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Daily Tildes discussion - future daily Tildes discussions
Sorry this is so late today, I had to go out and do some things, and didn't get back until much later than I was expecting. Since it's so late, I'm just going to do a simple one, and save my original planned topic for tomorrow or Monday:
What other topics do you think would be good to discuss in these daily posts? Are there particular mechanics, plans, concerns that you'd like to see covered?
How long can you work on this full time?
There isn't really a specific timeline. The donations so far are quite encouraging for how small the site is still, so for now I'm not worried and will see how it looks after we grow a bit more. I know that the donations definitely won't grow anywhere near linearly along with the users, but it's still looking pretty good.
Some people have also recommended a few potential grants to me that I need to look into more and apply for (which I'll probably do after I finally finish open-sourcing the code). If any of those work out it'll give me a lot more leeway.
Seeing as you're in alpha and figuring out what works best, I think it might be useful to have an Alpha-testing section of the site where you can trial bleeding-edge features before committing the whole site. (yes I know the whole site is alpha). It would give you a whole lot of freedom to try new and novel things without disrupting existing stable communities.
That and people seem to enjoy participating in these type of things, reddits april fools day being a good example, early-access games being another.
Oh yes I would love a next.tildes.net so I can see what will break in my extension in the upcoming releases!
As soon as this is open-source, I'm down to consult/contribute to A/B and feature-flag testing and deployment strategies. Can be really fun to implement and run stats on that stuff.
It's specifically mentioned in the docs that he sees A/B testing as user unfriendly: https://docs.tildes.net/overall-goals
Yeah, A/B testing is... just silly imo. Set up a dev.tildes.net or make ~test into a separate system of its own where new features are tried. Not having one's hands tied to 'keeping things functional' like A/B requires lets you get really crazy with the systems and run experiments that can't be done in the A/B framework. Plus, if we have a dev.tildes.net that's a fine place for bot development without them impacting the rest of the site. A good, old fashioned, separated developer sandbox for people to play with.
A/B makes a bit of sense as a phase-in system, to shake out the bugs, but that can be handled with a beta.tildes.net just as easily... a preview version of the next release.
Yes, for now the bus factor is a solid 1.
Ah, that's the official term. I've just been saying "hit by a bus protocol" the last few times the subject has come up :)
Related: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
Not enough for a repeating post, but I'm curious if the tilde in the top left is just a short term placeholder logo or meant to be a long term one?
I'm honestly not sure. I don't mind it, but I'm not particularly attached to it either. If someone that actually knows what they're doing comes up with a better one I wouldn't really mind changing it.
What's your opinion of it?
I love the retro aesthetic, with the large pixels especially, and I hope any future logo keeps that look. While I was drawing a picture for another post though, I got an idea to perhaps make the logo more recognizable. I was thinking maybe we could make it a stylized T, but with the top straight line of the T being an actual Tilde. It'd fit a little better with the theme of Tilde being more text based vs picture based, with the logo being a letter instead of just a picture, and I think it'd be more memorable too. We could also greyscale it, to make it fit with the default colors of the site better, and then maybe keep the current synthwave colored one for the solarized themes that have more color, or for the darker themes where color is better then a monochrome white. It's just an idea though, I'm curious to hear what other people have for ideas too :D
Not who you asked, but I find the logo decidedly 'meh' as it is. It works as a symbol, but the colours don't really fit with each other or my site themes. Perhaps something more monochrome?
Of course, there are much more important issues than this particular bikeshed, and feel free to ignore me.
I really kinda like it. It's simple, minimalist. Kinda represents what the site is about. Could easily be rendered in SVG or something. Not sure if the colours represent anything, maybe they could.
Looking at the source I was surprised to see it's just the favicon scaled up. And, you know what, I kinda like that. It's very efficient. I guess the PNG libraries in most browsers these days are very forgiving in scaling up square shapes, so there's no reason to have a higher-resolution logo.
The favicon is great, very distinctive.
I vote for ~kitty!
All jokes aside, I love the original logo so much. Simple, reminds me of tetris, doen't overdo it, is respective of the principles of ~.
As long as it's easy to distinguish from Reddit since I tend to spend all my time between these two sites.
I want a "get to know the admins" thread. I keep getting surprised when I learn that one of the common faces I see is someone running the show.
Irrelevant to the post, sorry - but can we all please agree on just typing out tildes when talking about the site, instead of using the ~ sign?
I keep reading it as circa/around/approximately/dash etc., and get horribly confused! Maybe I just need to get used to it though :P
On topic though, I agree with what someone else said just now - there's no real need to make every one of these daily discussions super serious. I don't mind some rather casual ones like this one once in a while.
I've said before that people need to use the actual "approximately equal to" sign (≈) on this website instead of resorting to a tilde: it's quite confusing when people use a tilde now.
Agreed... that's already an irksome trend, haha. Hard to read, especially since I didn't know how to pronounce tilde before I joined this site and looked it up.
The mechanic I'm most curious about is the trust system, so I would love to see some sort of deep dive into the determination of user trust. I don't know if the implementation of the trust has even begun, but either way I think a topic regarding the design of the system could provide valuable discussion.
While there's been some minor discussion on this, I haven't seen you mention it yet and I think it still deserves more attention than it's getting. I and others have privacy concerns about the connections between users that are visible through the invite chains. Others have expressed a desire for the public not to know who invited them. Personally, I'm more interested in my invitees not knowing my username, which would mean I would need control over whether my name appears on their profiles.
Yeah, that's an interesting one, especially since there are also a number of requests in the opposite direction too. Some people would like the entire invite tree to be public, like it is on Lobsters, and others have requested being able to easily see all their invitees on the invite page or somewhere similar.
Yeah, I've definitely seen those as well. Could a compromise be possible where users' nodes still appear in the public tree, just without their names on them if they desire privacy? This would take away a bit from the fun of that information, and I think even this solution compromises privacy a bit in some ways since some data is still leaked about a person (since a person could potentially identify who else their inviter has invited), but I guess that goes to show that there are a lot of options to consider.