Collected UI feedback
I've been grumbling about many of the things Tildes is trying to address for years. And I'm not alone. OTOH I have seen some sites that do some bits right, and some sites that almost got it right only to fall flat at the penultimate hurdle. Let's try to collect and enumerate what I think is good and bad, both here and elsewhere. I'm optimistic about here because Tildes is a work in progress and some of these are quite readily fixable.
Tildes, the good:
#1, a long way ahead of everything else: Non-profit.
I think Twitter and Reddit and Facebook all amply demonstrate why any general discussion forum that tries to make a profit is doomed to mediocrity and worse. Google+ is an edge case - the service may be free, but Google is watching and measuring your every move. And constantly optimising for their own performance metrics, of which fostering intelligent discussion totally is not on the list and is actually discouraged. See:
'The Algorithm' is Not an Idiot, It Is Actively Deceptive https://plus.google.com/104879277024913363852/posts/51mme29dSMy
#2 Markdown (also a coutny mile ahead of the alternatives) - elegantly simple markup; not too much, not too little. Even if you have technical quibbles with markdown's capabilities, the system is widely-enough known to outweigh them. I honestly can't think of a more appropriate choice.
#3 Clean simple UI (couple of grumbles though - see below)
#4 'Votes' rather than +1s, thumbs up, likes or or other cutesy shite. Elementary good UI practice - say what you mean.
Tildes, the bad including what I hope are readily fixable or just oversights:
#1 Poor display contrast. Don't use light grey text on white, you numpties, just because it's fashionable. If you want this site to be around long-term you'll have people of all ages posting, some with e.g. poor eyesight. There are well-known guidelines for the optimum contrast ratios for online text. Look 'em up and bloody stick within them. If you go for AAA that will be another point where you're ahead of the Google, Apple and other fashion-driven sites. Don't care if it's unfashionable, and if you want to be around in 20 years (as another successful discussion site I'll cite later has been) you should stick with what's usable, not what's currently cool. KTHXBAI. WebAIM: Colour Contrast Checker
https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
#2 Missed opportunity, fixable:
You can look at activity from the last hour, day, 3 days etc, or enter a flexible range. But you've only made the range one-ended!! So how are you supposed to find a post from 'about 6 months ago' without scrolling through thousands of entries? Again, if you're interested in longevity, you have to ensure that it's possible for humans to refind older posts, and to check back to a specific date range that may eventually be months or years back. My 'long-lived site' inserts markers with month and year so that you can tell where you are in the feed without having to peer at some tiny date in light grey on lighter grey.
#3 Vague datestamps
Use dates FFS. 'About 2 hours ago' is a moving target, duh. How are you supposed to refind a post timestamped 'about 2 hours ago' on a fast-moving thread that was left sitting unrefreshed on your laptop for half a day while you were disconnected from the internet? Useless. For short periods, yes, some users may prefer a vaguer indicator, but once a post is more than about 12-16 hours old, just use the date and time, OK? Vague timestamps, while superficially user-friendly, are a superb and subtle way to disrupt the serious discussions Tildes wants to foster. That's why Google+, for example, does it, and that's why you shouldn't. Also, if the date's in a predictable, stable form, you can search for it. Load a shit-ton of posts going back months, then try searching for a post made 'two months' ago; then search again in a couple of weeks and the same search will give different results!
#4 Preview and save button
Where's my post preview button? I would have like to preview this screed before posting it. And given how long it is maybe saving it as a work in progress would have been useful too!
Missing feature: effective filtering/killfiling
Long-term, if the site gets big, it will live or die on this. Seriously.
You need to be able to filter users, posts, and thread and groups temporarily or permanently.
That includes being able to temporarily hide people you follow and like just to get their posts out of the way. So, mute for an hour, mute for a day, mute for a week, mute for a month (maybe), mute permanently. Applicable to every possible category on the site you can think of. dredmorbius (who is also here) goes on about this a lot. The ability to filter stuff out is far more important than the ability to 'find' stuff. Just filtering out the stuff you don't want helps the stuff you do bubble to the surface!
Saveable filters (long term feature)
When I want to collect cat memes, non-cat memes are noise and I need to filter them out (see above). When I want to read about other sutff, the cat memes are noise and I need to filter them. I don';t want to have to keep creating and discarding filters. As soon as your filtering system is powerful enough to be useful, it will be too much work to keep redoing, so make 'em saveable and organisable. There's uses for all of whitelists, greylists and blacklists.
Post auto indexing (long term feature)
I have to manually write and maintain my own damn post indexes on G+, otherwise all my old posts just vanish into limbo, inaccessible unless you know a unique search phrase from that particular post or are prepared to scroll for hours. [But the Goodle internal servers can access and analyse them all just fine.] My post index, with some comments: https://plus.google.com/104879277024913363852/posts/XoWoRujTBun
Rapid browse mode, paginated
When you're reading in depth, it may be OK to have a Google+-like UI with only half a dozen posts on-screen at once. (Tildes is currently shopwing me ten at a time, which ain't enough of an improvement to be worthwhile.) But this is hair-tearingly inefficient if you want to scan a lot of posts rapidly. You need a dense display format that shows large numkbers of posts so people can skim and find things quickly. With thumnails for images and indicators for links. Paginated, with the pages staying at consistent points. That way you can keep track of you place when you're browsing back in the archives, and even bookmark old stuff. Sometimes you want leisurely mode, but sometimes you want to jump back a way before switching to leisurely. Having only a slow browsing route is very effective at killing access to older discussions. Anything older than a few days or a few dozens of posts is effectively lost.
Soft auto-lock for old posts
Posts should auto-lock after... about 3 months of inactivity is a good number IME. But ideally it should be a soft lock, which means people can resurrect them. If you post on a soft-locked thread, you get a warning, or the owner gets to decide whether to unlock the thread and let your post appear. So consequently you need a preference setting so that post owners can indicate whether they want a soft or a hard lock on a post, and the time till it triggers.
Per forum thread/post limits
If you've got a forum with 1,000 active threads, you haven't really got one forum. You've either got several, in which case they should be split up, or you've got one forum with a lot of noise. So there might be something to be said for limiting the number of discussion threads in proportion to the number of users; for example, if ~dogs.chihuahuas has 5 users, let them have the default of 20 threads. Of which they might only use six. Nothing says you have to use all 20. But if ~dogs.pugs had 40,000 followers, perhaps it should be permitted 70 threads. If 70 isn't enough, it's probably past time to split ~dogs.pugs up. There is an uppser and a lower limit to how many people you can have a sensible discussion with. The lower limit is 2, and for small forums or up to a couple of dozen regulars 20 threads should be ample. When you get to hundeds or regulars, the thread count does need to go up a bit. But when you get to 10,000s, the noise levels starts to go up and it's time to split the group into subgroups. A thread count is a decent way to enforce that - I'd say even the biggest forum isn't allowed more than 2-3 screenfuls of threads. So 30-60, maybe. If that's not enough, it's time to subdivide, because keeping communities from getting too large keeps discussion quality higher. You can always follow both groups even after the split. But if you dislike regular A in group X, you can switch to group Y where they don't post. If everything's lumps together without regard to community scaling, you never get away from regular A unless you unsubscribe from group X altogether.
Other sites
Google+
Circles (bad, it turns out) - seemed good at the time, but it turns out they're at the wrong end of the broadcast stream. The recipients have no way to filter what you post into the categories they want, and it's their preferences that matter at this point.
Collections (good, it turns out) - this was the better way to do it. If someone posts cat pics, politics, and astronomy, you can just follow the subset of their posts you're interested in. This is reasonably effective, implicit filtering.
Infinite scrolling windows (very bad) - [But excellent for Google's purposes of stifling anything but superficial conversations.] Finding anything older than a few hours may take literally hours of scrolling unless there's a search term you can enter. So tough shit if you wanted to find an image post with no associated text.
Awesomely atrocious search Google used to be good at search. You wouldn't think so from the comedy search tool they provide on G+.
Notifications (meh) - When you only have a few followers, it's nice to know you've been followed or mentioned or whatever. As your user count grows that becomes noise and then spam. Notifications have to scale intelligently, because a user with 240,000 followers has massivly different needs from a user with 12.
My own comments: Google Plus User Feedback Archive https://plus.google.com/104879277024913363852/posts/DUanxsc7ya1
Ello
I like the clean UI, and it's very good for image posting.
The discussions ain't too bad either, but it's maybe a bit too minimalist, and again, there was no way to find old posts,l so they're effectively lost.
Well it would be good if people actually used it for short posts of up to 2xx characters or whatever the present limit is. But when you have people writing articles that need dozens of Tweets (and there's aggregator apps to collect them back into full articles FFS) then the system is clearly not being used in the way it was originally intended to be. I think this is what corporations would like the future of all discussion to be. Basically babble, where even the good stuff vanishes without trace after, well, potentially a few tens of minutes if you follow a lot of people. It's like drinking at a firehose. Jeez. You harldy need to exert effort to bury stuff. Just wait a while.
Usenet
Good for: killfiles, threaded discussions, clue, and asynchronous discussions spanning weeks, months or longer.
Bad for: trolls, spam. Especially spam.
I sincerely hope there are some Tilders who are thoroughly familiar with the dynamics, successes and failures of Usenet. It does a lot of things right that you'll also need to get right. And now all the morons are on the web, I'm not sure if Usenet is reverting to clued people only, or if the spammers are killing it off completely. TBH I'm not sure there's much point spamming Usenet these days; next to no-one goes there, and those that do are tech-savvy and exceptionally spam-hostile. Haven't been on myself for years. A very good example of a private usenet area that works well is the Povray news hierarchy. Another demonstration that focus on a single subject (the PoVRay raytracer) does a good job of keeping site/forum/whatever clue levels high. news.povray.org http://news.povray.org/groups/
Web Forums
Good for: focussed discussions on a single subject. In general, the more focussed the higher the quality. The Wesnoth forums, for example, are all about the Wesnoth computer game. So it's easy to tell what's off-topic and remove it. But the Giant in the Playground forums, which also include general roleplaying, are not as focussed and the clue level of the posters, while not atrocious, is noticeably lower, and a much greater degree of moderation is needed. But the GiantITP forums are much bigger than Wesnoth, so there a lot of just scaling effects going on there too. You also see this on, I guess, the Steam forums and Reddit groups, where the small niche communities (e.d. OpenTTD on Reddit) tend to be much more pleasant places to visit than the forums for mega-games like, I dunno, World of Warcraft.
Good for: Actually handling collossal volums of posts on all sorts of subjects without collapsing into chaos.
I'm not a big Reddit fan, but I have to give them credit for working at all, given their traffic volume.
Also good for: Reddit Gold isn't a terrible way to fund a commercial-ish site. Aspects of that could be stolen.
Wikis
Placeholder
Suspect there may be some things that could be learned from how Wikis do things, but nothing comes to mind at present. May revisit later.
Email lists
Good for: digests?
Digests might be a useful feature when you're following a long-running discussion?
Google+ almost got this right - you can opt to recieve an email whenever someone comments after you, but you can't get G+_ to send you emails fo your own posts, or to send you a summary/digest of the full discussion. So you can have a partial email archive of threads you've been involved in, but you can't have an email record of your own contributions. So, half of a useful feature there. Nice one, guys.
Mornington Crescent
These sites have been running for decades. They're basically text databases plus a bit of Perl glue code. A decent developer could (and has, more than once) knock out a fully functioning Mornington Crescent site in a matter of a few afternoons.
Good for: longevity, stability, simplicity, 'weak user IDs', asynchronous discussions which can become realtime if you're online at the same time as your correspondent.
Probably bad for: scaling, security
The Crescent sites have a couple of dozen game threads each, and you post a comment wherever you feel like. Then the next person does the same, and so on. Some of the long-running games (e.g. the genral chat thread) have 30,000+ posts spanning years. But becuase it's paginated rather than an infinite scrolling window, you can jump back e.g. 1,000 posts (a few months) with relative ease.
These sites all predate markdown, so they let you use basic HTML instead. A feature which has been horribly abused, most notably in the bad HTML game, and Acre Street (don't ask). A modern MC site, you'd use markdown.
They still work on any browser - even Lynx - they don't even depend on Javascript. It's a web form with two or three fields. You type on your comment, click submit, and your comment is inserted into the page. Then the next person does the same, over and over for years, and the page grows as you do. As simple as a a web forum can possibly be, I suspect. And if bandwidth/performance becomes a problem, you can auto-split it into year-sized or 1000-post-sized chunks. Yes, people mostly only browse the last few tens of posts, but a paginated system lets you jump back further on occasion without placing an undue burden on the servers. (I go on about pagination a lot. I think it's a make-or-break feature, and it's only out of favour at the moment due to the whims of fashion and the web-corps' desires to make and keep online conversations at a superficial level. The black hats are doing it intentionally, and others are emulating them because they wrongly think they're following good - rather than evil - practice.
Speaking of evil practice - check out Dark Patterns in Design for some of the ways we're manipulated: https://darkpatterns.org/
'Weak User ID' - there's a text box you type your name in. Most people use the same name every time, because it establishes reputation. But it's just a text box so you could type in anything. That bit probably wouldn't scale, but for us, given that between us we all know everyone who posts except for the occasional random who shows up, it works fine.
'Non-persistent chat' - one of the sites, which has since shut down, had a rolling chat page that was only transient. Chat posts older than about a week and more than 100 posts ago just disappeared off the bottom of the chat page and were lost for good, unless someone saved the chat. For some discussions - e.g. things like cat memes, this kind of transient chat is probably ideal. You could even implement an infinite scroller, because you know the end of the chat is never going to be more than 5-10 screens away. That wouldn't be so good for 50-100 screen. As a yardstick my G+ posts would probably go back about 1200 screens. Who the hell would ever scroll through that? If Tildes becomes successful, it will quickly hit to same point. Pagination, chaps. It's not sexy, but it's the only reasonable way to manage long data streams.
OK, initial data dump done. This is more complete than I epxcted to get for a first go, but more typos too :-)
Am likely to revist.
If this is supposed to be a list of feedback about, and suggestions for, Tildes, then it belongs in ~tildes ("Meta discussion about Tildes itself, including questions, suggestions, and bug reports"). If it's comparing various social media applications, then it belongs in ~tech.
But, to be honest, I'm not really clear what you're trying to achieve here. It looks like you start out trying to give feedback about Tildes, but then half of your post is just a rant about other websites and forums.
However, if you are trying to give feedback to the developers of Tildes (which is almost entirely one person at this stage: Deimos), you might not want to call them "you numpties". That's not really going to make them look at your list favourably.
Also, you seem to be aware that this site is a work in progress, then you criticise it for not having a lot of features yet. What did you expect from a brand-new website which is still in early development? Which brings up another point - have you checked the backlog of issues which are planned to be worked on in future months? You may find some of your suggestions already there.
By the way... welcome to Tildes. I see it's only your first day here. You obviously believe in jumping in feet first.
Well, that's why I put it in talk to start with. It's a work in progress. Formal feedback would be more, you know, formal. Probably actual feature requests, on the tracker. But the trouble with those is, that's not a suitable place for debate, which is what I'm after. All you get is 'maybe later', ''acknowledged' or 'wontfix'. And at this early stage - first 24 hours - I'm not sure ~tildes itself is suitable either.
However, to get something as elementary wrong as text contrast, a very, very basic feature, and very important for a text forum, deserves a dig IMO. That's just flat bad user interface design and I ran out of patience for that kind of thing long ago. These days I will no longer give it a pass. It costs every user a little bit of extra time and cognitive effort for no good reason.
Anyway, I've been collecting UI stuff for years and years now, so I'm not really jumping in feet first, I'm trying to get stuff pertinent to Tildes down promptly. Since when does trying to enumerate the major things other sites get right as well as wrong qualify as a rant?
Also, 'rant'? I can do rants. Don't call a non-rant a rant, please, or say what qualifies this as a rant. I suspect your rant detector may be on the sensitive side. Also, there's some good belittling going on here - had you intended that?
Deconstructing the key sentence fragment:
"but then [half of] your post is [just] [a rant] about other websites and forums."
[half of] More than half, actually :-)
but then the word [just] there subtly devalues the bulk of my post,
followed by [a rant] when, if it really was a rant, shouldn't it only contain
negatives? And no reasons for the gripes, or references? I'm all to
ready to call out bad practice when I see it but the positives in the lists
do outnumber the negatives.
I was even trying to find a 'how flamey is this comment?' checker
online, to try to get an unbiased assessment (swear I've seen one
in the past) but can't find any now.
Out of scientifiic interest, what is your definition of 'rant'?
After all, I am trying to credit other platforms with what they do right as well as what
they do wrong, because the mistakes are surely just as instructive for Tildes
as the successes. The grumpy tone tends to show up esp. when I'm trying to dump
a lot of data out my head before I forget it again. [And also when I'm pressed for time - such as when (a random example) an in-depth discussion looks like kicking off about an hour before my dentist's appointment]
Missing features - just because I've criticised a missing feature doesn' t mean
I expect it to be there. Those I've flagged as long-term I don't expect to be there.
But the preview post button, on the other hand, I did. For a text-focussed website
that's almost as basic as good text contrast, and its absence was surprising. And
that reminded me in turn that a save post facility should also be near the top of
the feature list. Post preview, I will note is on page 5 of the issues list. And just
as with Google, people rarely venture beyond the first page or two of the search
results, so I only found it just now by specifically looking.
That's what word processing programs are for: Google Docs, Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer. Pick one. Tildes.net isn't your personal notepad.
Debate? What, exactly, are you trying to debate with this scattershot list of various features, existing and non-existing, from various forums? Most debates have a central proposition, a statement that people are for or against. What's your proposition? What would you like us to debate? What should I be "pro" or "con" about?
You've been here only about 24 hours. No matter how extensive your information-gathering might be from elsewhere, you haven't really taken the time to learn about Tildes before jumping in with your
suggestions"debate".If you don't like "rant", try "rambling unstructured pointless screed" instead.
Given tildes is free, supported by donations and open source. If you find the lack of features is so painful that you need to be demeaning. You are welcome to implement them yourself, donate some money to help Demios implement em or else make your own fork.
May I ask what color scheme you're using? Tildes has several, which are selectable from https://tildes.net/settings. These color schemes are based off of popular text editor color schemes that have been around for a while. I ask because to me, the white scheme appears to have relatively high contrast compared to most sites., with most text being black on white. I would not frame it as 'Tildes got this very wrong' (because it didn't), but rather "There is room for improvement in these specific areas".
On tildes itself, the default. Which fails AAA. Really, the default should pass AAA and the alt colour scheme should be looser. That way round is forgivable. Other way round, for a text-driven site that's making an effort to do things 'right', no. Bad. No cookie!
The links to docs, blog, contact, privacy and terms of use, all of which I would expect to be unaffected by skinning preferences anyway, all fail the AAA-level accessibility guidelines. I did go check them before complaining.
Colours there are:
background yellowish FDF6E3; foreground grey 586E75, light grey 93A1A1, blue 6C71C4
contrast ratios 4.99 (AA pass, AAA fail), 2.48 (AA fail, AAA fail), 4.06 (AA fail, AAA fail)
The important text passes AA only, but the light grey and the blue do not even manage that.
On the gitlab links, the light grey text fails AAA but all else I've checked was OK. Dunno how skinnable gitlab is, I admit.
On the main tildes pages, the 'black' text isn't black, it's #333333. On the grey boxes, #EEEEEE, that does pass, but the two blues and the light grey (#268bd2, #6c71c4 and #999999) all fail.
In fact, #999999 on #EEEEEE or #FFFFFF cannot pass the accessibliliy guidelines at any text size. What size do we have? I dunno but it's pretty tiny.
To say 'these color schemes are based off of popular text editor color schemes that have been around for a while' is really not much of a defence for them because I very sincerely doubt the people who chose them even knew to look at web contrast guidelines.
Most colour schemes are like that. People with an eye for colour but no UI experience choose what looks nice to them. [It's much the same for fonts. Actual, professional font designers can go on for hours about the mistakes in most of the free amateur-created fonts.]
I'll also bet they were young and still with superb eyesight. Contrast isn't on most people's radar until they start finding they can't see stuff properly. Just because a contrast ratio of 5.00 passes doens't mean you want all the text to be at the bare minimum permitted. It's supposed to be a minimum after all, not a target.
Here's the blurb about the colour scheme:
http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized
https://github.com/altercation/solarized
The colours aren't chosen randomly. There's an established rationale for why these particular colours were chosen. If you're going to rant like this it behooves you to at least read the documentation first.
This sounds like the Solarized Light color scheme, not the White (which for me is listed as "White (Default)"). If White isn't being default set as labeled, that may be a bug.
Yea FDF6E3 background colour is Solarized Light, to be fair that is the colour scheme on docs etc.
The main reason I mention this is that it's probably the reason that Deimos chose these color schemes - that they're already established, and so he could spend more time developing other more important areas of the site instead of worrying about something that may or may not be in his area of expertise. There's no need to rail against him so hard, especially while the site is still in alpha. I'm sure folks would be a lot more resceptive to your criticisms (which have merit) if it didn't seem like you were calling the site bad and terrible.
Let me get this straight, you are simultaneously upset at someone using the word just (dismissive / belittling) when describing your post in which you call the site developers numpties. You complain about others sensitivity. Fuck me that's hypocritical.
You're much more forgiving than I am! :)
I meant that I wasn't going to waste my time addressing a series of random points from someone who's only been here a day and has already decided they know what Tildes is doing wrong. By addressing those points, I would be giving them a sort of credibility. Meanwhile, you were nice enough to take them seriously.
Welcome! You'll be glad to hear that many of your issues are already in progress thanks to the site's recent opensourcing.
I do wish you had lurked for a while first, since I think that's always a good idea when entering a community to find out the norms. I agree with many of your points, but also think the comparison to other systems could have been much more concise.
And I apologise for Algernon_Asimov's rudeness. I often find myself reading his comments and thinking certain phrases were totally unnecessary and just there to insult. But we all have our little things ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .
Finally, please bear in mind that Tildes is not developed by some huge team - up until a few days ago it was just Deimos on his own. You could have phrased your suggestions in more of a 'this is what i'd like to see long term' way instead of being so critical. He's worked hard on this.
Don't apologise for me.
Numpties, Humpties, Dumpties, all figures of speech as far as I'm concerned. Informative post to someone who's not neck deep in the technical part of the web. Thanks for your thoughtful post. Welcome to Tildes.
As one of the users here with poor eyesight, I find the default white theme to be perfectly legible for the most part - it's the stuff like comment headers that works less well (and l intend to fix this Soon™). As a couple of other people have said, is it possible you're using the Solarized Light theme? That has significantly worse contrast, hence not being the default.