Some general advice for all the new Tildes users
I've noticed a significant amount of mod actions taking place over the last few days, and quite a few locked topics, so I just wanted to offer some basic advice for all the new users to help prevent that from continuing, or getting worse.
Don't bring the bad habits you learned on reddit here to Tildes, please. Consider this a chance to start fresh.
It's okay to walk away from a disagreement here before it escalates into a heated argument. And when arguments happen, please don't resort to insulting the other person, as that just escalates things even further, and pollutes the atmosphere here. Not everyone who disagrees with you, or misinterprets your meaning or intent, is acting in bad faith. So try to assume good faith before responding. And if you can't do that, then just walk away. Take a breather. It's not the end of the world if you let someone else have the last word in a disagreement.
Don't use the Exemplary label (which many of you have recently unlocked the ability to use) as a "super-agree" between two people having an argument. It's not meant for picking a side. That's not what it's for. And if you do use it that way your ability to use Exemplary labels may be revoked.
And finally, try to be nice. Please. Don't be a jerk. As Eevee said in On a technicality (which I recommend everyone read, since it inspired some of the core philosophies behind Tildes):
There are some nice people in the world. I mean nice people, the sort I couldn’t describe myself as. People who are friends with everyone, who are somehow never involved in any argument, who seem content to spend their time drawing pictures of bumblebees on flowers that make everyone happy.
Those people are great to have around. You want to hold onto them as much as you can.
But people only have so much tolerance for jerkiness, and really nice people often have less tolerance than the rest of us.
The trouble with not ejecting a jerk — whether their shenanigans are deliberate or incidental — is that you allow the average jerkiness of the community to rise slightly. The higher it goes, the more likely it is that those really nice people will come around less often, or stop coming around at all. That, in turn, makes the average jerkiness rise even more, which teaches the original jerk that their behavior is acceptable and makes your community more appealing to other jerks. Meanwhile, more people at the nice end of the scale are drifting away.
And Tildes wants to hold on to those nice people.
Agreed, and well said. I think a lot of people have come here looking for
a "Reddit alternative"an exact replacement for Reddit - which Tildes is not supposed to be. Over the years we've established a nice, cozy culture here that I've really enjoyed. And at the risk of sounding like I'm trying to shoo kids off my lawn - I worry a bit that the influx of Reddit refugees (who seem to account for the majority of the activity as of late) risks changing the culture we've established here.It's not necessarily that there's anything wrong with people migrating from Reddit. But, historically, the limited invite system meant that new users have slowly trickled into Tildes, giving them time to get a feel for how things typically work here. However, with such a large influx of users all of the sudden, I've been seeing a lot more of the bad bits of Reddit culture that you've mentioned here. And, given that the majority of activity at the moment seems to be from new users, mod actions have been almost the only tool to keep that in check, since old users are outnumbered and largely unable to lead by example.
I don't want this place turning into Reddit. Disagreements and debates are welcome here, but this is not a place for heated and emotionally charged arguments. It's not the place to dunk on other people and dogpile on the people you don't agree with. It's not a place to doomscroll through for hours.
This isn't to say that I don't want Reddit refugees here - the more the merrier! I've seen some great stuff from new users so far, and I hope to continue to see those people around. The majority of what I've seen so far from new users has been great. I'd like to hope these issues are being caused by a small minority who will lose interest in Tildes once they realize it doesn't reward that kind of discussion, or once they change their habits. I like this little healthy corner of the internet we've all had here, and I hope it continues to grow sustainably.
EDIT: When I originally wrote this, I think it came off a bit harsh towards new users. I don't want to make anyone feel like they don't fit in or aren't welcome here just for being new - I don't think any of us want that. I wanted to express my fears and doubts about a sudden influx of new users who may have to adjust to the culture here. I've seen a lot of struggle to adjust, whether it be noise comments, bickering, or suggestions from new users for sweeping changes to the site to make it more Reddit-like, seemingly missing the philosophy of Tildes and that this place has already been established for a while. However, my experience with most new users has largely been positive - I think most new folks will adjust over time or leave if they want a Reddit-like experience. I'll judge people on their behavior - not their seniority here. I think everything will sort itself out :)
I want to emphasize this part, and agree that arguments are generally fine, but that problems almost always escalate most quickly when people start getting condescending. That is, implying through tone/phrasing/etc. (or even just saying directly) that if you disagree with them you must be ignorant or immoral or otherwise inferior.
Unfortunately, this kind of argument style has become really normalized on the internet, especially since it's effective at attracting upvotes/retweets/whatever from people who agree. Making people that agree with you feel superior is powerful, and seeing people who act that way get high numbers of positive reactions through votes/likes/etc. gives the impression that replying that way is "good". But it turns so many interactions that could have just been conversations into battles instead.
I think phrasing is part of direct communication. If someone uses their words to assign a negative label to a person or their argument (or addresses the person with open condescension), and especially if that's the first thing or the core thing in their reply, I don't think it would be a good idea to continue the conversation. If I ignore it, but still reply, I'm not even continuing the thread of the conversation - I'm talking over them, so why is it a reply? If I address it, I'm escalating and making things worse.
It's possible that the person was writing in good faith and will apologize, but they could be writing in bad faith, or could be writing in good faith and get defensive. It makes more sense for people to be a little more careful with the words they're using, if they want to continue the discussion in good faith.
Sure, ambiguity is a thing and it's possible someone is reading negativity where there is none; it's a good thing to assume good faith in those cases. But I don't think that's what's Deimos meant.
EDIT: I see someone else already wrote something along these lines further down the comments, also in response to you.
Please be careful with this suggestion. It is sometimes deployed by people with more privilege as a way to silence those who have less . This can be particularly destructive for people who struggle with trauma/structural inequalities/neurodiversity (such as you and I).
Very supportive of a community where we can all unmask. But people don't know you have ASD unless you put it out there. Most humans, particularly those who suffer from trauma, tend to project negative intent onto ambiguity as a protective mechanism. We, too, should be able to unmask.
I am largely very grateful for how this is not Reddit. However, I have been dogpiled upon once since arriving here recently. It wasn't fun.
Very polite fascists will use dog whistles to say awful things about a minority group.
The facists know the dog whistles, the group being attacked know the dog whistles, but everyone else will say "no no, assume good faith, explain to me exactly why this is anti-trans, anti-lgbt, anti-woman, anti-black" etc etc.
At this point people who are part of the minority group have a choice: stay and continue to be attacked, or leave and find somewhere safer.
Certainly. I could have been clearer. And thank you for your curiosity.
People with trauma (e.g., PTSD) often present as hypervigilant and keenly sensitive to possible threats/slights. Telling people like this, who are accustomed to having less power, that they should give the benefit of the doubt can be received a lot like a potential abuser saying, "I may have hurt you badly before but just trust me." It's asking them to open themselves up to becoming victimized again.
Caveat here is that this has a potential to make people on the other side feel like they have to "tiptoe" around strangers because they do not know if that person might be hypervigilant and/or sensitive to something specific and very carefully choose words to not sound ambiguous. This is a free space and we do and will bump into people who sure might be abusive or just jerks, but also those who didn't mean anything bad at all and just came out harsh because of different cultural background, different world views, communication style and whatnot.
I've been on both sides and I constantly remind myself that I can not control or change other people. What I can control is choosing not to engage with someone whom I repeatedly perceive as being a jerk/abusive/offensive, whether or not it was their intention at all.
I also agree with this perspective. Thank you for sharing it.
Totally. You've done the work.
Others are still doing it. Many more don't even know they have the trauma, may never, and so will always be victimized by it.
I'm in the "doing the work" stage.
I wanted to add to this. Aside from Ask Culture and Guess Culture there is also Assume Culture- the assumption being a kind of one mindedness where the speaker assumes that they and everyone listening is in agreement. There is a lot of that on Reddit and in other places on Social Media. It can create a very insular, groupthink environment ,with an In Group and Out Group, and stiffle any dissent or discussion.
Truth. It's such an unhealthy thing to do, but it's also part of the design philosophy behind modern Reddit-like and microblogging platforms. This can get into theories like attention economy and what have you, since it's not only just in social media sites... it's a legitimate business tactic to play to that. It is, unfortunately, part of business too and it's like the saying goes...
Any press is good press.
I read this and agree with it all, but given my tendency to engage antagonistically (though I try not to be condescending, and almost never use insults of any kind about anyone), I wonder what my experience here will be like. as someone else said, I, too, was a stikler about reddiquette. still, I quite enjoy discussing topics that I know make people bristle. and I have opinions and evidence and all that. and I'm open to being wrong.
I feel like I'm just rambling but the questions nag at me: will I find that I enjoy engaging here, and will others find me tolerable?
The distinction between a good conversation and a poor one lies in whether both participants attempt to empathize with their counterpart. Assuming good faith is a sort of passive "Step 0" here. Step 1 is making the active and genuine effort to appreciate what the other person is trying to say.
If you approach a discussion as something to "win" or specifically to disprove another person, you aren't having an empathetic conversation. Now, empathy doesn't mean sympathy. You can still disagree with another person, but the goal is to understand where they're coming from, why they've formed their belief, and perhaps what it says about you and other members of society that differences in opinion manifest in this context.
I don't actually have many conversations with people on this website. I'm far from perfect anyway. But I read a lot, and I appreciate the opportunity to talk to others and learn more about the world. I find that the most interesting and useful discussions on Tildes tend to be the ones in which both parties are asking questions about the other, seeking to gain understanding as opposed to convey truth.
if someone said something that isn't supported by evidence, i'm likely to correct them. i realize its not really a conversation: it's closer to pedantry. but when a position is premised on a false fact, the position needs to be re-evaluated.
i don't want to tell anyone what conclusion they ought to draw on matters of opinion or when the answer is in flux, such as with ethics. and i'm not particularly interested in constructing arguments (i find it exhausting). but when someone is presenting one with false premises, i have an impulse to point it out. and it's rare that i resist that impulse.
This reminds me of my bad habits. Nearly everything I write is inspired by some kind of disagreement with something someone said, often just a little bit of it. How to disagree without being rude is tricky. I don't always handle it well, but here are some suggestions:
It's important to remember that there is no rule that anyone has to share any evidence in casual conversation. Often people don't give any evidence for what they're saying, and that's okay! This is not Wikipedia and we aren't writing scientific papers either.
Also, people rarely write using correct logic and that's fine. Sometimes you have to do a bit of work to figure out what they meant to say. Whatever trick gets the point across is fair game.
If it still seems unclear and you care, you can ask. Some approaches I like are asking how they learned something and asking for an example. It can be done politely, as a way of showing curiosity and asking for a favor. Make it easy to decline if they want, saying that they don't remember or whatever.
Another possibility is it to post somewhere else instead of replying. You can be inspired to write by an impulse of disagreement, and that's fine, you can take inspiration from anything. But that doesn't mean you have to reply. It's a habit we get into because the reply button is right there.
If I decide to reply anyway, I find it helps to re-read the post I'm replying to before posting, to make sure I'm really responding to it.
It seems to me that you are talking at cross purposes. The person you replied to was talking about false premises, the things people base their arguments and opinions on. What you argued about was wether or not the things people say are based on evidence and whether they communicate clearly. Those three things might not be completely independent variables, but they're definitely not the same thing.
A premise is what you assume to be true before you start your argument or voice your opinion. You can say very coherently why you're of the opinion that people should, say, do something to punish some business and optionally provide evidence for what happened when people did or didn't do that to other such businesses in the past, but if your premise is wrong (turns out the business you want to punish is innocent or your argument/opinion was based on some US supreme court decision and it turns out we're talking about a small shop in eastern Europe), it's still worth pointing that out.
Reading that again, I see now that they brought up both things that aren’t “supported by evidence” and “false premises” and I didn’t write about false premises explicitly. You’re right that I missed that. However, I did write about disagreeing in general and I think my advice still works:
To correct someone’s false premise, you need to know that it’s false, and they need to agree with you on that. Sometimes it’s a clear mistake, but more often proving it is difficult. You might be skeptical without having specific evidence that it’s wrong. A direct contradiction can start an argument that you don’t want to have. It’s often easier and less confrontational to ask about their assumptions.
It’s also worth re-reading because the false premise you see might be based on a misreading, or it might be unclear which assumptions they’re making.
That is valuable observation, niceness should not prevent criticism. That would be intellectually poor.
You can definitely identify imperfections in others arguments while remaining civil, kind, and appreciative of the person you are talking to ;)
I happen to have that impulse too, and I think most people do. We have a natural tendency toward "truth" because it makes it easier for us to understand the world.
I was trying to get at the idea that, whether or not you feel the need to correct another person's false statement or illogical conclusion, the relevance of empathetic conversation is that it allows you understand why they made that conclusion in the first place. If we don't make that personal connection, we can't understand the epistemology they follow. And if we don't attempt to understand the "what, how and why" of their worldview, we're likely to have an identical and equally fruitless discussion with them in the future, the second time more likely to be antagonistic on account of what both sides perceive to be "bad faith" or just stubbornness.
It's also possible, as I've personally found to be the case rather often, that what we're so certain is "absolute objective truth" is really just a reasonable but subjective conclusion we've drawn based on the lifestyle we lead and the information we're cognitively disposed to believe. This isn't necessarily equivalent to Capital "T" Truth, even if we're more educated, credentialed, or more quantitatively intelligent than another person. Occasionally, we also might just be outright wrong ourselves. The older I've gotten, the less I've found myself interested in maintaining complete assuredness of all things. Per Socrates:
It's a challenge to engage this way in practice. I don't know how well I'm even doing it now. We like simple truths, and empathetically conceiving of and immersing oneself in the worldview of another person — even just for a brief conversation — is pretty much the exact opposite of simple. Whether or not we specifically ask questions in our comments, or literally try to learn more about another person, an empathetic mindset can help us approach the conversation in a more productive way, so that, if nothing else, we can remain civil and think critically.
As a new user who just joined, I find it incredibly refreshing to hear this. I have always strived for the ability to engage in reasonable arguments on the internet. From my early days on forums and through platforms like 4chan, YouTube comments, Facebook, and Reddit, I have made efforts to engage in nuanced discussions, albeit with varying results depending on the specific platform and community.
It's great to know that this platform as a whole shares the same goal, as I've often been frustrated by the culture on other platforms. Even on smaller forums (which were generally better than 4chan or YouTube comments, to be honest), I witnessed discussions turning into fights due to needless personal attacks overshadowing the actual points being made. While Reddit provided a somewhat better space for discussion, it was still heavily influenced by the culture of individual subreddits, which often made meaningful discussions impossible.
I'm looking forward to a different experience on Tildes.
My caveat is that Tildes is a Reddit alternative (much like water is an alternative to juice.). What it is not, is a Reddit replacement, or clone.
Honestly as a long time reddit addict, I have waited and withheld comments (literally my first) until I have adjusted to the differences here because it is just so much friendlier and productive overall. Yes, I miss vegetating to pointless memes sometimes... But I also have made a strong point to expand my intelligence emotionally and mentally as much as I can in life and this is a great practice of reflection on bad habits and learning new ways to enjoy the internet. The world can be a very chaotic place for many of us and it is so vital to have an escape from that and to not bring every aspect of living into that chaos. There are so many things to appreciate about the atmosphere created here, and I think a lot of people are torn between standing up for their personal values and boycotting reddit, but being in limbo and not knowing where to go now. It is literally a grieving period and unfortunately some new users will learn the hard way that Tildes is not going to change just to make that process easier on them, there are plenty of places for aggressive emotions elsewhere on the internet.
I joined Tildes in 2018, and until recently was pretty much dual citizenship. It is a huge difference, like moving to a foreign country. But the difference is so welcome.
The number of parallels I immediately see to some specific countries surprises me.
That's a pretty apt comparison.
Agreed, poor choice of words on my part.
I mean, I get what you mean, in that it isn't an alternative Reddit. Language is weird, yo.
Look at these two people on the internet have a reasonable interaction when one provides feedback to the other. It’s possible.
I try to remember that I myself had a lot of those habits earlier that took at least a year or two to wind down, and that was in large part due to the amount of conflicts it engendered in here. I think it's natural growing pains that, unfortunately for Deimos, will take some active moderation to mediate.
In the meantime I suggest everyone familiarize themselves with the "Ignore" feature.
And also tag filtering. In my years of Tildes I had never bothered with this until recently, but it's helped keep the site less cluttered for me. For those who have yet to explore it, it's very straightforward to occasionally check in on your filtered tags if you're worried about missing things. Although I do wish I could toggle between a filtered homepage and the complete set of all filtered tags.
I'm also using the filters for the first time in my entire tenure here. Currently I just have "ask" filtered, as I find those style of threads very annoying for some reason I haven't figured out yet. They weren't very common until recently.
I do find myself wishing I could have predefined groups of included/excluded tags and/or topics, so I could view the site in different ways depending on what I feel like reading.
From what I see it is quite the cream of Reddit that ended up here 1 — in some recent threads you could see people who were moderators of well-respected subreddits for close to a decade.
While I definitely get your concerns, I think they (we) can be a valuable members, and may bring with us interesting new experiences/knowledge from all over the internet.
1 Myself not included
It's not an accident, many of us saw what was going on years ago.
Hey nate! You used to mod /r/science didn't you? Or perhaps still do?! I vaguely remember your name from when I first joined Reddit many, many years ago now.
Oh yes, I agree. I'm glad to have you here! Like I said, I hope the troublemakers are just a small portion of the refugees - the majority of the new activity I've seen here has been very valuable. Welcome!
The atmosphere and discussion here has definitely been the sort that I sought after on Reddit.
On Reddit, I didn't usually find it, though.
I have a loosely-constructed belief that the difference in quality is always going to end up inversely proportional to the size of the active user base, at least past some certain size. So I think if Tildes were to grow by orders of magnitude, it would almost certainly lose much of its quality.
But at the same time, we obviously want activity from lots of people, so the "social platform" is kind of a paradoxical thing, and seems to generally evolve along one of three paths:
Fail to attract new users as fast as existing users become inactive, eventually withering to nothing.
Attract many new users, faster than existing users become inactive, eventually swelling to a size that makes moderation problematic and detracts from platform quality (or inspires profit motives). I'm sure we can all think of examples.
Somehow maintain a balance, keeping enough active users that activity doesn't wane due to lack of stimulation, but never growing to the point of #2. A community like this might be necessarily exclusive, or even insular, reminding me a bit of a "secret society" or something. The fact that Tildes remains invite-only is probably contributing to this balance, and hopefully not leading to point #1.
Thank you for thinking so highly of me.
Very rarely do people respond well to being told they're in the wrong in this way. It's almost always better to redirect the bad behavior towards the preferred behavior instead. In other words:
Don't: Hey that's not how you're supposed to do that.
Do: I see you're trying to achieve [X]. What you did tends not to get there for [reason]. Try doing [Y] instead, that works better because [cause].
The exception is when someone is just being out of line, at which point you just gotta say "STOP." But that's a calibration thing. If people see a gradation of severity in responses they get a sense for what's actually appropriate. If everything is either positive or negative feedback on a binary scale, then people become accustomed to viewing any correction, however soft, as an attack.
This is a very nice, interesting, but even for a moment confusing to read.
I'm a Redditor of 8 years (+ 2 years lurking without an account or so), but what you said was exactly what I largely steered clear from all these years. Reddit was first and foremost a nice, supporting community full of nice people for me. I used to tell new Redditors that Reddit is what you make of it. I was rarely involved into drama and shouting contests, simply as I never accepted any invitation to do so. The part I was in it mostly was to end such things as a mod of a halfway big subreddit. Subreddit choice was so important and so influential in this regard.
But I fully agree with you that for many redditors, the entire Reddit experience will have been completely different for picking different subreddits or even actively looking for them. And I fully understand your concerns, and in your situation I'd share these concerns and would fear feeling pushed away from your internet home, just as many Redditors feel pushed away from their tiny communities, from their small mod teams.
So I promise you I'll try to do my best to be a good Rexiteer or whatever you want to call it. And I can assure you that you'll never see me in a shouting contest.
Good to have you here! I was a longtime Redditor as well (I believe my oldest account is around 9 or 10 years old), but stopped using it a few years ago, precisely due to the prevalence of shouting contests in major subreddits. I agree - subreddit choice makes all the difference. It just so happened that most of the communities I was engaged with either grew too large or migrated elsewhere, so I just had no reason to continue using it.
Like I said, I think the new folks I've seen around here have largely been great, and probably not the kind of Redditor that regularly engages in shouting matches. However, because Tildes was mentioned by the moderators of a few really large subreddits, it did attract a bit of less-than-savory behavior here. I have also seen a few posts from new users here and there suggesting changes to Tildes to make it more Reddit-like, seemingly missing or misunderstanding the idea behind Tildes. However, I think these sorts of people who want a more Reddit-like experience will find that Tildes isn't for them.
Ultimately, for me (I can't speak for others), I think it's just a bit unsettling to have this corner of the internet you've enjoyed for years suddenly experience a large influx of users and potential change of culture. Largely, I have witnessed positive contributions with new users, and a few bad eggs here and there. But, I feel they'll eventually sort themselves out one way or another.
Again, welcome to Tildes! I don't want to make new users feel unwelcome just for being new. That's not the kind of place I think any of us want. My original comment was more of a way to vent and express doubts about what could happen, and I think it came off a bit harsh.
I didn't feel unwelcome at all by your post, and I didn't get it as harsh at all. I'm a German, so I'm used to clear opinions.
In a way, I even feel sorry what is happening to Tildes, even though I'm part of the problem. A years long small community, and suddenly a giant crowd knocking at the door. Not allowing some to enter would mean wasting an opportunity, allowing to enter means spreading the old family thin between many strange looking new people who might mess up the mugs in the kitchen and want to take your seat at the table.
Reddit isn't the first Forum I bury (though by far the biggest). What made me interested was a comment on reddit that it might be worth looking at Tildes "if you liked Reddit as it was ten years ago", which made me start lurking here.
A few thoughts on this. First, I think you’re right. This is primarily a discussion-based site, and the people looking for the kind of fast food consumption of low effort content will move on fairly quickly. Just the fact that you can’t post an image directly will help keep that under control.
Second, I suspect a lot of the new user comments and posts you’re seeing are from people who are feeling a little lost right now and trying to figure out how to connect with a new community. I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing, but perhaps it’s something that needs to be guided in the right direction. I’m not sure how best to accomplish that, but I’ll be keeping an ion discussions like this because they provide a lot of useful information.
I've been on Reddit for 9 years, and my experience largely mirrors yours. While I was not above making the ocasional funny/meme comments, I also largely sought out and tried to foster polite discourse (my first comment was a rather in-depth explanation about how certain types of pipe organs work, in response to a question from an engineering-minded person). From the first time I viewed Tildes, as a logged-out guest, I saw much of the same qualities I had previously found, but had become scarcer in recent years.
I support whatever must be done to guard this golden corner of the web. If I wanted to participate in a cesspool, I'd go back to Reddit.
As an elder Tilderino, I have seen concerning behavior. I have also seen very positive behavior, which I believe is the vast majority at this point.
You, and everyone else, can definitely have a strong positive impact in maintaining a wholesome culture in the website ;)
I'm a reddit refugee but I was on Twitter in 2008 and it was bloody brilliant! Full of nice people.
I get a similar vibe here and I'm perfectly fine with the philosophy —which is my own dictator style and parenting philosophy— of Be Nice! Or else!
Great advice, cfabbro! Thank you for how much you do for this site (to anyone not in the know, everything he does -- and it's a lot -- is on a volunteer basis only!).
I'll add on a couple of other suggestions. I don't mean any of these as a sort of "holier-than-thou" kind of thing. Instead I offer them up as things that have personally helped me on the site and that, from my perception, have benefitted others as well.
Make an effort
I don't mean this in a demeaning way in the slightest. What I mean is that one of the things that I have loved most about Tildes in my years here is that it is a place that rewards effort.
I feel like a lot of new users are probably used to low-effort comments, in part because that's what other platforms prioritize, but also in part because making an effort often gets shot down. You type out something long and rich and meaningful, but all you've done is increase your attack surface. People then come in and snipe your comment with low-effort takedowns, and you're left wondering why you even tried in the first place.
Tildes is not a place where that happens, and what makes this place great are its high effort comments -- deep dives, thoughtful insights, personal narratives. We've had a lot of question threads lately and a lot of people have given short, one-off answers to them. It's not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but the comments that I love tend to be the ones where the person decided to make an effort. Look at this comment on the new Sigur Rós album from @zhantemi. It's wonderful. It's rich. It's thoughtful. It's memorable. They posted it almost a week ago and I still remember it. It didn't immediately slide off my brain like so much other internet content.
This is not to say that everything on here has to be a full-length blog post or an essay, but I encourage you, no matter what you're posting, to try and find the richness that you, personally, can add to that subject. I guarantee it'll make your comment more interesting to pretty much everyone reading it than if you had left it out.
Explicitly affirm your interlocutor
Let's say you do wander into something that might be contentious. Assuming good faith is a good guideline, but it's often invisible. Furthermore, when you disagree with someone, it's easy to dive right into rebuttal mode.
This can create a situation where an angry argument arises even if you didn't intend to do that. Tone on the internet is hard, and when left ambiguous, often comes across as harsher than intended. Taking a bit of extra time to say positive things about your interlocutor, identify common ground, honor their best points, or even reflect that you understand their concern, will help you come across as less harsh.
Even if you fully disagree with someone on an issue, there's common ground there: you both believe it's an important and valuable issue! Finding anything to commiserate on can help take some of the sting out of online disagreements. It also signals that you're actually reading their posts (the online equivalent of "listening") whereas diving right in to rebuttals can make someone feel "unheard".
A few sentences of softening can go a long way to defanging your posts and preventing escalation.
Ignore posts
Disengaging isn't just a best practice: it's explicitly baked into the site's structure. Use the ignore post feature as a matter of digital hygiene. If something is bothering you, and it doesn't rise to the level of needing a
Malicetag or further moderation, it is completely fine toIgnorethe topic and see yourself out. Nobody's going to see it as a cop out or cowardice.In fact, a lot of the old guard would often explicitly note they were doing this with a kind exit comment: (e.g. "Hey, it looks like we don't see eye to eye on this, and I'm going to exit the conversation. Thanks for talking with me.") No attempt at "last-wording", no dig at the other person -- just an acknowledgement that the conversation wasn't for them.
It's a much healthier alternative to spiraling or having a recurrent back-and-forth that goes nowhere and frustrates everyone. I imagine most of us have been online long enough to know how these conversations always end up going if someone doesn't exit. Better to head that frustration off at the pass than see it all the way through to its logical, frustrating, and ultimately unproductive end.
I cannot count the times when I'd done exactly as you described in writing a thought out comment, and then just smh and say "jewelergeorgia, reddit does not care, stop this insanity!" And then cancel the comment.
Like Zelkova, I find I really get that coffee shop itch scratched here. I feel like I'm really getting exposed to things here that I would not have the chance to otherwise.
Thanks for being here tildes
One of the reasons the SomethingAwful forums have managed to survive for over 20 years is due to assertive culling of troublemakers, along the lines of the blogpost you linked. It's important to not allow the letter of the law to get in the way of the spirit of the law, since folks with problematic behaviors tend to use rules as a shield.
Also if there's one skill that I would suggest we could all use practice with, it's being wrong. I suspect it's related to the way the Internet and social media in particular promotes binary thinking, that we feel a need to dig in and defend our positions regardless of any evidence presented to us. Which is a shame since being wrong is fundamentally one of the best ways to learn and grow.
Such a good point. You cannot have a real conversation with someone if they refuse to admit to being wrong.
I love learning and some of the most impactful in my life have been learnings that came from being wrong.
So much of Reddit was intrenched arguing on everything.
The abilities to be wrong and to apologise are some of the most crucial things you can learn, imo, if you want to have good relationships with people. I have historically been terrible at apologising or admitting to being wrong - I would become petty and defensive and deny deny deny - but since working on those skills I’m much happier and my relationships are smoother and deeper.
And if anyone’s wondering how to get better at these, there’s no real trick. You just have to force yourself to do it and sit with the discomfort until it feels easier. The first few times will feel awful, and then you’ll realise the sky didn’t fall and no one thought less of you (they might even think more highly of you!) and the next time will be a little easier. Like building muscles, it sucks and it hurts until suddenly it’s easy
wow, this is actually a handy feature you can just highlight a section click reply and it's automatically quoted in markdown thanks deimos!Anyway, yeah. I am wrong a lot of the time. I am pretty stupid, and being wrong is not only a challenge but a humbling experience. Sometimes you must swallow your pride to see through the trees. That's why I think good or decent behaviour is... really concerning to praise today online.
It's really good practise to stfu and think bout things. It makes conversations, debates, arguments and whatever much better.
There's definitely a subset of Reddit's population that craves the chance to be part of an angry mob of hate towards people or things that are popular to dislike. Things like r/FuckHOA, r/RelationshipAdvice, r/AmITheAsshole, r/RaisedByNarcissists, or any of the subreddits fundamentally built on people sharing experiences that are "safe" to collectively get angry and worked up at.
I think reddit's always had a community of these sort of users, who just want to be part of a mob. Things like r/FatPeopleHate and r/Cringetopia come to mind as the communities that made reddit look bad in the press and were banned as a result, but banning those subreddits was a narrow and minor band-aid that failed to address the real culture issue underneath. Those users never left, and they simply found new ways to be enraged in new subreddits and continue driving user engagement as those subreddits climb higher and higher into r/all.
Recognizing that negative interaction and feedback loop of the group-hate-sessions that these posts turn into as being destructive to the quality of a user base is something I appreciate about Tilde's stance on disagreement and tone. You can see the effect upon the quality of content, as there is next to zero reactionary content made solely to farm outrage.
i think you just worded something that i've been struggling to put my fingers on for a minute now. not that outrage in aita is the same as cringetopia or FPH or relationship advice, but that there's a prevailing thought in all those that whoever is commenting knows all the necessary information, and they are purely rational beings. i think it coincides with reddit's new atheist type of hyper-rational bs, where virtues of rationality, impartiality, etc are so highly regarded that the author cannot be wrong.
it reminds me of my own hyper-religious upbringing where it almost becomes a question of definition. "i'm [rational/religious/moral/good] and only a non [those things] person would [do/think/act like] that, so therefore any [action/thought/impulse] i have cannot be wrong"
idk if this is making sense but untangling myself from this super black/white thinking has been a struggggggle
I will forever be thankful for RaisedByNarcisists, as it was really one of the first times that helped me understand the bad relationships and behavior from my parents.
But yea, the hate spirals are not healthy either.
This isn't strictly true. Let me give a citation:
Deplatforming works. Ban the jerks, ban the places they congregate, they'll actually leave for elsewhere.
One of the areas where this got particularly bad on reddit was with respect to dog whistles. Yes, they exist, but if you go around looking for them everywhere you're going to collect far more false positives, alienate people, and generally destroy meaningful discourse. Reddit by and large became a battleground of sorts, where the goal wasn't to have a thoughtful discussion as much as to berate those who didn't already agree with you.
It's IMO the one big blind spot of your proposal here. Well, that and intentionally veilled malice that isn't exactly a dog whistle.
Some people will intentionally use subtext (either conventions that signal to their own in-group, or implied statements that aren't outright said) to say destructive things without saying them. For example, think "I don't know what we should do about it, I just know that $minority$ has power over $(cultural) institution$, for example. I'm sure you can fill in the gaps in a way that makes sense. These people absolutely know what "we should do about it", they just know it's not tolerated in polite society. When called out, such people will absolutely not clarify their statements, because that would mean retreating to an acceptable position that does not imply negative things about the minority, or taking up an undefensible stance that -on tildes at least- would get them banned.
Granted, such people are rare on tildes, thankfully. But no amount of meeting them with good faith is going to result in a good outcome here. If people repeatedly refuse to clarify what they mean in such settings, I think I know what I assume about their actual intentions.
For us ask-culture people, I think an important takeaway is to stay away from statements that look like we're trying to be sneaky like that. And to be aware of how it looks when people call it out. and address it appropriately, leaving no doubt which side we're on: The one that clarifies suspicious statements, because misunderstandings happen. Ideally, the underlying intention is the uncontroversial position, and not the one that'd be intolerable. Regardless, the clarification needs to happen.
This. AAAAAAALLL of this.
Happened the other day to me. Got a reply, asked directly for clarification on their reply, and I got a response from a different user that... read as p condescending. Like I should have known. I cannot read tone well or such over the Internet as I am autistic, everything after a while reads like someone is angry likely cos of Twt and the like.
Implications and guess culture can impact those affected cause some ppl are, for all intents and purposes, "built different". That's just how it is. I could go on a spiel about how this is endemic to American social norms, but that's beyond the scope of this reply and I'm prob wrong.
I really need to start appending this to the end of all my statements. I like the attitude and I'm prob wrong.
If it helps you feel accountability a/o responsibility in your statements, I implore you to start adding it now.
Well said. I am one of those new people that came over from reddit. I quite honestly like the culture that had been found on tildes. Due to the kind of culture that is on tildes, I have found myself commenting more. I have also found myself not commenting too, which is good.
I think this is a very good skill to develop. Yes, this is a discussion board and yes, commenting at all is to invite discussion but if you're not at least a little interested in engaging with the person beyond debating for the purposes of the crowd like some sort of internet gladiator, it's best just to walk away. Of course there are exceptions to this, but usually the kind of content that requires confronting has a very short lifetime on Tildes.
I didn't comment very much on Reddit because I often didn't get any replies to comments I worked hard on. Language learning was (is) my area of expertise. I get that I'm not going to get a reply every time, but I wanted to discuss stuff and it was a little sad to get nothing so much of the time.
And also the problem that others have mentioned, that you would get some hostile or aggressive replies. I don't mind being corrected, and being direct is fine too. As long as it's polite. I'm happy to find that here.
At some indeterminable point in time I stopped commenting/posting altogether on Reddit. I may as well not have had an account, more-so to your second point regarding hostility. I would read through comment chains on threads and see arguments unfolding in front of me and just be glad I had no input in it at all. I have no problem having a discussion and disagreeing with someone in a civil manner.
Also, unnecessary pedantry in back-and-forths if you don't ensure your comment/post contains the fullest breadth of detail accounting for all possible variables, lest it be raised against you as a hole in your argument. No room for inference. Reddit made me not a fan of prefixing a statement with: "You do realise...?".
Yeah. There were times when it was better in the small subreddits, but it got worse and worse everywhere as the years went on.
Reddit made me passionate about not being a grammar nazi. So many interesting discussions got derailed because someone spelled a word wrong or an apostrophe was out of place.
As a person of color, tildes has been an adjustment period for me. I used to comment pretty regularly on Reddit, but became exhausted constantly being put on the defense about very charged topics specifically around race. Over time I really just came to lurk, and maybe submit a meme from time to time.
When I moved over to Tildes, I felt the immediate need to remain a lurker. My goal was to just read and consume, rather than engage. I comment on a few things here or there, but it’s been nice knowing that I don’t have to enter every conversation on the defense. I appreciate the moderators and the work to keeping things respectful. Day by day, I think I begin to view Tildes as a trip to the local cafe, or bar. Everyone here feels like a person that I can relate to in some way, shape, or form.
Thanks for the advice, and I’m looking forward to continuing to grow on here and learn more.
A mobile game I play didn't have moderation on uploaded levels and chosen usernames. If you got the developer's attention in chat, racist/hateful levels and names would get removed, but the in-game reporting system was just ignored because there was no moderation system yet (huge backlog of other tasks being the excuse).
Now that I'm a moderator, the game is losing users and most of the trolls aren't active anymore. Still, I had kept a log of bad levels on a third party statistics site I made for the game, and could now go back and hand out warnings and delete those levels retroactively. So satisfying. My stats showed more name resets in that month than in any month prior. Whoever now newly downloads the game will see a game laden with thirteen year olds and no profanity or such whatsoever :)
Besides a minority of rotten apples, most people are just passive and that bothers me, but please know that there's also always a group of people working against that loud minority. All too often, I feel like it's a group of white males that end up in charge and doing this type of work and I wish for a woman, let alone a person of color (there's not that many where I live), to join these sorts of things and give us some perspective. I'm trying to do the right thing but do I get it right? Where's the line between a joke and a ban? Am I overlooking anything? (For example, I simply didn't know for a long time that faggot did not simply mean stupid person, though I'm also not a native speaker it's still one of the worst things I ever said to someone who I knew was gay, with most of the class in earshot. The 'target' seem to believe that I genuinely did not know, and they treat me like anyone else including being welcome to a party at their place, but the shame is still there for me.)
I can't speak for reddit, but in general, please realise there's always a quiet majority not agreeing with the vocal minority, and I'd encourage complaining to moderators or developers when you feel unwelcome, or even joining the moderation team even if just as an advisory type of position. Even if it's for the selfish reason of targeting a bigger audience: if the owner knows there's people feeling excluded, they will likely do something about it. Until someone complains, only the "haha" replies are being heard and seen. I'm pretty sure moderation in this game would have been picked up sooner if the developer knew that there were people of affected minorities among the community at all
Another perspective from a newcomer: I've been a lurker on Reddit and didn't engage much exactly because of the culture many commenters describe here. I came to Tildes hoping to find more meaningful and genuine conversations, and with that intention I started commenting sometimes when I feel that I can be helpful or contribute in some way to the topic.
I generally consider myself a nice & polite person and I did read all the Docs and Philosophy behind Tildes before making my very first comment.
That is to say, I personally find repeated discussions like this one a little discouraging, as they reinforce the anxiety about doing something wrong and I start to overthink things like:
I don't know how many newcomers feel the same way, but I just don't want new people to get under impression that they are not welcome here and will be called out on a slightest mistake.
There is almost a sad irony to what you point out. The people most hesitant about participating for fear of doing something wrong (such as yourself) often have the least to worry about, and would be the most welcome here. And the people participating without actually getting to know the place first are often amongst the most problematic users. But if we don't address the problematic new users and their behavior, things are unlikely to improve and instead just keep spiraling. But every time we're forced to address the problematic users we also make the hesitant users even more hesitant and fearful of making a mistake. It's a bit of a Catch-22, damned-if-you-do damned-it-you-don't situation for us, and I don't really know how to fix it. :(
But I will say that IMO, the fact you're hesitant, and worried about making a mistake, is a very good indication that you need not actually be either of those things. :)
Thank you :)
I agree that it's difficult to strike the right balance between calling out unwanted behavior but not repelling more hesitant people. I also remember (relatively)old internet days as someone here called it, and I've seen just too many great communities slowly decay because they did too much of one or the other.
I do not have any good advices unfortunately :( some communities had something like a "warning" system for those behaviors, and whenever you reach certain number of warnings you'd get banned or temporarily suspended, but I don't think this system scales well without dedicated moderators.
I think this is a very valid point. There is (and always has been) a lot of navel gazing here, but now that navel-gazing has a perceived two-tiered element where we have older users trying to onboard newer users and newer users worrying about their impact on older users.
It's important to remember that apart from Deimos, we're all just users and having been here longer isn't some sort of badge of honour or anything.
And to respond directly to you @elevenluckyrabbits, some level of anxiety about a new environment is to be expected, but I would just emphasize to you that Tildes is a human-centric message board and despite a few very serious (and seriously cool) people here, it's a pretty laid back crowd. The labels are there just to make the site usable. The joke label is there because we expect people to make jokes! It's not to discourage you from making them, it's to help boost the signal-to-noise ratio of the website. So go ahead and make some jokes, say thanks to someone, and even put some emojis in your post! 🤓
Had to look up "navel gazing" (English is not my first language) 😅 Aaand I think it's also the reason why it's sometimes hard for me to catch the level of laid back-ness!
well, there was apparently a huge argument because someone posted an image gallery in ~food earlier, which i found frankly quite stupid. so sometimes people just aren't that laid back? that event was just weird
Tildes isn’t quite a monolith, so I was just commenting on a general atmosphere that I’ve perceived since being here rather than a blanket rule. I would try not to take any one person too seriously — there is occasionally stuff here I roll my eyes at but I think that’s just people in general rather than something indicative of Tildes specifically.
Everything you mention is okay. I would refrain from a simple "thank you" if the thread has been inactive for a while though. Just because it would get bumped all the way to the top with no new information. A timely "thank you" is not a big deal and I do that often, often along some extra bit of feedback or some more specific display of appreciation just for good measure.
As a general rule, everything within the rules should be okay, and if someone overreacts that's not really on you. As someone else said, Tildes is "people centric". We're supposed to be nice.
And welcome to Tildes ;)
it would be kind of cool if you could label your own comment as offtopic/noise so the thread wouldn't get bumped or something like that.
Yes, it would. I've seen people requesting this feature before.
Same. And it's even on Gitlab already too (although nobody has worked on implemented it yet AFAIK).
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/317
cc: @emmanuelle
Thank you for the welcome :) and a great advice!
I did the opposite and just dove right in. I learn as I go, and I find that being engaged in conversation is amazing + I learn that way on how to be a good enough user. Yeah, the amount of Tildes posts coming up more whether due to "algorithmic" activity or the influx of new users from the Reddit exodus is concerning.
I don't think it's noise. Noise would be a simple emoji, or just one word. It implies something un-constructive and unnecessary to the conversation at hand. I think this one is a little bit of a touch and go answer. What I do is I pay more attention to the amount of votes a potential noise comment gets in comparison to other comments. I think that is more indicative of whether or not it is something that is nice. I assume good faith in users, which is why I like to virtually hug my fellow Tildes here.
Depends on the conversation. Common sense is a thing, but I think there's always a potential moment to insert humour! It is just how you do it that makes sense. You can sprinkle or pepper just a lil bit of cheeriness and fun in an answer. Concurrently, it is the same for more personal comments. It's a bit of a skill, and unfortunately, there is no right answer to it. It is a touch and go thing.
I think you should do the latter before the former, but not in the way you would think. The pipeline is a ramp rather than a flight of stairs. Adding to the Tildes conversation can influence others to adopt a different tone of voice. I also think sharing your opinion invites discourse, of which you will receive feedback on whether you did something wrong. Reputation is as simple as adding to multiple conversations, and bumping into the same people often!
I will stress this — if a message to you SEEMS negative but is not explicit stated and you cannot tell for certainty, ask directly. I am sure there's an arsehole waiting to strike, but no matter what, I think you will have a fantastic time here. I, for one, and happy you're here and am happy you are expressing your anxiety. In that way, we all learn together.
hugs warmly
Also I think this is an interesting read on why a post tagged as Noise is not bad at all.
hugs back
I think this is a great perspective you shared here! I do indeed enjoy being here and hope to bump into you in some other conversations as well :)
I think assuming positive intent in others has been one of the single best things I've done for my mental health. I feel like everything in society today is very "doom" centric. It's like an algorithm found out that's what gets clicks and engagement and it just dialed it up to 10. It's my first day on the platform and I really enjoy what I've seen in my time I've been waiting to be let in :)
Welcome to Tildes! :)
Thank you very much!
I still wonder, to this day, how much of that over the last decade or two has been intentional and planned from the beginning of a platform, and how much of it has just been emergent from seemingly benign designs where engagement increases visibility, or maybe even completely accidental and emergent from basic behavioral tendencies in humans to seek out the place where other humans are yelling.
I think it's just emergent behaviour. When comment voting first arrived on the scene and started to replace bulletin board style forums, it was a breath of fresh air. That really annoying person that would inject themselves into the conversation incessantly could be filtered out. Informative posts rose to the top. Over time, the community learned how to gamify this, and conversation-as-sport started to emerge as the feedback loops solidified people's behaviour. Impossible to predict in the mid-2000's, somewhat obvious now that we've lived it.
The sorting mechanism actually created a structure for that really annoying person to find a community of similarly annoying people. These people then ran their annoying brain droppings through what is functionally a large-scale genetic algorithm that optimized their annoying behavior for maximum virality.
Thus did we create a machine that maximized the reach and influence of the least virtuous and likable among us.
What’s that saying…? “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity” or something similar. Relevant to your questions about algorithm, I think!
My guess is that it's nearly all emergent. A reply-all button is enough and a reshare button is sure to lead to trouble.
Bad behavior can happen in any forum. It's happened on BBS's, Usenet and email lists. In the early days of the Internet, most newspapers started Internet forums, and they mostly went bad due to politics and often neglect.
Bane was spot on.
I'm sure it's both. I feel like it started off as benign and then greed quickly took over.
I totally agree. Even things like being cut off in traffic are more pleasant if you think well, maybe their wife is in labour or maybe they’re panicking about being late their first day on an important job or whatever. Chances are high that they’re just an arsehole but you don’t need to be angry and turn into an arsehole yourself just because they are
Amen and I try to think of all the times I've messed up and cut someone off that I didn't see, or was panicking about missing an exit or getting over in time. Everyone makes mistakes, nobody is perfect, everyone deserves a break!
Welcome Bane! We are so lucky to have you, and I am happy you are here.
I dunno about lucky but I very much appreciate the kind words!
It helps to realize that the longer you remain engaged in an argument, the more likely you are to say something dumb that negatively impacts your credibility with the theoretical spectator you're trying to persuade (because obviously the person you're arguing with is unpersuadable). When you're arguing with a lazy thinker who uses a lot of fallacious logic, it becomes easy to slip in fallacious arguments to hit back at them because they've set the bar low. If you're arguing with someone who is being an asshole, it makes you more likely to be an asshole back because why wouldn't you? If they're ill informed then you're going to get sloppy about making sure your facts are solid because you know they're too dumb to call it out.
The speed at which you will put your foot in your mouth is directly correlated to how heated the argument gets as well as how dumb/unfair your interlocutor is being. All of this makes you more likely to appear lazy, dickish, or wrong to others.
“Never wrestle with a pig. You just get dirty and the pig enjoys it.”
If somebody you talk to isn't convinced of your point of view, that's not a loss.
If you get the last word in and squash them mightily in their wrongness, and everyone participating comes away from it with adrenaline and anger, that's not a win.
I agree wholeheartedly. I’m new here and was previously using Reddit, but I rarely commented due to the anxiety I’d get from knowing someone would feel the need to correct anything they deemed incorrect or start an argument, even though I wasn’t looking for one, and especially if there wasn’t even one to be started.
It was exhausting. Like, I’d want to participate in conversations but it seems like, on Reddit, if you aren’t leaving puns or responding with a song lyric, you’re opening yourself up to unfair bad-faith arguments made by people who were either trolls or just had nothing better to do.
I get none of these feelings on Tildes so far, but I’ve seen some of these bad habits in replies I’ve read recently. Fortunately, it seems like those attitudes are frowned upon here and will get called out (like in your post here), so I appreciate the community a lot for that alone.
I would just like to add that, if you're allowed to remains on Tildes, than you're automatically worthy of Tildes.
Tildes is not some kind of internet elite that you are tasked to maintain pure. If someone publishes content you dislike, it's within your right to express your opinion on that content. But please, do so without needlessly implying that the poster should not be here.
Being nice, kind, and compassive is way more important than being "brutally honest". If you can't find a way to be nice about something, perhaps it is better to say nothing at all.
And to further add... remember we all make mistakes. Even recently I lost myself a bit and didn't realize what an inconsiderate ass I was being until the thread was removed and post locked. A helpful reminder that I messed up and need to do better. Detox can be a long process.
This is a very important point. I am (was?) a mod on a subreddit with a very diverse user base, from different political, social, geographic, etc backgrounds. We try to discourage posts that would generate negative responses, but of course it would happen from time to time. In those instances the threads would get locked, and the participants chastised. What we'd explain to new mods joining our team was that discussions and arguments are fine, healthy even. When they devolve to name calling, it is probably too late, just lock the thread.
I'm all for a good debate. A good argument even, but things need to remain civil.
As a Reddit refugee I do worry about upsetting the culture, especially around making new posts. Commenting I've found that everyone is pretty forgiving to misunderstandings. The biggest thing I worry about is incorrectly tagging things. Pretty much every post I've made has had the tags changed. I just want to make sure I'm not making extra work for some one.
People posting interesting topics, articles, and links is far far farrrrrr more important than "correct" tagging of those topics. So please don't let worries about tagging, or any edits that get done to your tags discourage you. If you make any mistakes or don't know which to include don't worry about that either. Just try your best to include some basic descriptive tags, and those of us with tag editing permissions will handle the rest. :)
p.s. The tag format conventions here are largely unspoken, and they are mostly just ad-hoc inclusions to aid with Tildes search feature (which unlike reddit's search, is actually really good!... try it).
How does tag editing work? I looked for it once I got the "Label" ability, but couldn't figure it out.
Is it only enabled for certain users?
Tag and title editing, and topic moving requires explicit permission from Deimos, so only a relatively small group of people have the ability to do them. At some point in the future that may change, like if the trust system ever gets implemented, but for now that's how it works.
Understood, thanks!
The curation of content here on Tildes is collaborative. Like @spit-evil-olive-tips says, there is no right or wrong. If you have any questions about tags, titles or groups, you can always ask. We're a friendly bunch behind the scenes here.
Don't worry about it. There appear to be a few folks tagging and titling each post as needed to work with the flow of how things are today.
It doesn't scale and everybody knows, but this is the life they have chosen and it is working well enough for now. There have been ideas about how to improve that, but the effort is not yet worth the reward.
Bumping this topic because it's happening again. Lots of comments have been removed, and topics removed/locked over the last few days. So just a gentle reminder that you're not obligated to keep debating with people here. If you feel a discussion is getting too heated, tiring, fruitless, or personal, just walk away from it before it escalates even further. And if you don't want to see a topic keep popping up in Activity sort or your notifications, use the Ignore Topic feature.
@cfabbro One of the etiquette questions I'm not sure about yet is whether to post polite but generally useless niceties in response to comments.
For example, you and I had a brief conversation about highlights in sports subs yesterday. My initial instinct was to reply to your comment with a simple "Glad to hear it, thanks" sort of comment, but it felt a bit out of place here, so I just upmodded your comment and let it be. Obviously one wants to be polite, but there's a really great signal to noise ratio in the comments here and one doesn't want to change that either. What would you suggest?
I think in general there is much higher tolerance for 'noise' (especially nice noise) in child comments while a top level comment will likely earn a noise label.
Yeah, I think this definitely an important disctinction. Noise, even a simple compliment of the OP, as a top-level comment is generally still frowned upon. People should try to add more meat to their top-level comment than that. But we're generally much more forgiving of Noise when slightly deeper in the threads.
From another comment of mine above to someone asking about Noise labels. So, yeah. Saying "Thanks!" and other polite acknowledgments is perfectly fine. That's one of the things the Noise label is there for. :)
Ahhh, I interpreted the "noise" label as something I don't want to get tagged with, not a "No one else really needs to see this" button. Thanks!
YVW! /noise ;)
On reddit, i used to comment and even post somewhat often in my early days(11 year account), but it tapered off significantly in sync with the culture shifting away from discussion of the content.
One certain "breaking point" as it were when i saw one of those alignment chart memes about anime catgirls and someone had asked who the character in a certain spot was. I responded that it was Felix from re zero(it was the chaotic evil section since Felix is a fem-dressing male), having watched the anime recently. I then tune in to my inbox later to find that someone had shamed me for deadnaming 'Felis', and my comment was downvoted to hell while theirs had notable upvotes. It boggled my mind because 'Felix' is used all throughout the anime, so I guess it was one of those 'gotcha' moments that really push people off.
Storytime aside, I've been mostly browsing Tildes with my years-ingrained reddit habit of near 0 participation. I hope that Tildes' healthier atmosphere can help me work myself back to the interaction levels that i used to have, and I've been doing my best to passively absorb the rules and procedures here
Hello,
That's because japan is shit in LGBTQ+ media representation, even worse than american media, so there are still not many trans characters that aren't "b- but I'm really a man, you see, I'm just t- tricking you :3". The few that are not like this are never officially stated as trans and, even if they have an arc where they literally say "I always wished to be born a woman" while presenting female for the entire show since episode 1, fans will still claim there is no evidence that character X is trans.
Ferris had a huge debate back in the days because of this and apparently there was a spinoff or something where the character finally stated what's going on, so ever since people treat the non-japanese spelling "Felix" as the deadname.
Hardly a reason to downvote someone and shame them, but depending on subreddit and what the post was about, I can easily see that happening.
Anyways, that's why characters like Ferris are garbage representation, even though everyone but the 'phobes knows what they are supposed to portray and more often than not use names clearly associated with their biological sex.
So thats the context! I had done some research at the time and couldnt find anything useful on why that was. Really highlights the culture difference when on reddit i get a zingy call out and downvotes in response to my ignorance while on tildes i get context within an hour. Thank you. I'd label this exemplary but I'm pretty sure I havent unlocked labeling yet.
(the subreddit was r/tumblr btw, 3 years ago. I hunted it down in my history cause i was curious)
Yeah, 3 years ago checks out. I think that was the peak of the discussion because the spinoff manga or whatever it was that revealed that info gained attention and everyone was discussing if it's canon or not.
Glad I could clear that up and my comment wasn't perceived negatively (:
As a Digg > Reddit > Tildes “refugee”… I can attest to feeling a noticeable difference in myself in terms of doomscrolling and communicating with the intent of understanding one another vs “making my point and proving you wrong”.
If I’m being honest, a lot of my defensiveness from Reddit also came when they revealed loads and loads of astroturfing, brigading, and agenda-loaded accounts, in which there was no real person trying to join a community in good faith, but to intentionally disinform, divide, or otherwise exploit people. These are very real things that happen in communities, and my personal reaction was to identify intent as quickly as possible, and then engage based on my findings.
Right now, I’m hoping there are no people with those same intents with accounts at Tildes. I’ve greatly changed my order of operations to first assume sincerity, THEN if things feel off to disengage. But I still struggle with not immediately questioning whether I’m dealing with a troll or not at first sight.
Question for the mods then: if we sincerely feel that an account is trolling or being suspicious, is tagging with malice the best course of action?
Malice is fine, if the comment you're labeling shows the problem, or it's straightforward enough to explain in the short reason you can enter. If it's something more in-depth, feel free to send me a message about it.
The problem with using the malice tag to combat propagandists is they'll use the tag much quicker than anyone arguing in good faith will. The pro-Ukraine propagandists/propagandized (one of the problems with internet propaganda is it can be impossible to tell the difference) on Reddit are a good example. One of their core talking points is that anyone who contradicts them about literally anything is on Putin's payroll, and they go there instantly, at the first sign of opposition.
Tildes is currently insulated from this by virtue of being invite only and relatively small. But if malicious actors manage to get a foothold, they'll be making use of both their invites and the malice tag. They already abuse the block button on Reddit to effectively ban anyone they know they can't easily out-argue from seeing or responding to their posts anywhere on the site, including responding to child comments of threads they started. See for example this theory of reddit thread where someone ran an experiment on whether that was possible pretty much as soon as the feature went live, and proved how easy it is to weaponize in that way. There's more threads there and in /r/modsupport about malicious actors actually using it.
Edit: Whoah, I just realized who I was responding to. I know currently you get a notification for every use of the tag and you're able to individually vet them, I'm just worried about the tool being weaponized as the site grows and the volume of tags grows beyond what one person can handle.
Yes, Malice labels definitely work, and the details of your complaint will be actually read.
Urm I think this might be a good place to ask but I’ve been wondering, will I be notified if my comment gets labelled as noise or similar? I want to know this so I know it I’m doing something against the tildes (I can’t remember the word so here’s a similar word) community feel.
Also on the other side of things, if I label someone else as noise or similar will they get notified that I was the one that applied that label?
I couldn’t see the answer on the docs or asked on any of the other newbie threads, apologies if I’ve missed it somewhere. I wanted to post somewhere to ask or message one of the older helpful tildes users but I didn’t want to bother anyone or ironically make an off topic or noise comment
On a side note I love tildes so far. I love the feel, the ethics and the vision. I feel very grateful to have found this place and hope I can be a constructive member
No. We tried something like that in the early days by having all labels applied being publicly visibly (though not revealing who used the label), and it turned into an absolute clusterfuck. People were constantly assuming the person they replied to had been the one to apply the label, resulting in them responding angrily to that user, and accusations of label abuse was flying left and right.
And I think what doesn't help is also that not all Noise labels are bad, or mean the comment is bad. E.g. If I reply "thanks!" to someone, that's a nice gesture, and encouraged here... but I also expect that to be labeled Noise, so it then gets autocollapsed, doesn't take up as much room in the topic, and gets sorted below other more on-topic comments. So if your comments are being labeled Noise, or Offtopic, or Joke don't worry about it too much. Nor should you worry about using Noise on those sorts of positive (but noisy) comments, Offtopic on offtopic comments, or Joke on jokes. It's not an indictment of the user. Labels are mostly meant to just help keep things on-topic and organized.
The behavior for the labels are explained here: https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/commenting-on-tildes
There's no notification or public label, but you can infer based on the behaviour of the comment.
The threshold for how many user labels it takes to actually have a comment labeled depends on the users' label weights. I think the default is 0.5 (labels require a score of 1.0 to go active), so two users together can get something labeled. These can in theory be reduced if you're using the system unproductively or increased if you're a reliable labeler but I'm not sure to what extent that happens.
Edit: somehow replied to the wrong comment, @IgnisAvem
Ah, the classic from basically every other platform with any kind of visible negative reaction system.
Someone posts something semi-aggressive, someone else comments with a negative reaction, meanwhile someone else downvotes the same person and suddenly it's a 10 comments long war where the downvoted person accuses the person from the reply of downvoting them for nothing while going to all their other comments and posts to downvote every single one out of spite.
I've been having trouble picking up on the "etiquette" for labels since most of them aren't visible, so how eager should the average tildes user be trying to label a comment?
Yeah, it’s one of those things that is hard for new people to pick up on, since the effects of the labels are often hard to notice. And the comment label docs don’t cover all their uses or applications, since many have gradually been adopted over time by social convention rather than any explicit rules. So I guess I would recommend that new people hold off on using them when in doubt, until they develop a better understanding. And if in doubt, perhaps ask somewhere on ~tildes for clarification first.
Thank you, that’s really helpful. I said it in another comment but you guys have built such a lovely ecosystem here and I don’t want to come in and disrespect that without realising
On that note, it might be nice to be able to 'pre-label' your own posts, if you know that they are noise/jokes. Thoughts before I open an issue?
It's already been added to Gitlab, approved, and was being worked on at some point (but never finished AFAIK).
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/317
Please.
There's too much jumping to assumptions that people are attacking, when they're just disagreeing or even asking questions. Sometimes a question is just a question. Sometimes a difference of opinions is just an opportunity to debate and air various points of view. This isn't a battlefield, it's a discussion forum. Discussion sometimes includes disagreement - but that isn't the same as an attack.
Remember that adage: "innocent until proven guilty". If you assume someone is responding to you in good faith, even when they're disagreeing with you, that's a lot less likely to escalate things into a flame war.
So far, tildes doesn’t seem to be “an alternative reddit. If anything, it’s what reddit could have been, aspired to be, but was not.
The quality of discourse I have seen hews closely to the philosophical standards outlined in the documents section. That’s a real marvel and I look forward to being a part of this community.
I'll get a lot of crap for saying this, so here goes: We need to cap how many groups a user can moderate. Significant actions like banishment should fall to a user and Tildes management run Arbitration Committee. Full stop.
Lemmy enforces a 10 group limit, we should do three. Moderator diversity would be incredibly beneficial to avoid creating a power mod vacuum like we saw on Reddit.
I've already seen at least one ActivityPub clone handing it out like candy, which is the WRONG way to do this. We want sustaintability.
There are currently no actual moderators on Tildes (at least not in the regular sense), just a site wide admin. When we do get moderators, it is not entirely clear how that will work. Tildes groups are more like categories than sub communities, so moderation will most certainly be nothing like Reddit.
At the moment, that's impossible, for a few reasons.
ONE: Tildes is still in alpha-testing. It’s an unfinished product. There aren't many moderation tools on Tildes yet, and there's not yet any way to limit the range of those moderation tools.
TWO: The definition of "moderator" gets blurry on Tildes. Tildes will have a very de-centralised moderation model. Most people will be moderators - probably including you. Read this page about the Trust/reputation system for moderation. Anyone can be a moderator.
Combining ONE and TWO leads us to a strange situation where there are quite a few people on Tildes with very low-level moderation abilities, such as labelling comments and tagging topics (because those tools have been built), but only one person with high-level moderation abilities, such as removing topics and banning users (because those tools have not yet been built).
Almost everyone on Tildes (including you) can moderate in the sense of labelling comments. You can label a comment as 'Noise' to push it down the thread. You can label a comment as 'Exemplary' to push it up the thread. You can do that, and you can do that across the entirety of Tildes.
Similarly, there's a group of people on Tildes who can tag topics or edit titles or move topics, and they can do that across the entirety of Tildes. That's partly because the tools to be able to limit moderation abilities to certain groups haven't been built yet.
Finally, there's only one person (Deimos) who can remove topics or ban users, and he can do that across the entirety of Tildes. This is partly because he hasn't yet built the tools to give these abilities to other users, and partly because he hasn't yet built the tools to limit moderation abilities to certain groups.
Eventually, anyone can be a moderator. There will be a pyramid of "moderators", from novitiates all the way up to the gods. You can climb up that pyramid, as can we all. And, in the medium term, those moderation abilities will probably extend across the entirety of Tildes, because the ability to limit moderation tools to certain groups will probably be built after the ability to give general users the ability to moderate more highly than they do now.
Moderation on Tildes is not, and will not be, like it was on Reddit. Here, it will be a communal activity.
Minor correction:
The current permissions that exist like you mentioned can be given on a per-group basis. See this commit message:
I don't know if Deimos has given out group-specific permissions yet, but they are possible.
Well. That's interesting!
I don't recall Deimos ever mentioning this (obviously). He must have been in the middle of improving some behind-the-scenes tools to improve the "moderators" function, when life intervened.
hmm...
I've said this wrong thing a couple of times in the past week. I'll have to stop saying this wrong thing.
Thank you very much.
Another corollary is "don't assume Tildes will operate like Reddit (or any other social media / aggregator / forum)".
I’m literally constantly waiting to be attacked. I can’t tell you how many times on Reddit I would write out a comment, pause, and think “someone’s going to find a way to twist this and I can’t be bothered for the argument” and delete the whole thing
And with all the posts talking about how the new arrivals are behaving and things, I just don’t want to be that person that comes into a space and disrespects its ecosystem. I think I’ve done okay so far, I’ve been dipping my toes in the water to see the result.
One time on Reddit, I was mildly lamenting that my city in the American south doesn’t have many old brick buildings left because of the destruction that happened during the Civil War, and some rando took that to mean that I supported slavery. I’m very glad to leave that culture of jumping to outrageous conclusions behind.
Don't worry about using the site to its fullest. Even if you make a mistake it should be a smooth course correction. The last time I tried to correct a newbie's behavior I wrote
The post did get removed. It wasn't a big deal. The user learned better how to use the site from that interaction.
Eh. Guidelines, suggestions, etiquette, sure. But a strictly defined set of rules tends to invite rule lawyering. That's largely the point of On a technicality, which is what inspired Tildes Don't act like an asshole rule. Sure, that statement may be somewhat ambiguous and open to interpretation, but it also allows a lot more flexibility in enforcement, in order to be able to kick people off the site who are abiding by the letter of the law, while ignoring the spirit.
Probably. I dunno, I think common sense and faith in the community is what Deimos is also gearing towards. Esp w the future plan to appoint sorta super users based on a specialised trust algorithm. Sometimes, you don't really need ""rules"" per se. Tildes is v cozy and intimate, and an Achilles heel like a loose code of conduct is instead a really awesome thing. It's still an Achilles heel, but not smth that could be exploited by users.