Group updates for July 2023
As I'm sure some of you have already noticed in your sidebars, I've just added a bunch of new groups based on the discussion we had last week. That ended up being a very large discussion with a ton of suggestions, and while we can't add everything, I am adding a fairly large set of groups this time. Some of these are definitely experimental, and I expect that we'll need to make some more adjustments based on how they actually do in practice.
Before I get into the specific updates, there are a few general things I want to mention first:
Many of the discussions about groups turn into debates about how things should be organized in the hierarchy. I want to try to clarify that the hierarchy is not intended to be some kind of perfectly logical system, or that there should never be any crossover, etc. The groups are more of a social organization method, like "for people interested in X".
For example, a common suggestion is to add something like an "entertainment" top level group that could contain ~games, ~music, ~tv, etc. This makes sense from a logical perspective, but not if you're basing it on interest. Someone's interest in gaming content doesn't really have any influence on them being interested in talking about music. There are similar reasons for other cases like having ~comp outside of ~tech and ~anime outside of ~tv, even though they feel like they should fit inside. The current hierarchy certainly isn't perfect for this either (for example, ~hobbies is extremely broad), but it's the general idea.
As part of this, I also want to mention that something being a sub-group instead of top-level shouldn't be seen as being "less important" or somehow inferior. As a convenient example, ~tildes.official is one of the most important groups on the site, but it was the first sub-group (and the only one for a year). It's not significant yet while we're still subscribing everyone to all groups by default, but when we move away from doing that, it could actually be an advantage to be a sub-group, since it would give a larger audience to its content through the parent one(s).
And finally, I want to mention that expanding the groups (and having higher activity in general) makes it more pressing to improve the capabilities for controlling subscriptions, filtering out groups and tags, and so on. This is something I want to treat as a high priority as I get back into Tildes development. I know there are also some existing problems such as topics from sub-groups being shown inside the parent group even if you're unsubscribed from them, and I'm hoping to resolve that one this weekend.
Anyway, on with the changes and some brief comments on each. Note that I still need to do some administrative tasks like adding descriptions to the groups and moving old topics into them, and will be doing that over the next day or so.
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Added ~comics, ~engineering, ~transport, ~travel (everyone auto-subscribed)
The subjects of these groups are currently kind of awkward to fit into the existing groups, and I think there's potential for good content and discussion in all of these. -
Added ~life sub-groups (auto-subscribed if you were subscribed to ~life)
Whether to create groups for men and women took up a lot of the air in the suggestions topic (and was the source of some strife—please don't restart that in here). I think it's worth trying them, but it's definitely an experiment. I also think it's important to have them be sub-groups, because having a common parent group enables posting similar topics without feeling like posting in one of them is a binary choice. Much like ~lgbt, moderation will be somewhat stricter for posts in these groups (and yes, we need a way for the site itself to indicate that).
~life.pets also needs some clarification: this will not be a group full of images. There will be a weekly scheduled post for posting photos and casual chat about pets (the first one will post tomorrow), but separate topics like that will be removed. The standard content in ~life.pets should be of a similar quality level to the rest of the site, such as articles, requests for discussion/advice, and so on.
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Added ~sports sub-groups (auto-subscribed if you were subscribed to ~sports)
- ~sports.american_football
- ~sports.baseball
- ~sports.basketball
- ~sports.combat
- ~sports.football
- ~sports.hockey
- ~sports.motorsports
This is also fairly experimental, and I don't know if we'll keep all of these sub-groups. I'd like to see if this can help encourage more posts about specific sports. I also don't like the name ~sports.american_football much at all, but I don't know what a better option is. Should we just call it ~sports.nfl? That's not quite right either.
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Added ~health.mental (auto-subscribed if you were subscribed to ~health)
A lot of the topics in ~health are about mental health, and I think having a clearer separation could be useful (including having a more clearly defined space for stricter moderation, as mentioned before). -
Added ~humanities subgroups (auto-subscribed if you were subscribed to ~humanities)
History topics are probably the most common subject posted in ~humanities currently, and I'm curious if these subgroups will help encourage posting both more history and more non-history.
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Removed ~games.game_design (topics merged into ~games)
This group has always been quite inactive, and I don't think the few topics in it still need their own separate space from ~games right now.
That's it for this time. If there were other suggestions that you were hoping to see that weren't added this time, don't take that as an indication that we won't add them someday. But this is already a lot of new groups (likely too many), and I had to stop somewhere. Let's revisit in a month or so once these new groups and the new users have had some time to settle.
And as usual when making a ~tildes.official post, I've also topped up every current user's invites to 5: https://tildes.net/invite
Thank you for adding ~life.men and ~life.women, but keeping ~lgbt top-level. As you mention re: logical hierarchies vs. social organization, this may seem illogical, but... It fits with a lot of the feedback given in the previous post? It feels like a good compromise, so thank you for finding a good middle ground for all of the parties involved.
It's always been top level, and I appreciate giving the group a metaphorically larger voice on the site. It doesn't make sense if you approach it from a taxonomical approach, but there are currently a storm of topics and discussions in virtually all aspects of life, in all parts of the world. So it definitely warrant it being a top level group (at least, c. 2023).
As always, thanks for all your hard work! I think the new groups are all sensible, and I really like the idea of the recurring post for ~life.pets as an outlet for people who want to share/see pictures of animals without letting that kind of content take over the whole group.
As for ~sports.american_football, I've also seen the game referred to as "gridiron football" or just "gridiron". If the term seems familiar/common enough to the community, ~sports.gridiron might be less clunky than ~sports.american_football.
I'm excited to see how everyone settles into the new groups!
It's referred too that way internationally but no American refers to it as "gridiron". I'm sure most would figure it out fairly quickly by process of elimination but it's definitely not intuitive. ~sports.nfl doesn't work because college football is at worst the 4th most popular sport in the USA, and potentially the 2nd most popular sport.
The easiest way would be just ~sports.football and ~sports.soccer. I know that ruffles a lot of feathers though.
As one of those international members here, that is I am not from the US, American football is what the sport is called in the rest of the world. I've never even heard the other terms mentioned here.
While just 'football' is often the word used for soccer, the word 'soccer' is universally understood to be the form of football that isn't the American one.
So 'American football' and 'Soccer' would make the most sense, as that is what these sports are known as when the world needs to differentiate while speaking/writing English.
I would also avoid using “football” to avoid confusion. Using “soccer” and “American football” makes it clear for everyone.
Making both sides equally unhappy is obviously the way :)
To be more serious, the (supposed) original meaning of the word "foot" in football referred to sports that play on foot (as opposed to say horse riding), not just sports that used feet as their primary interaction mode. Every regions had their own house rules (if I'm not mistaken, some even forbid using feet and only allowed hands!) until a few dominant ones remained today. Rugby was an offshoot of football as well, and someone else also mentioned that Australian football has their own rules.
I suspect the reason any particular offshoots wanting to use "football" to refer to their own their version of football is the same reason "man" changed from referring to the whole humankind to then only a particular subset of human. This topics of which version of football is the "real" football will likely keep coming up any time someone new comes to the site as well. Not to mention the confusion of going into ~football thinking it's one thing and then be surprised/annoyed it's another. Let's avoid this whole can of worm by not using "football" to refer to any particular version all together.
Agreed, I'm a soccer fan (I've outed myself as an American one) so the line between football/soccer is clear, even if the rest of the world doesn't agree while the alternative (~sports.football and ~sports.american_football) to me isn't ideal. The potential benefit of adopting football/american_football may match a more global distinction but I'd counter that with the fact that Tildes is already catering to an English speaking audience and possibly one that's heavily based in the NA, where soccer/football isn't as controversial. Plus, we all know that "American Football" only should apply to a certain 90s era midwest emo progenitor.
I’m so excited there’s a group where I can post about my love for Midwestern Emo music.
Not sure why it’s under the ~sports group though.
Plus, Canadian football is also a thing, and it's essentially the same sport as American football with only a few rule differences.
This is a good point. I don't know how many football forums include Canadian football but I can see an obvious of overlap. Like I'm sure there are some Seahawks fans that may pay attention to the BC Lions.
Don't forget that Chinese Football also exists which is basically a heavily inspired by American Football which has nothing to do with throwing a egg shaped ball. It's all very confusing.
Being that football originates from Rugby Football which predates Association Football which is where Soccer stems from, and American Football/Gridiron is a child of Rugby, the obvious choices, regardless of the ruffling of feathers by those that are closest to the names that created them, are ~sports.football for Rugby/American Football and ~sports.soccer for Association Football.
This is not about history. Most fans of the sport around the world use either "football" or a phonetic equivalent. The only place where "football" is not a synonym for "soccer" is the US. And Tildes makes an effort to honor the international context, not just the US.
Actually that's true in more places than just the US (Australia for one). "Football" in Australia could mean Rugby League, Rugby Union, Australian Rules, or soccer, depending on location (and the kind of school you went to).
This is just a case where a side needs to be picked. Using the international football is going to annoy some people and using soccer will annoy some others. There's no middle ground here, we have to pick a lane.
It was already picked, it's ~sports.football ;)
Football in Canada also refers to gridiron style footbal. When you consider English speaking countries, is really only the UK and Ireland where football refers to association football.
With that in mind, I think it makes sense to use football to refer to the North American and Australian varieties (and any other Rugby derived variants that I'm not aware of), considering the vast majority of people who speak English as a first language use it that way. If this site was primarily discussion job French, Spanish it some other language, then I think it would make more sense to use their names for the sports.
How about ~sports.football and ~sports.futbol?
My local soccer club had a t-shirt printed with an image of an american football and a soccer ball.
Below the football was the phrase "This is throwball", and below the soccer ball was the phrase "This is football".
I vote for ~sports.throwball for the "american football" ;)
~sports.football(round)
~sports.football(egg)
We might as well take it further and go full-on WYSIWYG: Kickball and Throwball.
The Italian word for football (calcio) comes from the word "kick", so I rest my case.
It's a pretty convincing argument!
How about ~sports.⚽ and ~sports.🏉?
Doesn't work very well for URLs, unfortunately, and is something of a pain to type. That, and you'll notice they weren't included in the tilde links by the site.
Does that include rugby in the second group? Unclear as it is also a popular sport player with an egg shaped ball :/
I'd say joined in with American and Canadian football since they're all closer to Rugby than soccer
Prefer NFL and Football for ⚽
I see a lot of discussion stemming from this... And to me, the key is in Deimos' hands.
Or more like what they rather make of Tildes, internationally. If the intention is to have tildes be a mainly US site, I'd understand "football" being the American football sub, and "soccer" being the "what the rest of the world plays" sub. Kinda like how on Reddit "news" refers to US news, and "WorldNews" (or rather AnimeTitties) has to be specified as the "non-US news" sub.
On the other hand, if the intention is to have the site be global... I don't think "football" should be the denomination for the NFL/NCAA/etc sport. And I'd agree with the "none get the football denomination" way.
nfl and ncaaf
I hate to say it, but you're either a fan of the NFL or NCAA or both, but some of us just like one or the other.
Off-topic
This exercise in updating the group list made groups on Tildes make way more sense for me.
A commenter in another thread helped made it clear that groups aren't subreddits, but just another way to help categorize posts. That comment was incredibly helpful to beat the redditor out of me, but left me unsatisfied since groups don't seem to be any more powerful than tags at categorization.
It's been cool seeing folks make posts in the new groups/sub-groups. It helped reinforce that groups go a long way towards inspiring conversation across more topics.
edit: Grammar
Thank you for the new groups and all of your hard work! I'm a new user, but I can tell a lot of these groups were a long time coming. I don't use the Sports groups, but I'll still throw in my vote on keeping the american_football name as-is. It feels a bit odd (especially as an American), but it's ultimately more clear from an international level. And the NFL would exclude too much, like casual or college games.
I'm looking forward to seeing how Tildes evolves in the future!
Agree. This update really helps me understand the layout and intention of groups a bit more. I'm personally very excited for life.home_improvement as I close on a house on Tuesday.
The football question is tricky. Perhaps sports.usa_football to shorten the name? Or sports.football.usa? Sub-sub categories get a bit annoying though probably.
I'm a photographer so an arts.photography or creative.photo (unsure the real difference between the groups yet) would be cool.
Either way these all seem like really cool changes.
Canada is in the Americas and we play Football (gridiron) up here too. See: CFL, which isn't quite as popular as the NFL in the US, but still very popular. High school and college Football (gridiron) is also a mainstay up here as well, though not as popular as Hockey. So usa_football wouldn't really work as well as american_football does.
~arts is for the more formal The Arts subjects. Photography as a medium spans several groups, but the more serious/professional photography discussions should probably be posted to ~arts, whereas the more casual/hobby level to ~creative or ~hobbies.
~sports.nfl makes sense to me. There are american football leagues other than the NFL, but they aren't as popular and can discuss in general ~sports until it feels necessary to give them their own sub-group.
Alternatively, you could do ~sports.football and ~sports.soccer (I may upset someone with this suggestion)
As someone who doesn't care in the least for the NFL, but cares very much for NCAAF, I'm happy to keep in ~sports.american_football. I don't mind NFL/NCAAF content being mixed submitted, more than seeking it out in general ~sports. But that's just my two cents.
As someone who watches the Canadian Football League, but doesn't really care about the NFL or US college football, calling the sport American football has always felt wrong to me. I can see why people do it, there's 10x the number of people in the US, so most people think of America when they think of the sport, but it's not just an American sport.
We can take "American" to represent North American football rather than specifically the US. I doubt you'd run in any trouble posting about Canadian football in ~sports.american_football.
That's a good and fair point. When I read it, I didn't associate it with the country America, as much as the American version of the sport (derived from Rugby, I believe?). I'm glad you brought that up, though.
I would just split it between ~sports.nfl and ~sports.CFB. That's the way 99% of fans think about it. Using ~sports.gridiron would include our Canadian neighbors and is the most technically correct terminology to cover all of gridiron football, but it's not the first thought in your head when looking for the relevant forums and CFL isn't nearly as popular. NFL and CFB are easy and ubiquitous terms.
Yeah I'd vote in favor of changing it to sports.nfl, adding sports.cfb and keeping sports.football for soccer
I don’t know how well known the term is, but ~sports.gridiron might work. Truth be told, so long as the terms are recognizable enough, I’ve always preferred both gridiron and soccer over football since both terms are unambiguous.
One problem is that, at least among Americans, wayyy fewer people know what "gridiron" is. I only learned it existed in this thread!
I think my preferred solution, ~sports.american_football and ~sports.soccer_football, would annoy literally everyone who isn't me though lmao
I'm with you on this one... why not just accept they're called football in various places and distinguish them accordingly... American football and soccer football... simple, easy to understand, and nobody is "favourited"
That does favor American football over Canadian football though. Although I understand no one outside of Canada really cares about that.
I want to second your suggestion, even though I'm not a sports fan and will probably unsubscribe from ~sports. At the risk of solving a problem that doesn't exist yet, I expect a lot of new users down the road who won't see this discussion accidentally posting American football topics to ~sports.football. Like how the /r/SuperbOwl subreddit gets Super Bowl posts annually (though granted it's a joke subreddit, so the confusion was intentional).
Yeah personally that's my only problem with the current setup. Yes, football is by far more globally used for the sport Americans call soccer, but you still risk confused Americans stumbling in and posting there. Granted, mods move posts between groups plenty here so maybe that's not a problem, but I suggested that bc it's how I disambiguate the two when I'm talking about them as an American living in Europe.
But my option also does the opposite of minimizing underscores so I can understand why some would dislike it.
Another option could be ~sports.futbol. I believe most Americans would understand what that's referring to. However that goes against the English-based presentation of Tildes (I'm still new and kind of fuzzy on Tildes' stance on non-English topics/comments).
Tildes is an English-only site atm for moderation reasons. I don't dislike ~sports.futbol as an option but I suspect a non-English name wouldn't fly.
I also want to support ~sports.soccer_football. Clarity should be the primary goal, this way no one have to second guess what football refers to. I also prefer this over futbol because as a non-western I've rarely seen that word, but I know about soccer and footbal because those are what we were taught in school. Imo, an english speaking site that's internationally friendly doesn't have to use more non-english words, just english words that international people can recognize.
Soccer is short for “association football” so you might as well call it that at that point.
True, but none native english speakers may not know that full name. I think of ~soccer_football as "soccer aka football", it's more for clarity than accuracy. That said, my official position is to avoid using standalone "football" to refer to any particular versions all together
This is what I was going to suggest. It's a real name for the sport and it's better than anything with an underscore in it.
"Football" originates from Rugby Football
"Soccer" originates from Association Football
American Football is a child of Rugby
The obvious, regardless of the changing opinions since they originated the term, choices are ~sports.football for Rugby/American Football and ~sports.soccer for Association Football.
Counterpoint: an extremely quick google says there are 3.5 billion fans of football (soccer) and 400 million fans of American football. The vast majority of the 3.5 billion would live in countries that call it football (or futbol, or similar)
The vast, vast majority of the English-speaking world calls it soccer. I'm not sure what the percentage of fans uses each term, though.
I know what you mean, but English is an international language, ergo the majority of the English-speaking world as it exists in this context actually refers to it as football.
Potentially. A lot of Indians/Pakistanis apparently call it soccer, but they also have a very loose definition of speaking English. It's much more of a distinct dialect than American or British English. I would wager that the majority of L2 speakers call it football for whatever reason and I suspect it probably is the vast majority of them, but I wouldn't want a French site to base its decisions on how I speak French so I wouldn't want an English site to base decisions on how an L2 speakers uses the language either.
I lived in Delhi and I don't recall soccer being preferred over football, the terms were used interchangeably (but it's been a minute).
In any case, agree to disagree. Native English speakers don't have a monopoly on their language, and this applies to all other lingua francas too, including French. Everybody who uses it to communicate "owns" it, therefore if a site wants to be inclusive it should use language that's a compromise to everyone. I think Deimos had the right idea here.
That being said, I don't oppose the use of "soccer" from a practical standpoint, simply because "association football" is too long, and there are various other forms of football besides the two being discussed here (so "football" should be avoided altogether). On the other side, "gridiron" is fine as well. It's an unusual term but people will get over it.
Alternatively, we could just have only ~sports.football and everyone has to play nice and share it.
Yes, that's what I was referring to. I've never been to India but I know I have seen online that both terms are used. I don't know much beyond that.
I would imagine the vast vast majority of fans call it football or the literal translation (to me this counts as a point for football - futbol, futebol etc are not soccer translated). All of South America, Europe and China would probably be the bulk of fans. It’s not super popular here in australia (except among people who emigrated, who probably call it football privately) and I don’t think it’s all that popular in America, right? Who else calls it soccer?
Canada and portions of Ireland and New Zealand. Potentially South Africa, too.
The US alone is five times the size of the UK. The 1994 World Cup in the US is still the most attended World Cup in both average and cumulative attendance.
I don't see why we should care what other languages call the sport, just as we don't worry about what other languages call any other topic.
Additionally, the Chinese name does not translate as "football," so in addition to it being irrelevant to an English language website, it just goes to show that there are other names.I’m not a fan of either sport so I don’t have skin in the game in that sense, but I do like being on a website that makes an effort to be international and doesn’t assume North America as the default. Same reason it’s nice to have ~life.women now even though the vast majority of users on the site are currently male - it signals something to the people you want to attract to the site
Why should British be the default international English?
Because British English is used by more speakers of English around the world than American English.
In terms of native speakers and people who use English as a first language, Americans outnumber all other Anglosphere populations, being about 60% of the total.
However, in terms of people who use English as a first or second language, Americans are only about 25% of the total. And, out of about 1,257 million speakers of English around the world, only about 400 million of them are using American English (USA, Phillippines, etc). Nearly 70% of English speakers around the world use a version of British English, rather than American English.
EDITED to adjust for non-USA users of American English, such as the Phillippines and Thailand.
I'm using this Wikipedia page as my source for this data.
In India and Pakistan, which I assume makes up a large number of those British English speakers, they use football and soccer interchangeably but football is generally understood to be either and varies based on context. Neither sport is particularly popular though Association Football is much more popular than handegg, but I think that’s largely because everyone roots for Brazil in the World Cup for some reason.
It shouldn't. But much of the world call the sport with some version of the word "football".
https://www.topendsports.com/sport/soccer/sport-name.htm
Maybe because that is originally a British sport.
Right, but I don't think it should matter what the French or Chinese call the sport until they get their own topic in their language.
The point I'm trying to make is that the English word "football" is used in several languages as a synonym for "soccer", and has phonetic equivalents in many other languages which are derived from that word.
So "football" is the most universal and easily available term for the sport in the English language.
No hat in this ring as I am not a sports person at all, but the Mandarin Chinese term for the game does indeed translate to football (足球, zú qíu), whereas the term for gridiron sports is literally olive ball (橄榄球, găn lăn qíu). That's just for Mandarin though, I'd be curious to know if other dialects use a different term! Much bigger fan of linguistics than sports lol.
Huh, I guess you're right. My source that I read said it translated to "kick ball."
An easy mistake to make, the verb used to express playing sports in mandarin is usually "to hit" (打 dă), so "play american football" would be "打橄榄球", but football/soccer is exceptional as the verb used is "kick (踢 tī)", so one "kicks football" to play soccer.
https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/1tg14k/football_vs_soccer_how_people_of_the_world_name/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1
The vast majority of the world calls it football or some derivative. Calling the group soccer panders to Americans.
In that case, the vast majority of the world calls "tea" some variation on "cha" so if we ever start a topic to discuss tea, we'll have to call it something like ~hobbies.chai so as to not pander to the Americans.
That is a very good point
But should we be taking the relative passion for the sport among those English-speakers into account? I mean, if they barely know what the sport is, do we care what they call it? (comment not to be taken too seriously)
Counterpoint to counterpoint: Worldwide populace is not Tildes population. And if going by population the group should be called ~sports.足球 since China has the largest population. Or ~sports.futebol since Brazil is the country with the most soccer fans.
Honestly...
...my comments are all in jest and I don't particularly care. I also think American Football should be ~sports.handegg and that's coming from someone that has been a football fan of some measure for decades.
Counter point: Eggs are all shapes and sizes and many if not most do not resemble a football
Snake eggs are probably the closest shape, so I nominate "hand snake egg" or "handsnegg" for short.
I hadn't considered that. I hereby nominate "handblob" because I can't think of anything else shaped like that.
From Google:
~football and ~handovoid it is
Is the hand egg truly oval, though? Perhaps handellipsoid!
Counterpoint^3: this is an English speaking site and both those terms translate literally to football.
(I don’t know how to do the drop down thingy but I don’t really care either. I’m not a football fan of any description! But it is nice to feel that the whole internet isn’t American)
Oh, we're cubing counterpoints now‽ You're just gonna drop counterpoint bombs like that and you're not even a fan?
Solid point though. :]
The spoiler thingy is much easier to remember with the Tildes Formatting Toolbar if you have userscripts enabled on your browser.
I’m a fan of language if not a fan of the sports :)
I’m one of the heathens that uses mobile exclusively (and I’m not even sure what userscripts are to enable them!) but thanks for letting me know!
Heathen!
Do you use Firefox mobile perchance?
If so you can install extensions like ViolentMonkey that allow you to install little bits of code (called userscripts) that can change/improve the sites you use, like the Tildes Formatting Toolbar above that has buttons (and not usable by you, keyboard shortcuts) for easy formatting of replies like bold, italics,
strikethrough, links, small text, subscript, superscriptlike cubed counterpoints ...big text,
code,spoilers,
Nothing to see here!
Oh god don’t flame me but I just use safari on iOS. I really appreciate the lesson though, it might even be enough to get me to upgrade. I worked out how to do italics, which is handy, but I’d like to be able to do everything else too!
No flaming here heathen! Use what you like just giving options. There should be a "Formatting help" just above the comment box you're typing in that'll give you all the ways you can format. The quick and dirty version is below:
Spoilers is a bit more complicated, the
<details>start and end</details>is required, but the<summary>start and end</summary>is not unless you want text in the summary or you want the summary to be blank.Or you can have a summary...
...like this.
Or by leaving the text between the summary code blank you can have the box be empty but still have spoiler text within
This is so thorough and helpful, thanks so much!! I’ll be saving this to refer back to :)
Edit: I had looked at the formatting help link but it was a bit long and overwhelming. This cheat sheet is perfect!
There's also unicode superscript digits¹ which don't require any additional HTML. I'm not sure which would be preferred semantically.
¹ https://css-tricks.com/footnote-characters/
Good call out and as someone that uses the line often...
...I forgot about it as I just used the common button in the script.
There's also an option for...
...medium text...
...which is a bit smaller than the big text...
by using a dash under the medium text and an equal sign under the big text instead of the pound sign in front of the big text.
To make this one more intuitive, it doesn't matter how many dashes or equal signs you use. The general concept of markdown was "take the way people format plain text and actually format it". Those are intended for headlines, like if you were writing something like this:
You can also put one or more
#at the start of the line, like# Introductioninstead.Ooh good one, footnotes can be so helpful. I tend to make liberal use of brackets for the asides but footnotes look so much neater
Off-topic: why are all these extensions called “_____Monkey”? E.g., GreaseMonkey, TamperMonkey, etc.
TL;DR; they all copied greasemonkey, because naming things is hard.
"Grease monkey" is slang for mechanic. I could speculate as to how that came about, but that's what it is.
The greasemonkey extension was the first of it's kind as far as I know, released around 2004-2005. It allowed users to monkey around, or behave like a mechanic, tuning web behavior.
Tampermonkey came a few years later, I think I recall but cannot appropriately source the reasonings being some combination of slow updates to greasemonkey and incompatibilities with some newer javascript stuff and browsers.
Violentmonkey came sometime between then and now (I only started looking into userscripts again sometime this year, not sure when violentmonkey showed up exactly), which to the best of my understanding was largely as a response to concerns about security and privacy with tampermonkey.
I assume because they (I think GreaseMonkey was the first) started out on Firefox, which uses a JS engine named SpiderMonkey.
"Futebol" is just the Portuguese phonetic version of "football" and pronunciation is similar. "fútbol" (Spanish) is the same thing.
"Football" is readable for many, and phonetically compatible to a lot of languages. It's the most universal version available to the English language.
~sports.nfl is so tempting because it is so short. The problem with american_football, apart from the annoying length, is that even though it is very accurate, a community wouldn't call it that, it would be football. And soccer... well, that is more tricky because of the football thing in the UK... maybe ~sports.fifa?
I'm not into sports and am an American, but I think FIFA would have the same issues as using NFL. It would exclude college and other games.
That's true, but non-NFL football gets 100,000+ fans at a lot of games, whereas non-FIFA soccer gets like 10 fans.
Not at all true. In my area there are local teams that have a league and the big matches regularly get 500+ fans, I can see why you might want to post about that? My bigger concern about using ~sports.FIFA is really just using a brand name over the actual word (see: googling)
I agree that FIFA is a bad name, I'm just pointing out that FIFA governs essentially all organized soccer in the world, quite possibly including your local league, whereas using the name ~sports.NFL would be like calling the soccer subtopic ~sports.EPL.
Americans don't call it "American football" (unless they live abroad lol) but it's something that will still make sense to an American looking for where to post about this. Maybe they go to "football" first and get confused, but I think adding "American" works fine to disambiguate even for confused Americans.
Did you migrate topics to the new groups based on tags or is poor @mycketforvirrad's tireless (thank you for keeping this place organized) work just grow?
Also the coloring for subscribed/unsubscribed subgroups - https://tildes.net/groups - isn't working.
I've made a start on
engineering.civilafter half a bottle of red wine on a Friday night because it is @cfabbro's favourite tag. 😉Oh, please don't spend any time doing that. I mentioned in the post that I'll move them all—it's easy with some database updates, I just haven't had time to do it yet.
(@AugustusFerdinand)
There's no rush, I'm just pottering around the tags as per usual. It's kinda fun. A fun that really is hard to explain to the other users around these parts...
While I got you here, could I get some clarification on how to do tags right? I've noticed you (and @cfabbro) have had a hand in editing essentially every post I've made. Is this normal, or am I doing something wrong and just making annoying work for you guys?
One point in particular is the use of the history tag. I added it to a post I made in the new ~humanities.history, but it was removed. However that leads to the peculiar situation where if you search for history posts using the history tag, any post in ~humanities.history without it doesn't show up! This is a bit of an odd situation.
Perhaps subgroups should have their "sub" part added as a tag by default? So, for example, all say ~life.pets posts automatically have https://tildes.net/?tag=pets for ease of searches.
Edit: Another example is how the first new post to ~sports.baseball doesn't show up when you search the tag baseball, but does show up when you search the phrase baseball.
I plan on editing some of the docs related to tagging next week, since the current ones are super out of date, and highly misleading. I will let you know when I do.
As for tags with the same name as subgroups, I think the cleanest solution is to just start including topics from the group in ?tag=<group/subgroup name> pages. So I have made a Gitlab issue for it:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/800
Excellent 👌
Thanks for the clarification.
From previous concerns expressed from others: they don't mind and it's not just you — they've been the backbone of our site for the past few years and they enjoy doing it! We owe them a lot and are very happy to have them here!
I used to thoroughly enjoy drinking and submitting ProtonDB reports. Even if others don’t understand your fun, believe me when I say I totally get it.
Keep doing what you love. We’re a better place because of it!
Edit: I just learned that comment links don’t work in deleted topics? (Double Edit: The plot thickens...) Here’s the comment:
Unlearn that, because it's not true: comment links do work in deleted topics. That link works fine for me.
Where comment links don't work is in collapsed comment trees: if a parent comment is collapsed as noise, then links to it or any child comments under it will leave the user stranded at the top of the page, because the comment being linked to is collapsed.
(Hey, @cfabbro: Is there a GitLab issue for this, to make it so a direct URL to a comment will force the comment tree to expand, to display the linked comment? If not, could there be such an issue? Pretty please?)
There are a series of bugs caused by how comment links are currently set up (using HTML anchors). All of them will likely be solved when permalinks finally get implemented:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/256
cc: @kfwyre
Thanks!
Interesting. It’s definitely not working for me. It just takes me to the top of the topic.
It might be a browser issue. It isn’t working on iOS Safari, but I tested it on iOS Firefox and it works.
Yeah, I've never had trouble with links to comments in deleted topics. But I'm using Chrome.
I swear I'll start helping with tagging, just as soon as I get the Linux laptop reimaged, which will be after a couple of work trips, which will be sometime in September (maybe). Much gratitude for the efforts of those who aren't so scattered!
I get you. I used to do Khan Academy Javascript project evaluations, and really genuinely enjoyed it.
I was really sad when they killed them ='(
Looks like I'm not the only person that missed that part of the post. Whoops.
At least @mycketforvirrad has the wine excuse, I haven't even started drinking yet.
Well... technically
history.militaryis my favorite tag, butengineering.civilis a close second! :PYeah, but you got slack with your content posting on that tag... 😛
It's more that there wasn't enough interest in my submissions to justify all the time I spent watching the videos, reading the articles, and then properly tagging them. And I also didn't want to flood ~humanities with history topics. :(
Now that there is a ~humanities.history group I will very likely start submitting more history and military history content once again though.
Ooo, burn.
Am I the only one who misses @cfabbro's obscure
ancient romecontent. I jest. But I do.It's still posted, just less of the videos it seems. As someone that prefers the text articles and the less well covered "Fall of Rome" stuff, I've enjoyed the recent posts and the articles peppered throughout.
I'll try to help my moving
sumoposts over to ~sports.combat soon.Edit: Nevermind, I have tag and title permissions, not move. Little help @deimos?
As you're an old Tildes friend, I've already gone ahead and ticked that one off for you. ✔️
Aww, I love you too!
Ah finally a place for civil conversations about all fields of engineering!
Makes sense, though I was hoping ~games.game_design gets a bit broadened and renamed ~games.dev instead. Should game development topics go to ~games or ~comp?
That probably depends on what the topic is more focused on (more programming focused = ~comp VS more game design focused = ~games). The one nice thing about posting more programming focused game dev stuff to ~comp is you're more likely to find people who can actually participate and add valuable comments in the discussions, even if they're not game devs themselves.
Yeah. It's much lower priority since "E3 season" is over now, but I found it a bit funny how I was excited for more sub-groups in the gaming sphere and we instead lost a subgroup.
I can paste my suggestion from the last thread, but I do hope eventually we can get some granularity, particularly for those who want to talk about games vs. the larger industry.
aforementioned copy/paste suggestion from last topic
I'd like to propose a structure for the games group. We group based on themes, so I'd propose this hierarchy:
names are all TBD (I'm not quite sure I like "mechanics" as it veers too close to "design" as is), but I think the general methodology of how to divide games, and potentially other media, is clear here. I think it solves a lot of problems compared to trying to split based on genre or game franchise or company, while still offering enough granularity to let people pick and choose what aspects of the games industry they are interested in.
I suspect if Tildes gets big enough something like ~games.dev comes back. I like your name better too.
I can't take credit for that, that was @cfabbro :)
I don’t have much to add other than loving the decision to add ~life.women
Anything that makes women feel more welcome on this site is surely a good thing and will make this place more interesting and healthy overall.
Oh, I also vote for ~sports.soccer if anyone’s keeping track. While I don’t know the exact demographics, I have a hunch it skews more North American than anything else and thus soccer would feel more natural to a larger number of Tildes’ user base.
Anyways, thanks for these new groups — many of them feel like they’ll foster interesting discussions for a long time to come.
Side note: Thank you to @mycketforvirrad who has been going through old articles and reassigning them to their now-more-appropriate groups. It's nice to see the new groups pre-populated with existing discussions, and it's also nice to see older articles getting new life through their newfound visibility.. <3
No worries. Happy to help. I've particularly enjoyed our new ~transport group!
Here here!
This will definitely be an interesting experiment. I'm personally most excited for:
But can you clarify what ~transport is meant to be? Is it a group for cartalk?
I've noticed a fair number of posts about bikes, buses, trains, and transportation infrastructure as a whole? I imagine these topics could fit into a ~transport group, too.
My concern would be that there is quite a bit of antagonism towards cars on Reddit, and I'm assuming there is a good chance that will exist here as well.
We car enthusiasts kind of need our own space so everything doesn't devolve into a discussion about how cars have ruined North American cities, how they should be banned worldwide, etc.
/r/cars (4,981,610 users) and /r/fuckcars (405,045 users) both existed and were quite popular for a reason. There were a lot of people who are passionate about both perspectives.
On a related note, I wonder if there would not be some merit to the idea of looking to Reddit's most popular subreddits for topic ideas. Granted, the most popular subreddits are cesspits of low quality posting (Tildes absolutely does not need anything like /r/memes or /r/mildlyinfuriating), but it might at least be a good way to gauge the relative interest in various things.
I’m not a car person, but I think you will find discussion to be much more level headed and less antagonistic here. Not just about cars but other potentially polarizing topics as well. It may be appropriate to split ~transport up to have a hobbyist companion group for people to talk about cars without having to frame it in the context of society and all forms of transportation. I wouldn’t even make it a subgroup of ~transport so car people don’t have to wade into what could be unfriendly waters of people who have no choice but to drive a car to live.
Yeah, as a car nerd, that's one thing I won't miss about reddit. At least in the UK, cars and public transport coexist quite nicely. And I don't want people giving me death threats for talking about sports cars when I actually bus or cycle most places haha
Your disdain towards low quality posts is ~mildlyinfurating
As well as, more specifically, tips for alternative transportation (e.g., bicycle commuting, which is different from more recreational cycling as found in ~hobbies).
Transport to me seems like it'd be a good place to discuss transportation infrastructure news. New highways, metro lines, high speed rail, etc.
It's for vehicles I think. But suggestions were like vehicles or machines. Transport is pretty ok IMO.Better than the weirder way too specific multilevel groups suggested, e.g. tech.cars for engineering, and hobbies.cars for..I dunno.
I'm really looking forward to ~humanities.history. Lots of interesting things to read and talk about in that subject. Perhaps ~sports.gridiron for american football?
Good compromise! Useful subgroups without going overboard and spreading people too thin and everyone is auto-subscribed :)
Regarding football: you could make it
.footballand.soccer. Not the cleanest way and it will also cause endless discussions, but it's clear to 99% of the users and you'd get rid of.american_football:) I would not suggest using the leagues as tags (nhl,nfl,mlb, etc.)Not that I personally particularly care but you'd confuse the dozen Australians on the site
Hey, we could just claim ~sports.footy for our version! Noone actually calls it "football". That's not the Aussie way. :)
But, yes, strictly speaking, Australian Rules Football is just as much "football" as any other versions of football played in other countries. A
.footballsub-group would appear to include all footballs that aren't The World Game - including AFL.cc: @zonk
I don't know which one is "pigskin". (I have next to no knowledge about sports.)
Football eggball or football football? ;)
I noticed I was not automatically subscribed to the basketball group. It's the only one I wasn't already in. Bug?
Whoops, I skipped the auto-subscriptions for ~sports.basketball. Thanks for pointing that out, it should be fixed now.
There may not be a need at the moment, but in the future ~sports.college or a similar group may make a lot of sense, especially if the American Football community gets renamed to ~sports.nfl . Professional and college sports fandoms can be quite different (and sometimes even mutually exclusive) in the US.
Yeah, ~sports.nfl doesn't quite work as a catchall for American football since college football is so popular too. Like my town doesn't have a professional league, but our college team is popular locally.
A different option for american_football, if not too tongue in cheek, could be ~sports.handegg
I’ve seen a lot of support for ~sports.gridiron and that would also be a great alternative. I believe ~sports.nfl would be too narrow
Handegg is a term generally used by people who don't like (American) football to denigrate the sport. I don't think many fans of the sport would appreciate the term as it's not used by fans or anyone who plays the sport.
Fair points, I’m well aware of its origins. I’ve always found the term humorous and use it among friends but I understand why it could be offputting.
Gridiron seems like a fantastic alternative
Manga are on-topic in ~anime; how does that square with ~comics? What about manhwa?
That's a good question. Is there any kind of term that people use that encompasses both of them? Something that would make sense for us to use as a parent group with .anime and .manga sub-groups?
This is probably the worst place to draw inspiration from, but 4chan divides these groups into "Anime & Manga" and "Comics & Cartoons"
This categorization system does the opposite of what you're looking for (grouping by region/culture as opposed to by medium), but I kind of like it? Especially given that many manga are adapted to anime, and many comics are adapted to animated films (shout out to Nimona!). They feel... More related that way?
I think it fits well in this case. We already have ~TV but keep it separate from ~Anime. It's not so much about trying to separate eastern vs. western media (I think we learned from Reddit the consequences of trying to delineate too closely to this) as much as finding the audience that would be interested in discussing these topics. comics and manga tend to be separate enough in style, tone, and content to where I feel ~Anime would suit manga more.
And I guess since it begs the question: we can keep the names snappy and simple. I don't think it has to be called ~anime_and_manga. To bring up the example once again, 4chan's board was simply called /a/, not /am/ (There is a /jp/ board for "otaku culture", but that may have implications to it that doesn't fit Tildes). As long as that association is reinforced people will figure out where to post and browse.
maybe farther down the line it can separate out to ~anime.manga and other related parts of the animesphere, but as it is ~anime is one of the quieter groups as is.
On one hand, ~east as the top level group would cover a lot of ground with .anime, .manga, .manhua, .kdrama, what have you. On the other, it seems a little like we're just recreating the ~entertainment argument, and I need to sort out my feelings of taking half the world's creative content (that I don't live in) and stuffing it into the same group as compared to ~tv, ~movies, ~comics and whatever else we come up with eventually.
Unfortunately I haven't seen any widely-used term that would fit, but it's something I've been thinking about for a while.
I'd consider that umbrella as "otaku media" which covers anime, manga, light novels, and visual novels. All of those could fall under different parent categories by medium (TV, comics, books, and games) but are united in their niche as you noted in the body of the post for keeping ~anime separate from ~tv.
As far as I'm aware in Japanese the term otaku itself is more analogous to "geek" and isn't limited to those in the same way that anime is a catch-all for all animation to the average Japanese person regardless of origin/style.
All of that's also focused on the Japanese terms and sidestepping the questions raised about where the boundaries lie. Manhwa (Korean comics) and donghua (Chinese animation) are both growing industries of their own.
Prefacing this with I can't speak japanese.
Is otaku a pejorative? Given the contexts I've seen it used in anime and manga, I'd gathered that it's often meant as an insult. Generally in the same way "geek" can be in English.
It depends. "Otaku" in general means someone strongly into something, similar to "geek" in English, so there are anime otaku, but also train otaku, history otaku, military otaku, etc., and it doesn't always carry a negative sentiment, making it a matter of context. But I would say that the usual image of an anime otaku in the Japanese society is not exactly positive, closer to "nerd" than "geek".
It's complicated, and I think "geek" is a perfect parallel to describe why. Some people will embrace the term and call themselves a geek these days. In that regard, it defines a growing group that is becoming more and more normalized in society. In the modern day, to certain demographics, it isn't anymore or less an insult than being called a jock nor a bookworm.
But yes, "otaku" does have roots as a pejorative, especially when comparing to traditional Japanese culture that teaches conformity and a duty to contribute to a community/society. Someone who instead indulges in consuming time wasting media and buying frivolous merchandise as an adult is about as shameful as it can get if you go back 30+ years, and has close relations with NEETs.
I think it is pejorative in Japan.
This is the old "Is Avatar: The Last Airbender anime?" question. Some folks are happy to just put everything anime-inspired into "anime". Puritan minded folks (like say most of /r/anime) like to restrict "anime" to Japanese animation, but since the market for has blown up and diversified so significantly (especially among Korean and Chinese studios) there's a bit of tension on what the proper nomenclature should be. To put it another way, there's no good answer.
At minimum, I think manga-like comics and animated stuff should be separate. They have some overlap of course (especially among Japanese properties) but they're still quite separate fandoms.
There’s not really a good catchall available,
except for weebtrash.If we want to lump in Anime and Manga because they are in the same niche, it might be valuable to group it as ~anime.manga or name the main group something like ~animanga. Otherwise, if we sort by medium, we could group it as ~comics.manga and ~anime.animation or any other combination of synonyms.No not really. Illustrating that by framing that question towards western media: "Something that would make sense for us to use as a parent group with .cartoon and .comic sub-groups?".
You'd be looking for a word akin to "media" or "entertainment" that is probably too broad to be useful.
How about "stories?" There is also stand-alone art and comics that are one-off gags, but I think telling stories is pretty key.
Fan fiction would fit there, and it can be broadened to more "serious" stories.
It would be weird to leave out analytical non-fiction like Understanding Comics. I guess you could say it's about stories.
"Stories" covers many many many forms of media: movies, television, documentaries, books, comics, cartoons, even some songs. That's almost as broad as the "entertainment" category that Deimos rejected in this post.
Forgive my ignorance, though surely this would be ~arts?
I previously mentioned that I felt web dev/design should be separated from design and was duly told no - so I'm not sure I understand why anime, comics, cartoons, manga etc. do not fall under ~arts, even as ~arts.manga etc.
~arts is more for discussion of THE arts and art in general. While I'd certainly agree that manga and anime are art, the discussion about them is going to be different in tone than a lot of other artistic discussion. They're separate for the same reason ~tv is.
To me it makes the most sense to put manga/manhwa/French comics/comics from wherever in comics, since they are non-animated sequential/panel-based art & stories. That is their medium. I realize that something like an American superhero cartoon and comic are related culturally like Japanese anime and manga are, but I think it makes sense to just separate comics and animation because they are two different media.
I like the additions!
I also don't love the name ~sports.american_football. I vote for ~sports.football and ~sports.soccer. I understand not wanting to be too American centric but this seems like the cleanest solution.
Where would Australian Rules Football (played by the Australian Football League, or AFL) fit in that arrangement?
~sports.rugby? I always assumed Aussie rules football was a variant of rugby, but I admittedly know next to nothing about the sport though. If it is its own totally distinct thing then ~sports.australian_football seems the most obvious answer to me. I am also firmly in favor of keeping ~sports.american_football and ~sports.football (for soccer) too though, since I hate how American-centric most of social media is.
Nope. We play two varieties of Rugby: League and Union. And Australian Rules Football is not related to either of those. If you want to start a fight in the states of New South Wales or Queensland, walk into a pub and announce that Aussie Rules is better than rugby. But run fast! :P
Some major differences:
There's no scrum in Aussie Rules.
Kicking for goals is done on the fly, rather than from the ground.
There are 4 goal posts (with no cross-bar), marking an inner section as a "goal" (for 6 points) and two outer sections as a "point" (for 1 point).
Famously, the rules of Australian Rules Football were codified in 1859, as a compromise of a few forms of football, with some new additions for the colonial situation.
It's quite a distinct sport these days. In fact, I've heard it has more in common with a sport called Gaelic Football than rugby. (We've sent Aussie teams over to Ireland to play games in a mixed blend of Gaelic and Australian Rules football.)
So, in short, Aussie Rules is its own distinct variety of football. If and when Tildes gets large enough, we'll need to create a separate ~sports.aussierules or ~sports.footy sub-group for it.
(And we're one of the countries that calls the round-ball version of football, "soccer" - to distinguish it from our local football game.)
Having .soccer and then some .football.version would not be wrong:
Soccer term origin story
I admittedly don't know much about Australian Football so I wouldn't want to make this decision. Like another user posted my initial thought was into ~sports.rugby.
Where do they belong now? How many users on Tildes follow the AFL vs the NFL? Whichever is the most popular with Tildes users should get the ~sports.football name. I would say the posts belong in the top level sports group and if there are enough of them we make ~sports.australian_football.
From some quick googling (this may be wrong) I see that Australians also use the term soccer when referring to soccer (association football) to help with the confusion. Do you know if this is true?
Edit: I just saw your other post where you said they also call it soccer. I also like ~sports.aussierules or ~sports.footy more than ~sports.australian_football
Thank you for your breakdown on groups as social organization, as it cleared up some misconceptions I had. It's this attention to the social effects of your site that really drew me here in the first place, so I'm happy to see that tradition and commitment continuing.
I must say though that I'm disappointed that you haven't added a DIY group or subgroup yet. I imagine we'll see a fair bit of DIY in ~life.home_improvement, but obviously this is only one aspect of home improvement, and certainly only a sliver of the notion of DIY.
I'm a computer hardware field technician by trade. I got into that line in part because I'm aware of how environmentally destructive it is to produce many of the devices we've come to rely on, and so I wanted to help extend the life of devices in hopes of lessening that impact. Another reason I got into it was because I rarely had the money to get my stuff repaired, so if I was going to have nice things and keep them nice, I was going to have to do that myself.
I suspect that we're on the cusp of a revolution in self-sufficiency driven by increasing wealth disparity, wage stagnation, and a general rejection of the disposable nature of western society. One of the things Reddit was great at was being a place where you could get pointers for repair and DIY projects, often from experienced professionals. I know that being an alternative to Reddit isn't really the raison d'etre of Tildes, but I would like to see a place for discussions of that type that's managed responsibly, and I think the spirit of self-sufficiency meshes well with the philosophy you've built into the site. Maybe that's something to consider for down the road.
Anyway, thank you for all your hard work, Deimos! You're much more generous with your time and effort than anyone deserves. I like all the changes, and an excited to see them in action.
Very good additions, I think. And well reasoned on the distinction between logical and accessible sorting of groups and subgroups. As many others have said, I think it's good for certain groups (like ~lgbt) to remain top-level, especially if those groups pertain to margianalized peoples. In that respect, I'm very glad, as well, with the choices for ~life subgroups. I think those will be useful for creating some more concentrated discussion in particular topics, at least to start.
I am a little perplexed in the inclusion of ~life.style... Wouldn't it maybe fit a little better in ~design? But I don't know, and I guess these are really just to test the waters with some of these new groups, so maybe it'll end up working really well!
Would you put fashion choices for watches, purses, makeup, hair or clothing under design? life.style makes sense to me.
Side note, but I'm just realizing now that ~life.style is accidentally punny in a way that might detract from its meaning?
~style is very readable, but ~life.style makes me think of lifestyle, hehe. Probably not a huge deal, though?
Offtopic: but there's a long-standing bug where the
:visitedselector will override the subscribed / not subscribed colours on the groups page. Any chance that could be fixed while you're messing around with groups?That should actually be fixed now thanks to a recent merge request from 2 weeks ago:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/merge_requests/136
I was hoping that merge might fix it, but I still see the issue.
Oh, huh... it does indeed appear to have failed to fix it. Shoot. I'll reopen the related bug issue:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/720
cc: @Deimos
Thanks for the update and all the work you've been doing!
There was so much good discussion in the previous thread and i think you've totally began to capture what was discussed. The new additions all look reasonable to me and i agree with subgroups being the way to go to keep it all organised. Its a dynamic space much like real life so working on it as the community grows and interests change is the only way to do it really. Excited to see all the new discussions in their new homes!
Edit: Just to add, after this i went on to unsubscribe from the sports sub as i really have 0 interest in these and nothing i could contribute but I have to individually go through all the subgroups to remove them. I know you said you are already working on these things but it could be nice if we had a button to unsub from all the subgroups at once then we can select the ones we have interest in manually after.
Thanks for the updates! I’d love to see ~sports.golf if others are interested.
Thanks for adding engineering and transport. Very happy they didn't get crammed into tech subgroups as was suggested.
Off-topic
This makes it sound like groups (or tags or some such) could also apply to users and not just posts. So instead of a user thinking "I'm interested in football," there could be additional data like "I am a football player" or "I am a football fan." The additional elements could have a dynamic interaction. Posts (or other user accounts) could be weighted and presented (or suggested) more dynamically. Maybe a way to make friends!
The user-to-group relationship could go both ways, and there could a user-to-user dynamic too.
@zoroa commented -
Groups and tags could interact dynamically too with multiple tags (posts) presented together under the umbrella of a group. Groups could be limited in scope, whereas tags could be more dynamic and varied. A post wouldn't be restricted to one group, or only to those users subscribed to that one group. Could also help consolidate redundant posts.
I like this idea but can I suggest that there be a disclaimer type statement while posting that says something to the effect of “strangers on the internet are not a substitute for professional help” and also some quick links to emergency/crisis resources?
That's coming. I messaged the /r/SuicideWatch mods yesterday and got the thumbs up from them to copy their Suicide Hotlines wiki entry to Tildes. It will probably take me a few days though, since I want to verify all those hotlines are actually still active first, and also add a bunch more countries if I can.
I also created a Behavioral Inpatient programs resource list for SW back in the day too, and plan on recreating that here at some point as well.
But I am also open to suggestions for other resources worth compiling for ~health.mental too though, and will probably make a topic there next week asking for that.
They all seem like good updates. Glad to see a baseball subgroup finally. Also really happy to see the focus of the pets subgroup to still be on discussion instead of images.
Thanks for the updates! There was a lot of feedback to process about new groups. I think this is a good outcome, and hope many others think so too.
It seems to me that the same reasoning could be applied to ~life as well. Why do we have it?
Here's the original suggestion for the group that became known as ~life. That might help to explain why this group exists.
Thanks for the links. Even after reading those, I still think it doesn't make much sense from an "interest" perspective to have such a broad, top-level group.
I appreciate creating in communities based on the need. But would love to see the sub groups nested inside the main group.
What do you mean by "nested inside"?
Because sub-groups are part of the main group. For example, the sub-group ~tildes.official is nested under the main group ~tildes, and the sub-group ~life.pets is nested under the main group ~life.
Or are you talking about something else?
I think Tildes could benefit from a place for professional wrestling. /r/SquaredCircle is literally the largest online forum for the sport, and I know there are a lot of people who migrated to the Discord that would like a better way to browse what's happened in the last week of wrestling; you are practically guaranteed tons of activity as people post links to clips that happened through the week and they get discussed. AFAIk SquaredCircle was also one of the highest activity non-default subreddits.
Just to note, for the time being we have ~sports.combat which should house such posts.