Tildes invite session call to arms
Hi all,
I just took a look at the Tildes subreddit after the recent announcements, and there are tons and tons of invite requests there. I just wanted to draw the site's attention to that as right now it seems like mostly @cfabbro (and probably @Deimos behind the scenes) handling them. I almost never use my invites, so I intend to go through and send out my 10 and help with the backlog a bit. I would encourage you all to do the same as well! Some good practices;
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Reply to users once you have sent so that we do not double up, and can reach the most people with finite invites.
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As always, be mindful of who you are inviting, and take a cursory look at their post history to make sure there are no crazy red flags. We are all responsible for the community we build here, so be mindful of who you are inviting!
We're pretty much all caught up on invite requests in /r/tildes now... in no small part thanks to all y'alls help. And now they're trickling in at a rate I should easily be able to handle in just a few minutes a day... unless someone mentions Tildes somewhere major again and it spikes.
So, thanks again everyone!!! I really do appreciate the help. ❤️
Okay. Finally all done. Phew! Invite Request Round is locked now too, and the next invite round probably won't be created until the weekend... so I can finally take a break and go play some Diablo IV. :P
Thanks again for all your help, everyone. :)
I went over to watch the drama and saw Tildes got some high profile attention on AskReddit. We should be careful to balance an influx of quality users against an eternal September scenario.
Yup totally agree. The invite system does a pretty good job of mitigating that I think. Even if everyone who is active uses their invites, I think we would barely increase the user base here by like 10%
@cfabbro: Would it be possible to edit your post where the invite requests are popping up to ask requesters to give a little info about themselves, like just 1 or 2 sentences? I'm loathe to make asking for a request feel like college applications or something, but it'd be helpful to get a little info up front so it's easier to figure out whose profiles we should check.
I just started doing this today. I have no idea what criteria to use, so it's "posts anything interesting and nothing too creepy." My process is: I click on a username at random and scroll down for a while (past all the video game comments, usually) to see if they've written anything interesting. Then I go back and reply with "sending an invite," followed by sending a direct message with the link.
(In that order because I'm a former computer programmer and care about race conditions. :)
Given that the process you described is my exact same one, in order to avoid potential conflicts we should agree on a protocol on our end to DM each other who we're going to send invites to, and ACK appropriately. Maybe with some idempotency keys…
I was thinking I should reload the page after replying to check for another reply, but hadn't thought about what I'd do if there were one. Last write wins?
Let's use a blockchain
Can't wait for that Tildes Token ICO
And it turns out the bug was in the "make sure you don't send the same invite code more than once" code.
Best start using OFFERs and REQUESTs before the ACK, maybe that'll do the trick. I've never had any problems with DHCP before.
I delete my Reddit account regularly out of privacy concerns. How would you judge someone with essentially no history?
I would typically give them the benefit of the doubt. Plenty of people don’t post at all anyway. Doing cursory checks it’s really more about looking for red flags (i.e. reasons not to let someone in) rather than green flags.
I don’t know since I only gave out a handful of invites and it didn’t come up. But I guess you got in? Welcome!
Thank you! Looking for quality alternatives. I’m hopeful this will turn out well.
You sent a code to me I think (assuming your username is the same there). Thanks so much!
This is exactly my process as well. Random choice, scan for good engagement / no unsociable posting, send an invite.
Oh. I've got like 80 sitting in the bank :P
Those are rookie numbers. I've got 758.
I gotta pump up my numbers
I've been here since May 2018, and I still only have 10 invites...
I only got 1k because I used to mod with Deimos, and he needed help sending out invites in April 2018. The people who got invited in that first big round then all received 10 invites themselves to invite more people. If you ever need more, it shouldn't be a prob (within reason). I'm down to 690 now.
I don't have any invites. I just joined, so maybe I get them later?
How long does it take before invites start being generated for a user?
Do you have a link? I’d be curious to read about it.
I was already asked for an invite not in a nicely way, I strongly suggest screen profile first before giving out an invite.
I turn my back for a few hours to play some Diablo IV and look what y'all do!!! Thanks for the help everyone. I really do appreciate it. It's was very thoughtful and kind of you all to offer your assistance, and take the time to hand out your precious invites to others in the invite thread. :)
Don't worry too much about it though. I have a rather high tolerance for repetitive tasks, and have handled much bigger waves than this in the past. It'll take me a few days to get through them all (esp because of the new, and more aggressive PM rate-limiting, and longer timeouts at 1-2 min every time), but I will get through them all eventually, nonetheless.
p.s. Since a few of you seem to be discussing how best to vett users, it's worth noting that I don't actually do that anymore myself. Why? Because even when I did it to pretty much every single user who requested an invite on /r/tildes back in the day, I only ever wound up ignoring about 0.001% of those users due to something I saw in their profiles. And the vast majority of the time it wasn't because they were an obvious bigot or anything like that, it was because they were an obvious spammer (which isn't hard to spot, even with the most cursory of inspection, i.e. opening their profile and giving it a glance before sending a PM). ;)
But since you're all discussing it, here was my process. It's not super thorough (since I often had hundreds, sometimes thousands of invites per day to get through), but I think it still did a pretty decent job:
It requires moderator toolbox to be installed.
I used to click on the user's history overview through mod toolbox, just to get a sense of where they frequently posted. I think you can all guess which subreddits were potential red flags.
Then I loaded their user profile, sorted their comments by controversial, and skimmed about a page worth. Red flags were seeing slurs, insults, and any blatant bigtory in their comments. Although I always made sure to click on the context pop-up and read that first before judging them to give people the benefit of the doubt, and because a comment stripped of context never tells you the whole story.
Then I sorted their submissions by controversial and did a quick scan for likewise.
If I saw any subreddits in their history that were red flags I would often filter their history by those to see what they were doing there (since sometime people active in a subreddit aren't there because they support them, just the opposite).
Depending on what reds flag there were, if any, and how serious they were, I would then decided whether to send an invite or not. But again, the vast majority of the times I ignored a request it was because the user was an obvious spammer, and not because of anything else. And, as I also said before, in total I probably only ignored 1 out of every 1000 requests. And, of the however many thousand people I have invited to Tildes over the years, I don't think more than a handful have ever been banned.
BTW, another of the main reasons I stopped vetting users is because I realized how unfair it was to judge someone that way. The users who are most active have the most for you to rifle through, and when trying to look for red flags, they're likely to have a few even if they're a generally good person, just because of the volume of their activity. Whereas users without a ton of history often get a free pass because of that lack of things for you to judge. So in the end I decided to just stop vetting entirely. I would rather just give people the benefit of the doubt than spend hours rifling through profiles looking for dirt. That and I also trust Deimos to bring the banhammer down hard and swiftly on any bigots that show themselves, as he has done many times in the past.
new refugee here
care to comment on sources of previous waves? Just curious
thank you for this thoughtful response. It really gives me some insights to your thinking process which I am so far seeing reflected in this site: careful, but generous and hopeful. That you would spend the time to consider someone's conversational context even in their most controversial comments is very telling.
Oh, y'know, the usual BS. Mostly Reddit HQ making yet another boneheaded decision. It's honestly all a blur at this point though, so I'm having a hard time remembering exactly what events in the past set things off. :P
We avoided opening up the floodgate for the ones where the users migrating away were likely not the right kind of people for Tildes though, like when TD got banned.
haha, yes, I guess this isn't your first rodeo and not Reddit's only infraction.
This one feels a little different to me, finally motivated me enough to leave my 15 year old account behind.
It's great to hear you folks have weathered thru previous "Septembers" though. Like this thread, calling to arms for everyone to pitch in to help.
Yeah it really does feel a bit different this time. And I think the sheer amount of 10 and even 15+ year old accounts (like yours) asking for invites is very telling. The age of the accounts in general is honestly kind of staggering. Of the 500 or so invites I have sent out over the last 24 hours already, the average account age was probably around 7 years. And the overwhelming amount of "thanks" type replies I am getting after sending out an invite is telling as well, IMO. In the past I would not typically get many of those in return.
p.s. I wish I could reply to all the thanks replies I'm getting, but unfortunately with my PMs constantly getting me timed out, I can't afford to waste my precious replies while I still have so many invites left to send. So if you, or anyone else reading this is sent me a "thanks", please know that I would have liked to reply "YVW! :)" like I normally do, but I simply can't afford to risk doing that and getting another timeout. :(
As a 10yr+ redditor myself who got an invite, I also wanted to say thank you. I haven't been poking around here much yet, but I remember already how much I missed the smaller community feel.
I invited someone with a 17 year old account.
What staggers me is the amount of 10+ year old accounts... that still actively add meaningful comments.... I didn't realize so many of us still existed.
12 year account here who also sent a thank you PM lol. Just got the invite an hour ago and tildes is so refreshing. It reminds me of the best bits (the interesting civil discussions) of old reddit.
Thanks for letting us humble refugees join this community. Rediquette got forgotten a long time ago, but the philosophy behind tildes seems very strong here. Us old timers know what happens when you don't stick to the site philosophy so I'm sure we'll be able to fit right in.
Yeah, I think most of the new users will fit right in. And the amount of people even mentioning reading the docs in their replies to the invites, like you did, is very encouraging too. ;)
I've got some time to kill tonight and wouldn't mind handing out a few more, but I'm out of invites. You would happen to be able to replenish, now would you? ;)
@Deimos, can you top @gpl up please?
I have 9000+ left, but I don't know if he would be okay with me spamming a shit ton and giving them to people here via PM. If he's cool with that, I can do it though. It would definitely still be faster than me having to send them to everyone requesting them myself, and constantly getting timed out in the process. :P
Check DMs.
At some point in the past I made a habit of deleting my Reddit accounts because I had a near miss of a doxxing attempt. So I started to just delete and recreate accounts after a year or so as a way to avoid having too much identifiable information accumulating in the comment history.
Which is to say, even the young accounts might be long-time redditors like me.
Yeah, I don't usually assume a newer reddit account means a newer redditor either, because of that. But that's also why the age of all the accounts asking for invites is even more surprising. I'm up to about 700 invites sent now, and the average account age still feels around 7 years old, maybe even a bit higher. It's kinda crazy.
E.g. The last ten invites I sent out the accounts were 12, 2, 12, 5, 14, 1, 9, 12, 6, 7 years old. O_o
Another random sample: 13, 9, 6, 11, 4, 10, 12, 6, 10, 11, 5, 10. So I think reddit actually fucked up big this time, and angered a lot of old users this time. Not quite as many as it would if they killed old.reddit but still a fair few.
p.s. Doing this slows down my invite sending so I avoid getting a timeout. ;) Since it appears to be a really simplistic rate limit. I would assume X# of PMs in 5min, since I am getting timeouts ranging from 1-4min depending on how fast I work. And after the timeout expires it starts over again.
10 year old account checking in. Killing 3rd party apps that we have been using for years is what prompted me. I know out of my friends group I'm the only one of us that also used reddit on the computer.
Yep! 12 years here but I requested an invite on an account I made a little over a year ago. There are dozens of us!
I'm about to use my last two invites as well but can keep handing them out if I get a top up.
Thats presuming everyone was using their original account, I purged my old account that was created before Digg v4. Sending a thanks from here instead!
Ha, you were the one who just invited me! Thank you!
I love how your username on reddit is "totally not cfabbro". Very sneaky.
;)
Thank you! I believe you were the one who sent my invite. 11+ yr w an active reddit account, over 15yrs if you include lurking, and digg before that. I am already so impressed with the thoughtfulness of everyone here. While I love cats pix as much as any internet citizen, I appreciate the deeper discussions that make up the backbone here.
12 year old account, checking in! 👋
welcome.... Glad to see you here, but sad to experience why you and I are here.
My apologies, getting a little sentimental here. Being a refugee and welcoming slightly newer refugees is something I've been doing in meat space for the last few years....I just....didn't expect an old digital space to go the same way. Mind, Hong Konger have legitimate fears of imprisonment, whereas Reddit refugees are fleeing from ads about cute cats.
Yeah it's really not the same thing but I can see why the mind thinks similar thoughts. It's weird, especially because I was there on digg - even though I didn't make a reddit account for a while - when it imploded and everyone went to reddit. So it's not like I didn't see something very similar before.
Ah well. Happy it's not something IRL.
Two different accounts since 2012 also checking in. Very grateful that there was a good option to switch to. It almost felt like I was in a time machine when I first visited this site lol. In a good way of course!
12 year account here too - I joined Tildes back in 2018 but haven't posted much since then. Looks like I'm back!
Yep, absolutely agreed. This is like the /r/ProCSS protest 6~7 years back, or even bigger. It's given me the same motivation to leave my 7 year old account behind. This is, to me, reddit's worst infraction yet, and it's absolutely about time to jump ship.
I'm gonna be turning some of my subreddits private.
@Deimos, thank you a lot for the invite!
I like it, I'm checking up on some post histories and sending some invites now. Glad you included the bit about checking their post history. Great idea!
I'm too new here. I can't generate invite links. I'm guessing there's some down time between being invited and being able to invite.
Probably a good thing.
FYI, https://redditmetis.com/ is a good tool for vetting a profile before sending them an invite.
I'm off to ban myself based on my account's results.
I just came to the exact same conclusion. I've been looking through comment histories and thinking "naw, I'm not comfortable inviting this person" and then realized I probably wouldn't have invited myself.
I was proud to be 87% wholesome, until I looked at my least wholesome comment:
The precious thing is turning quite a blind eye to my account's 13 year history.
Lol, I would love to know what metrics it's using. Regardless that is a lovely comment, welcome to Tildes!
Putting myself on it just crashes the tool.
I don't know whether that's an omen.
My least wholesome comment:
My most wholesome comment:
I am confused hahaha
I chortled.
I just look at the profile and scroll through comments from the last year and submission history. I don't try to go too deep in the past (because either way, ancient behaviour is not reflective of what the user will be like now).
I got myself all worked up digging through some of the profiles. Not necessarily stuff they posted but adjacent comments got pretty toxic. I'm reminded of why I left the site.
Yeah I’m honestly surprised when I see people with my account’s age still active on the site.
It’s not just the community. Reddit always hated its own users. Killing third party apps is just one more nail in that coffin. I always refused to jump onto third party apps because of that… why go through hoops to stay on a website that actively hates you?
Oh. Well okay then. That's pretty enlightening.
I'll go now...
Thanks to @cfabbro for the invite! I hope to be a positive addition to the community. Until I'm more familiar with the culture, I think it would be wise for me to hold off on inviting others. I look forward to learning a lot about this new community.
I thought about doing this, but I'm a little worried about inviting random people when their behavior here could reflect on me. Only so much you can do with a quick check of people's post history.
I haven't been on Tildes in a long while, but I figured I'd do my part and get some invites out as well.
Got mine from opheron (thanks) and I fully support lurking Reddit history to weed out creepy freaks and freaky creeps
Just invited 9 people! (Saved one code in case I screwed up an invite)
I've been vetting people by briefly scrolling through their profile and these looked like nine interesting posters. Excited to see if they're here for the long-term :)
Oh wow, lots of demand eh. I tried to dm a few people after checking their post history but everyone seems to have DMs closed :/ or maybe I’m missing something from the mobile site.
Given the attention, let’s write a welcome post tomorrow maybe?
I would but I’m off to bed in a moment.fuck itI sent a few and didn't get any error notifications from my third party client, and I did get a few replies back. But there are waaaay more requests than I anticipated.
I just don’t have a dm button on any profile I look at.
Maybe hidden in settings? Otherwise your account might be too new or something.
Edit: Well your account is definitely not too new lol
Ok it looks like the button is just absent on mobile. I can do it on desktop site.
cfab got me here. thanks bro
Sure, I can do that. No prob.
I've sent half of my invites (a total of 10) to people who has had a reddit account for at least a few years, assuming they don't have any red flags in their comment and submission history.
I wasn't able to reply to the people I've sent my invites to though, due to reddit's spam protection.
I have invited:
joestaen, dashingdon, Saylar, rottenworms, and Democrab.Thanks! I will look for these posts and remove them.
My pleasure! I hope they all contribute positively to our little community here.
If you sort the comments as new, you'll see them.
Sent out 8 of my invites. Saving two for IRL friends
So I finally got around to remembering to do this while also at my computer instead of mobile. Have we settled on a protocol? I see a bunch of requests on there, a few of which have replies like "dm sent."
I used the reddit analyzer on a user and they seem fine, but don't want to step on toes or duplicate efforts. . .
If you send an invite just leave a reply saying so! @cfabbro and I (and others) have been sending invites and removing posts afterwords. So if you see a comment that is still up, and doesn’t have any replies, it means they haven’t gotten an invite yet. Thanks!
@cfabbro, the thread is locked, I was about to DM some peeps with invites, let me know how I can help...
Yeah, after a conversation with Deimos, the latest Invite Request Round topic has been locked now to give the old users a break from onboarding, and give all the new users time to acclimatize before inviting more.
I forgot that others were handing out invites too, and it would disrupt that though. Oops! :P
But don't worry about it too much. I should be able to bang out all the remaining requests in a few hours. If you or anyone else here sent out invites but weren't able to reply with "Sent" don't worry about that either. Accidentally doubling up on a handful won't do much harm.
Let me know if you want help, I think I have about 50 invites left, you would just need to temporarily add me as a mod who can post to locked threads.
Thanks for the offer. If we open up another round this weekend and get absolutely swamped again I will keep your offer in mind, and probably take you up on it then. :P
For sure.
I deleted my reddit account some time back, would my invite codes be helpful to another Tildo willing to invite new people?
I’m in the same situation, but I wasn’t sure if passing invite codes to others is allowed. If it is, I’m also happy to pass my 10 invites to someone who can hand them out on reddit.
If it is allowed I would be willing to use both of your invites. Maybe better wait to get other input though.
I know this is creating work, but would you be up for creating a throwaway account to dole them out? With all of these invites heading out the door I'd be grateful to have thoughtful folks like you deciding who gets one. I'm having a hard enough time trusting myself!
I’d rather not, but if it turns out to be necessary then I’m happy to help. I’m booked until Sunday anyway, so I’ll wait until then to see if the tide is still high.
That's totally fair! I was too quick to circle the wagons. I read cfabbro's methods of dealing out invites and I realize how his assumption of best intent and openness is why Tildes is the way it is. Sorry!
Also in this boat. I guess we could create a login just to invite.
I think they throttle new accounts with limited karma?
Might be worth creating a TotallyNotNoblePath account on reddit tho, just for the invites?
You can send DMs to people with new accounts, I think. Just might not be able to post on the subreddits with low karma.
How can I know I'm not sending an invite to someone that already got it?
I make sure to reply "messaged!" in the thread whenever I respond to an invite request, so everyone knows they've been sent a link.
If there's no indication whether they've been sent a link, I'd just go ahead and PM one. Hopefully they'll let you know if they already got one :)
Inviters have generally replied to requests after sending invites to avoid doubling up.
I've PM'd people asking if someone had already invited them. That, and repeatedly refreshing the invite request post to check for replies.
Sent out my 10 :) had no idea this is happening
I will chuck my 10 invites into the pot. If it gets approved I can distribute others' invites too.