What do we want as a community?
Just got invited here and looking at the content of the front page, Tildes is basically a "poor-man's version" of reddit right now. That's OK: it's a new community and I imagine a big part of users are coming here from reddit so they're doing what they're used to doing on social networks, that's only fair.
However, more than that, looking at the groups, they are set up pretty much similarly to reddit's default subs - if not on a 1:1 basis, at least in the general tone: pretty casual, daily life topics, big focus on entertainment media, etc. Maybe again this is, by design catering to the people who are bound to be incoming from reddit, so they can immediately relate to a similar user experience. Good.
So I think it's fair to say that it's proven that Tildes can be "like reddit". It kinda looks like reddit, it kinda feels like reddit. That part of the deal is covered. Now, what can makes us different? I doubt anyone here has no ambition besides being a soft-fork of reddit.
What topics make you tick? What sort of online discussion makes you go "that's the good stuff"? What subjects are you truly passionate about? I'd like to know what the community here is all about, whether the current ~groups represent their interests and passions or not and, hopefully we could come up with some less generic ideas for new ~groups out of the discussion.
EDIT I realize Tildes has a specific policy of "lesser active groups are better than a billion inactive groups" but at this point in time a good selection of groups would really help define the identity and content, not to mention promote quality discussion that actually aligns with people's interests. Hopefully seeing common trends in the replies would allow us to identify a few potential new groups, perhaps.
I have read the links you've sent me and by their very nature they can't answer what I'm asking here. They are written by the creator regarding his vision for the website.
I"m asking the community for their interests and passion regardless of the website.
The question is about Tildes: what do we, as tilders, want from Tildes? It rightly belongs here in ~tildes.
To be honest, I don't think we need to get too heavily invested in a meta-post by someone who had been on Tildes for less than a day, and who hadn't posted any other topics or comments prior to this. You don't walk into a social function that's already underway and ask the people who've already been there for hours what they want from the party, like they haven't already talked about it before, and like they aren't already doing what they want to do when you finally turn up.
I think the dictum "lurk moar" applies here.
Agreed, just participate in discussion and if someone has a specific question about the community don't hesitate to ask, but these vague far-reaching threads about the 'goals of the community' are getting kind of old. RTFM!
Yeah more so the way you've read it than what other people replied with. I'm honestly baffled that out of all answers, maybe a single one or two actually attempted to answer, the others went the meta route - literally like I'd expect on reddit: a whole lot of uppitiiness and "look at me mah, me so clever" and absolutely no meat to it.
I'm disappointed, to be frank. Not to be overly fatalist, but the site's going nowhere if that's the core userbase.
Well, you did post your topic in ~tildes - a group specifically for "Meta discussion about Tildes itself" (it's in the sidebar!). If you wanted to discuss people's general preferences for social media, you might have been better off posting your question in ~tech or ~talk, which would reduce the potential for misunderstandings.
Also, three out of four paragraphs in your topic post directly referenced Tildes. You even asked "what can makes us different? I doubt anyone here has no ambition besides being a soft-fork of reddit." From this, it was very easy to believe you were asking what people wanted from Tildes.
If you didn't want people talking about Tildes:
Don't post in Tildes' meta group.
Don't talk about Tildes so much in your own post.
There was also the issue that you asked this question while you'd been on Tildes for less than 24 hours. It looked like you were coming here trying to fix a problem without even taking the time to understand it: if there was a problem, what previous actions had been taken, what future actions were planned.
Welcome to tilde my man. Lol. Just stay out of this section in particular. Oh and it’s kind of a echo chamber. I say hold on and lurk/post in the non meta threads and hope more ppl help change things a bit.
we're here because we read everything and agree with it. it does speak for us.
Honestly, I'm expecting this place to play out a great deal like reddit in the long run.
The major difference will come from the bubble-up mechanics. Unlike reddit, groups here form real, connected networks automatically, and there will be systems in place to help the higher quality content travel from group to group, mostly in the form of rising up within their own hierarchies. I wrote a bit about how this should work here.
On reddit, the 'defaults' get noisy, messy, and foster very generalized, lower quality discussion. They attract huge numbers of users and submissions, most of them are so fast nothing really gets a chance. Here that submission activity will end up more focused in the smaller groups at the bottom of the hierarchies, and the top level root groups will evolve into a 'gateway' community for everything below them. That's the reason for their general, generic nature.
Imzy allowed for unfettered group creation from the start. Everyone replicated reddit's general structure, but all the groups were ghost towns, and Imzy died off largely because they never took steps to help their users form a real community instead of content-starved splinters.
I eventually expect and want to see just about everything on reddit, though with a few exceptions - disincentivizing fluff content, no pornography, no pairwise-opposing hate communities or political circlejerk communities that exist just to fight with and harass each other. That's part of the reason group creation here is more of a discussion than a button-click. The existing group organization isn't set in stone, we can re-arrange the hierarchy, and that'll become necessary as things evolve. I think of it like a bonsai tree. It'll need a lot of careful, patient pruning.
Evey so often we do a 'new groups' thread, there are a couple in ~tildes from past discussions. Tilde's total population right now is that of a moderately interesting tiny subreddit on reddit - approaching 6k subscribers. I wouldn't expect group creation to really start taking off until we're closer to 25k users.
I'm looking forward to ~games.tabletop and ~music.streams myself. ;)
One very important question is how "best content" will be decided. If it's purely based on votes, ~music will end up indistinguishable from /r/music.
One potential solution for that is the exemplary upvote feature. That's the 'how' part. There's also going to be some gatekeeping from the curators involved when a post bubbles up from one group to the parent group. The curators in the original group will nominate it (possibly with help / automation from exemplary votes and other systems) and the curators of the parent group need some sort of approval after that.
There is an on-going thread right now that answers your basic question for me.
The lowest common denominator for me is what I see in this thread about Jordan Peterson.
There are people who like him, and those who don’t. They are all having an ego-less, rational discussion about a topic which would have likely devolved into something awful by this point on every other forum that I am aware of. This is what I want for any given topic. Knock on wood, we did it. I would love to buy everyone in that thread a round of beer if ever possible.
This potential is why I got so excited about Tildes.
Edit: I’d like to add that part of the rational magic of that thread is that it seems like most people are commenting on the linked article, and the subject, Jordan Peterson. They are not flaming each other, they are passionately discussing the topic.
Yes. Discussions about views orthogonal to the mainstream without jumping to the ad hominems and moralistic chest-beating are a nice change of pace.
Thoughtful discussion is pretty much the only way to change someone else's mind. I have yet to see someone change their opinion when being screamed at...
You can check here for a similar discussion: https://tildes.net/~tildes/3uh/what_kind_of_community_do_you_want_this_to_be
Honestly, while you're right that this website is laid out like a poor man's Reddit for the moment, I think the content on it is dramatically different.
Granted, I don't log in here as often as I do on Reddit, the content is dramatically different. It actually takes an effort to understand some of the stuff on here, it feels like it takes work to contribute something people will like, and those are good things. I read an article off here just now about a 'Semantic Apocolypse' and that is something I would never have found on Reddit - and it's that sort of uniqueness that I appreciate for the moment on this website. And on an article about Nintendo hating ROMs, the OP made an effort to post a multi-paragraph comment on it before they went to sleep.
So as far as what I hope for this community - it's to continue as we are. One of the things that people seem most paranoid about here is low-effort posts, and that is such a relief to see. It's indicative of a community of people committed to putting effort into something and understanding that nothing good will be made where there is no work put towards making it that way.
While the structure of the site can still use work - it's also still under construction. But the kinds of people this website seems to attract are wildly different than most social media websites. By the time Tildes is ready to 'go public,' I imagine there will a solid community cemented around a more genuine notion of intellectuality than websites like Reddit would have, which will be able to curtail the 'low-effort' posts that can plague larger websites.
Indeed.
We're going to have to fight for it as well. The content decay is a natural force arising from human interaction, not some easily tricked boogeyman or common mistake of design. It's killed every other website and service in history. It's undefeated - the grim reaper of online discourse. It's on us to design and build the systems that tame this force, perhaps even turn it against itself. It's on us to help integrate new users and fight the ones who are here just to spoil the party. Once this website goes 'open to read' for everyone, the fight begins. Once we're fully open registration, the fight begins in earnest.
Yeah, I didn't want to take it that far. I prefer to see keeping the community to a high standard more like working to maintain something rather than fighting for something.
I would rather have the degradation of social media be a result of natural entropy that we must continually regulate rather than an active, inherent part of humanity to destroy all that is good which we must struggle against. They both reach the same ends though - a genuine community.
Personally, I loved the poetry subverse they had on Voat before the community faded. Poetry is a form of high art that anyone can tackle and enjoy - be it by writing their own original content or posting some cool poem they read somewhere.
In the same vein, writing prompts (image-based, text-based or whatever) are much more interesting to me than most news or discussion. Having some sort of collaborative writing would be awesome, if people here are into that.
Sharing and discussing art in general is also a favorite of mine (music, DeviantArt and ArtStation artists, etc) but in that sense I think we're covered with the existing groups.
Finally: discussing philosophy and hacker ethics and how to achieve the most out of technology and the Internet. I think that must be a common interest for most early-adopters of any social network. I feel this isn't represented in the current group selection.
We are still relatively small, so I would say be the change you seek. There are plenty of opinionated and smart folks around here, just make some posts (topics) according to your interests and people are likely to respond. I don't think any new groups will be created until there is enough content being posted already to justify it. If you don't see a group that fits your exact needs, just use ~misc for now. Welcome!
Oh, and just to add something: be sure to tag your topics properly. I believe that this is the best way for admin(s) to gauge when a new group should be created. If there’s a lot of traffic under a particular tag, it’s likely that a group, or sub-group will eventually be made.
I think you will find this community very open to these topics! Just post and tag away.
One more thing to add regarding:
There is no poetry group or sub-group at this point, but you can find all of the poetry on Tildes by clicking on an existing Topic's "poetry" tag. ex: https://tildes.net/?order=activity&tag=poetry&period=all
However, how were you to find that as a new user? You would have had to randomly1 come across a Topic with a Poetry tag, and click that tag. This is the reason that I made this feature proposal/survey today.
@Deimos, I would like to bring this up as the main use case for this feature proposal.
edit: 1 you would have had to think, hmm, poetry is likely part of the ~creative group, maybe poetry is in there and not in ~humanities or ~misc. Giving the you top-level Browse by Tag list would have made that easier, correct?
Oh, but a search feature on the front page could have likely fixed all of these problems.. would you have just searched for poetry?
I think search is probably the simplest solution for a case like that (coming to the site and wondering if there's anywhere already existing for a specific subject), but ability to browse and discover things would definitely be something good to have as well.
I am also new to Tildes, but I also believe a proper search feature is highly necessary.
That may have already been listed or discussed somewhere as a feature request, but I unfortunately am not able to search for it (other than what Adams has posted).I'm am sure it is no simple task to implement something like that but I was unable to find it mentioned in any of the Tildes Docs.Personally, I do not post often and instead I will look for things other people have previously discussed when I come across a problem. Having search could potentially cut down on reposts but that is another topic with its own complexities.
Edit: Found a discussion about it here: https://tildes.net/~tildes/4sy/search_function_on_tildes
You might be interested in this topic from a month ago: Daily Tildes discussion - proposals for "trial groups", round 1.
There are also two things you should be aware of:
Deimos does not want to fragment this site too much while it's still small. He believes that Imzy killed itself by spreading its members too thinly across too many groups too quickly. He wants the growth of groups and sub-groups here to happen slower and in a more controlled manner.
There is an important feature missing from this website which needs to be present in order for subgroups (~games.computer & ~games.tabletop) to be useful. Even if you unsubscribe from a sub-group (~games.tabletop), you will still see all its content if you're subscribed to the parent group (~games). The mechanism to quarantine posts in sub-groups does not yet exist, so there's not much point in creating sub-groups at this time.
I think we need more fringe and specific subgroups of things the community has shown an interest for. Polarizing topics such as a ~Piracy would be nice to see as well as a more specific subgroup like ~tech.privacy.
Both these topics have been discussed (Piracy being debated) at length and I think its time to start adding more groups in order for the site to move towards more specialized and less generic content. The thing that makes these sites great is the specific sub-communities where everyone can spread out into their commonly held niche topics. We're not there yet.
I'm seeing a lot of love towards open source projects and news, recently a post about GOL got impressive votes, maybe an opensource world ~?
The biggest difference I've noticed so far is that people cannot just tell you to “STFU!” with a downvote button. If they want you to know they disagree with you, they have to engage with you in a discussion and tell you how exactly they think you're wrong. Also, if your opinion is unpopular you're not alone fighting against a bunch of faceless downvotes. But instead you're having an actual discussion with actual people. That's by far the thing I found most appealing about Tildes. And it's held up pretty good so far.
Online I'm mostly passionate about technology, film and “shock” content. I'm confident I'll be able to satisfy my needs for the first two. But for the 3d one I'll have to rely on reddit for the time being as there's no place for it on Tildes nor will there ever be according to what I've read so far.
I made a reddit account a couple of years ago due to one of these, r/spacex. Tbh, I had avoided Reddit in general until that point. On r/spacex I saw people having extremely rational and super domain-specific conversations and I thought that’s what Reddit was all about.. I know.. “oh sweet summer child.” As I became a general Reddit user I realized that this was not the case all around. In fact, it was only the small groups that seemed to contain rational discussions.
My hope is that we can somehow keep the tone of the general community at the same level as those specific sub-groups. While the quality and quantity of the sub-groups will require a critical mass of users, I pray that the tone can be kept at the current level.
When Reddit first started it seemed like a more modern version of Slashdot. It was mostly tech and science discussion and it was generally people in those fields. When the Digg exodus happened it brought all kinds of people with it and started to explode in popularity. I think the people that run Reddit still think it's the same community from back then that could largely police itself but that's just not the case.