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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 am here for the April 1 joke where we all post ASCII art renditions of memes for a day.
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.)
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.
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.
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 also dodge topics. Sometimes due to unpopular opinion (mine; I dn't want to start flame war or other such non-useful thing), other times due to language barrier that wouldn't let me express my opinion accurately.
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 would be nice if people knew how to discuss things in a decent manner. Sticking on topic, acknowledging the other's views, and not get hostile or comment on the person your replying to.
Luckily most people get it and that's a relief.
Part of the problem then becomes if the other person is either genuinely or disingenuously holding a line that is so abhorrent and diametrically opposed then what do you do? I'd never agree that their position is valid on a point, at all. Especially if my position is one that is frequently mocked and trolled against. It's why I stay away from various topics online now. It just isn't worth it. It's even happened on here.
Yeah, that's it for me too. People here engage with ideas in a proactive way and I really appreciate it.
If it turned into the same combat sport that many Reddit threads devolve into, I'd check out, too.
Agreed. We can disagree on things, but no need for hostility.
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...
God, I tried Voat too and 100% agree. It was jarring and enlightening to watch that place swiftly go down the toilet. As someone who was very pro free speech and 'let the best ideas rise to the top' mindset, that live experiment completely changed my perspective on how to manage communities and discourse.
I think what happened was Ellen Pao being forced to resign, which caused an immediate user exodus back to Reddit. And it's clear the mistrust towards Pao was misogyny becauss Spez has done much worse things as CEO since yet the community has barely batted an eyelid for the most part.
Then when Voat almost shut down, Stormfront (a white supremacist forum) closed and its users flocked to Voat.
Similar thing happened to Ruqqus after Voat closed in 2020.
I think Yishan Wong more or less confirmed in some interview that Pao was put in place as a sin eater to make some big changes that would absorb a ton of hate so that the old guard could come back.
Good ol' glass cliff.
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?
Am not who you replied to but one thing I get annoyed by sometimes is the "formatting help" button opens a page in another tab. It's also a very long page and kind of difficult to navigate. So if it was something that could be an expand thing next to the text writing field, that could be cool.
Tildes' simplicity is what makes it a nice website to spend time on. No noise or nothing. But a couple things like this one wouldn't hurt to be less simple in my opinion
Have you tried the text editor in Three Cheers mobile app for Tildes? I feel like that's a good compromise between clean minimal interface and ease of text formatting
I never use Tildes on my phone but I did try it once and even sent the dev some donations for the effort!
Would you mind posting a screenshot or two of how it looks?
Like this with bold, italics, quotes, spoiler box, strike though, links and quotes formatting buttons
The saves draft is especially helpful for longer comments
There are also a lot of other settings to customise the look and experience. It's quite nice and I'm very thankful for it
There are a few extensions and user scripts around that do give you slightly more to work with. For example, here is a very meta screenshot. No need to remember the syntax just press the buttons like you'd do with word.
They are listed on this wiki page: https://tildes.net/~tildes/wiki/customizing_tildes
I am using a heavily customized version of Tildezy.
But I also noticed on that page that @TangibleLight made a fancy rich editor very recently giving you a full blown rich text editor.
I think Reddit Enhancement Suite hits most of the reasonable needs?
https://imgur.com/a/CO47YFs
Main things are:
LIVE preview rather than having to hop between tabs. Markdown is what it is, and there's lots of little "ah fuck oops" things you might not notice if you write something large.
A full sized editor for longer form content. Resizing the editor window is doable but can cause odd issues and has limitations.
Quick buttons for common markdown formatting (or even common mark specific formatting like Expandable sections).
It can be a chore to edit longer form content right now, and while for the longest stuff you're probably better off just writing it in something like vs code with proper tooling and dumping it in, there's a lot of inbetween which just just feels like you're fighting the tool to write.
I find it really weird that Reddit's official mobile app is markdown only but we get semi-buggy rich text WYSIWYG bullshit with the desktop version of New Reddit.
And yeah, I feel like image and GIF embeds would take away from this site.
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 😅
No you're right, open signups would result in an almost immediate flood of automated posts. First Tildes would need automated protection against abuse that it doesn't currently need, then it would need more moderators. Invite only solves a lot of problems at once.
Oh it's totally possible, but I think it really depends on if someone thinks it's worth the resources. If you wanted to do anything coordinated (i.e. more than just onlyfans spam, scams, etc; stuff that's easily identified and blocked) it'd require some effort and tokens and I think there's just much easier marks out there.
Why target a tiny niche forum for things like disinformation, political subversion, etc; when you can get 10,000x more eyes on your content on other websites.
With the rise of AI/agents I wouldn't be so certain that it would be easy to spot, getting subtle marketing shilling by LLMs into open forums would be a pretty good use of tokens for greedy companies. Set up multiple accounts, build a history, post when the time is right.
I'm terrified for the internet over the next 10 years.
Already happening on Reddit and other sites. I'm less certain about obscure forums. Reputation still means something there.
Aside from “just” preventing spammy/bot signups (which as an aside is something we here IMO take for far too granted), probably the better part of Tildes being pleasant to use, unreasonably effective, etc. lies in being invite-only, and users generally being restricted to one account (throwaways/alts notwithstanding).
On average, most people here seem to self-select towards being nice and generally chill anyways, but if you were to misbehave, you’re probably out for good pretty quickly, whereas elsewhere, you could just head straight back to the signup page after receiving a community/user/site-wide ban or block. Thus people might think twice about how strongly their posts are worded, or if yet another rebuttal-and-disagreement is actually needed in an argument that’d get heated if it were to take place on another platform. Here, we see something unfortunately rare: People can and will just “agree to disagree” in a civil discussion.
The (relatively) smaller scale helps with this too, of course. You’d probably be more inclined to start a shouting match with a stranger, potential bot/paid actor, than someone who is clearly a recurring character, perhaps even recognizable by name, with their own interests and opinions.
Same for inviting: Nobody is inviting assholes in large numbers, since the invitation tree makes it both clearly (admin-)visible where it all started, and trivial to prune.
TL;DR: Keep invite-only accounts to ensure Tildes’ quality. Anyone can read along anyway, and there’s a multitude of ways to get invited.
I think this doesn't highlight (not purposefully) the effectiveness of the site's design philosophy. Strict enforcement of the "don't be an asshole" rule for one, but deliberate placement of friction too, as well as nudging people towards reading and voting on responses on their own posts.
Consider the placement where to create a new post. It's at the bottom so you have to scroll past all replies before adding your own, keeping standards up but also creating engagement as you're nudged towards reading before responding.
Additionally, responses in your inbox are not automatically marked as read and by making the mark read button tiny while also making Vote the first option available underneath the reply neatly push you towards engaging with purpose.
These are just a couple of examples that create an environment where people respond to each other in good faith. Most of the time. Things can get heated, we're human after all, but that's where rule number one comes back into play.
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.
I think you might have misread the question. This topic is for potential problems not clear improvements.
I was thinking, this is an option? Where do I vote for it?
At least we would have more Cato-stans.
Oh god. That would kill the site overnight!
Optional LaTeX on the other hand would be very welcome!
Good for you I'm not Deimos, that's a lot of good ideas right there. Except Chrome.
You are welcome:
https://github.com/archevel/tildes-polka
I think we are onto a winner here!
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.
To edit a cliche, Tildes could be the worst forum of the Internet, except for all the other ones. I think that if there's a better place where people are kind and it's mostly text based and site philosophy is good and well moderated etc, it's okay for users here to not only migrate but to actively encourage others to come with. Like how Cfabbro hands out invites still at the other place.
The bigotry disguised as "but both sides" discussions can look unfamiliar to some who are used to civil discussions and haven't before encountered that specific kind of insincerity before. The result is a sort of tolerance not because of agreement, but because one is fooled by the lookalike, like a prey animal surprised by a bush that's actually a lioness.
I agree with this comment wholeheartedly, including both the specific examples you give. There have been a few times when a thread has gotten me really pissed and discouraged about the Tildes userbase only for DMs with another user who feels the same way to pull me back from the brink. Luckily these aren't super frequent here, but they unfortunately do happen.
There's a lot of DMing behind the scenes by the minority groups (supportive, venting, etc.) because this has been a persistent problem since pretty much the inception of this place. Unfortunately it's not going to change, and I was told that these discussions were getting too heated and were basically not welcome on this website. This combined with a year long temporary ban (the longest in Tildes history, I believe) caused me to step back from this site significantly. For your own mental health (and anyone else who sees themselves represented in this comment chain in any capacity) I would suggest not being too engaged with this website and tactically avoiding certain conversations which seem to get overrun with rationalists, people who are just asking questions, and fragile individuals (see the writings of Robin Diangelo).
I was wondering why I don't see your very recognizable username as often. If it's any consolation, I think of Gaywallet sightings as the internet equivalent of an old wizard coming out from the tower to speak to the commonfolk. Sort of a Gandalf the Gay, if you will.
It sucks that the ban hammer tends to strike the most passionate more often than their rational and nuanced counterparts, regardless of how annoying the latter might be.
This is such a touching compliment, thank you 🥰💜
My DMs btw are always open and I'm happy to connect via discord or signal with folks that want to connect off-site.
I will keep pressing for a better Tildes but I don't begrudge folks who need to walk away
Way back I used to visit a slashdot clone Kuro5hin that fell into #1 and instead of being a site about learning new ideas it became a with-us-or-against-us political hell. Thankfully it died 2016.
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.
Yeah, I got so sick of the "rules-lawyering" that some users would engage in when they got actioned. I know a good rule system is in place to try and prevent biased mods from abusing their power, but in return they also cause a lot of annoyance to good actors when trying to maintain a community.
Community modding on reddit was a flawed and now failed system imo. Powermods, bad actors, and shills have infiltrated nearly every large community and now they've all lost what makes them unique. Even /r/Videos, which I did my best to keep from descending into political spam for over 14 years, finally succumbed after a hostile takeover from a powermod, and its just entirely political posts now. I just checked now and 24 out of the top 25 posts are ALL about politics, and 21 of those are about Trump specifically... There's pretty much nothing left when it comes to other types of content, and that makes me sad.
I still try to follow some sports teams subreddits for discussions, but half the time any news gets dropped, the top comments are all just meme GIFS. It's extremely annoying and sad to see how low effort a lot of the places have become.
These are the items, some of which are echoed by other comments here, that would make me at least consider it:
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?
(First, I will disclaim that I might have stronger feelings about this topic than possibly many others here, so I can't really get a feel for how many feathers would be ruffled overall). That said I still think it's worth mentioning making a distinction between different things that all get called "AI":
For me, if it fed into or is based on anything that touches or runs on an LLM model specifically, I would be opposed even if none of my own data touches it. Just its existence would be enough. Including pseudo-"local" systems that still require downloading some kind of pre-trained model / dataset
However, I have much less of an issue with a completely locally/narrowly/consensually trained non-LLM regular "ML" system (like those used for computer vision and audio classification like bird song detection and so on). Especially if none of my own data is fed in (or at least requires opt-in). These typically avoid a large majority of the long list of qualms I have with LLMs (which I will not go into here- let's not turn this thread into a debate about these)
(I'm not whom you're replying to) Careful with that, re: piping people's Tildes content into an external LLM API without consent versus running a local (on Tildes server) LLM.
Thank you for the heads up! But I'm already quite up to date on the legalities of the situation, and the intent was to do all the initial classification myself.
Additionally, the design wouldn't allow data to leave Tildes' backend/frontend, since off-premises processing brings in a bunch of additional privacy protection concerns.
I'd prefer my words not be used in such a way, fwiw.
It's a lost cause but I can still deny my consent.
Sounds good! I was very worried when I said anything, so I'm going to stop saying anything now. This never had anything to do with other peoples' words or content; I was going to read through a few hundred articles, train up a classifier, and add tags myself.
I totally get that this is a hot button issue, and I'm very sorry to have said anything. Once again, I've made a mental note to never touch upon this subject again. Sincere apologies to everyone who saw my post and was concerned: I was attempting to contribute something potentially helpful, and was floating the concern first because I wanted to know before trying anything. Now I do! So at least I can take this one off the to-do list.
Hey thanks for noticing and asking, and wanting to contribute, eh? I appreciate the polite + sincere question followed by quick response instead of "why" circular arguing.
Personally, I'd still find it extremely helpful. Tagging is one of the biggest reasons I don't post more often. Autosuggestions would really help!
First, I misunderstood what you intended - that you intended to input external articles, not user posts. While my request is sincere, I don't think this is a "never touch upon a subject again" situation.
I was just expressing my desires for my own words, not making a statement for the website.
This profusion of apologies makes me uncomfortable. This makes definetlynotafae seem like some tyrant. I totally get making your intent clear and as many people as possible feel valued, which i think is the intent, but this is too much, i really think she can handle someone asking permission for using ML on her writting.
I really think someone else's actions should not somehow reflect upon me at all and I'm not sure how it becomes what I can handle and my appearing "like a tyrant" given I wrote two sentences.
Obviously (or not, apparently) I wasn't saying you are a tyrant, just that the way he apologised too much for a minor thing (you don't agree that apologising 4 times, just for suggesting the use of AI, is too much?) seemed like he percieved you (or the tildes community, i just singled you out because he was responding to you) like one.
It's like they're walking on eggshell, worried about being percieved as thinking "the wrong way".
I find this kind of excessive fear can stiffle conversation.
I understand the concern, and I responded to such myself.
I just object to being dragged into it in both applicable sentences.
Wouldn't Tildes already be piped into LLMs that use internet scrapings for their dataset since it can be viewed without logging in?
Sure, but, in this case, there's a bit of a relationship between parties insofar as the one proposing this particular feature is a participating member of the community. Also, an analogy: other people around me looting stores during a street riot doesn't justify me doing so ("the stores are getting robbed right now anyway").
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!
I think losing the sense of community we have here. There's definitely a core group of active commenters/posters on the site. As such, it's nice being able to see a username and remember things about them. What they do for a living, what they're up to, their interests, etc. That they're not just random users whom I cross paths with once, never to see them "in the wild" ever again.
A few months ago, I saw a comment from a username that I hadn't see in awhile and said to them, "Hey you're back!" We don't really know each other (do I really know any of you?), nor did we engage directly much in the past, but still. They were active, then disappeared for several months, then came back. And I noticed.
I can't do that on reddit. The last time I had that experience was when the main subreddit I mod had like <1000 subs and a core group of like <50 users. But that was a looooong time ago. Like over a decade. Most of those people have left the subreddit or even reddit altogether.
I'm glad Tildes is still growing, but I'm glad the growth is slow enough that we're able to maintain that sense of community.
I'm sure there are lots of things that would make me leave, but one that stands out is the layout. I can't stand Reddit's bloated new layout that's full of white space and a focus on image/video. Tildes' text-focused layout similar to old.reddit.com is lovely (I use Solarized Light). You can see plenty of posts and comments at a time but not so many that it's overwhelming.
I'll also just take this opportunity to praise this place for being so welcoming of everyone. My identity is about as white bread as it gets, but I greatly appreciate how friendly this place is to people who are not like me. I've never seen another place that is so staunch about welcoming trans folks, and to me that is a litmus test for it doing something right. I'm sure that, failing this, it would also make me want to leave this place.
Not a top down change but an organic mistake that can spiral out of control: community drama. Regular drama and reoccurring characters in those dramas have always been a signal it’s time to leave.
I don’t think that’ll happen here though. The most recognizable names in the tildes community are some of the kindest, level-headed internet peoples I’ve seen (can’t say met because I mostly lurk). Drama is rare enough that I can only think of one real instance and it was handled pretty well.
I think drama tends to become really toxic when people continue visiting after the point where they’re enjoying themselves. The design patterns many sites use to keep the place “sticky” to keep you coming back probably contribute to it in a big way. But I basically only ever visit Tildes to see if there’s something interesting to read. And I never really feel compelled to interact unless something is interesting enough to interact with.
Advertising. Images.
Boo!
Losing the chronological feeds. I love the fact that I can rely on the content being shown to me not having been manipulated through algorithmic middlemen.
I quit Reddit (deleted all my comments and wiped the account password from my password manager; I don't see any reason not to keep squatting the account name) when they started explicitly selling all their content to LLM vendors. I was sort of surprised that was the line in the sand; I really expected it to be when they dropped or finally completely broke old.reddit.com (which is actually still up).
I quit lobste.rs after one too many instances of unaddressed bigotry (the specific straw was holocaust denial, but the pile of hay on the camel's back was all sorts). Reddit obviously had (and has) waaaaaaay more bigots than lobste.rs, and at a much higher concentration, but the siloed subcommunities created by the subreddit structure made it a lot easier to keep them out of sight. (Is that hypocritical? Probably, but "not reading nazi drivel" is high on my list of mandatory self-care activities.) That one I've regretted more than Reddit, but I still see enough bigotry while lurking not to try to reactivate it. (Also the site is currently absolutely gripped in a culture clash of biblical proportions around LLMs, which I have no real desire to wade into.)
So there's two potential lines: doing business with slop vendors, and letting nazis into the bar.
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.
Achievements and streaks.
I would elaborate my dislike for reddit's streaks specifically, but I'm not sure what the policy on cursing is
If they let in BOTS
I think continued antagonism towards certain lines of discussion.
When you get greeted with "I was wondering when you would show up" in a topic, it's not exactly welcoming.
I don't submit many topics here, but I do participate. It's a small enough community that's people's behaviors can become expected or predictable. But I'm not a fan of it becoming hostile.
I wrote that comment for three reasons:
If my comment made you feel unwelcome then I am sorry. I do not want to be the reason that anyone stops participating here. Please consider this comment something of an olive branch. I only ask that in the future you try to offer people grace, empathy, and thoughtfulness, especially when you disagree with them, think they are being heinous, or are being supportive of something immoral or unjust. I will try to do the same, and in the future, when I do not feel that there is anything I could write that would help us find understanding, I will write nothing at all, and when I find myself thinking that an exchange is not worth my time and effort, I will reconsider what my time and effort are worth.
Please flag such as malice. When things have been personal, that crosses a line.
Fwiw I value you and your thoughts and contributions
I do, and I did. They're still up.
I know that whole thread got nuked. Sigh sorry