Daily Tildes discussion - thoughts about making the site publicly visible, but still invite-only?
To be clear up front, this probably won't be able to happen for at least a few weeks—there are quite a few things that will need to be done or adjusted before I'd be able to make the site publicly visible, including making sure that it can handle the load from a lot of logged-out viewers.
However, I just wanted to bring it up and see if anyone has any particular thoughts about whether making it visible for people without accounts might be a good idea, or if we should just stick to keeping it totally private for a longer period.
For a lot of people, not being able to see any of the actual posts on the site makes it less interesting, and I think we're already starting to get to the point where there's enough activity that it's not "embarrassing" to show off an inactive site any more. There's some great content being posted already, and it would probably be good to allow people to see it, even if they can't necessarily register and participate themselves just yet.
Anyway, not much more to say about it. I just wanted to see if anyone had any particular thoughts on the topic to make sure I don't miss anything important when I start thinking more seriously about doing it, so please let me know.
There are pluses and minuses to this.
Keeping it private can lend an air of secrecy to the endeavor and secretism is a powerful thing. People want what they are told they cannot have and they always assume it is much more exciting than it often really is (ex: fraternities that have some huge secret over a ritual about a bedazzled cup you drink beer out of). If you have visibility but privacy that can create hype. And that's not a bad thing for a new platform.
Once it is publicly visible, you'll get a lot more people sharing links to content on other platforms. That's good for growing a community but if it hits you can go from sparks to wildfire quite quickly. You want to make sure you have resources to handle that and ensure you're prepared for something to go viral on Twitter, for example. But it brings needed attention and engagement. And the higher the barrier to participation the lower the likelihood you'll get much participation.
What kind of content do you think currently exists on Tildes that people would want to see if made visible? What kinds of content would people want to see but which doesn't currently exist here?
My favorite kind of content that I don't see much of here but I think will eventually get here is the fact that there is a massive amount of experts in fairly niche areas present on Reddit, and they will jump into threads and answer obscure off-the-cuff questions in the most unexpected places. I think tildes might get there eventually if it grows enough. I'm looking forward to being able to see that in this community.
Well, a few of the top mods at /r/science are here on ~ and they plan to host their AMAs here eventually. Plus one of the stated goals of ~ is to promote quality content. I'm sure experts will be attracted to a place like this.
If they learn about it. That's the balance that can be so hard to achieve. There are some great examples of platforms that had potential for high-level expert discussions & engagement but are largely invisible and unused. I think the old adage is that if your platform hasn't taken off in 9 months then it probably won't. I'm not sure how accurate that timeframe is anymore, but it is worth thinking about what you'd want to see this place look like in 9 months and then how we could build up towards that.
This is why we should open it up for public viewing in the next couple of months. Secrecy is good for building the initial momentum, but casual users are not going to jump through hoops to check this place out.
Agreed that if they can't see it they will lose interest. I do think you want a bit more of a community and active engagement & content before making it public. It would be nice if what they can see is interesting and active. You want them to not only see it but long to be part of it, you know?
And then after they can view it for a bit and there is some hype you can make it accessible to everyone. Hopefully, by that point, there are community norms that are fairly firm and that includes the level of content and discussions you want. As well as taboos about what not to do/say/post.
I think that, besides serverside improvements, the first thing that needs to be done before opening it up to the public are the sub ~s. Until that happens, there's a lot of content that just doesn't have a home here.
Yeah, I definitely run across cool things but can't think of where I'd put it on Tildes. A catchall ~ would be good and then if we start getting a lot of content that could be meaningfully categorized together we could ask that a ~ just for that topic be created. Might be a way to organically create new categories (in addition to purposeful ones, of course.)
To expand further on this, I think it might hurt user engagement on Tildes if it does happen that a discussion here is linked from a popular website and the site crashes.
I would rather the site grow slowly and organically in privacy until the operators are reasonably certain that the infrastructure is stable, and only then remove the login barrier.
Along with the trainwreck that the voat debut was.
Voat's major downfall is the open embrace of trashy, racist communities. It's what people most mention when deriding voat.
it wasn't just the embrace, it was that voat's ideal of egalitarianism was set off-balance by reddit admins banning those subreddits- combine that with the actual ddossing the site got, the pedo porn that someone was posting there to try to get it shut down, contacting their server hosts and paypal alleging criminal activity etc. etc.
Yeah, that launch was rocky as hell, even before reddit's worst moved over there.
Voat also had to deal with a mountain of DDoS attacks that are even now still going on.
Tildes shouldn't have that problem, since our hosting provider has built-in top-quality protection. It is possible, though unlikely, that we might have to bump 'up' a hosting tier if it gets really bad. Even then it's not a big hike to the monthly rate. Also you note we're not using Cloudflare or any of that crap - it's a violation of your privacy to send everyone through some shady 3rd-party protection system. It gives them the opportunity to track you.
I don't foresee the people who hate voat DDOSing tildes, since tildes has a former reddit admin leading it, it explicitly presents itself as being against "hate speech" and as not a free speech platform, so the politically/emotionally-motivated ddosers would not have the same incentive to harm it.
@Deimos, have you loadtested it at all? Do you have an idea of what it could support?
I have to agree with Firedrops. The secrecy is a great tool to drive up interest in these early stages which will also keep the rate of new arrivals under control for now.
However, we should also avoid Google's mistake with Google+ where they kept it invite-only for so long that people lost interest. If the timeline is a few weeks to a month, it would be worth doing. By then there will be even more users and content and features.
True, but Google+ was a site that was only useful if your friends were on it, so it wasn't particularly interesting in the invite only. This is interesting without knowing anyone here personally.
Honestly, more sports. One of my favorite things about Reddit was sports such as /r/NFL, /r/cfb, /r/fantasyfootball, /r/soccer, /r/MLS, etc. It usually had way better conversation than most other sports forums.
I also love gifs but I understand if that's fluff.
I know you guys are planning sub-tildes, but imo, that's one of the most important things. Definitely have to get it right when you do it though
I also agree with Firedrops and feel like for now if you make it public to lurk but invite only to post it'll help expand it. Before you do this you have to make sure the site has the capability to expand though
Definitely agree with having it private for a short while will create hype behind it. Similar to Pokemon Go and how it was slowly being opened for people even caused more of a hype.
Waiting too long to make it visible is bad though too. I think a period of 1 month or 2 and opening it up for view should be good.
I think public viewing would be a good ideas as it would allow prospective users to get an idea of the established culture and it would server as an early load test. Additionally, I believe it would be best to give sufficient warning pending an opening to public viewing, just so existing users have the opportunity to prepare themselves, and to set their expectations regarding possible degraded performance or the ol' reddit hug of death.
I would avoid setting too much time between public visibility and public sign-up, however, or people will lose interest fairly quickly. Two to four weeks or so of public visibility with invite-only sign-up might be fine, but we should plan to have the necessary moderation tools in place before that time period ends.
It might also be a good idea to plan to have some larger events, e.g. an AMA, during that open window!
A major science AMA to mark the public opening would go a long way to towards establishing a reputation for quality content.
Agreed! I like all of the suggestions in here so far, but the "event" idea could be pretty cool. Maybe only then unregistered (temp/demo registration?) could have some ability to do something but only on that page, and could browse all ~, sorta like an open house?
I think that there has been some discussion about the possibility of a temp account for certain event threads, actually.
Oh awesome! I just got here yesterday, and have been trying to catch up with everything aka docs, discussion, etc but I'm sure I missed plenty! Thanks for the heads up :)
No problem! Welcome to ~ :)
I like the public viewing idea and completely agree that waiting to long for public signups after the viewing is enabled will be a lost opportunity.
If you do make it publicly visible, I'd suggest implementing a waitlist system for signups, so that when someone tries to register they don't get completely crestfallen at their lack of ability to do anything.
At least with a waitlist, they can get notified when there is room for them. If your goal is virality, then you can add some mechanics about boosting their waitlist spot by tweeting, sharing on FB, however you want the word to spread.
Somehow, this seems against the Tildes spirit.
That will also give my poor fingers a break and allow me to finally get some proper sleep too... :P
So this suggestion gets the thumbs up from me. We can implement a wait-list for the invites via email address and maybe even use the reddit API to monitor for invite requests in the official thread there as well.
I agree, I think we should make it publicly visible. I know a lot of reddit users (probably the majority), that don't comment, or post, for the most part. By restricting the interaction to invite-only users, we can keep users that are motivated enough to be a positive part of the site (cutting down on low effort posts), while allowing new users to get acclimated to the culture of the site before they join.
Another thing we could do would be to allow people to sign up to view the site, who would then be able to post and comment after a certain amount of time voting and tagging.
I agree with making tildes publicly visible, but not the open sign up part. Tildes is still very young, and it's community and culture isn't very well established yet. A sudden influx of users can disrupt the ecosystem, so to speak, even if they only get voting permissions first. It would also put more stress on the servers.
We're also getting plenty of activity from reddit even now, people are talking about us in reddit's bitch-fest threads which are more and more common every day. That's driving lots of new people over to /r/tildes to check it out. In fact, we could really use some help over there with the invites, if anyone's not busy and doesn't mind vetting users. You can PM @deimos for invite codes if you run out. ;)
How do I get invite codes in the first place? The invite page is not working.
The AMA team from /r/science presented us with an interesting problem. If we're invite-only, how can all of the people coming in from the rest of the internet participate in an AMA? It's a good question.
We can make certain sections public, and even allow comments from users without an account, that would probably remain 'hidden' until approved if we have to handle abuse cases often. Think of it as a kind of temporary account - and we could even extend it to permanent if the user is groovy and wants to stay.
I think anonymous/guest posting would be awesome if it's possible to do it without it becoming a spamfest. I like the idea of being able to anonymously reply to a comment occasionally where I wouldn't want it tied to my main account (eg because it's a topic that could identify me, or embarassing, etc).
Maybe even a feature where you can tick a box below the reply field to "Reply Anonymously". I know the admins could still check which account that post belongs to but for the usual throwaway purposes it would work.
But I also love the idea of Guest posts that can then be invited if their contributions are worthy.
Anonymous posts by users, and Guest posts. Both would be great.
Well, one solution that's a bit draconian that sometimes works out well on reddit in places like /r/askhistorians is having all of the comments start out as [removed] until they've had a basic human eyes-on check to make sure they aren't trolls, spammers, or just general asshats. It's a lot of work, but it's guaranteed to solve the spamfest problems. We can probably find a way to do better than that, though.
Honestly I'd try it at least once as open-all-access, post as you like, and let the mods/whoever is wrangling and curating the mess concentrate on removing the bad - let's see how much bad actually shows up before we get all freaky about blocking it. If it's turning into a shitshow we can flip over to removed-by-default for anons.
I think that making it public but keeping it invite-only should be what is done until there is some sort of other authentication feature and maybe some more moderation.
This place has a lot of potential and I would hate to see it overrun by bots and spite. Plus, as others have mentioned, keeping it invite-only for a bit is probably a good way to drive up interest.
Until site mechanics are more well established I think the site should be kept invite only. It's not too hard to get an invite but does introduce a small barrier to entry for users that filters favourably towards those that are invested in tildes as a community.
if I understand the psychology on this correctly, having a small barrier to entry will make people more likely to value their ability to participate, meaning greater engagement and activity levels than if it were simply open. i'm not certain how important that is to the health and success of the site overall, but it's something to bear in mind that the invite-only process beyond the mechanics of it being a selector for those who are already predisposed to have a high interest, may itself cause greater interest once someone gets in.
I'm running as hell today so forgive me if I leave a comment they maybe others have left, no time to read them all:
I say for now keep it invite only. Prevent the bots from overrunning it too early. As far as keeping it private vs public, I agree with Firedrops
I kinda like the idea of it being invite only at the moment. Mostly because we're in an early phase of figuring out quirks and debating subjects. I'd prefer those decisions not get made with a live site. But that's just me.
I actually think keeping it invite only should be considered. Recruit a half dozen people to help with approving new members, and banning low quality members (spammers, trolls, etc). As soon as ~ opens, the pressure building up on Reddit will purge directly to here, and you'll get the exact same thing that happened to voat/etc.
The invite system creates an aura of exclusivity and a pressure to earn a place here, keeping the low effort trolling and memeing and multi-account wielding to a minimum.
The best forums I've been on, were all invite only, or at least admin-approved-signups.
Maybe also let existing users with good reputation (50+ votes?) have a few invites a week assigned to them, like early Gmail, and if their invitees get banned they get penalized or something.
Setting all of the other issues aside, can ~ afford to go public? If there's a 10x increase in traffic, how long could the site sustain itself?
At this point, I don't think the server has even noticed that anyone's using it yet. It would easily be fine with much, much higher traffic. There are also lots of ways to make logged-out traffic much lighter on resources such as serving cached copies of pages (since they should be identical for all logged-out users).
This is more of a personal preference than anything, but I would really rather have the ability to de-associate myself from certain comments or topics without actually deleting them before going public. It's possible that there are some comments or topics that I would like to no longer have associated with my username, at least at the public level.
My curiosity is piqued. :)
You have no idea who the 6,400+ invited subscribers to Tildes are (with more arriving every hour). Most of them are just as anonymous and unknown to you as any random public viewer of Tildes would be. Sure, there's a small group of us you're familiar with, but that's maybe only about 5% of the total population here at most. The vast majority of people with a Tildes account are total strangers to you.
We're also not really going through any sort of selection process beyond "Do you want an invite? Here, have one!"
So, why are you comfortable with letting these 6,400 random, anonymous, unknown people see your comments attached to your username, but not the wider public?
There are some people who I know personally who haven't been exposed to Tildes yet who know my handle, and currently there is no search engine indexing of Tildes content that I'm aware of. I've discussed some subjects that I don't really care to have brought up in a conversation with them in general, and I don't yet recall if there is any information that could be problematic in that regard. It's not that the content is bad, mind you. Let's just say that some of the people I know have a less-than-stellar record when it comes to maturity. I would really rather not go into details about that, though.
Granted, I could simply delete those comments or topics, but I would prefer to leave most or all of that content in place while simply not having my handle associated with it.
It looks like you need to create yourself an alt account! That won't fix the problem of your historical comments, but it'll prevent the problem in the future.
Haha, yeah, fair enough. I really should consider doing that :)
I think this would be great. I participate in some fairly niche communities on Reddit that may not have a ton of people here (yet). It would be great to be able to post, say, a picture to reddit then comment there saying “Check out more on tildes” where I have a more “high effort” post.
This would prevent me from having to double post, and can get some more people interested in an invite.
I say make it publically visible. I doubt it would hurt the platform, and would probably built up some more interest in it, maybe bring some more money and support in if people think it looks promising.
Maybe I am just uber-noob at this, but how do we create a new tilde/new post?
Go into a group and open the sidebar.
if you're using a web browser other than a mainstream one (like Pale Moon) the sidebar and the post buttons are at the bottom of the screen.
Excellent, thank you.
I had the exact same problem (pale moon user here, because fuck mozilla, fuck google, fuck "edge"), so deimos explained its an issue with some CSS thing Tildes uses that i guess my browser doesn't yet support until the next version release.
I like the ideas posted in this thread of making some threads, eg big science AMAs, public for all to see. Maybe if the load on the servers got too high with all the non-registered users, you could implement some kind of queue system or something where, once a certain amount of non-registered users is reached, it just serves all other incoming non-registered users a “sorry, we’re full” page and gives them a spot in the queue.
I have a slight worry that while I love Tilde so far and see that it is in the very early stages, if something is going publicly available, then there can be an expectation that it's being deemed 'ready' for the public.
Tildes is still fairly feature-light, which is exactly what you'd expect at this stage in development, but I don't want people looking and thinking "Oh, it's like reddit but much worse as you can't do any of the things you can on reddit."
If it got a bunch of attention (and face it, redditors are looking for an alternative and so this could blow up) That negative impression that it's a featureless reddit could cause lasting damage. I wonder if holding back until it's a little further forward might not help avoid that issue?
On the other hand, people do understand early access games, so if the feeling is to go public, then perhaps it should be done in a way that makes it 100% clear in big letters that this is an early alpha, have an easily findable list of future additions, so people can see that it will be developing and what will be coming. One thing people hate on reddit is that the future features are always hidden until they announce them.
Whatever happens, this site is great so far and I love the work that has gone in and the communities that are building up.
This is a very difficult decision, I keep changing my mind with each opposing comment. So I'll suggest a not completely thought out idea of just making a part of the site public. Basically just a "Best of Tildes Discussions" page where the public can view what goes on here and get a better idea of what it's all about.
I don't think it should become publicly visible, not for the time being, anyway. It seems to me that ~ is growing at a decent rate so far already, and it is certainly not dead, especially compared to other forums. Being invite only provides a higher barrier to entry that basically keeps the riffraff out, and that means that only someone who values discussion enough to care will be coming in in the first place.
Of course, if it's only publicly visible, and not publicly usable, then it isn't so bad. I still think it's not a good idea at the moment because it makes ~ have a feeling that it's special and not just anywhere, and having a personality like that will help the site stay unique and have a reason to come here as opposed to somewhere else.
I definitely think you should do it.
I think as long as the major grievances of the site/design are resolved, it should be public for viewing sure. I don't know if there are any actual major grievances, but it'd be best to resolve those before presenting Tildes to the public eye.
I think perhaps keeping it private for the time being but allowing current users (maybe ones who have been here x/length of time a single invite to expand the userbase a tad bit more would be valuable. If quality posters all invited a single friend, we'd grow overnight and be even less "embarrassing" when opening to the public eye.
I give existing users invites fairly regularly. I usually give everyone 5 invites every week or two, and will pretty much always give people more if they request them. So far, less than 25% of the accounts on the site were registered through "friend invites" like that, the large majority have been people emailing me for an invite or the invite threads on reddit.
Oh, cool. I didn't realize that happened, I still thought we were on the "no user invites" stage--shows how much I know. Good to know. I have been mentioning the site lately as my experience has been quite positive so far, and a few friends have shown curiosity in severing their reddit dependence, even if just a little bit for now.
e: Is there a certain amount of time one has to be here to invite? I of course don't mind the wait as I obviously have a new account at the moment.
AFAIK so long as an account was made before the invites are handed out to the users then that account will receive the invites no matter how old the account is, so you should be included in the next round when it occurs. But if you want some before then, as Deimos has mentioned a few times previously, you can generally just ask him for some. I also have tons to give out as well, so if you need a few for some friends I can provide them to you as well.
Making the site invite only might come off as pretentious. People might make the site out to be a bunch of holier than thou, pompous dicks and that might give a negative connotation to the site itself, even if the userbase is far from that
No, if you get scared about coming off as “pretentious” for having ideals and caring about content, what’s the point? Massive, uncontrolled user growth is a problem, here, and limiting invites the only direct measure against it. Painting that as “elitism” is essentially just trolling.
Not only could the trolling go out of hand and negatively affect other peoples' first impressions of the site, but it could also give some members of the site a bit of an elitist attitude. Of course, with it being invite only, you'd have a good judgement of a user's character anyway, but people are really good at lying. And if we were to make it invite only, what do we do about people who have never touched reddit before? We have no post history to judge whether or not they'd be good for the community, and we'd then have to develop some sort of questionnaire or probationary period for the site. It's a lot of time and resources we wouldn't have to spend by not making it invite only. And in the future, if we ever did make it invite only, if we ever wanted to make it fully public, we'd have a civil war on our hands
I partly agree about the perception angle (I believe selling the “no assholes” policy well is important to prevent people yelling “censorship”, for example). But the point not to cross, IMO, is letting that influence actual policy.
That's one of my concerns about the trust system too - ranks on minecraft servers for instance are a sensible tool for preventing bad faith players causing damage, and for selecting helpful players to grant greater permissions to - but it can generate elitism and cliques and make new users feel unwelcome in many ways - even if the server admins try to make things more neutral. Just the fact that there is an appearance of division between the haves and have-nots can generate animosity.
IMO there should be an option for registered users to allow visitors to read posts or not (as /u/StellarTabi said)
Maybe not a good example, but i recall oneplus, which made really good phones when they were on invite only, now they only want money (well, that's what a company wants after all), and are not making that cheap for specs phones (also last time i saw it was like on oneplus 5 or something like that, they are just spitting phones hoping for profit). I'm not saying that Tildes would turn evil if it became publicly available (to be honest i don't believe that /u/Deimos would do that :) ), but it could attract a community of people with not so common interests (which is kinda good) and maybe some reddit fanboys, not sure.
Maybe a kind of open registration but with limited slots(like with invites now)?
Also having ~ open for registration would make lot's of throwaways, which i dislike (not sure if already discussed, but it would be nice to have a "Post this as anonymous", if something goes wrong mods/admins can know who did the shit but other users would not know who posted)
Now i see that this post is more than 100 days old :D necrobumping for the win
What about a profile setting "only logged in users can see my username and profile"?
What about a thread option "only logged in users can read this thread?"