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Daily Tildes discussion - general plans for the week
Like I did last week, I'm going to use the Monday post to talk about the general plans for this week:
- Finish up the remaining pieces to open-source the site's code. I was hoping to get most of this done last week (and did get a fair amount done), but there's still some left. I'm pretty confident this will happen sometime this week.
- More fixes/updates that we need to be able to continue the growth smoothly. I think I figured out the issues with staying logged in, and that's definitely been a big annoyance for a lot of people. Major other ones that I want to get done soon are improvements to notifications (adding a "mark all as read" or similar), allowing people to set their default sorting options for topic lists, some improvements to make navigating large comment threads easier, and probably the beginning of some filtering/searching based on tags. I'll probably also add a couple more groups that people have been requesting.
- More updates to documentation and information. There are a couple of merge requests open already that I need to include, and then need to do some other updates that people have pointed out are missing or otherwise confusing.
- Grow some more! We've closed off the mass invite-request threads on reddit for now since we were getting way too many requests, but Tildes keeps getting mentioned in various places (like this thread today), so that's bringing in a fair amount of attention. We'll probably go for another burst later in the week, but for the moment I've given everyone 3 invite codes again that you can use to invite others (friends, or just people on reddit or other sites if you see them expressing interest or think they'd be interested). You can get the codes here: https://tildes.net/invite
That's it for now, I think. Let me know if you have any thoughts about any of this, or recommendations for other things that need to get worked on in the near future.
This is probably noise, but just wanted to say: great job on Tildes so far! This is one of the best online communities I’ve ever been a part of, and I hope it grows even more.
Your community discussion-based approach to features, rules, etc is great and really shows that you want a website made for the community.
Also loving how fast and simple the website is. It’s a pleasure to use on desktop and mobile alike.
Can’t wait for the open-source release!
Thanks, I really appreciate it. It's been exciting for me to finally be able to release this after keeping it quiet for so long, and seeing so much interest already (to the point that we've deliberately had to stop people from requesting to join) has been great.
There's still an infinite amount of stuff to do, but there always will be. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what happens once it's open-source.
I'm with go1ldfish, re: the "noise" tag. I've been tagged with noise several times now - once for trying to be funny and falling flat, and for adding a mildly off-topic comment that related to something said in the post I was responding to. So far this is serving to make me comment very little. I've deleted more comments than I've posted thus far. I absolutely recognize the value of a tag that will make you heavily consider posts before hitting the "post" key, and is there a way to clarify what is and isn't "noise"?
Here is a list of comment tag descriptions to help guide their use. Also, the "Noise" tag is often misused from what I can tell ("Offtopic" is often more appropriate), and the tags themselves aren't an indication of a comment's quality but are simply meant to provide a way to visually (and probably eventually via the UI) filter out stuff you don't really care to see, so try not to be too discouraged about your comments being tagged a certain way. That being said, be sure to stand back for a moment if you're frequently receiving a certain tag and see if there's a reason for it :)
I've only been noised/offtopic'd on like 2 comments so far, but it is a strange feeling when you notice someone clicked it (internal cringe?) so I see how that would be offputting.
I've also not been averting my eyes from noisy comments or anything like that (is it irony if the tag makes it noisier?), but using them as a way to prioritize the thread when I come across an old/unseen one. I like the fact that it's a non-combative way to let people know what the feeling in the room is.
I've seen it a tonne where everyone is extremely tolerant of the occasional noise, because "it's not too bad". Then it goes over the line for someone and they speak up and comment on it and then it sparks into something that's just not worth it, usually.
With this, though, you can be annoying and people will put up with you just the same, but they'll also let you know that they're "putting up" with something. That alone might be enough to help people self-moderate.
I don't think you should let the tags dictate what you comment. I don't think the noise tag is necessarily negative. A lot of conversation is just noise - noise fills up and makes conversations polite.
I would be concerned if I were getting "troll" or "flame" a lot. Those are both fairly negative.
In this case, I think that the ultimate parent comment is a reflection of (almost) how tags should function:
It's not a bad comment at all (and the votes reflect this) but it's not completely related to the discussion topic. Thus, tags.
I've already had someone tag several of my comments as Flame because I was talking about vegan food and my reluctance to post about vegan food because of the abuse frequently received as a response to using the v-word on reddit. This was after a couple of people told me I wouldn't face any such abuse here, too, so I guess they were / I was wrong about the community that's growing on ~ already. It's definitely affected how I feel about contributing comments and content.
To be perfectly honest, rereading that conversation I can sort of see why your comments (and his) were tagged as 'flame'.
You could have easily made your points without accusing @vakieh of being narrow/close minded. And he could have easily made his without calling the vegan versions of some food soul sucking bastardizations.
Were all of his comments tagged as Flame since then? I only saw one last time I tried to contribute to that conversation, but when someone just keeps calling your lifestyle soul sucking and your food a worse and bastardized version of the standard fare, and every comment you make gets a negative tag added to it, you tend to abandon the conversation because it's increasingly less friendly.
His second comment about vegan food being soul-sucking was the only one that really deserved to be tagged as flame IMO... and it was. Maybe the other mention way later of soul-sucking could have been as well though... but it's a tough call since by then you had already attacked his character just for not liking vegan food and the flamewar had begun in earnest.
I get where you're coming from but at the same time I think what kicked this all off was you seriously misreading his initial comment. His primary complaint was not that he disliked all vegan food, just that he dislikes recipes that are traditionally non-vegan but try to hide the fact they have been modified to be vegan without notifying people first, which is a fair complaint.
He claims he wasn't the one that tagged your comments BTW and I suspect that is probably true.
And my response to that was to continue the conversation about tags that we were having, until he started insulting vegan food.
It could be true that he didn't go through our conversation and tag everything as Flame, but someone did, and that makes me pretty unwilling to have discussions about food here anymore. I've already abandoned the conversation with him because I was tired of every comment of mine being tagged when I was only responding to his statements about vegan food being soul sucking bastardizations by saying that he seemed to have a narrow view of what good food was.
Tags are currently being used as downvotes, and it's working. I gave up the conversation.
Why should it discourage you from talking about food entirely? The reason you got tagged as flame was for taking the his flamebait comment and then attacking his character as a result. In future either ignore flame baiting comments or if you do choose to reply to them, talk in a civil manner and don't attack that persons character... then you won't get justifiably tagged with flame yourself. It's really not that difficult.
As you should have, IMO. Both of your were just escalating the argument, making no progress in convincing each other of anything and taking it more and more personally the longer it went on... as evidenced by your last edit in in which you accused him of doing something you have absolutely no evidence of whatsoever.
I understand exactly why you're taking their side, but I don't believe I did anything that attacked their character. That person made sweeping statements about a certain type of food, I said that it seemed that they had a narrow view on food, and he continued to lob insults when my initial question was on the topic of how to tag food posts. I could've taken their route and responded with rude statements about the food that they eat, but I didn't. But sure, I guess I was in the wrong and they weren't. That's fine. As I mentioned, I have little to no interest to talk about food here anymore.
Sorry to be blunt Ocean but it seems to me (and I'm no one to be considered and expert and don't know you, so take this with a huge grain of salt) that you ended up quite offended by that exchange because you went into that conversation already thinking that you were going to be attacked.
I'm one of the people that told you that you weren't going to have problem (I'm not vegan but my wife and I integrated quite some vegan / vegetaria dishes in our diet) but I didn't meant to say "everyone will just dance around you throwing flowers and agreeing with you".
I don't want to go there now and check the exchange with whoever you had a flame but you must consider that behind this screen we're all people anyway. Sometimes we fail at interpreting what the other is typing because of how we imagine the other is "talking" to us.
If you don't feel like posting again about food, it's up to you. I, for one, would like to see you post again, even just a recipe you think it's a good alternative to the traditional non-vegan, because I love to read suggestion about new things to try and I'm sure there are others that have the same opinion as I have.
I maybe never become a vegan (sorry, born and raised in tuscany and lived in Rome for too much time) but this doesn't mean that I wasn't surprise to find out that some vegan sausages were indeed tasting good and definitely are not going to kill me in the long run like some pork sausages will if I ate those as much as I do with the vegan counterpart :P
I am not taking "their" side. IMO you were both in the wrong! He flame baited and you took the bait, which continued back and forth, escalating until it finally ended in an edit with a very personal accusation from you about his character. In future, don't take the bait or if you do, don't let it get so personal. It's really as simple as that.
"Flame" is probably a bit of a strong term for it, but the conversation did get pretty antagonistic and wasn't a productive one.
I'm not sure what else I was supposed to say - we were talking about tags for food and he started talking about how vegan recipes are soul sucking bastardizations of normal food. The tags were being used as downvotes and they worked, I've abandoned the conversation and won't attempt to talk about food here anymore.
There's not always something "correct" to say. You two obviously disagree strongly about the topic.
Like I said, it was an antagonistic argument where you were both basically just saying "no, you're wrong" back and forth. Labeling your comments as "flame" was probably a bit strong, but if the tags helped encourage you to abandon the argument I honestly think that might have been a good thing. It wasn't going to go anywhere useful and most likely would have just resulted in you both continuing to get more upset at each other.
I wasn't trying to argue, though, I was only trying to talk about tags for food posts. :/ All that's happened now is that I don't have an answer, and have no desire to post about food at all.
I don't know how I can make it much more clear. These are what the comments are basically saying (I'm going through the actual conversation here and summarizing each one):
I'm sorry that my comments are being interpreted as "You are wrong," because I said what I meant: "You seem to have a narrow view on what good food is." and "We obviously disagree."
I've learned my lesson, I won't talk about food here anymore.
Please don't be discouraged to post about a passion of yours because of one bad interaction. Most of us here would be happy to get a vegan perspective on good food.
I think you're jumping to a pretty drastic conclusion from it. The takeaway doesn't need to be "I shouldn't talk about food," it could be "I shouldn't bother getting into an argument with someone that thinks vegan recipes ruin food."
Best feature of this website. I really like the minimalistic approach and hope it stays this way. The themes are great too
Your comment just made me realize that Vote/Tag are probably the equivalent to upvote/downvote but with the benefit of stating why a user chose to downvote. Basically what I see is that your comment has, as of now, 14 upvotes and 2 downvotes because 2 users thought your comment is just noise.
Sorry if that's common knowledge, I'm new here :)
Feature idea-- would love if messages inbox could clear messages that a user has responded to without having to manually "mark as read." Not a huge priority but thought I'd put it out there!
@chase, just pinging you since you had asked me about it. Thanks for prioritizing this, @Deimos!
I was on vacation during the first invite surge, but I’m back now and available to vet potential invite recipients as needed. Already talked to @Amarok about this.
I would definitely appreciate the help in that regard @Parliament. I only just now (5 min ago) finished all the ones in the Official Invite thread from over 3 days ago, plus all the PMs and reddit Chat requests (I hate that's even a thing). But in a couple days when we do another Official Invite thread on /r/tildes you're more than welcome to join me. We will just need to make sure we don't double up too much (I could sort by old, you by new or something).
That sounds like a great idea. I’m thinking toolbox will be handy in this situation since it gives a breakdown of posts and comments by subreddit. What criteria have you been applying when sending invites? The 5-6 I’ve given out have all been to personal friends either through reddit or IRL. Haven’t ventured into stranger territory.
I have never used mod toolbox but if that would make it easier, I could easily install it. Let me know.
As for a breakdown, I wrote up a brief rationale earlier on my quick once over on people before I sent them invites:
Now that I have handed out around 600+ invites I am only up to about 20-30 or so people that I have ignored... and only one user so far was really bad (personal insults every other comment) who won't take the "I'm ignoring you" hint... they keep making comments everywhere and PMing me over and over trying to get one (I will PM you the username so you can be aware of them). So I am not being overly strict but just trying to make sure someone who 100% clearly doesn't belong here gets in.
Lovely. Also FYI, I accidentally marked your PM as read, so it disappeared from my inbox. Oops. Can you resend for me to save?
https://tildes.net/messages/sent
Even recent 'Mark as read' replies aren't gone forever anymore. @deimos added a 'previously read' feature (although it has no pagination yet): https://tildes.net/notifications
Oh yay! Thank you.
Has there been any public discussion of the financials involved in maintaining the site? Is this still running out of pocket for you?
I guess whether it's "out of pocket" depends exactly how you want to judge it. People have been generous with donations so far, and the Patreon alone is already easily covering the ongoing costs for the server and such. So that's awesome; we're barely getting started and it's already significantly above the costs (and the server is way more powerful than we need, so that cost won't increase for a while).
It's definitely not anywhere near being able to pay myself a decent salary yet, but that's not meaningful at all—we only have a thousand users registered! It's extremely encouraging to see how many donations there have been already, and it makes me feel way more confident about this being feasible.
Overall, I'd really like to make the financials a lot more public before too long. I'd like to have a page on the Docs site that shows expenses (both ongoing and one-time ones like the incorporation/legal fees), as well as showing how much we've got coming in from donations from the different sources. That's not very difficult, but I need to get all the information organized for it, and it would probably be nice to automate on some level so that I don't have to remember to manually adjust it all the time.
What platform are you using to maintain the books for ~?
Nothing fancy for now, just a spreadsheet. There's nothing complicated yet, but once it starts looking more serious I'll likely hire an accountant with some non-profit experience to make sure that everything's being done correctly.
Good good good. It doesn't have to be sophisticated at all as long as you're keeping a record somewhere that an accountant can eventually review and translate into more formal documentation.
Since the server is just sending a bunch of simple webpages without images, sound, or video, I imagine that the bandwidth used is pretty low, and so server costs should be low as well. I imagine that this provides an incentive to avoid bloat like hosted images and video (ahem: reddit).
It seems like there are two benchmarks right now: 1) receiving enough donations to cover regular operational costs, and 2) receiving enough donations to ensure @Deimos can support himself and work on the site full-time. Per his comment above:
Basically, if there's some kind of indicator of progress for soliciting donations and covering costs, I think the donations necessary to pay @Deimos should be factored in from the outset. They're as vital to the long-term success of the site as monthly server costs.
Oh absolutely - all great points. I'm a CPA that values businesses and economic impacts in the US, so this is an area I'm interested in providing help on in addition to gaining more knowledge re: Canadian regulation. Even if Canadian non-profits don't require disclosure of salaries, I foresee @Deimos doing that anyway in the spirit of transparency.
Putting the complications of BoD voting aside for a second, my idea would be to peg the starting salary (until the site is a more sophisticated organization) to cost of living and occupation statistics for @Deimos' locality. I'm sure Canada has something similar to the BLS database. This would be the most universally acceptable benchmark and a great way to factor cost into solicitation of donations.
Might be putting the cart before the horse here, but these are still topics to address down the road.
True, but the invite system gives @Deimos a really useful spigot for controlling activity. That said, this is an area where you always want cushion. Just look at reddit - over a decade old, one of the most popular sites in the world, and still suffering from server issues. We don't want ~ to become another site where an entire community has sprung up around pervasive downtime (see: /r/downtimebananas).
Sounds like you have some valuable insight to provide here since you've gone through the process. I also mentor at a startup accelerator (after having started and ultimately dissolved my own tech venture), so I can empathize with the plight of taking that leap. I hope the decision to go out on your own worked out for you.
My caveat to suggesting COL/occupation statistics would be that it's more of a benchmark for budgeting (and how it relates to soliciting donations or planning for paid membership) than it is the most reasonable/appropriate/attainable salary at this moment. If that makes sense. Something, anything to help understand what it will take for @Deimos to live sustainably off this project given his location, ramifications of non-profit, trade-offs for what is essentially a sole-proprietorship, vision for ~ specifically, etc. - that could be useful in guiding the budgeting process. We know money will be tight for him, but there's no reason we can't start planning to achieve certain goals for long-term success. Never hurts to be proactive.
About the server costs - tildes is hosted on bare metal, and since it's not built on cloud services, the costs don't spiral upwards like they do for Voat and other systems that need more and more resources as users jump in. In fact the server hasn't even come out of 'idling' territory yet. It will be able to handle a hell of a lot of users before that happens.
The costs for the server will go up if/when we need more machines to handle the tildes infrastructure. That's what happens when things start to get fancy - caching systems, more tildes nodes, etc. At no point are they likely to run into tens-of-thousands territory like cloud services do.
At Wikimedia-point, they are likely to run into tens-of-thousands territory and if ~ manages to get to Reddit size, it'll be close to Wikipedia :)
It's grossly over-simplifying it and also assuming ~ will manage to get such an audience but one should not dismiss the cost of infrastructure / bandwidth, even if it's staying out of the cloud BS and on bare metal servers.
Hi there - I couldn't find anywhere better to post these ideas/comments (though granted I also did not look very hard).
When you click through the 'link' link to a comment reply, that should probably mark that reply as read.
On mobile at least, you can't see you have comment replies/notifications unless you open the sidebar. Except on certain pages, where there is no sidebar, only your username and reply notification underneath. This behaviour should probably be made more consistent, and I would love it if there was a way notifications could be made universally visible.
As the number of comments on a page increases, Chrome for Android slows to a crawl. Chrome for windows desktop begins to fail on rapid scrolling. I haven't had time to dive in and debug the page, but there's presumably some js or maybe some fancier css doing something it shouldn't. Hopefully someone can corroborate.
When you link in to a comment, you aren't taken directly to that comment inside the post via anchor. Could probably do with a CSS highlight as well.
I understand comment tagging is on the rocks a bit and about to be disabled, but for future note there should either be a mirror tag or the ability to 'untag' where for example someone tags a comment as 'noise', but you think it should be tagged 'relevant'.
Thanks for the work you've been doing on tildes!
Hey vakieh, thanks for the feedback. There isn't really anywhere in particular for random feedback, so just putting it in the daily discussion is always fine. Some quick thoughts:
I'm a little torn about this one. I'm definitely finding it annoying already myself - I can't mark the comment as read, because then it will disappear and I can't use the link to it any more, and I can't click "Link" because that will leave it unread and I'll have to come back after to mark it. I also know that some people like to leave notifications deliberately unread as a "things I need to come back to" though, so I imagine they wouldn't want the "Link" to mark it read automatically. There's definitely got to be something better though, I'm just not sure exactly what yet.
Yeah, this one is definitely a problem. I think I'll most likely add an indicator of some sort to the "Sidebar" button when you have notifications, so that you know that you should open it and look.
I definitely haven't seen this at all, and haven't heard anyone else mention it either. Could there be an extension that you're using that might be causing it?
You should be (and I am, in general). The only time it might not work is if the comment is very near the bottom of the page and it's not possible for the browser to scroll down far enough to put it at the top of the screen.
Yeah, that's definitely the sort of thing that we need, right now there's really nothing someone can do when they see an incorrect/misused tag.
Replying to a comment should certainly make it 'read' automatically.
Seems weird to me too. I just tried opening the most commented thread on Chrome/Android 6.0.1 and once it had loaded the entire page, it scrolled smooth like butter.
No slowdowns with Firefox on macOS either, and I've seen some pretty bad performance on some websites with this.
You should offer account settings for how the notification link works. Maybe something like Open and mark read / Context (different texts to make the different purposes obvious)
The scrolling is janky on Firefox Mobile too.
It's not at all for me, and my phone is quite old now. Are you using any extensions that might be trying to update the page while you're scrolling? Could you try disabling your extensions to see if it helps?
Just ublock origin and a few like that. Nothing heavy
A small nitpick: when marking new comments is enabled, changing the thread sorting stops them being highlighted. When I come back to a thread, especially if there are a lot of comments, sorting by newest helps me to find comments I haven't seen yet, but I can't do that or I'll lose the red highlight next to them.
Yeah, that's definitely a problem. Do you think it makes sense not to count as a "new visit" if it's within a certain time period of the previous one (maybe just a minute or something)?
That feels like a bit of a hack, but it might work well enough to justify it. I certainly can't think of a better solution.
It's not really a direct solution either, but I'd also like to make it so that when you're coming back to a thread that has new comments, initially you only see the new comments (and maybe their direct parents). That way it's less likely you'd need to adjust the sorting anyway, but it's definitely still an issue for cases where you do want to change the sort.
So I think with a few adjustments it would improve a lot.
Oh, that would be super nice.
Reddit Sync on Android has an optional navigation bar that let's you scroll directly to comments of various types, including new since last time. You really should test it yourself.
When you scroll by new it would show for example (0/3) as you start at the top of the thread and no new replies are in focus. Then you press next, and it jumps to 1/3, then 2/3 and so on. It can also scroll by root comments, or by all comments, or by OP's comments, etc.
You could achieve this with Javascript and anchor tags for each kind of comment, and using Javascript to compose a list of these tags on the page, using them to jump to the right one.
Thanks for keeping us updated. How many users do we have now?
Didn't know that, thanks!
I think it might make sense to make the ~tildes group un-unsubscribable.
You are correct, which is why I'm suggesting they change it so that particular group cannot be unsubscribed from. I think it would be good to have one group that all tildes users belong to.
How about 'Collapse all/Expand all' options and more importantly 'Collapse all except top comments' is extremely beneficial in navigation and certainly a great addition as a universal setting in the user profile.
Especially for mobile browsing, could we get a link at the bottom of the comments thread to take us back to the front page? It's not terribly inconvenient to have to scroll all the way back up, just mildly annoying.
There hasn't been a daily discussion in over 25 hours, I feel cheated! D:
Just kidding, I was just hoping to be able to read it before going to bed. Now I have something nice to wake up to tomorrow!
Edit: oh by the way, being able to see the exact time something was posted/edited when tapping on the "ago" time would be nice. Maybe this is already possible on desktop using hover, not sure.
It is there on hover, but that obviously only works reliably on desktop. There probably should be a way to do that on mobile, too. Tapping seems like a reasonable idea.
Didn't see it mentioned anywhere else, so I'll ask.
something I can finally help with!
1 - the comment box is at the bottom to keep everyone reading and not just making new parent comments, Deimos posted a comment a few days ago about this and it did make a ton more sense than my butchered memory of what was said, if I can find the link to that comment I'll edit with it in
Not a bad design choice, but it'd be nice to have the main post, at least if it's a text post, come down with the comment box as well so the user doesn't need to scroll up and down for reference.
completely get what you mean, hopefully something is suggested or added to help out on the bigger thread's.
I have been thinking the - might come in use to make previously read comments a little easier to get around but honestly haven't had the chance to try that yet
I actually emailed Deimos about the Markdown flavour. Apparently it's the same as GitHub's, but with the extensions like tables and strikethrough disabled for now. I also noticed that
<sup>and<sub>tags don't work at the moment.Can we get thumbnails for certain groups like ~creative where a preview image would be helpful? And/or enable thumbnails for links to websites like imgur, instagram, youtube, gfycat, etc., that are mainly visual in nature?
I guess the problem for now would be that ~ would need to re-host these thumbnails because of the technical goal of not serving remotely-hosted anything, which means that there would need to be a crawler that finds a suitable thumbnail on the linked sites. It's probably possible, but is likely not going to be a thing in the beginning.
I don't intend to add thumbnails. They only work well for images, and will help bias the site towards that type of content.
I'll try to get my MR cleaned up today / tomorrow
Do you plan to add an API? Mainly asking this because I would be interested in making an Android app.
Yes, there will be one. I have the very base of one started but haven't done much work on it yet (and have it disabled for now). I'm not planning to have an official mobile app, but I expect some third-party ones will be created.
Will there be an option for users to add tildes, like there is with subreddits and whatnot?
Hey, thanks!