It's been a while since we had a topic to generally discuss potential site mechanics, and this is one that I've been thinking about quite a bit lately, so I thought it could make a good discussion.

This recent "Suggestions regarding Clickbait and misinformation" topic originally started me thinking about this, because a lot of the potential ways of dealing with those kind of topics involve modifying link topics in some way—changing their link to point somewhere else, editing the title, adding additional links, etc. However, one thing I've noticed on the (rare) occasions where I've performed those kind of actions is that some people are extremely protective of the posts they submitted, and can get upset about even minor title edits because it's changing their post. Some users have deleted their posts after they were changed, because they didn't like the change.

So... what if we made it so that link topics don't really "belong" to any user in particular? We'd absolutely still want a record of who originally submitted the post to be able to notice behaviors like spamming certain domains, but other than that, if it's a good link/story, does it matter much which user submitted it?

Here are more unorganized, general thoughts about some of the things this might affect and would need to be considered:

• Text posts would remain as-is, since in that case the submitter is also the author/source of the post.
• On that note, it could be a bit weird to lose the connection in cases like a user submitting their own content (such as a blog post that they wrote). Maybe we'd need some way to indicate that, through a standardized tag or something (or even a checkbox when submitting)?
• Are there other cases where the submitter is important and associated with the content?
• We could use the space in topic listings where the submitter's username is currently displayed to show different, more relevant data instead. For example, maybe the domain could move into that space instead of being after the title in parentheses, or it could display other info like the name of the actual author of the linked content, the channel name for YouTube videos, etc.
• If the submitter no longer owns the post, they'd probably no longer have control of deleting it. When could that be an issue?
• How would this affect user pages? Should links that the user originally submitted still be visible there, even if they're no longer considered posts that the user "owns"?

Please let me know any thoughts on the overall idea, any of the above questions, and also feel free to point out other aspects of it that I've surely missed.

(And unrelated, but I've bumped everyone back up to having 5 invite codes available, which you can get from the invite page. I'm still working towards making the site publicly-visible fairly soon, and will hopefully post more info about that before long.)

When you're viewing your own user page, there are now two other "tabs" available, one for showing only topics that you've posted, and one for only comments. These pages are paginated, so you can go back through your whole history of topics/comments. I also intend to make the "recent activity" view paginated as well, but that's a tiny bit more complicated, so I left it out for now.

I plan to extend the tabs/pagination to all user pages some time next week, but as I previously promised, I wanted to give people at least a few days to be able to review their own posts and go back and see if there's anything they want to edit/delete before other users can more easily look through their posts.

This leads into a discussion that I want to have about whether we should do anything special to hide user history.

In general, I think that showing user history is good. It's valuable from an accountability perspective and it has a lot of legitimate benefits. If I run across a user that consistently makes good posts, it's nice to be able to look at their history and see some of the other comments they've made. Maybe (once the site is larger, anyway), I'll even learn about some new groups that I'm interested in by seeing where that user hangs out.

However, there are also obvious downsides, and we're seeing some major demonstrations of this in the media lately (mostly applied to Twitter). I don't want to get into the individual cases, but there have been repeated instances of people digging up years-old tweets and using them as ways to attack people. The main problem with this is that a full history (especially when combined with search) makes it very easy to find things to shame people about, especially when they're pulled entirely out of context of how they were written in the first place.

Tildes is still very new, but this is a real possibility as the site goes on. Do we want people to be able to easily dig up old comments a user made 5+ years ago? Do the potential downsides of that ability outweigh the benefits from being able to easily look back through a user's history?

One other thing to keep in mind is that once the site is publicly visible (and especially once there's an API), there will be external databases of everyone's posts. We can make it more difficult/inconvenient for people to be able to search/review user history, but we can't make it impossible. There's just no way to do that with a site where your posts are public.

Let me know your thoughts, it's a really difficult subject and one that I've been thinking about a lot myself as more and more of these "person in spotlight has embarrassing social media history" cases come up.

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.

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.