Do you think there should be more customization of user profiles on Tildes? If so, what should be added?

Nah. I don't think it's necessary to personalize the accounts. I honestly didn't think it was necessary on reddit either and never bothered with their avatars.

While signatures are closer to what used to exist on old school forums, I don't think it's necessary either. I think it'll distract and visually break the flow of discussion instead.

I won't be against these things if they existed, but I also don't think they actually add any value.

I am extremely again signatures, even text-only ones, here. Whenever I've gone through threads on a forum that uses them they've been extremely frustrating to scroll past, adding absolutely nothing to the conversation but more to scroll past. I don't see them having any utility here tbh.

Still holding out for my idea from 2019!

https://tildes.net/~tildes/ixh/profile_customisation#comment-44kl

I'd be opposed to profile pictures, but maybe simply being able to choose a single colour that decorates your profile page in a simple way would be a cute addition. Given the colours in the logo, I think it would be on-brand.

I think it's fine as it is, some other sites like MAL allow you to use custom CSS on profile and it looks absolutely horrible when people use too much of it. I don't like signatures either tbh they don't add much of value (I'm assuming it's the thing inserted at the end of each message in forums, correct me if I'm wrong). in addition to text-based tildes is also minimalistic.

also, maybe somewhat off topic but having a dark theme that is not some shade of blue would be great, something like DDG's terminal theme.

One of the things I liked about old.reddit (and hated about new reddit) was how simple it was / is. I really liked that you don't have many ways to "express yourself" with fancy things, but I preferred the simple and easy to use design. Signatures don't tend to add anything useful. Profile pictures are nice to have, but they'd feel odd on Tildes to me.

Lack of avatars and such is a big reason why I prefer old.reddit.com. I also disabled avatars on lemmy and would also do so on tilde if is was added. The discussion is all I care about, and anything that distract from the pure discussion, or otherwise might influence how I view someone's post other than the words themselves, is not something I want from tilde.

I can't say that is something I miss. A full-featured profile would make Tildes look more like social media. I like that I can recognize usernames from time to time, but I also like that I often forget them as well because I will focus on the content and not on grievances I might have with people.

Isn't a username already personal enough?

Maybe I'm biased about this, because I have come to strongly identify with this name, after using it for 12 years (almost exactly: 22/06/2021). As I say in my user bio here, it represents a lot of facets of who I am, so it is me, in a way. (In a science-fiction sense, it's a "persona", as in a virtual copy of part of my personality.)

I added an image as my icon on Reddit, because the space was there to fill and I didn't want Reddit using some stupid default image. However, I don't miss not having that image here on Tildes.

I don't see a real need to add any other personalisation, like a picture or a signature or whatever.

I think I like the site the way it is. I used to be on ravelry where you still had a pfp and your post number on the sidebar of your comments and I think that was too much. I don’t necessarily think people need to add customizations and signatures are very outdated and feel like grandma signing her Facebook post.

I’m new here, but what draws me to the site is the UI focus on conversation and not photographs. I hated the profile options in new Reddit. In my opinion, it is better to just go off of a user name and what someone actually says, as tildes currently does, instead of whatever someone puts themselves out as on a profile. Signatures are not fun to read over and over again and add visual noise.

funny cartoon avatars and nft accessories.

For real though, I'm fine with how it is.

I don't even need a user bio.

And I definitely would find signatures annoying, it's literally just noise added to every comment you post that has nothing to do with the discussion.

As it stands I feel the design of this website places far greater value on the content posted rather than who posted it. This I find to be a breath of fresh air after years of sites engineered to push people into clout chasing and making their name known. What’s important here is what people have to say and I worry that any focus on giving user accounts a more prominent identity would herald the beginning of a shift in that focus.

Please no, Facebook is there if you want some customized page to spew your personal info into. Reddit let's you do this as well.

This should be an anonymous message board, nothing more.

I once suggested a flair for personal pronouns. People did NOT like that idea... Not. At. All.

I have never so badly judged the mood of a room.

The thread that made me decide to become active on Tildes was one where people were talking about the friends they'd made on this site. They talked about recognizing people from long ago and worrying when they stopped posting. That's something I want to be part of, I thought.

But this is slow going, because the design of Tildes does nothing to distinguish one user from another, and that makes it hard to recognize people. It's like being at a party where everyone is wearing the same outfit and a face-covering mask, with only a nametag to distinguish them.

I think Tildes would benefit from having avatars (profile pictures, if you prefer). I don't want to disrupt Tildes' lovely, minimalistic style; we could allow avatars that are 15 pixels square, which would fit inline with a username. To keep them from being too distracting, they could be monochrome.

I just want something that lets me recognize people more easily. In a text-based discussion environment like this, it's easy to focus on an argument and forget the person behind the post. If Tildes wants to make discussion more human and less algorithmic, I think it would help to make users feel less interchangeable with each other without disrupting the site's calm aesthetic.

Maybe an optional field where you can select which country you're from, and the ability to find other users from your own country?

Sort of like a user tag.

Other than that I think the user page is good enough, with the ability to fill up our bio as we please (within reason).

I prefer no pictures, because then the post/comment speaks for itself; there’s no bias towards how a person looks or presents themselves. (Not that I think that would be a big problem here, but most humans have unconscious biases.)

I'm fine with a little bio which is what we have now. The only thing I'd really balk at, though, is users following other users - we need to keep this place about the 'groups', not become a bad impression of twitter.

I'd just like a way to personalize CSS theming. It's nice that we have a few options, but I'd just like to tweak the colors, contrast, fonts, etc. to my liking.

(and please no signatures, they're nothing but useless visual noise)

Profile page images might be interesting. It emphasises the human.

There's some small risk that with increased numbers of users that people are going to misuse images to display stuff that's not okay, so some gentle reporting system would be useful.

And some people would want the option to not see user images in profiles.

On Usenet people could add a custom (X-Face:) header with a text string. This would encode a 48*48 monochrome image. People who wanted to see those images could use software that displayed it. If you didn't want to see it you could turn it off. This would remove the need for image hosting, but the text encoding adds a bit of overhead. See eg the Face header which has a character limit of 998 characters, which means the png has to be a tiny 725 bytes.

It might be worth putting a code-golf style challenge in ~prog to see if people can come up with something for 128*128 images that can fit in a small text-encoded character limit that can be decoded by a browser plug in. (This is way too long for a code golf challenge, isn't it? It's a bunch of compounded problems).

I would hate for Tildes to have some kind of blockchain image profile with collectable hats that were obtained from loot boxes or a crypto market. (Trying to imagine the worst possible implementation of user profiles is fun.)

Customized profiles always seems like some sort of holdover from the Myspace era of social media, when people had personalized pages they could bling out. For me at least, it's the least-used feature on any social media site. Honestly I don't want strangers on the internet looking at my information or finding out more about me, hell I don't even like people reading my post/comment history, but that's pretty hypocritical since if I don't want that I shouldn't be posting in the first place.

I guess it's cool for people that are into that thing, it just seems like an odd feature that I don't think I've seen implemented well on many social media sites, apart from maybe content sites like YouTube or DeviantArt, sites where you actually want to look up creative work produced by a person. On a social media site, I just don't care. The strength of the person's post/comment to me really just matters in the context of where it's happening, in that thread.

This really depends on how many people we have running around in here. I veiw Tildes as being a bit of a throwback to BBS style forums. Those pretty much always had avatars and they were useful. Sort of like a face for your online identity.

They helped make it feel like you were talking to a community of people. I think it encouraged politeness a bit since you're reminded that you're still sharing a space with everyone and will be interacting with them again later. Apparently reddit had them, but I only found out recently because I've been using old reddit. I definitely felt like reddit was so huge that you were basically never interacting with the same person twice. Every conversation could be forgotten a day later so no need to be respectful.

I still remember the names and avatars of people from a random half-life mod forum that went offline 20 years ago, but I couldn't tell you the username of a single reddit user I've replied to in the last week.

I see some comments saying that each post should stand on its own merits, but I don't think it's bad for users to build a reputation. It's helpful to be able to come into a discussion and know that guy is from England and his perspective is different from yours in North America, this guy really knows his stuff about x topic and you can trust his advice, this other guy is super old and has a unique perspective, this guy is wacky and sarcastic so don't over react to his comments, and so on.

Main thing would just be to pick a size/style that works with the site. Avatars used to always be to the left of you comment. With replies shifting comments to the right in a narrower space, sticking a picture there might get crowded, or maybe it would be fine since that creates a little empty space in all but the top level comments.

Signatures I can either way on. I don't think they really add or take away from the experience. But does anyone remember when it was common to put your computer specs in your signature as a weird little flex.

I wouldn't bother with profile pages. Personally I'm unlikely to do anything with mine and I'm not going to be clicking on other people's.

I'm against most suggestions for additions/changes that have been posted in the last 2 weeks, this one included.

Less is more, and the combination of slow growth and thoughtful change is the best way forward.

Personally, I love that there is very little emphasis on profiles here. I think it helps keep the emphasis on the discussions. I love, love, love the lack of profile pictures/avatars on tildes, personally. Again, I think they kind of distract from the discussion, because your eyes are drawn to the "poster" first and then their words (can't seem to unscramble them). I don't want to end up biased (good or bad) towards individual users (build up images of their views, etc. because I remember that profile picture from various discussions), and want each discussion to be a fresh slate, if that makes sense. Seems easier to accomplish that without the visual cue always there to remind you.

If by chance profile personalization are brought on, one suggestion is to please keep those fields optional. I really dislike revealing much info about myself online (age, gender, country, whatever) and prefer to keep it as anonymous as possible. That said, if others have fun with sharing that info, I wouldn't want to take the option from them :)

Pinned posts and comments of yours? I think it would be fun to show other users what posts and comments you find important. You could also use it to pin a charity post you made or something or something that describes you. It could be called a user’s collection or just „pinned“.

User reputation always matters, but individual content needs to be able to stand up by itself.

Both signatures and profile photos take away from that.

Edit: typo

By the way, I've edited the title of your topic, to more accurately reflect what you've raised for discussion.

Let me know if you object to the change.

I'm a big fan of minimalism and it's one of the reasons I really like it here. Signatures and colours would be a distraction or just plain confusing for me. That said, I'd likely enjoy seeing a very small avatar if it fit within the header and was no larger that the +/- expanders.

With that you would gain a small amount of insight or bias about that user or their personality based upon what they pick, but I believe you get that already from their username anyway.

I would like a placeholder/fake display name. Both RES and Lemmy has this feature, at which I put “Reddit” and “Lemmy” respectively.

This way, when someone walks past my computer, they won’t see my real username “Aemilia”. This won’t affect other users though as they will still see the real username in posts and comments.

I like the idea of profile pictures (thought more like banners on the user profile page than like avatars on the posts) but I also like the idea of the site being super lightweight because all it serves is text.

Maybe we should just have a canvas on your profile that you can put whatever you want on, but it has to be done as ASCII art.

I'd like a bit more, but nothing too crazy. People shouldn't be able to customize CSS or change the UI of the site on their profile. That just gets too messy too quickly. It might be kind of cool to see which groups the person is most active in on their profile page. Or maybe let them choose some favorite tags as interests they can display under their bio?

No, I don't want to see much of anything like that.

I would say at most people should have the option of a bio that can provide alternative contact details if they so wish.

Pls no.​ Also a very similar question was already asked, but in the negative. Avatars/profile pics were highly disliked:

https://tildes.net/~tech/16cd/redditors_of_tildes_what_is_the_thing_you_can_live_without

I’m not supportive of profile pictures or signatures. Signatures have very low informational density and add more clutter than helpful information. Profile pictures I could see working if made extremely small, but I prefer the text based foundations of Tildes.

I am in favor of color coding usernames. The bucket of colors doesn’t need to be large. Just a secondary indicator to help with user recognition.

I like when people focus on what is being said, not who says it. I like simplicity. I really like the clean design of this site. No distractions, just discussion. To me, signatures or avatars would make this site worse.

as others have said, hard no to signatures or avatars - nothing I can do as a user should mess with the clean design of every topic I post or comment on.

offering color options is also tricky, design-wise, because the site allows almost a dozen different color schemes - we'd have to have users pick a non-clashing color for every color scheme (or at minimum, one for dark themes and one for light schemes)

the one thing I could see maybe being useful along these lines is an extended bio or an "about me" page. right now the user bio is limited to 2000 characters, and displayed in the sidebar of the user profile. I can imagine someone wanting to write something longer, and have it displayed as the main content of a page, rather than in the sidebar.

if that was implemented, it should just be the same Markdown content as any other post / comment - eg there wouldn't be support for embedded images or fancy colors or anything. the last thing Tildes needs is MySpace-style profile customization.

Not much for customization. A person's profile should be made up of their contributions to the site, whether shitposts or meaningful writing, rather than the story one makes up about themselves to tell others.

The only thing I'd like to see is more formatting options for our bios, assuming there's still something left to add.

I think it would be nice to strive for any decisions made, is to make major UI changes opt-in as much as possible. Since the site doesn't have a profit-driven need to push user engagement at the cost of user experience it would be nice to see changes be a user-choice.

That would include opt-in to use the feature, and opt-in to see the impact of that feature if any additional across the site. I'm thinking perhaps I don't want to customize my profile but I do want to see others or vice-versa. Ultimately keep the base "product" clean, efficient, and driven by quality of content but allow the flexibility for those that wish to use any proposed features/changes to do so.

Edited for clarity.

I would disable any of these given the option, profile pics are usually dumb (e.​g.​ a weed leaf), and signatures just add extra useless text to scroll through.

I could potentially see the usefulness of a "flair space", specific to each group where a user could select up to three flairs from a set of flairs determined by the group, and everytime they write a comment other users could ++ a given flair tag if the comment was really good relative to that tag, which would in turn increase the boldness of said tag from italic to normal to bold.

So a normal comment in ~vehicles might look like:

- Plik Motorcycle Airplane car 3h 23m ago Link

Something I agree with @deimos is privacy of Tilderinos, if it's something that won't breakup privacy I'm ok with. But I am not in favor of signatures or profile pictures in a thread, I think it would break the clean design of Tildes.

Something I miss from Reddit RES is tagging users, maybe adding this feature and improving to the next level.