Invite-only is a brilliant idea and I'd like to have it for longer than planned
Posting from glass houses as I'm a relatively new user and a reddit refugee, but I must say that I enjoy the idea of the invite-only forum-style network a lot. When Selig announced the first effects of reddit's API changes, people scrambled to find a new place to post. It's only natural, and I won't lie that I'm missing some fluff and meme communities like 196 and hmmm. Most, as far as I can tell, found Lemmy, some found kbin, some found Tildes. Not many were granted access to Tildes, and I think that's a good thing.
Like Deimos says in the documents, Tildes is not a reddit replacement and it shouldn't be one. It's something different - I see it as a lovely little nostalgia portal into the Web1 days with BBCode forums, modernised to fit a web that continues to enshittify itself. It's a refreshing oasis, and I think the fact that we're very strict about invites is a big testament to that.
In my view, invites serve two purposes. First, if they're a limited resource, users think closely about who to invite - keeping the general quality of participation high. The fact that Tildes has only one real content rule, that being to not be an asshole, and more importantly the fact that this rule works is a testament to that.
The other purpose is maybe not directly apparent. When I first encountered Tildes and I didn't see an easy "request invite" or "waitlist" button, it deterred me to join. Thank god I didn't, because this is a great little community, but for some people that's enough to turn them off. But, I don't see this as a bad thing either - if you want to join Tildes, you have to put effort in. You have to send an application to Deimos, or you need to find and befriend an existing member through other channels.
This is a barrier, a source of friction, sure - but it's also a great "defense mechanism" against the hordes of potentially bad users - be that assholes, be that lurkers, be that those users that leave after leaving a single comment and finding that Tildes isn't for them.
Which brings me to my point - Deimos has stated that this is an invite-only alpha. Eventually, the invite system will be removed, and considering the influx of new users along with the need to make the site more accessible fast, it might happen sooner than we think. I think we should keep Tildes invite-only for longer than we "need" to. Not because I don't want new users, far from it - but I think the small village vibes is what makes Tildes special. I'd like to preserve that island of nostalgia.
Also it keeps all the onlyfan advertisers and spam bots out. Reddit was/is becoming horribly overrun with them.
Voat was great for maybe a week. Innocently I started up a calvin and hobbies sub. And like a mountain of racism and crazy town, it melted down. That was one week wasted on a reddit alternative.
I agree with your points, bots are the enemy when talking about preserving the vibe here.
Btw… Your username reminded me of the a fascinating Reddit ama about a man with two dicks. Not what I thought I’d be reminiscing about over coffee this morning LOL!
Sorry to burst your bubble, but double dick dude was fake. He was made up to promote and sell the creators fetish erotica.
The more you know!
I made this username because of that AMA! Hahah
Ha! that's pretty funny.
well said, siamesedick.
I'm noticing an urge to simply write "r/rimjobsteve" here, which I hope will lessen over time. I did enjoy all the canned responses of reddit to an extent, but I also think it's somewhat antithetical to quality discussion.
Yes, we have a "noise" label for this (which you don't yet see because you don't have comment moderation rights yet), but in general canned responses including "relevant username", "well said [username]" etc all those kinds of things are very low SNR and degrade the community over time.
Best is to ask yourself if you really want to see the results of 100 more people/comments like you in the same thread. I stopped counting the number of times I opened an interesting Reddit post, started reading the comments and had to go several levels deep before finding anything actually worth reading beyond the 50 obvious puns and what not.
Invite only forever.
Its quite easy to see that the invites are not hard to come by, but they serve as a huge roadblock for spammers and sockpuppeteers.
The fact that it means every person is at least vaguely 'vetted' before coming here is a godsend.
Like, yeah I can ask for more invites and that is technically open to abuse, but anyone coming here is already coming here to avoid that.
It's a self-perpetuating system of positives.
I must admit though, the turnaround between asking for an invite in a reddit thread and receiving one was very fast in my case.
The reddit account I asked from itself is quite new too and doesn't have a long comment history as I deleted my decade old one as I didn't want to go by it's username any more so there wouldn't have been a lot to judge me by.
As such, I don't feel like I was vetted really at all. I don't intend on squandering the invite of course but I just want to express that I have a feeling that at least some of the invites went out with no real friction.
I wasn't handling invites, but the discussion here was that for the person handling most of them they just stopped vetting. It's creepy and wastes time. Ifbyou're asking you either know what you're in for or will find out.
That said, there were 4k additions, a very small number of banned users from it, so thing seem to be going well.
Yeah, I think you're referring to this post by @cfabbro which I think provided a really great explanation for why vetting probably isn't necessary. A really big argument against it in my mind is that it biases against people who post a lot, since there are simply more comments for someone to find something to object to. Meanwhile, someone who holds reprehensible views but hasn't commented — with that account — on Reddit would be let in.
When I was inviting people from Reddit I would pretty much always send an invite to someone who requested, provided I didn't see any immediately hateful content on their profile page while I was finding the "send private message" button.
@Kawa @Plik in case you're wondering why you weren't vetted, read the linked post
But the invites you give are connected with your account, right?
cfabbrodoesn't have to worry about it because he's a founding father, but I would like to be sure I'm not letting in someone who would hurt my own ability to keep inviting honest-hearted people in.Well, yeah, but if you invite 10 people and 2 of them turn out to be bad apples, that's not going to make Deimos ban you. These things happen.
If 9 out of those 10 people turn out to be total trolls... that would be a different matter. Because that's not just a coincidence. Or if every account you invited was a spambot.
Your reasoning makes sense, and I may be being too paranoid with my invites.
Oh the other hand, there's people that dates only bad apples. Is it because there's something wrong with themselves, or is it just plain bad luck? I don't want my bad luck to be counted as bad behavior, but it's reassuring we're not judged if that happens.
So don't invite the people you date! :P
Look. There's no requirement for you to invite anybody. I've been here 5 years, and I've issued a total of two invitations in that time, only one of which was actually used (and they're not an active member, just a placeholder username). Don't think you have to go out and recruit dozens of new members for Tildes - especially not now, when the userbase has increased by 40% in the space of a few weeks! However many people you could invite would be just a blip compared to that, so you don't need to feel any personal responsibility to add to the userbase here.
Just go through your life like normal (online and in meatspace). If the topic of an internet forum comes up in one of your discussions with people, then you can mention Tildes. If the other person shows interest, and you think they might be suitable, give them an invite code.
It's true. When we find something good, it's a second nature to be preachers of this amazing thing we just found, be it a funny meme, a thoughtful discussion, or a good place. But I won't lose my sleep because of this, worry not.
Also, completely off topic, but I got interested in you username. Is it because you're an Asimov fan?
True, that. I've seen it (and been it) many many times.
NOO... never! :P
Of course I'm an Asimov fan!
There is a full explanation behind this username I created 12 years ago: it's in the bio on my user profile.
I keep learning things about this site, I didn't know there was a profile.
I got hooked to the Foundation series, and my mind blew when I understood the robot series and the Foundation series was connected. Also, how prolific he was! Truly a role model indeed. It's always a good day when we get to spot a fan of awesomeness in the wild.
"Profile" might be over-selling it. It's just a page showing your Tildes posting history - but it has a sidebar with space for a few paragraphs of user bio. You have a user bio on your user page, so I assumed you knew what it was.
Personally, I prefer his other works to his Foundation series - such as his Robots stories, his stand-alone novels, his many short stories, even some of his non-fiction.
I was actually disappointed when he connected the Robots series to the Foundation series. It left a bad taste in my mouth, after having seen Robert Heinlein interconnect all his novels in a series of books published in the 1980s, about the same time that Asimov was interconnecting his stories. I felt it cheapened both the Foundation and the Robots series, and didn't reflect well on Isaac. I've read about why he thought it needed to be done, but I don't believe it was as necessary as he thought it was.
I actually inputted my bio, and then I couldn't figure a way to visualize it until now that you have pointed the right way.
It definitely came from the left field, and I can see it could be something done afterwards, but as a kid I loved the connection, because that meant if we can do robots with good AI, that's a step forward to space exploration and space colonization. I mean, science fiction is the genre of the dreamers who's dreams are based on reality.
The humans in Asimov's Robots/Empire/Foundation universe achieved space travel about 5,000 years before R. Daneel Olivaw was created. By the time Daneel was created, humans had already settled 50 Spacer worlds.
Connecting the two series didn't add that dimension.
I was actually talking about one of the stories of
I, Robot, in which a machine called Brain develops a spaceship capable of traveling faster than the speed of light. Humanity had to start there their space shenanigans.About Daneel, I believe you, because my rose tinted glasses didn't let me dig deeper in the inconsistencies, but now I could revisit that rabbit hole. Seems interesting.
We've gone way off-topic for a thread about Tildes being invite-only. If you want to discuss Asimov's Foundation series, I recommend starting a topic in ~books.
Hey, for what it's worth, you invited me, and I haven't gotten you banned yet!
I'm similar to you. I'm itching to send my five invites to five awesome people. Sadly, no one in my personal life is interested, and I'm not really checking Reddit anymore.
Hey hello there! You see, it feels nice to be the middle man between you and something good, and because you're not cause trouble, I also acted as a middle man between this community and a responsible member. It's a win-win, and now you have the opportunity to do the same.
Oh no, that itch isn't going to go away anytime soon, I can feel it too!
The fact you're even asking yourself these questions is very telling, so don't worry. Go nuts. Invite spez.
I'm really sorry but I finally decided I couldn't invite your friend. His profile shows a history of passive-aggressive behavior and troll tendencies, which go against the principles behind Tildes...
They are, but unless everyone you invite is problematic and being banned I don't think it will be held against you. In my time here I have not heard of someone being punished for their invitees, but that doesn't mean it hasn't happened. Ultimately it's up to you what to do with them, I'm just providing a bit of encouragement to not worry about it all that much!
I too was not vetted. However, I think the extreme focus on "text only" everything is a second barrier, and the intolerance of one liner comments is a third.
So someone coming for low brow karma whoring will quickly become bored, realize Tildes is not what they were looking for, and just dissappear naturally (or get banned).
You probably weren't.
5,000 new users have signed up to Tildes in the past 14 days. That's not counting invitations which were issued but not used. There's no way people were vetting who they invited, at that rate.
In all fairness, it takes less than a minute to verify that a redditor's profile isn't full of death threats, mudslinging, political hate spam, etc... If you go to RedditAlternatives that's actually a really common thing.
What was it? 1% of users cause 90% of problems? And it's very easy to spot them.
I'm more worried about eventual astroturfing. Tildes needs to grow 1000x for that to be a problem though.
Mine is 13 years old.... And wildy inappropriate at times. Same username.
Time changes all, neighbor.
I don't shy away from my idiocy.
Speaking as another reddit refugee it's also nice for sort bringing in whole communities. Your more likely to give out your invites to people in your communities than randos. Now if only I could get more cyclists...
The balance between invites being required and also being easy to get seems ideal to me.
You have to be interested and invested enough in the community to reach out and ask to participate. I was surprised to get an invite within a day or two of asking and would have gladly waited longer, but even that was enough of a waiting period that someone who isn't all that interested (or who has bad intentions) might not bother to sign up. This is how it works/worked on sites I've enjoyed before, like Archive of Our Own (which has been invite only for ~15 years) and Livejournal back in its heyday, and I suspect it goes a long way toward facilitating a sense of community without actually gatekeeping or excluding anyone.
On the flip side, I've tried to sign up for sites that take 6+ months to get an invite out to you, that have no mechanism for current users to generate invites, or that don't have enough public/easily discoverable content and discussion spaces to sustain a limited base of users. Tildes has none of those problems, fortunately, which makes me think it'd be just fine staying invite only indefinitely. Maybe I'll feel differently when activity inevitably drops off and things slow down, but even then, I'll still be able to rec the site to others and invite at least a few folks myself.
I must admit, you've got me incredibly curious as to what kinds of websites take 6 months to get an invite from..? Not that I don't believe you, I'm just wondering if it's maybe the 'norm' in some niche sphere/field or something
Your second (third?) paragraph reminds me of cashback offers on hotel sites. The ones where you pay at the hotel, then 60 days later you get an email telling you how to get the 4% cashback back, and it has to be redeemed within 120 days.
The whole point of that is that most people will likely forget, miss, or never respond to the 60 day email (you know, cuz they checked out two damn months ago).
Point being internet time is much "faster", so maybe even just a day or two is enough to discourage would be "lazy" users from even joining Tildes.
I agree with you on the points that (1) we have to think a little bit about who we invite and (2) the little bit of friction allowed new users to skew towards those who put some effort in, and that your overall points that (3) Tildes has a really nice and healthier culture.
I wholeheartedly throw support behind the conclusion that "we should keep Tildes invite-only for longer than we "need" to." And certainly you're not saying to keep invites forever either: just for now and maybe a bit longer than we need to.
But, I will try to respectfully not draw a casuation between "invite" and "maintaining good Tildes culture" by positing this counter : nearly all 5000 new users were unvetted invites.
Most of us got in from the thousands of hardly-if-at-all vetted invites triggered by the call to arms thread. Most of this wave came frictionlessly, and nearly all are fitting in well. Going forward, each has now been given 5 invites, but that's 5000 * 5 new, totalling more than all 5 years of existing accounts combined. If only 1% (50) of the original 5000 new accounts were folks that would have been weeded out from careful selection, that's now turned into 50+250. By next invite round that will be 300*5. Anyway my point is that the good culture can easily be overrun even if a tiny fraction of the carefully vetted invites turn out poorly.
To add to that: only deimos receives and process reports (label-->malice...). And as far as I'm aware, he's a mortal with a day job and he sleeps. And yet Tildes doesn't go to heck.
So what is it about Tildes? I think it's that the established culture* encourages members to participate in a way that humans actually want to participate: in a meaningful manner, respectfully, where no one is really applauding quick snips, rage, and preferring well timed and crafted jokes over references or mere call back to jokes.
I think that the main positive from the invite system is that it is significantly limiting new comments. But once people do get in, whether openly or quarterly invited, they need an existing quality and kind culture to integrate into.
The most exclusive clubs can and so often do turn into awful people clubs: Mean Girls clubs and frat inner circles and HOA committees.
So here's where we come in. Like you said, we will try to be responsible about who we invite, but more actively, Tildes will remain and become a place where people WANT in on, only because of high quality discussions and kind interactions and insightful shares and us actually taking an interest in one another and listening rather than fighting to be heard.
The reason why invites "work" is not the mechanism, but rather that new invitees have the old guard welcome them, respond to their intros, and have good quality posts and discussions to participate in.
Invites, moderation, reporting...these are relying on software system design which can aid human interaction but can't fully control the slightly worse angels of our nature. To that end, it's threads like these --your carefully thought out ideas shared with the goal of making this community better-- that will truly shape the long term health of Tildes.
Well said. I asked for an invite from an existing user, got screened a little, and I'm glad I've been welcomed here - this is all well and good, and I'm all for it as long as it keeps the Tildesian culture we like our space for intact. Looking forward to how we keep this place open and diverse, but still high quality, here's hoping!
I want this in the Tildes docs, in a t-shirt, and in a big billboard every time someone ask why Tildes is different from Reddit.
I vote for longer too. I think we should not remove the invite-only until the migration has settled. I have probably made several posts explaining myself why the invite only and no photos and no video embedding is preferred by me. I just got off work today, and my mind is kind of exhausted, so pardon me for not expanding my reasons for this, but if you scroll through my history, you can see it there. Cheers to Tildes and it's chill atmosphere.
Noone is removing the "invite-only" status of Tildes any time soon. Certainly not in the next few months. And that has nothing to do with the current influx, and everything to do with how unready Tildes is for people to come in with no restriction whatsoever.
We’ve already been invite-only for longer than planned. This site was never intended to be invite-only for 5 years. Tildes was supposed to have grown and developed in its first few years after its creation in 2018, with the invite-only restriction being dropped long before 2023.
However, circumstances intervened, growth slowed, and development ground to a halt – until a few weeks ago, when thousands of people flooded here from Reddit.
But they’re not a limited resource. cfabbro, one of the long-standing helpers, who’s been assisting Deimos since literally before Tildes existed, recently referred to sending out “literally thousands and thousands of invites” over the years.
As for recent times: we’ve grown
36%40% since 31st May. We’ve added more than 5,000 new users in the space of about 2 weeks. You can safely assume that that many invitees were definitely not all given background checks; anyone who asked for an invite, got one.You yourself have been the beneficiary of this latest round of people handing out thousands of invites to all comers, willy-nilly. And now that you’re in, you want to pull up the drawbridge behind you? :P
I think you’re under-estimating how much work needs to be done to make Tildes ready for open access, and over-estimating how quickly that work can be done. In my opinion, there’s no way this site will be ready for open access by the end of 2023, and possibly not until well into 2024, if not 2025.
Too late. That small village is already a tiny town, and still growing. As a result of that, this site is currently more active than it has ever been in its entire history. That “small village” no longer exists. The 5,000 new users have changed it irrevocably.
They woke up an awful lot of old hats too. Plenty of names I haven't seen in a while are posting again, good times. :)
That's true.
I could even count myself among that group. I've been fairly quiet here over the past couple of years, with occasional bouts of wakefulness followed by some very long naps. And now I'm wide-awake!
I would hope invite-only stays around for a very long time, maybe even forever (or at least as long as this site exists).
I like the lengthy discussions on here, and so it tells me that if you've at least asked for an invite, you've put some effort into your web searching. This tells me that while you may enjoy memes and low-effort posts, you're also at least capable of doing something more involved.
I’ve been looking at requests from reddit posts and looking for long term accounts who miss old Reddit, with quality comments, who aren’t assholes. I’m also trying to pick more diverse people like lgbt+, bipoc, women and non-US people when I can. I’m also sending people a link to the tildes docs when I invite them so they can learn the philosophy.
Just want to add support for your position, given the long argu-discussion below.
I think a lot of people have this kneejerk reaction against affirmative action (which overall I disagree with), but it's worth noting that for those who have that reaction, that gaining access to Tildes isn't like getting a job or whatever; it's not like there's just one position open.
Sure, on the microcosmic level, it's a bit of a zero-sum game— I have 5 invites, and if I choose to prioritise e.g. women, that means there are men missing out on those 5 invites of mine.
But macrocosmically, it's not. Tildes' userbase all have invites to send, and it's not like everyone is only inviting women. That's actually something that made me a bit more comfortable vetting— I just offered some of my invites to people who asked for them on Reddit, and while I didn't 100% limit it to minority groups, that (as well as comment histories) did play a part in the decision, largely because my feeling is that diversity is desirable for good discussion.
The fact that I know lots of other people have invites they can give out actually made me less worried about this, because it's very likely that someone else will give them an invitation, or there'll be another thread where invites are given out. So it's not a big concern, imo.
Have you considered maybe not discriminating based on race, nationality, and sexual orientation? It sounds like, "Wow, this person shares great insight. I'll invite them to Tildes. Oh wait, he's a white male...maybe not."
I fit 2/4 of those categories you listed, by the way. It's pretty frustrating that people say not to discriminate against us, but discriminate for us and against others.
That's one of the main things that turned me off from Reddit and other social media in recent years. I ironically recognize this about myself and actively avoid this just so I don't fall into that hole again. Maybe I'm triggered lol
I don't think that sounds like discrimination. No one's getting locked out. But it's also no secret that Tildes is overwhelmingly(?) white and male so purposefully seeking out and injecting some diversity sounds like a great idea.
There isn't anything wrong with a place having predominantly white males, but even then I haven't ever thought about a person's gender or race as I've interacted with them here on Tildes, whether it's a secret or not.
I'm not reading a good conversation between faceless people and thinking, "Are they a white male? Or an Indian woman who supports LGBT? How diverse is this thread right now?"
Choosing race or gender as a final checkmark to make a decision should be wrong any way someone looks at it. Is that not valuing skin color and sexual orientation more than the content of someone's character, their work, etc., which ironically defeats the purpose of equality and fairness?
I don't think anyone suggested there is? But there's many benefits to increasing diversity in an online discussion group. People's life experiences matter, they change us and shape us in lots of different ways. Personally, I'm interested in hearing from more varied perspectives around here. That has nothing to do with 'final decisions' or discrimination.
I think sometimes race gender and LGBT status are thought of the only diversity worth thinking about. But life is such a rich tapestry it paints over nearly all diversity in life that’s not neatly captured. Whether they were bullied, which friends/parents they had, jobs, places visited, things learnt, skills gained.
Let’s not lose sight of wide ranging diversity of thought in exchange for labelled diversity. Invite people who you disagree with about something (or raised a different opinion/point/view) but can hold a respectable and polite conversation with. That’s the most important diversity on an online chat room that makes you break out of your bubble.
I've lived in wonderfully diverse communities as well as predominantly race communities as a minority, so I understand how awesome it is to hear and witness so many experiences.
Tildes's demographic likely being predominantly white males, however, hasn't affected or detracted from the experience of discussing topics that I've observed and enjoyed so far, whether in a bland or negative way. A person's race or gender also doesn't always affect their perspective and experiences, usually unless it's negative. But we don't have to include race- and gender-related experiences or perspective to discuss a general topic.
Saying that something needs more diversity could very well suggest that A) something is wrong with its current demographics, 2) something isn't quite right with it, or D) it's subjectively not up to your standards.
"If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it," right?
We don't have to do anything but again, there is value in perspective. Even just sticking to the discussion aspect of Tildes, it would be great to hear from some women in a thread about preparing for parenthood. It would be great to hear from non-Westerners in a recipe thread. It would be great to hear from an immigrant on adapting to life in my country, or an emigrant on why they left. Etc. etc. And that's without considering the more serious aspect of how minority perspectives on 'general' topics add value to a conversation.
No one is 'fixing' anything. I can't really understand your reaction, to be honest. You're reacting to a single individual exercising their completely harmless decision to seek out some minority voices and acting as if Tildes has an 'applications closed for white men' sign on the door.
You're reacting to a single individual exercising their completely harmless decision to question why someone wants to include race and gender in their vetting process for inviting people to Tildes, and acting as if Tildes has an 'predominantly white men' sign on the door.
I can't really understand your reaction, to be honest.
From Mews:
That sounds nothing like what you assume to be the case for Mews's decision. It just sounds like, "Tildes is too white and doesn't have enough representation for minority people who want it."
Which is why I expressed my annoyance about bringing social and identity politics into an anonymous forum.
I wouldn't categorize what you're doing as completely harmless. When someone effectively says I'm going to invite a few more POC and the first response is can you please not discriminate that's probably not overtly welcoming to POC.
In your other comment you mention:
Actually, Tildes has had many, many discussions on exactly this. It's not explicitly a space for this obviously, but I've been here for a while and there's absolutely room for identity and identity politics here. You're welcome to discuss the merits of identity politics in a discussion centered around that, but I don't really think someone's attempts at inviting people to Tildes could be considered a suitable platform for that discussion.
Your perspective. My perspective was Mews's comment was potentially harmful. Turns out it wasn't. Wow, clarification helps and perspective matters!
Replace "POC" with "straight white males" and it's problematic. Singling out any group based on race or gender is questionable, whether if it's concerning bias or discrimination. It has nothing to do with me not welcoming my own people.
Exactly my point, it's not explicitly a space for it. Not once have I assumed that discussions about social politics don't exist on Tildes; one out of two of my concerns was that it could become a prevalent issue and end up like any other social media where you get censored, banned, or mass reported just because people disagree with you on social politics.
You think that, and I thought there was discrimination against white males and racial/gender bias from Mews's comment. They clarified that isn't the case, and that's all.
You mentioned in one of your comments:
This is ironically the case in this situation. I wasn't looking for an argument or a debate, and Mews already clarified what they meant.
Have a nice day/night.
I think you are seeing this as positive discrimination but it is a positive action.
To be fair, of my first five invites, two were white, male 30-50. Three were women, I think, two of which were from the UK. I don’t know their race and didn’t ask. One frequented an lgbt-affirming subreddit I also frequent.
If I hadn’t looked at these aspects of invitees, I probably would have invited all or mostly men, as this is the overwhelming demographic on Reddit.
Seeking out diverse invitees does not take away from the ability of the majority demographic from taking part in Tildes. People want a community that represents them, and adding diversity to tildes seems like a positive for us all.
Tildes isn't about representing any race or gender or ideologies or religion. It's just a place to have discussions. This is what I mean by bringing social politics into everything.
From what I've seen so far on Tidles, there hasn't been any white male or groups of them spewing mysognistic or racist remarks, and if there has been a few, that's expected literally anywhere within every race, culture, community, etc.
It's just an unnecessary thing to think that you need to think about race and gender on a faceless forum.
The beauty of each of us getting invites is that we can approach it in an individual way. I never said "tildes is too white", or too male, or too anything, but you heard that, and are having a negative reaction to my choice to intentionally seek out diverse voices because of your associations with diversity and identity. I disagree with your notion of what seeking diversity means for white men in the community and tilde as a whole, and despite my clarifications and those of other commenters, you are holding fast, and that's ok. I'm not stopping anyone from joining Tildes, and I'm not skipping over men or cis gendered, or white folks simply because of their identity. I am taking positive action to include other demographics with my invitations.
Ultimately, separating the identity and experiences from a person is impossible, and can trying to can cause valuable perspectives to be missed. The more diverse community we have, the richer the experience. We have people here who understand what life is like as a man, as an American, as a white person, and those experiences are important and needed. We also need other voices who know other lives, as those are equally important.
I totally get how important diversity is and how much value and richness it brings. My only concern was making things about social/identity politics in Tildes and/or vetting based on gender and race.
With that not being the case, great!
I didn't expect to see so many people commenting in favour of invite-only, but I disagree.
While it's nice now, I think when this site is considered somewhere close to finished, then having the most diverse possible user base is important to me, for the fair and balanced discussion I crave. I'm not really interested in yet another echo chamber.
I could be biased, because I am part of a lot of invite-only forums, so they could fill that void for me. While they're anything but an echo chamber, they're invite-only for pretty good reason. It's great to feel included and like you're part of something special, for sure. But the other forums I'm in get a little samey and predictable, with the same vocal minority always popping up to contribute.
To add to this. What is really neat about the invite-only is that on other forums where there is transparency and a user's post history is visible, you can simply just go through a candidate's history in order to determine whether the person is a good fit. I know this is what some private tracker website are doing already and seems to be in the cards for the future. There certainly is money in it and as a user you obviously want to be in the "best" community possible.
Hold on, do you expect people to bring references when applying to an online forum?
I find that slightly irritating. Sure, one or two sentences would be nice as to why someone would like to join, but I would ask them for their Reddit handle as much as I would ask them for their LinkedIn.
On the invite-only-basis: I too would love to see it prolonged.
In the context of this thread I don't expect them to bring me anything, if the question is whether I consider that to be the socially appropriate thing to do. It's simply that you have an invite and want to invite the right people. If you have access to their post history, that is an easy way to figure out whether they should get an invite.
As for a hypothetical systems where you had to apply for communities. I think that is going to happen, but whether that is good or bad is probably best discussed in a separate post.
I think that a vetting system makes sense for a private tracker (been part of many for over a decade) but for a forum? I just don't think it really holds up.
I use different usernames depending on the site, I don't see many people wanting to share their other usernames just so that they can be observed before getting an invite to an internet forum...
As an aside, I realized something interesting that is a result of the invitation system.
As I saw this post, I was honestly a little bit annoyed. I was thinking that I had seen too many posts that were talking about the way that Tildes is run lately with the influx of new users.
But then I took a moment to think about why I felt that way. I realized that the reason was because I had an implicit trust in this community to do the right thing.
Trust is possibly the single most difficult thing to cultivate out of a community, and one of the most important ones. It’s what provides a sense of cohesiveness, or a “sense of community”. And I realize a big part of that trust is knowing that there is a degree of accountability when new members show up, and that there is a barrier that would prevent uninvested people from participating. Those are things that come from the invite system.
So yes, I am also for keeping this system indefinitely.
Exemplary. Sorry, I'm too new to have access to the real tag!
The practice of auditing your own emotions and biases seems to be a lost art in modern internet. My theory is that doing this openly from time to time becomes a pay-it-forward scenario for the rest of the community. It's a good reminder of the human on the other side of tcp socket.
Ha! As much as I enjoy the flattery, I wouldn't say that this is something deserving of the Exemplary tag anyways.
Self-reflection is something that is crucial for mental health. It's quite literally the idea that is core to the most common form of psychotherapy there is - cognitive-behavioural therapy. It's also something that you should do just as part of being a good person in general.
I'm aware that there are a lot of people who simply don't. And that is equally mystifying and frustrating to me.
I am torn between two competing desires on this, really.
On the one hand I wish for the long-form, relatively high-brow vibe with mutual respect and measured discourse to be retained for as long as at all possible. Restricting the influx of new members may help with that... or it may not have that much more traction seeing as all of the new users outnumber the old guard drastically as it is. I'm talking like I belong to the latter when I only checked in like once a year after creating my own account back then, I'm such a hypocrite.
Anyway, on the other hand what I really desire is the opportunity to discuss niche topics aside from the mainstream with mass appeal. And while strictly speaking, we might not need new tildes (sub-tildes?) for that to work since we have tags - what is absolutely required as an essential ingredient in niche discourse is a critical mass of participants.
So, I would like a bigger community but at the same time not a community of lesser value, but how to achieve that? I don't think it's the invites that manage to uphold the Tildes values and the community vibe but rather the format itself. You don't get to post brainless memes for a quick Karma-slash-dopamine hit of instant gratification here. You don't do inane "And my axe!" drive-by puns. (I hope)
The Tildes experience is particular and peculiar and it does not lend itself for fast food consumption easily. That is why I think self-selection is the most powerful catalyst by which we can have some healthy community growth without sacrificing our values or suffering drastic degradation of the level of discourse.
Typically, the healthiest communities are indeed those that grow slowly but surely. Unless other platforms shoot themselves in the foot driving users to another mass migration though I do not think we need to gatekeep at all but rather open our arms to such members that actually want to be a part of this community. The others may be curious and make an account but leave if they find the experience is not for them.
BTW did I mention I was into long-form comments? Yeah. cough
I like it too. My only question is that if I’m spending most of my time here, how do I find people to invite?
I want to invite more folks from certain sports subreddits I follow, so I'm going to make a comment in the Free Talk Friday thread in /r/soccer because that's still a pocket of reddit with a good sense of community. It's generally where the more chill users hang out because everyone there just wants to chat about their lives and connect with other people. One user posted regularly about their experiences coming out as trans, and the comments there were incredibly supportive. Especially for a sports forum.
Apologies for making a new reply, But I feel this would get more visuals rather than if I edit my existing responses.
This post is abbout Beehaw, of lemmy but I feel that it is related to the topic at hand and may also be of interest to us in Tildes.
These maybe another argument in favor of retaining our invite only status in Tildes. The admins of Beehaw has just defederated from other instances largely because of these following reasons (reasons that we can also relate to)
aside from/complementary to what’s mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by and large, boils down to:
1. these two instances’ open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;
2. the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on those two instances;
3. our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to participate in;
4. and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt and others of whom simply don’t care about what our instance stands for
I agree as well. Being invite only is important, because as more people leave reddit for other sites, they will drive poster quality down with them. I'd like to use the site with the least amount of cringe on it, not excess cringe.
Tildes could aim to emulate what Something Awful originally strived for, by gatekeeping users behind invites (or perhaps a fee to help with infrastructure calls) to maintain quality. This will have its own problems down the road, but we'll deal with it.
I'll disagree but on a somewhat pedantic point.
What you said is certainly true and being invite only is the right choice for now, but to keep something around for more than "needed" doesn't make sense. As a site grows needs change and we shouldn't fight against that, tildes doesn't "need" to stay invite only forever.
I disagree for the following reasons:
Here I would like to chime in. Being invite-only is the way for this thing to be effective if we plan to maintain the culture for as long as Tildes is alive.
The invite-only aspect of the community puts pressure on the newcomer to behave and align to the site rules for fear (is this the right term?) of being booted out and then losing their chance of joining Tildes ever again. It also dampens the problem of spam accounts entering Tildes.
But then again the downside to this is it puts unnecessary stress on our community. It also makes us a little bit elitist to some point. with the possibility of going overboard in our exclusivity as a community in the long run. Setting standards that get higher and higher, to the point that no ordinary person can pass our "tests" of character.
So in the end, we can have an indefinite invite only but let us not go overboard in our vetting process. A trickle of joiners may be slow as compared to others but it is good for maintaining the culture, if we do not want it to be overrun by a flood of newcomers.
Another possibility is a 5 USD entry fee, which is what it cost me to join Metafilter back in the day. It seemed to work okay for them as a filtering tool, and this site (especially with the Dracula theme) reminds me of Metafilter.
That said, I had lurked Metafilter for years as a teenager in Asia and was effectively locked out from signing up. I never had the access to ways to pay 5 dollars until I moved to America.
I feel that charge to access unfairly keeps out marginalized voices. $5 is nothing to me as an American with a good career - hell, I could sponsor several people at that level without any hit to my budget - but as you said it keeps out teenagers, people from nations with lower purchasing power parity, people from nations that can’t access whatever payment system is used like Sri Lanka and Russia, and adults even in the US who have limited access to cash and banking services. Teenagers we can argue about ;) but I see no foundational reason to want to keep the other groups out.
I wouldn't even be against that, even retroactively. Keeps spam out and lets us support the site a bit
Could be both.
Either invite from someone, or a modest fee.
Just gotta be careful with money, it can end up badly if it "goes to head."
This is probably a non-starter for @Deimos at this point, but as a distributist, I'm a big fan of cooperative organizations.
My local city has a car-sharing cooperative which has gone toe-to-toe for years against Zipcar, Car2go and other corporate upstarts. The co-op has consistently been able to best the bigger guys in pricing, availabilty, vehicle options and customer service. I spent $500 and in return I have a single share in a service which benefits my city immensely.
If Tildes ever grows to the point of needing to reorganize (ie. if @Deimos feels like his role as BDFL becomes untenable for any reason) then I think a cooperative structure would sure be a cool way of doing it.
$5 seems like a nice number as well.
I have out my first invite this morning and I checked the account history of the person who asked. Didn't seem like they were overly spammy and kept to noninvasive subs.
I can see the domino effect where 1 "wrong person" gets invited and then the flood gates open for OF spammers, trolls, bot accts and propaganda farms stroll in.
Exponential growth is a hell of a drug. If the 5 bots invite each 5 more, you're at 25. Then 125. Then 625. Then 3000. Then more than there are active and inactive accounts at all on the site. Within Deimos filling us up on invites only 6 times. And in the past, he'd fill us up to 10. The 5 was a de-growth measure to delay the wave of refugees a bit afaict.
That said, Deimos has tools against this stuff, if the need arises.
If a record is being maintained, I assume it also notes down the chain link, i.e Aae invites Bee, Bee invites She & Dee. If in this invite chain Dee turns out to be spammer and invites 5 spam bots it's fair to boot the bots as well as Dee and inform Bee of the incident and to be cautious while inviting people next time. In future if another spam bot series is detected in an invite chain involving Bee we can boot them out too.
Personally I'm not in favour of being invite only for long. At some point we should go public, open for all preferably whenever Tildes 1.0 releases. Even though it's very straightforward to get a invite link, like I'd sent an email to invites@tildes.net for one, many people will struggle to understand what to do. There are three ways to get invites r/Tildes invite thread, via sending email, and getting one from a Tildes user. First works only for Reddit users, third may be easier but tricky to know someone here irl. And sending e-mail is barrier enough in itself.
I was going to write more but realised Tildes is still in Alpha version. For another 3-4 years being invite only is fine. It's stable enough for me but 1.0 will be one site to behold.
I'm not sure the tooling is actually there yet; don't think Deimos ever actually used it. But I would presume he has basically a full tree of who invited who. I'd hazard the guess that Deimos would have to come up with a script that retrieves all "offspring" of Dee and nuke their accounts.
I'm not toooo sold on it either. I could for example easily imagine a system of open signup with accounts that start out quite limited. You could for example customize the site as you wish, and post in a limited capacity. You'd be rate limited, or your posts would have to be approved first, something like that. Meanwhile, a pool of trusted users would have a special feed they could prowl for what the new kids are up to. See anything that doesn't belong? Call it out, label the posts accordingly, or even mark the user for a ban.
The reason I'd prefer this is it makes the path ahead much clearer for the newbie. You see the site, you sign up, done. You can even start posting, even if in a limited capacity. There's still friction, but it's intentional and communicated clearly, and most importantly, can be controlled by us. Site growth is slow, but the culture is rock-solid? No need to even bother with the new-kids-feed. Site growth is fast, and we feel the culture is threatened? Put more aggressive limits in place and more aggressively watch the new-kids-feed. As it is, the site's new user experience is often confusing and frustrating.
I haven't been here long, is spam a big problem here?
Nah.
Iirc, Deimos has a graph of who invited who, so if one bad actor gives out invites to lots of other bad actors, it's one spicy admin command and that's that.
There is the occasional person pushing their own blog or something, but never to annoying degree from what I can tell.
no, as I see it, it's not a problem, but we're discussing the pros and cons of invite-only status of Tildes. In a way to overtake the problem of spam, trolls, and bots, so as to prevent them from taking a foothold in the first place.
Not that I've noticed, but it's only a matter of time
Invite only is needed until we get sub-groups like reddit. If it becomes open without mods it will be too much to handle. Keep the default groups open but for things like city groups and and niche stuff, you will need a mod team to build and cultivate it.
This makes a lot of sense. And the amount of invites sent out will increase, so it’ll be keep getting easier for real people to get an invite.
If this platform gets big with many unique communities, I am worried that there will be a barrier to users who in some sense have an emergency. There are time sensitive cases on reddit where a person has to make an account to get help or advice. This would definitely apply to city subreddits. But maybe there would be a way to send an email to moderators or something to get approved - so a delegated version of what our one admin is doing.
I will never agree that anonymous online forums are the appropriate place for time sensitive help. I’m amazed and cheered by the goodness of humanity every time it happens anyways and things go well, but between the risks of being open and vulnerable online, to the slow and uncertain nature of forum responses, to the lack of ability to meet up and provide real, human help, I don’t think this should be the concern or goal of any forum.
Instead, each of us should do what we can do to build these resources and fund them in the real world, inside our living communities.
This is a bit of a privileged perspective to have though.
Safe, anonymous access to many services/resources can be awfully difficult to get, especially among marginalised demographics.
The anonymous part is very important in my experience. The responses usually point the individual in the right direction, to a safe institution that can help or to a government service... or simply they give a good argument why the police should be informed. Actually as a mod, I contact the police as well when it sounds like a plausible emergency.
I know these forums are not the best place to find help, but for a distressed person with tunnel vision, a place like reddit is a first point of contact.
Tildes does not have groups for locations yet, but if it does someday and they are popular, it will only be natural that people will ask for anonymous advice in sensitive situations.
On the flip-side of anonymous advice, people love communities like r/AITA and r/relationship_advice.
Far as I know, it's not going to be turned off. We'll have metered open signup tools (front page lets in 100 a week for example) or invite links that bring in a dozen at a time first. There's a lot of problem space to explore here without being open signup. I figure if that ever happens, it'd only be because we've solved the bot/spam/troll problems with the moderation system.