Inspired by the recent LFG thread I figured it would be good to start a thread to get some musical collaboration happening. :)

Reply with your instruments and skills, preferred musical styles, and availability.

When a comment is collapsed, either through tags or already being read, it shows a one line preview of the comment. This preview skips any quotes in the comment. This works perfectly when quotes are used to reference a part of the comment they are replying to. But if the comment includes only a quote, the preview line is just blank. This makes it look like an error. I think that, if a comment has only a quote, it should do something like this:

Quote

Or

Quote: This is the quote text…

This time the "iron chef" ingredient is storytelling. What's a song you know that tells a good story?

Ground rules:

• One song per comment, so we can vote for them individually.
• One top-level comment per user, so pick your favorite song.
• If you want to post more than one song, reply to yourself to add more comments.

Previously in this series:

• Happy Songs
• Cover songs with an an unusual instrument
• Good singing in a language you don't understand

(This is kind of a rant about Vimeo's website. It might be better in ~tech, or ~comp. Feel free to move it.)

I've always preferred using Vimeo to YouTube for finding interesting videos because it's more oriented towards artists than people just uploading random stuff. As mentioned in the recent What Creative Projects Have You Been Working On? thread, I had some nature videos I shot of hummingbirds and wanted to upload them somewhere. My spouse had uploaded videos to Vimeo before, so I thought I'd put them there rather than YouTube because I don't like dealing with Google.

The site is a hot mess. I've hit the following problems after lightly using it for 2 days. I uploaded a single video and set it to be public:

• No way to enter keywords or tags. Searching will only find your video if you mention the search terms in your title (and maybe your description).
• Some of their own pages are broken or missing. If I go to "categories" and click on "documentary" it shows me an error message saying the page doesn't exist. If I click on "arts" or "music" I go to that category and see videos available.
• No information on how to add your video to a given category. Is it done automatically? Is it done by someone on the staff noticing and adding it? I have no idea!
• My video has gotten a few views from people here, so it is uploaded and available for anyone to see. But if I search for "hummingbird" and limit the search to videos uploaded in the last 7 days, my video is not displayed. Why not? Who knows?
• I ran the iOS app without logging in and it showed my account but said I had no videos, even though others were able to see them. Logging in shows the videos and confirms that they are set to allow anyone to view them. WTF?
• I attempted to send them a message telling them about the broken links. When you go to the help section and click on "Contact Us," you get a fake chat window that's just a bot that will pick keywords out of your question and reply with articles that don't answer your question. In fact, they even ask below each one, "Does this answer your question?" with a button for yes and nothing else. There's no way to say, "No, this was unhelpful." If you scroll to the bottom of the list of articles they recommend, there's a button to send a message to their tech support.
• I'm on the free tier, so I wasn't expecting any sort of answer to my help question, but still wanted to let them know so they could fix it. But that didn't work either. They have enough sense to copy your question from the chat bot into the tech support form (nice!) but it strips out any URLs. (Thanks! Very useful since I was trying to report a broken URL!) But it doesn't matter anyway because after you choose a category (none of which are correct) and attempt to submit your form, nothing happens. You press "Next" and the button turns into a spinner for a few seconds, and then stops and turns back into the "Next" button. Nothing appears to have been submitted, but no error is presented.
• The site is full of dark patterns. I get that they want upgrade revenue coming in, and I have no problem with that. But they do things like have a blinking icon in your video's settings for "interaction tools." These are things you can do to monetize your video, or whatever. Stuff I will never need. All the options in this section require a paid upgrade and there's no way to turn off the blinking beacon (except, I assume, by upgrading).

I was considering upgrading to their bottom-tier paid account, but after seeing how much is broken, I have to wonder if they're circling the drain? I get using chat bots and forms to make it easier for their support people, and making sure users know about ways to upgrade, but this is ridiculous. Anyone else run into this?

I thought maybe we'd play this game again? This time the "iron chef" ingredient is good singing, but in a language that you don't understand.

Ground rules:

• One song per comment, so we can vote for them individually.
• One top-level comment per user, so pick your favorite song.
• If you want to post more than one song, reply to yourself to add more comments.

Previously in this series:

• Happy Songs
• Cover songs with an an unusual instrument

A bit over a week ago, I posted share a link to a happy song and it seemed like fun, so how about we play again?

The “iron chef” ingredient this time is that it should be a cover song with an unusual instrument. (How you interpret that is up to you.)

Ground rules:

• One song per comment, so we can vote for them individually.
• One top-level comment per user, so pick your favorite song.
• If you want to post more than one song, reply to yourself to add more comments.

It's Covid days and I am sure all of us who play Pen and Paper RPG's (watup, nerds) have found the experience incredibly lacking.
The way we communicate via Discord etc, has to be incredibly different from IRL conversations. Its frustrating when the core element of RPG's is the conversations, the chat, the small talk, the adlib and the silly jokes.
The way we talk IRL is so different because we can discern the different sources, we can listen more or less to different people, we can interrupt and add things. Conversations via Discord is more like listening to a speech, and then replying. IRL gaming and the conversations that crop up are more like actual human chatting - taking a joke, building on it, having it taken from you etc etc. (the way me and my friend talk is so natural, we know each other well enough to be able to discern the relevant from the irrelevant - the bits we can tag on to, and the bits we need to leave alone)

What I was thinking was to see HOW we talk in gaming, and how that could be mimicked SOMEWHAT in Discord etc.

My idea was to create a set of icons/low quality videos arranged around a table placement, that you can then focus on. Like a mouse controlled object that indicates what part of the table you focus on and how much. Just like a human would by turning her head this way or that to focus on one person talking in a group, or leaning in towards that source to indicate how much she listens to that unique source. By having a physical placement you can focus on an edge of "the table" and then lean in towards one source - and lean out to listen to all.

All other listeners can see your focus, the way you turn towards a source and be able to change their communication to fit.

So imaging having your "icon"/video at the bottom, the table sorted in a half circle shape above and your "focus" in the middle. If you pull it to its "lagrange point" (a snapping midpoint so its easy to find) you are listening to all. By dragging it towards one end you are focusing more on that person and the people around it, as a circle. You can see others focus, by coloured lines focusing more or less on an end or another.

My idea is to abuse the already available 3D audio effects existing and use that to put your focus towards one end or another, muting and muffling audio as your focus move across the table to be able to somewhat mimic the way we as human listen.

The social order of an RPG session, with the DM being the natural focus at times means that that focus can happen naturally either through focus, or simply silence. With it you can find the focus of others as an indicator of whether you are committing a faux pas or not, just like in real life when people pointedly may look directly towards another source.

Inspired by this post on lobste.rs, I thought it'd be fun for us all to post our homepages and talk about them. I'm posting this in ~creative because I think of a homepage as a creative endeavor, but feel free to move this to ~design or ~tech or wherever, mods.

Just post your homepage as a top-level comment, and we'll workshop in replies!

I noticed an odd behavior, and I can't tell if it's an intended feature, or if it's a mistake. I selected some text in a comment. I then scrolled it offscreen as I read more comments. Eventually, I started to reply to a comment further down on the page. When I pressed the "Reply" button, it used the selected text from an entirely different comment as a quote block in the reply.

I think it makes sense to pull selected text into a reply, if the selected text is part of the comment you're replying to. I was surprised to see it happen when replying to a different comment. Is this intentional or a bug?

Sometimes I get into a back-and-forth... heated interaction with someone, and it goes on for a while, and then they stop responding. Afterwords, I might wonder if it was worthwhile. Maybe they got tired of arguing with me, or maybe they just thought the conversation reached its natural endpoint? Rarely, the conversation might end with us explicitly agreeing it was a good discussion, but that's kind of formal and not the usual case online.

Just stopping is my habit as well. If I don't want to talk anymore, I upvote the last comment (if I thought it was good) but don't reply.

In the case of repeated interactions like this with the same person, sometimes I wonder if I'm annoying them by replying to their comments too much, particularly if we disagree often. I've never been explicitly told to go away, but people are often reluctant to say things like that, for good reason since you never know how people will react.

It seems to me that upvotes don't tell me this. Upvotes tell you whether your comments make sense to the crowd. They don't tell you whether the person you're talking to liked your reply. Which seems like it would be good to know. It would be valuable feedback if the goal is to be a better conversationalist. That seems like a good goal to aim for?

I guess we could get in the habit of saying "good point" and all that, and sometimes things can be inferred from what people say if you're good at taking hints, but not all of us are. But we are all trained to upvote things we like already, and it seems like it would be nice to take advantage of that.

To the extent that people like to gather internet points, I wonder what sort of conversation would be encouraged if you got them by writing a good reply from the perspective of the person being replied to? But I guess it could be gamed pretty easily if two people cooperate, so we probably shouldn't keep a total.

Also, think about how this looks from the outside: if you are reading a conversation by two other people in a heated back-and-forth, how do you know whether they're having a good time or not? Maybe it seems obvious, but in some cases a heated discussion might look worse to outsiders than participants. If you could see that they liked each other's comments then it would seem friendlier.

Note that Facebook does tell you who upvoted a comment, but since it tells you everyone who upvoted it, it's even more information, maybe too much.

(This is a followup to @NaraVara's previous topic, focusing on a particular aspect of it.)

I've been re-watching Avatar: Legend of Korra, and I've always thought Bumi's crazy stories would be super interesting to go into more depth on how they actually happened (if his descriptions were indeed true to life).

Then I thought it would be fun to have a sort of creative thinking exercise where the set up is provided and you have to come up with the details of how the characters got to it. Can you make it work?

Top level submissions will be the end state. You should reply to those top level submissions with how the subjects / characters got to that point while using the information provided in the set up.

Example:

"Yo Johnny, you remember that time we talked our way out of getting arrested using my pet rabbit and a dead cell phone?"

Reply:

"Yea dude, that was wild. I was shitting bricks when he walked up to my window with all that weed we had in the trunk. If Fluffy Jorge hadn't been in the back and your allergy pills hadn't wore off that you wouldn't have been all glassy eyed and looking like you were crying. I don't think he would have bought my fake ass story about your family being in a tragic car accident earlier that day."

I'll provide a couple to get y'all started with, but if you have any good one's feel free to submit those as top level entries!

I don't know about you, but I love reading about other people's dreams and occasionally sharing my own.

Let this be a place to share your dreams, whether they're super mundane or absolutely wild. Reply any time you feel like sharing to your last comment, so we have a thread where each top level comment is a different individual.

Based on replies to this comment there seems to be a decent amount of interest around the topic of reworking voting, so I thought I would start a thread to get some more input. We already had similar discussions about a year ago but it looks like some people's opinions may have shifted somewhat? and as was noted in the comment thread, 1 week wasn't really enough to accurately assess the value of something like making vote counts invisible.

Things to consider:

• Do you think how voting works changes your/other's behavior on this site? and if it does, is this change positive or negative?
• Would you support reworking/modifying voting? If so, how?
• How long should we test said modifications if they are made?
• anything else you consider relevant

The CSS selectors that determine whether or not to apply the display: none rule to comment text sections use the pseudo-class rule :not(:target). While this is great for keeping a comment in a non-collapsed state, it's a bit too effective as it prevents user-initiated collapsing of the comment. This can be problematic when you visit a direct link to a comment with an extensive reply tree beneath it and want to collapse it so that you can view the surrounding reply trees. As it stands, you can't do this without needing to either a) collapse the parent (prevents viewing sibling comments), b) collapse the children (requires collapsing potentially multiple child comments), or c) remove the fragment portion of the URL (requires reloading the page and possibly losing your place on the page).

Reproducing should be as simple as clicking Link in a comment's header, then trying to collapse the comment after being redirected.

I listen to quite a few, from ones related to my industry to ones related to my hobbies, to some just related to history or storytelling. Most of my choices have been at the recommendation of others, so I'm looking to add some to this week's lineup.

Queued up for my upcoming week:

• Citations Needed
• Darknet Diaries
• Reply All
• Rev Left Radio

If you don't know of a good recommendation, what podcasts do you have queued up for this week?

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

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?

(I'm tagging as ask.advice and ask.discussion because while my motivation to make this comes from my comments I'm not the only one who this could apply to and deleting coments is very much a general topic.)

So basically, I wrote this comment, noone agrees with it and the contrary takes all are upvoted, so should I delete it? If noone agreed with what I had to say and upvoted contrary answers, then what I said wasn't valuable to anyone, and so I should delete it, right?

This also applies to quite a few comments I have written that have 0 votes like this, this this and this.

In the other hand, measuring a comment's value by how many people voted on it isn't that great and leaving clarifications and tecnical/minor details and if someone replied, even if only to point out your comment as wrong or not so unlikely, so other than the third comment, you can argue they aren't entirely bad. (And leaving someone's answer without a question is pretty bad if someone comes later since they wouldn't know why that answer was there.) So where does one draw the line?

Hello everyone!

Some of you may remember last years census. I did say I wanted to repeat it, and have decided to push the date forward, as last year a few people said that doing it in December at the end of the year probably wasn't the smartest choice, due to well, christmas and new year's eve and I totally agree. Wish I would've seen that earlier, but I guess I'm dumb lol. Summer may give us better stats because more people are on vacation any maybe check in more regularily. Or maybe there's also less people around because everyone's on vacation. Who fucking knows, I don't know. I don't know anything.

Anyway, just like last time, I'd like to organize a preliminary discussion about the census and what questions we should ask this community. As a reminder, this was the 2019 census.

Areas that I'd like to improve: Politics, mainly. The 8values test I think is good, but maybe there's something better out there. We could do it with the political compass and go full quadrant and r/politicalcompassmemes, but of course that's also not going to be very accurate. I honestly don't even know if there's a good solution to this problem.

Other than that, are there other questions you'd like to ask the community? Let's discuss!^{I hope someone replies or this is gonna be emberassing.}

Hi,
I think I have mentioned it here a few times, but I (used to) spend A LOT of time on my phone. I’ve tried to reduce it in the past with more or less success, and recently without any university work (I finished all exams half a year ago) and varying amounts of work as a freelancer, it crept up to 6+ hours of screen time per day. (this is excluding watching stuff to fall asleep, which I want to reduce but I am taking one step at a time) - So it’s a lot.

I tried a lot of stuff, reducing the hours, by setting limits for apps, turning off notifications, but that just leads to me extending the time by entering the password myself, or checking my phone more often because I am curious about whether someone texted.
So last week Wednesday some stuff changed. I took my first long bike ride in a long time, and that day I felt really good, I still had 5 h screen on time that day though. The next day I turned off notifications for Whatsapp, but I left the indicator next to the app on, so I could see that I have messages quickly, I also decided to just force myself to wait a bit until replying to people. Also my girlfriend is the only one that knows my screentime passcode now, so I can't sneakily extend my app time

That Thursday my screentime was 3h 16 minutes. I was hooked, I wanted to keep my time as low as possible. Since that Thursday, I have not hit the 4h screen on time once. Yesterday I was at 3h 59 min... it was an exhausting day though (Spending 1.5h at the waiting room at the doc) and I wouldn’t have blamed myself, but I still didn’t want to hit the 4h mark. Last Thursday my daily rhythm has changed quite a bit. I got Ring Fit Adventure this week, and I have done sports 4 times this week, I started to pick up playing guitar (literally got one yesterday) and ukulele again, and I just try to find stuff to do that does not involve my phone. I also played Persona 5 Royal on my ps5, I know it’s screen time but I feel less bad about it because I don’t take my PS everywhere with me, and these were the first days I have taken off in a long time… Next, I am trying to maybe work through my books that are on my backlog, finally finishing some more again. (my girlfriend gave me the book "South Sea Vagabonde, and I am meaning to read it, and I am also listening to the Audiobook "The Shallows")
One change just caused so many good changes. I am stoked and looking forward to how low I can bring my average, I know 4h per day is still a lot for most people. I am aiming at sub 3h next ( I had that once this week).

This scene from Bojack has been my mantra since then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2_Mn-qRKjA

It really does get easier, too. Today I went biking and I managed to go much longer without breaks and I feel way less exhausted.

I just wanted to share my experience somewhere, maybe someone else is on the same path and this helps.

364 days specifically, and it's 11 PM again, so admittedly it's kinda late to ask this question.

Usually I would pull-up the concerns over no user growth meaning more groups is just more division for less content but this Deimos reply implies otherwise?

Meant primarily for long threads (35+ comments)

Mainly because sometimes we just want to get to the reply box after reading through a long comment section and checking several times over now that highlighting new comments is a default feature and the fastest way to do that is closing a bunch of threads or tapping the screen a few times/scrolling.

Admittedly it's kinda silly but being able to collapse all the threads and get straight to the reply box seems like a pretty good QoL feature.

I have a UX pain point: From the notifications / new comments (replies) page, if I mark all notifications as read, all the nice, handy links to the threads go poof on the page refresh. So now, I have to manually hunt down all/any of them to return to the OPs and revisit the broader discussions.

Can we make the "mark all read" link do its job without clearing the page? I realize this will probably make things more complicated (a notif that is already seen/read is being displayed on the "unread notifs" page, so how will that work, UI- and UX-wise), but... this is just a pain point that I hit again and again. I thought I could tolerate it (which is why I haven't said anything till now), but it's an issue for me nearly every single time.

Some replies are directly going to previously read section. It happened couple of times now, I didn't get notification for these two replies, I thought may be I had my browser running in the background. But it happened again for these, replies. I did get notifications for the replies posted in between the mentioned replies.

I browse tildes mostly on mobile using Hermit. One can get notifications on your mobile from hermit lite apps by adding a url and a css selector, I used tildes.net/notifications/unread as the url and [div.logged-in-user-info:nth-child(4)] as the css selector. I did get notification (on my mobile) for couple of times but most of the time I didn't so I deleted the web monitor. It should be noted that I didn't know what I was doing. So how do I fix this? :(

This submission showed up on /r/listentothis a couple of weeks ago. I'm reposting it here because it is the finest and most on-point collection of music I have ever encountered. The original post from /u/theamazingsounds is included below.

Hello again fellow music enthusiasts!

1 year ago, I made a post about my ongoing project to create a collection with as many genres as possible, aiming to give listeners a convenient way to discover new music. It got many interested and since then more than 50 genres have been added, as well as descriptions for every genre.

I'm making this post to thank those following already, and am once again open for suggestions and ideas. I also made a subreddit called r/TheAmazingSounds where you can post about music that you want to share with others. It is currently empty but I will try to keep it active and reply often.

You can find everything on Spotify. It is synced with other services but doesn't convert all songs.

Spotify | Deezer | Soundcloud | YouTube

Hello,

So I've been officially diagnosed with depression a few years ago. I am on medication for it and I've done therapy in the past. I am a more functional person than I was, let's say, one year ago as I've adjusted my medication.

However there is something that is SEVERELY affecting my quality of life and that is the generalized lack of interest or extreme difficulty in doing almost anything. Yes I've talked with my doctor about this. It's "normal" and we are working on it.

I don't know many people and COVID-19 took a hit on my already limited social life. So I guess I want to share my experience and hear from others who experience(ed) the same difficulties. When you are trapped in not wanting to do anything, what the hell do you do?

Recently I've started reading a physical book again. I think it is a good thing for me to have something to do that does not involve a screen. Plus it makes me sleepy if I am a bit tired which, for me personally, is great. Aside from this next experiment, the activities I do the most are playing one or two video games, study for my degree and work part-time.

Another thing I've started doing is doing the bare minimum in terms of physical exercise. I am working on doing pull-ups (I went from doing 0 to 1,5 =) ) and doing some squats. School and work rob me of a lot of energy so I tend not to exercise. But now I'm trying to at least do something.

I will try to keep up with this post but I have a tendency to procrastinate on them if I get a lot of replies. Thanks for bearing with me =).

Here's a fresh new thread for book recommendations! The last thread from a year ago got bumped and saw some new top-level activity but few votes or responses on the new requests. I think it's probably not visible in a lot of people's feeds due to its age, and I was planning on rebooting it anyway, so here's a fresh topic we can use for new recommendations that will be visible to all.

Top level comments should fill in the blank with some sort of descriptor identifying a kind of book you would like suggestions for.

Replies can then recommend books to that individual.

Examples of what top level posts might be are below. Get as generic, specific, abstract, or out there as you want!

• Recommend me a book that will make me cry.
• Recommend me a book with a great twist.
• Recommend me a book that deals with loss.
• Recommend me a book about the fall of the Roman Empire.
• Recommend me a book with a main character in her 80s.
• Recommend me a book to help me learn PHP.

Thread reading tip: use the "collapse replies" button to see only top-level requests.

This is a follow up to the thread from a few days ago, and specifically my comment in that thread regarding the use of a "Escalation" label.

As many users identified in that topic, political discussion on Tildes has the potential to become very heated, very quickly, and often the standards of discussion on these topics is below what we expect elsewhere on Tildes. In that thread, many suggestions were offered in order to remedy the situation, including banning overt political content entirely, more liberal moderation by @Deimos, more liberal usage by the community of labels, addition of new labels, and more. All of these solutions have their advantages and disadvantages, but I want to talk about the one I believe would be the most effective and least disruptive to the site as is: addition of new labels.

Right now, there are two main tags that might be used on a comment that is seen as falling short of Tildes's standards: noise and malice. Users seem to have some variation in how they interpret how each tag should be used, but it seems like there is at least some agreement on the 'noise' tag being used for comments that are clearly low effort. Users seem to have more hesitation to use the 'Malice' tag, however. While it is sometimes clear when a comment is hostile or malicious, this is not always the case. Argumentative is not always hostile, and sometimes topics are naturally contentious. One takeaway from that thread (for me) is that labeling something as malice confers a judgement on intent, and users are not always comfortable doing this as it can be difficult to tell if someone truly meant to be malicious. But in political threads, the intent matters less than the effect a comment has in a discussion. Someone can not be acting maliciously, but still be clearly making the situation worse. This is the point of an 'Escalation' label.

An "Escalation" label should be applied to comments that have made the situation worse.

Furthermore, an "Escalation" label would not only affect the sorting of a comment or thread, but has the potential to halt the discussion if there is too much escalation in a short amount of time. Here is what I envision:

Define the heat of a comment (as in, "ohhh this conversation is getting heated") as follows:

H = k*n ∑ N_i / d_i

where k is a tuning constant, n is the number of escalation tags given to the comment in question, and the sum ranges over the comment's direct ancestors and descendants in the thread with N_i being the number of "Escalation" labels given to the other comment and d_i is the distance from the current comment to that other comment. Here is an example thread:

.
├── A
├── C0
│   └── C1 (N=1)
│      └── C2 (N=0)
│          └── C3 (N=2)
│               └── C4 (N=1)
└── B0
    └── B1

The heat of comment C3 would then be

H = k*2 (1/2 + 1) = 3k

Finally, define the heat H(T) of a thread T to be the sum of the heats of its comments. My proposal is that if the heat of a given thread surpasses some threshold value H_c, replies are locked in that thread only. This essentially shuts down extremely heated conversations before they get out of control and cause an entire topic to be locked.

The above definition can obviously be modified, but it has a few good properties that I think should be retained.

1. It takes into account the relative positions of comments. A thread that is 20 comments long that has a comment with 1 "Escalation" at the beginning, midpoint, and end is probably a better and more controlled situation than a thread with 3 "Escalation" labels in a row.
2. One extremely heated comment (n is large) that generates many okay or slightly heated replies (n~1) is oftentimes just as bad as many comments that each escalate a bit (a long chain of comments, each with n~1).
3. It considers a the whole thread as opposed to on a comment by comment basis. If there is only one person in a thread posting heated comments, even if the replies are measured and reasonable, there is a good chance that thread is not producing a worthwhile discussion. If that one problem user stays problematic too long, eventually the heat of the thread will surpass the threshold and the chain will be locked.

I am sure there are disadvantages that I am not thinking of right now, but I truly think a system like this could be beneficial if implemented and used by Tildes. Furthermore, if two people are genuinely interested in the discussion and want it to continue, it is in their interest to avoid posting comments that get generate a high heat score so that the thread doesn't become locked. If they are not interested and keep escalating anyway, that conversation probably shouldn't continue.

I am interested in your thoughts on this idea. However, I don't intend for this topic to become a repeat of many of the suggestions and comments in the thread linked at the beginning - I don't mean to reignite that discussion.

Recently, this post was brought back to the front page with some fresh replies and it got me wondering how those of you with large (digital) music libraries organize them?

I'm not very tech savvy so I primarily just have my modestly sized library saved in folders by artist, but that leads to some folders only having one song in them which can be annoying to navigate when I need to. I have been thinking about just having all my songs dumped into one folder, since I'm able to filter them by artist/album in Foobar anyway.

I like to talk, I used to talk quite a bit more, but I still talk... a lot. I was always told I was a smart kid when I was young, and I always felt I had a lot to contribute. I honestly don't feel like I'm that smart anymore, even though I still feel that I have much to contribute. I'm not autistic or special needs, I don't feel I have any reason to ramble so much. I'm often told I'm not rambling, people insist they like to listen, I don't believe them.

While in real life I've learned to pipe down, the internet is a different beast. The internet allows me to check myself more easily before I speak; I can fact check. There's a larger filter in that the submit button is a physical barrier, vs my cognitive ability to filter myself. There is feedback from internet communities that you don't normally get in social settings, I guess the submit button isn't as much as a barrier for some people. Due to these reasons, I can take my time to form a position and a statement. This leads to the entire thought process landing in the reply box. I don't mean to come off as /r/iamverysmart material, it's just how my brain works.

My worry is that my verbosity turns people off to my conversations and ideas, to me as a person. How many people have gotten to a thread or a forum post and seen a wall of text and just backed out? TL;DR is a thing for a reason I guess. How many times have you seen somebody ramble on about something, unable to notice that the other person in their conversation (who is now more of a prisoner than a participant) has just tuned out?

I don't know, just a rant I guess, I've got some stuff I'm procrastinating from.

EDIT: s/attribute/contribute/

I often come across a topic that I find somewhat interesting, but end up being much more interested in a discussion happening within that topic. I think it would be useful to be able to "watch" a comment/thread to be notified if someone replies to a comment. Thoughts?

1. My Friend, the Moon

When Tom was younger, he went to buy fresh bread every evening with his mother, Alice. They always walked and the bakery was far from home, so it was not uncommon for the Moon to come out along the way. "Hello, Mister Moon! Do you wanna come with us?", he liked to say. When they arrived at the bakery, he looked to his mother, excited, and said "Look ma! The Moon came with us!", and did the same when they got home.

2. Fiction

"Did you know that The Hulk was a detective once?", says Alice. Tom is 4. He puts his hand in the forehead in a gesture of superb irritation. "No, mom, this is make-believe!".

3. Cookie Conundrum

According to Tom, a mysterious group of sinister chipmunks was eating the cookies in the jar. When Alice asked for proof, Tom replied that a secret group of chipmunks got rid of all the evidence.

4. Ice Cream Dilemma

"So, mom, you have two options" — said Tom, seriously. "There are only two ice-cream flavors: chocolate and vanilla. Any choice is fine by me".

5. Tom and the Rats

Tom's house used to be infested with large disgusting rats. One day, he shouted: "Rats are the worse! No wonder we call them rats!

6. Dream Logic

Tom dreamed that his forehead could fly without him, leaving a hole in his head. When he woke up in the morning, there was a deer on the porch eating a hot-dog.

This may seem like I'm rambling but, please bare with me, I think I have some point(s) to make.

• I've been trying to locate a common ancestor image to the album cover of Gnarls Barkley's single Crazy and the banner of an interesting talk titled Imagination and it's resistance to chance. I think the resemblance is sufficient to suggest one an ancestor exists and it's not just a crazy coincidence. Can anyone help identify it?

• The same academic conference linked above hosts a fascinating introduction to Intensionality, Invariance, and Univalence. It captures some of the most exciting mathematics going on at the moment. Presumably I should be posting this in ~science tagged as mathematics. Is there some limit at which particular tags become popular enough to warrant their own subtilde? Are there queries users can run to determine tag counts? These questions were prompted by the slight irritating thought of classifying mathematics under science.

• People could respond to many different parts of this thread since I've written so much. However, the points are slightly related, at least in how I present them. If I were to split them up into separate posts, not only would it add to the noise, each point would lose whatever relation they had. So, I wonder if, much like r/IAMA, could there be a better format for conversations where many users are speaking to a particular individual? An expert or celebrity perhaps. Trying to track all the replies of the main user was always a hassle in those IAMA threads.

If there's interest in such an extension to tildes, I'd like to offer my help in implementing it. That's my main point really and why I posted here.

Update 12/03/2020: this is not a telemetry, but a kill switch from Colombian carrier - confirmed by HMD. Kill switch will be removed from most devices soon. I updated an article and posted it here.

Original article below:

I have recently purchased Nokia 6.2 and wanted to check if it sends any data somewhere, considering what happened with previous models

First, I noticed approx. daily connection to dapi.hmdglobal.net
This is a Google Cloud that could belong to a company behind Nokia - HMD Global.
But the Privacy policy in my phone only speaks of "activation" process, not of daily diagnostics data.
So I used developer tools to remove the following packages (warning: this may break your device, I am not responsible for any consequences)

    com.hmdglobal.enterprise.api
    com.qualcomm.qti.qms.service.telemetry
    com.qualcomm.qti.qmmi
    com.qualcomm.qti.qdma

Before removing them, I used APK Extractor to save APK files just in case it breaks my phone and I may be able to attempt reinstall. This part comes into play later.
The first was my blind guess about what exactly connects to dapi.hmdglobal.net
The next 3 I found mentioned in various forums for other devices as "safe to remove", however, I have not seen any telemetry sent to Qualcomm or anywhere else, except what I mention next.

After removing these packages, I noticed that there are some remaining unknown connections my device attempts several times per day.
They are all done in same order, one right after the other:

    www.pppefa.com
    www.ppmxfa.com
    www.forcis.claro.com.co

After some investigation, I found that the first two domains point to some Microsoft Cloud servers rented in US.
The last one most probably belongs to Colombian telecom company, and this is where it becomes interesting.
After many hours of fruitless removing of different apps in my attempt so stop it, I suddenly remembered something.
When I used APK Extractor previously, there was an empty first line with some generic icon where an app icon should have been.
I went there again and indeed, this is a hidden system app, that you can not see in the list of all apps in Settings, normally. But it turns out, you can see it in Data usage (after it successfully sends some data using your mobile connection).
The name of the app is deliberately left empty to hide it, but if you click it in Data usage, you can see that this app is co.sitic.pp , which can receive SMS, can make calls, and has access to internet.
As with all Android apps, you can reverse read the name to guess what it is.
Turns out, http://sitic.com.co is a Colombian company, who "are leaders in innovation and create mobile and WEB applications for new products and services." (credit goes to Google Translate)

screenshot of the app with permissions

In other words, this app is a 3rd party telemetry, hidden from user, not mentioned in the Privacy policy, that has access to SMS.
This looks very bad and I really hope this is a malware injected by factory and not something knowingly distributed by Nokia, HMD Global, the EU company.

After removing the co.sitic.pp app, requests to Microsoft Cloud and Columbia stopped.
I was later pointed to a German forum, where (I believe) it was first found in a Nokia 7.2 device.
So, we have it confirmed in 2 devices in 2 different countries.

On German forum they contacted Nokia (I assume support) but got tired exchanging emails for weeks without any result.
On 02/03/2020 I have requested an official reply from Nokia and HMD Global via press.services@nokia.com and press@hmdglobal.com and waiting for reply.
Since I am not a journalist, I may never get one.

TLDR: 3rd party telemetry is found in Nokia 6.2 and 7.2 devices, is hidden from user, has access to SMS, and sends data to Microsoft Cloud in US and a server in Columbia.
It is probably supplied by SITIC S.A.S., a Colombian company, and looks more like a malware than a telemetry.

I'll start with @TheFanficGuy's reply to a comment of mine where he said you can bring down an authoritarian regime without a coup'd etat/successful civil war, although I admittedly can't really imagine any dictator just giving up power like that unless it hurts their economic allies. (And the Arab spring shows this above all else.)

I also wouldn't be surprised if many of these regimes only make a minimal amount of effort to keep their population shut.

Do we have any mathematicians in the house? I've been wondering for a while why math is usually focused around real numbers instead of computable numbers - that is the set of numbers that you can actually be computed to arbitrary, finite precision in finite time. Note that they necessarily include pi, e, sqrt(2) and every number you could ever compute. If you've seen it, it's computable.

What do we lose, beyond cantor's argument, by restricting math to computable numbers? By corollary of binary files and therefore algorithms being countable, the computable numbers are countable too, different from reals.

Bonus points if you can name a real, non-computable number. (My partner replied with "a number gained by randomly sampling decimal places ad infinitum" - a reply as cheeky as the question.) Also bonus points for naming further niceness properties we would get by restricting to computables.

I've read the wikipedia article on computable numbers and a bit beyond.

So I don't know about all of you, but I'm pretty sick of terrible healthcare in the USA.

So I'm starting this thread for all of us to rant about our personal issues with healthcare. I'll be writing my rant into it's own reply later (it's a bit of a long one), but I wanted to start the thread now to give others a chance to start venting.

Rules of Rant Thread:

1. Don't argue a rant
2. Thread is likely going to be incredibly USA-centric. USA healthcare is assumed unless stated otherwise.
3. Rants should involve people no more than 2 degrees of separation from yourself. This thread is to vent about your personal experiences, not hearsay from total strangers.

In order to foster further discussion, and include those without a rant: Here are some things I personally would appreciate and expect for replies, but others might not.

• Explanation of how things would work out for you if you were in a similar situation
• Advice for dealing with any ongoing or future problems

Special thanks to Max Woolf and Project Gutenburg for resources, and the Brothers Grimm for such inspiring material.

The Fae in a Bottle

By Reverend William Howland

"Dear brother, thou seest the water
crystallizing, go and show it to the merchant. I will make him a
little bottle of water of the same kind; put it in a corner, and
not open it too quickly, until the reflection shall let him see it."

The merchant, who was standing behind the glass, said, "If that is
the case, I do not see why the name of the fountain should be
changed." "Why not?" asked the merchant. "Because my name is
Dummling." "Dummling, what is that?" "Is a rare and wonderful
name; I do not know how it is to have it." "If you do not see why
the name of the fountain should be changed," said the merchant, "I
will pay you three thalers." "There! now I see what is in my head;
I will pay you thaler, but you must wait until I come back."

Then he disappeared behind the glass. The poor man was forced to go back
on his begging; he had no more money but the three thalers which the
merchant had given him. He had long ago left the village, and wandered far
off, and when he came back, his brother had forgotten him, and thought,
"Why should I travel farther? I have not seen my brother." Then he came to
the town where his brother was again living. "Dear brother," said the
brother, "how are you? How are you getting on?" "Oh," said the brother,
"not well."

"Then just come and eat thy bread."

"That would be very good," said the brother, and went away.

He walked a long time, and came to a great forest. Then he said to his brother,
"Go and bring me with you to-morrow morning." "Nay," said the brother, "I
can't go. I have heard so many lies and stolen things from my brother,
and they have not served me very well, I see very well that they will
do me no harm." Then he went to the gallows, and told them that there
was a poor shivering, peering there from the window. "If you let me in,"
said the brother, "I will do you a favour. In grey hairs you can see
a piece of a horse's heart." So he went into the forest, and saw there
how a greyhound which was his neighbour, was dead. Then he was sad,
and made himself known to the brother. "Dear brother," said he,
"how are you getting on? What hast thou been saying there about
a piece of horse's heart?" "Ah," said the brother, "how can I say that
on the gallows, when I have not a drop of blood on me!" Then he gave him
the greyhound's heart, and had it put in his own. The brother felt for a
while in his pocket, and then he said, "I have a small bottle of wine,
and if thou art inclined to drink, thou shalt find the courage
to hold thy tongue." "To what use is the bottle put," said the
brother, "but to some end I should like to have a sip?" "To win the
Rosen Cup," said the brother with great joy. "To me that is enough,"
said the hare. "To thee alone, it is the most valuable thing that
the world possesses," said the brother. "To me, it is my most valuable
thing." "To me, it is my most valuable possession," said the hare. Then
he turned himself around and went to the gallows. "To-day it was
announced that the very gallows were to be, and to-morrow they were
to be," said the brother. "I do not know to which I should place myself,"
he replied, "but, to-morrow it will be to-morrow, and to-morrow
I will go." Then he was led to the gallows, and was once more there
in the place where he had formerly been. He again said to the greyhound,
"I wish you were still standing there." "To-day it was announced that the
very gallows were to be, and to-morrow they were to be." "I do not know to which I
should place myself," said the hare. "To-morrow it will be to-morrow, and
to-morrow I will go." Then he turned himself round and went to the gallows,
and was once more there in the place where he had formerly been.

"To-day it was announced that the very gall

(E/N: The story stops here abruptly, as the author ran out available memory. I wouldn't like to enforce my interpretation of the story upon it, so I'm leaving it as written.)

One thing we take for granted in social media is that any comment may receive a reply from anyone. Maybe we should rethink that? What would happen if it were optional?
For example, for someone posting in "What's a widely criticized thing that you feel is worth defending?" topic, I am not sure that everyone posting there really wanted to start a discussion.
Having replies shut off might be frustrating sometimes as a reader, particularly when something you disagree with gets a lot of upvotes. But it would make the author's intent clearer. If you're inviting further conversation, leave replies on. If you're not, turn it off.
Everyone has the right to walk away from conversation. This would make it explicit. Maybe it would make heated threads less likely, since they'd stop sooner? It seems like it's more difficult to walk away when you're also letting the other side get the last word?

Per @mrbig:

What is a logline?: a brief summary (25 to 40 words) of a story for film, television or book that states the central conflict and an emotional "hook", with the purpose of stimulating interest (Wikipedia).

A logline is evaluated not exactly for what a story is (since it does not contain a complete story), but for what it can be. Suggestions usually seek to maximize the dramatic potential of the idea.

Create a Logline, and you can chose to reply to others with your interpretation of how their stories would go.