The reason I didn't do this is because it doesn't accomplish anything while all the comments pages are being indexed. All of your posts have your username on them, so a search for your username...
The reason I didn't do this is because it doesn't accomplish anything while all the comments pages are being indexed. All of your posts have your username on them, so a search for your username would find the individual pages for any topic you posted or commented on regardless.
Blocking their crawler from my profile page would only affect the top result there, the other thousands of results would still come up. There isn't any way to prevent this unless we didn't allow crawlers to access any page where posts were visible at all (which is effectively the entire site).
True. But honest follow-up question; Why do we let google and other search engines index Tildes in the first place? It's not like organic traffic growth is a huge concern here, so what actual...
True. But honest follow-up question; Why do we let google and other search engines index Tildes in the first place? It's not like organic traffic growth is a huge concern here, so what actual benefits are there to the community and its members in allowing it and all the individual posts here to be indexed and cached?
p.s. I ask this as a huge snoop myself, who often uses caches to check the contents of deleted/removed comments on social media sites (mostly out of morbid curiosity). But TBH that's a bit of a bad habit of mine, not something I'm particularly proud of, and I honestly don't think it's all that beneficial to a social media community to allow that to happen. If Tildes was more of a technical support forum, then I could see the benefit to people both inside and outside the community in allowing indexing and caching, but that's about the only situation I can think of.
Counterpoint: the information on tild.es is not exclusively of internal interest, and therefore is valuable to include in external searches. For example, people frequently post insightful...
Counterpoint: the information on tild.es is not exclusively of internal interest, and therefore is valuable to include in external searches. For example, people frequently post insightful observations or clarifications on technical topics in ~tech and ~comp, and it would be nice for those comments to show up in external searches on those topics.
At that point you're trying to treat it more like a private chatroom, where the only people that are allowed to ever find anything on Tildes have to already know about it and come here to search...
At that point you're trying to treat it more like a private chatroom, where the only people that are allowed to ever find anything on Tildes have to already know about it and come here to search it individually. It's not far from going back to the very early days where you needed an invite before you could even view the site. There would be some benefits to it, but there are also a lot of downsides, and the site was never intended to be private to that kind of level.
Out of curiosity, what would you say are the downsides? If there are too many, would you at least list what you think would be most severe or of relevance to tildes existing users?
Out of curiosity, what would you say are the downsides? If there are too many, would you at least list what you think would be most severe or of relevance to tildes existing users?
I mean, at this point, isn't Tildes pretty much exactly that (albeit only semi-private)? Registration still requires an invite; The site is never advertised and barely mentioned organically...
At that point you're trying to treat it more like a private chatroom
I mean, at this point, isn't Tildes pretty much exactly that (albeit only semi-private)? Registration still requires an invite; The site is never advertised and barely mentioned organically anywhere anymore; User growth is negligible. So why not simply embrace that and try to make it as privacy protecting as possible for the users here, google and googlers be damned?
One reason might be to avoid a false sense of security. Although it's invite only, I believe a lot of invites were passed out to complete strangers, and that's how many of us got here. We might...
One reason might be to avoid a false sense of security. Although it's invite only, I believe a lot of invites were passed out to complete strangers, and that's how many of us got here. We might have come to trust some people who post regularly and that might make it seem cozy, but someone who lurks? They could be anyone.
So even if reading Tildes became members-only, I would not recommend that users who are currently being careful about their privacy let their guard down and start posting personal information for all members to read. It's not a closed group and never was. Better to keep being however careful you need to be under those circumstances.
I guess there could be some benefit from knowing your post is unlikely to "go viral" but screenshots are a thing, too.
Right, but that's just because of how Google hides "similar results". Your reddit profile page isn't included (because you have the feature enabled there), so one of your random comments comes up...
Right, but that's just because of how Google hides "similar results". Your reddit profile page isn't included (because you have the feature enabled there), so one of your random comments comes up as one of the top results instead. And it's actually even worse in this case, because it looks like it's a comment that you deleted, but now it's stuck as one of the first-page results for your name. Imagine if that had been a sensitive comment that you truly needed to delete, and there would be nothing you could do about it continuing to show up as one of the top results if anyone Googles your username. At least your user page is more directly under your control, and should re-index more often.
Anyway, the same kind of thing would happen with Tildes. If your user page was un-indexable, the link to your profile would just switch to a random comment thread you participated in. I don't think the difference is meaningful. The same information—that someone with that username posts on Tildes—is included in the search results either way, and it would be trivial for anyone that cared to find their way to your user page.
This shouldn't be too difficult to add as all it should require is a robots meta tag in the user profile HTML header with 'noindex' (and maybe 'nofollow' too?). And TBH I'm genuinely surprised...
This shouldn't be too difficult to add as all it should require is a robots meta tag in the user profile HTML header with 'noindex' (and maybe 'nofollow' too?). And TBH I'm genuinely surprised Tildes hasn't done that already too given its privacy-by-default philosophy. Or at least I don't see them in the HTML header or HTTP response header anywhere, unless I'm missing something? cc: @Deimos
I think HotPants has it right. Tildes operates under an assumption that it's up to you to protect your own privacy by using pseudonyms and not posting anything too specific that might link your...
I think HotPants has it right. Tildes operates under an assumption that it's up to you to protect your own privacy by using pseudonyms and not posting anything too specific that might link your account to your real world identity. But a perhaps-unanticipated consequence of that assumption is that choosing a username that's the same as one you use elsewhere is a bad idea, if you're looking for that level of privacy. Needs fixing?
The reason I didn't do this is because it doesn't accomplish anything while all the comments pages are being indexed. All of your posts have your username on them, so a search for your username would find the individual pages for any topic you posted or commented on regardless.
For example, here are the Google results for my name on Tildes: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Deimos%20site%3Atildes.net
Blocking their crawler from my profile page would only affect the top result there, the other thousands of results would still come up. There isn't any way to prevent this unless we didn't allow crawlers to access any page where posts were visible at all (which is effectively the entire site).
True. But honest follow-up question; Why do we let google and other search engines index Tildes in the first place? It's not like organic traffic growth is a huge concern here, so what actual benefits are there to the community and its members in allowing it and all the individual posts here to be indexed and cached?
p.s. I ask this as a huge snoop myself, who often uses caches to check the contents of deleted/removed comments on social media sites (mostly out of morbid curiosity). But TBH that's a bit of a bad habit of mine, not something I'm particularly proud of, and I honestly don't think it's all that beneficial to a social media community to allow that to happen. If Tildes was more of a technical support forum, then I could see the benefit to people both inside and outside the community in allowing indexing and caching, but that's about the only situation I can think of.
Counterpoint: the information on tild.es is not exclusively of internal interest, and therefore is valuable to include in external searches. For example, people frequently post insightful observations or clarifications on technical topics in ~tech and ~comp, and it would be nice for those comments to show up in external searches on those topics.
At that point you're trying to treat it more like a private chatroom, where the only people that are allowed to ever find anything on Tildes have to already know about it and come here to search it individually. It's not far from going back to the very early days where you needed an invite before you could even view the site. There would be some benefits to it, but there are also a lot of downsides, and the site was never intended to be private to that kind of level.
Out of curiosity, what would you say are the downsides? If there are too many, would you at least list what you think would be most severe or of relevance to tildes existing users?
Well, there's one major path to discovery for people who have never heard of Tildes: searching "alternatives to Reddit"
I mean, at this point, isn't Tildes pretty much exactly that (albeit only semi-private)? Registration still requires an invite; The site is never advertised and barely mentioned organically anywhere anymore; User growth is negligible. So why not simply embrace that and try to make it as privacy protecting as possible for the users here, google and googlers be damned?
One reason might be to avoid a false sense of security. Although it's invite only, I believe a lot of invites were passed out to complete strangers, and that's how many of us got here. We might have come to trust some people who post regularly and that might make it seem cozy, but someone who lurks? They could be anyone.
So even if reading Tildes became members-only, I would not recommend that users who are currently being careful about their privacy let their guard down and start posting personal information for all members to read. It's not a closed group and never was. Better to keep being however careful you need to be under those circumstances.
I guess there could be some benefit from knowing your post is unlikely to "go viral" but screenshots are a thing, too.
Right, but that's just because of how Google hides "similar results". Your reddit profile page isn't included (because you have the feature enabled there), so one of your random comments comes up as one of the top results instead. And it's actually even worse in this case, because it looks like it's a comment that you deleted, but now it's stuck as one of the first-page results for your name. Imagine if that had been a sensitive comment that you truly needed to delete, and there would be nothing you could do about it continuing to show up as one of the top results if anyone Googles your username. At least your user page is more directly under your control, and should re-index more often.
Anyway, the same kind of thing would happen with Tildes. If your user page was un-indexable, the link to your profile would just switch to a random comment thread you participated in. I don't think the difference is meaningful. The same information—that someone with that username posts on Tildes—is included in the search results either way, and it would be trivial for anyone that cared to find their way to your user page.
This shouldn't be too difficult to add as all it should require is a robots meta tag in the user profile HTML header with 'noindex' (and maybe 'nofollow' too?). And TBH I'm genuinely surprised Tildes hasn't done that already too given its privacy-by-default philosophy. Or at least I don't see them in the HTML header or HTTP response header anywhere, unless I'm missing something? cc: @Deimos
Added to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/739
This is why I switch my profile every year. It's not ideal, as none of the regulars understand why this newb is sounding so familiar.
Also not ideal as if Tildes ever introduces the much vaunted trust algorithm, I will always be the lowest of the low.
I think HotPants has it right. Tildes operates under an assumption that it's up to you to protect your own privacy by using pseudonyms and not posting anything too specific that might link your account to your real world identity. But a perhaps-unanticipated consequence of that assumption is that choosing a username that's the same as one you use elsewhere is a bad idea, if you're looking for that level of privacy. Needs fixing?