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votes
I'm back!
hi, i've returned to look at how the site's going after a couple of years! is it dead? there seems to be some activity here but also the site isn't being worked on, wonder how y'all are doing here. seems to be some performance issues here as well, is it slow just for me?
i originally left because there wasn't any activities in the topics i was interested in, but i'll browse around, see what everyone's talking about
Welcome back!
Tildes never achieved widespread popularity. Initially I remember thinking that was a bad thing. Part of it was that I had calibrated my idea of success to be "as big as reddit" and the other part of it was that I didn't want Tildes to die on the vine and become a ghost town like some of the other alternative aggregators out there that I'd looked into before joining Tildes.
Over time I've come to appreciate that we don't have a huge userbase here. My time on Tildes has helped me identify that most of what I dislike about other sites of this type are problems of scale.
At present, Tildes has a small, cozy feel for me. It's slower moving and less densely populated, but I genuinely appreciate both of these aspects. I don't get any FOMO. The feed doesn't move too fast. Sometimes I come back to the site after an hour or two and there isn't anything new for me to read. I cannot stress how much I have come to appreciate that as a Very Good Thing. While there are a good number of posts that go by without comment, the community definitely isn't dead. There's a core set of people here who pop up frequently enough and have stuck around long enough that I have immediate recognition of (and fondness for) dozens of different usernames.
If there's content you're finding lacking, I'd encourage you to take the lead in posting some stuff of interest to you. Because we're small, a single user can have a huge influence on the site's content at large. I'm kept in the loop on movie news almost entirely due to @cloud_loud's efforts, for example.
yes i will definitely post some stuff if i stick around!
The quality of topics and discussion here on Tildes is, for me, a complete replacement for the worsening signal to noise ratio on Reddit. Reddit has some good content, but was becoming harder to curate and sift through the drivel and distracting personalities in the comments. Every so often a combative or overly aggressive comment will pop up here and it reminds me of why I left Reddit.
My problem with Reddit is that power users have made it borderline unusable and it's obvious that the current admins are siding with them.
Even without addressing the elephant in the room that was their disastrous v4 redesign, Digg was declinining and losing market share to Reddit because the front page was dominated by a handful of power users. Reddit now has a similar problem, except this time the handful of power users that dominate that site moderate hundreds of subreddits between themselves and often act as judge, jury and executioner when enforcing their own rules.
Two weeks ago, drama broke up on the Art subreddit after a Vietnamese artist got unfairly permabanned for posting artwork that moderators accused him of generating with AI. He didn't use machine learning AI to create it, and in fact had receipts in the form of sketches and Photoshop files to show that he actually did make it himself. All they had to do was acknowledge their mistake, apologize and reverse the ban. Instead they behaved in such a baffling and childish way that it made the frontpage of PC Gamer along with a few other tech sites.
Did Reddit depose the mod team for such a flagrant violation of their own moderator guidelines and Redditquette? Of course they didn't! Instead they purged posts and suspended users for calling them out, because the team cried "harassment" and "brigading."
Truth is, Reddit claims to have mod guidelines but the current staff members really don't care about actually enforcing them unless it's to purge users or a community that threaten their bottom-line. We've seen for well over a decade now that Reddit's content policy is purely reactive. They tend not to ban things until a crap-tonne of negative press is generated against them.
The reason Reddit hasn't died yet is because every alternative is either a closed garden with a very small community like Snapzu or Tildes, or a hotbed of white supremacy that toots "free speech" like its own branded dog-whistle. I wish there was another social news aggregator that was neither.
The vast vast vast majority of reddit users have no idea about any of the power user/mod drama. I moderated several defaults for 4-5 years, quit 5 years ago, and the problems are still the same. Reddit is practically in too big to fail territory as long as VCs keep pumping money into it and for the reasons you said in the last paragraph.
Just reminded me of Voat which had a similar vibe to Tildes in the beginning. I think it lasted maybe 6 months or 1 year? Then it became the new r/jailbait and as you say, a hotbed of white supremacy
Voat had promise to be a serious Reddit competitor, but flopped because the users who initially fled Reddit were sheepish and abandoned the site the moment Ellen Pao was pushed out. It's like the Reddit community at the time hated Pao more for being a woman in the tech industry than for her decisions to ban several communities. Steve Huffman was ironically more hard-line with censorship, rule changes, quarantines and full subreddit bans yet nobody really called him out.
Their mistake was embracing the Reddit outcasts, including the communities that were quickly purged in the years prior. It turns out that you need money and resources to host servers, and need to run advertisements to keep said servers running. The main reason I even jumped on that bandwagon in the first place was because I had serious problems with some of the power mods on Reddit.
Voat also had serious performance issues and frequent downtime.
Of course when racial hate communities were purged from Reddit and some racial hate forums were shut down, they flocked straight to Voat and made the place insufferable. I tried to keep using it but when every discussion gets derailed by slur-filled hostile comments... it makes me glad Voat died at the end of 2020.
I was also an early user of Ruqqus and sadly that site suffered the same fate, because Voat fell and they decided to welcome the Voat refugees, despite the precedent that stakeholders they used didn't tolerate hate speech. They were subsequently banned from Patreon and Paypal and had problems with securing future hosting.
Your first paragraph triggered my Digg memory so hard I almost posted to say so before reading the rest of your comment.
The only meaningful interaction I got when using Digg was in the comment sections. Submissions were so astroturfed and spammed that anything you post would either get immediately buried or remain at 1 Digg with absolutely zero exposure.
Even the Friends list feature felt like an unnecessary burden because the only people who would send me friend requests were blog spammers that Kevin Rose gave no craps about purging from the site.
Of course spamming your blog to random friends, or being that one power user who was treated like an e-celebrity (I think his name was MrBabyMan?) was the only way you could "organically" hit the frontpage. Other power users were blatantly manipulating the site and selling links.
To go meta, it does take a detox process when going from commenting elsewhere to being here.
I say this as someone who struggles with my own combative tendancies. You go through my post history and you could probably accurately 'tag' days where I was having non-tildes discussions.
My time on Tildes has been a years-long unlearning of bad habits I developed elsewhere online -- particularly reddit. You are not alone!
Oh man this hits hard! I've had the same experience and it's been sobering. Sometimes I even feel like I'm lashing out when I go to reddit because I've been holding back here.
i wonder though why use tildes when you can choose your subreddits. my home is populated by lots of trans and general queer-related subs of various sizes. i like discussing so a lot of time it's nice just to see an interesting post and read through it. and in between all of that i'm subscribed to lots of art subs as well so i see pretty artworks people make of things and i can share them with friends. sure, the big subreddits suck but i'm just not subscribed to them lol. and when i visit r/all i use filters so i never see the bad stuff
sure it might be hard to find them but that's just a general problem on the internet. the good stuff is out there, but it's hard to find a connection
You can do both. I do use Reddit for some topics.
One thing many subreddits get that you don't get here is a constant stream of transient newcomers. For example, every week r/accordion gets the same kinds of questions. (Most commonly, "What can you tell me about this random old accordion I found / bought / inherited.")
I think that's good in a way. People have questions and it's the obvious place to ask them. Would it better if they didn't ask? Handling a bunch of uninformed, repetitive questions more-or-less gracefully is a skill and one that not all communities have.
I don't think the barrier to joining Tildes is all that high (once you know about it at all) but most people don't want to, and that results in different kinds of conversations than in subreddits.
I still visit reddit, but only the r/belgium and r/brussels subreddits (and occasionally looking at language learning posts from r/ukrainian and r/russian).
But I visit it maybe a couple times a week if I'm bored. I check Tildes daily. "Why": Reddit is user-hostile. Nevermind the community, even; the site itself is designed to piss me off. I don't want to install their app; the site's UX is awful, slow, clicks don't work, etc etc.
And this is more or less on purpose, too.
I don't want to make something like this a part of my life. I don't want to participate in it, help make it successful, or be one of its numbers. It's brain rot and makes me feel dirty.
Now I remember you! YOU ARE THE ONE WHO HATES CAPITAL LETTERS and most full stops...
well i never thought of it as my defining quality but sure :p
I have a feeling you're a little more than that :) It just dawned on me.
That said, the conversations we do have remain pretty high quality. Tildes had been for me the best source for issues around the russia ukraine invasion.
Yeah, I come here almost exclusively because the discussion is good.
Same, it really is quality over quantity on here, and it's pretty special. EDIT: Oh and Welcome back :)