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    1. I hate my job as a system administrator

      Nothing but a rant and personal outlet here, so if you don't want to read that sort of stuff move along. To preface this, I haven't gone to uni, gotten an certs, or anything of that sort. I worked...

      Nothing but a rant and personal outlet here, so if you don't want to read that sort of stuff move along.

      To preface this, I haven't gone to uni, gotten an certs, or anything of that sort. I worked my way up the ladder and moved up positions slowly. My experience was/is my crutch. I DO NOT have any intention of going to, or getting any sort of schooling for anything computer related now. I am moving out of the IT industry.

      I started with computers at a young age like many people in my profession do. I loved everything about them. Their versatility, the ins and outs of them, hardware, software... It all fascinated me. So I thought, hey why not work with computers because I love them? That's when I got a job at the good ol' yellow tag store selling them!

      At first it was great, I got to talk to people on what they were doing with it, try to work within their budget while getting the best computer for their needs, and just got to see what all sorts of people do with their devices. But then the sales numbers started to become a thing. "Hey you aren't hitting your goals." "You need to push financing." "SELL DAMAGE WARRANTY." I fucking hated it. So I changed departments to Geek Squad once I realized that I wasn't a salesmen. I couldn't bring myself to get someone to spend something I didn't believe in. No problem. Started doing more tech support stuff and actually working with computers, instead of selling them and knowing hardware. Except that quickly turned into "SELL SELL SELL!!"

      Started looking around for a new job after sales started to become a thing for that position, and ended up finding a job at a local PC store. I was elated. I was a computer technician. I shouldn't have to worry about sales anymore. I work with customers on preexisting devices and get them running well! Although... The passion for computers started to die. I wasn't as excited for new hardware coming out. I didn't want, or care for, the newest thing. AND ON TOP OF THAT I STILL HAD SALES EXPECTATIONS. WTF. I was a tech, not a sales person! How was I suppose to sell half of what the sales guys there do when I'm working on machines all day?? On top of that if I handed something off to a sales rep to call and talk to them, it was always a struggle with them to get them to share the sale with me. Fuck this I'm out.

      That's when I got lucky. That's when I found my first actual IT job. I started on the phones at a place, and not even a week in they said they had a desktop support position available. I pushed for 4 weeks to get that job. I hounded the IT manager, director, and the admin there... And eventually, I got it! I was learning so much. So many systems to learn. WTF is AD??? IDK, but imma find out. No need to explain mr boss man, I got my secret weapon... GOOGLE. I learned quickly google was my friend in IT. TBH this job was mostly keep the little shit out of the boss mans hair so he could focus on getting the big shit done. I loved all the little shit. It was all so new and exciting to learn. I had to learn systems that NO ONE at the company knew because someone previously installed that system and no one knew how it worked. I wrote up documentation on it, how to pull info, what to put where for new employees, etc. etc. That was until the layoffs started happening. I started getting worried. Would I be next?? No, I was doing a great job! To top it off, my boss went from a backlog of 50+ items down to 12 in 6 months! They can't get rid of me! ...How young and naive I was. TBF I was the ONLY employee they gave any notice to. A full month. Everyone else came into work, and was let go in 5 min or less. So cool, they definitely appreciated me. Not only that, I was only like 19 at the time. To me it showed me they respected me, and that I was a good worker.

      After that passion was a 0. How could a company I worked so hard for do this to me?? I gave up countless hours (to a 19YO that aint much I can tell you that), and I documented everything, I was a good employee... But alas it was the end. I had to find something quick... I'll call up my old manager at the PC store. THAT WAS A MISTAKE. After only being there a week I fell into a depressive hole that I don't think I've quite gotten out of to this day. I was only there a few weeks, but goddamn... I hated every second of it.

      Next job was fucking amazing, and I took it for granted. I was lazy. I did what I was suppose to, but I wasn't proactive like before. I didn't care. I thought, "just give yourself some time. you just need to get out of this rut." But I never did. It sucked. Not the work, that was fucking easy. But life sucked. "But you just got married man? How can you be sad??" (outta left field i know, but my relationship status during any of this is a WHOLE different story) I CAN BE SAD BECAUSE I FUCKING HATE EVERYTHING ABOUT LIFE, I thought to myself. I wasn't happy. I should have gotten out then. It should have been the end of my IT career... But my ex-wife and I made a stupid financial decision and I needed the money that came with how hard I had already worked to get the pay I was. I had to stay in to be able to afford the bills. I loved everyone at that job. It was honestly the best. But... Cuts were made. 20ish% of all staffing was cut... Including my position. Not only that, my ex and I talked and we were separating. Wow, I can't even last a year in marriage. FUCK.

      That's when shit took a turn for the worse. I dug myself deeper, and deeper, and deeper. Separated, and now talking of divorce... I need time. 3 months. I'll find a job after 3 months. During that time I dated for the sake of not being home. I took nightly drive up the canyon... fast. In retrospect, I think I was hoping to fly off the cliff every night I drove. I wasn't in a good state of mind. But I got good at driving up that canyon fast! It turned into a hobby (although now I am not into cars for various reasons).

      But 3 months was up! Wow that was fast. But I feel good. Found a job. Service desk. Cool. Let's go. First day. FUCK. I don't want to be here. I went from desktop support making 40k a year, to service desk making 30k a year. I can barely pay shit rn. I need something better. I need more. I need more. I need MORE. Desktop support position opened there sweet. Apply. Nope the fucking retard got it who had been there for 3 years, even though I already know more than him, AND I get asked by the sysadms for help n the regular because I know the systems they use. But nah, he's been here longer. Fuck this, I'm finding something else.

      So I did. Here I am at my current job. As a system administrator. Good money. Like 50k a year. Full paid benefits. I got here with 0 schooling, or certs, just my experience like I was told I would be able to. Sitting pretty... But... I still hate it... WHY? I LIKE COMPUTERS? I LIKED LEARNING THIS SHIT BEFORE?! WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME?? WHY CAN'T I BE HAPPY?

      ...Oh... Wait... Do I really like computers? No. Not really. Do I want to do this ever rapidly changing career forever? NO. Fuck this. But... I have bills. Okay. Budget time. So now I am still here. I have an end date. Once I get my debts paid I will be out of the IT industry. I am moving states. I will be able to afford to live on much less, and go to school for ANYTHING else. I'm thinking I just want to do something simple for a little like night custodial work, or a security guard. I don't want to have to worry much about the next big thing always around the corner. It's too much stress. It's just not a career for me. Maybe it's not for you. Maybe you should walk away from it to if your not happy.

      What's the point of this post? Honestly mostly a rant. But I also want to let people around my age (24 now) know that walking away from a career IS AN OPTION. "But I need the money I make now because of debts!" Dude, did you not read this? I know. I've been working on paying shit off because of my ex and time I took off from work. I'm in the hole. I get it. Budget and get an end date. That helped me out immensely. Knowing there is an end... Just I'm already excited. Then get out of that career if you aren't happy. DO NOT SACRIFICE YOUR MENTAL HEALTH FOR YOUR CAREER. People in the US have this work work work mentality and I just hate it. I just want to live my life. I don't care about traveling or anything, I just want to be able to live.

      31 votes
    2. iPhone user to Pixel 3 - Let's talk phones

      Hello, ~tech! I've been really interested in the Google Pixel 3 (non XL) for quite some time, mainly due to my boredom of the Apple ecosystem. I've been primarily an iPhone user since 2014...

      Hello, ~tech!

      I've been really interested in the Google Pixel 3 (non XL) for quite some time, mainly due to my boredom of the Apple ecosystem. I've been primarily an iPhone user since 2014 (currently stuck on the iPhone 6S) and I've recently been eager to make a switch to Android. The Pixel 3 seems to be exactly what I'm looking for. Stock Android experience, a beautiful camera, modern device, and I'm already pretty integrated into Google's ecosystem of services, and I feel the transition will be very smooth.

      So, for any Google Pixel 3 users, non XL or otherwise, what do you love and/or hate about your device? Were you in my shoes as well?

      10 votes
    3. Proposal: Weekly neologism thread

      I'm a terrible writer, in part because I've got that epistemophiliac adoration for obscure, archaic or onomatopoeic words, word-play, and more pedantry than most audiences can bear. That being...

      I'm a terrible writer, in part because I've got that epistemophiliac adoration for obscure, archaic or onomatopoeic words, word-play, and more pedantry than most audiences can bear.

      That being said, I think it would be a fun exercise to create and justify new words. A broad range of examples can be found here.

      I'm suggesting this both to give serious writers new tools, and as a light-hearted lower-but-not-low effort community-building exercise to include those who don't consider themselves writers yet.

      Rules:

      1. Any subject matter, though I'd prefer we kept this SFW.
      2. The "logos", or rationale, of the neologism should need little explanation, or be presented in the context of usage, e.g. "asshat", "we're not leaving town, we're staycationing this year."
      3. English language is not required - if you can make a logical creole word and provide English justification, that's fine.
      4. Please Google to ensure originality.
      5. Puns are going to happen. If that's a problem for you, please refrain from complaint unless you feel there's unnecessary cruelty outside the bounds of Tildes' terms of use.

      Here's a starter:

      mortlifting - abusing the occasion of a celebrity's death to make an unrelated political point.

      7 votes
    4. Struggling to find a new TV show to watch? Check out my Google doc detailing shows I've watched, shows I'm currently watching, and shows I want to watch. All with IMDB links and ratings.

      Link to Google doc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hc-Ti6Pff_qUZLAfzzL7WjhFNh2m_XPvMkdYBL6mLzI/edit?usp=sharing I created this document a while back and update it every couple months....

      Link to Google doc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Hc-Ti6Pff_qUZLAfzzL7WjhFNh2m_XPvMkdYBL6mLzI/edit?usp=sharing

      I created this document a while back and update it every couple months. There's an Introduction tab with guidance on how to browse the spreadsheets, which I've copied below for reference:

      (1) This document outlines various TV shows and is broken up into 3 tabs: Watched, Watching, and Want to Watch.

      Watched: Shows I've completed through series finale or given up on. Some of these were canceled early.

      Watching: Shows I'm actively watching day-to-day or shows in between seasons that will air new episodes in the future.

      Want to Watch: Shows I haven't started and want to watch. Many of them are recommendations I jotted down to avoid forgetting, so this list will sometimes be unalphabetized.

      (2) Certain columns of information were exported directly from IMDB, and the page for each show is linked in the rating from the IMDB column.

      (3) On the Watched and Watching tabs, there are columns for Recommend? and Notes to provide background that will help decide what to watch. Don't let any of my negative comments stop you from watching a show you're interested in.

      (4) The Recommended? column is divided into the following categories: Must Watch, Yes, Maybe, No. These are all based on personal opinion with extra discussion/information in the Notes column.

      (5) I've shared this with most people using View Only permissions, so download the Excel file (or copy to your Drive account) to filter columns by genre, rating, and personal recommendation.


      Disclaimer: not everyone will have the same tastes as me - that's okay. I welcome any disagreement about how I've rated shows and hope to get some discussion going.

      • What shows have I missed that I need to watch?

      • What shows did I strongly recommend that you didn't like?

      • What shows did I give up on too early?

      I expect to take some heat for quitting Brooklyn 99 around season 3.

      • What shows haven't come out that I should keep an eye out for?

      Like Jack Ryan which debuts this month.

      • How can I improve the document?

      I considered including a column with the show's network or where it can be legally streamed, but this is pretty tedious given the nature of broadcast rights.

      35 votes
    5. My first time using LInux as someone who's not a computer aficionado - It's perfect

      To clarify I'm not incompetent at computers, I'm sure people don't tend to install Linux if they aren't familiar with technology in a decent capacity. But for instance I can't code, can't operate...

      To clarify I'm not incompetent at computers, I'm sure people don't tend to install Linux if they aren't familiar with technology in a decent capacity. But for instance I can't code, can't operate the command line short of copying and pasting command, and don't really know what I'm doing with the technical aspect other than following online guides. I have used windows all my life. I'm Linux illiterate for lack of a better description.

      I decided I wanted some form of USB bootable computer, i'm familiar with chrome books, enjoy the light weight OS, and am bed bound to the google ecosystem so I when I saw how you could plug in a USB and have the computer boot into Chrome OS running off the USB I thought that sounded perfect. But during my research of discovery I found that Linux seemed like a very good alternative, I had always had it in my head that it was very technical and finicky system where to do a simple google search you had to code in half a dozen lines into the control terminal in some bizarre 2018 text adventure to use the web, I do exaggerate of course but the image I had conjured up over the years was of a very non-user friendly experience and a system made for those running technical aspects such as web servers and system management.

      I decided you can't knock it to you try it and besides turns out you can't get chrome OS on a 32GB USB it has to be 8GB or 16GB apparently. So I installed Ubuntu on my USB, no clue if this is some snooty distro, or a version of Linux that's mocked in the community, or the perfect distro but after minimal research it seemed the most popular and well received version to put it on a USB and booted into it.

      Instantly all my preconceived notions we're erased. It's clean, modern, simple, light weight, and easy to use with a very intuitive and familiar UI. It's pretty much a more open and degooglified (That's a nice word) version of Chrome OS. Since Firefox Quantum was released I emigrated over to try break some ties with google for privacy reasons like it's some pervy conjoined twin of mine, I know it's not good for me, I don't want it there but I can't get rid of it without harming me.

      It's got a simple UI that's familiar to windows albeit without all the bloatware and ads spread everywhere, it doesn't track you like window does (that's as far as I'm aware it did ask to collect anonymised telemetry data which I opted out of). With windows I'm so used to having to go through 3 different pop up windows to change a setting that in Ubuntu it feels like I'm missing features although I'm yet to find one that's not there. The best bit about Linux, is if theirs a setting you want to change and can't find, than someone online has wrote a guide giving you a command line code to copy paste into the terminal to fix it.

      Although to me it feels more on par with Chrome OS than Windows as a bare bones OS with simple apps and a web browser to use the internet with, in this regard Linux wins easy, way more open, no profit based motivation, and more accessible allowing itself to be used anywhere.

      All though that comparison holds up for the normal user and if you are someone who just browses the web and uses apps like Spotify than Linux is amazing it's not complex or difficult, truly wonderful.

      What makes Linux even better is the fact it's not a fair comparison, sure to me it's like Chrome OS due to the simple purposes I use it for but what's truly great is all that nerdy technical stuff I thought Linux was for you can do, if you are hosting a web server than linux gives you a free platform to do it, it feels like you are directly modding the PCB of the computer it's that open.

      In retrospect to typing all that I feel I've just blurted out a generic description of Linux and for those that use it I'm sure they just think I was naive, but this is more aimed at the average user, Linux, or at least Ubuntu, is great, it's: simple, easy, fresh, clean, open, modern, intuitive, versatile, multi-purpose, and free. It's not some difficult to use system, it's alarmingly simple, but infinitely useful

      It's easy to learn and difficult to master.

      64 votes
    6. Collected UI feedback

      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...

      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.

      16 votes
    7. Those with mood disorders; how do you cope?

      I was curious if there are others on this site who struggle with mood disorders and what coping mechanisms are used. I myself was diagnosed bipolarII and have struggled with anxiety / depression...

      I was curious if there are others on this site who struggle with mood disorders and what coping mechanisms are used. I myself was diagnosed bipolarII and have struggled with anxiety / depression for my entire life. Initially I sought relief in medication and therapy but over the last several years have had great success with a variety of coping mechanisms. Specifically each morning I try to ensure I do several 'feel goods' that include:

      1. questions - "what am I happy/proud/grateful about? Why? How does that make me feel" and "Who do I love, who loves me, how does that make me feel?"
      2. Review core beliefs / positive affirmations that I keep on my google drive. Few examples: "I can weather any storm", "Failure is just feedback the current approach isn't working", "I am responsible for everything in my life"
      3. Journaling about feelings, what's happened.
      4. Meditation - 20-30 minutes following the breath

      I also find that keeping a regular sleep schedule, exercise routine, and scheduling a couple social events a week helps. I have learned drinking and other substance is especially damaging for me so I try my best to avoid as much as possible. I still cycle through depression and hypomania rather rapidly but these things help mitigate those highs and lows.

      What do you do to cope?

      16 votes
    8. test2

      Lodown Magazine FEATURES PULSE ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▄▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▄▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▄▄▄▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▄▄▄▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ ▀▀▀▀▀▄▄▄▄▄▀▀▀▀▀▄▄▄▄▄▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ ▀▀▀▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▀▀▀▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▀▀▀▀ ▀▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▀▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▀ Das Chaos frisiert sich...

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      Das Chaos frisiert sich nicht

      4102˙80˙12 :puɐʇs ɥɔılʇläɥɹǝ € 00'85 qɐ ƃunllǝʇsǝq/oɟuı
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      4102˙80˙12 :puɐʇs ɥɔılʇläɥɹǝ ʇɥɔıu ƃunllǝʇsǝq/oɟuı
      4102˙80˙12 :puɐʇs ɥɔılʇläɥɹǝ ʇɥɔıu ƃunllǝʇsǝq/oɟuı
      4102˙80˙12 :puɐʇs ɥɔılʇläɥɹǝ ʇɥɔıu ƃunllǝʇsǝq/oɟuı
      4102˙80˙12 :puɐʇs ɥɔılʇläɥɹǝ 65'74 ɹnǝ

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      plǝƃɹɐɐq ɹopoǝɥʇ sǝuuɐɥoɾ

      ˙ɐpɐpsɟdɯnɹɹɹɹɹɹ 'ʇɹɥöɹ ǝɹɥöɹɯɹɐɥ ǝıp 'ɹɥoɹɹɥoq 'ɹoqɐlloɔ ˙ƃunpıǝlʞɹǝʌsʇɥɔǝlɥɔsǝƃ uı ɹǝpɹöɯʇsqlǝs ɹǝp ʇsı ɹǝʞıʇoƃ ɹǝp ˙ɹǝıǝzʇolʞ ɹǝp sılɐuoıʇıqıɥxǝ ǝpuǝɹǝıssɐɯıɹƃ ɹǝp ʇsı ʞıʇoƃ ǝıp :ǝɹɥöɹɥǝʇs ¡ǝʇɐɹoqɐlloɔ ¡uǝɹɥöɹ ʇɥǝʇs ˙ǝɹɥöɹ ʇɥǝʇs ("ɐ" ǝqɐƃsnɐ ulöʞ uı ǝʇsuüʞ ɹǝp ʇɟɐɥɔsllǝsǝƃ ɹǝp uoʌ uǝƃɐlɥɔsɹǝʇun uǝɥɔsılƃuǝ ɯǝp snɐ) plǝıɟʇɹɐǝɥ puɐlǝıʍ ˙ǝɹɥöɹ ʇɥǝʇs ʇuɐsǝq - ıuuɐ - ǝıp ˙ǝɹɥöɹ ʇɥǝʇs pnoƃǝd ˙uıǝquǝɹɥöɹ ˙ǝɹɥöɹ ɹǝp uı pun uɐ ɹnʇʞǝʇıɥɔɹɐuǝɹɥöɹ ǝıp uǝllos ɹıʍ ˙uǝɥɔılƃǝƃsnɐ uǝpuǝɹǝıpnʇsʇʇodɯoʞ-lɐızos uǝuoʇılıɯɯoɔ uǝɥɔsıuıǝɥɹ ǝıp uɐ ǝʇsɹüʍuɥɐzɹɐɐɥßoɹ ǝɥɔsʇnǝp 029 ʇɐɥ ƃunƃǝʍǝq uǝɥɔsıʇsıɐpɐp ɹǝp ɥɔıɹüz ǝʞɔnusʇɹo ǝıp ˙sɯǝʇsʎsuǝɹɥöɹ sǝp ǝɟlıɥ ʇıɯ ǝuısäɹpǝƃɐuäɹp ǝuıǝ sʇıǝɹǝq pun 'ʇsı ǝlnäɟuɥɐz ɹǝp ƃunuıǝɥɔsɹǝ-suoıʇɐɯoʌ ǝʌıʇʞǝɹǝ ǝuıǝ ʞıʇoƃ ǝıp ßɐp 'uǝɯɯoʞ nz sıuqǝƃɹǝ ɯǝp nz ʇqnɐlƃ dɹɐ ˙uǝsıǝlǝƃ ǝsǝɥʇuʎsuǝɹɥöɹ uǝɥɔsıuıʇsnƃnɐ ɹǝp ǝssüƃɹoʌ ǝıp ǝʇʇıu ɹǝuıǝs uoıʇɐʞɹǝqnd uǝʇsɥɔäu ɹǝuıǝs uı ʇǝlǝɥʇɐlıɥd ǝʇqǝılɹǝʌ ɹǝp pɹıʍ uǝƃǝƃɐp ˙uǝƃɐɹʇɹǝʌ ıǝp sılɐnʇʞǝllǝʇuı ɹoɯɐ uǝp ɹǝläɥɔs uoʌ plodoǝl ˙ɟoɹd uǝʇǝlǝɥʇɐlıɥd sǝp ǝʇʇıu ɹǝp ʇɐɥ "p" sǝssnɥɔssnɐsuoıʇʞɐ uǝlɐuoıʇɐuɹǝʇuı sǝp ɹässıɯǝ 'dɹɐ suɐɥ ʇsıuıʇɐs ɹǝp ˙ʇɥǝʍǝƃ slǝʇıdɐʞɯop sǝp uǝızıɟɟo ǝıp ɥɔɹnp lɐɯıǝʍz ǝzʇlnɥɔs ˙ɹp ɟoɥɔsıqzɹǝ ɯoʌ 51˙3 ˙ɯɥɔɐu ǝpɹnʍ "uoıssɐd ǝƃızuıǝ uıǝɯ" ʞɹǝʍɹɐʇlɐ ǝuǝɟɟıɹƃɹǝ sɐp ˙ʇǝpuǝlǝɹǝʌ uıʇʇɐƃ ɹǝuıǝs ƃunlɐɯsnɐ ǝɥɔsıʇsıuoıssǝɹdxǝ ǝıp uǝuǝssılɟǝqɯoldıpuǝuuoq ɹǝp ƃunzʇıs ɹǝɥɔsıʇuǝpnʇs uı uuoq - ɹǝƃuıɥɔɐɟ ˙ɥlıʍ ˙ɟoɹd uoıʇʞǝɾɹǝʇuı ɹǝp ʇsıpuɐƃɐdoɹd ɹǝp ʇɐɥ ɯǝpzʇoɹʇ ˙ʇƃɐɹʇuɐǝq ɹǝlloɹ ɹǝzɹɐɥ ɥɔɹnp suǝsǝʍuǝʇuǝuɹǝzǝp sǝp ƃunɹǝısıɹɐuɐʞ ǝıp ɹǝɥɐp ʇɐɥ ƃunƃıuıǝɹǝʌuǝʇuǝɯnsuoʞ ǝıp ˙ʇzʇɐldǝƃ plǝɟɹǝǝɯ ɐlɐsoɹ uıʇsıɐpɐp ɹǝp uǝsɐʌ ǝıp puıs sɹǝssɐʍɥɔoɥ-ɹɐnuɐɾ sǝp ǝƃloɟ slɐ ˙uǝpɹoʍ ʇɹǝıdıʇsuoʞ uɥos ɯǝuıǝs ʇıɯ ʇlʎs ƃunlpǝısuǝɹɥöɹ ɹǝp uı ɹǝuıqnɹ ˙ɹ uuɐɥoɾ uǝʇsıɐpɐp sǝp ƃunɹɥüɟɹǝʌ ɥɔɹnp ʇsı ɹǝʇlɐʍuǝsɐɥ ˙uǝssoƃǝq uɥos ɯǝuıǝs uoʌ ,ǝpǝıʍ ,ǝʇıǝʍ pɹıʍ ɹǝʇlɐɟuǝsɐɥ ɹǝʌǝlɔ uǝɥɔlıǝʍouıʞ sɐp ˙uǝnɐʞnzsnɐ ɹnʇʞǝʇoɹɥdɐuǝɹɥöɹ ɹǝp uouɐʞlɐʇuǝɯɐuɹo uǝp ʇʞɐ uǝɥɔılqıǝʍ ɯɐ uǝƃunplıqlɹǝd pun uǝƃunɹǝuıǝʇsʇoʞ 'uǝƃunɹɐɐɥ ɹǝɯɹouqɐ 'uǝƃunsɥɔɐʍʇuǝ lɥɐzɟnɐ ɹǝuıǝ ʇıɯ ʇƃıʇɥɔısqɐǝq ʇnʇıʇsuı sɐp ˙ʇǝʇɥɔıɹɹǝʌ ǝʇɹɐʍlɐʇuǝɯɐuɹo ǝɥɔsıɯoʇɐuɐuɐld ǝuıǝ (1944ɐ ˙lǝʇ '451-051 ƃǝʍɹǝƃɹnqsɹǝɟǝıɥɔs 'sǝddıu) sʇlɐʍɹǝʌsƃunʇɹǝʍʇuǝɹǝıʇɹǝız ˙ʇpäʇs sǝp uǝɯnäq uǝp uı ʇɐɥ ˙q˙p˙q ǝʞɥɔsɐɯ ɐpɐp sǝp "ƃunɹǝʇıǝʍɹǝǝʇʇäʇs" uɹnɯıǝɥǝƃ ɹǝp ˙ʇzʇǝs ɥdɐʇıdǝlǝllɐɹɐdoɥɔʎsd uıǝ ƃɐʇ ɯǝp slǝʇɹǝıʌ sǝuıǝs uɹǝʇuıɥɹǝsnäɥ pun uɹǝnɐɯpuɐɹq uǝp uɐ uǝpɐɔɹɐɟuǝɹɥöɹ uoʌ uǝƃuıɹquɐ ɥɔɹnp ɹǝp 'ʇpuɐsǝƃ lǝʇʇüq ɯǝp ʇıɯ ɹnʇʞuıʇıɥɔɹɐuǝɹɥöɹ ˙ʇqɐ 3/ʍ ǝlɐɹʇuǝz ǝıp uɐ ɥɔıs ʇɐɥ ɹɐɐdlǝqnɾ sɐp ˙ʇǝʇɐɹıǝɥǝƃ ǝʇqǝılǝƃ ǝuıǝs ʇɐɥ ʇǝʍıǝs oǝl pılodoɯsoʞ ɹǝp ˙ʇɥɔıɹdsɹǝpıʍ sǝɟɹnʍʇuǝzʇǝsǝƃuǝɹɥöɹqǝıɹʇǝq sǝp uǝƃunɯɯıʇsɹǝʌ uǝp pun ʇsı ɹǝllǝʞ ɹǝʇƃǝlǝƃıǝɹɟ uıǝ ɹǝp 'puıs uǝqɐɹƃɹǝʌ nz sǝɯɹnʇlǝɟɟıǝ sǝp uǝıǝʇɹɐdǝqlöʍǝƃ ǝıp qo 'uǝssɐl uǝɯɯıʇsǝq ɥɔıs uǝpɹǝʍ ǝʇǝıqǝƃsƃunɯɯıʇsqɐ ǝıp ˙snɐ ɹnʇʞǝʇıɥɔɹɐuǝɹɥöɹ ɹǝp uǝpoq ɯǝp ɟnɐ ɥɔıǝlƃɹǝʌ uǝuıǝ ʎqɹǝp-uɐsǝzöıp ǝƃıllıʍıǝɹɟ-ƃıɹɥäɾuıǝ sɐp ɹüɟ ɐpɐp ƃunƃǝʍǝq ɹǝp 3/ʍ ǝlɐɹʇuǝz ǝıp ʇƃäs 'ulǝʞäɥ ǝɯɯɐɹƃǝlǝʇɥɔsunʍʞɔülƃ uıpoɹ ǝʇsnƃnɐ uıʇsılɐızos ǝıp pun uıǝʇsuıǝ ʇɹǝqlɐ puǝɹɥäʍ ˙nɐɹɟ ɹǝuıǝs ƃunɹǝısılɐunɯɯoʞ ɹǝp ʇıɯ ʇɥoɹp pun ǝɥǝ ɹǝp nɐqqɐ slɐ ʞıʇoƃlɐunɯɯoʞ ɹǝp ƃunlɥüɟuıǝ ǝıp ʇsɹǝ ǝsolɥɔnɐɹ ʇʞɐpıpouɹod ǝpuǝɥɔǝʇs ʇɥɔılɟdʇɟɐɥ ɹǝp qlɐɥɹǝßnɐ ɹǝp ʇɹälʞɹǝ 'uǝɯɯouǝƃ ƃunllǝʇs uǝsoɥɹǝıɹɟǝƃ uoʌ uǝƃnɐsuɐ ɥɔɹnp ʇʞǝɹpod ɯǝp nz sǝpunq sǝp lǝƃuılʞ ǝuɹodolıɥd ǝıp ɯǝpɥɔɐu ˙sɯop ɹǝulöʞ sǝp ɟnɐlɟnɐ uǝp ɥɔɹnp sɯǝʇsʎsuǝɹɥöɹ sǝp ƃunpuɐsǝq ǝıp ʇlǝpuɐɥɹǝʌ pun uǝʞɔɐqǝƃuıǝ puoɯǝɹ zʇıɹoɯ uǝʌǝlǝnɐqlɐunɯoʞ uǝp ɥɔɹnp ɥɔıluösɹǝd ˙ɯɹoʌ 03˙11 ɹɐnuɐɾ ˙51 ɯɐ ǝpɹnʍ ˙ɥǝƃ 0291/3332 ʇʞǝɹpod ɹǝp ˙uǝßoʇsǝƃ ˙ɥǝƃ 0291/3332 ˙ou ɟɹnʍɹoʌlɐuıɯıɹʞ uǝp ɟnɐ uǝʇıǝqɹɐ uǝʇɹǝıɹouoɥ puǝɟnɐlɥɔɹnp ɹǝuıǝs ƃunɹǝıʌouǝɹ ɹǝp ıǝq ʇsı uǝʇʞǝʇıɥɔɹɐsnıʇɐlnʞǝds ǝʌıssǝɹdxǝ lǝʌ ɹǝƃuäƃuǝʇuıɹd ɹǝɥɔsıuısɐɯoɥʇ ʇɟɐsuǝɥɔsɹnq ɹǝp ˙ɯɹnʍpuɐq 'puɐqzzɐɾ 'zzɐɾ

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      schwieriges los:

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      'Hannover' - Kurt Schwitters

      Die Hannoveraner sind die Bewohner einer Stadt, einer Großstadt. Hundekrankheiten bekommt der Hannoveraner nie. Hannovers Rathaus gehört den Hannoveranern, und das ist doch wohl eine berechtigte Forderung. Der Unterschied zwischen Hannover und Anna Blume ist der, daß man Anna von hinten und von vorn lesen kann, Hannover dagegen am besten nur von vorne. Liest man aber Hannover von hinten, so ergibt sich die Zusammenstellung dreier Worte: "re von nah". Das Wort "re" kann man verschieden übersetzen: "rückwärts" oder "zurück". Ich schlage die Übersetzung "rückwärts" vor. Dann ergibt sich also als Übersetzung des Wortes Hannover von hinten: "Rückwärts von nah". Und das stimmt insofern, als dann die Übersetzung des Wortes Hannover von vorn lauten würde: "Vorwärts nach weit". Das heißt also: Hannover strebt vorwärts, und zwar ins Unermeßliche. Anne Blume hingegen ist von hinten wie von vorne: A-N-N-A.
      (Hunde bitte an die Leine zu führen.)

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      ® featured content was

      • found on the interweb

      • found on my harddrives

      • done

      KAISERBESUCH_1896_STEMPEL_SPEZIELL_0900_0700_SV.JPG

      by sksm

      FACEBOOK

      TWITTER

      GOOGLE+
      SEARCH

      LODOWN SHOP

      IMPRINT

      FACEBOOK

      INSTAGRAM

      TWITTER

      SOUNDCLOUD

      2 votes
    9. Rename the groups after Geocities neighborhoods and please never allow a user to add a group. There has to be limits, and limits create communities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

      But There is one rule that must be set

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

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

      Why?

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

      So what am I getting at?

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

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

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

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

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

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

      List of IDEAS:

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

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

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

      6 votes
    10. Let's see how well Tildes handles a *real* submission...

      Welcome to the /r/ListenToThis Best Of 2017! Here there are no scores, no judgments, and no opinions - just obscure music shared by redditors, collected and arranged for you over the course of...

      Welcome to the /r/ListenToThis Best Of 2017!

      Here there are no scores, no judgments, and no opinions - just obscure music shared by redditors, collected and arranged for you over the course of several months by our dedicated mod team. This list is meant to complement other best of lists on the internet, many of which are linked in the sticky comment below for further discovery.

      Set #1 includes everything - the best of the best tracks and a corresponding all-inclusive album playlist.
      The other sets are the same content, broken up into genre groups so you can listen according to your tastes. There is a sampler (1 track per album) and a full-album (every track from every album) playlist for each group. We’ve also included a listing of the albums by set in this post as not everything is available on Spotify, Tidal, etc. We tried to prefer an artist’s Bandcamp or Soundcloud, but if nothing else was available, you may see Youtube, Spotify, and iTunes links. The final count this year is 226 artists out of more than a thousand submissions.

      What did we miss? Share your favorites in the comments… and happy listening..

      -- the /r/ListenToThis hipster facista


      Set 1 - The Full Smash


      Best Tracks on Spotify & All Albums on Spotify

      And, on the other services:


      Set 2 - Pop, Indie & Related


      Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

      Google Sampler & Google Albums

      Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

      Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

      Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums

      Apple Music Sampler (thanks /u/suckitnewtabs)


      Set 3 - Progressive & Related


      Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

      Google Sampler & Google Albums

      Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

      Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

      Apple Music Sampler (thanks /u/BlueRoseImmortal)

      Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums


      Set 4 - Hip-Hop, Trip-Hop & Instrumentals


      Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

      Google Sampler & Google Albums

      Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

      Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

      Apple Music Sampler (thanks /u/firewire_9000)

      Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums


      Set 5 - Punk & Related


      Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

      Google Sampler & Google Albums

      Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

      Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

      Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums


      Set 6 - Electronic & Related


      Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

      Google Sampler & Google Albums

      Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

      Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

      Apple Music Sampler (thanks /u/firewire_9000)

      Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums


      Set 7 - Metal


      Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

      Google Sampler & Google Albums

      Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

      Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

      Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums

      Apple Music Sampler (thanks /u/BlueRoseImmortal)


      Set 8 - Jazz, Soul, Funk & Related


      Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

      Google Sampler & Google Albums

      Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

      Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

      Apple Music Sampler (thanks /u/firewire_9000)

      Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums


      Set 9 - Afrobeat, World & Classical


      Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

      Google Sampler & Google Albums

      Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

      Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

      Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums


      Set 10 - Americana & Related


      Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

      Google Sampler & Google Albums

      Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

      Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

      Apple Music Sampler (thanks /u/firewire_9000)

      Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums


      Disclaimer: The Spotify playlists are the masters. They were auto-replicated to all of the other services, and there will be some missing albums on those services. The Youtube playlists may also get a bit wonky. Unfortunately, we don’t have the resources needed to fix every hiccup or keep track of what’s missing on every service. Apple music doesn’t provide an easy import mechanism either, though if someone wants to create Apple lists, we’ll link them here. Also, Google Music and Youtube simply can’t handle the All Albums playlist, so they are omitted.


      Links to Other Best Of Lists



      Please share other noteworthy lists you've found online in the replies to this comment.

      4 votes
    11. What's in a link? A recipe for using the web to find a spectacular amount of information about music submissions.

      This discussion is old hat for the l2t mods, but I'd like to get it written down here on tildes so when the time comes to develop these features we've got a record of all the tricks ready to help...

      This discussion is old hat for the l2t mods, but I'd like to get it written down here on tildes so when the time comes to develop these features we've got a record of all the tricks ready to help whoever wants to code it all. It's surprisingly easy to do this now.

      First, we're only going to concern ourselves with legal, legit streaming links. That limits the number of sites we need to support to the following...

      1. Youtube 2. Bandcamp 3. Soundcloud 4. Spotify 5. Google Play

      Sure, there are others, but they don't offer free streaming, so they aren't particularly useful for widespread music sharing on social media sites like reddit and tildes. Even on reddit, very little of the music shared ends up coming from pay-for services - it's almost entirely coming from youtube, bandcamp, and soundcloud, in that order. So those are the APIs we need to be dealing with in order to extract useful information. It's also worth noting that over time, some of these will die, and new ones will arise to take their place, and they will change their APIs from time to time breaking services built on top of them.

      Yes, sometimes youtube has pirate streams of music. That's their problem to solve, not ours. The closest we could come to 'helping' in that regard would be verifying that the video posted is on the artist and/or label's official channels. This is not easy, but it is possible. Frankly, I don't think it's worth the effort. It's hard to code and will have a messy false positive rate. A lazier solution we've used in listentothis for years is simply having a blacklist for channels that spam/rip/repost artist's music without permission - and we can get you a copy of our blacklist and whitelist if you like, so that isn't starting from scratch.

      Getting all the music information about an artist is a two-step process.

      The first step is querying the metadata provided by the sites listed above through their API calls. The relevant information we need for this is simply the name of the artist and the name of the track (or album, if it's an album link). There's plenty of other information available (some of which we will want, like the youtube views and various popularity metrics such as plays, scrobbles, listens, monthly listeners, heat indexes) but that information isn't needed unless you intend to start dividing up the music into sub-categories using other ~tilds or #tags. Eventually we will want to do that (subs like listentothis can't really exist without the popularity numbers) but that's a problem for further in the future, once tildes is a lot more active. For now, let's just concentrate on making the sidebar of a music submission take people's breath away.

      The second step is using the name of the artist and the name of the track (or album) to lookup information about that artist in public databases.

      The motherlode of music data resides in Musicbrainz. This has become the de-facto open-source database of record - you might remember its humble beginnings when it was cddb and freedb, embedded in most cd-ripping tools to provide lookups of the artist/track information. It's grown into a wikipediesque monster since then. It knows almost everything there is to know about every artist who has ever released so much as a single or an EP, and does well even for obscure and new independent artists. It's also being updated by-the-minute with new artist information.

      Musicbrainz has a public API, and they allow dozens of queries per minute, so it would be possible to use their free service - but I think that's the wrong way to do this. Musicbrainz does allow you to set up your own copy of their database, and provides scripts to download nightly updates of the data, so it's possible to run this locally. For a hassle-free setup, they do provide a virtual machine that's ready to go, just download and boot it up on your network. The VM also has their full API and web services (looks exactly like their official site), so with the VM you can query it locally through the API just like you would using the remote site (and you could have a failover between the local copy and the official site). Running just a local copy of the database rather than the VM, you won't get the API. The database is around 30GB right now and grows very slowly. Musicbrainz local copies also provide the option of querying their SQL directly, without the need to use the API.

      What data can we get out of this monster database?

      1. Artist search with a confidence rating for best match
      2. Complete discography and artist bio in excruciating detail
      3. A fantastic collection of every relevant link to other sites
      4. The most relevant collection of 'genre tags' available anywhere

      Let's also not forget they come with an army of developers and a great support forum. I think the case for using musicbrainz as tildes' prime music authority kinda makes itself. :P

      There's really no need for another data source. Musicbrainz doesn't do popularity numbers yet but they are planning to do it soon. The Listenbrainz project is, basically, an attempt to reinvent last.fm as an open-source service. Last.fm itself isn't likely to survive, they've been struggling financially for several years. Listenbrainz hopes to allow people to import that data before the site goes under.

      So what do we build out of this mountain of data? Easy - the laziest submission process for music anywhere on the internet.

      I think the goal here for the users is to be simply pasting a music link into the submission form, and letting tildes do all of the rest of the work for them. The tags and the title can be auto-populated by the lookup, and then tweaked by the user. That'll give a sense of uniformity to the titles, and it makes submitting on mobile almost effortless.

      Once the submission is created, the sidebar can be populated with the musicbrainz information. I think a good start would be to show the name of the artist, the name of the album, the name of the track (if applicable), and the release year - possibly even the record label and genre tags (big bucket generic tags like rock, jazz, folk, nothing overly specific). I'd follow that up with the relevant artist links to their own website, their official bandcamp/youtube/twitter/facebook, and possibly the links to discogz and lyric wiki if present. I'd close it with the artist's bio - just a blurb, that ends with a 'read more on wikipedia' link.

      If/when we have all of this working, we can worry about the next step - finding a way to determine the relative popularity of any given submission. That's a far, far harder problem to solve.

      Here's a quick link listing to all of the relevant APIs and their documentation for easy reference.

      1. Musicbrainz XML API
      2. Youtube API
      3. Bandcamp API
      4. Soundcloud API
      5. Spotify / Echonest API (second only to musicbrainz for raw amount of data)
      6. Google Play API

      Edit: Also, we can run a local copy of the Discogs database which will give us even more. If we have Musicbrainz and Discogs local, that's almost everything without the need to have Tildes connecting to other sites.

      14 votes