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Daily Tildes discussion - general plans for the week
It's been a few weeks since I did this, but I'd like to start getting back into the routine of using the Monday post for a general outline of how I'd like to see the week go.
So for this week, here's my general intentions:
- I added some new groups today, so I'll want to see how those are looking, and think about whether some other adjustments are needed soon.
- I'm planning to make a proper blog post (on blog.tildes.net) about the site being open-sourced tomorrow morning. This may end up getting a burst of attention for the site again if it gets some traction on HN, programming/open-source subreddits, etc. (but it's hard to predict if that will happen or not)
- Related to the above, I think it's about time to start actively trying to bring some more people in again. The site's size has been fairly constant for a few weeks now, and it's been pretty stable in terms of activity, so I think bringing in more users is a good idea. The blog post may help with this, but we'll also probably do another official invite thread on /r/tildes or look for some other possibilities.
- Various work related to the open-sourcing. There are multiple merge requests open for features/fixes that I need to review, and I'd like to put more work into the documentation, filling out the issue tracker, and so on.
- Get user pages paginated. I think this is my top priority for a feature to implement personally now, and I believe I should be able to do it this week while working on the other items. My current intention is to start out by only allowing users to look through their own full history, and leave that for a few days to allow people to go back and edit/delete anything they want to. After giving a bit of time for that, I intend to enable it for everyone. We can talk a bit more about this, but that's my current plan.
Feedback and suggestions for those plans (or other ones, if you think I'm prioritizing the wrong things) are welcome, thanks.
For DF: if you write it, you'll definitely have a very interested reader here, especially after the DF thread in ~games.
I posted a few more recent numbers in Friday's daily discussion. Overall, whether those are good numbers or not kind of depends on your frame of reference. For "relatively new reddit alternative" they're very good; some of the other attempts like Saidit.net and Raddle have extremely low activity, even though they're public and there aren't any technical barriers to people signing up.
So that's great to see, and indicates that there's already a level of interest/participation on Tildes that other similar sites just haven't been able to reach at all. However, as a more general number it's certainly still very low—below even fairly small subreddits and other more established sites like Hacker News. That's not a big concern yet though, it's very good for only having about 5000 registrations total, and I'm sure it'll only keep going up as we get more people in.
Actually quite a bit higher than Lobsters already, it looks like. I can use the "Newest Comments" page on Lobsters to see all of the comments posted, and there are 20 comments per page. It gets past "24 hours ago" on page 9, so they've had about 180 comments posted in the last day. Tildes has had 431 as of right now.
I'd say that interest has been explosive a few times, like when we had several hundred invite requests in /r/tildes in 15 minutes due to some attention in an /r/technology thread, but the growth itself has been controlled. That's good though, and why I wanted to start out being invite-only. I think the site would have fallen apart pretty quickly if tens of thousands of users had rushed in.
I agree with you that the activity is a really good sign so far though, which is why I've really tried to emphasize that even if the actual numbers have been drifting down a bit, I really don't think it's anything to be concerned about. This is only the very beginning, and it's already going well.
It's possible, but it's tricky because there are always different ways to view that info, so I think just blocking it from the history is a bit of a false sense of privacy. For example, we're definitely going to have a search system eventually, and I'm sure the search system will support "search by author". So what happens if you have "only show 1 month in my history" and someone searches for
author:hungariantoast? Should they only see one month's worth of posts there too? Probably not, but then that's basically a trivial circumvention for everyone's privacy setting.Yeah, user history in general is a topic that I'm really torn about. There are a lot of good, legitimate uses for it, but then you also have all these stories of "people dug up my dumb tweets from 5-10 years ago and I got fired over them". I'd like to see if we can figure out a reasonable approach for it, but I'm really not sure what that would be.
One thing we've talked about is a sort of "disassociate" function where people can remove their username/attachment to particular posts, but still leave the content itself accessible. That will probably help in some ways, but wouldn't have any effect on things like external archiving sites that still know who originally made the post.
And doesn't it also foster a bit more care in posting if you know your entire post history is visible? I know it does for me on reddit, because I very rarely delete a comment, so there's a whole lot of post history available. Thoughtfulness in posting seems to be in the spirit of Tildes, so it's probably a net positive that everyone knows anyone can review their post history. It might even be a valid way in the future to review someone for reputation (or whatever it's going to eventually be called), or for consideration as a mod of some sort.
Yes please, always wanted to get into that game but have been too intimidated to get much farther then generating a level
thanks, I’ll probably give the game another go tonight thanks to this post :)
I would enjoy the DF guide. I followed the quickstart guide on the wiki but I don't have any idea where to go from there.
On the open-source side of things, a blog post sounds great, and I hope it does catch some traction on HN/reddit. Keeping the issues tagged and organized can seem like a full-time job, but it's really a treat to be able to take a quick look and see exactly what's being worked on, what's high priority, etc. Official invite threads are often extremely popular, so if you're looking to get people in, that does sound like a simple way to do it. Great work!
Since this blogpost will definitely contribute to more buzz for the site, are you planning on making it publicly read-only soon? I think simply allowing people to easily lurk and tell their friends will be a major driving factor, and allow for invites to be more angled towards people who want to actually contribute to the site.
I know I'll definitely be posting about this blog post over on reddit whenever it comes out. See you then!
Yeah, I think being publicly visible will be the next major "phase". There are a few other things that I want to get done before starting on that, and I'm also mildly concerned about the traffic/load from being publicly accessible so I want to improve some monitoring and related systems first. So it'll probably still be a little while yet, but definitely one of the main objectives for the near future.
I think it'll be much better for invite "efficiency" though. Right now people need to request an invite to even see what the site looks like and what type of posts are on it. It'll be much better for people to be able to look and only need to try to get an invite if they actually want to participate.
Publicly readable, on-invite writable sounds like a fair compromise for now. Hopefully you're able to handle being potentially swamped with invitation requests :)
Probably not the best place to post this, but it relates well to a daily discussion of the site: I really think more views or a better default view are needed for the front page. In comments, there is a very pleasant contrast between text and background (not sure if it's simple black on white, but it's very readable), while the front page lacks contrast and looks "washed out" for lack of a better design term. I've tried the alternative views, and the dark is pitch-black with white text (very harsh), while the solarized white is probably closest to what I'm referring to: more contrast to make quick browsing easier.
Are you working with any UI folks or design people for better view choices? I think it's important that it look its best before being publicly visible -- I've shown people screenshots and they all seem to react with "how can you read that?"
I'm not really working with anyone, no. I've had a few vague offers from people to help with UI/design, but not really many concrete suggestions yet. Hopefully the open-sourcing will help there, since people can directly open merge requests with changes instead of needing to try to make suggestions in a more roundabout way like sending me screenshots.
Is there something in particular that you find hard to read on the front page? I know there are a few things that are small or lower contrast, but most of them are things that aren't really intended to be "read". For example, the short text excerpt from text posts isn't great for reading, but it's mostly just intended as a quick preview and you can click it to actually read the post in larger, higher contrast text. I'm sure there are things to improve, but it's a tough balance between de-emphasizing some things, and having the page seem extremely cluttered/overloaded if all the information is given more weight.
Maybe it's an idea to outline places to look for new members? You've mentioned HN and Reddit but there might other forums and communities with potential new members.
What's the target "commentary demographic" with a community like Tildes? Reddit has a burgeoning user base with some great communities and other not-so-great communities. How do we "select" good users without handpicking them?
Given the current invitation mechanics you already have to pick to some degree. Other then that I'd say Tildes is currently specifically focused on respectful discussion and stronger curation. I think there was a fair degree of success in recruiting people from /r/truereddit, maybe similar communities will also be interested?
Granted, I haven't been here long, but maybe therefore a permanent loose-invitation system isn't such a bad thing for the long term quality of Tildes. If a user wants to join, they can either petition for an invite from Deimos/a future team of people who hand out invites, or request an invitation from an existing user, who would knowingly give out an invite, aware that their standing rests on the quality of the user requesting the invite.
Maybe this is too regimented and strict. I'm just wondering if it's possible to strike a balance between "free for all" and "invitations required".
Invites on private trackers work similarly, and it seems to uphold quality pretty well. Your "invite tree" is tracked, and if you have a pattern of inviting users who break the rules, your invites can be cut off, or in extreme circumstances you can even get banned.
I'm glad Tildes are open-sourced, I bet it also helps you with building the site. And I suppose it will boost Tildes popularity.
But I just have to ask - do you plan an API? I know you have other priorities (search, pagination on profiles, ...), but I didn't find it at GitLab, so I'd like to know, if you even plan it. If so, when, approximately (month, half year, year, ...)?
It's definitely planned (it was mentioned in the announcement post, even), but it's a very vague plan at this point. As for when it will probably happen, it most likely depends if other people get involved that want to work heavily on figuring out the details of it and making it happen.
If it's up to me personally, it'll probably be at least half a year away since there's a lot of other high-priority things I need to do, but it could definitely be sooner if other people do the bulk of the work on it.
What are your thoughts on bots? Especially ones which post comments. Given how I've seen bots used over at Reddit, it strikes me that usually they're designed as a shim or patch over an unsolved problem which could otherwise be implemented at a community/Tilde-level basis within the Tildes source code. For example, acronym bots or conversion bots—these could be Tildes extensions which are enabled on a per-community basis, or otherwise simply provided by the client through a browser plugin.
As someone that created some of the most prominent reddit bots, it feels a bit weird for me to say, but... I hate most bots and think reddit should have cracked down on them long ago. The amount of useless noise comments in threads due to bots is pretty ridiculous now.
Bots can be great, but only for certain uses. I haven't thought too much about the specifics yet, but I think we could probably come up with a good set of rules/guidelines for what makes an acceptable bot. Like you said, I think a lot of the "good" applications for bots are probably things that could also be implemented more directly as well, but it's nice to have the API and allow people to do it with bots when that's not possible (or is particularly inconvenient for some reason).
Search / takeout / history?
I'm looking for a comment of mine that's outside the "recent activity" window.
Is there any way to aaccess this? Plans to enable this?
That's the "Get user pages paginated." point at the bottom (or that's one part of it, anyway).
Ah. Yeah, that'd be good. ;-)
I’m so excited to be here! Quick question: how do we think about users registering common usernames and being non-existent during this Alpha period? Have a name I usually snag as an early adopter, and it makes me a little sad seeing a name Id use with one post 60 days ago.