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What change would make you quit Tildes?
I'm curious to see how many have as strong opinions as me about Tildes. I'll go first.
I'd quit if the site shifted away from a text-only philosophy.
I'm curious to see how many have as strong opinions as me about Tildes. I'll go first.
I'd quit if the site shifted away from a text-only philosophy.
If the site went commercial (focus on advertising, monetization, etc).
And yeah, Tildes being focused on text content makes it so much more pleasant; imagine half the posts here being memes, Twitter/Bluesky/Tumblr screenshots and videos.
I'd quit if too much of the population became too hostile towards people with different opinions than them on polarizing topics, especially if the differing opinions were expressed in a well-reasoned and respectful fashion. (I don't think this is the case right now to a tangible degree.)
This is one of the main reasons I left Reddit, people who were wrong and given evidence as to why and they just call you stupid. Then there were people calling you stupid because you had a different opinion instead of just discussing it. The main social sphere of these websites are toxic and thrive with hate engagement.
It's small scale enough that you can pretty easily dodge threads you know are going to get spicy, I do my best to do that since I don't have the best self control when it comes to responding to people. My mental health gets much better when I don't fall back into the reddit-hole of commenting back and forth forever.
Yeah I ignore a number of tags + manually ignore threads to help prevent me from feeling drawn into a topic or discussion unnecessarily (and unhealthily)
I basically have a rule now where I just stop engaging after 2-3 volleys unless it’s genuinely interesting. If it’s just me trying to clarify a point that someone is insistent on refusing to understand or who is just trying to use my posts to find things to tee off on it’s not worth the trouble.
Agreed. We can disagree on things, but no need for hostility.
Bingo. I'm so tired of fighting for the information I want.
It is still weird to me that with a text-only philosophy that the text editor is much closer to twitter than a nicer editor however.
I have no power to do anything about it, but curious what changes you'd like to see to the text editor?
Something that i don't think Deimos would ever allow to happen.
I used to be part of a few Reddit competitors that went down the toilet (namely Voat and Ruqqus). What killed them for me was white supremacists infiltrating these communities and turning everything into slur-filled cesspools.
I remember Ruqqus got abandoned and eventually shut down because of a rule change. They used to literally follow the Brandenburg Test (same one used by the SCOTUS) to determine whether to take down posts for inciting violence. After they toughened that rule following pressure from their hosting provider, about 99.5% of the community abandoned the site whilst calling the admins every antisemitic slur under the sun, which showed just how much the site had been infiltrated.
My point is, those places turned into Nazi bars and I think this site's owner would fight to his dying breath to ensure Tildes doesn't go down that route...
I think if the flood gates were opened and Tildes was no longer invite only. With the rise of AI accounts on other platforms I'd like to avoid that here for longer if possible.
I also read this in my morning tired brain as "What changes would make you quit your job" and was very confused at the first couple of comments.
I doubt Tildes will ever be large enough scale to ever have that kind of problem, even if they opened up signup's today. There probably would be some bot posts, but they'd be so obvious that I don't think it'd end up being that big of an issue. Truth is we're a very small and niche community that is likely shrinking far more than its growing.
Just thinking out loud, but if people were running e.g. openclaw agents to autonomously trawl the internet for potential sites to exploit (free ad exposure, scams, etc.), couldn't that be an issue regardless of community size? Put another way, if the cost of exploitation is next to zero and requires no human involvement, does that not seem like a potential threat ...?
Although I guess a bunch of bluesky and mastodon have stayed safe from that, so perhaps I should put my fears to rest 😅
Might be somewhat hypocritical as I am sure I have probably added low-value comments before, but if there were to be a significant increase in low-effort comments consisting of recycled memes etc. that would push me closer to the door.
As an example, if you browse the ukpolitics subreddit you'll often see the same recycled joke about 'here's how this is bad for Rachel Reeves' often near the top of voted comments. It gets boring and I'm sure there's a wider meta-analysis on stale online discourse that could be made here with enough reflection.
I love being silly and making silly jokes in real life, but god damn have I lost my patience with the endless recycled comments in every single reddit thread outside of smaller niche communities. I got pushed out of /r/NoStupidQuestions mod team because I didn't want to allow all the stupid joke answers (and I was just tired of modding in general); and now the subreddit is literally just askreddit but even worse. Almost every single "question" and "answer" is a boring and unoriginal joke that I could probably predict without even seeing the title. And if its not some unfunny joke its just a completely unresearched, biased quickfire answer to a obviously politically charged question. Like if the question is "Why don't rich people get taxed more" every single answer will just be "donal trump is pedo file" which while obviously true, doesn't really provide any useful information.
Completely agree with you here and I think we're at a point where we've witnessed Reddit throw everything into it's IPO to promote activity and engagement over any meaningful discussion.
Numerous large forums over the years are no longer moderated with the same quality as before, save for a very small number of exceptions (AskHistorians for example) which only survive under this way of working as their raison d'etre is not for engagement, but as a genuine forum for help and discussion. Of course I am exempting small niche forums from this.
Because everything is based on engagement and gaming upvotes, there's no need to invest in a sensible comment for most threads now. You're right that it's easily predictable what the top few comments will be on many threads now, and you often have to scroll down for serious discussion, where present. I see parallels here with what had happened to search engines as well.
I really do think Reddit is approaching the acme of enshittification. It decimated most online communities, took pole position, and has now drifted more into a social medium alike to Twitter.
The central problem is communities trying to moderate like they’re a formal legal system rather than just a community in charge of maintaining good vibes.
The principle of free speech should be sort of there just to keep the place interesting, but ultimately if the arguments are just engendering a bad vibe people need a stern talking to. Ultimately people should enjoy checking in here.
These are the items, some of which are echoed by other comments here, that would make me at least consider it:
These are essentially my deal-breakers as well. It’s funny, I’ve never thought to look if I could block someone because I’ve never felt like I needed to!
Q: I'm not a contributor, but I was idly debating fiddling with the source code and proposing some sort of tag suggestion logic. That necessarily winds up touching upon AI/ML stuff, but I don't want to ruffle feathers ... may I ask if that's too close to the sort of thing you were thinking of?
I think I'd leave if discussion was continually upsetting to even a small minority of the Tildes userbase. Basically, bigotry disguised as 'free speech', when that 'speech' is in support of the policy platform and funding of erasing marginalized groups.
The thing that springs to mind is that thread a few months ago about the new Harry Potter show. I'm not trans, but I'm also really appreciative of the perspective our trans members bring to discussions. Especially when people are talking about trans people as if they're a hypothetical political football as opposed to, well, people.
I suppose my point is there are a million and one websites you can go to for Harry Potter discussion. There's only one Tildes - invite only, 'don't be an asshole', text-only discussion, with users relying on each other to be nice and kind people. If a sizable portion of the userbase decided that discussing pop-culture (as an example) was more important than the human rights of users, I'd be out like a weasel being fired out of a railgun.
That's only one example and I don't know how to make it more generalised, but that thread is the only one that gave me serious thought about deleting my bookmark and never coming back. Oh, also the one about 'Students are abusing disability adjustments at colleges, we didn't have that in my day, autism and ADHD aren't even disabilities, rah rah rah', but @cfabbro and I had a discussion about how frustrating and bigoted that discussion was and it made me feel like I wasn't going insane.
Oh, there are definitely some topics where conversation is continually upsetting. We've had people leave, and there are some topics that I and others will not touch because of the pushback. Anything relating to fat acceptance is an example I'm intimately familiar with.
Even so, Tildes is still the best place on the internet to have thoughtful forum style conversations on by quite a long shot, so it's a flaw I'm willing to accept.
Unmuteable polka music that plays while you type any comment.
A new rule restricting conversation to only be about the regulations and publishing policies of Moldovan journals of social science
Deimos edits all comments to end with "Carthago delenda est"
The only theme is now white text on neon pink background.
You can only access tildes via Chrome
Mandatory LaTeX. Also, mandatory latex.
Optional LaTeX on the other hand would be very welcome!
At least we would have more Cato-stans.
Oh god. That would kill the site overnight!
I don't reckon anything would, save for heavy AI integration or it becoming a nazi bar. Hell, I've stuck with both Reddit and Lemmy for years now. Even if the people here suddenly got very rude and argumentative, I would probably just enjoy arguing with them.