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Tildes predictions (a time capsule for 10 years from now)
Where do you think Tildes will be in 10 years? Will it still be around? How will the world be different from today? Do you think the world will be a better place? Be as positive or morbid as you want. Or, just say something, share something, post a link, tell a joke, give some advice. Then in ten years we can all come back to this thread and have a laugh... hopefully.
Yes, it will still be around. I think I'm supporting it for 5 years now but have only recently found my way here, so it's right at the beginning and at the moment we will remember it at being the best.
The world around us is uncertain. I try to be positive, but then I see that nationalism is blooming worldwide and Putin is still finding support. There's also too much support for Trump and other extremists. The far right party in Germany is almost at 20%, so I get pessimistic and see us all running into our doom. We don't do enough against man made climate change, the world is burning and we're still persistent to drive alone in our microplastic producing and fuel burning death machines. We're attacking minorities, getting more xenophobic. There's a lot of bubbles looming on the horizon. The world is literally burning and the air is getting unfit to breathe. Last week Canadas smoke reached Europe.
We're expecting that Russia will let a Super Gau happening at one of the biggest Nuclear power plants the world has to offer.
Housing crisis, an entire generation that sees themselves without a future. Capitalism that's at it's end stage. The knowledge we have to turn gears but refuse to do so because billionaires have control and think it's okay if everyone dies now as long as it preserves humanity on another planet about 1 million years in the future.
The only thing that keeps my hope up is that I'm usually wrong with my predictions.
That description of the word sounds heavy and burdensome to say the very least. I can agree that most of what you said is entirely true -- but I might differ somewhat in interpretation and severity. I think that point of view is very commonly held nowadays -- I once held it -- but that's a difficult burden to live under.
If you're interested in another perspective, there's a great book from a few years back that applies a great deal of data analysis to that perspective called Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (also a good audiobook). If you're not up for a full book, there's a 40-minute presentation on YouTube that is also data-heavy and covers some of the same ground called A Tale of Two Realities.
There's a lot wrong with the world, no doubt, but the best way for us to tackle it is to avoid retreating to extremes and to meet and dialog on solutions.
That's part of the problem. A major part is that there simply isn't anyone decent to vote for. Where I live all the parties are basically supporting the same thing. There needs to be someone that's not 70+ with corporate interests and owner of multiple homes. Who really expects politicians to vote for change that hurts their bottom dollar? System is broken right now and 90% of people are just arguing back and forth for their party while more and more rights get taken away right under our nose.
I'm forced to choose between two different flavors of asshole, so I contact them about some issues that matter to me. Imagine my surprise when I get the same answer from both, even down to the form letter. Kinda kills one's motivation to vote.
I think voting is important, or at least be, but it's getting to the point where I kind of feel morally responsible in a negative way for voting in any direction, I know that whoever I choose to vote for is going to do things to negatively affect millions of people. They do it blatantly and clearly get away with it. I don't know what the answer is, talking is first step so people are informed, one can only hope they see that the the tides turning and self correct. I for one am not really holding my breath.
I know exactly what you mean. Which dystopian future appeals to you the most? Better yet, what color tie would you like your politicians to wear?
I don't know what the answer is either. I'll be real, I'm not sure I want to care anymore. My late night research habits have been trending towards various nomadic lifestyles that don't necessarily include the US. That's not an option for...most people. It's not an option for me right now either. It's a tentative goal, though. I'm not sure I care about a future as an American.
I'm Canadian and it's the same here, might be confirmation bias but everyone I talk to feels the same. Lots of people looking into trying to buy land and get tiny homes/RVs/trailers and start big gardens and rely and support eachother. Shows people's hearts are still there which is relieving. People just want to be able to live comfortably, I know very few people that are striving for more than just regular lifestyles.
That's exactly it. I'd like to think there are still places in this world where the common goal is the continued prosperity of the community. I'd like to find some of those places, give that lifestyle a shot. I have no interest in handouts, just the freedom to live the life of my choosing.
I didn't sign up for this, I didn't vote for this, and I don't want to be a part of it anymore, but you don't get to opt out. It is extremely convenient to live in this country, but in order to do that, you have to take your place as part of the greed machine. My disgust is in danger of outweighing my appreciation for convenience.
I feel like this weighs on so many of my decisions. I'm job hunting now, and getting desperate, but I'm trying not to apply to jobs that actively make the world worse. And it's fucked up how hard it is to do!
My desperation is eroding my will. I'm too poor for morality. And teeth, probably. Fml.
But not voting is also voting - you just implicitly vote for “whoever gets the more vote in my district” (depending on voting system of course).
People all too often fail to see that not taking action is absolutely an action - sure, everything has a risk, taking a vaccine does as well have a tiny risk. But so does not taking it, and risking getting the illness, and its much more severe consequences.
There is. And they have no money and funding. There is no way to compete against billionaries and monopolies. The smallest sign that things can change in a "democratic" way, they move the world to take the guy down (see what happened to Salvador Allende).
Voting in our current democracy won't ever change that. It's only a democracy for the rich.
I'm from Brazil, so we have more leftists than the USA, but they are still liberals and reformists in the end. Trying to negotiate with the billionaries will always push you to the right.
One issue that might be popping up now is that I voted for democrats, all the way down. One democratic woman switched parties because she felt bullied by her fellow dems and then voted to give my abortion rights away, which was against the beliefs she ran on. If this becomes a more widespread thing, voting doesn't work anymore.
For a fun comparison, this was Reddit 10 years ago (as of the time you are clicking this link). As I write this comment in 2023, PRISM was the big news 10 years ago. For any other reddit vets, that was also around the time the Quickmeme fiasco happened in /r/adviceanimals. It was the good old days, back before the world got complicated.
I imagine in 2026, people clicking that link will start to see a trend towards the absurd world we live in now, starting with the presidency of Donald Trump. I'll make no opinionated statements for or against him here–regardless of how you feel about him, you have to admit that him becoming president made the political situation in America a lot more volatile. Like, people who voted Gore or Kerry didn't like Bush, and people who voted McCain or Romney didn't like Obama, but I don't recall ever seeing people's presidential picks on anything more than bumper stickers and yard signs around November. These days I can't drive through my city without seeing a dozen Trump 2024 flags up on people's flag poles.
All this is to say, it's kind of a fool's errand trying to think of where Tildes will be a decade from now. For all we know, we're currently in the good old days, back before the world got complicated, that we'll be reminiscing about in 2033.
This could happen to us easily. Life seems to always get harder and never easier. Then there’s something like retrospective bias (forget the name) in which we look back to the past as better than it actually was. Combine that with kids right now who will be high schoolers in ten years saying how much easier it is now (for them), I think we’ll all be saying this.
I think another issue is the subjective nature of “better.” Some things are better, some are worse, some are new and shiny but not really different. All of the tech advances are double-edged swords. Communication is faster, but misinformation is more prevalent and insidious. We have better medicine, but treatments get further and further away from being affordable for the average person. So, it’s easy to look back 100-200 years and say they had all these diseases that were untreatable and had a rougher existence, but are our lives actually “better?” Yes we have modern conveniences, but are we happier? Do we have less stress in daily life? Hard to say.
Hopefully still around and still open-source.
I think Tildes really gives me the same feeling I had when I first came to reddit back in 2011.
Tildes has already lasted for 5 years, with minimal support and interest for 3 of those years. Even if most of the new users who signed up in the past month suddenly stopped using Tildes, it could still tick over for another decade. It's a minimal website, requiring minimal tech resources to run and minimal financial contributions to support those tech resources. So, unless Deimos actively pulls the plug, there'll still be a Tildes in 10 years' time.
Back in the day, we predicted that Tildes would grow, slowly and surely, and become a popular place for discussion. Instead, after an initial burst of activity for 2 years, Tildes stagnated for 3 years.
Even with this sudden increase, which has nearly doubled the number of registered users on Tildes, the userbase of this whole website is still only two-thirds the size of one smallish subreddit that I moderate over on Reddit, which I've been growing for the past 6 years. In the scheme of things, Tildes is tiny.
If we'd kept that trajectory from the first 2 years, Tildes would be a very different place now than it is. Even a simple straight-line projection of user growth would have us at 30,000 users now, instead of 20,000 users. But that simple projection wouldn't have occurred if the growth had actually happened. It would have been geometric or even exponential growth, as growth in users fed growth in donations, which fed growth in feature development, which fed growth in users... We could have been at 100,000 users by now. But we're not.
Given that the history of Tildes has already been unpredictable, that makes the future of Tildes difficult to predict.
Will this burst of activity just be a flash in the pan? People sign up, and then drop away as the novelty wears off, and as Tildes fails to meet people's high expectations. It's happened before. It can happen again.
One thing we're lacking now, which we had in those early days, is a dedicated developer to build the Tildes software. That means the rate of developing new features on Tildes - all those wonderful ideas hinted at in the Tildes Docs - will be slow. That could disillusion people. That will also limit growth.
Another key lack is moderators. Right now, there's only one true moderator on Tildes, and there can only be one moderator on Tildes. The functions to support other moderators simply don't exist. They have to built by someone. But who? Without those functions, without those other moderators, Tildes can grow but it can't be effectively moderated, and it will turn into another unmoderated forum, like Voat or Gab.
Or, will this be the beginning of a new lease on life for Tildes? Will these new users turn into new financial contributors, allowing Deimos to pay some people to assist with developing the new features that Tildes absolutely needs in order to grow?
My predictions are modest. I think it'll take a while for Tildes to be able to take advantage of this burst of interest, and turn that into real development of the website. I think that delay in turning the website around will curtail further growth and future interest. I think this is not the beginning of exponential growth for Tildes. I think that, in 10 years' time, Tildes will be a second-level discussion forum. Not the new Reddit. Not on the level of Facebook or Twitter or even MySpace in its day. It'll be one of those forums that flies just slightly under the radar, that the general population don't know about. It will be bigger and better than it is now, but it won't be a trend-setter or a world-shaker. I don't even know what to compare it to... because its current equivalents are unknown to the general population like me. ;)
I’m not qualified or knowledgeable enough to actually predict where we might be in 10 years, but I am naive enough to have some hopes and wishes.
In 10 years my kids will be 16 and 14. Absolutely ripe ages for being manipulated or made unsafe on the internet. So my hope is that the internet is a very different place in another 10 years. I hope social media is different - my most unlikely-to-come-true wish is that it’s disappeared completely! I hope the creeps have all been ferreted out and banished. I hope that filters are banned or very clearly labeled, or that there are settings to remove all the filters.
For myself, I just hope that the internet isn’t an ad-filled hellscape that it seems to be becoming. Does anyone mostly enjoy being online any more? Apart from a couple of websites my usage is all functional - using google, for example (which is terrible now), or checking a companies page for opening times or whatever. It used to be fun!
I sort of hope that we’re through the “always online” section of history, and that people start to use the internet a lot less, favouring real life interactions and activities. Perhaps it’s for the best that the internet becomes its own worst enemy and is allowed to fade until it’s the equivalent of the yellow pages/telephone directories people used to use. I think I wouldn’t mind that
Agreed. Not sure how to get non-SEO-optimized Google results without adding "reddit" to the search. Otherwise I access(ed) reddit through an app, the NYT (and their games) through an app, AP news through an app, I have an app for Lemmy (don't really use it), a Google Chrome web page app for /kbin (use it a bit more), and access Tildes through my actual browser. Pretty much every other website that I access is just via Google.
It really sucks because I'm sure that there's more great stuff these days than there was, say 20 years ago, but I have no idea where it is (not looking for elitist forums or fun forums that have migrated to Discord...).
I used to love stumbleupon. I can only imagine if you had something like that today it would just be endless streams of AI written SEO nonsense pages.
I’m the same way with apps actually and I hadn’t really considered the difference between being online via an app and online via a browser. I think this is the only site I access via browser other than google, like you. I find ads so mentally intrusive that I try to avoid as many as possible, even if it means I miss out on things (I very rarely use youtube, for example).
Dream big, we're gonna be tildes.org by then.
I do already own tildes.org as well as tild.es (@dukk). tild.es is used for the topic short links (in the sidebar on any topic's comments page—this topic's link is https://tild.es/17cj), but I like the .net as the main domain for the association with "network".
If we were actually dreaming big maybe it'd be tildes.com, if the domain squatter ever drops it, or becomes willing to sell it for a reasonable price.
Damn squatters!
Way, way, way long ago, like I think 2004-2006 kind of time frame, I was just beginning to think about getting my first domain name and starting a business with it.
Since I hadn't actually bought any domains yet and didn't have an account anywhere, I ended up using some random who is lookup site to get a list going of domains I might want that were also available.
Along the way I checked for
mylastname.comand it was available. It went very high on the list of domains I would be grabbing on payday, a few days into the future.Well, a few days passed and somebody had bought up most of the names I looked up. That was a lesson learned.
All these years they have kept sitting on the lastname domain. About a year ago, one of the buying sites said this domain may be for sale for something like $20k USD.
I emailed the guy who has been sitting on it, told him maybe after 15+ years whatever hotness he thought he was sitting on has cooled off. Offered him $1200USD.
He replied that the domain has tremendously more value than that to the right buyer, and my offer was not in the ballpark.
I never answered. I kind of hope he comes back some day wanting to sell it so I can tell him to shove it up his ass.
Out of curiosity, what is the domain squatter charging at the moment? These prices nowadays are outrageous.
It's been a few years now, but they asked for $25,000 USD last time I contacted the broker.
Wow! And I thought $15K was a lot...
Someone has to bail out Mozilla, may as well be Spectria.
We can aim even higher: tildes.gov
(just ignore the implications of a Canadian organization ending up with a .gov domain name)
til.des!It certainly hasn't been replaced by Tildes and Tildes isn't trying to replace it either. If anything is really trying to, it's Lemmy/kbin, but it seems clear (to me) that the lowest common denominator, Tik Tok hordes will likely stick with reddit, leading it to great financial success.
Yup this is the reality of this API move. This is killing off us in the old guard. A lot of young users don't know anything beyond the redesign and new official app. Obviously it's the worst way to view and interact with reddit, but they don't know better so this change will mean nothing to them.
It's just reddit purging the user base that actually built the site which is really depressing.
Yeah I joined Reddit over a decade ago because I really enjoyed the communities and most of the great discussion that went along with it. Over the years it has slowly been replaced by the lowest common denominator of reposted Tiktoks, rage bait articles, and most of the comment sections on the main subs are now filled with just your standard one line quips and jokes. Serious discussion doesn't happen too much anymore unless you make your way to some of the smaller more niche subreddits.
I am seeing some of the above with the new horde of people joining Tildes but this is still way more community and high-value discussion based than what Reddit has become.
The people leaving Reddit may be the people who originally brought it from the ground up, but it's no longer their target audience, and they will be perfectly fine with us leaving.
Yea, i also was on Reddit for a long time (joined in 06).
One of the things that brought me here a few years ago was the quality of posts. It reminds me of when reddit was in its prime as a community (2008-2014ish).
I think since a lot of the reddit refugees coming to Tildes now are reddit old guard then they might fit in well when the dust settles.
I thought Tildes was supposed to have a bit more depth and nuance in its discussion.
I just joined and I'm already quite disappointed. It's the same circlejerks and conspiracy theories I was seeing on reddit.
Many of the people currently commenting on Tildes are recent ex-redditors. New place, same people, same discussions.
The old guard on Tildes are outnumbered and drowned out.
Are you concerned? I'm hoping it's just a period of growing pains, as well as some people moving on after the initial excitement fades and they realize they'd like something more fast-paced or lighthearted. (And those aren't bad things, they're just not what I'm looking for or what I've mostly seen in the historical posts.)
This is why the invite system is important, otherwise the change would've been even more swift than it has been. I'm surprised some people are so opposed to it.
Yes, I'm concerned. I've often said that Tildes needed to grow - but slowly. The newcomers should always be in the minority, so they can acculturate with the help of the old-timers. (Of course, that would mean Tildes' capacity to grow would increase as it grew.)
That's not happening right now. Right now, the newcomers are the majority. Whatever culture they might bring with them is now the majority culture on Tildes. Luckily, Tildes has a reputation which at least some of the newcomers are trying to live up to. But that could change quite easily. I've seen more Redditisms in the past few weeks than in the few years before that.
But, yes, I do think part of what's happening is a short-term fad. Some, even many, of these ex-redditors will move on when they realise that Tildes isn't quite what they were looking for. That's always going to happen when people join a new group.
I feel like it's a double edged sword. I do enjoy the higher effort discussions that normally are here, but the influx of reddit refugees is a nice boost to the user base.
I would think that in time it will even out and get back to how things normally are.
Reddit stands upon the shoulders of giants who, actually haven't died yet.
Reddit wasn't trying to replace Digg either. They were both around for the same amount of time when Digg V4 rolled around. They were both used by different people and a very small number of people who used both. And then Digg V4 rolled out and Digg users went everywhere but most of us went to reddit. And then everyone else who wasn't a user of either, joined reddit over the next several years.
Reddit wasn't trying to, but it did. Tildes is really trying not to replace reddit.
Tildes can't ever have investors. It's run by a (Canadian) not-for-profit corporation, which aren't legally allowed to sell shares or distribute any profits, so it's impossible to invest in one. Any money they make can only be used to further their activities (paying expenses, hiring people at reasonable rates, etc.).
(cc @Algernon_Asimov - it's not related to incentives, it's specifically structured to make it impossible)
Of course! I know that!
Except when I forget it - which is most of the time. :)
Thanks for the reminder.
Isn't it possible to change the structure? OpenAI started out as a nonprofit but that changed when they needed more funding to achieve its goals.
Yeah, I'm sure there's legal wrangling you can do (especially when a bunch of billionaires are involved). The code for Tildes is also open-source and licensed under AGPLv3 though (which can't be closed off), so someone else could just set up a functionally-identical alternative site if I ever started doing anything to try to exploit the site.
Well, so far, Tildes is relying on donations from users, rather than investments from profiteering corporations. And, given that Tildes has survived for the past 3 years on minimal donations from a small number of dedicated users, it doesn't really need much more than that to keep surviving. That means there's not much incentive for Deimos to get financial investors involved, so Tildes is unlikely to implode due to greedy investors.
It might not grow much, but it won't implode.
Here's to hoping you're wrong but planning for anything!
Was just thinking about this, looking at my feed. Looks exactly like reddit did when I first saw it on digg.
Maybe it will be a refuge, maybe a cheap knockoff. Who knows 🤷.
Best we can do is go forward with good faith and hope we can make the best of it.
I'm just hoping it continues to grow at this point. I don't even know where I'll be in 10 years much less this site.
In ten years we will use Digital IDs and we will be tracked all over the internet, how you behave on the internet will be scored and saved on your social credit score. VPN, encryption and "radical" sites will be crack down. In 2030 your life will be dependant on your social credit score, your life will be cashless and your income will only be available in your local CBDC.
I can see Tildes still running, but the internet will be highly censored.
First, excellent topic! I love this idea, and a cursory search suggests we haven't had anything like it here. Closest I could find was Dec. '22s 2023 prediction thread.
Personally, I find it virtually a guarantee that Tildes will still be around five years from now. In so far as I can tell, the only thing Tildes is currently vulnerable to is its low bus factor, but that's not terribly likely to occur, and so I think we'll be fine.
I wager you though that the rest of the internet will change a lot. Reddit has been spitefully attacking those users most vital to it, and Twitter's actively suicidal with Musk at the helm. Youtube continues its incessant attempts to force obnoxious advertising on everyone, while Discord's repeated acceptance of gobs of investor money show it as likely poised to start following others down the drain in a few years or so.
The latter two of them will likely survive, granted — Discord hasn't done anything real bad, just annoying, and Youtube isn't quite self-immolating the way the others are. Still, I find it extremely likely that the internet five years from now might look very different than it is today. I'm not ready to say that Twitter or Reddit are doomed, yet, but they're certainly giving their competitors massive boosts, so even if they do survive they won't be the same.
I don't feel as comfortable making predictions about the world at large, though, so no specific predictions there. I'd like to be optimistic and say it'll get better, but frankly I think we have a lot more worse to get through first before things start improving.
Dude that depends on a lot of things.
I understand wanting to make money, so if Deimos wants to make money, who am I to judge? That's natural. I like money too. But I also see that being part of the problem with reddit... that is to say, I felt manipulated to have been on Reddit for so long because I was doomscrolling and reddit made money off of the ads that they showed me. I was addicted and it didn't help me at all. They didn't help me. No, they made money off of my addiction.
So again, I understand making money, but if ads show up here then I'm taking off because I'm not going to let someone profit off of my addiction again.
Tildes has survived for the past 3 years on minimal donations from a small number of dedicated users. It doesn't really need much more than that to keep surviving. That means there's not much incentive for Deimos to make Tildes available to advertisers. This was always a passion project for him, rather than a profit-making venture.
As it grows in scale it's going to need more donating users, or costs will become untenable. Deimos has done a great job of combating the too much growth by making it an invite-only platform, so hopefully it doesn't grow beyond his capacity.
I'm fairly new, haven't donated yet but do plan to because I really like the mission Deimos has taken on this platform.
Actually, Deimos has assured us that Tildes doesn't need much money to keep running as it is. The current donations easily cover the current overheads (which are minor), and the current servers are more than enough to cope with even this increased activity. So, as long as we're happy with this low-feature alpha-testing version of Tildes, we're fine.
If the 8,000 new users donated just 1 (Canadian) dollar each per month... that would be a lot of money to contribute toward developing Tildes. Even if the 100s of people who are commenting donated that much, that would still be a big help.
I'll admit that I cancelled my monthly donations during the long stagnation, but I re-started them a few weeks ago.
I just hope if they do monetize they keep the project open source and keep their ears close to the community. This seems like a nice place with potential for growth.
I think it will still be around. I love the positive energy that I’ve seen so far. It reminds me of when Reddit first came around. It’s very refreshing here and I like that. I wish Digg would’ve stuck around all these years.
Digg is still around. It's not the same website it once was, but it's still there.
While l liked Digg (look at my username!), people often forget that Digg had two of the biggest problems that reddit didn't or that reddit did much better with than Digg.
Digg didn't have small communities. They had what 30 different categories and all you could do was post links and then people would Digg/bury those articles and then comment on them. You couldn't ask a question like you can here or on Reddit and then have a conversation with the rest of the community.
The second problem Digg had that reddit didn't was the power users. Remember how much complaining there was when some random no name person would submit a news article only to then have MrBabyMan come in and submit it, then have 45 of his friends Digg his submission and bam, front page. Does that happen on Reddit, do people game reddit to make money and get to the front page? Most likely. But at least on Reddit and on Tildes, you can submit an article or post a question, and without being anyone famous, your submission will get traction in the right sub.
Hopefully this site grows. I see reddit 12 years ago when I see this site.
As far as what the world will look like in ten years? Bad...I have a very pessimistic view on the future habitability of the planet. We've essentially hit the 1.5c threshold that we weren't supposed to hit till what? 2030?
Wikit becomes the Tiktok rival of Reddit. Kids flock to that, Reddit disappears, Tildes keeps existing
I don't think Reddit will ever truly disappear.
Look at Digg, it still exists. It's also difficult to measure when the quality drops "too far".
Before I erased my old Reddit comments/posts I found many of the 10-15 year old ones were generally low quality since I was 10-15 years younger (and younger you is always an idiot).
But, to answer the question of Reddit disappearing. I think what will finally kill Reddit (and Twitter) in the spirit of what you mean is the moment a new "event" occurs outside those platforms.
It'll probably be something tragic unfortunately. But the information won't be on Reddit. Sure Reddit will have a copy, but Reddit will be a middle man.
Also, wild prediction, Twitter dies in the next 12 months, competition like BlueSky or Meta Threads aren't ready yet and users flock to Reddit. Reddit sees a bump in users causing an increase in valuation. Reddit makes a bunch of money, enshits itself further and becomes the "Facebook" of generation. Not the "cool" Facebook mind you, but the "only my parents are on it" Facebook. Sure it makes money, but it's garbage.