Daily Tildes discussion - more growth, more groups
After we slowed things down a little last week, I was planning to post today and say that it would be okay to start promoting the site a bit again and getting some more people in. Turns out that... kind of took care of itself, with multiple prominent mentions in this thread on reddit this morning.
So we've got a flood of invite requests again, and will probably have a lot of new users showing up over the next few days as we work through those (and thanks again to the people handling all the ones in /r/tildes on reddit, it's a lot of work). If you're one of those new people—welcome, please feel free to post in this thread (or in ~tildes in general) if you have any feedback or suggestions. We're pretty swamped right now and might not be able to reply to everything (or reply quickly), but I'm definitely reading it all.
On that note, with a lot more people coming in, I think we can add some more (top-level) groups and see if we have enough activity to support a few more. I'll probably do this later today or tomorrow. These are the ones I'm planning to add right now, let me know if you think these are good and/or if we need some other ones:
- ~books (is this the best name?) - for reading discussions (fiction and non-fiction) - writing would probably still be in ~creative
- ~food - for discussion of food (and drinks, so the naming might be a bit weird), recipes, articles, etc.
- ~lifestyle - for fitness, outdoor activities, specific diets and so on
- ~soc (is this the best name? I think ~social would be confusing) - culture, social issues, environmentalism and so on - some people have told me that they don't really want to post these sorts of things in the more "general" groups, so I think we probably need a more specific one
I'm also thinking about turning off the auto-subscription to all groups on registration, so that people can start only selecting ones that they're interested in, instead of having to opt-out from ones they're not interested in. I never wanted to do that for long, but I'm not sure if this is too early to stop already.
Any thoughts on that? The groups list page definitely needs some improvements before I do it, including showing which ones you're subscribed or not subscribed to, and some better descriptions. Also, if I do end up doing it soon, should I un-subscribe all existing users from everything to get everyone to start fresh, or will that annoy you all too much? Maybe only people that haven't already changed their subscriptions at all?
Personally, when I see SOC I think Security Operations Center, however at the moment I do not have a better alternative. ~community maybe?
Or maybe I am just alone in that opinion! I do like no auto-subscriptions though but agree with all points made on it. I don't feel like unsubscribing existing users would be necessary however, because everyone that is already here would have had opportunity to alter this already
I agree that ~soc is not at all clear. I think ~society or ~community would be better.
Society is definitely better, imho, as community is usually meant as self-reflecting so it would seems like it's referred to tildes community.
I agree, should definitely be something more straightforward. When I see SOC, I think System On Chip.
Start of Care
im writing an EMR
I like ~community I think it implies an idea of togetherness that tends to go hand in hand with social issues and environmentalism etc. It's bringing people together for things that matter.
I click the link and get 404
It doesn't exist currently
It's also good for people to get a sense of the various communities and overall culture at first. As others have mentioned, we don't want to fragment the userbase at this early stage. I'm not sure individual ~ would have enough activity if people had to actively subscribe to them.
Agreed, I reckon users should be auto-subscribed to the main groups but not the subgroups (once they're implemented. Not sure how that's working). There aren't many main groups yet so it's no big deal
Sub group submission automatically emerge in the parent if they get enough votes/activity.
Yeah, that's the useful bit. Newcomers are exposed to small amounts of all the content. Then they can narrow down which subgroups they want to see more of.
I'll put a pitch in for something like a ~hobbyist group. Some of my favorite subcommunities on reddit are those that coalesce around niche hobbies; in particular, I think there's a lot of room for subgroups like:
~hobbyist.mechanicalkeyboards
~hobbyist.fountainpens
~hobbyist.EDC
~hobbyist.knives
~hobbyist.watches
~hobbyist.headphones
etc. These are large and highly active communities on reddit, and I would surprised if I'm the only person on here looking for something like the above.
Really good suggestion, I think that's a definite gap right now. I'm not sure about the name, but that seems like a category we'll want to have.
Yea, not sure on the name either. Something like ~hobby without the -ist seems too broad, since that would start to encompass gaming, running, etc -- I think there is a common thread between the examples that separates them from more active hobbies, but it's not easily summable into a short word (~coolmaterialgoodsandproducts doesn't roll off the tongue). Will keep thinking about it.
I actually really like ~hobby! I feel most users would understand the difference between that and activities, and if they didn't the content and sidebar would make it clear to most.
The thing that links all these communities together is the tired joke:
What about ~stuff, since it's all stuff that people use/collect?
~stuff would be too broad in my opinion especially since 'stuff' could just been seen as another word for miscellaneous. For collectables you could possibly have ~collectables, but then you'd have people wanting more subgroups for all kinds of obscure collectables.
Mmmm, gotta get my clicky fix
Just joined so I haven't had a chance to really explore much yet, but I kinda dig that idea because it delineates hobbyists from professionals. In my experience, hobbyists tend to have much more of a "let try to figure this out" mentality, while professionals tend to have more of the "my way or the highway" stance that's much less open to discussion. Advice for hobbyists from professionals can be solid gold, but the discussions typically need to be framed much different than discussion among hobbyists.
I think something that hurt imzy was having many small communities early on in its existence that fractured the user base. It made it difficult to find friends, or a "home" on the site.
I lean more towards letting the current groups/topics grow and develop some character. That way we can see what subjects are popular enough to warrant their own ~ as things progress.
That absolutely hurt imzy, yes. They had more communities created than they had users, and it just seemed like everywhere you looked was inactive.
I've said this before, but it's a tricky balance—we don't want to have too many groups and fracture the users too much, but if there isn't a dedicated group for a particular topic it also has a bit of a chilling effect because people don't want to post topics that don't really "fit" anywhere.
I don't think this is too much of an issue. ~misc serves this purpose until the community outgrows the need for it.
I think that's what Deimos is aiming for, but we just want to add a couple more groups that were "overlooked." My understanding is that we won't be adding any ".stuff" subgroups for a little while yet. So while I mostly agree with you, I need me a ~books group and a ~food group. Even with a ~lifestyle and a ~soc-type, I don't think it will be too fractured.
Imzy died because it was boring. It was like /r/wholesomememes, everyone was so busy dancing round the forest holding each other's hands that no one bothered to post or create any interesting content. Also, the design was quite ugly.
How about location based subs, eg. ~geo.europe?
I love the idea of having a top-level group called ~geo. It's sleek.
I like ~geo, it could just be confused between geology and geograpy
Well, the etymology of geo means Earth, so why not have all Earth based sciences come under it
I assume there would then be ~geo.europe.france, ~geo.europe.uk, and so on.
We might need to be careful about geographical groupings, though.
For example, some people would see "America" as covering the whole double continent, from Canada down to Chile. So, there'd be ~geo.america.canada and ~geo.america.usa and ~geo.america.chile. Other people (mostly people from the USA, I assume) would prefer to see "america" reserved for the country USA rather than the continent: ~geo.america would refer directly to the USA, leaving ~geo.canada and ~geo.chile as separate groups.
For another example, where would my country of Australia go? Some people classify it as part of Oceania, while others think it's a stand-alone category, being a continent in and of itself.
We could open up a series of very nasty arguments if we start using geographical regions.
Could it drill all the way down to ~geo.na.usa.ny.nyc.manhatten.timessquare.seventhavenue.143.myapartment
Only if you can get a group of people to support creating that community! How many people live there? I doubt that Deimos is going to create a tilde group for just 1 person. :P
Apologies, I've had a couple beers this evening...
Hmm, classifying countries by continent gets messy real quick with transcontinental countries (Turkey, Russia, Caucasus, ...) and continents are quite arbitrary anyway (America as a whole vs North and South America; Africa and Asia are the continents, but Sub Saharan Africa, MENA and East Asia is probably a culturally more appropriate division; ... ). I still like having subtildes for larger regions such as Europe, but maybe if we add individual countries they should also be first level subtildes. So ~geo.europe and ~geo.france separately. This does have the downside that posts in ~geo.france won't propagate to ~geo.europe though.
I guess most Americans would prefer ~geo.usa to ~geo.america anyway.
wink, wink!
Regarding ~soc: what about
Have we talked about having a ~history? That could perhaps sit under this group.
*edit: Additionally: ~anthro(pology) could work. "The study of humans and human behavior." It fits cultural and social (which would include politics and environmental) and doesn't need to mean "old shit."
I like ~anthro, it's clear and slick.
We've already had a furry fandom thread here, I guess ~anthro(pomorphic) could be a little confusing in those circles... As a non-native speaker I've never really heard it as an abbreviation for anthropology before, but I guess that'd be a little more well-known for the majority of the userbase.
Hmm... I didn't realize that was a furry word. I've heard it used around universities as an abbreviation for anthropology, but I don't know if it is a common usage. I think it would be just as easy to use ~anthropology. Or one of the other suggestions!
civics sounds like the best one!
I like the idea of ~earth, it would go well with subgroups later, e.g.: ~earth.europe, ~earth.asia, ~earth.usa.texas.
I like the oidea of ~culture. Its fun to learn about different cultures.
Not saying you should add this, but how would a something like ~scifi work here?
On some level I feel like ~music, ~movies, ~tv, and now ~books shouldn't be top level. Shouldn't it be ~entertainment.music, etc?
But on the other hand, these buckets are large enough to be top-level Tildes, but that's probably not true for other high-level subdivisions of entertainment, e.g. scifi or fantasy. You certainly don't want to put scifi under ~tv without putting it under ~movies, but you probably don't want ~tv.scifi and ~movies.scifi to be separate communities either.
So does ~scifi get a top-level Tilde? Given the precedent already set for other classifications of entertainment, the answer appears to be "yes," but even as a die-hard lover of all things sci-fi, putting it at the top level seems too prestigious relative to the other top-level options.
I would imagine that scifi would be a tag that you can search for (soonTM). It is one of those things that can exist in a bunch of different forms and show up in a bunch of different places, so fi you're interested in that you should (soonTM) be able to search for it regardless of what group it is in.
I suppose that works for a topic as broad as sci-fi, but what if I want a Star Wars tilde? Probably the best thing about Reddit is that, for better or worse, a subreddit is a community specifically for the topic at hand, and as a result subreddits develop unique cultures. Diffusing topics across tildes via tags like you're suggesting is going to make Tildes a lot more sterile and monotone when compared to the subreddit model. But then again, maybe that's the point.
As far as I understand, users will be able to make posts to ~(top level tilde).(specific) whenever they want. If enough people post to ~movies.starwars or ~talk.starwars the admins may consider adding it as a permanent subtilde.
Once hierarchical groups are implemented, I wouldn't mind seeing something like ~fandom for those sorts of things.
The 4chan boards are anything but sterile and monotone, and their topics are pretty non-specific. I think if anything, an interesting culture is actually more likely to develop on a more diverse board.
As far as subreddits go: in my opinion, the tiny ones devoted to very specific topics are great, but after they grow past a certain size their quality diminishes significantly.
Nesting scifi under talk makes sense as it could encompass all aspects of the genre. Eventually users will also be able to search for posts with specific tags if they want to see things that may be posted in ~tv or ~movies or ~books. Plus, I love the mouthfeel of ~talk.scifi.
I think what might make sense moving forward is a system similar to StackOverflow's tag synonyms. In that way, you could have e.g. ~tv.scifi and ~movies.scifi, but both would be accessible under a top-level of ~scifi or perhaps ~entertainment.scifi.
It could end up becoming a tangled mess, of course, but I imagine that there are fairly good solutions in place to manage this exact problem. I sincerely doubt that this is a novel problem space :)
From experience with handling tree-like structures, this is bound to become a huge mess unless there is a singular canonical address for each node. Shorthands and aliases should only be used to redirect, never to directly address something on it's own. Otherwise it's not a tree, but a graph with no obvious hierarchy. Tags seem to be the mechanism for tying content from different groups together.
I also imagine that it could lead to quite a lot of confusion. Can you post to the "virtual" ~scifi group? Where would an actual post be anchored? And how would you distinguish a "virtual" group from a real one? I don't believe that this distinction would be obvious to the average user.
I think I've said it somewhere else already, but search engines don't seem to like finding identical content on lots of distinct pages either.
Regarding the tree structure, I've managed one like this before. What you do is maintain a tree with maximum depth of 1 away from the root. So you only have the root and leaves.
Regarding your other points, I literally just woke up, so unfortunately I can't coherently respond, but I'm certain solutions exist.
Of course, none of this is unsolvable. It's just inherently quite a bit more complicated than a simple tree. I am sure we can find solutions for all of these issues.
Perhaps there could be some notation like ~~scifi. Which grabs all ~*.scifi subgroups? Probably not useful but might as well throw it out there.
inb4 tildes supports bash-style globbing of tags
Well, uh... the groups and tags both use ltree, so that means it supports things like
*.!pictures.*.astronomy.*for "groups that don't include a 'pictures' segment but include an 'astronomy' segment" (where by "segment" I mean an entire "level" of a group/tag name).So... at least from the data storage perspective, they do already have support for that type of thing.
Why not just ~.scifi?
this reminds me of the inheritance issues in object-oriented programming versus something like a component entity system where you can mix and match stuff trivially.
"You certainly don't want to put scifi under ~tv without putting it under ~movies, but you probably don't want ~tv.scifi and ~movies.scifi to be separate communities either."
Don't forget about ~books.scifi. It's a multimedia genre.
Also, wouldn't it be ~sciencefiction rather than ~scifi? I know that some people (not me!) have a VERY strong aversion to "sci fi", because they see it as referring to B-grade content, and they see "science fiction" as the more proper label.
If we ever get a "multi-reddit" type system where we could group things as we like, you could do a multilde^TM of ~tv.scifi, ~movies.scifi, ~talk.scifi, ~books.scifi, etc.
Hey everyone, I'm the one who suggested ~soc, first here then in the private conversation with @Deimos that prompted this post.
Unfortunately I think the framing @Deimos used changed the perceived goal from the one I had, so for clarity, the goal was for a home for social sciences and social issues, such as men's, women's, LGBT, and so on. I used ~soc initially out of not having a better name, but later discovered precedent: soc.* is one of the original 7 Usenet hierarchies. I still support it's use, though it would benefit greatly from sub-groups.
Suggestions like ~society, ~community, ~civics, ~citizenship, ~globalcitizen, ~culture, ~earth, ~anthro are too specific, but if we must choose something else I would choose ~society, which would be best with sub-groups like what I outlined in the comment linked above.
I don't believe so, actually! I think society and anthropology actually perfectly encompass social sciences and issues! In fact, when you go on to the Wikipedia page for anthropology, it talks about the various disciplines within it, including sociocultural: art, media, kinship, feminism, gender and sexuality, political, nature.
The main barrier in my mind is that people (including me before I read the wiki thread) won't know that Anthropology is the perfect word! ;-)
Even if everyone knows the word, I fear the posts would be biased towards an analytical/scientific view, would be better as ~science.anthropology.
I still think ~society would work, but I think it would steer towards patriotic and civic-nationalist themes without having initial sub-groups.
I expanded on the idea quite a bit in that private conversation I've been having with @deimos, which I will share here. Note that I was operating under the assumption that child-groups are mean to have their posts visible in parent groups post lists (so ~soc would contain all posts from all of the following, except ones manually filtered). This may very well not be the plan, waiting for clarity on that.
In any case, here is the demonstrative list of where I think ~soc (of any name) could eventually go. Not a suggestion.
I like the idea of adding ~creative under ~soc[iety] and changing ~soc.environment to ~soc.nature as well.
So what does "soc" stand for in your mind? If not "society"?
Social issues. ~socialissues is ugly, ~social is confusing, ~soc has a history of use with Usenet and makes sense, even if it has to be learned.
Gotcha. I didn't realize that it has a history of use, which is important! I still think that anthropology fits better and is a wider scope, but it sounds like we're pretty set on soc. All in all, the content of the group and sidebar description will help those confused to understand what is appropriate. Thanks for the discussion!
Yeah, it's one of the 8 main hierarchies on usenet, the others being comp.*, humanities.*, misc.*, news.*, rec.*, sci.*, and talk.*
I like ~soc, but I'd take an alternative name if it's the difference between having the group or not. I'd say my priority is ~soc, ~society, ~social, ~socialissues, then ~anthro or ~anthropology. But ultimately this is just my opinion 🤷♀️
I do sort of wish there was more discussion about ~soc with better context, I might post another thread for that purpose.
My understanding is that you actually won't see everything posted to subgroups if you're looking at the group, just the content that bubbles up due to lots of activity/voting.
Solutions:
This is where point #2 comes into play. Point #1 is intended more for the early groups, where managing the subgroups manually isn't really a problem. It's not intended to be a long-term solution. The Tildes source code is going to be open sourced pretty soon, and as this particular situation ends up coming into play and needing to be addressed, you're going to find that a lot of community members see a need for an appropriate subgroup filtering feature and will end up building it out. Odds are they'll be smart enough to realize that some people prefer a whitelist approach and some prefer a black list approach, and they would implement the feature accordingly to allow for maximum flexibility.
Oh well, tons of comments already and it's pointless that I reply to a first level with my suggestions:
I'm absolutely against a ~geo or ~world group.
There are already lots of barriers in real life and I don't see the reason to build virtual borders in which enclose ourselves in, even online. Also, of what you would discuss on that group / subgroups? News? There is ~news already for that, just type in the tag the country and there is that. Want to talk about custom of a country? Weird things? There is ~talk for that. I think we should just adopt more the tags than create n-thousands groups.
To provide some anecdotal experiences on the benefits of geographical groups, I personally love them. Reddit in particular is very US-focused, and it can be difficult to feel at "home" online when the front page is full of the superbowl, or the 4th of july, etc. It's nice to have a group where you know that people will understand particularly niche areas or local issues.
For example with the recent referendum in Ireland it was a godsend to have a reasonably safe and focused area to discuss the issue without being subject to external scrutiny or judgement and to actually have a conversation on a relatively local level. It applies for general news and events as well, and can be a great resource for tourists or visitors as well.
Depending on how big this place gets, I would love a ~geo! In my mind, it's not a place to sequester yourself, it's a place to discuss places! "I'm going to France, what was the best part of your trip there?" "Do other US states have as much statetriotism as Minnesota does (answer: no)" "What's going on at the StreetName exit of Highway 111?" "Lets talk about Governor McPolitician."
So I think it could even break down some borders. If you had a question about Mexico, you could go to ~geo.mexico and hopefully real Mexicans would be able to give their take. But only when we get big enough to support something like that.
I understand your view but I still think that it's superfluos.
Something like question for holidays could still go under ~lifestyle with an appropriate tag (travel holidays france). Question about the customs of a country, under ~talk or ~society. Same apply for a discussion about the upcoming local elections/politician.
If a user is interested in it, it will be able to build it's own subscriptions with certain tags by default I suppose so I would add "italy" but also "london" maybe.
There is no need to have a ~world or ~geo group really. Tags are more fluid and will allow topics to emerge in root groups. Instead in a ~geo or ~world people will be only subscribed to it's own slice of group.
I would be in ~world.italy and ~world.uk.london. You in other subgroups. Because of the divisive nature of this group, no one will ever be just in ~world. It'll become a group that goes against the logic of all the others in which a topic of a sub-group could emerge and get attention even from people not in that specific sub-group, because maybe I'm not into ~food.vegan but that recipe is so damn good that is popping up in ~food too!
"I'm absolutely against a ~geo or ~world group."
"There are already lots of barriers in real life and I don't see the reason to build virtual borders in which enclose ourselves in, even online. "
Even ~books is a "border" of sorts: you're walling off discussions about books from discussions about movies.
~news might be a good top-level grouping, but I'm really not interested in the local news of Pakistan or Zambia. I'm interested in news that affects me as an Australian. At the very least, I'd want a ~news.australia tag so I could filter out the non-Australian news and just show the news from my local country. Even then, I live in one state of Australia, so I'd want something like ~news.australia.nsw to be able to see more local news. And then there's news about my city, so we'd need something at city level: ~news.australia.nsw.sydney.
Then, under ~sports, we'd want to discuss Australian sports and teams and athletes: ~sports.australia.
And local politics: ~politics.australia.
These country-specific tags are going to show up so frequently that they'll need to be acknowledged somehow.
You must have missed why ~geo is going to be a series of boxes and all the other groups not.
I don't want to rewrite the same thing again so, please, just read it again if you're interested in a discussion.
It might be a little bit too early but having a ~language top level tilde would add a lot of possibilities for either foreign language news/discussion or translation and language learning requests.
This was at least one of the reasons @Deimos has waited this long (relative to internet time) to create new groups. And the question of when to auto-subscribe users I think is dependent on how many ~s there are and is therefore reducible, for the moment, to the question of when to create new groups. Obviously the metrics for determining when enough growth has occurred will vary from person to person, but I'm curious what your criteria are for sufficient growth? Are there some criteria that are necessary, but not sufficient to justify creation of new groups?
This is surprising to me, because that is much more stringent than what I imagined you'd say. And I'm not convinced that Tildes will ever meet that criteria. In fact I would be surprised to find many such divisions in much more divided communities like reddit, or the old usenet.
The reason being that even if Tildes was several times larger and auto subscribe was turned off that there would still be enough people who visit multiple ~s (acting as bridges) that the entire community (all of the ~s) would be a single connected component. In other words no single ~ would have a mutually exclusive set of users from every other ~. Of course I might have the wrong mental model, in which case maybe you explain a little more?
Adding more groups is definitely a good idea, also maybe starting to add subgroups? I'm thinking ~music.artists and then ~music.artists.{specific artist} for artist-specific discussion? Not 100% sure how that could work/look without feeling too long.
Possibly just ~music.{specific artist}?
Not sure about ~soc, seems confusing too although I don't see any other alternatives.
I think adding a subgroup for such a specific thing (like a single artists) only makes sense if users will be able to create them themselves in the long run. Has that been decided on already?
I think the most common idea so far is that subgroups will be created automatically if posts with that tag start spamming the parent group. That way hot topics can be dealt with automatically.
Do you mean completely automatically? Or that humans will use the tag mechanism to decide which new subgroups should be created?
If it was completely autonomous, I can see situations where people who don't know how to tag might throw off the entire system.
Are there any plans to record the graph the tree makes, if that's the case? that'd be really neat to watch evolve over time in response to certain trends.
I know I've said this previously, but I really think there should be a ~humor group. There are so many great things that a ~humor group can have beyond just cat gifs and memes: web comics, funny stories, classic stand-up comedian routines, etc. I know there are some people who only want serious content here, so they can just not subscribe to it.
Also, I really think it would be good to have 1 group that every tildes user is initially subscribed to, both for official announcements to the community (like this post) and to foster a sense of community. The ~tildes group seems like the obvious choice for an "everyone" group, or it could be a new one.
Site looks nice! First impressions are very positive overall.
I think you should call the new group ~society. As for the subscriptions, I think you should have a few default groups (maybe ~tildes, ~talk, ~society) like reddit does. Don't remove any existing subscriptions, including ones that are unchanged, that would be pretty annoying.
I think having to select groups instead of deselecting them is a good idea - especially if more groups keep being added (such as ~food, ~books, etc.). If that's implemented, the group list should probably appear automatically after registration (or maybe your frontpage could get replaced by it if you haven't followed anything yet?).
I don't think current user's settings should be changed, though. As you said, it might annoy/confuse us too much, especially those who already customized their groups.
Looking forward to improvements to the group page and the new groups! Maybe ~soc could be named ~society? Not sure about that.
Part of what I loved about Reddit was the ability to find experts in a given field and to be able to ask for input/advice on certain topics. What do you guys think about a group focused on giving advice or expertise? It could be anything from business ideas to relationships. As the site grows sub topics could blossom from there.
~advice
~askexperts
Also, I would love to see a group focused on entrepreneurship.
That would probably fit better under whatever category people are looking for expert advice in... e.g. ~science.ask, ~engineering.ask, ~history.ask, etc rather than under it's own top-level since the experts will ideally already be active in those groups.
I agree. I think that would be a much better approach, rather than a catch all group. However, what if one has a question that doesn't fit into the context of each respective group? Maybe going broad with a group like ~askexperts would serve the community better in its infancy. Thanks for your input.
I think ~talk or even the top-level groups themselves are basically that right now already. E.g. lots of people asking for help/advice on ~comp already.
But you may be right that a temporary general community for it like ~talk.expertadvice or something might be necessary until the more field dependent groups are more populated. I think the plan is basically to just play it by ear right now though since there is no rush and the hierarchy can always be rearranged at a later date to keep it functional.
I've mostly been lurking on this site, but one thing that absolutely jumps out at me is that ~creative needs split up or organized. I have two systems in mind:
Split them into separate communities; ~musicians (destinct from ~music as it's about music production hobbyists), ~writing (distinct from the hypothetical ~books- which should totally be a thing- because of obvious reasons), and ~drawing(/painting? ~visualarts? name needs work).
Alternatively, perhaps those three could simply stand as subgroups when you plan on implementing those (~creative.music, ~creative.writing, ~creative.visual). Either way, I feel like it's definitely a piece of organization that needs to happen.
As someone who dabbles in all three, the lack of organization is really frustrating to deal with when I'm looking to talk about a particular form of expression/creativity. I think subgroup might be the best way to go about it, but that requires quite a few more issues solved, such as how subgroups would actually function on the site and whether or not we're big enough.
That whole tangent aside, I love the ideas for new groups so far! ~food and ~lifestyle might have a bit of overlap, but I feel they can stand on their own. ~books NEEDS to happen, no question. ~soc needs a different name (~society?) but I love the idea of a more serious place for serious issues so that it doesn't leak into the other communities.
For my own ideas, feel like there could perhaps be a ~hobby as well. A catch-all for the unique niche hobbies that made reddit special! Pehaps we can even split up ~hobby once subgroups become a thing, but again, we can cross that bridge when we get to it. I feel like starting at even having ~hobby is a fantastic first step and will breathe a breath of fresh air into the site and cover some ground that our current groups don't.
I think you should keep everyone subscribed to all/most ~s for now but maybe get some kind of automated PM after 3 days if the user didn’t update any of his subscriptions? ( and send that PM retroactively to the existing user base )
I'm really looking forward to the coming ~books tag, as well as ~books.fantasy (if tildes grows enough)
I suggested ~cuisine as an alternate naming for ~food with reasoning here but didn't get much of a response.
As the site grows, I'd love to see an ~outdoor group, with subgroups such as ~outdoor.skiing, ~outdoor.mtnbiking, ~outdoor.hiking, etc. Perhaps there's a better name or maybe these just want to be top-level groups, but I'd love to see places for people to share gear reviews, advice, stories, and maybe some beta from locals for community members traveling to a particular backcountry area or trail network.
I know there is a voting mechanic, but I want to specifically support this comment. Over on reddit the best and healthiest communities I regularly interacted with were the ultralight (hiking, as in sub 20 lbs pack weight) and the climbing subreddits. I know tech is easy to focus on with this being the internet, but I think there is a lot to gain by being inclusive to outdoor activities here.
What would differentiate this from a politics ~?
Also I know it isn't intended, and when i see the label "~Soc", the first thing that comes to mind is socialism (strong negative emotional association). Not saying that it needs to be something different, just offering the subconscious impression that might have on people who are triggered by that sort of thing like i am. :P
Also IngSoc.
In my opinion, ~books and ~food are a bit niche for the size of this website.
I think the new groups are good. As for names, I am a fan of ~books of ~literature as a top level ~, since books that count as literature are a subset of all books. I think perhaps a better name for foods could be ~eats, since that is often used to refer to meals as a whole including drinks. ~lifestyle is fine, but I think the ~civics or ~citizenship name would be more clear than ~soc.
I'm wondering, in your estimation, how many users do you think ~ could support with these additional groups?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I don't think these are really linked. The number of groups shouldn't really be a big factor in how many users we can have. I think the main thing that will hold us back is mostly feature/organizational stuff (but holding back isn't necessarily a bad thing either).
Having lots of groups is nice in some ways, but it's also not necessary - reddit was a single "subreddit" for a long time and only added some others fairly slowly. I think Digg only ever had about 10 categories for its entire lifetime, and so on.
Sorry, I wasn't terribly clear with that question. I was trying to get at how many users can the system have before it once again becomes reasonable to add more communities, or perhaps the subcommunity tagging system?
Less of a "the system stops working" point and more of a "a critical mass of people will be asking for more subs" point, if that makes sense.
Ah - I honestly don't know. I don't really have any specific plans on that level, we're just figuring things out as we go along. I think when particular groups start looking really active (or there's obviously a demand for things we're missing), we can just try adding more.
It's not a big deal to add "too many" groups either, we can just fold them back into other ones if they're not working. I'm just trying to balance things a bit.
My apologies if this has been answered already, but will us users ever be issued our own keys to invite people here with? I love Tildes and I'd like to help share it :)
Yes, I've been giving everyone some invite codes periodically. We've already got a pretty good wave of people coming in now, but I'll most likely give everyone some again in a few days.
Awesome, thank you :)
What about making a real world connection of some sort. Perhaps you can also offer verified accounts that use the person's real name. This will 1) Create accountability as what you say isn't anonymous and 2) Create value in the comments as it's verified as not a fake or second account.
I think this goes against the privacy motivation of the site. If some people become verified, then that dramatically increases the pressure on others to be verified or suffer suspicion. Much like my reddit account, if I had to tie my name to an account here, whether as a requirement or due to social pressure, I would leave instead.
Agreed. If people start to value comments from verified users more, where does that leave those of us who'd rather stay relatively anonymous?
It ends up penalizing lots of people: women who don't want harassment to follow them beyond the site, trans/nonbinary people who don't want to use their current legal name, random folks who value privacy, people who want to make sure their online life isn't connected to their job...
As far as I know, this hasn't worked out that well for other sites that have tried it. People are still willing to be jerks under their verified real name. From what I've seen, strong moderation is better at keeping people accountable than real name policies are. And these policies have negatives, too—they can hurt people who are trying to avoid stalkers, trans people who don't have official documentation for their real name, people who can be targeted for harassment in the real world for all kinds of reasons…
"Perhaps you can also offer verified accounts that use the person's real name."
I would NOT use this feature. EVER. As a moderator on Reddit, I've seen what sort of crazy people are out there. I've received death threats on Reddit. There is absolutely NO WAY I'm revealing my real name on a website where I don't get to control who sees what I post (like Facebook). If I'm posting something for the world, including crazies, to see, I want some control over what those people know about me. I do NOT want some crazy person Googling my name and tracking me down in real life.
Fuck no.
Jokes, Poems(by users) , Free thought , medicine , philosophy
I don't think these need their own topic but:
I think I have to scroll all the way down to the end of the page to post a comment (unless I'm dumb and missed a button).
Also, if I post a reply to a comment, it, nor the parent message will show up first if I sort by activity. I think changing it so that they do would encourage contributing to a conversation.
A last comment timestamp would be nice too. I'm not sure if it's as helpful as the post start date, but I think it would be.
Take a look at this comment here. There is a link explaining the reasoning behind the comment box at the bottom and a solution if you absolutely must have it at the top. Welcome!!
https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/8nj5kj/an_exreddit_administrator_is_aiming_to_create_the/
Here comes more
A small suggestion to the UI - The comment box to the top of the page instead of being at the bottom.
Channel Suggestions:
~Funny ( yes for memes :P ), ~Aww ( will edit and add more suggestions if I can think of anything )
There is a very good reason for the comment box being at the bottom, along with all the other un-reddit-like design standards:
https://tildes.net/~tildes/150/tildes_ui_mock_up#comment-87l
And I very much doubt there will ever be an ~funny or ~aww on here:
https://tildes.net/~tildes/jz/daily_tildes_discussion_why_should_we_allow_or_not_allow_fluff_content
And I totally agree with both!
Good thinking, I hadn't honestly thought of it like that :)
~art would be great.
~museum is one of my favorite subreddits.
I didnt get a chance to read through every single comment but has anyone mentioned a ~travel group?
For example I'm leaving Sunday to Durango, Colorado for a weeks vacation and it would be sweet to talk with others who have been about their trips and have advice, suggestions for fun activities, etc 😁
A couple things I would like to mention.
Firstly, as a new user, the "vote" button wasn't immediately obvious. I didn't necessarily expect it at the bottom of the post, nor was it particularly apparent colour-wise.
Maybe changing the colour a bit to add contrast, like there is with usernames and ~ links.
Also, in the future, could we see options to edit the base colours of themes? I do, generally, prefer dark themes, but I like dark greys as the background, rather than black. Right now, I'm using a browser addon to change the colours, though it's a bit too aggressive at times and colours almost everything grey.
Thanks for all the hard work!
Maybe I'm biased, but we should probably have a programming group and an anime/manga group.
These are pretty significant communities everywhere(reddit, 4chan, and so on).
Edit: On closer inspection, we already have a comp subreddit, but I still think a separate ~programming would be appropriate, with different tags for different languages(e.g. haskell, C, ruby, python, etc.).
If you(Demios) feel that anime/manga groups do not provide quality discussion and therefore do not create them, I would have to disagree with you, but it would be entirely acceptable. There isn't a lack of forums for anime/manga. Though I do wonder how many niche interesets will ~ support?
I don't think any of the suggestions here are bad, but I'd like to comment on the method of creating new groups.
I think we should form new groups organically, by splitting new ones off when an existing group gets too much discussion, when a certain topic is getting discussed in a group that many members of that group aren't interested in, or when discussion of a topic is getting split across many groups. @deimos shouldn't necessarily ignore direct requests for new groups, but those requests need to be weighed against how necessary that group is based on current discussion patterns.
Also, as @deimos suggested elsewhere, an ~announcements group might be nice, for people who don't want to subscribe to ~tildes.
EDIT: Ok now ~tildes.official exists! I'm going to assume it didn't when I first wrote this comment so I don't feel dumb.
I had an idea, users can create their own group, but it will cost a large Internet fortune, something like reddit would cost, say, 10,000 karma to create a new sub.
If you don't have that many karma, you can crowd sourcing one, each one is a shareholder. If the new sub/group is not that active, the group would be closed so the investment would bankrupt.
However if the sub/group attracts good content, each shareholder can have the "internet fortune" gains.
Just for fun.
Hopefully we can get a proper ~futurology section added.
I was also hoping we could vote to move certain subreddits over. I certainly wouldn't mind vying to get some of my own transferred, like /r/robosexuality and ~mediasynthesis