To those of you making decisions about Tildes.
For the leaders of Tildes, please remember to grow slowly. Your initial policies will somewhat determine the demographic of your early members, and future policy will determine changes in the demographic until a larger demographic and your growing body of policies are in a tug-of-war for the direction of this undertaking.
This means if you act to appease, say, green martian chess players, the site will eventually attract more and push your growth that way. This applies to gamers, trolls, yammerheads(like me), or any class of people you care to name. I only say this because right now I sense a narrow demographic of current members.
Right now, you the leaders have a great amount of control over direction. My hope is for a wider demographic, while retaining a direction that discourages trolling, pedantry, and general instability. A daunting challenge. I respect your initiative and resolve in making a true non-commercial community, one that I hope points the way out of the advertising driven system of funding. Good luck and thank you again.
End of brown-nosing post. /s
I think that the owners of this site shouldn't focus at all on the demographics of the user base but more on the principles that they want the community to represent. It shouldn't matter what the topics are or who is involved with those topics so long as everyone involved follows the same principles. In this way, you can never "appease" green martian chess players because there's nothing that separates them from any other demographic on the site. Every decision should be framed in the context of "whatever the current topic is, are we ok with this behavior or this functionality or this usage of our platform".
I think the narrow demographic that you're seeing is simply because of how people are finding out about the site. It's a natural fit for tech-centered users who are currently looking for alternatives to other sites. That really narrows down who will put in the effort to get an invite.
This guy gets it. ;)
Remember that the goal is to eventually place value judgements, governance systems, and content management/curation in the hands of each individual group. That includes letting groups code their own systems - it's open source, if you want a feature, you can develop it yourself, or find someone to develop it for your group. The space of what a 'feature' is has barely been explored in the context of quality content. People will invent crazy and brilliant solutions to the problems of each group. We just need to give them the space and support to do that, and let the groups lead the way. When groups get into a fight (and they will) we need to broker the conversation and help them find consensus on resolutions.
There will still be some very basic sitewide guidelines, though - don't be an asshole is at the top of the list. The only real rule is to stay civil. There's also the overall founding goal - quality is more important than popularity. The rest of the internet is based on popularity, so if that's what you want, you don't need to come to tildes to get it. That's why we're leery of 'fluff' content like cat pictures and low-discussion-value content like pornographic images, so that stuff is being biased out. Shirky's talk made the point the best - the group is its own worst enemy, and it will want to slide back into base low-effort behavior. We need to design governance to help make sure that doesn't happen.
Someone suggested handling ~politics by going in the direction of ~politics.healthcare and ~politics.immigration rather than ~politics.liberal and ~politics.conservative. That's the kind of simple design choice that can foster discussion and put it on better footing here than it has anywhere else. That's why it's a question of governance - that's not a part of the code, it's a choice to shape the social dynamics in a better, more meaningful quality discussion framework. All we have to do is listen, and people will come up with good ideas like that. We can try them out, see how they work in practice, and if it fails, that's fine, we'll learn something anyway and use it in the next iteration/attempt.
Wow...
First off, who said I was a guy? ;)
Secondly, that's really exciting to see discussions around those types of things (~politics.healthcare instead of ~politics.liberal, etc.). That's exactly the type of thing I like to see because it doesn't inspire division right from the get-go but, instead, specificity.
I like where this is going. Now if only there was a better way to follow my past conversations here... lol
I agree that the narrow demographic will probably change. But again, I think the decision makers need to be mindful of their growing constituency if for example they don't want to unintentionally alienate women, transgender, or again any other group, like mine. Even simple decisions, like what groups to form first can unintentionally influence demographics. For example, the presence of ~tech ~science and ~games and the absence of ~families could easily influence this.
"But there's more demand for a games group than families!" Perhaps. In any case, going for group popularity at this point could have have long lasting consequences if the ideal is a balanced demographic.
Please don't take this in any way as me sounding at this point dissatisfied with the way things are going. I'm very impressed, actually. Just pointing out that some people can be good and polite non-trolls and still be more sensitive than others.
Reddit has something like 300k subreddits. Usenet has what, 100k groups total? Someday if Tildes does well, that's the scope of what we're looking at... though certainly not as chaotic. There's plenty of 'room' here. We just need to be mindful of how the house's floorplan is laid out.
Yes. And you have to balance too much growth with too little, especially since it tends to be exponential once it goes beyond invitation only. The invite mode is a huge advantage of controlling growth at the pace you want, I'd hang on to that until you have to let it go. But then, the same issue of expanding your demographic will be affected as well. Hopefully in a good way.
I'm very excited to see where this site goes. I've participated here in the last 24 hours more than I ever did on Reddit in 6 years.
I'm hoping for a fairly positive community that's willing to support each other and be respectful of everyone's fews. I definitely don't mind a fully invite only community, although I know there is plans to go public.
I personally believe the site could be a privilege more than anything. If you follow the rules and you stay within your own lane while still contributing content, nothing wrong with that. The biggest issue will be the people who come and don't get reprimanded for their actions. Do we want a strict censorship filled community to enforce people to be kind? Do we want people to be shitty and let the entire site go into a hostile hell?
Amen to that. That's the hope we have spinning of groups and subgroups and subgroups nested deeply. The tail end, the last groups in that chain, will all remain small communities, which tend to self-govern well. The ones up the chain will slowly become stewards of the content below them. That way, submissions will all tend to fall into small communities where they have a real chance to be seen, and if they produce quality, they can bubble up to everyone. It should help cut down on the noise you see in a 'default' subreddit with 4k submissions per day - that's unmanageably large, no one can get eyes on all of that. Instead you get a tree of 1000 groups, and the entire tree has 20,000 submissions a day - but most groups will only have a couple dozen submissions at the bottom. More chance for it to be seen, and more time too, since we're not on reddit's 24-hour turnover cycle. All those smaller groups will be using the 'activity sort' while the largest ones at the top turn over more into a vote-based sorting like reddit. Best of both worlds.
My intuition is that many people will feel incentivized to post immediately to the widest-possible audience they can, even if that means more competition. What mechanics have been proposed to strongly encourage people towards the leaf nodes?
Definitely, although it for sure will get worse.
Minor side note: there's nothing inherently uncivil about pedantry.
LOL that may be!
ped·ant
ˈpednt/
noun
noun: pedant; plural noun: pedants
And "excessive concern" is just a form of enthusiasm that strikes the majority as unusual. If anything, enthusiasm should be encouraged.
I'd say it's more annoying than anything
Right. I think it's important to clearly grasp that ~ is about civility, and that's very different from being about "no annoyances" or "no actions from others that piss me off".
I think laying out the values and floorplan of the site now will help it grow into its larger userbase that it will eventually accumulate. Until then, we need to be careful with growth so that we don't get overrun too quickly putting unneeded strain on the admins. Tools and values need to be in place to facilitate any meaningful growth.
I don't understand the balancing of demographics. Why is this a desired outcome? Is a niche a bad thing?