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Daily Tildes discussion - nothing in particular
It's a bit late on a Friday and I didn't have anything in particular I wanted to bring up today, so let's just use the thread today as a sort of general feedback/questions/discussion area.
If there's anything you wanted to ask about or give feedback on but didn't want to start a thread about it, feel free. You're always welcome to send me a private message with anything as well, I don't mind at all.
As always, thanks for being here, and have a good weekend!
This is just a personal observation on my end. I've noticed that I delete and/or rewrite my comments on Tildes far more frequently than I do on on Reddit. I don't think this is out of fear of being snarked at or disagreed with. Actually, I comment here more frequently than I do elsewhere. I think it's because the community here makes me really want to put my best foot forward, and only comment when I have something legitimate to add to the discussion. You all are a group of very interesting, polite and smart people, and I try to keep that in mind when I write. Thanks for being rad.
Also since its small population we take each over more seriously.
I think it's a fun metric we can consider if we wanna measure if the community is heathy or not.
Ping @cmccabe
I don't think pings work in Tildes yet
Hello! I’ve just received my invite, and this is my first comment. Happy to be here, and looking forward to being a part of ~s!
First impression on my mobile phone is that the site is very readable, and easy to navigate. I hope this project will be successful and satisfying for everyone involved.
I'm on a PC right now, there's no mobile app right? Just an in browser page on mobile?
Should the page work alright on Chrome or is there more of a benefit to having another browser?
For the record, I can not believe how clean Tildes is. The web page is so nice!
Right.
Yes.
It works fine for me on Chrome - on my PC and my phone.
If you want to use custom themes on mobile, you'll have to use a browser that can install extensions, like Firefox. Otherwise you can stick with what you are used to.
Are there already custom themes available, or are you just talking like for the future?
Yes, there are several themes and a browser extension already too thanks to @crius and @Bauke.
That's awesome, thanks!
There's is no mobile app, but it works very well simply added to the desktop as an icon and run from there. It cuts the browser chrome and gives it slightly more "dedicated" feel for want of a better word.
Correct, the site works well on mobile, no need to “wrap” it in an app.
I’ll let someone more knowledgeable about different browsers answer which is best. I’m on Firefox on iOS and Firefox on PC, and it works well.
Only issue I have on mobile is when changing a drop down menu, such as “last three days”, “all time”, etc. I have to tap somewhere else for the new choice to take effect. This is a little unintuitive and annoying.
Do you mind explaining that a bit more so I can investigate? I have tested on multiple iOS browsers and never had to do that. As soon as I click on a time span the popup disappears and the page automatically changes to reflect my selection.
p.s. What iOS version are you using? A lot (but not all) of the iOS Webkit issues with the site were fixed in the recent v11.4 update.
Strangely, I’m not able to reproduce this now. :)
Quite certain it bothered me last night.
Another thing though:
When clicking a tag while browsing a category, the url will not have the ~ character, but its “code”, so it looks like this:
https://tildes.net/%7Etech?tag=privacy
Ah, okay... if you manage to recreate it please let me know.
Also, that %7E one is interesting, thanks for pointing it out. I added it to the issues tracker.
Is there a way to get notifications (say, for new comment replies) other than through an app?
I'm pretty sure you can do that via a website (even when the page isn't open) - IIRC Facebook does.
Yeah. If you accept notifications and the page is designed to push them then it would work. If there's only one site it should do it on pc too.
We'll see—invite-only definitely has a lot of benefits, but I'm really not sure if the site will be sustainable (either activity-wise or financially) if it stays invite-only without some larger influxes of users at some point. Either way, it's not a one-way street. We could always open at some point and then go back to invite-only if it starts getting large enough and we want to slow the growth again.
It could be interesting to try invite only to comment and view open to the public.
Show people what it looks like but require a bit of effort to post.
I definitely think we need to get to that stage before too long, yeah. One of the issues right now is that people have to request an invite to even see what the site's like. So there are probably a lot of people that request an invite, check it out quickly, decide they're not very interested (or at least not yet), and leave. That's kind of a waste of an invite, and it would be much better to have people only requesting invites when they specifically want to participate.
How exactly?
Wouldn't it cost more to handle the heavier traffic caused by more users?
Not really, traffic is very cheap as long as the site stays minimal and I don't do something dumb like decide to start hosting user images/videos. Right now the total server costs are only around 100 USD/month, and I think this server could easily handle in the range of 100x the current userbase.
The major cost will always be paying people (me, and maybe others someday) to work on the site, which will probably only be feasible if there's a large enough userbase so that many smaller donations make up a significant amount of money. With 10,000 users if we average $1/year per user, that's only $10,000/year and can't really work. But if we had 100,000 users with the exact same average, now it looks a lot better.
It would only be an issue if the average user costs more in server resources than the average user donates, but that would mean that the site can't possibly work at any scale.
Edit: As a comparison, that Metafilter financial update I linked a few days ago includes:
So in Metafilter's case, server costs are less than 5% of their expenses, and they're using AWS which is generally on the expensive end.
I agree with keeping comments and user data hidden behind a login with the invite model. What if posts and links can be publicly viewable with comments and users hidden? That way the userbase maintains its privacy (as much as can be expected on the internet) from some data mining and general trolling while allowing the site to gain interest from outside people. That way invites are not wasted on users who are no longer interested after viewing the site and more interested people can request invites.
I think comments can be visible, just anonymize the usernames.
I have a suggestion. Several times now, I've written a comment up in the box, only to accidentally hit back on the keyboard and return to the previous page, and lose the contents of my comment along with it. Would there be any way to make it so that if the comment box has something in it, the user is warned before the browser navigates away?
Don't worry, this is already on the radar of issues to fix.
Oh thank god. May there be no more comments lost to entropy :P and if you happen to know, or somebody else reading this, is there any estimate on the time frame until Tilde's code becomes public...?
Ah sorry, I said I was going to add that a while ago and haven't finished it yet. I'll try to get it in over the weekend, it's not that difficult of a change.
Would you consider not using the nag box approach, and instead save the contents of the comment box in local storage with some reasonable (<60 mins?) expiry? That way if you hit back you can retrieve the comment by simply going forwards again, or reopening a closed tab, and it would be far less intrusive on the UX.
Hmm, it's possible. I wonder if it would be unclear to users that the text has been saved though, and they'll just assume it was lost instead of trying to go back to the page. I feel like I don't see many sites do it that way, and I'd guess that's probably why.
Maybe having something at the bottom of the input box saying
Saved ..., orYour comment is saved, it is safe for XX minutesOr add
your comment is automatically savedto theText (markdown)part of the input box.There's a few extensions out there (Lazarus forms and the later knockoffs) that provide similar functionality, so it's not entirely new.
I get a pop-up asking me if I really want to leave if I have an unfinished comment. For reference, I use Firefox.
I use Firefox too, and get no such popup. I'm using 60.0.2 on Linux with NoScript? Although I don't think NoScript could prevent Firefox's internal popups...
I think @merick might be referring to the popup you get if you click the "Cancel" button once you've started writing a comment. There shouldn't be one for leaving the page, unless they have an addon doing it.
Oh, you're right. I got those two confused, my bad. Clicking "cancel" gives me the popup, but leaving the page doesn't.
Both hooking into the back button and triggering an alert/confirm box require Javascript
yeah, but I have Tildes specifically whitelisted, since I know the script won't bog down even this crappy Core Duo and it doesn't do anything malicious. So if there were a javascript functionality built into Tildes, it wouldn't be blocked...
Ahhh
https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/2o3/daily_tildes_discussion_nothing_in_particular#comment-t8w
https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/2o3/daily_tildes_discussion_nothing_in_particular#comment-t8q
As @Deimos pointed out, I got my stuff mixed up. I get a popup when I click "Cancel", not when I leave the page.
I kinda wish tildes was more active during my day - it seems to be most active in the early morning or when i’m sleeping for me. Just a concequence of where the userbase is located I suppose. I’d like to see a more international audience on this site. Reddit gets treated like a primarily american site a lot - r/news being ‘american news’ and world news being on r/worldnews is quite symbolic if you ask me. People also speak in ways that are generally american centric which annoys me as someone on the other side of the planet. I’d like tildes to be a bit more neutral than that hopefully - obviously the largest constraint to having a truly global website is the language barrier, but there are a lot of english speakers who aren’t all in the US!
In one of the earlier posts here there was someone collecting a list of where everyone was from as well as a demographic survey, and there was a predominantly US audience - I’m not sure if that’s still true, I’m pretty sure it is and I’d be happy to see that even out more.
I totally agree. I think the "Year Zero" survey (taken when we had half the users we do now) showed that Americans made up about 60% of the userbase, and most other countries had only a couple of users representing them - which means if you're not American, you're probably the only active person from your country on Tildes. We need to increase the representation of non-Americans here.
I invited a couple of real-life friends to join, to increase the number of Aussies here, but they don't seem to have used their invite codes yet. :/
Yeah, I can relate to that I think i’m probably the only person from my country here right now...
It’s great you’re getting your friends to join! I’m not sure many of my friends would be active on a site like this but I should get around to inviting them. It does come down to people like us to spread the invites around our geographic regions.
It would definitely be nice to have it spread out more, but it's a bit of a hard thing to make happen deliberately.
One nice thing about Tildes compared to some other sites though is that the "activity" sort makes it so that threads stay active for longer, so it's not quite as bad if you're not online at the busiest times. On sites like reddit and HN, threads usually only have a short window when they're really active and if you don't get to them until 12 hours later they're already "over".
Yeah, I understand the difficulties with trying to change the userbase deliberately.
And definitely, with tildes I can go through a whole bunch of stuff in the morning and post then come back later in the day for more stuff. It isn’t a site where you sit around endlessly refreshing to see new content which I’m liking right now.
I'm in GMT+8 and tildes is nice in the morning to have something to look at, but it's pretty barren come the afternoon, then picks up again in the evening. Which does mean I get some work done, so it's not all bad.
Anyway, do you have some people to invite? I have eight just sitting around gathering dust.
I’m in the same timezone! SEA people unite haha, unfortunately i’m also short on people to invite...
Yeah I think it’s the afternoon time that gets me, i’m pretty free in the afternoons so not having much on tildes kinda sucks then.
Yeah, the afternoons are dead. We just need to find people to invite so we can all make it more lively.
Yeah, one of the reasons I shortened it is because the same (mostly controversial) threads were sitting up at the top at the site forever with people bickering back and forth, and there was no way for anyone to get rid of them. We've got tag filtering now, and I think once we have "stop showing me this specific thread" too, it should be reasonable to try going back to a longer time period again.
Well since no one else is, I have to provide the counter-argument. Once this site has, let's say only 10x the userbase, instead of 1 thread that you want to stay on the front page, 10 people have 10 threads they want to stay on the front page. Suddenly there is no room for new threads and you've basically built yourself an echo-chamber.
With the current activity sort and no time limit, anyone can dominate the front page by simply replying to the same thread over and over.
So there's that.
That is a good point. I imagine with the trust system (I assume that would be up and running when tildes hits 30k users) there would be a way to silence certain users bumping capabilities, if they were to abuse them.
It does. Whenever you change the sort option, a link pops up: "Set as default". You can set this chosen sort order as your new default.
Can we get pagination on user pages pls?
There's been more than one time I've wanted to refer to a thread I've commented on in the past, but I can't find it.
This is probably less important than a search feature, which would accomplish the same thing in my use case, but it'd be easier to implement.
Other than that, I've been having a pretty good time here. There's a lack of new content, which is to be expected, but the community seems to be pretty good folks, so I'm pretty happy with the site so far.
I've had the same issue, so I've been bookmarking my posts so I can find them again in the future if I need to. I haven't bothered bookmarking my comments though.
Is there any update on open-sourcing Tildes?
Been working on it more today. There are still a couple of minor things I'm trying to sort out, but it really shouldn't be much longer. Sorry it's taken so long, I've ended up getting sidetracked with too many other things.
We appreciate all your efforts @Deimos! Thanks for building such a nice community.
I'm puzzled by the tendency of people to post summaries of articles here. This has happened to me a couple of times: I'll post a news article, and someone writes a comment which is nothing more than a summary of that article (in one person's words, "the quick take-aways" of the article).
Why is this? Why do people see a need to summarise articles?
I would assume that, on a website where we're trying to encourage high-quality discussion, we would expect people to actually read the articles they discuss. What's the point of summarising an article?
In general I agree, though there are cases where an article tends to repeat the same point or fail to get to the point until a lot of unnecessary filler has been covered. In other words, the article itself can be needlessly and overwhelmingly cluttered. A summary can help alleviate those problems when those cases arise.
Of course, there's definitely a delicate balance. These summaries should be used sparingly to avoid laziness.
Ah, the old "filler" argument. I see this come up in discussions about Star Trek a lot - the old series had 22-26 episodes per season, while the latest series had only 15 episodes for the first season. And many people liked the idea of cutting out all those excess episodes which often didn't focus on what they saw as the main plot: the "filler". I delight in pointing out that most of the fans' favourite episodes from the older series... were filler episodes. :)
If we were against "filler", then we shouldn't ever read novels. We should only ever read cheat notes that summarise the main points of the novels. We shouldn't watch full-length movies, only fan-edits. The main points of the 'Lord of the Rings' movies could probably be covered in about 60-90 minutes, rather than a 9-hour trilogy.
The thing is that, sometimes the filler is an end in and of itself. It adds flavour and context to the articles (and books and movies and series). I found an interesting article via Reddit the other day which used drinking straws as a way of discussing America's consumerism. The use of drinking straws as a lens for this discussion was interesting and added flavour, but it was ultimately just filler. The writer could more easily have written a dry article about the pros and cons of consumerism and capitalism - but it wouldn't have been as interesting to read.
But that's me. I sometimes like a bit of context and flavour to what I'm reading or watching. I understand that's not true of everyone.
However, one of the benefits of Tildes in my eyes is that the discussion here is intended to be of higher quality than, say, on Reddit. I myself moderate a subreddit devoted to in-depth discussion of Star Trek, so I'm attracted to this idea of Tildes. But I would have thought that high-quality and in-depth discussion require a thorough reading of the source material, whether it's a news article or an opinion piece or a TV show.
I think we have different understanding of filler here. If I had to put it in just a few words, I would say that the content's value determines whether or not the content is filler.
With that in mind, episodes of a TV show that don't focus on the main story arc but still provide valuable character development or interesting side plots aren't filler, but episodes that provide nothing of substance and have no lasting story value (e.g. a one-off holiday or parody episode) would definitely qualify as filler. Novels themselves are typically meant for entertainment purposes and lack any sensory context, so there's more value in having additional detail than there is in giving the short summary, though a novel that spends far too much time adding details and not making any progress whatsoever will naturally be dry and boring, so too much detail can arguably be considered filler. For analogies like the drinking straws one you mentioned, there's value in making a subject that would ordinarily be dry or difficult to understand more digestible for a larger audience of average readers, but if you were to make several different analogies for the same exact subject without actually contributing anything new, then there wouldn't really be any additional value and those extra analogies would be filler as a result.
In the context of an article, if you have all of your important points scattered among many repetitive quotes that echo the same points and don't actually contribute anything more of value, then it becomes tedious to parse all of that nonsense just to get all of the important information out of the article. That would be considered filler. A brief overview of events leading up to the current event that just occurred, however, is valuable because it provides context for the new information being reported.
To bring this rambling discussion back to the point: I believe that posting summaries of articles is a bad precedent to set and a bad trend to start so early in this site's existence.
One of the news articles I posted this week had a lot of context about how a particular tax law came to be changed, and the horse-trading that led up to the law being passed, who voted for it and why, who didn't vote for it and why not, and an explanation of the new tax regime. There was no repetition and no filler: it was a straight-out news article with some analysis, not an opinion piece.
Someone posted a three-item bullet-point list as their comment. In fact, now that I check, I see that they merely copied the "key points" sidebar from the article itself! It wasn't even their own summary...
It was quite disheartening. I felt like my article was being criticised for being too long (when it was about mid-length for a news article).
And, this has happened before.
For novels, we mostly enjoy the process. For daily news piece, we enjoy the conclusion.
Okay. I'll just stop posting news articles, and just submit one-line posts:
"The income tax changes passed through the Senate today"
"Telstra is shedding 8,000 jobs"
"Australia is paying for an internet cable to the Solomon Islands"
Basically, all you need is the headlines: the conclusion.
But this isn't a news site, it's a discussion site. The news is material for discussion. And, without the detail in the articles... what can you discuss?
You answered to yourself. News article that can be precisely summarized in one short sentence is often less worthy of discussion.
Every news article on every news site and in every newspaper is summarised in one short sentence: the headline. No matter how long or short, or detailed or brief, an article is, an editor writes a one-line summary to put at the top of the article. That's what I did: I wrote one-line summaries of news articles. However, those summaries don't contain all the information. They're just there to tell you what the article is about:
How did the income tax changes pass through the Senate? Who voted for it? Why? (It was on a knife's-edge, and wasn't going to pass, but someone changed their mind at the last minute.) What is the impact of those tax changes? What happens now?
Why is Telstra shedding 8,000 jobs? When will it happen? Telstra is also splitting itself into two businesses. How was this information received by Telstra's shareholders? What does it mean for Telstra's future?
Why is Australia paying for an underwater cable that's nearly 3,000km long to a tiny nation in the Pacific? What's in it for us? What does China have to do with it?
All this extra information was in the articles - but if people just read the summaries, they'll never know that. And any discussion of these articles will therefore be very uninformed and shallow.
Oh, Hi again.
Thanks for all the examples. In that case, I think
That gave me an idea about the other thread we were discussing, we can categorize users to their "area of interest" based on if they spend time on the article, or just skimmed through the headline and left. Or at least this is an important indicator. If people from a particular industry wanna create new groups related to their industry, they have more weight for their reasons.
You joke, but it's normal for me to spoil myself and spend 15 minutes reading Wikipedia summaries.
I'd argue they shouldn't be used at all, even if it's like you said. If that's the case you can just comment "OK, good point on x, y, z, but why repeat that 5 times", or something else that discusses the quality of the writing, the logical train of thought, or whatever. Making a bulletpoint summary is unnecessary (and encourages laziness) imo.
Maybe because a lot of news sites these days are loaded with ads, pop-ups, auto-play videos, etc. and many users don't want to click those links but still want to have a better idea of what the article says beyond the headline.
If you're using firefox there's a reader mode (address bar, right side) and chrome is apparently working on something like it. It removes 90% of clutter (leaving only the "built in clutter" like pictures that most articles don't need) and puts it on a dark background.
By that logic, we shouldn't bother linking to any articles at all - just copy-paste the text into a text-post here.
If one of the main goals of this site is to promote interesting discussions, and having an article summary in the comment section prompts users to comment who wouldn't otherwise, is that a bad thing?
How can someone thoroughly discuss an article if they don't bother to read it? Any discussion that happens on the back of a summary must, by definition, be shallow and superficial.
I'd rather see no comments than a slew of shallow comments. Otherwise, I might as well be back on Reddit.
Nope, not true. Allow me to share some knowledge from my own experience:
I make regular posts in a niche sub on reddit focused on female beauty of a particular type. Instead of the usual boring titles typically seen in subs of this kind, I started making posts with titles that included additional information the women chose to share publicly on their Instagram pages. For example, instead of "Jane Doe" or "Fitness model" I would use a title like "Artist and fitness buff Jane Doe", "Swedish-Thai weightlifter Jane Doe", "UK bank manager and fitness model Jane Doe", "Law student and personal trainer Jane Doe", "Air traffic controller Jane Doe", etc. After doing these kind of titles for a while, I noticed something very interesting. Those additional tidbits of info will prompt comments that wouldn't have been made otherwise. Those comments in turn will lead to more comments, which lead to yet more comments, etc. The neat thing is that those title inspired comments and their replies will often turn into some very interesting, informative and entertaining discussions, even though the initial prompt might have been a single word or phrase like "bank manager".
Just like my extended reddit titles, the article summaries here provide additional info that can act as a catalyst for additional interesting discussion that simply would not have happened without the article summary acting as an initial prompt.
And that's his point, isn't it? He'd rather have no discussion than discussion based on a prompt like this; he's not doubting that there's discussion to be had from it, but that he'd prefer discussion from people who've read the article.
Fair enough.
So... what you're saying is... the more information people see about the content you post, the more discussion people post about that content. You're making my point for me! :)
But, basically, people are discussing your titles rather than the pictures themselves. And, if we posted summaries here, people would discuss the summaries rather than the articles themselves. That's not the outcome I'm looking for from my posts. I don't go to the trouble of finding an interesting and informative article which provides a little context about the events for people to read and discuss a three-line summary instead. If that's all people want here... why am I bothering to post at all?
Both, there are also comments made about what's in the pictures.
If you only want people to comment who've read the article, then I can see how that would be an issue. I happen to enjoy interesting comments on my posts even if not directly on topic, but everyone has different likes and dislikes. Ultimately I'm not sure there's much you can do other than maybe requesting people read the article before commenting on your posts.
Yep. I'm sick of opening posts on Reddit and finding the thread full of comments that only barely refer to the article, and are often based just on its headline: New Study Finds That Most Redditors Don’t Actually Read the Articles They Vote On. I'm hoping for something better here.
My original point here, way up-thread, was that I don't believe people should be posting summaries on any articles on Tildes. I don't think that practice is necessary or desirable on a website that's supposedly aiming for high-quality discussion.
the link is for courtesy, the tl;dr for the real value.
I absolutely appreciate that. Most of the articles title says very little of the real content or even worse, are just click bait.
By having a summary of the article or some quotes that the OP found interesting to discuss, not only it help kickstarting a discussion but also save me time from going to read something that maybe bloated by ads and images when the whole point is just a couple of paragraph.
I've said this already in this thread: I would rather see no comments at all than comments based on a summary. If people aren't going to read the article itself, they can't possibly discuss its contents.
I think it’s a couple of things. First, it’s not like every article gets to the point quickly and gets out. Plenty of articles add details that, while interesting, aren’t necessary to understand the significant points and arguments being made. Granted, not every summary is well done, but if it provides the relevant information more succinctly, is there any harm?
Second, a summary can help readers decide if the article is worth their time. I love sinking my teeth into a really great article. But I’m not going to spend my time on a long article if I’m not that into the subject and it’s not that well written. Same goes for the point above, if I only need to know a little bit in the article to get the point, but it just keeps going on and on. In both these cases, a summary can let me know if diving in will be a good use of my time.
Finally, as a broad concept, I think tildes should stay away from the presumption that good discussion requires extensive prep work. It’s unnecessary (see above) and it’s terribly discouraging to the new users this site wants to draw.
I think there's value in a summary because there's only so much time you can devote to reading per day. For me personally, if an article is so long that it's going to take 45 minutes to read, there had better be some strong indicator that it's worth my time - e.g., it's been highly upvoted by many people, or a trusted friend recommended it, or (in some cases) a summary piques my interest.
I've been focussed on people discussing the articles. I forgot that some people just want to read them.
I'm used to reading headlines to see if the article is about a topic I'm interested in, then reading the first paragraph or two to see if I want to read the whole article - but maybe that approach doesn't work for everyone. Maybe some people need a summary to tempt them. I'll be disappointed if writing summaries becomes a trend on Tildes, but at least now I understand why some people want it.
Thanks for that.
I wouldn't say "just", I want to read and discuss. In fact, it seems kind of wrong to discuss an article without reading it first.
The problem with some long reads is that they're slow burns - the first couple paragraphs don't really evoke exactly what's going on. For example, I enjoyed Promethea Unbound, but you don't really see where it's headed until finishing at least the full first section.
As submitter you wanna in-depth discussion
For readers, someone finds out what they wanted and leave a helpful "summary" in case someone else is in hurry.
I find tl;dr useful if the article is an opinion piece with few facts. If it's a technical or programming post I will read it myself and discuss the content.
I agree that if one wants to discuss an article, then one should read it unless the topic starter (or the group rules) states otherwise.
Maybe there should be a comment tag “Did not read” similar to Noise/Fluff/Joke/etc.
However, article summaries help in making a decision whether to read (and then discuss) or not to read (and then not to discuss).
Some articles come with lots of ads/malware, and some others are paywalled, and posting full texts in comments might be illegal. Maybe there can be group-specific rules as to article sources.
Heyo! Received my invite a moment ago, nice to meet you all.
I’m a student thats looking forward to using Tildes. Currently I’m using my phone to browse around and it’s not bad! Looking forward to any mobile updates.
Anyway, I haven’t browsed the site enough yet, see you all later!
I agree: the mobile experience of this website is very good. I mainly use the desktop version but, when I'm on my phone, it's still a simple and easy user experience.
And I've just found out I can get the 'Solarized Light' theme to display on my phone, as well as on my main computer! (Which raises the question about why my settings don't automatically populate across the two platforms...)
I like it.
It should work on the phone too, you just have to go to Settings there and pick it again, because the theme is stored on the device itself instead of being attached to the account. We could probably make it an account-wide setting as well, but at least for me, I like using a light theme on my desktop and a dark theme on my phone, so I like it being device-specific.
A suggestion that popped up elsewhere at one point is the ability to set an account default theme, and allow that default to be overridden at the device level. Might be worth considering.
You replied before my edit! I had assumed that the setting would automatically populate from one platform to the other, but I hadn't checked the settings on the mobile site itself.
The location of the score box means I basically never vote, I rarely even read the score. I suspect this is a habit from reddit (where the vote arrows are on the left), but I wonder if something could be done to make it more prominent.
That's a good thing, though—one of the biggest problems with reddit is bandwagon voting—making the box out of the way will generally make people only vote when they feel something is worth a vote, not on popular opinion.
You read left to right, so you see the score and the voting button after at least reading the title (rather than just glancing at it)
That makes sense, but at least in my case I end up completely forgetting that voting is even a thing. Like I'll see a good post, maybe leave a reply, then just navigate away. Perhaps this isn't an issue, but I thought it may be worth mentioning!
I think that's deliberate, so that the act of voting has more gravitas
Yeah, it's deliberate. It's another one of those "it's a feature, not a bug" things. It encourages reading the comment before making any preconceived judgments based on the vote count (or lack thereof).
I'm referring to posts / threads / submissions (the top level thing), not comments. The position of the comment vote button is fine for exactly the reasons you mentioned imo.
Ah, right, my mistake! But yeah, the vote button for topics is positioned as such with the same idea in mind. I do agree that it's often easy to forget to vote, however :)
Same problem here, I read the title, then read all the text, then read some comments and when I think it is of good quality and interesting I scroll to the bottom to leave a comment, and then I forget to vote because the vote button was all the way up to the right of the title. I think it should be below the text or link posted.
Pretty much just got here, as I received an invite about an hour ago. Really excited to check this site out! One of my biggest complaints about reddit was the downvoting, considering it was widely misused and abused. I'm super glad that one of the main tenets of this site seems to be only allowing "upvotes." I feel like that goes a really long way in promoting friendly discussion rather than toxic environemts. Hopefully that ends up working out well in the long run!
Hello everyone! I just made this account after receiving the invite code. I am so excited to be a part of the Tildes community!
As I'm exploring around the site, I'm really appreciating how clutter-free and everything seems to be.
I'd just like to mention how I love that everything is carefully considered. It's not a mad dash to do everything differently from the older sites. The recent thread on title editing is a good example where it wasn't just "Reddit doesn't allow title editing, so we'll allow title editing!", you weigh the pros and cons and the ask for input from the community. I hope Tildes continues like that forever.
Is it a feature to put the reply box at the bottom? To make it more difficult and require more interaction? I can see that working ok for now but there are some threads that really don't need to be read all the way through, especially at the second-level. I find myself collapsing top-level comments constantly. Any chance we will one day get the ability to auto-collapse deeper threads, at least after the second level comments? I get that it increases social interaction but at a certain point you'll just piss people off and they'll ignore your intentions and scroll down to the bottom automatically when they get bored.
You want to nudge users to read just a little bit more than they ordinarily would. People can be nudged. But if you shove them, it won't work, I think.
It would be really impressive if you could have an algorithm based on the total number of comments and average depth of comment chains that would automatically and dynamically collapse comments to a certain degree. So in a small, just starting thread, you would see all of the comments unless you had one or two chains of extreme depth, like 6 comments in. That would be really unusual, anyway. In a thread this size, you'd probably see all the second-level comments, but the third-level might not be visible. The fourth would definitely be hidden or somehow de-emphasized by default.
In a bigger, Reddit-sized thread, you might decrease that even more. In a Reddit-default-sized thread from a subreddit with like millions of subs, you'd probably decrease to just the first level.
I'm not sure of the solution, but I think it would be interesting.
It is, however it will not necessarily always be the default like it is now. @deimos has talked about in certain appropriate topics allowing the new top-level comment box to be at the top of the page to encourage new user participation (E.g. In these daily discussion threads) and also allowing the default comment sort to be set to New (E.g. In ongoing news stories so users who post the latest updates will get more visibility).
Many of the issues and ideas you brought up are definitely being considered as well though.
E.g. In especially huge comment sections, like megathreads or ongoing major news events, we had discussed perhaps every #k comments or # hours folding all the comments into their own little discrete sections, shown at the top of the comments page (and collapsed by default) so that it would essentially "refresh" the comments section ever so often to keep it more manageable and allow more visibility for new top-level comments.
Folding incredibly long threads is definitely coming at some point too... right now there is no folding and so long comment chains are incredibly broken as a result. Your idea of folding depth being automatically determined based on total volume of comment and average depth of threads is a neat idea too though.
edit: Some of the other ideas regarding helping manage large comment sections was comment tags (which were removed but are coming back eventually), so 'off-topic', 'joke' and 'meta' comments can be filtered out if users so desire. As well as "whisper" comments where they would be made inside threads but hidden behind a fold by default (perhaps similar to how Slack handles "threads"), so users can still feel comfortable replying with affirmations (e.g. "Thanks!") and off-topic or personal asides but without having them clogging up the main thread.
I wish I had not clicked on that first link. That was terrifying. Also, I didn't know the term was folding. That would have made my post a lot easier!
I like the Slack threading, yes. I think that highly personal interactions should be less visible.
As for comment tags, I feel like that would be really good if limited to certain tags. Free tags on posts sounds really good. Free tags on comments would just be a mess, and it would lead to people making stuff up the way they made up hashtags because they thought it was a funny or quirky way to make a statement. It would probably be funny sometimes, but I bet overall it would really be a pain in the ass. But with maybe 5 or fewer tags to pick from, that would be good. Maybe allowing groups to define a few extra tags as well--for example, if AMA ever came to Tildes, responses should be tagged, and perhaps "questions that get responses" should be tagged (after the fact, of course). No more than 10, total, and that's pushing it.
Yeah, comment tags were boilerplate not user defined like the topic tags. IIRC they were "troll, flame, noise, joke, off-topic" but it was very likely more would have been added (e.g. meta) and perhaps even slightly customized for each group. However before that could happen they had to be temporarily removed due to a bunch of users abusing them when they got in arguments. They will return eventually once action auditing is in place and perhaps even some basic trust mechanics as well, so abusers can be punished by losing trust and perhaps even losing the right to comment tag if they continue to abuse the system.
I’m really liking tildes so far!
Is there a way to post a top-level comment without scrolling to the bottom?
Nope and that is intentional, to get people to read the top-level comments already made before making their own. This will ideally lead to less repetition and as comment sections get longer the value of new top-level comments decreases anyways, as does their chance of actually being seen.
But if you really want to make one anyways, you can always hit END on your keyboard, which in most browsers takes you to the bottom of the page. Mobile you can flick to the bottom pretty easily as well.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for clarifying!
Surely at some point there should be a way, like in Reddit, to hide absurd excess amounts of low-value replies behind an extra click. In a thread this size, it's a bit of a pain--but this would be a medium-sized reddit thread, if that.
I actually just replied to your new top-level comment regarding that before seeing this comment. ;)
I really love Tildes so far!
You mention in the docs wanting to give Tildes the ability to have community trust based moderation (maybe something similar to StackOverflow). Will this community trust come from functionality similar to Karma, and if so how will it be protected against "karma-cows"? Or will it be based on positive feedback on other moderation tasks (sending good reports)?
The docs are your friends; so it's not only karma but another few factors like reporting things consistently and with good accuracy, etc.
If karma is directly tied to producing good content, what's the problem with people getting lots of karma?(I swear there's an xkcd about this, but I can't remember enough of the words to find it.)OTOH, I don't think that votes are really directly correlated with quality of content, even at this early stage, sadly. Maybe I'm wrong - maybe "I use gnome-terminal because it Just Works™" is great content - but I feel like most of the votes it got were purely from it being the first comment on the thread. It would be interesting to see some statistics on the correlation between comment age and comment score; I wonder if Deimos is in a position to do anything like that.
Hmm, if it still shows up while filtering "fortnite", that means that I've screwed something up. The tag hierarchy should definitely work (and I thought I tested it), but maybe I broke something. I'll look into it, but that's definitely the intention - filtering "fortnite" should filter things with exactly the tag "fortnite" as well as all "sub-tags", which are separated with periods. So in theory it would filter things like "fortnite.save the world", "fortnite.battle royale", "fortnite.strategy", etc.
I have been definitely enjoying Tildes. I have a few ideas as to user options and topic view.
Background: I strongly prefer topics and top-level comments sorted chronologically, and I understand that others may have different preferences, and the current defaults are most probably optimal for an average Tildes user.
User option: default group sorting as well as the default time period, which is to be used for all groups where no group-specific setting is provided by the user. As some groups might eventually have their own preferred sorting as well as time period, an extra setting as to whether the user's setting takes precedence might be considered; this applies to the next suggestion as well.
User option: default comment sorting within a topic. One of the most annoying Reddit features is that every time I visit a subreddit, I have to manually re-sort it by New (and in the so-called Redesign, which I do not use, this requires two mouse clicks instead of one). While Tildes allow to save the setting for each group so that it is sufficient to change the preferences once, the comments in each topic are always sorted by votes count.
New comments: it is great that new comments are distinguished by CSS, and that there is a link to the newest comment posted. However, a situation like “200 comments (20 new)” is still a bit difficult to follow. I propose that there be a way (a special link) to view all comments in a topic chronologically, newest first, regardless of the tree structure; I think this could be a special page rather than a new comment sorting way, with a link from each comment to view it in a tree according to the user's preferences.
They've been discussed before, briefly - I don't remember what the conclusion was, but I think they will probably arrive in some form or another eventually.
Yeah, they are definitely coming eventually... but when and how they will be implemented is still undecided yet AFAIK: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/57