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How do you feel about the ongoing Reddit migration to Tildes?
Are you worried about the quality of Tildes going down?
Are you excited for the user base to grow?
As a new member, I’m Interested in reading your thoughts and opinions.
I've been lurking on Tildes since I joined years ago during the beta to check it out.
I feel like the "critical mass" is really not here yet - there hasn't been a lot of conversation which I would be interested in. And part of the reason why I feel that is, is because Tildes might be slightly too serious. I know, I know. The Tildes community doesn't want the "low quality" poster - and that's why the invitation system is still ongoing. Given the ongoing collapse of Reddit, though, I feel like there's a gap in the internet unfilled that would be perfect for Tildes to fill.
While I get the importance of serious conversation, I think it's important for people to be able to relax and talk casually as well. Tildes often feels kind of overtly serious. Perhaps some people would appreciate that, but what was special about Reddit for me was how there could be deep conversation and casual conversation in the same place. I could be laughing along a stupid comment chain and then still learn something from a useful comment posted.
Maybe I just misunderstand what Tildes is for - but that's my view as a user of Reddit. I know that the "small family" feeling of this forum is what Tildes want to preserve. And definitely, if more people joined, that will disappear. It doesn't stop me feeling like it's quite a shame if Tildes will not volunteer itself to fill in the gap that Reddit left by accepting a more casual kind of user.
This has always been my main criticism of Tildes, and you phrased it well. On Reddit, I make a lot of thoughtful content about topics I know a lot about, but I also enjoy joking around sometimes, too--it helps me feel like I fit in and am part of the community. Because of the "noise" label and the general sentiment that low-effort comments aren't welcome, I've never felt like I fit in here. It always felt like I had to either be serious all the time or be quiet. Now that I'm considering spending less time on Reddit, I'm trying to change my attitude about that.
I like /u/m8y's suggestion about filtering content based on "how serious/jokey/banterous [it] is," especially if I can label my own content. I actually like the "noise" label quite a bit, but when someone else applies it to my comment, I feel dissed, much like when someone downvotes me on Reddit. But if I could simply label my own comment as a joke or noise or whatever, then I wouldn't feel that, and people could filter it out as they like.
I think with any transition to a new platform you will have the most serious folks be most outspoken. While this is great for high quality content, some community banter is good for cohesion and gives outsiders a chance to feel welcome to add something.
I think the semi-private nature lends to it as well.
Private trackers are a good example as well. When people get in the difficulty of getting their account in the first place makes them hesitant to speak up and certainly not want to dance the line of "sillyness" for fear of losing access.
The benefit of a barrier for entry is obvious. Less shitposting and a higher quality of user.
The downside of a barrier for entry is also obvious. Less shitposting and a a higher threshold for jokes and mucking around.
Personally I think everyone is looking for the golden goose that doesn't exist. A direct reddit clone doesn't exist. If it did, it would be heading the same way as reddit.
After lurking Tildes for a while I think they know what they want and have found a good way to get it. As time goes on I think the attitude here will relax somewhat, but in the mean time don't let perfect be the enemy of good. There are other places on the net for sillyness, its good to have somewhere to converse with a different tone.
I agree that as time goes on the attitude and tone of the posts will become more casual. That’s not to say I think Tildes will devolve into low quality shit posting-but the user base will slowly develop a posting meta that’s more routine and predictable.
As early users of the site and the barrier to entry being higher, as you mentioned, one may feel they have a responsibility to uphold a certain standard when it comes to post quality. I felt the same way about reddit 10+ years ago but that has changed, obviously. But it’s nice to have that feeling back with Tildes!
You can also choose what kind of content you feel like engaging with. You can add to the interesting comments, or add to the jokes, depending what you feel like at the moment.
The risk here is that jokes are like junk food - fast, easy, immediately satisfying - and the more they’re condoned (separate joke section, self-labeling jokes, etc), the more people are going to gravitate towards that. It’s happened time and time again on Reddit.
You just reminded me of one of my text based subs I like there,
dadjokes. I'm going to miss that. Do you really think a place like that here could be detrimental to the excellent discussions that take place on Tildes? I'm a newbie, so I have no opinion for now, and I won't disagree with yours. I just want to hear different perspectives, I want to understand the people, what Tilders think about this.It's not that it would be necessarily detrimental, but that's not what Tildes is about.
It could be detrimental in the sense that, once you open to that kind of thing, you invite both the good and the bad that comes with it.
Learn more here: https://docs.tildes.net/
And welcome to Tildes :)
And while one could say "Yeah but that's the nature of large communities, make your own small subs to keep the discussion going there", that's kinda the point: Tildes is a small community. To keep the discussion going.
I myself would like Tildes to remain serious, For reddit 2.0 I think Lemmy will be there, as I see it now, It is becoming more reddit like in its comment section. So I am fine if Tildes remains serious and deep, If I want a lighter, but very funny and entertaining kind of discussion, then I'll go to Lemmy.
edit: and both can live and exist in my phone.
I largely agree with this. We don't need a "one-size-fits-all" website, hell I'd say that's partly caused Reddit (and to an extent the Internet at large) to go downhill, the growing unification of websites.
To your point, I have a 14 year old reddit account and still remember when Digg users migrated over, and then when it just gained a lot of popularity in general. It went from being a website with cool articles and discussions in the comments to being all about jokes, memes and bots. It seems that when a website caters to everyone, the quality of discussion just naturally drops.
Let's demystify that a bit. Do you hang out with 14 year old kids all day? No? Then why do you think you want to hang out with them on the same internet site all day? On the other hand, do those 14 year old kids want to hang out with a bunch of 40 somethings all day? I doubt it.
When you make one site for everyone you just end up with everyone being unhappy. Groups and users need to do some soul searching and self-selection. Reddit is, frankly, overrun with kids that it addicts with dopamine and shiny bits. They are not remotely interested in the things that adults are interested in, outside of a few precocious souls who are ahead of their time.
I noticed the “Summer Reddit” effect that usually came each time the kids got out for summer break increased massively during the coronavirus shutdowns and sort of never went back. I don’t know if I just…. got old? Or maybe bots are pushing that vibe more widely, meanwhile media and social has become so wack and all about rage bait.
I definitely noticed the same thing. As soon as those first lockdowns started hitting across the world in Feb-March 2020 I noticed a huge uptick in new Reddit accounts and people flagrantly ignoring the "Rediquette" that had built up over the sites existence.
Don't get me wrong, the site was becoming a shitehole anyway, infested with swivel eyed right-wing lunatics emboldened by Brexit/Trump/Le Pen, tankies openly supporting dictators and Russian and Chinese bot accounts spreading disinformation but something switched like a light bulb in 2020 and it was like the whole culture just completely and utterly changed for the worse.
I didn't mind browsing /r/all a few years ago just to see what the rest of the site was up to but I eventually found myself withdrawing to my little niche communities because the content and conversation quality was becoming so dire.
See, I joined in March 2020 and never even spent time on the popular page. I had my curated content, and the rest of the site could argue, bully, and karma farm themselves to hell for all I cared. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what they’ve done, but they’re taking my content with them.
My theory is everybody who would otherwise be out and about sh*tposting IRL with their friends started spending way more time online due to lockdowns, and then just never stopped. These platforms are designed to be addictive, after all. I'd bet many users who never would have used Reddit, etc. discovered it during that time, or had heard of it but hadn't signed up yet.
To devil's advocate this a bit, some of the best forums i was ever apart of had people of all ages. I was 13 and some people were 40. I think it depends a lot on if everyone wants to discuss the same things and can agree to the same culture/rules.
Of course these were also much smaller groups than even tildes, so that's a bit easier to control.
I've known a few precocious ten year olds that hung around more adult forums in my time, even had some in our raiding guilds. It's more about the mental age than the physical one. Some ten year olds are actually thirty, and some fifty year olds are actually ten.
It’s also a bit different experience when you’re the one on the young end versus the one on the older end in the mixed case scenarios.
Which is an interesting concept in itself.
Subreddits almost solved that issue. I think the added layer of abstraction that the fediverse offers will go some ways to solve it further. I think we will see instances catered to certain demographics, and if those demographics don't vibe then they will isolate from each other.
100%, and I'd say that's the way of most things. Lazy metaphor, but like if a store tries to carry a large selection of products, they're less likely to specialize in a more niche, potentially better product. Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle, so they say.
interesting. I joined Reddit in 2018 and I still had the same observations that you did. It seems to becoming more "jokey" over time
I’d have enjoyed if it was more jokey. But it’s never actually funny. People aren’t making jokes they’re spamming cliches.
As a new user from reddit, I am really enjoying a lot of what Tildes is. It really does feel friendly and like people are happy just to communicate, rather than a queue of people waiting to snipe or throw in a one-liner for points.
I've only scratched the surface, but even if I joined another redditalike, I feel like settling down here, regardless.
I think it can be done, but it does require effort for all sorts of reasons. It also puts a larger overhead on whoever is moderating, and I don't think it's necessary. As many have pointed out, if people want lower effort comment chains, there can be somewhere else for that, and I'm personally fine with that being the decision.
If they did want to allow it, yeah you could have a tagging system or limit it to certain groups. All of that can cause issues though, and I'd kinda prefer it just be as is.
I think the biggest issue with lemmy is...it's a mess. Let's be honest it's not easy for new users to understand and see how it works. It also doesn't help that to make a "server"(Subreddit) it requires someone to pay and host it, you can't just create a new one for free. It's also not very UI friendly and their isn't a mobile app that works well or does it work well natively in mobile. At least tildes works in mobile for the most part, plus the RIF dev. Building a mobile app would be great for here.
Ain't that the truth!
After seeing so many references here to Lemmy over the past week, I decided to check it out. (Mostly, I wanted to create my "Algernon_Asimov" name over there, to make sure noone else could use it.) First off, it took me a few tries at internet searching to actually find it. And then, trying to figure out how to create an account was another complicated task. Then... I had to pick a specific server to sign up to, rather than just creating one Lemmy-wide account. One server? Which one? There's so many already - and most of them seem to be about things I don't care about. And I'm sure there'll be more in the future; what if I pick one now and a better one comes along later?
In the end, I didn't bother.
Oh no, this gives me Mastodon flashbacks!
And when I had picked a server and was busy looking up my old twitter followers to add them (which was a pain also), I found out that other mastodon servers had features that others lacked (the math server having LaTeX integration was pretty cool). That this meant that my account necessarily would be catered to a very specific type of content, and that the migration process would be annoying, made me just give up on the thing.
Yeah, I made a mastodon account but picked an instance that a) was not chosen by many others in my twitter circle, adding an annoying barrier to keeping my social circle intact and b) was not as feature rich as others. Federation solves some problems but introduces others which I don't think have been fully solved. I certainly wasn't motivated to keep using it.
There's a reason for that: Lemmy and Mastodon are both basically just different skins over the same network. Mastodon is a Twitter-like skin, Lemmy is Reddit-like, but really they're both just clients for a network protocol called ActivityPub.
Federation and decentralization have been novel buzzwords, but from what I've seen they seem too poorly implemented to be useful in practice.
Maybe I'm just a dinosaur but their identity systems seem like an inconvenient mess to deal with, and don't really offer enough pros to outweigh the cons.
I mean in a lot of ways this is because the social feeling we chase with networks like that is inherently centralized. We don't want a decentralized fediverse, we want a single "in"-group we can belong to. Or more generally the ability to pick our in-group from a single central pool in a convenient manner.
Hence why Reddit with it's Subreddits works well in that regard: you got all of reddit and its giant user base, but you quickly select which circles to belong to.
Mastodon or Lemmy are far more aboit existing groups establishing a new format, like a university running a Mastodon instance for all university and student body side announcements. Quite specialized, and already existed as a group before.
that's the same experience that I had. I just gave up and I'm pretty much stuck on twitter because of that
Perhaps it's just a difference in visions for what Lemmy could be, but I would view some of what you've mentioned as positive. Minor barriers to entry (debatable if these particular challenges count as "minor") can encourage an intentionality to the community which I think is valuable. If getting started requires reading a short guide and trying things out, you've now filtered out anyone unwilling to put in that effort.
If the goal is to replace reddit, then yes, that's a problem, but I'm hoping it can be something a bit different.
I think most people are having more luck over on Squabble. I read it’s supposed to be a mix of Twitter and Reddit, but at the moment it looks a bit like a Reddit clone. It works great on mobile, a bunch of subs have been created, and the developer was working actively taking suggestions both on the site and in discord — which is why looks so much like Reddit atm from what I’ve gathered.
The issue with squabbles it still has that same blown out and busy look to it. Reddit was great because of it's compact and simplification/minimalism. So far this place has been the only place that gets that simplified design, everything else has just been busy looking.
the downvote brigade, and the death threats, Oh my. how are people so affected that they waste time doing things like that!? That's the reason I vote for Reddit to be left there on Reddit.com and Tildes to be its own. Let us not make Tildes into Reddit. Reddit has been done before and we now see what it has become, let Tildes do its own thing and maybe become better.
Makes me wonder if there's a comfortable middle ground somewhere between on one hand everything devolving into the same five jokes, comment sections full of people who didn't read the article and who are just weighing on for fun, and on the other hand having the niceties that are memes, casual conversation, and humour.
Yeah, even as someone who likes joking around, I see the need for a middle ground. I've honestly grown to hate the Reddit comments that are a series of puns or just song lyrics gone too far. I was overjoyed a couple years ago when the "Press 'F' to pay respects" meme finally started getting downvoted rather than having to wade through a wall of "F" "F" "F" "F" etc.
My own personal policy has been to refrain from jokes on serious topics. If it's a news topic, it's just inappropriate to joke about it. What about a feature where certain topics discourage jokes or actively remove them? Or maybe when users make a new thread, they can decide whether or not jokes are welcome (something that can be changed by site admins if appropriate).
The thing is, if one person makes the joke it's funny. When 40 people all make the same joke one after another I just don't know what posters 2-40 are getting out of it. People will spam the same pun or joke for hours and each one will get upvoted. Like. . . why!?
I think its the family guy brand of humour.
Like when they have a segment that goes on for far too long to the point where it apparently gets funny again.
I never personally got it, but I know a lot of people who do
It's largely from Twitch chat scroll-spam culture these days I believe.
It's amazing how often Twitch chat or Tiktok end up being the usual suspects now, I guess 4chan's been dethroned from its sole remaining claim to fame.
I'm wholly on board with some site attempting to stem those trends, though I'm sure it'd be unpopular or seen as overly strict to many 'casual passerby' users.
Was that r9k?
The original was #xkcd-signal, and its enforcement bot, ROBOT9000. 4chan's /r9k/ was explicitly inspired by that, and borrowed the name of the bot for the name of the board.
Usually all the "F"ers are reacting to each other which makes it so I can hide it all with one click that hides the thread though, so I never minded such things.
Now the sub /r/interestingasfuck however, lately became a sub filled with posts where interesting conversation can be had but with nothing but jokes in the comments instead, and that is a fate you wouldn't want to see to happen.
What if.....hey you know how on Wikipedia there's a discussion tab separate from the main article? And in the dwarf fortress wiki there are sometimes stubs at the end clearly marked "D For Dwarf" which is kinda meta and always silly and has nothing to do with actual game mechanics?
AND that people have always complained about the comments box being on the bottom of a thread?
What if threads can have a shadow section that's all joking around and noise only?
It'd be like....in Mystery Science Theatre 3000, the characters have a running commentary on the movie they're watching -- it's not only to make fun of it but also using humour as a way to interact and to appreciate the
humourmovie togetherAnd maybe only users who do want to see noise can opt in to the shadow corner AND they have to scroll way down PAST the comment box to see it?
I like the idea of a shadow thread but that would make moderation more difficult, right? Now there's a second place to look, and fewer people would be looking, that may inevitably form a shadow culture at odds with the broader site, where some posters live only in the shadow lands.
Someone else mentioned being able to tag their own posts as noise/joke would make it less negatively valenced. With a user setting to auto-collapse (or make visible) noise/joke comments, you can choose your tolerance level for unserious content.
Perhaps if a more general "casual" label were added, that could be used to hide a broad range of casual content when you've had enough of that. It also means that more people will engage with the serious content when it is easier to find, even in a situation with a large amount of casual conversation.
I actually liked how Reddit could be totally irreverent about stuff. That’s actually what initially attracted me. But I think you also could find serious discussions on it too.
Also people complained that Reddit was too big but I do think that was a positive in that it was easy to find a group of people who wanted to talk about a more niche thing (for example smaller games that tend to get overlooked in general gaming forums would have subreddits for them and relatively active ones too).
There's nothing that says those niches have to exist under a single umbrella. Personally I'm hoping the web trends a bit back towards the way it was before, with smaller fora with their own personalities to discover.
While I agree that it's easier to 'cut loose' in places where not everyone's holding themselves to some standard, this past decade or so has had me starving for civilized places where people either hold themselves accountable for their conduct or it's done for them.
I'm happily willing to put the marginal effort forward myself in finding and contributing positively to "more serious discussions" as you call them, to not have to continue wading through the alternative.
I think the thing is though it's easier for those niches to exist when they are under a single umbrella cause it makes it easier for people to find each other (especially now that google has started to suck and there hasn't been a search engine to replace it). Plus not having to have a ton of different logins for a bunch of different accounts.
And as for wading through the alternative, I guess for me my solution to that was find subreddits that were more serious. But I also loved having subreddits that were less serious (or just cute, I will miss all my cat subreddits).
"Beta"? What fantasy is this? :P
Officially, Tildes is still in alpha testing phase!
The login page says "Tildes is currently in invite-only alpha..." And the Contact page says "To request an invite to the Tildes alpha..."
We're still in alpha-testing.
Actually, that's an important point to remind people of. Tildes is not feature-complete yet: there's still all these feature requests to work on. Tildes works as it is, but it's a bare-bones forum. Its current feature set absolutely can not scale up if the user base increases too much, too quickly. There was supposed to be a gradual growth in users, with a gradual improvement in features alongside that user growth. Neither of those has happened. We're still in alpha-testing.
My bad. The alpha-alpha then, :P
I just remember the first post on Reddit all the way back about some Reddit-like forum. I kept hearing about it, so I asked for an invite, because even then I was concerned about what would happen if Reddit eventually went kaput. Looks like my fears have mostly come true.
I always thought the point of an alpha was to prove the stability and get the framework done. I think we're pretty damn decent on the framework, and as for the stability it's proven rather invincible. Micro-downtime is wonderful. We still have a long way to go though.
In my mind, Beta begins when this code is a one-click install on a VPS, and hosting providers just start tossing it right in there like it's Plex or vBulletin. That's when the code gets more users rather than the site getting more users.
But the site isn't feature-complete yet. It might be a minimum viable product, and a workable proof of concept, but it's nowhere near a final product.
Seems to me like it's already superior to reddit. This place even has a functional search feature. :P
It's about 1% of what we've imagined, though.
I think a difference between Tildes and Reddit is that Tildes isn't trying to be a place where you can get pure passive entertainment like with TV. Nothing wrong with passive entertainment, but I don't think that's what Tildes is for.
Also, I'd say for that casual, comedic atmosphere to work, there has to be an element of performativeness and talking into the void. In practice this means people talking at each other rather than to each other.
That’s the perfect way to describe it: Reddit used to be more “interactive” and now it’s purely performative.
It’s only for the little orangered counter in the side and never to actually spark discussion or learn something.
My own subjective experience having been relatively consistently active on this site for the past few years is that Tildes has gotten less serious over time, but not less thoughtful, and that is good. I think part of it early on was reactionary (in that the site did, and to an extent still does, define itself in opposition/reaction to a lot of typical online communities), and part of it was the community simply figuring out on its own what it meant by "thoughtful discussion". I definitely felt the need early on to make sure each of my comments, if I was leaving them, was some long essay on the subject at hand. I still do that when its relevant now.
But I'm also much more comfortable leaving "smaller" comments as long as I think someone will get something from it, even if that "something" is just feeling nice. And generally, I haven't experienced any negative feedback from this approach. Maybe some of my comments have been labeled jokes or noise, but personally I don't mind that so much. All those labels do is affect the sort order and affect whether the comment counts towards activity, neither of which I really care about. In fact, having those labels actually helps me to post shorter comments, as I know if people find them frivolous they can simply be labeled and everyone is happy.
I'm new here and I've been finding I'm much more hesitant to post here than on reddit because I don't want to post a low-value comment, whereas on reddit I would post without thinking.
What's interesting, though, is that it wasn't always this way. When I started on reddit (about 10 years ago) I pretty much always posted comments that were long-form and thoughtful. It wasn't because I felt pressure to do so, but because that was (and to some extend still is) my preferred method of interacting with the site. It has occurred to me though that as reddit devolved in quality, so did my comments. This isn't to say I was ever particularly obnoxious, but at this point on reddit my posts are a line or two long on average, whereas at the beginning it was almost always paragraphs.
This is to say that I think that how we interact with a platform is molded in part by the platform itself. Tildes seems serious, so I will interact with it in a way that is serious to match the vibe. As reddit's vibe got more and more superficial, so did my interaction with the site.
I think part of it is the expectation that your comment will be read, appreciated, and responded to in good faith by others on the site. There came a time on Reddit where you could no longer reasonably have that expectation, as the quality of discourse dropped so much that you basically couldn't have a back and for discussion that didn't devolve into something bad. After typing out some long, thought out response only to get either no reply or responses that cherry pick and fixate on one thing, it was easier to just not engage seriously at all.
In any case, I agree with the fact that the platform molds how we interact with it. You say Tildes is serious and I might be inclined to agree depending on what you mean by serious. I would maybe say that Tildes expects effort from your posts, but not necessarily seriousness. I think its important distinction to make. Effort does not equate to length of comments, or tone. I personally think its OK to engage in "less serious" discussion on this site so long as people are getting something from it. Ultimately the main rule here boils down to "don't be an asshole" and I think as long as we stick to that the comment sections will continue being high quality.
At some point with political arguments on Reddit I sort of just decided my goal was to spend as little time as possible to make them spend as much time as possible. I didn’t even view my contributions as meaningfully trying to change minds anymore so much as trying to occupy the time of shitheads and trolls so they didn’t bother anyone else.
I don't blame you. Reddit's voting system incentivizes low-effort content and herd mentalities, to an insane degree. I think we all saw that trend in our own contributions (I have my archived ones saved but towards the end I became a heavy lurker, with my usual thoughts going into a notes app) and that shift in incentives.
Site designers don't take into account the cultural butterfly effects of seemingly-simple design choices, and I'm definitely hoping some forum engine/site learns to do so "for good", whether it's here or elsewhere.
For me Reddit is not only instrumental in finding individual opinions on multiple subjects it became a small source of social support after the death of my son. In the past I used to rely on a number of forums which have mostly all disappeared.
For me it will definitely be an adjustment if it implodes. I hope it remains at least in some form.
But as with all things on the internet I will survive.
I do like this site's philosophy and hope that the Reddit refugees will adjust without too much of a struggle for everyone.
I’m so sorry about your son. That’s one thing Reddit is really great for - connecting people who have a shared experience. I think the more serious subreddits will continue much as they always have, they don’t seem to get overrun by the jokes and memes like other subs. I hope you continue to find support when you need it
I think the fear is that even the serious subs may be overrun by bots and spam, if/when the third party mod tools no longer work. Another issue I’ve heard about is the official app is less accessible to users with certain disabilities (blindness is one I remember specifically). Now those people are likely either going to have to find another source of support or alternate way of accessing of those communities.
Ahh I guess I imagined that bots were like guided missiles in that they need to be told where to post, rather than being able to post anywhere and so assumed the smaller subs would get less of it.
Totally agree that the accessibility issue is appalling
Less of it sure, but that doesn’t mean they’re exempt. Plus, you should see the kinds of DMs people on the Chronic Pain sub get from drug dealers when they complain about not being able to get drs to prescribe them sufficient— or any — pain meds due to DEA rules, stigma, discrimination, lack of empathy, or even disbelief. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if those kinds of messages or religious spam became a larger issue without the 3rd party support. The issues are definitely different than a lot of the larger subs have, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t going to be problems. Then again, I don’t actually mod a sub, so I don’t know how much those 3rd party mod tools are utilized and I might just be paranoid.
I think that the seriousness as you put it is a feature of the site and isn't something to throw out. The fact that I stopped to think for a moment to figure out what a second and third sentence here could be is essential to a satisfactory experience. Without it, it's easy to end up with reddit style "Updoot for no bamboozle" style comments (or whatever the current comment meme on the defaults is). Fundamentally, I think avoiding that is a core piece of the culture of the site.
Let me try: “I updoot this for no bamboozle and my axe! please smash F in the chat for me the narwhal bacons at midnight”
Am I ruining this site correctly?
I think part of your post is correct, its all to do with critical mass. Once you reach that then it becomes self sustaining.
Like someday else said higher up, one of the issues was that people found Reddit and looked no further, I am as guilty of that as anyone, if I had looked further I would have been here years ago.
However, this site is a breath of fresh air as I have said elsewhere and the influx of ex-Redittors will be painful to start with but I believe a lot will drift back to Reddit after a while, when they realise they can't dictate the conversation as before. Others will fall by the wayside, but eventually a core of them, the ones that get it, will stay.
Yes it will be scary and maybe difficult but with more like minded people it will get easier.
From my short time here, I wonder if we could benefit from a seperate taxonomy for posts and comments that can be filtered for how serious/jokey/banterous the content is? That would put a lot of trust on us all here but could work out.
I wonder if it might be better to tackle that with multiple 'reply' boxes, or at least allow a user to apply some labels to their own comment as they make a reply.
As a new user, I'm still wondering....is it okay to make puns here? Like...are we allowed to have one-off jokes?
Like where's the line? Black tie? Business casual? Happy hour?
Business casual. Smart casual.
You can joke around as part of a serious conversation, but generally don't make humour the only purpose for a comment or topic. If you're writing a serious comment, and it happens to also include a pun somewhere along the way, that's totally fine. But if you're going to post a comment whose only purpose is to deliver that pun... think twice before posting.
I think I would disagree with this.
It’s OK to make jokes and light hearted comments, just not at top level. I don’t think they should be what you reach for first every time, but the joke label can handle some well-deserved silliness from time to time.
I fully agree with this sentiment. What I often loathed about reddit was on serious conversations people would make puns that would take away from the discussion.
But humour, satire and parody have for millennia been an important part of discourse. While making people laugh it can still convey a real point. It can disarm anger between communities.
Tildes like anywhere on the internet is a mixing of cultures from across the world. How they use humour will be very different, there isn't a standardised way of speaking to each other.
I grew up during the troubles in NI. Humour and silliness is part of our cultural identity that helped get us through the worst of it.
/\ This.
But also, don't do "This". That's what votes are for. ;)
Thank you. This makes good sense to me. So I'm getting "out to lunch with coworkers" vibe. We can let loose a bit, but it's a community with a purpose.
I tried looking it up to no avail, what does the “exemplary” under your username mean?
I believe that's kind of like a special comment. If you click on it, you can see the comment they made.
If that does anything for me I don't really know.
https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/commenting-on-tildes
Interesting that others can add tags to your comments. It seems like something that could be used in petty ways, like people marking someone’s comment they don’t agree with as “noise” or “joke”.
But on the other hand, I would assume others would correct it if the label is inaccurate.
Fun fact - first time we turned those tags on, they all displayed nice and colorfully like Exemplary does and they had a count so people could see how many times each one was applied. It was a fucking disaster - everyone was in a tagging frenzy, and taking the presence of [noise x5] as license to flame people. As soon as we hid the tags, the problem cleared right up. Social networks have feedback effects, and they are usually not what you expect them to be.
It's the first step in the "community as moderators" approach that is being (will be) used on Tildes. If you're familiar with StackExchange at all, the principles are similar to that.
Everyone will be a moderator on Tildes, but different people will have different levels of moderator ability, depending on their reptutation and experience on the site. The bottom level of the moderation pyramid is those comment labels that people can apply. (The higher levels haven't been built yet.)
Think of them as a more thoughtful version of Reddit's downvote - you can "downvote" a comment here, but you have to say why. Also, each user only gets a 0.5 weight on any label they apply, so it takes two users to click on a comment label for it to take any effect.
https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/commenting-on-tildes#labelling-comments
Interestingly, in the future, a user's reputation will depend partly on how they use comment labels (and whatever other moderation features they might have access to). If a user is found to be misusing or abusing the labels, their reputation would decrease, and they would lose access to some or all moderation features.
Only "Exemplary" is visible to users.
It can be used in petty ways, that is why they are reviewed by @deimos.
Thank you for clarifying, there’s a lot to learn for me
You can learn more here: https://docs.tildes.net/
I think it can stay "serious" by keeping posts limited to text and links. That would keep a lot of memes, fight videos, etc away from the site.
Time will tell. Change can happen when there's opportunity, and if things really go downhill over there, opportunity will present itself. Nothings real yet, just a lot of sabre rattling
so... let's put it this way: here's my first ever comment on tildes.
In case you didn't see it, I asked a similar question a couple days ago and got some amazing responses: https://tildes.net/~tildes/15tv/does_tildes_want_reddit_refugees
It sounds like, overall, people are happy about the growth but want to emphasize that this isn't Reddit 2.0. This is Tildes, and new people have to adjust to the change. But check out the thread for all the detail behind that poor summary.
I've been on reddit for about 13 years, and I have to say that this does feel like reddit 2.0... or rather reddit 0.9, which is fantastic! Reddit used to be more like this, but over the years they added bloated feature after bloated feature, slowly turning it into an Instagram or a TikTok: coins, awards, avatars, premium, online-status, subreddit themes... But it was gradual, not all at once. I'd been blissfully ignorant all this time because I used RIF and RES, but trying to use the official reddit app really made me see it.
Thank you for the link, I’m still getting used to the UI and search function
I really like the more minimalistic design
As one of the so-called Reddit refugees, I’m grateful to have found a place that feels in some ways like the Reddit I first joined 12 years ago.
I’ve been unhappy with Reddit for a long time but Apollo was brilliant enough to keep me engaged with the site. This situation and Apollo going offline have brought these negative feelings about the quality of content on Reddit to a head and it feels like a sea of repost bots and low effort memes, mixed with some select few tiny communities that are well run.
So I hope that the quality of discussion I see here is continued and that I can contribute in some way!
What do You like the most about Tildes?
Not OP, I like the well-thought-out long-form responses. The civil disagreements with both points being presented intellectually as opposed to antagonistic quips and willful escalation of the discussion, which eventually devolves into pointing out irrelevant items in an effort to downplay the credibility of the other side.
I also like the emphasis on text-based posts, and not giving embedded images and videos a platform. This somehow prevents low-effort memes from overrunning the site. I like that you have to post links and you go to other sites to read articles, its a way also to support those sites and kind of widens our online world, making us discover other sites besides Tildes, This is what Reddit lost, we became insular in Reddit with the embedded media. And it made people into headline rageaholics, commenting based only on the headline without ever really reading the article.
I would like to assure our future by limiting the bots if they ever are implemented here.
I also like that there is no karma to farm here (as far as i know) That way it will not be attractive to karma farmers and account sellers.
So far, that's all I can think of.
Oh, and don't forget. the sense of community. The attitude and the tone of the site is just right.
This is it for me too. I've only been on Tildes for a day, but I also came from Reddit. And I am really impressed with the friendliness here and the quality of the discussions. I like reading people's thoughts, responding with my own, and genuinely engaging in a thoughtful conversation with folks.
I agree with the limitation on bots...that would greatly affect the tone of this site turning negative really quick, in my opinion.
Similarly one issue I have with Reddit is due to the size, often long comments are upvoted but are just…wrong. Sometimes posts make the front page that are related to my profession and I scroll through and all the highly awarded top comments are way off the mark? But people sound very authoritative or make witty jokes about things I guess and it just spirals from there.
I haven’t been on tildes long enough to know how often that happens here but I think it’s easy to have BS spread when there’s an unlimited amount of users piggybacking off each other for karma and such.
Another Reddit refugee here. I'm also grateful to have a place that is somewhat like what Reddit used to be.
I left Digg to join Reddit about 13 years ago. This migration feels very similar.
I'm actually hopeful again (hear that, @cfabbro?).
When I joined up back in the olden days (has it really been 5 years?), I realised that Tildes was a great opportunity for the type of online forum I'd been looking for without really knowing I was looking for it. I'd always been a bit disappointed about some aspects of Reddit, and Tildes looked different, from the ground up, starting with Deimos and his philosophy. And I liked what I saw.
So I dived in, and... long story short... I was very involved for the first 2 years of Tildes' life. Then I got disappointed and disillusioned as the Tildes I was promised never materialised. So I reduced my involvement here. I'd pop in every now and then, to check up on the site's progress, but it was still the same.
However, as @Bauke showed in another thread, in the past week, the userbase has grown by about 2.5x as many users as in the whole 3 years preceding that. That's giving me hope that the processes which ground to a halt three years ago, might slowly start up again, and Tildes might start moving toward what it was originally intended to be. The site is coming back to life.
Reddit went about three years without having a major fuckup. That's what it was.
We're back on schedule now though.
I know you're joking, but... do we really want Tildes' schedule to be driven by a third party's fuck-ups? If Tildes had kept developing and improving over the past 3 years, it would be a lot readier to handle this current influx of users than it currently is.
Chicken/Egg. I understand your disappointment that Tildes stopped growing. I share it. But I think you're also being pretty unfair to Deimos. He worked his ass off for 3 full years without pay. But he could only do that for so long though, so he had to get a full-time job 2 years ago to keep paying the bills. And it's kinda hard to keep up the same pace of development when you're the only dev for a site, with not many other people making substantial code contributions even though the site is open-source, and you now have another full-time developer job.
However, with that said, we're now up to 192 donors between Github sponsors and Patreon, which I'm pretty sure is the most we've ever had. So perhaps sometime in the near future, faster development can resume, either with Deimos being able to start treating it as a part-time job, or by taking on some other contractors.
NONONONONONONONONONO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I totally understand Deimos' situation. I don't fault him for what he did at all.
But... if Tildes had kept growing from the early days, then Deimos might not have had to get a job, or he might have been able to get a different type of job. Also, he would have had more motivation to keep working on Tildes.
More Tildes users would include more supporters and helpers: more coders, more non-coding helpers - and, importantly, more donors. Imagine if 100 new users had joined every month, and 10% of those users decided to donate. By now, there'd be 600 donors to Tildes. Even if they all donated only 1 CAD per month, that's 7,200 CAD per year. It's not a living wage by any means, but it's strong encouragement for Deimos to keep working on this project. Maybe that money would have allowed him to hire a part-time coder to build just one or two new features per month. There's lots of possibilities that could have happened if Tildes had kept growing.
I'm not faulting or blaming Deimos in any way. I'm only saying that things could have gone differently if Tildes had kept growing over the past few years, and Deimos might have been able to do more than he has been able to do.
Yes! And, like I said, if Tildes had grown, that might have been able to happen earlier.
(And, because I put my money where my mouth is... some time in the next week or two, I'll get around to re-starting my own donations to Tildes.)
Sure, maybe. But how exactly would we have accomplished that? :P We were all trying our best to make that happen already. I personally sent out literally thousands and thousands of invites. But completely opening the flood gates wasn't (and still isn't) a very good option either, IMO.
I honestly don't know. If I knew, I would have suggested it or done it back then.
As things are right now, Tildes and Lemmy have won the hivemind's discussion on where to go. Lemmy is getting all the people who are hypnotized by the federation buzzword and/or looking for a less serious community with blackjack and hookers. Tildes is hoovering up reddit's entire old-school userbase. We are getting the better deal here, and it will bump the content and activity level.
It was never about the users exactly. It's all about the submitters.
But more users means more submitters. Even if only 1% of users are submitters, that means the site needs to add 100 more users to get that 1 submitter.
And, as Tildes has only added about 900 users in the past 3 years, which is only 9 new submitters. (Assuming that every single one of those users stayed on Tildes longer than just a week or two, which probably isn't the case.)
Part of it is forming a critical mass of activity that can then continue to attract more people, and getting a large influx all at once like we have in the past few days can help a lot in that regard, as we've basically just imported an entire userbase at once. I can't blame people looking at the site in the past few years for determining it was too inactive to care about. But I think anyone looking at the site right now (hello!) would probably be encouraged by its activity levels. The daily activity here in recent days reminds me of lobste.rs, which I would not say is "dead" by any means, just small.
My only point is that this influx has been a very welcome and needed shot in the arm so to speak, and I wonder if we can further leverage it to attract the type of people who become posters. Having sent out a decent number of invites myself, the Reddit account age of people I have invited has averaged very high. That's a promising sign to me because it indicates not only that many of these users are not motivated purely by low effort content, and also that they know what its like to be in it for the long haul. I think there's hope yet.
There is. Submissions beget more submissions. Just wait until the people who usually don't post much on reddit start delurking here. It takes them a couple of weeks to get into the flow.
Yup. I’m a longtime account holder and largely a lurker but this newest influx of redditors actually has me using the site again in the hopes that the homogenous tildes user base finally gets a breath of fresh air to it.
Figure that if I want them to feel encouraged to be here and post I better put my money where my mouth is and start posting again.
Yeah. I've been thinking that, too. Which is annoying, because my natural behaviour on these sites is to be a commenter (I'm normally part of the 9%, not of the 1%), rather than a submitter. But, I did it back in 2018/19, so I can do it again. It's just a matter of remembering that interesting articles I read could also be posted here, and then bothering to post them.
I'm in the same boat. I spent most of my time commenting rather than submitting posts. Part of it is it's so much harder to discover new and interesting things online these days outside of link aggregators. Stumble upon was something I used a lot before Reddit.
Now that I won't be using reddit much anymore I'll have to figure out new ways to keep abreast of topics that interest me, and if I find something worth sharing or discussing I'll make sure to post it here.
Well, hmm, I don't actually know if I agree: what I've really noticed in the past week are posts getting way more discussion. Before I think the average + median number of comments on a story was somewhere between 1 and 5. I never really felt like Tildes was lacking in what was submitted, more so often lacking in enough interest to spark a discussion. Once discussions did start, they often did keep going and were interesting, though.
Me either. :( Unfortunately, like it or not, our flow of new users depends on Reddit HQ fucking up, and people not losing interest in us before they get an invite. On the positive side though, Reddit HQ does fuck up... a lot. :P We just got a bit unlucky that they hadn't fucked up majorly again in the last few years (until now).
As a random newcomer…I’m really enjoying this site now. Wish I had found it earlier as I think it really fits what I’m looking for, regardless of what does/doesn’t happen with Reddit.
Thanks!
Yeah, I honestly do think that a lot of people on reddit would enjoy Tildes, and make good contributors here too... if only they knew about us. But spamming self-promotion to get us there wasn't gonna help us accomplish that, IMO. So we have just had to be patient, and let people become aware of us naturally, through word of mouth, and organic discovery. It feels like we may have finally reached a tipping point though, since a LOT of people are mentioning us on reddit right now. :)
If we want to maintain the high quality here though , we just have to be a bit cautious about letting in too many people at once now though, so new users have time to acclimatize before letting in more.
Natural discovery of Tildes was through someone bitching about Reddit on a Reddit thread and saying that the better alternatives right now were X, Y & Z. One of those letters was Tildes.net.
After 5 years of being around, and I'm a heavy internet user and (re)searcher, I hadn't spotted Tildes before. It's a great community so far, the content is nice and the discussion doesn't seem to be insulting.
I think the reason the site has stayed so small is a mixture of low search engine presence (Tildes content never seems to show up else I'd have fallen over it), the invite system (great system - vetted is always better for quality control) and simply content quantity.
Regardless, I'm glad I'm here and I'll be hanging around.
Speaking of... any idea when we might open the next Reddit thread? I'm itching to send out more invites!
I was thinking tomorrow, first thing. I want one more day of Diablo IV. ;)
Mind if I ask your role here, cfabbro? Not sure if you have an official role or just “guy who’s been here a long time” and does lots of things.
Thanks!
~ one of the newbies
From my user profile bio:
So no official role at the non-profit or on the site. But yes, I have been here a long time... since before the site was even launched, along with a handful of others who were invited to brainstorm ideas for the site, and help out with things. And chances are high that if you see another user "Registered April 26, 2018", it's another person who was also helping behind the scenes to get Tildes off the ground. :)
Thanks!
As it turns out, I still have access to one barely used ancient reddit account. I'll pop in tomorrow and help out for a bit as well.
I always welcome the help. Although I intend to lock the round after 500 requests, so I should actually be able to plow through them on my own pretty quickly.
PM me any time if you need some help then. :)
Will do. And thanks for the offer. :)
Samesies. Joined in 2018, was that alpha? Loved everyone, but needed more activity, I am making an effort now to be more active to keep the momentum.
I hope we can capitalize and attract a lot of the right people to tildes and build a vibrant and beautiful community.
As I pointed out yesterday, Tildes is officially still in alpha-testing phase!
Well then I still feel honored and privileged.
I like it. I've been here 5 years, but I'm more engaged than ever because we have some interesting new folks to talk to. Tildes needed more activity.
what keeps you coming back? I'm new here
Not the person you asked but I'll answer anyways for myself. I just enjoy the quality. If you know Hackernews, it's similar to that, but honestly with a better community and with more interesting topics. The community is the best thing about Tildes. For me, I really enjoy the casual conversations on many kinds of topics. I love when someone shares an interesting concept or thought. Tildes is also a pretty cool link aggregator, I definitely found some super interesting stuff here that I didn't see elsewhere. We also do some cool events that I love -- one of my favorites is Timasomo for example -- Tildes Make Something Month, where people can make anything creative in a month and share it with each other.
It's just a lot of people I know who have semi-migrated from reddit starting 5 years ago, and they tend to all share the same mindset on community forums. We either moderated together or crossed paths in the various mod subs/chats and learned the same lessons from our time on reddit. Honestly, I checked Tildes only a few times per week until the recent API announcement. There wasn't as much activity, and I was still relying on reddit to follow my main interests/hobbies. I've really been enjoying the opportunity to chat about those interests with a new wave of people here though and am working on shifting my browsing away from reddit by the end of the month.
just to add to that, I would like to say, I m both a Tildes and Lemmy user. The difference in a couple of days between those two have widen quite a lot. At my start in Lemmy, it was tildes like in the quality of discussion and the posts. Bute little by little, Lemmy is becoming a lot like Reddit, I see familiar behaviors there and familiar posts, I was even going to comment that one image has already been reposted to death, but then I remembered that I was on Lemmy and not Reddit.
But at the same time period, tildes has managed to stay the same, Posts and comment participation has increased, but the quality of discussion has been constant. I believe Tildes has the better community right now.
I was checking out Lemmy servers to join, and Malwarebytes popped up saying one of them was compromised. It might just be a false positive, but it makes me a little wary.
Yeah, the whole thing over there feels a little jank. Very early Web 2.0 vibes.
I’ve only been here for a week or so, but so far what you mentioned feels more like a really good feature. Like a built in way to maintain the vibe as the user base continues to grow.
The one thing that would make Tildes more appealing to me is more groups. I know that they are supposed to develop organically out of more general groups, but there are advantages to being able to start them without the organic growth.
For one, people are more likely to engage with communities that match their specific interest and less likely to engage if the site's groups are so broad that it includes things they don't care about. For example, I wouldn't call my self a fan of sports but I really enjoy hockey. I would not enjoy a sports group where hockey was 5% of the content so I wouldn't visit it. If I want to find conversations about my specific interest, I would have to wade through a lot of things I'm not interested in and so would all the other people with the same interest. If there were a group for my specific interest, I'd be much more likely to participate in it because I know that everyone in that group shares the same interest as I do.
Second, some specific interests are so popular that requiring they develop "organically" is counterproductive and just limits their growth. For example, the subreddit r/lawschool has 360,000 subscribers, but r/law has only 200,000. Requiring people interested in law school to post in a law group would severely limit participation. Interests with superficial similarities, like law and law school or grad school and law school, are actually very different and there would be little overlap between the groups.
This is my thought as well, and I think it’s a turn off for a lot of people that would want to otherwise use Tildes in the way it’s currently being used.
Like for support groups, it’s great to have ones for broad subjects like chronic illnesses or grieving or the girl survival guide, but at the same time it’s also important to have more specific groups that can relate and empathize on a deeper, more specific level. Within those specific groups you also lose the fear of a comment say “I don’t have/ haven’t experienced this, but…” and going on to give possibly really toxic or harmful advice based on something they read who-knows-where, their uncle’s wife’s brother’s best-friend’s cousin did or said, or their own completely unrelated experience. I know most people don’t even mean to cause harm or be malicious; they’re just trying to contribute.
I know your hockey thing can probably be solved by subscribing to the hockey tag and unsubscribing to ~sports.
I'm concerned about trolls to be honest, specifically bigoted trolls. I look at bigots on the internet all day, and Tildes has always been this little hideaway that they haven't touched as far as I've seen. I worry far-right trolls will exploit Tildes' more serious tone to legitimize their views, under the guise of "healthy, open debate." They will exploit the inherent trust here at Tildes.
There was recently a post about identity politics, and what struck me was how the author included white nationalism under the identity politics umbrella, which can maybe be included in the most loose of terms, but in my opinion has no place in any identity politics discussion. Identity politics is about the oppressed, not false victimhood. I was legitimately anxious that this person was trying to test the waters for discussion of such ideas. To be clear, I have no idea of that person's intention, and they could be participating in good faith, but I'm especially on guard right now.
To be blunt, I'm tired of the far-right infestation on the internet. My personal rule is that I don't debate fascists, it gives them legitimacy. That said, I don't want to give them this space, and I'd feel responsible to confront any encroaching users. I just don't have the energy to spare. Maybe that's self-centered, but fuck if I need a safe space.
I've been impressed with Tildes' generally ability to call out that sort of pseudo-intellectual legitimization of far-right viewpoints over the past few years. In fact, some of the larger instances of the community wrestling with itself have involved this issue, and based on the site today I think the consensus thus far has been to call out trolls when we see them. Not that its always perfect.
I think the identity politics post is a good example. I don't think OP there was trying to troll to be clear, but nonetheless the overwhelming response by the community, especially by old users, was resounding rejection of the premise. I think that type of response sends a clear message about the values here to people joining, and does a lot to help people not fall into the trap of legitimizing illegitimate viewpoints under the guise of rational inquiry. Basically, the community as a whole has been doing a good job so far acting as the bartender in the Nazi bar story, and I think as long as we continue to talk openly about these things (i.e. the need to not fall into this trap) we will continue to be successful. Just my 2 cents of course.
Hah. I wish. Deimos is just pretty damn good at banning them, that's probably why you haven't noticed any.
And as for the recent "Identity Politics" topic... there is a reason it was left up (so long-time users could have time to firmly shoot the premise down), and also a reason it was eventually locked too (so the "debate" would be soundly put to bed, where it belongs).
I appreciate that, @cfabbro.
P.S. Nice to be chatting again, I don't know if we ever cross paths, but you're one of the names I recognize from my early days here, glad some things are staying the same, even as things change.
My pleasure. And your username is definitely familiar too. I think I even remember some of your old topics... but I have an absolutely shit memory for names (even in real life settings), so you will have to forgive me for not remembering any specific interactions we may have had. :P
Glad to have you back, in any case, though! :)
Divergent opinions are welcome on Tildes but trolls and bigots are usually removed pretty fast. You shouldn't be worried. Tilde is not meant to be an Utopia where everyone is perfect and agree with each other, but those that fail to comply with the rules are met with strong repercussions.
This is how a ban happens on Tildes (paraphrasing):
Deimos: Hey, some folks complained about this thing, would you mind trying to do better in the future?
SillyUser: Fuck you.
Deimos: swings banhammer
I'd suggest that when the operator of your forum politely asks you to stop being a jerk to other people, telling him to fuck off and then being surprised by the ban is not rational behavior.
Tildes also supports muting accounts for a specified time period, just like IRC. In fact, if two people get into a fast paced back and forth comment stream, the site will shut them both down for a little while to cool off automatically. That basically killed flamewars before they got past the spark stage.
Eh... a lot of the times people don't even notice the bans, but I often do (because I'm nosy, and am on this site way too much!). And the majority of the bans I've witnessed have been far more immediate than you're suggesting, or most people might realize. I have seen quite a few users say some bigoted or truly mean-spirited shit, and when I checked back a few minutes later their comment was removed and they were already banned... no "please don't say horrible things anymore", second chance given. Just, boom, banned. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. And IMO that's the way it should be with those kind of users. They have no place here, and giving them second chances rarely ever results in a change of their behavior.
He did mod /r/games forever. That is the very last sort of moderator you want to fuck with, no? ;)
I'm here from Reddit, only first heard about the site a few days ago now.
I love the quality though and have been scrolling through old discussions impressed at the quality.
I've been falling out of love with Reddit for years now though, I feel the redesign signalled a big shift in the site but it had been suffering from its growth for many years... discussions were becoming rarer, abuse getting worse and worse with seemingly disinterested admins and moderators overwhelmed by the task of keeping the place clean.
I'll stick around here, it reminds me a lot of older discussion forums where people seemed to care more about their posts but I do wonder how scalable it is, heavy moderation makes for high quality discussions but surely the task can become unmanageable if user numbers swell.
Reddit refugee here as well. It’s going to be difficult to replace the breadth of topics and knowledge from Reddit. And it’ll still exist for some of those odd subs, but I’m hoping this place can grow to replace the “valuable” part of Reddit. It can certainly do without the memes and low-quality stuff but if I could come here for real discussions on Home Assistant, for example, and know that all responses will be legit and thoughtful, that seems to be what this place was made for!
Yup. On Reddit if I wanted to talk home automation I could find a community of people already invested in and knowledgeable about it. And if I wanted to limit that to talking about Home Assistant because that's what I use and don't really care about another ecosystem, I could find the community for that.
I suppose it will take time for a critical mass of niche hobbies and interests to build here. In the meantime, though, I'd definitely engage with Home Assistant stuff if it were posted.
Home Assistant... that reminds me, I need to get that set up again. Had a little ESP32 that was linked to a little Xiaomi Bluetooth LE thermometer and Home Assistant was giving me nice graphs of my greenhouse temperatures.
I feel like the party I've been at for five years got a whole lot bigger, and there's something of a social anxiety in my end but that's fading almost as quickly. It was partly predicated on a concern of Tildes being overrun by reddit refugees rather than new Tildes users, but the vibe is generally staying the same, just with more voices, which is great. The only reason I make that distinction is it's different to be solely running from something than it is to run towards and embrace something new.
Tildes was dying before it, so it's hard to complain.
I think I might be in the minority here, but I liked it smaller. I've been here for 5 years when I realized the endless scrolling of reddit wasn't good for me. I could read just about everything I wanted in a small amount of time, but now there's too many comments and posts to easily read through. Ive realized this is an uncommon personal preference, but I like very small communities.
I've been finding myself a little overwhelmed by the pace of things, as I did settle into being comfortable with being able to read the entirety of Tildes' activity each day. There's a couple of things that have made it easier for me, though I don't know if they'll be helpful for you as well:
I don't know that either of those are a good permanent solution, as either one takes more effort to maintain than how it was, but they've been helpful for me.
I’ve ignored more threads in the past couple of days than I have in nearly five years on the site!
To be clear, this is a good thing. I think of it like archiving emails I don’t need to act on. Helps me keep my Tildes feed tailored to my interests, but really I’m happy there’s enough activity that I need to even actively filter in the first place.
Damn, Tildes is five years old? Having joined yesterday, I thought it was much newer. That's kind of awesome!
We've had near explosive growth before, and it'll downsize after a certain amount of time and the amount of lurkers will likely increase, but I imagine just by the design of the site it'll keep it feeling smaller.
It's not an uncommon preference, really ; it's just that there's not much choice nowadays and everyone gets funneled into centralized SNS designed to retain attention. A lot of people would prefer to be in smaller communities, even if they don't know it yet.
Hell, technically, I joined reddit because it felt smaller than the rest.
I'm excited to see an increase in activity, and given how the site is run, not too worried about Tildes changing too much. Tildes has its own feel, it's own atmosphere, and I hope that it does not get lost in the increase in volume- maybe that is a concern about quality, I'm not sure. It's difficult to articulate. Tildes is tildes to me, it's not "another Reddit" or "Reddit 2.0" or anything remotely close to that- and I don't think I want it to be.
I am concerned that there's not going to be an apt replacement for Reddit because you don't easily replicate many years worth of crowd-sourced information about tech, troubleshooting, products, really any category one can think of... but I'm not sure I want Tildes to be that. Maybe it can, with growth, have those aspects without losing what makes it so nice to be here. Only time will tell, I suppose.
As Reddit has grown and the years have gone on, I feel like I've become more and more disconnected from the hivemind of reddit. Antiwork, fuckcars and other nonsensical, extreme "let me shove my narrow views down your throat" viewpoints took over so many threads. I'm hoping that as this community grows, it maintains a reasonable and realistic dialog.
It's good to hear that people who have been here for a while are confident in the site's ability to handle a potential surge of new users while maintaining some dignity.
I think the old hands mentioned that's because text is very light weight, and Tildes doesn't track our engagement, isn't gathering our data to sell, and isn't trying to host its own images and videos etc etc, so it's going to be okay. :)
I'm very new here, so I don't have much of a leg to stand on. I'm coming into this already functional community and don't want to disrupt. However, I do think change is always guaranteed. While it's important to maintain a level of expectations for a community, it's also important to not live in a bubble as that thwarts broader ideas. You have to deal with some of the negatives in order to gain a higher positive outcome and quality. Just my thoughts!
Surely it isn't a problem? The majority of new users will dissipate, and those who stick around will acculturate. The present invite system, alongside having a 'benevolent dictator' in Deimos, means that the ethos of the website is pretty sturdy - while newcomers will continue to be welcomed. That's really rather positive in my view.
I feel like I moved to a nice, quiet neighbourhood, but now it's not so quiet any more. Maybe I'm just getting old, and it's a "me" problem.
As long as the neighbours stay friendly and invite you to there chilled BBQ, it's all okay, no?
Well, that's the thing. It depends, right? If 0.1% of humans are rude, obnoxious drivers, when you live in a town of 5000, that's 5 irritating drivers you might encounter from time to time. When you live in a city of 5,000,000, your odds of running into a selfish driver in day-to-day travel go way up. Not to mention the "take advantage, or be taken advantage of" effect on increasing aggressive driving in a region. People tend to be considerate, law-abiding drivers in less populated areas. Not so much in the high density cities of the world.
I'm still not sure if I like what's happened to the Tildes I knew, but we'll see.
This is the reason i do not want to make Tildes a reddit clone. Courtesy of a post from @ourari
Please read
https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb
I came in this week and was permeated by the feeling of the old "community forums".
My problem with Reddit and other "social" networks is the monetization of the user. It stems from the roots of the Web2, and it's the norm now. Normally, a company makes a platform to try and hold the user to monetize it and abuse of low-effort content. I had enough of that.
Tilde is going to face a trial. How will it grow? If it tries to embrace Web2 culture, with videos, embedded content, etc. it will lose its appeal to me. If it keeps a sustainable growth model, keeping its identity and curating content, it will grow less, but in a healthy form.
Sustainable growth is key for a long-term endeavor and to hold one's ideals intact. Booming isn't worth it anymore.
Have you read the philosophy of Tildes page in the site Docs? We're headed in a good direction.
I'm not worried. I think the capital R Redditors who would mess with the vibe won't stick around for very long. reddit has a sort of je ne sais quoi that seems to attract said capital R Redditors, if that makes sense.
I remembered my Tildes password! Yay! Hello again, Tildes! I'm ready to switch over once the Reddit is Fun app shuts down on June 30th. The Tildes website works great on mobile, so that's nice.
I'm a 15+ year redditor. I remember when it was tiny. In a lot of ways I have felt for a long time like I'd outgrown it, but there wasn't an alternative. I learned about tildes via the /r/videos post, and a user from another sub was kind to invite me. I figure eternal September won't happen for a while. Thankfully.
I've been a Tilderino since 2020. I think there's been a significant negative cultural shift:
I've also been finding it difficult to find comments by familiar users like @Skybrian, @Kfwyre, and @Akir in the sea of new names, and to maintain and follow a continuous conversation thread and get to know new users.
I think that older users were more careful about invitations while newer users have been too eager to invite strangers.
I think we're in a teething period. Lots of new people on the site are getting acclimated and oriented. Lots of people are testing the waters.
Kinda like starting off with smalltalk at a party with people you don't know that well, a lot of the stuff on the site is a bit generic and low-stakes, but that also feels mostly fine to me right now. I want people to come here and feel good and welcome on the site.
I think over time we'll start to see a progression back towards what you liked about the site before. The people posting in-depth stuff haven't gone away, and in theory we have a lot of supports for surfacing that content as a way of encouraging others to emulate it (for instance: exemplary literally means "serving as a model"!).
One thing I do think will require some active intervention is the name-calling you mentioned. I've made comments on a couple instances of it myself, and I've seen more removed comments here in the past week than I have in years (but again, I don't think this is a bad thing -- those are a reflection that our responsive moderation measures are working as intended). I do think we'll have to consciously enable and support the more preventative measures in our shared site culture than we have in the past.
reddit has a way of promoting a sort of hyper-combative, hyper-pessimistic discourse, and I imagine lots of people coming over might still have some of that in their systems (I know I did when I came here, and I still haven't totally let go of it even years later). I think that means this period will also need to be a time of patience for us, where we actively try to see the potential in people even when they're not putting their best foot forward, and even if that's a bit frustrating sometimes.
Your comment on familiar users is one that resonates with me, because as excited as I am to have new users around, I am worried about losing people I like in the shuffle. I don't like the idea of Tildes having a "follow" feature and think that personalities-based social media ends up being a narcissism engine. On the other hand, I don't like the idea that people I have chatted with for years on the site and have really come to know will just sort of disappear into the crowd if we get big enough.
I don't know a good solution for that one. The influx of users has made me think that Tildes wasn't ever actually meant to be that kind of tiny close-knit site, and it only was that way for a while as a happy accident because of our small userbase? I'm not sure if that small-group feeling can ever scale, but I also know that Tildes was meant to be bigger than it was these past five years.
It’s not like we were vetting people all that much before. We didn’t try that hard to give out invites because nobody wanted them. That’s changed.
I joined in the early days, though I’m hardly a prolific poster.
Overall, I’m excited for the growth in activity. While it was nice to be able to keep up with everything by checking a few times a day - like reading a high quality newspaper - it did feel like even that was slowing and as a result I felt even less compelled to contribute. That surely looked even worse to potential new members, and if that course was kept I doubt Tildes would have survived.
With the new wave, the invite system has certainly helped, along with the cause of the recent wave (api/third-party Reddit problems), to filter the pool to people more serious about creating a higher quality community. The posts have been generally good, people friendly and charitable in their interactions, and such.
That said, I’m a little nervous about the rate of change. Sure, the raw numbers are small, but relative to the active existing user base are large. The threads asking about suggestions/likes/dislikes have come, in my opinion, too soon after these people have joined, without enough time to really experience the Tildes Way. The Reddit mindset and usage patterns are hard to unlearn, as many have described already, and it really shows in the responses to those posts. Many of the answers well upvoted would make Tildes more and more like Reddit - the focus on more specific groups/“spaces”/“communities”, more casual contributions/jokes, etc.
It might change a bit if many new users join, but I don't think we'll see any mass migration to Tildes. Not only there's the invitation system, but Tildes isn't really a Reddit replacement. You can't use Tildes to have fun with a meme or to support your favourite sports team, which is what many do on Reddit.
Just like WordPress or Blogger weren't a replacement for Tumblr after the NSFW/risky content ban, Tildes isn't a replacement for Reddit. This is not a criticism of Tildes, btw, it's just a different platform.
From what I’m reading, Lemmy is where the majority of users are going. I’m happy for people to come here though. My main hope is that Reddit dies more than anything.
I've heard mixed things about Lemmy and especially its admins. Plus I've read from a r/privacy thread that if you care about privacy Lemmy is a nightmare (can't link that r/privacy thread right now, of course)
I'm all for privacy but their argument is kinda off. Nothing on a public forum is private even if you can delete something. So every such service is a privacy "nightmare" including this one.
Fair enough, but still some are better than others (at least on paper) and if I have to choose I'll choose to stay here.
I didn't get to read the thread but yeah, if that's their argument, it's dumb. To me, a website is invading my privacy if it takes more info about me than what I explicitly give in
Tildes doesn't, since it collects no user data, and I would assume Le mmy doesn't or people would have seen it in an audit.
I'm more concerned about the culture of Lemmy since the founder is apparently a vocal supporter of the CCP, but even then, nothing prevents people from creating their own instance.
IIRC their argument was that with federating deletion doesn't work correctly (true atm)
If you are strict about privacy logging into tildes could be seen as bad. It logs every thread i visit , maybe only client side but that's just a line of code away from the backend.
Privacy is no black or white thing.
FYI, the majority of data that Tildes collects (other than what is strictly required to keep the site functioning) is deleted after 30 days: https://docs.tildes.net/policies/privacy-policy
Even the vote data is deleted after 30 days... which is why after 30 days you will see topics and comments can no longer be voted on.
See also: https://docs.tildes.net/philosophy/privacy
And IMO also worth watching is this talk by Maciej Cegłowski, which Deimos is a pretty big fan of and has shared here often: Haunted by Data (text version)
I wrote this just to point out how easy it "could be" and that privacy is a gradiant and not perfect.
If i hadn't at least a little trust in this site and the owner i wouldn't have registered. I read some of this before and it confirmed my decision to register. thanks for the sum up.
Heh. Fair enough. Sorry for misinterpreting your point. :)
Np, text is often ambiguous
First time here to be honest, a redditor suggested it and another gave me an invite. I love my reddit communities, but I can certainly see it's time for a change, and hope the communities here are welcoming as they grow. It's one thing to leave reddit, but do we want another reddit or something new? It's hard to say where this will go.
I'm very new. As in I've only had an account for a few minutes. But I've been lurking for a few days now. I got a nice email with my acceptance code which I thought was very welcoming. So far everyone here seems to be cautiously optimistic which I think is a fair response to the migration. I like what I see so far and I'm happy that people seem to be pretty welcoming. So far I really like how easy it is to just minimize a comment when I'm done reading it.
I actually forgot that I had an account, and am now exploring Tildes again.
I'm not sure how tildes can avoid the issues that reddit now faces, but I'm hoping with the influx of more users and content I'll have more reason to pop by and have a look.
my least favorite part was the Mod Abuse. Some basic threads like shower thoughts were impossible to post in, or post a link proving someone wrong... who turned out to be a mod, and then you're banned w/ no recourse.
Hoping Tildes will be different. If we can keep out spam and bots, there should be less need for Mods and therefor less mod abuse.
It's a double-edged sword.
I'm looking forward to this site growing, and am looking to start spending more time here. Growth is good, as growth helps drive discussion and content.
But too much growth inevitably leads to the same problems that have caused the downfall of Digg, and now Reddit. There don't really seem to be mechanisms to really limit it or dampen explosive growth, which results in sudden changes to a forums culture (you could see this basically whenever a subreddit got popular and went from ~100k users to ~1,000k. Or at least, few websites have seen it prudent to implement such mechanisms. I know SomethingAwful charged a membership... Perhaps keeping Tildes invite-only isn't the worst.
But even if Tildes becomes the new Reddit (which I kind of doubt will happen), it will at least start the cycle over, and I enjoyed a good decade or so on Reddit. I could enjoy a good decade or so on Tildes.
The only way to get an account on Tildes is by invite. And invites are not given automatically to every user, they are only occasionally handed out to everyone (5-10 at a time) by Deimos. And I control the /r/tildes Invite Request rounds, which we recently closed the last one of due to all the new users that round resulted in, and us not wanting to get overwhelmed by too many new users before they get acclimatized to the culture of the site.
All of those things are designed to control growth, and help prevent the culture-shift problems that you're talking about.
The emails are handled manually by Deimos. And yes, AFAIK he actually does read them all, and decide based on what's written in them.
I wrote a paragraph long email about why I wanted to join and what I was coming from. I was surprised to get an email back from an actual person. It was a really great welcome to the community.
I just wrote 'Hi, I'd like a Tildes invite, please. Best regards, MyName' and was also pleasantly surprised to get an email from Deimos.
I see every place online as a temporary mooring spot, a harbor in the storm if you will. Impermanence.
Right? It's what the Buddha figured out--nothing lasts, and it's our efforts to hold onto things that makes us suffer. I'm old enough to have grown from EBBSes through compuserve, the pipeline, aol, the well (which still exists, against all odds)....Everything changes. Everything stays the same.
That's maybe a practical outlook, but it's certainly nice to find a more permanent "home" I think, for a few reasons.
I spent well over a decade in the BBS' and Usenet, just over a decade on Reddit, the next 10 in who knows what but we shall see if Tildes becomes that next decade. I figure if I can get a decade out of a place online before it completely falls apart I'm counting that as a win.
As the audience grows (as I am a new member) I'm curious how subgroups/communities will diverge. You can have a community like r/de that isn't viewable in r/all that doesn't even write in the main language of reddit, commmunities which have a political adjenda like r/antiwork, or support networks for people who shared specific life experiences.
I'm glad I found tildes. I'm waiting until cat pictures and dadjokes exist.