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    1. Daily Tildes discussion - thoughts about making the site publicly visible, but still invite-only?

      To be clear up front, this probably won't be able to happen for at least a few weeks—there are quite a few things that will need to be done or adjusted before I'd be able to make the site publicly...

      To be clear up front, this probably won't be able to happen for at least a few weeks—there are quite a few things that will need to be done or adjusted before I'd be able to make the site publicly visible, including making sure that it can handle the load from a lot of logged-out viewers.

      However, I just wanted to bring it up and see if anyone has any particular thoughts about whether making it visible for people without accounts might be a good idea, or if we should just stick to keeping it totally private for a longer period.

      For a lot of people, not being able to see any of the actual posts on the site makes it less interesting, and I think we're already starting to get to the point where there's enough activity that it's not "embarrassing" to show off an inactive site any more. There's some great content being posted already, and it would probably be good to allow people to see it, even if they can't necessarily register and participate themselves just yet.

      Anyway, not much more to say about it. I just wanted to see if anyone had any particular thoughts on the topic to make sure I don't miss anything important when I start thinking more seriously about doing it, so please let me know.

      59 votes
    2. Six quality films from the directors of this year's Cannes Film Festival

      Quick intro: My personal problem with Reddit's movie sub is with its narrow perspective on films. I know it might sound elitist, but I just found most of the discussions to be circlejerks or full...

      Quick intro: My personal problem with Reddit's movie sub is with its narrow perspective on films. I know it might sound elitist, but I just found most of the discussions to be circlejerks or full of references/memes done to death. The anti-theater Netflix-can-do-no-wrong attitude is confusing at best (considering the overwhelming love for Nolan/PTA/Taratino who are championing the analog film experience). /r/truefilm is full of insightful writing but it's not exactly a welcoming place for newbie cinephiles who got into films via MCU, Star Wars, or other blockbuster franchises. Don't get me wrong, I visit both subs everyday, but I kind of wish there's a balance: A place where you can have both casual discussions about high-brow cinema AND in-depth essays about comedy with dick jokes.

      Hence why I am writing this while ~movies is still fresh (hopefully I am adding something of value and not come off too rambly). Now of course I could just start a post asking for foreign film recommendations, but I just don't find those post to go anywhere, they usually just end up with people listing out films without any thought or explanation. Cinema is about your personal experience in relations to what you see on screen, and I think we are doing ourselves a disservice if we watch something and just shrug it off as "it's great you should watch it" or "it sucks". So putting money where my mouth is, here are some recommendations for non-english films. Sorry for the long set-up, but I hope this encourages a dialogue, even if you disagree with the above or my recommendations.

      ANYWAY. I settled on 6 because I didn't want it to a Top-5 list and 4 seems too short. 6 just feels right. Cannes just ended and I feel like it's a good time to start talking about the directors of this year's festival as their newest films will be available in the near future. So in no particular order, here are six quality films from the directors of this year's Cannes:

      1. "Mountains May Depart" (2015) - Jia Zhangke
        An ambitious piece of work that spans 25 years with an intro that goes for about an hour before the title card. Even if you don't like the film, the confidence of Jia Zhangke is in full display here.
      2. "Secret Sunshine" (2007) - Lee Chang-dong
        If Lars Von Trier films aren't realistic enough for you, here's a good one to kickstart your misery. After I finished watching it for the first time, I had to go for a walk and ended up wandering the city for 3 hours. It affected me in such a meaningful way. Surprising funny, if you can see the irony in it.
      3. "Ida" (2013) - Pawel Pawlikowski
        The cinematography! The framing in this movie is incredible, as if Ida is having a silent ever-going conversation with God. Not to mention the beautiful black and white!
      4. "A Separation" (2011) - Asghar Farhadi
        It was my first Farhadi film, and I quickly went on a hunt for all other Farhadi films right after. The writing grips you and really puts you in the place of all the characters. I could recommendation any other of his films, but to me, A Separation is perfect writing and a must-watch for any screenwriters.
      5. "Nobody Knows" (2004) - Hirokazu Kore-eda
        Heartbreaking. You know how the characters will end up (spoiler: not a good place) but you can't look away. I'm glad Kore-eda won Palme d'Or. Can't wait for his new one!
      6. "Vivre sa vie" (1962) - Jean-Luc Godard
        The only film pre-2000 on my list, but it's a film that feels quite modern. I've always felt that "Vivre sa vie" should be everyone's first Godard film instead of, say, "Breathless". It's the most coherent and it's a easy watch. It's a good starter movie before you take a deep dive into Godard's filmography (his work ranges from groundbreaking to borderline unwatchable IMO).

      Agree? Disagree? Sorry if I sound too much like Cinefix, haha. What do you think? Which other Cannes directors should I check out?
      7 votes
    3. State of Tags as a Mechanic

      Through what I've seen with the tag system, it seems completely superfluous and often detrimental to a post that requires a full read. Sure, it helps identify funny posts and gives warnings and...

      Through what I've seen with the tag system, it seems completely superfluous and often detrimental to a post that requires a full read. Sure, it helps identify funny posts and gives warnings and the like, but it seems too powerful a system for sensitive people to abuse. Tagging a joke comment as "Fluff", "Funny", "Joke", or "Troll" devalues a post, as it spoils everything in the post before you read it. A lot of humorous posts rely on punchlines at the end or misdirection via links or lengthy stories, and the punchline is achieved by leading the reader on until the end. The site's preamble states that it doesn't aim to provide a "safe-space" as well as not become completely unmoderated. I feel like we don't need big warning signs going "FUNNY JOKE" on a post because it cheapens the impact and makes the site feel too "safe", in that we have to carefully curate comments and warn others about "dangerous" comments.

      On another point, the tags are one word. Posts are often many words, and span many subjects. Placing one word on a comment can make a reader come to a quick conclusion on whether or not they'll enjoy reading a post, and a post might get glossed over very easily due to such an ambiguous descriptor.

      Tl;dr, Tags both devalue and cheapen comments by allowing users to gloss them over by looking at a one word descriptor of a possibly long post

      11 votes
    4. We're starting to see a lot of repeat questions, so let me make an introduction to Tildes post for everyone just arriving

      It's been an interesting couple of weeks while we all decompress post-reddit and think about the future of democratic online forums. Most of the relevant topics have already been discussed in...

      It's been an interesting couple of weeks while we all decompress post-reddit and think about the future of democratic online forums. Most of the relevant topics have already been discussed in multiple threads, and rather than having repeats, I'd like to invite everyone to comment on these threads themselves - and to read the comments that are already there. You'll find most of the solutions we've been thinking about explained in some detail, and we do want your feedback on these ideas to help make them better.

      I suggest you bookmark this page. This thread is getting a bit lost in the shuffle, and it's really the best nexus of information about tildes we have at the moment. It'll take you quite a while to read all of this, so since we don't have 'save posts' here yet, a bookmark will have to do. We're also updating the links here as new discussions form. If you think a discussion should be added here, please reply to this thread with the link and I'll take care of editing it into the main post. When you see new users asking repeat questions, please link them to this post. Thanks for your patience while we work through all of this. :)

      Let's get started.

      And, of course, our first ban. In fact we're up to two now.

      It's not all serious, though!

      Please do take some time to browse through everything in ~tildes. It's a cross between theoryofreddit, ideasfortheadmins, and announcements. That's where we talk turkey. There's a new discussion there every day.

      I also want to make one important contrast about what this site intends to be.

      Reddit and Voat: Democratic republic based on popularity. 'Free speech' forums.
      Tidles: Democratic meritocracy based on quality. 'Civil speech' forum.

      Enjoy yourselves, post some content, make some new friends. This sweet honeymoon phase won't last forever, and it's one of the best parts of a new site. Remember, as long as you're civil here, you are never going to have any problems.

      60 votes
    5. What are some of your favorite genres/themes in music?

      I always love asking this question because the answers are always so unique to each person. I love a lot of music, but a lot of my favorite albums or songs often have a few recurring themes or are...

      I always love asking this question because the answers are always so unique to each person.

      I love a lot of music, but a lot of my favorite albums or songs often have a few recurring themes or are in a certain genre, and I personally like analyzing my taste and asking myself stuff like "why do I like this so much?" As I've done this, I've noted that my favorites often fall into one or more of these:

      Shoegaze and/or Dream Pop
      I like warmth in music, and a lot of shoegaze is very good at having a warm atmosphere like in Citrus. Other times I a noisy assault on my ears with an emphasis on wall of sound, and stuff like Grandeur of Hair is perfect for that need. I love the feeling of a wall of sound washing over me and just enveloping me, and sometimes a dream pop edge is also a great addition.

      Space
      This is mainly space rock, but I love a lot of space-y feeling things and I always have. I have a really big attraction to it, and I can't really explain why, but the idea of a cold vacuum of space just gets to me and makes me go "Wow, this sounds so cool and expansive and distant and I want to be there." Whether it's something sappy like Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, something a little more depressing and slow like Stratosphere, or something infectiously repetitive like Orion Awakes, it never fails to make me happy.

      Southern and/or soulful hip-hop
      I like vocal harmonies, soulful sounding stuff, and the accent is very familiar to me so it makes some of the rhymes feel a bit closer or special or familiar? Something like that. Anyway, things like Rodeo, Soul Food, and ATLiens fit into this and make me smile with the southern rhymes or the souls-y love.

      Plunderphonics/Sound Collage
      I LOVE plunderphonics to death. I love the idea of taking little things out of pieces of other stuff and molding it into a totally new project with a new feel and theme and sound. Some of my favorites are Since I Left You (full album wasn't on Youtube) and Wildflower (also not on Youtube), Pharma, and Planetary Natural Love Gas Webbin' 199999.

      You don't have to type out some big thing like I did, just tell me some of your favorite things in music!

      14 votes
    6. Daily Tildes discussion - suggestions for expansions/additions to Docs (and how you can help)

      Today I want to talk about expanding the information available on the Tildes Docs site. There's some info there, but there should be a lot more. Eventually, I'd like that site to include...

      Today I want to talk about expanding the information available on the Tildes Docs site. There's some info there, but there should be a lot more. Eventually, I'd like that site to include information about the site's goals, mechanics and so on, as well as things closer to standard "documentation", such as how the post formatting works, details on the tagging systems, etc.

      One specific thing that I know I'd like to add before long is kind of a "FAQ for mechanics" that can have answers for the common questions that keep coming up, like "why is the comment box at the bottom instead of the top?".

      To help with this, I've now open-sourced the files for both the Tildes Docs site and the Blog here now, so you can contribute to them directly if you'd like to: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes-static-sites/

      @flaque has already written a page to help with Markdown formatting that I'll add soon (but I wanted to see if he'd like to do it as a proper merge request so he gets credit as a contributor). Anyone else is welcome to contribute to the Docs as well, and I'd appreciate the help. However, if you're not sure if it's something that I'd want to add it might be best to ask first before you start writing.

      Outside of that, I'm open for suggestions about what you think would be good to include, or things that are already there that need work. Thanks!

      20 votes
    7. Discussing anonymity on ~

      So one of the things I really liked about the project is point 1 of the privacy section of the Mechanics (Future). Proactive not reactive; preventative not remedial: When creating new features,...

      So one of the things I really liked about the project is point 1 of the privacy section of the Mechanics (Future).

      Proactive not reactive; preventative not remedial: When creating new features, think about what data will need to be stored, and consider how harmful it might be if that data was to be leaked in the future. Is it possible to reduce the amount of data being stored to lower the potential harm? Can the data eventually be aggregated or anonymized so that we're only storing recent data instead of a full history?

      I think a good first step would be to not have a public comment/submission history. Users should evaluate other users contributions based on the conversation the are having/reading, not past submissions.

      This doesn't make you anonymous, but at least it can prevent nosy people from knowing too much. (I get there are valid reasons to want to find other posts by the same user, but I think individual privacy is more important). At least, if not enforced for everyone, this should be an option, making your profile not display your history to others.

      Now, one of my biggest problems with reddit is that it doesn't make it easy for you to stay anonymous and also keep your content on the site.

      Let me explain. I don't like people being able to see my submission/comment history, because I don't want to give the chance for people to identify me if I don't choose to do so personally. It's not about reddit knowing what I like or do (I mean, I use Google, they know everything I do), it's about individuals, about other users knowing things I'm not happy sharing with them for whatever reason.

      There are only two options on reddit: deleting my content (using a script or whatever or going one by one) or deleting my account. This results in me deleting all my comments and submissions on reddit every few weeks.

      Now, I would love to be able to leave most of what I post on reddit online, because sometimes I have really interesting conversations and I try to be detailed and clear and other people might find (some of) my posts useful. But I don't want anyone who knows my username or anyone who sees a comment of mine going through my history. There's too many crazy people. Also, I haven't suffered doxxing, but that's just not nice.

      There are many reasons why someone could prefer to not be identifiable. Just to give some examples that come to mind: people might have an ideology that other users don't like/respect, people might post pictures of themselves (think fitness groups, for example), people might post in local groups revealing their location, people might look for counsel and talk about their personal problems, etc. Putting all of that together might make it easy to identify someone.

      So, what I would like to propose is a way to leave my content online if I wish to and giving other people the option to read it in the future, without it being publicly tied to my username.

      How could this be done? Well, I think users should be able to anonymize their participation in a thread individually and throughout the site. There could be an button (on every thread for thread only anonymization and on your profile for full site anonymization) that you tap and your username is replaced all through each thread with a randomly generated username (it'd be great if the username is consistent within the thread, so people reading would know its the same person).

      These usernames should be words, ideally, not difficult to parse by humans. Of course this would generate a great number of usernames, but there are some solutions.

      One could be using something like Google Docs uses when several anonymous viewers are watching a document. Each gets a name (RedFox, whatever) which is consistently used throughout the thread. The same username (RedFox) can then be reused in another thread for any other anonymous user. (So RedFox wouldn't be referring to the same person in different threads, but to two random, anonymized persons).

      I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult to generate these (similarly to how reddit gives you suggestions to new usernames when you open an account).

      Also, in order to avoid the admins having to reserve many usernames in advance, these usernames could have a special mark (like *RedFox or °RedFox, or ~RedFox~, for example). This way, a new user can register any available name without interfering with these anonymous usernames. A thread could have some non-anonymized user called RedFox and an anonymized user called °RedFox (or whatever mark is used).

      In any case, the user should be able to access all of their submissions and comments on their profile even after anonymizing, being able to edit or delete them if they wish to.

      Ok, I think that's it, I hope I was clear. I'm also not gonna be able to log in again until tomorrow. So please, go ahead and discuss and tell me what you think and I'll come back when I can.

      EDIT: User karma should not be public either. I can make an argument for it tomorrow if needed or we can discus it on another thread.

      42 votes
    8. What if we got rid of votes entirely?

      There are no downvotes (which is a very good idea) and we are sorting by activity anyway. So what if we took the next logical step and got rid of the entire voting system? Please hear me out! :)...

      There are no downvotes (which is a very good idea) and we are sorting by activity anyway. So what if we took the next logical step and got rid of the entire voting system? Please hear me out! :)

      (1) Up-voting does not encourage quality postings (see, for instance, https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/data-mining-reveals-how-the-down-vote-leads-to-a-vicious-circle-of-negative-feedback-aad9d49da238 ; yes the article also covers the up-vote).

      (2) Anecdotally, up-voting discourages quality postings. I have often been frustrated because well-thought-out comments (by me or by others) got one hundredth of the up-votes of a strategically placed "lol" or something similarly trivial. People upvote things that evoke an emotional response, not things that make them think. (Source lost, unfortunately.)

      (3) Up-votes are time-critial. Being the first one to comment often assures getting the most up-votes, which can lead to (2), to "first" posts, and to quick posts instead of well though-out comments.

      (4) (Edit!) Up-voting can create an echo-chamber, because quality if measured by popularity.

      All in all, voting is just a social media habit without any benefit and with the possibility of a large detrimental effect on posting quality. Old-school Web fora and Usenet worked fine without it and quality was (arguably) superior.

      Would you really miss the option to vote? Is it worth the detrimental effects?

      Please discuss!

      Edit: fixed the link to the article. Thanks!

      45 votes
    9. Speedart for May 22 to 28th!

      As there has been positive response, let's get the party started! Speedart created in 60 minutes (or less, but not more!) during this week is welcome in this conversation. You can do as many as...

      As there has been positive response, let's get the party started!

      Speedart created in 60 minutes (or less, but not more!) during this week is welcome in this conversation. You can do as many as you like, out of any media. In homage to the folks over in ~music, I'm going to use music as my theme this week - but you do you and have fun!

      A couple of thoughts:
      ~ Out of courtesy to your fellow posters, please consider social appropriateness, pornography legislation, and giving a heads up in the post if there is gore and/or nudity.
      ~ One of the best gifts you can give to someone who has the joy or courage to post their work is appreciation of their efforts. :)

      GO! ARTIFY!

      23 votes
    10. We should have more actionable entity for tags

      To give you an example list: Everyone should be able to add tags to topics, not just OP in creation Tags are useful but only if they are correct. OP could not get the right tags but the community...

      To give you an example list:

      • Everyone should be able to add tags to topics, not just OP in creation
        Tags are useful but only if they are correct.
        OP could not get the right tags but the community as a whole could fix it over time. That would help browsing tags that actually reflect the content of the topics.
      • I should be able to tag my own comments. Sometimes you know you're posting off-topic or just a joke.
      9 votes
    11. Daily Tildes discussion - move comment vote counts to the bottom?

      We've had a few discussions already related to the voting mechanics (mostly about whether we should change the name, which is still definitely a possibility). Something that came up in one of...

      We've had a few discussions already related to the voting mechanics (mostly about whether we should change the name, which is still definitely a possibility). Something that came up in one of those that I think is an interesting idea is moving a comment's current "score" to the bottom of the comment instead of the top. I'm a little uncertain about this, so I wanted to see what other people think.

      Some thoughts:

      • I do think that having the vote button at the bottom of the comment is the correct placement. People shouldn't be voting before they've read the comment, and (especially if you're on mobile), needing to scroll back up to the top of the comment to vote after reading it is strange.
      • Because of that, if we move the score to the bottom it could even just be on the vote button itself, similar to how it already is for topics.
      • I do also think that having the comment tags at the top of the comment is correct. They're generally meant to be informational, and it's useful to get that information before reading the comment. For example, if I can see that a string of jokes is coming up, I may just want to collapse the thread and skip it, instead of needing to read them to recognize that they're jokes.
      • Comment scores are useful information overall and I don't think we should totally hide them, but some other sites have tried to de-emphasize or hide them in various ways (some of that is also related to the possibility of negative scores, which can't happen here). For example, Hacker News doesn't show comment scores at all except to the comment's author, and many subreddits on reddit hide the comment scores initially for a few hours to try to reduce biased voting from seeing them.

      Let me know what you think. This is a pretty minor decision overall, but even little things like this can have significant effects, so I'm interested in other opinions about it.

      25 votes
    12. I just wanted to say that since I joined I've never looked back

      ... and we're only a few bunch on an alpha website. While actually the fact of being a small group could be playing a big role in this feeling, it just feel good to realise that some unrest I was...

      ... and we're only a few bunch on an alpha website.

      While actually the fact of being a small group could be playing a big role in this feeling, it just feel good to realise that some unrest I was feeling in the last months was just due to lack of meaningful discussions.

      I was finding myself checking Reddit over and over (the meme about Reddit as an empty refrigerator feel terribly apt today) while I check here a couple times a day and get some interesting insight every. Single. Time.

      So, enough rambling and just tank you @Deimos to put this up, that mod from reddit/science that made me discover this platform and every single one of you for providing some quality conversation :)

      Keep going on!

      25 votes
    13. TIL Jame Joyce liked fucking the farts out of someone named Nora

      “My sweet little whorish Nora I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways. Yes,...

      “My sweet little whorish Nora I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if a gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual, fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.

      You say when I go back you will suck me off and you want me to lick your cunt, you little depraved blackguard. I hope you will surprise me some time when I am asleep dressed, steal over to me with a whore’s glow in your slumberous eyes, gently undo button after button in the fly of my trousers and gently take out your lover’s fat mickey, lap it up in your moist mouth and suck away at it till it gets fatter and stiffer and comes off in your mouth. Sometimes too I shall surprise you asleep, lift up your skirts and open your drawers gently, then lie down gently by you and begin to lick lazily round your bush. You will begin to stir uneasily then I will lick the lips of my darling’s cunt. You will begin to groan and grunt and sigh and fart with lust in your sleep. Then I will lick up faster and faster like a ravenous dog until your cunt is a mass of slime and your body wriggling wildly.

      Goodnight, my little farting Nora, my dirty little fuckbird! There is one lovely word, darling, you have underlined to make me pull myself off better. Write me more about that and yourself, sweetly, dirtier, dirtier.”

      ― James Joyce, Selected Letters of James Joyce

      https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/504662-my-sweet-little-whorish-nora-i-did-as-you-told

      5 votes
    14. Extended Scripts for Tildes Alpha

      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....

      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.

      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

      12 votes
    15. Suggestion: a 3rd way of posting, besides 'self post' and straight link: link with context

      Hi, One thing I really missed on Reddit was that there were only 2 possible ways of posting : self-post (text) or straight link with nothing else. I would often have an intermediate 3rd way: a...

      Hi,

      One thing I really missed on Reddit was that there were only 2 possible ways of posting : self-post (text) or straight link with nothing else. I would often have an intermediate 3rd way: a link, but with an associated short text.

      Motivations:

      1. Being able to add some context for the link: where does it come from, why did I post it, what did I post it for, what is special about it, what part of it do I intend to discuss, how does it relate to a personal experience, and so on.
      2. Adding other links in the text, related to the main link (previous history of the same subject, link in another language / translation, counter opinions, ...).
      3. Avoiding misinterpretation; do I endorse the link content (in full, part of it?), do I criticize or condemn it?
      4. Doing the previous 1-2-3 points, without giving up the advantages of straight link: being still able for the readers to click and jump to the link straight from the group post list, possible thumbnail/preview/embedded display; and without resorting to a self-comment which will look awkward and get lost in the other comments after a handful of those comments are made.

      In fact, if the goal of Tildes is to force a certain quality of post content and discussion, this mode may eventually be set to replace completely the 'straight link only' posting mode; in that case the following extra motivations come into play.

      Extra motivations:

      1. Mitigate stupid and low effort posts by forcing the poster to explain/describe in at least n character/words his link. If the poster is not able to spend 2 minutes thinking and writing a description, his link is probably not worth the effort of reading.
      2. Mitigate trolling and malicious posts by forcing the poster to motivate clearly his posts, and not insidiously disguise his intent behind a fake innocence.

      The accompanying context text should have a minimum and maximum length, for it should not replace well-developed 'self-posts'.

      What do users and admins think about all that posting mode I sorely missed on Reddit?

      9 votes
    16. Feature Request: Saving Topics and Comments

      I think the option to save a topic or comment would be a good addition. For example, I have had a ~music topic about music everyone's listening to open for over a day so that I can pick a new...

      I think the option to save a topic or comment would be a good addition. For example, I have had a ~music topic about music everyone's listening to open for over a day so that I can pick a new group to listen to each time I do homework. Sure, I could write them all somewhere, but I think it's a nice QoL improvement nonetheless.

      Edit: I'd like to add to this @Ganymede 's idea of following a topic to get notified of new comments inside it. Maybe this could apply to a specific comment chain, too, since a whole topic will be a lot once the site explodes. ;)

      16 votes
    17. Request: API to fetch all comments including hierarchy relationship

      Hello, I saw in another thread being mentioned that there is no use for API for real users other than bots. So wanted to voice some real API uses that I would be interested in: When I post a new...

      Hello,

      I saw in another thread being mentioned that there is no use for API for real users other than bots. So wanted to voice some real API uses that I would be interested in:

      1. When I post a new blog post, if I find it worthy of sharing here, it would be nice to mirror the comments I get here back on my blog post. I can imagine using API to fetch all the comments from a tildes thread, including the hierarchy relationship. The API would return a JSON with Markdown and/or HTML like the XML that Disqus exports (but JSON). When people want to comment on that post, they can come to tildes to do so, or if they don't want to create an account here, or if they don't have an invite, they can comment via other means that I have (Webmentions, Twitter, email).
      2. Second use is make something like hnrss possible.
      4 votes
    18. Gell-Mann amnesia effect

      (from wikipedia) The Gell-Mann amnesia effect defines the idea that "I believe everything the media tells me except for anything for which I have direct personal knowledge, which they always get...

      (from wikipedia) The Gell-Mann amnesia effect defines the idea that "I believe everything the media tells me except for anything for which I have direct personal knowledge, which they always get wrong."
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

      5 votes
    19. So far this site has been mostly politics-averse, but I am curious if I am alone as an MAGA/Trump voter/supporter in a sea of reddit mods

      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...

      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.

      90 votes
    20. Speedpaint or speeddraw interest, anyone?

      I love drawing and painting. But sometimes I am attacked by inertia or my self confidence deserts me. Or sometimes I want to scribble without worrying about the end result. Thus, SPEEDPAINT. You...

      I love drawing and painting. But sometimes I am attacked by inertia or my self confidence deserts me. Or sometimes I want to scribble without worrying about the end result. Thus, SPEEDPAINT.

      You grab whatever materials are around and race to get as much done as possible. I use a one hour time limit. You can copy a reference or make it up from your head. Technique is helpful but not required. This is a digital speed paint from a photo. I think I did it in mspaint. This is construction paper and crayola crayon.

      If we occasionally had a thread for a speed art challenge, would anyone be interested? Not to compete against each other, but compete against yourself and show support for others willing to try.

      12 votes
    21. Daily Tildes discussion - general plans for the week

      First, thanks for the great discussion yesterday about "fluff" content. There's a lot to consider, and a lot of people made great points (and are still making them), so thanks for all your...

      First, thanks for the great discussion yesterday about "fluff" content. There's a lot to consider, and a lot of people made great points (and are still making them), so thanks for all your thoughts in there. On a side note, that was the first topic on Tildes to get over 100 comments (and there's now already a second one). That's a pretty neat milestone to be hitting already.

      For today, I want to talk a bit about my general plans for this week and see if anyone has any thoughts. Maybe this would be a good thing for me to try to do every Monday?

      I'm planning to focus on a few things this week, in no particular order:

      • The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect this Friday. A lot of sites and people are panicking too much about it, and I think Tildes should generally be fine, but it's still best for me to try to make sure I'm doing things properly before it comes into effect. I've definitely missed at least one thing, and want to spend some time seeing if there are any other updates I should be making in advance.
      • Since you've all certainly read the Tildes Privacy Policy, I'm sure you all know that it says Tildes will delete various types of data after 30 days. Even though the site only started opening up more over the last week or so, I did originally set the server up on April 26 and that's when the earliest data is from. So this week I'll need to do some work to make sure that all of the relevant data is actually going to be getting cleaned up when it reaches 30 days old. A decent amount of this is already done, but I need to verify and finish building some other cleanup code.
      • The next big priority is to try to get the site's code open-sourced. I've had a ton of offers from people to help with development, so I'd really like to start making it possible for people to contribute very soon. This shouldn't be too much work overall, a lot of it is just writing up information that will make it easier for people to get involved.
      • Outside of that, I'll probably also just be doing some general fixing and tweaking of different issues that people have pointed out. Thanks for all the feedback, bug reports, and suggestions so far. If I have time, I'll try to work on some larger features that are already becoming more important with the activity increasing—things like basic search.

      Finally, in the interest of trying to keep momentum up, I've also given everyone 3 invite codes, so you can invite some other people to join the site if you'd like. You can get them from the invite page, which is linked from the sidebar on your user page.

      Thanks again for being here, it's really exciting to see so many people using the site already.

      26 votes
    22. Source and API

      If it's too early in development for these questions, let me know. Is the source available yet? If so, where is it hosted? If not, when will it be dropped? Third party API: I know the docs say...

      If it's too early in development for these questions, let me know.

      1. Is the source available yet? If so, where is it hosted? If not, when will it be dropped?
      2. Third party API: I know the docs say that the browser should be the client. However, after using tildes for awhile on mobile, it's quite... interesting. The site does really well on mobile, don't get me wrong, but it's missing the system feel that makes the experience pleasant. Honestly, one of the big reasons I was drawn to reddit was the ample support (by the third party) for mobile clients. I'd love to get started on a client for ~.
      14 votes
    23. Arrested Development back on the 29th May and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt on the 30th May

      It's a good time to have Netflix if you need some quirky original comedy in your life. Both seasons look like they'll be split in half, which means we'll have more to look forward to later in the...

      It's a good time to have Netflix if you need some quirky original comedy in your life.

      Both seasons look like they'll be split in half, which means we'll have more to look forward to later in the year too!

      Only sad thing is that it looks like this'll be the last season of Kimmy and who knows about more AD - but let's not be sad, let's be happy that we are getting what we are!

      5 votes
    24. Does anyone have tips or tricks for self studying / preparing to get a CCNA?

      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...

      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?

      6 votes
    25. Daily Tildes discussion - why should we allow (or not allow) fluff content?

      Alright, unfortunately I'm going to have to be a grumpy old guy, but it looks like we're going to need to make this decision already. There have been a few "cute animal" images posted over the...

      Alright, unfortunately I'm going to have to be a grumpy old guy, but it looks like we're going to need to make this decision already. There have been a few "cute animal" images posted over the last couple of days, and yesterday we had a request for a devoted group for it.

      So today, I think we need to decide if we want a devoted group, or if we should just disallow this type of content entirely. My personal inclination is that it shouldn't be allowed at all, but I'm open to discussing it. Unfortunately I need to go out for a while shortly so I can't write up too much right now, but here are some quick thoughts on why I feel like we shouldn't allow it:

      • One of the main objectives of Tildes was to prioritize high-quality content. By the very nature of this, it means we're going to have to take a stand against some things that don't represent what we want the site to become.
      • Cute animal content is pretty much the definition of "lowest common denominator". Almost everybody enjoys seeing a cute photo/gif, and that's why it tends to dominate almost every platform it's on. It appeals to a very wide range of people, so it attracts more votes/attention. This is also why we can't really trust "a lot of people want fluff content"—of course they do. We need to make the decision based on whether allowing it is good for Tildes overall, not whether it has wide appeal.
      • It has practically zero discussion value. About the only comments people can make on those sorts of posts are "aww cute", or "lol, goofy dog". Yes, there's a very, very slim possibility that you might get something like "this type of bird has an interesting migration pattern", but if that's the case, a better original post would have been that information in the first place.
      • Being harsh about what we want to allow is probably most important while the site is in this sort of small/invite-only phase. One of the main important aspects of this phase is that we need to build up a strong base culture. That way, when the site starts to grow, people will be coming into a place with an established culture and norms, not a complete free-for-all. So if we want to have a high-quality site, I think it's important to establish that very early.
      • If we're not certain what the right answer is, it's much better to disallow it now and eventually relent later, than to allow it now and have to ban established communities in the future.

      Let me know what you think, but I think it's important that we decide this very soon so we can be more clear about how we're going forward with this and similar types of content.

      147 votes
    26. AskComp: Reactive coding and splitting observables

      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...

      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?

      5 votes
    27. A few Off the Bat Thoughts about the Mechanics

      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...

      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.

      9 votes
    28. A little thing that might form some trouble (phising)

      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...

      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/

      7 votes
    29. Let's talk about that annoying thing we all don't want to think about: funding.

      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...

      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.

      66 votes
    30. Thoughts on addressing the filter bubble (echo chambers and "fake news"), scalability and free speech

      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...

      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

      26 votes
    31. Whats up? How's everyone's month going? Anything exciting happening?

      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...

      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?

      16 votes
    32. My random notes for Nim lang

      -> 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...

      -> 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 :)

      8 votes
    33. Promoting Anything That's NOT Individual Tracks?

      In my opinion, part of what makes places like /r/music so mind-numbingly boring is that outside of news, there's just individual tracks and question threads that beg for individual tracks. There's...

      In my opinion, part of what makes places like /r/music so mind-numbingly boring is that outside of news, there's just individual tracks and question threads that beg for individual tracks.

      There's some value in this and if that's the way you consume music, then cool. But as someone who primarily listens to albums, I rarely want to discover music like this. Like maybe if I'm looking into a new genre, it's cool to get an introductory song to get what it's all about, but beyond that it's kinda a haze.

      So others who value any kind of music listening outside of singles + loose tracks, what do you think we can do to shape this community into something that includes us a little more? Discussions on DJ sets? Album reviews? Games like the survivors done on artist-specific subreddits? I don't think this is something that just naturally gets fixed through the hierarchy system or something, like many of the other problems with /r/music. What can we do?

      13 votes
    34. Chasing the carrot on a stick: A karma system.

      That silly number on someone's account. One that means nothing but is a weird goal people seek out. Karma can be used to encourage user participation. Karma can also be bad and can cause someone...

      That silly number on someone's account. One that means nothing but is a weird goal people seek out.

      Karma can be used to encourage user participation. Karma can also be bad and can cause someone to post with the intent of collecting karma instead of discussion.

      Karma can be earned different way;

      • the reddit way, you get karma for how many upvotes you get for things you post
      • the gamefaqs way, you get 1 karma point for each day you log in

      I'm not sure of any other ways, but I like silly numbers. Perhaps the 'trusted user' thing in the docs can somehow tie into a karma system.

      What do you think about karma and how it could/should/would play out here?

      13 votes
    35. Daily Tildes discussion - welcome many new users + two new groups (~comp and ~creative)

      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...

      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.

      26 votes
    36. Topic reply notifications added

      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...

      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.

      17 votes
    37. Daily Tildes discussion - at what point should we stop auto-subscribing new users to all groups?

      Currently, when someone registers on Tildes they're automatically subscribed to all of the existing groups (except ~test). I did this because while the site is this small, it seemed like the best...

      Currently, when someone registers on Tildes they're automatically subscribed to all of the existing groups (except ~test). I did this because while the site is this small, it seemed like the best way to try to get reasonable activity in a wide range of the groups, but I absolutely don't want to keep doing it for long.

      I think it's very important that people should need to seek out groups that they're interested in, instead of being defaulted into them and needing to opt out. Here's a really old post I wrote on reddit about how being a default subscription made it impossible for /r/gaming to ever be a quality gaming subreddit, but it applies to all defaults.

      So, how should we decide when the site's starting to get active enough that we can stop the auto-subscriptions? And once we do, what do you think is a good way to start people out so that they're able to find groups they're interested in? Maybe, as mentioned in another thread earlier today, we should have a "welcome / getting started" page that new users end up on that goes over some of the important settings and helps them look into subscribing to groups?

      9 votes
    38. Community Resources?

      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...

      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.

      7 votes
    39. Daily Tildes discussion - go forth and multiply

      Alright, not so much a particular "discussion" today, but there are already a couple of other good ones going on in ~tildes as well. As I'm sure many of you have noticed, I've started actively...

      Alright, not so much a particular "discussion" today, but there are already a couple of other good ones going on in ~tildes as well.

      As I'm sure many of you have noticed, I've started actively promoting the site around some reddit places today, and I'm sure it'll probably spread some more from there too. In support of that, I've given all the current users 5 invite codes that you can give to others if you'd like to invite anyone. You can get to these on the invite page, which is linked from the sidebar on your user page.

      Also, in case you missed it, I fixed the invite process the other day so that you can have multiple active codes now, so you don't still need to invite only one person at a time.

      As always, let me know if you need more invite codes or have a particular suggestion for ways you'd like to invite more people. Hopefully we can keep some momentum going for a bit now and get the activity to a self-sustaining level.

      16 votes