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How has the Reddit drama affected the quality of conversations on here?
I think we all know how redditors can be negative nancies looking for the next user to argue with, so I'm curious to know from the peeps that were here before the redditors: has the quality of conversation and sense of community changed (either positively or negatively) since us redditors showed up?
The community is definitely different. I would hesitate to put a label on the quality change - it's better for some people, worse for some people - but I think that the appeal has likely become broader, and I think that overall that is a good thing.
I find that I personally have less to contribute; often things that I would bring to a conversation have already been brought up, so I just vote and move on without necessarily adding anything to the discussions that are happening. Again, I don't think this is bad; there's no need for repetition, and I think a middle aged hetero cis white male not spouting their opinion on something is probably, in general, a good thing.
One thing that I have seen a lot of, and I think is probably not really beneficial is people trying to be the quality police. I get it in some instances - Tildes in general is about high quality discussion - but in some specific groups, I think it's not particularly useful. ~talk is the example I am thinking of that is most relevant; I would suggest that anyone who thinks they might post a "Tildes is for high quality discussions" comment should just unsubscribe from ~talk. Any group that is designed for chat is not going to
be particularly high qualityadhere to an arbitrary standard of what quality is.I find myself using "ignore" a lot more than I used to. There are a lot of posts about Tildes and a lot of posts about Reddit. I don't particularly want to read about Reddit, and I think that we are doing a lot of navel gazing here. I saw, in passing, a link about, "The problem with Mastodon is that people just use it to talk about Mastodon" and smirked, as the "problem" with Tildes is that a lot of people are using it to talk about Tildes as, in fact, this very post is doing. That said, it's trivial to hide things, so it's not really a problem.
Overall, I would say that the question of the quality of conversation is going to be a very personal one, and I would take anyone saying "The quality has become worse" or "The quality has become better" with a grain of salt. I think that the types of conversation that are happening are different, and any answer you get that says better or worse will more be a reflection of how the user feels about the change in discussion, and it's important to note that everybody hates change to some degree, so answers will probably skew towards the negative.
nods I saw the title of this topic, and I literally sighed and thought to myself, "not another post about Reddit..."
nods I made exactly that point in that thread.
I'm not sure why so many people see the need to analyse the culture of Tildes, rather than just use it. Feature discussions and proposals for groups are one thing: they can have practical outcomes. But why do so many people get hung up on what the culture of Tildes is supposed to be?
As a newcomer who likes it here, I don't want us to ruin it? It's clearly different, so we ask questions. I'm sorry it's annoying.
Follow the classic adage: lurk more.
But Lowtax can't ban me here.
To be fair he can’t on SA either
Lurk moar? But where do I put my sharpies then?
I'm guessing reddit has left us with a type of "abused person's mindset", where if we said anything on reddit, we automatically knew to brace ourselves for down votes, arguments, insults, and general trolls. I'm still expecting it here, and tbh, when I see even slightly dissenting responses I still find myself jumping to conclusions, overanalysing and trying to over justify my response (if I have one), all while my heart beats too fast due to anxiety/social anxiety. I don't want tildes to turn into reddit either, for this very reason. I want, for once, to have a calm conversation on a website with strangers and not worry about if I'm about to be attacked for my point of view.
I felt so similarly when my reddit mailbox would turn orange. Hell sometimes I'd wait to look because I didn't want to be upset by mean responses. So far hear it's been so much calmer and nicer. Now if only I can get my immediate brain response to catch up to the new environment.
Holy crap, me too! I'd sometimes hold off opening RIF because I knew I'd posted some stuff that might have been controversial recently and didn't want to feel bad or get into it with someone.
In my area, someone has been erecting small signs on roadsides that say "Be Kind", and every time I see one it makes me happy that there are people out there who value kindness. I love that Tildes has kindness at its core <3
I eventually trained myself to click 'disable comment replies' every time I commented so that I would never see the orange notification and could go back and view the replies when I was in the right head-space.
Yeah, I eventually just stopped checking my reddit inbox. I had to. And my mental health thanked me for it.
I want to explicitly say - there is no apology necessary (@Oslypsis too). I think almost everyone here has also made their way here from the other place, just at different times. You're not ruining things; you're exploring and trying things out. This will cause change, and some of the curmudgeons (I include myself) just have to deal with that, and understand that growth and change is good. Explore, submit, chat, answer questions, join ~talk submissions, make ~talk submissions, share your opinion, vote on other opinions, and overall be kind. You are welcome here!
Thanks! I appreciate it. As a GenXer, it's kind of a unique feeling to be part of a very large cohort proportionally.
Thank you so much for this.
I think this is likely another "Thanks Reddit" moment - Reddit was a weird social network that has spend two decades figuring itself out, then changing, then trying to figure itself out again, and a lot of subreddits actively tried to get people to influence subreddits in a particular way, or studied how subreddits grew in a particular way, instead of just enjoying them as they were. I certainly did that with a number of subreddits that I moderated, and still am doing it with some subreddits.
I think it would be great if we could let go of the Reddit culture, and focus on our own; I don't recall exactly where I saw this, but I think you left a comment somewhere about "we don't need guidelines for this group, just the site guideline of don't be an asshole" and I think that is just right. Maybe we need a post-reddit care package for new users. Something like:
Something to acclimatize people to the different and much more human approach to link aggregation that Tildes is.
I think another thing that Reddit did very poorly was reward negativity. People would post something, and get it removed and be dressed down for trying to join in. Other people would see something and bring as much negativity to it as they possibly could. People would angrily say "repost!" or angrily say "wrong sub" or angrily say just about anything, and if there wasn't anger, there was mockery, and then there were personal attacks and lots of other crap to wade through. It's made a large population of people who want to participate but have been trained to do so with exceptional caution, and with a need to do so "the right way".
Tildes is a lot kinder, but we have a lot of people who have dealt with the cesspool of Reddit for years, and the kindness can even be hard to recognize, because we assume the worst of people.
Yeah, I did a lot of that navel-gazing about Reddit, on Reddit, back in the day (before I de-modded myself from most of my subreddits back in 2017-ish, after the redesign). But that was in the context of me:
Being a moderator of /r/Help and /r/ModHelp, so needing to really understand how Reddit worked, in practice and in theory.
Moderating a couple of other subreddits that were exceptions to the "lowest common denominator" philosophy that applied to most of Reddit, so needing to understand how to maintain an island of sanity in an ocean of inanity.
Neither of those really applies here on Tildes.
You might be confusing me with cfabbro. He likes to say that a lot. I don't like "don't be an asshole" rules, on principle.
However, I did just (only a couple of hours before this post), leave a comment over in ~life.men, telling someone who wanted to create guidelines for that new group, that I didn't see the need for anything more than just the Tildes Code of Conduct.
Maybe I just have the benefit of having been around Tildes for 5 years, so the culture here is more familiar to me. Also, Tildes is what I unknowingly aspired to, with those other subreddits I moderated, so it's not as much of a culture shock for me to transition between here and there.
And... as @ChthonicSun reminded us all: there's the old internet adage of "lurk moar" which applies to this situation.
I mean, if you've recently arrived from reddit then discussing reddit is likely something of recent interest. And a lot of users recently arrived from reddit.
Part of that seems due to longtime users who wanted to push back amidst a fear of reddit-ization. Some comments have had a paternalistic "There is a way we do things" tone that expects new users to know their place instead of treating them as equals who can contribute to shaping the community.
It's more complicated than just that, of course. Migrants from reddit have quickly noticed that this isn't reddit, and culture is a big part of that. In a lot of ways the obsession with cultural discussion is just an abstracted extension of all the reddit discussions.
I mean... I get it. I do.
But that doesn't stop it being annoying when you see the dozenth post in a week about "the culture of Tildes".
That might be a function of "Eternal September" creeping in which I believe informs why I've seen you (if I remember right) say you don't want Tildes to grow too quickly.
I'll keep that in mind next time I feel the urge to make a meta post (I think I'm only guilty of that once so far) but commenting on them is a bit like a drug haha.
You remember right: I have said many times that Tildes needed to grow but gradually. I calculated recently that Tildes grew at the rate of about 1 user per day for the three years up to May 2023. That was not enough. But now we've swung to the other extreme! :)
I know! As much as I complain about meta posts... I can't stop commenting on them. Like this one. <sigh>
Of course. I don't think I communicated this above, but my reply was written from a starting point of agreeing with your frustration.
I think there was some initial "good" reddit/culture discussion. And then some perfectly okay discussions of relatively minor developments. And then a further wave or two of new migrants who wanted to have the same discussions over again and it's all gotten to be a bit much.
That said, if there are any new reddit developments I'll likely be all over that discussion.
At least in terms of my post, I'm curious to know if I'm going to be seen as an annoyance to this community if I "come out" as an ex redditor in a post. I suffer from cognitive distortions of jumping to (negative) conclusions and I'm just curious to see if redditors are as welcomed here now, compared to when they were first starting to migrate over. With this post, I'm not trying to come off as if I'm judging tildes as a whole on whether the site is "worth my time" or not or whether tildes' acceptance of redditors changes that. With such a large influx of redditors, I think it's expected that for at least a few weeks (months?) there will be many of us asking questions about tildes & reddit together or comparing the two, etc. We're (I'm) mostly just curious I think.
We've had lots of posts here about people migrating from Reddit. We've added about 9,000 users in the past 6 weeks - almost all of whom have come from Reddit. (At 31st May, we had 13,000 registered users; now we have 22,000 registered users.) Scores of people have talked about how they jumped here from Reddit. People have talked about the influx of people from Reddit. People have talked about their own experiences on Reddit. I know there are a few dozen of us who have openly spoken about being moderators on Reddit. And... the owner/creator of Tildes wrote the Automoderator bot for Reddit, and then got hired by Reddit to install AutoModerator into Reddit's own code, and he worked there for a few years.
I don't think there'll be any problems with you "coming out" as an ex-redditor. There's more ex-redditors here than native Tilders! I'm a redditor and a Tilder.
I edited that just before you replied. In fact, I edited it within the 5-minute grace period, as you can tell by the fact that there's no (edited...) notation on that comment! :P
I used to read /r/TheoryofReddit and I participated heavily on a lot of meta subs on reddit, so weirdly "discussing the platform" well outside newbie talk is kinda baked into my DNA as far as how I engage and use social media as I personally finding that kind of thing enjoyable. Meta discussion also always attracted a certain kind of "superuser" and this is also the population more likely to leave reddit for an alternative platform given the recent drama.
Just my own observation.
I also used to be that "meta" user on Reddit! (Read this.)
But there's not really a lot of "meta" about Tildes to discuss. What you see is pretty much what you get.
By chance did you have a similar username then? I'm curious if my vague recollection of you is similarly accurate to my memory of interacting with cfabbro way back when.
I've been "Algernon_Asimov" for 12 years - on Reddit and on Tildes. I like this name!
I was having this conversation with cfabbro about the old days on Reddit at the same as you were doing the same thing.
Ahh, I think I remember you now as well as from AskHistorians (which I read pretty religiously still) -- I checked my old browser with RES which shows I upvoted you a bunch, so that confirms that much at least. And yeah, it's a good username haha.
That was another of my old haunts. ;)
You should read the bio on my user page to see why it's a good username.
Dang, that's very multilayered. I've always bounced usernames around in my head unhappy or paralyzed by choice. My current username reflects my interest in some rather esoteric ideas in cosmology -- and I've used it for my artistic accounts, so I decided to settle on it.
It did take a few days to come up with the name. It turned out that way, partly by accident, partly by pushing. But, once it fell into place, it was undeniable, and I've used it ever since.
Wow, that is esoteric! On surface level, I assumed your username was some deep-but-shallow reference to your own life being a defect in the cosmos. :)
That's the second reason; I've always enjoyed a little self-deprecation. :D
It's in our nature to do that as a people, though.
It's because if you are someone who moves from Reddit to a closed invite-only smallscale community, you're naturally the person who reconsiders and reconsiders their actions/purchases/decisions. And with that comes a lot of inherent, well, navel gazing. That's not to say it doesn't annoy me - it does - but I can totally understand why it is readily on everybody's minds.
Because people like you send them private messages to complain about shallow content.
Well, that's a blast from the past! I had to dig back three and a half years through my messages to find what you're talking about.
I'm not going to discuss it here, except to say it didn't happen quite the way you're implying - but it is just a difference of interpretation, rather than a difference of fact, which makes it not worth discussing.
However, I do sincerely congratulate you on your excellent memory; I had totally forgotten that incident from, as I said, three and a half years ago. I regret that my memory isn't as good as it used to be.
I had already unsubscribed from ~talk over a year ago. But when I come into the site without logging in I see a lot of the posts from there and they just feel so AskReddit-esque. Which is in stark contrast to what it used to be (the reason I unsubscribed is because the conversations would get too deep and honestly just depressing).
I think it's slowing down, but there's definitely still a lot of people just wanting to discuss the drama that went down on Reddit. The way one would go to a subreddit in the middle of drama (say the antiwork Fox News appearance), to just talk/read about the drama.
I don't often participate in things outside my little corner here, but still seeing Reddit-isms grow a lot has been fascinating.
“Again, I don't think this is bad; there's no need for repetition, and I think a middle aged hetero cis white male not spouting their opinion on something is probably, in general, a good thing.”
Remarks like these make me believe Tildes isn’t the place or forum for me. If I can’t contribute my opinion because of who I am and can’t help, why am I here? Is this a place for open discussion and people of all kinds or is it exclusionary to certain people? If I knew how much this was a seemingly shared viewpoint here I’d never have bothered signing up.
I never said that middle aged hetero cis white males are not allowed to have or share an opinion. I am saying that I frequently already see my voice represented and I don't always feel the need to add to a conversation, because my voice doesn't bring anything new to the table. That's not always the case; I took part in several comment chains today, and I feel like I had something to add. I'm also not saying that Tildes in general thinks that hetero cis white males shouldn't be commenting; that's just my own opinion.
I strongly disagree with the above statement, but I think that Tildes is the kind of place where people can disagree. It's one of the rare places where people can disagree; most places demand conformity.
The only conformity Tildes demands is one of etiquette.
That said, we do tend to lean center-left to left politically as a result.
Social conservatives tend not to find their views well-supported and heavily argued against, to say the least.
Economic conservatives so fare better, but they also tend to have more reasonable positions and can be swayed. Social conservatives tend to dig in and lash out.
The far-right gets rooted out pretty quick.
Yeah, I remember predicting this outcome back in the early days of Tildes.
Being hetero cis white male isn't a disqualifier by any means. There's a lot of us.
But recognizing the privilege that comes with it will help keep conversations positive. This is generally not a community that tolerates ignorance. Everyone is generally happy to guide and teach, but doubling down on ignorance will not be well recieved.
Please, contribute as you like. Unless you cause a problem and Deimos gets involved, it's all good.
Quantatively, there's more activity here. That's a good thing. I've always said that Tildes needed to grow, in a gradual and managed way.
Qualitatively, the biggest difference I've noticed in the past couple of months is that there are a lot more "meta" posts these days. For reasons I can't work out, lots of people are obsessed with "culture" and "community" on a website with over 20,000 pseudonymous users. It's like walking into a big party, with hundreds of people standing around talking, and then interrupting people's conversations to ask everyone what you're supposed to talk about and what manners you're supposed to use - rather than just listening to the existing conversations, hearing what people are talking about and how they're talking, and then speaking up when you've got something to say.
EDIT: It took @ChthonicSun to remind me that there's a already quick internet phrase for my long wordy rant: "lurk moar".
I wonder if some level of post limiting upon account creation would be helpful. Something like 'take 3 days to observe, then here's a 10 post limit.' Then lift that after another week.
Would hopefully slow the flow of "I'm new here, but why doesn't Tildes do this Reddit thing?"
I'd hate this. I lurked before making an account already and the invite process already puts a high barrier to entry.
If sign up was open, I'd be more receptive to an onboarding process (which already occurs to some extent with how labels unlock), say:
Week 1: Initially post 10 comments/day
Week 2: Unlimited comments. Unlock 1 post/day
Week 3: Unlimited posts. Unlock labels.
I get it, but if you've been lurking for weeks anyhow, whats three more days? So many topics here will keep going for weeks.
That’s how many many forums and irc channels worked for years/decades. You had to “earn” posting rights by being lurk-only for a while until you figured out the culture etc.
It also helped stop a lot of spam and drop-ins.
I personally liked that system in general.
Love this. Forced lurking for a bit, gradually a ramp up to proper contribution and then maybe moderation permissions.
I think this is a good idea as well. It’s in the same vein as having the reply box at the bottom of a post rather than the top. It forces more thoughtful engagement.
Honestly I think this is a great idea, although it might slightly punish those who are already doing it « right, » in a way. (For example, another commenter mentioned lurking before even signing up). That tradeoff seems worth it to me though.
If you find the inbox and wait for a return email, you can end up lurking involuntarily for quite some time depending on demand for Deimos attention. People who recieve a code through personal interaction might not wait nearly as long.
I imagine based on the contents of the email Deimos can often get a decent idea of how familiar the person already is with the site, the docs, the philosophy. Maybe the default new user experience could include a more restricted first week, with an option Deimos can use to let them skip that and have the current approach if they seem to already have a good understanding of the place?
In general though, you’ll probably always have some level of repeated “new user” questions, even if you make them lurk first, so the question kind of becomes “is it worth the effort?”
Although I love the huge influx of energy into a previously slow community, I have noticed an increase in aggressive interactions that reminds me of Reddit in a bad way. Those are still the vast minority, but frequent enough to make me more wary, apprehensive, and insecure. Kinda like I was on Reddit.
Most people are wonderful, but, every once in a while, someone will pounce on you.
The implicit trust is fading. We are all strangers.
It's like leaving a small town for NYC. The city is full of life, but it will also eat you alive.
Oh, well. There's no turning back now.
This is part of the reason I’ve been selective with my invites. Maybe it makes me a dick, but I lurked tildes for several weeks before getting my invite and I liked the community I saw. I’ve only given out three and those were to some of my irl friends. I’ve avoided just randomly handing out my invites to strangers on the internet because I can’t vouch for them like I can people I actually know. To me Tildes is the community that I would rather add quality members to rather than increasing the overall quantity of members.
In a similar vein, I've been selective although with a couple of Redditors.
Before issuing an invite I checked account age, post history and checked to see the quality of comment or post before handing out. Someone with a five day old account asked and I politely declined to send an invite stating I didn't feel comfortable, to then be reported to some bot/account that I was a victim of abuse and rape =\
Yeah... Not missing old school Reddit. I'm only popping on to check for Tildes requests and to make sure I didn't miss anything of interest in science and space.
Holy Christ, this is a great example of the boundaries we had to hold in order to exist safely and sanely on reddit. Good on you for politely declining and sparing us from interacting with someone like that. (Not that I would've blamed you personally if you had invited them.)
I've done a brief scroll through people's reddit comment history before extending any Tildes invites, but it's hard to evaluate even so.
I extended invites to my real life friends who I know would've been great on Tildes, but I didn't have any takers - most of them had already landed on Mastodon or other sites, or never used reddit regularly in the first place so they weren't looking for alternatives. I guess I'll just continue handing out my invites to people online who seem kind and reasonable, but I'm not in a huge rush to do so.
Reddit mod "pro-tip": don't message people about "negative" actions. Just invite people that look ok, but don't tell people you don't want to invite that they aren't "good enough" (that's how they'll see it), it's just setting yourself up for an altercation.
There's a reason the SOP for tech support is to send premade text replies to users. It's a lot less easy to personally attack dry technical steps sent from what may just be a bot, vs. someone that gives a human response.
Yeah I’m not really missing Reddit much either. I still check the couple of subreddits I use that are too niche to ever move, but that’s been it. Narwhal is still up and running so I ended up downloading it so I can view those subreddits and still not use Reddits app.
I want both quality and quantity, as I would like more specific communities, but I'm willing to wait to see it happen. If I see someone who looks like a likely candidate based on post history and expressed desire for civil discussion, I might steer them to the email inbox so Deimos can take the responsibility.
I've been here for about a month, and it's been kinda jarring how much this has felt like Reddit over the past week especially.
There's been a fair amount of threads that instantly trend towards the negative, usually towards the content but I've seen some OPs get some heat too.
Like you said, it's a casualty of growth. I hope Tildes does manage to keep feeling a community though.
Absolutely, I think that will happen. But I hope the pace of growth reduces a little bit, it's been overwhelming. I am very sensitive to adversarial environments, and, when I feel I may be attacked, I just close up. I really don't wanna close up to Tildes :(
I've been here for a couple of weeks. My hope is that that village feeling emerges. We are still only less than 25k total users, even if everyone engages. I think the exemplary tag and some other Tildes design features and community interaction will shape our interactions toward the positive.
I was fortunate enough to not have those encounters on Reddit.
In smaller communities like this that have a sudden growth, I do find it to be an interesting opportunity to be able to have a smidge bit of influence in shaping how those negative interactions can be directed towards more positive ones simply due to aggressors not being in their usual social climate and potentially being more open minded. I think. Or I just worded it wrong halfway through.
Instead of NYC, have a go at Halifax :]
I don’t have much to add, but I really liked this analogy :)
So far I still haven’t seen much of the ‘pouncing,’ although I have noticed a slight increase in deleted comments, so maybe I’m just arriving late to the parties 😄.
Admittedly, I’m pretty new myself though, so my experience with the ‘small town’ version of Tildes is more limited.
Maybe this is too off topic, but tbh I'd feel much safer with a dozen persons around than being all alone. Depends also on the region; with Iceland's crime statistics, I felt perfectly safe while on their countryside and left more things in the car than I would in towns in the Netherlands or Germany where I'm from. Or maybe NYC is a thing apart; I haven't been there.
Yeah, that's a bit off-topic because I'm not really talking about violence, but rather interpersonal relationships. I don't imagine NYC being really that dangerous, but they have a reputation for not being very nice to strangers.
I've found that it's slightly more complex (and more positive) in actuality.
NYC is so full of people that it is just not possible to stop, take the time, be bothered by a weird look, do a double take at everything unusual, etc. People have places to be, things to do, people to see.
This can come off as uncaring in a negative way (and it certainly can be a negative for a lot of people). However, I've found it profoundly positive in two major ways.
I've become so much more self confident and well adjusted because of this realization.
I know this is far afield, but I think it's an interesting side of the city that isn't seen without living here.
I was walking down the street (1st Ave south of 14th St in Manhattan) and saw someone sitting in the road close to the curb, seemingly injured (IIRC they were holding their leg). I stopped to help, and then noticed someone standing nearby who said thanks but no need to call 911. Apparently I was the 15th person to offer to help (they sounded a little exasperated). I think the person explaining was a stranger to the injured person on the ground. As I left somebody else rushed over to offer assistance.
I think the whole Kitty Genovese experience changed New Yorkers to now over-assist. ETA: Maybe this spills over to my online behavior? I know that I tend to offer help where I can.
I'm super clumsy so I've been on the receiving end of this a few times and while it's pretty embarrasing, it is incredibly heartwarming to know that people do keep an eye out. It's funny when we all queue up to do so though! Thanks for being one of those people, it definitely goes a long way to making the world better. And yes, I think that my urge to help definitely spills over - looking over my old reddit comments, most of them are in reply to people going through rough times where the compulsion to share whatever resources I know of took over. I ended up working in libraries which is a natural good fit for this impulse - it's nice to be able to get paid to help people and do it as a hobby as well :P
We're very nice to strangers and go out of our way to be helpful. It's just that we don't suffer fools gladly. ;)
Also, it's not too hard to get a small-town feel in NYC - each neighborhood has its own vibe. My little corner is downright sleepy during the weekday but becomes a scene on Sundays during the summer.
As an analogy to Tildes, I'm sure the different subject groups could be likened to towns/neighborhoods and will vary in size and personality (and decorum).
That is the second answer about actual real world NYC. Which is very interesting and I'm happy to learn!
However, to no detriment to your experience, I'd just like to point that I was only using it as an example to stress a point based on a well known stereotype. I've never been to NYC, I'm sure it can be a very welcoming city, and I'm sure that many small towns are not that friendly either! ;)
Oh, I misunderstood what you meant there then!
At least in conversations about travel online, I have seen them described as brusque but helpful. Short and to the point, but not hostile.
So right.
The meme/joke/low-effort trend dominates Reddit, and is something that'd drive me away from Tildes if it starts turning up here.
/r/movies is a good example. No matter what movie the post is theoretically about, the first three to five post chains to it will be nothing but memes or quotes. Maybe sometimes a joke that plays off a meme or a quote. Someone mentions Fifth Element and it's "Super Green" and "Multipass!" Someone mentions Ghostbusters and it's "Who you gonna call" and "Yes it's true, this man has no dick."
Like that's conversation? Like that's discussion? That's nothing. Noise. Meaningless. It's lowest of low effort, designed to just get a nostalgia upvote because some equally LCD asshat see it and giggles while thinking "oh yeah, that's from the movie" and upvotes.
Memes and that crap aren't conversation. The day Tildes, any forum, turns to that stuff as the predominant ratio of what shows up is the day it's just not interesting anymore. I love, so far, how here when there's a post it's someone who actually usually has something to say. Sometimes they say it well, sometimes they don't, sometimes they've thought it out, sometimes they haven't. But at least it's not some bullshit "just a joke bro" waste of time.
I've seen more emojis in the last two weeks than in all the five years I've been here. So that's new.
Otherwise, it's not majorly different. There's certainly been an increase in content posts which is great. I think "more content" was the most common complaint on the site in the past. Thread bumping has made the frontpage feel a little more chaotic as a result though, so I might reevaluate which homepage sort I use to try to smooth that out.
There's been a greater trend of help/question threads, but that's to be expected. Hopefully the onboarding process will eventually be improved so that people aren't left with so many questions.
I do think people are coming in with the expectation that Tildes is like reddit, because it has threaded comments. A few bad habits are also being brought over, such as using votes as an "I agree" button, and not "Good contribution". I get a little disappointed when I see a one-liner with 100 votes, and a lengthy, considerate comment at <10. I hope that improves in time.
But overall, I think the new members are making a great effort to fit in and respect the site's rules and culture. I also think the old members are doing a great job to explain it to them.
On the topic of navel gazing, yes there has been an increase in talking about Tildes on Tildes, but I'm confident that will pass. When the site started, we all spent ages talking about what we wanted out of Tildes as well. After some time, we settled into a rhythm and began sharing and discussing content instead. Give it a chance, and we'll get back to that soon enough.
I wonder if Tildes is starting to get a bit of a younger crowd? I may be wrong, but I tend to associate emojis with younger people. As someone who didn't grow up with them, I personally find them rather unnatural to use.
Unicode emojis are new yes but when I see ASCII and kaomoji I know I'm talking to fellow oldsters. ✧ ﾟ. ٩(ˊᗜˋ*)و ♡.
As someone guilty of this who is not young. It’s because there are mobile apps now, so people have quick access to the the emoji keyboard.
Win + .on Windows will bring up the emoji keyboard (it'sctrl + .on Ubuntu, other OSes surely have equivalents as well).cmd+ctrl+spacefor macOSMacs have an emoji button these days! But if you use multiple languages it will switch between them instead and you'll have to use the three-finger salute for it instead.
(given the legend on the key is a wireframe globe, I would assume the language switching is the intended purpose, but it defaults to emojis until more than one languages are installed.)
I actually find it a bit annoying because I tend to accidentally tap it from time to time.
Huh, interesting. I have multiple languages, so the globe does what the symbol implies. Didn’t realize the default behavior had changed.
The more you know!
As someone who does love a good emoji (I'm old enough that I didn't grow up with them but just barely), I found reddit weirdly hostile to them in general, and since this place is similar in format I feel held back on using them here (despite some slight emoji use being natural for me) bc I don't want to be judged.
I wouldn't say I judge the use of emojis (although others might) but I have found that I don't really like them-- to me it's just noise and visual clutter. I personally do use emoticons now and then, as I feel they do the same thing as emojis but clutter the visual field less.
To each their own, though-- if other people like it that's fine too. I don't think it's my place to tell other people how to communicate-- it's a perfectly valid form of expression.
Wow, I hadn't realized that. I'm a compulsive
tl;dr-er too; I did it all the time on Reddit, and I even do it in some casual work communication. But it never once crossed my mind to put a tl;dr here.I can't stand TLDR (sorry, tldr as they'll call it because shift key is hard).
I've seen people post a two sentence response, then say "sorry for long post" as part of it. Like, seriously? It's a text forum, but that person feels bad about having actually posted some text and wants to preemptively fall on the sword for having had the gall to post something that wasn't an emoticon meme quote joke?
For me it's a similar thing to tone of voice in speech. I almost only use emoji at the end of a sentence to kinda "mark" this. Often I just find some other way of marking this if I'm somewhere people don't usually use emojis, but some are hard to express otherwise. Among my favorites that are hard to replace: 👀, 🙃, 😔, 🤔, and 🙄.
=\
:(
:O
=O
(:
=:-D
ASCII lives on and I still love me some ASCII. I came from IRC where ASCII reigned supreme and the coolest cats had pages of fun formatted ASCII images. I'm that old I remember when boobs were literally represented as ( . )( . )
Those were the days.
Maybe I should do an old school ASCII thread and tag as casual....
I definitely used ascii before emoji overtook them and I'll occasionally do a simple :D, but I've definitely converted to emoji these days. Lots more innovation happening there, since it's what the kids use. I do have a bunch of fun kaomoji bc I have the Chinese keyboard on Gboard though so ¯\_(☯෴☯)_/¯
If you do make that page, I'd also include these as well.
:T
:1
:]
:[
',:/
:l
:p
:^)
:B
:F
:A
:c
Man there are so many. Lol
There are so many I just give up.
ʅ（◞‿◟）ʃ
But in reality I probably abuse emoticons more than anyone else on this site. ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ
Clearly, at least one of those has had a stroke.
On discord, I speak in pop culture gifs, so I understand the restraint against using emojis here. I feel compelled to use them when I'm making jokes or being silly, but that kind of posting isn't too common here, so I haven't felt the need outside the occasionally "clarifying emoticon" to establish tone.
This is mostly where I feel the lack of them tbh so I'll probably just start going for it. It feels so much more natural than something like /s
I would agree with you if my mum didn’t use more emoji than me ever since we taught her how they worked.
I imagine it’s just an increase in users visiting on mobile, where emoji are much easier to input compared to desktop.
(Yes, I know about the keyboard shortcuts, but in my experience the average user doesn’t, especially on Windows)
I tend to associate them with people over 50!
Interesting, I had the opposite impression. I expected all the new users to need time and help acclimating, so I was content to just wait for all the meta topics to settle, but I definitely felt like whenever I've peeked in over the past couple weeks there were a lot less actual links and discussion on those than I used to see before. You probably have been more active than me though, plus it's probably changing/changed with having new subgroups, so take my word with a helping of salt.
Although I am very new to Tildes, my emoji use has also skyrocketed in the past couple weeks because I am on Discord 80% of the time instead of only like 30% of the time, now that reddit is gone. And Discord makes emoji use a) easy; and b) more important, because you have fewer words in which to express yourself as the chat goes much faster.
When I'm on Discord I use emojis constantly, and they're now leaking into my communications on other platforms. I don't have reddit to balance it out anymore. I wonder if the same is true of other former redditors.
This is also my experience. And think it's great. 👍 I never really used emotes much outside Discord but now my browser makes it easier. I don't think they should be banned on Tildes, they can add some extra context to written conversations.
First, a note about quantity, there is definitely a large increase in posts and comments, which I find welcoming. I used to basically set the tildes view to new posts and be able to see a week of posts on the first page. Now, it's barely half a day on the first page.
Quality wise, I think it's been at the same level even with the rise in quantity. You see some familiar names with their usual well thought out comments, but you also see new users with similar comments. What is different (at least for me) is that I feel much more comfortable commenting than ever before. Between the two extremes of talking to an ocean of people (reddit) versus doing open mic at a comedy club (earlier tildes), the current vibe is like chatting with other people at a bar that isn't packed, but not empty either.
I haven't unlocked the exemplary comment achievement yet, but the current atmosphere makes me want to, rather than lurk endlessly.
I have spent most of my life in suburbs with populations of 10,000-20,000 people, like 6 different ones I guess, and your bar analogy would be a great way to describe probably every one of them.
I have a family member who spent a lot of years in some of these same kinds of places, and moved to a small town for a couple years trying to get some of that cheap housing everybody wishes for lol.
Population ~700: one gas station, one bar, like 5 churches, an ice cream shop, a general store and one super shitty pizza place. She said it was the creepiest thing after a few weeks, pretty much every single person "knew" her and she was so unnerved by it.
Pharmacy: oh hey you're that new lady; gas station: oh you got another car; ice cream shop: where's that other girl that usually comes with you?
Just a whole nother vibe.
Meanwhile, I have now landed in what is generally considered a soildly medium sized suburb, but it's 5x the size of what I'm used to, and has more population than the largest city in West Virginia.
Everything seems so anonymous here, I will never be able to know anything close to "a lot" of the people or happenings, or really have my finger on the pulse of this place.
I don't have a real point here, so I hope nobody was waiting for that lol, just that analogy got me thinking.
This site has always felt like a battleground between people who want it to remain a very small community with a homogenous personality between the users, all like-minded and interested in the same things albeit slightly stratified by the very few groups and the users that are more interested in broader appeal, with more groups, and more varied discussion. I've seen a definite trend towards the latter and it has certainly been upsetting to the people who wanted the former.
I am so so curious as to how Deimos is going to handle it but he doesn't seem interested in curtailing invites and is even adding more groups so I feel like the former group are not going to get what they want out of Tildes in the end. Despite the former group's misgivings, the site does not seem to be worse off and has remained quite a pleasant place outside of a few rare bad actors during the most recent wave.
I'm also new to Tildes, but I had stopped communicating on Reddit in any meaningful capacity a long ways back, so coming here I don't feel as though I were bringing any "Reddit-baggage" with me that would affect the quality of discussion. I've read about what etiquette is expected, and I don't feel the need to tiptoe around. If I make a mistake I feel I will be respectfully corrected.
However, recently I have seen at least one instance of the quality of discussion dipping (a post which has seen the guillotine treatment along with the OP). I think it's important to maintain a quality userbase that isn't afraid to pushback on that kind of hostility, and not allow it to run rampant as it does on Reddit, which is what stopped me posting there. I think there is something to be said about possibly having an observation period upon creating an account like I've seen suggested in this thread.
Chiming in to say that I really like Aphoenix's and Algernon's takes on this. And, in particular, I like the term "Quality Police" a lot. It points out the weirdness of some people on the site in that regard. There is value in trying to push the site toward quality discussion, but yeah, I do agree that people need to just start using Tildes rather than asking about it. Equilibrium will be reached sooner the more this happens.
Overall though, I like Tildes and have read a lot of interesting things here thus far. I like that you can just post something anywhere and others will filter it/categorize/tag it for you without getting a message for how it wasn't appropriate for the group. The smaller nature is also quite nice what with seeing familiar names offering their opinions frequently, although I'm aware that aspect probably won't last forever. Indirectly related to this point, I think I also selfishly hope that the rules regarding images stay the same as they are now because I'm liking the smaller nature of the site quite a bit and I think that change would make it blow up to a more Reddit'ish experience which I now believe that I do not want here. I can have Tildes for this kind of thing and Reddit for memes. But I'm open to whatever decision is made in that regard and trust Deimos.
Yesterday I got my first "Reddit"-level reply to one of my comments on Tildes.
I imagine there will be a dip in the quality of comments for a while, especially in generalist tags (talk tags, gender tags etc), but the best that can be done when faced with a low quality comment as a reply is to provide feedback and suggest changes in composition style that over time will bring the overall quality of comments back up.
As a former Redditor who left Reddit for Tildes, I'd argue (see what I did there?) that there's a good chance that the people who care enough to leave are not the Negative Nancy types you describe, but rather those who want to contribute and finally got fed up. I saw many posts by users to the effect of, "this doesn't affect me, so why should I care?" I suspect those types will stick around. Only time will tell what becomes of Reddit, but they've already lost their AMA mods, as well as other facets that made the platform interesting.
My two cents for whatever it is worth is that this will drive a significant subset of thoughtful, ethical people away, as well as old-timers who were used to the apps and don't want to switch. I see it as an injury but not a killing blow at this time. Getting rid of old.reddit for desktop would come closer to being deadly for reddit imho, but even so, I think it would survive in diminished form as facebook has and as twitter has.
I vaguely remember an idea discussed years ago about replacing the plain “vote” with separate “agree” and “quality” (or some such) buttons/labels. It didn’t really go anywhere, but the ambiguous "vote" certainly seems like problem worth experimenting around.
I think the label "Exemplary" functions as a "quality" vote. (Then again, we.mighy find comments exemplary when we most agree with them. )
I was thinking “quality” at the level of what theoretically an upvote should mean. “Exemplary” really should be reserved for exceptionally excellent comments - well articulated, substantial, something worthy of referencing in future discussions. Unfortunately, it often gets used as a “super agree” just to apply the highlighting, even more so in recent times.
Anyone else starting to take these questions kind of personally? Is it normal to regularly ask about those darn Redditors and how they're affecting our community?
It seems like at least every week there's another question or complaint about the Redditors and their lack of manners in our community. I get it. There's growing pains, but it feels very us vs them and not welcoming.
My anxiety when posting on Reddit is no where near the anxiety I feel when posting on Tildes. It has been made very clear that everyone is judging what is said.
Oh boy. You kinda nailed my apprehensions perfectly.
There is definitely more judgment on Tildes, or at least stronger more long winded judgment. I have noticed far more pre-emptive CYA style writing where people include polite vaguely hidden disclaimers in their comments. Hell, look at the top comment:
That might be fair and expected in a minority group like ~lgbt, but was it really necessary in ~tildes as an ask.discussion post?
I am not sure that users feeling the need to cover their ass everytime they post is a sign of a healthy atmosphere. It reminds me very strongly of the self censorship one has to practice in places like China, or other communist countries in order to avoid trouble with the government or police (or their informants).
I also feel like when there is a disagreement, or someone is offended, it is much more accepted to be a jerk if one couches their thoughts in more eloquent language; e.g. telling someone "go back to reddit shitter" is not ok, telling someone "perhaps you would enjoy squabbles.io more good sir" will fly completely under the radar.
Which leads me to my next point. Another user put it better than I, but basically it seems that "civility over content" is more highly regarded than getting one's point across briefly. There are a lot of comments that could say the same, with less. I am not sure if this is due to people wanting to sound intelligent, or whether it goes back to my (our?) intitial point where users are just kinda terrified of being judged.
Anyway, I still like Tildes, but I have definitely toned down my commenting since joining.
Lurk moar seems like a good plan.
As someone who regularly does this a lot (and is actually trying to get better about it!), I think it's less of a worry about the censorship police and more of an emergent product of a wider, conflict-happy internet.
Back when I used to comment on reddit, I learned to use lots of weasel words when I spoke -- "most", "many", "often", etc. This is because it quickly became apparent that people there were ready and willing to try and "take me down" without hesitation, and speaking in any sort of absolute was a way for them to find a counterexample, no matter how marginal, and dunk on me. By making my post more gray, I was hoping to head off some of that sniping behavior. I couldn't change the fact that people were actively wanting to be adversarial, but I could make their work slightly harder for them by not leaving low-hanging-fruit in the form of rigid, easily falsifiable statements.
I learned in time that speaking in gray areas is actually more reflective of reality, which is rarely simple or rigid, but the black-or-white, with-us-or-against-us polarization of wider social media makes that a hard space to occupy or convey. Tildes is the only place online that I feel comfortable inhabiting and exploring that gray area, in which we're approaching topics from a shared perspective of complexity rather than one of dueling sides in a war.
I think when you see people qualifying things or adding disclaimers, a lot of time they're actively trying to push their words more into a gray area and remove some usually counterproductive rigidity. They're trying to head off misinterpretations or outright disinterpretations of their words by qualifying not just what they mean but also what they don't mean, or additional context for where their meaning is coming from. They don't want their comments to come across as the black-or-white, argument-driven stuff seen elsewhere.
It's also unfortunately trivially easy to see a comment and project a bunch of associations onto it and the poster who made it. I've done this a lot, and it's caused me to miss the points being made right in front of my eyes because my brain had already unloaded a dumptruck full of baggage into my thought process that didn't really belong there in the first place. By qualifying against something, users are often attempting to stop that baggage from entering the conversation in the first place.
I think if internet culture weren't so steeped in conflict, we wouldn't need to take these precautions. Unfortunately, that's the wider landscape on which we sit, so disclaimers often act as a visible form of "disarmament".
I'm sure I'm not the only one who, when writing something, sort of actively anticipates objections or problems people might have with it and tries to head those off at the pass. I'm not doing it because I'm worried about any sort of authority or anything who might punish me -- I'm doing it because it's an attempt to add clarity to my intended message. It often makes what I'm writing better by removing potential misunderstandings in the first place. It can definitely be overdone though, and I'm probably someone who errs on the side of doing it too much.
In my time on Tildes, I've learned that it has a lot of people who actively want their words to be understood by others, rather than just seen. It's what's keeping me around here, and why longer, more in-depth conversations can occur without devolving into mudslinging (not that that doesn't happen sometimes). That's why I think you see a lot of hedging, qualifying, disclaiming, and caveat-ing. It's essentially a social strategy aimed at avoiding conflict online.
I find this response really interesting because using this kind of couching language is something very typical of how women speak, not just online but in person, and for some of the same reasons - we feel like we’ll be argued with less.
Yes - I also find myself using "I think," "I believe," "I feel," "I guess," "maybe" and "perhaps" when writing online. It can be read as conflict reducing language. Same thing with the use of "lol" and emojis ("see, I'm smiling, don't take what I said too seriously"). Women are raised to keep the peace.
Then again, every once in a while I like to strip that out of my language, consciously taking a risk.
God yes, absolutely agree with all of this. I feel extremely confrontational if I disagree with someone or ask someone to do something via text without using any of those qualifiers.
“Women are raised to keep the peace” !!!!!!!!!!!! Yes
I don't really have it in me to give a comment of respectable length to this. I will say you have provided some insight. Especially w.r.t. moving things into a gray area, I hadn't considered that before.
I guess for me personally I get really tired of having to qualify every sentence with its own paragraph just to pre-emptively defend from possibly offending someone. I actually tend to do the opposite now. Write what I want, and then respond to reasonable or antagonistic replies in kind. I suspect the first part doesn't always go over so well on Tildes. If there is an antagonistic response, people usually get one reasoned response from me, after that I will drop down to their hyperbole level, or just ignore the thread.
I am not sure that I completely agree that users on Tildes are doing this to avoid conflict, I get the vibe that it is sometimes simply to win an argument. Sometimes even worse, to win an argument that the original commenter hadn't even started. Basically arguing for the sake of arguing and winning the "well actually" war.
Note, I am not arguing with you, just saying I think it's more of a 50/50 (80/20?) with gray area vs "winning the internet"...Or whatever ratio you think is better, as those are just numbers I pulled out of nowhere.
Perhaps on Tildes the ratio is more in favor of gray areas. I am not sure, I haven't been here long enough. All I can say is it is certainly not 100% in favor of gray areas.
I don't read you as arguing with me at all, and I hope I don't come across that way either. We're just two people, looking at the same thing together, and sharing our thoughts on it. Each of us is capturing a different part and different perspective, and neither of us has the whole picture -- I'm sure there are other reasons we see that behavior too!
I was also intending what I said not as a dismissal to what you said but an addition to it. I definitely see the sort of "win the argument" phenomenon you're describing too. As someone who's been on Tildes for a long time, I think some of that might be a side effect of the recent influx of users. Prior to the increase in users there was a lot less of it, so my perspective is probably tempered by that. It had been a long time since I'd seen the reddity quote-rebuttal-quote-rebuttal-quote-rebuttal argument structure here, and I've now seen several of those in the past few weeks, for example.
I also agree with you that constantly having to hedge can get exhausting. Not only does it make typing things out take a lot of time and mental effort, it also creates situations where you end up with GIANT responses in your inbox (similar to what I did to you) which can read as intimidating or antagonistic just based on sheer length.
I mentioned in my original comment that I'm trying to get away from it in part because, like you said, it sucks sometimes. I also think it's an adaptation that serves a need elsewhere and against the backdrop of other internet cultures, but I don't think we necessarily need it here. Instead of making the onus on commenters to head off everything at the pass by loading up their comment with qualifiers, it's also on us readers to meet comments at their best and apply the principle of charity. We shouldn't need to worry about antagonistic responses here because, ideally, we shouldn't be antagonistic here in the first place.
Anyway, thanks for sharing your perspective with me and deciding to engage with me. I appreciated hearing your perspective on this, especially your most recent comment, which isn't in opposition to mine in the slightest. Together, they help to round out a clearer picture for me, you, and everyone reading.
While this is true to an extent, there a few different factors in play:
Controversial comments need to be well supported. You can avoid a lot of arguements by properly explaining why you say what you say.
It's easier to be verbose than concise when being thoughtful. First drafts are easy, editting down is hard. Not everyone wants to write a research paper every comment.
I notice the 'pre-emptive defense' is worse with all the new faces. Once everyone knows each other better, the atmosphere is a bit more relaxed.
And to your example given, there's a world of difference between saying "Get out noob" and saying "Tildes isn't really the place for memes and cat pics, here's a few other places that cater to that." One is rude and dismissive, the other is constructive feedback. Fostering the former is how you get 4chan.
To speak to this specifically...yes kinda-sorta. Tildes historically has a lack of diversity. @Algernon_Asimov was making (subconciously or not) a head nod to that problem in the past. One of our notorious examples is a pair of 'Men of Tildes/Women of Tildes' posts from years ago when most of the posts in the Women's thread was well-meaning men drowning out the women's voices.
Or... not at all. :)
The comment that @Plik is referring to ("and I think a middle aged hetero cis white male not spouting their opinion on something is probably, in general, a good thing") was actually made by @aphoenix, not me.
Dammit losing track of who's who in this thread. Need more coffee.
And just to verify - a conscious nod to that problem in the past. I make an effort to read / listen first, and comment second, and only if I feel like what I have to say hasn't been said, or if the chat is just, well, chat and not something deeper.
Oopsie. Something about we could all be dogs banging on keyboards on the internet.
No disagreement with most of this. However, my "good sir" example specifically had the good sir italicized to represent an abbreviated version of the negative tone that can come across in longer more judgmental comments, i.e. good sir meaning "you ridiculous nincompoop" or similar.
As far as Men/Women of Tildes posts, I wasn't here for that, but in either situation pointing out that one is not a man or woman in the respective post seems reasonable. If it were a ChemEs of Tildes post, then mentioning one's gender/orientation would seem more like a pre-emptive defense IMO.
This is the second comment that has focused on half a sentence instead of trying to parse the whole thing and grok the meaning behind it. Here's the whole paragraph:
I think the context of the whole paragraph is important:
While I do think middle aged cis hetero white dudes (MACHWDs) have a habit of commenting even if what they're saying has already been said, I'm just making a choice to not do that, but only for myself. I'm not even suggesting that other people be quiet if they are MACHWDs, just that I choose to be because of our overabundance of those voices.
Sorry if I offended you. My only point was that that one half sentence didn't seem necessary in the context of ~tildes. In another group sure. I don't care that you included it in any major way. I do feel sad (even that is too strong a word) that you felt the need to include it. I think it usually shouldn't even be a consideration (again in the case of generic ~ groups).
Of your four bullet points I have no disagreement or judgment, and I understood those points. I find myself limiting my comments if they could simply be boiled down to ye olde reddit "^ this" also.
I also never suggested that you were suggesting other people limit themselves. I did suggest that the culture of Tildes for whatever reason leads to self censorship, I was not implying that you were a source of tyrannical oversight, but that in general there is a negative reaction towards comments where people don't spend overly too much time protecting themselves from possible misunderstandings (as I feel I am doing right now).
I thought one of the core tenets of the site was to take people's comments and give them the benefit of the doubt, rather than assuming malice. I am not personally seeing this to be the case. Take your comment, and this comment as examples.
I do disagree with your paragraph on MACHWDs. The fact that you came up with that term seems like self-censorship/disclaimorism (yeah I just made up a word) in my opinion. I truly don't care who you are when you are commenting on how Tildes has changed given the reddit exodus, and again just feel mildly sad that you felt the need to include it (but it's okay that you did, I'll get over it).
Finally as an example of where I think your half sentence would be relevant: A thread in ~lgbt where a trans woman is asking about hair removal processes. If you were a white cis red haired male with light facial hair, then yeah, you should probably include that info if you decide to comment; especially if it's something along the lines of "just shave more, or use a straight razor", and I am in complete agreement with you, you probably just shouldn't say anything. If you were again a white cis male with dark hair who had undergone laser hair removal, then yes, go ahead and comment, but maybe include your situation since you probably aren't as concerned about darker/heavier upper lip beard hair.
Again, sorry if you thought I was implying you were enforcing personal guidelines on others. That was not my goal. Also apologies for the wall of text.
I really want to make that abbreviation into "middle aged cis hetero white af dudes", just so I can say MACHWAD in my head. Lol
Yea, if your response isn't a polite, well researched 5 paragraph essay citing peer reviewed sources, it probably isn't worth posting.
I agree. I still like Tildes! There's great information here! Kinda like the early days of Reddit. But I think the big brain, smarter and better than the rest of the internet attitude could be toned down. Toning it down would lead to more discussion and probably more interesting discussions. The attitude has probably turned more people than you and I off of commenting.
I think my most highly regarded comments here (so far) have been short. (As measured in upvotes and labels.) But I have to admit I've been hesitant to comment if what I say is brief - I hope it comes across as succinct and not snarky. (ETA: I have Reddit PTSD.)
The amount of posts on reddit about Digg during the exodus in 2009-2010 was insane. I chalk this up to just a normal response by people moving platforms.
Did you not feel that way on reddit? Just curious, since many people feel that reddit was extremely judgemental and hostile. Even in this thread, people have commiserated about how they eventually became accustomed to muting all reddit comment replies by default because it's so common to be chastised and insulted there, no matter how innocent or well-meaning a comment was.
However, I do understand what you're saying. I also feel like when I comment on Tildes, people will actually see it, will care more about whether my comment is appropriate/relevant, and will not hesitate to inform me about the same or offer criticism/feedback. Especially in the last few days, I've felt a bit on edge about commenting, or embarrassed that I'm not contributing in the way that people would prefer. It's not a good feeling, and I empathize with you.
I generally don't take offense to this topic on Tildes in a personal way. Really, "Tildes users," and "reddit users on Tildes" is no longer a very significant distinction at this point, since the ex-reddit users far outnumber the "pre-exodus" longtime Tildes users. So please don't feel like you're outnumbered or like you're "the odd one out." Whenever we see a post criticizing Reddit users, I can almost guarantee it was written by a reddit user who only left reddit a month ago or less. The OP of this post first commented on this site on June 9th (which is completely fine and not a bad thing - that's a few days before I joined!)
I'd wager that us "reddit users of Tildes" have continued to engage in the age-old tradition of judging and being irritated by other redditors. Whenever I've seen long-term users of Tildes comment about reddit users or the overall shift in tone on the site, it's usually done politely and based in concern for their lovely site, which many of them have put much time and effort into for years. Even if they are irritated, I don't see any of them making posts about it (they keep it in the comments of other posts) and they also tend to prefer not discussing Reddit in general. So the best thing you can do is post or comment about new, interesting topics.
Ultimately, I want to welcome you and encourage you to participate. I took a brief glance at your comments and you seem thoughtful and kind, which are really the main things that seem to be valued when it comes to posting on Tildes, from old and new users alike.
Not who you replied to but...
In my case, never. I started on reddit early and pretty much only looked at subs I was subscribed to though. Usually nerdy/gaming or travel/country subs. Part of this was also avoiding issue subs like the_donald, 2xc, subredditdrama, etc.
Occasionally you'd get an over the top shitty comment about why the MP5 is the worst gun and UMP is better because TTK and you are just a dumbass scrubtier shitter go KYS. But like, it's the internet, and for someone to flip out that much over a game is hard to take personally (and also not laugh at the intensity).
For the most part reddit was pretty ok. I'd still be there regularly if RIF still worked. RIP in piece RIF :(
Edit: There not their, jesus.😅
I definitely felt that way on Reddit in the beginning. But that was 10 years ago when spelling and grammar would get you chastised.Lol
Actually, I think most of those posts are coming from people who are new to Tildes, and are somehow intimidated by Tildes' reputation of being sooo much better than Reddit, so they're terrified of putting a foot wrong.
I've only been here slightly less than a month, but I think given a little time that everyone will chill.
I am NOT a negative Nancy! I always considered myself more of the gloomy Gus type. ;-)