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What do we know about early Tildes demographics?
I can't be the only one who looks at discussions about moderation, community norms, etc. and wonders who we are and aren't hearing from. What's the strategy for ensuring we have a breadth of perspectives (not talking US electoral politics, here) while setting early (possibly persistent) standards and structures?
Not an expert in this sort of thing, but I imagine the first step is figuring out who is currently here, and if certain groups are missing, trying to foster their inclusion and getting their perspective (if they're interested in giving it). As an invite-only website there are bound to be trends since people are inviting friends or people who come across tildes in places like reddit.
Informally, we have some queer and/or trans folks (and those are just people who feel like posting in that sort of thread). We also have a topic asking where people are from, complete with a tally and a map. (Again, that's only folks who want to publicly post personal info like that.)
I'm guessing it'd be more accurate to have some sort of completely anonymous survey, but I imagine it's hard to do one of those well. You have to know what questions to ask and how to ask them, and if you don't you'll miss people. A website population that's more privacy-minded is also less likely to participate.
I wonder if online community/communications researchers, like those out of MIT's Center for Civic Media, USC Annenberg, etc. are hip to this place yet.
Interesting thought... I'd assume not, just because of how new it is? I'm sure some researcher out there would be interested in watching a community develop and try to learn from mistakes of previous online communities. (Although I dunno if you could get privacy-minded folks to consent to them doing actual research.)
https://tildes.net/~talk/18g/lets_discuss_politics
Gives a pretty good insight.
i skimmed through all of the top-level responses and jotted down a summary:
4 social democrat
1 green politics (left)
1 voluntaryist/cryptoanarchist
1 neoliberal
3 unaffiliated
2 democratic socialist
1 MAGA/conservative
1 catholic theocrat
1 anti-political-discussion censor :P
1 UK Labour party
1 center-left
1 digital era reformist
1 anti-trump irish nationalist
1 OG Federalist
1 NDP
1 libertarian
1 anarcho-communist
1 non-tankie marxist
1 far left
1 left
1 left-libertarian
So.. overwhelmingly left-wing (mostly far left of those).
There are also many users who do not wish to reveal their political leanings or other personal information, even on an anonymous forum like this.
I've learned to keep my politics private on Reddit since I moderated a couple of politically charged subreddits. I didn't want to be accused of bias in my moderation, so I simply stopped sharing my political opinions on that account.
Political ideological diversity became a topic, I believe, in the first few days of Tilde's creation. But there are many more perspectives that are worth focusing on when building a community—often ones rarely arrived at through cogitation or discussion. The perspective of former mods is one example.
That marshmallow research shows how something that would be perfectly intuitive to certain people could go unexplored for decades.
I'd definitely be interested, I'm not sure when we'd want to do it though, since ~ is acquiring new users so rapidly.
Living survey? I can set up a google form if people would fill it out
I threw something together at
https://goo.gl/forms/nvqzQRM9u6Iq3tPH3I'll enable seeing the results once it gets a few responses, to at least limit exposure a little
EDIT: @TheMeerkat beat me to posting, so I'll let this one die. Go fill his out
I'd be willing to fill out such a survey as long as it is anonymous.
I've created one, completely anonymous, all questions are optional. I based it on some general demographics surveys I found online.
Filled it out, thanks for making that!
In part prompted by the marshmallow test post https://tildes.net/~science/1dp/why_rich_kids_are_so_good_at_the_marshmallow_test
This is a really good point, and not something I thought of when I posted that article. Thanks for starting this discussion. :)