9
votes
3 Degrees
I'm looking forward to someone creating a family tree from the creation of Tildes to some future point in time. Since the entire site is invite only would be interesting to see the who invited who and how the site blossomed.
It would be amazing to see from a datavis perspective, but my biggest issue with that is privacy considerations. The "invited by" system is mostly in place for accountability's sake during the invite only phase so we can identify bad-faith users and who invited them.
True, even if it was a simple tree with out identifiable names I bet it would look pretty amazing.
Best of both worlds: allow users to toggle hiding the public display of who invited them, which would also hide them from the overall tree display.
I'm pretty sure the name of the invitee is always going to be visible. It's an abuse-prevention mechanism, but that mechanism is only as good as the people who do the checking. If it's visible on profile pages, when users notice something suspicious about a user's activity (or a pattern of bad behavior) they can do the checking themselves.
We might make it so that only registered users can see the invite name once's tildes is public, or even move that up to a higher level of trust so that only users in good standing can see it - but we do want a lot of eyes on it.
On that note, what is the plan for invites after alpha? I was under the impression that invites would be a permanent feature of the site but looking back at the docs I don't see anything that outlines what the plan is.
Honestly, we haven't decided yet. We have considered staying invite only forever but the /r/science mods have shown interest in moving their AMAs here and I imagine one of their requirements would be open sign-up, since they are attempting to facilitate science education through interaction between academics and the general public. It's possible we could just do open sign-up a few hours before each AMA and close it again after it is done though. Right now we're unsure and will have to continue talking to the /r/science mods and likely post a daily discussion at some point to solicit feedback from the community before any final decisions can be made.
I'm not sure about that idea. I feel that it would effectively open a backdoor into an invite-only system - if anyone who wants can register during that time, what's the point of making it invite-only? Maybe users could have "temporary" names during that time, a bit like unregistered users on IRC, that are valid for that thread? It's a tricky problem.
Holy crap, that’s a really great idea... a temporary Account that expires after the AMA is over. Why didn’t I think of that? ;) Thanks!
Glad you like the idea! I was wondering if it had already been considered, actually.
My thinking was that they'd be marked in a way to signify that they are temporary, and wouldn't "eat into" the registered names - so they or anyone else could register that name later.
I don't know about access to other parts of the site - should they be able to see the rest of ~science? The whole site? Should they be able to vote? My first inclination is that they should be able to see either ~science or the rest of the site, but only in a read-only manner. That way, actions taken by that user are scoped to that thread, but it gives them a taste of the rest of it, should they be interested.
Hmm I think we could tag them as temporary and even allow them to comment elsewhere (but not vote) and then use their behavior to determine if the account should become permanent. This does certainly open up some really interesting mechanics!
Yeah - temp accounts opens up an entire frontier of possibilities. That's one of the best suggestions we've seen here yet and I'm almost embarrassed we didn't think of it before ourselves. :P
Right, that makes sense. What would you do with those accounts if they don't become permanent? Would it just look like a user that was only around briefly? Is their username marked in some way? (E.g. it's possible to see if a user is registered on IRC.) Would their name remain reserved, or become available?
And what about accountability down the line? If some of those users turn out to be bad faith, is the person who approved their upgrade on the hook? (I don't think this should be an issue, but it's worth considering how it plays with other mechanics.)
This is probably something worthy of a larger discussion at some point, I guess. Interesting mechanics for sure.
I think the smartest thing to do would be to simply put them back in read-only mode after they expire. And if a person comes back to the account they can simply request another temporary session to interact with the community or even request the account become permanent (which we can manually review before deciding on).
And accountability with invite only and even temporary accounts is rather easy... we simply punish or ban the bad-faith users.
And yeah, I agree... I think this idea is even daily discussion worthy once we flesh it out some more internally.
Right, of course. I was just wondering about that breaking the techniques that have been discussed for identifying groups of bad-faith users.
I agree about this being a point for a daily discussion. I'm sure that given some thought, we can formulate a good set of rules that works well with the rest of the system.
We haven't really formalized any particular method for that yet... and I am a firm "don't let people fall through the cracks" believer. Hence why I have fought so long and hard against shadowbans on reddit. But we will definitely need to address how best to trim the invite tree of bad-faith users at some point...
We've just been kinda busy and TBH most users so far appear to be behaving in good-faith anyways. Invite only + this temp account idea might even be enough that it doesn't become an issue... we will have to wait and see. :)
Indeed, it's been great from what I've seen! However, this site is still very small. If it grows to the hundreds of thousands or millions, finding and pruning bad-faith groups that are coordinated could become very difficult. Of course, this assumes the existence of such groups...
I hope my concerns prove to be unfounded, but I'd rather be cautious than naïve.
Well said and my thoughts exactly... Hence my passion for social system theorycrafting. :)
Wow! Slightly off-topic— It’s pretty incredible that such a big community is interested in moving their AMAs over to Tildes. That will be a huge driver for activity. Good activity, given the subject matter.
So exciting. Thank you for all you guys are doing to make Tildes an interesting place to hang.
I'm not sure how informative it is, but there's an example of this on the tech discussion site https://lobste.rs/u
It's a cool idea and and it would be cool to see while the site is still young, but like most data with a high degree of branching I think it will just turn into a indecipherable bush very quickly, especially if the identifying information is stripped out.