Tips on starting a good discussion topic
For creating link topics, see Posting on Tildes in the official documentation.
When you don’t see the discussion you want, you can create a new topic. Starting a new Tildes topic is pretty easy. However, It can be done in better or worse ways, so here are some tips:
1. Choosing a group
Don't worry about this too much. Unlike subreddits, Tildes groups mostly don't have their own rules or subcultures. They're folders for organizing topics. If you put a topic in the wrong place, someone will move it. Either ~talk or ~misc are good if you don't know where to put it.
But you do need to click on a group to go to the group's page. Then look in the sidebar on the right side. (If you're on mobile, you will need to open the sidebar.) There's a blurb explaining what the group is about, and a button under it to start a topic.
2. Choosing a good title
For discussion topics, a question often makes a good title.
Tildes has users from all over the world. Asking people to share their own experiences lets anyone participate and you can learn interesting things about people in other places.
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Bad: "What do you think of this terrible weather?"
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Better: "What's the weather like where you are?"
Discussing a specific weather event would also be fine, but you need to say where it is.
A downside to asking a very generic question is that it might get more attention than you're hoping for. (For example, you might get advice that's not relevant where you live.) If you want to narrow things down geographically, be specific about which country or region you're interested in. We probably don't yet have enough users for hyper-local topics to get many responses, but feel free to try.
3. Writing an introduction
For a discussion topic, you skip the link box and write something in the box below it. You can write whatever you like here.
3a. Setting ground rules (optional)
Sometimes you have something specific you're looking for and it helps to make a sort of game out of it by making up some rules. A good example is @kfwyre's AlbumLove topics. If you just ask for music recommendations, people are going to answer in any old way, maybe by making long lists. So instead the game is to review one album.
Tildes users are usually pretty cooperative as long as you make it clear what you're looking for and the game isn't too weird. (And if they get the rules a little wrong, it's usually not a big deal.)
4. Tags (optional)
This is optional because if i you skip it, someone will do it for you, but if you want to help out, there is more about tags in the official docs. You could also look at similar topics in another window to see what tags we use.
5. Seeding the topic (optional)
After posting the topic, you might want to add some top-level comments to get it going. For example, if it's a megathread then you might put a link to a different article in each reply. Or, if you have a lot of questions to ask, you could put each question in a separate comment. This would keep the answers to each question separate.
6. Encouraging discussion (optional)
You will see a notification at the top of any Tildes web pages you visit whenever someone posts a top-level reply in your new topic. Replying and upvoting (if warranted) will help keep conversation going. Conversation encourages more conversation. You can do a lot even without any formal “mod” powers. (Some users also have ability to label replies, which affects sort order.)
Okay, that's it for me. What are some tips you have about starting new topics? One tip per comment, please! <= See what I did there?
Hot Tip: If someone interacts with your post, and you want there to be discussion, then respond to it! Read what they are saying, process it, and respond in a way that is thoughtful and can encourage discussion. You can ask a question, add more facts, ask for clarification, etc. If you want to see interaction in your post, then interact!
This post itself is great, and with @chocobean's exceptional comment it acknowledges something that might need to be made explicit somewhere to help orient people when they come to Tildes, which is that Tildes is not a Reddit alternative. Tildes is a different site that functions in a different way.
The whole paradigm of the site is different, and I think coming from Reddit or other sites can be a bit of a system shock for people who have years of those other sites and their conditioning to deal with. When you share something, you are giving it to the group, and the group will decide together where it belongs and how it should be categorized, and even what it says to some degree, since some people can edit titles. And none of that is a problem; they are all features of the site, and a different approach to discussion and link aggregation.
Yes, good point. Adding it to the guide.
I would add: before creating a new post, please verify if there's a post or megathread for it already. When in doubt, use the search function. Before making a question, check if it isn't already answered in the docs. Never assume that, because something works in a way on Reddit, Tildes will be the same. And welcome to Tildes :)
Self marking as tangental, please remove if off topic.
In the context of when this post is made, tildes is experiencing a huge influx of new users who are leaving / are checking out alternatives to another, much bigger site that is increasingly hostile to
usershumans.Tensions are high and people are feeling very upset. A lot of us have lost homes that we spent years sculpting or hanging out in.
Which means I see a lot of posts made with the intent of "hello, I'd like to know if this community is welcoming to people like me, and if it also values these things I super value about myself"
The endless questions of "where is my sub-culture group" is actually asking this question: am I welcome here, and is this where I want to be.
Add to the mix: we are also detoxing from an environment that actively earns money from making us feel alienated, where it makes us filled with rage, take sides, dogpile, or gleam some satisfaction in making fun or certain things together, or seeing retribution play out.
We have all been trained to chase that high of getting our comments "liked" or rewarded, and might have our hearts broken if we don't get as many votes or participation in threads we make or comment replies to us.
And we also want to be valued as unique individuals, instead of "just one of the newbies", and so sometimes we can inadvertently present ourselves in ways that are slightly edgier versions of ourselves, or it's hard to resist wanting the last word, or we are too eager to demonstrate we "get" it etc. Perhaps this person wasn't acting their best because they're s a jerk, but because they are awkwardly trying to navigate between "fitting in" and "standing out".
I would encourage folks making their own threads not to feel too bad if something doesn't get picked up right now, or if something they're interested in doesn't seem to resonant right away, or if conversation kind of drops off too quickly: this is probably a very strange time for a lot of people, and we're all shouting very loudly together because a lot of us are hurting, are unmoored, and are in too much personal need right now to adequately provide for one another or truly engage with one another.
I'm not saying anything goes and we should accept poor behaviour and let hurting folks hurt folks. But I'm calling for those of us who are slightly healthier to be a little thicker skinned because not all of us can be right now.
I've recieved very kind messages from folks who want to see a boring garden box, and folks who asked about my pet geese. I've seen folks kind enough to share their lives and expertise in very unique or even what they think is mundane professions. I think more so than geo location or culture or hobbies or professions, I think we ultimately are here because we want to take interest in other human beings, and we want other human beings to take an interest in us.
Anyway! My point is that I think many people are interested in you, dear reader, just don't let the little numbers on the screen discourage you and tell you otherwise.
To new users who are worried about standing out, you can participate at your own pace, whatever you are comfortable with!
Tildes is still small, and although I don't know how much it is growing, you don't need to worry about making a big splash; lurking is totally fine too. Tildes isn't a community for power users, it's for people, as silly as that might sound.
... or just use the comment label feature to label it as "Offtopic"? :P
But that's not necessary in this case.
I don't believe I have the ability to self label yet, so I left it up to the decision of other users :)
Noone has the ability to self-label. But you asked people to remove your comment if it was off-topic. We don't remove comments for being off-topic here, we just label them and let the sorting algorithms take care of them after that.
Ahhh got it thank you :D that makes sense
Interesting. That link doesn't work if someone (me) isn't subscribed to ~music. I tested subscribing, and the link works. Unsubscribe again, and the link doesn't work again.
So... a tag filter will displayed tagged items only from groups you're subscribed to. Nice to know.
(I think it's time to re-start work on the Instructions pages of the Tildes Docs...)
https://tildes.net/~music?tag=albumlove should still work, even if you're not subscribed to ~music though.
Yes, it does. I discovered that option as I was playing around, after discovering that skybrian's link didn't work for me.
However, I wasn't trying to solve the problem: I was trying to understand it. I encountered something that didn't work as expected, so I wanted to figure out what was happening. And, I figured out that a tag search (not "filter", silly Algernon!) will display tagged items only from groups you're subscribed to, rather than from all groups on Tildes. That's something I didn't know. And now I know it.
P.S. Could you please label my previous comment "Offtopic", if you haven't already done so?
It didn’t for me because my default filter for ~music was set to “last seven days”, so no topics appeared. I can change it, but making search links that work for everyone seems tricky?
(Also, I’m increasingly of the opinion that setting it to anything other than “all time” by default isn’t that useful. Ignoring topics is a better way of making them go away.)
Yeah the way tag browsing works right now is a bit wonky, but there are some issues meant to address it:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/535
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/717