Hello Tilderinos! As I am finally entering the holiday slowdown, I wanted to express my gratitude for the community here.

I ended up migrating here from Reddit during the Apocalypse. Before that time, I would have told you that Reddit was a pretty good place, but after having time to detox and spending time here, I realize it was just better, but still pretty awful. With a few exceptions (like r/3Dprinting), the negativity I would get hit with when posting anything was pretty toxic.

I also set up Lemmy Sync on lemmy.world, but it's pretty much only good for scrolling shitposts and memes. Which sometimes I want, but if I dig into the comments under a topic, the noise factor is so high that it's usually not worth it.

Tildes is really different. The intentionality that people post with, the quality and positivity of the discussion is all amazing. One thing I enjoy especially is seeing reasonable people express views contrary to my own, and being to learn something from them.

This year has been a year of big changes for me. I left a 10 year run at a startup that was starting to lose the plot, becane a stay-at-home Dad to relaunch my wife's career, and wrestled with major health issues. All of that has been pretty isolating, but Tildes has been a bright spot of connection for me.

Sorry if this comes off as excessively cheesy, but I feel like it's a good time to take a moment and say "Thank you!" I am hoping that if something was really helpful to others, that they will take a moment to share it here.

I spontaneously came up with Tildesians, but I have seen others, including Tilders and Tildren.

Edit, I was hoping to surface a variety of nicknames, so thanks for your input, I like to play with language. It's fun.

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.

@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 just joined, and although it’s not extremely active, I love Tildes already! Firstly, the user interface. This is what the reddit redesign should’ve been. Clean, simple and lightweight. Loading a post on new reddit takes 10 seconds or so, because of all the useless JavaScript, but posts loads instantly here. And there’s no ads here, which is a nice bonus.

I also like the fact that it’s much calmer here, people focus on through-provoking discussion instead of attacking each other.

To everyone who works on Tildes, keep up the great work! I’m sure this has been asked many times before, but do you ever plan on allowing anyone to register in order to grow Tildes?

Thanks

After about a year-long absence I've hopped back on to Tildes again. There wasn't anything about the platform that made me "leave", it was purely external things in my life. With online communities, you really don't expect people to recognize you from day to day, but people here do and it's one of the things I love about Tildes.

What has absolutely shocked me is that after being gone for a full year people recognize my username. They have been incredibly kind and welcoming. They are happy to see me again. They remember the photography posts that I made and said they look forward to seeing them again. They remember the hard times my family was experiencing and have wished me well.

I'm not trying to be dramatic, but I'm being serious when I say that this reception has made me tear up. I've never experienced this before in any community, anonymous or otherwise. In all of the noise of the internet I never really expected my voice to be heard, much less be remembered by anyone. I never anticipated strangers to care beyond the time it takes to comment on a post.

I am completely overwhelmed by this reception. This is the kind of place that I thought had gone extinct on the internet. All of you have made me feel like I matter, and I don't think there's any way I can ever express my gratitude for this.

Since I'm posting anyway, I'll give a quick update for everyone.

Family

My family is doing amazing right now. Both of my sons have flourished and made so much progress. I've been around other foster/adoptive parents and the transformation that has happened for them in such a short amount of time is nothing short of a true miracle. Neither of them has needed inpatient psych care for almost two years now, and my oldest is now able to go to a special school that can meet his needs. My youngest who has struggled his whole life with social interaction now has several friends and even a best friend. My wife and I's relationship, which was on the verge of total destruction is now back on track and stronger than ever. I really appreciate the awesome support this community gave me during the worst year of my life.

Photography

I also fell out of photography during that time, but with the new stability I have rebuilt my darkroom in our new home and I'm picking it up again. It has gone from a fun hobby to a driving passion, and I'm now partnered with a mentor who has decades of experience. With his guidance, I hope to start producing gallery-quality material. I don't know that I'll ever submit to a gallery, it's really just a personal goal to start making things I can be proud of.

Again I can't thank everyone enough for all that you've done for me. I'm excited to be here and get plugged back into this awesome place!

So I've returned here after being gone for about a year. I didn't "leave" on purpose, just got distracted with some life stuff.

I'm happy to be back and to see the community is still as awesome as it was before. I'm also happy to see that on the technical side the site is still super minimalist and easy to use.

But what do you feel has changed here in the last year? Are there more users? Have the topics shifted? Are the opinions of users trending in a certain direction?

I'm really happy to be back and thanks for keeping me updated! :)

I'm not sure if this goes here or in ~talk, so if it needs moved, that's fine.

I've been thinking a lot, lately, about why I use Tildes.

As noted in my bio, I left Tildes for an extended period of time, after getting embroiled in some heavy arguments that, in the scheme of things, didn't matter. Such arguments consistently make me feel worse; I get into them on this account, too, though I do try to use uBlock Origin and the tag filter to keep out of the threads that will most obviously affect me.

But I can't seem to leave Tildes entirely. Even when I log out on all devices, I keep opening the site. Even when I had no account, I kept typing til<Enter> in the address bar and coming back.

So, why?

--

First, Tildes is what I love about the web. It's complete but uncluttered; it's featureful but not bloated; it uses client-side interactivity to improve the experience but does not break or reimpement default browser functionality. Overall, it's a good piece of software, designed to create, catalog, and discuss documents, like God Tim Berners-Lee intended.

Second, and more important, Tildes is a community. It's a community like my college dorm was a community; I know people here, and while I definitely don't like all of them, I recognize the personalities behind the names. Leaving, and diving mostly back into the world of Twitter and Mastodon where conversations are short, ephemeral, and deeply restricted, feels like losing relationships, no matter how damaging and negative some of those relationships are.

I don't know if gaining this understanding means I'll be able to - or even want to - drop the site again. We'll see. But I would love to know why y'all use it. Is it a community for you, too?

DISCLAIMER - The following is all my impression of discussions happening. I do not wish to call out any particular individuals or make any strong statements about 'truth' or 'fact'. This is a post about how all of this information made me feel and I will try my best to avoid language which paints any of this as definitive statements of truth.

Yesterday there was a thread which got nuked in which people were seemingly arguing on the validity of eugenics. Right now there's a thread about what's going on with Reddit which at times elevates the accusations raised by a group of troublesome individuals.

I'm not comfortable with people discussing whether there's any legitimacy to eugenics. I feel extremely alienated when people elevate accusations lead by kiwifarms and lineham and other bigots - frankly speaking I don't want to see anything lineham has to say on this website, ever, except perhaps when it is prefaced by a long post explaining the background of the troublesome individual and the post is being linked to explain why they are troublesome.

How do we stop this? Am I the only one who feels alienated and like I don't want to participate in Tildes anymore? If so, at what point is a discussion veering into the realm of intolerance and how can we stop this from happening and how do we culturally enforce this to happen?

Last week I woke up to yet another PM from someone I've come to admire from afar on tildes. This was a user I'd seen many times on Tildes, bringing with them a unique and powerful voice. This person was a minority. They brought a voice to the table that was like a breath of fresh air - I'd frequently see them enter threads dominated by a single opinion and make everyone challenge their assumptions. They would enter and offer their shoes to anyone who'd like to try them on and get a glimpse into how the world might work for them, should they be brave enough to walk a mile or two.

This is not the first PM I've received from someone who decided this website had become too troublesome to continue participating and it's likely not the last I will see. While it is heartbreaking to see them go, it is equally heartbreaking to me that the reason they are going is often not because people are trying to push them away. By far and large, I see a majority of tildes users actively participating in discussions with good faith. By the results of the last census, increasing diversity was of importance to the majority of users and I do not think they were free-text typing that in without good cause.

This post is one that I've been contemplating in the back of my mind for a very long time now. It first really occurred to me nearly a year ago when a fairly well known person of minority status got banned for being too confrontational and aggressive to the kind of voice they didn't want to see on Tildes. I wasn't sure how to address it at the time, and I wasn't entirely certain it would be a problem, but the year since this post I've become hyper aware to its existence in a way I wasn't previously. In fact, I've had a bit of this conversation on more than one outlet on the internet already, because my recognition of this behavior has had me upset many times since. To this extent, I thank that user, because it truly did open my eyes to a behavior which I believe is self-sabotaging, but often genuine in nature.

I believe the simplest way to explain what is happening is through the law of large numbers. While not everyone responded to the 2020 Tildes Census (in fact I would imagine maybe 10% of us did), I'm going to use it as a model to touch on these issues. There were a total of 350 responses to the survey. Of this 86% were male, 67% were heterosexual, 75% were atheist or agnostic (50, 25 respectively), 52% were from the US, and 47% identified as white or Caucasian. I point all of this out to say that as a population we tend to trend towards a particular kind of individual. To be clear, this isn't necessarily bad - we are still quite a small website and we need to start somewhere with a base we know how to pull from.

But this does present a unique problem when it comes to interaction. Let's imagine for a second that 1 in 100 individuals has some sort of problematic behavior on Tildes that manages to find its way into discussion. This behavior might be that they have a strong intolerant opinion on a specific subject but manage to obscure it enough to get past the intolerance detecting capabilities of others. Or perhaps their views are not intolerant, but they simply possess a strong opinion on how something should be worded or an aversion to a particular kind of venting. Because I don't want to throw anyone under the bus I'm going to pull from an upsetting behavior I used to have in my childhood - I couldn't shut my mouth when people would bring up that women make '70 cents on the dollar'.

It's very hard for me to look back and definitively say it was one shaping experience that led me to behave like that. If I had to attribute this shameful behavior, I think there's a few major players. First off, I grew up in an upper middle class family who happened to be located in an area that was very homogeneous. I went to school with the children of tech millionaires, many of whom were white and quite privileged. I think there were a grand total of 4 people of color in my middle school. Things got a lot better once I had made it to high school (by numbers, whites were in the minority), but there's a subtle cultural indoctrination that happens through absorbing what you hear from parents and teachers at a young age. As a young child, I also latched on to early internet behavior. People who were pedantic about grammar, who could use logic effectively, and otherwise followed the rules that rich white people before them set up as the 'correct' way to do discuss were revered on the internet. I remember when being the grammar police was behavior that was actually celebrated. This kind of mindset lead me to read into the research on the matter (also primarily conducted by rich white folks, another bias I'm trying to undo in my life) and the modern research suggested that this figure was outdated and poorly controlled.

I was the 1 in 100 users with the problematic behavior. It took me awhile to learn that I wasn't helping anyone out by offering this information up (turns out there were a lot of people already doing the same work I was and people are smarter than I gave them credit for), but that only scratches at the surface of the real problem. The real problem is that I didn't have the lived experience of a woman entering spaces where this discussion was happening. I wasn't the woman who received less pay than their colleagues, who put in more hours, who spoke up but was talked over, whose ideas were restated by their male peers, or who clicked on an article link talking about pay inequality or women's rights and how far we still have to go and was met with hostile comments. I didn't know how soul-crushing it could be to be met with nearly the same resistance in every public sphere where this was being discussed. I didn't know how tiring it was to have to justify my existence and to explain my struggles to those who hadn't lived the same life as me. I didn't know how heart wrenching it would feel for someone I valued, trusted, and loved to express opinions like these years after I had built up a strong bond with them and for them to be entirely unaware of the damage they were causing.

To be clear, when I say understand I mean to have either experienced it directly enough to begin to actually place myself in the shoes of others or heard about it enough for their experience to truly sink in. It's one thing to acknowledge and know that this behavior exists, it's another to live it and see it first hand on a day where you're hanging on by a thread. To truly understand how mentally exhausting it can be to treated this way was something that escaped my comprehension because I could only live this experience through the words of others. I didn't really start to appreciate this until I got older, because I started recognizing how universal this experience truly was. I don't think I know a single female who doesn't have a story of sexual assault - the rate at which they respond with something in their lives is a stark reminder of how far we still have to come.

What I knew, but didn't truly understand is that if 1 in 100 users have problematic behavior and 1 in 100 users are transgender, we have an equal number of transgender individuals as we do users with problematic behavior. I want you to stop here and reread the last sentence and really absorb it before moving on. Ask yourself what problems might arise by these inequality existing.

In this hypothetical we have an even number of individuals who are going to participate in a thread about a transgender issue as we have transgender individuals. If even 1 of these transgender individuals decides they do not want to engage with this behavior, we're on a downwards slope to eventually having nearly no transgender representation as now they are outnumbered and their voice is more likely to be drowned out by the problematic individuals. As less and less people of the minority engage, because they are discouraged by the expressions of the problematic individuals, less people will wish to engage as the threads become increasingly more hostile.

The problem we have on tildes is that the only way I see for us to become more diverse is to ask for more from those who have, to protect those who do not. I'm calling on everyone to pay closer attention to the intended audience of a thread. We need to look at how discussions are happening throughout the entirety of a thread and do a better job being welcoming of the minority opinion. We need to elevate and celebrate the voices of the minorities in these threads so that they are equal in paradigm to the voices which counter theirs. If a thread's topic is about a minority class such as gays we need to ensure that gays get an equal voice - if one person is dominating replies to gays in the comments, we need to be good allies and help balance the scales.

We also need to stop and think about how these discussions usually play out on the rest of the internet. Do you ever see something like this on twitter and go "definitely not checking the comments"? We need to pay attention to this, and strive to ensure the same doesn't eventually apply to Tildes.

A common example of this that I've seen is present in threads directed at specific minorities. The early discussion in a fantastic thread titled What's hard about being a woman? exemplifies this issue - because there aren't enough women on Tildes, the thread was dominated by male voices. Only one of these individuals were particularly problematic, but there was a hesitation from women I knew to enter this thread because an environment dominated by the male voice is not welcoming. Some of the women who entered this thread were met with replies challenging some of what they said, rather than elevating their voices and celebrating their participation. A small minority of men were in this thread to learn, but weren't aware of how the way they engage with other men on the internet was not appropriate for this venue. They didn't stop to consider that a thread dominated by male voices was neither welcoming nor a good start. If they had merely waited for women to start populating the thread, and replied to them, or opened soft with commentary on what they had seen in women without providing too much analysis they may have made the thread more welcoming.

Another common example of this that I see happened in a thread I posted titled Stop telling women they have imposter syndrome. I actually had to stop myself from posting in this thread because I had an inkling that it was going to exemplify the behavior I wanted to address in a thread like this and I didn't want to disrupt what would naturally happen on Tildes absent my intervention. Nearly every reply in that thread criticizes the author for not mentioning that men can have impostor syndrome too. Imagine entering this thread as a woman - even if you emotionally connected with the author on some level, would you bother engaging when highly regarded comments focus on nitpicking the author for not being 'inclusive' enough? As far as I could tell, even the title doesn't call upon the reader to critically examine what imposter syndrome is and who is eligible to suffer from it. It's calling upon the reader to stop telling women that they have imposter syndrome (or to stop others when they make this statement), when the problem is a sexist environment. I've even received recognition from women on Tildes outside of this thread (through DMs and discussions on different platforms) who thank me for posting these threads, but their voice is often conspicuously absent from the thread itself. I do not want to speak on their behalf, but I can guess that a major reason for that is the environment we are creating here on Tildes is not welcoming enough for them to feel it is worth commenting.

The insidious part of this problem is that very often the people creating a hostile environment do not intend to do so. They truly wish to be inclusive. Or they see behavior like this and they don't understand why it's problematic - it doesn't cause a flag to go off in their brain which tells them that they should jump in and fight on behalf of the people they want to protect. But this behavior is slowly causing minority individuals to flee this website. I don't know and cannot know them all, but waking up to PMs about someone else leaving makes my heart sink. Entering threads about the intersectional minorities that I find myself and my loved ones a part of often makes me feel similarly upset, downtrodden, and makes me feel like I want to engage less and less with this platform.

I wish I had an answer. I wish I could wave a magic wand and make everything better. To give everyone omniscience, or at least a day's firsthand experience of someone radically different than them. Unfortunately, I do not. I think the best I can offer at this time is this post - a call on all of us to do better; a start of an ongoing discussion on how we can protect the minorities among us so that we can be bettered by their presence.

Disclaimer I was going to post this on ~tildes but thought we could have a more casual conversation about it here.

So how can tildes stop corruption from happening on its platform, it’s no secret that other similar websites have become corrupted the best example of this is Reddit they do what advertisers want them to do or who ever is giving them money, only a couple of days ago I saw this video about a guy who was running a cult on there recruiting vulnerable people and they did nothing because he was buying thousands of awards a day.

Tildes doesn’t have advertising and is a non profit with no investors so those are 2 big places it can’t get corrupted from. One place I could see problems is donations I would be interested in if all donations are Anonymous I should probably have looked into them before writing this but maybe someone else knows the answer, if they aren’t what is stopping big donators getting special treatment?

My main reason for this topic is the video mentioned above but I also thought it would make an interesting discussion on here.

I think it's clear that all tildes political discussion leads to intractable arguments. Considering tildes was created to foster high quality discussion, I was wondering if it's even possible to have nuanced political discussions online. In person discussions work for me because I have base levels of respect for all the people I talk to, but that's quite difficult to get online. Are we doomed to snark and condescension filled megathreads, or is there a better way to structure the conversations? Are there additional political ground rules that need to be set up?

Now that a good portion of people have had accounts here for over a year, it seems fitting to ask: are there any interactions that have particularly stuck out to you? Anything that's caught your eye? Maybe changed your life, at the polar end of possible positive results?

~movies.horror?
~life.parenting?
~creative.poetry.limericks?
~comp.dev.games.godot?
~tildes.taxonomy? ;)

The possibilities are, of course, endless. Right now, with few users, we're all still living in top-level land, but I think it would be interesting to see what everyone's more specific interests are, as well as how some people would tackle defining a hierarchy. (e.g. ~games.overwatch vs. ~games.fps.overwatch vs. ~games.multiplayer.fps.overwatch etc.).

Furthermore, what content would you like to see in your specific subgroups? What types of posts would make having them worthwhile?

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.

Firstly, I'd like to dismiss any claims of pandering or fishing here. I need to say this and I need to write it out.

I was a reddit user for 8 years. I thought it was 5 but another commenter reminded me what it was. It put me into a bit of a reflective mood. I thought about some of the more meaningful insightful interactions I've had, and some of the more bitterly memorable ones where I was at best annoyed but more recently feeling attacked, shot down, rudely treated. It was profound as a sensitive human being to receive these things, to be made to feel through text, written for you by someone else. These weren't friends, people you held at arms length as you got to know them, they were complete strangers. And these people could be brutal. Make you feel so small. And yet I am a grown man, this environment I spent easily 30% of my waking time on for the best part of a decade was interacting with people and how much I enjoyed it. It was more than a website it was a place that I called home during bouts of depression, social drought and personal hardships. I found myself seeking help and for the most part finding it.

I have learned something valuable that I want to share here and I had to learn it the hard way, through hypocrisy, through mistakes, through mis-spoken words and harsh tongue thrashings both ways. I have realised for the first time that the people reading these things, the people writing them, the sentiments involved and the content/context is important. They are real, they are human, they feel, they are like me.

We are seeking some assembly, some community, some lectern from which to state our case. My whole life I looked for togetherness online and thought I found it in the early days of reddit. That is gone now. Even intelligent well thought out research style posts cannot culminate properly, they do not ascend, the public discourse is dead. I see now first hand the destruction of community the facebook exec spoke about. Our actual confident, open, readily invited opinionated perspectives are being replaced by circle jerks and shallow agree/disagree type statements. Upvotes have become likes. Now I see how it is broken.

Someone saw me having a meltdown and invited me here. I was told it was invite only, and that it was made by someone who had the same feelings as me. I don't want to be surrounded by likeminded people, thats not what I joined reddit for. I joined because open and honest perspectives based on experience were readily available; academics, workers, parents, billionaires, could just shoot-the-shit they didn't need to cite sources or write something popular. But upvotes were reserved for contributors, not jesters or people ridiculing/attacking/berating others. The reddit bandwagon has become savagely toxic in many respects. It is (sorry was) frustrating.

So here I am. Fresh off the boats as a reddit refugee. I hope than I can find my place here and contribute to the discussions, help build the site, build something that hopefully cannot be corrupted by growth, investors and advertisers.

We discussed in the hundred or comments attached to my meltdown that the lowering average age of the site population and possible the general dumbing down of internet users happening the past 10 years was largely responsible. I can imagine previously mentioned factors also drove it over the cliff. What is the current hope for Tildes future? I read the announcement post and it mentioned that a baseline level of activity will ensure that topics cycle regularly and user engagement is high enough to stimulate people coming back. Or that is at least what I think the baseline is for.

I hope this topic starts a discussion and doesn't get moderated away. But the lack of real debate, insight, coupled with a responsive and welcoming attitude is something the whole internet is missing right now, this is where we could make a positive change to the current online environment.

A common topic I've seen so far on Tildes is what exactly differentiates it from other online communities. This doesn't just encompass vision and meta-rules, but also the current state of the forum, and it's userbase. I wanted to propose a possible metric for gauging the quality of a forum, and would love to hear feedback on it. The metric is as follows: when all the content on the platform is no longer realistically consumable by any given member of the community.

I feel like Tildes is still currently at this state, but is somewhat quickly getting to the point where it's unrealistic for any one user to absorb all the content on the site. Once this tipping point arrives, the community has to change. The choice will be between whether one should start consuming all the content on specific sub-forums, like ~talk or ~comp, and ignoring the discussions and other subforums one cares less about, or accept that one will only ever see what is popular overall within the site.

I feel like this falls into 3 main categories: Community, growth, and that "magic" feeling of nascent internet communities.

I think it's important to define what I mean by "information" or "content". Information is meant in the more information theoretic context - it's a more abstract representation of content. It's context specific information that can be manifested as an image, a post, a comment, or even a set of rules. Information is, broadly, what makes up the discussion. If anyone has read Information: A history, a theory, a flood, I mean information in the same way it is defined and used in that book.

1. Community:

When every user is able to see what every other use posts, everyone involved has a singular point of view into the content of that community. It's never sharded or split - the information is distributed evenly, and everyone has close to 100% of it. Everyone might not agree or interpret content in the same way, but the very fact that everyone is seeing the same content, and the information is presented identically, makes it so that there is a very dense set of common ground. It's nearly impossible to "miss" big events - these being singular, really well written comment chains, unique posts, or thought provoking ideas. The sense of community is there because no one is excluded due to sheer amount of information - if someone puts in the effort to see everything, and it's still possible to see everything, they're almost automatically a part of that community.

Once a forum becomes so large that any one person can no longer realistically consume all the content it starts straying towards the lowest common denominator. These are posts that share common ground with everyone, which unfortunately means that you lose that unique community. Most people one site will no longer have seen every single post. You no longer run into posts or comments that are as thought provoking, simply because there is so much content only that which appeals to everyone will make it to the top.

2. Growth:

This ties in closely with what I mentioned above - the growth is what spurs those changes. Once you no longer have that feeling of community, you interact with it differently. You no longer can rely on the same people seeing your content, and the content itself starts decreasing in quality. This isn't due to "dumb" people joining - it's due to the sheer amount of "Information" being generated. The idea of Eternal September is tangential to this - you're not just losing out on community due to a lot of new users, it's also a loss of community due to sheer amount of information.

3. Magic internet moments:

I don't have a good definition of this but I think most people will know what I mean. Every popular online community has these moments - they're the random acts of pizza, randomly encountering someone else from the same site in real life, crazy coincidences, etc. These are often what kick start the crazy growth in the previous post - they're just really cool events that happen because of the internet, and specifically happen on that site. The new reddit book We are the nerds goes over a ton of these in the early days of reddit, and how they propelled it to what it is today.

I wanted to ask the current Tildes community what they thought about this, whether they had any major disagreements, and if anything can be done to remedy this./

This is something I've been grappling with for a while. For context I'm a long time mod on reddit, primarily of r/IAmA, r/damnthatsinteresting, and r/churning. I've helped grow and curate these communities over time, and each is drastically different. The most relevant here is probably r/churning, though.

It used to be that there was a core set of users that contributed all the content. They were known by name, everyone that visited knew who they were, and they built up the hobby to what it is today. All the things that I mentioned above started happening there - the content started skewing towards the trivial questions, new members weren't properly acclimated, and the sheer amount of information caused the mods at the time to implement fairly drastic rules to combat these issues. Once you could no longer realistically consume all the content the community aspect sort of fell apart, and it became more akin to a Q&A subreddit, with new users asking the same questions.

Do you believe there is something unique/special about those "early" users, and what changes have you noticed historically once that "content" tipping point arrives?

Everything I said was heavily downvoted, even though I was making valid points and 90% of the replies were mockery or useless dribble. The few people that attempted to engage in discussion with me were either just has heavily downvoted as me (even though their views were opposing mine) or were unable to do it in a logical or civil manor. It wasn't even a really controversial topic, my opinion is just something that is in contrast of the greater "hivemind".

I know we are not where I think most of us would like to be just yet, but I had not been back on Reddit for a while and I feel like I made a good decision by distancing myself from the Reddit community. I really enjoy the community we are building here.

Anyway, I kinda just felt like I needed to post this. I know it's not really high quality content (and I honestly had no clue where to post it), but I wanted you guys to know I appreciate all of you.

❤

~talk seems to fit this criteria, but as I browse Tildes to my dismay the majority of content is re-posts of links from external sources. Obviously, there are also quite a few posts which are more than simply URL pastes, and even in the comments of a URL post, there can be healthy discourse happening.

But I am interested to discover whether anyone here knows of any other platforms that are entirely dedicated to written discussion and communication, where external links do not play a big part in that ecosystem of discourse.

Do you sometimes find yourself typing up a joke reply typical of Reddit but then remember this is Tildes and stop? I do it quite often (less and less the more time I spend on the site, however).

I'm even doing it less and less on Reddit itself. Like, yeah, the puns is one of the things I used to love about Reddit the most when I first joined. But that's sort of the problem.

There's always new people joining and finding the beaten-to-death jokes hilarious and so they upvote them. Which means, after one year or two 90% of Reddit jokes are old to you and have been repeated ad nauseam.

Not only that, but since they're a quick and sure way to gain others' approval (via karma) people often try to force them anywhere. No matter how inappropriate they are at that time, how forced and out of place they look. To the point that they're often the first child comment of serious comments asking serious questions.

Which means that if you're interested in reading the serious answer to that question you have scroll down past the joke, and that's even provided there's an actual answer. And I'm pretty sure many questions are left unanswered because whoever has a relevant serious answer won't feel like wasting their time typing up a reply no one will see because it will be buried under the joke reply.

With that said, what do you think of “silly” or “witty” jokes on Tildes? Do you think they should be encouraged? Discouraged? That nothing should be done about them? What about the ones that get repeated ad nauseam, are they even controllable?

I also just remembered there was talk about introducing a “joke” tag that would allow users to not see them if they don't want to or to see only jokes if they so wish. What do you think of this tag proposal? I think it could be very, very useful.

Disclaimer:

There is a chance that some users will interpret this post as some form of rant or an attempt at policing the site even further. I just want to state that my objective with this post is to spark a general and open discussion about this topic, to gauge the opinions of other users and get a feel for what the general community thinks about them (if there's an overwhelming majority that shares an opinion, or if the community is highly fragmented with regards to the topic and if so, in what proportions... etc), to see if there's anything that we can do about it or if there's anything that should be done at all, for example. I am not trying to spark controversy or drama and I mean my post to be one that's constructive, friendly, in good faith and respectful and not on that's toxic or negative or disrespectful.

A Short Summary and Introduction Before the Actual Content of This Post:

A site—especially a small one, like Tildes—is going to have growing pains. That's natural. It's also natural, and to some extent, necessary, for users to raise issue with remedies for these growing pains. However, there's a spectrum of correct ways to do this, and a way to not do this. If you aren't interested in—or think you already have a firm grasp on the subject of—this post, you might want to skip it.

Tildes has reached its first major streak of growing pains, as I'm sure everyone active or lurking's noticed. We've also reached our first few incorrect methods of handling these. There are a few obvious things you shouldn't do, and everyone knows that—tantrums, slurs, personal attacks, etcetera—I'm going to be discussing a less realised one, and ways you could handle it instead.

Now, onto the good stuff.

Repeatedly, when handling issues, Tildes has seen a recurring circumstance. User makes post, upset. User namedrops and or subposts a user (the most apt description I could think of for a term lifted off of Twitter—subtweet—for example, "I'm not saying it's Garfield I'm talking about, but there was a suspiciously large orange cat with a mild food addiction with a fondness for lasagne who really pushed my buttons!" and etcetera). User hits "send." The targets of it feel offended, and the poster gets yelled at by the community for hurting people. No one wins.

The trick to fixing this: stop going out of your way to call out users, directly or indirectly. If you have issue with something someone said, either take it to an administrator, or directly message the user in question (politely, of course.) There's no reason to air dirty laundry in public, and there's no reason to bring personal grievances into the public eye for minor things.

If you notice an issue, do the above, and nothing changes, wait a short while before making a post on it. There's a fair chance it will resolve itself. If you end up feeling the need to make a post, do not mention individual conversations. Do not give examples from actual conversations; make an analogous example and put it into quote blocks. Never name a name or names, don't allow hate to be directed at anyone.

We're all (presumably) adults (or close enough,) here. If you have any desire for Tildes to flourish, act like an adult. Passive aggression isn't the behaviour of one. Aim to have better behaviour than the docs recommend; you might slip up sometimes, but you'll never fall too far if you keep that in mind.

Anyway, if you ended up reading this; thank you for taking the time. I appreciate it. I've spent a lot of time handling large forums, and in comparison to most of you, fairly small, incredibly high-volatility subreddits with immeasurably close communities. If you can't get a community to do the above, or something close to it, it's more or less going to be a death warrant for it. We'd all prefer not to have that happen to Tildes, so I—and presumably, most of us—would really appreciate if people made an effort to stop that from occurring.

Hate to copy reddit's slogan, but really:

Remember the Human.

Thanks again,

Eva.

They say downvotes don't mean anything. But I disagree. To me, it feels like a stranger coming up to you on the street, slapping you in the face and walking off. All the while you don't even know why and just stare in confusion.

Like, I'd get it if the person was being rude, or impolite, or aggressive, or insulting, or racist, or misogynistic... Hell, even a very bad joke. But simple, innocent comments just casually sharing an opinion or a personal experience just get so aggressively downvoted. Why?

The particular sub that inspired me to make this post is r/android. Very simple comments without presenting judgement or making claims... just sharing their personal experience on a smaller topic about a certain phone will get a downvote. Why? As if to tell this person that their experience is wrong? That this didn't happen? I don't get it.

And this extends to the whole community, or at least most of it. It's just so toxic, immature and petty. Like, if you hate what someone said so much, why not at least tell them, so maybe they won't do it again or at least so they know why they're getting spat on the face.

But the lack of explanation and the mere booing from a faceless crowd is just so hearbreaking. Like, this is how crowds behave. That's why lynchings and mass rapes in war times are a thing. And it's just such a shameful aspect of the human character.

On Tildes, if you don't agree with someone, you cannot just downvote them to shut them up and hide their comment for others to see. No, rather, you have to tell them how it is you think they're wrong. And, while this has the potential of leading to nasty arguments, it also has the potential of leading to productive discussions.

How many of those comments that you often see downvoted are just innocent remarks that were completely misinterpreted by a first person and then the Hivemind just took it from there?

I mean, even if someone is saying something that is downright not true, but their tone doesn't come off as aggressive or rude, why downvote them instead of telling them? A downvote won't send them a notification. So they're likely to move on with life without knowing that that thing they think is true isn't. If you tell them, however, you can help this person learn something and combat misinformation.

By replying to this person, you're giving them a chance to better explain themselves. It's a lot less hostile, while being more productive and positive.

Plus, if upsetting and trolling people is what they want (like those few “professional reddit trolls” who just try to amass downvotes instead of upvotes) then they're out of luck in here. If their comment is obvious trolling, they'll just get ignored. Or well, maybe they do upset someone and get a heated discussion, but without the fishing for downvotes.

People cannot just downvote you to prove you wrong and go about their day feeling all superior and righteous. They have to tell you how they think you're wrong (or how they think your comment is irrelevant or how they don't like it) and in doing so expose their views up for external judgement.

The lack is probably the main reason that attracted me to Tildes.

By the way, I'm mostly referring to discussions way down in the thread between two people. I mean, how petty and aggressive do you have to be to downvote someone on an inactive thread just two minutes after they added their comment and just before you reply to them? I mean that way you're making it clear that it was you who downvoted them. So you're intentionally setting up a hostile atmosphere before the discussion even starts. That's just so toxic and emotionally draining.

How do you feel about downvotes on Reddit and their lack on Tildes?

For me, I was just browsing a random thread and somebody complained about a reddit-specific thing and then another user linked them to r/tilde with a message implying that Tilde was better about that issue and I checked it out and decided to follow to see how development went with the site. I never actually actively followed news about it, just mostly waited for invites to be handed out so I could see for myself. I like it so far, it feels more communal.

I have been using Tildes for about a week now. I have come over from Reddit where I am primarily a lurker. I lurk because I often feel my thoughts and opinions on topics and discussions have been touched on because discussions are already hundreds of comments deep by the time I arrive. The biggest positive with Tildes is the fact that the community is currently small and I read the post/sarticles that interest me instead of jumping straight into the comments to be given a synopsis. I now read more than just the headline.

I still have not found my 'voice' in regards to posting comments related to articles/stories that I have read. I think it is because I haven't found a discussion that I am really interested in. I have posted a couple of news articles that provide information about the part of the world I am in but, while they interested me, I didn't feel the need to discuss their contents further so I didn't add any comment to start a conversation to the post.

Regarding providing some more content to the site. My hobbies include, like everyone else, traveling, reading, and photography. I am no where near being an influential voice in any of these! I am not interested in having a travel blog or a website but I would like to provide information, incase someone else here is interested or has experiences too. For example, I recently took a short weekend trip from Bangkok, Thailand to Ayutthaya, Thailand. I rode the train, visited the sites, visited a bar, ate some food, and stayed the night. I want to provide a write up on my experiences and thoughts of this trip. Is a post in ~hobbies with the tags of: thailand, ayutthaya, bangkok, train the way to go?
What do y'all think?

Sharing photographs - Taking pictures is another hobby I share with everyone else. I enjoy sharing pictures I am proud of. I tend to post to r/nocontextpics, because I like their rules of no back story in the title. I also post to location specific sites. I do this to show off my pictures and to feel good from earning points. I do not post pictures to facebook very often because I like having the feel of anonymity. I don't want to be perceived as a pretentious twat. How does everyone feel about picture posts in ~hobbies with the tag(s) like: location, device used, etc..

My problem would be not 'spamming' photos. With the age of the site, and my brief interaction with it, no one wants to see 2+ picture posts from one user in the ~hobbies group.
Any thoughts on etiquette or rules for picture posts? Allow: Yes/No?

The other day, I made a comment regarding our political climate that a number of people reacted to with anger. It is ironic because it is the very thing i was commenting on, that I wanted to avoid causing more emotional distress in that segment of the populace in my country which is right now very upset. I made my comment without taking into consideration that the very environment on tildes was no different than the environment I was commenting on.

It is something that has caught me off-guard in the past on this site as well, where I said something that I thought of as innocuous, which some people reacted to with extreme emotions. When I was told to police myself more, I felt indignant and infuriated. I thought I was already trying to walk on eggshells enough!

I don't think anything I've said or done on Tildes is objectively offensive or inappropriate - and I recognize that sometimes people see things from a completely different reality than I experience. I want to make a solid effort to get along with people here, and that appears to mean that I need to learn how to communicate in a way that doesn't provoke discord.

So how do I do it? What can I do to make sure that I'm not pissing people off here just by conversing and expressing my thoughts or feelings? What specific strategies can I employ to filter my self so that it is safe? Cfabbro and Deimos both have told me that I'm doing it wrong, but i want to know how to do it right. Please teach me.

I feel like there's so much going on back at the mothership.

The whole vibe and color scheme of this place is just so relaxed, and everyone so far seems so polite and actually interested in genuine discussion. Like if there was a ~writing or something like that, I could settle down in a sweater with some of my username and just flip through this place for hours.

thanks for keeping the place awesome!

I've seen a few remarks here and there that have implied sort of matter-of-factly that places like /r/The_Donald have no redeeming value, the community members are awful (and undesirable to have here), their ideas are all reprehensible, etc. I assume that this is mostly just due to the demographic coming primarily from popular reddit mod teams where being anti-Trump is sort of an unspoken requirement - but I don't really know for certain.

It reminds me a little of this woman in a class i had once, who spoke to me about atheists, assumed I was christian just as a matter of course. It's kind of an awkward situation to find yourself in. I don't identify as an atheist, but if someone is mildly insulting atheists, it's uncomfortable. You have to be a covert conservative (or covert center-right, or even left-leaning Trump voter) or else you risk being blasted/flamed/mocked/etc. in places like reddit.

Part of what attracted me to Tildes was the sales pitch that it is to be a community for civil conversation, no hate-speech/bigotry. I think that's a perfect environment for political discussion - far more than shit-flinging and nuclear downvoting on /r/politics. So even if I'm the only MAGA person here, maybe there's a chance we can actually have civil conversations on topics we might initially disagree on...?

Edit: wow! Really happy to have these conversations with folks. Sad that i haven't encountered any fellow (public) Trump voters/supporters yet but very pleased that things have been civil as advertised. ;) Apologies for slow responses, trying to give proper thought and consideration to all the comments!

Edit2: gotta head to bed. sorry to anyone i haven't responded to questions from. feeling a bit like a novelty "And here's our token Trump voter. ha ha, he sure is a quirky one, isn't he, that crazy dictator-enabler!" xP. I'll try to answer any questions I've missed tomorrow. Sleep well, all (well, all who are going to sleep before I get back).

Edit3: Thanks for the open engagement, all you people who live in a different reality!

Still a bit bummed there aren't any MAGA friends here yet, but I've been blown away by how cordial most of you have been (i hope we can retain this culture into the future of the site). For those who are just coming in and don't want to read everything, I'd say a tl;dr of the conversations I've had below is:

• most people here want to engage with others on important topics without the shit flinging,
• some people express disbelief that someone can not be a bigot or racist and vote for Donald Trump,
• I've been repeating in various conversations the Laurel and Yanny thing is a great metaphor for the polarized camps experiencing different realities, seeing different movies on the same screen.

I'm continuing to try to reply to questions, and in the spirit of not provoking heated emotions I have been trying not to argue any of my political beliefs except that both sides are seeing different realities.

Seeing as we're still a small community, I see a lot of familiar faces in every thread.

So if you want to know what other people noticed about you, comment on this post. And reply to others with description of them. I'll try to be active here for several hours also.

... and we're only a few bunch on an alpha website.

While actually the fact of being a small group could be playing a big role in this feeling, it just feel good to realise that some unrest I was feeling in the last months was just due to lack of meaningful discussions.

I was finding myself checking Reddit over and over (the meme about Reddit as an empty refrigerator feel terribly apt today) while I check here a couple times a day and get some interesting insight every. Single. Time.

So, enough rambling and just tank you @Deimos to put this up, that mod from reddit/science that made me discover this platform and every single one of you for providing some quality conversation :)

Keep going on!