Can I just say that the 'label' function on this site is magnificent?
I'm coming as a Reddit refugee from the most recent API shenanigans. I've had a few people drop Gold on my comments over there, and it's a nice little 'oh hey, look at that' but it's never been really particularly important to me.
I just made a comment on here the other day that I put a little bit of thought and effort into - nothing crazy, but really did my best to try to explain my perspective - and every single 'exemplary' that post has gotten has meant more to me than any of the awards or upvotes I would get on Reddit. Just the simple act of including a small message of appreciation with exemplaries makes it mean so much more; every one of them has made me feel more and more like I did a good job and maybe actually informed some people, did some good in the world and all that.
Haha. I was like... Hmm, I wonder what post OP wrote and to my joy it was you who wrote that wonderful comment about hip hop history.
I agree the label system is wonderful. It feels great giving an excellent post that blue tag. I have nothing else to say except I was happy to give it an exemplary label before anyone else. I was into Subi's post before it was cool.
Sure was, and this is in direct response to that! Seeing all the positive reception has been really rewarding, even if I think it was totally lost on the person I initially replied to. Honestly, it just made me wish I'd done more, brought up more modern artists and provided video examples as I'd done with the previous ones. In any case, definitely glad to contribute, especially on a topic that I feel pretty strongly about; I grew up with people who could best be described as white supremacist adjacent, people who aren't actively racist but absolutely passively are, and so growing up I wasn't into rap at all, regurgitated that same 'it's not music!' BS.
Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly drew me in initially because of the jazz instrumentals fusing so well with his rap, but really listening to and understanding those lyrics honestly changed me as a person and gave me a new appreciation for the genre and for music. It's still tied for my favorite album of all time with Random Access Memories, and I think as far as a GOAT list goes, I'm pretty damn happy to have those two up there. All this to say, it's really rewarding to have people immediately recognize the work you do on something when you really care about it. I think the only time I got a similar feeling to this was when I wrote a very in-depth guide for my League main back on Reddit, seeing all the help it did for people.
One feature I kind of wish Tildes has is the ability for me to bookmark and tag a post. Right now it's a huge growing list of things I should be reading that i hope to come back to.....plus excellent posts like examplaries.
I wish to have a little easy Rolodex of examplaries for different topics so that when I see a relevant discussion in the wild about say, hiphop, I can be like, bro, check out this post.
<Noise> it's a great feeling hahaha but it does feel a little "thanks for the gold" - or, for the olds, "sempai noticed me" . I wanted to make this post too but was shy so thank you OP for doing it</noise>
Tildes does have a bookmarking feature. It's in the links below every topic and every comment. (But you have to open a topic to see those links. They're not visible on the front page.)
If I'm understanding chocobean, what they want is the ability to tag and sort their bookmarked posts. At the moment, the only sort is Chronological.
Yes yes yes some sort of way to tag and or sort bookmarks :3
Like, oh someone is asking a Tildes question let me link them to the FAQ thread, or someone is asking about cosmology or ADHD, I know great threads to link them but searching takes too long. Etc.
Bookmark tagging and sorting are both planned features: #182, #342.
If I understood them correctly, they are bookmarking things but lacking a way to organize that constantly growing list of bookmarked posts. I can appreciate that request tbh - not too long before it shut down Apollo for reddit added the ability to categorize saved items and it was transformative to the usefulness of saving.
Edit: Ninja’d. Leaving this up anyways to express my support for the feature request :)
Yes, exactly, to categorize saved's! :D
As someone with cero rap exposure and experience this is becoming a rewarding post. I didn't saw your original one and just literally just followed the link in the reply above from CosmicDefect and spent a solid 45mins pretending I was a YouTuber doing a reactions video for each one of the recommendations - I think I now need to go deeper into rap.
Thank you!
Just wanted to pop in and say thank you for breaking my Taylor Swift streak to get me back into Kendrick, I loved Damn and Mr Morale but I haven't listened to TPaB in years at this point, it's still so good.
I participated in the topic you mentioned and just noticed that it's now locked. What's up with that? I would think there should be some explanation why it's now locked at least.
Seeing a topic being locked with no explanation smells like Reddit, and I don't like it.
That’s on me. I made the topic and later asked Deimos to lock it.
There was definitely some great stuff in there, but there was also some heavy “fractal” bickering working its way down some of the subthreads. One user went through and deleted all his comments, and I was starting to see comments I wasn’t sure if I should mark as
Maliceincluding one that I eventually did.It wasn’t any one thing or user — it was more the whole direction the topic was going. I meant it more as an exercise in curiosity rather than surface area for protracted back-and-forth debates.
This is 100% not on you, and not said with any kind of blame and you know I <3 you, and I'm not being glib about that.
It's sad that that thread ended up chasing at least one user off the site completely - the same user who wrote about driving a large vehicle deleted all their comments and then their account and is just gone. I read through some of the comments, and I was mostly on the deleted users' side - they were getting a lot of flack, and some people basically called them a murderer (or manslaughterer) for electing to drive a big vehicle. It seems like they got out of hand, but I think that's something we can probably understand. This is a very "we did it reddit" sort of feeling, and I have experienced around the same topic - big vehicles - as well. Congrats everyone, we got rid of a person who was sharing their perspective!
It happened in some of the other threads as well, and it seemed really counter to the purpose of the thread. Person A would say "Why do you like this?" and person B would say "I like it because of these reasons" and then Person C would say "Those aren't good reasons to like something." It was a real kick back to reddit and after some consideration, I realized I really didn't like it. I think you were definitely right to ask to have it locked.
It's not just in that thread; there have certainly been other conversations I've just noped out of because it's not worth it to talk about the issues. Maybe it's good to have wildly different perspectives, but there are just some that I don't really have time or energy to deal with, and I keep on hitting that ignore and opting out of conversations here. There are whole groups that I have just realized I need to opt out of because I'm not really jiving with what's going on there, and I think that's what groups are for, but it's still rubbing me wrong.
Change is hard!
I agree, I noped out of the topic myself due to the way things were going. It was interesting because it was one of the first times I've ever had that experience here on Tildes where I just walked away from a post's comments section and just didn't feel mentally great. That's been much more common for me to experience on other sites but I suppose it was inevitable that it would happen here
Yeah, I feel really bad about the user who left. I also feel like I should have made the call to have it locked earlier. It was hard because there were a lot of genuinely great comments there (yours, for example!), and I didn't want to have to cut those off, but the longer the topic went on the worse I felt about it. The social fires were continuing to burn and the negatives ended up far outweighing the good.
I feel bad that the user felt so attacked that they had to leave, but I think the thing that caused it was a real faceless-internet-comment thing that I heavily associate with reddit it and digg and similar, where people go for the jugular in a way that is deeply personal, but in a fundamentally impersonal way. These sorts of things:
I think all of these require some kind of addressing - people shouldn't be spoken to like this, especially someone who is going out on a limb to explain their point of view. There has been a lot more assuming the worst about people lately, and it is wearing thin.
And yes, there were some great comments - I'm not particularly proud of mine, because I was experiencing some of the frustrations that I just wrote about, and I think some of the things I said were not the most thoughtful things that I have said; I completely misinterpreted more than one comment in a negative way, which is the exact thing that I'm talking about bugging me in this comment! I think that these topics that are hot button topics are really hard to approach without emotions clouding the way.
I appreciate the thread though - there were some superlatively good comments, including @Subi's wonderful breakdown of the history of hiphop, which was just brilliant, @AgnesNutter's explanation of makeup and rosacea, @phoenixrises (great name) tattoos, etc. There's a lot of brilliance, and it's a shame we had to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Your comments were valuable in part because you continued to converse in constructive ways. Identifying the misinterpretation and airing it, as you did, is great! Working towards understanding isn't and won't ever be a perfect process, but it also won't happen if some people just discard any attempt at understanding in the first place. You didn't discard that, and that matters a lot to me (and I'm sure others who read your comments).
The thing that bothered me most about the topic (and I wish I had a sticky name for this phenomenon) was the particularly "online" thing where people will take a big, huge problem and attempt to put the entirety of that on a single person's shoulders. It's like a form of harm laundering, where I find something relatively small, cast it as a proxy for the bigger issue, and then assign outsize responsibility to the person for the purposes of taking them down. If I catch someone being suboptimally sustainable, I can then assign them responsibility for humanity's eventual extinction under the effects of climate change, for example.
I saw some of that in the thread (e.g. the driving a big vehicle = manslaughter link you identified). It's not that there isn't a tiny little root of truth in the connection there, but that proportionality is completely lost, any complexity to the situation is ignored, and it always seems to happen in a way that favors criticism and dismissal -- never understanding. It's very popular on Twitter and has been one of the things that has bothered me about the social culture there (long before Musk came in and made things somehow even worse).
The social conflict it generates bothers me not only on that level -- I don't like needless social conflict and think it's counterproductive to good discussions -- but also on the level that it actually waters down the larger harms it's using for weight. None of these larger harms will be solved in the slightest by indicting internet strangers for bad behavior. Big vehicles in the US won't be solved by shaming a random guy who drives a truck. Climate change won't be solved because we made someone here feel bad for their car's fuel efficiency.
By casting the issue as merely an interpersonal one, on the level of individual responsibility, we pull focus from the systemic changes that would need to happen to address the issues. We actually lessen the severity of the problem by making it seem that, if only a few people got their shit together, then this wouldn't be an issue. It's misleading and doesn't do justice to the scale of the problem or the types of solutions it would require.
Now, for all my aspersions here, which are genuinely coming from a frustrated place, I also wrote yesterday about a need for patience. It's easy for me to look at that topic and try to pass it off as a few bad users, but then I'm falling prey to the argument style I identified above. That topic was just one example in a wider pattern of a discourse type that is common on reddit and Twitter but that goes against what we're trying to do here. Saying "oh it's just a few bad apples" doesn't look at the root of the issue, nor is it constructive. People who are coming here are used to conversations like that and have been supported in them elsewhere. How do we acclimate them to the way we'd rather things be here? I think that requires a lot of patience. I've mentioned multiple times that my first few months here (maybe even years) felt like a "detox" from reddit, and I've seen other users mention something similar. Not giving them that time and space -- the same time and space I benefitted from -- would be unfair of me. Not helping them along in that process would be unfair of me.
Ultimately I'm disappointed that the thread went the way that it did. I'm also reminding myself that these sort of growing pains are inevitably going to happen, but I think they'll be made easier if we all choose to meet them with patience. Lots of people did do that in the topic too, and that's what I'm wanting to kind of keep in focus. Even the contentious stuff wasn't all bad.
I should also say that I don't think the people that I am quoting are necessarily bad users, but that they have bad habits, which I presume are from Reddit, or from years of online forums. Your point about needing to detox is important, and the need for patience is even more important.
I think that it is a very difficult thing to onboard a large amount of people who are used to being like this on the internet; it's painful that this has been so normalized. I also think there may be an age / generational difference, because I remember acting somewhat like this in my 20s. Heck, maybe even in my 30s. Maybe during bad days in my 40s.
I think it's hard to balance the patience - the giving of time to help people acclimatize to a better place - with how weary giving that time can make people. But as @chocobean said below - aim for friendliness and respect, and go from there.
I appreciate the positive call out! Unfortunately I think I replied in some not-so-great ways to the parenting topic. A real problem I have is being unable to stand rudeness, and I want to stand up for whoever is being talked down to (I’m much more ok with ignoring someone being rude to me) and I would do better to keep out of it! I didn’t want to delete it, because I feel like that’s pretending I’m better than I am, but I did engage and tried to end on a positive note.
I agree overall it was a really interesting thread with some great responses. Some topics are just extra emotional I guess, and while I overall agree with disengaging I can also see why someone who’s very passionate about a topic would feel it appropriate to say their piece
I'm someone who's switched teams on probably most of the spiciest topics of North American culture, and now sort of hated by all sides (lol).
I think I'm a better person now, not for switching teams, but for having the experience of being both passionately and profoundly wrong before, and still having met very patient and kind people who engaged with me even at my worst and at my most tearfully and angrily tongue-tied, now striving towards being graciously right but in action very far from it. I understand how awful it feels to be the only person championing super unpopular ideals in the midst of an echo chamber of snides and sneers. But also how important it is to HAVE at least that one voice against the grain, even if it's just "let's try to get along".
I've been in some communities where certain topics are avoided because passions are high and people have already dug in. The only way through those is with "love": I might be willing to hear you sprout horse apples only because I love you, that I could not tolerate from anyone else.
So.... @aphoenix , I think if we aim for a friendly and respectful community, instead of aiming for content or articulation or facts or tone, that might be the (perhaps only) way to have these difficult conversations.
I pretty much agree. I think the chances of actually changing someone’s mind on the internet are about 0.01%, especially on these hot button topics, but being able to listen to the other side gives tremendous growth. I appreciate hearing someone else’s view, but I get riled up if that view becomes disrespectful or hypocritical (and in the spirit of being extremely truthful, I’m hypocritical myself in that I probably get less riled up if it’s someone from “my side” using those tones).
To that end, I entirely agree that aiming for friendliness and respect is paramount to a pleasant community. It takes a lot of maturity and it’s not always easy, but aiming and trying for that takes you most of the way there.
I think that's the right way to do it - put the human first and foremost, and remember that there's a person on the other side who is probably doing the best that they can. Everyone's on a journey; most journeys are hard. And I think we don't even need everyone to do it, just enough people.
Oh no I contributed to this user not feeling welcome here and left the site entirely ;_;
My hope is that they wanted to keep private info and opinion anonymous and "invited" themselves back on a new account......but that is clearly just guilt talking.
Ah, shame. Many of us saw the value of that thread but for myself I had to step away because it was, I think I was talking to you as well, becoming less of " let me learn about others" and more of "successfully change my mind or else I will call you names".
There was definitely interest and I still feel like it's conversations like that that does eventually, slowly over time, along with other conversations, change people's minds. But I can also understand that people don't have the obligation to defend themselves against someone who isn't ready to acknowledge/incorporate foreign ideas just yet.
:| because some of us can't resist responding to responses except quality and wit degrade exponentially in these chains and I find myself replying with inane noise almost immediately......? Forgive me, daychilde
I appreciate the explanation but I still think when they lock a topic they should require an reason to be posted.
agreed - there's an issue for that filed in Gitlab.
Awesome, thanks for the info.
I really liked the thread (and made several comments!) But I feel like it started devolving into just posting what people didn't like without any followup or any good will or intentions, which I hated.
I thought that was odd as well. It seemed to have some good engagement, but suddenly, nothing.
I agree! I pondered about making a topic about it myself to spread some awareness on the fact. I usually give it out to thoughtful replies on the matter.
Additionally I love that it is anonymous and has an 8hr cooldown (though I can imagine if it gets abused or more people join Tildes it might get nerfed to be longer, which is fine.)
Use it freely, use it wisely, make Tildes beautiful!
So far in my short time here I've seen one instance of "abuse" where apparently at least four people marked a single sentence comment as exemplary as a kind of super-vote. It was a morally superior popular opinion which is all well and good, but the comment didn't spark debate and was what I consider low hanging fruit. I think it cheapens other exemplary comments that actually are insightful or detailed.
I wish there was a way to counter mark exemplary or at least a character minimum requirement so it doesn't devolve into the equivalent of reddit gold on low effort comments.
Please use Malice to report Exemplary abuse like that. Deimos has removed Exemplary labels on comments like that before, and also removed users ability to use labels as a result of them having abused them. But he can't be everywhere at once, especially now that Tildes has grown by so much. That is why the Malice label exists though, to help draw his attention to where it's needed.
Oh, I didn't know that! I didn't think of that since I didn't think the comment itself was malicious, just not worthy of it's label. I will make sure I do in the future.
When you "malice" a comment, you get to type a short response for WHY it's a bad comment, or part of a bad chain of comments, or if the thread itself is bad. This is very important as you'll be giving the admin context for what's going on is he hadn't been reading the thread.
Noted. Thank you for the instructions.
I hear you. However, in discussions about the malice tag I have seen Deimos and others comment that striving for precise definitions would lead to rules lawyering and for allowing technically ok behavior that was in fact malicious. I think it would be hard to avoid a similar problem re exemplary. We have a significant percentage of new people here since June 1 of this year (me included). I think it's growing pains. As people see exemplary used correctly, hopefully they will get it and improve. But also I am open to experiments if Deimos and the old guard want to try them.
Hehe, I know you're making a joke, but this is decidedly in "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" territory where a minimum character requirement probably cuts out >90% of the low-effort exemplary tags.
Same. I haven't yet seen that many "undeserving" exemplary tags except one I got but still appreciated -- so I don't feel strongly one way or another here.
I agree! I got the exemplary tag on a post, a post where I felt like I tried my best to explain my perspective, and when I noticed the tag I was like "aww 🥰 so sweet."
It is a really cool feature. I haven't seen any of the other tags in the wild yet.
You don't actively 'see' the other tags, they change the color on the left side of a comment, to more easily categorize stuff. Exemplary is a special case.
Only the Exemplary label changes the comment stripe color to blue. The other labels (Joke, Noise, Offtopic) only effect comment sorting:
https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/commenting-on-tildes#labelling-comments
All the other stripe colors you're seeing indicate things unrelated to labels. The different stripe colors and their meanings are explained at the bottom of the theme preview page:
https://tildes.net/settings/theme_previews
cc: @eggpl4nt
I still remember that a while after releasing an early version of one of my old incremental games, someone messaged me on Reddit to thank me for making it and that they still played despite the slow updates it'd been getting. I still remember that message and think about it to this day — even saved it so it wouldn't get lost. I feel similarly about Exemplaries here. It's amazing how meaningful a short positive comment can be!