Tildes is changing the way I use and think about online engagement. How about you?
I'm used to browsing places like reddit, mastodon, kbin.social and midnight.pub. If I'm lucky I can find something lighthearted, witty or interesting. But there's a lot of outrageous posts as well as personal ramblings that make the effort feel like a slog.
I was slow to get into Tildes because I didn't find much "quick hit" posts, such as a good topical quip. I also wasn't as sure how to navigate to places I might want to post. But I did find it very easy to engage with existing posts.
It's in these existing posts that the transformative stuff happened for me. On other sites, long-form posts were often not in my interest or self-indulgent. But I found myself taking my time here, perhaps guided by the thoughtful comments that I saw already beneath the posts. Looking back, it's like a tone was set that I respected and didn't want to diminish.
The result is that I find the other sites under-stimulating, in spite of their design. Tildes has been really good for helping me reform my internet habits. I don't have that regret of excessive internet use as much now. Thanks to deimos and everyone on the site that makes it what it is.
If I miss one thing, it's using my native language. But at the same time, my gut says that things are good just as they are.
One of the nicest things I've noticed about my habits on Tildes is that I am no longer afraid of receiving message notifications. For the longest time on reddit I used to get genuinely anxious whenever I got a message there because I never knew if it was going to be from someone engaging in good faith with something I wrote, someone trying to troll me, a racist/LGBT+phobic tirade from some asshole, or an insult-laden message from someone pissed off at an action I took as a moderator there. And as a result I would often let my notifications sit unread for days, or even weeks until I was in the right headspace to deal with that kind of shit.
But on Tildes I gradually got over that fear, and nowadays I actually get excited whenever I receive a reply/message notification, like I also used to way way way back in the early reddit (and slashdot) days, since I know most people here generally do engage in good faith (even if I disagree with them). And unlike on reddit the users here are also unlikely to say any super nasty, hurtful, derogatory things. And even if anyone here does say something awful, they usually don't last long since @Deimos has very very little tolerance for that sort of behavior, and bans are actually effective due to the invite only nature of the site.
That's a great point about the notifications! I hadn't thought of that but now that you say it, I'd obviously gotten used to that sinking feeling in my gut when I see a notification on sites like Reddit and Meta sites.
I'm glad you have a better experience here. That kind of experience you describe does nothing but harm for the sender and the recipient.
I have thought this many many times on tildes. Orangereds are something I look forward to on this site instead of being a coin flip of whether it will make me mad or not.
It was wonderful to me how quickly the distaste for notifications that I had from Reddit turned into delight at notifications here at Tildes. It's interesting to me that it is especially true when there is a differing opinion on something; on Reddit it would often be fruitless, but here it is almost always an opportunity to learn something, which tends to be fairly rare these days. I think that's the sign of a very good community that is well maintained.
I unfortunately got embroiled in a lot of the bullshit in the early days of Tildes when it was still a bit of a shitshow, back before all the most problematic/antagonistic users left the site or finally got banned, so I still had a bit of apprehension/anxiety about notifications even here. But for the last 4 years or so, it's been way way way more chill, and that anxiety has been replaced by genuine excitement whenever I see a notification now.
I have also gotten much better at staying out of certain discussions I know will inevitably get me heated too though. And the few times where I do get into those kind of triggering (for me) discussions these days, I've gotten much better at recognizing my mistake, and either ignoring the topic, or deleting my comments outright, so the temptation to continue arguing with someone isn't there anymore... Which I suppose is another big difference in the way I have changed my habits thanks to Tildes, @FarraigePlaisteach.
I just like the slow food aspect of the whole thing. Topics stay in my feed for more than 3 minutes, I'm recognizing usernames as I'll see them more than once.
Tildes comes with all of the ups and downs (wait - "realities") of talking to people in your community.
You know who they are, you see them around and whether or not you agree or disagree, at least you're familiar with who they are.
I like recognizing the usernames. It reminds me more of a discord server or small forum than a traditional publicly accessible social media website. I really only visit while I'm at work, so it doesn't feel like it invades my private time at home like other social media.
It made me reconsider my approach to online forums and social media. Places like Reddit have a very aggressive and debate-centric approach. Just like cfabbro, I was anxious of receiving notifications in these sites. Especially if I had made a controversial comment. While this is not completely gone, I think I realized how much I miss conversations, rather than takedowns.
For example, I made a controversial comment the other day. It attracted some heat, but after I explained myself, I was surprised to see it was very well-received. This is not something I'm used to seeing, because people generally dismiss it and double down, even going as far as hurling insults.
One of the strongest sides of Tildes is, for me, people being willing to listen. It feels really nice! And people do read the follow-up comments, too, which is part of this conversation-centric approach.
As a result of this, I'm trying to change my habits regarding online forums. There are two reasons. First is that I would much rather have this than what I've seen elsewhere so far. The second is that I don't want to disturb the habitat too much, so to speak. There's been an influx of new members, and I'm one of them, but this part of the site is what attracted me in the first place, and I want to preserve it. This requires unlearning things and learning, developing some new habits.
With this being said, I have some doubts about the extent of healthy communication on what I call open social media sites, where the mode of interaction is different from conversations among friends. I'm still in the process of considering various angles, and whether this is something I want for me. But for now, I can say that I do appreciate this place.
Tildes hasn't changed the way I use social media too much.
I came from bulletin boards and long form forum posting, this just feels homely and right to me.
The people here are different to those out on the web, that's for sure. It's a great bunch.
I'll still make quips and comments in jest on here, I just make sure it's a couple of levels down and not a top/root comment.
This is where I'm at. I started with forums in the 90's and never really liked how everything gravitated away from that, so Tildes feels like coming home. The last few years on reddit, I rapidly grew tired of the most upvoted shit being some quippy comment or "take down" (Redditor CLAPS BACK latest post on /r/news); I hated clicking on the comments for an article, hoping for some more insight only to see trite crap.
The stuff with Reddit last June got me over to Tildes here and also inspired me to search out some forums. So I've actually been participant at another forum since then and while it's slow moving, it's a nice place to check periodically and talk to the small community over there.
Pun threads as far as the eye can see! TBH, I sometimes miss them, since they were occasionally quite clever, and made me chuckle... but holy hell does it get exhausting and annoying when they dominate every goddamn comment section, even on super serious subjects. That's one of the reasons the
JokeandOffopictags exist here. So that even if people do have fun some with puns and such, you won't have to scroll halfway down the comment section to find actually on-topic, non-jokey, insightful comment threads.The initial reason I joined this place was because I wanted that old school forum experience I never had. All I’ve ever known was Reddit and Twitter. But it’s nice to have a place where you can have long form discussion, not just long form discussion but also a place where everyone remains level headed.
This place was good for reading longer form posts and articles and retraining my brain as I was getting accustomed to thinking in Twitterisms.
There might be a handful of people on the planet who can come up with profound, encompassing, insightful wisdom to share within the length of a tweet while staying on-topic with one of that day's discussion topics. And there are decidedly fewer topics that can be boiled down to that length in the first place, so those few legendary communicators will have few opportunities to share that wisdom with us.
People I know told me I was being a curmudgeon and "didn't get it" when Twitter first launched and proudly bandied about their concept of communicating in short little bites, while I was wondering "how is that useful?"
Anything pithy someone might come up with, almost anyone else can tear apart in ten different ways because pithy doesn't cover nuance. Something else that's started to become increasingly apparent as a flaw in social media communication in recent years. And most people aren't pithy, they're just trying to meme, hoping to amuse, or otherwise simply gunning for validation with not just their tweets, but most any social media post they make.
Text messages came about because they were "free." Because in that era, the phone companies were charging you by the minute. Sometimes by pieces of a minute; ten (or some other number) second increments. Some phone engineers figured out the phones had to phone home to the nearest tower regularly, and that there was available space in those data packets. Which is why texts were initially billed as being these small little communications.
Then phone companies jumped on the popularity of texts and began charging for them. Yay for capitalism! Twitter showed up somewhere in there and modeled themselves after texts.
I like jokes and stuff as much as the next guy, but most of what passes for discourse online fits into the humor category. And most people aren't comedians. So a lot of it's cringe, or ill timed, inappropriate, off topic, and so on. Which doesn't make humor bad, but does lead to a contribution towards some other prominent social media problems. Like lack of nuance.
Length doesn't equate quality, but there aren't that many issues the online mobs will seize upon that are well served by tweet length exchanges.
I was first attracted to Reddit because links to posts kept popping up when I'd search something. After a while, I started just checking Reddit out regularly. Eventually I joined. And for a time it was kind of nice. Posts there had length. Which meant more of them tended to have actual information in there somewhere, rather than just something empty. And people could actually type, actually write somewhat. They had interesting things to say, to contribute.
Then:
I mean, people fucking type like that. They post like that. One of the ideas on my idea shelf is a Falling Down style story where a 5th Grade English teacher sees a "message" from a former student that looks like that and she just fucking snaps. And goes on a rampage. With a shotgun.
One of the scenes will be her dragging one of those former students out of a car, throwing them down on the pavement, standing over them with the gun in one hand pointed at their nose and the other hand thrusting a phone into their face with one of that clueless idiot's tweets on the screen while screaming "Capitals, contractions, punctuation ... GRAMMAR MOTHERFUCKER, DID YOU LEARN IT?"
Ahem. Moving on.
But the masses continued to swell the ranks, and post lengths dropped, and then I started occasionally finding people who'd post two sentences, and half of the second was something like "sorry for the long post" or "TLDR: rah rah rah" where rah was some meme line.
When those are the majority, people who feel the need to apologize for having the temerity to post more than a single sentence (that would cause them to fail Elementary School), the downfall became inevitable. And what is it today? A cesspool of shouting and bandwagons.
For as long as Tildes can stay curated, and somewhat under control, it's interesting and useful. When it starts attracting those "oh sorry for long post" types, among others who populate the core ranks of the online mob, that'll be the beginning of the end.
Enjoying the ride while it's here.
Fuck me, do I want to see this movie or what!
I feel like I'm getting off of smoking by vaping here. Made me wonder why I do public social media, aside from out of habit. The answer is good discussion crops up, and it feels good to connect with people, but... Not enough for the negative parts of everywhere else, or very occasionally even here.
“not enough for the negative parts”. So true. I think I didn’t realise this until I found Tildes. I was just used to it.
I think the biggest difference for me has been the time spent on it. I spend much less time here than I did on Reddit, and that's a good thing. The time spent is much higher quality and it's actually educational to hear about different viewpoints even if I disagree with them.
It's still pretty interesting to me that the viewpoints here tend to be so much more leftist than I encounter among my own social circles (personal, professional and volunteer).
The biggest way that tildes has affected my internet habits is that there's almost no memes here (at least no image with funny caption posts). I discovered that I was hooked pretty hard on finding the next funnyclever picture. I find that I spend time on this site "by choice" while on others it more like I have to pry myself away.
This sounds dramatic, but Tildes has been life changing for me. Really, it could have been any singular small forum similar to this, but it has fundamentally changed how I interact with the internet. I'm a 90's kid and definitely used to use old school forums back in the day, but I very much fell in with the rise of social media in the 00's and 10's. I was never much of a twitter user, but I was using facebook daily and was, in retrospect, addicted to reddit.
I signed up for Tildes in 2018, used it for a little bit, and I'm pretty sure I fell off since I was still addicted to reddit. In the last 2-3 years I started to turn a leaf in the way I consume content on the internet. I stopped freaking out at headlines posted on reddit and spent more time reading sources, reading studies behind sources when applicable, etc., but I was still stuck in that stupid angry box where comment sections are 99% arguments.
When reddit started doing reddit things last year, that gave me an opportunity to quit cold turkey and start using Tildes as my main "online social interaction" site (not calling it social media since it really is not). At first, it was rough trying to train myself out of the reddit mentality. It took a lot of effort to be satisfied with 10 new posts in my feed a day instead of 200, and losing image or video based communities also took some getting used to. I found it was harder for me at first to keep up with news in sectors I care about (motorsports, gaming, etc.) since on reddit that stuff gets posted immediately, but here there's maybe one person that posts F1 news, nobody posts Indycar, etc., so it started prompting me to go out and actually seek news myself instead of waiting for it to plop in my lap.
In addition to the above, the smaller community here is just so lovely. Not only are heated arguments less common, thoughtful discussion is more common, friendly discussion and casual discussion is more common, and I absolutely love seeing some of the same usernames around. When I post and read through the "what are you playing this week" gaming thread, I feel so much more engaged with the community when it's now people I "know" and I can see their gaming habits over time. It feels much more like a community and almost like a shared blog space (that thread in particular, not necessarily the entire site). I know Tildes probably isn't for everybody, but the vibes for me are immaculate.
Now that I'm about a year into primarily using tildes for online interaction (besides discord to talk to IRL friends), I don't want to ever go back to social media. The way I consume content and view the internet in general has drastically changed for the better partly because of this site. It's very noticeable now how my internet habits differ from my friends, the level of "terminal onlineness" between them and I is staggering. I'm still online every day of my life, but the way I use the internet is with more purpose now. Instead of logging into reddit for 3 hours because I'm bored and want to scroll, I'm logging into tildes with the goal of learning something new or having a good discussion, or going to a news site to read actual news instead of just having the headlines pop up in my feed.
As an aside, rage bait news is almost entirely out of my life now and it genuinely affects my daily mood. I didn't realize how in the dumps I constantly was from the endless barrage of depressing news. While it's extremely important to stay informed on current events, now instead of seeing 100 headlines a week about how LGBT people are losing rights or something, I'm instead reading two or three articles. I'm just as informed, but my mindset is a whole lot less doomer.
I can't help but feel sad about the whole thing. It's now very clear to me how social media users are the product of their site. Feeds exist to addict you, get you to click on things, make you dependent on the site, to shove ads in your face, etc. It's very dystopian from my current point of view and I wish more people realized it. There are ways for people to interact with reddit, facebook, or twitter in a healthy and moderated manner, but so many people just get addicted instead, which isn't their fault. So for everyone's sake, I hope more people can find small communities they vibe well with, such as tildes, to kick social media to the curb!
Edit: one more thing I thought of is how my need of validation has significantly dropped. Places like reddit and twitter train you to want to see your likes or upvotes or whatever go brrrrrr and teach you that your opinion is only valid if a hundred other people think so. While that habit has been extremely hard to kick, it has less of a hold on me now. I do still check all of my comments on Tildes after a few days to see if someone read it/voted it, so I still deep down "need" that validation, but it's a lot less intense now and rapidly waning (I find myself satisfied if just a single person read my comment rather than needing an army of people to validate me).
'Tildes for Gaelgeoirí'... nach smaoineamh é sin :)
To me, Tildes confirmed the notion that good community management is the solution to online toxicity, and that the profit-driven insistence to always grow a user base is the biggest threat to that. Smaller, more persistant user bases like Tildes have much more productive discussions, because they're fostered like communities and not tapped like a business resource. This site has been very educational and has given me more of an interest in online community building as a sort of craft.
Gaeltacht Tildes 3km >
Ba bhreá liom é :)
Good points about learning from this. I think moderation and fostering is difficult to do and a lot to ask of someone. From looking at the varying character of different instances in the fediverse, it's beyond the scope of the software itself so difficult to reproduce. But at least as you say, we know that it's possible.
Tildes has definitely made me be more thoughtful in the comments I post. I remember when I first joined last June, I read somewhere that short, one line comments are discouraged because the comment section was meant to be a place for proper discussion where people can build off one another. As a result, I spend a decent amount of time actually thinking before writing my comments. I'll often write paragraphs on paragraphs and eventually whittle things down to be a few lines. Heck, even this comment went through many iterations before I got to this point.
Tildes has also just made me hyper-aware of my social media habits. I was hooked so I'd use social media on my computer and then pick up where I left off on my phone. I used to use Reddit, Twitter and Instagram fairly often on phone and computer. I've since mostly deleted social media apps off my phone, keeping around only Three Cheers around for random Tildes browsing. My Twitter usage actually increased when I switched off Reddit, I guess as a way for me to still get my meme fix. I've been lucky enough that my feed isn't really polluted with the junk that other people see but I doubt it'll stay that way for much longer.