Daily Tildes discussion - general impressions/annoyances + thoughts on changing the default sort?

I was going to request making Activity default or at least letting us swap our default, so I'm in favor of that.

Imo it solves one of Reddit's biggest problems, that you can't have a thread last for more than a couple days. I get that it'll be weird as things get more and more active, but for now it's by far the most useful.

Obviously, there are a lot of people new to the site in the last day or two. For all those people (and previous users too) - what are your early impressions? Anything you really like? Anything that's driving you nuts that I should try to fix very soon?

• I like the vibes and think the interface has the bones of something lovely
• There are a few minor annoyances related to padding/margin of elements, locations of certain UI things, etc. I think they'll be sorted out with time and I'm hesitant to suggest things that I know are probably already on your/other devs radar
• It's pretty hard to know who is speaking officially for the site. I don't like communities that go out of their way to denote status of administration/moderation/etc., but perhaps on the user profile page a little icon for like, "Tilde Mechanic" or something.

What do you think of changing the site's default sort to "Activity"? I've found myself using it almost exclusively since I added it, so I like it a lot, but I'm not sure if everyone else feels the same way. Ideally I'd like to make it customizable so people can set their own default sort (even separately for each individual group and the home page), but that probably won't be for a little while yet.

+1

So far I've been very impressed with what I've seen. The pages load extremely quickly, the coloring scheme is excellent on solarized, and every feature I've tried (voting, commenting, setting a recovery email, and with this comment now, markdown and editing) works flawlessly. I only have a few small suggestions:

• Since you can refer to a person by /u/Silbern for example, I think it would be a good idea to allow someone to visit your profile by typing /u/Silbern into the URL. Right now, if you try to go to tildes.net/u/Silbern for example, it's just a 404, while if you do the same with /user/Silbern, it works fine. I think that if /u/ is going to light up in comments it would be natural to be able to do it in URLs too, and all you'd have to do is redirect the request to the /user version.

• There are a few weird empty boxes that show up in places. In the top left of this page and on the 404 for example. It looks like something should be inside them but nothing is. Maybe it's a browser or rendering error?

• From what I understand, the email system works by having people email a formatted email to the recovery email address, and then comparing the sender's address' hash right? I suggest an approach where you have a dedicated webpage, maybe located at someplace like tildes.net/recovery and a link to it on the bottom of the page (alongside Docs, Blog, Terms of use, etc.), with two fields, one for the username, and another for the email to be hashed. The user enters both, and if the hashed email checks out for that user, it sends them an email directly like right now. This allows people to use emails they can't send from, or aliases, for example, and it'll be easy to discover if it's right at the bottom of every page.

I'm really looking forward to the future of this site and what it will become! :D Since it's open source, can we contribute code? Is there a public GitHub for example?

Really loving this place so far and I just want to echo stuff already brought up.

Only real complaint is that voting doesn't really change the color and my eyes are awful and can barely tell the difference between stuff I have and have not voted on.

+++ to making Activity the default. I live on default with a bookmark now.

And maybe I just haven't seen it yet but a way to jump to the newest comment or sort by newest comments on a post? I often find myself opening them up and scrolling to look for the most recent post but it would be nice to be able to jump to it or sort by new? If this is already a thing I just haven't noticed then ignore this.

Obviously, there are a lot of people new to the site in the last day or two. For all those people (and previous users too) - what are your early impressions? Anything you really like? Anything that's driving you nuts that I should try to fix very soon?

Honestly this looks like the best alternative to sites like Reddit that I've seen so far. It has the perfect simplicity that the site used to have (and that I miss from the site), it's easy to navigate, and easy to participate in discussions.

For suggestions, maybe adding an ~aww (or ~humor as I've seen in one of the posts) would be good. Also maybe adding the list of subs to the page once you click on the post, as it doesn't seem to be here while I type this.

I'm new here, and so far I'm liking it. The website itself is incredibly responsive, and I like that there are some dark themes right at the outset. Overall, the design is minimalist, but not necessarily dated or bad. Additionally, the community so far feels pretty positive and I really like that. Reddit has felt pretty toxic lately and I've found myself dreading looking through comments because of it, so this is a refreshing change of pace.

As for things that drive me nuts, my biggest gripe right now is that the comment box is all the way at the bottom of the page. I frequently find myself having to scroll up and down to review what all is in the post and what I've covered so far in response. It's definitely a bit of a usability problem.

Regarding sort order, I have yet to try out all of the options, but something other than "newest" may be preferable. I typically find myself changing the sorting order almost immediately. Long-term, though, customization is definitely a must-have feature.

Really impressed with the couple mins I've spent on here so far :)

Suggestion: on mobile, there is no way to know if you have a new DM or not from the main screen, unless you explicitly open the sidebar, maybe adding a notification bubble with the number of new message would help make it clearer that there is something to see in the sidebar.

I think setting the sort to Activity would make sense. If nothing else, it's what someone used to HN and Reddit would expect to see by default.

An idea: would it be good to introduce the tilde hierachy into ~tildes? ~tildes.features, ~tildes.bugs, ~tildes.requests (for new tilde requests) for example?

Clicking my own (your own) profile, you can't see who invited you.

Also, activity sort is great, that should be the default. Is there a way to have an "activity" sort for the comments too, idk how'd that'd work. Maybe bump the comment thread to the top if it's been replied to or new comment are thrown up top and slowly moved down.

I love how fast pages are to load. Thank you so much for not bogging things down with loads of scripts.

One minor issue: i use the firefox fork, Pale Moon as my main web browser, and it seems to have a problem displaying the sidebar and everything in it. I was having some mild confusion when i first loaded the site up trying to navigate and figure out how to post until i checked on a regular firefox browser instance. :P

I am not certain if there are other hipster browsers out there which may have similar issues, or if this is just a Pale Moon quirk.

Post comment shouldn't be at the bottom. It's not an issue with a low userbase, but it gets more annoying the more comments a topic has.

Edit: Default sort to activity works as long as we have a small userbase, too I think. For now it's great.

And a second thing I just noticed: I can't seem to find a way to go to the comment I got a reply to. Is there none or is it a PEBKAC error?

Also having to click "Mark as Read" every time seems annoying.

General impressions: I like what you folks are trying to do here, and I'm definitely interested to see where it goes.

I like "Activity," since it reminds me of how forums work. It's handy to be able to see both new topics and ones that people have been posting to recently. If this eventually becomes customizable, I like the idea of being able to set it differently for home, groups, and maybe even subgroups.

From what I've noticed, people are using Flame for opinionated comments that have nothing to do with other users. Offtopic is also used for child comments related to the parent comment, but tangential to the original post. I guess I can grok the latter for filtering, but it seems to represent an approach counter to naturally flowing conversations. Maybe tags need a description on hover, which people can read before selecting.

First impressions are excellent. One of the nicest parts for me is just how painless navigation and loading are. Things are pretty snappy and instant, even on mobile. I don't feel like I have to fight the site in order to use it.

I posted this as it's own thread, but I think it actually belongs here. I would really like if I click on a thread for it to open in a new tab. Just my personal browsing style. May have zero to do with anyone else's.

Being able to change the default sort would satisfy a lot of people, I don't mind the newest posts as default; you could show three posts sorted by activity at the top as a separate section; like a promoted content section if anyone wants to jump into an active discussion.

After a couple of minutes browsing on Tildes, here's my two cents:

• Members should also invite users. Limiting invitation number or awarding by checking of user's contribution on Tildes may be nice feature.
• I always miss a feature that called drafts. Implementing this feature may require much more effort than suggesting but especially, when I write a long comments or I have to improve my comment later, I always need to save it to somewhere.
• If there's a text in the comment box, Tildes should warn me about losing content. I just accidentally closed this tab and lost content on the comment box.
• The design of left column feels too wide to me. My eyes is getting tired when try to read descriptions or long titles in 13" screen.

I haven't actually tried out activity extensively yet, but looking at it for a couple minutes just now tells me I'd like that a lot. I generally agree with what everyone else said about it being neat to encourage threads to last longer.

Other than that I like how the interface is laid out in general right now. Some random feedback:

• Having the vote button and count for posts on the right side away from the title just seems right to me, nice job there.
• In a similar way, I feel like it might be better to have the vote count for comments moved to the bottom with the buttons. This is partly because it seems nice having them secondary to the content and partly because it feels like having it be its own row before the content of the comment is a waste of space when it could instead be on a row that already exists.
• I noticed that the side of your own comments is highlighted; are there any plans to do this for, say, OP comments? I feel like it would actually be more useful to have this feature for OP than for yourself
• Some buttons ("mark as read" on notifications is the biggest offender) are barely noticeable and could do with a size boost or other visual bulking-up so people know they're there.

Also I just realized I'd written all this out and then was gonna add more and got distracted and left it sitting here for 12 hours, I'm sure there was more I was gonna add but uh here have this

I'm finding that comment tags end up visually drawing my eye. That doesn't seem to be the intention. Or maybe it is for now, so that people start using tags.

I find the inclusion of Joke confusing, because it is the only one for which the description isn't negative. i.e. the docs suggest you may want to filter a thread to only see jokes, but not so with the others:

Noise seems most akin to a downvote. Troll and Flame seem like they would be better seen as a flag/report button. On that note, how should we report violations of the Tildes Code of Conduct?

Not sure if it's something that we want or not but on some forums, you get an error / warning if you try to post and there are new comments, that way you can potentially stop yourself from duplicating content. On super high-traffic posts, it might be a bit of a hindrance though, but on low traffic ones, with well-behaved posters, it could improve the overall quality of the thread / comments.

A few little quips:

• It's not obvious how to open up a comment in the inbox. There's only a little hashtag in the corner. I think simply clicking on the notification should open it up.

• You have you click "mark as read" on every notification you get. Two possible solutions I thought of: add a "mark all as read" button, or automatically flag them as read when you click the "<x> unread replied" in the corner of the page. (my personal favorite)

• The list of posts is a little hard to parse for me with the tags, username, date, group, title, domain, etc. all being listed - maybe there could be a "compact" mode. But I have no solid suggestions there, so perhaps it's a bit unproductive.

Hey, two suggestion on the UI/UX:

1. I think the header should stay visible as it's the quickest way to go back to the home page / list. I shouldn't have to scroll up all that much in a thread to just go back in the home page.
2. The post new comment box is after all the comments. Again I've to scroll all the way to the bottom to say my piece to OP. A simple solution, to not be invasive, would be to have it before the comments, if non-focused as a single line textarea. When focused expand it to a default size.
3. Add a preview box under this textarea, even as a developer I'm never sure that I-m using the right formatting :P
4. Make links in comments open in a new tab either by default or depending on a setting in the user profile

Sorry I absolutely didn't notice. Enable a "permalink" for the comments. Ideally when you click on it, it will save in your "paste" action the permalink.

I see that comments already have a unique Id so it should be quite simple to implement it.

I think comment tags could be more easily parsed if they were always in the same order ( no matter the order ), noted while browsing this one: https://tildes.net/~tildes/jz/daily_tildes_discussion_why_should_we_allow_or_not_allow_fluff_content#comment-1xf

dumb question, are username mentions not notificationable yet? I saw a few @tiz's floating around and didn't see them in my notifications.

Also, there should be a dumb questions thread.

I didn't see this thread when it was posted, but the default appears to have been switched to Activity in the meantime, which resulted in me seeing it, so a huge +1 from me on that change.

One thing I wanted to comment on but wasn't sure if it was worth making a topic for is that I seem to be getting logged out a lot, even with the "keep me logged in" option. Unsure if that's a common problem or just me.

Another thing I'm noticing is how common question-type posts are. Perhaps every topic should have a topic.ask hierarchy so users can filter out/for questions. Or maybe it would work better for ask to be a top-level topic, just like MetaFilter has Ask MetaFilter.

So here is another one: I should be able to tag my own comment. I found myself in the position of knowing my comment was offtopic (but it was still an interesting offtopic) and wanted to mark it as such and couldn't.

It's hard to tell what things I upvoted, the purple border isn't that apparent, and I find myself trying to re-upvote posts I already upvoted before. Maybe have some shading for the upvoted buttons?

Also I've seen a lot of discussion on the position of the comment box, in my opinion it would be more convenient at the top, but if you decide to keep it at the bottom, maybe consider adding 'jump to bottom' and 'jump to top' buttons?

Edit: after using ~ for a few days I agree that keeping the comment box at the bottom is a good idea. I find myself reading and replying to other comments more often, and sometimes not posting at all because others already echo my thoughts. Good design choice.

I Really like the layout and the UI is pretty intuitive. So far so good man.

So something I've noticed, is that when you get an unread message on your user-page, you can't directly link to the reply on the topic. You need to search for the question thread to see what people said on it before your reply.

Is there a way to implement a 'permalink' to the topic?

Ok, so a few things that bother me UI-wise:

1. On Chrome (Android), the URL box and OS status bar doesn't change colors according to the site colors. Having the solarized dark theme and a white bar at the top is not too nice to my eyes.

2. Given the importance given to long/detailed comments, there should be an easy way to quickly jump to the parent comment. Sometimes, when there are several comments replying to the parent level, you forget what the parent points were, so going up a level by tapping a button would be a fantastic addition. In Joey (reddit app) it's a ^ positioned where the current # is here. Maybe the # could be moved to the right of the timestamp and the ^ added at the right end of the bar.

3. When there are too many nested comments, half the screen is thread vertical lines which don't really convey much info after a while. I think after a number of nestings, the thread should continue on a new page (might be anew tab or the same), to allow for text to keep occupying the biggest part of the screen.

4. I think it's been mentioned several times, but to add a bit to it. I understand having the reply box at the bottom of the thread, but with the long comments (and the nesting system making them occupy even more space as explained in 3), this means scrolling a lot to get to the bottom. I might read all comments before replying, but I may also reply later, go back to the thread, of which I've read most comments, a but still I need to scroll all the way down. Also, one ce I'm at the bottom and writing, if I want to go back to the OP to quote something or remember some points, I need to scroll all the way up to do that... I think an option could be adding a reply button at the end of OP, and then, when tapping the reply button having OP's text directly above, so we can reference it as needed.