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General Tildes feedback/questions thread + invites given to everyone
It's been quite a while now since we had a general feedback thread. So if there's anything you want to discuss, ask about, suggest, etc. but didn't feel like starting a dedicated thread for it, feel free to do that here.
Also, speaking of things that I haven't done in a while, I've topped everyone back up to 5 invite codes. Please don't feel obligated to find ways to use them, but if there are people you want to invite, that would be great. You can get the codes here: https://tildes.net/invite
(Sorry for taking a while to respond to some of these "larger" questions, I was out earlier and didn't want to write replies from my phone)
It's been mostly fine overall. I've been involved in a lot of communities over the years, and nothing's really been too far out of the ordinary. Maybe a little overly-dramatic here and there for how small the site is, but some of that is the site mechanics, and some is that the people attracted to Tildes early on will largely be ones that are passionate about online communities. That passion's going to come out in various ways, and sometimes it'll stir up drama.
One thing that's felt a little more difficult/unusual for me is the fact that it's very "general". Previously I've mostly been involved in communities that had a pretty specific subject to focus on, so it's a bit different when everything is potentially on-topic and you don't really have the angle of wondering whether a particular subject is "appropriate".
Casual user here. Loving the mobile browser interface for the site. It's simple and easy, but looks good. Kudos
Emperor Marcus Aurelius? He does offer snippets of his Meditations on the regular. I just hope his succession plan is better.
... and perhaps spending a few less years fighting brutal wars on the German border
From what I can see, the thing that will make or break Tildes are the trust mechanisms. I can live without the ability to save and hide posts, user tagging or 2FA, but if there is no effective way to moderate the community, sooner or later everything will go to shit. After you open sourced the code, updates are coming out faster thanks to user contributions, but none of them seem to be very critical features. They improve user experience, sure, but it feels like you are avoiding the elephant in the room. I know that the trust mechanisms are hard to flesh out and probably hard to code, but that's why we should talk about them more. I hope that there will be more detailed discussion and planning on specific mechanisms - such as how the comment tags are going to work.
As Tildes grows, you will have to spend more time moderating posts. If you get the comment tags out soon, it might lessen your workload and give you time to tweak them before Tildes gets too big. So I guess my question is: do you have a solid idea on how some of these mechanics are going to work, and are you planning to implement them soon?
Yes and no—the whole trust concept is absolutely important, but it's aimed far more towards long term issues and needs. Tildes is tiny right now, it only has a few hundred active users at this point. It's far more important to worry about making sure that people want to participate (and keep participating) here right now than trying to figure out how the site will work if it's 100x this size. To put it more bluntly: it won't matter how amazing and complex of a trust system Tildes has if it doesn't have any users.
I think a pretty common mistake that sites make is forgetting that they need to build a site that works while it's small before figuring out how it will work when it's big. They worry about pre-planning for complex problems that won't be relevant until the site is very large, and when (if) it ever gets to that point it may not even resemble what they thought it would, because people and communities are unpredictable.
The group hierarchy is a good comparison, I think. Yes, it will definitely run into a bunch of weird issues and edge cases if it starts spreading out into a giant tree, but it's really not worth worrying too deeply about all of those potential issues yet when we're only getting about 5 topics posted per day in the top-level groups. It's certainly still good to think about what might go wrong, but not worth building complex systems in advance.
You mentioned the open-source contributions as well, and I think it's important to recognize that it's a pretty different situation than "normal" development. People are volunteering their time and figuring out how to contribute particular features that they're excited about, which naturally won't necessarily have any relation to what Tildes needs most urgently overall. It's a very different dynamic for development; I can't assign specific work to open-source contributors or say things like "is that really what you should be working on?" They're building things that they want to, which are still extremely valuable contributions that I want to support and encourage as much as possible.
To add on to this, with so few active users on the site we're not past the point of Eternal September. For now we can self-regulate without any special moderation tools.
I can't wait to say "remember tildes before 10/12/18 when there weren't thousands of redditors pouring in every day and ~Switzerland not only didn't exist, but wasnt the largest board?"
Is that December or October?
if you're European, it depends on when you're going to invite your fellow Swiss hooligans onto this site. if American, October so we can complain earlier.
I was hinting at the ambiguity of the date format you used. It could be the 10th of December of 2018, the 18th of December of 2010, or the 12th of October of 2018. Since Tildes didn't exist on 2010, then we can rule that one out. But it's still ambiguous as to whether you were referring to October or December 2018.
I haven't thought about it that way. My reasoning was along the lines of "it won't matter how many cool features we have if the community is not great". I guess it's a careful balance between quality and quantity.
I think I could have worded my original comment better, and I'll try to do better this time. I didn't mean that I think you should build up a complete trust model, but I do think you should try to get the comment tags up and running soon (and from other comments it seems you plan to do so already). From what I understand, you prioritized building site features to increase convenience and encourage people to participate. Personally though, I was never put off by the lack of features - I knew what I was getting into when I signed up for the alpha. However, the drama threads last week put me off more than anything else. This is my personal experience, and it may differ from others, but I think cultivating a nice community does better to attract people than more site features. People will post more if the site culture is friendly. So I think I was trying to say that building better moderation tools will help the site better than ordinary site features.
Another thing, it seems that my last comment came off as pointing a finger at the contributors, and I didn't mean to be dismissive of their contributions (pinging @Celeo too). My concerns were primarily directed to you, and I'm glad that Tildes development is moving along faster due to open sourcing.
All good, I interpreted the question as honest curiosity, so I was happy to share some insight into the process.
I'm seeing the hints of an Agile approach here. ;) (Which is a good thing!)
Slightly unrelated, but just wanted to add that I have an open merge request for saving topics/comments, am working on hiding posts (waiting for the saving merge request to be reviewed, as the code is very similar), and 2FA is already available.
I took my examples from the issues board :]
Part of the reasoning behind community-submitted features seeming simpler is that the devs are jumping into a new codebase; it's rough to do so while simultaneously working on a big task. Easing in is easier. Additionally, having community members contribute work means that Deimos is signing up to potentially not have that feature done any time soon - it's work that he doesn't have to do (until the review cycle), but it's also work that he can't really get out at a certain time. I'm guessing that is why most of the moderation-specific work has been done by Deimos himself - he identifies a need and needs to solve for it, so he's got to do it himself. For future work, he might still want to get community discussion on what it'll look like; can't schedule someone to work on something that's not decided upon.
I'm also interested in hearing the plan forward.
How have traffic levels been since the last post?
I don't really track traffic, but here's the counts of topics/comments each day for August before today:
Pretty graph version.
This is always the case in communities though. A very small percentage of users will submit content, as tildes is already small this percentage is mostly made up by the same dozen or so recognisable usernames.
Yep! The 90-9-1 Rule for Participation Inequality in Social Media and Online Communities
For reference, here's some data: users who've made the most topics.
New topic count and how many users have made that amount of new topics: https://i.imgur.com/qEsM4t2.png
New topic count (min 4) and how many users have made that amount of new topics: https://i.imgur.com/3cvODvz.png
EDIT: Disclaimer: I'm collecting this data; I can be wrong.
Damn, I need to pump up my numbers.
How do you know where you are on that scale? @Celeo left our names off!
I can count my posts on my users page. There's 17 of them.
I'd love to see a histogram plotting "# of topics posted" with buckets containing the # of users who post that many topics.
That's a great idea; I'll see what I can whip up.
I think I did that right, @teaearlgraycold - see above.
Thanks! I was thinking more so along the lines of having buckets for counts in groups of 10 or 20, including 0-size buckets. That way you could see the gap between 265 and 569 visually (there'd be a bunch of empty 10-wide spots in between them). This is still great, though.
I would guess that User #1 is @Deimos himself. What with regularly posting topics here in ~tildes.official, as well as having an incentive to post content to keep his own website active, and being the longest-standing user here, it's not hard to see him clocking up 500+ topic posts.
Beyond the table (and I added some charts), it's a pretty steady decline from there, rank 15 is 53 topics, rank 20 is 48, rank 30 is 32. Handful more users who've posted topic counts in the 20s and teens, and then a lot of people who've posted in the single digits.
Is that topic count for the whole history of Tildes, or for a particular time period?
As far back as we have access to, as far as I can tell.
You're being misled by the scale of that graph, because @teaearlgraycold put comments and topics on the same graph.
You can see the same peaks and valleys in this graph of the topics by day.
You could have them on the same graph and different scales if you align one of them right and the other left (and obviously adjust one's scale so they're at a similar peak or valley). That's how I'd do the comparison.
You're absolutely right! https://imgur.com/a/3iOivHL
I assumed that topics and comments would track with each other, but it's still nice to see them alongside each other like that.
The peaks seem centered around the mid-week (Tuesday through Thursday). Perhaps most of the comments on Tildes are from people bored at work.
This is a pattern that is observed and often discussed over at Reddit: the weekends are quieter. Most people use Reddit when they're at work or uni/college, rather than during their free time.
I assume the same applies to Tildes.
It's not that wild. Every Saturday and Sunday, the comments take a large dip and rebound during the week.
This data really highlights that weekends are much quieter - like that topic where someone noticed it was quiet on the weekend.
I'm doing alright, still just generally feeling like I'm falling behind on all the different things I want to do, but I think that'll just be how it always is.
And yeah, I think switching activity to all time is definitely feasible, but we probably need a few other features/adjustments first. Ability to hide individual posts probably isn't too far off, @what has a merge request open for saving/bookmarking posts that I need to review, and hiding is really similar to saving in terms of how it works internally. So once saving is in place I think we should be able to get hiding working before too long as well.
Do you think a default activity sort will work well if Tildes gets to 10x its current active user count? It seems to me that activity sorting would be far too noisy once more users are posting comments.
No, I don't think it'll be feasible as a default sort for very long overall. I think it'll still be a great option and work well inside individual groups where people want to try to keep up with all the discussions on a particular subject, but for the home page where you're combining many groups together it'll probably just be overwhelming once the activity increases much more.
Would you consider an outright copy of the reddit "hot" algorithm a good option? Or would you prefer to keep it simple and sort by votes at that point?
Having read your other comments in this thread I understand that we don't need to decide this now. I'm just curious.
I'm not sure, but I don't think that reddit's "hot" method is actually very good. It tries to be a compromise between showing what's currently popular and what was popular earlier in the day, but it doesn't do either of those very well.
I think a lot of the need for "hot" comes from reddit not being able to do more granular sortings like "top from the last 4 hours" or similar - a lot of the time when I check the site after not looking for a few hours, that's what I'd actually want it to be, but there's no way to do it.
I suppose the hot sort might also be designed to keep you on the site as long as possible. That's probably not the goal here.
How about a scaled activity sort where topics that already have a lot of comments take more to bump? If a topic that has a thousand comments gets ten more that's not very significant. At that point it's more likely than not people repeating things that have been said a hundred times in the thread already. But if a topic with twenty comments gets ten more that's a major increase and those comments are a lot more likely to be fresh.
One way to do it would be instead of sorting by the timestamp of the most recent comment you sort by the X percentile comment. So if X is 10% then a thread with 70 comments would be sorted by the timestamp of its 7th most recent comment.
Yeah, something like that is certainly possible and might be worth a try, but I think I'd want to implement it as a separate sort. I've said it a few times before, but one of the things I think is important is implementing things in a "dependable" way. That is, if someone uses activity sort, they should be able to be confident that they'll see every new post bumped when it gets a new comment and they can use it to keep up with all comments in a particular group (or even all of their subscriptions) if they want to do that.
One of the things I really dislike about a lot of modern sites is that they implement algorithmic sorting methods where the users can't feel confident that they're actually seeing everything because it's unknown how it works and what criteria cause a post to actually show up or change ranking.
Doubling up on this, default all time sort + a hide button would make this place much better.
Yeah that's my preference as well. Activity + All Time default, but ideally with a hide button for topics I am tired of seeing pop-up again and again.
I'm new here and noticed a thing that's probably just right to mention here: right handed comment collapsing. The - button is on the left and is a bit inconvenient to reach when having phone in right hand. Maybe there could be a setting to put collapse button to the right, or empty area there could do it. Of course not a very important feature, just an idea.
The whole title bar of a post should be a link to collapse (outside of the name, link, and parent buttons) IMO
Personally, I prefer a discrete button since I absolutely loathe when sites make entire background elements and whitespace do something on click when there is no clear indication they will do so. The new reddit redesign does that, where clicking anywhere in the submission area whitespace brings you to the comment section and it's super annoying.
I agree, making the collapse button easier to hit (bigger separation from user name & on both sides) seems pretty handy though?
I've been thinking about having some settings for "flipping" elements for that. Currently the topic voting buttons are way more convenient for right-handed people on mobile, but (like you said) it's the opposite for comments with the vote and collapse buttons both on the far left side. It would probably be neat (and not even too difficult) to allow people to flip the elements in the opposite direction, possibly even only on mobile and not affecting larger screens.
Please do this sometime in the future,rather than all on the right side. I understand its difficult for right handed people to click the collapse button,but as a left hander,its quite nice.
Its probably just plain easier for you to hold it left handed(off hand),I use my right to swipe/click/close often. Not necessarily because its set up that way,but because its easier to use my free hand(left hand holding the phone,size of screen,etc). I do appreciate devs that add an ambi function in their sites/apps,tho.
One thing I really like about collapse being on the left side is it's easier to collapse many long threads while scrolling down. Hacker News introduced collapsing on the right side, and I find it more cumbersome as the variable name lengths are always moving the collapse button.
Making the entire bar collapsible as discussed above may address both issues, though.
I just wanted to say again: Thanks for Tildes, and two other things:
.4rem margin-right on the search input is better than my suggested .5rem. I say that completely honestly. It really is the little things.
I would love it if you played fast and loose with us, the alpha users, as far as moderation and content experiments. Try ideas out on us, like a modified comment tagging system if you have even marginal improvement ideas.. or anything regarding the trust system. At this point I would love to see new features in those areas tried out, even if they don’t stay in the system permanently.
edit: removed extra word
edit2: @cirrus’s comment is along the same lines as mine, but with much better word stuff.
Yeah, almost everything related to spacing (margins, padding, etc.) is either 0.2rem, 0.4rem, or 1rem. I think it's not super important overall, but it's probably good to try to be consistent about it as much as possible.
Oh, duh.. sorry, that was you. Thanks!
What do you think about being more transparent with finances? You could have a "monthly donation goal" to show how much you have vs. how much you need, and list a surplus amount that goes into following months or other unplanned expenses.
I'd definitely like to be transparent about it (and the announcement post specifically mentioned that I want to do that). For now, things aren't very exciting - donation volume is fairly low (but still quite good for how small the site is) and I'm not paying myself yet, so it's mostly just sitting there. When things get more active and there are more expenses to worry about it'll probably be more interesting to show, but I agree that it would be great to keep everyone more informed about it.
I would love to see more transparency
Well, at the moment, AFAIK there isn't really a whole lot of "finances" to be transparent about. Tildes Patreon is only sitting at $425/month which Deimos has mentioned covers the OVH server rental expenses but definitely not a livable wage for himself.
p.s. Transparency will no doubt come in the future though since Tildes is a not-for-profit corporation registered in Canada, which have annual financial disclosure requirements:
http://laws.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-7.75/page-18.html#h-22
https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/cd-dgc.nsf/eng/cs05011.html
I'm aware of the patreon but it would be nice to see numbers for other sources as well, even if minor.
Tildes is part of the not-for-profit Canadian company Spectria (that I assume @Deimos made given that I can't find much information about it) so I would personally like to see financial transparency. As an example, the software freedom conservacy which is also a not-for-profit company (USA) has transparent finances.
That said I'm not concerned about finances specifically, I would just like to see more transparency generally.
Edit: oops took too long to reply, you mentioned it being not-for-profit. I wasn't aware it was actually a requirement, that's great to hear.
Yeah, Spectria is the non-profit behind Tildes. It's listed on the donation page: https://docs.tildes.net/donate#who-am-i-donating-to
And don't get me wrong, I too am 100% behind more transparency... I just don't think it would be particularly useful or interesting at this early a stage, is all.
Keep in mind how early this is too. The Software Freedom Conservatory page you linked lists all their fiscal year reports, but Tildes/Spectria hasn't even existed for a year yet.
Well then, here's to many more years to report transparently! ;)
There's been occasional, but ongoing, talk about how this site is moderated. Most people (myself included) are happy with our Benevolent Dictator Deimos moderating everything (there are, of course, always going to be exceptions, but that's par for the course).
However, it's simply not scalable for you to personally moderate every argument and every controversy here as the site continues to grow. There's a big plan for how moderation will work in the long-term future, and we've got you in the short-term, but that medium-term transition could be a bit tricky.
How are you planning to handle the transition from one moderator to multiple moderators? Will you need to build a trust system first? When might this become necessary?
I think the next stage will probably be almost like a rudimentary trust system, where we re-enable the comment tags and start using them as a bit of distributed "moderation". For example, maybe we can start with something very basic where if 2 or 3 people tag the same comment in a certain way, that could trigger things like a report to me, or even a removal or rate-limit in the relevant thread if it seems to be an obvious issue.
It likely won't include any sort of automatic trust adjustments like the overall concept does, but some manual adjustments (or removal of ability to use the tags from people that abuse them) might be possible and get us a decent amount of the way there for how small the site is now.
Interesting. Thank you.
As a quality of life improvement:
It would be awesome to have an option where opening a link post will first go to comments then automatically redirect to the link; so I can use the backbutton to read the comments rather then having to open one tab for each.
It can get annoying when using anything other then a mouse, and looking through tabs for the right comment thread when say opening 3 links form the front page generates 6 tabs to cycle through. Often times I will just open comments and read that similar to reddit browsing, that's no good for quality discussion.
Would also be very usefull when mobile browsing by improving the flow for example
- is a click and < is back the button
front page - article < comments < front page.
vs
front page - article < front page - comments < front page
Keep in mind clicks are harder to do on mobile then the back button.
It also subtilly encourages first reading the article before diving right into comments.
I'm not sure if this is an issue that should be put somewhere else but;
I have a double first line on every text post on the front page, the first like looks like a short form summary then right below it there is the whole post repeating that first line again. I'm on win 10 using edge if that's relevant.
This is what this post looks like on the front page to me right now.
Finally what an awesome site and community! I've actually started using it more than reddit now, with hermit set up on the my phone it's perfect.
Oh weird, it's happening on my version of Edge too. I wonder when that started happening? I tested a few months ago and everything was fine on Edge. :(
I will make an issue on gitlab for it in the morning (I am currently away from my Desktop). Thanks for mentioning the problem.
Created a Gitlab Issue for it:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/243
Thanks again for pointing it out.
Thanks for creating Tildes!
While I expect you don't want it to happen often, would an indicator on the front page with a little lock on it be good for locked posts? I'm not sure if it would be useful or just be clutter.
Also, any possibility of getting user tags built in to the site? I know an extension already exists for it.
User tagging is requested at https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/187
Hi, thanks for all your work (sounds like a quick greeting but I really do mean it! Appreciate it a ton!). (1.a)How are things going, (1.b)what are your plans, (1.c)what do you wish people would help out with?
I'm enjoying discussions here, usually some valuable information, but i've seen a few things now that I wish I could've reported, so I guess my question is (2)how are the plans for rudimentary reporting tools going?
Also (3)there was that thread a while back asking for mods etc; I didn't see anything beyond a few individual responses in there, so are there plans to mention who's modding what, and what their tasks/powers are?
I already posted a couple of other comments in here about how I think it's going, so you can check those ones if you want a bit more detail, but overall I think it's going pretty well. There's a ton to do, but I'm pretty happy with the level of activity so far. One of the hardest things is just getting enough activity to reach that critical mass where people will keep coming back to the site and not drift away from boredom, and we're doing quite well for that for how early on this is.
So many other "reddit alternative"-type sites just stagnate at only ever getting ~20 comments posted per day and never manage to push past that point. On that note, one of the things I need help with is just for people to make a bit more effort than they usually would to try to post topics and get involved in discussions. It's a bit of a feedback loop where existing activity causes other people to be more willing to post themselves, and lack of it makes people more hesitant.
I'm hoping to have a really basic report function done in the next week so that it doesn't feel as "heavy" as people sending me a message when they want to report things, and as I've mentioned elsewhere, I think we need to get the "comment tags" functionality re-enabled very soon. Between those two things I think it should be a lot better for dealing with problems as they come up.
Most of it was done through messages, but I gave quite a few people the ability to adjust other people's tags, and probably about half as many the ability to move topics as well. Overall, I'm not really planning to show exactly who has the ability to do anything. If they choose to actually take action, that will be shown in the Topic Log on that particular post, but I think overall I'd like to try to stay away from treating it as "moderation" and as something particularly significant. Of course some actions will be far more impactful and we'll probably have to treat those differently, but for things like minor tag adjustments I think it would be a lot better to just start having it feel like part of the natural process of using the site.
Please consider making them invisible to the reader. I've seen the threads where they were enabled, and argued here before that they lead to prejudicial judgement of comments. Seeing a comment a reader is yet to read marked
Noise x4orRant x6causes that reader to pre-judge the comment, and the taggers of course carry their own biases, so that what's "Noise" to one reader might be relevant to me, or answer some question. I'd much rather read that comment and form my own judgement.Or user A dislikes user B, and tags his posts
Noiseon sight, at least until moderation or reputation limits it. Invisible tags could still be used to sort or hide comments, without causing pre-judgement of their content, and good content is in the spirit of Tildes. Let the votes decide what the community thinks that is.There are a couple ways to avoid prejudice here.
First, tags on new comments could be hidden for a while (similar to score hiding on Reddit) to discourage early bandwagoning.
Second, tags can be listed at the bottom of the comment with the vote score, rather than at the top. This means the user either has to read much of the comment, or they have to jump to the bottom of the comment to check other users' reactions to it, and if the user is going to do that they were likely looking to be prejudiced in the first place.
I'm not a fan of keeping tags completely invisible eternally - after all, isn't the point of "noise" and "rant" to be "downvotes with reason" rather than a report system? They're supposed to let users filter out bad comments if they want to.
This is closer to my thinking as well. Keeping the tags permanently invisible allows them to do their job without triggering the bandwagon effect. It makes them a quiet feature rather than a loud one.
Tags should operate like a little vote-driven automoderator bot. Define a tag, once a post hits X number of tag votes it crosses a threshold, that triggers an effect (such as auto-collapsing the comment). There can be tiers as well, so that when you hit 2X vote threshold the tag does something else.
Tags could be defined sitewide and per-group, thresholds have sitewide defaults and trusted users get to set them up for their groups however they like. I think we're going to end up with some common sitewide tags and also certain groups will want their own custom tags with custom effects. It'd be nice to have these exist in some kind of automoderator-like framework, defining the tags and the thresholds and the actions so that everyone can experiment.
Only trusted users / mods would see the tags in the groups where they have sufficient trust. That should allow them to figure out what works and what doesn't, and set up thresholds accordingly.
That begs the question, what tags do we want, and what do we want them to do? We should probably have a not-so-daily discussion about it and see what people come up with as candidates for the first batch of comment-moderating tags.
Peripheral vision is still going to pick up those tags on a shorter comment. On longer comments, yes they'd be at the bottom, but I'm still against it because your opinion can have a snap-change if you see
Noise x15. It reinforces the groupthink.Hidden for a while doesn't do much for a reader who only comes here every few days.
You could still sort with tags, filter them out, etc., they just don't need to be seen. So if you sort out
Rant, you would miss those, but you'd also be relying on the judgement of others as to what constitutes a rant. I would never filter like that because I want to see the entire discussion, good and bad. Anything that is poor quality or in bad faith would move to the bottom for lack of votes.Are there plans to make a mobile (android) app? I would definitely participate more if I could access the site easily on my phone.
From the "technical goals" page of the docs:
Tildes is just being developed by Demios at the moment so it'd slow things down a bunch if he had to make mobile apps too!
I did that in Firefox on Android, and Chrome can, too.
I tried using Hermit but it makes Tildes buggy sometimes. for example if you load a thread and then tap an outbound link, it won't load. I don't have that problem when using a browser shortcut.
change hermit to open external links in your browser
I did, and the same thing happens. links open fine from the home page, but tapping on them when in the thread already doesn't do anything. I'll just stick to using the
ChromeBromite shortcut.I don't know, I've been using it for 2 weeks or so and its been fine.
It does what reddit has failed to accomplish in what, 13 years? I couldn't believe the first time I played around on Tildes on my phone. It's about the best mobile site I've used, across a lot of sites. To borrow a phrase, it just works.
In addition to design, I regularly use Tildes on 2G data while in the EU, and it loads fater than Google news. It’s nearly miraculous.
Probably one of the significant reasons for that is lack of need to advertise and track everything possible. The vast majority of other websites are for profit and they get bloated using the cheapest (new "cool" web frameworks) development techniques while implementing intense tracking of users and techniques to keep them engaged.
Agreed the only thing I miss from an app is to swipe right to the main page and left for the sidebar
I just added the browser shorcut to my homescreen. works pretty well for now.
This is a bit of a sillier/less important question/bit of feedback, but is there any reason that the search button has a transparent/white background instead of being filled in with #268bd2 like every other button on the site?
This is a very good question that I thought about but was too cowardly to ask. Didn’t even try to mock it up. I assumed Deimos tried it and it made the page look out of balance or something?
It was just to try to give it less visual emphasis since it's always on the screen. Blue buttons are "primary" buttons, so those are generally used for whatever is the "main action".
I agree that it looks a little strange though, maybe it shouldn't have a border, or maybe a different, lighter background.
The 'password exists in a data breach' is still confusing to some new users during registration. It's not that surprising since Tildes may be the only site doing that kind of check. Perhaps expand that message so they understand that they've been hacked, and send them on to haveibeenpwned.com or something similar to get more details.
They most likely haven't been hacked or directly exposed in a breach themselves. In the vast majority of cases all that message means is that the password they chose to use is a common one and was used by someone else that was exposed in a data breach, so they need to come up with a better, more unique one. But I agree the message could probably use some clarity.
I feel that getting to the settings menu (especially on mobile) is a bit difficult.
Sidebar>User page>Sidebar>Settings.
I think this bears fixing. People have been here for months and are still shocked to find out there's a settings page and four color themes. We need to make the settings for the site/user accounts more accessible. Right now they are kinda buried in the interface where it's easy to overlook them. I'd add a little 'settings' link right up by the username.
Today I posted a link, and someone let me know it had actually been posted a few days before. What about warning the user that a link has already been posted when they go to post, saying "Do you want to post this again"?
If you go to the tildes gitlab “development” board you can see all the ‘in progress’ and ‘high priority’ features and bug fixes listed there.
The only thing that feels off/bad to me so far is marking responses as "read." If I go to the comment in question it should do that automatically, I think.
There's an option in your profile to do that actually. I think it should be enabled by default.
Not quite, the option available will mark everything as read whenever you open the notifications page. There's an issue open for automatically marking the ones you click on (including voting or replying), but it's a bit tricky to do well.
That marks them all read when you view your notifications page.
I think @knocklessmonster wants it to mark as read when you visit it directly or perhaps reply to it?
I was fine with either way, I was just annoyed at my inbox staying unread when I checked it.
@Deimos, I found that option, it actually solved my concern.
How can I find a community if I unsubscribe from it? Is there (or are there any plans to add) a page that lists all communities?
https://tildes.net/groups
Thanks!
It's linked at the bottom of the front page's sidebar as a blue button, below the list of groups that you're subscribed to.
Thank you!
I don’t know if this is the right place, but I couldn’t find another way to give feedback :).
Couple small ui tweAks that would be nice, both on mobile:
Update the unread messages when closing the sidebar.
Swipe to close sidebar. I always swipe before I remember to tap close.
The entire ~tildes group exists for you to ask for features to be added the site.
I am new here. Is there a lot of drama? Were you singled out?
It's so much nicer when we're not all meta and navel-gazing. I get that things need to be figured out, but the trend was a bit nasty for a moment. I stayed out of it for the most part, but I still had to see it and read it (curiosity and my desire for this place to be a viable reddit replacement, which I already think it's well on its way to being). Agreed though, growing pains like that are natural and will probably help shape this place for the better.
Also a new user. Do you mind summarizing for the curious and uninformed?
Most of the drama threads have been about the topic of censorship: when should messages be deleted/locked and users banned.