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If we can't block users can we at least filter out topics posted by those users?
It seems like Tildes is not going to ever get a block user function.
But it would be really handy if I could get a filter to auto-ignore any topics started by certain users. Would this be something that Tildes would ever implement?
well, there's always
put it into stylus on the domain tildes.net and youll never see an article from them again
Something like that would also work with uBlock Origin, if anyone uses that but doesn’t want to install Stylus also.
All of these suggestions are great if you’re on desktop. But on mobile these aren’t really options. Is blocking users really so beyond the scope of what tildes means to be?
I don't think it is. Worth noting is that the user blocking feature request was approved by @Deimos ages ago... but unfortunately, like a lot of slightly less important features, it simply hasn't been implemented yet.
cc: @DanBC
It's a good feature to have, and it has value beyond just what it offers the individual user. I think it's also an underexplored avenue for detecting problematic users. If someone is collecting an awful lot of blocks that's a sign there is an issue. Not sure exactly what to do with that information as a sort of 'reform' process yet, but the possibility to do something is there.
With Firefox mobile on Android, you can use extensions. I highly recommend it!
And on iOS, userscripts can be used in Safari with the extensions Userscripts and Macaque. iOS Safari has supported extensions like these for a while now but this knowledge hasn’t become widespread for some reason.
Most extension devs sort of ignore Safari. There is requiring a macOS device for development and the absolute pain that is dealing with the app store.
But the general compatibility with other browsers also has been really poor. A few years ago they did sort of switched to webextension support but still wrapped in xcode and very incomplete.
It might have gotten better but for the most part they blew any goodwill extension devs might have years ago.
So, I know that Safari on iphones supports extensions in theory. But never had the inclination to look into it.
I'm with you on this. Granted, some people are properly atrocious in their approach to being online but why not ride it out and see what happens?
I didn't like shitty uncle Bob for my whole childhood, but now his nonsense just fades into the noise. Nobody engages, nobody acknowledges.
I have a different perspective. I wish people could block me because I don't want my posts to be a continuous source of annoyance to someone.
Nothing against Uncle Bob though, he's not that bad once you get to know him.
You can do this yourself with some client-side user CSS. This works for me:
You can
opacity: 0.2;ordisplay: none;or whatever you want.damn i got over-excited by :has being legal now and didn't even search for an attribute on the parent 😆
Honestly, I was going to do the same until I happened to see something on the higher level element in the DOM inspector. :)
A simple idea would be to voluntarily tag our own posts with our usernames. So, for example, I would add
user.louto all my posts, making it possible to filter them. That wouldn't require any additional work or coding. We would only need mods to agree to not remove those tags.It's a nice idea, but you will find it is impossible to get people to do this. Speaking personally, I'd probably also forget half the time, which would make it even more annoying for someone wanting to filter me.
You have a point. I would probably do it because I just hate the idea of bothering someone.
To be honest, not sure if that is the healthiest of attitudes? I am all in favor of online interactions where people are considerate of each other. Assuming that is the baseline, going out of your way to be able to allow people to block to me seems a bit much. Because at that point you are making other people's issues your own.
Not to mention that the action of doing so would just reinforce the mental image of you potentially posting things other people do not like.
Figured I'd mention that because from the comments you post you do pass the "considerate of others" baseline by a wide margin as far as I am concerned :)
On a more practical note, the majority of the people that will end up being blocked likely don't pass that baseline to begin with and will not even consider adding tags like that.
Small disclaimer, I did type this out with comments in mind as well. I just realized that I completely forgot the context of this thread was about blocking posts of specific people. Though, generally speaking, I still think the same applies.
Thanks!
I'm not really sure wether blocking should be a site mechanic from a philosophical standpoint, but given the fact that a lot of people really wants it and asked for it repeatedly for years, I'd probably just give them that regardless of any complicated objections I might have. At some point I just think it would be more positive than negative from a practical standpoint.
I'm perfectly fine filtering tags myself, and have no need to block anyone.
And my impression is that this is not really about blocking people because they're bad in any way, but maybe someone posts a lot about things that someone else find annoying or upsetting without being really abhorrent behavior.
You could pretty easily do this with greasemonkey or some other variant if you are on a desktop. If you’re interested in something like that, I could probably help you out.
Could you explain what the reasoning for blocking users or their posts is? The only time I made use of that option on Reddit was when “r/thedonald” was taking over the main page and cluttering everything with their inflammatory rhetoric. The community and moderation on tildes have felt completely different. Is there a toxic group of users on here that I’m unaware of?
I use the blocking feature on reddit and Discord liberally . If it gets to the point that I've noticed a username show up on annoying posts a few times, then I'll probably block them. It doesn't have to be inflammatory rhetoric, sometimes people are annoying just by the tone they use.
The people on this post saying they never block anyone, so it isn't needed, or that CSS hacks are enough, are missing the point. Blocking users should be a first class feature.
Some people are tedious bloviating cunts and I get nothing useful from their posts. Blocking them would enable me to more easily avoid them.
Some people post topics that they do not find interesting but they think other people may find interesting. But they also don't understand the content matter. This means they often post shallow flamebait, and blocking them is a useful way to avoid this flood of shit topics.
If people are toxic there are Tildes reporting mechanisms that I would use. But there's a range of behaviour between "toxic and "saint" and there are people who are not toxic but I'm just not interested in anything they post ever, and I find it personally a it too tedious or aggravating to deal with, and my Tildes life would be better if I blocked them. Importantly, it would be better for TIldes too because I'd avoid getting sucked into long mildly argumentative discussions with someone who clearly does not understand the nuances of the subject and who is JAQing off.
Honestly, I don't think you should need to explain why you want to block someone. Everyone understands its use.
I've blocked people for being frequent commenters that get a lot of attention but bring no value to me with their comments, I just found the obviousness of the comments annoying. It's not a problem for anyone but me, so why bother anyone else?
I don't think anyone HAS to explain. But I have to admit I was curious what users were so annoying. Tildes seems very positive compared to most internet, and generally has a really high signal to noise ratio.
I don’t know how such a feature would work, but I wish there were some way to see the posts/posters/tags that get blocked/filtered most frequently for educational purposes. I’ve been trying to improve my posting habits since arriving here but the lack of negative signal can make that difficult.
I block anything tagged video. It annoys me when someone posts a video without that tag although it's usually cleaned up quickly.
I don't necessarily mind video posts. What I do dislike, greatly, is when they can't be bothered to describe and perhaps offer a summary of what the video is, why someone might click on it. No, just a drive-by "here's a vid link" and nothing.
I also don't like posts, vid or otherwise, that go to a paid link. Medium or Substack, for example. Especially when I suspect the person is posting their own link, or the link of someone they know. That's basically marketing, and they're doing it out of self-interest rather than any desire to foster some sort of discussion.
That's what the tags are for. I (and others here) put in a lot of effort to tag video topics (even ones we haven't submitted ourselves) for precisely that reason... even when the video's subject is obvious from the title, and the reason for it being posted should be self-evident. So a comment basically repeating the same things that are already in the tags, and explaining why the OP thought it was worth sharing here, would be redundant in most cases, IMO.
If you genuinely suspect something like that, report it to @Deimos. He was reddit's "anti-evil" engineer for many years, and one of the major reasons he got hired in the first place was because he identified a major astroturfing/spam campaign on reddit operated by several prominent gaming sites. So he has extensive experience with handling that sort of thing.
I honestly don't find tags useful for that and as a result rarely look at them. Tags ... well... tag something but that is only the broadest of summaries often lacking a lot.
Also, because they can and are changed by others they don't tell the context of what made someone submit that video.
I realize you put a lot of work in them. I don't mean to belittle that effort, but they don't work for everyone. Certainly not for this use case.
I personally value actual submission statements more, even if they are fairly short and might overlap with tags. Because a submission statement will often contain the motivational triggers that might make me check out the video.
So yeah, lacking that statement, video posts more often than not I tend to ignore as well. Even more so when their title is also a carbon copy of the YouTube title, I might as well browse YouTube at that point.
TBH, I genuinely don't understand the desire some people have for submission statements, or the appeal of them.
Why does there always need to be additional context provided, and an explicitly stated reason to justify why someone submitted something? "Because I found it interesting/amusing/heartwarming/enjoyable/etc and so wanted to share it with others who might also find it that" is typically why, and is more than sufficient reason for submitting things here. And seeing slight variations of that type of statement repeated at the top of every comment section adds nothing of real value to the site, IMO.
All that forcing/expecting submissions statements would really do is make it so even fewer people are likely to contribute topics, and those that do regularly contribute will be less likely to submit as often since it takes even more effort to do so. And we're already kinda hurting for enough content being posted, so I personally don't see the benefit. It honestly just sounds like a recipe for the site completely dying off, to me.
Unless you are also subscribed to the same channel, and also enabled the bell notifications for that channel, what are the odds you would have actually stumbled into watching the same videos that get posted here by directly browsing YouTube. Their content browsing options are total crap, and their search is getting more broken/useless with every iteration of its design... with only 5-10 results that actually match your search terms, and the rest of the page now filled with "Popular today", "People also watched", "Shorts", "Previously watched" and similarly useless crap.
Tildes is a link aggregator, so at least the submissions here are user curated by another human, and them posting something is already their implicit endorsement of the content. And you can also sort everything in various way, browse by or filter out various tags here, and even get to know the posters themselves, and whether the type of content they typically submits align with your own interests and tastes. Whereas on YouTube, recommendations are purely algorithmic and essentially a black box which you have very little direct control over. Sometimes that leads to interesting things popping up in your feed, but for a lot of people it just leads them down conspiratorial, right-wing rabbit holes without them even realizing it.
About the only time I can see anyone truly needing to provide a submission statement here in order to provide actually essential context is if the submitter disagrees with the submission's premise, but they still wanted to discuss the issue with other users here.
I get this but I'm more interested in engaging with people. Someone's personal recommendation for a video means a heck of a lot more to me than just a link. And as much as we're a link aggregator, we pride ourselves on the thoughtful discussion. That's why it's helpful to me. Is the video funny? Clever? Reveals some neat intricacies of a process? I get that different things may matter to others but I don't think it's a mystery why some folks prefer to engage when there's a human connection.
I guess I can understand that... but I honestly see the human connection as already existing due to the fact the topic was submitted by a user, and often ones I have interacted with before so I know they're not bots or something. Which for me is really no different than when people post things in Slacks or Discords I am a part of as well. And I don't expect or need them to justify those links by providing a submissions statement there either.
Perhaps it's about your connection to the fellow Tildes residents then? I don't really "know" folks here well enough to feel a posted video inherently having that human feel because the name is not prominent and while I'm getting to know individual people by their posts I don't necessarily know if we share personal tastes. I don't share professional experiences either with most folks here or even gender.
The simple fact that a human sent it doesn't matter by itself if I don't know the human. Discord's similar. How big the discord or chat is means a lot. Especially when they're longer videos. I'm not knocking folks for not posting comments or whatever, but videos sit languishing for me because at best I think "oh I should watch that... But no one else has found it worth talking about, oh it's pretty long, ok I'll look later..."
But all that to say, that connection matters to me, and isn't inherently formed by just a username. I don't often register names on links unless there's a comment under them that says OP, and iirc that's by design.
To some degree it was done so emphasis was taken away from ownership over link topics. But IIRC, the major reason that the submittor's username isn't included on every topic is mostly because of the extremely limited horizontal space on mobile. :P
I had to fight for the usernames to be included by default in ~music and ~creative because those are more "taste based" and "user created content" groups, so who submits the topic is often more important than the domain name (which is typically just YouTube.com or Imgur.com). ;)
p.s. @Bauke's Tildes ReExtended has a "Show Topic Author" feature which adds them to every topic regardless of which group they're submitted to.
Hey design is design :-P
I've pivoted to three cheers on mobile mostly now that the functionality is improved
I do miss my tags in the app which helped me remember which people were who and that doesn't help either.
It's okay that you don't understand, to each their own. One thing I'd like to clarify is that I don't want people to force to write a submission statement. However, I do value submission more that have a spontaneous one. As @DefinitelyNotAFae says, I like the engagement with people in the form of seeing people's thoughts on things.
Tags in that regard do give a bit of insight on what has been submitted but not why it has been submitted.
Ah, okay. That does change things. I assumed you were for them being mandatory, since the majority of people who have brought the idea of submissions statements up in the past have usually been pushing to try to make them mandatory. So perhaps I brought a bit of my strongly negative feelings towards the idea of them being mandatory into this conversation because of that. Sorry about that.
Yes, I agree with you. I have some thoughts to add.
In my opinion, requiring submission statements would pose an excessive burden on posters. If someone needs clarification, they can ask for it conversationally. That is more pleasant and conducive to interaction.
Another reason to not share quotes or submission statements is that I do not trust my own ability to summarize the content. When I did that, people tended to engage with my selection more than the content, and I don't think that is fair with whatever I'm sharing.
I have an implicit trust in our user base, and I am usually confident that they are perfectly capable of grasping anything I post without any assistance.
Finally, I don't like the idea of making Tildes more formal than it already is. Sure, we should make an effort to share and produce great content, but this is not an academic environment, and things like that make me afraid that we'll become stuffy and unapproachable.
Just dropped in to say how much I love this turn of phrase. If ever there is a blocking function, this one will keep you off my personal block list @DanBC.