Let's talk about Reddit alternatives, shilling, and Tildes bans
@Deimos can tell us how many bans we've had so far on Tildes. Last count I knew was in the 50s months back, and some of those were the same person - out of 13,000 users. I'm sure it's rising right now, I'm also pretty sure it's still under a hundred, and I don't actually care if it's 1500. (Edit: It was four new bans, omg so nazi.)
If you take the time to learn something about social forums, you'll discover that 1% of the users cause 90% of the problems. Tildes will ban that 1% aggressively. Act like an asshole, attack someone, and you will find the door. You do not however have to tiptoe around like there are landmines here - nobody is going to ban you unless you start attacking other users or trolling all the time. You are in fact allowed to swear here, just not at people. Take a lesson from Louis Black - rants are best when aimed at inanimate objects. :)
Have you ever been to a nice big social party? Did you act like an asshole there? Did the bouncer throw you off the balcony? Probably not. That's because you didn't punch people in the face, piss all over the kitchen floor, or set the living room rug on fire while you were there (I hope). Try pretending that this is a real world party and adjust your behaviors accordingly. It is really not that difficult. Extend people here the same courtesy at a minimum that you would for a real world social gathering - maybe even go as far as you would for a black tie affair. The rest of us would appreciate it, I promise.
I'm sure by now most of you know about /r/redditalternatives. It's an old subreddit that has been collecting links to anything and everything even remotely like a social site for years that came out of the 2015 blackouts. Most of their favorites are long dead, and most of the ones they love now will be dead in a few years. They've been telling us we would be dead in two months for the last five years - which tells you how much their average user knows about social software. They are not exactly well read on the topic.
They are a useful link archive, and also a place for people to whine about the bans they've earned from other websites, or to shill for their own websites. Plenty of astrotrurfing for lemmy and squabbles going on there. Some of you folks are over there right now trying to sell them on Tildes, or worrying about the complaining about the bans.
I'd advise you not to waste your time commenting in that place. They do not want us there shilling, and you will never convince a redditor of anything due to the mindfuckery that place has inflicted on its users for decades. Let them be. Everyone who gets banned here (or on most other sites) posts a thread about it over there, and always has - this is tradition now. Laugh at it, like I always do. It's Shawshank all over again - everyone in there is innocent, lawyer fucked them.
Tildes was linked in the /r/videos post, which was #1 on reddit and why Deimos has an inbox taller than mount everest today. The 'secret' is out now. You do not need to go into forum warrior mode and try to defend Tildes. That's what your instincts are telling you to do, because 'tribes' are a thing, but it's not the right course of action. I guarantee you will have a better day if you just go for a ten minute walk, right now, rather than posting on reddit.
Frankly, bettervanilla's big collection here is the only useful thing to show up in that place in years, so good on them for giving that place a purpose again.
If you do want to help out, then use your invites. It's better if you pick, rather than just emails and invite threads. You do realize if Deimos tops everyone up to 5 codes, that's almost 100k new invites available and almost 20k people who can send them out, five at a time. This place is already past the point where it can die from the evaporative cooling effect, which did in fact have us on ice for a while there, but that's over now.
Look for conversations not where people are looking for alternatives, but where people are talking about real forums, pining for the old days of the internet, deep discussions, and complaining about cat posts and low effort content. Those are the people who will thank you for telling them about Tildes. Let's not be the same spamming, astroturfing jerks that every other website has become.
Edit: I take it back, this is also a remarkable post about the fediverse's moderation problems and I wish that place had more discussions of that nature. Also, Deimos says he banned 4 people in the last week, out of thousands of new users. Clearly, we're being unreasonable. :P
I'm actually a bit worried to post this, but one thread I thought was interesting is Why Tildes May Not Be The Best Place To Migrate To.
Do users need to worry about getting banned before being warned?
EDIT: I just found the comment that @Tygrak also linked below (thanks!).
https://tildes.net/~tildes/15my/new_users_ask_your_questions_about_tildes_here#comment-871q
Already answered here. The reality is that no one will get banned if you just do not act like an asshole. If you go over the line you will get banned right away which is in my opinion very reasonable.
It's also worth pointing out that every once in a while, you will have some removed comments. I do too. That's fine, and it's not a ban. That's just Deimos pruning the part of a thread that's about to catch fire and turn into something nasty. Someday you will be the ones doing that pruning, so wield that power wisely when it comes to you in the future.
Here's some context.
I saw all the posts. There was a duplicate post, it was very obviously a duplicate and was splitting the discussion. It was removed. There was then a followup post along the lines of "I thought Tildes was a great place, but my post was deleted and how could the moderators do this to me and now I don't think Tildes is so great."
There's no real need to make a post like that other than to stir up drama, especially over something so trivial so I'm not surprised at the temp ban.
This sounds like a solvable problem - lobste.rs has a similar policy, but they explicitly merge the posts and show a list of posts/titles that have been merged into the page. For instance, take a look at this post (I picked it at random - I scrolled through the lobste.rs moderation log and picked the first link I saw with "merged" in the description): It has four titles:
I think this is a good feature that Tildes should have.
Yea I believe HackerNews has this as well.
Merging threads would be nice. We’ve never really had the traffic for it to matter though and I’m not sure what I (not that it’s up to me) would point development hours at first — I imagine there’s probably several items that would be ahead of this.
Merging threads also solves the issues we saw on reddit, where fifty people would all post the same topics/threads at once for breaking news, and mods would have to remove 49 reposts all trying to be the one to get 10k upvotes. That problem goes away when you can just select all 50 threads and click /merge/. We had that technology on phpBB, why it isn't part of more systems is beyond me. It was damn handy. It's not critical until activity levels result in that much posting duplication, though. It'll be a while before Tildes gets there.
You can create an issue on the issue tracker on git lab. It sounds like a useful feature especially now as the platform is growing.
There's probably one up there already. @cfabbro has been relentless in creating the issues, and also in linking all the relevant threads that are now lost in the archives in those issues so that the developers can find them easily.
I actually don't think I ever added a merge topics feature request, since IIRC it was only ever discussed briefly years ago as a hypothetical, and we have never really had an issue with reposts so it was never much of a problem. That may have changed with the new volume of traffic though, so I have added it to Gitlab now:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/752
In this context, how can we differentiate the difference between trying to stir up drama and criticism? I honestly am not sure I agree with banning someone because they stated an opinion that criticizes Tildes. I believe if you care about something, you should be able to criticize it and want to make it better, even though sometimes it shows through frustration first.
The issue wasn't criticizing Tildes — read through the "What don't you like about Tildes" for a thread full of criticisms. That is very much allowed. I think the issue was taking what should have been a pretty minor interaction ("Your post was removed because it was a duplicate") and blowing it out of proportion. There's no karma here, there's not reason to care if your post was removed because it was a duplicate. You should be posting things here that you're interested in and want to discuss. If that thing happens to be a duplicate, that's good for you. It means the discussion is already happening and you can join! It was a fundamental misread of what this site is about.
A useful way to think about this is to realize that once you make your submission, you are turning it over to the group, in a sense. The group has some rights, and so do you. Most other sites focus on the 'you' or 'your submissions' attitude. That's in fact mildly toxic. Thinking of it as the group's thread, that you are head steward of because you made it, but not the king of because you shared it, is a better mindset.
For the new folks, have you noticed yet that for some topics, you can see the name of the submitter, but for others, you instead see the name of the website and not the submitter? Submit a youtube video, and you see the channel name, not the user who submitted it. However, if you submit a music track from youtube in the ~music group, you'll see the submitter's name and not the channel.
Now why oh why would we do something like that? Different behaviors in the display of a submission based on the group where it is submitted?
It's a reputation thing. Normally, you'd want to see the channel, so that people associate the content with the content creator being linked, not the user submitting the link. We are less interested in the submitter than we are in the creator. Let's also not be like reddit and try to keep people 'on site' all the time. Let's send people 'off site' to the good content and spread the love in ways I promise no other project ever will.
However, in the ~music group, the submitter is the tastemaker, and people like to follow other people whose musical taste is more in line with theirs. So, the same submission (a youtube video) has to operate differently there. Yes, users here actually asked for that feature (can't find the thread, but it's around here somewhere), and Deimos actually added it. It worked out well, too.
Do you think that reddit would ever do anything like this? Are they even capable of caring about something like this? Is it even important? Food for thought. :)
I think the language you're using for this can be a bit confusing for newcomers. Everyone will eventually have the ability to label comments, which affects sorting and may lead Deimos to take action, but, unless I'm gravely mistaken, not everyone will have the ability to edit other people's tags and titles, move or lock posts, remove content, or apply bans. Which are the things more closely associated with the role of a mod or admin.
Those features cannot sustain with just a couple people doing them if a community is growing. Eventually those tools have to be handed out to more users. As many as is safely possible, in theory at least. It'd be good if the Tildes software supported that, and someday it will. The topic logs already keeps those people honest, though there's more work to do there too.
Absolutely, we will need more mods.
I think I should clarify this a bit more - right now some of the mod stuff hasn't even been made part of the web interface yet. There are things that you can only do on Tildes with a quick database edit. If no one is using them other than one programmer, writing the GUI for the tools is a waste of time.
Like power users on Digg? I hope not if that's the case, we all know how that went.
I have never used Digg and I don't really know how that worked, however, the concept is outlined a bit in the tildes docs.
You can kind of already moderate everything by labeling comments as it is, so taking it a step further would be that if a comment gets labeled as malicious by 5, 10, 20, X number of users with a good track record, it gets automatically removed. If everyone is a moderator, the power user / reddit mod issue is completely non-existent
Yeah, I've read the docs, but at the time it didn't really click with me. I'm not sure, I still feel it could be misused, especially after it grows too much. We'll see.
Yep! Virtually everything concerning Tildes is currently in the "I guess we'll see how this pans out" category :D Just look at this graph about the user growth over the past 10 days. It's shockingly fast
The graph is also a victim of scaling - something super common in computer monitoring when dealing with large numbers regularly.
If you look closely, the baseline (bottom) of the graph is roughly 13,000 and the top of the graph is roughly 17,500.
While adding 4,500 people is pretty substantial and nothing to sneeze at, it’s realistically less of a hockey stick to the count than the graph makes it seems.
Actually, it is a significant amount of growth for Tildes.
Over in another thread, @Bauke linked a graph showing 1,000 days (nearly 3 years) of user growth on Tildes. That was nearly a week ago.
Because I was curious, I did some maths. I've updated that maths here & now:
In the 33 months from Sep 2020 to May 2023, Tildes increased from 12,113 users to 13,021 users: +908 users. It equates to slightly less than 1 user per day (0.914 user per day, to be precise). It works out to be a 7.5% increase spread across nearly 3 years.
In the single month-to-date of Jun 2023, Tildes has increased from 13,021 users to 17,671 users (at the time I type this): +4,650 users. That's a 36% increase in only 2 weeks.
Tildes has grown 5 times as much in the past two weeks as in nearly three years before that. That's huge.
Fair. Good callout. Apologies that this morning I was already grumpy about people misinterpreting data in the way I described at work when I posted.
Oh, I totally agree with your point about the axis-scaling. I hate graphs where the Y-axis doesn't start at zero (or some other relevant static starting point). There is a visual distortion introduced by that practice.
However, I was similarly annoyed by what seemed to be a dismissal of the biggest jump in Tildes users, both absolutely and proportionately, in such a small space of time. This point in time is one of the biggest moments in Tildes' history to date.
It does look more hockey stick-like when you zoom out though :P
1000 days
It does, but there's still a bias for a big jump because the Y-axis doesn't start at zero. I'll defer to @Algernon_Asimov having shown that this is a 36% increase in 2 weeks...which is substantial, but I still stand that the graph is making it look bigger than it is as a result of the Y-axis there starting ~12,000.
Yeah, having the Y axis start from 0 is one of the fundamental pillars of statistics and not having that bothers me more than I'd like to admit, but at least we have a graph :D
Sorry, not sorry. I know the truncated graph is a cardinal sin in datavis… But I'm already going to dance with the devil once my time is up and the regular graph looks awful, so aesthetics it is!
I'll probably add a proper holy, untruncated version as a separate link at some point.
Edit: An untruncated version has been added.
I respect it, particularly because the Tildes Statistics logo is of a very clever design that makes up for it! :D
Thank you for the page and the Tildes ReExtended!
Digg had cliques of power users controlling things. If all of the people on Digg had the same powers as those power users, would it still have been a problem? I thought what killed Digg was allowing it to get out of balance, too much power in too few hands.
More like StackExchange, where ordinary users gain more abilities to moderate the site, as their experience and reputation increases.
I'm so out of the loop on that place lately. Aren't their moderators staging a strike right now too? Anyone know what that's all about? It would be good for us not to repeat their mistakes, whatever they are...
I don't know.
I was active on StackExchange for a couple of years, a few years back. But I kept having problems logging in. And whenever I tried to fix it, it seemed like I had to fix the problem multiple times to log in once. It got very confusing. (In retrospect, I wonder if it's one of those "federated" websites people talk about now - which I hadn't heard about back then - which is why I kept having to sign into multiple instances.)
Eventually, there came a time when my password didn't work yet again, and I just gave up.
So, I don't know what's happening over there.
But, while I was there, I read extensively about their reputation system and how that tied into increased moderation abilities for users - so, when Tildes came along, I was able to recognise the type of approach that you and Deimos and others were talking about.
Oddly enough I'm not familiar with their approach. I adapted those ideas from running raiding guilds in MMO games and trying to manage said guilds. I ran a phpBB node for Everquest that had about 32k users when it finally dried up, and there's still a facebook group with 1k people from those days out there. Servers in EQ created communities like nothing I have ever seen, the number of people I know who got married because of EQ is staggering. They had a moderation problem to solve too, and it evolved in games like WoW and Rift I also played. I don't think people give games enough credit with this problem space. We're so focused on the game we shoot right over the game's social tools.
I never became active on StackExchange, because every time I visited I was logged out.
I think this is a great idea, but the issue I think is it runs into problems where we don't all agree on what acting like an asshole is.
What you think is acceptable I might take as "assholeish" and what I might think is okay runs afoul of someone else.
Having it be subjective makes it tough to know where the actual red line is.
The blurriness is intentional. Hard lines tend to create situations of rules lawyering or people acting in bad faith but within known barriers. Having a broad but fuzzy parameter allows for discretion in decision making.
One of the often referenced texts that's relevant to Tildes culture is On a technicality which gives a more in-depth rundown of the idea.
I don't think this is as complicated as people make it out to be. Like @Amarok says in the OP, people see who the assholes are in real life. It gets real obvious real quick. We've all encountered playmates, classmates, neighbors, co-workers, supervisors, friends, and even family who are assholes or exhibit being one from time to time. Hell, it may even be us, once in awhile, who are the assholes. Well, I don't mean Tildes users per se; we're all great ;D
Anyway, we all know what asshole behavior looks like.
And there are no hard and fast rules in real life about what constitutes asshole behavior. People can say the same thing about IRL as they say online. That what constitutes asshole behavior to one, may be different to someone else. Yet, we all intuitively know where that line is. Some people choose to step over it, often repeatedly, and that's what makes them assholes.
I guess I don't understand when people try to make a such a huge distinction between online and IRL communities and interactions within. OK, computer-mediated communication surely lacks some nuances that are more visible or apparent IRL. I understand that. But...again, there's no hard fast rules about what constitutes asshole behavior in IRL either, and we somehow all manage to deal with it and carry on. I'm sure we've all experienced IRL, for example, receiving a backhanded compliment or heard a backhanded compliment given to someone else. Where you think "Wait...was the really a compliment? What did they mean by that?"
As such, I think that same generalized principles we use in the meat space can also apply here. Will it require some nuance? Sure. Will it require understanding of context? Absolutely. Will it require having understanding, period? 100%. People may have to adapt how they bring forth their arguments or points or whatever on Tildes. But guess what? We have to do that IRL, too.
I find that thinking of it this way helps.
Does this user's interaction make the other user's experience here better, or worse?
Worse once in a while = dude needs a hug or had a bad day
Worse all the time = asshole, go back to 4chan and make it yours
It is subjective. Publishing guidelines doesn’t change that. There’s no objectively correct branch to trim on a tree. You just prune what looks right.
Thanks for the reply, that's reassuring. :)
I'm not at all poking fun at you for worrying about it, because that is absolutely a valid concern. I just joined the site the other day and have been pretty excited about it, so it definitely is reassuring that it seems like people here have a good head on their shoulders.
As somebody who used to play a lot of League of Legends, Runescape, and other stuff along those lines, it's really funny to me to see those kinds of posts (like the one you linked). I'm not saying it never happens where somebody gets wrongfully banned, because I'm sure it has, but I've learned in the vast majority of cases people will tell an extremely one sided sob story in an attempt to garner sympathy. The reason I mentioned League/Runescape is because in those instances a lot of the time a staff member would swoop in eventually and post some absolutely horrendous, vitriolic chat logs that of course the user conveniently forgot to mention when they "totally did nothing wrong and got banned for no reason."
I’ve only been here a week and a half, but my impression is that if you’re nice, you’ll be just fine. If you’re a jerk to someone, it’s possible to get banned. That’s completely different than the Reddit way, so I think that’s jarring to some folks. But if you’re kind to people I think you’ll be just fine.
Same, and I agree. There are ways to strongly disagree with someone, or even admonish and condemn them without resorting to being an asshole. They're more difficult to pull off, yes, but I am glad to be a part of a community that encourages it - it's really refreshing.
Although it's nice Tildes has a "be nice" attitude as one of its fundamental principles, I fear it may stifle discussion of more controversial topics, or at the very least make everyone seem artificial for acting nice in situations where's one's supposed to be more outraged/combative. Having a wide range of emotions, even when it disrupts the comfort zone of some people, is inherent of being human (and not some random AI).
honestly if it means fewer discussions, but those that happen are required to focus on the issues rather than two sides of an argument just talking past each other and devolving into personal insults and stuff, I'm pretty OK with that.
Rarely have I seen productive discourse where emotional flare-up was also present. Don't get me wrong, I've seen it a nonzero number of times where someone comes back and is like "sorry, I flew off the handle, and upon revisiting I shouldn't have done that" - but it's very rare.
To add to this, there is no scenario where a person can't convey their point during a discussion, heated debate or argument about a given topic without insulting the other participants. Even if it's an extremely controversial topic, every point can be made without harassing others; If someone can't do that, then that point doesn't have to be made.
Tildes just avoids all controversial topics or heated debates though. The only debates I’ve seen let run their course were ones about Tildes itself in a meta discussion like this.
I interpret this rule to be more like “be respectful”. I can disagree with someone, argue with them even, without calling them names or being rude. It also seems to be about trying to assume the best of people - if something does run me the wrong way, I can be immediately reactive and be rude or I can assume the other person didn’t mean it that way (or that they’re just having a bad day, or speak English as a secondary language, or whatever) and be cordial in my reply
Tildes isn't immune to heated discussions about controversial topics. We haven't figured it out, though sometimes we learned to avoid it. If it goes too badly, some posts might get deleted, or even the whole topic locked. (In which case it's unlisted and hard to find unless you were in it.)
Possibly, more structured conversations might help? Someone skilled at hosting could start a topic and set some clear ground rules to make sure everyone is heard and we aren't talking past each other. (Sort of like a classroom.)
If that interests you, I would suggest practicing your hosting skills with non-controversial topics first, though.
That's the opposite of the outright flamewar you seem to be suggesting, but I think there are plenty of other websites for that sort of thing.
It's important to note that that there's a big difference between feelings and behaviour. It is possible to have strong emotions without behaving like an asshole. IRL when I get angry at someone I don't yell at them or call them names. Instead I communicate like an adult and explain to them "I feel angry because..." and then elaborate on what triggered these emotions. For example, on the notably heated topic of trans-healthcare, I could respond to someone who in favor of banning puberty blockers for children by saying "I feel angry about the notion that it's okay to deny all trans children puberty blockers, because many trans children will suffer greatly from going through a puberty that triggers dysphoria." I wouldn't call that person a transphobic asshole, even though that may be something I believe to be true, because how is that going to help the situation?
If both "sides" of the argument can act in good faith, then all is well and perhaps an adult conversation can be productive.
I do have a concern, however, about people who act in bad faith. As in people, for example, who may come here (or reddit or whatever) to claim that trans-healthcare is harmful for the people receiving healthcare when what they really believe is that there is a "natural order" to things and "men should be men" and "women should be women." These individuals simply believe that transitioning is bad, regardless of how it makes trans people feel, but they claim to believe that transitioning makes trans people feel bad so they can get people who actually care about trans-identifying people to use the misinformation anti-trans people provide as reasoning to join the anti-trans cause.
In the example above, the "being an asshole" part is the part where the speaker acted in bad faith and/or intentionally provided misinformation.
The challenging part is determining who is acting in bad faith. I myself have been accused of acting in bad faith when that certainly has not been the case.
In the end, I think it's fair to go to a place with moderation you trust (which I believe for me will be here) and just trust that they will use their own best judgment in good faith to only ban those users who are promote a toxic environment.
I for one love controversial topics, but I could do without name calling, bad faith arguments, and the promotion of misinformation. While I do agree that the risk of false positives (people who are acting in good faith being accused of acting in bad faith) is high, I think a well-reasoned "heavy hammer" approach is likely to cut the toxicity while still leaving room for healthy debate.
I kind of get what you're saying, but honestly coming from Reddit I really appreciate how being polite and respectful is more emphasized here. One of my most hated things about even the communities that I liked to pop into there was how many people will leap down your throat with snarky condescension at the first sign of having a different opinion than you. It's completely unnecessary and makes interacting feel tedious and tiring rather than a positive experience.
I'm super new here but so far it's been a massive breath of fresh air in that regard.
Can you provide examples of such situations?
The current Reddit situation is a nice example. Everyone knows it's downright wrong making API access so prohibitively expensive that it locks out all 3rd party apps. This by itself evokes strong opinions from redditors. But that's just the first layer of the outrage. The second layer is when Reddit's admins attempt to pretend this was not their intention, and blaming the Apollo dev of things he didn't do (he showed receipts). Of course this layer and other layers like the AMA increasingly makes people emotional and combative. And it's allright to be that way if the situation warrants it. That's just what humans do. As long people abstain from crossing certain lines of good coexistence, being outraged is fine and shouldn't by itself be phohibited.
That is actually an accurate summary of the code of conduct. It doesn't say "don't be outraged" or that negative emotions can't be expressed. The focus is on how you express yourself in what you say to others. Someone else just a made a comment that expresses this better than I can: https://tildes.net/~talk/164p/lets_talk_about_reddit_alternatives_shilling_and_tildes_bans#comment-89b0
I saw that thread too, but I assumed that the user wasn't being truthful about their ban. In my experience most folks who take to complaining about being banned aren't being 100% truthful about their actions. At least outside of political subs.
It could be they weren't not truthful, but just oblivious.
Some people can't make the connection between a ban and their overall behaviour.
I think most people who are assholes (by public opinion) don’t self-identify as such. They tend to see themselves as victims. And they think that by co-opting simple rules and playing by them on their own terms, the world should be on their side. Like the whole “I got banned for saying ‘Adios!’ which is not even a curse word!” kind of reasoning. In my opinion, responding with “adios!” can be anything from friendly, to passive-aggressive assholery.. it all depends on context. The word “Goodbye.” would have done exactly the same in the exact same context. Despite being a proper and neutral polite word, It’s obviously passive-aggresssive and dismissive in its context. So even when I read just that persons side of the story, it still reeked of “aah, this person is THAT kind of asshole”.
This is what I'm more inclined to believe. Most of the time, those sorts of posts of, "I was banned!" are not entirely truthful.
Mostly I wait for the inevitable reply calling out their BS. That part can at least be entertaining.
In some of the game communities I've been in we called them "smackdowns" and they were always truly glorious. For the first 6-12 hours the sob story runs unopposed - user totally did nothing wrong ever and has absolutely no idea why they would have been banned. And then of course it comes out that they cheated, constantly spewed vitriol, afked constantly, and about 20 other horrendous rule violations all in the span of 3 days.
Coming from the SomethingAwful forums back in the day, one of the things I did appreciate was the sometimes strict moderation, especially where chronic trolls were concerned. That, coupled with the fact that memberships cost actual, real money, meant there were consequences to one's actions, and you wouldn't have some perennial yahoo coming back to grief your forum under a different username as frequently as you do with Reddit.
Requiring a debit/credit card to get a user account is a fantastic way to filter out all of the children.
Most kids do not have a bank account.
At the same time, it's unfortunately a good way to filter out global users. Plus, it's an additional nightmare for privacy and security, and not one that 50 problem-causers necessitates here.
Good point. I'd also like to say on that same note that having a website whose code is larger than the video game doom (as most do) shuts out all the dialup users. Tildes does not. We fast on dialup - the fastest there is. And boy would we ever like to start getting more global users in this place. We need the perspectives.
Visa and MC gift cards have rendered this effect useless, this day and age.
Edit: okay @xethos you are correct and I will cede a little ground. A small financial penalty and having to physically go to the supermarket to buy a visa gift card will raise the difficulty bar a tiny bit.
It won't completely "filter out all of the children", as @Amarok phrased it, emphasis mine --and it will actually deter a lot of adults who don't trust their cc won't be misused -- but it will raise the difficulty a tiny bit and filter out the less determined children.
Perhaps you were a better child than I, but 10 year old me would most definitely buy a visa gift card next time I'm shopping with mom , or if I'm feeling confident (as a dumb 10 year old) the site won't actually charge the card I'll "borrow" it from a parent's wallet.
I'm unconvinced - at least half the point, best I can tell, is a financial penalty for being an asshole to the point of getting banned. Hearing from a friend that frequents SA, one can use the same card to recreate an account post-ban - it'll just cost you $10. Such is their current going price to be an asshole.
Using a gift card negates being tracked by name (to a point), but they certainly aren't free.
Bingo. Make the bastards pay to play. If the cost is high enough, you can price the spammers right out of the system. It's a lot harder to price out the assholes, though. ;)
Technically yes, but many (most) children under the age of 14 or so aren’t going to get Visa gift cards to subscribe to a niche Reddit-like forum.
I mean with Greenlight and other allowance apps kids now have debit cards more often, so I think the assumption that kids can’t purchase things online easily may be less accurate today than in the past
Metafilter also has a signup fee and strict moderation - I'm a fan of the approach!
I’ve always been part of ‘idiots get banned’ forums since i was a young teen so it’s nice to see some lines drawn in the sand here.
SA is very refreshing in that respect; I’ve also added it back to my browser and phone after many years.
@crowsby Are you still active at the SomethingAwful forums? Another thread on Tildes introduced me to this community. I did a quick glance over there and the website is still up and charging $10 for registration. I looked it over and it looked unique and fun. Would you recommend participating?
I'm more dormant really, I think my last post was like ten years ago, but I check it out every once in a while. I'd lurk the forums first to see if you like the culture. The one thing that I think might throw people off would be the fact that there's 24 years of forums lore and history, but also it might be kind of fun for going down rabbit holes. It's also somewhat challenging moving from a multi-threaded conversation model to pure chronological threads.
That being said, the dialog on the site is a definite step above Reddit. It feels less anonymous, more authentic, and posts are less inclined to be vapid one-liner throwaways.
Pretty cool to have such an entrenched culture over the years. It would be interesting from an anthropological perspective - I wonder if any anthropologists have considered studying it in the digital culture realm! I'd love to read that.
Perhaps I'll jump in and experience it myself, and write about the experience of a newcomer to such an established digital culture and community.
I wonder if people really value the separation and distinct digital nature of their culture and relations, or if there are regular meetups in the physical world. If you can speak to any of these, very interested! :)
I want to take offense to this (kneejerk reaction, sorry), but it's pretty accurate. That place severely fucked with the way my brain is wired and made me self-conscious about things]. I started changing the way I talked to fit whatever worked there. I have no doubt that spending all of my 20s (and half my 30s) on Digg/reddit broke me in some way. Which honestly sounds pathetic, but it is what it is.
But anyway, I'm saving my remaining invites for an old forum (an offshoot of the GameFAQs Star Wars board dating back to like 2008 or so). A lot of us grew up there and a few gave me shit for being on reddit at all (fair enough, in retrospect), so I think all of them would be a good fit. Hoping there's interest there.
I had the same response. I'd vote for "conditioning" as better terminology here. "Brain damage" feels mean-spirited to me (not to mention a bit ableist).
I definitely get what y'all are saying though. reddit did a number on my brain as well that took me a while to undo.
Good call. I'll tweak that.
I've been there myself, I only say it because it's true. ;)
Aw man, I love hearing that some of these survived. I was in a Metal Gear Solid offshoot of the GameFAQs boards but we all split into the wind about ten years ago. I still think about them sometimes, we all really came up together.
Jesus I couldn’t agree more with your comment, I had the same reaction and subsequent realization.
I’m stunted in some specific ways by Reddit in a way I didn’t realize/want to acknowledge.
That wouldn’t happen to be 404, would it?
The board ID was 223 before they changed how the IDs worked. Our offshoot was called “neo223”.
Ah, ok. I was on a gamefaqs spinoff in the 2000s called 404 error. I wasn’t a member of the gamefaqs community from which it spawned, though, and not sure which one it was.
Ah gotcha. Wonder if that was the forum ID like ours was, or just a great name for a site?
If it was the board ID they got lucky haha. Not sure! I should look them up some day…
As a new user (was previously on Reddit and before that, Digg), how does Tildes handle contrasting opinions now and how will it in the future?
Back in the day, Reddit was a great place where differing views could be debated. As time continued, many subreddits became more authoritarian and would ban users - not for just being an asshole or trolling (which we can all agree isn’t helpful in building a community) - but for “wrongthink.” You could even be banned for participating in subs that other moderators disagreed with.
Not looking to get into an argument with this question but I am curious how Tildes will moderate users over time. So far, I’ve really enjoyed the discourse on the numerous threads I’ve read through. I’m just curious how this can be preserved without one side of a debate (when it arises) trying to silence the opposition?
The short version is this: We make sure that 1% of bad actors never become mods, and we make sure the other 99% of our users all become mods in all of the communities where they participate. To be a user is to be a moderator, and even lurkers can get in on this without doing anything more than voting normally. We level all our users up as they participate, like it's ranks in a gaming guild, with the most dangerous features at the top of that trust system. We also allow for inactivity to decay those ranks so that people are not 'mod for life' so to speak. We let people review the mod actions when possible, but only in context of where those actions took place. There's probably a separation of powers angle to explore as well, based loosely on roles like newspaper editor, museum curator, and traffic cop. I rather like the idea of splitting that up to help avoid powermod cliques like reddit has.
I should also point out that LLMs like chatGPT are going to radically change the 'moderation' problem space. None of us know what that looks like yet, but since Deimos did create SubredditSimulator from markov chains, he's not entirely unschooled in this area. The idea of an LLM helping with moderation is very exciting.
After that I honestly have no idea, because as far as I can tell, this has never been tried before.
Oh wow, I loved SubredditSimulator! That's so cool he made it!
That's news to me too! I loved going into that sub and checking out the bot conversations.
wait, does moderation really work like that? because that sort of moderation is under “future plans” in the docs. or did i misunderstand something? i was actually wondering how that worked since i’ve heard that “everyone is a moderator” but i haven’t really seen any moderation bits and bobs
Moderation will work like that once it's actually built. That's the 'dream' - right now you have comment labels, which is the first step, and they work pretty well. Once your user account is seven days old you can moderate other people's comments, like this.
aah i see, thank you for clarifying~ my account is 3 years old, just inactive for the vast majority of that time. so by moderation right now you just mean the labels, alright, got it
I do love the idea of this, and maybe you've already thought of what may seem like "obvious" ways to game this - but because so few people really put thought into what buttons mean on the sites they're using, it's very easy for "community moderation" to result in the removal of anything that disagrees, even if it's not toxic/offensive etc.
On reddit, as you likely know, upvote/downvote is not meant to be "agree/disagree" and yet here we are. Also on reddit, report abuse is rampant. If you're a mod on reddit, anything moderately unpopular gets reported by at least a few users who just don't like it.
The same is true on Facebook. I moderate a couple of large neighborhood groups and it's shocking how much stuff gets reported not just by one bitter person, but by several, even though it clearly doesn't break any rules.
Given that, if you bring an unpopular opinion into a fairly one-sided group, it seems extremely plausible that the community will moderate you "incorrectly", doesn't it?
I wanna be super clear: I am the opposite of some sort of edgelord archetype and this isn't some veiled "is speech here really free?" type of thing. This kind of thing could happen in any direction based on what community/sub-community it takes place in. Even a simple thing like a discussion group about string theory (which apparently now is falling out of favor?) where some folks still think it is valid and others don't - not a political thing, just a thing - would fall prey to this without some sort of controls in place, would it not?
We can wax theoretical all day, and it's fun, but ultimately we have to run experiments with new ideas to answer these questions. If you aren't being forced to make money, you're actually free to do these experiments and stop chasing 'growth' for your 'investors'. So I'll just say that Tildes is here to answer these kinds of questions. It's the only reddit alternative that is intentionally compatible with that goal.
I'm sure it does not help that most sites - and yes, reddit is one of them - are built to encourage the bad behaviors and make people get into angry slapfights for 'engagement' and page metrics. The entire silicon-valley-vc philosophy behind these sites is sick to the core. They will never find the solutions you are looking for. We might not find them either but we're going to go looking. Anyone trying to make a good reddit alternative had better go looking for them too. Failure is the way to greatness. ;)
In my experience, moderation basically only happens in three scenarios:
I can't see a discussion on string theory falling into any of those, but I'm also not a physicist. :P
Forgive me if you feel like I’m misinterpreting your words, but I find that the idea of an “unpopular opinion” is fairly muddled in your reasoning.
I will eat raw potatoes as a snack, and think they’re delicious. As my partner constantly reminds me, that’s an unpopular opinion. I doubt I will get banned on tildes for this though.
Someone saying that trans people are all groomers? Or someone trying to promote eugenics? Those kind of comments get labeled as “unpopular opinions” but i think that’s weasel wording what they actually are: hate speech that can cause tangible harm to others. I’ll be perfectly Frank, if someone’s free speech is used to talk about how inferior another group is, or to spread hate and misinformation, then I have no problem with their free speech being silenced.
Of course, that leads to the next question: who gets to decide what speech is acceptable? Well, in this case it is the community. When they do that they also shape the narrative around themselves.
So yes, in theory tildes could end up a white supremacist echo chamber with the current rules and if it was filled with people who believe that. The flip side is that then tildes reputation is shot.
Look at Reddit, for example. It’s (some might say ridiculously) light hand with shitty subs such as FPH, jailbait, T_D amongst others tarnished its reputation for years and years. The layperson who isn’t super connected on the internet did NOT have a good impression of Reddit for the longest time.
I agree with your points here.
But I have to ask… do you really eat raw potatoes as a snack? No judgement but I need to know.
Absolutely! When I cut french fries, for example, I'll grab a handful to eat raw. I like the crunch.
Amazing. Respect!
You will have to "level up" quite a few times to get to the level of a mod-ability as powerful as removing other people's content. Along the way, if you show signs of misusing lower-level mod abilities (like, for example, maliciously labelling other people's comments as 'Malice'), you'll actually be levelled down rather than up.
The moderation pyramid will rely on a user's reputation to determine what moderation abilities they get, and there will be continual feedback about whether users are misusing those mod-abilities, which will result in them losing those privileges.
Of course, like @Amorak has already said, most of this stuff is just theoretical at this time. But some people here already have very good ideas about what directions Tildes will go, broadly speaking, even if they'll have to work out the details through experimentation along the way.
Yep. I can also promise that this stuff literally never pans out like one would expect. One cannot predict how people will use a feature - that's what makes social software inherently chaotic. The best predictor is adding a feature that exists elsewhere - one can observe the other community using it. Trouble is, even that isn't a guarantee, because this group is not that group, and the group is the user of the software - not the individual. So, all these nice theories we're throwing up are going to get clobbered by reality. Often. And that's fine, we're used to it. :)
Substantive respectful debate is encouraged.
Bickering or disrespectful debate will get deleted.
Intolerance of any kind will get deleted or result in a temporary/ permanent ban. Which includes debating issues that don't affect you personally, but affect other users personally.
If you belong to a majority, and comment on a thread that are specific to a minority (e.g. women are a minority here) your thread will get deleted to allow the minority a voice.
If you debate an issue that impacts a minority voice, and you belong to the majority, expect the thread to be deleted at a minimum. You probably wont have anything interesting to say, and the minority voice is probably tired of having the same debate.
None of these are hard and fast rules, just differences I have observed over the years.
That doesn't sound right, sorry... maybe I am misunderstanding. If there is a debate about something that afflicts a group of which I am not a part of, I should not participate in that debate. Did I get that right? No sympathizing, no drawing parallels, if I am not part of the affected "minority" then my input is not only by default invalid but also grounds for deletion?
It's not quite as strict as PantsEnvy makes it out to be imo. But generally, tread carefully when the topic affects minorities or disadvantaged people, and you're not part of that. You can take part in the conversation, of course, but be mindful not to drown out the conversation. If a black person wants to do a post-mortem of the George Floyd protests with other black people, it'd be a bummer if it's just white guys talking over each other. If you've got relevant factual information to contribute, that might be a good reason to chime in, while your opinion might be valued less, particularly if it is a adverse opinion that black people find themselves having to debate constantly. Then there's the question of makeup of those threads. If there's already a lot of people of the majority in a thread that ought to be a space for the minority, it's best not to add to that.
It's also important to recognize that deletion of a comment isn't necessarily a reflection of your character, and doesn't necessarily get you closer to a ban. Deimos prunes a few comments here and there in discussions that are liable to boil over, not because those comments themselves break the rules, but because they raise the temperature and make it more likely for things to get very messy very quickly. Takes a bit getting used to, but it's been working quite well I'd say.
In case of doubt, take a step back and observe. You'll sometimes see people calling out the majority for monopolizing the thread, so that's a good reference point for where the line is culturally.
It's worth a note that this is the Malice tag in action. Deimos doesn't sit here reading your threads. The users here are the ones hitting the problem spots with the Malice tag, and they have to type in a text reason to apply the tag so he knows why they are doing it. If he agrees, he moderates. If not, he moves on, and if you spam Malice tags frivolously all the time, you won't be able to use them for very long. It works out rather well.
I kinda wish there was a lighter version of malice. If I see a comment I'm worried about, but I also don't think it's problematic by itself, I might want a way to slow down the conversation, remind everyone to tread carefully, but not outright ascribe malice. "Inciting" maybe, just to disambiguate accidentally heating up the discussion from intentionally doing so. Maybe the site could even tie some mechanics around that automatically to cool down that part of the discussion.
A 'let it go' label, for when you see a slapfight starting. Those things are always so damn obvious, until it's yourself starting the slapfight. Apply it to the participants and the site cools them down somehow. I like it.
Exactly. Maybe it rate limits people to only replying after a comment has reached a certain age - say half an hour. Same for edits of course. After you press "post" the site asks you "people think you're in a slapfight. You sure you wanna post this?" That kinda thing.
Actually a really good idea I'd say! Maybe the delay before being allowed to reply to the post again gets scaled based on how many people applied the tag?
Something like a “careful” tag and when a thread accrues one it pops up a “remember, it is everyone’s responsibility to de-escalate when it gets heated” before replying? Maybe the site has you review a preview of your post before you can commit it?
If someone posts news about eg trans rights in the UK to the ~lgbt group, and straight cis Hypothetical_Bob says "but I agree with banning treatment for trans people, we know it's harmful to kids", well, Hypothetical_Bob deserves at least a temporary ban and to have the comment deleted.
Should Hypothetical_Bob get bans and deletions if they post the same comment to other parts of the site, in different threads? I'd suggest "yes", because Tildes is a community and we don't force our LGBT+ friends to exist in tiny silos, we welcome them to the entire site. (Although it's important to note that I am not, and never ever will be, a mod here. I'd be terrible at it. So maybe I'm wrong about this.)
There are certain hot-button topics where people already know what they think, and discussion isn't going to change their mind, even though they pretend that they're some hyper-rational being. And if someone hasn't already made up their mind there are usually ways to have that conversation on Tildes.
I disagree he deserves a temporary ban if he comes from different perspective as you and follows the rule "don't be a jerk", the point is to have a discussion with good arguments, not just temporary ban because I don't like your points even if you are respectful.
That's one of the reasons I don't like current Reddit.
I need to get some priors in order to lessen some ambiguity that may be present.
The theoretical context that @DanBC provided is that an article is posted in ~lgbt about a situation affecting that group. Some other user, not involved, comes into the thread and drops the comment:
You have then replied saying:
With that out of the way I'd like to discuss the effects of a part of your reply.
It seems to have unintentionally mischaracterized the "original" offending comment. Commenting support for banning treatment for trans people in a group created specifically for users who fall under that umbrella is absolutely not following the rule "don't be a jerk". Sure it's a "different perspective", but it's also inciting, does nothing to contribute to the conversation, shows a lack of regard for users who are active in the ~lgbt group, AND actively goes against the medical advice that's recommended by reputable organizations. (For the second link, expand the subsection titled "Medical and Surgical Therapy"). Hypothetical_Bob's comment is not an argument; it's a statement decrying the validity of an entire group of people to receive healthcare services that the rest of the population has access to, based on a severe ignorance of transgender issues. I agree, Hypothetical_Bob should be banned. (temporarily if they show understanding of why it happened and make attempts to change, permanently if they come back and double down on the rhetoric)
An equivalent to the above scenario might be someone from /r/firearms making a post in a mass-shooting survivor subreddit about: "The issue isn't guns, we have 2nd amendment rights, you should be focusing on, like, mental health or something." It comes off as incredibly un-empathetic, tone-deaf, and adversarial - not conversational, not respectful, and certainly not productive.
I don't believe you did that on purpose, but I wanted to gently point it out. It's important to see how an unintentional framing can completely change how a comment might be perceived. One of the central tenants of Tildes is that we value high quality, high effort discussions. Sure it will take longer to type out and threads might move underneath of you while you're writing (this comment will be an example, been working on it for like, 45 minutes), but it contributes so much more back to the site than a simple 1 or two liner throwaway comment and in situations like this one, might even head a problem off before it starts.
I also wanted to include a section not aimed at you, but to provide visibility to a lot of the new users that are coming in. They might not have seen another prolific user mention it yet.
Topics addressing the "validity of LGBT rights", in my opinion, don't belong in the ~lgbt group. They have a LOT to deal with already, ~lgbt is meant to be a supportive, shared space, for escape from the almost constant barrage of hate from elsewhere on the internet. I don't post there, I don't feel a need to post there, I don't belong to that group so I have little to offer it. I'm not prevented from posting there mind you - but everywhere else online seems to have more than enough cis-het men like myself so I don't need to insert myself into that space. That's another aspect that I think was implied from Dan's comment above (correct me if I'm wrong), but might be easily missed from someone who hasn't been soaking in Tildes for a bit, like myself.
Others have already waxed poetic on the issue of having productive conversations about hard topics, and I don't feel like I have anything new to provide there. I'll let them speak on that.
Sometimes sophistry can be a "good argument" but is inherently a bad faith mode of engagement. It's very hard to know up front whether someone is deploying a sophistic argument because they heard it and were persuaded or because they are knowingly trying to use it to advance a malign agenda. It's something you kind of have to read from the vibes. I think a lot of left-leaning spaces are oversensitive about detecting the latter to the point where it inhibits their ability to engage with substantive objections and concerns. But a lot of centrist-leaning spaces tend to be undersensitized and assume the former which makes them easy marks for all manner of nonsense. It's legitimately a tough call to make in most cases. You just kind of have to do your best.
This is well said. It think it boils down to whether we want more type 1 errors or more type 2 errors, and I think we need to understand that attempting to reduce one will produce the other.
I also think everyone has a different preference and tolerance for those errors. What I consider “best” for the community might not align with what other people think, which creates a tension in and of itself that’s completely independent of any specific content or user actions.
I think the best thing we can do is all have some flexibility to accept that there has to be a little bit of width to our community lane here for those that would like it narrower, and it also means that it might be narrower than some of those who prefer more width would like. The boundaries will invariably be drawn somewhere outside of our individual comfort zones, because it would be impossible to find a single fit for everyone.
This is falling for the fallacy that all opinions are equal and should be treated fairly.
I don’t want or need to have a civil conversation with a Nazi to know their point of view is garbage, and treating that bad opinion like it belongs in the “marketplace of ideas” is giving a legitimacy to it that does nothing but hurt others.
There are no hard and fast rules.
(I am not part of any minority, yet I am here contributing to the debate?)
I would definitely comment in response to Hypothetical_Bob if no one else had. If someone self identifying as Trans started to engage, I would (try to remember to) let their voice take over.
Much like if someone was talking to my wife, about being a woman, I would defend her if the person was being offensive but otherwise (try to) let her talk and (try to) avoid the temptation to mansplain womanhood. (I just drew a parallel?)
It took me a while to appreciate this approach. I personally asked (what seemed to me at the time) a well intentioned question - in a thread specific to women. It got deleted. Because none of the women on here had commented yet. And I realized with hindsight that my question discouraged their participation.
Having a comment deleted by the admin is disappointing, but has happened probably to everyone here. Even members of the LGBT community have had comments deleted in the LGBT threads. Being a minority in one group does not automatically mean you have a meaningful contribution related to a different minority.
There is a thread you might have seen on Reddit. (You can't see it right now.) It's titled I said, "How tall are you?" He handed me this. It's funny. But the thread was full of very tall people talking about how tired they were of getting the same questions and comments. And being tall is usually considered a positive trait. Can you imagine how tired some minorities are right now? I can only guess. (That is my attempt at sympathy?)
Deletion of comments is something that is very different here than on Reddit. As someone said, it's not the same as being banned. Sometimes an entire thread will get nuked because the top level comment is too inflammatory. It really doesn't matter what the subject is, if the conversation is devolving or likely to devolve, the thread gets nuked. I think the site is better for that approach, but it takes a little getting used too. I've found I am much less argumentative on this site. And much more considerate.
meh. I still don't think it's productive. Many of my most insightful debates were born out of what might appear to be a vicious argument, it really depends on the crowd & sort of having the unspoken respect between a person bringing in an outside perspective and the person viewing from inside. And relevance should be up to the board not admins. If a group is a minority, give the group's votes more weight. Ultimately removing comments for reasons such as this will lead to corruption and hivemind. But that's just my opinion, I may be wrong but I believe it enough to type it out.
I imagine it's hugely context dependent. Like if it's some e.g. cis dude coming in and telling women how we feel and what we need ("if you just kept yer legs closed you wouldn't need abortions REEE!"), yeah, he needs to sit the fuck down. I can't expect good faith conversation to be affected.
Tildes has a long and storied history discussing this. In my opinion, it strikes a good balance. There is a fundamental shared world view required to use Tildes -- if your (abstract you) idea 'wrongthink' includes things like debating people's human rights you're going to have a bad time. But you're not going to get nuked for a dissenting opinion if it's one that's grounded with mutual respect.
We have a decently diverse set of political opinions here, mostly bounded by the American centre and leftwards. Something I've had to learn (and am still learning) as one of Tildes' few(?) liberals over time is not everyone who disagrees with you is asking to be responded to, sometimes people just want to vent about something without it turning into an argument or debate.
Tildes has had a running issue where we have lost our most left-wing and some right-wing users (though, people from the right rarely join up here). Part of the issue is that, as a community, there are things that are generally taken for granted by the native population and this did, especially in early days, lead to some friction among people with different ideologies.
So far it's more about the nature of the discussion than the topic, but obviously there are topics that are more or less forbidden. This isn't by site rules exactly, but societal rules. An example was we had a topic that turned into a side-discussion about eugenics. That went about as well as one would have expected, and the whole thing got nuked because the whole thing became angry and generally indecent.
Basically, there are three major things to do in a difficult conversation, and difficult conversations are likely where heavy moderation is needed:
Honestly state your position and attempt to clarify it.
If somebody takes issue with your position, feel free to defend it. If you dislike somebody else's position, feel free to criticize it. Do so in a civil manner.
If you aren't gaining anything from the discussion but anger, discomfort, and general unhappiness, walk away.
Do the above while considering the core ideas the site hopes to build itself around
The only time we tend to have deletions that I've seen is when somebody messed up on one of these first three points and it causes them to ignore the fourth.
It's hard to comment on your experience without knowing the full context, but here's how similar scenarios play out in my reddit communities.
IMHO, the tendency for websites to become more authoritarian has two main drivers: first, organized trolling pushes debate into non-debatable territory; two, power over others tends to make people want more power. There are so many more factors, however these are the main problems I have experienced.
I do not see the fear of "wrongthink". I only see the desire to divide and destroy communities. It only takes a handful of dedicated and coordinated people to introduce enough division into a community to completely destroy it. The word that you used sets off my alarm for that type of destructive behavior.
Reddit leadership failed to properly snub out the division. I think that they enabled the conflict to increase exposure and participation. I do not think that will happen here. Trolls are not allowed to play.
As someone who has been a community moderator on various platforms for close to 20 years now, I find the number one issue is time and numbers.
When your community is 50 people sure you can step in personally to each debate and make sure it’s worked out and people are respectful. That kind of individual care takes time and community bonds, both of which are less and less prevalent the more people you have to moderate, especially if you are not paid for content moderation. When you have 10 or 50 or 100 people a day you have to ban for using dogwhistles or bigotry, you literally don’t have time to make sure you give the offending party the benefit of the doubt, and if you do then the trolls use that against you.
(This isn’t even getting into the emotional labor or mental strain that dealing with this kind of conflict in your free time does to a person. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve actually seen someone become a mod just to have “mod powers”, which don’t allot to nearly as much as people think. It’s a labor of love of a community for the most part.
I can make a few points adding onto this:
To lower the stakes a bit: Tildes is a website. There are other websites. When someone leaves a website, it can be sad, particularly if you have no other way to connect. But it's not a huge tragedy.
We do make friends on websites and that matters. Finding alternative ways to connect with mutual online friends is a good backup plan, if you have a close enough relationships that you want to keep them. This is true even if you don't expect anything bad to happen. Many people participate anonymously for good reason, but if you're not worried about it, putting a link to your blog or Mastodon account or even Reddit profile in your bio might make sense? Otherwise you can use private messages.
On the other hand, if you only know someone when you meet in one place and nobody makes an effort to meet in any other way, how close a friend are they, really? Maybe they're more of an acquaintance. Maybe that's okay?
"Trust us" is not a particularly compelling argument, but sometimes it's practical. Discussing whether a ban was unjust is mostly a way to make yourself unhappy. We are unlikely to get enough evidence about any particular case to decide this one way or another. What evidence we do get may be distorted and self-serving.
Talking about Tildes elsewhere serves as advertising. Since invites are deliberately limited, Tildes also has limited use for advertising. If you want to do it, be selective. You only have so many invites and not being able to get one can be frustrating. Just saying that you have a few invites might be enough, in the right situation? (Although, I have pinned posts on Twitter and Mastodon and nobody has taken me up on the offer.)
It's a bit more concrete as a non-profit corporation peddling code with the most aggressive open source license. It runs on donations. That means if trust is broken, there are no donations, and so it goes. I mean, Tildes could sell all our private data for a buck a user like reddit and facebook do, rather than deleting it after 30 days - right now it doesn't even keep email address after signup. Well internet, which way do you want it, hmm?
I agree; the reason "trust us" is practical is because there's little at stake, so we can go on faith. Maybe have a little bit of a backup plan if you think you need one, but we're mostly about entertainment here, so the backup plan can be "find something else fun to do." That goes for banned people and for everyone else, too.
I don't know if this is a question that has an answer, but as a reddit evacuee (12 years, moderator, deleted my account today in support of blackout) who is hours-new to
TildeTildes, I wonder what this site's approach to astroturfing and bots is?By that I only mean: automated or bad-faith (advertiser/clickbait) accounts. Speaking for myself, reddit's content quality took an observable dip around '14-16 when the presence of paid and bot accounts grew ubiquitous. It's been frustrating to see the site become gamified by advertisers, PACs and ultimately the reddit admins themselves (from the site redesign to expanded social media features to this week's fiasco), but I wonder how much any site can do, once it hits the radar of advertisers, to prevent a flood of junk accounts?
My first impression is that the signup process here simply doesn't have the ease of reddit's, which allows reddit account creation to be automated. But has there been a larger conversation around whether or not
TildeTildes could reach an inflection point where bots and farmers will be banging down the door to be let in? Do you just cross that bridge when you get there?edit: Tildes, may as well try to get the site name right :P
I suspect someday bots might be a thing, but last time we talked about this, everyone was very firmly in favor of having all bots clearly labeled as bots, running on specially created bot accounts which limit what that bot can do to just the things it needs to do. If there's a bot not on that sort of account, that's a ban for that bot. They have to get approved.
That's if we ever need bots. More likely, useful features get baked into the code directly. We only did bots on reddit because reddit would never, ever add any features the users asked for. Bots were the only choice. Here we have better options.
As for spammers, Deimos was also on reddit's anti-evil team. There are ways to make them weep, and if they have to earn 'trust' by participation that's going to be a lot harder for them here. Honestly though, we will never have spammer or bot issues until we go open signup. The invite only model makes it too hard for them to get in, and too easy for us to spot them and remove them.
I see! Thanks for the reply. I didn't actually understand that the invite-only model was, well, the model.
The blog post I followed to request an invitation was already from '18, but I wasn't grasping that the invitations weren't just an alpha thing. That does do a hell of a lot to make it a non-issue.
I'm not sure that "invite-only" is the model. Back in the day, there was lots of talk about how being invite-only was a way to keep the intake of new users manageable, while this site is still in development.
5 years later, this site is still in development, and the invite-only regime has been in place for so long that some people assume it's going to continue like that forever. But that's not how it's going to work. As Amorak wrote in that comment you're replying to: "Honestly though, we will never have spammer or bot issues until we go open signup." Not "if we go open sign-up", but "until". But, at the rate we're going, that "until" could be a while off. "It won't happen overnight, but it will happen."
It could even be a decade away, who knows?
Think of it this way - we will know when our tools and mechanics are bulletproof enough to risk open signups. It'll become obvious that invite only's various advantages (immunity to spammers, bots, trolls and brakes for eternal september) have become redundant, and that will be the time to think about opening it up.
There's middle ground, too. One could allow for just 200 open signups a week with a metered signup feature. I'd expect to see that stuff long before we ever go all open all the time.
kinda reminds me of demonoid, they opened registration for the 1st of each month, but nowhere was it ever posted that that's when they flipped the sign. I only realized because I was on there like every day for a few months when Minecraft was being released :D those were the days
Being that Tildes is invite-only, the ability for automated accounts to join is severely limited.
Tildes also has no plans to allow advertising, is not a reddit replacement, doesn't intend on being a reddit replacement, it's primary motive is not profit-seeking, and should always remain small enough that advertising is never necessary.
If the site gets big enough that bots/advertisers show up I'm sure they'll simply be dealt with.
Is tildes to be self funding? If traffic grows to a point, some sort of revenue strategy might be desirable if the collective values self sufficiency.
Even if it's a Patreon.
You can already donate to Tildes. Here is Deimos's comment touching on the topic too :D
Ahh thank you!
The main problem with Tildes seems to be how homogeneous it is. Which is unavoidable given it's structure, but still prevents it from being super interesting.
By default every user is subscribed to every sub forum, which all have exactly the same rules as each other, which pretty much defeats the point of having sub forums at all.
This also applies to moderation, because this is effectively just one singular forum, run by a single person, the moderation is always going to be suspect and subject to potentially huge changes with no notice. Maybe it's good now, I really have no way to verify that even if it seems good enough, but how do I know it'll be the same in 6 months or a year?
With how Reddit works, the sitewide moderation can be extremely lax and it doesn't matter, because subreddits create their own rules to suit their users. The variety of subreddits and rulesets means that it's easy enough to frequent places with rules you like, and ignore places with rules you dislike, and if moderators of one subreddit happen to ban you without a good reason it doesn't really impact your ability to use the site as a whole. Sitewide bans are relatively rare and usually warranted, so overall as much as people bitch reddit ends up with a pretty robust moderation system and many unique subreddits
This place has neither of those
You're not wrong with your observations. I will clarify a few things from my perspective:
A month ago, this was a forum with about maybe 100 active users. It's been kind of a surreal experience, but figuring out how to do groups and moderation at scale haven't really been at the forefront of things to think about. There are some ideas on how to do moderation at scale and dynamic group creation in the original docs, we've just never needed them. Maybe that's changing, we'll see how things look in a few months I guess. Deimos does not seem to be actively developing Tildes at the moment, but he's not gone and we have a large community of developers if the need is there.
I think this is a really important point that is worth emphasizing. Although our user count was hovering at 13k, I think until about two weeks ago we had around 100 active users, who were already very familiar with the site. This is all so very new and exciting and I hope Tildes keeps growing and adapting! But it also means that things that some potential problems (like, are our groups effective?) are only now being highlighted. It takes time to adjust to a growth spurt!
But note that the user count went down to 100 over the last 1-2 years (not sure what the peak was at that point). I think the lack of subs identity is part of that decline, so if the same causes lead to the same effects we will be back to a lethargic forum in a couple of months. Maybe there's some threshold effect and the community will now be self-sustaining but I wouldn't bet on that.
I think the best solution for now is what we have done in the past, which is add a handful of new groups based on community input. I think allowing user-created subs this early (in size, not in age) just ends up fragmenting the community and making it hard to promote any site-wide culture. I'm reminded of the fact that Reddit did not have user-made subreddits for the first few years of its existence, and it got them when it was much larger than Tildes is now.
I only bring this up because I think a lot of people are dissatisfied with the current group structure (fair) but want the familiar solution of user-created groups. Maybe down the line, but not now.
I haven't talked to Deimos about this but I am positive we'll see a groups thread in the next two weeks. It's just that time. So, everyone think about what you would like to see here for new groups, and why, so you're ready to chime in when it gets here. Maybe think a bit more deeply about it than just 'import reddit community x' as well. Maybe there's a better way to do that group, or collection of groups, than reddit did it.
I supposed that what you describe is a "problem" if your perspective is that Tildes should become the next Reddit. I'd argue that if becoming the next Reddit was the goal of Tildes then that would be a problem because how can you become as big and popular and broadly-scoped as Reddit without eventually going down the exact same path we're seeing Reddit go down now? I don't think you can.
If we're going to compare Tildes to Reddit I'd say Tildes (at least as it is today) in its entirety is more comparable to a single local community's subreddit as opposed to Reddit as a whole.
But then tildes is far too generic to be an interesting forum, isn't it? If it's supposed to be a niche, focused forum why is it also trying to be about almost every topic imaginable.
It's got a boost now with the reddit drama but I'm very skeptical it will ever grow much, which may not be a bad thing for people who like it the way it is.
It's sort of supposed to be that way. Tildes doesn't want to capture attention like Reddit, it's not here for the dopamine hit brought by a never-ending stream of information, videos, memes, and discussions.
The intended experience is to maybe come in, browse around, find something stimulating to discuss, or share something stimulating to discuss, and have that discussion.
As far as growth, keeping the lights on is a goal, of course, but explosive growth is directly antithetical to the position Tildes wants to foster because, in general, massive growth of a site's population brings with it complications in moderation and problematic group behavior.
What tildes lacks is any sort of distinction between different sub forums. It doesn't need to go full reddit to just add the slightest levels of divisions between different forums.
Growth is also necessary because old users will inevitably get bored, if you have no new people coming in you won't be able to sustain. And the admins are trying to get new members from Reddit so they clearly don't agree with you there either.
The doors were opened, and have been closed again after 4k signups. We'll see if that was for the best over time, and is an exception in 5 years of the site existing. It seems to have gone well, and was simply one instance where they took advantage of an opportunity that presented itself. I would likely not expect that to happen again, and things to return to a trickle of users asking for invites once the current Reddit drama, and any dispensed invites that will likely be given over time, have managed themselves.
Tildes simply organizes itself differently using tags. This is, to my understanding, intentional to prevent community siloing like happens on communities like Reddit where every specific niche is locked away from other groups, while still allowing for easy perusing or blocking of certain topics should one choose not to engage with them.
It's not about everything per se; rather, users can post anything.
I know this is difficult with the "low" amount of users, but for me, the very few sub-forums are a hindrance, actually.
I can see why wou'd opt for very few forums, but if I want to discuss, for example, chatGPT or prompt engineering, I will need to use "tech" which might not like these discussions, and I would not even know what/how to breach such a subject.
You would use tags to designate the specific topic. If people don’t like a topic they will simply not engage with it or ignore it. There’s no downvote buttons here, there’s nothing to fear from people not liking your stuff and giving people a hard time for trying to share their passions is “being an asshole” which is against the rules.
If you’re being so prolific that you’re flooding the site with your pet topics that might become an issue, but that’s more likely if we have a bunch of small subgroups versus one big group that can dilute the negative impacts of posting a lot.
Yeah, I saw that.
Still trying to wrap my head round the etiquette here.
It seems to revolve around bigger topics, as on other sites, the user base was big enough for even smaller topics, such as ChatGPT prompting.
When I look at the "chatgpt" or "machine learning" tags, not so much pops up.
Tildes is definitely not on the scale of some other sites and forums, but as far as I'm aware there's no restriction on the breadth of topic for discussion. I wouldn't take the fact that nobody has previously posted about something specific that you're interested in to be a sign that it would be frowned upon--instead I'd take that as an invitation to fire up your own topic to get the conversation started.
See... that's what I wanted to hear :D
I'm surprised by that. One prolific Tilder has made a series of megathread topics "for news/updates/discussion of ChatGPT and other AI chatbots". Those topics have prompted a lot of discussion about AI and chatbots. You might want to check them out. The 11th in the series was posted just a couple of weeks ago.
Ah this a good point I hadn't considered.
@zielperson one of the conventions here for if you don't want to spam the place up with a bunch of articles about the same thing is to just create a single megathread for people to post in. As long as the discussion keeps going it will keep bumping to the top.
I did this recently with reviews for Apple's VisionPro headset and you may see a lot of these once US Election season starts up. One for each debate or primary event, for example.
Thank you.
This is exactly what I meant by having to observe first. How/when to create such a thread, for example
Thank you
Yes, I saw those.
it is a different pace and more of bigger posts instead of many small ones here.
Yeah. I just thought about this again.
Thing is .. 11 threads.. the last posted a month ago?
Being used to reddit's pace (userbase numbers), 11 threads would be before noon... and that's for a niche sub.
BUT.. a lot of that was low effort stuff, too. which I am happy to forget about.
I kinda feel like this here is more restricted, which has two sides to it.
Negative: slow, and "small topics" as in "look at this cool prompt I tried" might not fly
Positive: slow, and less low effort crap everywhere.
The very niched subreddits just had the advantage of knowing your target audience.
I can spam small posts about chatgopt prompting all day long in a reddit dedicated to it, and people will be happy.
I do this in ~tech and people will be justifiably angry.
Still boils down to getting to know the place, its inhabitants, and culture.
I wasn't around then, but what exactly is meant with the "evaporative cooling effect" and the site being on ice?
I agree with the invites topping off being a risk, even though I would like one for my SO. Is there a middle way where we can allow some invites without opening the floodgates?
Edit: my wife got her invite, thanks guys I'm good on the invites now :)
'Evaporative cooling' is a term you'll see social software engineers using to describe what happens when a forum is treading water. Not many new people coming in, not many people talking about it, not much going on with the forum in the first place. When that happens, users 'evaporate' and drift away to more active places. That cools down the activity, the number of posts, etc. It's a feedback effect, and it kills most online communities in the cradle.
The solution is to have a burst of activity and/or new folks coming in faster than old folks evaporate. That stirs things up and keeps it fresh. Tildes has just come out of a two year cooldown phase. If you're designing social software - plan for this, and make sure your finances can handle it. It always happens, and if you can't weather the cool phases, they will kill the site.
This is a great explanation of the phenomenon. I don't know if this falls under the same category, but it feels similar to what I've seen happen on tv show subreddits - there's little activity between seasons and after it ends, it goes dead. Exceptions being if it's popular enough that it keeps gaining new fans who want to discuss the show alongside a fairly active random.
I hadn't thought about that, asI don't watch much TV. It sounds similar to what we see in motorcycle subreddits and forums.
Things get almost eerily quiet as winter approaches in the northern hemisphere, and then in the spring there is an explosion of activity from new and existing members alike.
there's also pretty much always users leaving, the water never "stops evaporating", just that it's a lot less noticable with users coming in and keeping threads alive.
Aww thanks who sent the invite - Am Mrs. Nachoman and happy to get to chat here now too :)! Been lurking around the past week but just missed the window before open-invites closed!
Essentially, if a forum is quiet/low activity, over time it'll lose people. Maybe they aren't getting what they want out of it. Maybe they want a more active conversation. Either way, the active population slowly evaporates away faster than it's replaced. At some point the last person rolls up the welcome mat because there's no one left to talk to. This was a potential concern, since Reddit hadn't made any major mistakes in the last few years, and as such there hadn't been any significant spikes in user growth for Tildes. It was functionally on ice as far as expansion or additional development was concerned.
I've also noticed that sometimes - only sometimes - there's a snap-back effect. New users coming in can awaken lots of old users who haven't posted in a long time, and suddenly the place is busy as hell, leaving everyone wondering how it got so active so fast. There's this 'sticky' effect in some communities, and so far, that's what's been happening here. Lots of old accounts waking up now. Turns out they didn't leave, they were just napping.
Yep I'm one of them. I still, still have some reservations (I'm an anarchist after all, one man holding power freaks me out tbh) about the site as a whole but it's good to see the space active.
I remain in the same camp as @Algernon_Asimov though and that (beyond my stated reservation) the largest single flaw with Tildes is the homogenous, pretentious nature of the community. Sometimes people just want to post a dog pic and receive some comfort about what's going on in their world. Tildes has historically been...less than welcoming in that regard. I'm hoping some of that may change but I still have my doubts.
I'm not sure I've ever used the word "pretentious" in my complaints about Tildes' community. You may have misinterpreted my complaints slightly. Boring and homogeneous, yes. (But I always expected that would change over time, so I was mostly willing to ride it out.) Pretentious... not so much.
I'm against this site becoming a repository for dog pics. Not being able to post dog pics has never been something I complained about.
(I'm just clarifying my position, seeing as you've cited me agreeing with you.)
No your words were "spoken down to" to be more precise I believe.
I don't recall using that phrase here recently, but I know my memory isn't reliable, so I reviewed all my comments for the past couple of weeks. I haven't used either "pretentious" or "spoken down to" in that time.
Here are the three comments I've written about this: one, two, three.
I can only assume that you're interpolating things you believe into comments I've written.
My apologies then, I must be misremembering.
Actually, I see the confusion now. I quoted someone's story about "being talked down to" and said "I've had moments here like that myself." So, while I didn't write those words, I did relate to them.
At least now I know I’m not losing it completely yet. lol thanks.
Well, I was thinking about that far too much yesterday.
What do you think about bridging that gap with the apps?
That would be ~pics, ~music, ~tv, ~streaming, that sort of thing. Those communities could produce exceptional quality content but (on reddit) it took some serious work to mine it out of them and present it well. With no help, ever, from the admins I might add, except for this one guy running an automoderator bot. We have that same helpful admin here now. That's where this idea of 'curator' moderators comes in.
We can run curator experiments in the apps. Can we imagine a way to split this onion where we get the good discussions, and some other way to share the 'fluff' content in appspace? I wouldn't mind having ~music in my pocket as an app. I take walks where jamming to that would be quite pleasant, but I can't just pop into it and hit play on my phone, you know? The people here curate the content there, the people on the app have a different and more interesting way to interact that we haven't invented yet. Heck, we can make them the curators and see what happens in those groups. Different voting mechanics as necessary and invented.
bong rip Oh wait. This all takes time, developer hours, code donations, money, doesn't it. And the entire internet want all of this by July 1st? Well, is that a challenge? Put your money where your mouths are, for every alternative, not just this one. Let's set the web on fire and see what happens.
I mean really all it'd take is some non-default groups. I know group creation is supposedly "organic" but really they're functionally appeals to authority. What needs to happen is something like a Tildes ranked-choice vote every couple of months for "X, Y & Z or none" sorta situation (items can be determined by simple comment thread voting for election to be included in the run off) with a threshold number to cross and then the groups with the necessary votes get to have a group. Run that for a while and fill out the group structure so that way the userbase can decide for itself what groups they'd like to see.
Make them non-default so the new users and whoever else don't get inundated with them right out of the gate but have them available.
As for curation...the reigns are held tight around here, you know it, I know it, we all know it. Deimos may be fairly hands off but realistically we need dedicated people for these group spaces to cultivate the activity there to drive the want to be there by volunteering their time to bring in the content that people in those spaces would enjoy. To do that, they'd need some level of ability to control them.
Also as an aside I'd love to see complete transparency baked in to all moderating actions (including admin) on a group somewhere. An archive of content action has been taken against and the stated reasons for removal. It would at least assuage some doubts I'd think.
This is tricky business for a few reasons - there are network effects to having those logs visible that need to be addressed. In other words, those logs make some people behave very strangely just by being there. That said, it must happen. The Tildes codebase is bigger than just this website. If other nodes start popping up out there, they are going to need those features as well - and some better invite mechanics because they will want to grow faster than us.
Code, time, money, donations. There's a lot of work to do, and talk is cheap. We need some action. Tildes is an alpha software, AGPLv3 licensed minimum viable product right now. If it is ever going to do any of these things, that has to change.
You keep saying this like the fundraiser didn't just surpass a level it hasn't seen in...possibly ever. There are users bringing in new content, new devs making projects. I don't know what else you could want really.
Time.
All this new activity has been dumped in Deimos' lap in the past fortnight. The funding reached a high point in the past week. It's impossible to turn that interest and funding into new features on the website within that short space of time.
Well, I think if everyone who ever posted a comment asking for a better forum dropped a dollar in the hat of their favorite projects, we'd have this problem licked in no time. Everyone loves to complain, but when it's time to do something it all falls apart. I like to try and remind people of this. I don't think people take it seriously.
Now that reddit is imploding, it's nice to see something actually happening, including a spike in funding here - but I'm going to keep right on that axe. I would honestly love to see more funding going to the other alternatives as well. I am betting on this project because I like the ethos, but this is not all about me or Tildes either. I like social software and I like to see that experimentation happening. More sites, more ideas, more progress on our social software. This is the way, if we want better communities.
That's fair I suppose. I can respect hammering a point.
Honestly I'm just here because small community - this isn't a reddit replacement. I am keeping my eyes on the other federated projects though for possible replacement status as it will need replacing. It obviously filled a need and that need needs filling again. Only time will tell now.
No kidding?
I wonder if ~music will have a bestof this year. :D
Long time no chat, good to see you around again too.
Damn, I'm happy to see you again :)
The activity just died down a lot from its initial launch is all. And while it will likely cool down a bit again, now that we have so many users posting here I don't think it's going to be much of an issue in terms of content/traffic.
Also, I have a spare invite if you need one!
I would like to not answer those trying to instill fear in this place, but as someone said, it's a shame genuine traffic, people that are not there for the drama, gets involved into the drama because of lies.
I would love for
Redditwebsite drama to die, but for that, I would love to kill it by myself with facts and data.For that reason, I would like for bans to be public and shared with reasons for the ban, even for just 30 days. It would be awesome to be able to answer those drama mongering people with a link with the real reason of their ban, with facts and data, and not with my guessing or my faith in this place (I mean, I can trust it, but that's no basis for others to trust it too).
But that may just feed more drama. I'm not interested in them or their drama, only in the victims of the lie, who's first impression about this site it's bad because of the slander. We may need tools to handle bans as a community.
A major reason bans are handled quietly is to respect user privacy. That is one of the major goals if the site.
The other issue is it would only create more drama, and I think we can observe that in the related threads this topic mentions. Once a banned user captures an audience to complain to, reality becomes relative, even in the face of the facts. One of the users' ban reasons was mentioned here and it didn't do any favors.
When you kick someone off the island, the tribe gets nervous. That's where the drama comes from. We're all playing Survivor now. :)
maybe user could be sent a link that directs to the log, and they can decide to share or delete the link?
Every time I’ve seen this implemented in a community it blows up the second a “controversial” ban takes place, and becomes a community wide issue. It is not a pretty sight and ends up causing more trouble than it’s worth IMO.
"If you take the time to learn something about social forums, you'll discover that 1% of the users cause 90% of the problems."
That exact same synopsis applies to modern schools, too. An extremely small number of students derail learning and cause unsafe and problematic environments for nearly everyone else, yet we're kneecapped by federal law to do anything about it.
I’ve never given out an invite and I’m not sure I’ve ever mentioned Tildes by name in any alternative discussions on Reddit. Frankly I haven’t come across anyone I thought would be a good fit here. I’m not even a good fit here, lol.