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    1. General Tildes feedback/questions thread + invites given to everyone

      It's been quite a while now since we had a general feedback thread. So if there's anything you want to discuss, ask about, suggest, etc. but didn't feel like starting a dedicated thread for it,...

      It's been quite a while now since we had a general feedback thread. So if there's anything you want to discuss, ask about, suggest, etc. but didn't feel like starting a dedicated thread for it, feel free to do that here.

      Also, speaking of things that I haven't done in a while, I've topped everyone back up to 5 invite codes. Please don't feel obligated to find ways to use them, but if there are people you want to invite, that would be great. You can get the codes here: https://tildes.net/invite

      69 votes
    2. The Tildes code is now open-sourced

      Disclaimer: this post/information will probably only be interesting to more technical people It's long overdue, but Tildes is now open-sourced: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes There's still a ton...

      Disclaimer: this post/information will probably only be interesting to more technical people

      It's long overdue, but Tildes is now open-sourced: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes

      There's still a ton to do in terms of writing more documentation, filling out the issue tracker with known issues/plans and so on, but it should be ready enough to get started.

      I'm planning to make a post on the Tildes blog tomorrow or Thursday announcing this more formally, but I'd like to keep it a bit quiet until then, in case there are any issues or major gaps in the docs discovered when some of you start looking at it. I'd especially appreciate it if any of you would like to try setting up a local development version and let me know how it goes, and if the instructions all make sense.

      There are two new pages on the docs site as part of this as well:

      • Development Setup - describes how to do the initial setup necessary to get a local development version of the site running
      • Development - a general page with information and instructions related to a lot of aspects of site development. It's very scattered right now and I intend to split it into multiple pages eventually, but that will require some more work on the blog to support being able to organize it well. There are still some definite gaps in here, but it should describe most of the major pieces.

      I'd appreciate any feedback about the documents, code, etc. As mentioned, I'd be especially grateful if some of you want to try setting up a local development version by following my instructions, and give feedback about if any parts of the process are unclear, incomplete, or otherwise need more work. Please feel free to ask any questions you have as well.

      235 votes
    3. If you have the "mark new comments" feature enabled, old comments will now be collapsed when returning to a thread

      The "mark new comments" feature (which isn't enabled by default) has two main functions: From the listing pages, it shows which topics have new comments (and how many) On the comments page, it...

      The "mark new comments" feature (which isn't enabled by default) has two main functions:

      • From the listing pages, it shows which topics have new comments (and how many)
      • On the comments page, it puts an orange stripe down the left side of the new comments

      These are both extremely useful (and you should probably enable it if you don't already have it on), but it was still a bit hard to find the new comments in larger threads, even with them marked. You had to just scroll around and look for the orange stripes.

      I've deployed a new update now that makes it so that when you go back to a thread that has new comments, all the old comments will be collapsed, except for the direct parents of the new ones. I've also updated the appearance of collapsed comments so that you can see the first part of the text of the collapsed comments.

      No behavior will change if you're not using the "mark new comments" feature, and if visit a thread for the first time or go back to a thread with no new comments, all comments will be expanded as normal. Remember that you can also use the new "expand all comments" button added last week to quickly uncollapse all comments if you want to.

      Edit: And if you really don't like it, you can disable it now with the second checkbox at the bottom of the settings page: https://tildes.net/settings/comment_visits

      Let me know what you think, and if you notice any issues. This should make navigating large threads a lot easier, and there are also some other interesting possibilities with the "individually collapsed" comments that I'm going to be working on soon. One thing I definitely want to do is add an indication of how many comments are in a particular collapsed chain, since right now you can't distinguish a single collapsed comment from one with (potentially many) replies.

      81 votes
    4. Daily Tildes discussion - our first ban

      After reaching a nice milestone yesterday of over 1000 users registered, we've followed it up with a slightly less nice one—I've now banned someone for the first time. This almost certainly won't...

      After reaching a nice milestone yesterday of over 1000 users registered, we've followed it up with a slightly less nice one—I've now banned someone for the first time. This almost certainly won't happen with every ban, but I'm going to be quite transparent with this one since it was the first one, and it gives a good starting point for a discussion today.

      Trying to be transparent about this one is actually a bit funny, because the user I banned was named "Redacted" (really, I promise!). I had removed his comments from the thread, but I've un-removed them for now so that you can see exactly what I banned for: https://tildes.net/user/Redacted

      There were two reasons that I decided to ban him:

      1. Those last 3 comments, all in the ~talk thread. That thread has been a bit heated in places, but overall it's been civil and going pretty well. He came into it without being involved in the discussion at all and went straight to personal attacks.
      2. He went through and tagged almost all of Mumberthrax's comments as some combination of "troll", "flame", and "noise"—sometimes even all 3 tags on a single comment. That's just blatant misuse of the tags, with no possible reasonable excuse. (Note that I've already removed all his tags, so you won't be able to see them any more)

      So that's a pretty clear case of being an asshole, in my opinion. Let me know what you think—I'm not sure that there's any particular focus for the discussion today, so we can just talk about this specific case as well as banning/removing in general since this is the first time I've had to do anything (and I was just saying how nice it had been).

      161 votes
    5. Added buttons to collapse all reply comments and expand all comments

      Another open-source contribution, this time from Jeff Kayser. There are now two buttons at the top of the comments section, next to the header that says "X comments". The minus button will...

      Another open-source contribution, this time from Jeff Kayser.

      There are now two buttons at the top of the comments section, next to the header that says "X comments". The minus button will collapse all the reply comments, leaving only the top-level comments expanded, and the plus button will uncollapse any comments that have been collapsed.

      This lets you browse the comments in kind of the "opposite" way of normal—instead of collapsing the conversations you don't want to read, you start out with only the top-level comments visible, and can un-collapse responses if you want to read more.

      There will probably be some more work done along these lines in the future. A user setting would probably be nice so that reply comments are always collapsed by default, if that's what you prefer. And I'd also like to see the collapsed comments say how many comments there are in that chain, since right now there's not really any way to tell how large of a discussion you might be un-collapsing.

      60 votes
    6. Extremely basic search added

      Okay, okay. We really needed some sort of search, so I decided to just get an extremely basic version out today. It's very limited, but it should work for now and can be improved as we go forward....

      Okay, okay. We really needed some sort of search, so I decided to just get an extremely basic version out today. It's very limited, but it should work for now and can be improved as we go forward.

      Details/limitations:

      • Currently, the search only includes the title and the text of the post (if it's a text topic). It doesn't include the tags, the group, the link, the author name, comments, anything. Only the title and text right now.
      • There's no way to restrict the search to specific group(s) yet. Just full-site search.
      • All searches are "all of these words". There's no phrase-searching yet, or "X or Y", or anything else.
      • The search results page is just a quick hack on the normal topic listing page and will probably display some things weirdly in some cases (like the message when there's no results).

      It's a start though, and certainly better than not having any search at all. There will probably be a lot of minor issues, but let me know if you notice anything especially broken with it.

      118 votes
    7. Users can now be (manually) granted permissions to re-tag topics, move them between groups, and edit titles

      It's a bit late tonight (for those of us in North America, anyway) so I'm not sure how much attention this will get today or how many people I'll start granting permissions to yet, but it's now...

      It's a bit late tonight (for those of us in North America, anyway) so I'm not sure how much attention this will get today or how many people I'll start granting permissions to yet, but it's now possible for people-who-are-not-me to start helping with some moderation-like tasks.

      As of right now, these abilities are restricted to (and I can grant each individually):

      • Changing the tags on topics
      • Moving topics between groups
      • Editing topic titles (I may not actually give anyone this permission yet)

      All these actions will be logged publicly, and if any of them are taken, they'll display in the topic's sidebar, in the "Topic log" (which you have to click to expand, and will only show up at all if anything's been done). I've changed the tags on this post so that you can see an example here.

      For the immediate future, these permissions will be getting granted manually, will apply site-wide (not to specific groups), and will probably only be given to people that specifically express interest in helping with these tasks. I've written about grand, vague plans for a "trust"-based system that will hopefully help with doing this automatically in the future, but for now we'll have a more rudimentary trust system. Here's how it works:

      1. I trust you, and give you access to more powerful tools.
      2. If you abuse it, I take the tools away, and don't trust you any more.

      It's not very sophisticated, but I think it should do the trick for a while.

      So if you're interested in helping keep things organized, please let me know (post here or send me a message if you prefer). I'd probably prefer if you had at least some history of submitting well-tagged/titled topics to appropriate groups, but it's not necessarily required.

      Edit: I would prefer that you have at least been around on the site for at least a week or two though. This is mostly important because the tasks are mainly organizational, so I think it's best if you've had some time to get accustomed to what's "typical" on Tildes for tags, which types of posts go in which groups, and so on.

      109 votes
    8. Input wanted about title-editing, especially by topics' authors

      It was a bit of a side topic in the thread last night about giving other people access to some organizational tools for topics, so I wanted to have a more specific discussion about how we should...

      It was a bit of a side topic in the thread last night about giving other people access to some organizational tools for topics, so I wanted to have a more specific discussion about how we should handle title-editing.

      Editing titles is definitely a useful ability, both for being able to fix typos/mistakes as well as remove editorialization or misleading phrasing, or even update the title later if the story progresses and the original title is no longer correct. However, it can also be confusing or mis-used—the title is the main way that we (the users on the site) identify a particular topic, and when the title changes it can be difficult to recognize what happened.

      So I just want to have a general discussion about how we should handle title-editing, and especially whether we should allow people to edit their own topics' titles, and if there should be any restrictions on that. For example, should a topic's author only be allowed to edit the title in the first 5 minutes? Should they always be able to edit it, like they can always edit the post text itself? Maybe it varies, based on their history/account-age/something-else?

      One thing to keep in mind is that this doesn't need to be a system that's immune to abuse. If someone uses the title-editing to change a popular ~music post's title into a Star Wars spoiler or something, we don't just shrug and go, "oh well, they're allowed to edit titles, nothing we can do." We edit the title back, and either take that ability away from them or ban them from the site entirely if it was done maliciously. Trust people, but punish abusers is a good approach in my opinion—we don't need to hobble features constantly to try to make them un-abusable.

      Also, whatever we decide to do doesn't necessarily need to be kept forever. We can always try something, and if it obviously isn't working very well, we just change it. Decisions about how the site works don't need to be final, it's very difficult to predict how features will actually be used in practice.

      Anyway, let me know what you think. Thanks.

      38 votes
    9. Two-factor authentication is now available

      Another excellent open-source contribution has been deployed today - @oden has added two-factor authentication support (via TOTP apps like Google Authenticator). Here's the code, if anyone wants...

      Another excellent open-source contribution has been deployed today - @oden has added two-factor authentication support (via TOTP apps like Google Authenticator). Here's the code, if anyone wants to take a look.

      If you want to set it up for your account, the link is available on the settings page. If you do, please please please write down or store the backup codes that it gives you after you enable it. If your phone dies or you otherwise lose access to your 2FA device, you won't be able to recover access to your Tildes account.

      On that note, I wanted to ask for input about whether I should be willing to bypass 2FA for people if they've set up the email-based account recovery. People will lose access to their 2FA device and not have the backup codes, and I don't know if just telling them that I can't help them is truly the best thing to do. Allowing it to be bypassed does lower the security, but sometimes it's a reasonable trade-off. One possibility is adding a security option that people could enable for maximum security, like "Do not bypass 2FA for me under any circumstance, I promise that I've kept my backup codes".

      Let me know what you think about that, as well as if you have any concerns or notice any issues with the feature. Thanks again, @oden!

      74 votes
    10. Markdown for strikethrough and tables is now enabled

      Previously, the only way to do strikethrough or tables on Tildes was by using HTML. I've updated the markdown parser now so that it supports the methods of doing them through markdown. The...

      Previously, the only way to do strikethrough or tables on Tildes was by using HTML. I've updated the markdown parser now so that it supports the methods of doing them through markdown. The Formatting help page on the docs has been updated as well with info about how they work.

      I don't think there should be any conflicts between strikethrough and linking to groups, but it's possible that there are some weird edge cases, so please let me know if you notice anything. Generally, strikethrough requires you to have two tildes both before and after the text you want to strike out, whereas group links will only have one before. So something like This ~~should work~~ doesn't work will result in should work instead of a link to a group named ~should.

      69 votes
    11. The unread notifications page now has a "Mark all read" button

      There are a few updates coming in today, and I'm going to make separate posts for each of them. This is the first one, added by James Southern (I don't know if he wants his Tildes account named)...

      There are a few updates coming in today, and I'm going to make separate posts for each of them. This is the first one, added by James Southern (I don't know if he wants his Tildes account named) as an open-source contribution:

      Your unread notifications page now has a "Mark all read" button at the top, just to the right of the title. Clicking it will mark all notifications on the page as read so that you don't need to do them each individually.

      It works in a way that makes sure that it only marks ones that are on the page, and won't affect any new ones that came in after the page was loaded. If you have the "Automatically mark all notifications read when you view the Unread Notifications page" setting enabled, it won't show up (because you don't need it).

      Please post with any feedback or issues you notice with it. Thanks, James!

      41 votes
    12. Username mentions in comments now send notifications

      Another feature update courtesy of open-source contributors - @Celeo was brave and took this complex update on as a first contribution to the Tildes code. Mentioning a username in a comment will...

      Another feature update courtesy of open-source contributors - @Celeo was brave and took this complex update on as a first contribution to the Tildes code.

      Mentioning a username in a comment will now send them a notification. Any of the following formats work:

      It won't send a notification if you mention yourself, or if you mention someone that already would have gotten a notification for the comment anyway (the author of the parent topic/comment).

      Edits should be handled as well, so if you edit in a mention that wasn't there previously it will generate the notification at that point, and if you edit one out it will delete that notification (whether the user has seen it yet or not).

      Please let me know if you notice any issues or strange behavior (and please don't use this maliciously to annoy people).

      85 votes
    13. General plans for the week

      For my fellow Canadians, Happy, uh... Regatta Day / Terry Fox Day / Saskatchewan Day / British Columbia Day / Natal Day / Simcoe Day / New Brunswick Day / Colonel By Day / Heritage Day / Joseph...

      For my fellow Canadians, Happy, uh... Regatta Day / Terry Fox Day / Saskatchewan Day / British Columbia Day / Natal Day / Simcoe Day / New Brunswick Day / Colonel By Day / Heritage Day / Joseph Brant Day / Benjamin Vaughan Day. For everyone else, Happy Monday.

      Here are my overall plans for this week, in no particular order:

      On Friday, your own user page had topics/comments views added, and has been paginated. Sometime in the next few days, I'm intending to extend this to other users' pages. I haven't finished deciding yet which privacy options (if any) will be available as part of this, so feel free to add your input in that thread if you haven't already.

      There are multiple open-source contributions for features in progress, so there should be a few more things coming in shortly from there. I'll make separate changelog posts for anything particularly major, but one that was added over the weekend (contibuted by @what again) was some special appearance/behavior for "nsfw" and "spoiler" tags on topics. They'll stand out more, always be displayed at the start of the tags list, and the "spoiler" tag makes sure that text posts don't have their excerpt displayed in the listing (but can still be clicked to expand).

      @cfabbro did a massive rework and update of the Docs site that I want to get applied this week. There's a ton of new information in there that should help a lot as we keep bringing more people into the site.

      On that note, there's also a new official invite-request thread in /r/tildes on reddit, so we'll probably have a decent number of new registrations this week as that gets worked through. I've also topped everyone back up to 5 invite codes (available here: https://tildes.net/invite), so please feel free to invite people yourselves as well (and as always, if you need more codes, just send me a message and ask).

      I think that should cover the main plans, any extra time I find above that will probably go into various random things on the backlog (and if I have time to work on a major feature, probably basic search).

      Thanks for being here, and please let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions.

      42 votes
    14. General plans for the week

      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...

      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.

      40 votes
    15. Editing "grace period" for comments and topics increased to 5 minutes

      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...

      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.

      90 votes
    16. Four new groups added (and everyone subscribed): ~anime, ~enviro, ~humanities, and ~life

      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...

      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.

      69 votes
    17. New variant of "open links in new tabs" setting to apply to links inside the text of comments, topics, and messages

      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...

      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.

      31 votes
    18. Daily Tildes discussion - general plans for the week

      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,...

      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.

      48 votes
    19. Daily Tildes discussion - Just... try to relax a bit

      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...

      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".

      148 votes
    20. Not-so-daily Tildes discussion

      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...

      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.

      37 votes
    21. Daily Tildes discussion - General questions/feedback

      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...

      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!

      48 votes
    22. User settings are now available for opening links in new tabs

      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...

      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.

      56 votes
    23. Daily Tildes discussion - more details about handling removed posts

      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...

      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.

      37 votes
    24. Daily Tildes discussion - approaches to self-promotion

      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...

      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?

      42 votes
    25. Daily Tildes discussion - how can we maintain quality without drifting too far into "gatekeeping"?

      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...

      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.

      60 votes
    26. Daily Tildes discussion - thoughts about the site's activity level

      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...

      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:

      DateCommentsTopics
      2018-06-13104067
      2018-06-1482769
      2018-06-1583243
      2018-06-1646730
      2018-06-1737731
      2018-06-1882885
      2018-06-1966264
      2018-06-2088382
      2018-06-2192675
      2018-06-2255342
      2018-06-2347937
      2018-06-2428032
      2018-06-2563462
      2018-06-2666648
      2018-06-2769137
      2018-06-2843345
      2018-06-2941558
      2018-06-3029929
      2018-07-0136941
      2018-07-0223936
      2018-07-0335345
      2018-07-0433839
      2018-07-0550131
      2018-07-0648539
      2018-07-0737836
      2018-07-0842228
      2018-07-0944534
      2018-07-1042443
      2018-07-1135237
      2018-07-1229831

      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.

      81 votes
    27. Daily Tildes discussion - figuring out some early details of the group hierarchy

      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...

      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.

      34 votes
    28. Daily Tildes discussion - please help find omissions from the issue tracker

      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...

      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).

      29 votes
    29. Daily Tildes discussion - more filtering options?

      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...

      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?

      28 votes
    30. Daily Tildes discussion - general questions/feedback

      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...

      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.

      29 votes
    31. Added a confirmation prompt if you're leaving a page with something "unfinished"

      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,...

      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.

      63 votes
    32. Daily Tildes discussion - how do we make groups feel more like "separate spaces"?

      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...

      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?

      37 votes
    33. Daily Tildes discussion - how can we help people "acclimate" in a friendlier way?

      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...

      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?

      50 votes
    34. Daily Tildes discussion - minor group updates

      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...

      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?

      25 votes
    35. Daily Tildes discussion - please help write new descriptions for the groups

      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...

      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.

      27 votes
    36. Daily Tildes discussion - how to handle account deletion

      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...

      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.

      38 votes
    37. Minor text formatting updates

      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...

      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.

      38 votes
    38. Daily Tildes discussion - nothing in particular

      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...

      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!

      35 votes
    39. Daily Tildes discussion - title editing

      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...

      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.

      37 votes
    40. Daily Tildes discussion - "trial" groups?

      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...

      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.

      54 votes
    41. Daily Tildes discussion - starting some moderation

      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...

      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.

      62 votes
    42. Daily Tildes discussion (and changelog) - "new topic" page and process updated

      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...

      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).

      39 votes
    43. Daily Tildes discussion - the importance of content

      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...

      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.

      60 votes
    44. Daily Tildes discussion - Haunted by Data

      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...

      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.

      43 votes
    45. Daily Tildes discussion - Metafilter

      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....

      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?

      28 votes
    46. There's now a "topic log" shown in the sidebar of topics when changes have been made to it

      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...

      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.

      38 votes
    47. Daily Tildes discussion - A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy

      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...

      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

      81 votes
    48. Daily Tildes discussion - general feedback/questions

      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...

      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.

      37 votes
    49. Topic listings can now be filtered to a specific tag

      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...

      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.

      49 votes