What's the userbase of Tildes like? (+ some misc. Tildes questions)
Hi, I just joined an hour ago or so.
So far so good, site seems a welcome change as opposed to other certain content aggregators.
I'm just wondering what the userbase is like: what's your age group(not too specific if you want), occupation(again, vague is okay), continent of origin and gender? What draws you to this website as opposed to other social media? Do you expect Tildes to gain traction and grow to become a worthy Reddit(or other aggregator) competitor/successor?
Just to get a taste of the crowd and what kind of people we'll find here.
I'm in my 20's, currently studying engineering and living in western Europe. Applied to this website following a comment I saw that described the Tildes system compared to Reddit; seemed like a nice change on the clickbaity and sometimes not as fun-content on that website. Hoping this ends up a good place for discussion / quality content / fun chats, and also hope it can help me detox from social media by purposefully using a less active site(for now, of course).
Small note: while the site is closed right now, it might be opened up later, which means this post might be visible to the internet whole. Please keep your personal info in mind and only share what you want others(including crawlers/scrapers) to know.
Thanks, that was very helpful.
Shortly after the announcement that profiles were gonna go public. Quite a few older power users deleted.
@Kat might also have deleted her account for other reasons. You may recall that she had some serious health issues she was dealing with, and has been much less active on Tildes in the past few months, even before the recent announcement that
Tildesuser profiles were finally going visible.(cc: @apoctr)
EDIT: Oops! Wrong feature!
Some absolutely have, but
a lot ofsome accounts got nuked.It's really not a lot. Only 9 accounts that had any posts have ever been deleted, and most of those deletions weren't recent.
Apologies, poor wording and probably a bit of sampling bias
Eh, sorta correct. I know I'm not the only o r who did a bit of housecleaning when it was announced Tildes was going public. Which did not involve deleting the account.
Guess I'm lurking/absent too much these days, I wasn't aware of this situation. Where can I find more context?
You can read through someone's entire post history now.
Thanks for the answer! Was that really such a controversial change? I guess I missed the brouhaha. Doesn't seem to me like it should be of much concern, since it's not exposing new information that wasn't already freely accessible. I guess everyone might not feel the same way about that.
Huh?
I just shitpost as much as I can so anyone that tries to find anything worthy has to go through years of absolutely irrelevant and uninteresting content. It helps that beyond 1000 comments, it can't be found from the user's page. I also avoid talking about anything personal.
I see, thanks.
That's a very interesting approach, and I can see the value in it. Seems like a lot of effort for very little (or at least hard to estimate how much) benefit though.
I'm with you but some people conducted their posting under the assumption that it wouldn't ever be exposed and felt safer deleting their account or their posts.
Welcome to Tildes! I'm 21, I'm from the States, and I'm male. Pretty milquetoast and I'm certainly not the most interesting person on this site haha. Atm I'm unemployed and looking for work so I can pay bills while I figure out what exactly I want to do with my life (Some kind of software dev role probably. Coding, for sure). I'm really boring!
I came to TIldes because Reddit is getting too big for its own britches and bowing to advertisement companies. Reddit looks like shit now and it's obvious that it's to make it more advertiser friendly. Too much low effort content getting propelled up to the front page while quality content is buried deep below. Tildes looks promising in that there is no karma, and there aren't any downvotes. There's no hivemind enacting vengeance by downvote spamming; it encourages explanation and debate. While this can get long winded and some people elaborate to the point of redundancy, it's a nice change. It's very interesting to be a part of and I'm excited for the future of the site
Well said. Most fun I tend to get out of Reddit nowadays is a few small local subreddits in a different language and a private subreddit which is more like a glorified Whatsapp chat group with friends.
For the latter purpose it actually is really good, the moment any community grows large it's done with the fun however :/
I'm personally not really used to long-winded discussions on topics but it seems a fun change compared to shitpostey reddit and actually try to have meaningful discussions with people now, while also improving my vocabulary and learning how to discuss better.
I'd say the average Tildes user is young, male, socially liberal, American, very knowledgeable about tech, many users here have past experience modding reddit or other forums, and we're pretty communal by nature.
My personally, I'm 20 years old, currently studying Computer Science, I've lived in many places because of my dad's occupation and my mother's background, including Germany and Japan, but I currently live in Hawaii, and I'm male.
I come here because I enjoy the communal nature and the higher degree of curation / moderation; reddit has a lot of shitposts and memes and such, and it's nice to come to a place where I know I'll be able to reliably read interesting content. I don't really see Tildes and reddit as competitors, because while they're both news aggregators, they're based on fundamentally different premises.
Reddit's goal is to be the front page of the internet, a world community so to speak, and so they have thousands and thousands of different subs, many millions of users, and to allow pretty much any content.
Tildes' goal is to be a well curated news site where you can reliably expect interesting discussion and news, and although it's not really a goal per se, it has a more personal feel. You can easily stand out here because there are far fewer people, and you can get to know most of the regular commenters after a while. Some individual subs work like this on reddit, but the site as a whole doesn't. Tildes also comes down a lot harder on trolling / hate speech than reddit does, and so we haven't had any problems with that stuff (so far as I'm aware).
If I'm honest, I also love the site because of its retro feel. I'm not a fan of minimalism as a design language, but I am a fan of functional minimalism if done right, and I like Tildes' intentionally simple layout. It has a side benefit of working on nearly any device I've tried it on so far, and as a retro tech enthusiast, I have a lot of old shit to try it on. :)
So anyway, welcome to Tildes! Hope you enjoy your time here. I'm not a developer or a mod or anything, but I've been subscribed here for ages and it's just as good, if not better today, than when I signed up about a year ago, and I see no reason why that won't continue into the future.
Thanks! Average age so far seems lower than expected, though not off by much(I figured it'd be 25+ for most but I guess I can't really say so far with 3 top-level responses).
I like the minimalism, it's a lot less distracting and I think it might help me spend more time on other things compared to spending every waking moment on social media staring at pictures.
I'm 51 if that helps skew the curve, and I know of at least one other user here who's over 50.
I believe there were about a dozen over-50s who responded to the Year 0.5 Demographic Survey (and probably a few more who didn't).
Speaking as one of at least two 50+ women here, the demographics aren't that uniformly youthful. Technical, socially liberal, sure.
Tildes today is basically Reddit from ~6 years ago.
Wow. I'm the old guy in the house?
I'm 42, born and living in St Louis, MO, working in physics as the demonstration guy. I still can't believe they pay me to play with lasers and blow things up. It's an absolute dream job for me.
I'm on this site because someone said nice things to me on another forum and offered me an invite code. I'm a sucker for flattery, so here I am.
Seems nice enough. Less vitriol than I'd expect in a forum with a lot of current events posts. Very little physics to discuss, though, so... ya know... maybe it'll get better. :p
Nope! There are a few people here older than you. Me, for one. And there are quite a few people in their 40s and older here, according to the Year 0.5 Demographic Survey.
Though compared to the average, he certainly qualifies as one of the older guys.
Yes, but he's not "the old guy in the house". He's one of an - admittedly smallish - group of oldsters here. There's a few of us here trying to skew the average!
Fully aware of that, I myself am a good deal older than the average here.
Old guys repre.... ZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzz.......
There's dozens of us!
Hah I thought you wouldn't be able to resist!
NO! That's not true! You're not my father!
:p
Thanks, though. I'm enjoying this site so far.
Even though Tildes has slowed down a fair amount lately, we're still generally a decent chunk above Lobsters' overall activity level. Lobsters had 127 comments in the last 24 hours, and Tildes has had 181.
It's not very "fair" since Lobsters has much more restricted subject matter though, and would probably only line up with the combination of ~comp and ~tech on Tildes.
Sure, it's easy to check. In the last 24 hours from the time I'm posting this, there were 32 comments and 6 topics posted in either ~comp or ~tech. Tildes as a whole had 227 comments and 25 topics.
On the other hand Lobsters being more clearly defined in it's general purpose may also become a boon to it, as it has a clearer "sales pitch" for prospective users and less doubt about what kinds of content and comments should or shouldn't be posted.
I'm 28, studying Information Systems (late start on college, and have been going slow to balance work/school), from southern California.
I found Tildes by creeping on @Deimos's reddit account looking for some details regarding subreddit simulator, actually, did some reading, and it was everything I wamted to see in a social media site (voat was, too, but it went downhill before I could sign up). It's an open-source platform that respects users' rights to privacy and freedom of expression, is not federated, with a low community tolerance to rudeness and toxicity. Signing up, it does all that without being toxic, I've seen widely differing and opposing viewpoints discussed with nobody getting heated.
I want tildes to be comparable to reddit, but not a replacement, because when things get big, they tend to get watered down and lose what made them great in the beginning.
In am in my twenties, from a rural area of Italy, unemployed but hopefully going back to complete my informatics engineering degree this year. I am female, trans, and gay. I am an avid reader of all things fiction, my favourite author is Terry Pratchet (RIP), I write and draw pixel art from time to time, my most used programming language is Python, and I have been getting in the swing of "use Emacs for literally everything" lately.
I am not a big social media user in the first place, and the first one I joined was actually Reddit, back in 2014.
I joined Tildes mostly out of curiosity, as I heard some friends talk about it, and was hoping for something like Reddit, with some more discussion and with less noisy assholes.
I don't really think that it will ever become a Reddit competitor, if only for the sheer difference in size. Successor, possibly, but I hope it won't become its twin.
This site has always been intended to be opened up. The current privacy is just an initial phase of the alpha-testing stage. Deimos (the creator/founder/developer/moderator/god) has been working for the past couple of months towards making this site publicly visible, as a first step to making it fully open. In fact, that public visibility is due to happen early this week. As one "power user" recently said, this can be described as moving into "open alpha" (from "private alpha").
People will still require an invite to create an account and participate on Tildes, but everyone on the internet will be able to see everything on this site as of this week.
Later down the track, the requirement for invites will probably also be removed, so anyone will be able to sign up without restriction... making Tildes truly open.
Making this site public is not theoretical. It's a specific goal of Deimos' long-term plan.
I'm middle-aged (over 40). I'm Australian. I'm male.
It's aiming at high quality. Yes, I expect this site to gain traction.
I'm a 40 year old male, market farmer/ homesteader in the Midwest US.
If I had to quickly, relying on momentary personal thoughts, describe Tildes user base in 10 keywords they would be like:
Privacy, community, liberal, millennials, Linux, Firefox, environment, vegan, America, Australia.
22yo dude here. Mostly in-between jobs. Actively looking at the moment to start stockpiling cash so I can afford my next stretch of college without getting too heavy into debt. I do have a small job but work is very sparse, not nearly enough to save up anything. Hoping to study Graphic Design there. Or maybe some other form of Design. I like making things, especially with my hands.
I like Tildes because I like the ideas behind it. Open source, doesn't sell you out, doesn't try to take advantage of psychological quirks just to squeeze out a little more ad revenue, and the site itself is very lightweight with no massive invasive third party scripts or tracking. It's social networking with the crap cut out.
Have you had a look at (industrial) product design? It's usually some combination of technical and visual design and often very practical(wood/metalworking, 3D design).
That is a good idea, that's actually the kind of thing that I really liked about the Introduction to Engineering classes back in High School, we were mostly messing around with Autodesk Inventor and sketching out products and stuff. Loved that.
Got turned off of all of that the next year where it was all calculating force vectors, but if I could get just that first-year-class type thing going again that'd be fantastic, yeah.
If you're not interested in technical design, then there are still plenty of jobs in engineering for people who know how to use CAD software. You wouldn't be working with vectors and stuff, it's closer to being a draftsman/illustrator. Just with more modern tools.
Varies on location of course, but with some basic understanding of mechanical concepts and how to use CAD software you can get a decent job.
Send me a message if you're interested and got some questions.
Welcome! I'm fairly new as well. I'm a 34 year old Indian male policy analyst in DC. I'm mainly focused on tech and security policy and, particularly, on how to structure policies and procedures to build a constructive organizational culture. I work in a field that is equal parts technical and administrative/personal so I kind of sit at an intersection between technology and liberal arts. (A phrase I have shamelessly stolen from Steve Jobs).
I joined mostly out of curiosity to see other ways of doing social networking/content aggregation aside from the main ones. I used to be an active participant and moderator on a lot of big PHP bulletin board forums in the older days of the internet before Social Media ate everything. I'm still a bit nostalgic for that era so I guess I'm looking for ways to recapture some of the old magic that seems to be getting snuffed out as the Internet gets more "corporate."
Going back to the policy->culture bit, I think of being here as sort of a bit of research to help me clarify my thoughts about how online discourse works, how it should work, and what can be done to drive a more communal, less toxic, and more inclusive of non-traditional (read: non-technical) voices. A focus on surfacing well thought-out, well considered opinions instead of hot-takes would be nice too, as would safeguards to prevent scuttlebutt and gossip from turning into insane conspiracy theories. I've been meaning to write up a long treatise/effort-post about it here for a while, but I'm still getting my thoughts together.
I just joined up. I'm a 33 year old, trans femme from Canada. Working as a programmer in the machine learning realm. I hope that the higher level of curation of Tildes doesn't mean that we can't enjoy silly jokes :P
As long as it's not a chain of "Nice." or the lot, sure thing I guess :p
FYI: I've moved this post to ~tildes, which is the group for "Meta discussion about Tildes itself".
I always love these A/S/L threads :)
I'm male, mid-30's-ish, married, parent, Midwest US, software engineer with a varied background of past occupations.