Daily Tildes discussion - should inviter/invitee info be public?
Tsirist suggested this earlier today, and I think it's a pretty good topic, so let's just do it today.
Currently, on each user's page you can see who they were invited by. However, that's the full extent of what's shown about invites right now. The opposite relation isn't easily public (that is, there's no way to see a list of all users that were invited by someone), and you can't even currently see a list of which users you've invited yourself.
Some people think that these invite relationships should be more public, and some people think it should be even less than it already currently is. For example, some people want to be able to invite others without those people knowing their username, which is currently impossible.
I think that at least tracking the "invite tree" is important overall during the invite-only phase, but it doesn't necessarily need to be public information to serve this purpose. What do you think? Should we show more information about invites? Less? Leave it exactly how it is?
I posted a comment about this in another topic. I'm not going to hunt it down at the moment, but my feeling is that invites should be private. Maybe it's okay during a closed alpha to help identify if one person is inviting a bunch of trolls, but long term I believe it is counter to the stated philosophy of having people judged by their content. Because as it stands now, personal profiles show who invited you, which implicitly makes your reputation stand on that person's coat tails.
I do not want to be judged by who invited me here. I want to be judged by what I do here.
Nuke the invite info.
Do you want to be judged by who you invite? Do you want other people to be judged by who they invite?
I remember reading in an early thread that one reputational measure could be how your invitees behave. If someone continually invites people who cause problems here, at the very least that casts doubt on their judgement. It may even cast doubt on their motives and their own behaviour.
I agree with the you sentiment, but I wonder if the same goal can be accomplished without making the info public? Detecting that an account has invited a bunch of other accounts that where then banned in short order seems like a pretty straight forward thing to detect algorithmically, which can then be brought to the notice of a mod or admin.
The admin can already see the links between an inviter and their invitees - they're stored in the database. If the admin needs to track this information, they already can.
We're just talking about whether to expose that information to ordinary users like you and me. And what use do we have for knowing who invited whom? We would just report a bad comment to the admin (or future moderators) for him to deal with. If he sees a pattern, he can dig into his own database to track who invited whom.
I think it is fair for whoever doles invites out to users here to judge me on my invites and decide if I'm worthy of more, but so far that's no one.
I think it should be public in this invite-only stage, like @jgb said. But as @rorso said in my thread about similar thing:
I'd either keep this opt-out (and display something like
hidden
), or add option to post anonymously, where poster's identity would be revealed only to Tildes admins. So if I want to post something anonymously, I just check a box and instead of my name, there will behidden
in the whole thread (even in comments). If I want to post anonymous comment, I can, again, tick a box, and my name in the comment and all under-level comments will behidden
.Edit: Maybe somehow differentiate between different anonymous users, so if there are 5 anonymous users discussing in the same thread, it won't confuse everyone. Somewhere I've seen a thread about using the small generated images as user icons - as github uses. Maybe for each anonymous users, generate unique icon shown next to
hidden
based on hash of their username, so if the same user posts anonymously on multiple threads, he'll still have same icon? Or something like this, I don't really know how it should be done.I think the "opt-out" idea is a good one. I think I'd like it even more if it was "opt-in," with some sort of notification to the inviter if the invitee wants to switch the information on. So, for example, if you, Soptik, had invited me, and I wanted to show that information, you'd get a message saying, "Mechangel has requested to show your username in her 'Invited by' information." Then you'd be given the option to approve or disapprove that request.
I thought a good solution to differentiating anonymous users in a thread was suggested in this thread here:
I would like to be able to see the invite tree. It could potentially allow 'rotten branches' to be identified and reported by users, since that's quite a hard task for you to do alone.
Edit: I also feel that not showing the invite tree is somewhat similar to not showing a user's comments - it creates a false pretence of privacy when in actuality the information is trivially scrapable.
How would a private tree be scrapable? Or am I misunderstanding?
Well, assuming the status quo, it's easy to iterate through posts, scrape usernames, and from user pages build up a tree since the child->parent relations are all known. Obviously if even that information was removed, it would become impossible, but then my first point is even more applicable.
Here is a tree that shows the relationships between people in this thread that I made using exactly this method. Those who have been invited directly by Deimos and did not have any 'children' within this thread are not in the tree, since that would result in too much clutter, but it gives you a rough idea of what one would look like.
Wow. There's a third-generation Tilder already!
Ah, I see you're a 0 index kind of person.
It depends on the context. In this context, it wouldn't make sense to refer to Deimos as a first-generation Tilder because he's sort of not a Tilder. He is Tildes, in a way. The people he invited are the first generation of users.
@mir:
First of all, if you did it with a script, cool!
Second of all, every list start with zero obviously.
Third of all, the higher the number of the generation the more diluted are their powers? When they become more humans than tilders?
(This whole comment is a series of non-serious references, well apart from the first point)
I did what with a who now? (You know it was someone else who made the invitation tree - not me... right?)
Comment's tree are hard :P
Commented to the wrong user!
Although the current implementation does not make it easy to find people who have never posted.
Got it. I thought by private tree you meant not showing invite info on profiles.
I think "invited by" should be private since the the site errs on the side of privacy.
It could have practical benefits for admins. But for your average user it'll just be for curiosity and that's not enough reason to reveal possibly personal information (like relationships between users).
In that case, I think, that the information about who were you invited by, should be hidden as well. There is no reason to hide who you invited and show who were you invited by, because as soon as there will be public API, someone will make website that will mine usernames and generate invite tree anyway.
I meant to suggest that the entire invite tree entirely should be hidden, sorry if I didn't make that clear.
This is my sentiment exactly. Even if you use a moniker here that you’ve never used anywhere else, screen names your invitees pick, as well as their actions, are enough to make connecting the dots to your/mine identity.
Also, I’ll probably be over-policing people I invite here, so it’s irrelevant if my name is on their profile. It’d feel bad to know that someone you invited turned out to be a real jerk - just ask whoever the dude was who invited @hypnotoad... Jokes aside, I feel like the community-governance-with-leadership thing is what we’re gearing up for around here. I dig it.
The meat of the issue for me, personally, is that the current system creates two problematic questions at certain times.
Of course, these are really only issues that exist during the invite-only phase of the site. But if the site ceases to be invite-only anyways, I don't see much utility in the invite tree in the long run.
It's a minor issue to me that the inviter/invitee relationship has some asymmetry, as noted by Deimos, but I think that should be symmetric regardless of what decisions about privacy are made ultimately.
I think that making the list public is too much information. It reveals social relationships between users that can be leveraged for other purposes; while making the information public is really only a novelty "oh that's interesting" kind of thing. Knowing this structure seems useful only to administrators and (future?) moderators.
Maybe it would be okay to give inviters the ability to see their child trees ala private torrent sites since inviters are somewhat responsible for invitees -- but no more.
I'll toss an "aye" in the public pile, with some caveats.
Pros:
Cons:
I have a fairly recognizable name by anyone who knows me. If the invite list becomes public, I think people I invite would be hesitatant in posting and commenting, since they can be identified by association. I do not believe this is a good or worthwhile route to go. Other than pure interest, I don't see what this site gains from this info.
I know people irl I want to invite but can't because they'd immediately be able to discover my username.
I don't really have many online friends I feel comfortable inviting.
naturally, I fall on the "private" side of this discussion.
I'd rather it all be kept private. There's not much reason for normal users to know who invited who. This could just lead to
Basically I see it being used in arguments which it has no place in. In addition it has some privacy issues. What if user X doesn't want to know who he invites? Give me for example. I keep all my usernames completely separate in every website. If I were to invite someone from the subreddit I moderate (A fellow mod for example) than they can easily find out my Reddit username which I'd like to avoid.
I'm puzzled by this. Your fellow mod on Reddit already knows your Reddit username. I think you mean they would find out your Tildes username. Or am I missing something?
With some sleuthing another user could figure my Reddit name out.
Edit:
Basically I'd prefer none of my accounts to be linked back to to each other. My Co-Moderator will probably know but there are some exceptions I make.
Nononono. Your fellow moderators on Reddit already know your Reddit name. They have to - it's right there in the moderators list of your subreddit.
Unless you're talking about a different "they".
I'm assuming you're referring to the person you invite: "If I were to invite someone from the subreddit I moderate than they can easily find out my Reddit username which I'd like to avoid." I'm assuming the "they" in that sentence refers to the person you're inviting. But that doesn't make sense. Are you referring to a general public "they": just some random person like me?
I'm really confused.
Gah sorry. They as in users here. So yes users like you can if you so wished.
Thanks for clearing that up.
I'm going to vote "private".
The site administrators (currently Deimos, possibly other people in the future) can already see who invited whom. If there's ever any serious problem, they can track these invitation trails if necessary.
Apart from that, there's no real need to track who invited whom. What benefit does it serve the general public on Tildes to know who invited me? Does anyone know, or need to know, who first introduced me to Reddit or Stack Exchange? How does that information help anyone who is not an administrator?
By publishing this information publicly, we're encouraging people to make a link between inviters and invitees. This might including judging one person by another person's actions. "You invited xyz and they said this thing I don't like, so I don't like you." "You were invited by abc and they approve of something I'm against, so you must be one of those bad people too." It is introducing literal prejudice (judging beforehand) into this website.
I would not want to be held responsible for the actions of my invitees. More importantly, I don't want the person who invited me to be held in any way responsible for my actions. While I appreciate his gesture in inviting me (due to our long association on Reddit), it's not his fault if I say or do anything wrong here. I've already stirred up occasional controversy here to the point where one person has accused me of sealioning and a couple of others believe I've acted in bad faith. However, I am the only person to be held responsible for my words and my actions. I don't want this to reflect on my inviter in any way. "The opinions expressed by this account are the author's own and do not reflect those of his inviter."
I think it should be public. The fact that it would be public would have the potential to dissuade a lot of users to be reckless with who they invite. That would lead to more accountability about who you invite. It would possibly be somewhat open to witch hunting but I think the community is, by now relatively rational on regards to these pitfalls.
The most important thing, if we go that way, would be to be clear about that info being public. @Soptik brought the best arguments against it so far but if we ate clear about what is visible to other users that should not be a significant issue. The invitees will have the necessary information to judge wether or not they want to be apart of th community or not.
I would love to see the invite tree. I think this will increase accountability and make users invite higher quality individuals.
I usually assume that anything I post online is public. If I'm not willing to do or say it on the front lawn of my house, why would do it in this forum?
I don't have a problem with it.
Does this include your invitations?
I haven't given any out. But if I had, why would it be a secret? While you can set privacy levels, things can still get out. Anything I do on this forum could be cut and pasted. Screenshot and posted. While I would hope that people had better manners than that, I don't know without trusting first. :)
The reason I haven't given any out is because I only have a few online inhabitant friends that I would feel comfortable recommending. I'm an introvert; I have lots of friendly acquaintances, but just a few close friends.
If I'm not mistaken, the idea here is that the invite tree being known could help detecting bad faith chronic behavior, like if someone invites lots of trolls.
I'm fine with this, but I don't see how that is related to the tree being public and, on the contrary, it has deep concerns regarding privacy.
I don't think even admins/high trust users should be able to see this information automatically. I think I system should be implemented so that, for example: if after inviting more than 5 new people, more than 50% of invitees get warnings/bans, then admins (or maybe high trust users) would get to see the inviter tree for further examination. In any case, this should only be applicable for X time. So if i invite someone and they participate and they behave properly (no warnings) for, say, a month or 100 posts/comments, then the link should not only be hidden, but it should be completely wiped. You shouldn't be responsible for someone's behavior after a while if they have demonstrated to be here in good faith. And I shouldn't be responsible either if only 1 or 2 people out of 10 I invite are misbehaving.
Other problems I see:
-Right now it's asymmetric, invitee knows inviter name, but not the other way around (if it were to stay, it should be symmetrical)
-If users invite people they know, there can be a deterrent effect on the types of posts they will participate if they don't want to be associated with those.
-Users might not invite potential good users just because of privacy concerns (imagine I'm gay, for example, and I know someone I know is a good user but they don't know I'm gay and I don't want them to know when I post to LGBT or whatever, just a simple example).
-It ties users permanently and contravenes the active privacy guidelines of the site.
-There are no tangible benefits for regular users to see this information at all, besides encouraging a policing attitude (which I don't think is good) or gossiping.
-The argument that it being public helps with accountability is not enough, privacy should come first, accountability should be built after that.
If anything, it should be opt-in and get approval from both sides. But even then, I think it's totally unnecessary and might create a culture of "castes" and "inviter profiling" which is totally wrong.
I feel that it should be either completely hidden from users or have a page where we can traverse the whole tree, up and down.
I would not invite my friends because this is an anonymous-ish platform If the invite tree is visible but it also would help to find bots and such if it is visible.
Edit: have bad actors shown in red in the invite tree
I would be in favour of having the invite tree publicly available for everyone to see, however there is the issue of accountability and exactly where the blame lies when inviting new users. Does the user who invited the bad user also get punished? Even if I invited someone whom I’ve known for a long time and trust them, I still cannot guarantee with 100% certainty they will always abide by the rules as human behaviour is still unpredictable sometimes.
Personally I feel that showing who invited who, at any depth of detail, would not really add anything to the site in general. I think only the admins should be able to see the complete tree, for finding bad branches, whereas the individual user could always have the ability to see their own tree, i.e. who they’ve invited to the site and the invites following those invited.
As a few have already mentioned, once the site comes out of invite only it may become redundant information anyway.
I vote for public. Transparency is important, especially in a site's infancy.
Why not let user chose if it is public or not? I prefer my privacy.
I'd be fine with this compromise. Make it an opt in/opt out.
This is a question I find hard to care much about. I think the information should be accessible to users of a certain trust level, and maybe that means all users. There is value in being able to see who invited whom (as is being much discussed). There isn't nearly as much value in hiding that information except that you deny another tool for regular users to use to say "look this guy invited that trolling person, that must mean this guy is a troll too," even when it might clearly not be the case.
I do sympathize with the idea that users have very few tools they can use outside of their contributions to brand themselves, and that this persistent fact of who invited them is with them forever. So, as an example, if hypnotoad had used his invites to invite a couple good contributors, it would be a shame to let all users judge them solely on that fact. Users that are in a position to be making enforcement decisions though? That is potentially relevant information if one of hypnotoad's invitees is mimicing hypnotoad's behavior.
One side-effect (intended or not) of having the inviter-invitee relationship made public is that it prevents people making alternate accounts for themselves. If you can see that account xyz was invited by abc, you already know there's some sort of connection between those two accounts. Other clues may lead to the conclusion that user abc is operating xyz as an alt account.
Yes, someone could get another person to give them an invite code to set up an alt. But the point of an alt is usually to attain some level of privacy and confidentiality, and asking someone else to help negates that.
Also, alt accounts are often used to separate one set of interests from another. I believe the most common use for these is to keep porn interests separate from non-porn interests. This doesn't apply here, but there may be other separations.
Regardless of the purpose of alt accounts, having inviter-invitee relationships made public will reduce the number of alt accounts here. Whether this is desirable or not... I'm leaving open to discussion. I'm merely making the observation.
Sure, but make it opt-in.
I think in the invite only stage it's okay. Like I said another thread, I'd like to see a list of people I've invited on my invite page or somewhere. ( but I'm only invited one person so I guess it doesn't even matter) If people can see who invited me then I should just be able to see who I invited because why show one and not the other. But beyond the alpha I would just get rid of showing either or because it's going to just cause headaches.
There's no real reason for the public to have the information I mean they can't do anything with it it's more for the admins.
But I do also think that an individual user should have a list on the invite page of who they've invited just so they can make sure they're not inviting a bunch of trolls.
Because right now people can see who someone was invited by but the person who invited them has no idea who they are so there could be this person out there making them look bad and they have no way of knowing unless they stumble upon their profile.
I'd err on the side of privacy. I think as soon as the site goes open (assuming it does) it will be worthless to the admins because no one up to no good will join via invites in a network, and in general I think the balance of possible usages is highly skewed towards poor outcomes.
Public for accountability and trust.
Pros and cons have been pretty well covered. I think its unecessary to make that information public. Only admins need to know.
I don't really have a preference either way, I've got strong feelings for both public and private and so I can't really choose. However I will mention that I've not invited a friend who I think would've been able to provide quality discussion because they would have a direct link to my username.
While accountability through transparency should be the default approach, I don't see how keeping the invite connections public is of any use to normal members? Watching who invited the most productive members, or what?
Instead, we only inhibit people who wish to stay anonymous from distributing invites among their friends or making that decision at all.
As for opt-in/out, who will be the one opting in or out? If that's the one inviting, how's the public information of any relevance then? Those with ill-intent would just opt-out.
On the other hand, letting only the invited ones decide would be unfair and counterproductive.
I'm late to this post but have two concerns:
One is the quality of those invited. In this early stage we really need quality invites. The current system reminds us that these invites are tracked and probably increases the likelihood that we'll strongly consider who we invite.
The other concern is quantity of new invites. Seeing how the participation is going here, I'm getting a feel for the need for content, or at least the need for enough content of a sort that keeps invitees coming back and participating.
I think it's fine to be idealistic and imagine Tildes growing just because it's a good thing. But there's also the reality that we're all human and if there's not enough here to hold people's interest, they'll look elsewhere, regardless of how going non-advertising and quality content is the "right" thing to do.
This is why I think diversity of interest in the invitees is important. Otherwise Tildes becomes at risk of being one dimensional. So I'm saying that Deimos and the administrators have a challenging task of balancing quality and quantity. It seems to me that one the initial interest in Tildes grows, it will get its own 'reputation' as having certain characteristics, for example either overly nitpicky, arrogant, or some other typically simplistic and unfair judgment. As I said a challenging task.
So. That's my late input.
Private by default.
Analysis of the invitation tree, for finding rotten branches[@jgb], can can be done by administrators or moderators.
Let users decide it.
Visible by default. Can be disabled by either side. For both sides.
I don't see a reason NOT to have it if users (inviter and invitee) have the option to disable it.
I like the idea of being able to analyze invite trees and identify bad 'branches'. However, I think having invite information be public would create an unnecessary risk of harassment. I'm sure everyone here now would use that power responsibly but if it's truly public, who knows what people in the future would be able to do.
It is for that reasoning I believe invite tree information should be limited to administrators and possibly very-high-trust users.