So, after a rather clunky script to open comment's link in a new tab with the left click, I got inspired by the idea of @kalebo and wrote also a script to quickly jump to new comments in a topic.

I thought about writing a dedicated script but felt like it was going to become overly complicated for a user to import different script.

• The script itself is here: https://gist.github.com/theCrius/04dc86bea0ed0f1cbec7e57f1aaff9aa
• I wrote it with tampermonkey in mind: http://tampermonkey.net/
  Please read further as tampermonkey has issues with custom styles.
• And here is a simple tutorial on how to load script in tampermonkey: https://imgur.com/a/pY51wn2

These script are all meant to give the community some QoL while lightening the pressure on @deimos so he can work without too much stress from all the requests. As soon as the feature are implemented you should get rid of those script that in some parts felt like bad hacks to me that I was writing it.

I know the button to scroll to new messages is in a quite bad position (top center of your browser page) but I couldn't bear to deal with tampermonkey issue and its GM_AddStyle meta not working properly so I had to use the basic CSS provided by spectre already loaded in tildes.net.

If someone knows how to figure out that goddamn meta, let me know.

========= UPDATE ============

Edit: So apparently tampermonkey has issues with styles that are not yet fixed and firefox has some issue in general with script that inject stuff in the page (understandably).

For tampermonkey the solution is simple. Use violentmonkey instead. you can just copy the script and it will work.

For Firefox it's a little more dirty unfortunately but I cannot find other solutions. You need to open the internal URL about:config. Then search security.csp.enable and double click to disable it. After this the script will work.
Firefox has a very strict policy and the only real solution would be to write an extension and I don't think it's worth the effort in the current state of development.
For full description of what that policy does, check the official doc from mozilla: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CSP#Threats

I've seen a few remarks here and there that have implied sort of matter-of-factly that places like /r/The_Donald have no redeeming value, the community members are awful (and undesirable to have here), their ideas are all reprehensible, etc. I assume that this is mostly just due to the demographic coming primarily from popular reddit mod teams where being anti-Trump is sort of an unspoken requirement - but I don't really know for certain.

It reminds me a little of this woman in a class i had once, who spoke to me about atheists, assumed I was christian just as a matter of course. It's kind of an awkward situation to find yourself in. I don't identify as an atheist, but if someone is mildly insulting atheists, it's uncomfortable. You have to be a covert conservative (or covert center-right, or even left-leaning Trump voter) or else you risk being blasted/flamed/mocked/etc. in places like reddit.

Part of what attracted me to Tildes was the sales pitch that it is to be a community for civil conversation, no hate-speech/bigotry. I think that's a perfect environment for political discussion - far more than shit-flinging and nuclear downvoting on /r/politics. So even if I'm the only MAGA person here, maybe there's a chance we can actually have civil conversations on topics we might initially disagree on...?

Edit: wow! Really happy to have these conversations with folks. Sad that i haven't encountered any fellow (public) Trump voters/supporters yet but very pleased that things have been civil as advertised. ;) Apologies for slow responses, trying to give proper thought and consideration to all the comments!

Edit2: gotta head to bed. sorry to anyone i haven't responded to questions from. feeling a bit like a novelty "And here's our token Trump voter. ha ha, he sure is a quirky one, isn't he, that crazy dictator-enabler!" xP. I'll try to answer any questions I've missed tomorrow. Sleep well, all (well, all who are going to sleep before I get back).

Edit3: Thanks for the open engagement, all you people who live in a different reality!

Still a bit bummed there aren't any MAGA friends here yet, but I've been blown away by how cordial most of you have been (i hope we can retain this culture into the future of the site). For those who are just coming in and don't want to read everything, I'd say a tl;dr of the conversations I've had below is:

• most people here want to engage with others on important topics without the shit flinging,
• some people express disbelief that someone can not be a bigot or racist and vote for Donald Trump,
• I've been repeating in various conversations the Laurel and Yanny thing is a great metaphor for the polarized camps experiencing different realities, seeing different movies on the same screen.

I'm continuing to try to reply to questions, and in the spirit of not provoking heated emotions I have been trying not to argue any of my political beliefs except that both sides are seeing different realities.

Any fellow Tildes playing this? I picked it up yesterday with the steam release and it interests me enough to probably keep playing. Although I do think I'm going to need a different guild(nothing against the one I'm in just I'm NA and they're EU).

For those who want a quick idea of the game I would say it's a mix of EVE and Runescape. While there are traditional skills you level up based on a mix of these two. You gain "fame" based on certain tasks. But unlike runescape mining copper ore forever won't allow you to max out your mining skill set. You actually need to mine higher quality stuff.

For eve like stuff I would say look at banking and how PVP is handles. Banking is all local so if you want to move a lot of stuff it will probably take a long time(I just started but imagine they'll eventually offer something like contracts(or at least hope they do)). Then PVP has different levels like safe, red(where you can enable PVP and attack others), or black where PVP is always an option with no consequence other than other players.

Like I said I'm a noob but will try to answer any questions I can for those wondering about it. Links below for whatever else you may want to know.

https://albiononline.com/en/news
https://store.steampowered.com/app/761890/Albion_Online/
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/albion-online (not the best rating :( )

Hey everyone, I've decided to start studying to get my CCNA. My books are showing up Monday and I'm really excited.

I'm going to shoot for self studying and prep for the testing. I think I can do it as I've always thrived in a more self paced learning environment (I also have no money for the classes).

I'm just wondering if anyone has any tips, supplemental material, etc they could recommend? What was hardest for you and what was easiest? What did you spend too much time studying and what didn't you spend enough time on?

I was going to ask this on Stackoverflow but it seems like reactive programming is split into per-language questions (RxJava, RxJS, RxRuby, etc.) and this is a more generic question.

How do you stream items from one Observable to multiple Observers?

I have a stream of CSV items, they're mapped to a dictionary/hash table, and then I want to:

• get the maximum value from this stream
• process the stream in a different way
• sample the stream

Can I call subscribe multiple times and then call the other operators?

Tags

I can totally see nsfw.nude work, but do you think tagging will be done much further? It's relatively much work to tag a thing well, maybe some sort of cross-posting is more rewarding to the user. Essentially it might be the same thing, but the act of sharing to another tilde feels more rewarding than adding yet another tag.

Hierarchies in Tags and Tildes

Yes! I love hierarchies for how they scale.
Do you think the one-dimensional nature of such a "taxonomy" will get problematic, or is it merely a corner case? I might have "food > recipes" and "food > restaurants" or I might have "recipes > food" and "recipes > chemistry". Again I feel like cross-posting is essential to solve this duplication issue. Maybe this as another chance to improve on reddit: if cross-posts just reference a single post there would be just one big discussion.
Cfabbro is part of the team? "We were actually considering allowing multiple ways to access the same groups. E.g. ~literature and ~lit going to the same top level group" sounds good.

Comments

I think "most votes" has a strong bias towards early comments. Ideally you'd give a new comment the reason of doubt, and make it more visible until a good rating about is has been established. For this you'd have to track up-votes per "seen".
Sadly it's really hard to track these implicit down-votes ("read but not up-voted") and generally it obfuscates how the site works. I still think it's worth thinking about, especially if you might derive trust/reputation from the up-votes at some point.
Otherwise commenting on rising stories is the an easy way to farm karma (I tried it on HN to see how the down-vote mechanism works, which is unlocked at 200 karma). Here I also agree with you, that this process should not be 100% automatic.

Group-specific trust

If tildes are nested, will reputation (eventually) be inherited up the hierarchy?

Filter-Bubble (found your opinion in some discussion about it):
I agree again, good communities are bubbles. I think the "no-downvotes" will help a bit so controversial stuff can rise.

Links

I also like your decision to not allow text on links. I really like how HN moderators improve link-titles sometimes to get rid of clickbait or inaccuracies.

I will give some UX feedback later, when I got used to tildes a bit.

As can be seen in this post in ~test it is possible to secretly refer to another webpage than the one actually typed. It's not the biggest priority as of now, but it would be nice to see this fixed before Tildes will go live.

In case the ~test post gets deleted, here's an example:
https://innocent.site/

Tildes does have bills to pay. The donations are open, but I'd like to go beyond the basic donations for a moment.

Right now, tildes has server costs, and also the lead developer (Deimos) is donating his full time to the project rather than working for someone else. He can't do that forever, so if we want him full time, we need to get him paid by the non-profit. In the future, that cost is probably going to expand to larger server costs, multiple developers, possibly community managers and other staff - though nothing ridiculous like reddit with 300 people doing marketing.

When we talked about funding, we wondered if we could get all users to toss in one dollar a month, and if there were enough users (millions) even reduce that to one dollar a year. Now that we have a lot of new people here, I'd like to ask what everyone thinks of those funding ideas, and if they have any other good ideas on how to raise money to pay for whatever tildes' costs are.

Hi there!

First things first, I just want to say thank you for the invite, but more importantly, thank you for taking the time to create this platform. I, as I imagine most people on here, have a love-hate relationship with reddit. Clearly the site has had a tremendous impact, in many ways positive, but with many things structurally and fundamentally holding it back. I've been a subscriber to /r/RedditAlternatives/ for a while, and there have been very few sites that have compelled me to learn more and actively take part in them, and yours is of course one of them. I just got done reading all of the articles on your docs page and was very pleased - "finally", I thought, someone who's taken into account all of the articles on the internet that have been written about designing and building communities, from both a social and technical perspective, and put it into practice. You've addressed many issues that are often ignored by the platforms themselves and done it in a brilliant way so as to ensure that our voices are heard first and foremost, and I think that's just awesome.

Okay, now that all the praise is out of the way... :P

I did notice something that was not addressed in the docs pages, so I'll be blunt and simply ask: how do you plan to address the filter bubble, or rather, do you plan to address it at all? Maximizing user freedom regarding which communities you want to see content from seems obvious, but that inevitably ends up with users being stuck in their own bubble. reddit already has an infamous reputation of being an echo chamber, and gives users tools to make it an even bigger echo chamber. A long time ago, there was a commonly held belief that the internet would bring us closer together because it would force us to expand our worldviews and interact with people as people, not knowing where they're from or who they are (the "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" saying about anonymity). As reddit moves more and more toward becoming a social network like Facebook and less like the pseudonymous and anonymous internet discussion forums of old, this problem has only gotten worse, to the point of having real-world political and social consequences (especially with the increasing deluge of so-called "fake news"). I'd really like to hear your take on it.

I do have other concerns, namely: scalability, and the stance on free speech. The donation model has worked well for Wikipedia, but, well, they're Wikipedia. They're an incredibly important resource and people have clearly valued their resource so as to have sustained their model, mass donation drives with Jimbo Wales' face plastered all over the site notwithstanding. If tildes becomes the Wikipedia of internet discussion platforms, I am sure many people will find it valuable enough to donate to, though I am still not sold on how sustainable it really is.

The stance on free speech in the announcement blog post also has me concerned. As you mentioned, it is a difficult topic; that much is clear. I am mostly just curious as to where the lines are drawn in regards to how "threats, harassment, and hate speech" are defined. With an absolutist position like "we are 100% pro-free speech", things are very clear and simple, whereas any other position, I believe, comes down to the whim of the moderators/admins. Certainly most people will generally follow the golden rule and abide by basic common sense and decency (i.e. "don't be a dick"), but when discussions get heated I think it's important to not have a reasonable fear that you're going to get permabanned because you hurt someone's feelings (just as an example).

All these issues aside, I am very excited about the development of tildes and hope you & the community can come up with excellent technical and social solutions to these difficult problems.

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

(p.s. apologies for not posting this in the daily discussion topic, thought it warranted its own topic)

edit: formatting

Currently you can only do one or the other, but I feel that this results in low efforts posts where a user simply post a link and walks away. If we can post text along with a link to, say, a news article, the OP could then start some sort of discussion around that article without having to go into the comments and post whatever they were going to say.

Other people can tag my posts as jokes, but I can't. Is there a good reason for this to be the case? Obviously I'm not going to tag my posts as Noise, Troll, or Flame, but Joke and Offtopic aren't necessarily negative.

Shalom my dudes! I'm getting ready to graduate finally. I've been out of school for a few months. Getting work done and such. Then I'm going to iowa with my dad to visit family! So what about you guys?

-> Nim notes <-

Some background

I am learning a new programming language Nim. As many would do, I also take my own notes as I am learning it, running little example by myself, etc.

    .. but I doing that a bit differently.

• I take notes in Emacs Org mode. Org mode has a feature set called Org Babel. That allows one to document the code snippets, and also run them directly in that document, and insert their output results below them -- Notes in Org

  This also helps me document regression of the language behavior between different Nim versions of any, as the exact outputs are documented too. After each major Nim update, I press a single binding (C-v C-v b) in Emacs, and all the output blocks get recalculated.

• But not everyone uses Emacs and Org mode. So to be able to share them to a wider audience, I need to export (Org term) that to a format like HTML, PDF, or Markdown..

• Hugo is a really fast static site generator that uses Markdown as one of the primary content formats. It parses that to HTML using a Go Markdown library called Blackfriday.

• As my notes are in Org mode, and converting them to HTML via Hugo needs them to be in Blackfriday compatible Markdown (which is almost like GitHub flavored Markdown), I starting working on an Emacs Org mode package ox-hugo about a year back. Using that, this Markdown file is generated. Hugo natively supports a subset of Org, but I needed to write this package to use the full power of Org mode.

• Hugo then takes that Markdown and generates the final Nim notes page in HTML.

In the end, I have something that ties together all things of my interest: Nim, Emacs, Org mode and Hugo :)

Hi,

I got a CSRF error on the registration page, probably a timeout because I read the terms and privacy policy before going on with the registration. :)

That's a bad first impression for users and should be avoided.

Chris

Gotta limit the tags; I added maybe 5-6 tags on a submission, I know Instagram has a limit of 30 or so hashtags, if tags are going to be searchable or used for surfacing content in other contexts, limiting the hashtags would limit abuse of it.

Or maybe this already exists and I just haven't hit the limit... ;p

One of the biggest limitations of Reddit is that if you want to post a link, and comment on it yourself, you have to go make a comment on your own post after you've made it.

It would be really useful to be able to fill in both the Link and the Text box, and have your text displayed under the link while you are viewing the comments.

(Also, we should be able to edit posts after making them.)

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.

A bright light illuminated my workshop suddenly, causing me to drop my tools on the table. A figure appeared at the opposite side of the small office, encased within a surreal shadow in the middle of the blinding light. Slowly the light faded, as I made out the visitor. I was looking at myself.

"Wh-what are you- what am I...?" I stumbled, unsure if I could even blink anymore.

"I'm you from the future," the other me said. He appeared slightly older than I remembered from my mirror that morning.

"So it works?" I asked, wondering how else I would be there.

"Yes, it works," he answered, obviously wondering why I would ask such a thing.

"But why are you here?" I asked, just noticing I wasn't as happy as one would expect from meeting themselves. Not me, I was dazed but ecstatic. The other me seemed like he had been crying. "Are you ok?" I asked myself.

His eyes widened, but then quickly relaxed. "It's fine, but I just came to the wrong time."

"You didn't mean to meet me here?"

"No, this is too late." His voice became cold. "My work can still be recovered if I do it here."

"Do what here?" I asked, not sure I wanted to know the answer.

The other me stared, as he pulled out a handheld device, much smaller than my phone. After pressing some buttons on the screen, the bright light returned, enveloping him again until he quickly disappeared from the room. I'm not sure why, but I ran into the area of his departure before the light faded. I panicked when I realized I didn’t know where or when I was going, but my thoughts were interrupted when the light faded and everything went black.

I came to what seemed like hours later to find myself in my office, but I wasn't alone. The other me- or some other other me was lying on the ground by the table, gasping for air.

"What happened?" I asked running to my counterpart’s side frantically. "Did... I do this to you?"

"It's all wrong," he said, clutching his chest. Blood trailed around him, seeping through his closed fist. "None of this makes sense."

Before I could speak again, I noticed something odd. He didn't look younger than me. He was older. "You're the me that I just met, aren't you?"

"Yes," he started, spitting up some blood. "I pulled out my knife, but he grabbed it out of my hand and stabbed me before I could get to him."

"But why?" I yelled, desperate to understand why I would attempt to kill myself.

"You try to fix one thing," he trailed off, his eyes losing focus. He became still and my mind turned into override.

I had watched myself die. I ended up going back in time to kill myself, but my past self killed me instead. That was my future. Why would I do that? Was I still going to do it, knowing what I knew? If I didn’t, how was I in still in the past?

"Don't even try it," a voice called behind me. "I don't know why you guys came back, but I'm not letting you kill me."

I turned around to see a younger version of myself standing in the doorway, wielding a bloody knife in one hand and the handheld device in the other. Before I could respond, he pushed a button and light filled the room once again. A few moments later, I was alone.

It was a time before I had even started working on time travel. My only way back disappeared with my past self, which didn’t even seem to make sense. How could he become me if he wasn’t even there anymore? Would I become me? My head hurt.

“Hello,” another voice called into the room. It was female, so I immediately knew it wasn’t me again. I turned toward the door to find the solution to one of my lingering questions.

“Gwen,” I answered, walking toward her with my hand extended. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“How did you know my name?” she asked, shaking my hand with a confused look on her face.

Smooth move. I didn’t know her name the first time this happened. But at least it revealed the date. This was the day I met the best and worst thing that ever happened to me. “I saw your name on the sign-in sheet,” I answered. “You must be the new girl. I’m Chris. Chris Michael.”

I began to lead her into my office. “Let me show you around. This is my off-”

What was I doing? There was a dead body on the floor by my worktable. Not just any dead body, my dead body.

“On second thought, my office is a mess,” I sputtered. I turned Gwen toward the hall. “Why don’t you head over to the break room around the corner and I’ll buy you a cup of coffee? Just give me a few minutes.”

“Sure,” she smiled. She began walking away, but stopped momentarily and shot me a wink. “You’re an interesting guy, Chris.”

As Gwen walked down the hall, I darted back into the room. My future death was still where I left it. Police weren’t an option, what would I tell them? An older version of me was killed by a younger version of me? The only option was to dispose of the evidence. Trying to think back to old gangster movies, I heard footsteps by the door.

“Uh, don’t come in here!” I yelled. “There’s a, uh-” I couldn’t believe my eyes. Two men stood in the doorway. I was looking at two identical versions of myself.

“Hey, Chris,” the one on the left said. “Sorry about earlier. I didn’t know you weren’t here to kill me too.”

“So you’re the me from this time, right?” I asked Lefty. “Who is this then?”

“Hi Chris,” the one on the right said. “I’m him, but after he stopped me from saving our future self there“

“But you didn’t-” I turned to the left. “You killed him.”

“I did,” said Lefty. “Pay attention, because this will get even more complicated. After killing future us, I had to know why he came back, so I went to the future. You know what I found? Future you. Stranded, you had taken my place, fell in love with Gwen, and never invented time travel.”

My head hurt again.

“There was no way to know what happened,” interjected Righty, “because time was overwritten. So the original timeline had to be restored.”

“How?” I asked no one in particular.

“I went back to before our future self met me.” I’m not sure who said that, I was too busy clutching my head. “I took care of him and then sent you back to your proper time before you woke up. Everything continued normally and I followed the timeline to figure out what originally happened.”

“Oh, I can’t wait to hear this part,” I said.

“It’s all about Gwen,” said Lefty. “As you know, she eventually broke up with you because you were too dedicated to your work. Apparently you fixed that mistake when you had another chance back here.”

“Gwen,” I whispered. “She’s waiting for me in the break room.”

“We know,” said Righty.

“So where did you come from then?” I asked Righty.

“I had to undo what I did,” answered Lefty. “With you back in your time, you finish inventing time travel, but things don’t end well with Gwen.”

“I already know that,” I sighed. “She broke up with me before. This is old news to me.”

“But,” started Lefty, “with the addition of time travel, you become obsessed with fixing things. It gets a little more complicated here. You basically go back in time and try to make it work with her over and over, but it never ends well. Eventually, you decide you have to go back to the beginning and… start all over.”

“By killing you and taking your place?”

“Exactly. My place.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Lefty, who was giving me an unnerving stare.

“What about me?” I asked “And Righty?”

“Righty…? Oh, because I’m standing on your right. He wants us to leave.”

“You two take the time machine,” said Lefty. “Go live with the dinosaurs for all I care, just stay away.”

Righty patted me on the back and raised his eyebrows in an approving nod. Lefty handed him the handheld device, which looked different. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there seemed to be more buttons or something. Righty pushed one of them, but something was wrong. The expected light was there, but it was red. As Righty began to fade, a screeching sound emanated from the epicenter as he let out a horrendous scream.

“What did you do?” I yelled jumping into the hallway where Lefty had previously moved. His eyes widened as he pulled a familiar knife from his pocket.

“I can’t have you coming back and messing with my life!” he shrieked, swinging the knife in my direction. “I’ve already killed two of you, there’s no way you’re getting away!”

I jumped back into the room as the red light cleared, leaving behind a charred mark on the floor. Lefty followed me, still swinging. “Hey, what’s that?” I yelled, pointing behind him. He turned his head to find nothing, but before he could turn back, my fist met his chin. After pulling the knife from his hand I quickly buried it into his chest. As he fell to the ground, I could hear footsteps coming down the hall.

“Chris?” Gwen called.

I ran out of the room and slammed the door behind me to find Gwen holding two cups of coffee. “Hi, Gwen,” I said hysterically. She gave an odd look but then laughed, handing me one of the cups.

“I figured since you were so busy, I’d buy you the coffee this time. Would you like show me your office now?”

I looked at my closed door and then back at Gwen. “No, I still have some more cleaning to do. I have a new research project I need to prepare. But for now, how about we go enjoy these coffees in the break room?”

Hey all, I'm a board game designer named Adam Wyse and I just wanted to share my latest project that went live on Kickstarter this morning!

A little bit about me; I'm a former software engineer who now works in the board game industry full time. I have a few published games (Head of Mousehold, Masque of the Red Death), and many more that have been signed and will be coming out over the next year or two. I work for Roxley Games doing logistics and development. If you're a fan of modern tabletop games you've probably heard of Santorini or Brass.

Anyways, Mayday Games is publishing Poetry Slam; a word/party game for 3 to 8 players (10 if we reach the stretch goal). It's all about writing a word based on a prompt, then coming up with a short poem that allows other players to guess your word. Each player loses a letter each round that they can no longer use in later rounds. Coming up with your word faster will earn you more points, but you will lose more valuable letters! It's a strategic and hilarious word game that you can play with a big group - it makes for a pretty fun and unique experience.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/maydaygames/poetry-slam-a-beatnik-3-8-player-party-game

I did up a full how to play video here a couple weeks ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_Y-0FBCjyM

One of the cool things that Mayday is doing is a referral system. If you back the game you get a referral link. If you get someone else to back the game using your link, you get a free playmat. Whoever refers the most people will get a cool prize pack!

If you have any questions about Poetry Slam, board game design in general, the tabletop industry, or Roxley Games, I'm happy to answer! I hope you'll give the project a look!

Edit: The project was cancelled because it kind of stalled in the middle, but the game is still going to be produced! It will be available at Origins board game convention in June, and then in retail shortly afterwards. If you are interested in checking out a gameplay video, we recorded on at my local game store last night: https://www.facebook.com/sentrybox/videos/10156328694703428/

I'm sorry if I'm just blind, but there doesn't seem to be a way to permalink to a particular comment in a thread or to "go to comment" from the Comment Replies in your profile.

For larger threads when someone responds, getting the larger context is quite useful so it'd be nice to "go" to my comment in a thread vs just responding from the inbox, especially if I want to reference other comments made in the discussion.

A couple of us were chatting about recent events and figured it would be a good idea to rattle off some of the things that go without saying. We've already had two ex-mods who clearly needed them said. /shrug

• 1. CHILL. That should be your top priority at all times. This is the internet, it is not serious business. Don't let some dipshit issue on reddit that's going to vanish off of the page in three hours bother you, life's too short for that shit.
• 2. Keep mod chat and this backroom confidential. Don't share this stuff with the rest of reddit. If you do, that shows you can't be trusted and we pretty much gotta axe you at that point. Even if you're just sharing petty bullshit, it's a trust issue, the content doesn't even matter.
• 3. This goes triple for any other parts of reddit that have privileged access, such as /r/defaultmods. That not only makes us not trust you, it makes our mod team look like chumps to the rest of reddit.
• 4. When in doubt about something, ask! Ain't nobody going to fault you for questions or because you're just learning the ropes. We weren't born knowing this shit so ask away.
• 5. Be cool when dealing with other moderators. We're trying to weed this garden together, tempers may flare, if someone is having a bad day don't take them too seriously either.
• 6. If there's a problem with a specific user and yourself, hand that shit off to another moderator to deal with, one who hasn't got anything invested in that mess. It makes it easier to be impartial.
• 7. No special treatment. Mods gotta stick to their own rules, otherwise nobody is going to take any rules seriously. If there's something about the rules that's bugging you, post here and let's talk it over, and maybe change that rule for the better.
• 8. Pay some attention to what the other mods say. Everyone's opinion is supposed to count, this isn't meant to be just a team of button clicking robots. Mods here all get a say in how things are run.
• 9. No powertripping, period. That's just immature, you can do better. This is a stewardship, not ownership. Reddit owns this place, not us, and it's nothing without the admins that pay the bills and the users who come here to share music. Any credit that could be claimed by anyone in this place is spread far too thinly to justify a holier-than-thou attitude. If anyone gets to claim a boss attitude, it's radd.it - and he stepped down to avoid conflicts of interest. :P
• 10. If despite your best efforts some shit does go down - especially if it's a conflict between mods - talk to a mod who's been here a year or more such as myself, astarkey12, multi-mod, boredop, or g_yore. Don't let things get to the point where someone has to leave the team before addressing concerns. When in doubt, sleep on it.
• 11. Do not go begging for subreddit moderation invites from other members of our mod team, and do not be one of these crazy people collecting subreddit mod bits like they are some kind of new age pokemon. The more subs you mod, the less time you have to spend moderating here. We're not interested in part-timers. Having a couple other subs you moderate is fine, but not like 70 or 300!

(0) Background

This is coming off a discussion in today's thread on forming new groups around whether or not to add a group for politics. I expressed there that, given my moderator experience on /r/ChangeMyView and /r/NeutralPolitics, I opposed making such a group given how Tildes currently stands.

(1) Political discussion is nearly always garbage.

I don't think anyone needs reminding of this, but political discussion almost uniformly fails to achieve anything positive in almost any social media platform. Your uncle's facebook rants? Garbage. Political sniping on Twitter? Garbage. The endless repetitive point scoring and outrage fest on most political subreddits? Garbage.

So, we have to ask, why is this content garbage?

(2) People want to be heard, but nobody wants to hear.

I do not think political discussion is garbage because of bad faith trolling. That certainly exists and does not help, but usually it's not hard to ID the trolls, and excepting egregious stuff like doxxing or threats, to ignore obvious bad faith absurdity.

The much bigger issue is that what people want to do is to be heard and validated in their political views. This is not merely that they want to proselytize or to win converts, but that they're seeking validation and a sense of rightness or righteousness in their statements.

This desire is toxic to a neutral forum, because invariably on any divisive issue, you will not merely be heard and validated, but will be challenged and denigrated. Indeed, often the challenges and denigrations themselves are the same performance in reverse. Members of each team trying to dunk on the other and earn validation for how hard they owned the other side.

(3) To overcome this, a successful political forum must have a purpose other than mere commentary.

On /r/ChangeMyView and /r/NeutralPolitics, we have been able to build forums which have large amounts of productive and non-hostile political discussion. The key to this is that neither forum allows for being heard, or general discussion, as its reason for being.

On /r/ChangeMyView we limit posts to views people genuinely hold, and are open to changing (CMV rule B). This requires that OPs cannot come to troll or soapbox. It is by far the most frequently used rule of ours in terms of removing submissions, almost always on the soapboxing side.

On /r/NeutralPolitics, we limit posts to neutrally framed questions about political subjects, which can be answered with facts. By doing this, we narrow the scope of discussion away from soliciting feelings (which is an invitation to people posting just to be heard) and towards bringing forth factual information, where people might learn something.

I don't know what purpose a political forum on Tildes might have, but to succeed it must have a clear purpose, and that purpose must be one which excludes people posting merely to be heard.

(4) In addition to a purpose beyond being heard, a political forum must have extreme civility rules.

Both CMV and NP have extremely similar rules in this regard, and they are absolutely crucial to the success of the fora.

In general, any comment or post which in any way denigrates another user should be removed. This is an extremely broad civility rule that is well past what most subreddits do. Calling another user a liar, or accusing them of bad faith posting is banned on both CMV and NP for example, even when such accusations are true.

The prohibition on what even may be seen as justified rudeness is I think the key to a civility rule. It immediately removes from the moderation process any discretion around the substance of the politics, and makes it a neutral rule which can be applied evenly to all parties.

It is also necessary because nothing productive ever happens after bad faith is accused. Almost uniformly, once someone is rude, if there is a response back to them, the response will be rude in kind, usually more severely. People love to try to get the last word in, and a clear, objective rule banning "they started it" spats is also an important component. CMV's wiki has a really good overview of how we enforce this rule there.

(5) Conclusion/TL;DR

I don't know exactly what political content should exist on Tildes. I do know that a general politics group will not work, and that rather a politics channel should be focused on a discrete purpose other than just discussion.

I would almost certainly ban link posts from any politics group, since inherently they're going to act as just headlines for people to pontificate on, without guiding discussion towards a particular goal. I would also obviously enforce civility, and have much stricter moderation of it than I might on a non-politics forum.

Edited for formatting

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:

• Best Tracks on Tidal & All Albums on Tidal

• Best Tracks on Google

• Best Tracks on Deezer & All Albums on Deezer

• Best Tracks on Youtube

• Spotify profile with listing of all playlists

• Google music profile with listing of all playlists

• Youtube profile with listing of all playlists

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)

• Kacey Johansing - The Hiding
• Walker Lukens - Tell It To The Judge
• MY BABY - Prehistoric Rhythm
• Phum Viphurit - Manchild
• Jonti - Tokorats
• Whitehorse - Panther In The Dollhouse
• HOTT MT - Au (Alternate Universe)
• Surf Dads - All Day Breakfast
• Skyway Man - Seen Comin' From A Mighty Eye
• Heaters - Matterhorn
• Girls Who Care - Light Sleeper
• SCALLER - Senses
• Psychedelic Porn Crumpets - High Visceral {Part 2}
• Elise Trouw - Unraveling
• Sunglasses Kid - Graduation
• Meatbodies - Alice
• The Marías - Superclean Vol. I
• Kelley Stoltz - Que Aura
• Jane Weaver - Modern Kosmology
• Kelly Dance - Wild Grass
• Starcadian - Midnight Signals
• Caleb Hawley - Love, Drugs, & Decisions
• The Mysterons - Meandering

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

• Bent Knee - Land Animal
• Arch Echo - Arch Echo
• Arcane Roots - Melancholia Hymns
• Blumen - Mångata
• ichika - forn
• Chinese Football - Here Comes A New Challenger!!!
• Milco - Nerima
• I/O - Anyone, Anywhere
• Perihelion Ship - To Paint A Bird Of Fire
• Lör - In Forgotten Sleep
• Waclaw Zimpel, Kuba Ziolek - Zimpel/Ziolek
• The Physics House Band - Mercury Fountain
• Amplifier - Trippin' With Dr. Faustus
• Wobbler - From Silence To Somewhere
• Smalltape - The Ocean
• Pregnant Whale Pain - Blank
• Kettlespider - Kettlespider
• gP. - Destroy, So As To Build
• Dora The Destroyer - Dependent Secondary
• Glowbug - Fantasma Del Tropico
• O.R.k. - Soul Of An Octopus
• Aiming For Enrike - Las Napalmas
• Soup - Remedies
• Bader Nana - Devlover
• James Holden & The Animal Spirits - The Animal Spirits
• Grün - Manyana

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

• Awon & Dephlow (prod. Phoniks) - Sleep Is The Cousin Of Death
• Otis Junior & Dr.Dundiff - Hemispheres
• Figub Brazlevic - 4x4 Palestine Jeep Beats
• Deca - The Way Through
• Sweeps - tomorrow
• mister T. - The Return Of The Classic
• Sidewalk Chalk - An Orchid Is Born
• Has-Lo - The Paul Tape
• TheColorGrey - REBELATION
• Hex One - Words Worth A Thousand Pictures
• mtbrd - Smoovies
• Sampa The Great - Birds And The BEE9
• Dirty Art Club - Basement Seance
• Vanilla - Moonlight
• ETOAS - End Times Of A Sunshine
• Insight The Truncator & Damu The Fudgemunk - Ears Hear Spears
• Damu The Fudgemunk - Vignettes
• Damu The Fudgemunk - The Reflecting Sea (Welcome to a New Philosophy)
• elijah who - gentle boy
• Declaime - Young Spirit
• Abstract Orchestra - Dilla
• Stik Figa - Central Standard Time
• Mykele Deville - Peace, Fam
• Uncommon Nasa - Written At Night
• Armand Hammer - ROME

Set 5 - Punk & Related

Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

Google Sampler & Google Albums

Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums

• ISS - Endless Pussyfooting (bandcamp exclusive)
• Onsind - We Wilt, We Bloom (bandcamp exclusive)
• IDLES - Brutalism
• The Dopamines - Tales Of Interest
• SINGLE MOTHERS - Our Pleasure
• Milk Teeth - Go Away EP
• Charly Bliss - Guppy
• UV-TV - Glass
• Scarboro - Here Comes The Hangover
• Hard Girls - Floating Now
• Just Say Nay - Logistical Nightmares
• Perspective, a lovely hand to hold - What Not To Do
• football, etc. - Corner
• Silver Shadows - Cold Plastic
• The World - FIRST WORLD RECORD
• Parlor Walls - Opposites
• Agent blå - Agent blå
• Telethon - The Grand Spontanean
• Ganglions - Thirsty
• pigeon pit - treehouse
• Harley Poe - Lost And Losing It

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

• Primate - Simulated Reality
• Fearofdark - Exit Plan
• Lav & Purl - A State Of Becoming
• Prequell - The Future Comes Before
• Hades Of Spades - Dysphoria
• Edamame - Bask
• JASSS - Weightless
• Nym - Lilac Chaser
• Kelly Lee Owens - Kelly Lee Owens
• Laurence Guy - Saw You For The First Time
• Dysphemic - Zeus
• Sally Dige - Holding On
• Basement Freaks - Freedom
• Zoogma - A Future In Blue
• TIANCI - Too Alien For Earth
• Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement - Ambient Black Magic
• Octo Octa - Where Are We Going?
• Anomalie - Métropole

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)

• Elder - Reflections Of A Floating World
• Dool - Here Now, There Then
• Yellow Eyes - Immersion Trench Reverie
• Archspire - Relentless Mutation
• Below - Upon A Pale Horse
• Mesarthim - The Great Filter / Type III
• Power Trip - Nightmare Logic
• The Hirsch Effekt - ESKAPIST
• Zeal & Ardor - Devil Is Fine
• Satan's Hallow Band - Satan's Hallow
• Xanthochroid - Of Erthe and Axen Act II
• Unleash The Archers - Apex
• Walpyrgus - Walpyrgus Nights
• Violet Cold - Anomie
• Havukruunu - Kelle Surut Soi
• The Ruins Of Beverast - Exuvia
• Mutoid Man - War Moans
• Voyager - Ghost Mile
• In The Company Of Serpents - Ain-Soph Aur
• Worry - A Celebration Of Suffering

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

• MonoNeon - A Place Called Fantasy
• Ill Considered - Ill Considered
• The Comet Is Coming - Death To The Planet
• The Heliocentrics - A World Of Masks
• Don Bryant - Don't Give Up On Love
• Five Alarm Funk - SWEAT
• Tony Allen - A Tribute To Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers
• Wildflower - Wildflower
• Alfa Mist - Antiphon
• The Babe Rainbow - The Babe Rainbow
• Charnett Moffett - Music From Our Soul
• Nicole Mitchell - Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds
• Orlando le Fleming & Romantic Funk - Romantic Funk
• Collocutor - The Search
• Soil & "PIMP" Sessions - Music from and Inspired by Hello Harinezumi
• Yazz Ahmed - La Saboteuse
• Binker & Moses – Journey To The Mountain Of Forever
• Nubya Garcia - Nubya's 5ive
• Jaimie Branch - Fly Or Die
• Melanie De Biasio - Lilies
• Richard Spaven - The Self
• Kalu & The Electric Joint - Time Undone
• Voodoo Visionary - Off The Ground
• Sr. Langosta - El Experimento Caribeño
• Ambrose Akinmusire - A Rift in Decorum: Live at the Village Vanguard
• Skinshape - Live & Love
• Braxton Cook - Somewhere In Between
• Mammal Hands - Shadow Work
• Chuck Johnson - Balsams
• Joey Defrancesco & The People - Project Freedom
• Superfluous Motor - Idiosyncrasies
• The Necks - Unfold
• Johnny Sketch & The Dirty Notes - Sketch
• Nate Smith - KINFOLK: Postcards From Everywhere
• Cameron Graves - Planetary Prince
• Jungle Fire - Jambu
• Baast - Bazzar

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

• Stinger - Hard Proof
• Luis Peixoto - Assimétrico
• Antibalas - Where The Gods Are In Peace
• The Seven Ups - Drinking Water
• The Scorpios - The Scorpios
• Ajate - Abrada
• Trio Da Kali & Kronos Quartet
• Danish String Quartet - Last Leaf
• Hear In Now - Not Living In Fear
• Tamikrest - Kidal
• Anouar Brahem - Blue Maqams
• Sebastião Antunes & Quadrilha - Singular
• Oumou Sangaré - Mogoya
• Ifriqiyya Electrique - Rûwâhîne
• ROSALÍA - Los Ángeles
• Songhoy Blues - Résistance
• Awa Poulo - Poulo Warali
• Jenna Moynihan & Mairi Chaimbeul - One Two
• Battle Of Santiago - La Migra
• Jeremy Danneman - Honey Wine
• Michael Head & The Red Elastic Band – Adiós Señor Pussycat
• Aldina Duarte - Quando Se Ama Loucamente
• Juniore - Ouh là là
• Isabella Bretz - Canções para Abreviar Distâncias
• Jenny Scheinman - Here On Earth
• Daymé Arocena - Cubafonía
• The Homesick - Youth Hunt
• Mondo Grosso - ???????????
• Blue Rose Code - The Water Of Leith
• Moses Hightower - Fjallaloft
• Litku Klemetti - Juna Kainuuseen
• Various Artists - Sweet As Broken Dates: Lost Somali Tapes from the Horn of Africa

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

• The Texas Gentlemen - TX Jelly
• Billy Strings - Turmoil & Tinfoil
• Kate Rhudy - Rock N' Roll Ain't For Me
• Norah Jane Struthers & The Party Line
• Courtney Marie Andrews - Honest Life
• Nicole Atkins - Goodnight Rhonda Lee
• Sherman Holmes - The Sherman Holmes Project: The Richmond Sessions
• Viper Central - The Spirit Of God And Madness
• Twisted Pine - Twisted Pine
• The Dawn Brothers - Stayin' Out Late
• Kitchen Dwellers - Ghost In The Bottle
• Bad Manion - Good Afternoon
• Trout Steak Revival - Spirit To The Sea
• The Trongone Band - Keys To The House
• The Railsplitters - Jump In
• My Terrible Friend - I Tried To Be Kind
• Sallie Ford - Soul Sick
• Lilly Hiatt - Trinity Lane
• EmiSunshine - Ragged Dreams
• Derek Hoke - Bring The Flood
• The Sons of the Palomino - Sons of the Palomino
• Thorpe Jenson - Odessa
• Pam Taylor - Steal Your Heart
• Samantha Fish - Belle of the West
• Jim Byrnes - Long Hot Summer Days
• Angaleena Presley - Wrangled
• Chuck Prophet - Bobby Fuller Died For Your Sins
• Natalie Hemby - Puxico
• Marty Stuart - Way Out West
• Whiskey Shivers - Some Part Of Something
• Sarah Shook & The Disarmers - Sidelong
• Split Lip Rayfield - On My Way

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

• NPR's Top 50 Albums
• NPR's Top 100 Songs
• AOTY's Master List for 2017
• Rate Your Music's Top Albums of 2017
• Metacritic's Best Albums of 2017
• Pitchfork's Best Albums of 2017
• Pitchfork's Best Songs of 2017
• The Quietus' Best Albums of 2017
• The A.V. Club’s 20 Best Albums of 2017
• Amoeba Music’s 50 Best Albums of 2017
• Wire’s Top Releases 2017
• Fact Mag’s Top 50 of 2017
• XLR8R's Best of 2017: Releases
• XLR8R's Best of 2017: Albums
• XLR8R's Best of 2017: Tracks
• Complex’s Top 50 Albums of 2017
• Spin’s 50 Best Albums of 2017
• Fader’s 101 Best Songs of 2017
• The Guardian’s Best Albums of 2017
• Bleeps Albums Of The Year For 2017
• TheNeedleDrop’s Top 50 Albums of 2017
• NOISEY’s 100 Best Albums of 2017
• BestEverAlbum’s Best Albums of 2017
• Sputnikmusic's Best Albums of 2017
• SputnikMusic's Staff Top50 of 2017
• Resident Advisor's Best Albums of 2017
• Resident Advisor's Staff Picks of 2017

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

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.