As mentioned last week, I've stopped making the official Daily Discussion posts, but I'd still like to have this general weekly one on Mondays to talk a bit about my overall intentions for the upcoming week.

This week, my main focus is definitely going to be working through more open-source-related tasks, especially reviewing the open merge requests that people have contributed. It's been great to see people diving right in and contributing significant features already, there's some really exciting stuff in there—username notifications, post saving, 2-factor authentication support, and even more. So I want to try to get through reviewing most or all of those in the near future (and deploy some when they're ready).

Beyond that, there's still a fair amount of documentation and other things related to the open-sourcing that I'd like to do, and (as mentioned last week), I've now got most of the work for user-page pagination done but haven't quite had a chance to finish it up yet. There are also some company-side things that need attention, including looking into applying for some grants that I should be eligible for now that the code has been open-sourced.

I think we also need to bring in another significant-size group of users fairly soon. Some people have been giving out invites on reddit in /r/tildes and other locations where the site's been brought up, and I expect we'll also do one of the official invite threads this week too (which tends to bring in a lot). To help with that a bit, I've given everyone 5 invite codes again (you can get them here), but if you have some way that you'd like to invite more people through and need more codes, just send me a message and let me know.

This is an extremely minor change and I don't know if it's even really worth posting about, but I think it's probably good to make people aware: I've just increased the "grace period" for editing both comments and topics to 5 minutes (previously it was only 2 minutes). That is, any edits inside the first 5 minutes after it was posted won't mark the post with the (edited ... ago) text.

Currently, all older posts that were edited between 2-5 minutes after posting will still be marked as edited, but I'll probably go back and un-mark those as well.
Updated all old posts now as well.

A couple weeks back, we had a thread for people to propose some new groups, and then I got too involved in open-sourcing and some other tasks to follow up on it properly. Thanks again for all the suggestions and the patience with the long delay - I've finally gotten around to going through the thread now and selected 4 groups from the suggestions to try adding. If I didn't select a group you suggested or were excited about, it doesn't necessarily mean I don't think it was a good idea, I just don't want to add too many groups too quickly, and I think these ones have some interesting possibilities.

I decided to auto-subscribe everyone to the new groups, but if you're not interested, you can easily unsubscribe from them through the groups page: https://tildes.net/groups

Here are the new groups:

• ~anime - this is one that I'm really iffy about from a hierarchy perspective, so I think it'll be interesting to experiment with because of that. It's unusual because it will probably contain posts that technically could have fit into ~tv, ~movies, ~games, and other existing groups, but having the anime subject split across all of those groups doesn't seem great either. There will probably be some interesting possibilities to play with here, like possibly making ~anime.games and ~games.anime basically point to the same "location".
• ~enviro - we've had a fair number of topics being posted about recycling, alternate energy, and other related topics, so I think this will be a good one to try.
• ~humanities - this should be able to cover a wide range of the topics that have mostly ended up in ~misc so far (and I'll probably move some previous ones here) - history, ethics, philosophy, etc.
• ~life - the proposal for this one was named ~personal, but I think that term has some other implications that might be a little off, so I decided to go with ~life. This is intended to be a group for discussing and posting about general life topics - work, school, families/parenting, and those kind of things.

Let me know what you think, and if any of the names or descriptions of the groups (in the groups page and in their sidebar) are confusing or should be rewritten, I'd appreciate suggestions.

Following up on his original addition of "open links in new tabs", @what has added another sub-option to it, which will make it so that external links in the text of comments, topic, and messages will be opened in new tabs by default.

This can be enabled on the Settings page, and I enabled it by default for everyone that has the setting enabled for topic links.

It's been a few weeks since I did this, but I'd like to start getting back into the routine of using the Monday post for a general outline of how I'd like to see the week go.

So for this week, here's my general intentions:

• I added some new groups today, so I'll want to see how those are looking, and think about whether some other adjustments are needed soon.
• I'm planning to make a proper blog post (on blog.tildes.net) about the site being open-sourced tomorrow morning. This may end up getting a burst of attention for the site again if it gets some traction on HN, programming/open-source subreddits, etc. (but it's hard to predict if that will happen or not)
• Related to the above, I think it's about time to start actively trying to bring some more people in again. The site's size has been fairly constant for a few weeks now, and it's been pretty stable in terms of activity, so I think bringing in more users is a good idea. The blog post may help with this, but we'll also probably do another official invite thread on /r/tildes or look for some other possibilities.
• Various work related to the open-sourcing. There are multiple merge requests open for features/fixes that I need to review, and I'd like to put more work into the documentation, filling out the issue tracker, and so on.
• Get user pages paginated. I think this is my top priority for a feature to implement personally now, and I believe I should be able to do it this week while working on the other items. My current intention is to start out by only allowing users to look through their own full history, and leave that for a few days to allow people to go back and edit/delete anything they want to. After giving a bit of time for that, I intend to enable it for everyone. We can talk a bit more about this, but that's my current plan.

Feedback and suggestions for those plans (or other ones, if you think I'm prioritizing the wrong things) are welcome, thanks.

Today I want to talk about a pattern that seems to keep happening—someone makes a post that's on the low effort end of the scale, and people freak out in response. Multiple users attack the poster in the thread itself, at least one separate meta post gets made about it, people send me messages concerned about the direction of the site, etc.

This really isn't necessary. Every instance of a post being a bit outside the lines isn't a harbinger of the site's impending doom. I know that a lot of you are passionate about having a higher-quality community site, but it doesn't mean that everything even slightly outside that goal needs to be viciously suppressed. It's okay to just ignore some posts here and there (or nicely point out that they don't really fit the site's goals), we don't need to try and chase off anyone that dares to post a joke or a cat gif.

So... just try to relax a bit, it'll be okay. Tildes is still very new, and there's a lot to figure out. The site's got a lot of growth and evolution in its future, and it doesn't need to be run with an iron fist from the very beginning. I promise that there's a solid vision for the site and I'm going to make sure it goes in that direction, but every minor deviation from that goal doesn't need to be destroyed. One of the most important parts of these early stages is to build up a good base culture, and we really don't need the community to feel extremely unwelcoming with people scared to post anything because it might be judged "too low effort".

I've already been doing this a little (both deliberately and not), but I'm going to stop specifically finding something to make a Daily Discussion post about every day. I'll definitely still be asking for input and posting about general site topics often, but I think it'll be good to move to doing it as more of an "on-demand" thing. Part of the reason for doing daily discussions was to try and help boost the site's activity, but I think we've gotten to the point now where it's not really needed any more.

There's already a pretty good backlog of plans and ideas that we've discussed in the previous posts but I haven't had a chance to implement yet, and I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves in talking about all sorts of features that may not show up for quite a while. I'll still be making changelog posts whenever a significant update is deployed to get feedback on those, and if there are any features that are being worked on that I'm not completely certain about, I'll post to ask for input on those as well.

In terms of more formally scheduled posts, as mentioned this Monday I'd like to keep making a post at the beginning of each week with general plans, and I'll probably keep doing an overall feedback/questions/suggestions one every couple of weeks or so as well.

Other than that, as always please feel free to post in ~tildes with any questions, feedback or suggestions you have, or submit things directly to the issue tracker on GitLab if you're comfortable doing that.

It's been a couple of weeks again since the last general feedback thread, so let's do another one today. Especially since the site has finally been open-sourced now, and we've already had people starting to submit code contributions, it would probably be great to hear about some more general issues/suggestions/etc. that can be added to the issue tracker and potentially worked on by other people.

So if there's anything you want to discuss, ask about, suggest, etc. but didn't feel like starting a dedicated thread for it, fire away!

Tildes has been open-source for about 4 days now, and there have already been a number of people diving in and making some great contributions. Thanks to Ivan Fonseca, we now have our first feature update from an open-source contribution, and it's a heavily-requested one: you can now choose to have links open in a new tab.

This is split into two separate options, so there are two new checkboxes on your settings page under "Open links in new tabs":

• "Topic links to other websites" - this will make the external links (from link topics) open in new tabs
• "Links to text topics and comments" - this will make links to comment pages open in new tabs, both from clicking the title on text topics and the actual comments link

Please let me know if you notice any issues or unexpected behavior with it. There are multiple other open-source contributions in progress as well, so expect some more updates soon.

Sorry, I've been busy with open-source-related things and have been bad about the daily discussions for the last couple of days (late today, and completely forgot about doing one yesterday).

Today I want to ask for opinions about some specific details of how removed posts should be handled. To be clear, this is related to posts that are removed manually by me (and maybe someday by other users, in response to reports, etc.). This is not related to posts that have been deleted by their author.

Specifically, I'd like to answer these questions:

1. Should the author of a removed post always know that it's been removed?
2. When informing the author that a post was removed, should it be a "passive" notification (like an indicator on the comment noting that it's been removed), or should they get an actual separate notification telling them? The difference is mostly that "passive" ones may never be seen if the author doesn't look back at the comment after it's been removed.
3. Should the removed comments/topic still be visible on the user's profile page, when other users look at it? That is, is the comment/topic only removed its "context" but still visible from their profile, or is it completely removed and no longer visible anywhere?

Please let me know what you think for those specific questions, as well as any other suggestions or concerns you have about removed posts in general.

This is a topic that's been brought up a little here and there, but not something we've gone into very formally yet. Specifically, this was prompted by this post today. Not to pick on @nkv too much, but it makes a good example of a user that (so far, at least) has very little activity outside of posting about their own project/business.

For my personal opinion, when I was a moderator on reddit, the guideline that I would generally use to explain to people that were overly self-promoting was along the lines of: "It's fine to be a redditor with a website, but not a website with a reddit account." When I started working at reddit later, this was included in the "Guidelines for self-promotion on reddit" wiki page (though some Confucius guy stole my credit).

Reddit doesn't follow those guidelines any more, but I've always thought it was a reasonable way to explain the distinction. Members of the community occasionally posting about their own projects is good (and something we should want to encourage), but we don't want people outside the community coming and trying to just use established communities as a source of traffic.

What are your thoughts about self-promotion in general? How should we try to determine if someone's activity on the site goes too far into self-promotion territory? If we find people that are over that line, how should it be dealt with?

The daily discussion from Friday about the site's activity level has been great, with a ton of solid insight, feedback and suggestions from many different people. Today I want to continue discussing one particular theme that came up in there multiple times: a number of people seem to feel like they're not "worthy" of posting on the site, with it seemingly exacerbated by seeing complaints about the quality of other people's posts.

This is a bit of a tricky thing to balance: we want to try to keep the quality of content on Tildes up, but it can be unwelcoming and discouraging if people feel that they're likely to get berated for posting something that isn't "good enough". By its very nature, being more selective about content means that we have to discourage (or remove) some types of content, but how can we do it in a way that doesn't feel quite so antagonistic to the people submitting?

A good way of thinking about this is to try to consider it from the submitter's perspective. If you were to post something that wasn't really suitable, how would you like to be informed of that? And (just as importantly), how would you not like to be informed of it?

As always, all thoughts and suggestions are welcome. Tildes is still going to require a lot of growth, so it's important to figure out how we'll be able to integrate people into the site's culture over time without feeling overly hostile towards new users.

The activity on Tildes has been (mostly) slowly dropping for a while. To be clear up front, it's definitely not doing badly at all and I'm not worried about it—it's still very good for how early this is, the fact that the site is invite-only, and that we haven't had a real "burst" of people for almost a month now.

Just as a point of comparison, saidit.net (a reddit clone that's been trying to get attention and doesn't have restricted registration) has had 9 comments and 3 submissions posted in the last 24 hours. Tildes is far, far better off than that and is already doing better than most community sites ever get to. Here's the last month of stats:

So the numbers are still quite good overall, but there's an obvious downward trend in there. I'd like to talk about what you think is behind this—is it just a bit of a feedback loop, where the activity isn't very high, so people get bored and the activity drops more? Or are there other causes? For those of you that feel like you're drifting away a bit, are there any particular reasons, or anything that would encourage you to participate here more?

We probably also just need another influx of users before much longer—it's been nice for me to have it a little quieter so I can focus on coding things more than community-management lately, but we're obviously not at the point yet where the activity is self-sustaining. On that note, I haven't given out invite codes for a while, so I've given everyone 5 again. You can get them here (and always, if you need more for a particular reason, just send me a message and let me know): https://tildes.net/invite

Let me know what you think. There are still quite a few high-priority things that I'm trying to get done in the near future, but if there are other changes we could make to try to help keep the site active, I think they're definitely worth considering.

This week, I'm trying to focus on the last few pieces needed to finally get the site's code open-sourced (really, I am!). One of those pieces is that we'll need a group on Tildes for discussing development, answering related questions, and so on. The obvious location for this is something like ~tildes.dev, but adding it opens up a few questions related to the group hierarchy in general, so that's what I want to talk about today.

Currently, we only have one subgroup on the site, this one (~tildes.official). The way it works right now, if you visit or subscribe to ~tildes, you will also see the content from ~tildes.official. You also have the option of going to ~tildes.official directly, so that you see only the content from that group without the posts from its parent group. However, there's no way to see only the content from ~tildes without ~tildes.official. This will become more significant when ~tildes.dev is added, because that group will probably only be interesting to a small group of the site's users—people that are involved in (or interested in) the actual code/development behind the site.

So now we have a more interesting case, a subgroup that most people looking at the parent probably won't want to see. How should this work in practice? Some more specific questions that might help thinking through it:

• When someone visits ~tildes, do they see ~tildes.dev posts in there?
• When someone subscribes to ~tildes, are they automatically subscribed (implicitly or not) to both ~tildes.official and ~tildes.dev?
• If someone only wants to see the content from ~tildes and ~tildes.official, what sort of process should they need to go through to make that happen?
• How might these ideas work once the hierarchy gets much larger (for example, imagine a ~games with hundreds of subgroups inside many branches)?

Any input about the topic is appreciated—try not to worry too much about whether a plan is "perfect", we can always adjust it as the hierarchy actually starts becoming more extensive.

I'm continuing to inch closer to finally open-sourcing the site, and one of the aspects of having it open-source is that other people will be able to start contributing fixes/improvements/etc. To keep this process organized, I want to treat the issue tracker as the "definitive source" of what needs to be done, who's working on it, etc. A lot of the existing plans and known issues are already in there, but there are certainly some things missing.

I'm not expecting anyone to register a GitLab account to help with this, but I'd appreciate it if some of you would take a quick look through the issue tracker (which you don't need an account to do), do some quick searches for features/fixes that you know should be planned, and make sure that they seem to be present: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues

If you notice anything missing (or aren't sure if it's there), please just leave a comment here about it, and I can make updates.

Thanks, any help is appreciated (and if you have any other general questions about how the open-sourcing/contributions/etc. are going to work, please feel free to ask as well).

I added topic tag filters a few weeks ago, which should make it so that people can more easily filter out certain types of topics that they're not interested in.

How much further should we consider going with filters? Should we allow filtering out posts from certain domains by default? Posts with certain words or phrases in their titles? Other possibilities?

Is there a point where it's possible to filter out too much, too easily and that starts having negative effects on the site? What do you think?

It's been a couple of weeks since we last did a "general" post, so I think it's about time for another one.

If there's anything you wanted to ask about or give feedback on but didn't want to start a thread about it, feel free. You're always welcome to send me a private message with anything as well, I don't mind at all.

I know things have been a bit slow for updates over the last couple of weeks, but there's a lot happening in the background. Thanks for your patience with everything, and all the input on everything.

This has been requested a number of times, sorry for all the lost comments in the meantime.

The site should now ask you to confirm if you try to leave a page with an "unfinished" topic, comment, or message. This includes starting to write new ones, but also covers the forms for editing a post. It should only trigger if you actually make any changes, so if you click "Edit" on a comment/topic, but don't edit it at all (or do, and then change the text back to what it was originally), you shouldn't get a confirmation when you leave the page.

Please let me know if you notice any issues or strange behaviors with this.

This is a topic that some of us have started to go into a bit in yesterday's daily discussion, but I think it's worth splitting out and continuing more. I think one cause of people being so sensitive about content that they think doesn't belong on Tildes is because the site currently feels like one overall shared space, instead of many individual groups that might have their own different types of acceptable content.

A lot of this is just because the site is so small right now, and will probably gradually change as it grows. Quite a bit probably also comes from the fact that new users are subscribed to all groups automatically, so to them, everything just feels like "part of the site", not really separate groups that they individually opted into.

What I'd like to discuss is if there are any ways we could help make that separation more clear—should we stop auto-subscriptions to everything soon? Could we try to display posts from different groups in a more distinguished way? Any other ideas for ways to make things feel a bit more "separated", even while the site is small and there will probably be common users across most groups?

One of the things I've noticed so far (and there were a couple obvious instances over the weekend) is that we've had a few issues with new users posting content that doesn't really fit some of the ideas behind Tildes (primarily, trying to focus on higher-quality discussions/content). This in itself isn't a bad thing or surprising, it's always going to happen. However, I think we need to try to think about some better ways to deal with it—it's great to have other community members telling people that it's not really the type of content they should be posting, but sometimes it's been done in a pretty hostile way, which isn't very good and makes the community seem unfriendly even though it's still very small.

So I'm mostly just looking for general thoughts about how we could try to improve the situation. Are there mechanics that we could implement? Should we try to get "what types of things should I post?" in front of new users more prominently? Could/should we have a "standard" way of dealing with new users posting things without realizing it might not be particularly welcome here?

Any other ideas or suggestions?

Just a few minor updates to the groups today, mostly as a follow-up to this previous thread:

• I've renamed ~lifestyle to ~health and changed the description, as requested by a number of people. I think the purpose of ~lifestyle was pretty muddled, and I'm going to be moving the non-health-related topics out of there into ~misc or other appropriate groups in a bit.
• I've updated the "short description" of a number of groups, mostly using suggestions that people wrote in the linked thread (thanks again for doing that).
• I made a few small style changes to the list of groups page so that it's more obvious which groups you are and aren't subscribed to, since it was quite difficult to tell apart before.

Discussion-wise, let's just talk a bit more about groups (and feel free to suggest more description updates if you'd like, a lot of them could still use work). Has the switch from ~lifestyle to ~health created new gaps? Are there any topics you've wanted to post about but felt discouraged because there wasn't a group that they fit in?

Maybe not so much a "discussion" today, but this is something I've been meaning to do for a while and I think it would be good to specifically ask for some input/help. When creating new groups, I wrote quick little descriptions of each of them, but they're not very good. You can see all of the groups and their descriptions here: https://tildes.net/groups

I'd like to replace some or all of these descriptions to help clarify what types of content goes into each group, so I'd appreciate any suggested new descriptions, especially from people that have been active in those groups and have a good feeling of what does/doesn't belong in them. Even just thoughts on what needs adjusting if you don't want to write something yourself would be great. A few specific things that I know could use clarification, but I'm sure there are more:

• What's the difference between ~tech and ~comp?
• What is ~lifestyle for?
• What distinguishes ~talk compared to just having discussions in all of the other specific-subject groups?

Thanks, any input (or entirely new descriptions) would be great.

This came up yesterday, and I think it's worth discussing in a little more depth.

There isn't currently an account-deletion feature (though I can do it manually on request), but it's going to be needed in the future. The main thing that probably needs to be decided is what exactly to do with all of the user's posts when they delete their account. If the user was prolific and you wipe out all their posts, it can damage a lot of history. But if you leave their posts up (possibly no longer associated with their username), it means that all of the user's content is now basically "orphaned" and they no longer have control of it even though they posted it.

I won't go into too much detail about my own thoughts, but I'm curious to hear what you all think of how deletions (and the deleted user's content) should be handled.

I've just updated the site's markdown processor a bit to allow a few more HTML tags through, and added a section to the Text Formatting docs page to explain these options. The short form is that the following formatting is available only by using HTML (some of these may be added with markdown syntax eventually):

• strikethrough - <del> tag
• strike replace - <del> and <ins> tags
• ^superscript - <sup> tag
• _subscript - <sub> tag
• Tables - using <table>, <tr>, <th>, and <td>

I think at this point we should probably have almost all of the wanted formatting available, but there may still be a few missing.

It's a bit late on a Friday and I didn't have anything in particular I wanted to bring up today, so let's just use the thread today as a sort of general feedback/questions/discussion area.

If there's anything you wanted to ask about or give feedback on but didn't want to start a thread about it, feel free. You're always welcome to send me a private message with anything as well, I don't mind at all.

As always, thanks for being here, and have a good weekend!

Pretty straightforward topic today, but I think it's worth discussing briefly at least. I'm able to edit users' titles now (and the edit will be logged in the Topic Log in the sidebar). In the future, this ability will probably also be extended to others, both allowing users to edit their own titles, as well as giving others the ability to do it (will probably be tied into the trust system).

So the question is: when should titles be edited? It's nice for me to be able to fix typos or other mistakes, remove spoilers if that comes up, and also remove (or at least reduce) editorialization when that's an issue. Are there any other cases where I should (or shouldn't) edit titles?

Along with all of the other docs that need to be written, maybe a sort of "what makes a good title?" section in the submission guidelines would be good as well, so if you have any thoughts on that please feel free to post them.

I've been thinking a bit about this post about groups that @Kiloku made yesterday, and about how we'll be able to figure out when it's the right time to create a new group.

I had an idea (inspired somewhat by how StackExchange's "Area 51" works), and just want to see if you all think it's worth trying sometime, or if there are reasons that you think it wouldn't work very well.

Every week or two, we could have a thread for "group proposals", where people suggest groups that they think would be good to add and likely to be active enough. If there's enough support from other users (for some meaning of "enough"), we create the group and then give it a while (maybe 2-4 weeks) to see if it actually builds up a reasonable level of activity. If it does, great. If not, we could remove the group and move the posts back into another group with an appropriate tag.

So for example, if someone suggested a group for fantasy novels and a decent number of other users express interest, we could create ~books.fantasy as a trial. A few weeks later, if it doesn't seem to be working out, we move all the posts from it back into ~books with a "fantasy" tag (and can always try it again in the future).

I don't know if we'd want to do this anytime soon, but I thought it would make for an interesting discussion anyway, so let me know what you think of the general idea.

Alright, this is very late today, but I had some other things to get through first.

If you missed it, I locked this topic earlier today (which involved quickly hacking together a lock method because I didn't have one). There was nothing wrong with the subject itself, and some reasonable discussion did happen in it, but overall it was disappointing to see it start devolving into the same old tired arguments, and it was unlikely to go anywhere productive if it had continued. I don't want to focus on that specific post though, and let's (please) try not to turn this thread entirely into a debate about it.

The thing that I'd rather discuss is that I think this marks the first time I've done any sort of "strong" moderation-like action that wasn't also associated with banning a user (and there have still only been a few of those total). This shouldn't be a shocking or surprising event—introducing some moderation was inevitable if we want to have any hope of maintaining quality, and I'm honestly impressed that we managed to make it a month before it was necessary. From this point, I'm probably going to start doing it a little more (especially as we continue growing), and at least for the near future the actions should mostly be restricted to:

• re-tagging topics (and I'll give other people the ability to do this as well)
• editing topic titles
• moving topics between groups
• (hopefully rarely) locking topics, or removing topics/comments

The main thing I'm working on finishing up now is a sort of "topic log" that will show which actions were taken on a topic, and who took them. So for example, once this is deployed, you'll be able to see things like "Deimos added tags x, y, z" or "Deimos changed title to ...".

So what I'd like to talk about in this thread is just general thoughts on moderation—would you like to see a bit stricter moderation to try to set the bar a bit higher to start? How aggressively should I move topics if I think they don't fit? Do you think we need some sort of global log to list topics that are removed? Opinions on those sorts of questions are welcome, so I can take it all into account as I figure out how I want to approach it.

I'm going to cheat a bit today and combine the daily discussion with a changelog post, since I'd like to get input on the changes and talk about what else should be done. I've just updated the "new topic" page in a few ways that we've discussed over the last while:

• There's a note at the top asking people to post informative or interesting content with discussion value, and not to make posts mainly for entertainment.
• You can now fill in both the Link and Text fields, and if you do so, the text will be posted as the first comment on your post. This allows people to make a sort of "submission statement" if they'd like, or give their opinion about the content. I've seen some conflicting opinions about this lately, so I tried to make it clear that adding text is optional. Personally, I don't think mandatory submission statements add much value, since in my experience most of them just end up being "I thought this was an interesting article", or a quote or two taken directly out of the article.
• I added a "Formatting help" link above the Text field that links to the page on the docs site that @flaque was nice enough to write up. This link has also been added above the markdown fields for comments as well.

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm also working on a "tagging guidelines" document which I'm hoping to get into decent shape today, and I'll add a link to that above the Tags field once it's available.

Let me know what you think of the changes, and if you have any other suggestions for things we should do with the submit process. We'll definitely need some group-specific submission info before too long as well, so I may end up adding a sidebar to the submit page that can contain more info (though that doesn't work very well on mobile since it's hidden by default).

This is a topic that's been discussed on and off a fair amount recently. Probably the most significant recent example was this post yesterday about whether people were "fully switching" to Tildes already. I think the really key point that came up in there is that for it to be more feasible, people have to feel like they're not "missing out" by being on Tildes. This is a difficult point to reach for a small site, and it's something that I've tried to advocate myself by doing things like having an entire section of the welcome message to encourage people to post content.

It's definitely going to be a long time before Tildes has anywhere near enough content to satisfy people looking for very specific topics (such as for a particular video game or niche genres of music), but it's important that we keep moving towards that point. The biggest thing that will get people to keep coming back to the site is if they can feel like there will always be more interesting content whenever they do.

You can see this in other sites: Hacker News is a great example. The site has extremely minimal functionality (I think Tildes already has more), and it generally only gets posts about a narrow set of subjects, yet it's quite a successful community overall. That's almost entirely because of the content—people know that there will always be good content and interesting discussions there, so they come back often and spend a lot of time there.

Here's a few of my general thoughts about how we can get there:

• I think people are feeling a bit discouraged from posting a lot of content, for a few reasons. Some users have expressed that they think posting content is "low effort" (which I disagree strongly with), and I also think that people might be worried that they'd be "spamming" too much by posting a lot. I think we need to push past that feeling, so how can we do that? One thought is that maybe we should stop subscribing people to all the groups automatically now. I think submitting feels more "spammy" because you know that your posts will be seen by almost everyone, but if we switch the groups to opt-in that should mostly go away—people shouldn't really complain about seeing posts about games when they chose to subscribe to ~games, and so on.
• When I started /r/Games on reddit, one of the things I did to seed it with content initially was create a bot that would look at every post made to /r/gaming and run it through various criteria to try to figure out if it seemed like it might be a "good post". For example, it would disregard all images, posts from certain sites, ones that weren't getting upvoted, and so on. Anything that made it through the filters would be automatically cross-posted to /r/Games. I didn't end up having to run that bot for very long (only about 3 weeks), but it was pretty useful as a way to initially get some content into the subreddit. Do you think we might want to have a similar sort of thing here?
• As mentioned in a few of the related threads, I think it would be good to try to focus on "meta" discussions a little less. I obviously enjoy them, and I still want to have the daily discussions and so on, but I think (especially for technically-minded people like a lot of us), it's very easy to spend a lot of time focused on "let's work through complicated systems and the flaws they'll have when the site is huge", when a lot of it probably won't be relevant for years. I'm not sure if we should do anything in particular to try to reduce this, but if we do decide to stop subscribing people to all the groups, just having fewer people in ~tildes might do a lot of that on its own.

Let me know what you think about all of that, and if you have any other thoughts or suggestions about how we can improve the quality and quantity of content.

Bit of a non-standard daily discussion again, but today I thought I'd post another inspiration for some of the decisions made for Tildes. I did this a couple of weeks ago with Clay Shirky's "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" as well, if you missed that one.

The one I'm going to post today is a talk by Maciej Ceglowski (who runs the minimal bookmarking service Pinboard). I linked it in a discussion here related to privacy recently, because I think it's a great talk that goes over some of the dangers of tech companies casually collecting so much data on their users:

Maciej Ceglowski - Haunted by Data

That's a link to his slides and a transcript, but a video of him actually doing the talk is also available on YouTube here (20 mins long) if you'd like to watch/listen.

Let me know if you have any thoughts about privacy topics (ones covered in the talk or otherwise), or questions about my approach towards privacy/data-collection on Tildes.

I happened to take a look at Metafilter today, and noticed that they were linking to this post from last week in their header: State of the Site: Metafilter financial update and future directions.

It's an interesting post, even as someone that only has vague knowledge about Metafilter. There's a lot there, including a ton of comments that I haven't even started reading. So I thought it would make an interesting topic for today, since Metafilter has quite a few things in common with Tildes: it's unapologetically very minimal/old-school (it's almost 20 years old), is fairly small and closed (and isn't trying to be huge), gets a lot of its income from its users, and so on.

So for those of you that do have experience with Metafilter, are there particular things that you think Tildes should learn from Metafilter or try to do differently? For people with less knowledge, is there anything in that post or the discussion that stands out to you as good things to keep in mind?

As I mentioned in a couple recent posts (about standardizing tags as well as starting some more moderation), I'm going to start re-tagging and making some other changes to posts now.

So that you can see when changes are made (either by me, the post's author, or someone else), topics now have a "Topic Log" that's only shown in the sidebar when changes have been made. It's collapsed by default, and you'll see a title like "Topic Log (3)" that you can click on to see the log of changes. I've added and removed a tag in this post so you can see what it looks like.

For now, this only shows tag changes and lock/unlock, but I'll add title changes and moving between groups shortly. Edit: This does not include edits to the post, you can already see when a post was last edited (if it was), but I don't intend to add more detail or a log for that.

It's another busy day - Tildes is getting a fair amount of attention in /r/TrueReddit, so I've been trying to reply to questions in there (and have also ended up inviting quite a few more people as well). We've also already got multiple good discussions going on in ~tildes on a whole bunch of topics, so for the "official" daily discussion today I'm going to try doing something a little different.

I read a lot about online communities—there are all sorts of articles, books, talks, research, etc. that I've read that have helped me figure out what the major issues were, and how we could try to do things differently with Tildes. So instead of writing something myself today, I'm going to try linking to one of these, and encourage people to talk about the topics that it covers. If this works out well, this might be an interesting thing to do once a week or so: I'll post a link to something that's influenced the plans for Tildes and see what you all think of it.

I'll start it off today with what I would probably consider my single favorite talk about online communities of all time. It's worth noting that this is from 2003, which is before almost all of the major platforms we have today were even started:

Clay Shirky - A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy

I'm falling behind on a few things (open-sourcing, multiple updates/fixes, replying to emails/messages/etc.), so I'm going to be a bit lazy with the next few daily discussions. There are various interesting discussions going on in ~tildes as well, so I think there's plenty even without an in-depth daily post for a bit.

This is a very simple one: feel free to give any general feedback or ask questions, especially things that you feel are minor and probably not really worth starting a new topic about.

I appreciate any thoughts as always, and thanks for all your patience on the things I'm behind on.

This is the first of several updates coming soon to make the topic-tagging system more functional, since it's been only informational up until this point.

You can now filter a topic listing down to showing only posts with a particular tag by clicking on that tag in the listing. It will affect the current listing you're on, whether that's your home page or inside a group. So for example, clicking a "facebook" tag on your home page will take you to this page - a list of all topics with the tag "facebook" in your subscriptions. Doing it from inside ~tech would go to this page instead, which is "facebook"-tagged topics inside only ~tech.

One thing to note is that (as mentioned in the mechanics page), tags can be hierarchical and this filtering supports that. For example, filtering to "rock" in ~music will also show a post I made yesterday tagged "rock.progressive".

Let me know if you notice any oddities with it or have any feedback about how it works.

After adding the ability to filter to a single tag yesterday, the next piece is active now: you can set up filters that will make it so that topics with specific tags aren't shown in your lists by default (but it's easy to toggle the filters off and see them). The filters are in the sidebar, hidden by default, but you can click the "Filtered topic tags" label to show the list and access the button that will take you to the settings page to change your filtered list.

A few notes:

• Filters are global. They will apply to posts in all groups, whether you're viewing from your home page or not. I'd like to add group-specific ones in the future, but for now they apply everywhere.
• Make sure you comma-separate the tags when you're setting up your filters, if you just use spaces it won't work.
• You can temporarily toggle off the filters from a link at the top of the topic list.
• Filters won't apply if you're viewing a single tag (in case it's one you had filtered)

I think that should mostly cover it, let me know what you think. I know this isn't super useful yet because tags aren't very consistent overall, but the next step (today or tomorrow) will be to make it so that other users can edit tags to fix incorrect/improper tagging. I'll start a daily discussion in a bit related to that topic as well.

Now that we've got viewing specific tags and filtering out tags, to make these most useful we need to start making tagging more consistent. So today I want to talk about some general tagging approaches and figuring out some standards.

Are there particular tags that we should try to keep consistent across all groups? One example: I think it would be good to have one like ask or survey that goes on all topics that are "what's your favorite [something]?" or "what are you playing/watching/reading this week?", etc. That way those types of topics can easily be filtered (or focused on) across all groups. Are there any other ones that will probably be used in multiple groups that we should try to standardize?

Other than that, any other suggestions or thoughts about how we should generally try to organize tagging would be useful. Links to other sites that do tagging well (and/or have good defined guidelines somewhere) would be great as well.

We've had a few topics related to recruiting new users come up over the last few days. I won't link to them specifically (and at least one has been deleted as well), but they've included ones that recommend relying less on reddit, seeking out more people of different demographics, and a few other recommendations related to how and where we should be looking for more users.

So for this topic, I wanted to ask to see if people have specific recommendations for reaching other potential users. Reddit is definitely the simplest from my perspective, because I have a fair amount of name-recognition there and also a lot of connections with mods and users. I'd love to reach out to other groups of people as well, but that often comes off as pretty spammy from someone that doesn't have a pre-existing relation, so I'm not sure how it could be done well.

So any recommendations are appreciated, and I've also given all existing users 5 invite codes again, so feel free to invite some people if there's anyone you think would be a good fit. You can get them here (and as always, feel free to message me if you want more): https://tildes.net/invite

Also, I haven't done it yet, but after this discussion the other day, I think I'm going to stop showing info about who users were invited by. Multiple people are saying that the current situation is preventing them from inviting others, and I don't think that's a good thing. I'll make another post in ~tildes.official once I've done that (should be today).

I've just banned the user @Hypnotoad for some repeated bad-faith behavior. Some of this is still visible in their history if you want to look, but some has also been edited or deleted which will make it less obvious (this post explains some of it, not all). I also know their reddit account (but hadn't looked through it previously) and there's a bit of bigotry and general poor behavior there as well.

No, I did not send them a warning, and no, I don't intend this ban to be temporary. I know that some of you will think this is too harsh, but to be honest, some of you are way too forgiving. It will be completely impossible to maintain any semblance of a high-quality community if we have to constantly give low-quality, trollish users the benefit of the doubt. Good users don't want to (and shouldn't have to) spend most of their time on a site trying to educate other people how to behave. That gets tiresome extremely quickly, and results in the good users just finding somewhere else to spend their time instead.

So... in terms of discussion topics, feel free to give opinions on this specific ban, as well as thoughts about how this type of decision should be made in general. Having some standards is absolutely necessary though, Tildes can't possibly serve as both a high-quality discussion site as well as a "troll education space".

After we discussed this the other day, I've now changed it so that you can no longer see who a user was invited by. While some people did like it being public, I think the benefits of keeping it public were pretty minor, and there were legitimate concerns about privacy on the opposite side.

So now it's still stored internally and I'll be able to use it to see if someone is repeatedly inviting users that cause problems, but it won't be shown on the site any more. This means that invites are now effectively anonymous—neither the inviter or the invitee will know the other's username if they don't want to reveal it themselves, and other users won't be able to see any relationship between them either.

Hopefully this will help make some people feel less hesitant about inviting others, and as I mentioned earlier in the daily discussion post, you've all been topped back up to 5 invite codes again.

This is a topic I wanted to talk about late last week, since there were a few posts related to it coming up at the time. For example: "Idea: requiring submission statements for link‐based topics, at least in certain groups". This is interesting to me, so I wanted to turn it into a bit more of an official discussion.

I think there's a bit of a conflict here, where people have different ideas of what purpose they're coming to the site for. There are some people in that thread (and some other similar ones) with an opinion that external links are a bit inherently "lazy", or even unnecessary if they can't trigger a discussion. I disagree pretty strongly with that - good discussion is definitely one of the things I want Tildes to have, but it's not a requirement for every single post. If people want to share songs on ~music, trailers on ~movies, interesting articles on ~news and so on, that should be a good thing.

As a specific example of what I mean, I submitted this article from Wired earlier today. It's an interesting, well-researched article that goes into depth on the story, and I enjoyed reading it. The reason I'm submitting it is because I think other people would enjoy reading it too, not because I want to start a discussion on it. If a discussion happens, that's great, but it's not the actual purpose of why I'm submitting.

I want Tildes to be able to cover both of these: help bring good content to people's attention, and also foster good discussions (whether those are attached to external content or not). I think right now it's a bit tilted towards the discussion side (the "Activity" sort as default is probably a big factor), so I guess I'm looking for general thoughts about how we can try to balance this and serve both purposes.

The ability to set different default sorts for individual groups probably helps some, and I think topic filtering based on tags will help a lot as well for people that are more interested in one side or the other. What else should we consider?

Inspired by this thread in ~talk from this morning, I think it would be good to start thinking about how to define some more formal guidelines for what sort of behavior we do (and don't) want to see in the discussions on Tildes. I'd like to put something together that can be on the Docs site and linked to fairly prominently, and used as a reference to help people understand what's expected here.

As an example, Hacker News has some pretty good ones (the bottom half, under "In Comments"). We should be able to do something quite similar to that, so let me know if you think any of theirs are particularly good or if there are other ones that you'd like to see covered. I know many of you are involved in other online communities too, so I'd also be curious to see links to other sites' guidelines you think are done really well.

Please focus on comments only for now, and we can have another discussion soon about guidelines related to topics/submissions (there will be some crossover, I'm sure). Thanks, input is appreciated as always.

Tsirist suggested this earlier today, and I think it's a pretty good topic, so let's just do it today.

Currently, on each user's page you can see who they were invited by. However, that's the full extent of what's shown about invites right now. The opposite relation isn't easily public (that is, there's no way to see a list of all users that were invited by someone), and you can't even currently see a list of which users you've invited yourself.

Some people think that these invite relationships should be more public, and some people think it should be even less than it already currently is. For example, some people want to be able to invite others without those people knowing their username, which is currently impossible.

I think that at least tracking the "invite tree" is important overall during the invite-only phase, but it doesn't necessarily need to be public information to serve this purpose. What do you think? Should we show more information about invites? Less? Leave it exactly how it is?

Sorry this is so late today, I had to go out and do some things, and didn't get back until much later than I was expecting. Since it's so late, I'm just going to do a simple one, and save my original planned topic for tomorrow or Monday:

What other topics do you think would be good to discuss in these daily posts? Are there particular mechanics, plans, concerns that you'd like to see covered?

There's now a new checkbox available on your settings page for "Automatically mark all notifications read when you view the Unread Notifications page". It's off by default so that I wasn't surprising anyone by changing the current behavior.

I figured this would be a quick one to add, and it's a little simpler than a "mark all as read" button (since it doesn't have to worry about new notifications that came in after loading the page but before clicking the button).

Sorry for the lateness on this one today - this is a topic that's been very important on reddit lately, since the redesign is taking away a lot of customization from subreddits by taking away their ability to use full CSS and moving towards more limited tools. I wanted to get some thoughts from the people here so far about whether allowing similar levels of customization on Tildes seems like a good idea.

This probably wouldn't happen in the near future anyway, so don't worry too much about the "how" of it. I know that if we support it here it would have to be a fair amount different because there aren't really "owners" of particular groups or anything like that. For now, let's just talk about whether it seems like a good idea at all.

I don't want to bias the discussion about it too much, but just a few general thoughts about it from my end:

• If we do allow it, I'd always make sure that it's very easy for users to choose not to see the customizations if they prefer the "stock" appearance.
• Since Tildes is trying to keep the site itself as the main mobile interface, this means that we'd be able to have CSS customizations apply to mobile users as well.
• Supporting full CSS on Tildes could be a significant factor in some reddit communities wanting to move over once it becomes more apparent that they're not going to get full CSS in the redesign (this could be a good or bad thing).

It's a pretty vague topic, but I'm curious what people's general opinions about it are, so let me know what you think.

As we talked about in the daily discussion yesterday (which was great, thanks for all the feedback), I've got a few changes coming soon that will help people customize what they're seeing.

The first piece of these is out now—changes to the way topic listings are sorted:

1. I've changed the default sort for the site from "activity, all time" to "activity, last 24 hours". This will mean that the same older threads aren't constantly getting bumped back up to the top of the site, but you can still easily change the time period drop down back to "all time" if you want to see if any older ones are active too.
2. You can now set your own default sort and period, which (currently) applies to both your home page and individual groups. To do this, change the options on the home page (not inside a group) to whatever you want to use as your default, and a "Set as default" button will appear after the time period dropdown.

I'll be adding the ability to set separate defaults for each group before too much longer as well, and I'll also make a daily discussion post a little later.

In the daily post yesterday, I mentioned that I was planning to add filtering for topic tags fairly soon. I have this working now, but I'm balking a bit on actually adding it. So before I do, I wanted to take some time today to talk specifically about filtering, and how we can try to make sure that it doesn't get "out of control" and hurt the site in different ways.

"Filter bubbles" can be a real issue, but on the opposite side, I don't think that trying to force people to see content that they don't want to is a good approach either. You can't force that—people will add their own filters with browser extensions, just "mentally filter" the posts, or even leave the site if there's too much that they don't want. Overall, it's one of my goals that people should have control of what they see, and being able to filter some things out is an important part of that.

So there's not really a specific question I want to ask or anything, I'm just looking for a general discussion about filtering and if there's any specific things that you think would work well, or pitfalls we should try to avoid with it. Thanks, I'd appreciate any thoughts.