Part 1: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/llhd33/152-the-real-enemy-part-1
Part 2: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/94hwe43/153-the-real-enemy-part-2
Part 3: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/j4hl3vj/154-the-real-enemy-part-3
Sign-ups for the group itself will NOT close and will continue to be available on an invite-only basis.
IMPORTANT EDIT: It is more than okay to join the group even if you do NOT intend to gift games to others! Please join if you want to receive games. Gifters love to have an eager audience to gift to!
For certain events (such as Not-So-Secret Santa) gifting is necessary for those choosing to participate, but these are always optional. Membership in the group and accepting freely given gifts requires no burden of gifting on your behalf.
ALSO IMPORTANT EDIT: Not-So-Secret Santa has a buy-in of under $5 USD. Though gifters can certainly choose to gift a more expensive game if they prefer, each participant is including at least one game on their wishlist that is less than $5 USD in order to minimize the people who are priced out of participating.
With @Deimos's permission, I have started the Tildes' Steam Game Gifting Group and am beginning its first event: Not-So-Secret Santa!
In proper Tildes' fashion the group is invite-only at the moment, so if you would like to join, please reply here or PM me with a link to your Steam profile or your Steam username. I'll have to friend you to send you the invite, but you don't need to keep me on your friends' list after you've accepted it if you don't want to (I promise I won't mind!).
I envision the group being used for specific events (like Not-So-Secret Santa), random giveaways, and group-limited lotteries (using the platform Steamgifts).
Some people only include footnotes on their text after they finish it, or realize that their interpretation of something might not be the same as others interpretation (like what is social media) or source their claims, or detail it after finishing the main body. Admittedly we might want to let the user choose whether their edit is worth notifying to all who replied for the sake of stuff like typos though.
My favorite genres are hip-hop and electronic but lofi and synthwave songs like resonance and HOME are just as good.
Edit: Seems most people here (at least most who replied) like a variety of metal and rock genres. Pretty interesting.
Discuss: namespace clashes expose and ensure instabilities in user-side solutions to interface problems.
Case in point -- the RemindMeBot, which will send a timed reminder message to anyone who calls it in a reddit comment with the phrase "RemindMe!", has been cloned and iterated upon by another bot, Kzreminderbot, which responds to the exact same trigger phrase. Both bots reply to the comment threads where they are summoned. Kzreminderbot has slightly more diverse features, including email/text notification, but the interesting thing here (I think) is the impotence of the response from the creator of RemindMeBot, who has added a link in their comment replies to send annoyed feedback to the second bot.
We talk occasionally about the scramble for usernames on new services, but this is an slightly novel example of the cascading hierarchies of website design. A feature which reddit lacked is added by a bot, but that bot is too provisional to cover the hole which it was meant to fill.
I had a problem uploading a profile photo to Meetup today and so contacted support:
I can't upload a profile photo so am unable to join a number of groups. The photo just fails to upload and have tried a number of different sizes (from 400x400 to over 2000 x 1000) and formats - jpg and png. Something seems to be failing!
I got a fairly quick reply:
What problem do you see when you try to upload a photo? Are you seeing any error messages?
The first thing to check when uploading a photo is the size and format of the image.
Images should be .jpg, .gif, or .png format.
The file size limit is 10MB. (If your file size is already below 10MB, try reducing the size further.)If your image meets these specifications, send the photo to me as an attachment and I'll take a look. I'll also need the link to the page where you're having trouble uploading the photo.
So I sent the image I was trying to photograph (a photo of me with a camera wearing my Refused tshirt) and received this reply:
Profile photos can't have text in them at all (even words written on clothing). It's one of the most common reasons you might have trouble uploading a profile photo. If your photo has any text or lettering, try uploading a different photo.
If that still doesn't work, the next things to check when uploading a photo are the size and format of the image.
Images should be .jpg, .gif, or .png format.
The file size limit is 10MB. (If your file size is already below 10MB, try reducing the size further.)
If your image meets those technical specifications and is free of text, send the photo to me as an attachment and I'll take a look. It's also helpful if you can send the link to the page where you're having trouble uploading the photo.
What? "Profile photos can't have text in them at all (even words written on clothing)"
I pixelated the word "Refused" from the photo and sure enough after uploading the edited photo, it uploaded.
Confused, I sent a reply:
I've pixelated out the text on my tshirt and that seemed to resolve it. It seems to be strange policy? Any reason for this?
And got this bizarre explanation:
To keep our design consistent across all devices, rich text formatting, embedded images, and embedded videos are not supported.
I've replied back to see if the support person can explain what they mean.
If a top-level comment is collapsed by default (presumably due to "noise" tags), replies to that comment will still trigger the "1 new" text on the topic, but won't be visible when you visit the thread - and there's not even any indication that you should expand the noise-tagged comment to see a reply.
Would it be possible(/desirable) to show the red indicator next to collapsed comments if there's a new comment underneath them?
A few pretty quick things to talk about today, with some input wanted on each:
As announced last week, the site now has native scheduled topics (which need to be configured by me). There have been a couple of these posted now, with the most recent one being today's "What are you reading these days?" topic in ~books.
Here's the schedule that I have set up right now. Times are in UTC (Pacific time is UTC-7 and Eastern is UTC-4).
| Topic | Timing (UTC) |
|---|---|
| ~talk - What are you doing this week? | Monday, 15:00 |
| ~games - What have you been playing? | Monday, 16:00 |
| ~tv - What have you been watching? | Tuesday, 16:00 |
| ~anime - What have you been watching/reading this week? (Anime/Manga) | Wednesday, 16:00 |
| ~books - What have you been reading lately? | Every second Thursday, 16:00 |
| ~creative - What creative projects have you been working on? | Every second Thursday (alternating with ~books), 16:00 |
| ~talk - What are you doing this weekend? | Friday, 15:00 |
| ~music - What have you been listening to this week? | Friday, 16:00 |
These were all pre-existing topics that had been getting posted consistently. The timings are a bit arbitrary, but somewhere around 16:00 is usually the time the site starts getting more active each day, and I went with every 2 weeks for ~creative and ~books since I think people don't change through those as quickly.
There are a few other topics I think would be good too, let me know what you think or if this is starting to be too many:
One other question I wanted to ask, since I'm doing some work related to it: Is there any reason for people to still be able to post new top-level comments in old recurring threads? I'll definitely still allow posting replies to existing comments so conversations can continue, but I can't really think of a reason why anyone would need to post a new top-level comment in any thread except the newest, and may just disallow that to keep people from inadvertently posting in the old ones.
I deleted the three ~science subgroups (~science.formal, ~science.natural, ~science.social) and moved all the topics back into ~science. These were confusing (I had to keep checking which branch certain subjects were in), and the activity level across the science groups really isn't high enough to need 4 groups.
I also deleted ~hobbies.automotive and moved the (very few) topics from it back into ~hobbies with an automotive tag. The group was getting less than one topic posted a week, and doesn't seem necessary yet.
One other change I want to make but haven't yet, because I want input first: I think I'd like to move ~creative into a sub-group of ~arts. What do you think of calling it ~arts.original? Any other possible names that would work better as "content created by the poster?"
Finally, I've also just deployed a change that starts showing a "content type" on each topic. Currently it doesn't do anything other than get displayed in the listings, but the plan is to be able to use this for searching, filtering, and similar purposes. This will be able to cover the common requests like "I'd like a way to see only videos", and will also make some other things easier to customize (for example, there's no need to show word count on Ask topics).
Here's the list of content types that are shown right now, but I'm fairly sure that I'm forgetting about some others:
Update on Oct 11: if a type for a link topic isn't detected, it will display "Link"
What other types of content get posted to Tildes that aren't covered in there?
This was posted on Twitter by Alec's sister. She's protected her account now (probably because of how disgusting the replies to it were), but I've re-typed the statement here:
Alec Holowka, my brother and best friend, passed away this morning.
Those who know me will know that I believe survivors and I have always done everything I can to support survivors, those suffering from mental illnesses, and those with chronic illnesses. Alec was a victim of abuse and he also spent a lifetime battling mood and personality disorders. I will not pretend that he was not also responsible for causing harm, but deep down he was a person who wanted only to offer people care and kindness. It took him a while to figure out how.
Over the last few years, with therapy and medication, Alec became a new person—the same person he'd always been but without any of the darkness. He was calm and happy, positive and loving. Obviously, change is a slow process and it wasn't perfect, but he was working towards rehabilitation and a better life.
In the last few days, he was supported by many Manitoba crisis services, and I want to thank everyone there for their support. I want to thank Adam Saltsman for staying up late talking with us and reminding Alec that there was a future.
My family has and always will be the most important thing to me. Please give us time to heal. We tried our best to support Alec, but in the end he felt he had lost too much.
I currently do not see a place for myself in games or on Twitter. I will not be looking at the responses to this post. I appreciate everyone who has reached out to me over the last few days. For anyone who is in a time of darkness, I encourage you to reach out for support. There are always people who will be there for you.
As backstory, he was accused of abuse (and sexual abuse) last week by Zoe Quinn with several others corroborating past abusive behavior (a bit more detail in this article). As a result, the other Night in the Woods creators cut ties with him. I'm going to re-post their statements below inside a collapsed block since they're fairly long, but you can expand it if you want to read them:
From Scott Benson's personal account:
Allegations of past abuse have come to light this week regarding Alec Holowka, who we have worked with in the past. We take such allegations seriously, and applaud those speaking out about their experiences with abuse in the industry and elsewhere.
As a result, we won't be working with Alec in the future. What this means for Night in the Woods going forward is something we will have to work out. These things take time, longer than a couple days at least.
Night in the Woods is a very personal game for Bethany and I. Our parts of the game - the writing, world, characters, art, etc - are pulled from our own lives, sometimes very directly.
We know it has connected with thousands of people in a very deep manner. And whatever your reaction is, that's valid. Know that we are just as heartbroken right now. We'll have more info in the future about how we're moving forward. Thanks.
On a more personal note, this has all been devastating. And people will ask for details that we as collaborators on a project simply do not have. They’ll want essays and interviews as if we have some secret info. But we don’t. We’re just very sad right now.
And on the Night in the Woods account
This week, allegations of past abuse have come to light regarding Alec Holowka, who was coder, composer, and co-designer on Night In The Woods. We take such allegations seriously as a team. As a result and after some agonizing consideration, we are cutting ties with Alec.
We are cancelling a current project and postponing the Limited Run physical release. The iOS port is being handled by an outside company and supervised by Finji and will remain in development.
We’ve received a lot of emails and messages in the past few days, often very hurt and angry. That’s also how we feel. This has been very, very tough.
I should say that I’m Scott. Hello. I run this account. I was the artist, lead animator, co-designer, co-writer, and the guy who wrote almost all of that dialogue in the game. Bethany’s here too, she was co-writer and researcher.
Much of Night In The Woods is pulled pretty directly from our lives. Bethany is from a tiny valley in central PA. I’ve lived out here in Western PA for about 20 years. The characters are us, and people we’ve known. The places are ones we know.
Thousands of people have connected with Night In The Woods in a very personal way. We can’t tell you how to feel about any of this. Whatever you’re feeling is valid. Your experience with art is yours. What it means to you is yours, regardless of anything else.
Going forward, Night In The Woods will be handled by Bethany and I. We’re not sure what that all means yet. This stuff takes time.
Thanks for your support over the years. We’re sorry to even have to say any of this. That’s all I can say at the moment. Thank you for your patience.
(Edit: since Zoe Quinn has deleted her Twitter account now, I'm going to re-type her statement as well)
I want to say upfront that I'm not saying this for anyone but me and the other people that I know have been hurt by him, and might in the future be hurt. I read Nathalie Lawhead's post about her rapist being an industry legend who took advantage of her and poisoned her career and it shook me to my core. Her waning health, her fear, the way she described all of it feeling like drowning... and my heart broke for her. Beyond that, I felt *ashamed*. So many of the little details, down to the timing, had been things I've gone through too, just a few months into my time as an indie game developer. And it's haunted me ever since. It's why I don't go to GDC anymore. I'm drowning too.
A few months into making games, I was sexually assaulted. My visa status was threatened if I told anyone, and he went out of his way to tell the community that I'd been falsely accusing him of rape when I hadn't said anything to anyone (but a third party who saw it happen firsthand confronted him about it the next day). This story isn't about him - after years of therapy and working on himself, he reached out and apologized for everything, and I've forgiven him. But that's the background to this story.
One month after the assault, I wanted to leave Toronto. I was scared, I couldn't sleep, and I almost killed myself over it. I had a suicide note and everything ready to go but I just didn't want to do that to my roommate.
Enter Alec Holowka. Yeah, the one from Aquaria and Night in the Woods. He was one person who I felt like, in my newly chosen field, had my back.
He talked about how great and cheap Winnipeg was and we flirted and talked on skype for hours. He knew I was in an incredibly vulnerable place and he asked me to come visit him in Winnipeg to see if I'd want to start an indie house there with the 3 friends I'd been talking about the idea with, and to see if the thing between us was as cool as it seemed at a distance. Two weeks. I'd buy the plane ticket there, he'd buy my plane ticket back. He knew i couldn't afford it otherwise so that was the deal.
I wouldn't get home for a month, and only then it was because my roommate used his miles to get me out of his apartment that he had physically confined me to.
While I was in Winnipeg he slowly isolated me from everyone else in my life while absolutely degrading me whenever we were alone. He convinced me to talk the 3 friends out of getting a shared place with me there. He convinced me to let him program my game instead of the friend I had been working with, despite many protests. He screamed at me for over an hour once because of the tone in my voice when I said hello. He wouldn't let me leave the apartment without him and refused to give me the code to get in.
About the sexual assault, he blamed me. He said he was jealous of me, to be wanted like that. He'd bring it up during sex, where he'd regularly be mean and violent. He told me he loved me, in a way no one else would, because he could see that I was terrible and he loved me anyway. And I bought it, because that's how you feel when you're recovering from being sexually assaulted.
I spent a lot of that month hiding from him in the bathroom. His moods would shift and he'd throw things and hurt himself seemingly at random and blame me. He'd jam his fingers inside me and walk me around the house by them when I told him it hurt.
I was scared to leave. I was scared to tell anyone. He'd act normal when other people were around and lay into me as soon as we were alone, then apologize and say how much he needed and loved me. I got even more scared when the two weeks had passed and he kept putting off the agreed plane ticket home. I spent a lot of that time hiding in the bathroom from him. My roommate started to get scared and asked me if I needed help getting out. I said yes, and Alec barely looked at me as I left.
When I got home, I sent a cordial and friendly break up email. He lashed out and banned me from an indie games community he ran, banned himself, then went to other industry legends asking them to help him kill himself because I was such a bitch. He made sure to blacklist me at important industry events. He tried to ruin the career I'd barely started. To a degree it worked.
The night GG started I vaguebooked about it without specifying which ex and two other women in games immediately messaged me to ask if it was Alec. He'd done similar things to them. They knew he'd been fixated on me and were also too afraid to speak up about an industry legend.
It's been the better part of a decade and I'm still afraid of him. Too afraid to speak out, especially because I've gone through so much publicly, like people will just roll their eyes and ignore me as if there's some karmic limit on how much bad shit can happen to someone before people stop listening. I'm afraid that people will care more about their love of Night in the Woods than they will about the safety and truths of women and non-binary people in games.
I'm still afraid of him. I'm afraid of telling anyone about him. I'm afraid of how many indies have seen this behavior and given him a pass. I'm afraid of being in the same room as him because I'm afraid he'll hurt me again. I'm afraid of all the developers who watched this happen, and watched him scream abuse at another woman out front of Moscone during GDC.
But being silent for years has been worse than the fear. I skipped the last 2 GDCs because I couldn't risk being around him or seeing everyone clap for him on stage. Especially not people who know.
I don't wish any ill will on anyone. I know Alec is likely not well and I will always believe in rehabilitation over punishment. I don't want anything bad to come of this to his collaborators who may not know any of this. But I've watched enough of the big names in the indie community know about him - so much so that the reaction to his first meltdown about me was "oh well that's Alec what can you do" - and I've seen enough to know nothings going to happen about this particular broken stair unless someone says something. But we're all scared. I'm scared. A big childish part of me has been hoping people would somehow start caring or figure it out on their own.
But feeling like a coward in the face of Nathalie's strength, feeling like I have to hide from my own life because it's not safe and I can't tell anyone *why* I'm hiding, of knowing I wasn't the first or last, of drowning, that's too much for me to keep carrying with me. I just want the other boot to drop so I can breathe again. I don't want another new dev to get hurt and hear the same "oh that's just how he is" after the fact that I did. I want to breathe again.
IMO one of the major issues with online debates, arguments and heated discussions is that they often tend to escalate rather steadily over time, and as each side gets more frustrated with the other they also tend to slowly get more personal as well. I am admittedly guilty of falling into this trap occasionally myself too, which has got me thinking about ways that Tildes (the site and the users here) can potentially help deescalate unproductive arguments and allow people to disengage more effectively from them. To this end I thought it might be a good idea to have a brainstorming session regarding that.
To start things off, here are most of the ideas I could find related to this issue that have previously been proposed and are already on Tildes Gitlab (click ▶ to read the full details):
How deep the block goes is also something that probably needs to be investigated and discussed. E.g. Does blocking a user just prevent PMs? Does it prevent their replies from notifying the user? Does it hide their comments/topics, and if so does it hide all the replies to those hidden comments as well? Etc.
edit: Feature also requested again, but for a slightly different reason (avoiding getting spammed on busy topics)
Feel free to voice your support or criticism regarding the above suggestions, offer up ideas to potentially improve them, or even propose your own brand new ideas related to this issue in the comments here as well.
p.s. Once again, the point here is to open up the conversation and get ideas flowing freely, so let's please try to keep things positive, and keep any criticism purely constructive and friendly so as not to discourage people from participating.
Previous Unofficial Weekly Discussions:
Other relevant links:
Donate to Tildes - Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board - Tildes Official Docs
Similar to the last topic, I've got some more minor updates to let everyone know about.
It's also been quite a while since we had a general feedback topic, so let's do that today as well—feel free to ask any questions or give feedback about Tildes overall.
Here's what's been happening:
@Algernon_Asimov's major reorganizing and rework of the Docs is now live on https://docs.tildes.net. A decent number of changes needed to be made to be able to support having the pages in categories/folders, dealing with some formatting changes, redirecting old urls, etc. Some of these changes have started being integrated back into the wiki on Tildes itself as well (and I'm still gradually working on it). For example, the pages in the ~tildes.official wiki are somewhat organized into the same folders, even though the UI doesn't handle it very well in a lot of places yet.
If you want to help edit the Docs at all, all of the pages (except site policies) are available in the ~tildes.official wiki, and I'll review and transfer any edits to the Docs site. If you don't have access to edit the wiki, send me a message and ask and I can give you access to edit (and you can edit the other groups' wikis too).
Some new HTML-exclusive formatting capabilities are available when writing posts:
<small>: lets you write a section of text in a smaller font. Good for "side notes" and such, and much better than using superscript, which some people were doing previously to get that effect.<details> and <summary>: lets you make "expandable" blocks in your comments. This is useful if you want to do things like hide a large block of text or code and let people expand it if they want to read it. @hungariantoast used it immediately in his comment here, if you want to see an example. The current state of it isn't great for use for spoilers (but probably better than just writing them in plain sight), but I may make an adaptation of it specifically for use for spoilers.There's a new site theme available, "Zenburn". It's a fairly low-contrast, and used to be one of my favorite color schemes. I had to do some work on one of my old sites that was using it last weekend, and it reminded me how much I liked it, so I added it. Here's the official screenshot of the vim color scheme for it, if you want an idea of what colors it uses. You can change the theme on the settings page if you're logged in, or there's a dropdown at the bottom of every page if you're logged out.
@deing has added a small warning to try to let people know when they're about to reply to an old comment or topic, since it seems fairly common for people to accidentally "necrobump" old threads without realizing. For now, the warning shows up when the topic/comment is over a week old. I set that threshold based on pulling out some stats and seeing that only 1% of comment replies and 2% of top-level comments were replying to anything that old, so it should be quite rare for anyone to see anyway.
Other than that, I haven't forgotten about the new group proposals and should be adding some new ones this week. I wanted to finish some backend changes to the group system first to help with that, and it's... gotten more ugly than I was expecting. Sorry for the delay, hopefully soon though.
Let me know if you have any thoughts about any of those changes, and as mentioned, feel free to use this topic for general feedback/questions as well, since I'm sure there are some things that people want to give feedback or ask about that might not feel like they're worth starting a thread in ~tildes for. As usual, I've also topped everyone back up to 10 invite codes, which you can get here.
This thought was brought to you/sponsored by my perception that there's an increasing number of comments on Tildes that attempt to "answer" questions posed in the titles of posts, but don't necessarily demonstrate that the user has read the article before commenting. I won't link specific comments, but I've noticed a fair bit of it as of late. I get that those titles bait people into voicing their opinion, but often it's at the detriment of overall discussion. Should a prerequisite of clicking the actual link in question be a requirement before the user is allowed to post a top level comment? Or perhaps a cooldown period of entering a thread versus commenting may help?
The goal here would be to disincentivise the posting of "driveby" or similarly reductive comments that often don't demonstrate nuance or knowledge that is conveyed in the associated article. Sure, we can't ever know if the user has actually read the article, but it's not designed to be a foolproof strategy, just a discouraging one.
There's a few ways this could be implemented, probably via the utilization of a small bit of javascript that toggle's a user's reading state for a particular post. Thoughts?
Just to clarify since I've edited this post: I mean top-level comments only. Replies are more likely to be in response to the parent comment, rather than the title and wouldn't be affected by this proposal.
I'm sharing in case some of you are having a similar issue at work or at home, and to hear your opinion and/or similar stories!
I've been using Ubiquiti access points in my home for a few years now, and overall, they've worked very well. 3 APs giving near perfect 5GHz VHT80 coverage on DFS channels. LAN transfers are about 600-650mbit on laptops, which has proven to be plenty for wireless clients in my home. Keep in mind that this is a pretty basic setup... besides the APs, there's just the ISP provided GPON ONT which is also a typical all-in-one ISP solution (router, switch, AP, firewall, DHCP server...) with it's Wi-Fi turned off.
As I said, I was pretty happy with the results, however there was one feature that I could never get to work just right; roaming. You could be walking around the house watching a live stream and the stream would pause for 5-8 seconds until the roaming transition was over. Strangely, with VoIP calls, roaming would be about 3-5 seconds. Even enabling fast roaming features (which I believe is simply 802.11r) on the AP's controller would not give the results I was looking for. After days of tweaking TX power settings, channel selection and trying to implement Minimum RSSI (which I ended up not using), I finally gave up and resigned myself to the 4-6 seconds (oh, the humanity) of roaming time.
Fast forward to about two months ago and I added a new router to the setup (UBNT ER-4) and a switch (UBNT USW-24). Setup went smooth, already had some cat.6 cabling around the house, now it was time to actually use it. Had some fun setting up a guest Wi-Fi network on it's own VLAN, which was always a concern of mine; having "untrusted" devices connect to my network. The access points do client isolation on guest networks by default, but in my mind it wasn't enough as I have some file servers and time machines on the network.
Anyways, a few days after doing the setup I'm walking around the house with a livestream on my mobile and suddenly realize that it's not losing the connection. I try with a VoIP call and it worked flawlessly. I start walking around faster and still, the phone is roaming without an issue. I was very excited!
I'm thinking it must be the router that somehow solved the roaming issue. My first theory was that the DHCP server on the ER-4 was doing it's thing much faster than the ISP's device, allowing the wireless clients to actually roam faster. So I do a web search and I find some very relevant info. It was a thread on a forum and reddit thread with a sysadmin that was about to give up on the APs because of roaming issues. In both threads, there were replies about what switch were they using.
Apparently, some switches (Cisco and HP were mentioned), have a "MAC aging" interval setting which is way too high by default, or they simply have bugged firmware that doesn't allow the switch to "re-learn" the MAC address of a device on a different switch port. I assume that ISP provided "el-cheapo" gear has similar issues.
So, if you're having roaming issues with your wireless clients, check your switches!!!
Anyways, just wanted to share this story. Thank you for reading. :-)
It's been over a year now since we first talked about adding some more groups to the site (and ended up adding several). I think the current set has mostly worked well since then, but some people have mentioned being hesitant to post as many topics as they want to on some subjects due to not wanting to flood out the more-general groups, as well as feeling like some subjects also don't fit into the existing ones.
So let's do another round of suggestions. New groups can be either top-level ones (if that seems to make the most sense) or a sub-group of an existing one (for example, this group, ~tildes.official is a sub-group of ~tildes). The functionality of sub-groups is a little weak right now, but I'll be working on that over the next few days to get it into better shape in case we end up adding some new ones.
The general process from last time seemed to work fine, so I'm just going to copy that:
Proposing a group
If you want to propose an idea for a new group (either a new top-level group or a sub-group of an existing one), make a top-level comment with the following information:
- The proposed name for the group, and a short description of its purpose/subject.
- 3 examples of topics that would be appropriate to be posted in that group. These can be existing posts already on Tildes, or hypothetical new ones. Just example titles/links is sufficient, it should just give an idea of what sort of posts you're expecting the group to get.
- A "failure plan" - if the trial group doesn't work out, what should we do with the posts from it? For example, should they be moved into an existing group or groups, with a particular tag?
Supporting a proposal
To express your support for a proposal that someone else made, post a reply to it, saying something like "I would post in this group" (assuming you actually believe you will). I don't want to interpret votes on a proposal as support, and for a group to be successful it really needs people to post to it, so I think it's most important to get at least some indication that there are users that will post in the group if it's created.
I'll let this topic run for at least 3 days before making any decisions, so don't feel like you need to rush. General questions or thoughts about groups are welcome too, it doesn't need to be entirely proposals. I've also topped given everyone 10 invites again as well. Thanks!
What are Tilderinoes' opinions on people who correct other people's grammar? Should it be done publicly, as a reply, or privately, in a PM, if at all?
(foreigners are also welcome to chime in on who they'd vote for if they were eligible)
it's still 200 days to the iowa caucuses, but since this election cycle began literally six months ago already and we already have one debate under the belt, we're probably far enough along in the primary at this point that at least some of the billion candidates trying to run for the coveted position of democratic nominee for president in 2020 are making an impact on you, and nobody has actually asked this on here recently, weirdly enough.
i'll probably ask this question again in... i dunno, three months (so mid-october)? and see what changes between threads (if anything does).
I bet this is already taken care of, but if I type @Silbern or /u/Silbern , will I get a notification I wonder?
Edit: Nope, but someone else replied to a comment right before I hit refresh, so for a brief moment, thought I did. Thought I was quite clever for a moment, but alas.
Update! After a few hours of struggling I managed to set up Read the docs for Tildee, it should help using the library significantly.
After getting some inspiration from TAPS I thought that maybe I try to work on something vaguely similar on my own. And after… some? hours of coding today I came up with this: tildee.py (source)
It's a wrapper for the Tildes Public/Web API that is already used by the site internally to make it work. The obvious problem with that is that it will at one point break when this unstable API is changed. It can do basically all things a normal user can do with the notable exception of applying comment labels (because I haven't gotten around to that yet).
Example of usage for a DM reply bot (result):
import sys
from tildee import TildesClient
import time
# Initialize client and log in, 2FA isn't supported yet and will probably break in horrible ways
t = TildesClient("username", "password", base_url="https://localhost:4443", verify_ssl=False)
while True:
# Retrieve the "unread messages" page and get a list of the conversations there
unread_message_ids = t.fetch_unread_message_ids()
for mid in unread_message_ids:
# Access the conversation history page; this also clears the "unread" flag
conversation = t.fetch_conversation(mid)
# Get the text of the last message
text = conversation.entries[-1].content_html
# Abort if it's from the current user (I don't think this could actually happen)
if conversation.entries[-1].author == t.username:
break
print(f"Found a message by {conversation.entries[-1].author}")
# If the message contains a reference, reply in kind
if "hello there" in text.lower():
print("Replying…")
t.create_message(mid, f"General {conversation.entries[-1].author}! You are a bold one.")
# Delay before processing next unread message
time.sleep(3)
# Delay before next unread check
time.sleep(60)
This has a lot of potential. Haven't yet figured out potential for what, but I'll take what I can get.
I'd be really grateful if someone with a little more experience than me (that's not exactly a high bar :P) could give me some pointers on the project's structure and the "API design", hence the ask tag. Other creative ideas for what to use this for are appreciated, too.
welcome to debate #1, night 2. the first thread on this turned out to be about twice as active as i was expecting (i estimated at most 50 or so replies), and that was for the "undercard" so unless something changes with this night, i think we'll be doing these in pairs from here on out--at least until either the DNC pushes out enough candidates for one debate, or activity drops significantly in these threads. previous night's thread can be found here if you'd like to continue the discussions of last night's candidates. anyways here are all the details you'd ever need, and probably then some:
first off, i recommend you sort by newest first instead of the default since this thread will likely be semi-active and covering a live event.
The debate is being broadcast by NBC News, MSNBC and Telemundo, and will air live across all three networks starting at 9 p.m. ET.
Telemundo will broadcast the debate in Spanish.
The debate will stream online free on NBC News' digital platforms, including NBCNews.com, MSNBC.com, the NBC News Mobile App and OTT apps on Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV, in addition to Telemundo's digital platforms.
livestreams will also be available on Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube because the DNC mandated that of its partners for the debates.
Democratic Presidential Debate: See The 20 Candidates Who Will Be Onstage
Bennet is running on fixing a broken political system, the blame for which he puts at the feet of Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell. Bennet says spending from wars and tax cuts was essentially the U.S. lighting “money on fire.”
Biden’s top concern is less about reshaping America and more about returning America to “normalcy.” He argues that if President Trump gets another four years, the DNA of the country will be fundamentally altered.
The 37-year-old is making a generational-change argument. He argues for progressive processes — like fixing redistricting and voting rights — in addition to policies — like being more cautious on war and more progressive on climate change and health care.
She’s focused on women’s rights, especially when it comes to health care. She boasts that a Fox host called her “not very polite” for speaking out about the “nationwide assault on women’s reproductive freedoms” and “fundamental human rights for women.”
Harris’ slogan is “for the people,” and she’s making the case that President Trump is a “fraud.” The former prosecutor says Trump is fighting for the wrong people — the powerful and wealthy — while she wants to “advocate for the voiceless and vulnerable.”
The centrist has a pragmatic message. He says pragmatists aren’t against big things; they know how to get them done. He has also spoken out against Democrats’ lurch toward socialism, warning that moving in that direction would reelect President Trump.
Sanders wants to beat President Trump, but he believes the way to do it is not with “middle-ground” approaches, but with promising wholesale progressive change. He’s the only candidate willing to wear the (democratic) socialist label.
He has focused his campaign on ending gun violence in the country, targeting semiautomatic assault weapons in particular by calling for a mandatory national ban and buyback.
The New Age author is campaigning with a philosophy of “Think. Love. Participate.” As an outsider to politics, she believes change needs to come from the outside and that “half-truth tellers” can’t beat President Trump.
The startup investor is running on a data-first approach to the presidency. His big idea is to address the threat of automation with a Universal Basic Income, in which every adult would get $1,000 a month.
Candidates will have 60 seconds to answer questions and 30 seconds to respond to follow-ups. No opening statements, though candidates will have a chance to deliver closing remarks.
Five segments each night separated by four commercial breaks.
NPR has 7 questions of their 8 for the debates which apply to today's debate:
Will Biden stand up to the scrutiny?
Is the debate an opportunity or danger zone for Bernie Sanders?
Can Harris and Buttigieg stand out?
Do the pragmatists or progressives win out?
How much of a focus is Trump?
How will foreign policy factor in?
Who will stick in voters' minds?
other pre-debate analysis pieces that may be pertinent to you:
I am working on an app called Percent Done that is a combination of goal setting, time tracking and habit tracking.
I like setting time-based goals for myself every day, such as “write for an hour” or “work on Percent Done for four hours.”
I also like Seinfeld’s “don’t break the chain” method. For example, Apple Watch shows you how many days you have completed your exercise circle and tells you that you have been keeping at it for x days.
Percent Done is a marriage of these two concepts. It allows you to set goals and track the time you spend on them, as well as how many days in a row you have consistently completed them. For example, you can add a goal that says “write for an hour every day,” and Percent Done will notify you every day to write for an hour. You will be able to tap on this goal and Percent Done will start counting back from one hour. You will also be able to see how many days in a row you have written for an hour.
You can also add one-time goals to Percent Done with or without time tracking, so it is a task management tool as well.
You can play with the design prototype here: Percent Done design prototype
I would really love to get your feedback on this. If you are interested in being a beta tester, feel free to reply to this topic or e-mail me at "hi at evrim dot io."
By the way, this is almost completely a self-promotion post. If it is against the rules, I'd be happy to remove this.
Neon Genesis Evangelion is out on Netflix. I'm thinking to use this topic as the megathread to discuss the (re-)watch, to avoid flooding the Tildes Activity feed with one topic per episode.
To borrow a past Tildo's approach, I ask that any top-level comments contain ONLY the episode number, such as "Episode 13" and no other text.
Press the Collapse replies button, find the top-level comment for the episode you care about, and reply under that top-level comment. If there's not yet a top-level comment with that episode number, create it.
Since it launched, Tildes has always been using "Activity" as the site's default sorting method, which behaves like a classic forum—any new comment in any topic causes it to "bump" back to the top of the list. This has generally worked well overall, and has been a good way to keep threads visible and active over longer periods.
However, there have been a few issues related to it, such as controversial threads staying at the top of the site for long periods of time, and bickering back and forth between two users causing threads to constantly bump back up to the top even if nobody else is interacting with the topic at all. We haven't had great ways to deal with this so far, and have mostly had to work around it by setting the default time period to "last 3 days" so that threads can't dominate the site indefinitely, or even locking threads to force them to drop off.
As an attempt at a better solution, "Activity" has now had its behavior changed so that topics will only bump to the top when something "interesting" happens, instead of for every single comment. The exact methods we're using to determine "interesting" will need experimentation and to be adjusted as we see how they work, but initially it's entirely based on comment labels:
If a comment or any of its parent comments has an active Noise, Offtopic, or Malice label (note: it generally takes at least two users applying the label to make it "active"), the comment will not cause the thread to bump to the top. For example, this means that if a particular comment gets labeled as Offtopic, any replies "below" that comment will no longer bump the thread in the Activity sort. This will also apply retroactively, so if someone posts a new top-level comment, the thread will still initially bump to the top, but if that comment is then labeled as Noise, it will "un-bump" and return back to its previous location in the listing.
Since this will give us a better way to prevent threads from staying at the top of the site forever, I've also now changed the default time period back to "all time".
If you'd rather keep the previous behavior and continue having threads always bump to the top when a new comment is posted in them, you can use the new "All activity" sorting method instead. Logged-in users can set it as their default sorting across the site by changing to it on the home page and clicking "Set as default" to the right of the time period dropdown.
Any feedback is welcome, but these are questions that I'm particularly interested in:
As usual, I've also given everyone 10 invites again (and don't worry, I haven't forgotten about turning the visible comment votes back on either, and I'll do that this afternoon, along with posting a thread to discuss it).
I thought it might be fun to make a little game out of asking Fermi problems and trying to work out solutions to others'.
A Fermi problem is (to quote wikipedia ):
an estimation problem designed to teach dimensional analysis or approximation, and such a problem is usually a back-of-the-envelope calculation. The estimation technique is named after physicist Enrico Fermi as he was known for his ability to make good approximate calculations with little or no actual data. Fermi problems typically involve making justified guesses about quantities and their variance or lower and upper bounds.
Basically, these are questions that would be very difficult to calculate exactly without looking up the answer. The goal is to arrive at a good estimate by making justified assumptions. As such, looking up facts and statistics should be minimized or outright avoided (e.g., if the question is "What is the mass of the water in Lake Michigan?", you shouldn't look up Lake Michigan's volume to aid your answer. This should be estimated from things you know off the top of your head).
Fermi problems can be fun to come up with, and fun to answer. Examples of Fermi problems might include:
How many piano tuners are there in Chicago? (this one is apparently one that Fermi came up with himself)
How many keystrokes occur worldwide, daily?
What is the mass of the water in Lake Michigan?
How many cars are there in New York City on a given day?
How many blades of grass are there on the National Mall?
How many eggs are consumed in the US each day?
Since many of these have no definitive answer, it is not always possible to score the 'correctness' of an answer. Nonetheless, others can judge when an answer makes reasonable assumptions, so feel free reply to answers with suggestions of which assumptions can be refined or further justified.
Not much to add. It'd be nice to read replies later to something you feel is going to get a lot of replies so you don't get spammed with notifications
Top level comments should fill in the blank with some sort of descriptor identifying a kind of song you would like suggestions for. Be as generic or specific as you want.
Replies can then recommend songs to that individual.
Hint: Use the "collapse replies" button to view only top-level posts.
This post went well in ~books, so I figured we could give it a go here.
Top level comments should fill in the blank with some sort of descriptor identifying a kind of game you would like suggestions for. Be as generic or specific as you want.
Replies can then recommend games to that individual.
Hint: Use the "collapse replies" button to view only top-level posts.
EDIT: This is an old thread that's fallen off many people's feeds. See a current version here.
Top level comments should fill in the blank with some sort of descriptor identifying a kind of book you would like suggestions for. Be as generic or specific as you want.
Replies can then recommend books to that individual.
Examples of what I'm thinking for top level posts, in case my description was unclear:
We've had an experimental method of avoiding deeply nested comment threads in effect for a little over a week now, and while I think it's useful in some ways, it's definitely also pretty confusing in some cases (as multiple people have pointed out to me).
I've made two changes to it now that should help quite a bit:
The flattening will now only happen when there won't be any "sibling" comments after the flattened thread.
This is to avoid what seemed to be the most confusing case (it's a bit difficult to explain, but I'll try): Previously, you could have a thread where a comment has a few replies ("A", "B", "C"), and the first one has a string of single replies ("A2", "A3", "A4"). If the flattening applied, you would have all 6 comments displayed on the same level, in the order of A, A2, A3, A4, B, C. It was very difficult to tell where the "A subtree" ended and it went back to siblings of A—you had to look for where comments stopped having the "(Reply to above comment)" note on them.
Some people suggested that we use a more obvious indicator of the flattened threads (which might still be a good idea), but this case should now be avoided entirely, which should reduce a lot of the potential confusion when threads are flattened. This also means that the flattening will apply in fewer cases overall, but it should still work for the most common and impactful case of a long string of single replies going back and forth.
As mentioned in the original announcement, one of the nice parts of managing to do the flattening entirely in CSS means that it could easily start at higher thresholds on larger screens, so that threads aren't flattened as early on desktop/laptop-size screens as they are on mobile. I've applied this now, and it should now be very rare to see a flattened thread if you're using the site on a PC.
If you want to see this in action, you can go to a thread where flattening would apply (the ~tildes.official thread about "source info" is still a good one), and try resizing your browser window to see how the flattening kicks in and adjusts at different sizes. If you're using Firefox, an easy way to try this out is to press Ctrl-Shift-M to go into responsive design mode, and you can easily resize the viewport or set it to specific sizes.
Other than these changes to the flattening behavior, I've also merged in another open-source contribution that adds alternate sorting methods on the user page. These only appear when you're on the Topics or Comments listings (not the default "mixed" page), and allow you to sort by the other methods available, such as "most votes". Note that since those Topics/Comments pages are only available to logged-in users, viewers without a Tildes account won't be able to use these alternate sortings. Thanks for the work on this, JediBurrell (whose Tildes username I don't know either)!
Let me know what you think of these changes and if you notice any issues with either of them.
One of the difficulties with a nested/tree commenting system is finding a way to deal with threads that get very "deep", when people continue replying back and forth under the same threads. The deep threads end up getting indented very far, and this looks bad, can be hard to follow, and wastes a ton of space (especially on smaller screens like phones).
I'm not a huge fan of any of the ways that I've seen other sites try to handle this, so I've been trying to figure out if there might be any other possibilities that would work well. I've noticed that in most of the cases where a thread gets very deep, a lot of the depth comes from back-and-forth replies, where there's only one comment on each "level". So I'm testing a method that will flatten those sections out and just put a note on each comment that it's a direct reply to the comment above it.
Specifically, the current method (which is now live), works like this: if a comment is at least 4 levels deep and only has a single reply, don't indent the reply any further. Instead, keep the reply at the same indentation and add a note at the top of it indicating that it's a reply to the above comment.
I managed to implement this entirely through CSS, by writing what's probably the worst best chunk of CSS (really, SASS) of my life, which I want to show off here. If you don't know CSS and can't read this, trust me, you're better off:
.comment:not([data-comment-depth="0"]):not([data-comment-depth="1"]):not([data-comment-depth="2"]):not([data-comment-depth="3"]) {
&[data-comment-replies="1"] {
& > .comment-tree-replies {
margin-left: -1px; // compensate for border
& > .comment-tree-item > .comment > .comment-itself {
& > .comment-text::before,
& > header > .is-comment-deleted::before,
& > header > .is-comment-removed::before {
content: "(Reply to above comment)";
font-size: 0.6rem;
font-style: italic;
margin-right: 0.2rem;
}
}
}
}
}
One of the really interesting things about implementing this entirely in CSS is that we can easily change what level it happens at based on screen size. So I have it set to always start at depth >= 4 right now to help with testing and deciding whether it works well or not, but if we decide to keep it I could easily change the threshold to higher on desktop and keep it lower on smaller screens.
As an example of how it works, the previous ~tildes.official thread works really well. @Amarok and @cfabbro had a long discussion about music metadata that went very deep. The thread ends up 16 levels deep, but this new change makes it so that it only indents by 5 levels instead of 16. Here's a comparison between how the end of the thread looks on my phone: before this change vs. after this change (yes, something's not quite right with the indentation lines yet).
Let me know what you think. I'm mostly concerned that this might make it a little harder to follow long threads since the information from the indentation is lost, but I think we need to test it out in real threads for a while to see if that actually ends up being significant or just takes a bit of getting used to.
It is Wednesday, my dudes! So why not have some good old foreign-language practice? As an
experiment, let's try just that. Start a thread in a language you would like to practice or teach,
or reply to an existing one. E.g.
## German / Deutsch
Hier sprechen wir Deutsch! Wie geht es Ihnen?
If you want to fix someone's grammar and also reply to them in the same message, I would recommend
using a horizontal ruler with “* * *”. E.g.:
I think “sich” should be “ihm”.
* * *
Es tut mir Leid, dass es ihm so schlecht geht.
This is a relatively minor update, but one I've been meaning to do for a long time. By default, comment notifications will now be automatically marked as read if you interact with the comment (currently, by: voting on it, replying to it, labelling it, or bookmarking it). This will happen regardless of where you take the interaction, so if you're viewing the thread itself and interact with comments that you also had notifications for, they will be marked read.
When you're on the unread notifications page, even though actions are resulting in the comments being marked read, they won't disappear like they do if you click the "mark as read" button manually. This is so that you can take multiple actions if you want (such as voting and then replying). However, if you reload the page, they will disappear.
If you don't like this behavior and would prefer to continue marking all comments as read manually, you can go to the Settings page and disable "Automatically mark notifications read when you interact with the source comment".
I've bumped everyone back up to 10 invite codes as well, which you can get from the Invite page.
For those of you not following the NBA too closely you might not be aware but tonight the Magic play the Heat. For about the past month or so the two teams have been battling out for the final seed in the Eastern Conference Playoffs. I'll re-cap why this is so important for the Magic since they're the team I support and maybe some Heat fans can hit back with a reply for why it's so important to them.
In the 2011-2012 season the Magic entered a dark period called the "Dwightmare" where their best player who had led them to an NBA final Dwight Howard began stirring up drama within the organisation. Dwight was traded in the offseason to the Lakers giving serious deja vu of Shaq's time in Orlando. Since 2012 the Magic have consistently been cursed to mediocrity and missing the playoffs.
Magic star Nikola Vucevic (a player acquired from the Dwight trade) has been constantly underrated and disrespected by people around the NBA. After 7 seasons Vuc has finally made the All Star team and has led this team to exceed the expectations set at the beginning of the season. It is also important to note that Vuc has not made the playoffs either since 2012 when he was playing with the 76ers.
The Magic are 0.5 games behind the Heat, whoever wins this match will take the 8th seed from the other and likely bring a lot of motivation and momentum into their next games therefore being more likely to make the playoffs.
There's many more storylines to this match than I've put in here but I feel that this gets the main gist of why it's so important to fans of the Magic.
Suppose you want to participate in an old post with hundreds of comments. You made your fresh new comment, injecting your thoughts and effort into it and hit the post button with hopes and dreams.
The post is bumped to the top under Activity. Other tilders saw the old post on the top, they are intrigued, perhaps as much as you are and wonder what you can add to the discussion, but they couldn't find your comment.
Why is that?
You replied to a thread with a very old top-level comment.
As Tildes is still relatively new, this isn't much of a issue now, but one that I feel needed to be addressed eventually as the site grows. It is certainly a low priority issue for the time being.
Sort by new only sorts comments by the time when top-level comment is posted, which is an inherent characteristic of comment threads. If my last years of memeing on redditting has taught me anything, it is that a new post gathers the most views in the first few minutes when it was posted (This might be a few days on Tildes).
Bumping helps extend the longevity of a given post if the thread gathers enough attention and discussion value to warrant a comment, but that alone would not alleviate the fact that new comments is seen by less and less people as the post gets older (as indicated by votes). If we want to make high-quality comments seen by more people, we need to make comment age a less limiting factor.
Tildes needs to help its users to discover new comments.
A few solutions come to my mind.
By presenting comments in a linear fashion like the good old bulletin board does without any hierarchy such that sort by new would truly be sort by new.
By highlighting ( or whichever other means ) comments that meet certain criteria (Comments that are among the latest 10 or comments that were posted within the last hour, this can vary depending on the activities of the comments)
I would like to propose a novel solution to this problem by compacting the comment threads to a forest of trees with navigable nodes. This sounds totally outlandish, it might very well be, but its an idea that I think worth sharing.
The editing is rudimentary but I hope the idea is communicated well.
A decent number of smaller changes have been implemented over the past week, and while I don't think any of them individually were worth devoting a post to, I figured it would probably still be good to let people know. If you're interested in following Tildes's development more directly, you can always keep an eye on the commits on GitLab (an RSS feed is available as well). I try to write good commit titles/descriptions, so anyone should be able to follow what's being changed without needing to be able to understand the actual code.
Anyway, here are some recent updates:
. However, since Tildes doesn't allow people to embed images, anyone attempting this would end up with an escaped <img> tag inside their post. It's fixed now so that it just treats an attempt to embed an image as a link to the image instead.> in front of them and you had a blank line in between them, you would end up with a separate quote block for each paragraph unless you also put a > on the blank line. This behavior was clearly unexpected most of the time and people ended up with longer quotes broken up into many quote blocks for no reason. I've now changed it so that it will automatically merge subsequent quote blocks into a larger one, but you can still force them to be separated by putting at least two blank lines between them (or other methods like using a horizontal rule between quotes). Info about this was added to the Text Formatting docs page.I've topped everyone back up to 10 invite codes again as well. With the site being publicly visible now, I know that some people are getting requests for invites and have been using them fairly often, so always just let me know if you need some more. You can get your invite links from here: https://tildes.net/invite
Let me know if you have any feedback or notice any issues with any of the things I listed above (or anything else). Thanks as always, it's been nice to see the site's activity level moving up again lately.
Hey everyone, thanks to you who posted in the original Workshop Wednesday; I think it went really well! Here we are for week 2 (sorry it took me til noon, I was busy this morning!)
Some questions:
Please begin your comment with [META] to discuss these. Otherwise, I'll copy and paste the guidelines from last week.
Basically, a workshop is when you have a bunch of people with poems or stories they've written, and everyone gets together, reads everyone's work, and comments on it, sharing what they got out of it and what the author could do to improve the work for publication. I used to do a lot of them in college, and I've missed the dynamic since graduating. I thought others might also be interested, so here goes nothing.
Each week, I'll post a "Workshop Wednesday" post. If you have a poem or (short) story you'd like workshopped, post that as a top comment. Then, read others' top comments and reply with what works/doesn't work/questions you have/ideas you have for the piece that could make it better. If you post some writing, try to comment on at least two other people's pieces as well -- we're here to help each other improve.
I'm fairly sure it's either a Reddit or RES feature, but whenever I select text in a comment and then click Reply, it'll copy that text to the comment box and add a > in front so it'll turn into a quote. It makes it a little quicker to respond to a specific part of someone's message.
I'm no IT bird and as such I don't know if this is something that can be implemented easily(if at all). It'd also require more JS, not sure if that's an issue as well.
In any case, let me know what you think.
Edit: I'd like to suggest something else, should I make a secondary post or append it to this one? I'd like to avoid cluttering up the front page.
So I was talking to @cadadr in this thread about starting a workshop on Tildes, and since today makes for an alliterative title, I thought I'd start one now.
Basically, a workshop is when you have a bunch of people with poems or stories they've written, and everyone gets together, reads everyone's work, and comments on it, sharing what they got out of it and what the author could do to improve the work for publication. I used to do a lot of them in college, and I've missed the dynamic since graduating. I thought others might also be interested, so here goes nothing.
Each week, I'll post a "Workshop Wednesday" post. If you have a poem or (short) story you'd like workshopped, post that as a top comment. Then, read others' top comments and reply with what works/doesn't work/questions you have/ideas you have for the piece that could make it better. If you post some writing, try to comment on at least two other people's pieces as well -- we're here to help each other improve.
Since this is the first one, obviously we can change the format or do something else. Please start meta-discussions with the word [META] so that we know it's not a poem you're trying to workshop!
I'm excited. Let's do this!
EDIT: I'm only talking about the Exemplary tag
Greetings. I'm Alexis, and I signed up for this site back on May 30th, when it was just beginning. However, I have returned and I see something that doesn't seem like that big an issue, but I fear it will lead to the same sort of 'circlejerk' that Reddit has.
The issue is with this comment. At first, it doesn't really seem that bad - it is a person (we'll call them Adam) replying to someone else (Barbara) who says the subject matter (Charlie) is using white nationalism as a means to cause chaos. Adam takes this to mean Barbara supports Neo-Nazis, as Barbara states the following:
Hate to say it, but neo-Nazism is better than this, if by a small margin: at least its followers have an ideology.
Adam asks what "lofty ideology do you think Neo-Nazis" have, including a long rebuttal of this miscommunication.
The real problem with this is the labels. On the top of Adam's comment: "2x Exemplary". I have not seen any labels whatsoever anywhere else on this forum when I have been browsing it. On a miscommunicative post. Adam seems to claim Barbara is downplaying the issue, despite the miscommunication.
To see why this is an issue, let's take a second post discussing a network of paedophiles on Youtube. As on 1:14 PM EST, Feb 21, 2019, not a single label is there. This is in spite of communication being just as civil and developed.
My theory is that the Exemplary labels were not used as a "Well done" to Adam's post, but rather as a "We hate Neo-Nazis as well", or "super-vote". What I fear is that this will lead to an echo chamber where Devil's advocates, such as Barbara, are shunned for things from a simple miscommunication to having 'wrongthink' and defending ideas that people think should not be.
Let me be clear: I am not conservative or a Nazi. If anything, I am a socialist - but it shouldn't matter. You should be allowed to discuss the pros and cons of relevant political views as long as it is in a civil manner.
This is going to sound like a total rant, but I just don't know what to do anymore. I've been completely screwed by OnePlus and they really just don't care. I bought a OnePlus 6T back at the end of November and received it in early December. It has barely worked for about two weeks since then. The ticket I have open with them is ridiculously long. And then they just went dead silent on me. I assumed I was being ignored. I even got the perma-hold ignore on the phone too. But today OnePlus finally replied after 27 days!! During all this time I just went out and bought a Pixel 3XL and I am tickled pink with it.
If anyone wants a good laugh at my expense you are welcome to read my story on my site read my story on my site.
From the bottom of my heart - be careful spending your money with OnePlus.
*edit - formatting
This will probably be controversial, but I disagree with the current password policy. Checking against a list of known broken passwords sounds like a good idea, but that list is only ever going to get bigger. The human factor has to be taken into account. People are going to reuse passwords. So whenever their reused password gets hacked from a less secure site, it's going to add to that list.
Ideally, a password would be unique. Ideally, users should maybe ever use a password manager that generates garbage as a password that no one could hack. An ideal world is different from reality. Specific requirements are going to lead to people needing to write things down. In the past, that was on paper, like Wargames. Now, it's going to lead to people pasting their username and login into text documents for easy reference. That's probably what i'm going to have to do. Was my previous method of reusing passwords safe? No. Will my new method of remembering passwords be safe? Probably not either.
I'm not entirely sure what all the account security is about, either. For my bank, sure, a complex password. I have a lot to lose there. For an account on a glorified message board? There's better ways to establish legitimacy. 4chan, of all places, dealt with this (nod to 2chan), by having users enter a password after their username that got encoded and displayed as part of their username to verify that they were, in fact, the same user.
So the topic for discussion would be, what's the endgame here? Where is the line drawn between usability and security? I may well be on the wrong side of this, but I think it's worth discussing.
Edit: I think there may be some good reasons, evidenced in this reply. I think it was a good discussion none the less, since it wasn't obvious to me and perhaps not to other people.
Edit 2: I'm going to hop off, but I think there's been some good discussion about the matter. As I said in the original post "I may well be on the wrong side of this". I may well be, but I hope I have addressed people well in the comments. Some of my comments may be "worst case" or "devil's advocate" though. I understand the reason for security, as evidenced above, but i'm unsure about the means.
It's somewhat of an unspoken rule on Reddit that replying to a comment that's more than a day old is a faux pas. The conversation naturally settles within that period – or, less often, within two days. After that, the only appropriate thing is to either reference the conversation, or quote parts of the comments in relation to a similar issue in another post.
On Hubski, conversations could go on for days. It's explicitly stated in the guidelines that it's completely okay to reply to a comment of any age. I've never seen a year-old "revival" do any good, but the fact that it isn't prohibited or frowned upon adds no burden to the user.
How does Tildes handle this? Is there an unwritten rule already? Should there be a written one? What would be the factors?
Today's Feb 13. I've found a post from Feb 2 that was on a subject of interest of mine, where comments were insightful, but I feel like not all questions that need to be asked have been. Surely I won't go about creating another topic just to revive the conversation against only my own commentary to show for it.
There's also the matter of important, (semi)official topics on Tildes. Suppose a new issue arises that concerns an earlier public discussion held, say, half a year ago. It's a minor issue, but one that requires a discussion to settle. Does one comment on the old official topic, or does one create a new topic for this purpose?
While browsing through the Tildes documentation, I stumbled across this in the Technical Goals section:
Tildes is a website. Your phone already has an app for using it—it's your browser.
Tildes will have a full-featured API, so I definitely don't want to discourage mobile apps overall, but the primary interface for using the site on mobile should remain as the website. That means that mobile users will get access to updates at exactly the same time as desktop ones, and full functionality should always be available on both.
This got me thinking. Despite Tildes preferring mobile browsers over an app, is there still a chance for one? I usually avoid using websites on mobile unless I must, as mobile websites generally don't have the full functionality of the website. Labelling comments 'Exemplary' and 'Malice' on mobile is an example of what doesn't work (there's more), and it's usually very unresponsive for some of the things that still do work. Also, there aren't any notifications on mobile websites and some people, me included, have cumbersome browsers that make the feel of using the website slow and laborious.
Another thing is, if the app has no chance of happening, could Tildes get desktop notifications? I usually like to respond to replies to my topics and comments as quickly as possible and I'm not a fan of the whole 'constant login to check my notifications' thing. Email notifications aren't possible because of Tildes' privacy belief.
This is, of course, all anecdotal.
Spiteful downvotes are a common occurrence on Reddit. Sometimes I'm arguing in a deeply nested thread with a single person, and every one of my responses receives an immediate combo of reply and downvote. It's clear that the person arguing with me is the one making the downvotes, which doesn't seem fair. That's not an indication of my contribution to the debate, they just wanna "win".
In other occasions, when I go against the hive-mind, subjective interpretations of my phrasing renders a torrent of downvotes. I'm not talking about active belligerence on my part, but subtle differences that indicate minor defiance to the norm.
Upvoting seems less toxic. Some subs can use it to brigade /r/all, but that's easily addressable by the admins (I'm not saying they do). While downvotes can easily go unnoticed, upvotes are public by nature, they attract lots of attention, so if something vicious is upvoted the backlash it receives is frequently enough to put the author in their right place.
Tildes lack of downvotes is liberating. Not that I have the urge to post controversial stuff, but the lack of an easy "fuck you button" makes it possible for me to speak with nuance. I'm more preoccupied with what I wanna say than with the 300 implicit rules [1] I must follow to avoid being buried for offending the intricate biases of every sub.
And before this gets political, please notice that I never post on those subs. I'm speaking of "silly" places like /r/aww, /r/DunderMifflin/, /r/howyoudoin and /r/programmerHumor/.
So yeah: thank you, Tildes!
[1] I have no trouble following explicit ones.
Firstly - thanks for the invite, looks like a good place!
I signed up and read some posts, alt tabbed to other sites, came back and went to post a reply but got an error https://i.imgur.com/Fz1MXtd.png
I opened a new tab and logged in and could post ok, but it didnt feel like that long from when I logged in to when it timed out on me.
For the past few years, I've grown more and more uneasy with Amazon's business practices. I think it's time to move on. Not to mention the declining quality in products since international shippers were added (as discussed in the podcast Reply All).
I'm addicted to the convenience of 2 day shipping, even though we use Amazon less and less, I like knowing I have that option.
I've been considering a Costco membership instead - how does their online shopping and shipping times/prices compare?
I've also considered using Jet more but I don't know much about their ethics, does anyone?
Open to other alternatives and discussion about business ethics here.
Hello everyone.
Due to @Kat’s ever-failing health, I will be analyzing the data instead of her this time around. If you have no idea what this is about, see the demographic survey that was posted on the day of Tildes’ half-year birthday. She’s done this before, so let’s see what's new.
The original survey was answered by 404 people, while the half year survey was answered by 293. Though the total number of replies was lower, the completion rate was actually higher: 293 responses from 422 unique visitors, or 69.4%, up from the first year’s 404/599=67.4%. The decrease in answers is most likely attributed to the change of the default sort from “Activity, all time” to “Activity, 3 days”: the response rate held fairly consistent for the first three days, then plummeted after the third as the topic stopped being able to gain any publicity. Though response rates on the original were not high after the first three days, there was a steady trickle up until the survey stopped accepting responses.
While the numbers are relatively big (for a community of this size), do take anything found with a healthy dose of scepticism. Even though the original dataset she shared with me does not contain any identifiable information (all I can see are randomly-generated user strings) the specifics of that data will not be posted, as was mentioned during the original survey. This is because I am unable to be certain I can sufficiently anonymize it. Typeform has created a summary of the data on a per-question basis with substantially more datapoints than this thread, which you can find https://themeerkat.typeform.com/report/H2TtYg/rVf75AqbKaPncy6y.
I will compare the statistics with a similarish reference set based on the six most common territories, all of which are above one percentage of the survey answers. That means when I compare on the general populace, I will base it on numbers from USA, Canada, UK, Australia, the Netherlands, and France.
This means it will be weighted like this:
| USA | CAN | UK | AUS | NL | FR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 55 | 22 | 20 | 10 | 8 | 6 |
| 45.45% | 18.18% | 16.53% | 8.26% | 6.61% | 4.96% |
I’ll clean up my data sheet and post it in the comments later. You all are absolutely encouraged to fix it because it will most likely contain errors.
What has changed in the first half year?
This time around an age range was used instead of an exact numerical input, but if we were to assume that everyone is aged in the middle of their age range (so 20 for 18-22 year olds, for instance), the average age of a user would be 26.84 years, or 26 years, 9 months, and 4 days old (roughly). So we’ve grown a bit younger than last year, on average.
Gender distribution seems to be roughly the same. We see a small decrease in percentage of heterosexuals, divided roughly evenly on the remaining categories. We also see a significant increase in the amount of transgender users, but since the amount reported is small, that could also just be statistical noise. The percentage of polyamorous people has remained exactly the same. For pronouns, there are only three users who prefer it/its, and zero who prefer any neopronoun set: every “Other” was offering commentary on the question rather than answering it. Similarly, almost all of the “Others” for orientation were expressing that they didn’t understand the specifics of the options given.
All in all, little has changed.
In both surveys, three options dominated: the USA, the UK, and Canada. On that end, little has changed, though it seems that all of the Swedes disappeared, with zero answering the half year survey as compared to eight for the first one. Wonder what they’ve been busy with.
Unsurprisingly, about everyone speaks English. What is more surprising is the lack of native multilinguals: fewer than 6% of Americans who natively speak English also natively speak a second language. For comparison, that’s 10% for Australians, 21% for Canadians, and 13% for the UK. This represents an overall decrease in geographic diversity, with users coming from 36 different countries as compared to 42 the first time.
Compared to the world at-large, we sure are a god-denying folk. A whopping 52% of us consider ourselves atheists, whereas the sample data puts it at 12.1%, so we’re far from the norm of our fellow citizens.
We got a few interesting answers in the “other” section of the religion part of the survey. We got a few interesting ones I had never heard of before, like “Discordian”. But generally speaking, around half of them were either “none” or one of the actual options. Two stood out to me though.
To the one Chinese user who filled it in as “The heck is chinese traditional”: I have no idea either.
To the one Australian user who wrote “Left-hand path Heathen”, you be yourself, mate.
The average has barely moved in the last half year—we’re still slanted very much to the left. Unlike the first survey, there was no freeform input this time around, so the specifics are hard to discuss.
We have seen a drastic fall in the percentage of Windows users. It was at 60%, and is down to 43%. Nearly all of this has gone to Linux, which is now at 38%. That’s quite large, especially compared to the reference data, which has Linux use among web users at 1.23%. It’s like a herd of penguins in here.
Compared to half a year ago, not many of us have switched mobile OS. Compared to the calculated data, we like Android slightly more than average. 62% vs 72%.
Not much interesting in the “other” section, though I will give a salute to the one American user still holding out on Windows 10 Mobile.
We have a pretty even distribution with three exceptions. “Computer software”, “Never employed”, and “IT”. Nearly 3/4 who answered “Never employed” are currently students.
Among the students, we only have one student that proudly smokes and has no interest in quitting. The campaigns seem to be working.
If we look at the users who visit Tildes multiple times per day, we see a few interesting trends. Nearly all of them use Android, and nearly all of them are employed. Beyond that it all seems surprisingly… average.
Overall, people rated Tildes as a platform as-it-stands a 5.7/7 (0.81), and their optimism for the future of the site at a 5.4/7 (0.77). The most important reason they use the site (of the options given) is “Minimal, fast design” at a 4.6/5 (0.92), with “Privacy-consciousness and lack of trackers” right on its heels. 20.8% of users have ever contributed money to Tildes (surprisingly high, compared to most donation campaigns), with about half as many making a recurring donation.
Despite @Kat’s insidious attempt to influence the data, “waves” as a demonym only received 5.5% of the vote. The leader for that, overwhelmingly, is “no demonym at all”, with a combined 49% of the votes and 18.5% of respondents strongly preferring the site not to have a demonym. Second place, the generic “users”, only has 15.8% in comparison. The first Tildes-specific demonym present is Tilders/~rs, with 13.4%.
Most notably, about ⅔ of users would prefer Tildes to be remain invite-only long-term.
The survey had three freeform questions: “What do you like most about Tildes, thus far?”, “What do you like least about Tildes, thus far?”, and “What is the most pressing missing feature/‘pain point’ for you about Tildes in its current state?” All the comments fill over 30 pages, so it seems like we really have a lot to say. You can download and look at all of the raw answers here, if you’d like. They’ve been shuffled to ensure privacy.
A large majority of the comments boil down to “a quality of discussion where disagreement is discussed in a respectful and level-headed way”. A very significant amount also point out the lack of “low effort content and trolls” as a good thing. A significant amount also mention the simple and quick-loading interface. We also have one user who believes he can find a twerk team on Tildes.
So on this, @Deimos can feel proud for what he has done. Though you know what really makes the site good? There is one comment that properly gets it: “The people, d’awwww.”. Yes, that includes you.
But not everything is perfect, though negatives about Tildes seem to be a lot less unanimous than the positives. There are a few that repeat a bit more often than others: the biggest one is “left centrism in discussions” or “echo chambers”, though in a close second, as with any political discussion, is its exact opposite with complaints about “too much discussion about left-centrism in discussions”—notably, though, in the question “Do you feel as though Tildes has a good mix of political opinions, for your personal preferences?”, the leading answer was “Yes” with 63%. A small amount of users also think we have too many software developers.
Beyond that, the main complaint that stands out is “lack of users and content”, which I am sure will improve in time.
This too is very varied. A lot of the comments are actually about features that have been introduced since the survey was done, like bookmarking. Honestly, it’s not that many complaints compared to just likes and dislikes.
The “majority” seem to be on a lack of tag autocompletion, USA-centrism, and the lack of a mobile app.
There was one more section: “If you would like to offer any long-form commentary, criticism, or feedback regarding Tildes, you may do so here.” Due to its nature, I’ll let you read through them yourself in the raw data, if you’re interested.
First of all, to everyone who took the time to answer: thank you! I hope this post and the survey has brought some fun to everyone. If there’s an interest, I am sure that Kat, myself, or someone else will make another one at the one year anniversary. We already got some feedback in the previous thread, but we’re always open for more.
I will do some additional data comparisons on request. I might be a bit occupied this weekend, though, so that will come when it comes.
inb4 John McAfee makes Anime real again
Since we're currently lacking native spoiler tags, I'd ask all of you to follow this scheme:
Post a top level comment with the title and episode number of the anime you want to talk about like this
**JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Vento Aureo - Episode 1**
Then reply to those top level comments with your thoughts. This way people who haven't seen something yet or plan on binge watching once all the episodes are out can simply collapase the top level comment to not get spoiled ^.^
Simply post, discuss or joke about any currently airing anime you want. For Anime you've been watching that aren't currently airing refer to Cleb's weekly thread.
But what if the anime I want to talk about hasn't aired yet?
No problem, just post a comment here once the episode has aired, these threads aren't meant to last one single day.
Archives of these threads can be found at the unofficial wiki
As per title. It's rather annoying to click through to topics, then have to go back to the inbox to mark it read. If I click 'link' then I've clearly read it.
