45
votes
Daily Tildes discussion - general impressions/annoyances + thoughts on changing the default sort?
Hey everyone, thanks for being here. It's really exciting to see so many people on the site now, and hopefully we can keep the momentum up. I even have about 50 more invite request emails from overnight that I haven't gone through yet.
As I've said before, I think keeping these daily discussions a little less serious on the weekend is a good idea, so I'll stick to that for today. Two main questions/focuses:
- 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?
- 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.
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.
Ditto. Activity already is my default using bookmarks. It's a nice combination of New Topics and Comments...
Plus it's awesome to see new comment activity on 16+ day old topics too. That almost never happens on reddit and having Activity as default will further encourage topic longevity here since a new comment acts similar to the forum "bump" of old.
Agreed on the point of thread-life. This is something that I think Hubski does well, if anyone here uses that. Perhaps just as a result of its small community, but also through a site wide ethos of 'nothing wrong with necros', it manages to keep threads running for quite a while, which is a nice thing.
+1
+1 for an admin badge of some sort. Maybe a quick/dirty hack by changing admins names to have an emoji or something in them?
@deimos would probably be the only admin, to be honest... the rest of us (me, @Amarok, @BuckeyeSundae, @brian and a few others) are basically just volunteer helpers/advisors/friends of @deimos with no official titles or responsibilities.
We have all spent a lot of time working together trying to help craft the policies and feature/system ideas for the site, during the last few days have been helping where we can and answer questions (since @deimos can't be everywhere at once) and even though he has allowed us to use "we" when referencing ~ just for simplicity's sake... I still don't know if that quite qualifies us for "admin" status. :P
I definitely think you guys deserve some sort of special designation vs. regular users like myself. Maybe something like what Discord has, which has an Admin level and the option to add multiple user classes below that.
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?
Oh, and one other suggestion I just found out; when someone relies to you, it shows up as a notification, which doesn't clear on its own. Then once you mark it, it disappears entirely. I think a system like Reddit's where it shows up once as unread and then later is still viewable, but marked as read and doesn't light up, would be better. Sometimes I like to browse through my old notifications to revist conversations or be able to quickly see a running conversation, and if nothing else it's pretty neat to be able to read through them later.
There will be a similar system here where you can revisit old notifications. As with most things though, it's just not implemented yet. :P
Thanks - added this now, /u/username will redirect to /user/username.
You make a good point that tildes.net/u/username should probably redirect to /user/username. I'll mention it to @deimos and add it to gitlab
Could you take some screenshots so we can see what you're talking about? I don't see a weird empty box at the top of this page... are you're referring to the blank square next to some URLs? e.g. next to url on this submission... Those will be replaced with favicons once the favicon scraper is done.
3rd recommendation @deimos will have to answer.
And yeah ~ is planning to opensource soon, there are just some thing that need to be decided beforehand, e.g. the license. But once it's opensource people will be able to contribute and do so at gitlab.com/tildes
Sure! Here are two. Look in the upper left corner of each and you'll see this large blank box. It's not a text input field, looks like a frame of some kind, but with nothing in it. Favicons are only small icons right?
That is... odd. I'll report it up the chain but are you sure it's not an extension doing that? The 404 page shouldn't have anything on it but text since it's just basic html:
You're right! It was one of my extensions, vim vixen for firefox (allows navigation of a webpage with vim key bindings). It doesn't do this on any other page, I wonder what it is that makes it appear here... I really like it so I'll leave it enabled, but now at least we know what's causing the box. Thanks for your help! :D
Because Tildes has a very strict Content Security Policy, it prevents a lot of javascript/CSS injection from working, which can break some extensions that try to add things into the page. I think if you open your browser console and reload a page where you see that box, you'll probably see some errors saying that the Content Security Policy blocked something from working.
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.
I don't know if you already have it on, but the "mark new comments" feature makes it quite a bit easier: https://tildes.net/settings/comment_visits - that highlights all the new comments in a thread since your last visit with an orange stripe down the side (similar to how your own comments get a purple stripe).
I think eventually I'd like to have a feature like "only show new comments" (and maybe their parents), or "jump to next new comment" to make it easier.
Oh, I missed this! I'm sure this will make my browsing easier until y'all get to those features. Thanks!
Permalinks to comments and comment anchors are coming AFAIK.
This is the biggest bump in the site's usability for me at the moment. If I go to someone's user page and want to see replies to their comment, I have to click on the thread and start searching for theirs.
Glad to see it'll be coming.
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.
Yeah, that's definitely something that needs to be improved. One option I was thinking about was just changing the "Sidebar" link to be orange if you have any notifications, but just adding an actual message or something to it would probably work fine too.
From an accessibility standpoint, it's often suggested to make sure color isn't the only thing conveying important info.
I know there are other features here that already rely solely on color, and I imagine adjusting them would be time consuming and has the potential get cluttered. But it might be helpful guideline to keep in mind going forward? In this case, something like a notification bubble would make sure new messages are perceivable in any of the current themes and any new ones down the line without testing all colorblindness types on all of them.
(You may already know this, so hopefully I'm not being a pain by mentioning it, haha.)
Good point, thank you. That's definitely something that I haven't done very well with so far. Hopefully some more design-oriented people will get involved pretty soon and fix all the awful design mistakes I've made.
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?
I think right now we're at low enough volume that ~tildes.features, etc aren't really necessary. But very soon I can definitely see that being the case. Even now it might be nice just so they're organized a bit better though and it will be a good test of the hierarchy.
I agree with @cfabbro but if you want to raise a bug / feature request that you see others have already raised, you can try to use the gitlab issue tracker.
Be advised however that this tool should be used "properly" unless we want @deimos to rightfully lock/restrict it for spamming bugs/features around. If you open a ticket there be sure to provide some context and the more information you can.
If you don't feel expert enough, open a topic here and others with more tech knowledge will surely help you check out the specific issue or feature :)
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.
Hmm, from a quick look at Pale Moon's roadmap page, it says:
I'm using CSS grid for some layout things, including the main/sidebar, so I suspect that's the cause of the issue (and should be fixed when Pale Moon 28 comes out, whenever that is). Can you confirm that the sidebar is actually at the bottom of the page, instead of on the side? (I think that's what would happen if CSS grid isn't working)
oh! hahah, you're right it is at the very bottom on the left-hand side of the screen. I'm running version 27.9.2 (probably should have mentioned that initially).
That's what I figured, I should probably try to make things work a little better on browsers that don't support CSS Grid. Most browsers have pretty good support now, but there are still some gaps: https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-grid
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.
We talked a bit about the comment box location the other day in this thread FYI
Oh okay, thanks.
I like it at the bottom for all of the "read first, post second" reasons. That said I do notice myself in a pattern of read OP -> read comments -> reply to comments individually -> get to end of page -> go back to the top of the page to re-read OP before replying -> scroll all of the way back down to reply.
What about keeping the reply box at the bottom, but having the
12 comments
header clickable to collapse all of the comments down so we just have the reply box?At that point, just add a reply button on top. Makes way more sense.
And reading all comments works, until you get to a thread with 100 comments. Or 500. Or at whatever arbitary number you go "fuck this".
In a regular forum posting at the bottom works because of the short pages. Say, on Spacebattles having it at the bottom is fine as I have to scroll through 20-25 comments IIRC. Now on a site like this? That'll quickly get annoying. Also, I'm not sure how it'd work with the inevitable limit on how many comments can be viewed at once. Have a button right above "post comment" that continues the thread?
Good point.
Yeah I dunno how the powers that be plan on implementing pagination for comments. I just looked and couldn't find it in any of the mechanics docs, but I thought I remembered reading somewhere that attention-stealing gimmicks like infinite-scroll were going to be avoided.
This is where having a good behaviour analysis help. There could be (or we could experiment with) a number after which comments become of less quality.
We could have something like:
OP Open Post
Comment
Comment
Comment
<hidden threshold - algorithm to define>
["Hey, look like you're enjoying this topic. Feel confident about this topic! [Tell us more!]"]
Comment below threshold
Comment below threshold
Comment below threshold
[...]
edit: Paging @deimos as well. Also, man you really need to give some users the role of "something" because this website is keep growing its user base and you cannot follow everything. I could page @cfabbro or @Amarok as well but they clarified already that they are not officially anything.
Having the reply box somewhere in the middle of the comments is even worse, as people have to look for it. At that point, many would likely not bother commenting.
Also, what if I organize comments by newest? No quality check there.
+1 on making some people officals. I recognise cfabbro and Amarok by name, but a badge, even if "semi-offical" would help.
Yeah I see that it become quite complicated to manage that with different ordering of comments.
Just FYI, @Deimos said that user mentions don't generate notifications yet.
Thanks for letting me know, I didn't know... and am kind of relieved as I was trying to imagine what kind of hell must be for @Deimos in these days with all these mentions :P
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.
Looks like you can click the little # on the right side to open up the comment. It's not very obvious - a little bit of a UX issue, in my opinion.
Yeah, I think that could probably be improved upon UI-wise. I know @Deimos is probably hesitant (and for good reason) to copy too much of the UI from Reddit, but the "context" button there does a good job of conveying what it is, and adding something like that to the # button might be a good idea.
It wasn't there when I made this comment, but thanks :)
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.Examples as described:
Flame
: https://tildes.net/~news/pg/judge_orders_boy_who_started_oregon_wildfire_to_pay_36_million_in_restitution#comment-385Offtopic
: https://tildes.net/~tildes/qc/discussing_anonymity_on#comment-3gjFirst 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.
Might be something that could be a settings option. I prefer to use middle-click to open things in new tabs, or long-press and select from the context menu on my mobile browser
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:
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:
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 haven't looked into them too much yet, but SSE looks pretty nice. The intercooler.js library that I'm using for a lot of the simple JS interactions also has some built-in support for them, but I haven't tried it out: http://intercoolerjs.org/docs.html#sse
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?
I can see how Joke may seem a bit out of place, but Offtopic doesn't strike me as necessarily negative, either; for example, I used it to tag a tangential conversation that was really interesting but something you could skip if you were only interested in the main topic.
They're both conditionally positive. But while it would make sense for someone to want to only see jokes in a thread, I can't imagine someone only wanting to see offtopic comments (which may or may not also be good comments). The offtopicness isn't what would make it positive for someone.
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:
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.
Yeah, they don't actually go into the notifications page yet. It would probably be good for me to make a list somewhere of "things you probably expect to work but don't yet".
Perhaps add a section in the Mechanics (future) docs?
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.
Yeah, there are some other recent reports of that as well, I was looking right now to see if I could figure out what might be causing it: https://tildes.net/~tildes/li/session_timeout
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 forask
to be a top-level topic, just like MetaFilter has Ask MetaFilter.I think using a tag would be most appropriate, which there will be filtering for eventually.
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.
You're not the first to complain about this... so I will put it in gitlab to further explore this problem.
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?
It's not very obvious, but there's a "#" on the far right of the header bar on the reply, that will link you to the comment. This needs improvement but I'm not sure the best way to do it. Having a "Permalink" button at the bottom of every comment like reddit does is pretty excessive, and I tried putting something like "link" over there instead of "#" but it looked pretty bad on the comments pages where you'd have a whole line of them down the right side.
Ah gotcha. I noticed that it was there but I wasn't sure what it did.
Is it possible in the design to have something limited to your mailbox? Some kind of 'back to thread' button exclusively in your notifications wouldn't be a bad idea. I really like your UI on this page, so if you feel any solution to that would change your aesthetic too much then no problem!
Yeah, it could be possible to add some things specifically for the inbox page. Something like the "context" button on reddit would be useful.
Yeah that'd be a nice feature just for your inbox. As it lets you get linked to the comment and thread where you're talking, and it'd be a little easier to see.
I think someone already mentioned this somewhere, but some sites put permalinks on the timestamp/date. (Might still be a bit opaque, but it'll familiar to some folks...)
Agreed, that's kind of turning into a convention. I think it's a terrible, unintuitive convention, but I guess I might as well—the timestamp isn't linked to anything else anyway (and I can still have a separate one too).
Ok, so a few things that bother me UI-wise:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks, those are all really good suggestions. I'll add some issues to gitlab for these to make sure they don't get forgotten about, and will try to get to some of them soon.
No problem. Thanks for this project! I'm really liking it. And when I learnt you were the author or amazing SubredditSimulatortand all that cool stuff I was totally sold!
Btw, I can't contribute to coding, unfortunately. But if there is any other way I can help, let me know. :)