Does Tildes *want* Reddit 'refugees'?
The Reddit company is screwing up and upsetting a lot of their "power users" and mods. A lot of people are fed up with Reddit, and are possibly ready to move on to a new platform.
Is Tildes that platform? I've lurked here for most of Tildes' life, and from that, my impression is that Tildes does not especially want to replace Reddit. A lot of people here like the small, intimate atmosphere. I've even noticed a bit of derision toward Reddit's lowbrow appeal.
The reason I ask is because there are communities on Reddit that I don't want to see die. /r/Permaculture and /r/composting are some of my favorite places. I've gotten to know quite a few people who also frequent those places and I've come to enjoy the tone of conversations there.
But this seems like an important question for Tildes to answer not just for my sake. Reddit is full of niche communities like this. If they have to go somewhere suddenly (and I realize that this is a big "if"), where do they go? I know that they technically can't come here suddenly--slowing growth is one of Tildes' features. But if Reddit's niche communities decided to move here, would you welcome them? I'm interested in what you, personally, think, as well as how you think Tildes as a whole would handle this.
P.S. I'm also sorta asking for permission to invite /r/Permaculture and /r/composting over here. I like this website, but I'm just a lurker, and don't feel like I'm part of the Tildes community. It feels super presumptuous to invite my friends over here without asking. But I think the wider question is more important. Do you, and does Tildes, want Reddit's 'refugee' niche interest communities?
Edit: Thank you all for the excellent responses! I don't have time now to respond individually, but I really appreciate the thought so many of you have put into your replies. This will help a lot in considering how to proceed over on Reddit.
As long as Tildes doesn't lose sight of "Don't be an asshole" as one of its primary principles, it's all good.
It feels reductive to express this way but I really think that's such an important principle. One of the things I don't enjoy about the modern internet is how accepting of assholes it has become. It used to be that trolling was tongue-in-cheek and ironic but at some point it turned into a twisted virtue of being "online".
It manifests in different ways, from concern trolls to "dunk" culture to line-by-line responses. Places like reddit and Twitter encouraged this behaviour as a way to get ahead of the noise and stand out. I've posted before about how some of the growing pains of coming into Tildes from reddit means trying to rewire my own brain's communication habits to be less like it has been molded by the social media culture at large over the past decade and go back to what it used to be in the earlier days of pre-social media internet. Back when long form comments were desired, and were regularly more informational or entertaining or insightful than they have been in our "140 characters is brevity and therefore wit" era.
Of course the growing pains are real. It's hard to let go of emotions and feelings that overtake us when we see a comment or an idea we don't like after years of being trained like attack dogs. Lord knows I step back into that role sometimes, even all these years later. And I think this is where we return to the "Don't be an asshole" principle. It's not absolutist, it doesn't mean no arguments or don't have feelings. We're all the asshole sometimes (unless you're a saint like @kfwyre) but "Don't be an asshole" to me has always meant "Learn to be better tomorrow" as much as it means "Don't just insult people or be a jerk for the sake of it".
What set Tildes apart was that it was made by someone and taken to by people who rejected what they saw reddit becoming five or six (or more!) years ago and wanted to go down a different path. I imagine the people who come here from reddit must be on the same journey.
As long as Tildes maintains the spirit of people looking to learn and grow and we soundly reject those who try to do the opposite, it will be fine.
I only just found out about Tildes from the dev of RIF and I was instantly in love with it from reading through some of the posts that I saw.
It was just genuine in a way that I hadn't seen on the internet in a very long time. I'm very thankful to be here now because I just feel like I could actually relax here and have a delightful moment to myself instead of just quipping or typing an entire comment so I can delete it instead of arguing with someone for hours.
Reddit was always the site for, "well, technically," and that was fun when I was younger and thought I knew more than most people. But now I just want to be in a community of people who want to grow together, and when I read an anime thread that looked like enjoyable conversation instead of judgment and aggression, I knew I wanted to be here.
I want a comfortable place on the internet like this - a place where "Don't be an asshole" is thriving.
Yes. I actually missed the days where you could remember usernames and form a genuine friendship on a forum. That was what i haven't seen in reddit for a longtime. Everybody's just quipping for the sake of karma. All the jokes but no substance about the post yhey are replying to. No conversation ever happens where you are genuinely delighted to have spoken with a person. So much so that you look forward to speaking with them again. Akmost all the long back and forth conversation i have seen there are about people arguing about trivial things (example: grammar). And people intentionally misunderstanding the context so that they have reason to rage about. It was all so tiring tgat there come a time where you crave for something more substantial. A return to meaningful discussions and enjoyment of interaction with a person that lives on the other side of the world.
As a fellow “old internetter,” the old internet community feel is what struck me about Tildes as well. I will miss the niche communities I was part of on Reddit (especially some of the podcast ones), but it’s better than turning a site like this into Eternal September.
One thing I really appreciate here compared to Reddit is I'm no longer incredibly tense when I see a notification that I have a reply. Is it someone laughing my joke, or someone picking a fight that's going to last for 3 days? I can easily trust that if I see a new comment, it won't be someone insulting me because I didn't like their favourite video game.
This is actually what I enjoy about Tildes as well — it reminds me of the early 2000s forums where you even need to “apply” to join the community and, as @Black_Gulaman said, a throwback to the days where you would create connections with users you actually remembered usernames of!
What also makes me love about this place is a level of civility and maturity among its users. And I hope it stays like that amongst the deluge.
This one is hard to deprogram yourself from, speaking from experience. Its a combative conversational style and you don't realize till you break the habit.
Trust me new folks, take a moment to breath and seperate yourself from the rest of the internet before writing here. You can find my bad mental health days strewn even among non-locked/remove threads. You can tell because I'll probably have been fighting an issue with someone else and that bleeds through here.
This is something that I’ve found both useful, and extremely destructive. It all depends on when I’ve used the tactic. Funnily enough, the useful moments have been offline while the destructive moments online. I think the tool is fine, it’s the medium that isn’t a fit. Having a space where responses can happen in real time is essential to avoid the “tit for tat” that an argument becomes.
I think your advice is best; Breathe, and separate this space from others.
That tracks, because its a conversational style, and it can be effective in-person. I think part of why that works is because you can have a dialog as part of each point, and not a giant wall of text.
I think it's destructive because it encourages reading and responding to each literal line, instead of interpreting the comment in context.
When someone writes a comment with many paragraphs, covering multiple different points, using a quote from each section helps to contextualise my replies to each point. Or, if I'm only replying to one point in their comment, it shows which point I'm replying to.
Also, in a threaded forum like this, the replies can often be visually far away from the comments they're replying to (especially if a comment gets a lot of replies or triggers a long discussion). I often find myself scrolling down a page, getting to a comment and then wondering what point it's replying to, 10 or 12 comments further up the page. Having a quote from the parent comment helps me, as the reader, to follow what's going on.
When the exact wording is important to a response, quoting bits is useful. It’s probably more conversationally natural and may be better received when responding to broader points to lead in with “to your point on X” or “regarding X” instead of a direct quote. I know I’m guilty of quoting unnecessarily more than I’d like in practice, so take that with a grain of salt.
I can do that, and have done that - but it feels forced and artificial. And, in an environment like this, it doesn't visually delineate one part of a response from another.
I think the context matters. We're not having a naturally flowing conversation. We're participating in an asynchronous textual exchange amid other similar textual exchanges. This is literally only one discussion thread among many on this page.
If I was writing an essay to respond to someone else's essay, I would be more likely to write "So-and-so wrote this about such-and-such, and here are my thoughts about that." But, in an online forum which we're reading on computer screens or, worse, phone screens, I think that just makes my comments more confusing and less readable.
Maybe what I could do (and have also done, sometimes) is to write a separate comment for each of my replies, if someone has written a comment with many disparate topics, and I want to reply to a few of them.
But I honestly don't see why it's supposedly aggressive or antagonistic to quote someone else's words when replying to them. That's something that's in other people's minds, not in my intentions.
Quotations are often very good etiquette to use online, but if you're doing it to such an extent to strip context, even replying separately to fragments of arguments, you're moreso writing a polemic than anything good-faithed. I've never seen you do that kind of spiteful quoting but I have seen it often on reddit, so I think you and the others are discussing different "manifestations" of line-by-line arguing.
Random aside: The ebb and flow of the line-by-line quotation conversation reminds me of books from antiquity and from before the printing press. Back then, when debating somebody via writing a book, you couldn't guarantee that your readers would have access to your opponent's book, so you'd extensively quote them, often line by line as you dismantle their argument. There's actually a good number of ancient texts we have in at least in part exclusively from quotations by other authors with the original being lost. An example would be Contra Celsum (or "Against Celsus") by 3rd century Early Christian writer Origen of Alexandria which extensively quotes The True Word by 2nd century Greek philosopher Celsus. In modern academic texts, you generally don't extensively quote people. You cite them with a little flag and generally write in your own words with minimal quotations so it's interesting how text discussion evolves over time.
Thank you!
I had the feeling we were somehow talking past each other, but couldn't put my finger on it. Thanks for explaining it.
I said "encourages", not "causes", because it's a website feature and not a mind-control device. Obviously you can still write good comments with the feature and bad comments without, all the feature is doing is subtlely slightly guiding.
While you can directly quote their line, you're usually better off paraphrasing a summary, because the direct literal quotation encourages a direct literal interpretation where you're responding to the individual line instead of the whole comment.
learning to deprogram myself more and more every day on Tildes :)
I've found myself deleting argumentative comments back on reddit and just engaging less and less on there in general over the past week, its been nice.
Yeah, me too. I eventually realized it wasn't worth it to engage with Redditors who reply simply to feel superior/get upvotes, rather than to understand what you're saying and make an intellectual response. And to be honest that's most Redditors, so I stopped commenting or trying to converse. I won't miss that part of Reddit for sure.
I think it can depend a lot on the context. If you are both engaging in calm, intellectually honest debate — especially if both have a tendency to be wordy — line-by-line responses are not necessarily combative, just thorough. As long as they aren't being assholes, I personally prefer it when someone dissects my arguments piecemeal because it ensures that they read the entire thing. When they just respond to the overall gist of my comment, the result is often that they often miss things and pick things out of context to rail against, when the whole reason I was so wordy in the first place was clarify those points.
Speaking of which, that is another thing I would be interested in seeing here eventually: respectful debate between individuals specifically seeking that type of interaction (a ala "I am a strong/gnostic atheist, and I am interested in having a friendly but rigorous debate with a weak/agnostic atheist. Any takers?").
I've found it is generally helpful to make a good faith attempt to summarize and paraphrase the point I'm responding to rather than quoting it directly. Pasting the quote is convenient, but has a tendency to get people overly fixated on the specific words being used instead of the intended meaning. I think this norm is responsible for how much disinterpretation you see in places like Twitter and Reddit where people read things into comments that aren't there or willfully take everything in the worst way possible. Having a back-and-forth that stresses that we're each just interpreting each others statements leaves space for people to clarify what they meant rather than just what they wrote. Online we're mostly responding while procrastinating from other things. We're not going through multiple edits and rereads generally.
As you said, people often ignore your caveats to pick out the thing they want to rail against anyway and the quote-reply-quote-reply format doesn't stop this. You end up with discussions that revolve around semantics, gotchas, and verbal traps instead of on clarifying thoughts and ideas. But insisting that before someone can begin to rebut you they must first be able to summarize what you said in a way that you will agree with does.
The way I'm referring to it is when people pick and choose which lines of someone's comment they want to reply to. That usually means stripping all context away from the statement and then reply to that isolated sentence in a vacuum. They wind up changing what the argument even is, purposefully or not, and it leads to just a big, long, pointless argument where people talk over each other instead of with each other.
@NaraVara already covered this, but I'm already seeing it in another active thread right now, and it's what inspired me to come and find this comment and clarify. If it worked the way you described mostly, I wouldn't have flagged it. But that's unfortunately not how it really gets usually used.
This comment you're reading is the first one I've made on this website. I keep typing up something to say in tildes threads and then just deleting everything and moving on since it continually feels like I wouldn't be adding to the conversation. On reddit there's a lower barrier of entry when it comes to throwing a comment in a thread since everything's trash and you'll stand out just by being competent. But here it feels like there's a palpable sense of duty to keep the conversations constructive and well informed.
This is, to clarify, an absolute compliment to this site. It's refreshing.
I am not kidding, I've done the exact same thing, and my first comment was in this thread.
I just want to live up to the standard that I'm seeing here because it feels good to finally have a standard to live up to.
Honestly, all my best comments here come if I still feel the need to say something hours to days later. Even this one above. I first read this thread, felt I had nothing to contribute, had a thought an hour later, and then just typed it up when I noticed nobody else mentioned this one thing I had a thought about.
That's all it is. It doesn't need to be pretty or verbose or long. Just an honest contribution and genuine expression.
It’s also nice that I can make meaningful contributions even if I don’t manage to catch the thread within its first couple of hours.
This is my first reply, and I haven’t commented for the same reason, and I love that. This feels like Reddit from long ago and I am really happy to be a part of it.
Yes, good post. I will add that, beyond basic civility, being kind online is a skilled practice and one I still struggle with.
One way to screw up that I’m currently working on is not reading carefully before replying and reacting to just one thing. (That is, skimming.)
This, exactly. Public communication is a particular skill and requires patience and humility to develop well enough to justify the privilege of being part of a community. Cultures like reddit's have been pushing against acknowledging that responsibility out of laziness on the side of users and perverse incentives on the side of administration.
Upon reflection, I’m left wondering how much of that low-effort behavior on social media is a result of the users, and how much the platform itself is to blame? Most have fallen into the trap of focusing on engagement at all costs rather than being helpful and quality focused (which I’m hoping tildes never loses sight of).
Come to think of it… maybe the responsibility of being a good community really does rest more in our own hands, and I feel that we have a chance to prove that here. It’s a great opportunity as a community to really challenge the assumptions. For example: do we really just want another Reddit? Are we okay with keeping the community smaller so it remains special? Or do communities remain special because of clear guidelines and good moderation, irrespective of community size?
I’m personally leaning on the idea that if we attract and keep people who post and appreciate higher quality stuff, then maybe the site staff can focus less on moderating and more on innovating. And if we want to prevent these folks from being baited into The Church of Advertisements, we need to be okay with donating directly and frequently enough to give them a worthwhile job.
I’m personally hoping we never turn this place into a Swiss Army Knife. Let tildes be tildes.
Maybe we need a bit of a more explicit social contract here. We have to try, as users, to be responsible and thoughtful and lend to a better community (and donate!!), but the devs must reciprocate by not falling for greed and implementing low effort engagement models into the site.
Perhaps for strategic sake, maybe we should think of it as about evenly divided. If only so we can earnestly hope for the best and look back on our attempts with pride, but recognize our limits.
It's becoming clear that large (on the order of tens of thousands) online communities are very hard to maintain quality in, and that another couple zeroes makes it all but impossible. That we need more mutual understanding between participants than those scales can afford, regardless of any specific moderation efforts or structures.
And even then, we need more moderators than we are used to. Enough of them to "take somebody aside" when that needs to happen. Moderation is about conflict resolution and maintaining an environment of open and respectful conversation, it shouldn't be the equivalent position of a spam filter crossed with a sheriff. We're used to "communities" with thousands of daily contributors and only a dozen people with the explicit responsibility of regulating discussion.
Would you mind expanding on this?
I think we can more or less trust the current management. Tildes is set up as a nonprofit, and based on previous behavior, the admin does not seem like the kind to "sell out" before everything of value is already lost. There's always got to be a bedrock of good faith in these projects.
I can definitely expand on my Swiss Army Knife comment! So… there’s a bit of a mental disease in the business world, where they believe that if a business isn’t experiencing a constant and infinite pattern of growth (whether steady or exponential), then it is dead in the water and the ship must be abandoned before we all drown. (I don’t believe that and will never believe that). Often that thought process leads to a company becoming the soulless ghouls that we’ve all come to despise.
So they take a perfectly good business and distort it in the name of growth and competition. The little roach coach with the best authentic Mexican tacos in the entire state now flounders as a bloated, generic Texmex that cut corners and lost all sense of authenticity in the name of exponential growth. The business that once sold the best chefs knives in all the land is now stuck selling cheap Swiss Army Knife knockoffs. They are not led by a desire to make their product more valuable and attaining growth as a side effect, but rather turn growth itself into the goal, and lose sight of why people found them special to begin with.
A bad sign of this is whether or not the devs know what this site is supposed to be and how they keep the boat afloat. If the goal / mission statement whatever is nebulous, and the general attitude is “well let’s just amass a bunch of people and then monetize later”, then it’s likely that the spark of what makes this community special will be lost in future business decisions. Instead of being the best knife in the land, they will try to be the best Swiss Army knife so that there’s something for everybody.
I personally made a donation to the devs of Tildes, but I think it’s important to make the donation scheme more prominent and easy to access on the website if we want the current philosophy to survive and not go the same route Reddit, Digg, and all sponsor-driven media tend to go.
Well spoken. I've had the same thoughts about needing to rewire one's brain to get away from that learned behaviour. It's become so instinctive that it's easy to recognize through common patterns. The line-by-line response, like you said, but even when you see a back-and-forth between two users, it's almost always an argument slowly going off the rails.
I really don't see that here, and I think that's great.
There's a lot for me to unlearn, but I genuinely feel that the way Tildes works, encouraging you to read linked articles and comments thoroughly and have something valuable to say when you reply, is the way forward.
I see a lengthy news article, and instead of looking for some one-liners in the comments for a quick dopamine fix, I read the article and actually engage with the media and with other people.
By far my biggest issue with sites like Facebook is the number of 3-5 word vapid replies. People feel the need to comment something, anything, to get that dopamine rush. The signal to noise ratio on Tildes is much better.
Facebook has the morals of a haunted chainsaw. There's that too.
I like that. I try to also pair that with "You tried and failed. So be quick to apologize about being an asshole just now".
"leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift." - Christ
For the new people, take a look at the first introductions thread and see if there are any old reddit names you recognize.
Aside from IRL friends and the occasional moderator, I almost never remember usernames on Reddit.
Well, the thread has a lot of usernames from old reddit that used to show up in both red and green. ;)
i chose a different username here, after 16 years on reddit (whatever it was when I joined here, 15, I guess). Not because I’m hiding from my reddit past, but because I probably left enough of a trail there for somebody to knock on my door — so best to periodically reset. I do miss the early days of the Internet, before the general public had access, when everybody used real names and nettiquite was a shared value that was taught to new users if they dared violate it.
EDIT: I can’t believe that next week will be a year on Tildes already!
I chose a different username here because I thought that the relatively low number of users allowed me to have a cooler username than the one I had there, not that I have anything to hide 😅
"As long as Tildes doesn't lose sight of "Don't be an asshole" as one of its primary principles, it's all good."
I have only been using Tildes for a few days now but how it is supposed to maintain this principle?
The only ways I can see this happening is either through:
There's a third option, it's what we've been doing this entire time: actively not tolerating assholery as a community. People get called out directly when they're out of pocket. People are given warnings when their behaviour is problematic. Apologies and growth are valued. We don't react like coldwokes on Twitter who search for reasons to hate someone forever.
When someone tells us that we're out of line, we stop and assess. We don't continue the fight. That's what we did on reddit and Twitter and it sucked.
It's the reliance on hoping on some kind of process or design or technology to regulate behaviour that lead to social media ruining the internet and our social fabric. It removed the sense of personal responsibility for one's conduct and instead encouraged gaming the algorithm or the systems to stand out, and it encouraged bad behaviour.
If the last decade has proven anything, a good community must be self-policing and not rely on solutions that remove individual or collective personal agency.
I can see you have been on here a few years, so I appreciate your insight.
If someone is acting like an arsehole, and people warn them and tell them they are an arsehole, what is stopping them from just carrying on being an arsehole?
I am asking this as a practical, rather then a theoretical question. As far as I can see there isn't any moderation, or ability to report or block. I can't even deduct the ever important internet points, like you can on reddit. Maybe I am too cynical, or have spent to much time online but I find it hard to believe that just calling people out is enough. (And yeah, I am saying this dispute the evidence of a community that seems to be doing just that).
Deimos has been good about not letting anyone get away with particularly egregious instances this whole time. The moderation here isn't as spectacular (as in noticeable and eventful) as on other platforms but it does happen.
The things that get shut down hard are rarely unique or novel situations. Usually things like people trying to cause problems, or hate speech of some nature. One thing that many new people may need some adjustment to is that intellectual dishonesty related around hate matters are shut down quick here i.e. championing known conspiratorial or -phobic rhetoric or arguments. The intolerant are not tolerated here, and that includes shutting down any mealymouthed or disingenuous argumentation that is prevalent across the modern internet. Many people are here because they were tired of other sites constantly making excuses or sticking with vague policies that seemed to only help ruin discourse, not help it, so taking a vigilant attitude against such things was necessary.
To be clear, it's not that people cannot or should not hold contrary or controversial opinions, it's when they insist on sticking to known bad or illegitimate arguments to push something that is making people discomforted (and the arguments are designed to do so) and do not demonstrate or indicate any initiative or willingness to learn or engage with others honestly.
I've been trying to not go into details but I feel like I'm being too vague so I'm just going to put a more specific example in the collapsible detail box:
Real example of bad gender argumentation
One of the most recent comments I remember having to get moderated out was someone who flatly insisted that trans people were mentally ill, and would not entertain any other notion or evidence or argument otherwise.Users older than 7 days have the ability to label comments. One of those labels is “Malice”, which is effectively reporting it to administration, and allows you to include a message for the admin (Deimos). Because a message is included, you can use it to call attention to a situation/user where you feel it’s needed, even if that specific comment hasn’t crossed the line yet.
Ah, right, thanks. I am still a baby, so I guess I don't have everything available to me.
Answering this has been an ongoing discussion here for the past five years, and a big part of why Tildes has stagnated in growth and development. Nobody has a single satisfactory answer, probably at its core because this is more or less a coordination problem like all of politics. All we can do is incrementally improve the system and try and enforce a polite, compassionate, and thoughtful culture on an individual level.
Are your two bullet points meant to say "these are the mechanisms I think Tildes is using?" or meant to say "these are the two mechanisms I can imagine and I'd like to know how Tildes implements them?"
"They are the only ways I can see this being achievable" might have been clearer phrasing.
In that case, I would say that those are actually two things Tildes actively does. Many of the UI choices (e.g., comment box being at the bottom, lack of downvotes, lack of karma) are meant to encourage discussion and facilitate disengagement when things get heated. As to your second point, the invite system and very slow growth have done a lot to enable existing users to acclimate new ones to the site's culture, avoiding (so far) an eternal september. The trade off is that growth has been slow, and at times the site has felt stagnate. I think it's safe to say, as others have noted, that there's probably no single satisfactory answer to this question. We're just trying our best.
I joined awhile ago, not quite as long ago as you. The biggest problem I had with Tildes at the time was that the "news cycle" was slow compared with Reddit. The community was smaller, and as a result hot issue topics were slow to post, slow to receive comments, and slow to refresh with something new.
Now common with those Reddit posts was a lot of garbage content. I specialized my feed a lot so that I wasn't on the popular "entertainment" subreddits, and that had given me a steady stream of useful information. It isn't the main "default" subreddits which will be impacted as greatly as the smaller communities. Any sub you visit where you see a number of comments which are just an image or sticker, those weren't worth my time and those posting in those subs are already using the official client and new Reddit website.
I'm hoping that this change will give Tildes and other alternatives the influx of users it needs to support those smaller communities and the less thoughtful crowd sticks with Reddit. It's not for me, but arguable it hasn't been for 5 or more years anyway.
I do agree that to not be an online asshole is a good way to conduct ourselves here in tildes. But i want to add, we must not be passive in this. Because there are special kind of trolls out there. Specially coming from Reddit. These are malicious trolls. Not torlling for the sake of it or for infamy. But they truly want to inflict harm to others. I don't want them to proliferate and ruin Tildes like what they did the other communities.
So let us add the "help if you can" attitudes as well. If you see some troll picking on someone in our community, do not stand by and tell yourself that it is not ypu problem. Let us help each other. And in that way we're also helpin the whole community (Tildes) preserve it's values.
As a fresh new user here, loving it so far, but I'm dreading the day people come here to push their OnlyFans or the blatant botposting for karma (for some reason, I'm assuming to sell the account?).
Fortunately we have no per-user karma record. No matter how many votes one of your comments gets, your next comment will still only have the intangible reputation you've built by participating. There's plans for a more robust "trust" system associated with a user, but right now there's not much value beyond the name.
I mostly lurk here, but I have been around for a while. Here is my 2¢.
We only want a certain portion of Reddit refugees.
We do not want the type of Reddit refugee that just wants a Reddit clone. This is the type of person that overall enjoys Reddit, and just wants a Reddit clone with admins that don’t make terrible situations. Tildes is not a clone of Reddit.
We do want the redditors that have been upset with the way Reddit has been going for years. They will be upset about Reddit’s focus on low effort content, memes, and fights in the comments section. These people want something similar to Reddit but makes different fundamental decisions. The current api issues may be the straw that broke the camel’s back, but that isn’t the primary reason they are leaving. (After all, tildes has no api, and might never have one)
In short we want the users that want something better than Reddit has ever been. I would recommend checking out the tildes docs and philosophy pages. We want users that agree with that.
I was quite happy to read quite a few comments here from redditors who had been over there for 7, 10, even 17(!) years. 10 years for me. That means they remember what reddit USED to be, where the discussion was deeper, more civilized, and memes and videos were rare. My hope is that the eternal September crop of new redditors, who are looking for another version of Instagram or TikTok will be greatly turned off by the longer text and zero graphic nature of Tildes. That alone should keep the quality of Tildes high. I think if Tildes ever starts with videos, memes or pics files the same thing will happen to it that has happened to all the other social sites - it just goes downhill and everything becomes clickbait.
The people suited here are thos who read the articles, not those people who comment based on the headlines. :D just joking.
For me all are welcome but, and it is a big BUT. Do not bring reddit here. This is different from reddit. Look around, see if you like the culture, blend with the culture, enjoy it for what it has become, do not make it bend to your ways.
I particularly enjoy the lack of video and imagery on Tildes. I like the links. Because it supports rhe original creator of the media, by bri ging traffic tbeir way. It kind of promotes exploration of the web. Where you may discover sites that you don't know existed. I like reading articles but with discussions and opinions from other Tildes users. Not like an email rss where it is only you reading an article.
I think the lack of memes, videos and photos and gifs will be a natural filter of some sort to guard against the influx of incompatibpe users from other communities.
Just to clarify, I most definitely DONT want Tildes to become Reddit Part Deux. I was just expressing that I was glad that the redditors who came over are 'old school', the ones who joined reddit back in the day when reading articles and engaging in some erudite conversation was the norm not the exception.
I've been here before, a couple of years ago I think, but there were so few comments it felt quite dead. But Ive been actively looking for a place with more thoughtful, deeper conversation. Tildes seems to fit, and Im quite happy to see much more engagement than the last time I was here.
I myself am also from the time of the digg migration, and i do agree with you.
This is me. My reddit account is over 15 years old. I remember the early days of that site fondly. And when I joined Tildes, it reminded me of those early reddit days.
I too am here for the "old Reddit" feel. I don't want to blame the decline of Reddit's quality on Gen Z (i.e. permanent summer Reddit), I think any site's quality would decline with growth due to appealing to the lowest common denominator, but even beyond that, it feels like Redditors just don't want to debate but just win arguments. There's way too much pride involved in the discussions and I have no idea why that started.
It started when Reddit started chasing growth for growth's sake. At some point, the website reached a critical mass where the userbase wasn't a cohesive community outside of the more isolated smaller subreddits anymore, but an ever growing mass of strangers brought in to interact with the content, not the other members. And as space on the frontpage was limited compared to the ever growing activity, the goal was no longer to share, but to compete with everyone else. You're no longer trying to engage in interesting conversation, you're trying to win.
Hence the comment section devolving to memes, quips, dissenting opinions getting downvoted to oblivion, any argument turning into a shouting match and moderators having to switch from fellow community members dedicated to keeping the discussion civil to killsat operators wiping out the garbage from up high, directly interacting with the users as little as possible because doing otherwise wouldn't be efficient enough to keep up.
And all of this happening with the blessing of the company. After all, when you fruitlessly argue with people who are wrong on the Internet, all that matters to Reddit is that you're doing it on their platform, driving up engagement.
I'm one of the refugees (I guess?) From Reddit. I've only been here for like a day, but I do quite like the feel of tildes. At first I was like "what kind of basic ass site doesn't even have custom communities besides the big generic ones?" And "what's the point of there's no memes??". But I've actually kind of grown a little fond of Tildes in the very short while I've been here. I don't think that Tildes can be a full Reddit replacement for me, as I, like op, have some Reddit communities I'm active in that feel almost like a digital family to me, and I like the occasional meme and nicheness of a lot of Reddit communities.
With that said, I don't think I'll be leaving Tildes either. I actually really, really like it here. I also understand why Tildes doesn't have most of the "features" Reddit does, and I appreciate it for what it is.
(Also, perhaps it's half driven by my "nostalgia" for what Reddit was, even though I wasn't around during those times)
I'm in love with tildes design, how the comments look and function, the speed, and general smoothness is way better then I recall even old.reddit being. The attention to detail, like if you visit a post you previously read and the older comments are collapsed is a nice touch and I honestly think it would scale very well.
The speed is unreal. It's amazing what you can do on a modern website with modern internet speeds if you have clean code and don't load it up with tracking/spying/marketing bloat.
Same, really. I Joined Tildes a while back during a previous migration wave, but it never really caught on for me because, although I really like it, the place was very dead at the time and posts were only every day or two. Since around January though, Reddit has seemed very different from before, and the entire front page is just constantly repeating the same inflammatory talking points. I'll se a picture of a cute kitten in r/aww and all of the comments will be like "wow, so cute, too bad we're all going to die of Florida school shooting climate inflation change." So I basically corralled myself in r/CuratedTumblr and r/Subredditdrama, but I honestly don't know where I will be able to go for the same things I used Reddit for after July 1st when it'll be impossible for mods to control the bot swarm anymore.
Man, I feel old!
So, I was part of the Digg community back in the day. Long before the Digg exodus occurred, I remember becoming extremely fond of a little thing called Stumbleupon. For you whippersnappers: stumbleupon was a website / browser extension where you would get a toolbar on top of your browser. It had a “stumble!” button, a “like” button, save, share… I think that was about it. But the idea is, you click “stumble!” and your magically be teleported to a random website. These websites were user submitted and curated. It was a magical experience to just be surprised by what you found, and sometimes you’d stumble across something you used forever.
That was where I stumbled upon Reddit. I remember falling in love with the community. It was small, but every comment seemed well thought out and oozing with intelligence. I always felt like the dumbest person in the room, but it was great because these incredibly bright people weren’t afraid to dumb things down for me, and seemed content with trying their best to understand one another. Tildes reminds me of that now.
When the exodus at Digg happened, I saw the migration into Reddit. It was nice and largely remained high quality despite the large influx of new users until the devs focused on engagement over quality for ad revenue.
I’m hoping we study history at Tildes to keep it from repeating itself.
As a fellow StumbleUpon user, it captured the dopamine rush of new, exciting content without toxic comment threads ruining it. I think there are minor equivalents with ShowHN and Hackaday, but SU really felt random and niche.
You could exhaust the cache of options, and start seeing the same sites again (equivalent to reposts), which inevitably led to my abandoning the browser extension (or perhaps Digg/Reddit replaced it).
Tildes can expose niche content on occasion (I’m an older Tilderino and there’s some great links here due to most users being on the fringe of the Internet), but the reason I stay is because the community has been very open-minded and thoughtful. I don’t want that to change due to the Reddit exodus: high quality but low volume content makes a subculture that becomes “cool” due to its inherent value.
An API is planned, but was never started. It is on the feature list. Suddenly we have app developers who are very interested, might be a wise idea to get them in on that process too. I'm sure they have plenty of insight into how not to do things from dealing with reddit's api.
There are many communities on reddit that would be a fine fit for this place for sure. Speaking for myself I'd kill to get /r/letstalkmusic and /r/listentothis over here - their brains are already chilled out from all the good music, they aren't metaphysically capable of starting trouble. /r/depthhub is the closest thing on reddit to a nexus of tildes-like subreddits.
It's really about one simple rule to be on this website: don't be an asshole. If I have to define that, then don't be the guy/gal who just goes on and on and on making everything about your one thing - be that politics, religion, or coffee - and picking fights with people. If that's your thing, head on over to the chans or to somethingawful, that's what they are for. If you can be a normal civil adult person, then stick around.
The entire point of the tildes code base is to set communities free from their current hosting issues. Do you remember when phpbb obliterated ezboard? Tildes code can obliterate reddit. This is not a new story. The clock is ticking, though. We have three weeks until reddit implodes, unless they panic and reverse course (not bloody likely imo).
So, for everyone who wants to have a reddit like site - be it for your family, raiding guild, reddit refugee community, facebook group, or sewing circle - I have some very good news. The tildes code just needs a little polishing up to do that job for everyone who does not want to join this specific website.
I suppose you could also think of this place as the spiritual successor to /r/theoryofreddit and /r/circlebroke, in that those communities were constantly trying to imagine better ways to communicate. All of those discussions contributed to the thinking and constant meta-tildes discussions here that designed the tildes codebase. If you want to develop tildes and/or you care about kicking eternal september's ass, then perhaps you should stick around as well. All usenet refugees are welcome here. Welcome to project november. ;)
Otherwise, take the code and run with it. Take the fight to the companies and move your communities off of them. I promise it is not as hard as you think.
Yep, I think maybe kbin.social might be better for those users.
Squabbles and Discuit also have fans. r/redditalternatives has been fulfilling its function of surfacing options for places to go. But I wish there were a better way to find reddit users who might love it here.
Well, want us or not, here we are.
Since it's all invite-based and we had an entire thread dedicated to organizing the sending of mass-invites to reddit refugees, I think it's a fair bet we want yall here. And there isn't even really an "us vs them" thing because most of us either came from reddit or are still active there as well.
Just refer back to how compassionate and welcoming I was towards Digg refugees 13 years ago when they started popping up on reddit, and treat me the same here :) (I wasn't very nice.)
Argh! Eternal September! Damn kids! etc. etc. ;)
The internet is full. Go away!
Funny thing is that I remember that era. Accessing the internet via a BBS that installed an internet gateway. Fun times first accessing Usenet.
Yeah, I've been on tildes from nearly the beginning and never stopped using reddit. Frankly, I'd like to see a steady influx of new users this summer because the only downside to this site over the last five years is that you run out of things to do pretty quickly. Hopefully the invite system will just continue to do it's job and space out these new users so that they can acclimate to the community without it being disruptive.
Sure, there are plenty of new users, but just how many does Tildes want? And does Tildes want to be huge communities' primary new destination? For example, /r/Permaculture is asking for suggestions for where to migrate the entire community of 260,692 subscribers. I'm sure the number of active members is way lower than that, but even so, this would totally change Tildes' atmosphere. How many are welcome here?
In a way I think we're all reddit refugees, just from different waves.
As for what people want I don't know how useful of a question that is TBH. Like unkz said, like it or not they're coming, Tildes will change and that's a natural part of life. We just need to ride the wave and try to steer it to go in a direction that's nice for all of us.
I think the more useful form of your question is whether Tildes can scratch the same sort of itch that certain Reddit communities did for the people who went to Reddit for that. Reddit was a lot of different things for a lot of people all at once. For communities like /r/permaculture and /r/composting I think Tildes could definitely meet many similar needs for users if the niches get big enough here. That is doable and desirable, though we may need to do some thinking about how tags and groups need to be organized to facilitate it. For communities like /r/PrequelMemes or /r/AdviceAnimals I think they'll need to find something else.
As a permaculture........erh, as someone who occasionally tries to grow stuff, I actually don't want the entire permaculture sub here. Specifically, I do not want the hustle people here. They just spam the subreddit with their own videos, don't comment, and are using the sub as a fishing ground for folks to "be sure to like and subscribe" to. That small segment of the sub really turned me off.
For folks who actually want to talk about permaculture, I would love to see their wisdom and passion here. /u/suuperdad, for example, I've had the pleasure to meet in real life and is a fantastic fella who also happens to have a youtube channel with patreon etc.
One of the things that has drawn me here is the expectation of good-faith participation being baked into the site philosophy. We have to see how that bears out long-term, especially having only "one guy" in charge, but if the platform can consistently enforce that philosophy, that crowd may simply never see it as a viable marketing platform.
You can dig some of the older posts. Tildes was fairly quiet until this recent wave; its quietest it had been in a long time in fact. We did discuss whether we want the site to be more active, to grow etc.
In general I think we all want a more active and open tildes as long as it doesn’t greatly decrease the quality of the community as a whole. And size can unfortunately do that. But some communities manage to keep the quality decrease to a minimum despite growing a ton (HN is a good example imo).
I am not sure Tildes can do that without @Deimos admitting at least one backup admin however.
Anyway, I think people who are looking for a 1:1 Reddit replacement, will be disappointed. But I don’t see why that has to be the end all be all of social media.
Remember that a lot of social media sites thrive on engagement. They get more money when you browse the site longer, when you comment more, when you click more. This has perverse incentives wrt content quality. Tildes is not like that. So the site isn’t looking to keep you here, get you riled up to engage more, etc.
So yeah I think as long as those joining have an open mind, it’s great to have y’all here. I enjoy seeing the increased activity, and I even noticed that it’s brought some old timers out of their quiet slumber!
Take it from an old moderator who has run many rodeos in his time on the net. This place, with this culture, can self-govern with basic tools up to at least 250k users. That was the point at which the signal to noise ratio inevitably went sideways on reddit, and I guarantee the user culture, slow growth, and invite-only nature has provided us with a user selection that can beat reddit's typical behavior.
I'm not saying to go hog wild here, but let's not panic so easily either. It's wise to take week-long or even longer breaks between invite waves for several reasons, but there's no reason to panic when 2k people show up, especially when it's mainly ancient reddit accounts coming over. Ancient reddit accounts are precisely what built this place, with some help from hackernews and 4chan /g/ if you can believe it. These people are coming home, not coming to raid us like vikings. ;)
250k users is only slightly more than Something Awful’s total registered userbase. I just don’t see how that’s possible.
We did it in /r/listentothis with about 30 moderators, and only half of them were highly active at the time. I'd also suggest that somethingawful is a rather... unique entity in the history of online forums. When everyone on your website is a troll and loves trolling, the sky's the limit for your userbase.
I never really delved into the comments on /r/listentothis. Were people prone to arguing there?
(I was about to say "Yeah but a music sub probably doesn't get into political issues or controversy as much" and then I remembered what music fans are like lol.)
Actually, listentothis was genetically immune to an argument. It's a property of forum culture that only shows up in music communities, far as I can tell - there must be others, but it's hard to miss in a place where the tunes fly heavy. People were simply impossible to piss off - and I say that as a head mod who would flame and troll the userbase as necessary to provoke responses on discussions about how to moderate the place. I have had my ass gently roasted by that community, and they are classy as fuck to a fault.
Just think about /mu/ on 4chan, and tell me it isn't the most civil of any chans. I mean, it's still a chan, smack talk is the rule, but they are better at that too. Now go open up the youtube comments on some good tracks or videos, and tell me what those comment patterns look like and how they differ from most other video topics.
Something strange is afoot in all of those places. The toxicity is almost nonexistent and it's much harder to provoke it there.
This thread right here is the closest I ever saw listentothis get to a hot thread.
There's no permission needed. Just start posting about permaculture and composting in ~enviro. If people like it, they'll engage with it. If they don't like it, then having our permission to post won't improve matters.
You won't be able to create a niche community immediately just to discuss these topics. They'll have to mix in with other topics about the environment and conservation. However, in the far-distant hypothetical future, you might get a sub-group for ~enviro.permaculture. However, if I can use a bad simile, you need to start planting the seed now if you want it to bear fruit in the future.
I assume you've got invite codes, like many of us old-timers. Use them to invite your friends: that's what the codes are for.
(And I've deliberately not answered your wider question because, quite honestly, I don't know the answer, and I wouldn't presume to speak for the Tildes community.)
I think of megathreads as working around limitations in the design of Tildes that we haven’t figured out how to fix. When I get interested in a subject, I want to be able to post a dozen links, but I don’t want a dozen links on the front page because that takes up a lot of space and we should have more variety there, and ignoring them all seems like it would be playing wack-a-mole?
It’s unfortunate that links posted in comments aren’t searchable like top-level links, but that’s the way it goes until we figure out a fix.
There’s also a fishbowl effect. I’m not sure how best to describe it, but top-level headlines attract attention and we don’t have a great way to selectively attract attention. A megatopic with a more boring, vague headline seems like it’s easier to skip over, particularly once you’ve seen it before. You can either read it or not.
A downside is you need to click to read a topic with more replies, and there’s no way to tell whether it’s worth reading.
what is the general attitude about AI here? context, i joined in 2020, used Tildes for a bit, went back to Reddit because i felt too dumb for Tildes, checked it out again due to the whole API debacle, and i might stick around if i don’t feel too dumb again to participate here :p
There's a sequence of megathreads about AI you can find to see for yourself. But I don't think it's nearly as negative as the commenter above believes. I'd say we're ambivalent, like a lot of people, we are both amazed and concerned. I don't think those concerns would necessarily spill into any particular person, a lot of us are openly experimenting with all kinds of AI despite our critical attitudes. It would be interesting to see innovative ways people are using AI in their art.
cheers, i honestly have no horse in the AI vs. artists race, i was really mostly curious about the “community position” but it seems like it’s just still a topic under debate which is normal, it’s good, thank you for clarifying :)
One of the benefits of this site's design is that it seems to encourage longer-lasting conversations. In Reddit, older posts are usually absolutely dead after about a day, but here, I am seeing people go back and respond to comments people made a few days previously.
This is a huge boon for more niche topics, like permaculture and composting. It means a smaller number of people can keep the conversation going, which in turn generates more interest in that topic from other users.
It's lifeblood for small subgroups, essentially. It keeps the smaller communities in a more active state than Lobsters or Imzy or Reddit or Raddle or Lemmy has ever managed - and it's basically just re-adding a traditional forum feature to a news aggregator.
Yes, I love that feature. And it's so simple in essence: instead of the default sort for topics being "new", it's "activity". Suddenly, conversation is prioritised over freshness. Topics which people are discussing get bumped to the top, even if they're not new. That keeps those topics alive, and gives other people a chance to see what's happening, and participate if they want.
Personally I like the surge of activity, but I do have concerns about some of the things that people are looking for. There was a post about "what do you not like about Tildes" and one about "what is Tildes missing" and the top answer to both of those felt like "we should be more like Reddit", which I explicitly do not want.
I think that some of the Reddit Refugees will stick around, and some of those niche communities can find homes here, but I don't know if those communities even can make a wholesale change to reddit. I don't see Tildes as a place where r/Composting is going to flourish, but it is a place where people who care about composting can find an alternative to the reddit community about r/composting.
I hope that some of those groups can get away from the idea of reddit and get into the idea of Tildes, where users do not have as much control over groups, and groups are just not analogous to subreddits. If that can happen, then that could be great for Tildes and for those users.
Growth is hard. I'm looking at being a reddit-refugee myself. After 17 years on Reddit, I feel like the VCs are about to kill the old girl.
But with that 17 year history comes some institutional memory. Here's what Tildes needs to figure out sooner rather than later:
Note that there are no advertisers.
Sure, but eventually the angel funding runs out and you find a way to monetize the site or it closes down. We can't expect Tildes to exist as a public service forever, right?
Donations are the way to monetize the site. This makes users the priority, as it should be. This is the fundamental decision that sets everything free from more... capitalistic concerns. Canadian non-profits are also required to have transparent publicly disclosed financials. The current funding is enough to sustain things as is indefinitely, as Deimos has said a couple of times now. The hosting cost is like $150/mo and this node can probably do a quarter million users even on that older basic hardware.
The only real question is if 'as is' will be good enough for all the reddit agitators, or if they might like to upset the boat a bit.
I think that can work but, as Wikipedia demonstrates, if you want to scale, it's no small task.
Wikipedia has a rather stunning amount of overhead. I promise, one can run a reddit-like monstrosity with just a couple of devops/coders. It gets super easy after deleting the 30 megabytes of tracking code reddit is shoving down our throats with every page refresh. An entire tildes page is just a couple of kilobytes. Yes, that means Tildes has near-instantaneous performance over dialup, unlike just about every other site on the internet. ;)
I keep seeing this sentiment that running a website is no small task. I wonder where that nonsense started and how it became such a universally held view. As a sysadmin/devop with 20 years of experience, let me assure you that it is a small task, and it has never been easier than it is today. One just needs to pick the right technology, or build it, if it doesn't exist. Luckily we have a head start on that part.
When Killfile mentioned "angel investor money" I did kind of chuckle. It also made me a bit sad to think the era of the default state for website and online communities just being hobby projects maintained by some person with the leftover change they have lying around is so far in the memory hole people don't even think of it.
As someone that's been pretty deep in the Silicon Valley perspective - take note that Tildes was specifically made to oppose that mode of the internet. Deimos used to work at reddit in San Francisco. I won't speak for him but I do know a few things. He left SF. He hates VC funding. Tildes is just his side project.
Fun fact, I love Wikipedia as much as the next guy, but they aren't broke, they're just trying to build a warchest so they can handle any future uncertainties. Right now, they are trying to get an endowment to the ~ $100 million mark.
Scaling is not the goal in and of itself.
What makes you think we even want to scale to anything close to Wikipedia level, or should? Or that operating Tildes is remotely close to operating Wikipedia?
I don't think Tildes wants to or even should want to. But since the subject of this conversation is "Does Tildes want Reddit refugees," I'm really trying to discuss what the technical and financial hurdles would be to actually accomodate Reddit's existing user base.
I don't think, back when the Digg diaspora happened, that Reddit was thinking "yes, we will just take all of these users thanks" but that's what ended up happening... more or less.
Well, if a hundred million users showed up, that would sure as hell mean moving tildes from a single server architecture into something more scalable involving multiple machines. Deimos is a veteran engineer who actually does know how all of that works, so that's a big plus.
That would also be a mountain of coding work, too much for one person for sure in any reasonable time frame - especially when right now, that person has to work another job to make ends meet, rather than being the tildes BDFL.
Of course, if the hundred million people who show up toss in a buck a year, that's enough to hire a literal army of developers (and to marshal the donations of hundreds more developers) into a badass fast moving project. We can fund Spectria, which can fund Tildes, then bail out Mozilla and acquire them, then buy up wikipedia and continue on with world domination.
I kid, but let's face it - you get what you pay for. What it takes to get this thing moving is cold, hard cash. Not a ton of it, either. 300k users at a buck a year, 30k users at a buck a month, 3k users at ten bucks a month, etc. It takes 2-3 good people working on something like this to sustain it at an active level, like any open source project.
Even if the migration was way more intense than it has been up to this point, it stand to reason that a vast majority of Reddit's users want something that greatly resembles Reddit and will not want to be on Tildes. I can't imagine this migration coming even close to Digg -> Reddit levels just because of that. The people who wants to come here have a very specific profile. Tildes is an alternative for a specific niche, not a replacement. And a lot of people will look around, realize it's not for them, and never come back.
Tildes doesn't have any VC/angel investors. It's a non-profit, and operated by donations.
This is baked into its identity, so this isn't likely to change in the future.
https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes#non-profit-no-investors
And I wish it luck in that regard but I would argue that is going to fundamentally constrain its maximum size in some interesting ways.
Historically speaking, putting a community like this into the hands of a single individual limits that community in terms of its longevity, resilience, and long-term relevance. I'm not saying it can't function, but that it puts an awful lot on the shoulders of @Deimos
He's in pretty good company.
I mean… people (yourself included above though not in those words), go on and on about how bad the vc “growth at all costs” mindset is. Why is it a problem if tildes’ growth is inherently limited then?
I think there's a difference between "growth" and "growth at all costs." For starters, the VC "growth at all costs" model doesn't give a damn about the size of the community; it's all about the profits being generated quarter-to-quarter. The VCs who are squeezing Reddit right not don't give a damn if the community shrinks by 90% so long as profits go up 10% every quarter.
But as an online community, Tildes essentially has four options available to it and all of them will color what the site looks and feels like in 5 years.
The problem is that "high availability of accounts" pretty much requires substantial scaling of the site and its infrastructure and eventually you need to be able to pay at least some people to keep the thing running and safe.
My feeling is, based on my experience with Reddit and high availability large scale web projects, is to achieve the goals tilde seems to have, it would be much cheaper than Reddit to operate and could be long term sustainable on donations. I personally have a $2 monthly donation to this site now, which I would guess subsidizes at least hundreds of non-paying users.
Edit: approximately 3000 users based on the above comment claiming $150/mo cost capable of handling 250k users. Surely one in 3000 users can be convinced to pony up $2.
I think some of that depends on what you mean by "high availability." Like, $150/mo cost probably works for.. say... three 9s but probably not for 4 or 6 nines of uptime.
How many nines do you suppose are necessary for a non profit casual conversation site? We’re not talking life or death here. Besides that, how hard would it be to get 1/3000 people to donate say, $10/month?
I don't know. My instinct is "pretty hard." I'm prepared to be wrong about that though.
About 0.5% of Americans donate more than $200 to a political party or candidate. Now, on its surface that would appear to be saying that about 1/200 people donate twice what you're asking and... yea... that's a fair read.
But I'd also argue that political parties spend a LOT more money trying to beat donations out of people and the idea of political giving is a lot more normalized.
On the other hand, about 8% of college graduates donate back to their alma mater. I don't know what the cash figure is though.
The fact that Wikipedia exists says that this model is possible. The fact that Wikipedia is the only major site financed this way says it's hard.
Consider this, Reddit has about 400k premium users at around $5/month. That’s $2m/month. I suspect that would suffice to operate a tildes with a far larger user base than reddit, when you consider how heavy the Reddit backend is with its built in image hosting, advertising, chat, awards, and other features that I suspect tildes would never want.
It depends how tildes grows. Eventually, it may be more than a "casual conversation site," even if still non-profit.
Yes, you can. This is how most Mastodon instances run and run successfully.
The advent of Patreon and subsequent services have provided a viable model for sustainability without advertising or out of pocket money. Many YouTubers have switched partially or entirely to this model, as YouTube continues to, well, do what YouTube does: perhaps notably 3Blue1Brown who wrote a little something on the subject a few years back. Twitch already exists on somewhat of this model (though they can't seem to help chasing profits, as a corporation does).
I don't expect capital-C-Corporations to ditch ads any time soon (they make money! what company is going to give up money?), but running an sustainable independent site without advertising has never been more viable.
As a very slightly older redditor, I have to keep reminding myself that VCs were the original reason Reddit even exists. Paul Graham inspired a buncha young'uns to dream (financially) big and angel'd them towards something that was always meant to be VC'd.
Benovelent dictator: I think @Deimos should continue to run a kingdom, not a democracy, and ruthlessly defend it against barbarian hoards.
the same thing we do with all memes and images: say no. eg, I would welcome NSFW discussions on the topic of AI waifus and in depth articles on its generation and tools here, but I wouldn't want to see actual posts of AI waifus here.
Indeed. Perhaps @Deimos can share the site's financial stats, and maintain the site on a scale that is supported by its users. Eg, if he gets $10 a month then we close invites when we get visits beyond what $10 pays for.
Welcome to Tildes, fellow veteran Reddit user :)
Apparently that was the original point of the site.
I do agree that in recent years it’s appeal to the frequent users has been it’s small community. Im personally indifferent to the current Reddit refugees. I don’t think the majority of them will last (as is the case every time something like this happens). And as long as I can still write my stupid little blog posts about movies I’m fine (even if everything is getting a lot more votes right now).
I stopped actively posting on reddit a long time ago. I still go there sometimes, but I don’t use an account and just window shop through a libreddit instance. I have a rotation of subreddits I still occasionally check in on.
I like those places. People there seem nice. The energy is at a comfortable, reasonable 2 or 3 out of 10.
Every so often I used to also visit the reddit front page. I didn’t like that reddit. People were mean. Outrage was everywhere. Everything, and I do mean everything, was always at a 10. Or an 11.
I kept visiting the front page for way longer than I should because, of course, it’s addictive and engaging. But also I hated it, and I felt like a worse person for my time spent there.
Just over a month ago I made a rule for myself that I wasn’t allowed to go there anymore. If I did go to reddit, I was only allowed to go to specific subreddits. No more front page.
It was a good month for me. I was more relaxed. Less distracted. Less angry about the state of the world.
It sounds callous, but I don’t want the people from the reddit front page here on Tildes. I don’t want this place to be at an 11 all the time.
I wouldn’t mind at all if people from the subreddits I still go to came here though.
I suspect many of us have our little corners of reddit that we still love, much like you do with r/Permaculture and r/composting, even if we have a dislike or disdain for wider reddit culture and direction in general.
I’d be happy if some of those little corners made their way here.
I agree with your points, but I just wanna nitpick and say the front page is what you make it. By default, Reddit subscribes you to a ton of subreddits. When I made my account, I unsubscribed to ALL default ones and then only subscribed to the ones I'm interested in.
For example, if all you're interested in is r/Permaculture & r/composting, you can subscribe to only those. Now your front page is the low energy place you might be interested in. Not necessarily any need to visit them individually :)
Sometimes people use ' reddit front page' as a standin for /r/all or /r/popular, which are pretty terrible on most days. That could be what @kfwyre meant.
Oh yeah, r/all and r/popular are the wild west!
I liked that about /r/all. Once you filtered a few hundred political, anime, and meme subreddits, you had a glimpse of what was going on in so many spaces. Communities you weren't aware of, or haven't thought about in years has something big happen and you get to be apart of it.
Seriously. I even enjoy /r/popular, once I've axed basically all of Reddit.
I’m using the site without an account, hence the standard front page and my weird subreddit surfing behavior. 😆
Right... I didn't consider you wouldn't be using an account, my bad 😅
I have been on reddit for 18 years after being an avid user on Digg. I have found tildes.net to be great so far. I want to read, participate in discussions, and find cool new things in my interests.
I think there are more reddit users out there that are in similar situation and find reddit stale with reposts of old content and tiktok leaking into it.
I think Tildes will go through the same demise if it becomes popular, it's inevitable.
I have been searching for a reddit alternative for a few years. Just recently found tildes. I absolutely love that it is 100% text based. And frankly, I didn't even know that was something I wanted.
But I spent the vast majority of my scrolling time reading the comments on reddit. Coming to tildes, I didn't even notice the lack of images until someone in a comment pointed it out. I guess I have always favored the discussions about images more than the images themselves, so their absence wasn't even noticed. I love it and am very happy to be here.
It's a tough question, and I only speak for myself here. This place isn't very gatekeep-y and we've got a good culture going. I haven't seen a dip in quality at all the last week or so as we've seen people move over. If anything I've seen a huge bump in activity, which means I'm spending more time here than I have in a good year plus. Newcomers seem to be adapting really well as far as I can tell, and I think the invite-only system is a large part of that.
I don't think the issue is having 250k+ people active on the site. That would be awesome! I think the issue would be having 250k+ new people joining all at once. That's a lot of friggin people! There might be server stability concerns, a sudden increase in the need for moderation, a ton of support needed for new users, etc. I don't even think there's a way to bring that many people over at once anyway because there are only so many current users and not all of them have invites to spare (I only have 8 left, for example).
There was a user, whose name is escaping me, that wanted to do something similar with a small religious academia subreddit. I don't think anything ever came of it, but I do remember he tried to coordinate his efforts with @Deimos, tildes' creator. And I think that's probably the best way to go about it, personally. At the very least it would enable you to avoid the issue of manually inviting a ton of people one at a time.
I believe it was /r/AskBibleScholars that they wanted to port over, but I don't remember their username.
I'm pretty sure it was /u/suspended, who has since deleted their account.
You and @NaraVara are both correct.
Heck the literal only downside to this new influx is that its harder to keep up with everything in 20 minutes. I had fully adjusted to the slow and steady vibe.
But always nice to see more conversation, even if I'll have to start filtering more now.
The communities won't port over 1:1, but the big issue I've seen is this concept hasn't landed. It's been less than a week, and it takes longer to really get the hang of a community, of course.
We have broad topic sections you tag things under. Just post int he right section, tag it appropriately and you've planted a seed to foster a community interest.
Tildes was designed to replace and improve upon Reddit's model by being less instantly gratifying. With that, I believe the main thing Tildes doesnt "want" is to be a Reddit support group. We are our own community with our own rules, culture, and vibe not because it's been small and insular for a few years, but because people here want something different that is defined in the site documentation
Talk about what you want, tag it, and if a niche is important enough it could be added as a subgroup, but that would arguably be because it's not a niche interest.
At tildes, subgroups are an organizational and filtering tool, rather than as a way to organize an insulated communities.
That high degree of isolation for subreddits is part of what makes Reddit a problematic site to manage.
Right. I was just using the two subreddits/tags as an example because we organize our larger topics wirh tags. Like when COVID hit as an epidemic, we had a ~health.coronavirus subgroup created because it was a major subtopic that warranted more than tags. The point at which ~enviro.permaculture would make sense as a group would be if most of the ~enviro discussion became Permaculture discussion to the detriment of other subtopics.
I think in general if you found tildes it's because you were looking for something like it, and presumably this means you have some investment in keeping the discussion healthy and the culture stable because that's what attracted you here in the first place. Based on that, I'm happy with newcomers until I have a reason to believe otherwise. :)
I just hope the core philosophy of the site is kept in consideration alongside any new features or policies, and that the site doesn't try to be everything to everyone - it's OK if some people don't like it or find it limiting. There are a million other places to go that allow for memes, snark, hot takes, outrage bait, etc. The appeal of tildes for me (and I'm sure many of the other new folks) is that it's more explicitly opinionated than Reddit on the type of content that should be shared here overall.
I'm not sure if it would be as good a place for moving over niche communities wholesale due to the mechanics of groups and tags.
Tildes is what I always wanted from Reddit but hadn’t found. I’m not particularly techy and the idea of looking for another website was overwhelming, so I stuck with Reddit despite disliking so much about it. I’ve been here a few days and really enjoying it so far, it’s a much calmer experience. I think you’re right in that the ones who will join and stay will be ones who think similarly - they don’t want Reddit, they want the discussion without all the chaff
I'm new here, but my understanding is that Tildes explicitly does NOT want to become like Reddit, and that's actually a reason why I like Tildes already. Although it appears that this site is very welcoming and almost anyone can get in, if you're coming from Reddit, you have to do a little legwork, mostly in the form of getting to the Tildes subreddit and then making a request. Which will help eliminate a lot of low-effort users who would only posts memes or other low-effort content to get karma.
I think we have pretty good control control over the taps here, so I’m not too worried. New users don’t have invites, and probably won’t for some time. I know the invite thread on /r/Tildes has been closed for at least a week to give things here time to settle, so I think we’re well equipped to handle an influx by slowly ramping up.
Also, let’s see how things look in a few months. Tildes is not Reddit, a lot of people probably aren’t looking for a quaint community of quirky internet people, and that’s OK.
Tildes also doesn’t solve all of Reddit’s problems. I think it solves the VC problem and it tries to solve the addicting ‘growth-hacking’ problem. But anyone who thinks moderators or Reddit admins are too unaccountable will find a human making moderation decisions at the top of Tildes as well.
So I think a lot of people are trying Tildes out right now, but I’m guessing not everyone will stay.
Rules lawyers not welcome here. Maybe not an official policy, but thats how it shakes out in practice.
No, it isn't and quite frankly I don't think it'll ever replace Reddit, the lack of user-made communities for one already attests to that, I see it as an alternative, not a replacement. What could be a Reddit replacement in the short term is Lemmy or another federated platform, but that is it's own can of worms with how confusing the whole ActivityPub standard can be for new users.
I'm speaking as a new user that lurked here for a while before joining, but I for one don't mind it one way or another niche communities migrating here, as long as the website grows I'm fine with it. But for that to happen user-made communities must be a thing or it will never realistically happen, that's the draw of Reddit and that's what places like Lemmy have over Tildes.
The issue with user made communities is you get a lot of moderator drama and nests of cliques that negatively impact the overall site culture. Just look at the mess that /r/TheDonald made of Reddit, as well as the sheer volume of drama subs.
The intent of communities, to form circles of mutual interest and have specific topic areas to share and discuss, is achieved with the tagging system. Over my time using the site, the groups in the sidebar have started to feel more and more like an atavism we've held over out of habit that don't really add much value. What they do end up adding is a bit of additional friction in the way of me deciding where to post any given article. At this point I functionally just use them as a tag that carries more weight that regular tags, but since functionally everyone is opted into every group there is no meaningful distinction between the communities so it seems pointless. The tags at least permit a powerful way to create custom-feeds.
This is what I've taken away from my short time here, too. But the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. For some people, I think this could be a good replacement, and for others a good alternative. Personally, I like the vibe here, but there's just a few parts of Reddit I've grown accustom to and really enjoy. So I'll probably never completely switch. But I have been hopping on here a couple of times a day, which is more or less on par with how often I use Reddit.
I think the goal is to avoid /r/enlightenedbirdmen and /r/madmudmen. That's the reason that creating any group requires a conversation. I know those two are harmless fun, but they are also a rather stark parody of a common problem where a pair of communities basically devolve into a back-and-forth that ends up destroying them both. There are also other risks - if we created ~politics, how long exactly would it take before it did to Tildes exactly what /r/politics did to reddit? Some groups are actually too dangerous to exist.
So, when we do groups, it's a conversation just like this one. Everything happens from the aggregate of the users, not individual users. It's a subtle difference but it's a very important one. There's also the Imzy problem - their users created a trillion empty groups because they could (and let's face it, because all of them wanted to get in on that sweet moderator real-estate) - so the entire site suddenly looks like a ghost town, because there aren't enough users to fill the groups with content. Then it killed them because nobody like a site that looks dead as fuck. Whoops.
You have a good point with there with Imzy, and I'm not saying Tildes should become Reddit, but if it was to become Reddit it'd need more variety of groups for certain niches, like it or not. As it stands it obviously won't be a Reddit replacement, and I'm fine with it.
Tildes to me is more akin to HN but with more topics / categories that are open to be discussed
There's pretty much nowhere on the internet that forever maintains an environment like that anymore, even carefully cultivated.
One thing that can be done is careful growth (like is being done now with invite codes) to allow new users to adapt to the curated culture.
I'm afraid that no matter which way you cut it, every single road leads to the same kind of thing. As popularity increases, the social media hive mind becomes more general and less individual. It converges to a unique entity but not really that different from any of the other ones out there.
One thing people will soon miss is the ability to get a cool 3 letters username like yours! ;)
I'm from the most recent reddit purge, but I'm not really looking for a reddit clone, per say; I'd been branching out to various forums (such as they still exist) and federated communities for a couple years before this, as I don't think it's wise to keep all your eggs in one basket, as they say.
That said, I literally never used reddit outside of a 3rd party app like Apollo, so I was VERY insulated from much of the worst of reddit's population by accessing only very little corners of it and by lurking a lot more than I was talking. I expect that I'll be much the same here, but that's just my personality.
Tildes seems interesting for it's take on things, and so far the overall mood has been pleasantly chill. The only downside is some of my main interests are very niche (hobby farming (some gardening, mostly livestock with a focus on genetics), zoo enrichment & keeping up to date with best practices regarding habitat & enclosure design, etc...) , and it's been rather hard to find any active communities for those things outside of reddit, which has been the biggest bummer. I've found a few cute communities for a lot of my other hobbies and interests with things like DIY, woodworking and mini terrain builds and the like at least!
The only advantage reddit has ever had for people like me is just combining a lot of niche topics under one "forum" style site. I didn't have to log in to 3-5 different sites to satisfy a social curiosity or answer people needing help with, say, backyard chicken enclosure sizes in one group and then people wanting advice on a terrain build for their dnd game in another, but I've never thought that idea was unique to reddit by any means. I do understand Tildes' reluctance to implement user-generated subgroups despite my more specialized interests, 'cause moderation can become a nightmare for both the moderators and users very quickly depending on the quality of the other.
I do wish we had a couple more broad ones I think are missing like DIY and/or home economics... My selfish wish would be for maybe one related to broad animal husbandry, pet and livestock alike, but I think the latter is mostly because it can be so hard to find hobby farm groups that are lgbtqa+ friendly. :')
I'm a Reddit refugee, and I think a certain user group of Reddit would really like it here. It reminds me so much of Reddit from 15 years ago when I first joined the site. There used to be such an emphasis on discussion and less on memes. Even memes back then on Reddit mostly stemmed from discussions and not from images/videos. Reddit is nothing like how it used to be back then, and I think the older users of Reddit who joined the site back then would appreciate Tildes and they would be able to adapt more easily to the culture of this website. Newer users who joined Reddit for memes and endless scrolling content probably wouldn't fit in well here, and most likely would quickly grow bored and move on to other sites.
Tildes is entirely made of Reddit "refugees", buddy :)
Just adjust your expectations. Understand that Tildes is not Reddit, and never will be Reddit. It's something different. You may grow to like it here, as long as you accept it is not the same.
Also, you may invite anyone you want. But I don't think ultra niche communities will ever be a thing, and, even if we had those, groups are not sub-communities so it would work very differently from what you expect.
Just to be pedantic: no, it's not.
I remember in the early days, quite a few people saying they'd come over from HackerNews. I also know of a couple of people who came here directly, without fleeing from another content aggregator or social media site.
So, while most of the people here (possibly even as high as 80-90%) are from Reddit, Tildes is not entirely made up of Reddit refugees. :P
Honestly, while I discovered Tildes from Reddit, it reminds me more of early Slashdot in many ways, but as more diverse group than Slashdot was.
society has become a lot more diverse since slashdot's hayday -- most people probably just didn't come right out and identify as not-male-white-american-cishet-techie in a..."there are no girls on the internet ahem ahem" way
In my few days here, I've seen people argue both sides of this issue in earnest. Almost to a person, though, they all said they wanted growth. Growth is a liability for an intimate culture, but necessary to build interaction. I agree with this - "can I interest you in everything, all of the time," is not the way, but having more than a few threads/day to read all the comments of would be nice (as I'm led to believe is the norm when there isn't a diaspora underway).
I am already happily going to remain a Tildo, regardless of what happens to Reddit. Even if they pull back on the API nonsense, the tenor of discussion has atrophied, and the communities I love have been diluted...Having Tildes has already been good for me, and I want to help contribute how I can, in return.
We should take ways to build community in ways that incorporate new
barbariansusers - they are inevitable, but Rome burning is not. We should find ways to help folks identify with other users, even as the site grows. We should work to help niche communities flourish, while not being overrun by mass-appeal discussions. These are likely going to require structural changes, and those will be difficult to implement, but can help keep the delightful culture intact, even as Tildes grows.Given that a lot of the folks you'll be getting are old redditors (I'm 12+ years) who tend to produce more quality content and more often than not care about the topics they are passionate about. Yeah, you probably want them.
I think a lot of the refugees coming from RIF, in particular, are likely to represent older Reddit accounts with greater interest in the more discussion-based aspects of Reddit. I am delighted, but not entirely surprised, that RIF's developer has been working on a Tildes app.
RIF refugee here, and 10.678 year veteran of reddit. I'm definitely up for something new. There's only so many OP moms to screw before you want to try something different.
Things come and go. If tildes makes it big, there's no doubt it'll fall one day too. What makes reddit great is that it has a community for the most niche interests.... that's what I want from tildes, a place for most people, refugees or not.
Reddit refugee here. I am hoping to just get a different experience out of this compared to what I have had for 11+ years. I'll probably spend the next few weeks or months exploring something that fills that void. But I am just glad to be invited! :D
welcome! glad to have to here with us
The one thing I wonder about the most is if Tildes will be willing to host more of the anti-corporate subreddits such as r/Piracy. If anything, those are the valuable subredddits I never want to see die or their information lost.
We've not shied from talking about ideology and tech behind piracy before, however I'd wager links and detailed how-tos will probably draw unwanted attention.
IMO private trackers, especially their forums and IRC are generally better suited for these discussions.
It's definitely something that would have to be managed extremely carefully, a sudden influx could be immediately fatal and the culture of Reddit has changed significantly in the past few years, a very different type of user has become tolerated and in many cases encouraged compared to the early days.
I think the more niche interest subreddits would definitely fit in quite quickly in a place like this though, they're the type of communities that you want.
The notion of being a Reddit refugee I think means wanting something that you can mentally approach the same way you approached Reddit. I am a previous Reddit user, but wouldn't consider myself a Reddit refugee since I approach Tildes as it's own distinct platform.
I am a Reddit refugee. But my Reddit account was from 2008, and to me Tildes is just simply Reddit from that time and I love to see it. Good conversation, punctuation and grammer, and "reddiquite" were all heavily pushed in those days. Then Digg redid their UI and everyone left that platform and Reddit became what it is now. The entire site is unusable to me without the old format or 3rd party apps.
We will see what happens to Tildes if this becomes the "go to" spot, as this entire thing is so ironically like Reddit and Digg. History really does repeat itself.
I recently realized the Digg v4 redesign was nowhere near as big a cosmetic change as I remembered it being:
Fark, Digg, Reddit. I’ve seen them all rise and fall over the decades. Tildes needs growth and Reddit refugees, but it needs to retain its own identity and purpose, otherwise it’ll eventually fade away.
I made an account here on june 2nd just for that very reason. I need a place to waste 7 hours of work, since I'm basically just there in case weird stuff happens and it almost never does happen.
I enjoy having more activity. I first joined in like 2018, but I was only off and on because it seemed like there was almost no activity.
Now, it’s a bit livelier. I like that it isn’t massively overrun like Lemmy currently is—but the influx of users has definitely boosted my engagement.
A niche community I would like to see someday is homebrewing and beer. But there is a catch sort of way to put it, even some niche subs in Reddit can get too political and that's the reason I'm using Reddit less. I was even banned in a niche community because a really bad mod did not like my opinion. I think Tildes still has work to do to not fall as Reddit.
So I have been trying to convince my husband to join me here and he mentioned the lack of homebrewing as a topic/group. Would you be willing to start a thread that would encourage the brewers to identify themselves and chat? I have seen a couple threads like that, most recently cigar enthusiasts.
That's a good idea let's try.
edit: there is already one
https://tildes.net/~hobbies/160w/any_homebrewers_winemakers_here_if_so_what_have_you_been_making_recently
Thank you