Tildes is still in alpha-testing. It’s an unfinished product. Set your expectations accordingly.
Someone mentioned elsewhere that they signed up for Tildes “years ago during the beta”. That reminded me: Tildes hasn’t reached beta-testing yet.
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. Alpha-testing of software usually happens on an incomplete product before it is released to the customer.
This is a very important point. Tildes is not feature-complete yet: there are literally hundreds of feature requests yet to work on before Tildes will be what people want it to be – and even that list is far from complete. In Agile software development terms, Tildes is a minimum viable product, or, in other words, “a version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future product development”.
Tildes works as it is, but it’s a bare-bones forum: you can post, and comment… and that’s about it. It’s a proof of concept. There are a few minor tweaks here and there, which give the impression that Tildes is more complex than it is, but they’re misleading. There are plans to make Tildes a more complex website but, right now, most of that complexity of Tildes exists only in people’s imaginations (and there have been some very imaginative people contributing to that list of future features!).
Most questions about “Why doesn’t Tildes do X?” or “Can Tildes do X?” can be answered simply by saying “Tildes is incomplete and X hasn’t been built yet.” There are some questions about missing features which can be answered by saying “Tildes was never intended to do X”, but those are far and away in the minority. Most flaws, drawbacks, and problems with Tildes exist because Tildes is still a proof of concept, rather than a finished product.
It’s also worth noting that Tildes’ current feature set is absolutely not up to the task if the user base and site activity increase too quickly. There’s too much manual tinkering required at the moment to make things work properly: for one thing, there are no significant moderation tools on Tildes (that’s almost all done manually at the moment). There are still a lot of features yet to be built - and we don’t even know what some of those features are yet!
To pre-empt the people who will rightly point out that Tildes is 5 years old: Tildes’ feature set was intended to grow gradually over time, in line with a gradual growth in users, activity, and the need for those features to exist. However, Tildes has not undergone much growth over the past few years, so the existing features were sufficient to manage the existing activity. Basically, the site didn’t need a lot of fancy features to handle the low traffic here.
This sudden surge of new users might change that. But it will take time to build more features. That was always the intention, and it hasn’t changed now.
Until then: Tildes is still in alpha-testing. It’s an unfinished product. Set your expectations accordingly.
EDIT:
If you're one of the many people who seem to be replying to this topic, saying "it's okay, I like this simple bare-bones site as it is"... then you're probably not part of my original intended audience for this topic. This topic was aimed at all the people who are arriving here, being taken aback at how simple Tildes is, and wondering where the advanced features are.
However, we can still take the "set your expectations accordingly" message and apply it to you: "Tildes is an unfinished product, so you can expect it to change in the future. It won't be like this forever."
Either way, "set your expectations accordingly" is the message here, whether you're expecting more features and not finding them, or whether you're expecting simplicity and enjoying what you see. Either way, you should know that things will change around here. Maybe slowly. Maybe quickly. Maybe they'll get better from your point of view. Maybe they'll get worse from your point of view. But, change they will.
At the time of writing this comment, I must say that Tildes already has a community with a culture similar to the old internet, and that's a good thing for me. It doesn't matter that features are still missing, in just 30 minutes I have felt the excitement of sharing my ideas, something that hasn't happened on Reddit for more than 5 years for me.
This inspires me to stick around even if the going gets tough. I truly miss the "old internet."
I completely agree. I've only been here for less than 24 hours but this really feels like the beginning of Reddit again, which is honestly fantastic.
That's the exact reason why I'm here. Someone on Reddit said that Tildes' community is reminiscent of Reddit's early days, which was more discussion-oriented than meme-oriented.
Of course, I hope Tildes grows more. The culture will slowly change as the community grows bigger, but I'd still like to see where it goes.
Agreed, I’ve contributed more in the 1-2 days I’ve had access than in a year of Reddit. This feels like a community that you can actually have a conversation in.
I'd like to point something out that's a little unusual about Tildes development, at least I think it is.
Deimos loves this theorycrafting stuff. He also loves running experiments. He's been geeking out over human social software for longer than reddit has existed. There are about ten people I've ever met in online spaces that can talk intelligently about social software (meaning they are well read on the topic) and most of them are on this website. He is one of them. We're just missing /u/blackstar9000 from old reddit to get the whole set.
You may log in one day here and find out that for a week, we're trying a new view of this or system that does that and the site could even look shockingly different. Then it goes back to how it was, we all talk about what worked and what didn't work, what we liked and what we didn't like about it. Then the feature comes back again - better and likely radically changed - and sticks around for longer. Repeat until we're all happy with it.
That hasn't happened much for the last two of years because a) he has a day job and b) we haven't needed new toys because it's been slow. It will start happening more often if this place gets big enough to pay his salary, count on it. Just a few examples of this methodology from past threads...
It is strange to have an admin who is this into the idea of creating social software. In fact, I can't think of many communities I've ever been in where the administrators/creators weren't doing this to get rich, or just doing it because they had the tech skills, like a forum for a WoW guild. This is an incredibly rare thing and I suspect that it is also an oft-missing ingredient to getting this social software stuff right.
I recently noticed that @Deimos was the one who set up Subreddit Simulator, a Markov chain bot that auto populated subreddit content based on source data from other subreddits. It was a really cool idea and, even though markov chains are pretty simplistic compared to LLMs and most of what they said was literal nonsense, it was still interesting to see how the word choices and vibes shifted from one bot to another.
It might be interesting to see an LLM based version of the same experiment.
I want an LLM doing the tagging here, and then some.
They seem 'intelligent' enough to gather relevant data and auto-populate all of the submission fields, tags, and links to relevant other websites. If I submit a link to a Shakey Graves album, I expect the sidebar of that submission to have his bio and links to his website, relevant tags, like radditbot once did. Ditto for books or film or whatever - there's acres of info that can be collated automatically, tying into many open source websites like musicbrainz or isbn data, and that is a massive value add to every submission.
I think LLMs may not care about other websites changing their look or api - it shouldn't break their ability to scrape a page, so there goes a ton of dull maintenance work out the window along with the dull housekeeping. Let's get lazy. :)
If we want to one up this process, get an LLM that is smart enough to take my corrections of its data for my submission and submit those corrections back to musicbrainz. Start pumping the data back to these resources instead of just harvesting from them all the time. ;)
I actually think ML/LLM based sentiment analysis can do a lot of things to simplify moderation. It can quarantine certain types of posts for review, interject to encourage disengagement from discussions that are getting heated, and provide personally designed filtering/content warnings for sensitive people.
An LLM should be able to be an effective stupidfilter as well - certainly better than Bayesian tools. The ability to identify rampant stupidity in written english, basically. Imagine a checkbox in your profile on most websites for 'hide the stupid' and what that would do to the web.
Oh shoot, I actually private messeged Deimos then, and didnt know who he was, I was asking him questions when I built my own Markov chain in Python, I loved subreddit simulator
Great summary of Tildes 'as is' and the direction it will head in, thank you.
With the wave of new users from Reddit (myself included), I can imagine this must be a formative period for the website. Has there been a shift in priorities due to the influx of new users beyond moderation tools? How much time is currently spent on manual moderation?
I'm very much enjoying the culture here, while I'm looking forward to new features I hope that remains consistent.
I think this is very much a formative experience for the site. Certainly the time of biggest change in my few years on here. Other than Deimos, who is probably the only one who could answer the questions re: moderation with actual facts, we don't really have any moderators here. (A few of us have moderation capabilities like tagging, renaming, and moving topics, but nothing beyond that).
By and large, so far the culture has been maintained collectively, by the community as opposed to enforced via moderation. Not to say moderation doesn't happen — users get removed occasionally and posts get deleted and locked. But given the seeming infrequence with which that happens (at least evidenced by the 'comment deleted' messages being left behind), I think it is very impressive that quality of the environment here is what it is. On some level this type of community enforcement is necessary if any long term culture wants to be maintained. I simply don't think its possible to moderate a community into existence.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm just opining on moderation because your comment made me think about how much moderation there is, only to realize — not a lot! Couldn't tell if my comment above came off as challenging something you said
Reddit's largest problem is they only ever let people 'remove' content. They were too chickenshit to allow the community to edit titles or move posts around. That way submissions can be corrected by community action and sent to their best homes rather than removing them and telling users to try, try again. Tildes already has those options and someday, thread merging and being able to collaboratively submit to and curate a collection of links will make our megathreads mightier too.
I dont think editing titles would work on reddit, it will just become a meme to edit titles to something ridiculous, or say you post something "liberal" in a "conservative" subreddit, they may change the title to something bad
Here, if a title editor got caught doing that sort of thing, Deimos would immediately revoke their ability to edit titles (at the minimum).
Even in the hypothetical future version of Tildes, where acquiring moderator abilities will be more automated (and less Deimos manually giving abilities to hand-picked candidates), there will be a mechanism to review people who are suspected of misusing their abilities, and revoking them if necessary. Tildes won't allow mod-level trolling.
No worries at all, I definitely didn't take your comment that way! But thank you for clarifying.
I'm very curious about changes to moderation as Tildes grows, but I think if done right the community can remain somewhat self-governing. I actually think the absence of a 'downvote' equivalent will, perhaps counter-intuitively, prevent a lot of negative behaviour. Any behaviour not tolerated will just be ignored.
Thanks for your hard work and detailed response!
It's worth mentioning too that the current plan for future moderation on Tildes is based on a group based trust system granting reliably helpful community members more moderation powers. This is not entirely dissimilar to what sites like Stack Exchange have used successfully for a while.
EDIT: Oh goodness no need to thank — I just happen to procrastinate by posting here ;)
Reddit ex-moderators, rejoice, we are designing moderators out of the system.
For the rest of you, be very afraid. You too will become a moderator just like every other user, and you will know our pain.
Yeah... as a long-term moderator on Reddit, it took me a while to get used to that idea. I'm coming around!
Many hands make for light work. Let us hope that burnout becomes merely a memory.
So I’ve actually been curious how the response process should be for gore/shock/pedo content where you need rapid action and, ideally, as few people exposed to it as possible? I assume the community moderation will actually be able to respond faster, but if there are subgroups it’s possible noxious stuff could stick around for a while where trusted members are unlikely to see it?
I'm pretty sure that content wouldn't last five minutes even now with just the Malice label, and neither would any user or group involved with it. People have the rest of the internet for that stuff, they don't need to have it here as well. Perhaps people should not expect all things on every website. Being selective has massive advantages, no matter what you are selecting for, and it's not so hard to get your internet fix from multiple sites rather than just the one.
Not just that though - Canada's hate speech laws apply to Tildes. If that sort of content is up, it's going to eventually cause legal issues. Deimos' own standards are much higher than Canada's are, but it's worth mentioning that there is in fact some small legal requirement to keep that content off of this particular node since it is hosted in Canada - specifically, in Alberta.
People will just hit it with Malice tags, and PM Deimos directly. He'll also probably turn that data on the user over to the authorities - I certainly would. Tildes values your privacy, and all that data disappears after 30 days. Keeping it 30 days is both for functionality of the site and to deal with abusive users.
If I remember correctly, Deimos once told me that he set up code behind 'Malice' tags so that he receives some sort of push notification (email, SMS, something) every time one of these tags is used. That way, he can respond quickly even if he's not online (of course, it doesn't work so well when he's sleeping!).
Obviously, this is only for while he's the sole moderator-admin on Tildes. Those push notifications won't be necessary after some of the planned "community moderation" tools are built.
My concern is more the worry about there being a covert community within the site that posts in ways the trusted members are unlikely to see, so there just wouldn't be malice labels hitting it. It wouldn't happen at this scale, but at smaller scales I can imagine it if they're clever enough to stay undercover.
It would really have to be PM-only, and having it private like that rather defeats the purpose for most trolls - they want it on the front page. The closest thing Tildes has to a hidden area is ~test, which is a group there for test posts and trying to break the site that can be wiped at any time.
Bring it on! :D
I’m rather excited about the prospect of not having “moderators” per se, there are many good ones out there but equally there are bad ones too.
I like the idea of the community policing itself long term, and should hopefully prove to be a good system. I’m excited for what’s to come.
I really like the no downvoting as well! Sometimes I can be really sensitive to even just one or two downvotes, and in practice most of the time it's someone being angry with me or being mean, rather than explaining why they don't think I'm contributing to the conversation.
from the docs:
Yeah reddit dosnt get that, when ever I'm down voted I leave a comment under my down voted post, "why was this downvoted", and sometimes, rarely, someone will explain why they dont like it, but more of the time, people down vote my second comment asking why
I am very much enjoying the reading so far and greatly appreciate the community... particularly as a Reddit-ex-pat
Agreed, and to add on to your comment 'reading' is the key word, I think! The text-based format does wonders. I'm finding myself finding and reading far more longform articles, the comments are more verbose, in general there's much more interesting conversation going on. I'm feeling very optimistic so far!
Oh, yeah. I am browsing Tildes more than reddit and Lemmy combined at this point. The quality of discourse and the number of article links on subjects I'm interested have really impressed upon me that this is where I want to be. Glad Reddit decided to self sabotage in the sense that I otherwise wouldn't have poked my head up to find this gem of a community.
I can say as a reddit "refugee," I know these things take time. I do not expect the full blown reddit experience, with thousands of subreddits (sorry, subtildes?), millions of users, and the like. I am actually looking forward to a return to what reddit once was; a forum where communities could be built, (anonymous, very important!) open communication across all languages, countries, religions, races, etc. The downfall of reddit is disappointing. But to be honest it will probably be best in the long term health of the internet. We (as a species) need an open forum free from corporate or national control of ANY nation or government.
The terminology here is "groups" and "sub-groups". ~health is a group. ~health.coronavirus is a sub-group.
Would a sub-tilde be a ` character? (shift + ~)
re: languages
that's one of the "maybe one day" features I'll be looking forward to as well.
see: docs -site design and non English languages
While it's true that impatience is sometimes useful, I'd like to put in a good word for patience. Here are some excerpts from a Mastodon thread about online community evolution that I quite like:
[...]
Tildes has had a long Cozy phase. That has changed:
Excitement phase is exciting, but Cozy mode was nice in some ways too.
I have not, and noone has, forbidden anyone to have expectations about Tildes.
With this recent influx of new users, there have been a lot of questions about what Tildes can do, and why it doesn't do certain things people expect it to do. In that context, it is helpful to inform people that Tildes is incomplete, so they can manage their expectations about what Tildes does right now. That's the point of my post.
Nowhere and nohow have I said or implied that people should not expect Tildes to do certain things in the future.
I could see how one might read it that way, but I think in all likelihood Algernon wasn't trying to be aggressive. That being said I agree with your point too, that its good to have some expectations to help drive site and community development is optimal. After all, in order to set your expectations you must have them in the first place!
Do I need to change those sentences to say "Set your expectations accordingly about what Tildes can do right now", to make it clearer? Or do you think people can work out my intention from the context?
I did include remarks like these:
I assumed these would let people know that expectations about the future are permitted, and even open to change. But you seem to be implying that I have not done so, that I have told people not to expect anything different from Tildes ever.
With Tildes as it is, I haven't felt that QOL were lacking. Because I'm enjoying the conversations, which is literally what I came here for. Honestly, Tildes might never add any features and I'd still be here as long as there's someone to talk to and that conversation is insightful.
This bare-bones alpha doesn't bother me at all. I'm more interested in the community than the bells and whistles. Of course, the extras will be nice eventually, but I'm not in a rush. Take your time, devs!
At this very moment in time I have no expectations whatsoever and the fact that we’re able to comment and vote, is good enough for me.
Back in ye olde days of forum that’s what we did, comment and have discussion.
I’m happy to see a viable alternative to Reddit and I hope this place will, in time, grow to be a fantastic hub for many online communities.
Thank you for having me!
That you so much for the work you’re doing on this. I’m happy to be an alpha tester. I’ll report my feedback when I think of some.
Edit: is there place where we can place feature requests to ask to be put on the backlog. Obviously it’s probably got quite a few items on it (1000s by now I bet). But if I may ask one be added it would be dark mode of some sort.
In the footer of every page should be a drop-down where you can select a theme, many of which are dark. I'm partial to Zenburn myself.
You can also select one as default for that device by clicking on your username in the upper right, and then clicking on "Settings" in the sidebar.
Amazing. Thank you so much. Happy to be here from the ground up
Thank you!
Don't thank me: I'm not a developer, and I have done zero work towards building Tildes. (I merely write some explanatory material about Tildes, sometimes.) @Deimos and @cfabbro and a few other developers (who I can't recall right now) are the ones you should thank.
You can select from a variety of themes, including some dark modes, by going to the 'Settings' link on your user profile page (https://tildes.net/settings). There are currently 11 different themes to choose from, including 6 dark modes. Enjoy!
Post a topic here in ~tildes, to share your request. A helpful person like cfabbro or bauke will come along and add it to GitLab for you.
Alternatively, if you have a GitLab account, or are willing to create one, you can log in to GitLab and add an issue yourself. (I might hold off on doing that, until you're more familiar with what issues are already on that list, and what direction Tildes is going.)
It's okay, Tildes devs. We're happy you're here to begin with, and look forward to seeing this wonderful platform grow into something even more awesome! We're with you every step of the way!
"but it’s a bare-bones forum: you can post, and comment…"
Which is what I search for ;). It resembles how I like to digest the content on my screen.
Dense and simple.
Honestly, thanks for all the effort so far. Older places turned into mindless meme factories and copypasta. This looks like the message boards and forums of the late 90s, where people were there to have actual discussion and not to farm for internet points.
Cheeky! :P
I signed up for Tildes awhile ago as well and am starting to use it due to the API issues with Reddit and so far it's been a great reminder of what Reddit used to be and I'm all for it. I've never really needed all the "features" reddit had but I've also never moderated a sub. I'm really hoping to stay a part of the community for the long term.
I just arrived here and I'm completely impressed. It's great as it is. There's no rush.