Collect and code, until it is done.

And now it is.

Ladies (the few that we have, I mean holy ^FUCK ), gents and everyone inbetween, welcome to the results of the 2020 Tildes census, which is only 34% less horrifying than 2020 itself. And you better believe I'm going to keep this up for the whole post, because fuck the responses this year, while greater in numbers, were occasionally still [REDACTED].^{thanks, thought police}

In the year of the lord, 2020^{CAN YOU PLEASE END ALREADY}, we got 350 responses in, which is a whopping 100 more than last year. I don't know how many accounts we have in total, no one does, and I'm too lazy to calculate the percentages right now because I'm calculating as we go so from the point of me writing this to clicking Post Topic an hour or two will probably pass.^{Update: I went to bed, so like 10 hours passed} Absolute numbers is all you're going to get here, so fuck me, fuck you and fuck off.^{I need some alcohol}

Anyway, let's go through the census. I let JotForms compile this nice graphical report that is pretty much useless because it completely breaks once either sexuality, gender or the myriad of various operating systems the people on here have get involved. But it's still funny seeing it struggle. Have a link to the PDF. So back to good Excel, my old nemesis.

Aggregated Data

Thankfully, this time around you'll have access to generate all this shit yourself, HERE YOU GO. The thing is in JSON, so easily deserializable, etc etc. I'm sure you people are skilled enough at typing the words into the IDEs to magic the data into your memory.

Important info: Empty answers are usually marked NO ANSWER, in case of numerical values it's usually -1 for age, -2 for the Kinsey scale (-1 is taken) and -69 for the 3 political values from the Sapply test, as these range from -10 to 10. Yes I made the default value -69. It's everyone's favourite number after all. Also, for some absolute FUCKED reason one of the values has 3 more entries than the other ones, I'm sure it has a totally VALID reason that has nothing to do with people entering bullshit. NOTHING.^{FuckingKILLME}

Also I can't be bothered to edit the "wrong" data out, i.e. typos in languages etc, so those are all in, maybe someone with more compassion than me can do that.

Kowalski, Analysis

First of all, I'm going to less graphs this year because it's fucking hard to aggregate things like ethnicity when you get responses ranging from black to a literal link of someone's You23AndMe results. Yes. I mean props to you for that but like, uh, FUCK, what am I going to do now? YOU ARE ALL MAKING THIS WAY TO FUCKING HARD. ლ(ಠ_ಠ ლ)

This propagates to basically all responses and next year I'm probably going to captain a way straighter course with less options, because I can't fucking MAKE FANCY GRAPHS WHEN YOU GIVE ME TOO MANY INDIVIDUAL RESPONSES^{FUCKINGKILLME}

Personal Shit

Geography

Not much has changed, the US still dominates, Canada second, though the British are catching up. I'm sure you'll have your tea party eventually. Though with good ol' Boris in charge I don't know if annexing the yanks is such a good idea. Also, as there are no invidual option here for everyone to FUCK IT UP it's the most sane graph of them all. No fucked colours this year, I promise, it's all scale.

Fancy Graph #1: Geography

Age

Fancy Graph #2: Age by decile For those wanting to repeat this, watch out, as the age by decile and specific age questions were exclusionary. You'll have to combine the results to get the same numbers. I hope. Unless I fucked up. Equal possibility.

Also whoever entered 28.9, because of you I had to make the age field in my code a double instead of an integer. Fuck you.

Gender etc.

I honestly thought this was going to be the wildest answer, but y'all are such a minority that it's fairly sane. The real clusterfuck starts after this question. Also whoever wrote prefer not to say, DID YOU NOT READ THE PART ABOUT THE OPTIONAL ANSWERS, [REDACTED] PLEASE [REDACTED] AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH-

Anyway as I said, fairly standard results.

Fancy Graph #3: Gender

Trans? Value
NO ANSWER 13
no 312
yes 23

Yeah I'm not gonna make a graph for a yes/no question, if that's bigoted you may scream at me in the comments.

Sexuality

I MADE THE SCREENSHOT BUT I FORGOT TO ADD IT FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK

Kinsey

Also forgot about you. Average is 1,37, idk what else to do.

Ethnicity

This was a mistake. 124 wrote white. 23 wrote caucasian. One person wrote causcasion. One person wrote that it's illegal to ask this question in their country. Someone wrote I bleed red white and blue.

THIS WAS A MISTAKE.

Kill me. Safe to say, that Tildes is, as someone put it perfectly: white af. Yes this was also a reply. KILL ME.

Language

Fancy Graph #3,5: Language^{This was added later, and I'm really not updating the others.}

Religion

I'm just gonna let the graph speak for itself, I don't have it in me to keep the anger up.

Fancy Graph #4: Religion

Politics, Education, Work

This is where the fun begins. No, honestly not really.

Politics

If I average out our Sapply values, we get this compass result. Yeah we're all communists. So whoever said in their dislike the alt right people on this platform, I really don't know what you mean. If anything we need more to achieve PEAK CENTRISM. In all honesty, the people saying that this sub is a leftist echo chamber (there were a few), you may have a point.

When we get to the magical field of how everyone identifies themselves politically, well, let's just say^{ah, there's the rage again} I'M NOT GONNA REPEAT THIS NEXT YEAR, GREAT FUCKING IDEA. Whoever entered confused, I FUCKING AGREE. SINCE WHEN IS PINK A FUCKING POLITICAL AFFLIATION? We do have a pirate though.^Nice

You may wade through the rest OF [REDACTED] YOURSELF in the published data.

Education

Tildes is an educated lot, contrary to popular my belief after making this census. A good chunk of people have a Bachelors, Masters, PhD. Still only one MD though, so if you have a medical emergency take it up with... checks notes ^{Ah fuck I can't reveal anything.} ...Take up with them. ^{JK please call your local emergency line when you need help}

Fancy Graph #5: Education

Work

Actually fairly sensible results, except a few, like that one person that entered not STEM, thanks for not giving me any useful information. You have the ability TO NOT ENTER SOMETHING. THIS GOES FOR THE PERSON WHO ENTERED meh AS FUCKING WELL, [REDACTED].

Fancy Graph #6: Work

Technology

Fancy Graph #7: Computer Operating Systems

Fancy Graph #8: Mobile Operating Systems

Basically just like religions. You all have to many options, since we're all communists now according to average, and options are bad, you MAY ONLY USE WINDOWS VISTA FROM THIS POINT ON, OR THE GESTAPO WILL PAY YOU A VISIT ^{fuck, wrong mass murderers}

About Tildes

Have Acc? Value
NO ANSWER 7
yes 312
no 29

For consistency, and it didn't fit into the picture in a nice way.

Fancy Graph #9: Various Tildes Statistics

Most people migrated off reddit, followed by Hackernews. The rest is various random shit, include like 5 different ways of "I don't know", but the one person replying Gab surprised me. Didn't think people would hop on Tildes off Gab, since Gab is basically extreme rightwing Twitter and Tildes is like, the antithesis to that. Leftist userbase, longform discussion.

The long replies

Once again, can't graph the shit outta this, so here's the collection of them. One reply per line. Had to format some replies to fit this format, I know someone did bullet points, apologies.

What do you like about Tildes?

What do you dislike about Tildes?

What would you change about Tildes?

Final notes

To keep my sanity in check, although when I read this post, that probably didn't work out too well, I kept some notes.

1. Someone suggested to ban all Europeans off the platform. You now have the stats, so I'm going to let you guess from where they are. Fucking hilarious.

2. Someone very cordial managed to write an entire blog post into one of the final freeform boxes. I appreciate the feedback and I'm sure Deimos does as well, but why did you have to make so many empty lines? TBH it's more on Jotform for not removing linebreaks when giving you the CSV, it breaks the entire format.

3. We should have a prize for that person who fit a textbook into the box for ethnicity, also amazing, you mad fucking lad (or lass, but statistics are on my side, lol)

In closing, most answers were good and interesting, except for the part where I let you run wild with the politics question, holy fuck, but that's on me. To the people that reduced my IQ by a few points, well I took the piss outta you already, so I hope you have a great day. Everyone else, I hope you [REDACTED] on a few [REDACTED]. Wait, I think I mixed something up here.^{As you may have guessed, don't take this too seriously}

As always, see you all next year, same time?^{Unless I get banned, which seems like a good possibility when I proofread all this, so much angerI need to get laid, or drunkActually how high does this go?}

Cheers, I'm gonna go C͉̠̰͚͚͓ͪ̿̋̏̚O͓̯͕̙͕͎͈̫̦͐̊́Ṅ͕̮̣̺̖̣̖̈ͥͦ͊̽͒͠S̶̵̹̜͔͖͗͂̋̔̈̒͊̚Ú̷͔͍͇̪̥͍ͭͭ̔ͨ̄̇̅̕M̵͈̮͉̹͈͕̻̎̓E̛̯̝̭͉̼̍̎̐̋̑̎ ̷̵̮͔̬̙̠̣̬͉ͭ͒S̨͙̼̟̻̜̈̄͋̄̇ͨ͛́͟͞Ò̡̧͙̩̓̄͂̓͗́M̹̰̲̆̌E̴̡̲̟ͯ ̹͇̲̩͍ͨͨ͒̑͊̌͒͆̕͡F̵͊̊̾ͭ҉̘̲̝͎̥͔̠̺̙O̧̡̱̠̙ͤ͒ͪO̬̯̪͉͙̩̅͂̀̏ͫ̄̓͂D͎͓͍͔͙̰͕̒̒͒̓̃̍͂ͭ̀͢
Grzmot

I beat Final Fantasy VII Remake last week. Those last chapters were exhausting, and amazing, and now that I've gotten some rest I'm thinking about going back and doing some postgame content and Hard mode.

Any tips on where to begin? I tried picking Chapter 9 to go to the Colosseum and get a couple upgrades I missed for Aerith, but quickly died to some easy mobs within the first 15 minutes of the chapter.

So I'm thinking I need to do some grinding first, probably on Normal, before attempting Hard? My characters are around Level 40.

How did you go about the postgame content? Did you replay the chapters in chronological order, or prioritize specific goals? What worked well for you (read: made the postgame enjoyable and not frustrating), and what would you have done differently?

I'm interested in anything that's basically non-fiction television that isn't news or news commentary. They don't have to be documentaries but certainly can be, and I'm open to stuff available on any streaming service.

tl;dr What applications (web or desktop) have you seen that have excellent, productive user interfaces that prioritize getting shit done?

I am currently developing a moderately complex web application with a management interface that will be used by non-technical users. It also has a separate interface for technicians to see their tasks and submit reports, but I'm pretty happy with how that's coming together. I have a pretty good idea of how I want to display data in terms of what kind of "widgets" I could use. For example, a calendar view with daily, weekly, and monthly view modes. What I'm looking for inspiration with are the finer details, like filtering data, navigation, data hierarchy. I want to find things I hadn't even considered and aren't part of the typical "flat web UI toolkit" playbook.

I'd love to steal small ideas from a forgotten tool built for Windows 95, or maybe those paradigms are best left in the past—I don't know. Personally, I find most flat UI applications are almost useless in terms of discoverability, productivity, and general ease of use. Something like the Azure dashboard is what I would like to avoid building.

I'm also trying to keep my front end stack pretty lean by using Vue.js and rolling my own components based on accessible and keyboard navigable HTML components.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

In this thread, @viridian said this:

Twitter, in my limited usage, has a completely different problem. It actively encourages you, by rule of the 280 character limit, to strip away all nuance and conversational tone. You can avoid this of course, but the UI ensures that you then suffer the consequences of having to

split up your posts into multiple tweets, which is bad by design in every single way for the user. Replies become distributed to different tweets, and thus inaccessible without a series of 2*(# of tweets) clicks. Everything about the design is just begging you to

box in the entirety of your thoughts to 280 character blocks, which I think is the single largest issue the platform has when it comes to encouraging thoughtful engagement. Twitter actives fights nuance and explanation, and so the platforms users follow the bad behavior

patterns Twitter encourages.

Completely agree, it is a bit of a feedback loop. You do have to say though that even the fact it's no longer at the original 140 characters is a concession to the fact that the kind of discourse that now happens on there rather than what it was intended for. I imagine designing something to handle both types of usage well while maintaining the platform's identity can't be easy.

(Okay, this one was said by @culturedleftfoot.)

It's certainly not an easy problem to solve, it may even be impossible. That said though, maybe a 280 character mass social media platform is just destined to be a net negative for society.

And it reminded me of this comment I wrote a while ago:

To be fair it the term 'social media' is pretty useless when it comes to describing a site's purpose. In twitter, for example, you have celebrities rambling about random aspects of their lives, politicians delivering serious to obviously canned responses to serious or made-up problems, anime artists sharing their work, YouTubers sharing sneak peeks for future videos or shilling out, all in the same platform, which is disponible in 33 languages across every continent except Sub-Saharan Africa. (which was started specifically as a SMS & microblogging site, hence the word limit). Not many 'social media platforms' actually have their intended purpose be their sole purpose, which can backfire intensely. Social media platforms might have decided to recommend people with similar opinions to you as an unintended consequence in order to find people with similar hobbies to you, rather than to create an echo chamber of radicals and stifle communication between different political beliefs.

(Not that the fact that's a real possibility excuses them from not doing anything to combat it once they realized that was one of the side effects of their decision for most or all of my lifetime.)

One of the IMO most underrated problems with the state of social media today is that social media platforms are used in far too many ways for any one site to be designed around.

YouTube for example is used as a meme-consumption feed, source of education, video-game feed, ASMR feed, news feed, music feed, child cartoon feed and more.

And since YouTube was designed mostly for video sharing, things like the comment section were of secondary importance and areas like educational or political content are greatly harmed by that since the YouTube comment section is basically impervious to serious discussion. The algorithm also appears to be basically universal for all these vastly different types of content. This also hurts educational and political channels (unless they somehow accommodate to that, usually by lying ala PragerU) but also animation channels.

Another example would be Facebook which originally (supposedly?) started off as a platform for connecting with people, apparently limited to universities initially. Now it's used for sharing memes, news, personal life updates and more, things which are fundamentally quite different from one another and probably shouldn't be under the same site, since the things important when it comes to spreading a news article are wildly different from those when spreading a meme (format?). (Or management, obviously.)

IMO, decentralizing social media along these lines into say news sharing platforms, meme-sharing platforms, image-sharing platforms, educational platforms, social platforms (where you go to make friends, which is what social media billed itself as early on IIRC) is IMO one of the more interesting but underlooked options and in some senses is looked on into with places like Instagram and pinterest (although obviously if these sites aren't regulated to provide privacy it's all smoke and mirrors and given this requires government action I don't blame people for ignoring this all that much).

So does anyone else have any more thoughts?