Tildes and personal content?
I've been thinking about the way some people use their opportunity to share in places like Tildes.
There are weekly topics what the music the users listen and the books they read. Since the community is small, there are rather few people interacting with those, which has the capacity to create stronger interpersonal connections.
There's also the fact that I see a few names very often, in many different threads. Unlike some other places, though, I don't automatically map them to an idea of a person behind them. It's more Reddit than a small forum: people share their opinions and discuss subjects, but there's little personal interaction. It's a more a space of intellectual, rather than emotional, engagement.
And yet, there are threads here about oneself where the person asks questions or raises subjects that are of importance to them. Some time ago, someone asked what to do with their existential dread. I bet there were similar threads here that I didn't get to see. There was also the "Hey, whatcha working on?" thread a while ago. So it's not that asking personal questions is opposed here: you can, if you want, ask for community support.
So I'm wondering: what's Tildes' attitude towards more personal content? Things like life updates: "So hey, I'm doing okay, am still in a relationship (going great), looking for a job, working on the pet project I mentioned" etc. etc.. Is this something the users and the admins approve of? would enjoy?
IDK about life update topics of past, but we had a "How yall doing?" thread in the recent past and I'd love if it was a recurring feature. And then there was one which prompted "is there anything you wanna vent out?" Personally, I like these sort of threads b/c they are both nice interactions and also are like little therapies. I would not fancy users opening topics specifically for their own updates, though. But having an occasional or regular "how are you doing" thread over at ~talk would be nice!
Hey, thanks for taking the initiative to start the postings!
Any specific reason?
Not the person you are replying to, but I don't think it would scale very well. The question and answer accommodates many different users' updates and discussion on each of them. If there was a community that was devoted simply to people posting their life updates, I don't think I would use it since it would be pretty time consuming to determine which posts are going to be ones where I might be able to contribute. I feel that kind of content is better suited to a blog, rather than a more forum like experience like ~.
That's a massive stretch from "I'm going to ask people how they doin'".
Things like that work. I was wondering if Tildes is one of the places that would accomodate such a side to a forum.
IMHO that would qualify as fluff content given it is hardly discussable. It should be alright if it is more substantial than "I'm feeling as such...", say e.g. "Hey, this happened in my life, I feel such, what should I do?". I.e. some invitation to community interaction somehow.
This is my opinion tho, and I don't mind whatever the community decides, I'd just go with it. TBH if saying merely "Hey, I feel good!" will help the poster in any way, I woudn't mind it at all that such posts appear under ~talk.
Do you not feel like someone talking about their lives – in a manner broader then "I'm good" or "I'm bad" – invites discussion in the form of "Hey, this sounds cool! Tell me more!"? Dunno how about you, but I'm intensely-curious about how other people are doing, and would ask them questions almost every time.
There's another aspect to this. We've talked before about extending the Tildes identity system to other platforms. Your username and your trust all come from Tildes, but they could also exist inside a Tildes mastodon instance, for example, without needing to do any more than the registration we've all completed already. That'd give us the ability to set up some side channels for other forms of communication that might not do so well on the Tildes website itself.
Sounds fascinating. I can't yet see how this would function, but am curious to be an observer in the discussion.
That said, I don't quite follow how this relates to the question. I asked about would it be okay to post personal stuff here. I can see how this could form or erode trust, but still.
I've seen some people express concern that we're chasing the fun (such as the personal stuff) off of the site. Honestly it was a lot worse early on. There was a period where all of us needed to decompress from the reddit mentality and learn how to be good to each other again. I like the personal stuff and don't want to see it get lost.
My point is that if the main Tildes site is the 'serious' place, we can create other forms of 'fun' spaces such as a Mastodon instance - which is like giving Tildes users their own private twitter. The trust would be shared, it'd all just be one account in both places, or any other future places such as if we set up some kind of private slack/irc chat service. We don't have to choose between fun and serious, it's not binary, we can have both. As long as the trust system is the arbiter in all of our spaces it's all good.
The Tildes website isn't the only way we can all interact with each other. Everything doesn't have to just be a group here, it could be a cloud of other services. Someone already set up a Tildes minecraft server. Maybe we can do an EQ emulator server and game together. Take a page from tilde.club and set up shell accounts for Tildes users. Lots of possibilities, lots of fun open source toys out there to play with.
Let's not limit the idea of Tildes to just one reddit-like place. Think of it more like a garden. What do we want to plant here while we watch it all grow?
I bring Hubski up a lot when the discussion turns to how things should or could work – for a good reason, I feel, but still.
The place existed for a few years before I joined it. In the single place, they have both serious (sometimes heated, sometimes simply passionate) discussion, and the personal stuff. Others posted it, and people genuinely cheered for them (and asked insightful questions, or left wise remarks), and so I did, too.
It's this experience that makes me so confused about a lot of the negative comments on the matter. You can have both in the same place. Hell, Reddit has it, too. (Granted, on Reddit it's mostly fluff and filler with memes, but you do get occasional glimpses of genuine human interaction and the deep, insightful conversation on a given topic.)
I understand if people here don't want to have it: a forum is a sum of its users. My feeling is, though, that with the empathy that Tildes has in mind, it could be a good place to share. The difference between Hubski and here, as I've mentioned in the topic text, is that this isn't a tight-knit, familial-esque kind of place: it's a news aggregator that happens to care about human interactions. Whether that fascilitates the kind of interactions I'm talking about remains to be seen.
Though not as long as this place remains Reddit-lite in the minds of the people visiting.
If you want to ask about people's lives, go for it: post with an "ask" tag in ~life. If you want people to talk about their feelings, ask them: post with a "casual" or "chat" tag in ~talk. Post it and they will come (and if they don't, there's the answer to your question).
As for me, personally... I don't come here to spill my guts about the day-to-day routine of my life, or my relationships, or my sex life, or my job, or the things I'm doing this week, or whatever else it is you want to chat about. I can - and do - talk about those things with the flesh-and-blood people in my life. I come here to get away from that boring tedious stuff, to indulge in conversations I can't have in real life - like the ethics of murdering fascists, or the books I'm reading, or the validity of using "Q" to describe the variegated LGBTQ+ community, or the politics of racial discrimination. That's why I'm here! Not to natter about boring day-to-day trivia. I get enough of that in real life. There's a meta-reason my username is based on a genius mouse and a real-life genius: this is my outlet for intellectual stimulation, not Kaffeeklatsch-ing.
But I'm just one grumpy old man. If you want to chat with actual friendly people, there are plenty around. Go for it!
Hoo boy. You make it sound like I'm trying to murder discussion here by talking about how good the weather is.
More precisely, you make it sound like I'm trying to murder your discussion, or asking you whether the weather is good.
You don't have to engage with the kind of content you don't want to see. You can even grump it up in every down-to-earth thread you see. Or, you know, promote discussion by making a discussion (not that you aren't doing that already). Might be more productive than... whatever that was.
You did ask for Tildes' attitude towards personal content! Was I not supposed to answer that question by telling you my attitude (as someone on Tildes) towards personal content? Did I misunderstand the question somehow?
And, to make the tone of this comment clear... have some emoticons. :) ;) :P
I'm not a fan of people acting like their opinion defines the thing, is all.
I did everything possible to present my opinion as my opinion, short of writing something like "the opinions here expressed do not represent those of management".
I started by telling you how to post the types of posts you're talking about, and ended with "Post it and they will come". I told you how to do what you wanted, and told you to do what you wanted.
I then wrote "As for me, personally... to introduce my personal opinion, separately from telling you to do what you wanted.
I summed up with a paragraph that I thought made it clear that this was just the opinion of one grumpy old man, but there were other, more friendly, people around who you could chat to.
I ended my comment with "Go for it!" - as in telling you to go ahead and do what you wanted.
I'm not sure how much clearer I could have been that this was my personal opinion, but you should still go ahead and post your chat-topics if that's what you want to do.
I'm confused. What sort of responses were you expecting? What should I have written here?
I would very much enjoy that kind of content. And I think it's a great way to invite more discussions regarding a pletora of topics. If I mention that I've finished my garden, someone might ask me about it and we end up with a cool discussion and posts.
The people who enjoy that interaction would interact and the people who don't wouldn't, especially if it had a unique tag.
I feel the same. As far as the community goes there are several usernames I recognize but only a few of them really have 'personalities' where I remember much of anything about them. I think this is something the old forums did well: different subforums had different rules and cultures and there were places to basically hang out, post silly content, and get to know each other. Avatars helped too I'm sure since they're easier to notice at a glance than usernames and sometimes easier to remember.
Here on Tildes even if we had "here's how I'm doing" posts we'd still be missing the other more casual interactions that don't necessarily go along with in-depth discussion threads. There could be groups for this but that wouldn't really work well because it would confuse what exactly a group is and how it should be used, i.e. are groups used for socializing or for discussion, and what use would upvotes have in a socializing thread? Right now Tildes is built for discussion and it does that well but if we wanted to use it for a personal community too we would probably need some new features that encouraged that.
Not necessarily – at least initially. A weekly thread of "Yo, how's everyone doing?" should suffice to let people expand upon their lives a little.