might only use six. Nothing says you have to use all 20. But if ~dogs.pugs had 40,000 followers, perhaps it should be permitted 70 threads. If 70 isn't enough, it's probably past time to split ~dogs.pugs up. There is an uppser and a lower limit to how many people you can have a sensible discussion with. The lower limit is 2, and for small forums or up to a couple of dozen regulars 20 threads should be ample. When you get to hundeds or regulars, the thread count does need to go up a bit. But when you get to 10,000s, the noise levels starts to go up and it's time to split the group into subgroups. A thread count is a decent way to enforce that - I'd say even the biggest forum isn't allowed more than 2-3 screenfuls of threads. So 30-60, maybe. If that's not enough, it's time to subdivide, because keeping communities from getting too large keeps discussion quality higher. You can always follow both groups even after the split. But if you dislike regular A in group X, you can switch to group Y where they don't post. If everything's lumps together without regard to community scaling, you never get away from regular A unless you unsubscribe from group X altogether.

Other sites

Google+

Circles (bad, it turns out) - seemed good at the time, but it turns out they're at the wrong end of the broadcast stream. The recipients have no way to filter what you post into the categories they want, and it's their preferences that matter at this point.

Collections (good, it turns out) - this was the better way to do it. If someone posts cat pics, politics, and astronomy, you can just follow the subset of their posts you're interested in. This is reasonably effective, implicit filtering.

Infinite scrolling windows (very bad) - [But excellent for Google's purposes of stifling anything but superficial conversations.] Finding anything older than a few hours may take literally hours of scrolling unless there's a search term you can enter. So tough shit if you wanted to find an image post with no associated text.

Awesomely atrocious search Google used to be good at search. You wouldn't think so from the comedy search tool they provide on G+.

Notifications (meh) - When you only have a few followers, it's nice to know you've been followed or mentioned or whatever. As your user count grows that becomes noise and then spam. Notifications have to scale intelligently, because a user with 240,000 followers has massivly different needs from a user with 12.

My own comments: Google Plus User Feedback Archive https://plus.google.com/104879277024913363852/posts/DUanxsc7ya1

Ello

I like the clean UI, and it's very good for image posting.
The discussions ain't too bad either, but it's maybe a bit too minimalist, and again, there was no way to find old posts,l so they're effectively lost.

Twitter

Well it would be good if people actually used it for short posts of up to 2xx characters or whatever the present limit is. But when you have people writing articles that need dozens of Tweets (and there's aggregator apps to collect them back into full articles FFS) then the system is clearly not being used in the way it was originally intended to be. I think this is what corporations would like the future of all discussion to be. Basically babble, where even the good stuff vanishes without trace after, well, potentially a few tens of minutes if you follow a lot of people. It's like drinking at a firehose. Jeez. You harldy need to exert effort to bury stuff. Just wait a while.

Usenet

Good for: killfiles, threaded discussions, clue, and asynchronous discussions spanning weeks, months or longer.
Bad for: trolls, spam. Especially spam.

I sincerely hope there are some Tilders who are thoroughly familiar with the dynamics, successes and failures of Usenet. It does a lot of things right that you'll also need to get right. And now all the morons are on the web, I'm not sure if Usenet is reverting to clued people only, or if the spammers are killing it off completely. TBH I'm not sure there's much point spamming Usenet these days; next to no-one goes there, and those that do are tech-savvy and exceptionally spam-hostile. Haven't been on myself for years. A very good example of a private usenet area that works well is the Povray news hierarchy. Another demonstration that focus on a single subject (the PoVRay raytracer) does a good job of keeping site/forum/whatever clue levels high. news.povray.org http://news.povray.org/groups/

Web Forums

Good for: focussed discussions on a single subject. In general, the more focussed the higher the quality. The Wesnoth forums, for example, are all about the Wesnoth computer game. So it's easy to tell what's off-topic and remove it. But the Giant in the Playground forums, which also include general roleplaying, are not as focussed and the clue level of the posters, while not atrocious, is noticeably lower, and a much greater degree of moderation is needed. But the GiantITP forums are much bigger than Wesnoth, so there a lot of just scaling effects going on there too. You also see this on, I guess, the Steam forums and Reddit groups, where the small niche communities (e.d. OpenTTD on Reddit) tend to be much more pleasant places to visit than the forums for mega-games like, I dunno, World of Warcraft.

Reddit

Good for: Actually handling collossal volums of posts on all sorts of subjects without collapsing into chaos.
I'm not a big Reddit fan, but I have to give them credit for working at all, given their traffic volume.

Also good for: Reddit Gold isn't a terrible way to fund a commercial-ish site. Aspects of that could be stolen.

Wikis

Placeholder

Suspect there may be some things that could be learned from how Wikis do things, but nothing comes to mind at present. May revisit later.

Email lists

Good for: digests?

Digests might be a useful feature when you're following a long-running discussion?
Google+ almost got this right - you can opt to recieve an email whenever someone comments after you, but you can't get G+_ to send you emails fo your own posts, or to send you a summary/digest of the full discussion. So you can have a partial email archive of threads you've been involved in, but you can't have an email record of your own contributions. So, half of a useful feature there. Nice one, guys.

Mornington Crescent

These sites have been running for decades. They're basically text databases plus a bit of Perl glue code. A decent developer could (and has, more than once) knock out a fully functioning Mornington Crescent site in a matter of a few afternoons.

Good for: longevity, stability, simplicity, 'weak user IDs', asynchronous discussions which can become realtime if you're online at the same time as your correspondent.

Probably bad for: scaling, security
The Crescent sites have a couple of dozen game threads each, and you post a comment wherever you feel like. Then the next person does the same, and so on. Some of the long-running games (e.g. the genral chat thread) have 30,000+ posts spanning years. But becuase it's paginated rather than an infinite scrolling window, you can jump back e.g. 1,000 posts (a few months) with relative ease.

These sites all predate markdown, so they let you use basic HTML instead. A feature which has been horribly abused, most notably in the bad HTML game, and Acre Street (don't ask). A modern MC site, you'd use markdown.

They still work on any browser - even Lynx - they don't even depend on Javascript. It's a web form with two or three fields. You type on your comment, click submit, and your comment is inserted into the page. Then the next person does the same, over and over for years, and the page grows as you do. As simple as a a web forum can possibly be, I suspect. And if bandwidth/performance becomes a problem, you can auto-split it into year-sized or 1000-post-sized chunks. Yes, people mostly only browse the last few tens of posts, but a paginated system lets you jump back further on occasion without placing an undue burden on the servers. (I go on about pagination a lot. I think it's a make-or-break feature, and it's only out of favour at the moment due to the whims of fashion and the web-corps' desires to make and keep online conversations at a superficial level. The black hats are doing it intentionally, and others are emulating them because they wrongly think they're following good - rather than evil - practice.
Speaking of evil practice - check out Dark Patterns in Design for some of the ways we're manipulated: https://darkpatterns.org/

'Weak User ID' - there's a text box you type your name in. Most people use the same name every time, because it establishes reputation. But it's just a text box so you could type in anything. That bit probably wouldn't scale, but for us, given that between us we all know everyone who posts except for the occasional random who shows up, it works fine.

'Non-persistent chat' - one of the sites, which has since shut down, had a rolling chat page that was only transient. Chat posts older than about a week and more than 100 posts ago just disappeared off the bottom of the chat page and were lost for good, unless someone saved the chat. For some discussions - e.g. things like cat memes, this kind of transient chat is probably ideal. You could even implement an infinite scroller, because you know the end of the chat is never going to be more than 5-10 screens away. That wouldn't be so good for 50-100 screen. As a yardstick my G+ posts would probably go back about 1200 screens. Who the hell would ever scroll through that? If Tildes becomes successful, it will quickly hit to same point. Pagination, chaps. It's not sexy, but it's the only reasonable way to manage long data streams.

OK, initial data dump done. This is more complete than I epxcted to get for a first go, but more typos too :-)

Am likely to revist.

I'm probably about to be guilty of causing the problem I'd like to solve, namely the endless iterations of questions asked and previously answered, or seemingly innocent questions that are tantamount to trolling.

I'm sure there have been prior discussions about pinning items, and I've seen prior commentary about further refining the ground rules for some sub-group areas.

For the sake of efficiency and comity, there are communities where it would be helpful to create a common body of rules, reference material or other semi-permanent posts which should be regarded as the minimum governance/factual/technical basis for having a productive discussion.

From a UI design perspective, Reddit, xda-developers, and some other forums have created visually confusing, dis-unified means of handling this - there are multipage FAQ/Wiki top links plus sidebars plus top pins. There's considerable independence among Reddit forums as to which model is chosen, furthering the confusion. I'd like to see Tildes "keep it simple", so pinned topics may be the way to maintain consistency and uniformity.

Seeking thoughts and discussion about whether this is needed, feasible, desirable, etc.

[What prompted this query was a a random response on this topic which posited a strawman argument so disingenuous that I wanted to run off and pull a Wiki together just so I could say, "do this minimal amount of homework and come back later, or get reported for being an obvious troll".]

Note: edited to remove confusion of groups, sub-groups and topics, since I hadn't had enough coffee yet. Sadly I can't do this for the topic title...

This comes from an article in Current Affairs, which to be upfront is an openly leftist publication. I thought it was an interesting anecdote, especially with the news from a few weeks ago about the woman in Boston begging for people not to call an ambulance for her because she wouldn't be able to afford it (which is also mentioned in the article).

I was in a New York City diner two nights ago and something disturbing happened. It was about 2am, and a woman was sitting alone in the next booth. She was disheveled and possibly homeless, and looked unwell. She had been eating a plate of food, but then sprawled herself along the seat and fell asleep. Someone in the restaurant must have called 911, because an ambulance showed up. They parked directly in front of the entrance and left the flashing lights on, and through the large windows the lights filled the restaurant and were overwhelmingly dazzling. The two paramedics approached the woman and told her to sit up. She mumbled a refusal. They insisted. As she finally sat up, bleary, they told her she would need to leave with them and that she should pay her bill. She replied that she had no money. The paramedics became upset, one of them asking her why she would order food if she couldn’t pay for it, and telling her she’d need to pay before they left. While the paramedics stood issuing her instructions as she muttered and fumbled, a young man at the front of the restaurant quietly approached a server and paid her bill. He then told the paramedics he had paid for her. They looked vaguely annoyed, and told her she should be grateful that a stranger just paid for her. The woman did not seem to comprehend, and just made a noise. Then the paramedics took her out to the ambulance. In the hour or so I stayed in the restaurant, the ambulance didn’t leave, and kept its lights on.

Here’s why I was disturbed: the paramedics did not act like health professionals. They acted like cops. At first, I thought they were cops. Their uniform was similar, and the dazzling flashing lights were like police lights, and had the same bewildering effect. They were more concerned with whether the woman had paid her debts than whether she was okay. They had very clear contempt for her, treating her as a nuisance who was bothering restaurant patrons and needed to be removed. She wasn’t actually bothering anyone, of course; I was sitting in the next booth and had barely noticed her, and there were plenty of spare booths in the diner. But the paramedics were aggressive and unsympathetic in the way that many cops are. Incidents like the one I saw must happen constantly all across the country: homeless people and drug addicts (I don’t know whether the woman was intoxicated or on drugs, though it seemed somewhat likely) not being cared for with compassion, but being “policed” even by those who are supposed to be selflessly devoted to the improvement of health. The flashing lights were totally unnecessary, and made the whole diner feel like a police raid. And, of course, how typical of America that the issue of whether you can pay the bill is more important than whether you will live or die.

What do you think of this? If you've had an experience with emergency medical services, how did it compare?

EDIT: Since a few people now have not realized how old this topic is before making a comment, see above date ↑. :)

My old PC's CPU (i7 930) started to critically fail after 8+ years of being overclocked from 2.8 to 4.0 GHz, so I decided to build a new one based on the Ultra-Compact Mini-ITX Gaming PC Build from TechBuyersGuru.

I went with Mini-ITX this time since my old PC was in a huge Antec P193 tower which weighs 16.4kg (36.2lbs) before components and so was a giant PITA to move around. The new Sugo SG13 case is roughly 1/7th the volume and initial weight so is much more convenient to move (but not build!).

p.s. I was unsure whether to post this 'buildapc' style content in ~tech or ~comp.... thoughts?

PCPartPicker Part List
^{Parts labeled incompatible are not... see "Notes" below in Build Process section.}
Salvaged from old PC:
GPU   -     $0 - EVGA - GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB Superclocked ACX 2.0+ Video Card
SSD   -     $0 - Samsung - 850 Pro Series 1TB 2.5" Solid State Drive
SSD   -     $0 - Samsung - 840 Pro Series 256GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
HDD   -     $0 - Hitachi - Deskstar NAS 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive

New Components:
Case -   $72 - Silverstone - Sugo SG13B-Q Mini ITX Tower Case
Mobo - $190 - Gigabyte - Z370N WIFI Mini ITX LGA1151 Motherboard
CPU   - $325 - Intel - Core i5-8600K 3.6GHz 6-Core Processor
Cool - $114 - Silverstone - NT06-PRO 74.0 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler
RAM   - $220 - Corsair - Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3000 Memory
PSU   - $175 - Silverstone - 600W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular SFX Power Supply
M.2   - $143 - Crucial - MX500 500GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive
M.2   - $143 - Crucial - MX500 500GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive

Total:  $1382 (CAD)

Build Process w/ Pictures:

TL;DR - Behold my new Battlestation, IN ALL HER GLORY!!!

After saying goodbye to my old, heavy, oversized, Antec P193 case...
Unboxing the new one, which is almost the same volume as my UPS!...
And prepping all the new PC components for a photo op...
I began the arduous process assembling my new computer.

Everything went fairly smoothly to start. I installed the RAM, M.2 Drives, CPU and CPU Cooler before mounting the motherboard to the case, as instructed in the build guide. The CPU Cooler was a PITA to attach but that's no surprise as they always are.

Note: These "incompatible" parts listed on PCPartsPicker actually do fit together as the build guide said they would. However the RAM and CPU cooler fan are actually touching and I barely managed to squeeze them in together, so the build guide probably isn't lying when it said that particular low-profile RAM might be the only one that actually works with the cooler.

I then mounted the motherboard to the case and began slowly plugging everything else in. This was a particularly slow and frustrating process as I have pretty large hands and everything was incredibly tiny, in incredibly cramped positions, and required more finesse to get in place than I could muster with my fingers alone. As a result I wound up using long needle-nose pliers, including some bent-angle ones, to get most everything plugged in.

This is when I ran into my first major problem though... and one that was not mentioned in the build guide at all. The Case's front panel USB cable wouldn't fit in the motherboard with the CPU cooler fan in place. After trying fruitlessly to get the cable plugged in for 30min I finally gave up and decided to solve the issue the old fashioned way and it plugged in just fine afterwards. (Thanks for saving my ass yet again, Mr. Dremel!)

The other potential issue was due to the CPU cooler and case mounted PSU, which aren't supposed to work together, but once again as the build guide suggested they actually do... with a whopping 3mm clearance between them! At this point I also decided to swap out some of the ribbon power cables that came with the new PSU for some spare braided ones I had from another build since they are much nicer looking and allow for better airflow.

Note: The other supposed incompatibility listed on PCPartPicker is due to the fact that the case only officially supports 3x 2.5" drives or 1x 3.5" with 1x 2.5" but that's easy enough to get around, as explained below.

I also decided to cram an extra SSD under the front case fan, secured with double sided tape to the properly mounted SSD on the case floor panel. It worked just fine and allowed me to get my 3.5" 4TB HDD properly mounted on the underside of the top plate. Linus Tech Tips, in his similar Sugo SG13 build, even managed to squeeze 2 more SSDs above the PSU using double sided tape as well, so I guess that even leaves me with some room to expand my storage later. ;)

The rest of the build assembly process went relatively smoothly and once everything was hooked up, in position and plugged in, it booted straight into windows 10 (which was still on my old 1TB SSD). The moment when a new PC build gets past the POST is always a huge relief, however that momentary relief soon turned to dread as I quickly noticed a pretty big problem; The machine couldn't detect one of my new M.2 SATA drives.

After several hours of frustrated tinkering and much googling I finally found out the reason why, cursing PCPartPicker for not warning me and face-palming pretty hard for not having read the motherboard specs more carefully. It turns out that the Z370N motherboard actually only supports 1x M.2 SATA drive and the second M.2 slot is NVMe only. I had apparently just wasted $140+ on an M.2 SATA drive I couldn't use and my plans to configure them both in RAID 0 was shattered. But that's honestly not the worst part... in order to get the useless M.2 drive back out I had to basically FULLY DISASSEMBLE my entire build again since the NVMe M.2 slot is located on the bottom of the motherboard!

Despite the serious temptation to just leave it in there even though I couldn't use it, I wound up going through with the disassembly purely because I had a pretty good idea for how to actually make use of that second M.2 SATA drive based on something I saw on Linus Tech Tips a few months ago. So rather than leaving it in there or even returning it, after ordering myself the necessary enclosure I now have myself a pretty nice DIY 500GB Thumb drive. ;)

So several hours later after completely taking apart my new build, removing the bottom mounted M.2 SATA drive, and fully reassembling my build once again, I booted it up, it got past the POST and into Windows 10 again. I then reactivated Win 10 on the new hardware configuration (which was surprisingly painless compared to how it used to be where you needed to actually phone Microsoft) and then began the process of installing Linux Mint on the M.2 SATA drive I still had remaining.

Conclusion:
After several days of going at it now, I am finally done and my new computer is fully assembled, functional and ready to use. As always with building computers it was a bit scary, a bit painful, and more than a bit frustrating but ultimately well worth it. I couldn't be happier with the results and can't wait to overclock this bad boy when I get the chance!

For me, that'd be a multiplayer war sandbox. Take a big map, plop down resources, population centers and factories, spawn a lot of players who then have to organize to fight a war.

• To add espionage, you'd not hard-code a lot about the way teams organize(think removing the guild mechanics from WoW), so one could sign up with one side, then run to a different side (who do not know you already signed up with the first) and do ye olde double agent.
• Research could be modelled as being done by NPC civilians, which produces documents detailing the results. These documents must be on-site whenever the research is being used (i.e. present at factories), so it could be stolen.
• No need to go factorio on the production chains. Their purpose is mostly to enforce cooperation to reach better hardware for the guys in the field.

So, what's your crazy dream game that's never going to be built?

I've been noticing a social effect lately and I'm curious about others' takes on this. I'm calling it "specialty fatigue" because I've noticed mostly in specialty communities. I differentiate between this, elitism, FAQ annoyance because there seems to be a more complex cause at work.

To put it in general terms, specialty fatigue is caused by the overexposure to others' work in a given area of expertise. Whereas elitism is more of an ego driven personality traits, and FAQ frustration arises from repeatedly answering the same basic questions, this fatigue seems to be caused by seeing too many things that don't live up to standards (often arbitrary personal standards, but sometimes can be industry standards). In others words, people notice their industry getting flooded with novices getting away with crap they'd never tolerate. It can be disheartening and disillusioning. Most often, it results in the community of specialists becoming overly critical of things that didn't originally bother them. People who were once helpful and encouraging become raging internet monsters.

I see this happen a lot because I'm a bit of a jack of all trades, master of none, and largely autodidactic. I don't have very many strong opinions on how things should be done because I've learned to constantly question the efficacy of norms, and try to establish a system that just works best to achieve the results I care about. Despite that, I'm still interested in finding out how others go about doing things, or even just listen to the sort of stuff they care about. What factors do specialists find worthwhile in determining quality? How feasible is it for me to achieve those results?

Quite often, specialty communities are so corrupted by overexposure that many members of the community start acting as gatekeepers. "If you can't afford decent equipment, don't even bother." And they'll criticize anything that could remotely be interpreted as a newb question or point of view, frequently to the point of acute toxicity where just about any discussion becomes unfeasible.

I'm a propenent of openly sharing knowledge. But the offshoot of increased introductory material is that there will be a corresponding increase in novice level production. I can see why people might be bothered by that (personally, I'm not), but it blows me away that anyone would be surprised by that. That's exactly how it seems sometimes, though. Almost as if people just wanted to show off how much they know without anyone else using that knowledge for anything productive.

This seems like the social deflection point between "old school" methods of passing down specialty knowledge (apprenticing, higher education, family businesses) to "new school" methods (look it up online and just try it out). With the removal of a mentor figure from the equation, there is less of a filter for what's quality and what's crap. Add social media into the equation and there seems like there's a constant influx of garbage into every industry out there. But for specialty communities, it definitely has an "end of the world as we know it" kinda feel because it seems like the entire specialty is getting flooded with subpar work that is a threat to their livelyhoods.

Has anyone else noticed this sort of thing? Do you have a specialty? If so, what trends have you noticed within that field regarding apparent willingness to share information? Have you ever dropped a hobby because people seemed to take it too seriously? How do you personally feel about the balance between open sharing of information vs keeping secrets (for example, a technique a process from which you derive a substantial portion of income)?

Edit: Fixed a typo. Can and can't are a bit different. Oops.

A little pretext. I wrote this poem in november 2017, and I slightly improved it today. I enjoy creating stories and poems are a way that I did not try much before. I don't know much about it, except the few things I learned in school and i can't remember most of it. Also english is my second language and there might be some words that don't fit in.
The changes in lines and rythm are intended to match the story.
If this does not meet the high-quality content and discussion and therefore doesn't fit in with ~, let me know and I will remove it.

To stop my rambling: Feel free to leave criticism. I plan to make poetry my hobby so any tips, comments, feedback and thoughts are appreciated.

Somewhere,
deep in the wild
Layed there,
Cold a little child.

It wasn't very long ago,
The rotten did not show,
All consuming deafening silence,
Pierced only by crows crying violent.

What happened here?
She ran from fear.
To escape the grasp,
Of the ones she hold dear.

One soul has passed before her,
Taking with his life,
The only thing she ever strived
Her mother, father and her brother
Two of these caused the disaster.

It began with a fight,
In a cold winter night,
Snow falling lightly,
And the ice growing wildly.

Suddenly the moment
when all seemed to fly
Death was potent
Coming in the blink of an eye.

Crushed by the car's roof,
Not needing any more proof.
The little boy left,
She cried over his death

Sad things passed
and bad will follow.
To escape the sorrow
Two chose their paths

Alcohol in mornings and nights,
Followed by overbearing fights,
Inbetween this shit
Was one little kid

Treated like air,
It was just not fair
Her family's break,
Was the last thing she could take

She ran into the woods,
Only on foot.
Soon she lost her trail
And soon after she wailed.

In her last thoughts
she met her god.
Looked him deep in the eye
And pierced him with a knive

Somewhere,
deep in the wild
Layed there,
Cold a little child.

Edit: Formatting mistakes

Wanted to see if we could get some conversations going with any freelancers who may be around. I figured a good place to start is with one of the more commonly discussed topics, which is the online marketplaces catering to freelancers.

These days, Upwork seems to have gobbled up a huge chunk of that market, while garnering plenty of criticism and complaints along the way for how they handle it. The graphic design space seems to have a little more competition in marketplaces, with 99designs being a frontrunner it seems. Truthfully, there just aren't that many platforms to pick from regardless of your specialty. Which can be a positive, as it provides a centralized place to look for and post available work, can increase exposure to the freelance market as a whole, and ensures you don't have to maintain profiles across numerous platforms which can be far too time consuming sometimes. But of course there are many downsides that come along with that.

The standard advice that comes with such discussions is to ignore the online marketplaces entirely because of those downsides. Competing against an international labor pool, as well as an under-experienced labor pool much of the time, in a format that heavily encourages price competition above other factors can be disastrous for your bottom line (and your sanity). These platforms also generally remove a lot of the negotiating power that a freelancer needs to leverage, as it is much more difficult to establish the captive audience that can be built with more personal interactions.

And frankly, that standard advice has continued to be my own, both for my career as well as to others who may seek such advice. But it does make me wonder if there is a better way to do it. Of course as a developer I'm always looking to find a way to solve problems, so I can concede I may be looking for solutions in a place that is misguided to try to fix.

What has been your experiences with freelance online marketplaces? What advice do you give when asked about it? What would you like to change?

Sorry for the minor clickbait title

Let's talk about ISPs in USA. In my personal opinion, they do so much "bad" things to their clients, as opposed to, most noticeably, Europe (I guess it's because, (at least in my country, IDK about another European states) much bigger competition, even in village with 500 people, there are about 3-4 ISPs, but there are even more of them in bigger cities). They throttle websites (even before they destroyed Net Neutrality), they track that you use your network too much and throttle you because of it ("they may send you a warning for excessive internet usage and throttle your bandwidth for awhile.").

Now, they track that you download/upload too much and/or pirate movies and can throttle your account, downgrade your account, or completely refuse to provide you any service.

Why? Why are they allowed to do this? Why they can track users and throttle them just because they download too much (I've read article about it, downloading too much, ISPs slowing down internet for few hours, link soon) or they suspect you of pirating. How they dare intercept your packets, read them and throttle you because of this? Why is it wildly accepted as completely normal behaviour?

And I could continue on things like them publicly buying votes to remove Net Neutrality from the way, and so on.

I honestly do not know why so much people are OK with this. Could we start a discussion on this?

Throttling because of piracy sources: 1 2 3 4
Pre-NetNeutrality-End websites throttling: 1 2

As someone who is relatively removed from the programming world (I do basic Python scripting and not much else), I'm curious to see an argument opposing what I perceive as the majority viewpoint. Those against the acquisition have cited examples of Microsoft "ruining" services such as Skype and Minecraft.

So I was thinking the other day -- is there any good reason to allow voting from the main ~'s page? For clarity in this discussion, I'm talking about this view.

Some pro's and con's for removing the vote button from the main page:

Pro:

• Discourages "drive-by" voting. We all (mostly?) know that reddit in particular is notorious for having highly up-voted posts that most users read the headline / top-comment and not the article itself. This is particularly noxious for political posts, as often times a vote on a post is an extension of one's own biases / beliefs, rather than an engagement on the topic at hand. This hasn't reared it's head to the same extent on ~'s yet (this post with 15 votes / and only 1 comment would seem to be the closest I can find), but I think it would be a mistake to think that this sort of behavior wouldn't migrate over from reddit. Other reasons for voting on a post without at least getting into the comments are equally bad e.g.: "Oh, I like that band / song / movie / whatever" -- this is a key driver of recycled content on /r/music or movies or tv etc. This reason alone is enough for me to consider removing front-page voting a net-positive

• The user is forced to enter the comments to vote, wherein they may actually read something that sparks their desire to read the thing / interact with the post. The goal on ~'s is to promote substantive discussion, and I think this would be an interesting tool to try to direct users to said discussion.

Cons

• It's more inconvenient, but hey -- so is putting the comment box at the bottom of the page (and I think that's a good idea on net as well)

• UI inconsistency -- this is a bad thing, but we've got a lot of smart computer people on here. We can probably figure out some way to make this work.

• It doesn't actually force the user to read / listen / interact with the submission, just suggests that they do. But hey, let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, eh?

Hanging Questions

• What about voting on ~group pages? My off-the-cuff idea would be that voting on ~music.world.calypso would be a good thing (to promote organic growth of quality posts from small ~groups), but not voting on overarching groups (~music) -- but then the UI issue rears' it's ugly head

• What about comment / submission voting from other places e.g.: user-pages, notifications, inbox replies, etc.

Anyone play an instrument as a hobby?

I'm currently learning how to play the violin I started about 2 weeks ago and really like it so far!

I noticed my G string's fine tuner was not quite working so I removed tension off the string to fix the screw--when I re-added tension I ended up breaking my string. This gave me an excuse to buy some nice starter strings! I can't wait to start playing on them I'm still waiting a few hrs to let them "settle in" on their own.