As already mentioned, there was a reasonably successful post about Tildes on Hacker News today, so I've got an email inbox full of invite requests and feedback that I'm about to start going through. This means that I'm about to invite a lot more people, so the activity will probably start picking up shortly.

As part of that, I've created two new groups: ~comp and ~creative. A lot of the people coming from HN will definitely be on the more technical end, so ~comp is intended to be a place where we can post articles about programming and so on without filling up ~tech with that kind of stuff. ~creative was a suggestion that meristele made yesterday, and I think it's definitely something that we needed. Let me know if you think there are other groups we need desperately.

Note that while new users will get auto-subscribed to those groups (for now), I did not go back and subscribe all existing users to them. So if you're interested in either of those topics, you'll need to go subscribe on your own.

Outside of that, please be welcoming to all the new users. And to both old and new users - please let me know what you think and if there's particular functionality I should prioritize. I know that there's a lot of things still missing, but if you're coming from HN you're probably pretty used to that. You can post here or feel free to make separate threads in ~tildes if you want to discuss something in more depth.

Thanks! I'll most likely give out some more invite codes to everyone in the next day or two, so that we can try to keep more activity coming in.

A few people have expressed surprise to me that there weren't any notifications when someone replied to their topics (only comments), so I've added a basic version of topic reply notifications now as well. You'll get one when someone makes a new top-level comment on a topic that you posted, and they're combined in with the comment replies and shown in the same "unread notifications" page for now.

Most of the other weirdness mentioned when I added comment replies is still around, and I'll definitely want to add some sort of "stop sending me replies for this topic" toggle eventually, but I don't think it's a big concern for now since the comment volume is still very low.

Whoops, forgot about posting a daily discussion until pretty late today, sorry.

Simple topic since it's late: what do you think about adding "expand inline" functionality for topics that point to sites that provide embeds (like YouTube)? There's already the ability to expand text topics, and it can certainly be useful for other types as well. It's a bit dangerous for things like images though, and if we do allow it we'll need to be careful about whether it starts tilting the site towards "quick" content.

Any opinions?

Edit: I decided to change it from "Recent activity" to just "Activity".

As mentioned in the post over the weekend, I've added a new sorting option now: "recent activity". This behaves kind of like a forum, where active topics (ones getting new comments) will keep coming back up to the top of the list. I haven't added any specific protections like @cfabbro suggested in that thread, but I will if it seems necessary to prevent excessive "bumping".

I'm considering making this the default sort while the site's overall activity is still pretty low, but haven't done it just yet. Let me know what you think of it, and if you notice any weirdness.

I've made a couple of fairly minor changes to sorting for topic listings recently:

• pulled the sorting options (most votes, most comments, newest) out of a dropdown list and made them into tabs, to make it easier to switch between them
• added an "all time" option to the time-period dropdown

The default sorting on the site is also still currently set to "newest" since the activity is low, and I think that's the best way to make sure new posts are getting seen.

I'm also planning to add a sort along the lines of "recent activity" where it will behave like a forum - new topics still come in at the top of the list, but any time a topic gets a new comment it moves back up to the top as well. This will mean that active topics stay near the top, instead of gradually being pushed down by new ones, regardless of how active they are.

Any thoughts on that idea or the other changes? Once I do add the "activity" sort, do you think that's a better option as the default for now, or should I stick with "newest" (or even switch to one of the others)? Any other suggestions or ideas for different sorting methods?

As promised, I've done a fair amount of updating of the Docs pages now. There were various small tweaks, but the major changes were the addition of the "Future Mechanics" page to explain a bit about plans for the "trust system" (which we also discussed here), as well as mostly rewriting the "Overall Goals" page so that it covers different topics than the announcement post.

I've asked this as a bit of a side question in a few other places already, but haven't really heard much, so I'm going to make it the focus today: where do you think we should try to promote Tildes to get more (good) users?

I think posting on reddit is a given, but I'd like to hear suggestions for which specific subreddits you think would be good places to try.

I tried a post on Hacker News this morning, but it did about as well as my posts there usually do—it had one upvote after an hour, so I deleted it and will try again some other time.

Outside of those, if you think there are any news sites, blogs, etc. that would be interested in the site and its goals, I could send a message to any of those as well. Michael Eades made a post about it on his blog last week which was great to see and has brought in a few people.

Edit: oh also, I've given all the existing users 5 invite codes again, so if there's anyone that you want to invite please feel free. They're available on this page, linked from the sidebar on your user page.

Currently, Tildes user pages only show one "page" of the user's history—their most recent 20 topics and/or comments. This wasn't really a deliberate choice, I just haven't added pagination yet (it's a bit tricky because of the combination of topics and comments). But I wanted to talk about the general idea of being able to look through users' histories and see if there's anything we should consider doing differently.

In some ways, being able to look through user histories is nice. Sometimes I find a user that makes good posts, and I like to go back and see what else they've posted. However, a lot of people use it in a malicious way, going back through people's posts to find "dirt", or even sometimes using it as a way to doxx them. This happens a lot on Twitter especially, where attention will land on someone for some reason, and people will dig through years of their previous tweets to find things to attack them with.

Even reddit (unintentionally) puts a limit on how much history you can look back through because of their 1000-item limit on any listings. That's not a limitation that I'm going to have, so adding pagination will mean that it's possible to view all of any user's previous posts.

Do you think we should add some restrictions to how much history is visible to try to reduce these bad uses, or is that futile/unnecessary?

It's still very rough in quite a few ways, but lack of comment reply notifications has definitely been one of the biggest missing features, so I wanted to get this basic form of it out before I worry about fixing some of the weirdness with it.

A few quick notes on it:

• Currently, notifications are only for replies to comments. You won't get any notifications for replies to topics, username mentions, etc.
• Currently, you can only view the unread notifications. Once you mark one as read, it'll be gone with no way to see it again. It's still stored and viewing read notifications will definitely be possible in the future, just not yet.
• There are some strange interactions between the comment visit-tracking and the notifications still, I'm not totally sure how I'm going to handle those yet.

Let me know if you notice anything else, I'll probably apply some more updates to it before long to fix some of the strange aspects.

Today's daily topic comes out of a discussion in this thread yesterday - people are currently feeling a bit weird/rude about using the comment tags (described here, if you haven't read this already).

So the questions are:

• Does it just feel rude because we're currently very small-scale, where any negative action feels more personal?
• Are there any ways that we could try to reduce that feeling a bit?
• Should we just remove comment tags until the site is larger, since they're not very useful at this point anyway?

Feel free to add any other thoughts/discussions about comment tags as well.

Hey everyone, really happy to see people still coming back, and especially having extremely good discussions like this one about moderation. Here's my vague plans for the next few days:

Finish comment reply notifications and a couple other high-priority items

I've got comment reply notifications mostly done now, and hope to have that out today or tomorrow. Username mention notifications should be pretty simple to add on top of that as well. Other than that, I need to look into fixing a few strange bugs that have been noticed, and would also like to get through a few other things in the backlog (including doing a better job of getting the backlog listed on the issue tracker).

A significant feature I'd like to have soon is making it possible for other people to edit the tags on topics, as well as potentially allowing editing the title or even the link. For this to be possible though, we need to have a sort of log of the changes, so that there's accountability in who's making the changes and what they're doing.

Some more updates/additions to the Docs pages

The most important piece is to finish writing up some info about the "trust system", which is a lot of what we've been discussing in the "Community moderators?" post. This is going to be a really essential part of having the site be able to handle growth, so not having anything about it on the Docs site currently is a really big gap.

I'd also like to do a bit of writing/rearranging of some of the other pages before I get too much public attention, since they're pretty scattered right now and are missing some information that people seem to look for.

Invite more people and/or get some "larger" attention

Once those other updates are done, I'm planning to start actively looking for a bit more public attention, including possibly posting to places like Hacker News or reddit. We're going to need a pretty steady inflow of people to keep the activity level up, so I think really getting the site out there soon is going to be the easiest way to do that. I do want to have the updates/info mentioned above done first though, so that will probably still be a couple days.

In the meantime, I've topped up all existing users to 5 invite codes again, so if there's anyone you'd like to invite please feel free. You can get to your invite codes on this page, which is linked in the sidebar when you're on your user page.

Thanks again, definitely let me know if you have any questions, suggestions, etc.

Not a very "deep" discussion topic, but I think I'll try to leave more formal ones for weekdays since that tends to be when people are around more.

So just a general question: in the short time you've been using the site so far, is there some pesky thing that's already annoying you? Something that takes too many clicks, information where you don't expect it, etc.?

I'm going to start posting one "official" daily discussion topic a day in ~tildes to talk about general site things, plans for mechanics, feedback on specific ideas, etc. You're definitely all welcome to post other similar topics as well if you want to, I just want to have one sort of "focused" post going every day.

For today:

What do you think of the current set of groups? It's a decent mix, but there are also some obvious gaps (though ~misc is supposed to act as a catch-all for posts that don't really fit anywhere else).

Overall, it's a tricky balance—I think if there isn't a group where a particular topic seems to fit, it feels a little discouraging, like maybe you shouldn't post it. But I also don't want to create too many groups, where we end up with a lot of them just being inactive because it's uncommon for anyone to submit items that fit in there.

And on a related topic, do you think there's a particular way we should try to handle "group requests", or just treat them mostly informally in ~tildes?

A couple of fairly minor updates to topic-tagging (that mostly came out of discussion in this thread the other day):

1. When you're entering tags, you now need to separate them with commas. Spaces will be kept as part of the tag, instead of working as a separator. So you can tag something like music, soundtrack, full album and get 3 tags out of that.

   (Side note that I doubt anyone cares about: spaces are converted to underscores internally, so using a space or an underscore in a tag is now the same)

2. I added a tags field to the "new topic" page, so you can tag while you're posting the topic now, instead of needing to do it separately afterwards.

Most of you have probably already read it (especially since I spammed you all with a message that has a link to it), but there's a bit more info about topic-tagging here as well: https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics#topic-tags

It's not quite notifications for replies/mentions yet, but in a similar vein, I've now added a feature that will mark which comments in a thread are new since your last visit, and also mark which topics have any new comments when you're on the listing page (like "9 comments (3 new)").

To fit with Tildes's approach to privacy, this feature is disabled by default and requires you to opt in.

There's a link to the page to do this from your settings page, which is linked from the sidebar on your userpage. The page explains the privacy implications and allows you to enable it if you want to use it.

Let me know what you think of it, more new stuff coming soon.

Here's a quick list of things that I'm working on getting ready in the very near future. Please let me know if you have particular thoughts on any of these.

1. Fixing the site icons for link topics (currently just shows the blue dashed square).
2. Putting some information in topic sidebars - any thoughts on what would be good to have here? I think I'd like to have some of the more-detailed metadata about the topic once there's more of that being generated (for example for videos, this could show which channel it's from, how long it is, etc.), but that still won't be very much and there's a lot of space. Commenting rules? Something else?
3. Inbox/notifications for replies to your comments and topics, as well as username mentions. Any opinions about how it would be good to do this in a way that's convenient and not too annoying?
4. Collapse buttons for comment threads (possibly by being able to click the line as well, similar to the reddit redesign)