As promised yesterday, it's now possible to set different default "views" (order of topics, and time period) for each individual group. Similar to how setting it for the home page works, just go into the group, change the view order/period to the ones you want, and then click the "Set as default" button next to the time period dropdown.

So now when you go into a group, it will choose your default sort by the first one of these that exists:

1. Your default for that group
2. Your default for the home page
3. The site's overall default (currently "activity, last 24 hours")

On that note, any opinions yet about the default switch yesterday to "activity, last 24 hours" instead of "activity, all time"? Or does this question not even matter much since people are setting their own preferred sorts now anyway?

Yesterday we had quite a few topics posted in ~tildes related to "fluff" content and some similar topics. Today I want to talk about a few related things, and some changes that I'm planning to make in the near future.

Not a reddit replacement

First, something I obviously haven't done a very good job of making clear (and needs to be added to the FAQ) is that Tildes really isn't intended to be a replacement for reddit. It's not my goal to have most people want to move here away from reddit. The goal is much closer to a complement—reddit is making a lot of choices to prioritize "quick entertainment" content, often at the expense of more in-depth content and discussions.

Reddit wants to prioritize that kind of content because it works better for the business goals they have. "Fluff" content attracts the most users, and supports showing far more ads. You can show a lot of (in-line) ads to someone skimming down through hundreds of cat pictures, but you can't really show any to someone that spends an hour having an in-depth discussion inside a single post. So naturally they're going to prioritize quick content—it brings them more users, and directly makes them a lot more money.

Tildes doesn't have the same incentives, so my goal is to be a better home for that in-depth content that's slowly getting pushed out. Reddit can keep the fluff. It's going to be better at it than Tildes ever will be anyway, due to displaying images and autoplaying gifs in-line, and many other design choices they're making to prioritize that type of content.

Concerns about current quality, and some changes

That being said, even though we're really not getting image posts or anything similar yet, we have been getting a lot of "what's your favorite?" type threads, which are especially prominent due to the default activity sort. For example, if I look at what a new user on Tildes would see right now, in the first 20 posts we have:

• Favorite desktop environment for Arch?
• Name the online accomplishment you are most proud of
• What upcoming video games are you looking forward to?
• What are some TV shows you find yourself constant rewatching?
• Here's an idea. Comment something really unique (in a good or a bad way) and relatively unknown about a place you're living in or lived in.
• Name a cool, mostly unknown feature of your OS of choice
• What are the most influential books to you?
• What's everyone's favorite movie?
• So, what have you been working on?

And a few more that are similar as well. None of these are bad topics at all (especially the ones in ~talk where that should be expected), but they're pretty much all just "casual discussion" and not really what I'd consider particularly high-quality content. I don't want to discourage these or start removing them or anything, but I do think we probably need some changes to make them less prominent (or at least easily avoidable if people don't want to see that type of topic right now).

So here's my plans for the short term (all three should happen today, I think):

1. Implement filtering for topic tags - I have a basic version of this almost done now, which will allow people to set up a (global) list of tags, where any posts with any of those tags will be filtered out of their view. There's a "show unfiltered" toggle as well that allows you to easily see everything.
2. I'll start editing tags on other people's posts and/or giving other users the ability to do this. Primarily, all "what's your favorite?" type topics should have a common tag so that they can all be filtered easily. I'm thinking "ask" or "survey" or something similar, suggestions are welcome.
3. Allow users to set their default sorting method for the home page and individual groups, and then probably change the default away from "activity".

Let me know what you think of these plans, or if there's anything else you think we should consider doing.

Normally I've been trying to use the Monday post to do a general "what's planned for the week?", but with all the attention and unexpectedly-quick growth last week I didn't get the main thing (open-sourcing) finished anyway, so this one wouldn't be much different.

Instead, I want to ask for input on what are the current missing or broken things that are the most surprising? That is, I don't want to talk about "this would be nice" things here; I want to focus on, "Is this really not there? Am I doing something wrong?"

Here are three examples that will hopefully make it a little more clear:

• User pages currently have no pagination (should I just bump them up from 20 items to 50 or 100 for now, until they do?)
• Username mentions don't send a notification
• There's not even a basic search function

That's the level of things I want. Let me know what others are out there, I'm sure there are more. And two more quick things while I have your attention:

• We added some new groups the other day, make sure to check those out if you haven't yet.
• I've given everyone 3 invite codes, so feel free to invite some more people if you'd like to. You can get them on this page: https://tildes.net/invite

Thanks!

A few updates related to groups today:

First of all, we now have our first actual sub-group with ~tildes.official . I've automatically subscribed everyone to it, and I'm currently the only one that can post in it. So if you'd like to make sure that you're seeing the official announcements and daily discussions but don't want all the suggestions and bug reports and such clogging up your home page, you can subscribe to ~tildes.official and unsubscribe from ~tildes. Subscribing to ~tildes will still give you the posts from both (regardless of whether you subscribe to ~tildes.official or not). I'll be moving the previous announcements and such into ~tildes.official eventually.

Also, as mentioned a few days ago, it's time to add a few more groups. As part of this, I've updated the groups list page a tiny bit to add the Subscribe/Unsubscribe button onto that page, so that you can easily tell which ones you're already subscribed to and change your choices. These are the new groups:

• ~books
• ~food
• ~hobbies
• ~lgbt
• ~lifestyle

I know that there are a number of other ones that people are clamoring for as well (including sub-groups of existing ones), but I think it's important to go pretty slow with this. At this point I think we already have more groups than reddit did for years (and Digg ever had), but the site's population is lower than even a tiny single subreddit would be. Having things organized more is nice, but we don't want to fragment too quickly into a bunch of inactive groups.

One more thing I could use some help with: the short group descriptions on the groups list are pretty close to placeholders that I wrote very quickly. If anyone wants to suggest some new ones for any of the groups we could use to help make their purpose more clear, I'd love to update them with better ones.

Thanks, let me know what you think.

There are already a couple of (great) discussions going on related to comment tags, from different directions:

• Are noise tags turning into a de facto downvote?
• The case for "noise."

As I mentioned in a comment in the top one, I've disabled the ability to add/remove comment tags for now. They didn't have any actual, non-cosmetic functionality yet anyway, and they're being misused (not severely, but a bit) for various reasons and in various ways.

Obviously we can have lots of larger discussions about how to revamp the comment-tagging system significantly to make it better (and link it into the trust system and such, once that actually exists), but I'd like to try to talk about something more focused in this thread for the sake of expediency: are there any simple, minimal things that we could do to make comment-tagging "useful enough" to turn back on soon?

For example, maybe it would be enough for now to just drop or add some of the options, or make the comment tags non-anonymous so that we can see who added particular tags. I'm not saying we definitely should do those, because it very well might go wrong in other ways, but those are the types of ideas I'd like to talk about—relatively quick solutions that might address some of the misuse.

After we slowed things down a little last week, I was planning to post today and say that it would be okay to start promoting the site a bit again and getting some more people in. Turns out that... kind of took care of itself, with multiple prominent mentions in this thread on reddit this morning.

So we've got a flood of invite requests again, and will probably have a lot of new users showing up over the next few days as we work through those (and thanks again to the people handling all the ones in /r/tildes on reddit, it's a lot of work). If you're one of those new people—welcome, please feel free to post in this thread (or in ~tildes in general) if you have any feedback or suggestions. We're pretty swamped right now and might not be able to reply to everything (or reply quickly), but I'm definitely reading it all.

On that note, with a lot more people coming in, I think we can add some more (top-level) groups and see if we have enough activity to support a few more. I'll probably do this later today or tomorrow. These are the ones I'm planning to add right now, let me know if you think these are good and/or if we need some other ones:

• ~books (is this the best name?) - for reading discussions (fiction and non-fiction) - writing would probably still be in ~creative
• ~food - for discussion of food (and drinks, so the naming might be a bit weird), recipes, articles, etc.
• ~lifestyle - for fitness, outdoor activities, specific diets and so on
• ~soc (is this the best name? I think ~social would be confusing) - culture, social issues, environmentalism and so on - some people have told me that they don't really want to post these sorts of things in the more "general" groups, so I think we probably need a more specific one

I'm also thinking about turning off the auto-subscription to all groups on registration, so that people can start only selecting ones that they're interested in, instead of having to opt-out from ones they're not interested in. I never wanted to do that for long, but I'm not sure if this is too early to stop already.

Any thoughts on that? The groups list page definitely needs some improvements before I do it, including showing which ones you're subscribed or not subscribed to, and some better descriptions. Also, if I do end up doing it soon, should I un-subscribe all existing users from everything to get everyone to start fresh, or will that annoy you all too much? Maybe only people that haven't already changed their subscriptions at all?

Howdy. Things are still very busy (which is why I'm falling behind on plans like getting the code open-sourced). The TrueReddit thread yesterday went very well, and I still have hundreds of invite request emails piled up from it. We're also now up over 2000 registered users, and activity is very high for such a new site - there have already been over 100 new topics posted today alone, and over 2000 comments.

As part of that, one of the things I'm trying to get done very soon (in the next few hours, I really hope) is splitting off these "official" posts into their own dedicated group, so people can feel free to unsubscribe from ~tildes without worrying about missing important announcements. There's a ton of activity in ~tildes with suggestions, bug reports, questions, etc. which are all great, but I understand if people would rather not have that filling up their home page and only go to check on it specifically when they feel like it.

On a similar note, since I asked everybody to read a super long, in-depth talk transcript yesterday, I'll keep it simpler today:

Do you think the "activity" sort is still a decent default?

I feel like it's working pretty well (and you can change to other sorting methods and time periods if you like, though it doesn't save your choice yet), but it's definitely leaning the site more towards "forum-like" activity, with the threads more towards the "discussion" end than links, articles, and so on.

So is this still good for now, or should we think about switching the default over to "newest" or "most votes", and let people just pick "activity" on their own if they're interested in that more forum-like experience?

Geez, I said I was hoping to keep these daily discussions a little "lighter" on the weekend, but that's definitely not working out this weekend.

Yesterday's thread is getting awfully large, so I think it will be good to use this one to continue with some specific topics from that one, instead of trying to keep it in there where it's pretty unwieldy (I definitely need to do some work on handling large threads better).

There are 3 things I want to try to clarify and start discussion on:

1. Whether someone is civil or not is absolutely not the only factor in whether they're going to be welcome. Multiple people in the other thread seem to be jumping to the conclusion of "this means that as long as someone says it politely, they've got free rein, and we have to treat all their statements as valid!" That's not true at all. So how can we try to make this more clear? Are there particular rules or guidelines that we could put in place to help separate reasonable conversations from "just asking questions"? Are there existing communities that you think handle this well that we can try to emulate?
2. To be completely honest, I probably haven't been paying enough attention to the political threads that have been posted so far. I'll spend some time today looking through some of the existing ones to see if issues are already coming up. We've talked previously about why political content is difficult—should we consider something like just banning "overly political" threads (at least for now) to prevent the site's culture from getting too adversarial initially? Again, is there anything else specific you think we can do or emulate to help the situation?
3. Please try not to extrapolate too much immediately. Tildes has "really" been going for a week, I've taken one moderator/admin-like action, and there are people acting like that's already defined the site's entire future. I know everyone here is pretty passionate and excited, but try to relax a bit—the site's brand new, still very tiny, and a lot of things still need to be figured out (both for mechanics and policy). Things like "one user might be getting away with being a troll" doesn't mean that it's doomed to turn into "polite Voat". I'm not going to let that happen, but if you don't believe me that's fine—the only way I can prove it is through what actually happens, and that takes time.

So... that's pretty scattered, but hopefully it's a decent starting point to talk about some of these topics. Let me know what you think, I definitely appreciate everyone's input so far, and it's going to be important to keep getting it regularly to make sure Tildes can stay on the right track.

Moving the vote count to the bottom of comments has been suggested a number of times, and since the comment tags are disabled for now anyway, this seems like a good time to try it out since we won't have those being shown at the top right now either.

I'm definitely not certain I'll keep it this way, but at least for now, a comment's vote count is now shown on the Vote button itself at the bottom of the comment (unless it's your own comment, in which case it's still shown at the top).

Let me know how it feels to you, I figured it would be an interesting thing to try out at least.

Like I did last week, I'm going to use the Monday post to talk about the general plans for this week:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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 isn't a huge update, but it should make navigating around the larger comment threads a little easier. There's now a "Parent" link in each comment's header (unless it's a top-level comment), right after the "Link". This is also present on user pages and in your notifications as well, for if you'd rather jump to the parent instead of the comment itself.

When you're using it from inside a comment thread, I also added some extra behavior to it: when it jumps you up to the parent comment, it will add a "[Back]" link at the end of that comment's header, which you can click to jump back to the comment you clicked "Parent" from. This can be used in a "chain" as well - you can click "Parent" multiple times to go back up a few levels in a thread, and then use the "[Back]" links on each one to get back down to where you started.

Hope that helps, let me know if you notice any weird behavior or have any feedback about it.

Edit: completely unrelated extra note - hey, we've made it to 3-char topic IDs already (this one is 103)

It's now been almost exactly a week since Tildes got its first "real" attention on Hacker News, and it's been a great week. We're going to have over 1000 users registered today, which is awesome and incredibly encouraging for me to see so much excitement this quickly. I'm also extremely glad that I decided to start out invite-only, because with the attention Tildes has been getting in various threads on reddit already, I think we could have easily had 20,000 or more users right now, and that would have been far too fast to grow.

On that note, I think it's good to try to slow down for at least a few days at around this size while we get some things sorted out and improved. So at least for now, please don't go out of your way to post about Tildes in any major reddit threads or anything (I'm looking at you, @Vibe, you're too good at finding places to mention it). You don't have to hide it and are still welcome to mention it to friends and such (and send me a message if you need some invite codes), but it would be nice to try to avoid major public attention for a few days so we can catch our breath.

As for what we should figure out while we're trying to pause the growth a bit, here are a few things from my perspective, but please let me know if you have any other suggestions:

• Comment tags - I think I may just disable these entirely for now. They don't really do anything useful for the moment anyway, and I think the system for them needs some work so they're more likely to work as intended.
• More groups - we could probably use a few more groups. A food/drink one has been suggested a few times and I think that's a good idea, any suggestions for the name? Other than that, any other ones you think we need urgently?
• Various minor convenience improvements - there are a lot of little things that need tweaking, that weren't as obviously needed when the site was less active. For example, easier ways to find new comments in large threads, since we're already getting ones with hundreds of comments. I'd like to get some of that kind of stuff in place before it gets even worse as the activity keeps increasing, so please let me know also any specific ones that you think are urgent. Once the code is open-source I expect user contributions to help a lot with this kind of stuff.

Thanks again for being here, it's pretty amazing to already be worrying about growing too quickly.

One of the main complaints so far has been that some people have been having trouble staying logged in (until randomly it just seems to work for no apparent reason). Examples: Here and here and here and here and probably even more.

I think I've figured out (and fixed) the issue now, so if you get unexpectedly logged out again after your next login, please let me know. I think the existing sessions may still have the issue, so I'm not totally sure if it will be fixed until after a new login (and even then, I'm still not totally sure).

This is definitely just a stop-gap until I get some time to work on properly paginating it, but quite a few people have asked about a page to view old notifications again after marking them read, so I put a quick one together that's linked in the sidebar of your user page as "Previously read", at https://tildes.net/notifications

For now it doesn't paginate at all and will just show your most recent notifications (up to 100) that were marked read, and doesn't include the unread ones. It's not great in a lot of ways, but hopefully better than not having any way to view the read notifications at all.

Hey everyone, thanks for being here. It's really exciting to see so many people on the site now, and hopefully we can keep the momentum up. I even have about 50 more invite request emails from overnight that I haven't gone through yet.

As I've said before, I think keeping these daily discussions a little less serious on the weekend is a good idea, so I'll stick to that for today. Two main questions/focuses:

1. Obviously, there are a lot of people new to the site in the last day or two. For all those people (and previous users too) - what are your early impressions? Anything you really like? Anything that's driving you nuts that I should try to fix very soon?
2. What do you think of changing the site's default sort to "Activity"? I've found myself using it almost exclusively since I added it, so I like it a lot, but I'm not sure if everyone else feels the same way. Ideally I'd like to make it customizable so people can set their own default sort (even separately for each individual group and the home page), but that probably won't be for a little while yet.

Today I want to talk about expanding the information available on the Tildes Docs site. There's some info there, but there should be a lot more. Eventually, I'd like that site to include information about the site's goals, mechanics and so on, as well as things closer to standard "documentation", such as how the post formatting works, details on the tagging systems, etc.

One specific thing that I know I'd like to add before long is kind of a "FAQ for mechanics" that can have answers for the common questions that keep coming up, like "why is the comment box at the bottom instead of the top?".

To help with this, I've now open-sourced the files for both the Tildes Docs site and the Blog here now, so you can contribute to them directly if you'd like to: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes-static-sites/

@flaque has already written a page to help with Markdown formatting that I'll add soon (but I wanted to see if he'd like to do it as a proper merge request so he gets credit as a contributor). Anyone else is welcome to contribute to the Docs as well, and I'd appreciate the help. However, if you're not sure if it's something that I'd want to add it might be best to ask first before you start writing.

Outside of that, I'm open for suggestions about what you think would be good to include, or things that are already there that need work. Thanks!

As I mentioned in the post on Monday, I've spent some time this week trying to make sure that I should be in good shape for the GDPR (which takes effect tomorrow).

In the end, the change in minimum age for some EU member states seemed to be the only issue, so I've just updated the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use to account for that. You can see the exact changes that I made here, on GitLab.

And on that note, now that the Docs pages are open-source, I added a "view history" link that shows at the top of pages on the Docs/Blog if they've been edited, so that people can click to see the full edit history of the relevant page on GitLab.

Because of these changes, if you're older than 13 but below the minimum age in your country (for example, in Germany and France it's 16), you'll have to stop using Tildes now. At this point, it's unlikely that anyone is affected by this. As a side note, if anyone knows of a comprehensive, updated list of what the minimum age is for different countries, please let me know. I'd love to link to a list so that people can easily check if they don't know what their country's minimum age is, but I wasn't able to find one.

As discussed yesterday, since everyone seemed supportive, I've updated the default sorting for topic lists to "activity". I think we'll probably need to reconsider this as the site's traffic and posting volume continues increasing, but I think it's working really well as a default for now.

Hopefully the default will also be customizable on a per-group basis in the future (and/or allow people to set up their own "shortcuts" to certain groups with specific sortings).

We've had a few discussions already related to the voting mechanics (mostly about whether we should change the name, which is still definitely a possibility). Something that came up in one of those that I think is an interesting idea is moving a comment's current "score" to the bottom of the comment instead of the top. I'm a little uncertain about this, so I wanted to see what other people think.

Some thoughts:

• I do think that having the vote button at the bottom of the comment is the correct placement. People shouldn't be voting before they've read the comment, and (especially if you're on mobile), needing to scroll back up to the top of the comment to vote after reading it is strange.
• Because of that, if we move the score to the bottom it could even just be on the vote button itself, similar to how it already is for topics.
• I do also think that having the comment tags at the top of the comment is correct. They're generally meant to be informational, and it's useful to get that information before reading the comment. For example, if I can see that a string of jokes is coming up, I may just want to collapse the thread and skip it, instead of needing to read them to recognize that they're jokes.
• Comment scores are useful information overall and I don't think we should totally hide them, but some other sites have tried to de-emphasize or hide them in various ways (some of that is also related to the possibility of negative scores, which can't happen here). For example, Hacker News doesn't show comment scores at all except to the comment's author, and many subreddits on reddit hide the comment scores initially for a few hours to try to reduce biased voting from seeing them.

Let me know what you think. This is a pretty minor decision overall, but even little things like this can have significant effects, so I'm interested in other opinions about it.

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.

First, thanks for the great discussion yesterday about "fluff" content. There's a lot to consider, and a lot of people made great points (and are still making them), so thanks for all your thoughts in there. On a side note, that was the first topic on Tildes to get over 100 comments (and there's now already a second one). That's a pretty neat milestone to be hitting already.

For today, I want to talk a bit about my general plans for this week and see if anyone has any thoughts. Maybe this would be a good thing for me to try to do every Monday?

I'm planning to focus on a few things this week, in no particular order:

• The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect this Friday. A lot of sites and people are panicking too much about it, and I think Tildes should generally be fine, but it's still best for me to try to make sure I'm doing things properly before it comes into effect. I've definitely missed at least one thing, and want to spend some time seeing if there are any other updates I should be making in advance.
• Since you've all certainly read the Tildes Privacy Policy, I'm sure you all know that it says Tildes will delete various types of data after 30 days. Even though the site only started opening up more over the last week or so, I did originally set the server up on April 26 and that's when the earliest data is from. So this week I'll need to do some work to make sure that all of the relevant data is actually going to be getting cleaned up when it reaches 30 days old. A decent amount of this is already done, but I need to verify and finish building some other cleanup code.
• The next big priority is to try to get the site's code open-sourced. I've had a ton of offers from people to help with development, so I'd really like to start making it possible for people to contribute very soon. This shouldn't be too much work overall, a lot of it is just writing up information that will make it easier for people to get involved.
• Outside of that, I'll probably also just be doing some general fixing and tweaking of different issues that people have pointed out. Thanks for all the feedback, bug reports, and suggestions so far. If I have time, I'll try to work on some larger features that are already becoming more important with the activity increasing—things like basic search.

Finally, in the interest of trying to keep momentum up, I've also given everyone 3 invite codes, so you can invite some other people to join the site if you'd like. You can get them from the invite page, which is linked from the sidebar on your user page.

Thanks again for being here, it's really exciting to see so many people using the site already.

This is more of a stop-gap than a real solution, but it's now at least possible to link to a specific comment. On each comment, on the right side of the header "stripe", there's a # that links to that comment. It just uses an HTML anchor, so you're still linking to the full comments page, but it should scroll to the correct comment at least. You can also click the # on a comment from your notifications page or a user's page to go directly to that comment.

In the future we'll probably want to have a better view that highlights the linked comment more, and allows displaying context (the parent comments), but for now this should help a bit.

As promised, I've done a fair amount of updating of the Docs pages now. There were various small tweaks, but the major changes were the addition of the "Future Mechanics" page to explain a bit about plans for the "trust system" (which we also discussed here), as well as mostly rewriting the "Overall Goals" page so that it covers different topics than the announcement post.

I've asked this as a bit of a side question in a few other places already, but haven't really heard much, so I'm going to make it the focus today: where do you think we should try to promote Tildes to get more (good) users?

I think posting on reddit is a given, but I'd like to hear suggestions for which specific subreddits you think would be good places to try.

I tried a post on Hacker News this morning, but it did about as well as my posts there usually do—it had one upvote after an hour, so I deleted it and will try again some other time.

Outside of those, if you think there are any news sites, blogs, etc. that would be interested in the site and its goals, I could send a message to any of those as well. Michael Eades made a post about it on his blog last week which was great to see and has brought in a few people.

Edit: oh also, I've given all the existing users 5 invite codes again, so if there's anyone that you want to invite please feel free. They're available on this page, linked from the sidebar on your user page.

A few people have expressed surprise to me that there weren't any notifications when someone replied to their topics (only comments), so I've added a basic version of topic reply notifications now as well. You'll get one when someone makes a new top-level comment on a topic that you posted, and they're combined in with the comment replies and shown in the same "unread notifications" page for now.

Most of the other weirdness mentioned when I added comment replies is still around, and I'll definitely want to add some sort of "stop sending me replies for this topic" toggle eventually, but I don't think it's a big concern for now since the comment volume is still very low.

A couple of fairly minor updates to topic-tagging (that mostly came out of discussion in this thread the other day):

1. When you're entering tags, you now need to separate them with commas. Spaces will be kept as part of the tag, instead of working as a separator. So you can tag something like music, soundtrack, full album and get 3 tags out of that.

   (Side note that I doubt anyone cares about: spaces are converted to underscores internally, so using a space or an underscore in a tag is now the same)

2. I added a tags field to the "new topic" page, so you can tag while you're posting the topic now, instead of needing to do it separately afterwards.

Most of you have probably already read it (especially since I spammed you all with a message that has a link to it), but there's a bit more info about topic-tagging here as well: https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics#topic-tags

Not a very "deep" discussion topic, but I think I'll try to leave more formal ones for weekdays since that tends to be when people are around more.

So just a general question: in the short time you've been using the site so far, is there some pesky thing that's already annoying you? Something that takes too many clicks, information where you don't expect it, etc.?

Currently, when someone registers on Tildes they're automatically subscribed to all of the existing groups (except ~test). I did this because while the site is this small, it seemed like the best way to try to get reasonable activity in a wide range of the groups, but I absolutely don't want to keep doing it for long.

I think it's very important that people should need to seek out groups that they're interested in, instead of being defaulted into them and needing to opt out. Here's a really old post I wrote on reddit about how being a default subscription made it impossible for /r/gaming to ever be a quality gaming subreddit, but it applies to all defaults.

So, how should we decide when the site's starting to get active enough that we can stop the auto-subscriptions? And once we do, what do you think is a good way to start people out so that they're able to find groups they're interested in? Maybe, as mentioned in another thread earlier today, we should have a "welcome / getting started" page that new users end up on that goes over some of the important settings and helps them look into subscribing to groups?

Tildes has a feature that marks which comments are new in threads since you last visited (kind of like a combination of the similar gold comment-highlighting and RES features on reddit), but I've noticed that not many people are enabling it so far.

I think the reason is that I made the label/description of it a bit too scary, and it sounded like it was some sort of tracking for the sake of tracking, without explaining the actual benefit enough. So I've updated the info now, and added a small image that shows what it does to its settings page. If you didn't already have the feature enabled because I scared you off about it, please take a look at the Settings page again and see if it makes more sense now.

Alright, not so much a particular "discussion" today, but there are already a couple of other good ones going on in ~tildes as well.

As I'm sure many of you have noticed, I've started actively promoting the site around some reddit places today, and I'm sure it'll probably spread some more from there too. In support of that, I've given all the current users 5 invite codes that you can give to others if you'd like to invite anyone. You can get to these on the invite page, which is linked from the sidebar on your user page.

Also, in case you missed it, I fixed the invite process the other day so that you can have multiple active codes now, so you don't still need to invite only one person at a time.

As always, let me know if you need more invite codes or have a particular suggestion for ways you'd like to invite more people. Hopefully we can keep some momentum going for a bit now and get the activity to a self-sustaining level.

Whoops, forgot about posting a daily discussion until pretty late today, sorry.

Simple topic since it's late: what do you think about adding "expand inline" functionality for topics that point to sites that provide embeds (like YouTube)? There's already the ability to expand text topics, and it can certainly be useful for other types as well. It's a bit dangerous for things like images though, and if we do allow it we'll need to be careful about whether it starts tilting the site towards "quick" content.

Any opinions?

It's still very rough in quite a few ways, but lack of comment reply notifications has definitely been one of the biggest missing features, so I wanted to get this basic form of it out before I worry about fixing some of the weirdness with it.

A few quick notes on it:

• Currently, notifications are only for replies to comments. You won't get any notifications for replies to topics, username mentions, etc.
• Currently, you can only view the unread notifications. Once you mark one as read, it'll be gone with no way to see it again. It's still stored and viewing read notifications will definitely be possible in the future, just not yet.
• There are some strange interactions between the comment visit-tracking and the notifications still, I'm not totally sure how I'm going to handle those yet.

Let me know if you notice anything else, I'll probably apply some more updates to it before long to fix some of the strange aspects.

I've made a couple of fairly minor changes to sorting for topic listings recently:

• pulled the sorting options (most votes, most comments, newest) out of a dropdown list and made them into tabs, to make it easier to switch between them
• added an "all time" option to the time-period dropdown

The default sorting on the site is also still currently set to "newest" since the activity is low, and I think that's the best way to make sure new posts are getting seen.

I'm also planning to add a sort along the lines of "recent activity" where it will behave like a forum - new topics still come in at the top of the list, but any time a topic gets a new comment it moves back up to the top as well. This will mean that active topics stay near the top, instead of gradually being pushed down by new ones, regardless of how active they are.

Any thoughts on that idea or the other changes? Once I do add the "activity" sort, do you think that's a better option as the default for now, or should I stick with "newest" (or even switch to one of the others)? Any other suggestions or ideas for different sorting methods?

Edit: I decided to change it from "Recent activity" to just "Activity".

As mentioned in the post over the weekend, I've added a new sorting option now: "recent activity". This behaves kind of like a forum, where active topics (ones getting new comments) will keep coming back up to the top of the list. I haven't added any specific protections like @cfabbro suggested in that thread, but I will if it seems necessary to prevent excessive "bumping".

I'm considering making this the default sort while the site's overall activity is still pretty low, but haven't done it just yet. Let me know what you think of it, and if you notice any weirdness.

Previously, the invite process was pretty annoying if you were planning to invite multiple people - you could only have one "active" invite code at a time, so you'd have to send someone a code and then wait until they registered before you could generate another code for the next person.

I've fixed this now and it's possible to have multiple active codes, so you can generate as many as you need (up to the limit of how many codes you've been granted). You can do this on the invite page: https://tildes.net/invite

Hopefully this makes it easier to invite people, and as always if you want more codes for a particular purpose just send me a message and let me know.

Okay, okay. The default site theme is now less beige/tan/yellow. This was a bit of a quick-and-dirty way of doing it, so the other colors are all still the Solarized ones for now, but I may change them around some later.

The other themes are still available, and can now be selected on the Settings page—if you want the beige back, that's "Solarized Light". I also added a theme with a full-black background (I don't think it looks very good, but it's there).

Currently, Tildes user pages only show one "page" of the user's history—their most recent 20 topics and/or comments. This wasn't really a deliberate choice, I just haven't added pagination yet (it's a bit tricky because of the combination of topics and comments). But I wanted to talk about the general idea of being able to look through users' histories and see if there's anything we should consider doing differently.

In some ways, being able to look through user histories is nice. Sometimes I find a user that makes good posts, and I like to go back and see what else they've posted. However, a lot of people use it in a malicious way, going back through people's posts to find "dirt", or even sometimes using it as a way to doxx them. This happens a lot on Twitter especially, where attention will land on someone for some reason, and people will dig through years of their previous tweets to find things to attack them with.

Even reddit (unintentionally) puts a limit on how much history you can look back through because of their 1000-item limit on any listings. That's not a limitation that I'm going to have, so adding pagination will mean that it's possible to view all of any user's previous posts.

Do you think we should add some restrictions to how much history is visible to try to reduce these bad uses, or is that futile/unnecessary?

Today's daily topic comes out of a discussion in this thread yesterday - people are currently feeling a bit weird/rude about using the comment tags (described here, if you haven't read this already).

So the questions are:

• Does it just feel rude because we're currently very small-scale, where any negative action feels more personal?
• Are there any ways that we could try to reduce that feeling a bit?
• Should we just remove comment tags until the site is larger, since they're not very useful at this point anyway?

Feel free to add any other thoughts/discussions about comment tags as well.

I'm doing some writing (and re-writing/editing) for the Docs site today, to prepare for trying to spread the word about Tildes more in the near future. To help with that, what information, explanations, or answers do you feel are missing or insufficient right now?

For example, the discussion we had the other day on moderation was a perfect example—there was no information really laid out about "how does moderation work?" I'm sure there are quite a few other subjects that also feel like mysteries for now.

So, especially for people that only found out about Tildes recently, what other gaps are there where you feel like, "I don't understand how Tildes is planning to ____________"?

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.

Fairly straightforward question today - do you think it's useful/interesting for people to be able to write a small "about me" section on their userpage?

There are definitely good uses for these, but they also have the potential to be used in spammy or otherwise bad ways too, so I'm not totally sure if it's something I want to do.

Any thoughts or strong feelings about why this would be a good or bad feature?

(P.S. Sorry, this is later than I'd usually like to make these posts)

It's not quite notifications for replies/mentions yet, but in a similar vein, I've now added a feature that will mark which comments in a thread are new since your last visit, and also mark which topics have any new comments when you're on the listing page (like "9 comments (3 new)").

To fit with Tildes's approach to privacy, this feature is disabled by default and requires you to opt in.

There's a link to the page to do this from your settings page, which is linked from the sidebar on your userpage. The page explains the privacy implications and allows you to enable it if you want to use it.

Let me know what you think of it, more new stuff coming soon.

I'm going to start posting one "official" daily discussion topic a day in ~tildes to talk about general site things, plans for mechanics, feedback on specific ideas, etc. You're definitely all welcome to post other similar topics as well if you want to, I just want to have one sort of "focused" post going every day.

For today:

What do you think of the current set of groups? It's a decent mix, but there are also some obvious gaps (though ~misc is supposed to act as a catch-all for posts that don't really fit anywhere else).

Overall, it's a tricky balance—I think if there isn't a group where a particular topic seems to fit, it feels a little discouraging, like maybe you shouldn't post it. But I also don't want to create too many groups, where we end up with a lot of them just being inactive because it's uncommon for anyone to submit items that fit in there.

And on a related topic, do you think there's a particular way we should try to handle "group requests", or just treat them mostly informally in ~tildes?

I think I was confusing about this before, so to be clear up front: Tildes will stay invite-only for the foreseeable future. There's a ton to figure out and build before we can even consider making the site open to the public. Staying invite-only will let us take our time on a lot of the systems and functionality, and build up a good "base culture" before worrying about a massive influx.

However, starting now, we can stop treating it as a secret. Please don't go out of your way to promote/spam it anywhere (and I'm personally still going to take it a bit slow today), but if there are people that you want to talk to about it, feel free. Please try to send anyone to the announcement blog post first, since that's the best explanation of the site's goals.

Edit: I've also tweeted the post from the official account, if that's useful for sharing or anything.

I've also given all the current users 5 invite codes, so you can invite specific people if you'd like to. You can access these on this page, which is linked from the sidebar on your user page. Keep in mind that the site is currently quite minimal and inactive and probably will be for a while yet, so it's best to invite people that you think won't be discouraged by that (and ideally will help by posting things themselves). If you want more invite codes, just let me know and I can give you more.

As always, thanks for being here so far, and please do tell me if you run into issues or have any feedback.

Since we're starting to get a decent number of new people coming in (and I'm hoping to keep that going), I just set up a welcome message that will go out to all new users when they register. I also went back and sent it to everyone that's already registered just to make sure everyone sees it, since I think the site hasn't been very good so far about explaining itself. A lot of you probably already knew (or figured out) the info in it, but maybe there's something new, like the tracking of comment visits if you don't already have that enabled.

More stuff coming soon, I've got a few things in progress and have also been talking with a bunch of people about the site.

Here's a quick list of things that I'm working on getting ready in the very near future. Please let me know if you have particular thoughts on any of these.

1. Fixing the site icons for link topics (currently just shows the blue dashed square).
2. Putting some information in topic sidebars - any thoughts on what would be good to have here? I think I'd like to have some of the more-detailed metadata about the topic once there's more of that being generated (for example for videos, this could show which channel it's from, how long it is, etc.), but that still won't be very much and there's a lot of space. Commenting rules? Something else?
3. Inbox/notifications for replies to your comments and topics, as well as username mentions. Any opinions about how it would be good to do this in a way that's convenient and not too annoying?
4. Collapse buttons for comment threads (possibly by being able to click the line as well, similar to the reddit redesign)

Alright, I'm going to take one more "private" day. I want to work on a few more of the high-priority items, and write up a bit more on the docs site related to questions that people have asked me so far, and information that still isn't very clear.

I'll make at least another post or two later today in ~tildes with specific info for features, then let's plan to start trying to get some public attention tomorrow (edit: to be clear, the site is staying invite-only, just attention for the announcement post, I mean).

If you want some invite codes today to quietly invite a few more people, just let me know and I can give you some.

Just a couple quick notes for today:

Updates

I've made a few minor updates to layout and such here and there. I also changed the site's default sorting to "newest" while it's still pretty inactive, since that should make it easier to see the new posts. I'm planning to get an update in pretty soon that will remember which sorting settings you change to (on an individual group basis), so you should be able to adjust that soon if you want to.

Still working on the things I mentioned in this post, hopefully should have a couple of those done in the next day or two. I know the lack of reply notifications is especially painful and hard to keep conversations going at all, so I'm trying to get that in very soon.

Invites + "going public"

I'm inviting some more people directly today, so there will probably be various new faces showing up. If any of you have others that you want to invite, definitely let me know and I can contact them myself or give you some invite codes.

Currently, my plan is to start going more public tomorrow or Wednesday, trying to spread the announcement post out a bit more and get more people invited. I'll probably give all of you some invite codes at that point too, whether you want them or not. If you have particular suggestions for where you think I should (or shouldn't) try to get attention on the post, let me know.

Thanks, it's really great to see some people getting started using the site.

Very basic for now, but there's now a button in the top left corner of each comment (before the author's username) to collapse the comment along with its replies.

In the future I'll make this persist across page loads (so if you come back to the same thread, things will stay collapsed), and have the info at the top change - maybe showing how many comments are in the thread or something similar.

First issue closed!

Hey folks, thanks for trying things out so far. I know it's in a bit of an awkward phase right now where everything is inactive, but this should improve as more people join. Unfortunately I've had some bad timing today with fun things like a surprise early-morning trip to the vet, so I haven't been able to pay as much attention today as I wanted to.

Anyway, a few updates:

Site mechanics

I did manage to spend some time writing up a page that explains some of the basic site mechanics, which is here: https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics

Hopefully that helps explain things a bit better, since so far you've just basically had to try things to figure out what they are. Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts about the info on that page.

Issue tracker

There's not much there yet either, but I set up an issue tracker here on gitlab (which is where I'll host the site's code eventually): https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues

I'm not expecting anyone to register on there and submit issues or anything, but that will be kind of the "formal" location for issues and plans (and I'll transfer things there that get reported on the site itself).

Invites and other plans

So far, I've only invited people that already knew what I was working on and that I've been talking to about it. Today and over the weekend, I'm going to start inviting some more specific people that I'd like to have involved but I haven't previously talked with about Tildes. While doing that, I'm also going to be working on the things mentioned in this post yesterday: https://tildes.net/~tildes/a/high_priority_things_to_fix_add

If any of you have suggestions for people you'd like to invite (who won't be turned off by an inactive site), please let me know. I can contact them or give you some invite codes.

Early next week, I'd like to start trying to get some public attention and expanding more quickly. This will probably include posting the announcement blog post to some places, as well as giving you all some invite codes. I don't have very specific plans yet though, so again, please let me know if you have any suggestions.

Thanks again, and please keep posting a bit just so we can get some base activity going - if you read an interesting article or anything, just take a minute to post it here as well. Like I said, I know it's a bit awkward for now, but it will get better.