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    1. Daily Tildes discussion - time to slow down a bit and figure some things out

      It's now been almost exactly a week since Tildes got its first "real" attention on Hacker News, and it's been a great week. We're going to have over 1000 users registered today, which is awesome...

      It's now been almost exactly a week since Tildes got its first "real" attention on Hacker News, and it's been a great week. We're going to have over 1000 users registered today, which is awesome and incredibly encouraging for me to see so much excitement this quickly. I'm also extremely glad that I decided to start out invite-only, because with the attention Tildes has been getting in various threads on reddit already, I think we could have easily had 20,000 or more users right now, and that would have been far too fast to grow.

      On that note, I think it's good to try to slow down for at least a few days at around this size while we get some things sorted out and improved. So at least for now, please don't go out of your way to post about Tildes in any major reddit threads or anything (I'm looking at you, @Vibe, you're too good at finding places to mention it). You don't have to hide it and are still welcome to mention it to friends and such (and send me a message if you need some invite codes), but it would be nice to try to avoid major public attention for a few days so we can catch our breath.

      As for what we should figure out while we're trying to pause the growth a bit, here are a few things from my perspective, but please let me know if you have any other suggestions:

      • Comment tags - I think I may just disable these entirely for now. They don't really do anything useful for the moment anyway, and I think the system for them needs some work so they're more likely to work as intended.
      • More groups - we could probably use a few more groups. A food/drink one has been suggested a few times and I think that's a good idea, any suggestions for the name? Other than that, any other ones you think we need urgently?
      • Various minor convenience improvements - there are a lot of little things that need tweaking, that weren't as obviously needed when the site was less active. For example, easier ways to find new comments in large threads, since we're already getting ones with hundreds of comments. I'd like to get some of that kind of stuff in place before it gets even worse as the activity keeps increasing, so please let me know also any specific ones that you think are urgent. Once the code is open-source I expect user contributions to help a lot with this kind of stuff.

      Thanks again for being here, it's pretty amazing to already be worrying about growing too quickly.

      83 votes
    2. As per the username: Anyone want to talk about D&D? If you play - what's going on in your game?

      I notice quite a few people on here play RPGs, whether it's D&D or another system. I have an hour to spare until my game starts, so I thought we could chat a bit about the hobby. GMs, players -...

      I notice quite a few people on here play RPGs, whether it's D&D or another system. I have an hour to spare until my game starts, so I thought we could chat a bit about the hobby.

      GMs, players - what's going on in your game right now?

      If you're just browsing ~games and have never played - ask questions!

      -LTADnD

      52 votes
    3. Confusion with when I've voted

      My biggest problem with this format thus far has been with the placement of the "Vote" button. I currently use the Solarized Dark theme (I enjoy the color scheme) and I find I keep unvoting things...

      My biggest problem with this format thus far has been with the placement of the "Vote" button. I currently use the Solarized Dark theme (I enjoy the color scheme) and I find I keep unvoting things I've already voted up when checking through older posts. My eyes are left reading the headline, I forget I may have voted for it, and I go to unclick my vote.

      I feel the vote button would be better if it was situated closer to where my eyes are for reading headlines. I spend a lot of time micromanaging ui placement in my mmos, so maybe I'm just pickier than others, but I don't like my eyes needing to jump all over the monitor when browsing through things.

      Moving these elements closer together would be really helpful. I also wouldn't mind the Solarized Dark themes "Vote" and "Voted" colour having a little more contrast

      14 votes
    4. 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
    5. 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
    6. 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
    7. 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
    8. Are we going to be able to make our own groups?

      This was one of the biggest appeals of reddit. There was a subreddit for everything and you could use your subs for way more than just a group of like-minded individuals. But yeah. We should be...

      This was one of the biggest appeals of reddit. There was a subreddit for everything and you could use your subs for way more than just a group of like-minded individuals.

      But yeah. We should be able to make our own groups.

      9 votes
    9. 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
    10. 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
    11. Can a solution to massive carbon emissions include nuclear energy?

      One of my frustrations with political threads generally is that they are often too broad to be meaningful in terms of policy discussion. So I thought I'd narrow the topic of discussion. I am quite...

      One of my frustrations with political threads generally is that they are often too broad to be meaningful in terms of policy discussion. So I thought I'd narrow the topic of discussion. I am quite interested in political discussion and this seems a fine enough place to have it as any.

      So let's talk: Nuclear energy policy!

      With the Paris accord attempting to have countries pledged to reduce their carbon footprint to keep the globe from warming past 2 degrees above industrial era temperatures, it seems like a lot of countries have a whole lot of work to do in a rather short period of time. Maybe the US decides to commit to some informal reduction in carbon emissions eventually. Maybe it doesn't. Here we're talking about shoulds.

      So for non-US people: how should a given country go about meeting their commitment to the Paris Accord?

      For the US peeps: 1.) should the US bother trying to reduce carbon emissions and 2.) how should it go about doing it?

      For everyone: What place does nuclear energy have in an energy portfolio that reduces carbon emissions?

      24 votes
    12. Suggestion: "Mark as Read" should not fade out the box

      Instead of fading the replies after clicking on "Mark as Read", it should just remove it immediately. It's really, really time consuming to have to mark 40 something replies as read. I know this...

      Instead of fading the replies after clicking on "Mark as Read", it should just remove it immediately. It's really, really time consuming to have to mark 40 something replies as read. I know this can be solved with a "mark all as read" button, but I do actually want to go through and read all of them.

      10 votes
    13. 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
    14. 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
    15. 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
    16. 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
    17. 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
    18. Basic comment anchor links added

      This is more of a stop-gap than a real solution, but it's now at least possible to link to a specific comment. On each comment, on the right side of the header "stripe", there's a # that links to...

      This is more of a stop-gap than a real solution, but it's now at least possible to link to a specific comment. On each comment, on the right side of the header "stripe", there's a # that links to that comment. It just uses an HTML anchor, so you're still linking to the full comments page, but it should scroll to the correct comment at least. You can also click the # on a comment from your notifications page or a user's page to go directly to that comment.

      In the future we'll probably want to have a better view that highlights the linked comment more, and allows displaying context (the parent comments), but for now this should help a bit.

      28 votes
    19. Albion Online

      Any fellow Tildes playing this? I picked it up yesterday with the steam release and it interests me enough to probably keep playing. Although I do think I'm going to need a different guild(nothing...

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

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

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

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

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

      6 votes
    20. 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
    21. 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
    22. 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
    23. 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
    24. 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
    25. 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
    26. 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
    27. Allow users to submit text (markdown) along with a link for new posts

      Currently you can only do one or the other, but I feel that this results in low efforts posts where a user simply post a link and walks away. If we can post text along with a link to, say, a news...

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

      3 votes
    28. Suggestion: Ability to tag one's own comments

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

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

      9 votes
    29. 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
    30. 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
    31. CSRF error on registration page

      Hi, I got a CSRF error on the registration page, probably a timeout because I read the terms and privacy policy before going on with the registration. :) That's a bad first impression for users...

      Hi,

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

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

      Chris

      7 votes
    32. Suggestion: tag limiting

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

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

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

      7 votes
    33. Let us post a link *and* text

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

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

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

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

      11 votes
    34. 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
    35. 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
    36. 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
    37. Testing how posting a story would look - Time and Retime by me (MajorParadox)

      A bright light illuminated my workshop suddenly, causing me to drop my tools on the table. A figure appeared at the opposite side of the small office, encased within a surreal shadow in the middle...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      My head hurt again.

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

      “How?” I asked no one in particular.

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

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

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

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

      “We know,” said Righty.

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

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

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

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

      “By killing you and taking your place?”

      “Exactly. My place.”

      “Oh,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      “Chris?” Gwen called.

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

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

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

      1 vote
    38. Community thoughts on submitting aggregate stories vs primary sources?

      I am curious to hear everyone's thoughts/ideas on submitting aggregate stories vs finding and submitting the primary sources of news/articles/stories/studies/etc. E.g. Today, Eurogamer published...

      I am curious to hear everyone's thoughts/ideas on submitting aggregate stories vs finding and submitting the primary sources of news/articles/stories/studies/etc.

      E.g. Today, Eurogamer published an article about Fortnite driving headset sales up which is basically just a rearrangement of quotes from the original source, an article in Variety. So even though the Variety article is a few days old now, I decided to just submit that instead.

      But that situation brings up some interesting questions:

      Do we care if the submissions are "hot off the presses", when the newly published aggregate article doesn't add anything substantive to the original, older source material? Should we just post the original source material despite it being dated by the time we stumble upon it, if the subject is interesting enough?

      What about aggregate "breaking" news/politics articles that take the more "dry/clinical" original source reporting and "spice it up" with opinions, add additional context or focus on a more "important/interesting" part of the original source's subject matter?

      What about science reporting, which is often shoddy, inaccurate and/or outright misleading? If there are no good aggregate sources should we post the shoddy one if the subject is interesting, or should we hunt down the original study from a peer reviewed publication and submit that even if it's locked behind a hard paywall?

      Where should we draw the line on these sorts of aggregate articles? How far back to the original source should we go if doing so means potentially locking people out of actually reading it (through paywalls) or even stripping all the useful context out of it (e.g. the first tweet that mentions an event)?

      Should we simply combine all the sources, megathread style, and maybe even let users submit new ones to it as they come out? If we do that, how do we maintain any semblance of usefulness to the comments section, especially at scale and for events that are ongoing? IMO, most of Reddit’s megathreads outlive their usefulness after just a few hours because of that and sorting the comment by new doesn’t really help.

      IMO, if ~ wants to focus on quality submissions and discussions then these questions are ones we need to carefully consider before any policies or systems regarding them are implemented. So I am curious if anyone here (mods especially) have any experience dealing with these issues, how they did and if anyone has any ideas on how ~ can do it better.

      5 votes
    39. Daily Tildes discussion - suggestions for promoting the site?

      As promised, I've done a fair amount of updating of the Docs pages now. There were various small tweaks, but the major changes were the addition of the "Future Mechanics" page to explain a bit...

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

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

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

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

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

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

      20 votes
    40. Poetry Slam - A word/party game from Mayday Games. I'm the designer and we went live on Kickstarter this morning!

      Hey all, I'm a board game designer named Adam Wyse and I just wanted to share my latest project that went live on Kickstarter this morning! A little bit about me; I'm a former software engineer...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      13 votes
    41. Daily Tildes discussion - limits/restrictions on viewing user history?

      Currently, Tildes user pages only show one "page" of the user's history—their most recent 20 topics and/or comments. This wasn't really a deliberate choice, I just haven't added pagination yet...

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

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

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

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

      11 votes
    42. Comment Permalinks

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

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

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

      8 votes
    43. l2t mod guide copy

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

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


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

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

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

      A few quick notes on it:

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

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

      9 votes