15
votes
How does Tildes feel about restricting usernames?
Usernames can be inflammatory or just distract from discussion in general, and especially considering that humor is not a focal point of Tildes, should they be restricted to something reasonable/appropriate?
Ban people for including anything in a username you'd ban someone for in a comment.
Hatespeech and/or obviously inflammatory things.
Going further I think would start to get into the "no fun allowed" zone, which is not something Tildes should do. I mean, shittymorph, would you consider that inappropriate?
Where do you draw the line?
I agree, whoever's drawing the line for comments should draw the line for usernames as well.
What makes you think they aren't? The code of conduct doesn't specify that it only covers comments, or posts, and comments, and thus there's no reason to assume that it doesn't also cover usernames. Unless you've heard one of the admins/moderators say otherwise somewhere?
As I was informed recently, there is currently only one admin/mod of Tildes: Deimos. All those other knowledgeable people posting informative answers are just helpful volunteers, with no actual power to do anything on the site. (Although that will probably change as the site continues to grow.)
I believe there are three people right now that are admins of ~Tildes. I want to autocomplete their names but I can't remember the spellings.. that cfafbro person is an admin, I know that.
Nope, only @deimos is an admin, I am also just a volunteer.
So do you actually like contribute to code or anything like that? You seem pretty official to meeeeee!
A bunch of us (me, @amarok, @buckeyesundae and a number of others who I don’t know if they want to be named) have been helping @deimos over the last year or so by theorycrafting on features/systems for the site, finding articles/studies/blogs worth reading regarding social media/social dynamics/social system development, offering advice and providing other assistance where we can (me with design and hierarchy prototype work mostly).
Now that the site is launched we have all voluntarily taken on various responsibilities to continue to help as best we can, e.g. answering questions, writing documentation, handling user vetting before sending invites, modding the subreddit, organizing the gitlab, monitoring the site for trouble/suggestions/questions, etc simply because @deimos can’t do everything himself and needs to focus on other more important things like getting everything ready for opensourcing.
However we are still just volunteers, @deimos has the final say in everything and his word should always be taken as the only definitive authority.
This exactly.
Deimos wrote the code, it's his non-profit, it's his passion, and after talking to him about more social media topics than I can ever remember, he's convinced me that he's the right guy for the job. I say that as someone who has engaged most of reddit's 'competitors' this way at one point or another... Deimos was the only one to reach out to me directly, back when this was all just an 'idea'.
Frankly I'm amazed with his patience with my rantings. :D
As a grateful Redditor, thank all of you. This is a fantastic undertaking.
Seems pretty official to me. You're all his right-hand men and women.
I think @awoo is some sort of mod? Though Awoo said they prefer the term janitor.
Not here! But I have been in several communities both on and off reddit.
Offtopic - Do these @ mentions not notify users @deimos ? I stumbled across this one accidentally and don't think I receive an unread message about it like on reddit. I had initially assumed that the @'s were functioning the same way.
Only @deimos works as a mention right now, and that only works because deimos reads every post 🙄
He definitely does not read every post I wrote a 25,000 character post in response to the 60,000 character talk from 2003 he posted. I'm certain he skipped over it :DDD The man has important work to do!
I assume @awoo is a moderator on Reddit (or somewhere else), just like I am.
Ah, ok. This place is full of reddit mods, it seems.
I mean I technically mod two subreddits, but they don't have any subscribers besides me 😒
Indubitably! :)
Okay. I may have misinterpreted when someone told me "there's only one official Tildes representative".
Nope, you got it right. Maybe we should do a daily discussion about this to clear things up. So many of us have been answering questions for everyone for so long that it's probably easy to make the mistake of thinking any of us have authority. The buck stops with Deimos, period.
I have yet to make an assumption, I'm only here to ask.
I draw it at names intentionally trying to be hurtful. Such as, ihateRACISTTERM or ihateTHISGROUP or ihatePERSONWHOIDENTIFIESWITH. You get the ide. I say just block certain words. Usernames can't allow words like fag, honkey, etc.
I think it would be appropriate for admins to ask users with names like "PM_ME_YOUR_TITTIES" to pick a new handle. That sort of thing isn't really hate-speech, but it could make some users uncomfortable, and it doesn't really add to the site.
I'm curious about the judgment for something like PM_ME_UR_TILDES, which is slightly more ambiguous but still suggestive.
We're getting more specific than I could've possibly hoped.
It's just the nature of censorship (not saying it wouldn't be justified censorship) - the internet perceives it as a bug and routes around it oftentimes. If we create a rule for banning usernames, people are going to search for the boundaries of that rule for different reasons.
There are a few ways to argue why your example may or may not be allowed, but the first one you chose is certainly the worst one.
Personally, I'm no free speech buff, but imho, in regards to censorship even common sense decisions need a well-defined and reasoned justification.
If you judge based on comfort, then you're bound to create filter bubbles for yourself and as admin for your entire site. Not to mention that it scales badly.
A better solution would be to disallow all caps usernames longer than 5 characters, or even, more than [edit:] 2-5 capital letters in any username. pm_me_your_titties suddenly doesn't matter as much.
You could also prohibit the mention of private parts as there is no topical reason (e.g., no reddit/4chan-style truly everything goes talks) to tolerate such terms in usernames on tildes.
"It doesn't add to the site" is similarly problematic. It's only short or mid-term a viable way of judging things.
As I understand tildes is an attempt to regulate how communities communicate, not what the communities ought to be. So unless tildes fails, quickly it won't be valid to refer to the site as a whole.
I agree that judging by comfort isn't a great standard, especially if the site wants to allow discussion on a wide variety of topics. However, I think names and posts should be held to a different standard. Names aren't really speech though. I think, since names are used throughout the site they need to be appropriate in any context. Having a specific nick isn't really a restriction on using the site, but people might be driven off by seeing a name that makes them uncomfortable everywhere. Like, you can avoid a topic that has uncomfortable discussion, but you can't avoid someone with an uncomfortable username.
Usernames are either a thought or an expression.
In the end, you're still talking about comforting other people. If you go that route, you will have to ask whom do you want to comfort, to what extent, what for, etc.
Again, you ought to find solutions that scale well. You have to define constraints where you need to understand as little of the context as possible.
"Don't demand naked pictures from users, even in your username" is pretty well defined. As is "don't use slurs."
Or, more broadly: "If something would be considered harassment if it was in a post or private message, don't make it your username."
Personally there's no need for some objective scale. Just warn people that if they choose a name that's inappropriate or offensive they may be asked to change it. No reason not to use mod intuition to make these judgements since we can, and a biased decision can't do much damage.
That's along the lines of what I was thinking.
Define reasonable
I don't have that, but just like comments can be moderated, maybe usernames can be as well?
With any luck, Tildes will maintain it's current type of user-base, where people are quite mature and this won't be that big of a problem.
We've already had ban-worthy comments, so I don't know if we can rely on pure luck.
two out of several thousand (?) is pretty good though, I gotta say
Definitely
The takeaway here is - be mindful of who you invite. It's really no big deal to take a quick look at someone's online activity and make sure they aren't a bile driven pile of angst. Their views are much less important than their attitude.
I made a similar point in another topic, I don't think the opinions are as important as the way they are expressed.
Unfortunately it's pretty much a law of nature that it won't, unless the community stops growing.
Reddit pretty much nailed it I feel. No slurs, no hate speech, etc. If we moderate usernames too heavily based on a username making somebody uncomfortable, we could be on the path to a safe space-type website that Deimos stated he does not want it to be. Are usernames like "PM_ME_YOUR_TITS" mature or necessary? No, they are not, but I don't think Tildes should be a cornerstone community of maturity and purity. Dirty jokes can be funny, and immature jokes can be funny, they just need context. Usernames are a fairly harmless bit of text to identify users, it only becomes a problem once they use it to identify as part of a movement, racist or something otherwise hateful. Just because his (or her) username is PM_ME_YOUR_TITS doesn't mean you have to