Tildes feels like the last bastion of the Information Superhighway
(Information Superhighway, for you youngin's, was a term that was thrown around quite a bit in the early days of the internet. See also: "world wide web" and "cyberspace")
I'm writing this post to say thanks to the developers, admins, and moderators of Tildes. This is one of the few corners of the internet that hasn't been completely taken over by bots, trolls, shills, or astroturfers. This is a tight-knit community of folks who are good at disagreeing with each other respectfully. It's the way the world should be.
I'm thankful that I can come here and talk about things that I'm uncomfortable discussing elsewhere on the internet or even in the real world.
I came from the great Reddit exodus of 2023. For a while, when I was actively watching the Tildes User Growth chart, I started to worry when it looked like user registrations were stagnating. I even created a post asking the community if it was time to accelerate growth. Thankfully, there was pushback from Tildes veterans who understood that bigger is not necessarily better. I now agree with that sentiment.
Be human, everybody!
I don't think it can be underestimated how much of this is the result of Deimos' tireless work. I joined very early only because I heard Deimos was making his own site and I felt compelled to follow him. I've had the pleasure to see how he worked behind the scenes before, and he has my implicit trust. It's only because of him I don't see this site as "social media" but rather a genuinely thoughtful experiment of community building with a morally good ethos behind it. I trust nothing here will ever be sold, only quietly retired and deleted should he ever decide to move on.
But also, a lot of credit to people like Bauke, cfabbro, and the dozen others who work quietly and selflessly on the site (so consequently I don't have your names at the top of my head, I'm so sorry). It's a good crew, and the lack of ego about it is key to the success.
Kudos to that. For me, it's both the personal connection to somebody doing great work and the novelty of seeing a small community push an alternative product in an age of tech behemoths. David *instead of * Goliath is the way to go.
His no nonsense rules are a large part of what makes tildes good I feel. It is what has resulted in a toxicity-free community 99% of the time. Other forums I have been on have had a lot more lax and long leashes for toxic users which while they had a community feeling were not as comfortable to be on. The few simple rules here have lead to almost no heated arguments or personal attacks ever. Rare instances that those do happen, he shuts it down very quick.
Yeah, when I discovered Tildes I read about Deimos and his previous work on reddit and it was just and list of "oh he was the reason behind this positive change".
When a small site like this kicks off, I normally don't bother, because it's so much effort from every single user to get traction and if a part of the community crumbles, then the whole thing slides into the abyss.
But with Deimos' track record I thought I'd give it a shot and I am extremely happy I did!
About 15 years ago, when I was a kid, I was not yet plugged into social media but was instead a member of some hobby related forums. This place feels more like that than any type of social media and it's better for it. I love seeing the same names pop up here and following updates on people's lives. This place rocks and keeps me coming back. In addition to the developers, admins, and mods I think a big thanks to the community is in order.
Hobby related forms are what I miss the most about the old Internet.
I think I've mentioned this on Tildes before. I used to own an Acura Legend (Honda/Acura discontinued the car in 1995) and because of that car, I joined an Acura Legend forum. At one point I needed apart but couldn't find it because the car was no longer for sale. I posted in the forum and within a couple of days, I had multiple people around the US and Canada offer to go to their local junkyard to find it for me. And eventually I had two different dude's send me the part, one from Quebec and another one from Washington State (I live on Virginia).
And then I paid them back by mailing them cash!
I really hope people and groups like this still exist in today's Internet.
Hear hear! Thank you to the aforementioned, but also thank you to the Old Guard for having us :) and thank you to the regulars for being here together, for the occasionals to add their perspectives like sprinkles on cupcakes, and for the lurkers who keep us honest with your votes
Yeah, you nailed it. While I'd love to see a survey of ages (maybe I'll make one!) a lot of the references used make me think that many users here are old enough to remember those days.
I grew up with the internet. Some of my earliest memories are my mom taking me to a local computer user group, which also had a BBS. I'd go home and then download all sorts of free/shareware games from the BBS. There was one dude nobody cared for too much because he kept uploading weird naked lady card games, which looking back is just generally hilarious, and in comparison to what's available today is hilariously innocent. I also remember when the university in town first got publicly usable computers with Mosaic on them.
Oh also the massive upgrade when we went from a 14.4 baud modem to 28.8, 2x the speed, so fast! lmao
Would that have been on a 486? I'm so ignorant to that era of the internet - would you have been using Netscape or a browser to access a BBS?
I started going on BBSes in the early 90s, on my 386 PC (Tandy 1000). In the earliest days, you didn't use a browser to access BBSes because they were terminal-based. So was your PC--Windows 95 didn't even exist yet. From a command line, you would launch your telnet software such as Telix or ProComm and it would dial into the BBS and render the pages in ASCII text, often with ANSI art because that was the best/only way to draw graphics in your terminal. You navigated it with your keyboard, using a mouse was typically not an option. GUI-based navigation became more common near the end of the BBS days but by then the Internet was kicking off proper so most BBSes were shut down by the late 90s.
BBSes were typically run on a single person's computer out of their house, on their normal phone line, so they had to be fairly simple by default, and access was often limited to just a few users at a time, sometimes just during certain hours of the day. So you'd make your own directory either in a .txt file or just writing down in a notebook the phone numbers and available hours of the BBSes you wanted to access. Probably also the phone rates for the numbers that weren't local to your area, because long-distance phone charges did apply.
It was a fun experience--playing door games like TradeWars and Operation Overkill, posting on message boards, grabbing warez, leaving and receiving DMs in your mailbox from other users, spending way too much time on drawing your own ANSI signatures. I have good memories of those days. Tildes, as a small and close-knit community with a very simple text-based site design, does have something of the vibe of dialing into a BBS in 1993.
Very cool - I had to idea how it functioned. Thanks!
If you would like to learn more, there is a nice documentary about BBSs with many interviews with the people who ran them: http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/
The second link on the homepage tells you where you can download and watch it for free.
I'll do it - thanks!
Do you remember that wonderful feel of the Tandy keyboard from those days? I had one with GeoWorks as the OS, and that keyboard stands out as my favorite I've ever used.
For sure--it was clacky but not too clacky, ha ha. A very comfortable keyboard to use.
That was on an Apple IIci running MacOS 6 or 7 using a BBS program to dial in to the server that had one modem per connection. 🤣
Yes! Back in the days I hung out a lot on various video game related RP bulletin boards (Elder Scrolls for example), where we'd just pass a role play back and forth between our characters. It was a lot of fun, and it's actually how I met my best friend. It's so much harder to connect with people online on a personal level nowadays.
I think it lacks variety of people. I just read the topic about what programs people use on daily basis, and 90% was linux command tools lol. This is obviously not representative of the average person.
On the plus side, people are respectful and genuinely interested in having a discussion instead of being assholes to each other, which is certainly a plus in today's social media landscape.
I do hope future growth comes from people who aren't IT dudes in their 30s/40s though, or this will just end up being another internet echo chamber.
I think that thread is a poor test of actual demographics. I use entirely generic enterprise software, and have no interest in having a conversation about it. It's the people who use software of interest to them who would opine on the topic, and so you'll naturally weed out other groups.
A great example of why sample size and diversity of sources is paramount when trying to come to any conclusions based on things like surveys. I'm a plain old boring windows user without any exciting programs I use (mostly just Chrome, OBS, and Discord) so why bother posting in a thread like that.
Speaking of discord, good grief, the new design.. makes my eyes twitch.
Haven't seen it yet, I don't upgrade super regularly. Is it that bad? Me and my friends have been contemplating swapping back over to Teamspeak 6 because discord has been really bad recently.
I would guess that like half of tildes are techies but we are plenty who just don't care. So yeah heavy selection bias in threads like that and obviously ~tech is also only used by people who actually care about tech - not me lol and I'm probably not alone in that.
That said I agree with you @sunset that I wouldn't mind more non-tech people as well as more variety of people in general. Guessing here but the site is probably 50% American, 45% western European and 95% white.
Early on, I made a music request here and someone responded who was either black or had an unusually in depth knowledge of obscure African American artists and music.
So who knows re people's color and ethnicity.
But I think you are correct re general demographics.
One of the very first groups of users invited to Tildes was the original /r/listentothis mod team lead by @Amarok, who are all INSANELY knowledgeable about music of all kinds, and several of whom are/were actual radio station DJs and/or music archivists. They in turn invited a lot of L2T regulars, who also have incredibly eclectic taste and broad music knowledge as well. And I know of several Rate Your Music members who are similar knowledgeable and active here as well. So I'm not surprised you encountered someone with an unusual depth of knowledge about obscure music here on Tildes, since this place was initially seeded with users like that. :P
I abused my executive mod power and linked the announcement of Tildes into the listentothis sidebar (last item) and across the stylesheet's announcement banner. It sat there for about five years before the new mods noticed and took it down, right in front of every single listentothis user who was paying any kind of attention to the music tsunami.
I invited all of reddit's cratediggers with that, though I wasn't flashy about it. Modding flashy was never my style anyway, my uses of green over there were to crack jokes, or post community curated content. Let's just say I recognize a lot of people's musical tastes and obsessions here from the early days of l2t - you can change your handle but not the music you love. Kinda amazing what being ten years older does for everyone's perspectives and attitudes and tastes.
I don't do bestofs for listentothis anymore, but I never stopped doing my own bestofs and mixtapes - which aren't as short or conservative as the official content was. Listening for other people is exhausting, but since I only have to listen for myself now I can cover ground much faster, plus I have about 2000 artists I'm following that listentothis helped me find. My real payment for all the mod work. :)
Fun fact, Deimos is an ex-listentothis mod. We invited him on to install Automoderator for us when only a couple dozen subreddits were even using it, and he coded some custom features just for listentothis to implement a curated content system. I saved the gold star badges in listentothis for the people who wrote code for the place, that was a real contribution. Curation did not catch on with many users, but it did surface the top content better than reddit's voting mechanics and it proved the mentality we're using here truly works, at least to me.
I think that thread might overrepresent the number of Linux users bc they're more likely to evangelize their favorite tools than most people 😄
Besides, not all the Linux-user techies here are men in their 30s/40s. It's easy to assume that, but it's not necessarily true. I've posted Linux distro recommendations before, and I'm a non-binary person in my 20s.
Exactly! Some of us are in our 50's, thank you very much!
What was I going to say, Android OS? My Kindle app?
Whatever software operates my car? 😅
Simplicity/Maxient just aren't relevant to most of y'all and they're like, fine. So... Yeah.
Yeah I'm using this super obscure gaming storefront called "Steam", you probably haven't heard of it.
And even some of us 30s-40s male Linux users are somehow not techy and have no idea what we’re doing.
l think I might be using arch btw but I’m not sure?
Hopefully we get the results of the demographics survey soon. Then we'll for sure know that 90% of users are north american IT dudes between the ages of 20 and 40.
I just want to say that this is not the last bastion by any means, and there are other strongholds out there that have stood the test of time. Metafilter is a perfect example.
Not gonna lie, I rarely see a worse colour scheme than that website has - that said, thanks for sharing! It looks cool and will check it out
You are not wrong!
I don't think I do. There's a stark difference between untenable growth and slow growth.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want another Reddit, but I like to see responses to be in the double digits regularly rather than sometimes.
There are plenty of topics that get no responses whatsoever and I do think having more varied interests will shake things up a bit.
This place is healthy but you need minor growth just to combat people leaving over time. During that same exodus it was far more lively, and mostly not in a bad way.
Just as an aside, I see you too lurkers, I know you're out there. Keep keeping on! We need lurkers too!
I agree wholeheartedly, and to second your point: about a year ago I asked the same thing (essentially, 'dang guys why is everyone here so nice?').
I'm shocked at pretty much every other website where I end up glancing at the comments. From news sites to youtube to tech blogs to sports sites to other forums and random memes found online. So much needless vitriol. I'm amazed tildes has managed to remain so level-headed for this long. Hope it stays that way forever.
I was also part of the 2023 Reddit exodus, invited by a friend who's ironically not active here at all (as far as I'm aware). I do still read a few niche subreddits that have pretty good communities and very low toxicity, and ignore the rest, but even still the quality of discussion there is pretty low most of the time. Sometimes it can honestly be great in the smaller subs, just often enough that I haven't deleted my account yet, but I imagine the day is coming.
Tildes has been such a breath of fresh air. I read a full-on argument in another thread yesterday but the discussion was totally respectful past an expected bit of snark, which is fine, both sides had valid points, and they agreed to disagree and left it at that. The quality of discussion here has been extremely high-level without feeling like an echo chamber--sure, a lot of Tildeans are probably like-minded to a degree or why would be voluntarily participating, and the people upthread talking about the assumed demographics of the site probably have a point (I certainly fall into it), but I don't feel like it's either a circlejerk or a circular firing squad.
I know there's been a bit of buzz around here lately about the "old" Internet (viz. the "I Hate the Internet" post the other day) but this place really does feel like the old Internet.
Tildes is great. Some other websites also scratch that itch. Like some suggestions on this recent post I made. I use bearblog.dev and it feels like Tilde's "brother from another mother". Discourse, perhaps? I don't know much about it, but anything that is not Discord looks good to me.
this might be where you spend most of your time but there are bastions of the old internet all over. humanity and human-focused content is everywhere there are people that care. not to take away from the appreciation in this post but it feels very doomerist/nihilist to try and assert this is one of the last