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What are your expectations and hopes for Tildes in the future?
Personally, I hope it takes over Reddit’s role of being primarily for discussion and a place to congregate interesting content, staying away from the more mainstream-y aspects, like the redesign. What do you expect/hope for?
I would like to see it focused more on news and discussions with comments that actually focus on the submitted post rather than quick one-liners for easy karma. I'd also like to see it discourage NSFW content, or at least straight up porn. There's plenty of other places on the internet for that.
Could you give an example of these other places? That way I know never to go to those places.
In all seriousness, I agree. Just a place to come and discuss different things and be more text-based with links to things. News and things like that. No out-and-out porn.
Reddit.
Reddit will never, ever go out of business simply because it is possibly the greatest aggregator of porn, in terms of sheer dissemination and incentive driven content creation. Voat and 4chan/8chan just simply can't compete with reddit's genre and niche specificity, sourcing, and accessibility, especially with amateur women.
This place really doesn't need to have porn. I just want a place to discuss random topics
Porn traffic won't keep reddit in business though, it's pretty worthless. Almost nobody wants to advertise near porn, there's a reason that porn sites are kind of notorious for having incredibly shitty ads. Porn alone definitely wouldn't be able to sustain the site, but the porn traffic is probably amazing for pumping up their overall numbers, which helps them impress investors/advertisers. It's even better at this than "normal" traffic, because people tend to use private/incognito sessions when looking at porn, and most measurement methods will treat each of those incognito sessions as a new "unique user".
You're absolutely right. Regardless of optics, it's going to help the site regardless
Accessibility plays a huge role in it. You can find literally hundreds of subreddits dedicated to very specific porn actresses, fetishes, roleplay and meetups. I've spent enough time on 4chan to know that its UI can't compete with ease as Reddit does. I can't speak for Voat or 8chan though, but I'm assuming it's pretty close to what I've mentioned, as I really have never come across someone recommending to another that those sites are "where its at", so to speak.
Exactly. When/if this site grows, and more user-created groups are made, there will definitely be porn dedicated ones, whether it's allowed or not, people will try to get it in here. I don't necessarily have an issue with that(power to the people), I just don't come to this site looking forward to seeing a pair of triple D breasts launch across my monitor straight into my face.
Users won't create groups here.
As I understand it (based on explanations I've read from Deimos and a couple of his associates), new groups and sub-groups will be created by moderators of existing groups, based on the demand for those new groups/sub-groups. A main way to demonstrate demand for a group will be through the use of tags. So, if a lot of people post in ~movies with the tag "star wars", that will demonstrate the need for a group about Star Wars. The moderators of ~movies would then create ~movies.starwars for those posts.
However, even if a million posts are tagged "porn", that doesn't mean that the moderators are under any obligation to create a ~porn group.
That's actually a pretty cool system
Ok, thanks for educating me.
I mean, those tits would just be too big anyway. I mean really. That poor woman probably has back problems
I was joking.
Nearly 6 years ago, I became disillusioned with /r/StarTrek, a group about Star Trek on Reddit. It was becoming a place for people to dump their photos of Trek collectibles. "Look at my Borg Christmas decoration!" "Look at my Doctor Crusher Halloween costume!" "Look at this Enterprise-shaped pizza slicer!" These posts came to dominate the subreddit for a while, and made it hard to find any discussion about the show itself.
I considered creating an alternative subreddit, but some other people beat me to it. I therefore ended up becoming a founding co-moderator of /r/DaystromInstitute - a subreddit devoted to in-depth discussion about Star Trek. No pics of decorations or costumes, just discussion about the show. No shallow jokes or pun threads, just discussion about the show. We omitted the bad stuff and focussed on the good stuff.
That's how I see Tildes, and what I'm hoping to get from this: a place that has all the good stuff I like from Reddit (the discussions, the news, the interesting articles) without the bad stuff (the pun threads, the memes, the bigotry, the advertisements).
The incessant jokes on reddit are the worst. Don't get me wrong, I love a good joke every now and then, but when you have someone clearly and explicitly asking a serious question and out of 10+ replies there's not a single non-joke answer, the cheap karma-whoring behavior gets pretty old pretty fast.
I do enjoy seeing jokes accompanied by actual discussion, however. I don't mind Tildes being a place where humor is valued as long as it takes a back seat to actual constructive discourse.
This is such a similar story to why we created /r/Games as an alternative to /r/gaming: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/metq6/announcement_rgaming_to_branch_into_two_separate/
And yes, I've definitely thought about Tildes in a similar way too—basically "the higher-quality alternative subreddit", but for the entire site.
Like we said when we were promoting Daystrom in its early days, it was never intended to compete with /r/StarTrek, but to complement it. /r/StarTrek could continue doing what it did well - being a broad-based subreddit for all fans of Star Trek, covering all types of content - while Daystrom would specialise in just one particular type of content. We'd be an extra option for people who wanted something else, rather than a replacement.
And I've seen you say similar things about Tildes, which I'm pleased to see.
I left /r/StarWars for the same reason. /r/MawInstallation was great for a while (and still produces the odd gem) until it too became flooded with debate and confusion about new vs. old canon. I hope that any topics on Tildes are focused on analysis and discussion like /r/DaystromInstitute and /r/MawInstallation instead of /r/StarTrek and /r/StarWars.
Cosplay posts have their place in cosplay oriented forums but contribute little to places of discussion on their subject matter.
I'm a bit disappointed about how /r/MawInstallation turned out. The creator of that subreddit deliberately modelled it on Daystrom, and even asked us for advice when starting out. But I think they just didn't have the dedication to keep working on it over the long term and, unfortunately, building a subreddit like that takes time and hard work.
I want it to become what reddit intentionally stopped short of becoming. The 'subreddits' never fully evolved.
On reddit, the owners of the site continue to think of reddit as one site with lots of subforums - but generally, as one large community. Everything they do is an all-or-nothing approach. Everything, everywhere on the site works the exact same way, and any differences are due to user bots or user moderation teams. Reddit steadfastly refuses to evolve and implement anything beyond what they think will make them a quick buck. Lately, they've been sabotaging user activities and features in various communities just to get them to conform to their reddit standards - going backwards, not forward.
I'd like to see those differences on tildes turn into actual features so that groups here have a massive library of functions to draw on setting up their own community in whatever way works best for that particular kind of content. The mod control panel here someday should have a pile of widgets and modes to choose from, several of them mutually exclusive/incompatible with each other. I'd like to see tildes become about the groups more than about the site itself. Any features groups design and ask for should be added to the package as tools for others to use in the future.
New ways of ordering comments, specific sidebar widgets (embedded players, calendars, etc), content curation features, anonymous posting modes, different styles of voting and tagging, different ways of tracking reputation, multiple forum view modes - anything people can think of that seems like it'll serve a function for a community. This kind of massive experimentation will produce entirely new ways of managing forum content, and the good ones will prove themselves. Having the code open-source helps a great deal, since that means anyone with a feature idea can do the work of implementing it.
I want to see the site technology itself grow and evolve far beyond the lame facebook/tumblr/twitter/imgur/reddit paradigm. It seems to me like forum tech is frozen in place right now, with all of the corporate players either clueless or indifferent, and most of the startups making the same old mistakes going down paths that have been shown to go nowhere time after time after time. The communication mediums we use have a staggering impact on our ability to stay entertained, informed and to make decisions. It really bugs me that no one is working seriously on this issue, except for tildes.
I think the bubble-up publishing action we've discussed is the tip of the iceberg for a system that can actually find and promote the best content the web has to offer. There an entire universe of editor-level features waiting to be explored, aimed at the cleanup and presentation of user-generated content here. It's like what reddit claimed to want to do with Upvoted but they never followed through (and it was half-assed from the start). For something like that to work, it's got to come from the community itself... we just need to provide the tools to manage it, so that doing anything like a 'best of' or 'megathread' or 'roundup' isn't such a gigantic pile of work... producing content that almost no one outside those communities will see.
I'd also like to see Spectria expand into other areas once tildes is off and running. Tildes itself is just one project, there's an awful lot of potential out there for more. Extending the tildes identity system to mastodon, offering shell/email services as part of a premium membership, integration with other open-source non-profit projects... the potential is there to create a user-centered privacy-focused platform for everyone to use as an alternative to the corporate spymasters we've allowed to take over online communication.
Maybe, along the way, we can ask and answer some questions about human self-governance and make some progress on that too. Without the profit motive involved it's actually possible to have that conversation again.
You should realise that what you ask for is a forum hosting provider then.
To offer something like that is extremely different from Reddit or even tildes.
Create dedicated tools for specific community is not something that take "5 minutes of coding" and quite probably won't happen here as well.
I'm merely speaking from the technical point of view of course, maybe @Deimos can speak his view on this at some point.
For this website to manifest itself into a more serious, matured version of Reddit. I'd like this place to be somewhere where I'm encouraged to engage in discussion, and for it to help me with my writing. I need a hobby so hopefully I can start like a Youtube channel discussing this platform or make video content for here.
I think how the voting system is developed may play a strong role. The vote should be maintained as a functional tool (popularity, visibility, etc.) rather than a reward system (karma whoring, user statistics, etc.). Social media 'likes' can create a dopamine response in users, which for Reddit I believe results in karma whoring/poor quality comments & content. (I could be completely wrong. Some social engineer has probably studied this more than my observations. This is just some quick reasoning.) Although like Reddit, unsubscribing from disliked groups and avoiding /All pretty much instantly removes disliked content.
The one thing I dislike is I have noticed an overall community aversion to image/video/quick media style links. Although text-based links and long articles tend to be of better qc, Tildes is still an aggregate site. I like a little bit of mix-ins in my salad. I have enjoyed reading articles I would otherwise gloss over on Reddit, but... I also think Reddit has its perk of staying on top of social situations, quick tastes of general news and politics, etc. that don't require much effort or depth of discussion as expected on here by the Tildes community.
I just like being part of an online community. Forums back in the day used to be like this, but I miss having a place to come where I recognize people, where they recognize me. Where we value each other's input, not because we say you should but because you've conversed with me in the past and you know I'm open-minded, or that I'm posting with good intent, or just because we're friends. I was daydreaming about the day the first sub group gets created (I know Tildes.official exists but I mean one dictated by and for the users) and I'm very excited for it. I like the direction things have been going so far and I'll be here in the future to watch it develop.
Hi TreeBone, I'm Data. Please to meet you. What sub group would you like to see?
This is how I remember making friends on online forums in the past. Not to say that TreeBone and I are friends now, but I will remember the name now that I've typed it a couple of times.
I agree but we must consider that with the growth it will still comes more "anonymity" (it's probably not the right word) in the sense of having so many users that knowing to which you're discussing becomes less relevant.
That's why I hope tildes implement native user's label at some point and in the meanwhile I plugged those in tildes extended.
(label with random things written in it, dunno if TreeBone actually has a thing for sponges :P)
Maybe I wasn't clear, you can download tildes extended for Chrome or Firefox. It adds some UI features that I think are quite useful to tildes. Development kinda slowed down now because I'm going through some intense projects now at work, but I'll get back at it soon enough.
Hi Data! Nice to meet you as well. I don't particularly want to see any subgroup but in very excited about the prospect of the community banding around smaller or even niche subjects. That being said, I like gaming a lot, so maybe a competitive smash brothers one. I'm sure that won't be around for a while, but I'm fine waiting.
I like gaming as well. I'm looking forward to an RPG subgroup. I tend to lean towards those types of games now a days.
What sort of RPGs are you playing? I'm mainly an Xbox guy these days, but I'll play some casual PC stuff. I have been away from intense PC gaming for so long it takes me a while to get finger placements down again.
Been playing mostly jrpgs this year. I stopped playing jrps for years for no real reason, missed a lot of great games it seems. At the moment I'm playing Dragon Quest VIII and Xenoblade Chronicles, both on 3ds.
I'm going to have to get myself a 3DS at some point. I have to take an hour lunch break every day and can't leave so I can definitely utilize it. I'll put them on my list!
Nice to meet you too mozzribo.
Hey Mozzribo! I'm glad we're on the same page. Nice to meet you.
Honestly? A place where I can disagree with a person without summoning a shitstorm.
Not a general site direction, but more along the lines of what I'm personally seeking.
A strong and diverse creative community for feedback and collaboration. Given the range of experience and backgrounds of those who already contribute, I'm looking forward to seeing the size of the creative community grow. The current quality and tone of discussions is a rare treat, and I'm excited to see how it will pan out as the site grows. Creative types seem to be particularly susceptible to specialty fatigue, and as a result it can be difficult to get people to engage in higher level discussions without getting bogged down in negativity and contention. I think the general aim of this site and the cultures within it provide best case conditions for the establishment and growth of a creative community focused on positive and intelligent discussions, and hopefully draw in others who are like-minded.
I'd love to see more subs added to the sidebar. We need a politics sub. Maybe a gif sub if we don't have one. I'd like to see a mobile app, and push notifications as well
You might be interested in this post from a couple of weeks ago: 'Daily Tildes discussion - proposals for "trial groups", round 1'.
You might also be interested in this post from a month ago: 'A mobile app for tildes?' (In short: don't expect a mobile app.)
Thanks for the links! I had a feeling that there was some reason for not having an active politics sub and that it was probably for the reasons listed lol
We'll need to get the comment tags back in before much longer so that lower-effort comments can be tagged as "noise" and such. There needs to be some mechanic that's able to deal with them, because just hoping that people won't post low-effort comments isn't realistic.
A site that allows for meaningful discussions, with good moderation and a good sense of community. I hope that personal attacks and generally shitty behaviour will be discouraged, while different opinions, if expressed thoughtfully, will be allowed.
Hopefully no NSFW content (I don't dislike porn per se, but I don't think it would be beneficial to this site).
In other words, I want a more serious version of Reddit; maybe a bit like HN, but not just for tech.
That’s basically my hope as well... although maybe not quite as anal retentive and pedantic as HN can often be, especially with regards to the userbase and moderation policies. ;)
My hope is that Tildes technology allows the creation of a site (possibly tildes.net or else a fork) that solves what I see as the biggest problems with modern western capitalist societies.
In advertising funded media be it social, video or print the person buying adverts is fundamentally the customer, the viewers are the product. This is true even if there's a nominal fee. What is being sold is your attention. An early (now ex) googler calls modern web advertising technology a DOS attack on free will.
The very business model of advertising supported media implies through the incentives created a completely adversarial relationship between viewers and media companies.
My hope is that the Tildes technology will allow a media feed created in the best interests of the viewers & wider community. Where our attention is not constantly diverted for the monetary benefit of powerful business or government interests.
I hope that people with access to such a feed will be able to reduce their exploitation by the economically & politically powerful's machinations.
If you haven't, you should read the book "The Attention Merchants": http://www.timwu.org/AttentionMerchants.html
I really enjoyed it, it's an interesting look at how advertising has gradually infiltrated and affected so many different aspects of media and our lives.
Some more reading along those liness -- I include Wu, who is good: Media, Advertising, Sustainability, Externalities, and Impacts: A light reading list
Doesn't seem to have a kindle version, do you think it covers particularly new ground? (Should I get a physical copy?). My current read is phishing for phools so it's definitely a topic of interest. I've kinda stalled getting through that though. My kindle got 'borrowed' for someone to read Anathem. :D
Hmm, it should be available for kindle through Amazon, I read it on my kindle. I don't know if it really covers new ground, but I thought it was a good overview of how advertising came in through different types of media (radio, TV, and so on), and what the effects of that were—both on the people creating the content, as well as the consumers.
Amazon uk has a link to notify the publisher you'd like it on kindle so I guess they've removed it.
I want Tildes to be the grown-ups.
I'd like to see a space that promotes depth to discussion, and attracts those who seek same.
Noise, disagreeableness (not the same as disagreement), low-effort crap, salacious material, bad actors, etc., are negatives.
Enough sugar to be palatable, but no more. Possible just a hair under -- you should want to be here.
With reddit I'm concerned about it being so heavy on resources, annoing ads and tracking. Tildes is really lightweight, works well on mobile and doesn't track me, so all I want from tildes is too keep doing those things. It could become just like reddit content wise(even though I think that it greatly improves over reddit by not having downvotes and doing other things) as long as it keeps being as great from the technical standpoint I'll be happy. It's simply the best website I've ever used in my entire life