28
votes
The ~ character is not in my keyboard. Can you see Tildes expanding when most people can't write the URLs?
Even if Tildes is an English-only community, I can see how it been "US keyboard layout"-only might stop other users from using the site. I understand that the character is even in the site's icon and name, and it feels pretty aesthetically and brand-crucial, but I don't think it is related to the main idea of the site/community or its functionality; and being still in alpha is not too late to make a change that could help it expand and get more users (or at the very least, not limite it).
What do you think?
I think it's a valid concern, though I'd dispute the claim that "most people" can't type a tilde. If you don't mind me asking, which keyboard layout are you using? I'd be curious to know which widely-used layouts don't include a tilde.
Edit: of course Wikipedia has a whole section about typing a tilde on various keyboards... A quick summary:
(obviously, I have no idea how much of the above is accurate)
It's in the qwerty spot on simplified dvorak, which is the most widely used version. Not many people use pure dvorak, which even swaps around the numbers in the number row.
Maybe some buttons you can click on the top of the comment and post submit text box to link other groups and format text, it could even help less markdown savvy people to do better formatting.
I wonder how many international keyboards don't have the character, I use the Portuguese qwerty keyboard and I have tildes.
I think @Pipas is referring to a discussed feature from earlier on where you can e.g. click a button on the site to insert certain characters or bring up a text box to type a group name into and have it perform the linking for them.
This is a concern, but not something that I'm very worried about. People don't usually type urls directly, so it's probably more of an issue that there's no easy way to refer to a group while making posts on the site. We've talked about a couple options for this (I think both have already been mentioned in here):
~(maybe something like&, I don't know what's more accessible on all the layouts). This could probably be made to work in the urls as well.~character.I don't think editor-style buttons are the way to go. Something like a combination of formatting characters might be handy, though.
---music
becomes ~music
or something similar, for example.
I think that this solution is the simplest and most elegant. Yeah, it's not perfect since the user still needs to learn that
---turns into~, but there's nothing wrong with a little bit of a learning curve.I understand this is not the most urgent issue, but if this community is gonna grow and expand, the sooner this problems gets solved the better, so less users need to re-learn how it works. Personally, I don't see any of those solutions as actual solutions, since users would still need to learn that there's an alternate character (which is redundant), and having a button just to type one character seem to be kind of overthinking a solution to a problem that it's, really, a thing of aesthetics vs user experience. And I understand the attachment to the aesthetics, don't get me wrong, specially when is tied up to the core of the brand, but I still think UX should come first.
Yes, I understand the concern. The entire site name/structure isn't going to be replaced at this point because it's inconvenient for a small group of users though.
No, of course not, but I'm not sure changing the character equals changing the whole brand. I understand it is a big issue, but I still think it's necessary, and the earliest the better for big changes. Hope you aren't afraid of that.
It really doesn't seem like the use of a hard-to-type-on-some-keyboard-layouts character would significantly impact the rate of adoption, especially considering the 'target audience' is fairly tech-savvy and intelligent. We don't need to compromise the aesthetic of the site to treat users like children in the name of UX. They're smart and will be able to figure out something as simple as an alternate character.
I'm part of the target audience, and I'm not tech-savvy.
Good point. Maybe I'm not the best example to use, due to my previous history of having worked alongside software developers. Let me rephrase.
The target audience for Tildes is not restricted to people who are "fairly tech-savvy". Sure, some people discovered this site through Hacker News, a site for mostly tech-savvy folks, but announcements have also been made on Reddit, a site where lots of average joes hang out (which is where I found out about it). And, in the future, when Tildes is public, it will attract all sorts of people, not just tech-savvy types. We should not be designing this website to be used primarily by people who have an above-average knowledge of computers.
Someone after my own heart! :)
I think the simplest approach is the "alternate character", and it could be implemented as simply as
RewriteRule ^-(\w+)$ /~$1 [R=301,L](or the equivalent nginx, or in Pyramid with a redirect or even just accepting both as valid URLs).This allows anyone to type the url in the browser
For commenting, it could be remapped as well, it shouldn't cause problems, as hyphen-prefixing isn't really a thing in any language as far as I know, and it's nearly transparent for the users. It would be easy enough to detect a locale that is known to use a non-english keyboard to show a hint for it as well
Careful with numbers, though :) I don't know whether an initial number will be allowed in a group name, but it doesn't seem impossible. Plus, hyphens are frequently misused as dashes - like so - and not everyone puts a space on both sides.
Maybe /t/ becomes ~? IIRC dashes are used in formatting, so using dashes might cause some unintended consequences.
"what about people that can't type a period?" becomes the next question
Not really. What keyboard layout can't type a period, or an @, or a #? Most can, but ~ is not in the same category, because the number of keyboard layouts that have that character are way lower.
The problem with a period is that it’s too common; using a character (or set of characters) that are commonly used in writing leads to a lot of accidental parsing as special. Characters like @ and # are rarely used in conversation, but easy to type, as are strings like “/r/“.
Then for #, I think if it were to have another meaning it would be a shorthand for tags. I'm not sure how often it would come up - I guess people don't really link to tags inside the body of a post or comment very often.
We probably also don't want full hashtag functionality where comments become grouped under tags a la twitter, instagram, facebook etc. But I guess if people wanted to link to a tag, #foo would be easier than https://tildes.net/?tag=foo.
Giving it any other meaning would probably confuse users from those other platforms, so that's out too.
I agree that it is an important character to use in this site, but I don't agree that the number of users that can't type it is a small set. Even if English is the most used language on the Internet, English keyboard layouts are the minority around the world. I see this problem where people of English speaking countries don't really get a grasp of the amount of people that exist and engage from other countries, because the default imaginary user is a male white american user, just because they don't announce they aren't. And English has become the universal language, there's no discussion about it, but this is an interesting and particular case where language is not the issue, but keyboard-layout is. And even if a huge amount of people from non English speaking countries have no problem communicating in English with the rest of the community, a seemingly non-issue as a keyboard layout is actually a huge issue.
Because that's not the same in any way. You can speak many languages, but every single keyboard you can buy in a given country comes with that country's layout. You can't just switch that. I don't think buying an imported US/UK keyboard to comfortably use a single website makes sense either. For your reply I assume that you don't care much about having users from other places, so there's not much to talk about here, since my original question was about the difficulties this community will have expanding.
Strange that OP said ~ is uncomon. Most programmers will need to type ` somehow. Most academia people host their personal website like people.example.edu/~someone.
Check out the keyboard section of the tilde Wikipedia entry for how to get a tilde using various keyboard languages.
I reckon that shouldn't be a requirement for every user, so I think my point still stands.
ALT+126 = ~
Not the best, but easy enough :)
The problem is not that it's impossible to do tho, is that is not easy and/or people don't know how to type the character :/
and everyone that wants to participate will figure out how because there are a plethora of resources on how to type the character
Is that a threshold that we specifically want to impose on a subset of users for an actual reason, or a burden we impose onto them because of an aesthetical reason?
I just personally don't think that a tilde is an obscure enough of a character to cause a change
Is it on your keyboard? Would you think the same if the character was § instead of ~? The 'Ñ' character is probably on more keyboard than ~.
I just think that the possible limiting effects of it (user growth wise) weight more than the aesthetic/brand importance, more so given that this is still in beta and such a change wouldn't be that important at this point. Being afraid of change now (or lazy, or just convenient) might just be the difference between reaching critical user base or not. Google spend months choosing between hundreds of shades of blue on A/B tests for the links on the search page; I think this is way more substantial than that.
From the accessibility perspective, getting a ~, §, or Ñ is actually the most difficult on desktop (where i had to copy/paste to get the characters). on mobile I can get ~ in the alternate characters list and § or Ñ from holding down on & or N respectively. And considering that most traffic is on mobile even now and that the next billion people to get online are all going to be on mobile, I feel that marks the character choice as even less of an issue. All sorts of software takes accessibility into account and keyboards are no exception.
That still depends on the mobile keyboard layout, and I still think that we're dancing around the issue just to keep the character for aesthetic reasons, while there are many other characters that could work just as well and exist on (almost) every keyboard, like @, #, etc. In all this thread I haven't heard a single reason to keep it besides avoiding any change on a site that's still in alpha.
The reason to keep it is that its the name of the website and would be incredibly hard to change and there are plenty of workable solutions and workarounds to it. I think @Eva had a wonderful solution that I was hoping you would weigh in on.
Aesthetics before usability and user growth, then.
I can't see how. But anyway, isn't that what alphas are for?
That a solution, but still seems like a workaround that users would have to learn.
I'm not dumb, I can see how tied up the character is with the brand, I just don't think that should be a reason to keep it.
Alphas are for finding issues like this and finding solutions for them. Rebranding is an extreme solution. There are other solutions out there that we can make work. I think you brought up an important issue, but I wish that you were more responsive to the solutions being posted and offered a critique of why you think they wouldn't work.
Using quotes is something that users have to learn. If that seems to be a major issue though, perhaps adding a button to insert one could be a solution, but I really don't think it would be if there were other solutions like % or -- equating to a ~.
I guess why I'm a little less sympathetic to your argument than I think I normally would be is that you seem to be less interested in finding a solution to the ~ problem and more just anti ~. There has been a few solutions posted that you don't seem to be too interested in discussing, you seem to be more into arguing that there is something about the ~ that is exclusionary and that there is no way to keep it and have a diverse user base. I guess I'm just feeling like you are more interested in arguing about that than you are about finding a solution to a functionality issue.
I've said many times that there's no need for rebranding. I don't see how the site's name or logo should have to change.
That's what I've been doing, and you quote an example just after. Seems like you want me to agree to any solution, but I just don't think those solutions solve anything. And I still haven't read a single reason for keeping it but aesthetics, and that is not worth changing something you're used to for a small set of users, which I think is a terrible reason, and also, if this site does get critical mass at some point, the current users that are so used to the character will make a way smaller set than the users who won't be able to type it, so I think that's pretty short-minded. That won't happen anyway, since those who can't type it probably won't use the site in the first place. In any case, I think I'm repeating myself, and your comment attacking me personally has burned me out, so I'm gonna leave it here. I posted this here because I wanted to help the community and I want to see it grow, because I like the ideas is based on, but I also think communities should make up their own rules to a certain point, and imo most of you seem to prefer the character and the brand over the diversity, so maybe it should stay like that, even if in my opinion it's a waste of potential.
I did not intend that as a personal attack, I meant it as a criticism of your lack of engagement with the solutions offered. As I have said, I think you brought up a very valid issue that needs a solution, but my issue is that the only solution you seem interested in is your own. The reason I find this disappointing is that this site is based around discussions and I haven't seen you really discuss the issue, more just restate your belief that the ~ needs to go. As a US Dvorak and QWERTY user I find the solutions offered such as -- and % to be perfectly usable (I would probably even use -- more than a ~ since the - is on my homerow), but I'm very interested to know why other layout users may not find it useful. Again this was not meant to be a personal attack, I was just asking for your perspective on why those solutions won't work. I think we all understand at this point why you believe the exclusive use of a ~ can alienate some users, but I don't think we understand why you think there is no solution other than getting rid of it. It's a little unfair to accuse the community of not wanting diversity when the community has been in here offering solutions and alternatives, if we didn't want diversity there would have been no replies, clearly the community want's diversity and we want to be able to make the site easy to use for everyone. The community disagreeing with your idea is not a rejection of diversity, it's an invitation to work together to find a solution.
the reason (other than personal preference from Deimos) is because it's not a difficult character to type
For you.
Is it for you?
Yes, it is. What would I be arguing about otherwise?
You need a numeric keypad to do that, and many laptop don't have it. Not to mention mobile keyboard.
You are right but just yesterday I was thinking, how often you have to use that symbol for real?
I joined since quite some time at this point but I only used it in the meta topics about tildes itself.
Is it really going to be this much of an hassle, really?
In any way, I think that we could add a simple formatting bar for the comment/topic textarea and include a custom "tildes" button that simply write the ~ sign.
It's on my desktop keyboards, but I have to go through a couple loops get to it on a mobile screen keyboard.