New users: Ask your questions about Tildes here!
This thread is officially retired. Please see the new version to ask any new questions.
We have a lot of new users joining the site. Welcome to Tildes!
This thread is for you to ask any question you have about the site, from “what is the moderation philosophy?”to “what does that blue line next to some comments mean?” to “what is the general vibe like here?” Tildes has a lot of documentation, history, and embedded social norms that can be daunting or opaque at first glance, so here’s your opportunity to get help with anything you need.
Questions about anything and everything are fair game. Follow-up questions are encouraged! No question is too simple.
Also, a quick note: the only person who can speak in any official capacity on Tildes is our admin @Deimos. Everyone answering who is NOT him is just a helpful community member!
EDIT: To be clear, is perfectly okay to ask any question — even if you think it’s been asked before, or even if you didn’t search for an answer beforehand. There are an overwhelming number of comments here to sift through, so don’t worry about trying to read all of them. Just ask away, and someone will answer you!
A lot of new users are about to get their moderation privileges, which activate seven days after signup.
Tildes takes the approach of 'everyone is a moderator' because after a hundred discussions on the topic, we're generally of the consensus that it is the only way moderation is ever going to work. If everyone is a moderator, it's incredibly hard to abuse that power without other moderators noticing and correcting the problem. It also destroys the 'special' power class that moderators enjoy on other sites. Here a moderator is just another user - one who has been around at least long enough to absorb the culture.
Any moderator actions for any given topic are listed in the sidebar on the right side of every thread under 'topic log.' Note that if there are no actions in the log (empty) then it won't appear. Keeping the moderation logs public like this, but also focused to specific threads rather than group or site-wide views, helps cut down on certain bad behaviors like witch hunting and keeps the actions visible in context of the thread where they happen. Note that these moderation logs self-delete after 30 days, just like the information of who voted on what posts/comments does.
As groups get larger with more users, it's possible to require multiple users to apply the same label more than once to activate that label, thus preventing any single moderator from being able to abuse more powerful features. Actions can trigger from the aggregate instead of the individual. It's all rather flexible.
Mod privs can be revoked if a specific user repeatedly abuses them. For the other 99.9% of the user base who don't abuse the powers, it makes for light work of the moderation because as soon as anyone notices a problem, they can fix it, whatever it is. This methodology washes out the bad actors and trolls with extreme efficiency and it de-glamorizes the act of moderating from King to Janitor.
Look for the word 'label' to appear right next to the word 'vote' on every comment that isn't your own. Labels have effectively replaced the downvote. You can think of them as 'a vote with a reason attached to it' - the reason is the missing ingredient that makes voting into something more than farcical democracy.
It will look like this.
The effect of these labels is simple - they alter the weight of the votes attached to the post, which alters that comment's position in the thread, hopefully with an eye for quality at the top. A detailed breakdown of how this operates is in the docs page. I'd suggest giving it a quick read.
You can think of this system as a very simple stub. There can be more types of labels. Labels could be customized differently or special labels created for specific groups. The label effect doesn't have to be just a vote weight change, each label could trigger specific automoderator-style actions as well. Maybe we'll have special labels for ama or nsfw or fluff in the future. The general idea is to use this method as the launching point for the community moderation and trust system. Users apply labels, labels trigger moderation activity.
Labels are only for comments at present. A similar system can exist for submissions if it becomes necessary. If you want to get your /r/theoryofreddit on, you might want to browse ~tildes by most comments like this. There are loads of discussions about how to solve most of social media's problems in there. Turns out most of the problems are dirt simple if you are willing to give up the financial exploitation. ;)
In the future, it's possible to gate access to the moderation this way by only granting it to people in specific groups based on participation, only after certain thresholds of activity, trust, lurking, or voting have been met. While tildes is small now, many of its features have been designed at the ground level to scale up to reddit-like levels of activity someday.
Please be aware that at this time, only Deimos himself can mute or ban users, or delete and lock threads. There is a very small number of other old guard users here that can also move posts from one group to another, or edit the tags and/or titles on posts that are not their own. As the site's code improves those will also become part of the standard moderation toolset here.
Some small clarifications:
The only actions that show up in the Topic Log are Topic Tag edits, additions, removals, and Topic Group moves. And everyone does not get the ability to do those 7 days after they join, when Comment Labels unlock for them. Only people that have specifically been granted elevated privileges can do those actions. Comment Labels that users apply to other user's comments do not show in the topic log, nor are they publicly visible... other than Exemplary, which causes a blue text box and stripe to be applied to the comment (the message you type is only visible to the person you Exemplaried the comment of).
However Comment Label use is tracked behind the scenes, and if they are abused Deimos can, and has in the past, removed the ability to use them from those people, or even outright banned or temp banned them as a result, if it was an egregious abuse.
Admin actions (comment removals, bans, etc) generally do not show up in the Topic Log either. Removed comments will show a <removed by admin> in their place in the comments section though. And locked topics will also be obvious, as they have a giant stripe at the top declaring that the topic has been locked for all to see.
BTW, the "Malice..." Label is Tildes version of a Report button. If you see someone misbehaving or being an asshole, use it on their comment to send a message (which only Deimos can read) so the situation can be dealt with by him.
Definitely appreciate your detailed explanation, particularly on how votes work. The labels concept seems like an improvement compared to other systems.
One question though:
Do votes on posts affect the post order on the front page?
Or are the ordering of these posts only affected by most recent comment?
It depends on how you sort your front page. The goal with those sorts is to give you freedom of choice.
Tildes does come with an instruction manual. When people want to RTFM we like to make sure they have an M to work with. This section on the front page will explain the various sorting methods. As for any weighting, I don't think there is any vote weighting on the submissions - it's supported, but we never had a need to turn it on yet. It's just the vote count without weights involved. Deimos could be more precise about it, he knows the current runtime settings and I wouldn't put it past him to be tinkering with things from time to time and taking notes. He is studying us, this is his laboratory.
Thanks for this! Just a question - I had a read through the labels document and saw that an application of the 'noise' label auto-collapses the comment. I see a lot of collapsed comments - does this mean they've all had the 'noise' label put on them, or are there other reasons comments get collapsed?
If you come back into a thread you've visited, old comments are all collapsed if new comments are present, so that you can find the new comments super fast and read them easily. A fine improvement on basic thread design, I think.
I believe there's also a minimum limit length where the short comments are all collapsed by default. That's just to save space, if your comment is a one-liner, no need to make it large.
...and if you come back when there's nothing new, everything gets expanded again. So if you want to read everything all over again, just F5 the page.
I've found this gets a bit frustrating with the Arc browser because when you open a thread as a tab it loads the page. But then if you do something else it backgrounds it and reloads the page when you go back to that tab. So functionally everything is re-expanded again.
You can also click the [Expand all] button at the top of the page, should you be on a device that's not F5-friendly.
Thanks! I was slightly confused after reading the document since there were all these collapsed comments that didn't seem at all like noise to me, so appreciate the explanation!
Thanks for this explanation. It was my first question about being a moderator. I love this Wikipedia-like approach a la “everyone can be an editor, but there are more good ones than bad”.
I’m reading through the comments here and may find the answer, but how are tildes started?
EDIT: don’t answer, found it in the thread!
You mean how Tildes itself started? @deimos did it. Here's the announcing post: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes
If you mean to say "How are groups started?", then they are not user created, but added by @deimos when there is enough of a kind of content that justifies having a group for that.
Learn more here: https://docs.tildes.net/
And welcome do Tildes :)
That’s similar to how subreddits were first made on reddit I think, the admins made them. Cool. I’m reading the rest of the comments here and learning a lot. Thanks for the answer and I’m happy to be here. Seems nice so far, love how friendly the community is.
From the docs page you linked:
I was already wondering how this "everyone is mod" could work when applied fully. StackExchange has a pretty good instance of it, but there, too, are diamond operators with special privileges that can swing ban hammers that normal users can't.
This voting system, I would just say that everyone can vote on posts, because that's what it is, not actual conversation moderation (maybe in the lightest sense of the word)
The site is the main mobile interface, not an app
A lot of people seem laser-focused on having an app, and a non-official one is in the works. However, I would like to stress that, unlike Reddit, Tildes was made to be perfectly usable on your mobile browser. I use Tildes like that every day, and it works very well. There's nothing wrong with wanting an app, but it's important to understand that you don't need an app to use Tildes on your phone. Give the mobile website a shot!
Its perfectly usable but there are some aspects to navigating that require an app, primarily swiping.
That's okay. I don't see why I would wanna swipe Tildes, it's just not that kind of content. But I understand.
If you were a power user of Apollo, there were sooo many nice features surrounding gestures. A native app, when done well, is much better than mobile Web apps.
Me me me. I loved Apollo so much. It got my blood boiling when I saw that Reddit was killing them off. The user interface and gestures on Apollo are unparalleled. If anyone’s developing a third-party Tildes app, that’s primarily what I’d wanna see in it.
Imagine if Christian could turn Apollo into something detached from Reddit. Like a browser or interface for other aggregator sites. It would be interesting to see it work, if it could work.
Relatable. We stan Apollo in my household.
For example if I want to go to differnt topics, or view differnt filtered views, rather than needing to scroll all the way back up or reloading a page, I could swipe open a navigation pane. Honestly thats one thing that would drastically improve my expeirence, especially since notifications of new comments are in the side bar. UI elements can also use some tweaking to satisfy my preferences.
I use those features on BaconReader and they are indeed useful. But, with time, you may realize that those features are not essential on Tildes just because there is much less content over here and you can easily scan all the topics posted in a day in less than half an hour.
That's a temporary predicament, though. Tildes will definitely grow to the point where content will exceed one's ability to consume it.
It's already there for me, when you include the discussions as well as the link posts.
I feel like the issue with this is that in the future, Tildes will very likely grow. The same way that Reddit evolved, Tildes will probably experience the same thing.
So who knows, by then, Tildes might have a dedicated app with these features too.
I've been very much enjoying using tildes on mobile, it's implemented excellently and is a delight to use - especially once you enable a dark mode theme. However an app made by the RiF dev will be lovely. My mobile browser is a bit slow and crashes often, and I quite like the stack based navigation an app provides vs tabs or the back button on a browser. That being said a third party app is very much a nice to have rather than being essential like it is on certain platforms.
Thanks for the tip about dark mode. For anyone else wondering where this is accessible from, scroll to the bottom of the main page and there’s a drop down selector for different theme options.
You can also set an account default in your settings (the very first option). This way any time you login to a new device it will use that theme.
Thank you, more useful info!
The mobile website is the desktop website is the only website. It's adaptive!
Yes, you're absolutely correct ;)
Using a web browser on my phone is a measure of very last resort. Whether a page is perfect for mobile or not, it is always a faff to use compared to an app. Would much rather have a webapp of the site in lieu of a full client.
I'm sorry you feel that way. Even so, I encourage you to open this website on mobile and judge for yourself. I've been using Tildes this way for a long time and I like it a lot.
I will absolutely use the app that talklittle is making because I just loved RiF and want to support projects like it - but I'm shocked at how incredibly good the experience of this site is between desktop and mobile. I've not had any real complaints except that I want to type longer comments than I have the energy for on my phone.
If that's my biggest problem, that's a great problem to have.
That problem could also be solved with the right keyboard or text-to-speech software. Maybe try something like swype or SwiftKey. I've got something like that on my phone, and my phone wpm is as fast as my keyboard wpm.
I actually swipe on my phone almost exclusively, I'm just extremely lazy even when it comes to typing anything out on my phone. It's fine and all but I just prefer to type longer messages on physical keyboards.
Dedicated apps are nice, but I’m actually really liking the mobile site and at the moment don’t have an urge for there to be an app. I’ve too many apps on my phone anyway. Using the browser feels more “minimal”, which I’m liking for some reason.
Yeah, I think a lot of people have been conditioned into thinking they need an app for something so basic as a link aggregator because they're used to reddit, where the website is so unusable (by design) that an app is required.
This is where I come down as well, but I’d really prefer a fully thought out native app.
For most people, I suspect what it comes down to is the mental model of using apps vs a browser. I don’t use a browser to go to sites, I use it to search things. Those things tend to be sites, but that’s secondary.
I get that Tildes is evoking the early pioneering feeling of Internet forums in a lot of ways, but that doesn’t override the fact that when I want to use a service, I think of the app first.
Interesting! I very much prefer webapps for the most part instead of dedicated apps - I see the apps as harvesting more data about me (typically, Tildes wouldn't) but have a bias for the browser.
I prefer webapps to mobile apps for stuff that I'll check a few times per week. But websites that I want to check daily gets kinda lost in my 50+ tabs hahah
Edit: someone else in the thread reminded me that you can set a website on your homescreen, and I did just that. Good enough for me!
i use about 50/50 apps from google play or fdroid, and i am far more trusting on the fdroid ones
that being said i'd like an app just for the notifications (:
I'd prefer an app at some point. Push notifications are the biggest draw for me. I will say though I'm generally not a huge fan of using mobile web all that much (I mostly use it for quick google searches), so perhaps there is a way to get push notifications on the mobile web that I just don't know about.
I guess I'm just used to everything having an app, and so I've mentally associated doing specific things with clicking on a specific location on my phone, which in my mind, is easier to handle then managing a bunch of tabs in my mobile browser.
You can save a website to your home screen as an “app.” It’s not really an app, just a shortcut to the page. But being as how most apps for online services are just a thin wrapper around a browser anyway. . .
Thanks for the tip, I'll try that out. I imagine that notifications still won't work, but I don't really see a way around that without an app or something like email notifications, which I'm pretty meh about, mostly just because email is better for things you want to keep around.
As far as notifications go, Tildes will get you obsessively checking the website soon enough without your phone bugging you :-) Or if not, seems like that's fine too?
Tildes also has bookmarks, which I haven't used much but I can see being useful for going back to things. For finding a comment you wrote yourself, there is a search box on your profile page that's often useful.
Yeah, I'm already obsessively checking for new comments that are being made. I just like being responsive to comments and such and I'd rather not constantly think about it when I'm doing other things (but I still would take the few minutes to respond to a comment). Polling is just high maintenance.
This is maybe a really dumb question, but what’s the best way to check for new comments? Refresh the page?
that's what I've been doing.
Nah no notifications. I guess I never notice because I disable all notifications on my phone except SMS/iMessage.
I’m not sure if you can do this in iOS with non-Safari browser interfaces. I haven’t been able to set an icon on the Home Screen as an “app” with Brave on iOS. Could just be missing it though.
Just tried setting Brave as my default browser but it still launches in Safari. That’s annoying.
But it’s still doable in a roundabout way. You can create a Shortcut and save that to your homepage. It should be a simple, one-step automation script. In the Siri Shortcuts app create a new one (plus sign in the top). In the search bar on the bottom pick the “Open URL” command and type
brave://open-url?url=www.tildes.netinto the editable space. Then save that to your home screen.The Open URL command has a safari icon in it, but don’t let that spook you. The Brave:// has brave launch it instead. The first time it’ll ask you if you want to give it permission but subsequently it won’t. It does have a little checkbox that shows up on top each time, which is not ideal, but not terrible.
While this works and is pretty clever, it opens a new tab unless it finds a tab with an identical URL. This is probably a better experience on Android. My experience with iOS is that a well built application is pretty much always superior to a browser application.
I’m beta testing the backtick app now.
That's much smarter than what I did. I created a little SwiftUI app that wraps around a WebKit WKWebView and has a few navigation buttons. I wanted to keep Tildes separate from my browser and thought it'd be a fun little side project. If anyone's interested in it, I can upload a GitHub gist or something as the main code for this is ~100 lines of Swift.
https://imgur.com/a/Krv0vBx
(p.s. don't worry about the SOS in the screenshot, I just took it from my development phone which has no SIM in it.)
For what it’s worth, iOS Brave is also just safari underneath. The benefits like adblocking also doesn’t really affect Tildes, so it might be fine for you to add it from Safari.
The mobile UI is light years ahead of what reddit currently has (it's sad, because they once had a good mobile UI and they just killed it), but there are things that still work best in the native app.
I mean I'm right now typing it from my phone and while it is good it isn't great. Just to compare with RiF. The interface is designed to fit as much text on the screen as possible. Each comment doesn't show action until you click on it. When I want to type a response, I get a popup window. I have a button to save my response so I can continue it later (I don't have to worry that my browser refreshes). There's obvious thing like notifications of new responses that would be harder (impossible?) to do with a browser. If link for example is YouTube it can open a native app. Someone mentioned mouse gestures.
The thing is that it is those tiny little things that add up to huge user experience improvements.
Lack of an app isn't something that would make me stop using tildes, but I did read somewhere that there is a work being done on it, and would be interested to be beta tester, and likely I would still use it if at the moment it is worse experience as eventually it will improve.
You can still access the old mobile reddit layout, I just discovered today. Just add '.i' to the end of the URL:
https://old.reddit.com/.i
While I'm satisfied with the website, there are definitely things an app can do best, and that is why an non official app is being made :)
The website definitely works great on a mobile device. I initially thought I’d prefer or desire an app, but the way the site is designed seems to just work.
That said a PWA would definitely be a nice bonus.
Some people have been using Hermit or similar "app-making" workflows for that ;)
That’s a good idea, I used to use hermit when I was on Android. Will need to look into an iOS version !
I am on mobile now and it is fine!
Can confirm, this is my first time checking out tildes on my phone and it's great. Usually phone browsing is terrible but not here. Would still love a dedicated app though, especially if it's being made by the developer of RiF.
Yeah I just got here also and it’s quite a pleasant experience for a mobile web app.
I’ll miss swiping to collapse a thread for a while though but at least the expand and minimize buttons are large enough to accurately tap
Is it foreseeable that Tildes could get Progressive Web App support? Another new-ish service I use, Cohost, has that functionality and it results in significantly less friction when it comes to faffing about with tabs on my phone. I've only been here for a couple days but I'm seeing the Tildes tab cleanup becoming a bit of a routine already.
I have no issue faffing with tabs lol.
But some people are using Hermit and similar tools to have a "Tildes app" ;)
Not for iOS, unfortunely!
I was under the impression that similar apps exist for iPhone, or maybe it's a built-in feature?
Website devs have to explicitly enable the functionality, hence why I specifically namedropped progressive web apps.
Simple question, are the subs set in stone and managed by admin? Is there a process of creating new sub categories?
To add on to the other comments, I believe (but could be wrong, my memory is shoddy) that a point in favor of having fewer groups was that it fit our smaller community size. Having lots of niches but not enough people to populate them would result in a lot of empty-looking groups that would likely turn people off to the site.
If we see that our current influx leads to a larger userbase than it has in the past, then it might be worth reevaluating the decision to add more groups.
I hope eventually we can create sub-groups for focused discussion on say a particular video game or happenings in my country/area.
Programming wise you could have these have to be children of the established groups, i.e: ~gaming.zelda, ~tv.theoffice. Has the double effect of name spacing, i.e: ~politics.canada ~finance.canada
This already exists. I posted earlier about a Deep Rock Galactic announcement video, and the post got a
Deep Rock Galactic-tag. Clicking on that shows only posts that have the DRG tag applied.Topic tags allow this sort of granularity within the larger groups.
Can you subscribe to topic tags, though? I've had an account for years but haven't used the site much because activity levels are low even in the big groups and it just doesn't have the kind of niche topic coverage reddit does. Unfortunately I made an account here four years ago because Reddit was declining then, and it's only gotten worse since.
Not that I really want a reddit replacement. More like I want a usenet replacement, which Reddit was the closest thing to, but is getting worse at by the day.
I'm brand new but from what I can gather you cannot subscribe to tags, I found a discussion about this and it was being talked about as a potential feature though.
This would be lovely! As a Star Trek nerd, I want to be sure that I see all the things Trek! 🖖🏻
What I like about it is they can declutter and roll back in sub-groups into the main group, addressing the issue with dead subs.
But that would assume a subtopic only falls within one topic.
(I'm new here, but it seems like the only way to find groups is by either searching or following a link from an umbrella group)
In that case you can use tags to further refine how the post should be classified.
Definitely need a way for people to create their own groups (tags is nice too but I can't subscribe to tags)
State or city groups would be great. At least for bigger cities.
I think this previous comment of mine about groups should address that:
Doesn't this inevitably lead to a similar problem that Reddit has especially with smaller subs and the moderator(s) start removing content they don't see "fitting" while the users like it? Without freedom to move on to/create competing "subreddit" users can't directly address this problem (other than complaining of course). The problem exacerbated when it's admin-level moderation because there's no escape.
And I'm not saying that it's anyone's intent or that I'm building a case for "freeze peach" hate speech; that absolutely shouldn't be tolerated. I'm more talking about someone posting prehistoric animals to animals group and someone having a bad day decides that they aren't fit to that group. It's just human nature that that kind of conflicts come up with time.
So, one of the ways that Tildes is different than Reddit is that it’s more or less, at least to this point, the same group of people posting across all groups rather than sub communities. Groups and tag filtering let people control what they want to see/participate in, but they’re not really meant to be independent fiefdoms of content like a subreddit, although admittedly that has yet to be tested with a larger user base.
So, assuming we’re talking about a constructive topic, ‘moderators’ (people with the ability to edit posts and tags) aren’t really here to be arbiters of little kingdoms, but more like librarians helping you tag and file your post away to the spots that’s most beneficial to the community. So maybe your example would get re-tagged from animals to animals.prehistoric or something, which should not be taken as a bad thing. In fact, the day you can post something and not get it re-tagged by @mycketforvirrad is the day you ascend to Tildes nirvana.
Cheeky! It's a serious affliction to tagging, I'll have you know...
I know how you feel. But being referred to as a librarian makes me feel slightly better about it though. Librarians are awesome! :P
Motion to call mods here as Librarians (I never have had drama over a power tripping mod before, so I don't have any bad feeling towards them). Maybe being appreciative about your work will prevent the possibility of power tripping mod appearing in the future, idk
Second! Librarians is a bit endearing.
Then you will be happy to know that I have just been admitted to a masters degree program in library science.
Congrats! People often say "Thank you for your service" to soldiers, but I think librarians should get regularly shown some of that appreciation too! :P
Congratulations! My wife just finished hers 2 years ago.
Thanks for your reply. That sounds good but are there any tools to prevent misuse? Because everyone is human, everyone has bad days and bad calls, and in my opinion not to prepare for that is just like having a bomb waiting in your hand (if the site reaches that level of popularity where it can become a problem). I'm certain you all have good intentions so I mean no ill will.
It's foreseeable that some content will need to be removed, presumably some already has (reposts for example).
Although if this community is meant to be kept at a manageable size it probably won't ever become a problem, I'll admit to that.
I understand your concerns, but ultimately you must decide whether those in charge deserve your trust or not. There are no mechanisms I can think of that would guarantee trust mechanically. Anything can potentially be circumvented by someone at the top.
Take a look around, read the docs, visit the repository, and understand what Tildes actually is both legally and socially. Tildes is very different from Reddit on multiple levels, so take that into account. I'm not saying you should trust anyone, but understand that FOSS non-profits work very differently than for-profit corporations.
Make your own decision.
And welcome to Tildes :)
I don't think my worry is inherently about FOSS vs commercial but philosophically who's leading the way. Obviously there needs to be a head that has the final say, no doubt about that.
But it's too soon for me to speak if this does or doesn't work but I'll at least give it a shot. And thanks for the warm welcome.
Your concerns are reasonable, unfortunately some of your doubts are mine as well.
What would be a good general idea against misuse of mod powers? Democracy (voting for mods)? Hand pick every mod by the Admin? I'm interested in this as well, because I like the core values of Tildes.
I have to cast my mind back to quite a few years ago, when we discussed this at length. Now, keep in mind that the systems and processes I'm about to discuss do not exist yet. They were intended to be added gradually as Tildes grew, and needed more people who could curate the site - but that need never eventuated (until maybe now-ish? we'll see...)
The idea was that everyone could become what's traditionally called a "moderator", but which is more like being a janitor or a librarian.
Tildes would have a "trust" system, where every user would earn "trust" through their actions on the site.
New users have no power to take action.
After the first 7 days, comment labels will become visible to all users (this feature already exists). All users then have the power to label comments as "exemplary" or "noise" or "malice" or whatever.
Over time, a database would record how often a user's labels aligned with other user's labels, and how often those labels resulted in a change to the website. If a user makes positive changes, they earn "trust".
As a user gains more "trust", they also gain more abilities. The philosophy is similar to StackExchange's theory of moderation. As people use those abilities well, they gain more "trust". More "trust" leads to more abilities, and so on.
So, there would be a pyramid of moderators, from the novitiates all the way up to the gods. Anyone can work their way up to the next step on the pyramid (and fall back down to the previous step). Everyone can (and probably will) perform some type of moderation, even if it's as simple as labelling a comment as "exemplary".
Deimos wrote about this on the Future Plans page in the Tildes docs. There have been previous discussions about this; here are some random old threads I dug up:
Community moderators?
The future of moderation on Tildes
Use sortition for moderation ?
How will moderation on existing groups work?
(Sorry for the randomness of those threads. It's hard to remember and track down discussions we had 4-5 years ago.)
It's important to remember that none of this theoretical future "trust" moderation model actually exists. As I said, the need for it didn't arrive.
For now, we have Deimos, our benevolent dictator, and his hand-picked
lackeys... umm...puppets... umm...demigods... umm... helpers. At certain points in time, Deimos asked for and/or selected some people to be granted the limited moderation-style powers that are currently available on Tildes, to wit:Adding, editing, removing tags on topics.
Editing titles of topics.
Moving topics from one group to another.
So, some users were hand-picked by Deimos to undertake those janitorial/curatorial duties.
Sounds awesome, but this Trust® system seems more sophisticated than a database. It's like a judicial system for irresponsible people and trolls, so maybe is a machine learning endeavor? Anyway, the fact that this idea exist gives me hope for the future of moderation.
The "Trust® system" wasn't intended to be based on machine learning - at least not when we discussed it 4-5 years ago. StackExchange has been doing something like this forever, since before machine learning was commonly available, so it can be done without that level of smartness. (And it's possible my explanation wasn't the best, because it has been a few years since Tildes users regularly discussed this idea.)
That said, the world has moved on since those early discussions. Maybe, when the need arises for an automated algorithmic way for moderator-types to arise on Tildes, Deimos (or one of his helper-developers) will use machine learning to achieve that. Or not.
However it's implemented, the idea is for many people to be moderators, with higher levels of moderator powers being automatically granted to longer-term users who have achieved positive (algorithmic) reputation on the site. So: 90% of users may have the ability to label comments; 50% of users may have the ability to tag other people's posts; 30% of users may have the ability to move posts; 10% of users may have the ability to remove posts/comments; 1% of users may have the ability to ban users. (Note: all numbers are purely for demonstration purposes.) The longer you're active here, and the more positively your actions on the site are acknowledged to be, the more actions you'll be able to do.
For the time being, Deimos hand-picks the people with these abilities. However, he hasn't exactly been stingy about handing out these abilities!
Yeah, seriously. If you are the kind of person who likes to edit tags all day for no reward, I'm sure if you ask you can have that honor.
Damn. I thought Deimos had just mislayed my payslip. 😉
Are there more specific guidelines for what is considered
noiseoroff-topic? As these labels push comments to the bottom of the thread, regardless of votes or number of replies, it's a really powerful tool.More specifically, this thread: https://tild.es/16l7
The
off-topicornoiselabelled comment by OP at the bottom of thread is an article snippet. I'm not sure, but I'm guessing such a label has been applied to this comment by a user(s) either due to the lack of contextualisation (snippet has no explanation or analysis), or the fact that such a comment will cause some readers to skip the article.The issue here is that either possible label doesn't cleanly align with existing recommendations from the docs page.
This doesn't apply to an article excerpt, which is definitely on-topic.
I presume this is the label applied.
The complication here is that such a comment doesn't make "no difference to the discussion". It may arguably be regarded by many users as a negative difference to the discussion, but nevertheless, it is still a comment whose contents is a subset of the article, that people will engage with, making a difference to the discussion.
Essentially, none of the comment labels, as indicated from the instructions page, apply for such a comment.
This makes such comment fall in a grey area, where a value judgement must be made — on whether it constitutes to a general (or personal) definition of "noise", in spite of contrasting guidance from the recommendations. It is a situation where not all users will judge similarly, and where guidelines are unclear.
I didn't initially agree with the label designation, but after thinking about it whilst writing this comment, I can see why user(s) may have applied this label.
Also, as an separate aside:
Is there a method for unfairly labelled
noiseoroff-topicto be vouched / rescued? These labels are really powerful, so I'm guessing this is something higher trust users (e.g. cfabbro) can do?The labelling guidelines you've read and quoted are the only guidelines that exist. Everything else is subjective: as you say, it's a value judgement whether any given comment is off-topic or noise. Note that the guidelines about the 'Noise' label use the phrasing "might include". That was deliberate on my part (I wrote those instructions), because:
it's not possible to exhaustively list all examples of a comment that would qualify as 'Noise';
there's a lot of subjectivity involved in decided what qualifies as 'Noise'.
These quote-only comments are a side-effect of a deliberate feature of Tildes. When you create a topic there are three fields to be completed. The combination of fields you complete determine the type of topic you're making.
Title All topics must have a title. This is compulsory.
Link A field for a URL linking to an article or video or other off-site content. This is optional.
Text A field for adding text to your post. This is optional.
If you complete:
Link but not Text - this creates a simple link topic: the topic consists only of an off-site link.
Text but not Link - this creates a simple text topic: the topic consists only of user-provided text.
Link and Text - this produces a complex link topic: the topic consists of an off-site link plus user-provided text. However, the user-provided text is not incorporated into the actual topic, but is split off into a stand-alone comment.
Some people who post links, also like to include a relevant quote to summarise the article they're posting, to let readers know what the article is about before they click the off-site link. But, as above, this quote gets split off as a stand-alone comment. It is no longer part of the post. It's just a comment with a context-less quote.
In a perfect world, that summary quote would remain as part of the topic, rather than being split off as a comment. When we discussed how this feature should work, that's what I argued for (obviously the decision went differently). In a near-perfect world, people posting an article would include the URL in the Text field, so that the Tildes code treats it as a text-only post, and keeps all the text (including the link) in the main body of the post. But, in the real world, people post the URL in Link, a quote in Text, and Tildes then separates the text portion into a stand-alone comment (which now has no context).
And, as a context-less quote... some Tildes users believe it qualifies as "noise".
I am one of those users. In my opinion, as a comment in that thread, the context-less quote adds no value. People opening that topic can be assumed to have read the article before they read the comments. When they then read the comments, having one comment be just a quote from the article they've already read, is clutter. I have labelled similar comments elsewhere as 'Noise' (but I observe that I did not label that one).
It's also important to keep in mind that the 'Offtopic', 'Joke', and 'Noise' labels activate only when two users click on them, as per this section of that instruction page:
This means that at least two people have labelled that comment as 'Noise'.
Yes. The only method for getting a label changed is to message Deimos directly.
Deimos is the only person who has the ability to change labels. No "trusted users" have this ability. (Tildes is still in alpha-testing. It’s an unfinished product.)
So, you send him a message with a link to the comment you think has been wrongly labelled, with an explanation about why you think it has been wrongly labelled... and he will make his own decision and do what he thinks is best. In my experience, he agrees with my opinion about three-quarters of the time. (I've never tried to get the 'Noise' label removed from a quote-only comment, so I don't know what his decision will be on that.)
I think just open logs for every mod action will help things self regulate and identify problems. With anonymous identifiers to prevent abuse from butthurt users.
We talked about that it became clear that people's egos are not that important. Let them be butthurt and work themselves up into a ban if they want, it's more important that people can keep an eye on all the users and for that, their usernames need to be in the logs. Don't half-ass the transparency, if we're gonna do it, let's get it out there.
Oddly enough, if you have a sitewide mod log that shows all moderator actions all over the site, you are shooting yourself in the face. There's a very special kind of paranoid user - a small percentage but rather shrill - who will camp on that log, criticize and post and bitch about every single action in it, and work themselves up into a frenzy.
If the log is focused - like the topic logs on the threads on Tildes - those exact same people do not have this adverse reaction. Keeping the logs 'in context' like this knocks down the witch hunting behaviors surprisingly well.
There are dozens and dozens of little strange invisible hacks like this built into this place. All those subtle design decisions are already prompting people to get along, and they don't even realize it.
You can check the topic sidebar for "topic log", which records changes to the topic.
Yep, this is the answer. Everyone can inspect the changes being made in the Topic Logs. So if the system ever gets abused, it'll probably be spotted pretty quick, and Deimos can strip that person of their elevated privileges so they can't continue to abuse them. This isn't like reddit where the Admins are totally "hands off" and letting mods run amok, @GunnarRunnar. If we abuse our "powers" here, we lose them. Simple as.
p.s. Reposts don't generally get removed here, and only Deimos can remove posts anyways. So we tend to just tag them with duplicate post, and will often also leave a comment pointing to the older post for anyone that wants to read the previous discussion on it. But duplicate posts aren't necessarily a bad thing. Revisiting submissions at a later date, and/or with new people there to discuss it, can be productive and lead to interesting new discussions.
Like Deimos said way back in this post:
Edit: Apologies to anyone who saw this originally, I misrepresented GunnarRunnar's concerns.
No. And IMO there shouldn't be. As you mentioned, encouraging rubbernecking and pointless drama is rarely productive or healthy for a community. However, more than that, a totally transparent admin log would also violate user privacy; Even assholes have the right to privacy, and not having all their actions aired out like dirty laundry for all to inspect. And such a log would also inevitably just lead to rule lawyering, which is a major problem. See: On a technicality for why.
So ultimately, either someone trusts Deimos and his judgement, or they don't. Spend some time here and I think it will be obvious why he has earned the trust of so many of us already. And it's also worth noting that many of us also knew him from Reddit (as Deimorz), where he created Automoderator (one of the few mod tools still keeping reddit running!), and later when hired by reddit he was one of the main admins interacting with and helping people in an official capacity via /r/modhelp, /r/modsupport, and elsewhere.
As one of the new refugee members (this is literally my first post); I really like this approach and the focus on more in-depth content.
An alternative is to create megathreads. (For example, I started doing that for AI chatbots.)
There are some topics that are auto-created on regular schedule, but you can also go ahead and do it yourself if you think you'll be posting about the same topic a lot.
(A lot of people are reluctant to start new topics, unless it's for an article that seems "important" somehow, so it's a good way to get conversation going.)
Right now there is no way of making new groups. Over the past few years there have been some periods where groups get added, sometimes removed if they weren't at all active. The current set of groups hasn't really changed recently.
Culture Query:
I forget how it used to work on forums, for etiquette / culture surrounding "meaningless" social niceties, because acknowledgements bumps entire threads for a community.
For example, let's say I asked you for an invite code. You respond with said code. Do I respond "thank you" back or is that more annoying to every single user than it's worth?
As the sort of person who compulsively says thank you habitually it feels odd not to acknowledge replies in some way, but not if it comes at the expense of being annoying. Thoughts?
To me, thanking someone is pro-social, helps interpersonal relationships, contributes to the community feel, etc. As such, I really wouldn’t see it as noise. It has way more value than stuff like “first” or “lol” or “I agree” or whatnot.
That said, just seeing “Thanks” or “Thank you”, especially if there are a lot of them, would look kinda noisy to me.
In general, if you’re worried about a comment coming across as noisy, you can counteract that by adding a bit more surface area. Instead of just commenting “Thank you”, write something slightly more personalized, specific, or detailed (e.g. “Oh wow, I’m really excited to look into that book. Can’t believe I never heard of it until now — thanks for the recommendation!”). It humanizes your comment a bit and gives it some novelty and sentiment that take it well outside “noise” territory.
What about situations where a topic or conversation becomes more narrowed or deep and it results in only two people commenting back and forth which results in the post continuing to get bumped? Is it just the normal expectation that people will just ignore it if they don't want to participate?
I'm not attempting to think of edge cases, I assume this must happen here occasionally as I've noticed it in various types of forums or communication platforms over the years.
I would presume that it's not as unnatural for people to take a conversation to PM if the conversation becomes more personal in nature, but if it's just something that is more specific or if the discussion goes on long enough there may be only those two people invested enough to keep the discussion going.
I just looked through the docs a bit to get a better understanding of the philosophy and etiquette that guides the community but I don't think it covers anything like that.
Great question. I don’t remember off-hand exactly what the details are, but at some deeper nesting level (maybe 5 or 6?), posts will actually stop bumping threads in the normal Activity sort. It’s assumed that a conversation that has gone that that far is either of less interest to everyone else (might just be an extended conversation between a few people) or a back-and-forth like you’ve mentioned.
Those posts still bump under the All Activity sort if people want to keep up with them, but they won’t bump under the regular Activity one, and the thread will only go back to the top there if someone posts something that’s under the nesting limit (say, a new top-level comment, or a reply to one, etc.).
This is also combined with a cooldown feature that starts to get applied if someone repeatedly posts in the same topic (or possibly even in the same thread?) I can’t remember the exact details because it's been a long while since I've hit those limitations, but if someone else here knows or has a link handy, please share! Tildes will actually rate-limit users once a likely “back-and-forth” has been detected, so users won't be able to post again in that thread/topic for a certain amount of time. In a back-and-forth, the rate-limit would likely apply to both users and slow down their conversation.
It's entirely possible for two users to just wait out their rate limits to continue arguing, but the cooldown is meant to be a structural nudge at exactly that: a "cooldown" of the user. Take the heat out, re-evaluate what you want to say and how you're saying it, or if you even want to say anything at all.
Tildes is very supportive of individual disengagement when warranted or necessary. For example, a recent beloved user was banned not because they misbehaved but because they asked to be banned as a support for their digital hygiene. Disengagement, both from individual topics or from the site at large, is seen as a good thing if necessary for users. We also have a built-in disengagement feature in the form of Ignoring a topic. If you use the feature to Ignore a topic, you won't see it in your feed and I believe you won't even get notifications for responses to your own comments on the topic anymore. It's a way of stepping away from something that you want to see yourself out of.
I can't speak for everyone here, but I know I'm not the only one who, when I first got here, slowly realized I had some bad habits that I'd picked up from other places on the internet and transplanted here, including things like having back-and-forths or doing the quote-rebuttal-quote-rebuttal-quote-rebuttal style posts in response to someone. My time in this community has, in many ways, been a continual unlearning of bad internet habits and a building of better ones. This was helped by some of Tildes' structural methods (hitting a rate-limit helped me re-evaluate my actions, for example), but really it came from being in a place where cutting others down and stomping on their ideas was widely seen as a bad thing rather than a good thing.
That's okay, that's just how conversation works.
The conversation will not get deeply nested because Tildes has a nesting limit and after that they stay at same level with an indication of what they're responding to.
There is also a built-in ignore feature you can use if a topic is annoying you.
You can do that if you want but it's not really necessary.
To avoid bumping, it's probably best to just DM the person. But generally, if someone helped you out it's unlikely you'd need to go back to thank them 30 days later. The site will warn you if you're about to necropost when you open a reply window on an old thread. If it doesn't give you the "this is an old topic" warning nobody will mind you bumping.
A "thank you for helping me" label might be a good feature request though.
If people label the "thanks" type comments as Noise it will undo the bump on them in Activity sort. So that's what I usually do. There was talk at one point of allowing "aside" or "whisper" comments for things like that which don't trigger the bump mechanic at all though. And it might be time to revisit that idea with all the new people, esp if they all actually stick around.
Yeah the problem is you can't self-label your own posts as "joke" or "noise" so it relies on inflicting work on at least 1 other person.
Like, I didn't even realize until I tried to mark my own post as a joke earlier and noticed I couldn't.
Yeah, there was a feature request for allowing people to apply those two tags (and offtopic) to their own comments. But IIRC the fear was that it would encourage more of those kinds of comments if allowed.
A "whisper" mechanic is actually a great idea. Could be as straightforward as a "post without bump" option when leaving a comment.
The discussion/imageboard platform used by "chan" websites (4chan being the best-known) has a feature where in the reply window you can input "sage" into the topic bar and it will prevent your reply from bumping the thread. That might be a useful feature here, though it might also lead to weakened disincentives against overly short/low-effort posts.
By the way, "sage" isn't a reference to the fragrant herb - it's a romanization of the Japanese word for "to go down." Take that one with you onto Jeopardy..!
that's an interesting feature
in Microsoft Teams and other apps it's possible to "thumbs up" someone's response, which comes with a note of "who" made the acknowledgement. But if the intent is to minimize noise, I can also see that even the smallest icon will add visual noise, for every comment on every post.
thank you for the response : )
Thanking someone on a recent topic is fine because it's probably at the top anyway.
If what you have to say is a relevant contribution, you should feel free to bump any topic you want. Every once in a while, people bump very old topics, and that's fine ;)
Curious as to the mechanism of tolerance. I understand how bumping a topic with a low-effort response causes “noise” but will it get to a point where such responses are actually deleted or user removed? Or will it be more organic to where that comment won’t get upvoted and thus no “reward” to the poster?
Labels only automatically affect sorting.
Malicelabels may lead to the manual removal of the comment if it is against the rules.Given that there is likely to be a huge influx of people from reddit. Perhaps a quick FAQ on how tildes differs from Reddit and what parts you'd still expect to be the same? I'm thinking that something specifically for reddit -> tildes would help tremendously.
I think this is a pretty good idea, and something the community can work on together. Maybe it would make sense as a wiki page for ~tildes if anyone wanted to spearhead creating that!
This offers opportunities for both new and old users to contribute. New users are looking at Tildes through fresh eyes and naturally have questions, whereas old users are well equipped to answer those.
I don't know if anyone but Deimos can answer this question, but I'm curious what the perspective is on the site being solely dependent on Deimos as the only admin.
I don't mean this to be a criticism of any kind, I think the goals of this site are noble and the purpose sounds great. I also am brand new to Tildes and have very little perspective on what his impact on the site as sole admin means for the day-to-day experience nor the long-term experience general users have nor the moderators that I presume exist.
I found this blog post - https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes - and it seems like it is meant to be community driven.
Mostly I just wonder if we're all just participating in something that is more of a hobby of Deimos or if there's any kind of community ownership or some kind of plan to account for the fact that one individual cannot exist forever or unexpected things happen in the lives of a single individual that can direct their attention to other things in their life.
I hope I'm wording this in the proper tone that is meant to convey it as a curiosity to have a better understanding of the community that I'm joining. I won't look a gift horse in the mouth in the sense that I'll appreciate the benefits of the site regardless of how long it could last, but I've also been apart of things that solely relied on one person and it's not unheard of to finally get the news that the person has moved on to other things. I do see that it is open source so I realize that people could spin up their own server if they should choose, but there is challenges in regrowing a community in that way.
Edited: Changed name to his tildes name rather than the name I remembered him by on reddit.
First, there's nothing wrong with your wording and these are valid questions.
I am just a regular user like yourself, so these are only my impressions.
Some people in the community believe that collective governance should already be in place, and some are critical of @deimos. I am not one of those people, so it wouldn't be fair for me to further characterize their positions. Maybe they'll respond directly to you.
In practice, what we have at the moment is a BDFL like Guido van Rossum was for Python. @deimos's goals are in accordance with the wishes of a majority of the users, and even when they are not his actions are reasonable, clear, and, in my view, beneficial. Besides, a lot of how Tildes must be governed is already set "in stone" due to how it was conceived and implemented and is not up for debate. In most matters, he is pretty hands-off.
Up until now, things are running more or less smoothly, but it is conceivable that, down the line, Tildes will need a more collective and complex model of governance.
I appreciate the impressions, it better helps me contextualize the community more and what to expect.
It's understandable that you aren't able to characterize the positions of those that are critical of Deimos since that isn't your position.
It seems like planning/development of the site has stopped since late 2020ish. In particular I am drawing this conclusion based on the gitlab feature/merge requests, and the topics on the ~tildes.official group, as well as the last updates on the docs pages. Additionally browsing ~tildes group I didn't really see much recent conversations about this. I also perused Deimos history and it seems to have curtailed a lot over the past year or so.
Granted I do understand the site isn't motivated by growth for growth's sake, but there were clearly plans for various features and it all seems to have stopped.
Overall it gives me the impression that my expectation for Tildes should be that it exists in its current form only and it could stop existing any day/week/month/year now which to some extent an ephemeral existence is possible for anything, but one reliant on a single person who has seemingly become increasingly disengaged in the past couple years increases the possibility if it being a more ephemeral existence. I feel kind of overly cynical for characterizing it like that when I'm new, but I don't want to create unrealistic expectations either.
Do you view Tildes as not needing any improvements or changes and are satisfied with it as is?
These are entirely valid concerns, and ones I tend to share.
When Tildes went down recently, I had thoughts of "what if it doesn't come back?" and "what if it's gone for good?" I also have some ideas for improvements or changes I'd like to see.
You mentioned feeling cynical, and I totally get where you're coming from. I would likely feel the same if I were new too! One thing that might be helpful to you to understand is where a lot of us long-timers are coming from. For many of us, @Deimos has earned a substantial, unbelievable amount of goodwill and esteem. He has a clear vision for this place, the knowledge and technical expertise to make that happen, and the temperament to handle all of the community's most difficult judgment calls in fair ways. He, pretty much singlehandedly, created the best online community I've ever been a part of (and I've been online since the 90s).
When people here speak fondly of Deimos, we're doing so because he has an earned authority and respect that runs very, very deep for many of us. He's not just another guy or just someone with admin powers -- he's someone who, through his actions and efforts here, has established strong trust with many of us. This space is essentially his gift to all of us.
My understanding is that, at the beginning, he treated Tildes as his full-time job, and he was hoping that the site would be big enough and funded enough that he would be able to maintain that. That didn't end up happening. Tildes makes "cover its hosting costs" money from donations but never came anywhere near "Deimos makes a livable income" money, much less "Deimos makes an amount comparable to what his expertise and skillset can get him elsewhere". He got Tildes to a stable state at what was undoubtedly a huge hit to his own personal savings, and he now works full-time at a different job.
I definitely get the idea that you don't want to invest in a community that might not be around, and I totally get that having a single point of failure for anything is not great. Again, I would feel exactly what you are feeling if I were brand new to the site! I think something that's hard to see is that a lot of users' belief in the longevity in the site comes directly from our first-hand witnessing of Deimos's efforts to build this place from the ground up.
I will also say that, that even if the site went down and stayed down for good tomorrow, that won't take away the love I have for the nearly five years that I've been here. I would be sad, of course, but I consider the time I've been here to be well-spent time, not wasted time. The site suddenly going belly up still wouldn't take that away from me. This is a place where I'm happy to spend my time, whether that's the next ten years or only a few more months.
The fact that a lot of the development time, and development stalling somewhat, is due to funding, is actually somewhat promising to me. As a brand new user, one from the 'reddit wave', I'm hoping that 'more brand new users' will also mean 'more donations'. If people arrived here with the right intentions, anyway, and are in it to contribute and make this site great. I'm not looking this as 'We've just arrived and the site isn't being worked on, it may not last' but rather 'We have just arrived, an influx of users and therefore cash will give the site the boost it will need to develop and grow'.
Maybe that's naive, I don't know! I know that Tildes may not get the type of influx that, say, Lemmy, got, but surely there are still a lot of newbies that can actually help make this space work.
I do not view Tildes as complete and I very much wish it was under more intensive development. At the same time, I don't expect nonprofit FOSS projects to be developed at a predictable pace, and I'm way more tolerant than I would be if Tildes had a team of paid developers.
That said, the current state of Tildes is stable, perfectly functional, and relatively complete in regard to its current features.
I do not believe Tildes is likely to end any time soon. It is a stable project that requires little upkeep and in the event of @deimos leaving I'm sure there are candidates to fill the role.
However, it will probably take quite some time before we see major new features implemented.
Deimos got a day job around then so the side project became lower priority. I expect the pace of work on developing features will ebb and flow over time but don’t think it will remain stuck as is indefinitely.
As a functional matter, I don’t really see any improvements that Tildes needs in order to accomplish its purpose of being a site to converse with others and share content. I used to be on some forums and bulletin boards that were functionally unchanged for years and years and it never got in the way.
Are there features that would be nice to see if development became more active? Absolutely. But those features aren’t vital and I think Tildes demonstrates that you actually don’t need a ton of features or continual updates to support a community that supports itself. I think of it a bit like a digital cafe that I frequent. I like what is offered here, and I recognize the “regulars” that I talk to when I’m here. The fact that it could close tomorrow doesn’t stop me from investing those connections and community because I get something out of it now.
After reading the thread you linked, I'm trying to approach this as level-headedly as possible and not mischaracterize Deimos' response, but: is the admin position really just "don't read things that make you upset"? After the past few years on the internet I'd think it'd be blindingly obvious that hate speech and the people who propagate it are something to be dealt with swiftly and harshly. But instead of addressing this, his comment—from what I understand—simply sidesteps the entire issue.
From what I've seen in this thread, he seems to have engendered a great deal of trust among the website's userbase over the years of its operation. But I haven't been here for that - I've been here for an hour. And as a multiply marginalised person, even though a lot of things about this platform greatly appeal to me, this kind of admin response sets the tone for the platform in a really unpleasant way. So I suppose what I'm asking is: is @kfwyre's post here, and the following discussion, considered off-base by the majority of tildes' audience? Because after spending thirteen years on Reddit, I simply don't have the time or energy to deal with the constant cognitohazard barrage of people who don't think I'm as human as they are.
I’d say that characterizing Deimos by that alone isn’t accurate to who he is. He is advocating for disengagement, but it’s a lot more nuanced than just “don’t look at hate speech”.
Deimos actually takes significant and swift action against hate speech. He doesn’t let it sit on the site; he doesn’t let the people try and rules lawyer their way around things; he unequivocally removes it and the user. I’ve seen instances of it happen myself, live, and I’m sure there have been plenty more I haven’t known about.
The context for this particular comment of his was that we had had a number of community back and forths over a much more complex, possibly intractable problem. I tried my best to capture it with my top-level comment in that same topic, where I talked about “academic dissections”. Basically, some people on the site love to look at a topic and pull it apart as if it were a problem in a textbook or a case study, which requires a sort of distance from the topic itself. Others, however, don’t experience those topics from the same distance, and thus there’s the potential for harm.
The hardest part about these threads was that I genuinely believe that no one there was acting maliciously. I think everyone was thinking in earnest — usually deeply — about a topic, and the frictions came from misalignments of perspectives and expectations for what that should look like.
The second hardest thing was that the frictions these conversations produced tended to create a sort of long-term, non-isolated erosion. Some people left the site because of it, but many people stayed on but had negative perceptions of other users because of it. Because Tildes was small and every user was always seeing every other user everywhere they went, this kind of negative relationship was caustic. It had a way of taking up all of the oxygen in some topics. At times it felt like a wound the site was collectively picking at, even when it knew it shouldn’t.
This is the background that Deimos was talking about. His recommendation isn’t giving a pass to hate speech or bigotry. Instead he was advocating for disengaging with something that is creating or sustaining unhealthy behavior patterns. Much of his work in creating Tildes has been to structurally try to incentivize better behavior, but there’s only so much that structure can do. At some point we have to acknowledge that user behavior is also something that users have say and ownership in, and disengagement is part of our own agency. Deimos has explicitly baked several disengagement strategies into the site itself (e.g. being able to
Ignorea thread and deactivate its notifications), but others are much harder to codify and rely on our own judgment (e.g. actually clicking thatIgnorebutton).Ultimately there’s not any one thing that Deimos is advocating for or that this community is built around. Instead there are a lot of little different things that work together. Disengagement is one of those.
I was rereading some of the comments in that topic, and I think @rogue_cricket captured another aspect really nicely in her comment there:
I like her quote because it captures how wider harms can almost become self-harm by how we engage with them. It’s not excusing or permitting the wider harm to walk away from it or ignore it — often that’s the healthiest thing to do! Furthermore, and somewhat paradoxically, actively countering it might make things even worse.
I also like her quote because it hints at the idea that the issues we were seeing on Tildes weren’t necessarily Tildes-specific issues. They were reflective of tensions in the wider world. This doesn’t excuse them on our site by any means, but I think we have to operate with an understanding that no matter how great of a job we do, there will inevitably be non-zero spillover from wider society onto Tildes. It will happen, even if we don’t want it to, and even if we do our best to avoid and route around it.
When that stuff does come up, we’re defined not by its existence but in how we respond to it.
I won’t link it, but recently there was a thread here that gave me some concern. Instead of disengaging from it, as I probably should have, I instead obsessively checked it (exactly the same bad behavioral pattern that Deimos is advocating we attend to in ourselves as a measure of better digital hygiene, by the way).
What could have easily been an absolute mess ended up being powerfully affirming. Multiple community members addressed the area of concern head on, thoughtfully but unequivocally. Several others chose to share personal stories and perspectives that counterbalanced the more distanced academic framing with up close personal experience.
I ended up being proud of what our community looked like in that tapestry, because I think anywhere else online it would have cratered and become a complete dumpster fire within minutes.
It wasn’t a perfect topic, mind you, and it ended up getting locked, which I believe was for the best. It getting locked isn’t a failure either, but a success. Like I said earlier, community moderation has multiple parts and layers. In this instance, the first moderating action was tactful social pushback. That served a significant purpose, and once it looked like things might be heading south, the topic was locked (rather than removed) to preserve the good that was there but eliminate the possibility of future harm or damage.
Now, I realize that across all of this I’ve just thrown a lot at you. It’s a lot for me to chew on, and I was there for all of it, so I can’t imagine what that looks like from a new, outside perspective. Also, a lot of it has probably been frustratingly abstract, since I’m avoiding putting anyone on the spot by giving specific examples.
Here’s an attempt to cut through all of the noise and get to the root of what I hope you’ll take away from this: I hope you stick around, and I hope this space becomes somewhere you’re comfortable enough to not have to have your guard up. I want it to be a relaxed, affirming space for you, and I genuinely think most everybody else here does too!
What I’ll also say is that, if something does come up that makes you have to put your guard up, then I hope our community steps in and addresses it in the best ways we know how. Sometimes it’ll be in the form of site actions, but other times it’ll be in the form of what this site does best: words. We will never have a perfect place free of all frictions, but we can always try to smooth out those frictions with effort.
That's fair. I really appreciate both you and @gpl taking the time to explain the context to me; as I said before, I'm sure you can understand how everyone's a bit on edge all the time forever right now. I think I'll stick around for now. :)
I can't speak to the specifics of that particular discussion — it has been a while and while I remember the thread I can't remember all of the details that followed. I will say with some emphasis that the moderation philosophy here is very much not "just don't read what you don't like", and I think many of Deimos' moderation actions reflect that. I happen to disagree with his response in that particular thread, but that thread was also posted at a time when there was a lot of arguments going on over Tildes' purpose and goals, and I have a feeling he was a bit burnt out about the constant arguments.
Anyway, when it comes to far-right content, hate speech, concern-trolling, etc one of the most oft-linked to stories here is the Nazi bar story, and I think this does a pretty good job of characterizing the general view of the community. It is important to nip in the bud instances of hate speech and not to give them a chance to germinate. I think Deimos agrees with this based on his moderation actions, despite what his response to that post might lead you to think.
Just the other day there was a thread from a new user about identity politics, and going through the comments there from long time users I think gives a good idea of where this site is at with regards to dealing with questionable content. Leaving that thread up (albeit locked) was an explicit moderation choice as well on Deimos part, as it serves as an example to new users what kind of community we are trying to build here. I keep placing emphasis on his mod actions here because he is currently the only person with full mod abilities, and I am hoping to provide a little context for why he has built up such good will over the years.
In short, I think most agree here that hate speech and associated content needs to be swiftly and decisively dealt with, and that it is the community's responsibility to do so.
I seem to remember something about having to do some aggressive moderation while on his honeymoon. That was the moment 'troll reform' died, along with said trolls. That was definitely the right decision for the rest of us, though some of them are still so salty about it they are still going around on reddit posting disinfo about how and why they got banned, years later. I think that says everything we need to know about those people, no?
In certain instances, the rights of the group here have to trump the rights of the individual. Libertarian philosophy of respecting individual rights is all well and good, but the group has rights too, and if you don't protect those rights, you lose the group, rather than just the problematic individual.
Lol, yep. Every time Tildes gets brought up on .r.redditalternatives they seemingly come out of the woodworks to bitch about how they were "banned for no reason" here, and tell various other outright lies and half-truths about the site. It's still going on yeeeeears after they were banned, too. It's been so damn hard to resist calling them out on it... Oh, banned for no reason, eh? Then what about when you openly declared yourself "transphobic" and called it a "mental illness" in a topic on ~lgbt meant for trans people here to meet and support each other, then bitched about being banned on .r.tildes and tried to lie about why (which a ton of community members called you out on) and so we banned you there too? Yeahhhhhh. Banned for "no reason" whatsoever. Uh huh. Sure.
Sigh. Oh well. It would be pointless to do that anyways, since most of the regulars at .r.redditalternatives have already made up their minds about Tildes due to us not allowing absolute "free speech" in the first place. God, I really wish that subreddit wasn't the main place that people looked when they wanted to find reddit alternatives.
I think the biggest tragedy was g0ldfish. We tried to warn him, but he had to create (and then lose) notabug.io to learn the group lesson the hard way. Free speech warriors are doomed to bitter disappointment by network effects. It's civil speech you need to be concerned about, if you want to have an adult forum people want to visit.
Tildes is five years old, invite only, and doing everything 'wrong' - yet somehow, it's outlasted several dozen 'more promising' and better funded alternatives over the years. Redditalternatives has quite the pile of dead websites there. How long until people realize we actually know what we're doing, I wonder? :P
I often think about this. I also think it’s explicitly because Tildes doesn’t set the unrealistic goal to replace Reddit (scale to 10M+ users).
Who knows, maybe it will get there one day, or maybe it’ll always remain under 100k. But I think expectations matter a lot.
Yeah, it's a real shame how much work he put into his site too. He was a truly brilliant and incredibly hard-working programmer... just so very very misguided about the principles he should be working to uphold on his site. Imagine if he had instead put all that effort into improving Tildes? Sigh. What might have been. :(
Every single banned person in the history of the internet was banned for "no reason". Naturally. Because noone is the villain in their own story.
Having not been banned, I'm curious. If someone is banned, is a reason given?
Sometimes people are asked to change their behavior before anything happens, if their behavior is only slightly out of line. And others in the past have been given a warning along with a temporary ban. However, given Tildes explosive growth in recent days, I suspect in most cases people are simply being banned without any warnings or notice right now.
Not everyone knows every subreddit, and can instantly make a judgement call about people promoting specific ones. I had never heard of stupidpol before that topic, and even now still don't really know what it is. Keep in mind that both Deimos and I have been away from reddit for over five years now too, which coincidentally appears when that subreddit was founded, which probably explains why I'd never heard of it before. Whereas you're far more connected to that world than we are due to your efforts in AgainstHateSubreddits. So if you want Deimos to be more proactive about that sort of thing, you could try explaining to him what stupidpol is and why you think people promoting it should result in a ban... since he might not even be aware of what it is either, just like I wasn't.
I can't speak to that specific scenario, since I didn't witness it. However, if you're referring to the now removed thread in the RvW ruling topic, honest question: What did telling that user to "fuck off" accomplish? The thread was removed, and very likely would have been removed even had you not replied to it, and instead just reported it. And if it was as bad as you say then I assume the user was also banned (probably permanently). So all you did by telling them to fuck off was feed the troll, giving them exactly what they wanted, and drawing more attention to their trolling efforts before it was removed.
p.s. FYI, if a comment is truly egregious and pretty undeniably ban worthy, I also typically Noise label it as well report it with Malice, to make it less visible until Deimos can arrive to deal with it. So I would suggest also doing that in the future instead of replying to it.
I had a post commenting on this, but I deleted it because I believe the issue is entirely semantic. I don't think anyone wants racial supremacists and similar ilk here or on most social media sites. And I can't imagine the creator of this site created it with the idea that people should just ignore hateful rhetoric. It goes completely against everything that describes this site and its vision.
That said, you can't make a generalized rule about any and all comments that are "hurtful" because it's a completely subjective opinion. I am on another site where I saw a post from someone saying that they found the news posts to be hurtful (admittedly, lots of sad news). Some people are just more sensitive than others.
So my suggestion is to stop having these generalized conversations and really just be explicit. It's easy to make decisions about explicit topics. It's really hard to make broad sweeping policy about this. If it was easy, I'm sure we'd have a lot more rules like that in the world.
I'd also note that you're going to have a REALLY hard time stopping people that want to be shitty from being shitty. The site can ban swastikas, "18", "88", pepe the frog, etc. til the cows come home but those people will just keep making up different ways to make others upset and then what will be left?
No, absolutely not. There's a lot of context to that thread, and particularly Deimos's response to that thread, that is missing to anyone who wasn't on Tildes back then. I was not happy with how it was presented but the problem that was being discussed there was not "hmm should we remove hate speech" but "hate speech is sometimes not removed instantly and iffy conversations can devolve quickly, how can we do better".
As a recent reddit refugee I find their response really disturbing and questioned whether this is the platform I thought it was.
Racists who espouse scientific racism that Africans are inherently stupid and violent is utterly unacceptable and I would not except this community to tolerate it. The same goes for antisemitism, if people are posting holocaust denial and disgusting Jewish slurs I would not expect them to be tolerated.
With Trans people it is no different, it is blatant bigotry and hate speech, it is disgusting degrading language. It isn't a scientific topic up for discussion, we have decades of research on gender, transphobia is purely pseudoscience.
Is African racism, antisemitism, homophobia et al. accepted on this platform? Assuming they are not, is transphobia not treated in the same way?
Have you read the other replies from myself and others in this thread regarding this exact point? Happy to answer any other questions to the best that my perspective as a normal user allows me. In short, no, those things are not accepted on this platform, transphobia included. Check out this response as well as my own above and see if it answers those questions for you.
The comments I've read from people like yourself after coming into this community have near universally emanated care and compassion. That comment from Deimos isn't an exception, it wasn't spreading hate.
However I already have apprehensions about a centralised platform, particularly if it is under an individuals control. That is the case of all social media these days and I'm willing to accept an benevolent dictator provided they don't hold such views on any form of bigotry.
For trans it is done under the guise of "academic discussion". If you had an academic discussion that sub-Saharan Africans are intellectually inferior and prone to violence it would be removed right? Because we have many decades of research showing scientific racism to be utter nonsense pseudoscience. It isn't an academic discussion, it is purely ideological at that point.
The same is true for gender, we have decades of research. People like to think they are having an "academic discussion" to justify their bigotry. But how can that be true when it flies in the face of a half century of research?
If it is just another user on the platform who doesn't realise that their trans views are anti-science I can accept that. It is part of how others learn and you can teach them constructively. But I don't want to be trying to teach holocaust deniers about thousands of papers of research. If it is the person in control it is a different matter, if transphobic gender discussion are allowed as part of academic research, does this platform similarly allow holocaust denial for the same reason?
I can't definitively speak for the admin, and maybe I am misunderstanding your point (it is late where I am), but I would reject the premise that "transphobic gender discussion are allowed as part of academic research" on this site (nor would they ever be) for exactly the reasons you list. I think you might be referencing this bit of @kfwyre's thoughtful post:
But this wasn't meant to be some statement of what is allowed, I think, nor an excuse for that type of content. What it was, if I read correctly, is an explanation for why some users may engage with that topic in such a way when they are generally understanding and decent people. Some people are afforded emotional distance from these topics and it leads to an over-intellectualization of things that have a real, day to day impact on people's lived experience. This isn't a Tildes problem really, its a society problem that gets reflected in Tildes and we have to make do with it. In any case, you're asking hypotheticals like
which are difficult for me to answer because I genuinely do not believe the first part is true. Transphobic content gets pretty decisively removed and if you see any you should report it.
I don't think that 100% of discussions which involve the aforementioned academization of these highly personal topics necessarily come from a bad place. I still think they are bad and should not be allowed, but I do think intent matters when it comes to things like bans. I think it is possible for people to be wrong about a subject, get told that, and improve their behavior and continue participating in the community. If someone genuinely has a problematic stance but changes once the issue is explained then I think that is a net positive. I still think the problematic content should be removed because the first priority should be to clearly signal that marginalized identities are welcome here, but as for an immediate ban I think it is context dependent. I really really believe it is important to allow people to change. A community has to be careful though, else you run into the Nazi bar dilemma where the first few people seem reasonable, if misguided, but quickly your bar (site) becomes a hangout for, in this case, transphobes.
Anyway that was a bit long and rambling. I understand your concerns via centralization and how it applies to Tildes. The fact that Deimos has basically sole power around here does not go ignored by the community and has been very actively discussed in the past. Ultimately any community is built around trust and that is no different here. It's really all we can do when building community, online and elsewhere.
Thank you for your in depth and well considered reply.
As I said, my experience has in no way been of rampant transphobia, the reason I brought this up is due to the owners comment.
When I wrote "It is part of how others learn and you can teach them constructively", I really meant it. Some of the most meaningful interactions I've had online have come from someone flippantly writing a misogynistic, or racist comment. I will try to engage and show them the evidence as to why that is wrong and the hurt it causes.
I hadn't suggested banning these individuals, simply whether allowing such hate speech is to be tolerated generally. Before coming onto this site I had read the philosophy.
Holocaust denial and antisemitism is harassing hate speech as is describing Africans as intellectually inferior and aggressive. Transphobic denial is also hate speech. I have no problem with people in good faith writing a misguided bigoted comment that I can challenge them on. But a post that calls into question transgenderism with a long discussion isn't acceptable.
Coming back to the Deimos comment, when asked about how to treat Lineham's hate speech, they wrote "if Tildes is consistently making you unhappy, please spend less time, emotional energy, and mental energy on it." My concern is that transphobic content like Lineham's isn't being considered hate speech in the same way antisemitism et al. is.
My relatively brief experience here so far had none of that. But on a centrally controlled platform we all know how things can change. Additionally I'm not trying to infer Deimos holds these views or would express them, if it comes across that way I apologise to them for any offence caused.
Intolerance of intolerance is one of the core principles of Tildes. You won't find any bigotry here. But it goes deeper than that.
One of my favorite threads is here.
I have read @GayWallet's comment numerous times over the last couple of years.
I disagree, I think the bigotry present on this website is relatively mild, but it is absolutely present. It's why a group of us, myself included, set up another website to try and prevent the space from repeating the mistakes we feel Tildes has made. This place is way way way better than Reddit, but it is sadly not devoid of the more subtle forms of bigotry.
I won't ask about what the space is because I imagine you'd like to keep it private (?), but am interested in the kinds of steps you've taken to avoid those mistakes? I'm very new to Tildes and so haven't seen much, outside of a) the thread linked above, and b) that recent thread on 'idpol' and free speech. I'm interested in policies/strategies to avoid subtle bigotry if you'd be up for sharing?
not trying to keep it private so much as I'm not sure if I'm allowed to advertise it here haha, if you send me a dm I can tell you
I’m one of many Reddit refugees y’all have been seeing around lately. It’s really cool what you’ve all built here! Much like Mastodon was for Twitter, it’s a relief that a newer community had formed that I can join when something that has become a habit is turning sour.
However, I’ve been on Reddit long enough to remember the Digg exodus, and what that did to our site’s culture seemingly overnight with that giant influx of new users.
When Mastodon started picking up Twitter defectors, they seemed to adopt an ad how strategy of educating new users on the history of the platform and the background behind why certain UX decisions were made.
Being on the other side of the exodus now, I want to be a good citizen of the new platform I’m joining. I read through the Philosophy of Tildes but I’m curious if there’s any written history of the site. Are there any collections of famous posts, write ups around hard decisions, or lore about the early days?
I want to learn about where Tildes has been in the past so I can best help it grow.
Nobody's written a history that I know of. You can get some idea about what active posters are interested in by reading older posts in their profiles. Also, a trick to finding the usernames of longer-term active members might be to choose a group and go back a few days to before when when the latest influx hit.
Regarding cultural changes to Tildes, I can say that some Tildes members have long been concerned about the membership being overly tech-heavy and not diverse enough. I've been less worried about it since there are active and valued members who aren't techies, but I can see their point as I read all the introductions as they come in. While everyone should feel welcome, I'm particularly happy to see anyone who isn't a gamer or computer professional (like I was before I retired).
Since we can't control who becomes interested enough to want to join and the only big influxes we get are from Reddit, overall, I think this influx is less about changing culture and more about growth, which reverses a slow decline if people stay.
And in other respects, we're fairly diverse. It's a pretty international crowd, and it doesn't seem like that's changing?
I don't see any easy ways to improve diversity. (A company might buy advertising, but I'm not sure that makes sense here.) Maybe someday we'll get a celebrity who brings a different crowd?
Increasing the variety of what we read is something people can work on if they choose. But when we're pulling links from the same newspapers, aggregators, and social media sites, that can result in a lack of diversity in content too. A lot of interesting articles end up shared everywhere.
Tildes is in a weird place regarding tech news - it doesn't have enough to actually be a source of information about tech news for me, but it seems like it overwhelms a lot of other people. Regardless, I'm also excited about an influx of people who aren't necessarily in tech, or constantly playing video games, even though ~games is probably my most perused group.
Well I’ll regretfully let you know that I’m an automation engineer on a platform team of a big tech company you’ve probably never heard of.
But I talk so much tech at work and in tech specific online communities that I rarely want to do it on other social media sites. I’m here for talking hobbies with people. :)
From what you and others have said, it seems like there was a sizable drop off in monthly active users here semi recently. Did something happen or was that just a smaller network going through some growing pains?
Nothing too dramatic, it's been more of a slow decline. Tildes is so small that when someone who actively posts decides to stop for whatever reason (perhaps reasons of their own that have nothing to do with Tildes), often we will notice.
Having some experience with very long-running communities in stable decline (like, I was a member of The Well for many years, quit, joined again years later, and recently quit again), I believe in not getting too worked up about it. I wrote a bit more about that here.
Hi, I am a lawyer, former english major, who was recently admitted to a Masters degree program in library science. So I am a nerd, but not a techie. Hopefully I add some diversity.
I'm currently a law student (rising 3L), who majored in journalism and minored in philosophy, and am an avid reader and bicycle commuter. Hoping to bring a similar contribution to this site as well (it reminds me of Reddit nearly a decade ago).
Best of luck networking and finding a professional niche you enjoy!
It is so hard to get non-techy people on unknown sites like this, and the irony is that it's community diversity that enables all sorts of subtopics and threads.
Good to have some law expertise here, though I of course understand that you are not our lawyer. :-)
Not really anything formal, as far as history goes. But ~tildes.official has a bunch of old topics that should give you a sense of some of the trials, tribulations, and triumphs experienced during the early days.
Stellar, thanks for letting me know. I’ll have to go delving in there. :)
Is there a way to "filter in" tags instead of just out?
E.g. Some times I might want to just check formula1 tag in sport, and other times I want to see all sport posts.
Is it just a case of bookmarking the link of the formula1 tag instead of anything natively in the page?
This is exactly the thing I'm missing. I want to have a list of posts merged from all the specific tags I want, so for example I might want Overwatch and CSGO news in one feed but no other games whatsoever. In Reddit I sub to those two subs and that accomplishes exactly that...
That would be cool. But Tildes is a fairly small website at the moment, and I'm sure you'll notice that we don't produce nearly enough content for that to be an issue right now! ;)
Am new to the site, am still working out the vibe, but it seems to be that without a way to subdivide (like subreddits or tags) posts it makes people (well certainly me) a lot more reluctant to post anything as it might be on a niche topic that you don't think will appeal to everyone on a top level forum. Hence why you get a lot less content.
I appreciate your observation. Feel free to make any questions :)
I just game here to ask the same question - I want to subscribe to formula1, but I don't want to have to subscribe to the entirety of sports to do it.
There isn't. The easiest solution currently would be to bookmark the link, like you mentioned.
How do you pronounce "tildes"? Is it till-deez, or till-dezz, or till-dess?
Technically I think it's actually til·duhz, but I have always said til·deez.
Just when you think you know someone...
I've been told by my American friends that my accent is Canadian AF (and gets stronger the drunker I am), and that I sound a lot like the Out For A Rip boys. So I'm sure my pronunciation of a bunch of stuff would make you shake your head. No doobt aboot it, eh. ;)
I've always gone for teel-days, but that's probably subconscious Spanish
My internal pronunciation is similar to this: Till-days
Had this same question, thank you!
Unlike all your alternatives, and unlike everyone else who replied to you, I pronounce "tildes" with one syllable: "tildz". Like "tills", but with a "d" in the middle.
EDIT: I just saw a comment by someone else who pronounces it the same as me, and they came up with what I couldn't - a rhyme! (rhyming with "builds")
I go for “Till-days”
I go with teelduhz
Is there a easy way to bulk unsubscribe from groups without visiting each page manually? I know there aren't that many, but it's the principle more than anything.
There is not. But Tildes is a fairly small website at the moment and your front page won't be crowded even if you subscribe to every group. It's mostly the same people everywhere, think of groups more as categories than sub-communities. Tildes won't drown you in content as Reddit does. I recommend keeping the defaults for now and only unsubscribing when something becomes annoying.
Thank you
No problem!
You can further refine the content you wish to see by filtering tags!
Look under "User settings", below the "Browse the list of groups" button.
I'm a reddit refugee, fresh new user. What should new users do to join and be contributing members of this community? I was hesitant to post on reddit a lot because of all of the arbitrary rules each sub had. Will posts here get removed for anything like that?
I'm just curious what you guys think new users should know as well. Thanks!
Comments do occasionally get removed but only by Deimos (Tildes' sole admin), as there are no group specific "moderators" here who can remove comments, like in subreddits. And as for rules, I would strongly encourage you, and everyone new here, to have a gander at the Tildes Docs, especially the Code of Conduct.
Thanks for the info, greatly appreciate it. I'll definitely look at the links you shared.
As long as you focus on "don't be an ass" and post something you think will generate discussion, it should be fair game.
Sounds good. Hopefully everyone plays nicely here.
Wheaton’s Law
I want to add my vote to this. I would like to help make Tildes fun, but it's good to know what the rules and limitations are. Can I post art? Make posts easily? How do people feel about links to external sites or places? I really miss the subreddit dedicated to my Finch App, but I am not sure if I can bring it up here as it's like a different space / different app.
Is Tildes capable of accommodating a large influx of new users? Is the site's philosophy growth and expansion or is it intended to remain niche?
Tildes is a non-profit, open-source project so there are no incentives for growth at all costs. It is not intended to remain niche, but rather for sustainable growth.
Is there an API for Tildes?
There isn't, though it is possible to cobble something together by parsing the HTML and formatting the HTTP requests the way Tildes expects if you really wanted to.
There was intended to be, but the user presently developing an app is using the html, so http is the API for now. The IndieWeb would be proud, I suppose.
I know this place is still fresh - is there an Android app in development? I usually browsed Reddit on mobile (I had 50 hours in Relay for Reddit this week...) so it'd be great if there was an app so I can pretend nothing happened. ;)
The mobile website is outstanding, fully functional and you should try it. I don't feel a need for an app myself, but a lot of people do and one of our users is making one right now.
The RIF developer is making a Tildes app. It would be hard to get 50 hours of use out of this site though.
To add, Deimos' design philosophy is for Tildes to be a place you drop in on a handful of times a day, see what's up, and leave. It isn't meant to be an infinite scrolling content-stream in the way Reddit or Twitter (or Lemmy or Mastodon) are. It's best to engage with it more like a community forum or bulletin board than a social media site.
The fact that you're meant to check in several times a day rather than just once and doom scroll means the convenience of an app would be more significant. I think a lot of people would rather open an app than a browser and then go to the webpage. Having said that, a lot of mobile browsers let you add a shortcut on your home screen, at least on Android.
It's worth noting too that Tildes' mobile site is good. Like, really good, imo comparable to the browser experience. An app would be welcome but the site is very usable on mobile as is, especially if you add a shortcut to the homepage.
I agree, and am currently using it that way, but I personally don't like using the browser on mobile if I can avoid it. Tabs are a pain to manage and I haven't found a way to permanently force the browser full screen (I found an extension for Kiwi Browser that does it, but it resets after tapping a link).
Ideally I'm not dead set on an app per se; PWAs work great on mobile and function in full screen without tabs just like normal apps, but I don't think there's a way to do that with Tildes, at least in Kiwi Browser.
So I’m not new, I’ve been here before but kinda forgot about it.
I don’t see any way to create a new post. Am I missing something? I’m on mobile
When you're in a group, in the very top right of the page there is a button called "Sidebar", tap on that and the sidebar will open. There you should see the "Post a new topic" button.
Ah you have to be in a group first! That’s what I was missing. Thank you!
Kind of related question -- How to reply to the main post. The only spot I see a reply button is under each comment, whether it's a top level comment to the main post, or a reply on a comment of a comment.
The comment box is at the end of the comment section.
Guess I just need to keep scrolling... Duh.
Thanks.
Is it possible to subscribe to a tag instead of a tilde (group?)
E.g., I want to subscribe to the tag formula1 but not all of ~sports
Nope. The only way would be to bookmark the tag manually, or bookmark a post within Tildes that utilises the tag, allowing you access to the tag quickly through your bookmarks.
There's a post elsewhere in this thread that shows how to use RSS feeds and tags. You can then use whatever feed reader app you want to get notified about activity on a tag.
I have a quick question about the code of conduct and overall philosophy of things here. Specifically around don't be an asshole, fully agree with that and love it. It's a great philosophy for a community. The question I have is around how that relates to people off site? My take on it and I think I'd be right in saying that this is probably most people's view, is that should also apply to stuff on Tildes that relates to people off site. For example as much as reddit is obviously a hot topic at the minute and a lot of us disagree with the events at the moment and more so with the admin behaviour, I've noticed some particularly critical comments and outwardly hostile ones about certain people. My thinking is that while that's perhaps (most certainly) deserved, we shouldn't really be encouraging or allowing any insults about people or groups whether they are members or not. I think it just makes a bit more of a negative atmosphere all round while contributing to the snipe culture seen at reddit and therefore should be discouraged.
Is this something that's been discussed before? If so is there a consensus on it that was reached? Obviously if the long term members and Demios are okay with it then I'll say no more but if not how would we all feel about the don't be an asshole principal being applied to not only those in our community but also those outside of it?
This is a great question, and it’s one that I think we as a community need to tackle.
I’m very much in line with your beliefs: “don’t be an asshole” extends to everyone. Not just people on this site, and not just people we like. I actually think this is probably one of the places where my beliefs diverge from the Tildes norm significantly. I think a lot of people here believe that you can be an asshole to someone provided they’re “fair game”.
I firmly believe that one of the worst things that internet culture has done has been the justification of abusive language and rhetoric if someone is seen as “deserving”. Not only does it give people permission to be their worst selves, but it outright normalizes abuse. After all, one of the lies that abusers tell their victims is that they deserve it. When we create a culture that is predicated on this very concept, we are enabling the harms of the worst people in society and making it all the harder for their victims to identify their situations in the first place.
Even outside of that, dogpiling and skewering are part of what makes other places on the internet awful places to be. I don’t want that for us here. We are trying to be better, and, to me, part of that means fighting the often tempting desire to engage in visceral internet takedowns. Even if we really want to. And even if we feel it’s “fair”.
Like, I’m as critical of reddit as they come, but some of the comments towards /u/spez on this site right now give me pause. I’m a gay guy who grew up in conservative Christianity, but the almost celebration of Pat Robertson’s death makes my stomach turn.
This is not a defense of either of them. It’s a defense of the idea that we do not have to indulge the worst in us when faced with the worst in others.
I’m no saint and have written harsh words on this very website. I’ve deleted posts here that I’ve made in anger. I’m human like we all are.
What I always try to come back to though is that we gain nothing from being assholes ourselves, even if the people we’re being assholes to are assholes themselves. If being an asshole is part of what makes them so terrible, why do we want to replicate that in ourselves?
I don’t know if I answered your question so much as used it as a jumping off point for my own
thinkingsoapboxing, but ultimately I agree with you and honestly wish more people did. I think we shouldn’t be assholes to anyone.I'm glad to see that it's not just me with this thinking here.
It's definitely hard to maintain that kindness to others, especially when we feel attacked or persecuted and I can't say that I never act like an asshole or that on occasion the situation doesn't seem in my mind to warrant it at the time but I think it's definitely something society at large has taken as a basic response to things in recent years which shouldn't be the case and really it doesnt help. I always think back to the fact that when I first started posting online, while I was open minded, I often said things that would get me dogpiled if said today. Hell the word fa**ot was a common use word everywhere online when I joined my first forum at 13 and I sadly participated in that language. I think that probably applies to most of the older members here too if everyoneis honest about it. Using gay as a negative description was also common and poof was a common insult in my area in real life growing up even if we as kids didn't know what it meant. I've never been genuinely homophobic (hell I'm bi and always knew I was curious about other guys even if I didn't accept that and consider myself as bi until recently) but it was the common way to speak as wrong as that is so I did it and all the dogpiles and hate would have done is hurt and scare me to the point I'd have probably retreated to places where people were more accepting of my comments which could have lead to a rabbithole of the wrong kinds of thinking.
I honestly think that's a big cause in the rise of a lot of the right wing, racist, homophobic and anti-trans groups we're seeing today. Somebody uses the wrong language, gets attacked and it reinforces negative stereotypes or creates one in somebody's mind and drives people to seek out groups and communities where they are accepted which just perpetuates the issue.
I'm gonna be trying to take a step back when angry and come back to the situation with fresh eyes later to let me respond better and to assume best intentions from people to do my own part in making the Internet a better place. I've also started "sense checks" with folk I trust who aren't angry to give me insight into whether my response is fair when I'm upset about things, if a 3rd party says that my response is shitty I don't send it.
Given I'm not the only person with this line of thinking though I'll try to reply to posts that I feel are hitting the asshole metric and gently remind of the CoC without being a prick about it, and when I have the ability unlocked I'll mark these as noise if there is no merit to the posts outside of anger/vitriol. I think one of the better things we can do is to remind people as often we might not even realise we're being an asshole, I sometimes don't and if you ever see me post in that fashion I would appreciate a polite reminder so that I can correct myself. Humility and openness to correction is crucial to improving so I'm not gonna sit and pretend my shit don't stink or that I'm some paragon of empathy and kindness but I want to be better so I hope the people here can help me to be better!
Thanks for your thoughts on the subject.
I loved reading this. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.
I'm 100% with you on us being honest about ourselves and where we've come from. Like you, there's a lot of stuff in my past that I'm not proud of, but I'm happy to have had the opportunity to grow out of it. I'm also still growing out of other things, some of which I'm probably not even aware of at the moment, and I appreciate those who are able to meet that in me with grace and patience.
I will say that I do think there's a big tension here on Tildes related to this, with some people wanting to give some space to people who might need to do a bit of growing, and others not wanting those people to erode the experiences of other users. It's a tough balance to strike.
Also, I love your perspective at the end, which treats communication and personal improvement as a collaborative process. I think the rest of the internet makes us think that everything has to be adversarial, and we can often forget that sometimes other people are actually trying to help us, or that they might need our help. Read your comments have helped me think about things, so thank you for that!
I've hesitated to say anything, but a lot of the comments in that spez AMA thread were very unkind. I understand that people are mad right now, and that reddit-related threads are where recent refugees are congregating to express their frustrations, but I hope it isn't setting false expectations about what to expect on Tildes.
I think people need time to settle in and see that Tildes is not meta-reddit. There are unique conversations that happen here, even if they are at a slower pace. I'm sure some will lose interest as a result, while others will adapt and begin to add their own voices. There'll just be a bumpy period while people figure out which category they fall into. But ultimately, I think we'll be better off for it.
I've been thinking I need to get more busy with the noisy tag.
I think it's maybe one where a bit of balance is needed, polite corrections to a point to allow those who genuinely are trying to do better or didnt realise but naturally repeat offenses are actionable. That's how I've always approached it when running a community and it worked.
Yeah I think if we want to improve we need collaboration, otherwise we can't truly know if what we're doing is working. Ultimately I can try to be better as a person but I'll never know if what I'm doing or saying is hurtful in some way if that's not made clear to me. You're right about the adversarial nature of the Internet at the moment though so it's definitely a challenge but one that's worth it in my view.
Glad that it's been something to think about though.
Yeah I am worried about engendering a culture of negativity if the place just turns into "meta-reddit." I don't really know what the solution is besides trying to lead by example and occasionally pointing out we don't want to just spend all our time gossiping and sneering.
I think all that can be done is lead by example, be kind in our interactions with others, if we come across conduct that isn't kind, gently remind the user of the expectations here and that while we can understand the anger and frustration they have, it's not the kind of thing that needs to be shared as it causes a culture of verbal abuse to form which we don't feel is acceptable here. Outside of that, mark the posts as noise if possible. If it persists we'd generally not have much else we can do without specific moderation capabilities other than flagging to Demios if its getting bad. Hopefully it'll never get to that point but all we can do in the mean time is try our best.
I wouldn't worry too much. We just added a ton of new users, people want to vent, and reddit has activated apocalypse mode. That's quite a lot going on to rile everyone up right now. That's why we take some time to let people acclimate between invite waves. Folks need to learn to stop doomscrolling, relax, take it slower, and stop poking each other just like we did - and they will, it just takes a little while.
I remember the first six months here weren't exactly a picnic for us old hats either, we have been where they are now. I have had my own comments here removed a couple of times, and for good reason. Try to remember that the venting can be healthy, if it's contained and short-lived. We just have to keep it from becoming 'normal' like it is on so many other sites.
Good point. I definitely went through a reddit behavioral detox period here (in some ways I think it’s still happening?). I think we get patience in others by modeling it in ourselves, and I think everything going on right now is a little overwhelming for everyone. This is a good reminder to go slow and breathe a bit.
Also, on a personal note, I’m happy to see you active on the site again, Amarok!
It was time for me to take my little break, like so many others have. ;)
I saw similiar posts & comments on Reddit, and I was disgusted.
I was looking through some old comments & posts of mine here on Tildes, last night, and I found a discussion about an "ex-ex-gay" man where everyone called him a horrible man, for what he'd done while he was "ex-gay" - one person in particular called him a "sociopath" - without concern for how he himself had been traumatised by religion.
Sometimes it's hard for people to have empathy for those who oppress them.
This is an interesting question.
The goal here is to have interesting conversations that are kind and thoughtful.
I've seen some threads still standing about that normally I would have expected to be deleted by now.
If a comment has nothing of interest, or if the snark or bickering outweighs the content of the contribution, you will (in about 6 days) be able to flag a comment as noise, then if it gets marked as noisy enough, it collapses by default so other users don't have to read it.
Yeah I look forward to being able to help out in respect of moderation by tagging/flagging. I'm glad to hear that some of these posts would normally be hidden and it's not that I'm completely out of left field here. I've elaborated a lot in another comment just above on my thoughts on why it's important we maintain a stance of not being an asshole even if the subject of our anger is subjectively being an asshole so I'll not repeat that here but as mentioned in that post, I'll not pretend I myself am perfect in that regard so if you see any posts from me that are straying, please do politely correct me by reply, I would like to know if I am being an asshole so that I can correct myself and learn to be better not only for my own sake but so that I can play my part in maintaining the welcoming atmosphere here and showing that we can all disagree and get things wrong but that how we respond and do better next time is more important than being perfect from the get go.
Thanks for your thoughts on this subject!
Any insight into this? Do people get banned permanently (or even temporarily) with no reason given?
As other people said, within a few hours of being on the site, that user had already called people "dipshits", "fucktards", and done multiple other things that made it blatantly obvious they don't belong here.
So yes, people that behave like that don't get given a reason. I'm not going to waste any more of my time on them.
Have you put any further thought into some type of transparency for removed comments and banned users? Nothing against you personally but requiring that a reason be given is an important check on power and source of trust for any system like this.
It's totally understandable if you don't have the bandwidth to give that to every comment you remove, but personally I'd rather we address that manpower problem directly than start to slide on banal but important transparency measures.
I respectfully disagree that “checks on power” are worth worrying about here. We’ve become habituated to social media platforms wringing their hands about a user bill of rights and free speech and other such concerns to ensure everything is official and formal.
It is performative nonsense. They do this because they are self-important megalomaniacs. Tildes is one website among what ought to be, but is not, a thriving ecosystem of many websites in the same way a local bar or cafe is one among many and their proprietors don’t feel the need to run every decision about how to run their business by their customers, nor do the customers expect it. The reason platforms pretend to be governments and mimic the formalism of bureaucratic procedure is because they are monstrously fattened monopolies who have choked out the vital market dynamics of the public sphere and had to substitute it with their own, inferior, half-assed, and ultimately self-serving, attempts at community management that make nobody happy.
Just think about how many of these platforms with overwrought moderation processes actually have what you’d think of as good moderation that keeps the vibes positive and the assholes from shitting up your feed. In spite of all the formalism, their moderation calls are still dumb and arbitrary. Even when governments institute these sorts of bureaucratic checks they’re necessary evils because governments are monopolies by necessity. But we shouldn’t need that from every corner of society. It’s actively burdensome to have to check boxes like that for everything you do.
Ultimately, you keep Deimos honest by just leaving the site if you feel like the administrative actions are hostile or unreasonable. If there was a thriving ecosystem of other places you could go to that are more your speed this wouldn’t be an issue, it’s just one bar that you can’t hang out in for whatever reason. It only becomes a problem when you’re banned from Applebees but Applebees is the only hang out spot in town. The problem there is primarily that Applebees is the only spot in town, not that the proprietor decided to be heavy handed or arbitrary about kicking you.
Now as someone who has been subject to Deimos’ administrative actions in the past, I can tell you he is exceedingly fair as long as the you’re willing to work with him and understand that he’s trying his best to make a judgement call on what’s best for the community as a whole. If you are in a position to interact with him while he has his admin hat on, you can decide for yourself if he’s someone whose establishment you want to continue hanging out in.
I know of at least one case where a member of the community had good faith, but very strong disagreements with the the moderation approach here. Deimos had a very long back and forth with them to tell them that constantly harping on it was more disruptive than the issues they were citing and suggested they step back from participation in the site for their own mental health. He did temp-ban them to settle tensions down, but he also offered to help them set up their own fork of Tildes that they could cultivate according to their preferences. It’s all about keeping the community healthy here. They ultimately were not happy with the decision, but I don’t think anyone say it was anything but a fair disagreement where people have to walk away from each other as happens in life.
TL;DR: You will know the tree by its fruits
The problem with that is that we -individually- have very little insight into what those actions are, or under what conditions they were made. Not that I think he'd do it, but deimos could ban you or me and completely fabricate the reasons. He could delete this very comment before enough people have seen it, and claim I called you whatever slurs his mind can come up with. Once I'm banned, no one can see this comment anymore to ensure he's sticking to the truth. And I wouldn't even be able to tell you guys that he's lying through his teeth. Because I'm banned. Again, to emphasize: I don't believe any of this is actually going on.
I don't want to white-box Deimos' decisions. That leads to a lot of trouble. Rules lawyering, etc. But a good black-box will do the job. Let me know the inputs into his decisions (the comments) and the output (inaction, deletion, ban), and I can figure the rest out. I can figure out if Deimos is a lying scumbag, or the smartest person to ever administer a social network.
We've gotten by without too much action from Deimos so far. Which means there is at least a level of scrutiny on some of his decisions, and so far he's been pretty open. But going forward, as the user base grows and at the latest once the pool of moderators grows, I'd prefer if at least a bare minimum audit trail was available.
Oh, and on a related note: deleted comments also disappear from your own post history, so you can't even read what you yourself wrote. That part is (imo) extremely unsavory for a bunch of reasons.
It's worth noting that removed topics/comments are treated differently from deleted ones; According to Deimos, removed comments are visible to the user that posted them in their own history. Deleted posts can't be visible in your own history, since the content is actually deleted from the database.
Makes sense.
Thank you for providing clarity about this!
I saw the original post and almost marked it as malice myself. It was sneering and mean-spirited. It ended with “#Dipshits”.
Ban-worthy? Maybe not normally, but at a time when Tildes is growing quickly and our culture is pretty fragile? I get why that call was made. It was pretty clearly against our norms here, and first impressions go a long way.
I can't comment on that ban in particular, but...
... as I said in another comment in this very thread, only 20 minutes ago: "Every single banned person in the history of the internet was banned for 'no reason'. Naturally. Because noone is the villain in their own story." Having been a moderator on Reddit for over a decade, I can promise you that that banned user is not giving us the full story. They never do, when they're telling everyone about how an evil moderator stomped on poor little innocent them.
Last night, I saw a comment here on Tildes which referred to "fucktards". In my book, that's flat-out offensive language. As I wrote in the note when I applied the 'Malice' tag, it was the "-tard" suffix that offended me rather than the "fuck-" prefix.
This morning, that post and all comments under it by that Tildes user have been deleted. I can't remember their exact username, so I can't check the status of their account, to see if they got banned by Deimos or if they deleted their account after Deimos had a word with them.
In fact, when I first read that Reddit post, I saw some similarities in that story and the behaviour of the Tildes user I'd seen refer to "fucktards". They might even be the same person. I know that @kfwyre says he saw a comment by that banned user saying "#Dipshits", but maybe we both saw two problematic comments by the same person (or maybe they're two different people).
I know from past experience that Deimos does not put up with any type of hate speech or aggressive shit.
If they were in trouble for skywalking on dust, they were only guilty of trying to reach a higher plane of existence. That along with them probably hurling racist slurs.
Just by fast scrolling through those comments I really hope OPs warning works and no one from that threat comes here.
There's a few good people in there I believe. But yeah, a bunch of people in there don't seem great.
I do wonder how susceptibility to rage bait (which is what that post is) plays into compatibility with the community here. Frankly, I believe we're only barely less susceptible than most others. We're merely better by not posting as much rage bait. Which is to say, just because someone gets angry about reddit-OPs account of the situation, doesn't mean they can't be cured. Of course a little bit of skepticism goes a long way here.
Doesn't mean we should want to wear that hat of curing them of their reddit habits. Nor that I think that thread's a prime spot for recruiting new users.
As a new user I think the invitation only method is a great way to get the right kind of people rather than just a random influx. I got the invitation from someone I like and know well. And I would only give an invitation to someone I know and trust too. This place seems really friendly and wholesome and I want to make sure it stays that way.
That's the spirit! I'm not too picky about who I invite whenever there's a lull in activity. Other than the recent influx, the site's culture has been resilient enough, so whenever I see someone who I think was looking for a community like this or who would otherwise fit in, I'd give them a code. Currently, I'm a lot more cautious, as the stakes are just higher. Eventually that'll even out and we can continue regular operations.
That is why sealioning is so insidious. They don't hurl their rage and insult others resulting in a ban. They know better. By the time you recognise what is going on they will have already been seriously abusing others.
Some white supremacists have been practising and honing the skill, they have becomes experts at it.
Do you have a reference for the term, "sealioning"? First I've ever encountered it.
Seems like it's from this comic strip. My understanding is it refers to trolls who try to piss people off while pretending to be acting in good faith but ignorant, so they can say "look at this person escalating a calm discussion into a fight! so overly defensive, I was just asking questions"?
Only barely might even be overselling it. We have to rely on each other to keep it in check. That's always been what's missing in most other communities. It takes a little effort to get those better angels moving.
I try my best. The sad part is the amount of effort it takes to defuse rage bait. I've done it a few times before. I don't know how long it took me to write the essay on Veritasium, his Waymo video, and the hit piece by some random youtuber on it, but it was too long.
Critical thinking is difficult and takes time.
But yeah, I suppose in hindsight what I meant to write wasn't that "we're only barely less susceptible" but rather "we're at best slightly less susceptible".
Yeah that's a more well rounded assessment. I guess my own comment was actually just as reddit-like as my judgement.
Usually you would typically expect a temporary ban, followed by a longer term ban for a second violation, then a permanent ban for a third violation.
I've never seen anyone confused as to why they were banned. Usually it is that people don't think their behavior was ban worthy.
"Voting" is one topic that alludes me despite looking through this thread and looking through the docs.
Maybe it's visible somewhere and I've just missed it – but either way, I would like to understand more about voting on Tildes: What's the philosophy and culture on how and when to vote? I just don't want to assume it's "like upvotes on reddit" but am trying to understand the context of the vote. Especially since there's a neutral semantic connotation to a "vote" as compared to e.g. a "like".
Like, do I sprinkle votes on every comment I feel is worthwhile, or is the intent to be more restrictive with the votes? Should the votes be given to comments that I believe add value to the discussion, or could/should it be used to voice quick and simple agreement rather than the all to pointless "This." comment? Do I vote as a courtesy on any comment to me because that's just part of the culture? Is there even a consensus or do Tilde users just adopt their own individual voting philosophy?
Great question! Voting is essentially nothing more than a filtering/sorting mechanism.
In theory, better quality content will get more votes, and that will allow them to be more visible by being higher up in the voting sort.
In practice, and this is speaking pretty much from my own opinion now, I honestly don’t even “see” vote counts on the main page anymore since I sort by Activity. I only recently re-noticed them because we had so many users that the totals were unexpectedly high, but I honestly don’t put any stock into them. That might change with more content being posted, where vote counts will be more important for separating out content because too much will be posted that no one person can feasibly go through everything.
For comments I do pay more attention to votes. The mechanism is the same as topics, but I sort by relevance or most votes which, in theory, raises higher quality comments to the top.
This is something I would actually love to revisit in the future of the site. Voting still tends to stack on earlier comments rather than later ones, which leads to those getting read more, which leads to them getting more votes. I personally would love to see the system changed, though I’m not sure how.
Early on, the site actually experimented with hiding vote labels entirely. You can see some of the discussion about that here if you’re interested.
At present, I think the best practice for voting would be to use it on anything you feel is a good contribution to the site. I don’t know if we have any strong norms about it, or that everyone necessarily treats it in the same way. If other people have different perspectives on it, chime in!
any guide for configuring rss feeds?
The main Atom/RSS feed is https://tildes.net/topics.atom or https://tildes.net/topics.rss
You can also get the feed for a group at e.g. https://tildes.net/~tech/topics.atom
Or by tag at e.g. https://tildes.net/topics.atom?tag=user_created
Awesome, thanks. I only recently finally dived all the way into rss and so it helps to have some direction with more complex sites like this one.
Thanks! I've been on Tildes for a while but I didn't know about feeds. This is a game changer!
@cfabbro since you are the main inviter, do you have any idea how many people joined since the migration started? I'm really curious about that number. Feels like a lot.
IIRC, I started with 10,000 invites when I first made that Tildes 5th Birthday post a little over a month ago. I now have 8,600 invites left. Whether everyone who I sent invites to actually joined, I can't say for certain. And I didn't hand out all the invites this time, so there's that too.
IMO the best way to get a sense of Tildes actual user growth is @Bauke's Tildes Statistics site:
https://ts.bauke.xyz/
And it looks like we went from 13,021 users to ~14,350 over the last few days. But it's likely a bit higher than that since I am still sending out invites, and how often Bauke scrapes those numbers I don't know.
Once a day at noon (12:00) UTC, except for the other day when Tildes was down and I had to do it manually when it came back up. :P
The numbers there are also not 100% accurate (hence the "estimated" on the site) because it takes from whichever the most-subscribed group is, so if you unsubscribe from that group technically you aren't counted.
Just to add another data point, I alone have had ~90 users accept invites. And there are still more to be sent!
I see. It certainly feels like a lot more because we're getting some highly active users, while many older accounts are not as active.
Well if the new introduction topics are anything to go by, it looks like a fair amount of former lurkers, and people that stopped visiting, or forgot about their Tildes accounts, are back on the site now too. So that may be a major reason why it feels like more than the new account numbers suggest.
And as I have said elsewhere, unlike a lot of previous invite waves, the account ages of the people who are requesting invites now is really really surprising. Lots and lots of 10-15+ year old accounts, with what I estimate to be an average of around 7. So this new wave is likely full of a lot more committed users than previous ones, where the majority were just people curious to see Tildes, since Tildes wasn't always publicly visible without an account. So that likely inflated those first few waves' numbers, and also probably resulted in a lot more of those users leaving soon afterwards when they were finally able to see the site and realize it was not for them.
Right now it's 13021 -> 17334 over the last 12 days. Almost exactly 33%.
Why is there new users, something happened ?
Reddit messed up.
I've seen that, I guess people have linked tildes in the discussion then.
Yep, that's how I found it. There have been widespread discussion threads on many subreddits over the last couple of days and there seems to be consensus among veteran Reddit users (10+ year old accounts) that this will be the final straw for us. Tildes has been brought up in many of those threads and is the closest match for that old-school Reddit style; I'm hoping it will be a viable alternative.
I'm in the same boat. I've been on Reddit for almost 11 years and I've been sad to see it spiralling over the last however many years; it seems to be getting worse, too. I miss the small community feel of it without the toxicity and overly strict moderation. As soon as RiF is gone, so am I. I'm super new here but I'm really digging what I'm seeing so far.
I recently recieved an exemplary tag? award? I don't even know what the actual term is.
I was on reddit for so long that awards weren't a thing when I first signed up, I saw them become a thing, then editing a comment to thank the user for an award started, then people began to hate that so much they made a subreddit dedicated to making fun of people who edited their comments to thank for gold, the hate seemed to subside, and then eventually it seems that editing to thank just stopped being a thing as more and more kinds of awards came about and individually they meant less and less.
So my question is that since I'm not even sure exactly what the reddiquette for editing to thank for a award is these days, what is the etiquette for that here? I see that the giver can leave a short message with it, but I don't see a way to privately reply (like on reddit you can reply to the inbox message that accompanies the award to directly thank the giver).
Edit to add thanks? Or is that too tacky, just take it and move on?
The normal protocol is that you read the note associated with the exemplary tag, feel just as confused as before, and then look through all your prior comments wondering why none of your favorite comments ever got exemplary :)
Generally folks don't edit their comment in response to an exemplary tag. Unless they are particularly confused.
I'd say the norm is just reading the associated message and moving on. No need to thank anyone in an edit.
Exemplary labels are anonymous, and there's no way to reply to the person who gave it to you. Sometimes people will sign their exemplaries by appending their username to the end of the message. I do this if it's important to me that the person know that I was the one who gave it to them (e.g. if we'd been arguing and they changed my mind about something), but more often than not I give them fully anonymously (I like the idea that the people I give them to see them as coming "from the community" rather than me specifically).
Given that you probably receive more "Exemplary" tags on Tildes than anyone else, whatever you do with them must, by definition, be the norm! :)
I have no idea what you’re talking about. ;)
(Yes, this is a bit of a flex.)
(Which is against type for me, but I’m still pretty proud of that comment.)
(But not proud enough to let people know which one of mine it was! :P)
Hey... if we're flexing...
But you still get more exemplaried comments than anyone (as far as I've seen).
IMO either is fine. Doing nothing is fine, editing in a quick thanks is not usual, but I wouldn't find it nice if someone hated on you for it. If you want to address the text within the tag, or want to otherwise expand on the conversation, a self-reply would also be fine. Though content-less self replies are low-key frowned upon I think as they bump the topic.
Most people caveat an offtopic in their comment and another kind soul will mark it as such.
Tildes has tended to draw a more privacy-conscious userbase than most other sites in the past, but I don’t know if that also holds true for the current influx.
I do know of several people here who have been targets of doxxings or attempts on other sites, including myself. I now am very careful about sharing any identifying information because I intend to keep this account around for a long time. As far as I’ve been on Tildes, I haven’t been aware of any doxxing issues related to our site directly, but given that the site is publicly viewable, it’s always a concern.
There is a small hurdle to doxxing from off-site sources. Logged out users can only see a limited number (I think 30?) of items in a user’s post history. Logged in users can see the whole thing though, so it’s not too much of a barrier to a determined bad actor.
I do think a doxxing caution post would probably be helpful for the wider community given how many new users we have. It wasn’t until after someone was trawling through years of my posts that I realized how many little identity breadcrumbs I’d left, forming a pretty clear trail right to meatspace me.
Some users here cycle usernames. You’ll start to recognize them after you’ve been here a while.
Deimos has also deleted several peoples accounts on their behalf, for different reasons. I would like to see a delete feature built into the site though.
And a 'download all of my own content' feature as well. One can PM Deimos and get this service right now, but it's not automated.
What is the suggested way to post about local cities/neighborhoods?
If there is a group relevant to the topic, you can post there and simply tag the post with the city or neighborhood (or even city.neighborhood). So, e.g., if you’re posting about restaurant recommendations maybe you would post in ~food, more general posts could maybe go in ~life, and of course there’s always ~misc.
To add to what gpl said, there's a geographical system for tagging posts that starts with the country, such as usa.ca.los angeles for the US. But you don't need to worry about it. There are people who will add the tags if you don't and fix them if you got it wrong.
If you want to be helpful, you can do some searches to see how previous topics were tagged.
More generally, this is a pretty international community. Posting local news is fine and can be interesting to outsiders, but it's mostly going to be seen by people who don't live near you and are often from a different country.
(Also, many people don't want to be too specific about where they live for privacy reasons.)
Having more context of the type of expected posts are helpful, thanks!
Man this sounds like a much better approach to organizing related comments/topics than specific subs that are supposed to be a catch-all!
So to make sure I understand, if I wanted to ask about restaurant or food genre recommendations for a small US town, I would categorize that into the ~food group and tag it with the “small town” (use a real town name of course) for people to find? Just making sure I understand the recommendation.
For now, yup that's exactly it. Groups were never meant to be static so it is possible that as we get larger there will be new groups and more granularity. But as it stands, you are welcome to post any such content in the group most relevant, and just tag it accordingly!
I may be dumb, but is there any way to increase the font size on iOS? It’s coming up very small and difficult to read. And though I can use the accessibility option to increase the font size on Safari, it doesn’t do so on this page specifically.
If you tap the “aA” on the left of the URL bar at the bottom it will pop up a menu. There is a small and a large A with a 100% in between. That percentage is the font size level. If you tap the big A font gets bigger. If you tap the little A it gets smaller.
Thank you so much!!
Sorry if this has been asked, there are a lot of comments to look through and I’m not sure if it’s possible to search a thread on mobile.
What is the difference between “activity” and “all activity” on the home page headings?
Activity sort has certain exemptions, namely comments labeled Noise or Off Topic, which don’t bump threads.
All Activity ignores those exemptions.
Well now I've learned something new. Great question @AgnesNutter.
I thought All Activity still ignored noise/off-topic comments? I could be wrong though (I don’t really use it). I thought the main difference was the depth cutoff.
NaraVara is correct. Noise, Offtopic, and Malice labeled comments don't bump topics in Activity sort. AFAIK they still will bump topics in All Activity sort though, since it doesn't factor in "uninteresting" comments.
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/blob/master/tildes/consumers/topic_interesting_activity_updater.py#L49-52
Do they bump in All Activity though?
See my edit. ;)
Hmm I think you’re right. I took it off the docs but I realize there’s some ambiguity there in how it’s written:
Nope! You’re right. 😆
Oops I misread your comment. LOL... yeah Naravara is correct, NOT YOU!!! :P Edited my original comment to reflect that. ;)
That tracks. It’s been my experience on this site that @NaraVara is generally right about pretty much everything. 😆
No worries! This is the place to ask.
On Tildes, a new comment to a topic bumps a thread to the top of the activity sort (similar to old-school forums).
However, when a conversation has gone deep enough down a thread, it’s likely that new comments there are of less interest to the site at large. Either a few people are just having an extended conversation of their own, or it’s a sort of back-and-forth bickering with each trying to have the last word.
As such, comments below the cutoff depth will not bump the thread in the Activity sort. I don’t remember the exact depth, but I think it’s 5 or 6 layers deep?
All Activity doesn’t have this restriction, so any new comment in a topic, even if it’s 30 deep in a chain, will still bump the topic to the top.
Also, I just recently learned how to search on iOS myself! I don’t have the link handy, but someone else on Tildes taught me. Start typing what you want to find in the address bar, and then you should see a “Find [text]” option on the screen above that will search that page for you. I am not sure on the process for Android though, but maybe someone else here can chime in.
You’ve absolutely just changed my life with that tip about searching on iOS! That’s so handy.
Thanks to you and the other responders for explaining about activity vs all activity too :)
Right?! I couldn’t believe I’d gone that long without knowing how to do something so simple and so useful.
Re mobile Search
On android Firefox browser, on the right of the address bar is a three dot "🍢 kebab" menu. There is a "find in page" tool
[Side rant] I would never have figured out the iOS way of doing it. Address bars are for URLs, and when I type in there I expect to go AWAY from this page, not further interact with it. And it doesn't come up until you're already doing an action. That's just poor discoverability and why I have stayed away from Apple products since iPod.
Is there any issue with/rule against having multiple active accounts at a single IP address?
Say I want to send myself a second invite because I want to talk about hobbies on a separate account from personal stuff, is that ok? Or say I invite my partner (who I live with), do we risk facing consequences for vote manipulation if we vote on each other's posts?
Having multiple accounts is fine, but there are some stipulations:
https://docs.tildes.net/policies/code-of-conduct#multiple-accounts
Thank you! Just one additional thing I'd like to clarify if possible - I see that there's no rule against multiple Tildes users in one household, but would I need to be careful about voting on or replying to posts made by people who live with me? On other sites I have sometimes run book clubs, discussions, etc with my partner's help. I get the sense that'd be fine here but thought I'd ask to be safe.
I wouldn't worry about it. It is generally pretty clear if the accounts are sock-puppets or not based on methods of engagement and server logs for when different accounts are logging in and interacting.
Thanks, I figured that would be the case - but it's surprisingly tough to break old habits from sites where you'll get hit with auto-bans for behavior that isn't disingenuous! I'm always having to reassure people that they don't have to walk on eggshells in a tiny Discord community I run, and it's interesting to be on the other side all of a sudden.
Is there an option to put the comment box below the post but above the comments?
Nope, and there probably won't ever be a setting for that. It's at the bottom to encourage people to actually read the other top level comments, and participate in the already ongoing discussions, before making their own new top-level comment. It's designed to help cut down on the noise, repeat comments, and people commenting before reading the submitted content or some other comments related to it.
Guess it's time to script it on my end then!
Yeah, it's pretty trivial to circumvent. And TBH, the people who can write a script to circumvent it are probably not who we need to worry about making those sorts of comments anyways. So feel free. I think there may even still be a working userscript for it floating around on the ~tildes Customizing Tildes wiki entry, but I'm not sure. I would still strongly encourage you, and anyone else reading, to give it a try for a while before altering it thought.
I’d probably just add a link to jump to the reply box element honestly.
Sometimes comments have different colour bars on them, but I'm not sure what the different colours mean. I thought it was to help show which comments were replies to other comments but they're often the same colour.
The theme previews page has a brief explanation of what every comment stripe color means:
https://tildes.net/settings/theme_previews
And as for what exactly an Exemplary is:
https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/commenting-on-tildes#exemplary-label
I just joined up as well as part of the Reddit exodus. As soon as I loaded this site up on my mobile browser, I knew it was the one I'd jump to. Clean, information-dense, text-focused. It really is like the old Reddit.
I default browse with uBlock Origin enabled, and it didn't find one single thing to block. This is the kind of community I want.
Welcome aboard!
Thanks!
Got a few questions about general usability/navigation...
Is there a setting to make external links open in new tabs by default?
Are there keyboard shortcuts for navigating the page easier (i.e. jump to comment box, navigate to previous/next comment at the same depth as the active one, etc)?
Jump to comment box, specifically, is unlikely to ever be implemented officially. Having the comment box at the bottom was a conscious decision to encourage users to scroll and hopefully read / respond to existing comments before posting a new top level comment of their own.
This is 100% effective for me by the way - I thought that was the reason and so I consciously slowed myself down to read other comments and it made my experience very enjoyable.
Is there a way to jump to the next comment, parent or root comment, when navigating a thread? Sometimes I forget the OP and like to reference it quickly.
You can jump to the parent by clicking "Parent", and then jump back to the original comment by clicking "[Back]" that will then appear on the parent comment. No way to currently jump to the next comment or immediately to the root comment though. But those are good ideas, and I will add them to Gitlab after I finish playing Diablo today. ;)
Thank you for point that out. Somehow I had glanced over the 'Parent' button(?) or it didn't click with me what it was. I lean on that pretty heavily on the longer threads to keep myself oriented in the discussion.
This should be found in your settings page.
May be a silly question, but are there any limits for length or words or anything for text posts? Sparked by the recent discussions about Beehaw defederating, I'm working on a post about Nozick and the Fediverse/internet in general, and it's getting a bit longer than I expected. Currently sitting at about 1000 words, and not quite done yet. Is this (well not here, but as a text post in humanities) the best place to post it, or should I look for somewhere else?
If anything it’s the short posts that are discouraged. Feel free to go wild.
I think there is an upper limit on word count but can’t remember what. It’s pretty capacious so I’ve never worried about it. You can do the Twitter thing and break it up if that’s the case. But if it’s breaking up into more than 2 posts then you might want to host the text somewhere else and link it.
I just checked my longest comment, and it was 4000+ words. I'm sure there is a limit somewhere up there, but I've never hit it. Go wild!
It ended up at just under 3000 words, so sounds like I'm fine!
...after an edited clarification, it's at exactly 3000 words, which pleases me even though it wasn't intentional
The limit on topics, comments and messages is 50,000 characters.
cc. @kfwyre @NaraVara
Ah, good to know! Thanks for clarifying.
Also, in case anyone's curious, I just checked my 4,000 word comment, and it's about 25,000 characters. So, the rough word count limit for a Tildes post is somewhere around 8,000.
Oh god that's the perfect length for someone to write their entire NaNoWriMo novel in a Tildes comment.
which would be horrible. But now I can't get that thought out of my head.
I'm assuming there is no way yet to get a reminder about something on here (eg like RemindMe bot on reddit)?
Often times I would like a reminder to msg me or something and let me know I intend to return to a topic later. For example, there are a few great topics about programming stuff I would like to join the discussion on while toilet reading at work, but don't have time to contribute until later that evening, but by then I usually forget.
The closest function available would be to bookmark the topic so it appears in your bookmarks. But no guarantee that you'd be reminded to check in on them...
As others have said, not currently. However there is a Feature Request on Gitlab to add a !Remindme function to Tildes: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/740
There's not a reminder, but you can bookmark threads to return to later.
Quick link to the latest "Introductions" thread: https://tild.es/155d
There's now a new one for June.
Are images supported or are posts mainly just text, polls, or links?
By convention image only posts are frowned upon. This isn't to say you can't post images, but they should certainly be accompanied by text (beyond just "look at this thing!") to kick start some discussion. So what you commonly see is a text post with a link to some image that is part of the discussion.
Image posts are not allowed. You can post links or text posts. Tildes doesn't have a native poll feature but you can post a link to your preferred poll website if you like.
And welcome :D
Don't they put the links to the images in the body of a text post?
Would 3rd party apps being able display image/video links directly within posts be against the ethos of Tildes?
Yeah, probably. And similarly, anything that increases the popularity of low-effort topics and comments likely would, since on Tildes, "In-depth content (primarily text-based) is the most important".
Reddit polls encourage low effort posts. I've actually begged a few subreddits to disable them.
Hi. I literally entered the site 5 minutes ago. How will you deal with powerf users that repost stuff everywhere and power mods that overlook a stupid amount of communities without doing a quality job in none, and are essentially untouchable by the users and mods that actually want to look for the community?
Welcome!
Tildes doesn’t have a site-wide karma system, nor do its posts have artificially limited lifespans. Topics here can remain “alive” indefinitely, and there’s no incentive to post just for points. In the years I’ve been here we’ve never had problems with reposts or power users. I also imagine that being text-only cuts down on the potential for reposts even further.
As for moderation, people here cannot create their own communities, and we do not have moderators outside of the site admin at present. It’s possible that could change (there were plans for a different moderation system for the platform but those haven’t been implemented).
Yes, duplicate posts tend to happen only by accident. (They get tagged as duplicates. I hate it when I do that.)
But a bit more about older topics: if they're inactive there's a warning about posting to them, and they do get frozen eventually.
Also, people might not see updates to older topics depending on their settings. At the top of the front page, there is drop down where you can select "all time" or some other time period like "last 7 days." If you want to see updates to old topics, make sure you have it set to "all time" by default.
So in practice, we do need to recreate topics every week or two to keep long-running conversations alive. This is different from some forums where topics can keep going for months or years.
Sorry, just a quick question as you mentioned the platform is text only. Are we allowed to share links to images? I am a designer and creative, I would love to share things like artwork, designs, pictures of my doll house or dog, with people with similar interests. Is that allowed, or does everyone stick to text exclusively?
That's very much what ~creative was made for. It always helps to include a little bit of text alongside too though, to tell us all about your pride and joy. This current post by @marvia is a great example.
The Tildes docs should provide some answers to your questions. The linked page from the docs touches on moderation and site philosophy.
We have users that post a lot of topics on specific subjects, but the things they post are valued by everyone[1] and they don't get any prizes or points (fake or otherwise) for being popular other than the ability to share and talk about things they are passionate about.
So in a sense we do have power users, but not really.
[1] and if not, you use tags to filter their content.
New Reddit refugee here. Excited for a smaller, more rich discussion site. Hoping this community grows into more content for niche topics but I like the feel of it so far!
My burning question: how is this site pronounced?
There are lots of opinions on this! I personally say “til-deez” but I’m also a fan of letting people say it how they want to.
Welcome to the site!
Thanks! I coincidentally I ran into those topics while browsing around today. It seems you can’t go wrong and just pick one. I mentally call it “till-dezz” but the Spanish language education part of my brain wants me to call it “teal-dehs”
The official pronunciations is Tildes ;)
Of course! Why didn’t I just look at the spelling 😆
How many-ish active users does Tildes have?
https://ts.bauke.xyz/
~13,021 last week -> ~16,213 as of last update
How many of those are actually active is harder to say though.
I would say before last week we had maybe ~100 active posters and probably more lurkers. I've mentally been subtracting 13k from the total number to estimate active users (assuming everyone who joined this week can be defined as "active").
Does Tildes have an inbox like Reddit, where you can see all the replies to your comments? Or do I have to somehow remember where all my comments are and hunt to find replies?
Do I have a profile page here showing all my comments/posts?
Thanks
On the sidebar you will see a notification for new replies to you at the top. As well as that you can go to your profile https://tildes.net/user/SparksWest and see past notifications there as well on the sidebar.
Excellent, thank you!
I guess I just hadn't had any replies yet...
I found this reply by doing what you said though, so thank you for your help
Is collapsing comments a bit buggy for anyone else?
Just me?
I'd report it on gitlab straight away but my mobile browser setup is pretty exotic so don't want to bother if noone else has this
I can replicate this using Firefox on Linux.
I ran into another issue with it while testing it out:
ParentLinkIf you re-expand the parent comment, you can see the child comment has the highlight stripe on the site for the link.
I believe this is intentional but maybe not ideal. The comment collapse CSS only applies to elements that are not
:target, ie. the ones linked with the#comment-idin the URL.Clicking the collapse button does actually add the CSS class but because it's the
:targetthe collapse doesn't take effect. So in step 5+6, the:targetchanges and the CSS for the parent collapse now applies.cc. @lucg
So far on Tildes the discussions have been very polite, well meaning, and insightful. I’m not seeing comments of just ‘this’ ‘lol’ ‘came here to say this’ Not to mention there seems to be a nice ‘everyone that says something is valued’ vibe.
How does Tildes plan to manage when the site inventively gets bigger and deal with moderation - especially when some topics will get bigger than others and be a bit ‘noisier’? As far as my knowledge goes, only the admin and 2 others(?) moderate. I should say, at least from my experience the moderation is going great! However, I can’t help but think of it in the back of my mind.
The traditional "moderation" functions (which is to say disciplinary actions around bans, kicks, timeouts, etc.) are actually only done by the admin for now. If it grows beyond the point where he can handle it himself he'll probably appoint a couple of others.
But there are a lot of "curation" functions that are handled by the community. These are several tiers of functions. Some trusted users who volunteered can edit the tags associated with posts or move them between groups. All users with accounts more than 7 days old get the ability to "label" posts as noise or jokes (which, if they accrue enough such labels, get moved to the bottom of the sort) or as malice, which basically reports it to the admin for action.
Tildes is still in alpha and lots of features still need developing. You can read the docs, specifically the future plans for insight as to what the plan is to manage the site as it grows to require more complexity.
Also worth mentioning is that everyone that has an account over 7 days old has access to comment labels too... which already acts as a form of crowdsourced moderation tool for comments here on Tildes. So when people make comments like "this" and "lol", everyone can can label them with "Noise", resulting in them showing up as automatically collapsed for everyone, and their order in the sort will drop significantly as well.
cc: @Jarvis
I've seen people move my posts and edit the tags. How can I do that to others' posts?
At present only certain users that Deimos manually gave elevated privileges to can edit tags, titles, links, and move topics. The plan was to roll those out to more users along with the trust system, but that has so far been unnecessary. With the increased workload due to the increased posting volume, we may need more users to help with all that. But it would likely still only be given to a handful of people who have been active on Tildes for a while, so they're more familiar with the system, and the way things are organized here. Or perhaps to slightly newer people who are willing to work with @mycketforvirrad as an apprentice of sorts. :P
Hi, I have a cultural question.
What's the consensus here on leaving conversation? If you don't feel like you can add anything to the discussion anymore, is it generally preferable not to clog the thread with one-sentence thank-yous/acknowledgements? Obviously, I can see where this would be expected, but I wonder about the more quick-fire questions/interactions. I am probably way overthinking this, but I've noticed there is a heavy focus on neatness here, which I would rather help preserve for its comfort.
I'm of the opinion that if the interaction is positive and or helpful, then commenting is fine.
Noise, to me, is usually more of a throwaway comment (e.g. "This is the way", "Booooo", etc.). But if you're having an actual conversation with someone and need to make a quick response, that's fine.Also, it's a bit outside of the scope of your question, but Tildes in general is supportive of the idea of disengaging when necessary. If you're in a heated conversation or might say something in anger, the best move there is actually to step back and not post at all. There are actually some rate limits built into the site that will trigger if the site thinks you're having a back-and-forth argument with another user, for example.
I think a lot of us who have been here for a while have learned to step back a bit when we want to respond. I know that I've been furiously typing some posts before it hits me that, hey, maybe I shouldn't say anything at all, and I just delete what I'd been planning to post and move on -- and it's pretty much always been the right decision in hindsight. Tildes doesn't want to be a place where people feel on the hook to comment. We have no algorithm or advertisers who benefit from keeping people in conflict because it boosts our engagement metrics. It's strongly encouraged here to step away whenever you need to, and it's our hope that we create a culture where everyone is understanding of that.
I tend to be a bit more liberal with my noise tags. My rule of thumb is “would someone not involved in this conversation want an update on this comment?”
So comments like “Thanks, I hadn’t considered that perspective. I’ll have to think about that in the future.” will get a noise tag from me. I think those type of comments absolutely deserve to be posted. People need feedback on good things just as much as bad things. But we don’t need a bump on the topic for that.
I think these differences are actually a feature rather than a bug. Especially once the trust based moderation system is fully implemented.
I think this is how it should be treated since it means something like a targeted “thanks” can be said and labeled “noise” without bumping the topic to the top of standard Activity sort for everyone to see (it’ll still bump in All Activity)
I'm definitely guilty of this, sadly. I just made a similar comment about this - I tend to make comments like that (not just here, but anywhere) because I don't want to be rude to the poster that took their time to respond to me, or give them the impression that their comment was ignored or not useful. I actually dislike making those “Thanks, I hadn’t considered that perspective. I’ll have to think about that in the future” posts for the reasons you mentioned (it feels like noise, and maybe it's actually bugging that user), so understanding how people view this on tildes would be very helpful.
(An interesting example is Stackoverflow: not only do you not need to make such posts, but they are discouraged and removed (at least back when I used to use the site.) It's one thing I liked about it, because I knew no one would be offended for lack of such replies.)
Is there a way to self-mark your comment as noise? Because I've had exactly this issue (wanting to say how something has helped me because just voting didn't feel like enough, but not wanting to post useless noise) and don't want someone else to have to go through and moderate my comment
No there isn’t. As I remember, that was an intentional decision. The reasoning was: if we allow people to mark their own comments as a joke or noise, it tacitly encourages that type of content. We want to discourage it, not encourage it. Therefore someone else must label your comments.
I wouldn’t overthink this too much though. “Noise” content is still good for the community at a certain level. A noise or joke tag isn’t “this is bad for tildes, you should delete this comment”. All it says is “don’t bump this comment to other users”. The user you replied to still gets a notification no matter what.
To use a metaphor: consider a tildes discussion to be someone on a soap box giving a very good speech to a crowd. This is the long form, high quality content we try to foster on tildes. If you want to thank or congratulate the speaker, you can and should (these small “thanks” and other noise are also important for a community). However, if all you are saying is “thanks, that was really well said and I’ll have to consider your points”, you don’t need to get your own soap box and gather the crowd around you. It is enough to say that directly to the speaker. It will still be overheard by some bystanders.
On the other hand, I would also recommend considering if your “noise” comments can become discussion comments. If you want to thank someone for giving you something to consider, maybe talk about how or why you never considered it, or how it improved you as a human, or something else.
Precisely what I'd want from adding such a tag to my own comment.
That sounds contradictory. On the one hand, you're saying it's good to post, just that it shouldn't get pushed to everyone on the site, which makes sense to me. On the other, you're saying it's discouraged to post it.
Yes. I do that when I have inspiration (of what to post) and a few minutes to spend on it.
If everyone could self-label their comments as 'Noise', then more people would feel free to post noisy comments, knowing that they could suppress them. That's how enabling self-labelling would encourage noisy comments.
By not being able to self-label, people are forced to think about whether their noisy comment is worth posting (in theory, at least). In some cases, it is worth posting. Thanking someone is a social good, and it's worth creating some small noise to do that, and waiting for other people to hopefully label that comment as 'Noise'. However, in some cases, a noisy comment is not worth posting, and having to think about whether the noise is worth posting would discourage that noisy comment.
Yeah, there is definitely some contradictions around labels. It may be worth reconsidering those decisions as we scale up, but they have worked quite well so far. For what it’s worth, your request is not new. It’s something we discussed when labels were first introduced. If you want to read more, see if you can find an old post in ~tildes. Also, the bits in my last post about how to use the noise tag is just how I personally use the noise tag. I hope my usage is close to the community consensus, but it may not be.
Also, remember tildes is an alpha. It is definitely not feature complete.
Not at present, but there is an already approved Gitlab feature request issue for it:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/317
And a related issue for whisper/aside comments as well (which might render the above unnecessary):
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/141
cc: @Algernon_Asimov, @Weldawadyathink
You can't self-label comments. In theory, it's supposed to be up to other people to judge whether your comment is Exemplary or Noisome or Malicious.
Sure, I'm not talking about marking my own comments as exemplary! And self-marking as malicious sounds like a shortcut to labeling rights being taken away xD
Sometimes I get engaged in a conversation but then real life things come up and it saps my energy and I really don’t feel like continuing. In those case, if the other person is “actively waiting” my reply (i.e. they asked me a question or something else where one might expect a response) I usually leave a short comment to tie things up and move on. Other times I’ll just leave a vote on their reply and likewise move on.
In general I wouldn’t worry too much about it!
Thanks for posting this. I was curious about this myself. I always feel rude if I don't follow up replies, but it often feels awkward when I'm not contributing anything other than the thank you. I don't want to clog up a thread, but also don't want to offend the person who took their time to respond to me (and also want them to know that I'm grateful for that time). I've never been able to quite figure out this balance. Would love to see some more input on this issue from older users.
Any plans for a iOS app? I haven’t quite explored too much yet, where would be the best place to post about c programming?
The mobile website is outstanding, fully functional and you should try it. I don't feel a need for an app myself, but a lot of people do and one of our users is making one right now.
Programming discussions can go in ~tech or ~comp, usually the latter.
And welcome :D
Two questions: I've been seeing some posts that are actually fully fledged HTML articles. How does that work? Is that an option whenever I want to post something, I can choose between HTML and raw text?
Second question: I'm using Tildes on my phone's Firefox browser, is there a way to reach the "Post a comment" section on a post without having to scroll through all the comments?
When you write a comment, click on the “Formatting help” link that appears above and to the right of the comment box. That will open a page detailing all of the formatting options available in your comments. Briefly, many html tags are supported - you can just type them as you would if you were writing html. But be sure to check out that guide for details.
As far as I know, there’s no way to move the comment box. I also use firefox on mobile (typing from there right now). One thing that helps is that right under the post there are buttons to “Collapse read”, “Collapse all”, “Collapse replies” etc that make scrolling to the bottom not as annoying.
The comment textbox was intentionally designed to be at the bottom to incentivize people to engage with the content before making a top-level comment. I can see how that might be annoying in a hugely active post like this, but that's usually not an issue. We don't have a lot of posts like this. As suggested by @gpl, you can click on "collapse replies" to make that easier for you.
Is there a way to see or be notified of replies to your comments/posts?
There is a red notification that appears next to your username in the top right corner.
The color varies depending on what theme you have selected. Mine is orange!
Also @Zak8022 and anyone else who didn’t know, you can also get notifications from username mentions like I’ve done here.
Fancy-dan!
Tagging onto this, am I safe to assume that mobile notifications (push) aren’t possible with it being a browser site and not an app?
Correct. There are no dekstop or mobile notifications for Tildes. Although that may be possible on talklittle's upcoming Tildes app.
We've discussed this before: here, and here.
There is some thoughtful discussion there and certainly different ways of thinking about the organization. What I don’t see, however, is any particular plan, resolution, or action items. I know new groups can get added from time to time but is there an official path to get one added?
The official path in the past has always been suggestions via those ~tildes.official topics Algernon linked to, which we haven't had a new one for in a long time (mostly since the traffic hadn't warranted it). And the other way was simply by a subject getting submitted so often that it was overwhelming the rest of the contents in a group, so a new group was created to house that content (e.g. as happened with ~health.coronavirus).
Now that Tildes is getting busy again, it may be time for a new group suggestions round, but I think that should probably wait a bit until everyone new here gets settled in for a bit first, so people get acclimatized and don't suggest things that will likely never get groups here (like ~memes, ~pics, etc).
It's gonna be a wild ride. We'll probably need to do some copypasta of previously suggested groups that didn't make the cut and the pros/cons that have already been discussed about them.
Also I feel like our current list of groups is probably too long, if anything, and could do with some pruning.
Yeah, I think we definitely need to do some pruning. E.g. ~comp.advent_of_code has been up there for way too long now, even with the new users ~games.game_design isn't really busy enough to warrant its own group IMO, and ~health.coronavirus is totally dead at this point (thankfully!). @Deimos *wink wink nudge nudge*, sorry for making more work for you again :P
~health.coronavirus definitely looks worse than it was because I've been manually rolling a lot of the content over into ~health the last few months...
Ah, gotcha. Thanks for doing that. Even if you weren't, I still don't think there is enough ?tag=coronaviruses.covid19 submissions to warrant the groups existence anymore though.
Definitely not. It also feels like an unwanted ghost, lurking in the corner. Unless you like ghosts. Then it's more like termites.
Which group would you prune first? My dibs are rolling the remaining ~health.coronavirus content into ~health.
That and ~creative.timasomo to start.
In general I think a lot of the topic-area hair splitting we're doing with groups right now would be better handled with tags and we need to come up with a better kind of mental model for what the purpose of groups is. Based on feedback from a lot of new users, they are assuming these should work like subreddits but that's not the model we're going for. But we don't actually have a good explanation of what the groups are for.
A lot of the time I spend more time than I like trying to decide which group I want to post an article into and I think the reason for that is because they're subdivided in ways that makes it difficult to choose. Like I feel like it's hard for a new person to grok the distinction between ~life, ~talk, and ~misc. I'm not sure if ~finance is active enough to justify being separate from ~news, and so much news has implications for finance as well. ~anime is quite dead and ~tv and ~movies seem like they could be consolidated along with it and in today's era of streaming services and "shared universe" mixed-media cross-pollination I'm not sure how much it even conceptually makes sense to divide them anymore.
Consolidating the groups would smooth out some of that friction with posting. It might work better if the groups functioned kind of like a family of associated tags so people could subscribe or unsubscribe to classes of subject areas.
Good points. I've always seen the groups as a "super tag" that helps new users quickly filter out larger swathes of content they may not be interested in. That's definitely not a universal opinion though, and they are definitely proving to be a stumbling block with new users who are coming over and trying to decipher their function in the Tildes ecosystem.
Hi! New to the site here and currently using chrome on iOS. Do I have to scroll to the very bottom to comment? Or is there a way to customize that?
There is no way to change it, and probably won't be. It's intentionally at the bottom to encourage people to read the other comments and participate in ongoing discussions, before making a new-top level comment of their own.
that's a good reason to keep down there! Thanks for the fast answer :)
No prob. And welcome to Tildes. :)
Is it possible to change the default view of the home page to newest posts first?
Is there any way to send a one time donation to the Tildes dev? I see a Patreon link but I'd prefer something that doesn't recur (and maybe has lower fees).
On the top bar, click
Newthen you should see aSet as defaultoption. Click that and you’re good!Per https://docs.tildes.net/donate, if you're not interested in setting up a GitHub sponsorship then immediately cancelling, Stripe is also available.
Thanks. I just threw Deimos a one off $5 donation.
Where do I log in using Tildes on my phone? No problem on my laptop but I dont see a login button on my phone?
At the top right, tap
Sidebarand then you should see the login link at the top left of the sidebar that opens.Great. Thanks!
Can I create a community? Ex: I like One Piece and I want a dedicated area to discuss it.
Sorry I know this is an ultra n00b question but I thought this thread was okay for this.
This is THE thread for questions of any type, so don’t feel bad at all! You’re in the exact right place.
Users can’t create communities. Right now the best way to talk about One Piece would be to make posts about it in ~anime which covers both anime and manga.
In the past we’ve added new groups due to demand, and it’s possible with all the new users on the site that we’ll have another round of group creation. Until then just post about whatever you like under the bigger group headings (and don’t worry too much about where to put things: we have librarians on-hand that will move and tag your posts if needed to make sure they’re in the right spot).
Along with what the others have said, I think its helpful to note that we're still small enough that just about everyone will see every post, assuming they are subscribed to that group still. So if there are other One Piece fans on here (I am sure there are!), then just by posting in ~anime I think you'll reach them.
is there a list of all tags like there is for groups ? I looked around but couldn't find anything like that
You might find this discussion I had recently about tags to be helpful in this regard.
In short: there's no list of all tags because anyone can invent a new tag at any time if they think it's necessary.
There isn't a list of tags, as it would definitely be a pretty long list. You can always search for a tag in the search box in the top right though.
What is the expected way to format a survey topic? To pick an example, I have submitted this one, but in the process have misread the topic submission info and thought that text entered for a non-link topic would be submitted as the first comment like it would be for a link topic. This results in my own contribution to the topic being its own box ahead of all the comments this topic might have, which doesn't feel right. Is this fine or should I have submitted the topic's title as-is then enter the text as my comment? Or done something else entirely?
Formatting looks fine to me. Your contribution to the post as part of the body text helps to guide the discussion and give ideas for others.
Your submission is fine! Like @mycketforvirrad mentioned, it’s a great model for others to follow.
In the future, if you’d rather your specific content be its own comment, you could put a blurb or set of questions in the topic itself, then make a comment on the topic with your own thoughts. I’ve done this before with some of my topics. It can help with conversation, because replies to your content will fall under that comment, instead of as separate top-level responses.
Regarding how invite codes work:
How long does it take for them to regenerate/accumulate? Weekly, monthly, or something else?
Are they capped at a particular number or will the amount of available codes continue to grow over time?
Do people here like to be generous with invitations (providing there are no obvious red flags with each person) or are they scarce enough that it makes more sense to share them only sparingly?
Invites aren’t automatically regenerated. In the past, our admin, Deimos, has given out a set number of invites to everybody, which remain in everyone’s accounts until used. I believe he gave new users 5 invites a few days ago, but I don’t have the link on that and could be wrong?
Some trusted users have larger pools of invites. @cfabbro has thousands and has been the primary person sending them on reddit.
As for sharing invites, that’s entirely up to individuals. Some people give them all away, while others are more selective. Most people seem happy to give them away though. With the current high number of requests, it seems like people who want invites will end up getting them — it might just take some time.
My understanding is invite codes are only given by the admin periodically, so no set frequency or amount of invites expected.
It’s probably staring me in the face, but is there an easy way to get to my profile without having to type out tildes.net/user/3rd_eye? I see settings in the sidebar but not my profile with comments/posts/etc
I found it right after I posted, of course. It’s at the top of the sidebar, click on my username. I had a feeling it was glaringly obvious…
If you click on any username in any thread, that will take you to that user's profile page. That includes your own username. Click on the "3rd_eye" name above your comment here, and that will take you to your profile page. Click on my "Algernon_Asimov" name above this comment, and that will take you to my profile page.
Alternatively, if you're using a computer, you'll see your username in the top-right corner of every screen; that's a clickable link, which takes you to your profile page. If you're using a smaller screen, like a phone, that corner gets hidden inside the sidebar: open the sidebar, see your username, and click on it.
Can we post threads regarding personal health situations in ~health? Not asking for medical advice of course, more along the lines of "here's something I recently learned about managing diabetes, I would like to share this in case it's helpful to someone". Not sure if this would be allowed, because it's not really a discussion so much as just sharing information. Hope that makes sense, thank you.
Yes, absolutely. Discussing your health-related experiences, and trying to help one another in that broader sense, is one of the things that group is for. However, asking for or offering actual medical advice (i.e. pertaining to diagnosis, medications, etc) is a bit more ethically dubious and fraught with issues, as you're clearly aware, and so likely wouldn't be allowed.
thank you so much!
YVW. And welcome to Tildes. :)
Thanks, I am really enjoying it here. It feels very calm :)
The irony is that for many of us older users, right now likely feels the opposite of calm, due to the sudden wave of new faces arriving, and much increased pace of posting. :P
But at least the vast majority of new users seem to have fully embraced the "remember the human" and "don't be an asshole" ethos of the site, so the overall culture hasn't changed too drastically... and everyone's interactions with each other have still been relatively peaceful too, which has been great to see. :)
oh haha yes you guys have a huge influx right now I suppose, I didn't even think about that. Coming from reddit everything feels calm. I have always really valued civil discussion (even if someone is getting worked up and angry at you, to just stay calm and try and connect with them still, usually they will come around!), and I honestly didn't think I could ever find that on the internet... I think that's why I'm so excited to find this place. The last years have been very depressing with regards to interactions, even in real life, because with the political atmospheres it seems like many people get very angry at each other, very quickly. :( So another reason I value finding this.
like you said, i haven't encountered anyone jumping at anyone here, even with a ton of new users so it seems like yeah everyone is respecting this, which is great!! go tildes! :) hopefully you older users will find things back to normal soon!
Huge is a bit of an understatement. :P
I'm glad that you, and so many others have found this place a sanctuary from the aggressiveness and anger so common on the rest of the internet (and real life) now though. We're far from perfect, and still have much room to improve, but it makes me feel proud of what we, as a community, have already managed to accomplish here. :)
Holy crap! That is a massive spike! I know you folks are protective of the culture so I imagine that's been daunting. But seems it is working out. Thank you guys for letting us in.
I actually feel very positively about this. If we can absorb a wave like that without completely distorting the site's culture but mostly merely its activity levels, then I think tildes could actually grow quite fast if we wanted to.
Though I guess that also depends on how you young'uns take to adjust from reddit-brain to being compatible with the culture here to finally being able to advance and implement it yourself. Or in other words: After a surge of active users, how long does it take till we're ready for the next one?
Is this site inspired by tilde.club/the tildeverse? They seem pretty similar.
Not really. But the reason behind using the name is similar for both, since both were inspired by ~ representing the home directory in unix systems. And Paul Ford's Tilde.club is actually mentioned in the docs: https://docs.tildes.net/philosophy/site-design#the-tildes-name
I'm completely new to Tildes, another refugee from Reddit. I'm loving the discussions, the clean layout, all the things that made Reddit great before it was ruined.
My question is: Is Tildes the right home for our community? It seems that the discussion groups are created and managed by the admins, and don't get specialized. That is fine, it is a fundamentally different approach than Reddit, and not necessarily bad. It does seem though that that is the site trying to be more of one big community, rather than allowing groups for individual interests, no?
To get in to specifics, we run r/nudism on Reddit, a SFW sub for nudists to discuss philosophies, rant and rave, leave reviews of different clubs and resorts they've been to, compare notes, etc. It doesn't seem that there is necessarily a place to do that here without creating a new group for it.
Your read is correct that it’s currently more of one big community. That said, there is a community wide discussion ongoing about whether it should subdivide more.
Presently the way you would discuss a topic of specific interest is to use tags. People who aren’t interested can filter it to opt out. For example, you can search for “parenting” to see parent content.
Should probably also link them to that ~tildes.official discussion so they can read it and participate if they want: https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/167q/thoughts_on_making_tildes_groups_more_independent
cc: @HangoverTuesday
Don’t want to open a separate post for this question: I have recently noticed that one of my comment was removed - I am quite sure I didn’t do anything negative in the case and that the parent comment was actually the offending one.
Is there a difference for me to discern between the two cases? I really want to make sure that I didn’t do anything wrong..
That's not too uncommon with removed messages, to have the entire chain cleared. If Deimos didn't send you a message about it then I think you're all good.
i got a comment removed too, in one thread about creating a women-focused group in tildes—maybe you also commented there, i don’t know. i was also scared at first, but apparently the whole chain was nuked. i dm’d Deimos and he reassured me that it was just collateral damage, so i assume it's similar for you (if you did comment there)
New user here. Is there a way to search for a username? I'd love to see if any of my favourite reddit folks may have ended up here.
I'm impressed with the idea and execution of things here so far. Hoping that Tildes would eventually grow large enough to accommodate discussion on niche topics, which is my primary reason for taking part in online conversations vs. real life.
Edit: Thank you everyone for the helpful responses!
There currently isn't a way to search for usernames, but it has been added to the GitLab.
As @mycketforvirrad rightly says, you can't search for usernames.
However, you can check if a username is in use.
Every Tildes user has a user page. Yours is https://tildes.net/user/Lia
To see if a particular username exists on Tildes, just change the "Lia" part of that URL to the username you're checking. If you get "Error 404 (Not Found)", then that username does not exist on Tildes. However, if you get a page showing a user, then that username does exist on Tildes.
You may already have thought of this (though I often notice that non-techies have entirely no idea what a URL is and never bothered to even look at it), but you can always try going to a profile:
https://tildes.net/user/<Username>E.g. for yours: https://tildes.net/user/Lia
I am not one of your favorite reddit folks, but I'm pretty sure I'm the stranger who gave you the Tildes invite yesterday. :) At least that's what I thought based on one of your comments earlier, you sound like the cool person I invited.
Welcome!
Bold of you to assume so! You're the one I was looking for in particular. Thanks for outing yourself and thanks again for the invite. I really love this place and what it stands for.
Can something be done about the site design having width restrictions? Just I have about 500px of blank space either side of the web-page on an Ultrawide monitor and it looks a bit ridiculous.
You could file an issue but it's unlikely to result in a change any time soon. Things have been fairly quiet on Tildes until recently and development on the Tildes software has mostly stopped. It's not usually a problem since it's very stable and works well enough, but it also means we don't get improvements. Maybe use a narrower window for reading Tildes?
It's not unlikely to get changed because of lack of recent Tildes development, it'll probably be due to it generally being considered bad UI design to have unrestricted width for text field heavy webpages. So if some users want the width restriction disabled, them having to use a userscript to accomplish that is probably going to be required. I am currently away from my computer (and about to go to bed) but I can whip one up tommorow, if @DurplePurple or anyone else wants one.
The issue is the amount of whitespace, the large gaps on the sides already are a third of my screen and when combined with the width restriction on comments it means that barely 1/4 of the screen is being used for text creating the effect of a newspaper with only one column which does not improve readability.
Thanks for the offer to create a userscript. Here's an example of what I'm doing with just css edits to widen the default widths.
Oh, if you already know how to live edit the CSS in your browser, and already know what changes you want to make for Tildes to look the way you want it to, then you should be able to make a userscript pretty easily. E.g. Here is a quick one I threw together in Tampermonkey to max the width at 2000px, but you can customize it ever further for yourself.
click to show
Change the 2000px to adjust the width. And you can add more addGlobalStyle lines if you want to, to tweak more elements.
Yeah, just making text fields wider doesn't make much sense. But I imagine a UI designer could do something fancier to use up more horizontal space? Maybe use a media query to go to a three-column layout somehow?
I’m here from Reddit. And I can’t see any comments?? I can see posts and other communities but when I enter one, I can’t see any comments at all. Is this a bug? Or have I somehow not unlocked them?
You should be able to see comments. That's a very strange one. About the only reason I can think of for that happening might be an adblocker acting up? Can you take a screenshot and share it somewhere so I can see what you're seeing (and so I can file a bug report with it attached)?
Looks like it was an adblocker issue! Turned it off for the site and now I’m seeing comments. Thanks for the suggestion!
Heh, no worries. Glad you got it solved. And if it makes you feel any better about disabling your adblocker here / whitelisting the site, Tildes will likely never have advertising. :)
So awesome to hear that!
What’s the best way to read a topic? Is there a way to collapse all top level reply threads so you can jump into a discussion point that feels more relevant?
Also, is there a way to search a thread? For example, in the “what’s you’re favorite old TV show” thread, if I wanted to see if someone already answered “TNG” so I don’t have to start another TNG reply, how could I do that?
There is a
Collapse repliesbutton at the top of every comment section, if that's what you mean.Not via a search function on the site itself, but you can hit CTRL+ F or CMD+F on desktop browsers. And on mobile it will depend on your browser, but for iOS Safari you can click the "action" button (square with up arrow in the middle) and then click "Find in page".
In iOS you can also just type the search term in the URL bar and underneath the main search engine results it will have an option to search in the page for it. No action menu needed.
You learn something new every day. Thanks for teaching me that!
For the first question, I usually read through in order (sorted by relevance), and participate along the way if I want to jump in. Subsequent reads I “Collapse read” at the top and just scroll down to new comments and see which discussions are continuing. Something I sort by new if there’s a large thread I don’t care to follow from the beginning. That allows me to jump in at fresher parts of the conversation that might still be going on.
In regards to searching a thread, I think the best option is the good old fashioned ctrl-f.
I actually do have a question, if longtime users are still watching this thread. Why does clicking "link" to see a comment from my profile seem to be broken? It jumps to an unrelated comment, I hit "back", and then when I click "link" again, it works the second time. This is 100% consistent across all my devices.
EDIT: I lied, it's just Chrome on my S23 (desktop seems fine), and only with "Collapse old comments when I return to a topic" enabled.
My answer to a similar question in another topic:
cc: @gpl
Ah, thanks for the info! It seems like disabling "Collapse old comments when I return to a topic" fixes the issue for me, so maybe I'll have to deal with that.
That would solve it, but I honestly wouldn't recommend doing that. In huge comment sections that feature is a lifesaver. And if you encounter the problem again, you can usually just click 'Expand all' then refresh to actually get taken to the linked comment.
Given all the new donations to Tildes, I suspect we will probably start seeing some more development on the site start happening again though, and I also imagine the permalink system will be reasonably high on the priority list since it was once already considered "in progress". So hopefully the issue won't be around for too much longer anyways.
Just chiming in to say this works for me, so it doesn't appear to be a universal issue. Are you using the same browser across all devices?
Ah, yunno, I lied, it's just with Chrome on my S23. Chrome on desktop works fine. And when I disable "Collapse old comments when I return to a topic", it fixes it. So that seems to be the issue.
Is there a way to filter by tag AND community? If not, is that a feature that might be added in the future? For example I don’t necessarily want to see ask/survey questions for some communities but I do want to see them for others.
Not currently, but the plan was to make tag filtering a lot more granular and configurable like that. And there are already several feature request issues on Tildes Gitlab related to improving the system.
I know that we're supposed to use tags in posts in order to see if more localized / specific groups will be made, but won't that end up adding a lot of what would otherwise be irrelevant noise to the main group in the meantime? Like say I'm trying to find bird watching groups in my local city. Would I go to hobbies and make my post that says "Hey, anyone here in Whitehorse, Yukon know of any local bird watching groups I could join?" and then tag it as canada.yn.whitehorse to see if there's interest?
Meanwhile some guy in another part of the world entirely would see this post in hobbies that would have absolutely nothing to do with him. It seems like a strange way of doing it, though I might be misunderstanding the faq.
(Note, I do not partake in bird watching, nor to I live in Yukon. Though I am sure that is a fun activity and place to live)
Exactly.
That person would notice the "canada" tag, and realise it's not for them.
Even if there was a ~world.canada group for you to post your request for a local bird-watching group, that post would still be shown to people it has nothing to do with: all the Canadians who don't go bird-watching.
However, the non-Canadian bird-watchers in ~hobbies can probably point you toward the relevant international bird-watching federation which has a master list of all local bird-watching groups around the world.
I imagine this would get problematic though if the site ends up scaling up with a lot of users. Do you just filter out specific tags at that point if you get 100 posts about Canada when you show up?
If the site scales up with lots of users, then people will start building the missing features to handle the extra content and sorting and categorising. As I wrote a couple of days ago: "Tildes is still in alpha-testing. It’s an unfinished product."
Makes sense! I'm excited to see how it all turns out. I mostly just wanted to make sure no one was going to jump down my throat if I make several highly specific area posts or something.
Of course not. Go for it!
You might not get many replies from people in your area, given how big the world is and how few people are on Tildes, but don't let that stop you.
I might have missed it, but what do the colored lines mean next to comments? I figured out blue from context, but now I see orange and white. White is OP I think?
The theme previews page has a brief explanation of what every comment stripe color means:
https://tildes.net/settings/theme_previews
My own fault for not scrolling far enough. Thank you!
No worries, and YVW. :)
I'm a reddit refugee but what I've seen most difficult to replace here given my limited time adventuring/exploring is: Are foreign languages supported?
The toll on moderation is obviously difficult but I've seen success in areas involving language learning to geospecific subreddits organize themselves over time. I'm not sure tagging is a solution (unless certain tags aren't surfaced at tilda roots). Ex: ~ask.de
Site Design Doc
As the other response helpfully pointed out from the docs, "not yet".
I think a fair number of us speak multiple languages, and yes I wish so much that local and non English communities have somewhere to go, but the difficulty is that there's a lot of new people and new things going on, tensions are very high and admin is already stretched very thin.
I think perhaps a request to fork tildes so they can do their own thing, with their own dedicated German speaking admin who can more quickly respond and shape their own community culture, would be even better than having it here.
You should post your suggestion here?
https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/167q/thoughts_on_making_tildes_groups_more_independent#comments
I just joined yesterday, and I feel really positive about Tildes already! I wonder, though: I want to share this place with my friends who are also likely to appreciate it here. How long until I can access invites?
To be clear, I'm happy to build trust within in the community first! I'm just really excited about this awesome, new to me place.
The admin, Deimos, gives out invites to users periodically. There’s no set schedule for it, and he generally does it when there’s a need. Given the demand that exists for the site right now, I imagine more invites will come to users in the coming days/weeks.
Aha! Thank you very much. It's kinda nice, in a weird way, that it's controlled in such fashion. I'm on another site I love called Pillowfort, and it's had growing pains, let's just say. I still love the community there, but there have been missteps. It happens.
Ask and you shall receive! Deimos mentioned in his post today that he gave every current user 5 invites, so you should now have some in your account.
I did see that! Thank you very much for taking the time to let me know, though.
Have
you
ever
seen
a
commentthoughtwonderedclick View Markdown
and peek behind the curtain!
The last time I experienced such joy from, and not in spite of, making text difficult to read, was when I came across this.
That details tag is absolutely brilliant
Goddamnit, @kfwyre... now I'm going to have to save my next Exemplary for this comment of yours. Are you happy now!? Exemplary hog! :P
Lol, this comment is better than an exemplary.
Also my comment isn’t exemplary. It’s a hideous formatting mess that takes a simple message and makes it unnecessarily difficult to read! It’s the exact opposite of what we want to promote on Tildes. 🤣
If ~design sees it, they’ll probably just try to have me banned outright for my crimes. Can’t say I blame them.
Hey @Deimos could we have a ~confessions topic with an option to post anonymously
One of the features on the list is to create the option to post under a throwaway name. That way the throwaway account is still tied to your real account for moderation purposes (as well as for the trust/reputation system and other functions gated by account age like labels) but you get a bit of anonymity for sensitive questions.
That way you’ll be able to do anonymous posts within any topic, not just ~confessions.
How can I/am I allowed to set up recurring posts? Weekly megathreads to discuss certain topics that don't really have their own space.
Also, how are groups supposed to grow in the future? Is it supposed to be an ever-branching tree from larger topics to smaller or will more top level groups be added?
I'm enjoying the feel of the site right now, excited to see what the future will hold.
Edit: also, how are new tags generated?
Recurring posts are set by the admin. I don’t believe there’s a way for regular users to create them at the moment.
There are periodic threads to discuss adding new top level groups where people can make proposals. Here is an example. There will likely be a new one soon.
You can make a new tag by just typing in a word that’s never been tagged before in the tag bar. If no auto-suggestion comes up then you’ve created a new tag.
Thank you, I appreciate the info. Take care
It should be noted that there is a Gitlab issue for better supporting user created recurring posts though: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/763
Hello. In the ~arts forum, is this a place where we can share art techniques, tools, questions, etc. (i.e. paint recommendations) or is this mostly for sharing existing art? I guess I mean can we use it as an "artists forum" in a way, or would that be more suited in the ~hobbies forum? Thank you.
~creative is where people share their own work and ~hobbies is more about the techniques and such. ~arts is more like fine arts discussion.
thank you.
I've seen comments about how Tildes is "currently" invite only (though I also see now that the site is five years old, and presumably has been this way the whole time). Has any thought been given to making this permanent? I've been around the internet block a fair bit by now, and I think having a barrier to entry (which doesn't have to be anything extreme, just something more than making an account for yourself and maybe verifying your email address) affects quality of discussion almost as much as a strong moderating team. If it takes some actual effort to join, it will naturally be populated largely by people who want to be there.
Yep, there has been much debate on this over the years. It was originally intended that the site would open up registration eventually, but even how to do that has also been debated. E.g. Some suggested probationary periods for new users. But regardless of all that, nothing was ultimately changed. It still might some day, but it might not. And what those changes might look like if any occur still remains to be seen.
p.s. I am personally of the opinion that requiring invites should remain forever. It's not a very big barrier to entry, and it has a lot of advantages (like bans being far more effective). But I am admittedly a bit biased since I am the person that hands out the majority of the invites in /r/tildes. ;)
I think maybe allowing people to register accounts can open up but then you’d need an invite to actually post, vote, or otherwise participate. Without an invite you’re basically “read only” and can save, ignore, bookmark, etc. And there would be some specific threads (like maybe ones tagged ask.survey) that you can post to.
Hmmm, that's actually a really really interesting idea! And it might just be enough to keep people interested in the site, rather than forgetting about it eventually due to not being able to get an invite to register an account. It would also likely cut down on all the people asking for invites even when all they're interested in is lurking. @Deimos, I know you're probably swamped, so sorry for constantly pinging you, but what are your thoughts on something like this? It would likely help reduce our workloads when it comes to handling the invites, so might be worth considering for that reason alone.
Yeah, I wrote a little about a similar idea the other day. The general idea would be that registration could be open, but a user's first few posts have to be "validated" by (a random subset of?) trusted users before they start showing up for everyone. They're effectively getting an "invite" by showing how they'd contribute.
It would definitely bring up some other issues related to things like vote-brigading since it would be a lot more difficult to validate a users' votes (and I wouldn't want to show those to other users), but it would get rid of the heavy load on people like me and you who have to deal with the floods of invites.
(@NaraVara)
I think the only issue I have with that is, what if their first posts aren't validated (for whatever reason, even technicality ones)? That could feel like a pretty strong rejection to a lot of people, which could actually discourage them from using the site further. Whereas Naravara's idea would allow people to just confortably lurk, without voting, submitting, or commenting, if that's all they wanted to do.
So maybe a mix of the two would be best? Allow users to register for lurking accounts, giving them access to some features, like ignore topic, bookmarks, etc... but then have them have to seek that validation if they wanted to "upgrade" their account in order to participate here?
That would remove the potential brigading issue as well, since lurker accounts wouldn't be able to vote.
Oh, yeah, they'd still be able to do almost everything else on the site that a normal user account can. I'm just thinking that when they first attempt to post topics/comments, it stays hidden by default until some trusted user(s) validate it, and after a few validations they no longer need to go through that process.
There will be some other issues to worry about, like their voting, whether we need to prevent them from sending private messages or any other functions, the potential for open registration meaning that people/bots claim a lot of usernames, etc.
I like the idea of getting more features as a reader. Could we arrange so that readers don't need usernames or passwords at all? Their account data could be stored client-side in the browser. To enable optional account backup to the server and syncing between devices, they could use either a recovery email or one of those new-fangled passkeys.
For becoming a writer, I think the current system is fine. Needing an invite is easy to understand. It's good for rate-limiting entry and I doubt that unrestricted growth will be a good idea any time soon. It means you only need one person to vouch for you, and that seems like plenty for now.
As Tildes grows, knowing someone you can get an invite from will become more common, so it's less of a hurdle. I guess it would make sense to get rid of it when it doesn't really restrict growth anymore?
Hmm so kind of like the old Gawker network's Kinja platform for comments under their articles.
On that platform posts were hidden by default underneath a "view more" bar. This was known as "being in the grays" because your text would be grayed out. Some trusted users were given stars by the site writers and editors. Starred users had their posts visible by default. They could also promote a gray post to visibility by either promoting it or replying to it. (It was generally agreed that allowing posts to get promoted by reply was a mistake because people would troll starred users to get their comments promoted). Over time, if you get enough promotions your contributions get noticed by a site editor who decides to star you.
Kinja was a trash platform. Performance was terrible and it had a weirdly complicated sorting system that nobody understood. Sometimes replies to other comments would show up as top-level comments on their own. It was really strange. But I think the starring system was the kernel of a good idea that needed more consideration.
To add on a bit, I think the rule of thumb with reddit was that, like, 1-3% of redditors actually post content and a little under 10% ever post comments. The other 90% do neither, not sure what percentage votes vs. doesn't vote on content though.
Yep. It's actually been formally studied, and even has a name too; The 90-9-1 rule.
How can I make tildes? As in, the symbol. I tried to write "about three" as "~three" but that renders as a link to the Tildes group "three". Putting a backslash in front does not escape it. Making an illegal escape character like ~\three just renders the backslash literally, and escaping the backslash predictably renders one backslash as well.
The formatting help mentions the tilde syntax but not how to disable/circumvent it. Is it possible?
Edit: the good old bbcode workaround that I discovered in the 2000s works here as well :-) albeit with html/markdown of course:
~<b></b>threeworks. Is there an official way to do it that might not break in the future, though?I typically use a zero width joiner (https://emojipedia.org/zero-width-joiner/) in between the symbol and text to avoid triggering things like that when I don't want to. E.g. ~three, or @lucg.
Edit: WTF... @Deimos is this a new bug or am I am idiot and am doing something wrong? I can't seem to get the below markdown to work properly:
zero width joiner
https://emojipedia.org/zero-width-joiner/
Linking it normally, works, but the []() markdown keeps leading to
https://tildes.net/user/https://emojipedia.org/zero-width-joiner/event though that's not what's inside the (), instead of going to the emojipedia domain.Edit: now the above is pointing to this topic after I editing something else in this comment... but it definitely went to /user/ before, since I have that in my browser history... WTFception.
Edit2: OOoooooh. When clicking the link from inside this comment section it leads to ~tildes/i5my/ but when inside my own profile it leads to /user/. That actually makes sense.
ZWJ sounds useful as well, though harder to type (probably need to remember a unicode index for linux and on android it'll be impossible with any ordinary keyboard).
Weird that you can't link that domain, let me try: test to emojipedia -- seems to work for me? Did you use a ZWJ somewhere in that tag?
Huh... I must have somehow accidentally put a ZWJ in my previous attempts to write the markdown and not noticed... LOL! Thanks for trying it out. Copying your markdown works fine though.
Now I'm curious about where exactly the ZWJ is hidden in my previous attempts, and why that results in going to the /user/ directory though. :P
normal test
test with ZWJ before https
(leads to https://tildes.net/~tildes/15my/%E2%80%8Dhttps:/emojipedia.org/zero-width-joiner. WTF?)
test with ZWJ after https:// (is just broken entirely)
How the heck did I get it pointing to /users/?
I am definitely going to have to play around with this some more in ~test. :P
If you're on some unix-like system, you can copy the text and paste it in a program like xxd or hd or hexdump to find out where the funny character hides.
On Windows I guess notepad++ probably shows unprintables (or maybe that's a setting?) but it has been a long time since I used that
Ah, thanks. When I get back to my computer I will copy my broken original markdown into notepad++ and see if I can get it to reveal what's going on.
p.s. You don't have to manually type the ZWJ, or use the ALT-# Unicode character method though. emojipedia allows you to just click copy to copy the character to your clipboard, even on mobile, then you can simply paste it into the reply box here. That's how I do it.
Yeah sure, let me go and open another website to copy a single character, like that's not inconvenient :P
For something that I regularly need, I'd prefer being able to just make it with the tools at hand. But yeah, if not possible, this is indeed a last resort, plus this escaping mechanism is not really necessary most of the time.
This is also sorta hackish... but you could possibly use HTML (like <b>) to get around it too. E.g.
~<b></b>three= ~threeEdit: Yep, that works. :P
p.s. There are already Gitlab issues to fix this, so the markdown escape character \ stops the string from parsing as a link:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/595
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/686
by the way, i know this is kinda offtopic, but is there an issue on gitlab for text boxes to have Ctrl+b for bold, Ctrl+i for italics, i.e. keyboard shortcuts for formatting like RES (or maybe default reddit? no idea) does? if there is one i couldn’t find it. i think that feature is absolutely wonderful
There is an issue for adding a dropdown menu with common markdown/html elements used in comments: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/651
I could have sworn there was a Gitlab issue for keyboard shortcuts, since it has been discussed before. But apparently not. Weird. Added to Gitlab now: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/778
cheers!~
Oooh nice, I was thinking of HTML entities also but then got sidetracked by something else I guess. Good to know those work!
What is the actual effect of labeling comments as jokes?
From the docs:
I like this approach. It make sure that, while funny comments are still welcome, they won't always float to the top of discussions—where, y'know, discussion should take place. Disincentivizing low-effort participation is a plus, in my book.
EDIT: Removing the redundant link to/quote from the docs as @cfabbro beat me to the punch. Leaving my 2¢, however, because I do support the concept.
EDIT2: Whoops, added back now. Heh.
Hah, I just deleted my comment because I thought yours was actually better, since mine was just the quote from the docs. So you can add it back if you want to. :P
Added back! Thanks for the response so that I could make another edit, haha.
On long topics, how do i go back to top page? Would be great to have a scroll to top button.
The Home key on your keyboard will take you to the top of a page, if on desktop. Double tapping the very top of the screen on iOS will do the same. And on android I'm not sure since I don't own one.
There is a feature request for adding a "jump to top" button on Tildes Gitlab though.
I'm on a mac, don't have home key. Is there any other keyboard command? I have an iphone, i'll try that on mobile.
Apparently on a Mac, Fn + Left Arrow is the equivalent to the Home key. But I don't have a Mac, so can't test it.
That's it. Thanks
I am personally a fan of mouse gestures and have the "up" gesture bound to going to the top of the page. Since the web is mainly mouse-based anyway, dragging a short line upwards anywhere on the page using the right mouse button is much quicker than going for the keyboard.
But a simpler solution is to just drag the scroll bar up? Since your system apparently doesn't have a home button and mouse gestures would also be a thing to get in the habit of
I admit I haven't RTFM, but what's the general meaning of voting? Is it more of an "I agree" or a "this is a good contribution"?
A little from column A, a little from column B. I tend to vote on comments even if I don't necessarily agree with them so long as the comment was well written and the user presented their opinions well.
Pretty sure it's meant to be the latter, but you know how it goes. I just vote on my own definition and if others vote based on any other criterion (hypothetically, one might they like to see roasts) then I can't help that
How do I create wiki pages? I'd like to start something under the sports group and have it repeat once a month, but I don't know how to do it or who to talk to for making it a reality.
I honestly can't remember if everyone can create new wiki pages or if it requires special permission from @Deimos. Do you see a "Create new wiki page" option here: https://tildes.net/~sports/wiki
BTW, if you want to do a recurring topic in ~sports, you can... just use the recurring (.weekly, .biweekly, or .monthly) topic tag on your submission. If it gets popular and participation is high each time, it may even be added to the automatically posted scheduled topics.
I don't.
Ah, okay. Then yeah, Deimos has to manually approve people in order for them to create wiki pages. Ask him nicely, explain what you want to create, and he may give you permission, @GalileoPotato. He is probably a bit swamped right now, handling invites, moderating, and the Gitlab merge requests though, so be patient.
I'll approach him sometime in the future. Thank you cfbarro 👍
Are bots allowed on Tildes? For example, if I wanted to create a ChatGPT bot that was clearly labeled as such, would that be acceptable?
Like @cfabbro said, some people are in favour of bots on Tildes, and some people aren't.
I'm one of those who is not in favour of bots on Tildes. Very strongly so.
What would be the point of an autocomplete bot like ChatGPT? How would that contribute to discussions here?
Many people enjoy interacting with ChatGPT, finding it to be illuminating, useful, or just fun. Seeing how it behaves in a multi-user environment is particularly interesting. That said, if it’s not wanted here, I totally understand.
We've talked about this in the past, and some people were in favor, others were not. However, one popular idea was to require bots to register themselves using bot specific accounts, so people would be able to easily filter them out if they didn't want to see them. And I personally think that would be a good compromise.
Thanks. I'd be happy to follow any such rules, but it sounds like I should wait for now.
NP. And yeah probably for the best, at least for now. Once the block user feature gets implemented, then I think it might open up the possibilities for bot experimentation. But as it stands right now, unfortunately people would have no way to filter them out if they don't want to see them.
I wouldn't want to see a bot posting all over the place, but there are other ways to use ChatGPT that I'd be okay with:
If you're discussing ChatGPT itself, such as in a topic that's about how to use it, pasting a short example as a quote should be fine. For longer content, ChatGPT now allows you to share a link to a transcript, so I would do that instead. It allows other people to pick up where you left off, too, which could be fun.
I would find it annoying and kind of spammy to see ChatGPT content posted as-is in a topic that's not about ChatGPT. Posting "look at what ChatGPT wrote, isn't it amazing" isn't as novel as some people seem to think.
Using it as a writing tool is kind of a grey area - maybe okay as long as you stand behind it? If you've edited the output enough that it reads like you wrote it yourself and it doesn't seem to be a bot at all, then how you got there doesn't matter to me. And if you did a good enough job while editing it, how would we even know?
But if you do that, make sure you check all the facts because ChatGPT will make stuff up. Done properly, it doesn't seem easier than writing the post yourself, but it might be a better one in the end.
Question: Is there a way to browse only exemplary comments? such as ~exemplary
Intent: I want to speak less here and listen more, and I want to get a better feel of the existing "desired" culture
Answer: No.
Longer answer: That feature hasn't been built yet.
Even longer answer: I don't think anyone has requested functionality like this. I just checked the issues list, and there doesn't seem to be a request for people to be able to search for comments by their labels. If you want this feature, you'll have to make a proper request to get it added to the list, and it might appear at some unspecified future time.
I feel like the site, or maybe Deimos, might have talked about this in the past? Maybe I’m just remembering my own feelings on it? I’m genuinely not sure, but I seem to recall the idea of having something like an ~exemplary feed would be a negative because it would encourage the decontextualization of individual comments. Given how much damage context collapse has done elsewhere online, I get the sense that even highlighting the best comments in isolation could end up being a bad thing.
Hello. I can we post threads in languages other than English? Or is this an English-only forum (so that everyone can understand I guess?)
Currently Tildes is english only.
You should post your suggestion here? https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/167q/thoughts_on_making_tildes_groups_more_independent#comments
Oh, thought I responded to this but maybe i didn't. Thank you, it makes sense, that way everyone can understand all the threads. Not sure if anyone would be up for smaller niche communities for different languages, i'll give it a shout out, but understand if it wouldn't fit here.
Could anyone tell me how to find my bookmarks
If you go to your user page (by clicking your name in the top right corner) it’s the second link on the sidebar under Profile.
Your bookmarks can be found here.
There doesn’t appear to be a function of “down voting”. Just wanted to be sure I’m not dumb and missing it.
It's intentional. Once you've been a member for a week you'll be able to tag comments as Offtopic, Noise, Joke, or Malice, if you think one of those descriptors applies, but there's nothing equivalent to the downvote. Each of those tags has an effect on how the comment is seen, so there is an effect, but there's only upvotes here.
to expand on @MimicSquid’s reply, the only label that shows up publically is “Examplary”. and the wiki page Commenting on Tildes explains the effect of each label in detail~
I love the mobile site but I’m frustrated with the amount of opened Tildes tabs. I’m using a “Add to Home screen” shortcut in iOS and I’ve unticked the “open in new tab” options for my Tildes account. Is there any way to have safari open Tildes in the same tab?
I tried it out, and it looks like the problem is with the "Add to Home screen" shortcut in iOS. It opens a new tab each time, but once you're interacting with Tildes in that tab, Tildes itself doesn't open any more. I have no idea if there's a way to change the iOS behavior though, sorry.
Thank you ! I’ll try and get around it with Shortcuts
So I am not sure whether I am misunderstanding the message function. Is it possible to send a message without typing it where others can see?
Regardless, my immediate question is here. It was mentioned in a thread that I cannot now find that Admin might appreciate help distributing invitations to highly motivated redditors. I have seen a lot of them in the past few days and would be happy to help if that is desired.
If you want to send someone a message that only they will see you can send them a private message. Go to their profile (e.g. @cfabbro) and click ‘send a private message’.
Also, I’m not an admin on Tildes, but I do handle the /r/tildes invite rounds for Deimos (the sole admin here). I genuinely appreciate the offer for assistance, but we are trying to strictly control growth right now (to avoid the site getting overwhelmed with new users) so we don’t need any help with sending out invites at this time. Thanks for the offer though. :)
So, there seems to be some sort of autoformatting for posts where metadata like information that it is an article or a video becomes part of what you see before clicking into it. Would it be possible to do the same thing for links posted in comments? It is helpful to know before clicking into a video, especially on mobile.
That would have to be implemented by Deimos and might be outside the scope of what he wants (since comments are the domain of their author rather than the site itself), but I could definitely see the benefit to having some sort of built in marker to distinguish, say, video 🎥, article 🔤, or PDF 📜links (I’m 100% spitballing with the emoji, by the way — I think there’s a better way to do it but I don’t know what that is). Cool idea.
@Deimos, sorry to bother you but would the idea in the comment above be feasible?
It's probably possible, but there would be some complexity to it, and it would greatly increase the amount of scraping Tildes needs to do for what feels like some pretty minimal benefits. Most of the scraped data wouldn't be usable in comments, and it wouldn't even necessarily solve your problem, since there are plenty of "text" links to articles and such that actually have an auto-playing video or some other source of sound in them.
If you're worried about the destinations/types of links, it's probably best to get in the habit of long-pressing links instead of tapping them so that it shows you what the destination will be, and then you can only actually follow the link when you're comfortable with the destination site.
Not Deimos, but I do know that Tildes uses Embedly Extract to scrape metadata from articles. And IIRC Tildes is using a free, "non-profit" tier account with Embedly... and so I'm not sure the free tier would allow for that sort of volume of scraping for every link in the comments here as well.
Do you have another idea? It's not fatal to my use of the website, but inadvertently opening a video when on mobile can be noisy and disruptive in the wrong situation. Anyway, it would be nice to have, but i understand if you can't.
How do you deal with that problem on other sites? Reddit doesn't have metadata for comment links, does it? Not saying it's a bad idea though, and I have added it to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/803
(where those smarter than I may be able to come up with a workable solution)
Reddit completely fails to address this problem lol. I got excited by the possibility when I saw the metadata on the Tildes top level posts.
Ah, gotcha. I'm not much of a mobile user, but I still agree it would be a nice feature to have. So hopefully someone smarter than me can figure out a workable solution to add that as a feature. :)
I miss having pictures.