welcome to week twelve, one day late edition. this delay is brought to you by the weirdly confined issue to the file i wrote this in, which necessitated three days(!) of writing because of the sheer number of links this week. the opinion section is only one article long this week again, but we have some [LONGFORM] pieces and some recent polling to make up for that.

the usual note: common sense should be able to generally dictate what does and does not get posted in this thread. if it's big news or feels like big news, probably make it its own post instead of lobbing it in here. like the other weekly threads, this one is going to try to focus on things that are still discussion worthy, but wouldn't necessarily make good/unique/non-repetitive discussion starters as their own posts.

Week 1 • Week 2 • Week 3 • Week 4 • Week 5 • Week 6 • Week 7 • Week 8 • Week 9 • Week 10 • Week 11

News

Polling

• Iowa Caucuses, from CNN & The Des Moines Register:

Twenty-four percent of Iowa’s likely Democratic caucusgoers say former vice president Biden is their first choice for president. Sanders, a Vermont senator, is the first choice for 16% of poll respondents, while Warren, a Massachusetts senator, and Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, are at 15% and 14% respectively. No other candidate cracks double digits. California Sen. Kamala Harris comes closest at 7% [...] Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke are at 2%.

• National head-to-head, from Quinnipiac:

In a first look at head-to-head 2020 presidential matchups nationwide, several Democratic challengers lead President Donald Trump, with former Vice President Joseph Biden ahead 53 - 40 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University National Poll released today. [...]
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders over President Trump 51 - 42 percent;
California Sen. Kamala Harris ahead of Trump 49 - 41 percent;
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren tops Trump 49 - 42 percent;
South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg edges Trump 47 - 42 percent;
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker by a nose over Trump 47 - 42 percent.

• National Democratic Primary, from Quinnipiac:

Biden leads the presidential primary race with 30 percent among Democrats and voters leaning Democratic. [...] Sanders is next with 19 percent; Warren has 15 percent; Buttigieg has 8 percent; Harris is at 7 percent; Former U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke is at 3 percent; No other Democrat tops 1 percent, with 14 candidates polling at less than 1 percent.

General Stuff

• from Vox: Poll: a growing number of Democratic voters are prioritizing gender-related issues we begin with some polling, which suggests that the recent slate of abortion bans and heavy restrictions on abortion is having an impact on what voters prioritize. a doubling of democratic voters who prioritize women's issues has been observed across the board in the span of just a month. this might not be maintained if the slate of abortion bans gradually dies off, but at least in the immediate term you definitely seem to be seeing this in how often these issues are mentioned in the media.
• from Vox: 2020 is quickly becoming the abortion rights election. Here’s proof. also from Vox, in a similar vein some activists are considering 2020 the year of the abortion rights, and the 2020 election a defining election on them. in iowa, for example, it was ranked the top issue of caucusgoers, placing ahead of climate change narrowly. this piece is primarily a conversation focusing on the issues surrounding abortion and how activists think it will play out in this election cycle.
• from Pacific Standard: Can Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, and U.S. Cities End Exclusionary Zoning?. exclusionary zoning policies are something that's gotten attention from a few candidates, most obviously cory booker and elizabeth warren who both have plans which seek to end it. zoning policies are but one part of a greater issue in affordable housing, but the fact that candidates are even bothering to take the time to acknowledge its existence probably demonstrates something about what an issue housing is for a lot of people.
• from CBS News: Some progressives worry Puerto Rico is being left behind on 2020 campaign trail. despite the focus on the complete bottling of aid being sent to puerto rico by the trump administration, a number of progressive groups are concerned that puerto rico is being largely left out of the conversation when it comes to 2020. puerto rico has been largely ignored by candidates so far (only 3 of the candidates in the race have visited the island so far) and is still recovering from hurricane maria; nonetheless, progressives seem ready to make it a defining issue of the campaign trail.
• from Slate: The Democratic Candidates Ought to Debate Climate Change Policy. one of this week's plotlines with respect to the debates was the DNC's unwillingness to agree to a debate specifically on the issue of climate change. this has been a generally poorly received move, and the party has received considerable backlash for it as this piece is representative of. the DNC might walk this back or it might not, but regardless this seems like it will be an issue that causes future friction, especially given the DNC's expressed desire to uninvite anybody who qualifies for the debates should they engage in a non-DNC affiliated one.
• from Buzzfeed News: California’s Early 2020 Primary Is Pushing Presidential Candidates To Talk To Latino Voters. the california primary coming so early on in the cycle and being such a decisive part of it in 2020 is leading to democratic candidates placing significant priority on appealing to latino voters this year, who are likely to be a major constituency in the primary. this is a welcome change for a lot of latinos and the state of california in general, which has generally come late in the cycle previously and not played an especially significant role in most of them.
• from the Atlantic: [LONGFORM] How the Democrats Got Radicalized on Student Debt. the recent policy developments of the democrats on student debt are the focus of this article by the Atlantic. this has been a rapid change for the party; in the span of just three election cycles the party has gone from "one year of college free for “qualified students”" (the John Edwards proposal, 2008) to things like "making public college tuition-free for students from families who made less than $125,000 a year" (Clinton, 2016) and probably beyond in this cycle.

Joe Biden

• from Grist: Joe Biden says he’ll take the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge. Here’s why that matters. joe biden, in rolling out his climate plan next week, also became the latest candidate to take the "no fossil fuel money" pledge, which most candidates have also taken (and which counterintuitively allows candidates to take donations of less than 200 dollars from the fossil fuel industry). biden's acceptance of this--even though it is far from binding--is particularly significant because it suggests that the progressive wing of the party has basically forced people's hands on this.
• from In These Times: [LONGFORM] Hold the Applause. Biden’s Climate Plan Is Mostly Fluff. meanwhile, In These Times has an extensive critique of biden's climate plan; primarily it notes that biden's plan when you strip it down is not that special and is essentially shared by the rest of the field which has rolled out plans so far at its best moments. at others, it is actively misleading, relies on technological optimism as a crutch, or implies biden supports things like the green new deal which he for the most part does not.
• from the Atlantic: Joe Biden Has the Most to Lose at the Debates. the Atlantic has a piece on joe biden, his near total lack of experience with debates in the past decade, and his debate prep in light of that fact. biden's last serious debate was of course 7 years ago when he faced off against then-VP candidate paul ryan; however, as far as debating other democrats goes, he hasn't done that in a decade. the majority of his prep is centered around trying to stave off the inevitable questions about his record and his positions while presenting himself as a viable alternative to both other democrats and to trump (not that most people necessarily need convincing on the last point)
• from the Guardian: Biden abruptly drops support for 'discriminatory' abortion rule. in policy news, biden decided to do a weird and wholly unnecessary flip-flop on the hyde amendment after originally affirming his continued support for it ,and then having to immediately walk his support of it back when it turned out that literally nobody else but him supported it in the democratic primary. great look, joe.
• from Pacific Standard: Green Jobs and New Technology: A Look at Biden and Warren's Latest Climate Plans. this small article from Pacific Standard compares warren and biden's climate plans together on a number of issues, since they are actually fairly similar in a number of respects despite their ideas being relatively different as a whole.

Elizabeth Warren

• from the Guardian: Elizabeth Warren gains momentum in the 2020 race plan by plan. warren has continued her quiet, but consistent rise in the polls; she's currently pushing some of her best numbers thus far in the campaign in multiple polls. this is good for her campaign of course, but it's also a bit of a potential quagmire for progressives because with sanders and warren both splitting the difference of mostly the same voting demographics, it's unlikely that biden will relinquish his lead over the primary any time soon.
• from the Guardian: Watch Elizabeth Warren blast Biden for his stance on abortion funding. biden drew a massive amount of criticism from democratic candidates over supporting the hyde amendment, probably the strongest of which came from elizabeth warren. in warren's words here: "We do not pass laws that take away that freedom from the women who are most vulnerable"
• from Jacobin: Elizabeth Warren Has a Plan for Everything — Except Health Care. jacobin has an article focusing on the conspicuous absence of an actual healthcare plan from all of warren's ideas so far in the campaign. warren has been pretty vague about what her healthcare policy actually is despite firmly falling into the progressive camp, and she's not really committing to anything in particular yet, to which jacobin encourages her supporters to press her. in their words:

The entire country is desperate for health care security, and Warren is in a position to argue intelligently and emotionally in support of a bold, progressive solution, just as she has for so many other important issues. Her voice can help the single-payer movement in a significant way. Together with Sanders, she could make Medicare for All an unambiguous and uncompromising demand of the progressive left in the 2020 campaign. The longer she stays silent, the weaker the Medicare for All movement becomes in the face of relentless attacks from right and center.

Kamala Harris

• from CNN: Kamala Harris rolls out proposal that would require states to prove abortion laws were constitutional. kamala harris has basically proposed a section 5 provision for abortion rights, which would create a standard where states or polities with a history of unconstitutionally restricting abortion rights would have to prove the constitutionality of their restrictions before they go into effect. this mirrors section 5 of the voting rights act, and would be implemented by harris if she becomes president.
• from NBC News: Kamala Harris ramps up in early primary states. harris has largely lagged behind other candidates, but seems to be finally kicking her campaign in the early states into full gear this week. harris has been relatively low-key with her scheduling so far, only attending around 50 events, but she seems to be intending to gradually pick up the pace, which is probably a good idea because she still has a name recognition problem.

Beto O'Rourke

• from Buzzfeed News: Beto O’Rourke Wants Term Limits For Congress And The Supreme Court. beto o'rourke wants to do a bunch of stuff, but in particular he seems to want to implement term limits for congress; he has a plan which would "limit members of Congress to serving 12 years and create 18-year Supreme Court terms."
• from the Texas Tribune: Beto O'Rourke's proposed election reforms seek to simplify voting registration, get big money out of politics. that plan is also part of a broader scheme to reform politics. the crux of his ideas revolve around elections, where he wants "a national transition to same-day voter registration and automatic voter registration when any citizen visits a government office, with pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds" along with "let[ting] people vote without ID as long as they sign a "sworn written statement of identity."" o'rourke wants to "mak[e] Election Day a federal holiday, expanding early voting to two full weeks before Election Day and relocating polling stations to more convenient places." o'rourke also wants to reform campaign finance, among other thing spporting "encouraging low-dollar donations by making contributions up to $500 tax-deductible and matching those donations with public funds" and "requir[ing] campaigns to disclose donations over $1,000 within 48 hours" among other things.
• from CBS News: Beto O'Rourke says Biden "absolutely wrong" on abortion stance. o'rourke was extensively interviewed by CBS News the other day, during which he also threw some criticism at biden for his bad stance on the hyde amendment:

"I hope Joe Biden rethinks his position on this issue," O'Rourke said. "Perhaps he doesn't have all the facts. Perhaps he doesn't understand who the Hyde Amendment hurts the most...lower income communities, communities of color. I would ask that he rethink his position on this."

Pete Buttigieg

• from Buzzfeed News: Pete Buttigieg’s Struggle To Win Over Latinos Could Limit His Rise In California. pete buttigieg is going to need to do a lot of things if he wants to win the nomination, and one of them is win over latinos who currently are not going to him in nearly the numbers he needs. in california in particular, the biggest state in the primary his bump in the polls is really being limited by his current lack of appeal to the latino community (to which he is trying to rectify things, but not necessarily doing the best job). he's made overtures toward the latino community, but he's still going to need to do a lot more than what he currrently has on the card if he wants to compete with them.
• from NBC News: Buttigieg's big accomplishment that he never mentions on the campaign trail. buttigieg incidentally has one proposal which might actually endear him to the latino community's undocumented members but which he has yet to really play up on the campaign trail. in south bend he organized a "Community Resident Card" program through a private organization and basically turned it into an acceptable form of ID accepted by most of the businesses and services in the city, which allowed undocumented immigrants in south bend to participate in life without having to worry about immigration services.

Jay Inslee

• from Reuters: Presidential hopeful Inslee unveils plan to reclaim U.S. leadership on climate issue. jay inslee not only has plans on climate change, he also has plans on how to make the US a leader on climate change internationally. according to reuters, inslee's plan on taking the reins internationally "ranges from rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement, an international accord to fight climate change that Trump opposes, to more ambitious ideas like overhauling U.S. trade and immigration policies to prioritize climate change, and blocking U.S. financing for foreign fossil fuel projects."
• from Buzzfeed News: Gov. Jay Inslee Says He Is Running For President To Do “Everything Humanly Possible” To Defeat Climate Change. buzzfeed interviewed jay inslee primarily on climate change here and he goes into a bit more detail about his campaign, but probably the most interesting thing about this interview is inslee's non climate policies, which he also goes into a bit here. (he does not want to change the law federally on sex work, leaving it up to the states, for example.)

Everybody else

• from TIME: [LONGFORM] Bernie Sanders Wants to Change America. But He May Have to Change Himself First. this longform piece from TIME focuses on the bernie sanders campaign and bernie himself, mostly in how his own successes in 2016 have so far been his worst enemy in 2020 because other candidates have come to emulate him. in many respects 2020 will probably be a campaign which sees bernie reinvent himself in ways that he didn't previously have to consider in 2016, when he was an upstart radical challenging hillary clinton and trying to push for radical positions that are now basically mainstream in the party because of him.
• from Vox: Cory Booker’s plan to fix the housing crisis and make renting affordable. cory booker has policy on fixing the housing crisis, and in summary it's: tax credits for renters, federal incentives for affordable housing, “baby bonds” as ways to make housing more affordable, protections for renters against evictions, and aid for the homeless.
• from Buzzfeed News: This Democratic Presidential Candidate Has A Sweeping Plan To Eliminate Lead Poisoning. the apparently nameless julian castro hasa plan to deal with lead poisoning in america, which is something that no other candidate has put forward before now. his plan is pretty straightforward:

He would ask Congress to allocate $5 billion per year for 10 years to replace lead pipes and address lead contamination in paint and soil “in areas of highest need,” as well as an additional $100 million per year toward preventing lead poisoning in children.
For people whose blood has high levels of lead, Castro’s plan includes provisions for treating lead poisoning under universal health care, mandatory lead testing for children under 2 years old, and “support services including counseling, tutoring, education on nutritional needs.”

• from RollCall: Think Kirsten Gillibrand has no chance? She’s heard that before — and won anyway. kirsten gillibrand might be well behind most of the frontrunners, but she's no stranger to longshot races. as this RollCall article notes, gillibrand's first big victory came in a district that was something of a longshot, and despite the expectation that gilibrand would lose. obviously a congressional race is not a presidential race, but we're also early and technically speaking, nobody is out of it yet.
• from the Guardian: 'For the NRA, the gig is up': Eric Swalwell on why gun control is a winning issue. from one perennial 1%er to another, we now turn to eric swalwell, who the guardian snagged an interview with on the issue of gun control, the topic which motivated his run. in his view gun control is a winning issue primarily because of the massive toll mass shootings have already wreaked on the country and the fact that most people support restrictions on guns.

Opinion

• from the Guardian: Want to defeat Trump? Attack Biden. this opinion piece by bhaskar sunkara echoes a similar refrain from a number of people, which is that biden is out of step with the party and needs to be halted because his policies essentially make him an empty suit.

week nine is here, and while we don't have a lot of candidates this time, we still have a bunch of stuff to go through. the opinion section is back this week, since there were a few pieces of the sort, but it's pretty short this week. we actually have more [LONGFORM] tagged pieces this week than op-eds, so that's always interesting. anyways.

the usual note: common sense should be able to generally dictate what does and does not get posted in this thread. if it's big news or feels like big news, probably make it its own post instead of lobbing it in here. like the other weekly threads, this one is going to try to focus on things that are still discussion worthy, but wouldn't necessarily make good/unique/non-repetitive discussion starters as their own posts.

Week 1 • Week 2 • Week 3 • Week 4 • Week 5 • Week 6 • Week 7 • Week 8

News

General Stuff

• from Buzzfeed News: [LONGFORM] “Abolish ICE” Was The Call Of Last Summer. 2020 Democrats Have Moved On.. despite the big hooplah surrounding this last year, it's been surprisingly quiet on the abolish ICE front since then, to the chagrin of many immigration activists. given the fact that it's fairly radical (despite ICE only being an agency since 2002), don't expect a lot of movement here; many of the democrats running who adopted the drumbeat last year have almost totally dropped it and show no signs of really picking it back up.

• from The Atlantic: [LONGFORM] The 2020 Presidential Candidates’ Families Look Like Americans’. this is an interesting piece which analyzes how even the "nuclear" family which we're all so used to has essentially ceased to exist on the campaign trail, on both sides of the aisle, and become more reflective of what you'd expect of such a large and diverse country:

Of the 24 candidates, eight have blended families: Donald Trump has children with multiple partners; the candidates Elizabeth Warren, John Hickenlooper, Bill Weld, and Joe Biden are married and have children from previous marriages, while Bernie Sanders is married and has a son from a previous relationship; Sanders, Tim Ryan, and Kamala Harris all have stepchildren. Seven are remarried divorcés or divorcées (Trump, Warren, Hickenlooper, Weld, Sanders, Eric Swalwell, and Tulsi Gabbard), and four have no children of their own (Harris, Gabbard, Pete Buttigieg, and Cory Booker). One has a spouse of the same sex (Buttigieg), one is a remarried widower (Biden), and two are unmarried (Booker and the self-help and spirituality author Marianne Williamson). Two candidates have at some point lived as single mothers (Warren and Williamson).

• from Pacific Standard: What Role Will Religion Play for Democratic Presidential Candidates in 2020?. religion has been largely absent from the democratic side of presidential elections for awhile, but interestingly even as organized religion starts to decay in america, this year you're seeing a few democrats pick up the banner of religion in their campaigning. this might be because WASP-types tend to vote heavily republican and even scalping a few of them or making them more hesitant to pull the lever for republicans could render a republican unable to win nationwide except in particularly unique circumstances--but it could also just be that there are a lot of candidates this year, and some of them just happen to be openly religious and democratic. either way, it's too early to really say how this will shake out in future elections, but keep an eye on it.

• from FiveThirtyEight: [LONGFORM] How Will Democrats’ Move Away From Caucuses Affect The 2020 Race?. a lot of states which used caucuses in 2016 are not going to be doing so again in 2020; in fact, the caucus system is basically dead at this point in the democratic party. besides turnout, though, it's unclear how this will actually affect the 2020 race. maybe the biggest subplot of this will be the party-run primaries some states will be having (which differ significantly from government-run primaries: "While state governments might open hundreds or thousands of polling places statewide for 12 hours or more, party-run votes might provide less than one voting location per county or keep the polls open for just four hours on primary day. These party-run affairs will likely offer forms of early and absentee voting in 2020, but seeing as they won’t be able to rely on the state-run systems that normally handle these kinds of election administration, it’s unclear how effective the parties will be at managing this on their own.") beyond that? shruggie.

Joe Biden

• from POLITICO: ‘Slow and steady’ strategy pays off for Biden. biden's early game so far has been pretty laid back compared to just about everybody else. this is very much intentional--biden has several reasons to not want to attempt the wild pace of everybody else, namely that he's old and gaffe prone--and so far, seems to be working. biden's lead has been retained thus far in the primary and doesn't seem to be really abetting yet.

• from The Atlantic: Joe Biden’s Bet That 2016 Didn’t Change Everything. this piece by The Atlantic goes into a bit of detail about the big bet of the biden campaign: "that in the four years since Trump launched his campaign, the country hasn’t changed, the Democratic Party hasn’t changed, and politics hasn’t changed." it's an interesting bet, one which i'm not sure is exactly correct. also, this feels like possibly the most accurate summary of biden's case for the presidency thus far:

[...]It’s early days yet in the Democratic primary, but Biden’s campaign is discussed in some circles as a self-fulfilling prophecy: that he will win the Democratic nomination simply because he appears the likeliest to win the nomination, that he will beat Trump simply because everyone is talking about how electable he is—not because voters are actually excited about him or the specifics of what he’s running on.

• from NBC News: Joe Biden at rally casts himself as candidate who could unify the nation. not surprisingly, biden's angling remains as the centrist unity candidate. in his words:

"I know some of the really smart folks said that Democrats do not want to hear about unity. The Democrats are so angry, the angrier that candidate could be the better chance to win the nomination. I do not believe it," Biden said. "I believe Democrats want to unify this nation."
[...]
"I am running to offer our country — Democrats, Republicans and Independents — a different path, not back to a past that never was but to a future that fulfills our true potential,” he said.

Elizabeth Warren

• from POLITICO: How Sen. Elizabeth Warren would protect abortion rights. warren is pushing a few new proposals on protecting reproductive rights. specifically:

Warren would call on Congress to pass laws enshrining the right to an abortion that would preempt any state attempt to ban the procedure or impose onerous regulations on abortion providers. She would also push for the repeal of the Hyde amendment, a long-time prohibition on federal funding for abortion and sign executive orders rolling back recent Trump administration moves aimed at cutting Planned Parenthood out of the Title X family planning program.

a lot of this is contingent on congress, you might note, and this is one of the big weaknesses of her plan here. democratic control of the senate in either 2020 or 2022 is far from a given, meaning that in the event they fail to take control of the senate this plan basically cannot go through since it'd fail on a party-line vote. (she might be banking on the democrats splitting the chamber 50-50 since it is unlikely they'd--in 2020 anyways--outright win the senate.)

• from CBS News: Elizabeth Warren introduces bill to curb defense lobbying. warren's also introduced a bill in congress which, among other things, seeks to "ban defense contractors from hiring senior officials directly from the Defense Department and extend to four years the ban on former generals lobbying the Pentagon", "[disqualify former contractors who join the government] from working on any issue that could help or hurt their former employer for four years", and "limit foreign governments' hirings of U.S. national security officials."

• from CBS News: Elizabeth Warren introduces plan to reduce military's carbon footprint. aside from abortion and lobbying, warren's also been busy with climate policy. specifically she's pushing for "the military to reach zero carbon emissions for all non-combat bases and infrastructure by 2030." this is a surprisingly ambitious goal, because the military's carbon emissions have been increasing recently.

• from Jacobin: How Warren’s Climate Defense Bill Undermines Itself. of course, warren's bill isn't without some controversy. jacobin argues that some of the provisions of the bill essentially undermine it completely, specifically the "market waiver" and the "war waiver":

WAIVER: the Secretary of Defense may waive the requirements of this section . . . [if] he determines that market conditions for a product or service make it difficult for the Department to acquire that product or service and the waiver will accelerate the Department’s acquisition of the product or service.
[...]
WAIVER: the Secretary of Defense may waive the requirements of this section . . . [if] he determines that meeting these requirements would adversely affect the national security interests of the United States . . .

in their view these waivers are likely to be exploited to such an extent by the government that they essentially offset any benefits the bill could have and render it incapable of addressing climate change in the way climate change needs to be addressed in the time we have.

• from In These Times: [LONGFORM] When It Comes to U.S. Militarism, Elizabeth Warren Is No Progressive. more broadly, In These Times makes an argument for warren being basically joined at the hip with military interests, even as she tries to address some of the biggest problems with it. specifically they note that her voting record outside of yemen on military issues is not the best, and they often stand in contrast to some of the policies and rhetoric she espouses on the issue.

• from Vanity Fair: Can MAGA Country Learn to Love Elizabeth Warren?. vanity fair notes meanwhile that warren seems to be gaining some traction with trump voters, at least on policy issues:

[...]In a recent focus group observed by Axios in Sioux City, Iowa, voters who flipped from Obama to Trump “strongly supported” Warren’s plan to cancel up to $50,000 in student debt for voters whose families made less than $100,000 a year. They echoed her message that many Americans are not reaping the benefits of a booming economy, pointing to stagnant wages and a declining quality of life. And there was a strong consensus that big financial institutions should be taxed to pay for infrastructure.
The only catch? The focus group wasn’t told that the student debt plan was Warren’s. All but 1 of the 11 Obama-Trump swing voters in the group said they would re-elect Trump if he were running against Clinton.

Kamala Harris

• from POLITICO: Kamala Harris' next target: Banning AR-15-style assault weapons. a few weeks back harris outlined her plan for gun control (Kamala Harris Says She’ll Take Gun Control Into Her Own Hands As President If Congress Doesn't Act), and this seems to be an extension of that. this would be an extensive measure:

Harris wants to ban AR-15-style assault weapon imports and suspend all other assault weapon imports until the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can analyze whether they should be permanently banned under U.S. law. Her campaign argues the weapons could be banned because they aren't "suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes." This includes all 44 AR-type models listed in the latest assault weapons ban that was introduced in Congress.

• from POLITICO: Kamala Harris: Biden would make ‘great’ running mate. one of the weirder subplots of the week is the row that's been stirred up by a few members of the Congressional Black Caucus suggesting harris would make a good running mate for joe biden. harris herself mostly dismissed this with the humorous jab in the title here, but...

• from POLITICO: 'It's infuriating': Kamala Harris team galled by Biden veep talk. ...her campaign was less than enthralled with this, to say the least. making it doubly awkward, harris is--as a significant black democrat--a pretty visible member of the CBC, so they had to figure out how to address this without egging this on further. this ultimately seems to have been where harris's jab came from:

Anticipating questions from news media on Wednesday, Harris and her advisers settled on the humorous one-liner, according to an aide.

harris remains committed to running for president, obviously.

Cory Booker

• from Mother Jones: Can Cory Booker Really Turn His Back on Silicon Valley?. a significant booker sticking point so far (although it's gone mostly unreported) is his desire to step in on silicon valley and social media; he's been angling himself in this way for the past few years. the problem with this, of course, is that booker has a long history with silicon valley himself. for the most part, he hasn't really been punished for this by the voters, it seems (not that there are many to punish him in the first place of course--he's sitting on like, 4% in the polls now), but it is a legitimate question whether or not his barnstorming on this issue can necessarily be backed up.

• from Buzzfeed News: Cory Booker Vows To Make Roe V. Wade The Law Of The Land As President. on another note, he is one of several candidates who have pledged to do this. not surprising, and i'd be shocked if anybody besides maybe biden eschewed eventually stumping on this, but it's interesting to see how openly people are running on this.

• from POLITICO: Booker campaign official urges donations for Gillibrand to ensure debate spot. also, perhaps demonstrating the extent to which democrats are trying to avoid conflict, booker's campaign is encouraging people to donate to the perennial disappointment of a campaign that gillibrand has been running so she doesn't miss out on a debate spot. kinda wild!

Everybody Else

• from Buzzfeed News: Bernie Sanders Has A Plan To Fix Racial Segregation In American Schools. bernie sanders unveiled a proposal combatting racial segregation in schools this week while swinging through the south on a four-day, four-state tour:

Sanders’ plan would ban for-profit charter schools, which make up a small slice of charters nationwide, and put strict limits on nonprofit charter schools, temporarily banning federal funding for new charters. Charter schools tend to be more segregated than public schools — the NAACP has called to ban them outright — though they are also popular among black voters.
[...]
One significant roadblock for Sanders’ sweeping plan: the reality that the federal government plays a relatively small role in K-12 education. The vast majority of money for education comes from states, which set their own policies; some states ban for-profit charters, and others allow them to proliferate.

• from Buzzfeed News: This Democrat Is Running For President Behind A $9 Trillion Climate Change Plan. jay inslee is getting some attention this week from the media, mostly for his extensive second climate proposal. seriously, it's huge:

Other notable components of Inslee’s new 38-page policy proposal includes investing $35 billion in clean energy and climate solutions research, a big increase over current levels; creating a $90 billion "Green Bank" at the federal level to help finance clean energy development; phasing out potent greenhouse gases called hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, in line with global agreements; proposing federal agencies get all of their domestic energy production from clean energy sources and purchase only zero-emission vehicles by 2024.
To pay for it all, Inslee proposes a federal investment of about $300 billion a year, which his campaign anticipates will generate an additional $600 billion a year in outside funding. This adds up to $9 trillion in total investment over a decade.

• from POLITICO: ‘He’s white, male and gay’: Buttigieg hits obstacles with black voters. buttigieg is one of the few democrats who might have genuine problems appealing to black voters, most of which is outlined in this POLITICO piece. in a field this large with multiple minority candidates, he's going to have a hard time (and already is having a hard time, honestly) establishing himself as a candidate minorities should go for. for the most part, i think that his status as white is going to be the bigger barrier than him being gay (at least with the majority of black voters--the article notes the big generational disparity on that: "In 2017, 69 percent of African Americans aged 18 to 29 backed same-sex marriage, but just 40 percent of African Americans aged 65 and older did, according to a Public Religion Research Institute poll."), but we'll see.

• from The Atlantic: [LONGFORM] Democrat Steve Bullock Won a Red State in 2016. Can He Beat Trump in 2020?. steve bullock is one of the latest candidates to throw himself into the woodchipper. hailing from the nominally red state of montana, though, he probably has a better case for the presidency than most of the perennial 1% polling crowd. this article mostly outlines who he is, what he wants, and what he's shooting for, because honestly unless you're a politico, you probably have no clue who he is or what he stands for (he's the governor of montana, for the record).

Opinions & Other

• from GQ: Elizabeth Warren Deserves Your Undivided Attention. this piece by drew magary is basically an op-ed, even though it's not labeled such by GQ. anyways, magary basically lays out all of the places where warren's policies would be good, and why in his view they'd be good. it's not that special nor is it the most elegant basically-an-oped ever written, but GQ doesn't exactly run a lot of pieces like this so i figured i shouldn't pass it over.

• from The Guardian: Joe Biden would be a disaster for climate change. this was a theme with last week's post where people raked biden for his awful climate change policy. maybe the biggest takeaway from this op-ed, though, is this line: "As atmosphere scientists Andrew Dessler told HuffPost’s Alexander Kaufman, Biden’s plans would “be more in line with stabilizing at 3-4C of warming, rather than staying below 2C”." this is... not optimal! it's actually barely an improvement over donald's policy, which is in line with 4C+ warming.

• from The Guardian: If New Yorkers won't back Bill de Blasio, nobody else will. oh, by the way, bill de blasio is running for president. nobody cares about him, though, and he's a perennial 1% candidate. super funny how badly he polls, though:

In a Quinnipiac poll last month, 76% of New Yorkers agreed that their mayor should not run for president. This included 70% of black voters, who usually make up De Blasio’s strongest base of support. As the Washington Post’s Philip Bump pointed out, De Blasio was a standout in another poll, this time of national Democratic primary voters, for being the candidate with the highest unfavorability ratings. He was also the only candidate with net unfavorability, with more respondents having an unfavorable than favorable view of him. The Quinnipiac poll even showed that one-third of Democrats in De Blasio’s home city – what ought to be his main bulwark of support – disapprove of his job performance.

anyways, feel free to as always contribute other interesting articles you stumble across, or comment on some of the ones up there.

EDIT: minor spelling stuff

Should offtopic comments bump up topics? IMO, offtopic discussion is not “real” discussion. Seeing a topic at top with 7 new comments only to discover that all of it is offtopic, meta discussion, is annoying and disappointing.

As an example, there is one topic on the front page (don’t want to link it), that was bumped by the biggest offtopic discussion I’ve seen on Tildes so far. The discussion itself is not wrong, and is quite interesting, but it’s not about the post. The comment chain should IMO either be in it’s own topic, or not bump the topic up.

Suppose you want to participate in an old post with hundreds of comments. You made your fresh new comment, injecting your thoughts and effort into it and hit the post button with hopes and dreams.

The post is bumped to the top under Activity. Other tilders saw the old post on the top, they are intrigued, perhaps as much as you are and wonder what you can add to the discussion, but they couldn't find your comment.

Why is that?

You replied to a thread with a very old top-level comment.

As Tildes is still relatively new, this isn't much of a issue now, but one that I feel needed to be addressed eventually as the site grows. It is certainly a low priority issue for the time being.

Sort by new only sorts comments by the time when top-level comment is posted, which is an inherent characteristic of comment threads. If my last years of memeing on redditting has taught me anything, it is that a new post gathers the most views in the first few minutes when it was posted (This might be a few days on Tildes).

Bumping helps extend the longevity of a given post if the thread gathers enough attention and discussion value to warrant a comment, but that alone would not alleviate the fact that new comments is seen by less and less people as the post gets older (as indicated by votes). If we want to make high-quality comments seen by more people, we need to make comment age a less limiting factor.

Tildes needs to help its users to discover new comments.

A few solutions come to my mind.

1. By presenting comments in a linear fashion like the good old bulletin board does without any hierarchy such that sort by new would truly be sort by new.

2. By highlighting ( or whichever other means ) comments that meet certain criteria (Comments that are among the latest 10 or comments that were posted within the last hour, this can vary depending on the activities of the comments)

3. I would like to propose a novel solution to this problem by compacting the comment threads to a forest of trees with navigable nodes. This sounds totally outlandish, it might very well be, but its an idea that I think worth sharing.

The editing is rudimentary but I hope the idea is communicated well.

Cheers!

My wife and I are flying home from our first vacation in a while. We got bumped to a later flight and the airline has compensated us each with $2,000 dollar travel vouchers. Where would you go given this opportunity?

Since activity is the default view when looking at tildes, it seems like bumping a topic all the way to the top after each new comment can get a little abusive after the topic has existed for quite a while.

I'm thinking there should be some sort of restriction that after a topic has been inactive for a certain amount of time, it does one of four things:

1. It closes. New comments cannot be added, but votes can still be added.
2. A warning appears upon clicking the reply or add new comment button, warning the user that this will bump the topic, maybe giving the option of a silent reply. (no bumping)
3. As topics progress in age (think more than a week), new comments bump less and less on the list as the topic becomes less relevant.
4. As a plugin to the trust system, only users with high enough trust can bump topics after a certain date.

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!

tonight i went to a party
was never no coke and bacarti
just a bunch of people in a circle
playing uno and one dude in the corner eating smarties

his name was ignacio
(beat)
and he was hanging round
having a good night,
just bumping some music
and catching a vibe

and thats alright, and we were at your place.
(beat)
and i took a look at your face
looked like you were in a good place.

blue eyes got me feeling fine
same way they did a few years
ago - about nine, when we were
sitting in the park by the pine
and i said fine and i kissed you.

and six months passed, we been apart since then.
now im back at home
drinking corona with the lime in
twisted in the lions den
and I took you to bed.

passive thought in my head when i tucked you in
made you dirnk some water
before you woke in the morning
just so you wouldnt be moaning
and i miss you

and i think that i like you
got my heads so high in the clouds
i can see the planes
and a couple kites too
its just like you

to fade out and fade in
and leave me wondering
what would've been
but now you're flirting with me

and i like it because im hurting
and i need that attention
a little maternal care
and that desire for retention

i feel like you really want me here.

i like it

If successful this will be Rocket Lab's first commercial launch and second rocket to reach orbit after Still Testing's successful launch in January. It's Business Time will carry a handful of small satellites including the IRVINE01 cubesat built by Irvine, California high school students; two Lemur-2 cubesats for Spire; and the NABEO drag sail demonstrator for end of life satellite deorbiting for Bavaria.

Rocket Lab launches their Electron rockets from Launch Complex 1 on the picturesque Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand.

Rocket Watch page with some info and a countdown timer

Rocket Lab on Twitter

Rocket Lab on YouTube

It's business, it's business time!

Updates:
Launch bumped to 02:10 UTC
Scrubbed for the day for motor issue

Alright, so in the ideas thread, several of you expressed that you'd like / it would be more active if we went for a listening club that goes for something more general. As I think ~music is in a bit of a rough spot right now and needs a little more to bind it together, I'm going to try and have a bit of a hybrid solution that can hopefully be interesting for a lot of us.

Again, the idea is to come together and listen to the same record each week, discussing our thoughts on that album over the course of that week in these threads. For now, let's make our goal to build a community and become familiar with the thoughts, tastes, and musical histories of each other!

For every odd numbered week, we will listen to an acclaimed or important album of some kind that will hopefully have far-reaching appeal. I'm going to exercise my own judgement in picking these out of the qualifying albums, but expect them to be the OK Computers, A Love Supremes, and Illmatics of the world. If and when we reach a point where we've exhausted too many of these classics, we can restructure or retire this listening club.

For every even numbered week, we will listen to a more obscure record as voted on by the participants of the thread. For an initial guide, as stolen from @Eva, we will define "obscure" simply as not being certified Gold (or anything higher, of course). This is of course a very loose definition of the term, but it's at least a concrete starting place. As ~ gives us a raw vote count, we will do this through voting on comments. All nominations must be made as a reply to my top level comment. Everything else will be ignored, and this will help keep things organized once this voting occurs on a thread that's dedicated to its own week's record. If it becomes necessary, we can vote on an external platform.

I'm open to suggestions on how to change this process, but let's try to run it like this for a little bit. I don't want to get caught in that loop where you have so many tweaks and find so many flaws that you don't end up doing anything at all.

The first thread will be posted tomorrow (Thursday the 21st here) and will continue on from there weekly.

When we start our first record, feel free to listen, comment, and vote throughout the week. ~ gives us an opportunity to bump things and keep discussion going for a bit longer than Reddit, so let's take advantage of that where we can.

Whether digital or physical, what certain tools do you use and what unique ways do you use them to achieve the best results? Namely, what tips would you be able to share with someone looking to get into making art somewhat similar to yours?

Examples:
oil painting - Are expensive brands of paints worth it? Do you prime your painting surface? Why/why not?
digital painting - Are their tricks to the way you can use some photoshop tools? What bumps your game up from beginner to mid-level?
photography - what can/can't be accomplished in Lightroom? What's worth investing in? And how do you make a photoshop selection to cut out a person or animal with fuzzy or whispy hair?
crafters of all mediums - what adhesives are good? What's the best place for materials?

This is obviously an open-ended conversation as tilde's user base is still growing. What type of art do you do and what personal tips can you share?

One thing that's always annoyed me about reddit is that sorting a thread by "new" isn't as useful as scrolling down to the end of a discussion on traditional forum software like phpbb. I propose two ways of sorting threads:

• Breadth-first: Exactly the same as the current sort on reddit and tildes. Each nesting level is sorted independently.
  This sort makes it easy to find the oldest discussion of a thread, as well as new top-level comments.
• Depth-first: Newer replies 'bump' threads. The timestamp of the latest reply of any depth determines the sorting of all of the parents.
  This sort makes it easy to find the newest discussion.

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

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

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

As of today, the features are:

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

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

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

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

One thing that hacker news does that I really like is seemingly randomly bumping up certain comments to the top, temporarily. They are likely doing this based on the number of interactions the comment has received. Crucially, it doesn't always happen and you often can't even tell it's happening, since it looks like just another top comment.

This solves a number of problems:

• it brings possibly counter-circlejerk opinions to the top (and makes people actually read them seriously, since they are at the top where they expect a high-rated comment to be)
• it causes less "freezing" of the comment hierarchy over time
• it gives users the chance of making comments that get read and voted on, even if they are late to a thread.
• it raises the long tail of high-quality comments. Usually, there are a few high-rated comments, and a large "swamp" of both good and bad comments with little views after that. This feature would likely increase the number of good comments that get out of the "swamp", while also increasing the number of low-quality comments that get flagged as such.

I've been browsing Tildes a bit today and, overall, am enthusiastic about what I've seen. However, while reading a thread, a thought popped into my head that was evocative of an issues Reddit and other tree-based systems suffer from — thread freshness and activity over time both decay quickly.

While reading the thread, I thought "I would comment, but there already seem to be a lot of comments here. If I reply to a specific tree, then that limits people who might see it and respond. Even a top-level comment probably won't be likely to get much of a response."

On Reddit, this leads to repost after repost of the same content in brand new threads, as the activity level of a thread decays and the thread is lost. It looks like one way you intend to combat this is with different sorting methods (Newest, Activity) over various time periods (all time, last 3 days, etc.). Do users feel that this will be effective enough itself, or do they have other ideas to combat this issue?

The way I generally see it, linear threads often beat out tree threads when it comes to keeping threads alive without users having to read through a lot of crap to figure out what the current topic of discussion is, and where it's taking place. (Linear threading models to think of are phpBB, vBulletin, IP.Board, and their ilk. Tree threading models are sites like Reddit, Slashdot, or Shacknews. There are also hybrids, like Metafilter. Please share other examples and their pros/cons.)

In a tree system, I've often experienced the following sequence:

1. Read all top-level replies
2. Read most sub-level replies
3. Find where in the tree the most recent discussion is occurring
4. Realize it's not coherently taking place in one tree
5. Decide not to reply

While in a linear threading system:

1. Read past 2–3 pages of replies to get caught up
2. Add a reply

Alternatively, the linear threading sequence can also be:

1. Read entire thread to see how it's evolved over time
2. Add a reply

An added benefit that is usually concomitant to a linear threading system is that threads are easy to "reactivate" (AKA gravedig) — simply add a new reply and the thread gets bumped up the stack for all users. This is not an exclusive benefit of a linear system. It could likely be made to work with a tree system too. The Activity sorting method may be related, though it's unclear how this functions.

I ran a Lighthouse audit for performance and accessibility on a comments page (specifically this one); the results are pretty good on the whole, but there are definitely a couple of things I think ~ could do better.

Performance

IMO the performance of ~ is fine; Chrome thinks that the time to first meaningful paint is a bit high (3.1s on a simulated 3G connection with CPU throttling), but I don't know what you can do about that without doing things like inlining all the CSS, which would make the very first page load faster but hurt every request after that. Maybe minifying the CSS/JS would help? I don't know if the performance benefit would be enough to justify the increase in complexity to handle the minification, and you'd also lose the easy legibility of the source (which I personally really like).

Accessibility

There's some really small text on ~! The Lighthouse audits I ran don't catch it, but the SEO audit does, and it's not hard to see it with your own eyes either. The suggested minimum size for easy reading in that audit is 16px, which is the current size of all post and comment text on desktop, although mobile only gets 14px (I don't know if this is actually a problem, since you probably hold your phone closer to your face than your monitor).

Edit: posting this from my phone - yes, the 14px font on mobile is definitely harder to read than 16px would be. I don't know if that's just me (I have a fairly severe visual impairment), but I would definitely prefer 16px text everywhere, not just on desktop.

There's also a good amount of text that doesn't have a great deal of contrast (even using the default white theme – I'm sure it's much worse with Solarized). This is mostly all the grey text, although Lighthouse also complains about the links when they're on a grey background (especially the "visited" colour, which is much closer to grey than the normal colour).

Some specific examples: The timestamp and "Link" text for each comment is only 10px, which is a bit small for me, especially with the low contrast on "Link". Similarly, the post timestamp is a bit hard to read.

The worst offender by far, though, is the "Comment deleted by author" notice (example). It's tiny and grey and incredibly easy to miss, and is directly relevant to the flow of the conversation, unlike the timestamps. I'd really appreciate it if that could be bumped up to at least as large as usernames are currently displayed.

The default "activity" sorting means that topics which lead to a lot of conversation tend to get bumped to the top. It seems like, in the long run, controversial topics will end up drowning out topics where the link itself is interesting but doesn't provoke people to react with a comment. I find that a lot of the most interesting links for me on other sites are the ones with the fewest comments.

I think it could be worthwhile to experiment with different default sorting, or even different mechanics. For example, Everything2 has a feature where, at a certain rank, users are able to add pages to a "Cool User Picks!" sidebar.

The current solution, custom sort ordering, doesn't seem like it will scale very well. People will tend to vote on the posts they see; if most people sort by activity, most of the votes will go to the most active posts anyway.

Anyway, just food for thought. I don't think this is super urgent, but it seems like something that would be good to think hard about and get right in the long term.

One of the most useful things about most internet communities is being able to compile resources on a particular topic and act as a hub for getting into that topic. On Reddit, this is handled through sidebars and wikis containing guides on how to start speedrunning, sewing, [ridiculous third example for humorous effect], etc. On imageboards, you have generals with pastebins and charts that each new version of that thread inherits. Traditional forums have a similar implementation, just slower.

Given that groups on Tildes are not user-managed and the Reddit-style posts don't encourage the kind of infinite repeating and bumping you see on imageboard generals, I don't see how this kind of thing can take root on the site. How is this going to be managed, if there are ideas on the way?

Of course, this is working from the assumption that this is something which the site should have. Personally, I see it as an essential measure for any site of this kind, but maybe yall don't agree.