19
votes
User bios?
Should we have optional short user bios? Say a 300-500 character markdown bio, a la Hacker News (IDK their character limit BTW)?
edit: add the word "optional"
Should we have optional short user bios? Say a 300-500 character markdown bio, a la Hacker News (IDK their character limit BTW)?
edit: add the word "optional"
I honestly think the option might be nice as long as it's not mandatory.
Pro:
It might remind the person reading your bio that you're a human person with feelings and shows you something about them.
Con:
Might make people more likely to respond to how they perceive that person rather than the idea they're presenting.
Certainly, I updated the topic to say "optional". I guess I thought that that would be obvious and thus did not spell it out.
edit: speling
Created an issue for this: #206
Thanks!
Not really. It might be that I'm interested if they have a blog etc. in case that I find their opinions interesting. It's almost always the reason I check somebody's HN profile, and that's what I'd do with my own: put there a greeting and a link to my homepage.
WRT you second paragraph, it depends on choice. I'm not using Tildes anonymously, others are. Like @Mango said and I forgot to include in my topic text, this would be best if it was totally optional, and the UI did not incentivise sharing data that needs to be kept private.
Anonymous interaction on the web (which began with chatrooms and has since all but disappeared from the mainstream) has always flirted with disclosure.
Would you mind expanding this a bit? I don't exactly understand the axiom but it seems interesting.
The anonymous chatroom. What is the first thing everyone asks: D/S/L?
Anonymous Reddit. I know we're not supposed to give out personal information but I'm from __________. As a __________ I think that ________________.
You can agree or disagree with my take on it, that's fine. But I think humans are naturally drawn to disclosure as a means of influencing others and defining themselves. If I were designing a Turing machine, that's the first thing I'd have it do.
I do not disagree, but I doubt Tildes was meant to be an anonymous platform. Sure anonymity is welcome and facilitated, but not required. I never intended my account to be anonymous, or else I would not pick the same user name I use non-anonymously elsewhere.