Vague plans for the next few days
Hey everyone, really happy to see people still coming back, and especially having extremely good discussions like this one about moderation. Here's my vague plans for the next few days:
Finish comment reply notifications and a couple other high-priority items
I've got comment reply notifications mostly done now, and hope to have that out today or tomorrow. Username mention notifications should be pretty simple to add on top of that as well. Other than that, I need to look into fixing a few strange bugs that have been noticed, and would also like to get through a few other things in the backlog (including doing a better job of getting the backlog listed on the issue tracker).
A significant feature I'd like to have soon is making it possible for other people to edit the tags on topics, as well as potentially allowing editing the title or even the link. For this to be possible though, we need to have a sort of log of the changes, so that there's accountability in who's making the changes and what they're doing.
Some more updates/additions to the Docs pages
The most important piece is to finish writing up some info about the "trust system", which is a lot of what we've been discussing in the "Community moderators?" post. This is going to be a really essential part of having the site be able to handle growth, so not having anything about it on the Docs site currently is a really big gap.
I'd also like to do a bit of writing/rearranging of some of the other pages before I get too much public attention, since they're pretty scattered right now and are missing some information that people seem to look for.
Invite more people and/or get some "larger" attention
Once those other updates are done, I'm planning to start actively looking for a bit more public attention, including possibly posting to places like Hacker News or reddit. We're going to need a pretty steady inflow of people to keep the activity level up, so I think really getting the site out there soon is going to be the easiest way to do that. I do want to have the updates/info mentioned above done first though, so that will probably still be a couple days.
In the meantime, I've topped up all existing users to 5 invite codes again, so if there's anyone you'd like to invite please feel free. You can get to your invite codes on this page, which is linked in the sidebar when you're on your user page.
Thanks again, definitely let me know if you have any questions, suggestions, etc.
Will this include post reply notifications? If so, can we have the ability to disable those notifications on a per thread basis and/or set a default preference?
What if the OP received a notification about the change/addition of a tag? Maybe include a link in that notification to the log. You wouldn't go so far as giving the OP power to override, but they'd at least be made aware of the change and know to report abuse if that's what's happening.
I'm going to start with just comment replies, but I think topic replies can follow that pretty quickly (they're almost exactly the same from an implementation perspective). I agree that they'll need to be able to be disabled though, it's fairly common to submit something where you don't necessarily want to read all the replies it generates (or at least don't want or need to be notified for each of them).
I think that's an interesting idea, thanks. I'll keep it in mind while I'm thinking about how to implement this.
I think getting more people is going to be trickier than it seems. I've shared the blog post with a bunch of people but few of them are interested at this point.
Perhaps we just need to stabilize this site, then have it go public the next time reddit blows up?
I think the simple fact is that ~ isn't going to be for everyone, especially at this early stage. That and even people that probably would appreciate what we're attempting to do here are wary of any new news aggregators because of the recent super polarized ones like voat and raddle.me, the "safe space" that was imzy and the super niche tech related ones like lobste.rs and hacker news. So even if they are interested, they have no desire to be an early adopter because they want to see how it shakes out first.
I have a whole bunch of friends like that... they admire the premise and wish us luck but just don't want to join until the site is fully featured and popular enough they can feel comfortable joining without having to discuss minutiae, features, internal mechanisms/systems or policies at every turn.
I doubt more than 1-5% of current reddit users (which is already a rather nerdy and specific group) care about the values behind Tildes enough to give up the massive amounts of content on reddit and focus on a new website. It's like how most people wouldn't switch to a Twitter alternative. That 1-5% could be massive though, when the site opens up. 1% of 100 million users is still a million. Not saying any of those numbers are hard data but I don't think worries about growing too slow are necessary.