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

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

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

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

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

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

Some thoughts:

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

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

As already mentioned, there was a reasonably successful post about Tildes on Hacker News today, so I've got an email inbox full of invite requests and feedback that I'm about to start going through. This means that I'm about to invite a lot more people, so the activity will probably start picking up shortly.

As part of that, I've created two new groups: ~comp and ~creative. A lot of the people coming from HN will definitely be on the more technical end, so ~comp is intended to be a place where we can post articles about programming and so on without filling up ~tech with that kind of stuff. ~creative was a suggestion that meristele made yesterday, and I think it's definitely something that we needed. Let me know if you think there are other groups we need desperately.

Note that while new users will get auto-subscribed to those groups (for now), I did not go back and subscribe all existing users to them. So if you're interested in either of those topics, you'll need to go subscribe on your own.

Outside of that, please be welcoming to all the new users. And to both old and new users - please let me know what you think and if there's particular functionality I should prioritize. I know that there's a lot of things still missing, but if you're coming from HN you're probably pretty used to that. You can post here or feel free to make separate threads in ~tildes if you want to discuss something in more depth.

Thanks! I'll most likely give out some more invite codes to everyone in the next day or two, so that we can try to keep more activity coming in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any opinions?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So the questions are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For today:

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

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

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