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How did you come across Tildes?
Just got curious as to how other people ended up here. Personally, I came across Tildes through random searching on the internet (ADHD) and then learned more about it through Reddit. That said, as a follow up question - What site or platform do you use the most?
Haven't been here long, but I can already tell that there's a great community here and it's a site I will frequent the most. Plus I like the simplicity/layout and the intentions of the developers.
I think I represent the majority of current users by saying I found out about Tildes from Reddit. Specifically someone in the comments recommending it as a Reddit alternative, thought it sounded cool so I emailed Deimos and here we are.
Overall I still use Reddit the most because it has the most content, but Tildes is probably a close second especially for actual discussion.
Same here, found it through reddit on one of those big "reddit alternatives" list. The small community is what appealed to me as well as the focus on actual discussion instead of circlejerks and memes.
Similar for me. I was searching on Reddit for Reddit Alternatives and came across Tildes in a comments section. That it is setup as a non-profit was of huge interest to me. I was lucky enough to get an invite through a request thread and then found my way here.
I will likely pop onto Reddit from time to time for some of my hobbies which haven't fleshed out quite as much here as of yet (meadmaking, Star Trek, Firefly, etc.) but I can't get over how great the conversation is here. Maybe it's rose-colored glasses and I just haven't been exposed enough but the dialogue seems more mature and disagreements are met with healthy discussion, as opposed to trolling and just yelling at one another.
Anyway, regardless, I'm a big fan of Tildes and hope that it continues to prosper as a place for folks to meet and chat.
The discussion is more mature because the majority of the people here are people who actually want to have a healthy, thriving community. Honestly, I wouldn't mind if Tildes remained invite-only or have an extra barrier to get in, because now that I'm here it's such a breath of fresh air that I really don't want to see this community vanish.
Same. I'm not sure when it happened, but I gradually realized I didn't enjoy reddit anymore as a whole, I just enjoyed certain subreddits that fit my niche interests and luckily have decent moderators. Ironically, I like this site more as a "front page of the internet," especially since I don't have to filter out ~30 subs the way I do on reddit.
I got a PM on reddit from Deimos close to two years ago... something like "Can we talk about a project I'm working on?"
Y'all need to hear @Bauke's story about how he found Tildes. I laughed.
Microsoft acquired Github in JUNE?! Fuck, I thought it was like last month. Jesus, I need to get my shit together.
I'm really curious what's the full story behind Tildes and who was involved in which role
AFAIK the only person with an official role on Tildes.net is Deimos. A bunch of us (amarok, myself and others, who I don't know if they want to be named so won't) were asked by Deimos, way back before there was even a site to visit, if we would like to discuss his new project with him and help brainstorm ideas for it, which we did. However none of us have any official role on the site or in the related non-profit, nor do we speak with any real authority here. We are just people trying to help him as best we can (but often failing ;) because we believe in him and this project. :)
Although I should probably mention that myself and a few others are also moderators on /r/tildes as well as "reporters" on Tildes Gitlab. There are also a bunch of users, myself included, that were granted additional permissions to do things on the site like move topics to different groups, edit topic tags, titles, etc., which you can read about here: https://tild.es/53r
p.s. I was the creator of /r/reddithax, a regular on /r/theoryofreddit and a moderator of /r/ideasfortheadmins (amongst many other subreddits back in the day) and especially love discussing meta-topics related to social media, so similar to amarok, I jumped at the chance to help out and contribute as best I could when asked.
I think it's important to stress that all of the moderation activities that have been handed out are cosmetic-only. In fact I don't think title-editing has been granted to anyone yet. At the moment, only Deimos has the power to do deletes, locks, and bans - and it'll stay that way as long as possible.
I honestly don't know if anyone else has the permission, but I can and have edited a few titles... all but one time was just correcting basic spelling mistakes and that one other time was a super editorialized and obnoxious title so I just changed it to the actual article's title, IIRC (I have no way of going back to verify this though, unfortunately).
AFAIK that is true, yeah.
I have this ability. I was going to dob @cfabbro in as having this abilty, too, but he beat me to it. :)
However, you're right that even editing titles is only a cosmetic change: editing tags, groups, and titles on a post is just about how to present that post on Tildes. There's no true moderation happening, in the sense of removing posts or banning people. That gatekeeping level of moderation (blocking content or people) is reserved only by Deimos at this time.
I heard about Tildes from this guy! Then I waited like a year to finally get an invite once the site started accepting users.
I stumbled across a post on Reddit called 'An ex-Reddit administrator is aiming to create the Reddit we've always wanted–Tildes is a non-profit community site driven by its users' interests'. I messaged a co-mod of mine because we've both been on the look-out for a replacement to Reddit, to migrate our subreddit, for years (we watched Voat back when it was WhoaVerse, and we checked out Imzy before it collapsed): "Do you know about this new website?" Of course he did! He'd already signed up a few days earlier, and he sent me an invite code.
I was already disillusioned with Reddit due to the redesign and everything associated with that, and Tildes turned out to be what I was looking for. "Algernon" has now all but left Reddit.
Tildes made the rounds with reddit's mods and admins early on, based largely on the love so many of us have for Deimos. His reputation with that group on reddit is impeccable, like Moses. That's mostly due to his eternally present professional attitude and automoderator. When it was just Deimos' user bot, before reddit bought and integrated it, we all had to PM Deimos for any changes and updates and problems, so all the mod teams who used it (which was back then the ones who cared about fighting spam and shitposting) were always talking to him.
You can see some of this if you check the very first invite thread. Just look at the names. The first post on Tildes also has quite a few names you may recognize from reddit.
That's the same thread I found Tildes through too!
It's almost like it was public and able to be seen by more than just one person! ;)
I found Tildes through Hacker News -- it was in a comment from the creator (Deimos) and he said to email him for an invite, so I did and here I am! I also think if you find an Introductions post, a lot of comments about how people got here are on those as well.
I find Tildes to be a more enjoyable Hacker News. I work in a specialized tech role, and don't find the vast majority of HN articles interesting / relevant. That said I've historically gone to HN for the insightful comments. I'm finding that more & more, Tildes scratches both my itches -- great articles & insightful comments. To me, Reddit has become a place that I browse when I'm on the toilet looking to kill a few minutes; Tildes is where I come when I really want to dive into "the internet" and maybe learn a thing or two.
I really tried to like HN when it was young. It's so... antiseptic. The lack of a more general focus is what put me off. When major tech developments break I do still go over there to read about them, though. There's loads of insight in the comment threads, they've got quite the posse of techs over there.
Yeah, I'm with you on HN's reach -- I'm only a tech hobbyist, so a lot of the articles I don't even understand, but the comments are nice, usually. But Tildes is a good "like HN but for all sorts of topics" that I really like.
Reddit is really only good for toilet-browsing, IMO.
HN is good for content discovery but the comments... ugh
Yep, that's how I found it too.
I found it the same way. I saw the comment by Deimos and came to check it out and saw access was granted by invitation only. I didn't read enough to realize I could ask for an invitation by email. A week later I saw tildes mentioned in a comment on another HN article and the commentor said they got their invitation through email so I also sent Deimos an email and got in.
Ultimately, I guess Reddit getting funding from Tencent is what lead me here.
I saw it way down in a Reddit thread, not sure what that post even was about but it definitely wasn't about Tildes. I wasn't actively looking for a Reddit replacement, it was just the right post at the right time that made me switch over. Mailed Deimos and here I am :p
I actually heard about tildes by reading through the redditalternatives subreddit. I like the proposed ideal that tildes offers, so I figured I'd give it a go.
As a side note, the minimalistic approach for the website is beautiful.
I learned about Tildes in the same thread that Algernon_Asimov posted. I think one of the commenters linked to the subreddit and I signed up through the second or third invite request. I remember being nervous that I'd get rejected since most of my reddit experience had been reduced to sports talk and trying to make sense of the answers in asktrumpsupporters.
These days I almost exclusively use Tildes. A big reason early on was reddit being blocked in China soon after I was invited here (I mostly browse on my mobile, which I never bothered to put a vpn on). Reddit has more content, but there is just so much noise and fluff that even when I'm home on my computer I rarely bother. I enjoy the content posted and the discussions here, and reading insightful comments from smart people. I also like how people rarely comment just for the sake of commenting. Sure, it leads to some empty comment sections, but I'd rather be stuck with my own empty thoughts than read someone else's.
Hah... that's kind of ironic since back when I actually did spend a significant amount of time vetting people before sending them invites due to the community being way smaller and one user making more of an impact here (positive or negative), people using the sports subreddits was actually a huge positive in my eyes since I didn't want everyone on here to be just tech geeks, sysadmins and programmers. Activity in /r/asktrumpsupporters was a positive in my eyes too since it showed the user's willingness to engage in good faith conversations with people they don't necessarily agree with (instead of just trading insults like happens in many other subreddits). ;)
I'm pretty sure I saw Tildes first mentioned kind of offhand in an r/Futurology post, deep in a comment thread in May. I asked about it, got the invite from Amarok (I think), and my redditing has sharply declined since. Although I still trawl through r/Politics on the daily, and a few small, niche subreddits. My social media use overall has gone down drastically since joining actually, Tildes hits a spot that hadn't been satisfied since my earlier days on the internet. So, props to Deimos for the site and the gang for spreading the word.
I was getting sick of reddit's shit--specifically the predictable pun threads drowning out valuable responses and the all-around toxic behavior--and decided to look into reddit alternatives. Turned out there was a subreddit actually called RedditAlternatives and Tildes was listed there (I happened to time it really well!). I read through the docs, loved the entire premise, and requested an invite.
Just luck of the draw, really :)
I first saw it mentioned on Telegram, back in June, in the context of alternative social media (Secure Scuttlebut, which I in turn was asking about in the context of alternatives to GitHub as it has a git module).
I then stumbled across it a second time on Reddit, asked for an invite, and joined.
Off-topic, but have you tried Scuttlebutt? I was on there a little bit about a year ago and kind of quit because it was too hard to use. I wonder if it's any easier now.
Nope. I was playing around with the Manyverse app earlier, but I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do, with who I should interact, or how to export my identity to possibly use it on desktop.
I'm in the same boat as you. It looks really neat, but I think I'll be in the next wave of adopters.
I was actively looking for a reddit alternative, as their recent decisions really started to bother me. I think it was around the time they started having people try their redesign. Then I found a thread in r/redditalternatives (i'm not sure) where some Tildes invitations had been given, but I was too late to get one. I went to read the Technical Goals of the project and each line just made sense to me, so I PMed an admin for an invite and he replied with a code :)
I was similar. I hated the redesign, hated the new "meme culture" (I don't hate memes themselves, they can be funny but communities that have sprung up around them /r/dankmemes and the pewdiepie subreddit are terrible and bleed into the broader site), hated that most of the other popular subs were extremely formulaic to the point where you could predict what the comments would be with a high degree of accuracy (quotes from the office! star wars memes! puns! "I don't get why more people believe <insert incredibly common and uncontroversial opinion>"!). I checked redditalternatives every once in a while even though most of the sites are just clones or gimmicks (reddit: but with bitcoin!, reddit: but it's twitter!, reddit: but with absolute free speech! [hey were did these nazis come from?]). Tildes stuck out as actually being fairly thought out, clearly addressing the problems I had with reddit, and offering some of its own ideas.
Those popular subreddits don't really bother me. Their contents rarely if ever leak to the ones that I follow. But yeah, the quality of discussion on Reddit overall is many levels below the one that we can find here. But the ads and tracking are the main reason for me to want to leave. Just think about the amount of aggregated information from people around the world that reddit is able to provide if one pays enough.
I am definitely the minority in that I learned about it by word of mouth IRL! My SO actually told me about it and gave me an invite code. I've told at least two other people about it and I know one of them has used their invite code. However, my SO had heard about Tildes on reddit as well, I do believe.
Saw it on a thread offering invites on a torrent tracker forum
Now that's cool. We get so many people from reddit and HN. Any time I hear we're getting folks from other quiet little corners of the internet it makes me very happy.
Private torrent tracker forums are a hidden gem on the internet. So many topics get discussed on them that would be flamed and trolled to death on any other website. Tildes is pretty good but one of the things I like about forums is its not just a link dump and everything is focussed on discussions between users rather than just firing off opinions about the headline of a news article.
Hacker News and then searched out the invite thread on reddit
I saw it on /r/againsthatesubreddits.
I came from a weird place - Google Plus. I'm an old fart who's tried just about every platform over history, from BBS to Usenet to IRC to LiveJournal to Reddit, and gave up on most of them when barbarians invaded.
In the course of that journey, I made acquaintance with @dredmorbius, a significant presence on both Reddit and G+, who apparently thought Tildes would be the right place for another collector of intellectual mathoms.
And I just haven't managed to deal with the inherent filter-bubble, tweet-length qualities of Discord and Mastodon.
My community progression is pretty similar.
I still really miss the BBS days though. :( One of my friends in elementary school had some much older cousins (already graduated high school) who ran a local one here in Toronto called The Lion's Heart Cartel and it was glorious. We used to go over to their house for LAN parties every month and even though we were way younger than anyone else there, they were all super cool to us. Seeing the insane hardware they had in their basement (dozens of phone lines+modem banks, rack servers, desktops everywhere, etc...), as well as learning how to set up local networks from them, is what got me so obsessed with networking and computer hardware at such an early age.
By the time I got around to Slashdot, the barbarians had already arrived! HN is a better version.
I found M-Net in grad school - got through the Public Health Masters, but it was a near thing to resist swapping careers right then and there.
I knew relatively few of the members IRL (that grad school thing). Ultimately, I met my spouse-to-be in one of those "You're welder?" "You're namerose?" meet-cutes. So, yes, I've got some sentimental attachment to BBS.
On Usenet I was probably one of those barabarians that people blame for its downfall. ;) I was really young and mostly hung out in the alt.binaries trading 0-day warez (through IRC-DCC and private FTPs as well) but would frequently pop in to the more serious newsgroups to be an obnoxious, trolling little shit too. :P
Thankfully by the time Slashdot rolled around I had matured a little (not much but a little) and it was still pretty great when I joined. I think I can even credit slashdot for helping further that maturation process, too... chasing those i's (insightful, interesting, informative) made me into a better, more helpful contributor to online discussions. I was a really early adopter of reddit though, so never got to experience slashdot's ultimate decline firsthand.
For all the shit I give HN and my general distaste for the way it's moderated and run... there is certainly no denying that they have managed to maintain a quality community there.
p.s. Thanks for sharing your story, too. :)
People talked about it in /r/redditAlternatives and I was searching for a place to try to get the weeb community to move to as the purge raged on.
Now the purge has quieted down a bit and this place may or may not work for a place for weebs to have their community but this will easily fill my void of in depth discussions that reddit has had the last few years.
As far as what site I use the most... it is still reddit for now. We don't have enough users to replace reddit and my /r/animemes even in the gimped form still doesn't have a replacement nor does /r/anime even if /r/anime currently is unhurt from the purges.
Some of the low effort content is surprisingly high effort but I agree that this isn't the place for it. I guess I could see /r/anime and more importantly /r/animesuggest moving over here. /r/animesuggest would need a decent population of weebs over here to function properly after a move but with the recent banning of all ecchi anime I could see them wanting to move.
Somewhere in this thread on Net Neutrality, someone made a joke whining about the Reddit redesign and arghdos started plugging away. At least, I think it was arghdos, I don't have that account anymore so I can't check, and we can't even see the people who invited us on our profiles here anymore for some reason (I thought they just weren't publicly visible anymore, but I guess not). edit: it was actually @Amarok
I read the docs and gushed to my friends about this being the perfect place I've been looking for for years, and quickly got an invite (which, after the way dates are shown here got changed somehow, bumped my registration day to my birthday!). I pretty much immediately made this place home, and it's been a great ride all this way so far.
I'll take the opportunity to say that I really enjoy being on this website with you all, and everyone doing their best to make this place grow and improve is a beautiful thing.
https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/26m/invited_by_information_for_users_is_no_longer_displayed
Nope, no longer displayed at all. And I don't even think anyone thought to suggest it only not be publicly visible anymore but still privately visible... but I have to admit that being able to at least see for yourself who invited you might be nice.
Ditto. <3
I have been a lurker on Reddit for years, and an active user on r/politics for I think somewhere around 2 years. Up until last night, I had never had any issue or committed any violation of any kind.
But last night I got banned on r/politics. The short if it is, they banned for me "spam".
What happened was there was a news story that I think thousands of online at the time were trying to submit. The mods active at the time concluded that it was off topic. So toward the end of this cycle, I posted the same comment or some variant of it about 5-10 times in a row in every new submission which was almost instantly removed. So I had the same comment in a bunch of quickly-removed submissions.
Incidentally, the mods later changed their minds and allowed submissions and discussions of this particular news story.
I messaged the mods with what I would argue was a sincere message. I took responsibility for my actions and didn't deny what they said. I give a heartfelt plea to have them reconsider. It would appear they responded condescendingly and would ultimately double town and even hint that my plea would even harm my chances of being unbanned further.
I thanked them for all that they've done. And respectfully stated that I will not in fact be appealing my ban.
I never said anything uncivil toward the mods. Nor did I accuse them of anything. I even told them I understand their decision (one they would, again, later reverse).
And according to private messages I got and what was publicly commented upon, it seems there were a lot of other people like me who got banned because of that story.
And in some thread or another, I saw people discussing all of this and then one of them mentioned Tildes.
And now the rest is history. I'm super happy to be here.
Burnout is a bitch.
Imagine you deal with 50 incidents like this a day. Every day. That's just you, now your other 40 co-mods are doing the same. Now let this go on for weeks, months, years, with that volume steadily increasing to the point where any time something happens, a deluge pours in. You're now being distracted by it at work, at home, in the bathroom.
Now imagine the only tool you have to deal with this is the removal button and the banhammer. You can't move things, you can't merge things, you can't change titles. All you can do is delete, delete, delete... all day, every day deleting submissions and users. Run that out for a couple years.
At some point, you forget to give a damn about individuals anymore.
This is why it's so important that the mod tools be in everyone's hands - which makes light work of the problem. You're reading, you see something that needs a tweak, and you do it with a quick click, a tag edit, a title edit if you've earned access, then go on reading. Those fifty threads on the same topic? Select and merge. Now the users are voting on all the story links and discussing them in one big post.
It's better. It might not be enough, but it's definitely better.
Welcome to Tildes. :D
Burnout is indeed a bitch.
Yeah, honestly that's one of the main reasons I was attracted to the model of Tildes.
I really didn't say anything bad to the mods. In fact, I said a lot of nice things and disagreed where I felt I should. One reason is in the back of my head, I recognized that whoever I was speaking to is someone who is dealing with a whole lot now, too. So I wanted to attempt to appeal what I felt like was a wrong action on their part, while at the same time not taking too much of their time or energy.
I still felt a bit sad when I got the reply that I did. Especially because I didn't approach them in an adversarial manner and I acknowledge what I did and apologized for it.
Also you have a way with words. I've never been a mod but holy shit that was a rollercoaster. Hahaha.
Yeah, I understand that. It's certainly how I felt when I got their responses. Honestly, I'm not blaming them. I've never done this (the spam thing) and I never had a reason to. It's just funny I get banned for posting about a story that they would later allow once they realized they were wrong.
Also, yeah this may not be enough but I think if I've understood the spirit Tildes is that the community matters and come first. So it's on us to make it better and maybe one day enough, right?
Hopefully I'll be able to do my part.
Thank you for such a warm welcome :)
Moderating on Reddit was always frustrating. But it wasn't until I started moving posts from one group to another here on Tildes that I realised just how objectively bad that removal-oriented moderation model is. It's awful having to tell a sincerely mistaken user that I've removed their otherwise good post just because this subreddit wasn't the right place for it. It actively creates conflict where conflict doesn't need to be. Being able to quietly shift a post to the right place is so much nicer for both parties.
I was invited by @Deimos on Reddit. Aways on the lookout for clue,.
Delighted to see you here, at least briefly - I do miss having a taxonomist of the entire body of systems knowledge in the house! I still peek into "The End of the Beginning" periodically, but life got busy.
"The End of the Beginning"? I'm not catching the reference.
Edit: Oh, The Beginning is Near?
I meant, "Plexodus: The Beginning is Near" and "G+ Mass Migration". Serves me right for 2 a.m. posting.
Got it.
Sleep at night, damnit!
I joined just now, after requesting an invitation through Reddit. I was thinking of the night about the six years that I spent on Reddit, and I realized that it just hasn't seemed as fulfilling as it used to be. So I heard about this site, and wanted to see if it had the same flare and conversation quality that Reddit had when I first joined.
There are still a lot of good places to talk and browse on Reddit, but I'm happy to see that this site seems to have a pretty active and engaged base already.
I saw it mentioned through Hacker News as another channel for interesting discussion and asked for an invite on Reddit.
A friend of mine in a Discord server for a game brought it up and it looked neat. I decided to check out the community and it was worth it.
I found this place when it was just being launched, which is why I have a really old account.
on hnews about aggregators post.
I saw it mentioned on reddit, I read that it was being created by Deimos, that sounded good to me so I emailed him asking for an invite.
Reddit & their increasingly rampant usage of censorship & receiving money from China's censorship powerhouse drove me here.
I hope you're not expecting Tildes to be a platform for free speech: it's not. We've already had a few free-speechers get frustrated when their free speech principles come into contact with the pro-moderation culture of Tildes and its founder.
I saw it mentioned on Slashdot, which is where I normally hang as I'm a code monkey :-) But I never post there because... well because Slashdot LOL I don't consider that a community I belong to. I also saw Tildes mentioned on Reddit of course. I've only been on Reddit a couple of months, but I found that everything my friends said it was, it wasn't (anymore that is). As a software engineer and UI designer I was something less than impressed by Reddit (as I am with most sites on the internet). I had initially set about forking RES and testing out some of my ideas but it as painfully frustrating for me because there isn't much information about the code, absolutely zero commentation, and many things are just broken because of the new Reddit design. And there's a slight chance also that I've just plain become crotchety after 34yrs LOL
But despite being semi-retired (and crotchety LOL) I do intend to contribute if I can, lawd knows I have the time to give it a shot anyway!
Thrilled to be here - Greetings all!
Oh, I have a hunch you'll fit right in around here. :D
I was a member of Reddit (still am, actually) for more than a year and was getting tired of the juvenile behavior there. Even though I unsubscribed from subs that were becoming toxic, I would still see comments on various 'serious' subs that were just as bad. I came across r/RedditAlternatives, and heard about Tildes. I requested an invite, received it, and here I am. I like it much better than Reddit already!
Some guy on Raddle mentioned it