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votes
What would you think of completely supressing user invites?
By user invites I mean the invites that are given to Tildes' users which they then can give out to their friends. Personally, I think more often than not they're sort of gifted to strangers online without much consideration or deliberance behind the decision. And the user receiving it hasn't done much to “earn” it.
Now, I'm sorry if this sounds like an obnoxious case of gatekeeping. But I think there's a certain beauty to checking the sub daily waiting for the next official round of invites. And that's the kind of user I'd want to interact with, rather than someone who just accidentally stumbled upon r/tildes, opened the sub, found an invite thread active and got one without having even read the docs page.
What do you think?
If you only give out codes to your friends, all we can manage to create is an insular society where everyone thinks the same. I want a diverse website.
See that's the issue. Eventually you get so diverse you have a reddit situation where the masses of "casuals" come in and your quality goes down to meet the average. With the size you get "the masses."
Reddit used to be the niche site for early 20's white guys that work in tech. Tildes is just earlier on that same timeline.
I disagree. Quality only goes down when moderation doesn't scale to meet the new demands. The Tildes model of outsourcing moderation to active and prolific users ensures that moderation will scale appropriately.
How could you possibly scale the level of moderation to something the size of reddit without turning the entire site into a /r/science type of situation? The cool thing about reddit was that different communities have different guidelines based on their moderation, the smaller subs are still cool places to be while the only big subs that aren't total cesspools are the ones that have extreme moderation and are basically only approved experts replying with many threads getting deleted.
The long and short of it is that the communities automatically generate their own moderators based on activity and participation. Read the Tildes docs for more information. It's fundamentally a different platform than Reddit so it's not an apt comparison.
Yeah and there is little to no specification on how that's actually going to work or survive the scale which is what we're actually discussing here. The eternal summer problem is not something unique to reddit, so it's not a question of format. It's definitely at least trying to approach a solution I've just not seen any real evidence that this format has any difference. The main thing in my mind that would prevent a change is the lack of something akin to /r/pics or any of the meme subs.
It's been discussed at length, but you're correct that the technical details of this have not been worked out yet, as it is not implemented.
If this is something you are passionate about, then I would suggest creating threads in ~tildes talking about how you would like to see it implemented. What do you think would help?
Ignoring the fact that it's new and therefore can't really have evidence, what worries you about the format? What are the downfalls you see?
I don't see it specifically as a hole in the tildes design, I think it's simply a fact of the nature of people.
You get enough people you eventually get the idiots. It's happened to site after site I don't know if there is a way to actually stop it. I like that Tildes at least acknowledges it and it actively trying to thwart it, but my only point was that I'm not really sure you can have the diversity you're looking for without letting "them" in too.
The point about the no /r/pics is actually what I view as the biggest defense. Low-effort quickly viewed and discarded content seems to be the biggest attraction for those type of people so simply by not allowing that we could potentially avoid a large onslaught of them. However I still see it as an eventuality that either the site remains small and niche community or it balloons into the reddit type of site and eventually has an eternal summer.
Have you read Shirky's talk about the group enemy?
Well letting them in is diversity, who you find annoying is relative to who you are. So what makes this initial cohort the one with a right to decide who should join or not? I mean we were all probably just some random redditors until someone pm'd a code to us.
I think the most impoartant will be to establish a strong site culture, then when it's ready to intake new users without loosing it's original identity, it will. The moderation methods and intake method/speed are all jsut details which will help in achiving a userbase that cares about the site and the way it's run along with a respect for the way things are done here.
I just think that at some point any culture or moderation are going to fall to "the horde"
Not saying we shouldn't try or just let them all in regardless.
The problem is not about people but about the content that is put on the site. Of course the content is put there by the people, but the site design favors certain content over other content, for most sites, quickly consumed material that doesn't require you to leave their website is prioritized over more complicated posts, and I believe that this is the reason for communities going to shit.
Tildes is never going to be ad-financed, and that already is a huge benefit for the quality of the content on the site. The differences in the tagging and voting system are other technological solutions to keep quality up and discussions multifaceted.
I don't want a site that keeps people out with an invite system, the design of the site should keep the quality up.
One of my red hat friends declined the invite even after me saying there needs to be more republican voice on the platform. I told him he'd have to play nice, because in our little google chats it gets heated sometimes. And I'm fine with that but just wanted his voice here.
It's not really a problem; that's too big a word for it. I just think making it slightly more difficult to get an invite would filter out most casual users.
Well, I'd say it's different. Since to get an official invite you have to visit the sub daily or several times a day, in order not to miss the window of opportunity before the official invite thread is locked.
You also don't know if you'll get the invite by just commenting. Maybe they don't like your post history, or you haven't been active enough, or your account is too new, etc.
I have been on both situations. I got an invite from an official thread (for which I waited like 3 months checking the sub daily) and another invite someone just offered to me (only one account, though).
I enjoyed the official invite much more. It felt more sort of “deserved” in a way.
If this sounds rambling is because I don't really have a strong opinion on this, nor a made up mind. I just want to discuss it.
The day I found out about Tildes, I shot a short email to Deimos and he graciously sent me an invite code the next day. Seems no different than asking a current member for an invite code.
Same here. To be honest, from reading the docs I didn’t know there was any other way to do it. This method does apply a very simple quality/interest threshold to be applied, though I imagine that it will be the first victim of any ramping up of interest.
If the aim is simply to manage the growth of the site, then a simple waitlist will be sufficient (as well as weeding out the momentarily interested). I guess the user-invite approach is a way to manage the nature of the community during these early days, but a reactive, moderation-driven approach will become necessary very quickly.
Designing a scalable solution will have to be an organic process, based on a clear vision for the aims of that solution. I think Slashdot’s meta-moderation approach is a good example of an innovative approach, helping to avoid some of the extreme behaviours of all-powerful moderators.
We're already filtering. Most sites have open signups and we have invites. That's a filter that keeps out the kind of people who are just floating by. The people who are interested enough to hang around on /r/tildes to get one, or are willing to read the docs and simply send an email - that's who we want. They want something better than reddit. That's who you tap to help build a new community, and that's why we're all here right now.
I am under the impression that the invite system is just a mechanism used for the alpha of the site, I wouldn't worry too much about it because everything will be open to anybody at some point anyways!
I'm uncomfortable with the superiority complex that seems to be brewing here, particularly with regard to Tildes vs. Reddit but also Tildes vs. anyone who hasn't "made it in" yet. It doesn't have to be this way.
It won't be. The destiny of this site is inclusive open registration, that's been made clear by Deimos since day one. If people want a fully private space that is very exclusive, The Well is four decades old, and right over there. They've proven it is possible to beat eternal september, though they require you to disclose your real world identity to do it.
Building anonymous spaces that can scale well is still an open problem. The Well did it with reputation, I bet we can too.
It’s one of the biggest turn offs about this site. Ppl think they are so much better than the average person. It makes for a icky feeling any time reddit is discussed.
This is the first time I notice this (I don't check in here too often though), but it also really bugs me. I also just got my invite by mailing Deimos so it's not that hard to get onto the site (just be civil and ask nicely I guess) and the whole idea is to change the ranking system of posts, not the way people register.
The quality is supposed to go up by the way the content is organized, not by keeping people out!
I think that Tildes is tiny and suppressing invitations is certainly counterproductive.
I've been fairly selective with who I give invites to. If you want to be selective, then that's great. Be the change you want to see in the world. I don't think we need to prescribe how people need to do things as much as a lot of people want to.
We should just let this place happen, and making rules that preclude it from happening seems like a bad call.
I don't feel like you should have to "earn" an invite here. Tildes should allow as many users as its moderation system is able to support, instead of making invites scarce to create a superiority complex so that only people who "deserve" an invite can get one. You shouldn't have to prove that you're worthy of getting an invite, all that does is create an echo chamber.
When I send invite codes, I generally briefly check their profile to make sure that they are an active poster. I haven't run into anyone having a profile sharing hateful messages or anything, but I wouldn't send an invite to that user because that's not the kind of community that we are trying to build here.
If someone seems like more of a lurker, I will generally mention that since Tildes is still relatively small, that the community would appreciate their contribution to add content to the site. The few people I have mentioned that to have said that they will try to contribute when they can contribute to the discussion, and to me that's enough.
I unfortunately have, but it’s thankfully been relatively rare. Out of ~3000 invite requesters I have vetted so far, I only ran in to about 50 or so cases of overtly hateful racial slur use and/or clearly hateful ideological posts (e.g. holocaust denial submissions) in user histories. Needless to say I didn’t send invites to those people, however as far as I am concerned if someone expresses interest in tildes, took the time to request an invite and doesn’t have anything overtly hateful like that in their user history then they have “earned” the invite. Even lurkers and shitposters may simply be a product of their environment on reddit so I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I haven't vetted anywhere near that number, but I am not surprised that you have given those numbers. I don't care if someone posts memes and low effort comments because I know that the community here wouldn't respond positively to it and there is nothing similar to karma to keep track of. I think most people who are seeking invites to the site are wanting more in depth discussion that is harder and harder to find on reddit these days.
Yeah that is roughly my line of thinking too. I think I was even editing in the last line about people being products of their environment on reddit as you were responding. ;)
What would you considering "earning" an invite?
I put it in brackets because I'll concede it's pretty subjective. And it sounds a bit too much for what I really mean, which is in reference to people checking the sub for official invites.
Like, actively trying to get into Tildes. As opposed to just stumbling upon an invite.
Ah okay.
I don't really see a point to this. As anyone who requests an invite will get one, so I'm not sure how much difference we expect to see from someone seeing something about Tildes and requesting an invite on Reddit or elsewhere.
The goal of Tildes is also to eventually be completely open. I would say, post what you want to see and contribute the way you want others too, and hopefully there's enough of us that want the same.
I think the best way to bring quality content to ~'s would be to give invite codes to Redditors who post particularly good content. Basically, just treat it like you would treat gold.
I don't think that suppressing invites outright is going to help improve the community. What we likely need is a way to ensure that people are judicious in handing out invites. This would probably take the form of keeping track of invites in some way (like @dubteedub suggested) and using that to react accordingly both to users who are detrimental to the community and to users who invite such users.
But what does it mean to be detrimental to the community? Is it someone who joins, views, and even votes on posts but never comments? Or is it only a user who actively detracts from the community (by trolling or stirring up controversy)? Is someone who makes many claims but rarely posts sources to back up those claims detrimental to the community?
I'm personally only in favor of imposing sanctions for users that actively harm the community, but would be in support of a system that assigns "levels" of features for users depending on how much they have contributed, either by thoughtful posts or by inviting users that contribute positively to the community. For example, maybe each user gets one invite at first, and then the new user is vetted for some time before the original user gets another invite. This would take a significant amount of effort, but would hopefully ensure a quality community.
That info used to be public early on but was removed from the profiles after discussions with the users here. It's still being recorded, but the intended use case is to cut large branches of bad users out of the invite tree. If a group of dedicated trolls or a network of paid spammers gets an invite code, we can trace all of their invites in the tree back to that original, and review/prune all of that group at once.
That implies that invites are going to be the main/only way of growing the membership for a long time.
It might be useful to also develop (and highlight) a waitlist mechanism for those with no connections, to avoid masses of begging messages to existing members. Releasing accounts via this route could be rate-limited versus new sponsored accounts to get a manageable mix, and to deal with waves of malicious actors.
We can't easily move off of invites until we have trust and moderation systems built into the site as more than generalized plans. In a way the invites are there as a reward to the users here - you'll always be able to bring your friends in.
At some point I expect it'll become more like a private tracker model. Open registration for a couple days, close down again for a while and get everyone acclimated, repeat. Probably closed on days where there's intense viral interest just like Metafilter does it.
Someday once we know the trust/abuse/mod/etc systems can handle it, we'll move to fully open registration.
Sounds good. I imagine it will remain a topic for discussion for years to come as the site grows and matures.
It will. Chaotic internet systems like this forum aren't amenable to timelines, so we get there when we get there and that's the best we can say for certain. I'll be interested to see how many people stay subbed to ~tildes given the frankly embarrassing volume of meta-discussion here. That's why we've got ~tildes.official, for the real announcements.
It would be interesting to me to offer up batches of invite codes to redditors that are focused around certain subreddits. That would allow for more diverse discussion about various topics. For instance, inviting people who participate in /r/diving could result in ~hobbies.diving becoming a thing, and encouraging discussion such as environmental issues.
I think that's very likely to happen over time as reddit gets worse and tildes gets better.
I agree, but doing it now could result in more active and diverse content and discussions. I suppose it would be difficult to handle though, easier to just invite anyone with an active reddit profile that asks for one.
Having had a quick skim through the code, I think the data would allow that. I guess a big risk would be that if this information was easily available, people might start trying to game it for imaginary internet points. In fact at some point, invites might become more of a problem than a benefit, allowing brigading etc to happen.
There was a discussion on this a while ago. A part of it was enabled for a brief period too. For privacy issues, it was disabled. You may be interested in related topics "Invited by" information for users is no longer displayed and Daily Tildes discussion - should inviter/invitee info be public?.
Thanks, some good points in that topic.
Yes, the problem being that people love games (not being negative about that, it’s just human nature). No matter how the info was presented I could see people in all innocence posting things like “hey guys, I notice that only 10% of my invites get activated. How can I get this number up?” and starting up an SEO-type discussion.