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What is, in your opinion, missing on Tildes?
Pretty much the title. What do you think is missing on tildes? What is something that you'd like to see on tildes that is currently lacking? It could be discussion wise, a feature, or anything else really.
i think this is mostly a day-to-day thing that just happens some days and doesn't on others, but there's probably a time aspect which plays into this. making a good comment that will spark discussion on here takes time and is honestly a bit of a crapshoot (and the same is sorta true of submitting articles, speaking as someone who submits something in the ballpark of seven of them most days), and most people don't really have time to make that many comments like that during the weekdays since they presumably have social and work priorities.
i mean just to continue as an example of this, i am apparently considered pretty prolific of a poster on here? and most days, between submissions and comments i generally make 10 to 15 posts a day. so the bar for what constitutes significant activity is pretty low on here, especially compared to reddit. most people who contribute aren't really contributing in a voluminous way, which is probably also why a lot of threads tend to not be that active, and it's probably going to be like that until we're significantly larger honestly.
Speaking for myself I don't engage a whole lot unless I feel like the comment is going to be meaningful. If somebody posted my exact thoughts and I agree with the phrasing I just vote it and move on. The somewhat higher degree of expectations Tildes places on submitters is going to mean the volume will be lower, is my guess.
Also I enjoy your contributions :)
When commenting on Tildes, I put more effort into it than I do elsewhere, because I expect lengthy, in-depth replies back. So when I write a comment I only do it when I'm ready to get into a long conversation.
probably because it's easier to contribute to this discussion and it has a lower bar of entry than say one about the nigerian vegan and vegetarian community, for example.
Also, meta topics seem to generate the most conversations in my view.
this is because everybody has an opinion on meta, and also because there's a lower bar for entry. don't really have to explain in some wordwall why i feel a certain way about some meta topic, usually.
enough so, that I recognize your username
For a community like Tildes people are being thoughtful about the discussions they engage in. It takes more time to engage in thoughtful conversation vs throwing memes around. We'll all just have to engage more.
I can say that I now check Tildes first prior to going to Reddit or alternatives. :-)
Personally I'm fine with it. Conversations seem to occur when they are necessary and don't when they are not. I'd much rather have this than the hundreds of other places we could frequent where much is said, but very little conversation occurs.
I'd like to see sub-groups working here. Currently, there's only one sub-group: ~tildes.official. I'd like to see sub-groups in groups like ~science and ~humanities and ~life.
There's been a lot of feedback from people that the current groups are too vague and therefore intimidating. People want to see more specific places to post their content: they feel intimidated posting niche content in broad groups. So, I'd like to see some of those more specific sub-groups be implemented.
subgroups really are the mechanic i feel like we should be testing out at this point. it varies from day-to-day, but i think it's reasonable to say that tildes gets a pretty steady flow of submissions on most days now, and it'd make sense to start breaking down groups into subgroups since it's pretty cosmetic and straightforward, unlike some of the other defining mechanics the site is supposed to eventually have (and it's also kind of an important mechanic unto itself, since it's the literal structure the site is predicated on and if it were for some reason to not work like we intend it to, it pays to modify it while the site is still relatively small instead of trying to wing it later on).
I agree that subgroups should be a thing already.
And I know that you (and most people) think that subgroups should come after the engagement of the community on a particular tab and I disagree with that. I think subgroups should be created first and then the community will notice it. People will see that they have a specific place to post tag X, that someone thought of their interests and made it so they were comfortable. They will engage then.
I still disagree. We need to keep growth here controlled and slow. As Deimos has pointed out a few times, one of the things that killed Imzy was that it spread itself too thin, too fast. All the new users on Imzy decided to recreate all their favourite subreddits as soon as they arrived - which meant there wasn't enough traffic in each community to sustain it. When you're small, you need to keep everyone together so they'll interact with each other. It's why nightclubs don't open their second room until later in the night, when the front room is getting full: if your patrons are too spread out, they all feel like the place isn't active, and they'll leave. But if you keep everyone close together in one place, they'll interact and build activity. We need to do that with Tildes.
I still don't think we need to create sub-groups before there's a demonstrated demand for them. Tildes is still an alpha-testing website. It's full of innovators and early adopters, who are known for taking the lead and trying things out (I'm still not sure why I'm here, given that I'm usually part of the late majority, but here I am...). We can rely on these people to take the lead and post content even though there isn't an official sub-group for it. The most prolific posters here are certainly doing so.
Then, using those early posts as guides, Deimos can start slowly creating sub-groups. And then the late adopters can start posting their content.
Remember that the technology of sub-groups itself needs to be tested. The only sub-group here right now doesn't work properly. One of the expected features of a sub-group is that you can subscribe to it to see posts from that sub-group and unsubscribe from it to stop seeing posts from that sub-group. This is not the case with the one and only sub-group here: ~tildes.official. If you unsubscribe from the sub-group ~tildes.official, but stay subscribed to its parent group ~tildes, you will still see all posts from the sub-group. The feature doesn't even work properly yet!
So, at the very least, we need to do an initial phase of development and testing on the sub-group feature. There's no point opening dozens of sub-groups if the feature doesn't even work properly. We need to control how this is implemented. Maybe we should create only a few sub-groups in only two groups to start with, just to test it out.
However, even when the technology is working, we still don't want to fragment the userbase too much. If we create hundreds of sub-groups (I bet everyone here has at least one sub-group they want to see that noone else cares about...), then most of those sub-groups will have no activity. People will see all these empty graveyards and assume that Tildes is dead. "There's never any posts in ~music.classical.baroque.bach. This place is dead!" That creates a negative impression which drives people away, rather than draws them in.
We need to create sub-groups slowly and carefully, so as not to fragment the userbase too much. And, one way of doing that is by creating sub-groups for which there is a demonstrated demand; sub-groups which we know people will post in because they've already been posting that type of content.
That said, I think we still need to create some sub-groups here and now. I believe this stage of Tildes' development is overdue. We need to be testing this technology and getting it to work. We also need to be demonstrating the future direction of Tildes, even if it is only through a dozen sub-groups in two or three top-level groups.
I still think it's something worth trying in a limited capacity. Maybe it's just a personal quirk, but I mostly stay in more niche communities and am usually put off of posting in anything too general. I just end up fighting with myself on if this fits in or if I'm skirting the spirit for the sake of my own bias.
But if there are technical issues with the current sub-group then that's reason enough to not expand. I'd rather have issues fixed before we build on them, especially in this early a stage.
I don't disagree with you: at the start of this very comment chain, I wrote "I'd like to see sub-groups working here." I think we should create about 10-12 sub-groups across a few main groups, to see how it goes.
Sub-groups were the thing that initially intrigued me about Tildes. I think it's a great idea but I can see where it'd take a much more active community to be really effective. One I'd really like to see is a more computer and technology divisions.
I still feel like a lot of more interesting threads are not getting either the votes nor the conversations they deserve, which is partially just a general quirk of the internet and also probably a general lack of users with the knowledge or qualifications to speak authoritatively or meaningfully on certain topics. But what this means is something of a slower repeat of Reddit: controversial "easy" topics still get more "engagement", that or threads where you are directly asked to "post your own" and most people simply post their thing and move on.
I wish people would ask more questions on posts. Its something I want to try and more actively do. I'm making a lot of personal life changes rn that will hopefully increase the amount of time I have to spend working to help build the tildes community. The biggest thing I want to do is sort articles by fewest comments, read the articles, and just start posting questions. OP might not have the answer, but we could take the opportunity to do research and learn together. And by us doing that, drive otherwise forgotten content to the top of tildes as well as the comments having discussion and opinions and research in them.
Edit: I'm going to go post this as a comment on this post. I think asking more questions to help drive content would be a great idea and would make more niche topic posts more accessible to users.
Similar to what @alyaza mentioned in a different thread, I think an important factor here is time. Even with the low activity rate on the site, I already pass by multiple topics and threads daily that I would like to comment on but simply can't fit into my schedule. I can't even keep up with my own posts, and that's usually only a handful each week!
Granted, some of this is my own doing, as I am quite long-winded, but also I feel like the ethos of the site in general encourages longer, more thoughtful posting. It also encourages longer, more thoughtful reading as well, so there's the double whammy of having more to read as well as more to write. Unfortunately this means that some great articles and topics will not get their fair shake simply because most of us decided we didn't have time to do the topic justice. Just yesterday I read a couple different long read articles which were compelling and great, but the time I took to read those ate up my free time for the day, which meant I had to forego commenting on them.
That said, one of the things I like about Tildes is not only its slower pace, but its willingness to sustain a conversation across a longer period of time. I could comment on them today, tomorrow, or even next week, and I feel like it would still sprout a conversation, whereas so many other sites focus on what's new that anything old dies on the vine almost immediately.
i mean, i think tildes still kinda has this problem though, currently, and that it's actually become more noticeably a thing that happens in the past few months. i always sort by activity from all time and have basically since i got here, and while on occasion threads do revive a few days after they're posted, i've been noticing it happen less and less often recently. the last thread (outside of ask threads) i saw do this was actually one i made back in february about zero-waste grocery stores, and i'm pretty sure that one only revived because i brought it up as an alternative perspective in a more recent topic i posted on a similar issue. the potential is definitely there and more viable than on other websites, to be clear, but in practice i think that as a community we're not really playing up that potential, and so older people on the side are falling out of the habit while newer people aren't internalizing it as a possibility in the first place.
I think a lot of that also has to do with the fact that users here can currently still use the front page as a way to keep abreast of absolutely all the topics submitted every day to the site. But as the submission volume increases and people have to increasingly start relying on group and subgroup pages to do that, you will likely start seeing revivals of older topics happening more often.
But I agree that it will also probably take some time for people to adjust to the new paradigm of being able to comment on older topics and still have other people see those comments... instead of like on reddit where >24hrs and the only person likely to see your new comment is the person you replied to.
The default time window for activity sort is to blame here. With a three day default on the front page most people won't see old topics even when they do get revived. But people going directly to the group pages, as you say, where the default is all time will see them.
Yeah it is to blame, but it was switched from all-time to 3 days for good reason. For a few months early on, while Tildes was experiencing some "growing pains" the activity sort was being absolutely dominated by highly contentious topics that refused to die and were constantly at the top of the all-time activity sort for weeks on end as new users kept being enticed into joining the arguments taking place in them. It was a vicious cycle and not a good look for the site, IMO.
I personally still use activity all-time as my default sort, but I totally understand why 3 days was chosen as the new default-default for new users. Perhaps it could be bumped up to 5 or 7 days now that things have calmed down and a more congenial culture has taken solid root here... but there are definitely risks/drawbacks to doing that and people can change their default anyways, so I don't really see the point.
edit: also, until the "hide topic" feature is implemented, so people can easily ignore topics they don't want to partake in that keep popping back up in activity, I really wouldn't recommend it either.
Yeah keeping it short for new users on the front page is probably the best thing to do. Taking the time to learn how the site works to change the sort window or diving directly into group pages filters for people who are more committed and more likely to have taken some time to learn the site culture. Those are the people we want participating in long running discussions.
I'd honestly like to see more features that facilitate good discussion. Like specific post layouts specialized for different types of discussions. For example, allowing people to post about a scientific journal and having a field for the Journel, number of subjects, and other relevant information. Or posts that integrate survey services and a ton of other ideas.
One specific feature that I think could really help discussion would be encouraging people to fill out an operational definition field before they post. There have been many discussions where people bicker back and forth because they're using differing definitions of the topic.
Yeah, some stuff has been talked about here and there before (e.g. megathreads, AMA and debate specific formats, surveys, etc), but I think at some point we might be due for an "alternate topic types" ~tildes discussion.
I'm not too sure honestly. I'm pretty happy with Tildes other than I wish there was more non-tech content. That said, I am guilty of posting a lot of tech-centric content. I have friends of various professions who I have sent Tildes invites because (1) I think most of them would like the site (2) they'd add some diversity in terms of interests and professions to the site, and (3) I asked them to tell me what they think of it after they noodle around a bit in order to answer this very question from the perspective of someone who isn't in the community currently. Haven't talked to any of them in a few months actually. Should probably reach out to them (both in general and about this).
One of the main reasons I augment Tildes with other sites like Lobste.rs is the lack of technical content. It's interesting that we have such different perspectives - and I am in no way saying yours is wrong or invalid, it's just as valid as mine. It creates an interesting problem for Tildes as a whole though; we have different ideas of what content the site should be giving us, and put different things in; there are probably about as many different ideas of what the perfect ratio of content is as their are users of the site.
I think that's mostly a volume problem... and if/once we get enough volume to where one user cannot hope to consume all the content being submitted to all the groups (or even each individual top-level group) on a daily basis, the mechanics here (subgroups, tag navigation, tag filtering, sort methods, etc... with more to be developed) will hopefully allow people to completely customize the ratio to their taste.
Let users make their own decisions about what they want to see FTW.
in general this is the one big stumbling block i still have with the website which i'm trying to offset--and in general i think it's getting better than it used to be.
one of the unfortunate side-effects of tildes primarily recruiting from reddit and hackernews and having most of its power users hail from the two is that the community really skews toward technological content, since that's what most people know about and are able to talk about extensively more than anything. there are always exceptions, but in general i think it'd be accurate to say that i'm the most active person on the site (or possibly second besides @Algernon_Asimov?) who doesn't post large amounts of tech content. because i mean, we're not going to ever diversify and attract sports people if nobody ever uses ~sports, and we're not going to attract foodies or politicos if there's seldom anything to talk about in ~food or no discussion of politics in ~news. there has to be someone posting things like that on a semi-consistent basis, even if nobody ever replies to those threads, and that's kinda what i try to do. i want people to see, when they come to this site, things in ~tech and ~comp and ~news and ~science like there should be, but i also want them to see that those three things aren't the whole community and that yes, people do post about and talk about food and sports and other stuff.
i think the front page today is pretty good, for example. there's a lot of diversity in sections and topics, and it's not mostly tech news or information on coding and scripting or topics on an esoteric programming language and what not. someone who comes today who might not be drawn to technology might figure "oh, this is more than just another tech site" and be inclined to request an invite or something because of that. whereas someone who was the same way who did the same over christmas might not have been so inclined.
i think it kinda goes without saying that perception is pretty meaningful in the early stages of a community. if this site always comes off as mostly tech-oriented and not as a place where technology is just one part of the conversation, it's going to end up attracting mostly tech-people and only make it harder in the future to attract non-tech people. the community right now is still very malleable; the community at 50,000 people or 100,000 people will not be nearly so. if we want this place to actually be a diverse community, then obviously we need to ensure that more than just technology is what's being discussed. and there are some days where tech tends to dominate, but i think as a whole the community is a lot less like that than it used to be, and hopefully it'll keep trending that way so eventually sections like ~sports can stop being propped up by people like me (i think i've made like half of the past 30 topics in that section, lol) and can develop their own communities rather than just being side pieces to the tech community here or somesuch.
Keep in mind that Reddit was mostly tech-oriented when it started out, and look at it now. Early adopters of technology tend to be technophiles; the two things go hand-in-glove. But as Tildes grows, it will attract late adopters and non-tech types.
I'll admit I sometimes find it frustrating being surrounded by IT types (which repeatedly leads to communication issues), but I mostly just grit my teeth and remind myself this is only a temporary state of affairs - and then go post another article in ~humanities, to act as bait to bring more non-techies to Tildes. Or I post a social science article in ~science, so I can convince Deimos at some point to create a ~socialscience group, to also act as bait to bring more non-techies to Tildes.
That's how I see part of my job here: providing the bait for people to want to join Tildes. And, if I want non-techies here, I have to give them a reason to sign up. So I post in ~humanities and ~news and ~life and ~lgbt...
But I also can't ignore the current audience. They need some content in their STEM groups, so I drop occasional posts in ~tech and even ~comp. We need to keep the current audience happy while attracting a wider audience.
In short: I agree with you and @Micycle_the_Bichael. Tildes needs a lot more non-tech-oriented content. Unfortunately, I am only one man with only one set of eyes and one set of hands.
EDIT: Formatting to make it readable :)
I have a lot of thoughts and this is kind of a stream of consciousness that mixes a lot of ideas together.
I wish people would ask more questions. I personally am guilty of this. I have a lot of anxiety about asking questions on articles I don't understand because on Reddit I was always met with hostility or condescension. I'm trying to be better about that. But I think doing that would be good. People would learn and grow more.
As an extension of the above idea, I'm going to start trying to do this on 1-2 posts a day: Research the topic, read the article and comment any primer material I find to help people understand the article in the comments. That way the article seems less daunting. I know that people should be reading the article before clicking the comments so this isn't perfect, but I can't think of a better way to help niche content get more engagement. I'm also going to post questions that either I answer after doing more research or maybe OP has an answer to. Start a dialog with OP and anyone who might check out the article.
I also want to try and reply more to people in comment chains, not just post my own content, or post my own comment and read others comments on a post then leave. I feel like on a lot of posts people comment their own thoughts, then if no one replies to them then they never look at the post again. But interesting dialog could be happening in other comment threads! By engaging their content maybe it brings them back to the article and they read other comments and can add to those threads. A key here is that I'm not planning to spam pointless shit to get people's attention. I still want everything I post to be meaningful. But I also want to try to personally use tildes less as a "read articles, vote, maybe comment then never think about it again" to "posts are an opportunity to see something I don't know much about, and talk to members of communities to learn new things and meet new people."
I'm making a million life changes right now so I've been very absent on Tildes the last few weeks, but I'm hoping that things calm down soon and I can focus energy towards bringing in more conversations. I feel like people, myself included, view making new posts as the best way to be involved in tildes, and I'm questioning if my time wouldn't be better spent trying to engage in existing posts on topics that I didn't know about, rather than trying to find interesting articles around the web to post here that won't get much engagement. Not to say I won't still post my own content, but rather I think I could spend less time/energy generating posts and more time engaging in the community.
Sorry. I know this was long and rambling and had no real focus or thesis and was incoherent at times and makes a lot of assumptions.
I've started sorting by new instead of activity in order to combat the inherent bias of activity sort. I feel like that might be a good first step.
Yeah that' going to be my route I think. There isn't a sort by fewest in Tildes so the comment idea won't work. I like your suggestion though. Did you see it make a big change in your feed?
Yes, at first it created an impression of lower activity, as threads on Tildes have a much slower "startup" time, but what I liked about it is that I saw far more threads I was interested in instead of seeing the same thread multiple times.
I had to get into the habit of manually returning to threads to check on them though, something I ought to be using the bookmark feature more for.
That's a really good point. I'm definitely going to have to put more thought and effort into revisiting. I'll probably do something like post a couple of comments on my way to work or at the start of my work day, bookmark everything I comment on, and then go back and check my bookmarks before I go to bed. Probably will have to clean house every couple days to a week to keep my bookmarks manageable.
Some paragraphs on what wall of text would be nice, yes!
I do agree that commenting is probably better than posting. The "million life changes" seems interesting. Perhaps a post in the future?
Yeah, I was on my cell when I wrote that out. Now that I'm back at my laptop I'll do some formatting :sheepish_grin:
And we'll see, most the changes are more personal and not super exciting or interesting. Cutting back on twitter and reddit where my engagement is super low and content quality is shit and replacing with BBC News and Tildes. Not smoking weed every night because it's expensive and also it's hard to understand and generate good content when you're so high you can't pronounce words. Realizing I've been working 50 hour weeks without realizing it so cutting back to 40. Trying to be more fiscally and environmentally responsible, which has a lot of its own posts and also is made up of a lot of small changes. Idk. I'll think about it and see what I come up with on my train ride home today.
What’s missing you say?
Pet peeve: I think we need a logo image that works better in the White theme, which is the default theme. I’ve played with a transparent background for the logo and I think I like it better.
Nice to have: I’d like optional notifications via email. In version 2 of that feature, add the ability to reply to the email and have Tildes process that into a comment. The basic email notification would scratch the itch I feel for push notifications on mobile. V2 would need something like Mailgun, and is not that important I guess.
Very nice to have: A paycheck for @Deimos. I wish trying to promote donations didn’t have a downside and everyone was cool with it. But it’s basicaly marketing and this is not the most marketing-friendly crowd, myself included.
I posted a topic about making donating more obvious in the UI, but sadly that’s the extent of my contribution.
Email notifications and replying through email seem to be at odds with the privacy-first approach of Tildes, even if they were opt-in (using a third party service like mailgun for delivery would be a big breach of design principles too). Currently the recovery email associated with an account is stored as a one-way hash. If the notification and reply features are implemented, the email address will have to be stored in plain text.
From the Tildes announcement post:
Thanks for that. I completely support this philosophy.
I wonder if a separate notification email field would be best for that in settings?
I also understand that notifications are loathed in a lot of circles. In my use case, really what I want is a mobile push notification. This would let me keep conversations more timely. But an email notification with a link to the comment would work. If there is an easy way to do push notifications that work on iOS then that would be superior for me.
Note: I’m probably an outlier in how much I edit comments, but maybe the email should not contain the comment text in case of later editing. Just a link would do.
Edit: iOS Safari service workers will finally allow push notifications soon, correct? Then Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Android and iOS will all allow this feature. If the push notifications are compatible with the privacy philosophy, then maybe that’s really what’s missing.
Edit2: After a bit of searching I now have a conspiracy theory with no proof. I don’t think apple wants to allow web based push notifications on iOS because of the potential of lower App Store sales. There could be another reason, but I don’t know it.
While Tilders might be against marketing in general, asking them contribute to the website they're already using isn't really marketing, as such.
And, most Tilders are in favour of supporting Tildes in general, and Deimos personally. I'd be surprised if you got negative feedback for reminding people about donating to Tildes (gratuitous link).
I have thought of running an unsanctioned campaign of donate links in my comments.. like a footer of smaller text or something. But that just feels shilly.
I agree that most people do want to support Tildes. Maybe I’m overthinking it. The other issue is that this is not a technical/dev problem. I bet no one wants to work on it because it’s boring, and possibly out of their wheelhouse.
Added to gitlab:
Make the Tildes logo match the themes better.
Option for receiving notifications via email
Make donate button/link more prominently featured.
p.s. If you happen to still have that transparent logo handy, feel free to share it and I can link to it in the gitlab issue related to it.
Thanks for making all those! Being a non-dev (former script kiddie) I always feel weird making issues.
No problem. I have tried to take on the responsibility of copying people's suggestions to Gitlab so they can get seen by the developers, and I don't mind doing that at all... but IMO you shouldn't feel weird or hesitate in making issues yourself either if you want to, even as a non-developer. Submitting issues to gitlab is pretty easy:
Us "reporters" can handle the rest, like labeling it properly. And if you make a mistake we can fix them for you too, and add more details if required.
I have a weird answer kinda piggybacking off the top comment about simply having more users.
Diversity. It's hard to avoid these things and they occur for obvious reasons but I would love to see a poll done on Tildes to see what our demographic is. Which is kinda ironic cuz one of the ideologies behind tildes is not giving your information lol
But, I just wanna know how many of you are Caucasian males between the ages of 20 and 35 and consider yourselves to be tech savvy and play video games?
we do actually have some data on this.
and given the skew of countries and site of origin for people on here, it's probably safe to assume this site is mostly white.
I'm 61, and I definitely feel as though the denizens are of a different generation. For good and ill.
All you damn youngins. 28.5 year olds and salty as an old seadog over here :D
From where I sit, even you're a young 'un.
Most. It's the dominant demographic here.
I've been trying to come up with a meaningful response to the OP and I keep coming back to this. I'd already noticed some little things, like some echo-chamber-y engagement on certain posts, that have made me shake my head. Even something as simple as this - a few weeks ago (before the big 10,000 users celebration) I was trying to figure out the size of the user base, so I looked at the different groups to see the number of subscribers. Either ~tildes or ~tildes.official was at around 9900, just about everything else was somewhere between 9100-9800, but ~lgbt was at something like 5700. I don't even have any personal ties to the LGBT community, but the fact that so many people went out of their way to unsubscribe from it, far more than from any other group, just really disappointed me.
I realize that it might not be the desire of everyone on here, but I'm hoping this site grows into becoming a home for not just the smart but the open-minded, and diversity of viewpoints fosters that. At least there are quite a few countries represented.
As a gay man myself, this doesn't bother me in the slightest.
We don't all have to be interested in everything. I, myself, have unsubscribed from about a third of the groups here - and that's not because I'm sports-phobic or food-ist. It's just an acknowledgement that I'm not interested in those subjects, and I would have nothing to contribute to those groups. So, in that context, I'm fine with non-LGBT people deciding they're not interested in seeing content that's relevant primarily to LGBT people.
I get you, and I don't mean to mean to make any prescriptive judgment on anyone who unsubbed. More than anything, it's the effect in aggregate that I think isn't particularly charitable. Maybe it's my own naivete or hope for the site, like I mentioned... like, I don't necessarily think I'd have much to contribute to discussions in the lgbt group either, but I recognize there's a lot I could potentially learn and think about, just from exposure to perspectives I'm not familiar with.
For the record, when ~lgbt and a few other groups were first created, none of the existing users here were automatically subscribed to them. Auto-subscribing users to new groups was only first started a few weeks later. So 4000 users have not "went out of their way to unsubscribe from [~lgbt]", it's likely a decent portion of them were never subscribed to it in the first place, but just never went out of their way afterwards to subscribe to it when they subscribed to the rest of the other new ones. It's a slight distinction, but an important distinction nonetheless.
See here:
June 2, 2018 - "new groups added, please subscribe to them if you're interested"
July 23, 2018 - "I decided to auto-subscribe everyone to the new groups, but if you're not interested, you can easily unsubscribe from them"
EDIT: Actually, it turns out ~lgbt may even have an exemption, where new users are not subscribed to it automatically. I don't know if @deimos stuck to that plan or not though:
https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/1e1/daily_tildes_discussion_new_groups_added_please_subscribe_to_them_if_youre_interested#comment-ian
That's a good point, except that ~lgbt still has about 1,000 fewer subscribers than any of three other extant groups created that day: ~books, ~food, ~hobbies. So, there is an extra factor involved, beyond the lack of auto-subscription for their initial periods.
Interesting, it would explain it quite neatly. For what it's worth, I was auto-subscribed when I joined in February.
I see him musing about whether to stop auto-subscribing people to ~lgbt, but I don't see him saying he'll do it.
I didn't. New users are still auto-subscribed to everything except ~test, and logged-out viewers see everything except ~test as well. (@cfabbro)
I didn't think so. Thanks for confirming.
Indeed. Hence my using "may even have" and "I don't know if" and pinging him so he can let us know if that's the case.
at least personally, i don't think of diversity of viewpoints as a particularly big problem here. the biggest failing point of diversity on the site so far in terms of traditional diversity is probably race, but of course that's probably the hardest one to fix of the traditional diversities online since you can't exactly racially vet people, and a lot of communities besides tildes struggle with that too. we could certainly do with more people who aren't coming at things from a "white"/caucasian perspective, but honestly even the worst tildes is still like, ten orders of magnitude better than reddit in this regard so it's not that big of a deal really, just something that would be nice. i think females are also the one other group that's not represented as well here as they could be, but honestly given where most of tildes' users originated, i'm surprised we have as many significant female contributors as we do, and i suspect that'll get better on its own as tildes grows.
beyond that, most of the other traditional diversities are pretty well represented (or represented roughly in line with what you'd expect for a site this size, i think. the main issues of diversity on here seem to be more abstract ideas like the inevitable technophile overrepresentation and political diversity (which tildes does actually have, to be clear, just not in a way some people like or recognize necessarily). i think those more abstract ideas of diversity will also get better as we grow, provided people actually foster the conditions for it.
Obviously, you can only speak for your own perspective, but because it might not be that much of a deal for you doesn't mean it is or isn't the same for others, or whether it should... especially since the majority of users coming from the typical US context won't necessarily even know what they're potentially missing out on if status quo homogeneity prevails. I also think things will improve as the site grows though.
you're preaching to a choir of someone who is probably one of the biggest outliers demographically on this site, lol. probably the only one i hit is being american. i'm well aware of how other people might feel. that's why i lead with "personally"
To be fair, LGBT groups on the internet today can be just as unbearable as pro-gun groups or pro-Christian groups, etc.
And you're comparing it in a field of groups like tech, sports, games, music, etc. It's unfair to compare it to things like that, where almost everyone identifies with the subject matter.
I don't even know how to sub or unsub on here yet I just use the pages it shows me at the start to talk about the things people are engaging in the most.
But if you want to dig into that concept deeper, yes there is probably a large group of right wing types on here. I mean if the general sub is at almost 10k and the lgbt sub is at 5k, you're literally looking at the 50/50 split that is libs and conserves. Considering what I said earlier about lgbt communities becoming more aggressive and annoying the past 5-10 years, I would say keeping that 50/50 split is a good thing. Better balance than maybe 15-20 years ago where people were still ignoring LGBT issues unless you lived in a 99% blue area. (shrugs)
I don't understand how those two numbers would correlate.
Click "Browse the list of groups" in the sidebar on your front page and on the far right is subscribe/unsubscribe. Or you can go to that page directly: https://tildes.net/groups
I would wager a significant amount of money that American "right wing types" and political Conservatives are by far the least represented political demographic here.
You can also sub and unsub directly on the group page.
unless they literally don't participate in anything, i doubt it. this place is pretty left-of-center and a decent number of the most vocal right-of-centet wingers have actually either quit the site decrying the "echo chamber" here or been banned for being kinda assholes.
I am going to use this thread to request a feature:
Sometimes, when I have people over or I am in a public place, I avoid logging in to sites that have my username visible. This would make it so that I don't have to frantically close tildes' tabs. /u/deimos, is this something easy to do, or even desirable to you?
Probably not going to happen because of the amount of toxicity it brings but i wish there was a Geopol sub. I completely understand why the admins wouldn't want it but it's practically impossible to discuss things like Russia or whats happening in Yemen on forums as big as Reddit without it devolving into a shitshow or one narrative dominating. A smallish moderated community would be ideal (if anyone knows of any forums where it is possible please tell me)
On a user level I wish there was some way to make users more recognisable. It was always one of my biggest problems with Reddit, i'd spend years on a subreddit and only recognise a few of names, i could have had dozen conversations with a person and not recognise the name. I know bbforums were often a mess with avatars, signatures, and other silly stuff that made the website less sleek but i personally found it much easier to recognise people and, i believe, for a community to develop. It's a lot harder to call someone names if you recognise the person behind the comment. Not sure how it could be implemented on a reddit style site though.
Personally, remembering old forums makes me want to stab my own eyes out. People quoting every post above them, huge signature boxes with animated emoticons. Like every post was a personal MySpace page.
Yeah they could be god awful and wouldn't fit on the Reddit style site but at the same time they could be very memorable and help create a "character" to the person you were talking. Maybe i just have a brain that is better at remembering pictures rather than words but i still remember people on forums long gone even though i only spent 12 months there than i do on reddit on which i spent the best part of a decade.
It always seemed like that was a detriment. There would always be an entrenched clique of people who used the forum a little bit too much. It usually resulted in gatekeeping and other toxic behavior that wasn't welcoming to new or even casual users.
I'm not trying to say this is in anyway your fault or intent, but I really dislike the use of the phrase "the admins" as a conversational snippet on Tildes. It contributes to dehumanisation in some respects, and facelessness like this has on Reddit been an enabler of all sorts of vitriol.
"The admins" is one guy: Deimos, who runs (with some help from programmers) this site at his cost (with some help from donators), for the benefit of others. I don't expect the community to always be so tight knit, but I hope users always make an attempt to be personable & chat like they're holding conversation that assumes good faith.
I have two thoughts on this, I agree that dehumanisation causes a lot of strife on the internet, it's why i think the site would benefit from some other identifiers other than names, but Admins is different than say Mods. There are many Mods, they will come and go and the good ones get a lot of flack because of the bad ones but the admin is the admin, there is no pejorative behind it, it's Deimos and those he listens to on the direction of the site. As i didn't know him before Tildes, his position of admin humanises him just as much, if not more than the username Deimos.
Secondly i think there is a reason we use terms like Admin, Mods, OP, etc. on internet forums. We often visit many different forums (hundreds if you include subreddits) and it's simply unreasonable to mentally "name" the important people on those sites. Any attempt to do so will simply limit the size of the site to a couple of dozen or force unnatural conversational tics.
And non-programmers as well!
I think the best way to accomplish that is implement individual user labels/tags, not add a bunch of other cruft like avatars or signatures. And to that end, Tildes Extended has user tagging already and "Personal user tagging" has also been labeled a "feature" on Tildes Gitlab, meaning Deimos has decided he wants the feature implemented natively on the site... so it will likely be coming here if/when someone eventually gets time to work on it.
p.s. There is also user bios, which was implemented last month:
~tildes.official - User bios added: you can write a short bio that will be visible on your user page
I'm deliberately avoiding using extensions for Tildes. If I'm using an add-on to compensate for Tildes' shortcomings, then I'm not going to notice those shortcomings or be able to suggest improvements for them.
Yeah, that's fair enough, but I personally couldn't live without the "next new comment" feature of Tildes Extended... and I know that is sorely lacking natively on Tildes.
I used RES on reddit but i only really ever tagged people who said something i found stupid or offensive to warn me next time i came across them. I don't think it's a feasible tactic to tag general users on a individual basis because for most users there isn't really anything to go off. By the time there is i probably already recognise the name.
I agree it's not the absolute ideal, especially on its own and in the way you chose to use it on reddit, but I use them for far more than just labeling potentially troublesome users (e.g. I have @ainar-g labeled with "Russian music"). And when combined with friending, bios, and all the other user distinguishing features we can potentially add (e.g. group specific user flair, verified "hats" similar to lobsters, etc.) it is just one piece of the puzzle. But the most important part being it's a non-obnoxious piece of the puzzle... which avatars, signatures and many other common distinguishing methods definitely are IMO. ;)
pls chng 2 “Russian music and cheesy synthpop” thx
To escape the “Offtopic” label, group-scoped user flairs will be especially handy when we have some form of language learning group (
RU N, EN C2, DE B2, EO B2) or something like /r/vexillology, where you can get set a flag for yourself. Hell, even in ~music I could finally make everybody know that I post Russian music and cheesy synthpop.I'm looking forward to getting reputation management logic iterating. The reputation roadmap is a great start and will help start communities self-manage as they grow.
In addition one of the things I loved about the old BBS communities was that community-leaders came from the community and were identified as such. We had visuals that established someone's reputation on sight and helped the user gauge the source. It would be cool to think of some ways we could simply promote those users that contribute strongly to the culture and/or content of a group.
Specialized groups. Tildes is decent for general content but when I want to discuss a specific thing I have to go to reddit
Indeed. I absolutely agree with you.
I imagine this website to have the content of reddit, but with more intellectual discussions. Right now the content and user-base just isn't there yet. For example, ideally it would be awesome if ~movies had active discussions about new film releases every week, similar to /r/movies, except the discussions would be more in depth and analytical.
I think the community appreciates recurring posts with themes like this; I run one over at ~books and it has been a success: a diverse set of users come there to share their current reading every other week.
So I'd suggest starting something like what you want on ~movies, or at least bringing the idea to the table to see if there's someone else who'd jump in to run the threads. I'm not really active there myself to say how much interest these threads could earn ther tho. But ~books is one of the less active groups, yet the thread gets somewhere between 20 to 60 comments each time, and we're on the 18th already.
I have been on a comedy kick for awhile now so I would say ~comedy would be a nice addition where interested users could post stand up comedy bits, parodies, and any other high-effort forms of comedy. I know there have been talks for ~fluff but I would envision ~comedy to be more like ~music.
I love that idea! Maybe with a focus on the art of comedy rather than "fluff."
Stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBqDiK6gYfE
Tildes is already one of the best sites that I visit from a technical point of view. The only thing which would be nice is a preview box for markdown content, however I know there's already issue for that on gitlab and tbh it's a minor thing.
More users has been mentioned already.
It might be nice to have a tildes chat (discord, irc etc) since this place isn't designed or suited for that.
Just FYI, Tildes Extended has a comment preview function.
There is an unofficial discord but it's kind of dead at this point AFAIK.Turns out there is a new unofficial Tildes Discord that is still active (see below). But also worth mentioning is the potential for a Tildes Mastadon instance eventually, which Deimos has talked about before:https://tildes.net/~tildes/9gl/does_tildes_have_a_mastodon_group#comment-2euh
Oh, I didn't realize that wiki link was to a new Discord channel... I just knew that the old one seemingly got abandoned. Thanks for letting me know. Joined. :)
I see no point for a mastodon account. I would rather see a matrix room.
https://unofficial-tildes-wiki.gitlab.io/chats/
One thing I find myself missing occasionally is the possibility to hide posts. There are a few things I just don't want to see, and thanks to the activity sort, they keep popping up for a few days. Not a major issue, just a minor annoyance.
A "hide" function has actually already been submitted as a merge request so should be coming Soon-ish™
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/merge_requests/62
Topic tags can be filtered out from a, slightly hidden, page. For future reference, on the sidebar there is a "filtered topic tags" area where tags can be seen and the previous link can be navigated to.
3 row (1 line each) Tildes topics = 84px high (68px topic info + 16px padding)
3 row (1 line each) old.reddit submissions = 60px high (52 px submission info + 8px padding)
That's hardly double (only 28.5% larger) unless there is a lot of tags taking up multiple lines (which is kind of a separate issue)... but I agree a "compact mode" would be nice to add eventually, so I made a Gitlab issue for it: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/430
They might be using compact mode on reddit, which makes the submissions quite a bit smaller (very similar to Hacker News).
Ah right, I totally forgot "compress the link display" existed on reddit. And with that enabled, 2 row (1 line each) old.reddit submission = 43px (38px submission info + 5px padding)... so Tildes would indeed be roughly double. Sorry, @cwagner.
I would have said tagging suggestions, but they just landed :)
This is going to be my dumb thing, but I rather we have ~entertainment or ~media as a big catch all rather than breaking out subjects like ~anime, ~books, ~games, ~movies, and ~tv into their own groups. Ideally we just have everything organized by tags to avoid the lumper-splitter problem, similar to Gmail Tags as compared to Outlook Folders, but that seems like one of those ideas that could a whole lot longer to explain why that's bad compared to me suggesting it, so I'll sit that one out.
And as long as we are suggesting impractical ideas, something like Reddit Sync, but for Tildes would be incredible. I know that the will is not there and it is actively considered a detriment to the mobile website, but if the subject is what we are missing, I miss the Sync app.
You're asking for an insanely deeply nested and unwieldy hierarchy if you go with ~entertainment as the top level group, and tags can already generally be browsed for media types (e.g. ?tag= video, podcasts, poetry, etc.). And as Tildes search is improved (e.g. adding domain filters, maybe even media specific search) that will also help too.
Polls, after some time Deimos can open a poll of what subgroup should be opened next.
Some pizazz in the formatting. I feel like I'm at work when I am using Tildes.
Can you expand on what you mean by "pizazz in the formatting"?
pizazz? What does that mean?
“The quality of being exciting or attractive.”
mbc is saying it should be more visually appealing.
Oh, that is weird. That is the one thing that makes me come back to tildes: I find it incredibly appealing. The dark themes are awesome.
I think it's great. It has nice themes, simple text buttons, nice spacing and it's fast! I can't think of any website that compares to Tildes.
I really like the look of Hubski. Clean but not empty.
This is not going to be a popular opinion, but thumbnails. Either that, or get rid of the favicon things. My brain is conditioned to expect either nice thumbnails, or just text. The small, only semi-relevant images are just distracting to me.
It's a vicious cycle for me. I see the the site doesn't have enough activity especially around my interests, so I don't participate as much. I could be leading discussion around those interests, but there's just not enough time to right now. I end up back at reddit where I have more content to browse, only commenting here and there nowadays after a fairly prolific 8-year period.
Piggybacking on the word of mouth recommendation, could you engage some of the existing communities around that interest and tap the active posters you liked to be invited?
How would you go about in finding more users?
EDIT: I remembered now that new sign-ups are closed, you have to have an invite. Is there any idea of when sign-ups will open for everyone?
The old-fashioned way - word of mouth.
There's this notion floating around out there that you have to actively promote and aggressively grow your website community. I have serious doubts about that way of thinking. Tildes is already getting mentioned online when talk of reddit alternatives springs up. This sort of thing comes in spurts, though, not nice sustainable growth curves (which I think are bs numbers to begin with on the sites that show them).
Reddit was a near-singularity of new communities appearing and old ones dying. There's no question that activity there was higher than it has ever been anywhere else in the history of the entire internet, so it was a great place to study the phenomena of how communities evolve and grow. Those behaviors aren't reddit-specific, though, they are universal.
People will bring Tildes up out there in natural conversations. That'll drive users back here. Some will leave, some will lurk, some will join and contribute. The spurts will be small at first, a couple hundred at most. We've been through what, maybe four periods of intense invite activity like that so far? I haven't really been keeping count. These usually flare up when people out there are getting their $site-hate on and bitching about their existing communities not being good enough, or that the places they love are being interfered with. That's the trigger.
This is exactly how it worked on reddit. New sub, small number of users, but they start linking /r/whatever in relevant threads and conversations, which leads to bursts of subscribers. New users often provoke activity from ones who have gone dormant, so these bursts of subscribers come with bursts of content as well. The place comes alive all at once, and that gets more people to stick around.
One can't really fuck with this process. Go out there and promote it outside of on-topic conversations and it's always seen as spam/astroturfing. People get pissed off rather than interested. You can't really force it without also damaging reputation in the process.
The invite links I've mentioned before are the next step in facilitating this process, since by sharing one link, one can bring in a lot more people - one to many invites, rather than one to one. If we want to speed up user growth here, that's the next step imo.
Likely not until the trust/reputation systems are in place and known to be functioning as intended... so I wouldn't hold my breath for that. IMO slow and steady, controlled growth > risking turning into voat or raddle.
I suppose using it more ourselves so that lurkers have more conversational entry points to jump in. At least, that's the only good idea I have.
3.8k likes on this tweet about how that other place is toxic: https://twitter.com/mekkaokereke/status/1116870900517785600
There's probably people there who'd like the idea of Tildes, and who are not arseholes.
I'm too shy to start offering my invite links, especially because I don't know any of them.