I don't want to get too high in the clouds with moderating philosophy. Instead I want to talk about action steps that can be taken in the very near term to improve moderating. Especially so long as Deimos is the only one with most of the moderating tools at their disposal, I think it's crucial to make sure it's as painless as possible.

So far it looks like Deimos has these moderating tools available to him:

1. User bans
2. Comment removal
3. Thread locking/removal
4. Title/tag editing (and this ability is shared by many of us as well)

Am I missing anything?

The three next tools I would hope are coming next are:

• A reporting mechanism, where users can report comments and threads that they think should be removed.
• A feedback mechanism for reports, telling users that a report they gave was acted on.
• A note taking system for the moderator-type person, shareable with all other moderator-type persons at that level, with an expiration date probably around 30 days.

Now I'll talk about why. First, the reporting mechanism. While it's still possible to keep up with everything that gets posted, I don't necessarily think it's the best use of Deimos' time to read literally everything, especially as the site expands its userbase and presumably activity level and depth. The reporting system at first should probably just be a button, maybe eventually with a pop-up field allowing the user a brief description why their reporting, and a queue that gets populated with comments and threads that get reported.

Coinciding with a report queue/option should probably be an easy, rudimentary system for providing feedback to those whose reports led to moderating action. At first, an automated message saying something like "thank you for reporting recently. Action has been taken on one of your recent reports" without any relevant links would do fine, and we can leave the particulars of how much detail to add for later discussions.

The last thing I think should help things considerably in the immediate term is a time-limited user tracking tool for the moderator-type person. As things scale, it isn't always going to be feasible to use mental bandwidth remembering each username and the relevant history associated with their behavior. A good note-taking tool with an auto-timed expiration date on notes would be a good way to address what can easily become a hugely mentally taxing role at almost any scale. This tool should let Deimos take a discrete note for himself (and other moderators at that permission level and higher) connected to a user regarding any questionable threads or comments that were yellow/red flags, or any other moderator action taken against a user within the last X days/months (the particulars don't matter to me as much as that there is an expiration date to these notes). This should let the moderator type person focus on the broader history of the users they're looking at before making a decision, without having to go searching for every relevant comment from the past 30 days. Fewer problematic users at scale should fall through the cracks and more users that might just be having a bad day can be let off with comment removals and/or warnings.

Are these priorities fair? Are there design elements you would want to see in the immediate term that would help reduce the burden of moderating? Are there problems with these tools I'm suggesting that you would want to see addressed?

This post will be discussing the nature of political correctness and its ramifications on our culture, intended to analyze current trends and provide a basis for discussion on a very relevant issue in our society. This is a long post, so buckle up.

DISCLAIMERS

Before I begin, I will begin a series of disclaimers, as I’ll be making a lot of claims in this piece, so sorry for the length. For the sake of this post, I will be assuming the role of a neutral character, with no intended leanings towards any political or cultural ideology. Any reference that I make towards a specific side of the spectrum of politics or to social cultures does not reflect my personal opinion on them nor show a bias/prejudice towards that side. I would also like to note that, while I’m trying to make this a quality read about politically correct culture, this isn’t a lecture, a thesis, a Pulitzer article, or even a simple college essay, and is simply very informal essay. A lot of what I say goes off of either whatever comes off the top of my head or things that I find out from a quick search on Google. Some things may or may not be correct, and if they are, please feel free to call me out for it in the comments.

With that said, let’s get into it: Political correctness. Defined by a Google search as “the avoidance, often considered as taken to extremes, of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.”, has become a powerful influence in the media that people consume as more and more creators, fans, and everything in between try to avoid language or dialect that would offend audiences. Our society progressively has become more and more PC (politically correct) due to an increasing attempt to remove toxic or otherwise harmful material, generally rhetoric like slurs or playing upon stereotypes, from media in an attempt to create a safer, more friendly environment and community, especially for those who often feel targeted by such harsh rhetoric. PC culture is inherently good-willed with an unquestionably noble goal fueling it. However, in the act of making more and more things PC, the media that is affected changes, for better or for worse. In the viewpoint of many, PC culture has become increasingly threatening to the quality of the media they consume, as the element of vulgarity that media possesses sometimes is attributed to their success or favorability. An increase in avoiding content that is in any way threatening to a certain culture has upset many because it dampens the reality of the content, affects its strength, or births new weaknesses. In short, people believe that making things more PC is making them less good.

The big question of this post is why PC culture matters to the opinions of those who digest media affected by it. It is a question with a myriad of answers, as its influence has been taken in many directions. As iterated before, some claim that it strips away the reality of the content and provides a false reality or delusional perspective; some claim that it softens content too much and dampens the quality; and others think that it is simply stupid to try to be so friendly with what content they make or consume. The element of vulgarity that political incorrectness adds to content makes things more interesting than what they actually are, ironically because they highlight or exaggerate the reality of what they offer, and taking that away from people or reducing it takes away that precious component by avoiding any sort of offensive material. Take SNL, for instance; their skits like Black Jeopardy plays upon Black culture/stereotypes and is widely acclaimed for the hilarity of their vulgarity, but were it to face a demand for more PCness, it would lose a lot of the charm it had because of the necessary avoidance of content that would offend Black culture. The problem with this is that offensive material is not always a great sin that must be purged away. Material that PC culture can see as offensive encompasses a great deal of things, from simple slurs to stereotypes of cultures and societies. While it is good, even preferable, that things such as slurs or directly offensive comments are censored or dismissed, other forms of content seen as offensive are necessary to provide an ounce of harsh reality to the content that is provided. A specific example of such a case would be how the news handled the increase of refugee crimes in Germany and Sweden since those countries took in more Syrian immigrants. PC culture would try to dissolve the correlation as one being the product of another, but non-PC content would assume that the increase in refugees led to that increase. While it is very offensive to assume that the large intake of Syrians has led to that increase, being too PC by dancing around the issue and saying that refugees from other countries relatively contribute the same amount to the violence would be feigning ignorance to a clear and very possible causality, ultimately affecting the quality of the news piece. The same could be said for many other things, like TV shows, blog posts, etc.; When concerning or including potentially controversial content, avoiding the elements that make them controversial or ignoring them takes away from the media’s effectiveness. In other words, being too PC and removing the gritty elements of something can remove the punch that it has and make it seem fake, uninteresting, or any other dissatisfying adjective.

That’s not to say that offensive material must be in abundance, however; one must never have too much of something, as it may upset the balance of acceptable and unacceptable content. But certain material like social commentary, often in the form of societal stereotypes or portrayals of a culture, is a necessary element to add truth or interest in whatever is being made, albeit it being handled with an utmost delicacy and respect. Saying that the increase in refugee crimes means that all Syrians are criminals, scum of the earth, and a true representation of how shit the Middle East/Islam is would be greatly offensive and also detract from the quality/esteem that that news piece may have. Having the PC to refer to them less offensively, as well as discussing the issue in a manner that doesn’t clearly perpetuate Syrians as the devil, allows for the controversial content to be taken more seriously, basically adding civility to otherwise provoking content. On a gentler note, Black Jeopardy often plays upon the tropes of black culture on relatable, universal grounds, like home culture or the more meaningful discrimination from white people. It doesn’t say that all black people act without genteel to one another or that all white people are evil/stupid, but plays upon familiar stereotypes and experiences shared by many people of both races and enhances their hilarity with their trademark controlled crudity. While this example reflects how PC culture can mitigate offensiveness, it can also bridge gaps between people by portraying them as equals, not separated the nature of their age, sex, race, sexuality, or disabilities. Diversity within a space, such as a profession, a community, or group, is PC culture at its best, for it highlights inclusiveness and unity that political incorrectness would draw borders with. It allows people of any background to pursue the same career choices or interests without discrimination or other forms of inequality, putting forward the message that despite the differences those people may have, they are still human beings, one alike to another, all part of one human society.

Now that we’ve gone over the merits of both PC and non-PC culture, it’s time to evaluate the consequences that they each have on society. I say consequences because the developments both cultures set precedents for how media controls the amounts of PC put into their content as more and more new media juggles the amounts of friendly content they put in and the vulgar content they take out; and of course, vice versa. Political correctness has shown a powerful trendsetting effect in that once an action is called out for not being PC, it creates a rippling effect where all other forms of media avoid that un-PC element. If you take the Me Too Movement, once sexual harassment claims have been made against one big Hollywood figure, a million more followed in its wake, and now many Hollywood big wigs and US politicians reel in the fear of getting “Me Too’d” and losing their job/getting indicted. While it’s not a real presentation of PC culture at work, the Me Too movement’s rippling effect demonstrates how severe PC culture has influencing society, as now the sexually harassed don’t feel the need to cower behind the fear of denial and claims of insanity that would have been used against them pre-Me Too. And while it’s excellent that sexual harassers are getting what’s coming to them, the crossfire catches many unfortunate victims in the rise of Me Too and its anti-sexual harassment waves. James Gunn is a very relevant example of this, as his history of highly distasteful vulgar Tweets caught up to him and led to his expulsion due to Disney’s attempts to be PC. But Gunn’s expulsion has caused a big issue since he’s not actually a rapist or someone who has harassed his actors, but simply someone who made a couple of extremely stupid jokes, jokes which he had already apologized for 6 years ago. Despite apologizing twice, Gunn is still seen as too much of an un-PC person to work under Disney. This presents the problem of PC culture having too high of a sensitivity for things that they think are absolutely wrong and criminal. Gunn’s actions reflect the rising issue of where any hint of vulgarity in the publicity of an individual can be used against them to tarnish their image, something that has been in prudent effect by the Me Too movement. And while social justice demands that individuals like these who have a history of offenses must be reprimanded, the work that they have created shall suffer in quality after losing an essential component of what made them great. This is not to say that all individuals who have been accused and punished don’t deserve their fate, but merely a claim of consequence.

Sensitivity is the name of the game in today’s culture. People are becoming increasingly sensitive over things that present even a hint of harm towards an individual or group, attacking that thing like vultures in order to dispel the negativity whatever comment or element that object has to enforce a positive atmosphere. This particular trend is something associated with social justice warriors, or SJWs for short, which has become something of an internet slur because of the reputation that they carry of being agents of anti-vulgarity. They have become such an issue to many people because they are being claimed to attack the right to free speech that individuals carry, becoming a nuisance to many who now have to watch what they say with extreme delicacy, lest they become swarmed by attacks by those who denounce them for their profane statements. But their actions aren’t inherently bad, they’re just people trying to create a safer environment for people who frequently find themselves harassed by the world around them. It’s simply that they exaggerate their efforts to such a point that their actions carry a negative connotation with them. They even fight fire with fire, attacking individuals and harassing them to get them to stop their offensive comments through brute force. But when you fight fire with fire, it just spreads, and those who are attacked by SJWs and see them as a threat to their experiences will double their anti-PC nature to combat these SJWs, creating a loop of toxicity as both sides wage a war to maintain their ideal community. This is unfortunately the great conundrum of PC vs anti-PC: Two sides fighting for absolutes that can never be achieved. SJWs and advocates for absolute PC environments will never achieve it because there will always be people who want to speak their mind about people and things that others will find offensive, and anyone can get offended by anything. A truly PC environment would have to restrict all forms of communication, otherwise someone will eventually get offended and upset the “harmony” the absolute PC achieves. On the other side of the spectrum, an environment without any form of PC will find itself quarreling with each other all the time as people will lack the restraint to say offensive things and therefore find themselves at ends with whatever group their speech or actions offend. An environment without PC is an environment without rules, and an absence of rules will result in chaos.

Now the question to this is: Where’s the sweet spot? If too much PC and too little are both bad, is the medium the best? In truth, I don’t really think any balance of PC and anti-PC will ever be truly perfect. There will always be advocates for both sides fighting to increase the influence of whatever they fight for, and the balance will always tip to one side or the other. Fortunately for the human race, we have the ability to exercise a lack of care. The reality of this feud is that there will always be something you don’t like, and nothing you or people like you can do will change that fact. You can call out as many sexual predators, societal offenders, and all other forms of anti-PC individuals all you want, but you won’t stop people from doing it. You can label SJWs as thin-skinned and juvenile all you want, but you’ll only be feeding the fire. The only happy solution to this issue is to simply accept the reality that you can’t create a perfect world for yourself by changing everyone else. You can keep fighting the battles and win as many as you’d like, but you’ll never win the war. If you’re someone who wants the absolutes, you’ll never get it. The only semblance of peace you’ll get is accepting there will always be bad.

PC and anti-PC cultures both possess a merit to them valuable to our society: PC culture imposes civility and friendliness to all people, especially those who are frequently discriminated or treated unfairly, ensuring they feel safe, happy, and equal to their fellows; anti-PC culture, however, advocates for the freedom to say what needs to be said, and while it is vulgar, it is real, and reality must be embraced. People may always fight with each other for each side as they get increasingly sensitive, and sometimes even do something that turns the tides for them, but they will never truly defeat one or the other. The balance between them is always shifting and will never really settle, but the beauty of this war is that it teaches us about people, about their experiences and their beliefs, and help us come to terms with reality. Whether we want to change that reality for the better or champion its present merits, it is, and always will be, up to us.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to discuss, criticize, compliment, etc. in the comments.

Lots of new folks seem to be coming in these past days, so I wanted to make a post that compiles some useful things to know, commonly asked questions, and a general idea of tildes history (short though it may be). Please keep in mind that tildes is still in Alpha, and many features that are usually present such as repost detection haven't been implemented yet.

Settings

First of all, check out the settings page if you haven't yet. It's located in your user profile, on the right sidebar. There are different themes available, the account default is the 'white' theme, which you can change. I recommend setting up account recovery in case you forget your password, and toggle marking new comments to highlight new comments in a thread. There are more features available but you should go look in the settings yourself.

Posting

You can post a topic by navigating to a group and clicking on the button in the right sidebar. Tildes uses markdown, if you are not familiar with it check the text formatting doc page. Please tag your post so it is easier for other people to find, and check out the topic tagging guidelines. Some posts have a topic log in the sidebar that shows what changes were done to the post since it was posted. You can see an example here. Some people have the ability to add tags to posts, edit titles, and move posts to different groups. They were given the ability by Deimos, see this post.

Topic Tags

You can find all posts with the same tag by clicking on a tag on a post, which will take you to an url like https://tildes.net/?tag=ask, where ask is the tag you clicked on. Replace ask with whatever tag you want to search for. You can also filter tags within a group like this: https://tildes.net/~tildes?tag=discussion, and it will only show you posts within that group. Clicking on a tag while you are in a group achieves the same effect.

You can also filter out posts with specific tags by going to your settings and defining topic tag filters.

Comment Tags

Comment tags are a feature that was present in the early days of tildes, but was removed because of abuse. There were five tags you can tag on someone else's comment: joke, noise, offtopic, troll, flame. The tags have no effect on sorting or other systematic features; they were only used to inform the user on the nature of a comment. The tags would show up along with the number of people who applied them, like this: [Troll] x3, [Noise] x5

People used these tags as a downvote against comments they disliked, and because the tags appeared at the top of a comment in bright colors, they often would bias the user before they read the comment. The abuse culminated in the first person banned on the website, and the comment tags were disabled for tweaking.

As of September 07, 2018, the comment tags have been re-enabled and are experimented with. Any account over a week old will have access to this ability. The tagging button is located on the centre bottom of a comment. You cannot tag your own comment. Here are the comment tagging guidelines from the docs.

Currently, the tags are: exemplary, joke, offtopic, noise, malice. The exemplary tag can only be applied once every 8 hours, and requires you to write an anonymous message to the author thanking them for their comment. Similarly, applying the malice tag requires a message explaining why the comment is malicious. The tags have different effects on the comments, which you can read about here, and here.

Search

The search function is fairly primitive right now. It only includes the title and text of posts and their topic tags.

Default sorting

The current default sorting is activity, last 3 days in the main page, activity, all time in individual groups. Activity sort bumps a post up whenever someone replies to it. 'Last 3 days' mean that only posts posted in the past 3 days will be shown. You can change your default sort by choosing a different sort method and/or time period, and clicking the 'set as default' button that will appear on the right.

Bookmarks

You can bookmark posts and comments. The "bookmark" button is on the bottom of posts and comments. Your bookmarked posts can be viewed through the bookmark page in your user profile sidebar. Note: to unbookmark a post, you have to refresh first.

Extensions

@Emerald_Knight has compiled a list of user created extensions and CSS themes here: https://gitlab.com/Emerald_Knight/awesome-tildes

In particular, I found the browser extension Tildes Extended by @crius and @Bauke very useful. It has nifty features like jumping to new comments, markdown preview and user tagging.

Tildes Development

Tildes is open source and if you want to contribute to tildes development, this is what you should read: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

For those who can't code, you might still be interested in the issue boards on Gitlab. It contains known issues, features being worked on, and plans for the future. If you have a feature in mind that you want to suggest, try looking there first to see if others have thought of it already, or are working on it.

Tildes' Design and Mechanics

In other words, how is it going to be different from reddit? Below are some summaries of future mechanics and inspiration for tildes' design. Note: most of the mechanics have not been implemented and are subject to change and debate.

1. Tildes will not have conventional moderators. Instead, the moderation duties will be spread to thousands of users by the trust system. [Trust people, but punish abusers]. More info on how it works and why it is designed that way:

   • Docs on future mechanics
   • Possible levels of trust that users can acquire
   • A long rant
   • Bubble-up mechanics: 1 , 2
   • A group is it's worst own enemy
   • If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault
   • On a technicality
   • This neat game about trust and game theory

2. Instead of subreddits, there are groups, a homage to Usenet. Groups will be organized hierarchically, the first and only subgroup right now is ~tildes.official. Groups will never be created by a single user, instead, they will be created based on group interest ^{[citation needed]}. For example, if a major portion of ~games consists of DnD posts and they are drowning out all the other topics, a ~games.dnd subgroup would be created - either by petition, algorithm, or both^{[citation needed]} - to contain the posts, and those who don't like DnD can unsubscribe from ~games.dnd. There is currently no way to filter out a subgroup from the main group.

3. Tildes is very privacy oriented. See: Haunted by data

Tildes History/Commonly answered questions

I recommend you check out this past introduction post by @Amarok before anything else, it's a bit outdated but contains many interesting discussions and notable events that have happened on tildes. @Bauke also tracks noteworthy events each month on his website https://til.bauke.xyz/. Also see the FAQ in the docs. Other than that, the best way for you to get an idea of how tildes changed over time is to go to ~tildes.official and look at all the past daily discussions.

Below are some scattered links that I found interesting, informative, or important:

• There are 2 announced bans, you can read about them here, and here. There have been more bans since, just unannounced. You can tell if a user is banned from their user page: there will be no private message button. An example. This differs from deleted accounts, which have all content removed and say "This user has deleted their account". An example. Note that when an account is deleted, whether all posts are deleted or not seems to depend on the user's choice. There is no official commentary, but there has been examples of deleted user comments left intact. Example: deleted user, intact post.

• The first group proposal, and the resulting group additions.

• You used to be able to see who invited a user on their profile, but now you can't.

• Past introduction posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

• The very first post on tildes: https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/2/welcome_to_tildes

• The first page of ~tildes.official, if you want to start reading from the beginning (there really should be a chronological sorting option): https://tildes.net/~tildes.official?after=5k

• What should the names of Tildes users be?

• There used to be comment tags, but they were removed because of abuse, and now they are re-enabled again.

• Some tradition that has started to develop:

  • programming challenges

  • music weekly threads

  • black mirror watch thread

  • what are you reading these days?

  • what have you been watching/reading this week? (Anime/Manga)

  • the "layperson's introduction" series

• How do we fund tildes?

• How to handle account deletion

• Anonymous posting

• Demographics survey: year 0 and results, year 0.5 and results

• How should we deal with low effort content?

• Why is the comment box at the bottom?

• How does Tildes feel about bots?

• The Tildes unofficial Minecraft servers: 1 , 2

• The Tildes unofficial wiki (now closed due to inactivity and spambots)

• How will Tildes work with bans?

• Should we have a mascot?

• Scraping Tildes/Statistics

If anyone thinks of a link that should be included here, post a comment with the link and I'll edit it in.

Markdown source for this post: https://pastebin.com/Kbbh7pYU (outdated, and probably will not be updated unless someone explicitly asks for it)

To the rest: have fun!

Probably most appropriate for the "Activity" tab.

I would love to be able to click some kind of toggle that only showed topics that I've started and topics that I've commented in. Not sure how taxing this would be on the server, but figured I'd throw it out there for consideration. If it's been suggested before, sorry. No search function yet!

I've tried searching for wrestling tags on ~tv and ~sports a few times and haven't seen any posts. I wonder how many other people have done the same and have just given up when they saw there was no discussion.

Feel free to leave a comment here if you're a fan of any kind of wrestling. We can use this thread to gauge the audience. If other fans here see that there's enough interest, they might be more willing to drop some their own OC on tildes. When we get enough people here we can start making live discussions for the shows.

Recently, I remembered reading a thread on Tildes about CCleaner that convinced me to stop using it. I wanted to find the thread to see what the suggested alternatives were. I can't see any search functionality on the site and it seems laborious to browse by tags. I tried doing a site search on Duck Duck Go "ccleaner site: https://tildes.net" with no results.

I don't know if this has been brought up before, I can't find any information. I looked in the Docs to see if its mentioned anywhere but didn't come up with anything. Is there a plan to include search functionality on tildes?

This thread talks about Discord is trying to become Steam just as Steam is trying to become Discord.

Deimos and others said

This feels like the beginning of Discord flailing around in search of a business model.

But I really like this comment from Krael,

It's a Slack/Ventrilo hybrid that requires almost zero technical knowledge to set up or join. It's nothing groundbreaking by ANY stretch of the imagination, but there's a reason it took off the way it did.

Discord is at its heart is the same as Skype/Slack/Teamspeak/IRC but the UI/UX is leagues above everything else. Using Discord is so much easier than most alternatives and with just enough integrations that if they coughed off the "gaming" mantra they would be able to attract so many more users. Perhaps enough to get the amount of Nitro subs to stay afloat.

This was the first expedition of the Heroic Age, organized by Adrian de Gerlache, and funded by King Leopold's image problems. de Gerlache was a restless man of thirty, his life oscillating between breathtaking daring and breathtaking mundanity --- a man of the Belgian Navy, working on the fishery protection detail, then a seaman on an English vessel, failing to round Cape Horn and ending up on a scrapyard in Montevideo; an officer on a ferry between the prosaic Ostend and the boring Dover; then writing a flurry of letters, petitioning for a chance to go to Africa with Stanley, to the Arctic with Nordenskiöld, to anywhere with the Royal Geographic Society of Britain. Finally, a plea to the Geographic Society of his native land drew flame, a ship was purchased (MV Belgica), and funding was secured from the king. de Gerlache's crew included more than just Belgians; among others, the Norwegian 25-year-old first mate Roald Amundsen, destined for later fame, and the 26-year-old Pole Henryk Arctowski, a later authority on meteorology, who was much teased for his overappropriate name.

Belgica sailed south by the way of South America, where their reception was warm, the local scientists were enthused, all seemed well.

In truth, they were sailing into a world they knew very little of, into an implacably hostile world, and they were ill equipped for it. They reached Graham Land --- the northern part of the Antarctic Peninsula --- in the January of 1898, skirting west between the peninsula and the islands flanking it --- not knowing if what they took for the farthest tip of the continent was just another archipelago, kitted together with glaciers and pack ice. The same month a sailor was washed overboard and lost.

In February they crossed the Antarctic Circle --- they sailed down the western side of the Peninsula, mapping and observing the flora and the fauna and for the lack of them, the stars and the moon. They tried to find a peninsula-breaching passage to the east side, the Weddell Sea, for their return --- and on the 28th of February, 1898, towards the end of the Antarctic summer, they got stuck in ice.

Some say this was an accident; some say this was on purpose: a ploy of de Gerlache or (say) the first mate Amundsen, to gain additional glory or experience.

If it was done on purpose, it nearly killed them all.

They would be stuck for over ten months, including two months of total darkness --- when Belgium sees the middle of summer, the Antarctic sinks to polar night.

They were unprepared: they piled on all their clothing, and it still wasn't enough to shelter them outside the ship. They had nothing to do: there was nothing but cold, darkness and death outside the ship; inside, the same hateful faces, the same ``three books and four issues of a magazine, a Bible and the mandolin that Amundsen tossed onto the ice by mid-March''. They did not have enough food: it was necessary to supplement it, but the choices were low. An officer by the name of Danco fell ill and died in June, raving that the others should promise to not eat him. A Belgian sailor went mad and walked out, shouting he was going to return to Belgium by foot --- he was not seen again, though several others claimed, for months, to hear him shouting outside, inviting them to join him. One more sailor did.

There weren't breaks in the ice to allow fishing; the nearest open water was (they thought) tens of miles away.

They had prepared, as best as they could, before all the horrors of the winter set in. In February, when the ship was still sailing, they had killed dozens of penguins, and harvested their meat for eating, storing it in the cold of the ship's open deck.

The meat might have been better fresh, but de Gerlache tasted it, and ordered the cook to not serve a gram of the disgusting slop to anyone. He didn't know the superstitious cook had adulterated the meat with soap and sand, spurred to this deception by the dream he had had of the birds talking like men, no doubt disturbed by how they already walked like men.

By midwinter, the men were ill of scurvy --- the lack of vitamin C, which first manifests as lassitude, weakness and soreness of limbs, and then goes to bleeding gums, falling teeth and other terrifyingly general symptoms. What's worse, at the time ``vitamin'' was an uninvented word; the two easy sources of it, vegetables and fresh meat, were not widely understood. de Gerlache was seriously ill by this point, writing his will, staring out his frost-encrusted window for hours at a time, willing the mountains of ice to move, at times twitching as if they did, and then shaking his head, knowing better.

Georges Lecointe, the ship's captain, was similarly ill; on his orders, the penguin meat had been dumped off the ship, and only its encasement in ice had kept it from being thrown in the waters. Lecointe stalked the ship, asking the crew strange questions --- later accounts have said he suspected some had been substituted with treasonous penguins, intent on sabotage, but this is likely nothing but malign rumors.

With de Gerlache and Lecointe so distracted, the first mate Roald Amundsen and the ship's doctor, Frederick Cook, acted. Cook had been with Peary in the Arctic,(footnote) and so knew fresh meat was the key against scurvy --- there weren't too many vegetables to be found in the Arctic --- so they walked round the ship, cracking piles of snow to find the piles and bundles of penguin meat.

(footnote: Indeed, Cook had claimed to have reached the North Pole with Peary (1909) and by himself (1908); neither claim stood against the scrutiny of outsiders. To read Cook's account of the Belgian Expedition is to come away thinking Amundsen hardly did anything; this is a constant pattern in Cook's accounts of his life and supposed deeds.)

This meat was of course no longer fresh --- it had been frozen for months. But it was good enough for a while.

With the cook now abandoning superstition in the face of survival, the meat was cooked and proved if not tasty, then at least edible. When it was served to de Gerlache, he did not ask what it was; when it was served to Lecointe, he said ``Is this penguin?'', and on being said so, cried out, made the sign of the Cross, muttered a few confused words on the state of his soul, and ate.

Thus empowered and restored, the crew organized a hunting party, with de Gerlache taking the lead. They marched thirty terrifying miles over the hills and valleys of creaking midwinter ice, in full darkness, the sun gone for weeks (and to be gone for still more weeks), until they found the edge of open water, and a small colony of penguins.

They fell among the birds with rifles, pistols, swords, cudgels, nets, gloved fists. In a fury of survival and hunger they slaughtered the birds, clubbing and striking them one after another, their beards stiff with frozen drool. The snow acquired a crimson hue; their cries were as harsh, bestial and varied as those of the doomed birds.

Adrien de Gerlache, the man of ups and downs, the noble-featured and mild-mannered Belgian officer, was the first among them, a demon with a saber and a pistol, his face and chest caked with diamonds of red frozen blood and penguin gore.

After the massacre was done, they tied the dead birds together into lines, fifteen to each, and then dragged, through the moaning winds of the unceasing darkness, them back to the ship.

de Gerlache himself fainted after the killing; the blood on his face and down it was from a copious nosebleed occasioned by the harsh environment and the monstrous occasion. Before falling down --- to be dragged back to the ship, just like his prey --- he raised his saber at the even deeper blackness of the open waters, and cried: ``Come, beast! We killed these --- we will kill you too! No matter how big --- we will kill mountains!''

The expedition lived on penguin meat and their official provisions for the rest of the winter. Boredom and the stresses of the alien environment continued to haunt them, and many felt guilty for their slaughter of the penguins --- or rather, haunted by it. Many mention in their memoirs the odd noiselessness of the battle, the utter surrender of the enemy, the terrible frenzy that overcame the men, as they ran from bird to bird, striking them down, crippling, stopping, slashing and crushing, then finally eliciting the discordant caws and croaks and cries the birds made --- the way they killed so many, and the way the rest slipped, like shadows, into the waters without as much as a ripple. One memoir, no doubt inspired by de Gerlache's ravings, mentions seeing a vast shape out in the water, a black iceberg that slipped underwater as the last bird quorked its last. But most of the memoir-writers wrote nothing of this all, choosing to imply a much more sanitized narrative of fresh meat.

Eventually spring came; the season of autumn in the northern world.

By January 1899 the ship was still stuck.

The ice was over two meters thick. There was open water, half a mile away, but it was not getting any closer --- and January was the height of Antarctic summer, meaning the halfway point!

Desperate to escape another winter in the ice --- and another war in search of meat --- they took to the ship's tools, and laid dynamite on the ice with drills and axes. The first explosions but warped the ice, and nearly crushed the ship's hull. The men attacked the ice with mattocks and hammers; some of the tools broke, their frozen nature no match for the native ice. A hammer's head famously shattered on the first blow, and a flying iron shard cut a line in Amundsen's cheek.

de Gerlache fell into a deep depression, and retreated to his cabin; around this time he covered its window with bootblack, and kept it so closed for the remainder of the expedition, referring to the view as ``the black mountain''.

In the meanwhile, Amundsen took control of the crew, and laid explosives right in front of the ship's keel. The blast rocked the ship and had the incensed captain Lecointe nearly shoot the first mate; but it had made for open water at the front, and with the ship's weight and the endless application of manual tools, the crew was ever so slowly able to move the ship forward. After two weeks of nonstop day-and-night work, they were in open water, the ice closing after them as if nothing had ever been there, and nothing had passed through.

It took them another month --- the last half of February and the first of March --- to navigate another six miles of the iceberg- and ice floe-choked water. By then the summer was over; the floes were knitting together into the impassable dead plateau of lengthy winter. But by the 14th of March, they were out of the ice, onto open water, and they immediately headed north, away.

The Belgian Expedition reached 71 degrees 30 seconds south. One degree of longitude is approximately 69 miles, and as the Pole is full 90 degrees south, the Pole was still some 1280 miles away.

Despite its name, the Belgian Expedition was the most multinational and, in a way, least greedy of the expeditions of the Heroic Age. Those that followed de Gerlache were much more conscious of the double glory they sought --- not just for themselves, but for their country.

As for de Gerlache, he did not return to the Antarctic. He joined Charcot's 1903 expedition, but left before it reached the Antarctic; he cited quarrels within the expedition, and others let understand he had suffered a major breakdown at seeing something vast and dark out in the ocean.

So lately I've been working on a chatty, digressive pseudo-non-fiction book that's 80% true facts about Antarctica, suggestively arranged, 15% amazingly truth-like lies about Antarctica, and couched in those two, 5% increasingly loopy lies about the sleeping penguin-faced menace that's waking up from beneath the Antarctic ice, any day now, because we made forbidden pacts with the quorking, cawing, tux-clad guardians of the Last Continent.

Ahem yeah high-quality discussion. What's the strangest creative project you've stumbled into, or thought of?

So I just posted a comment in a month-old topic and it shot to the top of the Activity tab. I'm still new here and forgot that that would happen.

Is there any stance for or against necroposting on Tildes? I looked around for a search feature but didn't find one, so apologies if this has been discussed before.

If it hasn't been discussed before, what do you think? My gut instinct is that it's bad, but only because I've been conditioned to think that way from long ago when forums reigned before social media. Are there any downsides? And if necroposting is allowed, will it indirectly promote a kind of "NO DUPLICATE THREADS!" culture?

I see there is an issue open to add a saving feature for topics, which is great! I would like to make a suggestion for this feature.

Do you think it would be possible to give users the ability to add their own tags to a saved topic?

A lot of times I search for content related to a project I am working on, and it would be nice if I could tag the topics I find as "project-xyz", as this would allow me find them easily when I come back to reference something. This tag would be useless to anyone else, but having our own personal tags, that only we can see, would be very useful in curating content.

One way this could be done is by having a new section named "Your Tags" that appears under the existing "Tags" one, in the sidebar for a topic. Then on the Saved page, the sidebar could list all your unique tags, and clicking one would filter the topics.

Anyway, just throwing out an idea. I can add a comment to that GitLab issue, if this is a possibility and something people are interested in.

To clarify I'm not incompetent at computers, I'm sure people don't tend to install Linux if they aren't familiar with technology in a decent capacity. But for instance I can't code, can't operate the command line short of copying and pasting command, and don't really know what I'm doing with the technical aspect other than following online guides. I have used windows all my life. I'm Linux illiterate for lack of a better description.

I decided I wanted some form of USB bootable computer, i'm familiar with chrome books, enjoy the light weight OS, and am bed bound to the google ecosystem so I when I saw how you could plug in a USB and have the computer boot into Chrome OS running off the USB I thought that sounded perfect. But during my research of discovery I found that Linux seemed like a very good alternative, I had always had it in my head that it was very technical and finicky system where to do a simple google search you had to code in half a dozen lines into the control terminal in some bizarre 2018 text adventure to use the web, I do exaggerate of course but the image I had conjured up over the years was of a very non-user friendly experience and a system made for those running technical aspects such as web servers and system management.

I decided you can't knock it to you try it and besides turns out you can't get chrome OS on a 32GB USB it has to be 8GB or 16GB apparently. So I installed Ubuntu on my USB, no clue if this is some snooty distro, or a version of Linux that's mocked in the community, or the perfect distro but after minimal research it seemed the most popular and well received version to put it on a USB and booted into it.

Instantly all my preconceived notions we're erased. It's clean, modern, simple, light weight, and easy to use with a very intuitive and familiar UI. It's pretty much a more open and degooglified (That's a nice word) version of Chrome OS. Since Firefox Quantum was released I emigrated over to try break some ties with google for privacy reasons like it's some pervy conjoined twin of mine, I know it's not good for me, I don't want it there but I can't get rid of it without harming me.

It's got a simple UI that's familiar to windows albeit without all the bloatware and ads spread everywhere, it doesn't track you like window does (that's as far as I'm aware it did ask to collect anonymised telemetry data which I opted out of). With windows I'm so used to having to go through 3 different pop up windows to change a setting that in Ubuntu it feels like I'm missing features although I'm yet to find one that's not there. The best bit about Linux, is if theirs a setting you want to change and can't find, than someone online has wrote a guide giving you a command line code to copy paste into the terminal to fix it.

Although to me it feels more on par with Chrome OS than Windows as a bare bones OS with simple apps and a web browser to use the internet with, in this regard Linux wins easy, way more open, no profit based motivation, and more accessible allowing itself to be used anywhere.

All though that comparison holds up for the normal user and if you are someone who just browses the web and uses apps like Spotify than Linux is amazing it's not complex or difficult, truly wonderful.

What makes Linux even better is the fact it's not a fair comparison, sure to me it's like Chrome OS due to the simple purposes I use it for but what's truly great is all that nerdy technical stuff I thought Linux was for you can do, if you are hosting a web server than linux gives you a free platform to do it, it feels like you are directly modding the PCB of the computer it's that open.

In retrospect to typing all that I feel I've just blurted out a generic description of Linux and for those that use it I'm sure they just think I was naive, but this is more aimed at the average user, Linux, or at least Ubuntu, is great, it's: simple, easy, fresh, clean, open, modern, intuitive, versatile, multi-purpose, and free. It's not some difficult to use system, it's alarmingly simple, but infinitely useful

It's easy to learn and difficult to master.

When it comes to disaster relief, I often hear the refrain that it is best to donate cash, and donating boxes of things often hurts more than it helps. Is this universally true, or are there situations where donation boxes are actually helpful?

Search results on the subject ("disaster relief donation box vs cash"), all saying that boxes of stuff hurt more than help, due to the logistical costs of shipping, sorting, and storage:

• https://www.cidi.org/how-disaster-relief-works/monetary-contributions-work-bestwhy-cash-is-best/
• https://www.cbsnews.com/news/best-intentions-when-disaster-relief-brings-anything-but-relief/
• https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2017/10/27/thing-bad-disaster-donation/

We're obviously being denied the benefits of so called advances in algorithmic search, as evidenced by the poor showing of Google Itself in unusual searches. For example, if you search images for "runners wearing green hats -shamrock -st. -patrick" Guess how many runners wearing green hats you get?

So search is hard? I think it's more likely that Google and everyone else is more interested in selling you a hat than helping you find a picture of a runner in a green hat.

I've been grumbling about many of the things Tildes is trying to address for years. And I'm not alone. OTOH I have seen some sites that do some bits right, and some sites that almost got it right only to fall flat at the penultimate hurdle. Let's try to collect and enumerate what I think is good and bad, both here and elsewhere. I'm optimistic about here because Tildes is a work in progress and some of these are quite readily fixable.

Tildes, the good:

#1, a long way ahead of everything else: Non-profit.
I think Twitter and Reddit and Facebook all amply demonstrate why any general discussion forum that tries to make a profit is doomed to mediocrity and worse. Google+ is an edge case - the service may be free, but Google is watching and measuring your every move. And constantly optimising for their own performance metrics, of which fostering intelligent discussion totally is not on the list and is actually discouraged. See:
'The Algorithm' is Not an Idiot, It Is Actively Deceptive https://plus.google.com/104879277024913363852/posts/51mme29dSMy

#2 Markdown (also a coutny mile ahead of the alternatives) - elegantly simple markup; not too much, not too little. Even if you have technical quibbles with markdown's capabilities, the system is widely-enough known to outweigh them. I honestly can't think of a more appropriate choice.

#3 Clean simple UI (couple of grumbles though - see below)

#4 'Votes' rather than +1s, thumbs up, likes or or other cutesy shite. Elementary good UI practice - say what you mean.

Tildes, the bad including what I hope are readily fixable or just oversights:

#1 Poor display contrast. Don't use light grey text on white, you numpties, just because it's fashionable. If you want this site to be around long-term you'll have people of all ages posting, some with e.g. poor eyesight. There are well-known guidelines for the optimum contrast ratios for online text. Look 'em up and bloody stick within them. If you go for AAA that will be another point where you're ahead of the Google, Apple and other fashion-driven sites. Don't care if it's unfashionable, and if you want to be around in 20 years (as another successful discussion site I'll cite later has been) you should stick with what's usable, not what's currently cool. KTHXBAI. WebAIM: Colour Contrast Checker
https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

#2 Missed opportunity, fixable:

You can look at activity from the last hour, day, 3 days etc, or enter a flexible range. But you've only made the range one-ended!! So how are you supposed to find a post from 'about 6 months ago' without scrolling through thousands of entries? Again, if you're interested in longevity, you have to ensure that it's possible for humans to refind older posts, and to check back to a specific date range that may eventually be months or years back. My 'long-lived site' inserts markers with month and year so that you can tell where you are in the feed without having to peer at some tiny date in light grey on lighter grey.

#3 Vague datestamps

Use dates FFS. 'About 2 hours ago' is a moving target, duh. How are you supposed to refind a post timestamped 'about 2 hours ago' on a fast-moving thread that was left sitting unrefreshed on your laptop for half a day while you were disconnected from the internet? Useless. For short periods, yes, some users may prefer a vaguer indicator, but once a post is more than about 12-16 hours old, just use the date and time, OK? Vague timestamps, while superficially user-friendly, are a superb and subtle way to disrupt the serious discussions Tildes wants to foster. That's why Google+, for example, does it, and that's why you shouldn't. Also, if the date's in a predictable, stable form, you can search for it. Load a shit-ton of posts going back months, then try searching for a post made 'two months' ago; then search again in a couple of weeks and the same search will give different results!

#4 Preview and save button

Where's my post preview button? I would have like to preview this screed before posting it. And given how long it is maybe saving it as a work in progress would have been useful too!

Missing feature: effective filtering/killfiling
Long-term, if the site gets big, it will live or die on this. Seriously.
You need to be able to filter users, posts, and thread and groups temporarily or permanently.
That includes being able to temporarily hide people you follow and like just to get their posts out of the way. So, mute for an hour, mute for a day, mute for a week, mute for a month (maybe), mute permanently. Applicable to every possible category on the site you can think of. dredmorbius (who is also here) goes on about this a lot. The ability to filter stuff out is far more important than the ability to 'find' stuff. Just filtering out the stuff you don't want helps the stuff you do bubble to the surface!

Saveable filters (long term feature)

When I want to collect cat memes, non-cat memes are noise and I need to filter them out (see above). When I want to read about other sutff, the cat memes are noise and I need to filter them. I don';t want to have to keep creating and discarding filters. As soon as your filtering system is powerful enough to be useful, it will be too much work to keep redoing, so make 'em saveable and organisable. There's uses for all of whitelists, greylists and blacklists.

Post auto indexing (long term feature)

I have to manually write and maintain my own damn post indexes on G+, otherwise all my old posts just vanish into limbo, inaccessible unless you know a unique search phrase from that particular post or are prepared to scroll for hours. [But the Goodle internal servers can access and analyse them all just fine.] My post index, with some comments: https://plus.google.com/104879277024913363852/posts/XoWoRujTBun

Rapid browse mode, paginated

When you're reading in depth, it may be OK to have a Google+-like UI with only half a dozen posts on-screen at once. (Tildes is currently shopwing me ten at a time, which ain't enough of an improvement to be worthwhile.) But this is hair-tearingly inefficient if you want to scan a lot of posts rapidly. You need a dense display format that shows large numkbers of posts so people can skim and find things quickly. With thumnails for images and indicators for links. Paginated, with the pages staying at consistent points. That way you can keep track of you place when you're browsing back in the archives, and even bookmark old stuff. Sometimes you want leisurely mode, but sometimes you want to jump back a way before switching to leisurely. Having only a slow browsing route is very effective at killing access to older discussions. Anything older than a few days or a few dozens of posts is effectively lost.

Soft auto-lock for old posts
Posts should auto-lock after... about 3 months of inactivity is a good number IME. But ideally it should be a soft lock, which means people can resurrect them. If you post on a soft-locked thread, you get a warning, or the owner gets to decide whether to unlock the thread and let your post appear. So consequently you need a preference setting so that post owners can indicate whether they want a soft or a hard lock on a post, and the time till it triggers.

Per forum thread/post limits
If you've got a forum with 1,000 active threads, you haven't really got one forum. You've either got several, in which case they should be split up, or you've got one forum with a lot of noise. So there might be something to be said for limiting the number of discussion threads in proportion to the number of users; for example, if ~dogs.chihuahuas has 5 users, let them have the default of 20 threads. Of which they might only use six. Nothing says you have to use all 20. But if ~dogs.pugs had 40,000 followers, perhaps it should be permitted 70 threads. If 70 isn't enough, it's probably past time to split ~dogs.pugs up. There is an uppser and a lower limit to how many people you can have a sensible discussion with. The lower limit is 2, and for small forums or up to a couple of dozen regulars 20 threads should be ample. When you get to hundeds or regulars, the thread count does need to go up a bit. But when you get to 10,000s, the noise levels starts to go up and it's time to split the group into subgroups. A thread count is a decent way to enforce that - I'd say even the biggest forum isn't allowed more than 2-3 screenfuls of threads. So 30-60, maybe. If that's not enough, it's time to subdivide, because keeping communities from getting too large keeps discussion quality higher. You can always follow both groups even after the split. But if you dislike regular A in group X, you can switch to group Y where they don't post. If everything's lumps together without regard to community scaling, you never get away from regular A unless you unsubscribe from group X altogether.

Other sites

Google+

Circles (bad, it turns out) - seemed good at the time, but it turns out they're at the wrong end of the broadcast stream. The recipients have no way to filter what you post into the categories they want, and it's their preferences that matter at this point.

Collections (good, it turns out) - this was the better way to do it. If someone posts cat pics, politics, and astronomy, you can just follow the subset of their posts you're interested in. This is reasonably effective, implicit filtering.

Infinite scrolling windows (very bad) - [But excellent for Google's purposes of stifling anything but superficial conversations.] Finding anything older than a few hours may take literally hours of scrolling unless there's a search term you can enter. So tough shit if you wanted to find an image post with no associated text.

Awesomely atrocious search Google used to be good at search. You wouldn't think so from the comedy search tool they provide on G+.

Notifications (meh) - When you only have a few followers, it's nice to know you've been followed or mentioned or whatever. As your user count grows that becomes noise and then spam. Notifications have to scale intelligently, because a user with 240,000 followers has massivly different needs from a user with 12.

My own comments: Google Plus User Feedback Archive https://plus.google.com/104879277024913363852/posts/DUanxsc7ya1

Ello

I like the clean UI, and it's very good for image posting.
The discussions ain't too bad either, but it's maybe a bit too minimalist, and again, there was no way to find old posts,l so they're effectively lost.

Twitter

Well it would be good if people actually used it for short posts of up to 2xx characters or whatever the present limit is. But when you have people writing articles that need dozens of Tweets (and there's aggregator apps to collect them back into full articles FFS) then the system is clearly not being used in the way it was originally intended to be. I think this is what corporations would like the future of all discussion to be. Basically babble, where even the good stuff vanishes without trace after, well, potentially a few tens of minutes if you follow a lot of people. It's like drinking at a firehose. Jeez. You harldy need to exert effort to bury stuff. Just wait a while.

Usenet

Good for: killfiles, threaded discussions, clue, and asynchronous discussions spanning weeks, months or longer.
Bad for: trolls, spam. Especially spam.

I sincerely hope there are some Tilders who are thoroughly familiar with the dynamics, successes and failures of Usenet. It does a lot of things right that you'll also need to get right. And now all the morons are on the web, I'm not sure if Usenet is reverting to clued people only, or if the spammers are killing it off completely. TBH I'm not sure there's much point spamming Usenet these days; next to no-one goes there, and those that do are tech-savvy and exceptionally spam-hostile. Haven't been on myself for years. A very good example of a private usenet area that works well is the Povray news hierarchy. Another demonstration that focus on a single subject (the PoVRay raytracer) does a good job of keeping site/forum/whatever clue levels high. news.povray.org http://news.povray.org/groups/

Web Forums

Good for: focussed discussions on a single subject. In general, the more focussed the higher the quality. The Wesnoth forums, for example, are all about the Wesnoth computer game. So it's easy to tell what's off-topic and remove it. But the Giant in the Playground forums, which also include general roleplaying, are not as focussed and the clue level of the posters, while not atrocious, is noticeably lower, and a much greater degree of moderation is needed. But the GiantITP forums are much bigger than Wesnoth, so there a lot of just scaling effects going on there too. You also see this on, I guess, the Steam forums and Reddit groups, where the small niche communities (e.d. OpenTTD on Reddit) tend to be much more pleasant places to visit than the forums for mega-games like, I dunno, World of Warcraft.

Reddit

Good for: Actually handling collossal volums of posts on all sorts of subjects without collapsing into chaos.
I'm not a big Reddit fan, but I have to give them credit for working at all, given their traffic volume.

Also good for: Reddit Gold isn't a terrible way to fund a commercial-ish site. Aspects of that could be stolen.

Wikis

Placeholder

Suspect there may be some things that could be learned from how Wikis do things, but nothing comes to mind at present. May revisit later.

Email lists

Good for: digests?

Digests might be a useful feature when you're following a long-running discussion?
Google+ almost got this right - you can opt to recieve an email whenever someone comments after you, but you can't get G+_ to send you emails fo your own posts, or to send you a summary/digest of the full discussion. So you can have a partial email archive of threads you've been involved in, but you can't have an email record of your own contributions. So, half of a useful feature there. Nice one, guys.

Mornington Crescent

These sites have been running for decades. They're basically text databases plus a bit of Perl glue code. A decent developer could (and has, more than once) knock out a fully functioning Mornington Crescent site in a matter of a few afternoons.

Good for: longevity, stability, simplicity, 'weak user IDs', asynchronous discussions which can become realtime if you're online at the same time as your correspondent.

Probably bad for: scaling, security
The Crescent sites have a couple of dozen game threads each, and you post a comment wherever you feel like. Then the next person does the same, and so on. Some of the long-running games (e.g. the genral chat thread) have 30,000+ posts spanning years. But becuase it's paginated rather than an infinite scrolling window, you can jump back e.g. 1,000 posts (a few months) with relative ease.

These sites all predate markdown, so they let you use basic HTML instead. A feature which has been horribly abused, most notably in the bad HTML game, and Acre Street (don't ask). A modern MC site, you'd use markdown.

They still work on any browser - even Lynx - they don't even depend on Javascript. It's a web form with two or three fields. You type on your comment, click submit, and your comment is inserted into the page. Then the next person does the same, over and over for years, and the page grows as you do. As simple as a a web forum can possibly be, I suspect. And if bandwidth/performance becomes a problem, you can auto-split it into year-sized or 1000-post-sized chunks. Yes, people mostly only browse the last few tens of posts, but a paginated system lets you jump back further on occasion without placing an undue burden on the servers. (I go on about pagination a lot. I think it's a make-or-break feature, and it's only out of favour at the moment due to the whims of fashion and the web-corps' desires to make and keep online conversations at a superficial level. The black hats are doing it intentionally, and others are emulating them because they wrongly think they're following good - rather than evil - practice.
Speaking of evil practice - check out Dark Patterns in Design for some of the ways we're manipulated: https://darkpatterns.org/

'Weak User ID' - there's a text box you type your name in. Most people use the same name every time, because it establishes reputation. But it's just a text box so you could type in anything. That bit probably wouldn't scale, but for us, given that between us we all know everyone who posts except for the occasional random who shows up, it works fine.

'Non-persistent chat' - one of the sites, which has since shut down, had a rolling chat page that was only transient. Chat posts older than about a week and more than 100 posts ago just disappeared off the bottom of the chat page and were lost for good, unless someone saved the chat. For some discussions - e.g. things like cat memes, this kind of transient chat is probably ideal. You could even implement an infinite scroller, because you know the end of the chat is never going to be more than 5-10 screens away. That wouldn't be so good for 50-100 screen. As a yardstick my G+ posts would probably go back about 1200 screens. Who the hell would ever scroll through that? If Tildes becomes successful, it will quickly hit to same point. Pagination, chaps. It's not sexy, but it's the only reasonable way to manage long data streams.

OK, initial data dump done. This is more complete than I epxcted to get for a first go, but more typos too :-)

Am likely to revist.

Government agencies around the world continue to run a dragnet on a large amount of communications, most of which is sent under the expectation of having a private conversation and yet the vast majority of the public seems apathetic to the issue. Why is this? Is it because of an underlying cynicism and belief that you can’t do anything to stop them? Is it because you don’t care and are using the “I have nothing to hide” argument? Do you think that it is too much work to protect yourself? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I hope that we can at least talk about it and maybe I can even convince you to care if you’re willing to hear me out.

First, lets take a look at what these agencies actually do. There are many to pick from such as the CIA, FBI, MI6, MI5, the NSA, GCHQ, and FSB just to name a few. Their goals are pretty much the same as far as intrusive espionage goes. They all want to gather as much data as possible in hopes of finding political dissenters and protest groups, information on powerful leaders from other governments (usually with a strong potential for blackmail) and terrorists (although they rarely ever find them). Like many tyrannical practices before them, it is done under the guise of national security. This is because people are usually willing to sacrifice their freedoms for more (perceived) security. It is important to note that these agencies do not solely operate domestically. They are global threats and their reach extends far further than you may think. Just because you live in the EU does not mean you are safe from their reach.

Does it sound like I’m exaggerating here? It can’t be that bad can it?

Well, lets look at the facts. We don’t know that much about these agencies but what we do know is absolutely terrifying. Whistleblowers like Edward Snowden have shown us that their technology is being used for far more than just hunting terrorists. In fact, the NSA and GCHQ have essentially been running a dragnet on the entire world. Here is an article on the GCHQ showing how they hacked the cell phones of foreign politicians attending the G20 summit in 2009. They did not discriminate, they simply tapped everybody so they could read their texts and listen in on their calls to see whats going on. Here is a similar story where the NSA collected phone calls of Verizon subscribers, only this time they weren’t looking at politicans and suspects, they were either spying on you or people like you. The more recent Vault 7 and 8 leaks showed that the CIA was engaging in similar practices such as developing tools to send information from Smart TVs. Using a code that was written and gifted to the CIA by the UK’s MI5. Even the FBI, a domestic federal police agency has been given the go ahead to hack any computer in the world. Here is some evidence of when they hacked over 8,000 computers in 120 countries using only one warrant (given by a US judge which is NOT valid in any other part of the world) during a child pornography investigation.

But they’re targeting criminals right? I have nothing to be worried about.

First of all, that is the same rhetoric being used by the Chinese Government as they continue to develop facial recognition technology (currently being used to take pictures of jaywalkers and post them on billboards), their social credit system and mandatory surveillance apps on the phones of their citizens. All in effort of building a surveillance state.

This has also not been the case historically. The two biggest enemies of the FBI in the 1960s was the Civil Rights movement and the Anti-War movement. The former article touches on the wiretaps placed on Martin Luther King Jr by the FBI, but its also important to note that they also sent him a death threat as well. The latter link is about the program that targeted both groups. Some modern day examples include the FBI’s survellance of PETA and Greenpeace as well as the NSA and GCHQ’s probe into humanitarian groups such as UNICEF. I also encourage you to read this post written by a redditor about what it is like to live in a surveillance state.

Ever since 9/11, the motto of US intelligence agencies and many others around the world who feared the same threats was “never again”. Never again would they let an atrocity like 9/11 take place. They would do whatever it took to prevent another disaster from happening and so they introduced the PATRIOT act in congress. This 2,000 page act appeared less than a month after the attacks, and was passed with an overwhelming amount of support. As Michael Moore showed in his mockumentary film Fahrenheit 9/11, a member of congress has openly admitted to not having read the bill as well as many of his colleagues. Concerning parts of this act can be found in here.

Now lets take a quick look at what happened in 2002. DARPA created a division of US government called the Information Awareness Office, now if that sounds Orwellian than just take one look at their logo. One year later in 2003 this organization started the Total Information Awareness Program which was described as a "Manhattan Project for Counter-Terrorism". The scope of this program was massive for the time and Senator Ron Wyden called it "biggest surveillance program in the history of the United States”. Sounds pretty creepy right? Yea, the American public thought so too, so DARPA responded in a brilliant stroke of genius to rename the program to Terrorism Information Awareness and suddenly nobody cared about being watched.

Okay, but I’m fine with them spying on me as long it helps them to thwart terror attacks.

Have you seen the news lately? The terror attacks that these practices are supposed to prevent still occur. There has yet to be one documented attack that has been prevented by any of these programs and I will prove to you why. During Edward Snowden’s tenure at the NSA, the Boston Marathon bombings happened.

Here we are in 2013 and the second biggest terror attack since 9/11 has occurred. Snowden watched the events unfold on the news while sitting in the NSA’s break room. He made a remark to his colleagues saying that he would bet anything that we already knew about the bombers, and that they had slipped through the cracks with nothing that could be done to stop them. Turns out he was right Russia had warned both the FBI and the CIA about the older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev but when the FBI investigated they found nothing. As Snowden so eloquently put it, “when you collect everything, you understand nothing”. Not only are these practices morally wrong, they are also ineffective.

One year later in 2014, Snowden decided to leak everything. He objected to the American and British government’s warrantless surveillance and decided that the public had a right to know what was happening. Among the numerous startling documents, he revealed a program called XKEYSCORE. This program works as a sort of search engine for intelligence agencies. Analysts with access to the system will search for keywords like BOMB and PRESIDENT or DONALD TRUMP. It will then give them a list of unsecured text messages, emails, social media posts and so on. In fact just by writing this, I will likely show up among one of these searches.

Okay, so if they are targeting everybody in the name of safety and they aren’t effective at keeping everybody safe, then why the hell are they still doing it?!

One word: power. Just imagine the things you could do if you had access to everyone’s texts, emails, Facebook posts, bank records, as well as the legal and technical means to gain root access to any of the billions of devices in the world. Sounds pretty impressive right? Unfortunately for us, it all comes at our expense and without taking the proper steps, our lives are not private in the eyes of the government. After all, you wouldn't let a stranger go through your phone, so why would you let a government?

I hope this information has been helpful to those of you who are either learning about this for the first time or getting a reminder on the extent of these invasive practices. I hope that you will reconsider the repercussions of these practices and maybe take steps to protect yourself. If there is any interest then I will post a part 2 later with things you can do to minimize this data collection. Its not as hard as you might think!

For those of you who are still not convinced that governments are a threat to your personal privacy, please drop a comment below so we can get a discussion going.

By the way, anyone who is interested in their privacy is likely under heightened surveillance due to interests in anonymity and security software.

Hooktube.com used to provide a private way to view youtube vids, blocking ads, bypassing region locks, and also pulling comments and search results via the api. All you had to do was replace the you in a youtube link with hook.

No more. On July 11, this appeared on the changelog:

HookTube no longer uses YouTube api for anything, and most features (channel page, search, related videos, etc) are gone. No choice.

Which was extremely bad, but at least you could still watch videos privately right?

July 16: YouTube api features are back but mp4 <video> is replaced with the standard YT video embed. HookTube is now effectively just a light-weight version of youtube and useless to the 90% of you primarily concerned with denying Google data and seeing videos blocked by your governments.

rest in pieces
It was a good run, 1.5 years. Started as a quickly made addition to the norbot project, and within long the server had to be upgraded several times. Of course YouTube Legal was an inevitability at that point.
Special thanks to the many people who created plugins and extensions for hooktube, /g/, the five people who donated anonymously, and BitChute for working hard on a real YouTube alternative. HookTube will remain operational in the present state for those who only needed it for performance reasons. See you in the next project.

:(

Alternatives include: invidio.us, youtube-dl, the Freetube desktop app, Newpipe for Android, and you’re doomed if you use iOS. ETA: Actually, I just remembered, there’s Media Grabber for the Workflow app. And Invidio mostly works on mobile.

Months ago I decided I was going to build my own underwater remotely-operated vehicle. I got sidetracked by a kitchen remodel, but since it is now complete I will have some free time to start working on my vehicle. There are some decent videos out there where others have done the same thing, some are wildly complicated and others are basically built from items out of a scrap bin. I am hoping to land somewhere in the middle.

During the bit of research I have performed, I discovered companies selling very high-end parts, the likes of which you would find on a highly funded/sponsored deep sea expedition or a government project. I didn't find a whole lot of middle ground really, either you DIY or you dump a ton of money into it.

My plan is to use PVC for my hull. I had thought about constructing it similar to the Russian Typhoon-class submarine, with two pressure hulls within an outer hull. That would allow the electrics to reside in dry compartments while I use the void space for ballast. I even found RC submarine ballast systems on eBay which would allow me to take on water and dump it remotely so I could trim it out on the fly.

The general opinion, I have discovered so far, is to make it neutrally buoyant. As much as I would like to add that ballast tank system I may need to just keep it simple for my first attempt. Tethers also seem to be an issue, adding too much weight when they get to a certain length and if you do not take steps to make them buoyant. I thought pool noodles, but learned from someone else that they become water logged and are a bad choice. Then there is power, the trend I noticed is keeping it onboard in the form of a battery pack, but I would like to keep it ashore and just add a wire to the tether so I can not have power to worry about.

So far I have an Arduino board, some old laptops, and some rivers to explore. If we had a makerspace or hackerspace nearby I would be all set. I did search, and the closest is an hour away, which is disappointing since I know I am not the only person into ridiculous projects/hobbies around here! Anyone on here into things like this?

Good morning!

I was listening to the CBC radio on my way to work and there was a very interesting discussion about how people choose to interpret the results of DNA tests. I did a quick search and unfortunately couldn't find the radio broadcast on CBCs site.

Points mentioned (from my memory):

• People don't look at the results of a DNA test and go "this is who I am", instead they use it to cherry-pick who they want to be
• Statically, "white" people tend to identify with a more "exotic" finding in their test
• Example used included a person that chose to identify with who they thought they would pass as; results showed Native and Celtic blood, and person went with Native because he didn't believe they physically passed for Celtic

The cultural appropriation part:

• When non-minorities, who have generally not been raised or have much interaction with the minority they are now choosing to identify with, they can skew, more specifically flatten stats. For example, for a person who's always identified as caucasian to start checking off boxes for a minority, they are potentially 1) disregarding the consequences there are to race (discrimination), and 2) pumping up the stats for minority representation.

As a visible minority myself, I just find it in poor taste. I would love to think people who find a little bit of Asian blood will go and try to discovery more of what it is to be Asian, but I would definitely roll my eyes, if you just come up to me and say "I'm 1/64th like you".

So thoughts? Has anyone done a DNA test and how did it go?

I'm mostly very appreciative of everything @Deimos has accomplished here; so far, it's been a very smooth and interesting alpha experience. I'm seeking some clarity on how the eventual reputation and trust system he proposes might eventually materialize, and would like to start a discussion among other users as to what mechanic they're seeking. [My apologies if this has been addressed previously - search functions are also anxiously awaited.]

There are multiple social sites (Slashdot, HN, Reddit, etc.) which use new/active/upvoted categorization for ranking front-page comments. This seems to be reproduced here, and generally, I don't have a problem with it as long as the permitted posts don't become just a reproduction of inflammatory click-bait available elsewhere, dank memes, etc.

However, on a per-user-basis, the first reasonably-well composed comment on a thread collects most of the votes. My observation is that in an active post thread, the best-reasoned/researched posts may occur after dozens/hundreds of comments, as people who don't spend their entire lives camping on a social site (highly-engaged!) join, read through prior material, and comment. These users don't garner the votes and reputation points which highly-engaged users might, even though they're working harder as quality participants. Threads die, potentially prematurely, because there's no reward for late arrivals or continuing disputation.

While this phenomenon hasn't become egregiously manifest on Tildes yet, there's certainly potential for it to arise. Would it make sense to age out the votes on the "first post!" comment, so that there's some encouragement for deeper or longer posts to continue on an active thread?

Since Tildes is ostensibly built to discourage the "engagement" tactics required to optimize for maximum ad views (e.g. https://www.bitcatcha.com/blog/instagram-tools-strategies-no-ones-talking/), is there another system which might further encourage participants to engage in thoughtful discussion and high-quality posts instead?

Ok, so I'm relatively new here on tildes, so I'm not even sure if I'm posting this in the right place, and if I am, I apologize. One of the things that I've noticed about tildes is that it doesn't have a search bar. I've looked through some posts but can't seem to find anything about it (it was made difficult by the lack of the search bar :P), so I'm wondering is there a reason we don't have one, have we not gotten round to getting one yet or do we just not want one? What are your thoughts on a search bar?

I'm sure as tildes gets bigger, security will continue to be a matter of discussion.

The dev GodEmperors of tildes have (quite awesomely) taken a big position on security already by disallowing breached passwords from being used.

I'm not much of a hacker myself, but it's an armchair interest and I'm sure others more skilled would love to be able to give back to Tildes and help keep the site as secure as possible.

What's the policy on bug hunting, and searching for exploits?

Thanks!

Inspired by @Marszalot 's topic about humor podcasts I would like to see you guys have any good recommendations about high performance mindset topic.

Recently I stumbled across Cindra Kamphoff's podcast at Spotify and I've been enjoying it a lot. Most of them are short, which suits very well my time to walk from home to the office (20 to 30 minutes), but it's weekly, so I'm searching for more sources to listen about high performance mindset / habits.

I have to do an assignment for university soon-ish, and it requires Angular. I'm not very fond of that framework specifically, but I would be interested in making it more interesting as a learning project. I've also recently discovered PureScript, which I have no experience with right now.

Searching online, I've purescript-angular, which hasn't been updated in years. I also couldn't find much else. Of course, I may be missing something simple (for instance, it's actually supported by default in Angular these days), so I wanted to ask if any of you know if this is possible, and if so, how?

I'm certain this has been discussed before, but seeing that
A: There's no search function and
B: Maybe people who joined since the last discussion would like to talk without necroing anything

Is there a cycle/timeline for adding new groups as interest seems to appear?
What's the plan for how to choose which new groups get added?

If not, could we (and the site's staff) discuss possibilities on good ways to do that?

I've gone through quite a few of the music streaming services now. I was on Rdio for a long time until it (sadly) shut down, switched to Spotify for a while, then to Google Play Music, and as of yesterday I have access to YouTube music (which it sounds like is intended to replace GPM before too long).

From a quick glance at YouTube Music I'm a bit worried—the "library" functionality seems pretty limited, and the search isn't really working as I'd expect. It also doesn't seem to have any connection with my GPM collection or playlists.

I think it's been out in the US for about a month now, has anyone been using it? Any thoughts on it so far or suggestions about using it?

In ~comp, there's a post about optimizing a string parser, and one of the tags is "optimisation" instead of "optimization". This makes me curious, what's the official policy for regional spelling differences in tags? Will people be encouraged to use exclusively American or British spellings, or will the search feature (when it arrives) automatically link results for both if you search for either?

Hey there!

I'm planning on going full linux again (last time was 5-6 years ago). The only problem is: i've lost track of the community and especially what hardware is currently best to run, especially tech that was really giving me headaches back then (GPU - remember the omega drivers?).

But searching for linux compatible laptops without purchasing a machine from some dedicated vendor is quite hard.

Any recommendations?

Earlier I saw a post on imgur about how the mars rover has now been carrying out it's mission for almost 15 years, but recently a large dust storm has resulted in NASA being unable to contact the robot at all. Whilst reading the post I felt a sudden sadness for this poor little robot that has been on its own for such a long time and now it can't even communicate with home. I caught myself and wondered why I was feeling such sadness for a electronic device on the other side of solar system.

One possible explanation I had was that most humans all share a common disliking of the feeling of loneliness, and feel sad for those experiencing that feeling, regardless of whether that thing is human or not. Maybe it's just me, but I feel like a lot of other people also hate to see others in a position of loneliness as I think at some point in everyones life you experience some form of loneliness and therefore know how horrible it is to be in that situation. There's a really good quote by Carl Sagan that sums this up rather nicely: “In all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.”

Do any of you fellow users occasionally feel bad for robots or have done so in the past, and why? I'm sure I can't be the only one but I'd like to hear other peoples take on the subject.

Next week the EU parliament will vote for their new copyright directive. In general it contains some good ideas, but also some extremely bad ones, such as article 13. It will require all uploaded content to be scanned, and deleted if it might contain references to other copyrighted material.

The issue here is the word might. Due to the possible fines for companies that accidentally leave up something that contains a copyrighted work, they are incentivized to act more harsh than often necessary. It's safer for them to delete everything that looks like it might infringe copyright than risk the fine.

This could be disastrous for the Internet as we know it. And this is why many movements are speaking out against it. One such example would be the open letter to EU parliament. More information is available on https://saveyourinternet.eu/resources/, and you can find much more about it all over the Internet if you search with your favourite search engine.

What's your opinion on article 13, and have you done anything to make your voice heard?

I was reading a discussion about this on here earlier today, and I've already lost it! 😬 Sorry if this is just creating more noise, but we clearly need better ways to find content. The search feature will go a long way, but here are some other ideas:

Tag search. On any topic with tags, the tags should be clickable links to URLs like https://tildes.net/tag/elder+scrolls. This page would show all topics that use that tag, with sort and filter options. There should be a way (maybe built into the search form) to type any tag and jump straight to this page.

Recently viewed topics list. Reddit shows a sidebar listing the last n posts you viewed. It's admittedly a little creepy seeing your history displayed like that, but it's a useful way to jump back into conversations for follow-up later. The old Reddit design had a "clear" button to delete the history, but curiously that is no longer present in the redesign. (Privacy features like that should not be overlooked here.)

Saved topics. Another feature from Reddit. Every post has a "Save" link below it, that adds the post to your personal saved posts list, which can reached from your profile. Saved post lists are only visible to the users that own them.

Repost detection. I really like how Ask MetaFilter helps posters make sure their content is fresh before they publish it. The submit button under the new post form is labeled "Preview" and clicking it shows what the post will look like before publishing it. This gives posters the opportunity to proofread and ensure their text formatting is correct. More importantly, the site scans the content of the post and displays a list of five possible existing posts that match it:

The following previously-posted questions might be related to the question you're asking. Please take a look before posting to see if any of these answer your question.

This flow adds an additional click before you can actually post, but I think it's for the best. The slowdown politely nudges you toward considering the quality and originality of what you're about to say, without being overbearing. The main MetaFilter site also checks all URLs you enter to see if anyone has posted them before. Note that these tools don't prevent anyone from posting, they just empower users to avoid reposting and reinforce good posting behaviors.

Repost flagging. I have a half-baked idea about allowing users to flag topics as reposts, but I haven't seen this implemented before. This would be separate from voting. A user wishing to flag a topic would be asked to provide the URL of an existing topic it duplicates. This wouldn't affect the topic itself, other than to add a small banner to the top of the page: "n users flagged this as a repost of the following topics: [list of links]". Then anyone would have the ability to [agree], [disagree], or append a link to the list. Public consensus would affect the future of the topic... if enough others agree the topic is redundant, it could be auto-deleted or just algorithmically prioritized lower than non-reposts. If enough disagree, the flag could be auto-removed from the topic. The usernames of the flaggers should be public, and there should be a way to view both a user's frequency of flagging and whether consensus agreed with those flags. Accountability would be important for this sort of system.

Ability to subscribe to users. I saw the other feature request for a "friend" mechanic. I agree with the commenters who said it would be too much like a social network. However, I could see a use case for a "Subscribe" button on a user's profile page, just like the ones on group pages. This would cause all topics posted by that user to be included in your main page, even if they are in groups you aren't subscribed to.

I'd be interested to hear your feedback on these suggestions, as well as other ideas specific to increasing content visibility.