Daily Tildes discussion - welcome many new users + two new groups (~comp and ~creative)
As already mentioned, there was a reasonably successful post about Tildes on Hacker News today, so I've got an email inbox full of invite requests and feedback that I'm about to start going through. This means that I'm about to invite a lot more people, so the activity will probably start picking up shortly.
As part of that, I've created two new groups: ~comp and ~creative. A lot of the people coming from HN will definitely be on the more technical end, so ~comp is intended to be a place where we can post articles about programming and so on without filling up ~tech with that kind of stuff. ~creative was a suggestion that meristele made yesterday, and I think it's definitely something that we needed. Let me know if you think there are other groups we need desperately.
Note that while new users will get auto-subscribed to those groups (for now), I did not go back and subscribe all existing users to them. So if you're interested in either of those topics, you'll need to go subscribe on your own.
Outside of that, please be welcoming to all the new users. And to both old and new users - please let me know what you think and if there's particular functionality I should prioritize. I know that there's a lot of things still missing, but if you're coming from HN you're probably pretty used to that. You can post here or feel free to make separate threads in ~tildes if you want to discuss something in more depth.
Thanks! I'll most likely give out some more invite codes to everyone in the next day or two, so that we can try to keep more activity coming in.
It seems like there could be a lot of overlap between ~tech and ~comp. Maybe ~comp should be a sub-tilde(?) of ~tech like ~tech.comp or ~tech.programming?
I agree, but I would be a little hesitant to organize it so much. It seems like a flat hierarchy might be nicer for a lot of things.
It might end up being really hard to navigate and type eventually: for example, let's say there's a ~tech.comp.javascript. Then we get a ~tech.comp.javascript.frontend. Also cool. But then there's a ~tech.comp.javascript.frontend.react. Now we're starting to get a little lengthy.
But on the flip side, not having large hierarchy's would beg for a grouping feature. Let's say we pick a flat system and instead just have a ~node, and ~react, then there's bound to be someone who would prefer to just combine those two with ~node+~react.
I dunno what the right answer is.
Well, one thing I can tell you to help is that the order of the tags has no impact whatsoever, it's the same group identified by music.metal.progressive as progressive.music.metal. ;)
That means that a single group could appear at multiple places in different hierarchies, potentially - and maybe even with different ways of interacting with each if that seems like a good idea.
Hold on now, I don't think that's correct. That's completely removing the concept of a hierarchy. We might be able to handle some rearranging when that makes sense, but I don't think it'll be that all permutations point to the same place.
Can't you just grab and re-arrange the tags into the 'proper' order? Auto-disambiguation. Since every community is going to have its own tag signature like that, and all of them are unique, there shouldn't be any collisions.
I agree and that's why imho we should have only a limited number of levels. Maybe 3 top.
~mainGroup.subGroup.subSubGroup
The rest can be organized by using tags. That also can have hierarchy.
Indeed, welcome new HN and reddit friends. :)
Just be sure to check ~tildes for previous discussions and actually read the tildes docs before posting to ~tildes with questions/suggestions since they may have already been addressed.
It's disappointing you had to use a clickbait title to get any action out of hackernews, I expected better - but the last time you posted it, zzzzz nothing. They also tombstoned the thread when they changed the title. I'm also finding their speed-posting restrictions rather irritating.
I'll add those problems to the list of things to solve here on tildes. Online forums are such shit overall, lately. Why does it seem like no one is interested in the evolution of these decades-old half-assed communication models? We haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what's possible yet.
Glad to see ~comp making an appearance though. That one popping up early was a foregone conclusion. :)
So true--the opportunity to explore even further is huge. I'm a big fan of the mindset of digital spaces being as important as physical spaces, including both aesthetics and function. The way an interface is built has huge impacts on the social structure, and ~ seems like it's gonna be the place to appreciate that.
Pretty exciting.
Take a look at Marshall McHulan’s “the medium is the message” or watch an old YouTube video to see a famous personality talking about this very subject
Maybe a dumb question: in the future when subgroups exist, will the feed include links from all subgroups?
For example, let's say I go to ~music, will I see posts to ~music.indie, ~music.metal, ~music.xyz? Or will there only be posts from ~music?
From my understanding (discussions with @Amarok), good posts will "bubble up" -- so a hot new ~music.metal track will start showing up in ~music. I don't know that the algorithm by which this will happen has been discussed in any great detail on ~ however
Right now that's just 'the plan', we have nothing concrete. Once we have enough activity to start creating sub-groups, then we can play with that model and discover how to make it work the best.
This seems like the best way to do it. I like that.
I've been thinking about why /r/music sucks (and modding /r/listentothis) for almost ten years. It's the best solution I can come up with for why music sucks on reddit and how to save it. Also, if it works for music, it just might work for other topics that are based on subjective tastes, like photography, film, creative writing... maybe if we're lucky, it'll turn into a universal quality-measuring metric. That would be the ultimate holy grail for a place like this.
Honestly I wonder what this might mean for the root groups. Is it possible that eventually, people won't post anything at all to ~music, and they'll have auto-sorted themselves into the ~music.genre.groups they like the most for posting? Could the content of ~music become exclusively bubble-ups from below? What would that do to the quality of the place?
Everyone posts on reddit to the old defaults to get noticed. That's why /r/music has a submission rate in the thousands per day, and that's why nobody can even stand wading though /r/music/new. What if that just... goes away, by sorting itself so that most of the posting activity follows the groups down to the smaller communities?
No way to know until we try. I assume people can still post to any point in the hierarchy, but that may evolve in different directions a few years down the line.
If my understanding of the whole subgroup thing is correct, there is an incentive to post in subgroups ( on top of being a good poster and properly "classifying" your post ;) ): you reach a more "qualified" audience for your post, which should yield more activity thus allowing you to reach a wider audience in groups that are higher up in the hierarchy.
If you only post in ~music, you'll most likely end up buried by those posts with tractions from smaller communities.
On the other end, there might also be a "too small to be noticed" issue for sub-communities and we could imagine calculators ( like the ones giving you the best time to post on a specific subreddit ) that would take into account the whole hierarchy of tildes you are in and their relative sizes and give you the best tilde to be posted to.
This is something we'll definitely have to work out as it goes, and see how it actually feels in practice. My inclination is that yes - we'll want to have subgroup stuff come back up into the "higher" groups, but it will probably end up depending on why and where we start splitting subgroups up.
There's definitely potential to do it in a few different ways though, so we'll see. I expect it could take a while until we need many (or any) subgroups, the base categories should be fine until activity starts really taking off.
I love the idea of them being true subsets, so that the parents contain all of the content of the children. The music example is a perfect one and the opportunity for refinement of topic scope makes me giddy.
Hi!
How is ~tildes pronounced? Til-dees? Tilduhs? Tilduh (s is silent?)
I think "tilduhs" is probably the closest to correct, I tend to say something more like "tildez" when I'm talking about it though.
Technically til-duhs, but that sounds dumb so everyone here says til-dees ;)
And in comments we generally just refer to the place as ~ which is super sweet!
Yikes -- I've been saying
tilldsfor a very long time.I like both of those things: til-dees and ~
This is a good website.
I always pronounced it as a single syllable. "Tild-s".
I've been saying Till-days.
Am I a heretic?
Yeah probably, but there's no ~heretics yet so I guess we can just file you into ~misc
~s
This is my passport! I'm not from here!
Gonna be honest, I thought ~comp at first meant "competitive."
Understandable, but for most of us older techies it should be pretty familiar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comp.*_hierarchy
I've never actually heard comp used as competitive. I have heard it used for "worker's comp(ensation)" and "comp(osition) 101" though.
In before ~osition.
No, silly, that would fall under ~creative.art.composition or ~music.prod.composition ;)
I know it's used a lot for games that have competitive matchmaking. Like, "Hey, wanna play some comp?"
Never heard that usage outside that context, though.
Ranked is love. Ranked is life.
Welcome everybody!
Hey, I'm one of those users!
Hi everyone--you all seem very friendly.
[mean comment in jest because you said we're friendly]
This is great. I'd love to see a modern version of alt.history.what-if (I know it's still around...)
Hmm, one (tiny) thing I've noticed as sort of an extension of the landing page discussion we had yesterday, is that there's currently no simple way to navigate to either the blog (I usually have to log-out and navigate to ~ to remember the URL, but I'm slow :P) or the docs.
edit: I'm double slow, there's links at the bottom of the page!
I think that a consolidating the various bits of information we have out there would be both relatively simple (but I may be wrong!) and high impact (in that we won't have to keep having the same discussions)
Look at the bottom of the page. ;)
Man, I am not on my game today (or the last few weeks apparently).
For the record, I noticed it myself before your comment, so THERE :P
To be fair, I do think it should be placed somewhere more visible though... and have argued the sidebar is a good option for that. And once the sidebar starts getting filled up with information it can be just a small bar at the top. E.g.
docs - blog - contactI agree to what Shoop said (how do you refer/ping other people: /u/Shoop? @Shoop? Edit: It looks like both work.. both got hyperlinked.).. there's an overlap between ~tech and ~comp. So, is the ~comp limited to only coding stuff?