(@Bauke probably won't like this answer much, since it's almost the opposite of his comments) To be completely honest I should probably be trying to pause further development on the site for now....
(@Bauke probably won't like this answer much, since it's almost the opposite of his comments)
To be completely honest I should probably be trying to pause further development on the site for now.
As much as I really do enjoy perpetually updating the site and wish I could just continue focusing on coding, the reality is that almost none of it is going to make any difference in getting Tildes to the next stage. Someone that wasn't interested in the site before isn't going to suddenly change their mind because we can search our own posts now or have built-in scheduled topics. These are absolutely useful features, but they're useful for people that already use Tildes.
At this point, the site is very stable, and already has comparable features (better in many cases) to similar platforms like reddit, HN, etc. Continuing to enhance and refine the features even further isn't going to make any significant difference for attracting new people. Instead of continuing to work on things like that, I should probably be:
Writing blog posts - I've still only ever published posts on the Tildes blog for the original announcement and when it was open-sourced. I should be writing about things like the site's goals and philosophies and why they're important, results and observations from some of the experimental things we've tried, and so on. Posts like that can get spread around and will bring more attention and users.
Talking to existing communities - There are tons of existing communities out there that aren't particularly happy with the platforms that they're on. Seeing if it's feasible for them to move here and potentially making some updates to support that (including finding ways to make it easy for their existing users to register) could be an improvement for both Tildes and those communities.
Thinking about ways to move on from invite-only registration - Invite-only has worked really well for the site so far, but we can't require someone to manually invite every new user forever. I won't go off onto a tangent about some of the other possibilities right now, but it's definitely something that needs to change eventually.
Looking into grants and other funding options - I really haven't been pushing donations at all (please donate!), and while the current level is great for how small the site is and more than pays for the site's expenses, it's definitely not at the point where it's sustainable for me to get income solely from Tildes. Bringing in more users should also increase the donations, but it would be nice if I could just find something like a grant that would remove any concern about it for a year or so.
These are all things that I'm less interested in than site development, but they're probably closer to what's really needed now.
Honestly, I agree with this; while it's good to grow the site from the perspective of its functionality, right now, if there's few users to use the new functionality, it's a less effective use of...
Honestly, I agree with this; while it's good to grow the site from the perspective of its functionality, right now, if there's few users to use the new functionality, it's a less effective use of time than it could've been.
I'd support opening up the site to new users with a quasi-open registration. Maybe have a "why do you want to join Tildes" question, and require manual approval for now? It's one step towards fully open registration. I'd also support some kind of tag against a user, for the first 2 weeks, they've got a badge of "New user, be nice"; similar to Ars Technica or HN's commenting systems.
Yeah, and I do think it's important to keep in mind that none of the time on development is wasted in any way. When more people start using the site, they'll be happy to see those features, and...
Yeah, and I do think it's important to keep in mind that none of the time on development is wasted in any way. When more people start using the site, they'll be happy to see those features, and it's great that they're already implemented. They just don't contribute much towards helping the site grow right now.
Tildes isn't going anywhere—as I've said before, one of the main benefits from not being dependent on any kind of investment is that it means there's nothing that can really make the site "fail". The growth has been on the slow side while I've kept working on development, but it's not like a VC-funded site where spending time on the wrong goals can make you miss revenue/growth targets and force you to shut down. Everything worked on is still useful over the long term, the order it all happens might just be a little different.
@emdash mentioned "quasi-open registration" above, and that did get me thinking: would it be viable to extend the invite system already in place? What I'm thinking about this is basically that...
@emdash mentioned "quasi-open registration" above, and that did get me thinking: would it be viable to extend the invite system already in place?
What I'm thinking about this is basically that there are three ways for a user to join Tildes currently:
Request an invite directly via the site Invites email.
Find a "request an invite" thread on another site and ask for one there.
Know someone already on Tildes and ask them.
The third one is pretty situational, but it might be viable to integrate the other two more closely with the site. A couple examples:
Provide a link or form to request an invite directly on the site — e.g. on the main page, login page, etc. In order to find the email needed to get here via option #1, folks have to go to the login page, find and click the small link leading to the site announcement post, then find the email in there. It's not much, but it does increase the effort required to sign up. This is good and bad; users who jump this small hurdle are more likely to care about the site itself, but it has the trade-off of making it less likely for someone to try this method at all. Adding a more directly-visible link or even an onsite form for requesting invites could ease this and help encourage new users to request an invite.
Allow existant users to accept the above-requested invites themselves by consuming one of their 10 invites, OR give trusted users the privilege to do this (similar to topic title editing / tag editing / moving). I don't know how many requests you get by way of email now, but given how much else you do to maintain the site I'm nervous about the idea of increasing the workload here. Letting other users accept these invites would both help them get on the site sooner, and also help you avoid having to manage them all yourself. This also ties in to the above-mentioned option #2 for getting an invite by integrating "invite request threads" in to the site directly: instead of making a thread elsewhere to give out an invite, users here could give out their invites through the site itself. If needed, this could be limited to a trusted set of users as well to keep things more controlled.
I'm mostly just throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks here, but – assuming one or both of these wouldn't add too much development work – I figure this might be a good way to keep the site invite-only while still allowing the userbase to grow more, and thus encourage more content with it.
Thanks, I think those are good ideas (and @Bauke copied it to the issue tracker so it can be more easily kept track of). I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do next, but that seems like a...
I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do next, but that seems like a pretty good way of making it easier without needing a complete overhaul of the system.
I don't think it would hurt to have those kind of statistics (and I do want to make my monitoring charts public eventually), but I also don't think it would make a significant difference overall...
I don't think it would hurt to have those kind of statistics (and I do want to make my monitoring charts public eventually), but I also don't think it would make a significant difference overall in terms of convincing someone that they should register or not.
One thing I would like to do before too much longer though is stop showing how many subscribers there are for each group, and switch to showing number of topics/comments per day or week instead. I think that's a more meaningful metric about each group's activity level (and would have helped with this specific ~tildes case).
When you said one of the things is "Writing blog posts", I automatically assumed you mean letting users write their own blogs on Tildes, as part of their profile or something. Is that at all a...
When you said one of the things is "Writing blog posts", I automatically assumed you mean letting users write their own blogs on Tildes, as part of their profile or something.
It's not something I've thought about very much, but the other day I did have a vague idea about adding a group like ~blog, where people could just make blog-post-like text topics about whatever...
It's not something I've thought about very much, but the other day I did have a vague idea about adding a group like ~blog, where people could just make blog-post-like text topics about whatever they want.
I'm not sure how much it would actually get used, but I do think it's an interesting idea. Tildes has good markdown support, so it would give people a decent way to make "blog posts" with a built-in comment system.
Interesting. So, instead of making it personal from the root (e.g. by making blog a function of the account), you're thinking of it as a communal entity? If you have user-tied search (i.e.,...
Interesting. So, instead of making it personal from the root (e.g. by making blog a function of the account), you're thinking of it as a communal entity? If you have user-tied search (i.e., ~tildes.official@Deimos → all the posts in the tilde tildes, subtilde official, made by user Deimos), you can make it both, effectively.
Tildes is growing to be a ground of personal expression as well as a link aggregate. Not sure myself how many people would blog, but the existence of weekly threads proves that many at least want to share.
Honestly? Right now I'd like a focus on more users and more content. I've never been one for limitless growth—in fact that's what leads to the downfall of so many communities. But right now, my...
Honestly? Right now I'd like a focus on more users and more content. I've never been one for limitless growth—in fact that's what leads to the downfall of so many communities. But right now, my feeling at least is Tildes is getting less activity month after month, when we probably need to at least double what we currently have. What can we do to encourage more users?
It's been mentioned elsewhere, but comments on existing topics I think are even more important than more topics. I don't have any hard numbers, but looking at the Activity-AllTime sort subscribed...
It's been mentioned elsewhere, but comments on existing topics I think are even more important than more topics. I don't have any hard numbers, but looking at the Activity-AllTime sort subscribed to most groups, it seems most are <10 comments (with a handful of popular exceptions). When a user sees that kind of response activity, it really hurts motivation to post new topics; why bother finding good content and posting here if there isn't a great chance of lively discussion.
It's the age old problem of encouraging lurkers to comment and commenters to do so more often (while still maintaining standards), but there has to be some things we can do to help things along.
I wonder if tilde's focus on quality isn't backfiring a little here. I often find myself in a situation where I see a great article, but don't have anything extremely intelligent to say about it....
It's been mentioned elsewhere, but comments on existing topics I think are even more important than more topics. I don't have any hard numbers, but looking at the Activity-AllTime sort subscribed to most groups, it seems most are <10 comments (with a handful of popular exceptions). When a user sees that kind of response activity, it really hurts motivation to post new topics; why bother finding good content and posting here if there isn't a great chance of lively discussion.
I wonder if tilde's focus on quality isn't backfiring a little here. I often find myself in a situation where I see a great article, but don't have anything extremely intelligent to say about it. So I upvote it, move along, and watch the link quickly drown to the bottom. Meanwhile, less interesting discussion topics get a lot of activity and stay at the top for a very long time.
Technically you could always start a discussion with something like “Slightly off-topic, but that reminded me of (…)”, and I think that a community should not be against such discussions. But I've...
Technically you could always start a discussion with something like
“Slightly off-topic, but that reminded me of (…)”, and I think that
a community should not be against such discussions. But I've also seen
some moderators on some forums being against tangents.
Definitely. Another easy way to start a conversation is to comment "FIRST!!!!!" ...just kidding. An honest suggestion: Just grab a few lines from the article that stood out to you. "I noticed this...
Definitely. Another easy way to start a conversation is to comment "FIRST!!!!!"
...just kidding. An honest suggestion: Just grab a few lines from the article that stood out to you. "I noticed this portion <quote from article> and I thought it was a great point." It's an easy starting point for a conversation, and people have opportunity to build off your comment.
Here's a completely undigested thought: could something like writing prompts be used to encourage participation? Prompts are quite a standard practice in education. Rather than just giving your...
It's the age old problem of encouraging lurkers to comment and commenters to do so more often (while still maintaining standards), but there has to be some things we can do to help things along.
Here's a completely undigested thought: could something like writing prompts be used to encourage participation?
Prompts are quite a standard practice in education. Rather than just giving your students a topic to write an essay about (cf. posting a link to an article here), it is often a good idea to include statements and questions that guide students to think about the subject before they start writing.
In recent years, prompts have also started to pop up on websites that ask for our reviews. Amazon, for instance, sends user submitted questions to product owners, which has generated plenty of review-type discussion on product listings. Similarly, Google's services like Maps and Play Store have switched away from just nagging you about leaving an open-ended review, and instead have started to ask very specific questions, at the end of which they perhaps also ask you to leave that more open review, after your mind has been prompted by the questions.
This is also a typical tactic for bloggers. If you end your blog post with a question, you tend to get far more discussion than if you don't. And it's very much true here at Tildes as well: topics that specifically prompt a response from users, like the various ask.discussion threads such as this one, seem to generate more activity than plain article links.
I'm not aware of any social media service that would systematically use prompts to encourage discussion and I don't know how this would function in practice. The range of potential topics is so wide that it would probably be impossible to come up with a standard list of prompts that could meaningfully cover article submissions automatically.
I suppose one pretty straightforward way within the current system would be to just encourage or even mandate article submitters to submit a comment that either asks a question or states an argument for others to engage with. Over at Reddit, some subreddits do this as "submission statements" or such.
But perhaps prompts could be a separate feature from comments. Both the original poster as well as others could (anonymously?) add questions and discussion prompts, which would show at the bottom of the submission, either before the comments or before the comment text box. Most of the time, it is easier to ask an insightful question than it is to provide an insightful answer. Yet, many may feel, or have even been taught to believe, that asking questions is a sign of ignorance, or in the case of a discussion driven platform like Tildes, considered "noise". But questions are very valuable, and often an interesting thought only manifests itself when someone else has come up with an even more interesting question or prompt to react to.
So, might one key to generating meaningful discussion be to systematically encourage the creation of meaningful prompts in connection to articles posted?
I wonder if having something like a "low activity" feed might help with this -- something that features recent articles with very few comments, or none at all. Not only would it help call...
I wonder if having something like a "low activity" feed might help with this -- something that features recent articles with very few comments, or none at all.
Not only would it help call attention to articles that might benefit from more discussion, but it could also be a sort of self-selected disengagement. Some of Tildes high-activity threads are ones where conversations get heated and tense, and a person who has chosen to step away from those will likely still see those particular topics pop up again and again in the activity sort. A "low activity" sort gets them off their page and shows them only topics where they are better able to have a fresh start should they choose to comment.
One small improvement that I think would help us get more content is title suggestion, like Reddit has. It sounds a bit stupid, but I really think minimizing the amount of friction for submitting...
One small improvement that I think would help us get more content is title suggestion, like Reddit has. It sounds a bit stupid, but I really think minimizing the amount of friction for submitting makes a difference.
Alternatively, some sort of bookmarklet or browser extension like @NaraVara is suggesting.
Do we really need big software improvements? The software is better than many online forums already. So, if development moves slowly I think that's okay? For comparison, Hacker News moves very...
Do we really need big software improvements? The software is better than many online forums already. So, if development moves slowly I think that's okay?
For comparison, Hacker News moves very slowly in making software changes.
Yes, fair enough. I would just caution against false urgency putting too many expectations on the maintainers. It's easy for someone filing an issue to say that it's very important and for the...
Yes, fair enough. I would just caution against false urgency putting too many expectations on the maintainers. It's easy for someone filing an issue to say that it's very important and for the issue tracker to fill up with feature requests, while meanwhile most users are satisfied.
The trust system sounds neat and it would be good to have it before seeing high growth, though we don't know when that will be. But it will be hard to design without feedback from having an active problem to solve.
Activity. More more topics, more comments, more votes. Also, probably a shameful confession, but I often re-post something I saw on Hacker News to Tildes, and I would like it to go the other way...
Activity. More more topics, more comments, more votes.
Also, probably a shameful confession, but I often re-post something
I saw on Hacker News to Tildes, and I would like it to go the other way
as well.
Well, it's not an original submission. And it's basically a cross-site repost, and I am not a big fan of reposts in general. I can imagine some people being annoyed when they come to Tildes from...
Well, it's not an original submission. And it's basically
a cross-site repost, and I am not a big fan of reposts in general.
I can imagine some people being annoyed when they come to Tildes from HN
and see all the same topics here.
I agree with the sentiment, but I think it's still a good way to bootstrap tildes until we get enough original content. I think a good way to find original content for tildes is to follow good...
I agree with the sentiment, but I think it's still a good way to bootstrap tildes until we get enough original content.
I think a good way to find original content for tildes is to follow good Twitter accounts in your area of expertise and submit links that you think are interesting for a wider audience.
I think it's fine as long as they're just the links you find most interesting. Sometimes they get lost in the noise over there. The links you post need to come from somewhere else you actually...
I think it's fine as long as they're just the links you find most interesting. Sometimes they get lost in the noise over there.
The links you post need to come from somewhere else you actually read. Most of the time this isn't going to be terribly original, and that's ok.
I'm the same—HN remains my primary source for news in that particular culture space. It's like the water chiller of the tech/intellectual community in my view. That being said we're not the only...
I'm the same—HN remains my primary source for news in that particular culture space. It's like the water chiller of the tech/intellectual community in my view. That being said we're not the only two people opening up HN first thing in the morning when we get to work!
I'd love for Tildes to become my primary source with a wider scope of topics.
I think Tildes' problem is that it isnt the primary source for any topic. Like bbforums of yesteryear you used to go for a certain topic (cars, health and fitness, crocheting, TV, whatever.) and...
I'd love for Tildes to become my primary source with a wider scope of topics.
I think Tildes' problem is that it isnt the primary source for any topic. Like bbforums of yesteryear you used to go for a certain topic (cars, health and fitness, crocheting, TV, whatever.) and then spend as much time in the non-topic sections because of the community. Tildes has no focus other than "people tired of Reddits toxicity" which massively divides what content people come here for and leads to a struggling community.
RE: new users; I feel like Tildes isn't as active as it was when I joined about 6 months ago(I think). Could be just me, but in any case I think it should be easier to get in here. Maybe make some...
RE: new users; I feel like Tildes isn't as active as it was when I joined about 6 months ago(I think). Could be just me, but in any case I think it should be easier to get in here.
Maybe make some kind of "tutorial island" easy-to-join place that's separate from the rest where people can go into a trial period and be accepted later on if they're up to spec. I realize that likely requires a lot of moderation but I'm sure people here would be up for it.
If we wanted more content, we could have a list of RSS feeds we could aggregate for and have Tildes auto post for each new entry. I'm not sure if it brings in the sort of discourse we want to...
If we wanted more content, we could have a list of RSS feeds we could aggregate for and have Tildes auto post for each new entry. I'm not sure if it brings in the sort of discourse we want to bring in, sets an odd tone, or just makes us an unofficial comment section, but it is something to consider for popular media series.
Automated posting seems like it might end up flooding the site with uninteresting stuff. I think part of the point is some level of human curation on the article level. A bookmarklet or browser...
Automated posting seems like it might end up flooding the site with uninteresting stuff. I think part of the point is some level of human curation on the article level.
A bookmarklet or browser extension to quickly share an article might be useful though.
Yeah, I don't post every Tom Scott, SmarterEveryDay, etc video because not all of them are worth posting IMO. But the ones that are particularly interesting, I do post. And if posting outside...
Yeah, I don't post every Tom Scott, SmarterEveryDay, etc video because not all of them are worth posting IMO. But the ones that are particularly interesting, I do post. And if posting outside links was automated all it would do is greatly increase the noise and reduce the signal on Tildes.
And honestly, I don't feel like it's topics that we are lacking anyways, it's comments (and commenters), which flooding the site with even more (likely lower quality) topics would actually just make worse.
Perhaps automated content gathering wouldn't necessarily need to lead to automatic posting. Instead, the system could ask users to curate the content that it gathers and act as gate-keepers. I...
Perhaps automated content gathering wouldn't necessarily need to lead to automatic posting. Instead, the system could ask users to curate the content that it gathers and act as gate-keepers. I actually wrote some thoughts about this some time ago.
Yes, I wouldn't want to see automatically posted links. Posting a link indicates that someone found it interesting enough that they felt they had to share it. I think it's okay if things are quiet...
Yes, I wouldn't want to see automatically posted links. Posting a link indicates that someone found it interesting enough that they felt they had to share it.
I think it's okay if things are quiet sometimes, as long as the links are interesting.
(@Bauke probably won't like this answer much, since it's almost the opposite of his comments)
To be completely honest I should probably be trying to pause further development on the site for now.
As much as I really do enjoy perpetually updating the site and wish I could just continue focusing on coding, the reality is that almost none of it is going to make any difference in getting Tildes to the next stage. Someone that wasn't interested in the site before isn't going to suddenly change their mind because we can search our own posts now or have built-in scheduled topics. These are absolutely useful features, but they're useful for people that already use Tildes.
At this point, the site is very stable, and already has comparable features (better in many cases) to similar platforms like reddit, HN, etc. Continuing to enhance and refine the features even further isn't going to make any significant difference for attracting new people. Instead of continuing to work on things like that, I should probably be:
These are all things that I'm less interested in than site development, but they're probably closer to what's really needed now.
Honestly, I agree with this; while it's good to grow the site from the perspective of its functionality, right now, if there's few users to use the new functionality, it's a less effective use of time than it could've been.
I'd support opening up the site to new users with a quasi-open registration. Maybe have a "why do you want to join Tildes" question, and require manual approval for now? It's one step towards fully open registration. I'd also support some kind of tag against a user, for the first 2 weeks, they've got a badge of "New user, be nice"; similar to Ars Technica or HN's commenting systems.
Yeah, and I do think it's important to keep in mind that none of the time on development is wasted in any way. When more people start using the site, they'll be happy to see those features, and it's great that they're already implemented. They just don't contribute much towards helping the site grow right now.
Tildes isn't going anywhere—as I've said before, one of the main benefits from not being dependent on any kind of investment is that it means there's nothing that can really make the site "fail". The growth has been on the slow side while I've kept working on development, but it's not like a VC-funded site where spending time on the wrong goals can make you miss revenue/growth targets and force you to shut down. Everything worked on is still useful over the long term, the order it all happens might just be a little different.
@emdash mentioned "quasi-open registration" above, and that did get me thinking: would it be viable to extend the invite system already in place?
What I'm thinking about this is basically that there are three ways for a user to join Tildes currently:
The third one is pretty situational, but it might be viable to integrate the other two more closely with the site. A couple examples:
Provide a link or form to request an invite directly on the site — e.g. on the main page, login page, etc. In order to find the email needed to get here via option #1, folks have to go to the login page, find and click the small link leading to the site announcement post, then find the email in there. It's not much, but it does increase the effort required to sign up. This is good and bad; users who jump this small hurdle are more likely to care about the site itself, but it has the trade-off of making it less likely for someone to try this method at all. Adding a more directly-visible link or even an onsite form for requesting invites could ease this and help encourage new users to request an invite.
Allow existant users to accept the above-requested invites themselves by consuming one of their 10 invites, OR give trusted users the privilege to do this (similar to topic title editing / tag editing / moving). I don't know how many requests you get by way of email now, but given how much else you do to maintain the site I'm nervous about the idea of increasing the workload here. Letting other users accept these invites would both help them get on the site sooner, and also help you avoid having to manage them all yourself. This also ties in to the above-mentioned option #2 for getting an invite by integrating "invite request threads" in to the site directly: instead of making a thread elsewhere to give out an invite, users here could give out their invites through the site itself. If needed, this could be limited to a trusted set of users as well to keep things more controlled.
I'm mostly just throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks here, but – assuming one or both of these wouldn't add too much development work – I figure this might be a good way to keep the site invite-only while still allowing the userbase to grow more, and thus encourage more content with it.
Thanks, I think those are good ideas (and @Bauke copied it to the issue tracker so it can be more easily kept track of).
I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do next, but that seems like a pretty good way of making it easier without needing a complete overhaul of the system.
I don't think it would hurt to have those kind of statistics (and I do want to make my monitoring charts public eventually), but I also don't think it would make a significant difference overall in terms of convincing someone that they should register or not.
One thing I would like to do before too much longer though is stop showing how many subscribers there are for each group, and switch to showing number of topics/comments per day or week instead. I think that's a more meaningful metric about each group's activity level (and would have helped with this specific ~tildes case).
When you said one of the things is "Writing blog posts", I automatically assumed you mean letting users write their own blogs on Tildes, as part of their profile or something.
Is that at all a feature thought of?
It's not something I've thought about very much, but the other day I did have a vague idea about adding a group like ~blog, where people could just make blog-post-like text topics about whatever they want.
I'm not sure how much it would actually get used, but I do think it's an interesting idea. Tildes has good markdown support, so it would give people a decent way to make "blog posts" with a built-in comment system.
Interesting. So, instead of making it personal from the root (e.g. by making blog a function of the account), you're thinking of it as a communal entity? If you have user-tied search (i.e.,
~tildes.official@Deimos→ all the posts in the tildetildes, subtildeofficial, made by user Deimos), you can make it both, effectively.Tildes is growing to be a ground of personal expression as well as a link aggregate. Not sure myself how many people would blog, but the existence of weekly threads proves that many at least want to share.
Thanks for the link. I wasn't there when the discussion happened, so I didn't know.
Honestly? Right now I'd like a focus on more users and more content. I've never been one for limitless growth—in fact that's what leads to the downfall of so many communities. But right now, my feeling at least is Tildes is getting less activity month after month, when we probably need to at least double what we currently have. What can we do to encourage more users?
It's been mentioned elsewhere, but comments on existing topics I think are even more important than more topics. I don't have any hard numbers, but looking at the Activity-AllTime sort subscribed to most groups, it seems most are <10 comments (with a handful of popular exceptions). When a user sees that kind of response activity, it really hurts motivation to post new topics; why bother finding good content and posting here if there isn't a great chance of lively discussion.
It's the age old problem of encouraging lurkers to comment and commenters to do so more often (while still maintaining standards), but there has to be some things we can do to help things along.
I wonder if tilde's focus on quality isn't backfiring a little here. I often find myself in a situation where I see a great article, but don't have anything extremely intelligent to say about it. So I upvote it, move along, and watch the link quickly drown to the bottom. Meanwhile, less interesting discussion topics get a lot of activity and stay at the top for a very long time.
Technically you could always start a discussion with something like “Slightly off-topic, but that reminded me of (…)”, and I think that a community should not be against such discussions. But I've also seen some moderators on some forums being against tangents.
Definitely. Another easy way to start a conversation is to comment "FIRST!!!!!"
...just kidding. An honest suggestion: Just grab a few lines from the article that stood out to you. "I noticed this portion <quote from article> and I thought it was a great point." It's an easy starting point for a conversation, and people have opportunity to build off your comment.
I switched my default view to "New" instead of "Activity" so I don't see this. (There isn't really enough content yet to need ranking.)
Here's a completely undigested thought: could something like writing prompts be used to encourage participation?
Prompts are quite a standard practice in education. Rather than just giving your students a topic to write an essay about (cf. posting a link to an article here), it is often a good idea to include statements and questions that guide students to think about the subject before they start writing.
In recent years, prompts have also started to pop up on websites that ask for our reviews. Amazon, for instance, sends user submitted questions to product owners, which has generated plenty of review-type discussion on product listings. Similarly, Google's services like Maps and Play Store have switched away from just nagging you about leaving an open-ended review, and instead have started to ask very specific questions, at the end of which they perhaps also ask you to leave that more open review, after your mind has been prompted by the questions.
This is also a typical tactic for bloggers. If you end your blog post with a question, you tend to get far more discussion than if you don't. And it's very much true here at Tildes as well: topics that specifically prompt a response from users, like the various ask.discussion threads such as this one, seem to generate more activity than plain article links.
I'm not aware of any social media service that would systematically use prompts to encourage discussion and I don't know how this would function in practice. The range of potential topics is so wide that it would probably be impossible to come up with a standard list of prompts that could meaningfully cover article submissions automatically.
I suppose one pretty straightforward way within the current system would be to just encourage or even mandate article submitters to submit a comment that either asks a question or states an argument for others to engage with. Over at Reddit, some subreddits do this as "submission statements" or such.
But perhaps prompts could be a separate feature from comments. Both the original poster as well as others could (anonymously?) add questions and discussion prompts, which would show at the bottom of the submission, either before the comments or before the comment text box. Most of the time, it is easier to ask an insightful question than it is to provide an insightful answer. Yet, many may feel, or have even been taught to believe, that asking questions is a sign of ignorance, or in the case of a discussion driven platform like Tildes, considered "noise". But questions are very valuable, and often an interesting thought only manifests itself when someone else has come up with an even more interesting question or prompt to react to.
So, might one key to generating meaningful discussion be to systematically encourage the creation of meaningful prompts in connection to articles posted?
I wonder if having something like a "low activity" feed might help with this -- something that features recent articles with very few comments, or none at all.
Not only would it help call attention to articles that might benefit from more discussion, but it could also be a sort of self-selected disengagement. Some of Tildes high-activity threads are ones where conversations get heated and tense, and a person who has chosen to step away from those will likely still see those particular topics pop up again and again in the activity sort. A "low activity" sort gets them off their page and shows them only topics where they are better able to have a fresh start should they choose to comment.
One small improvement that I think would help us get more content is title suggestion, like Reddit has. It sounds a bit stupid, but I really think minimizing the amount of friction for submitting makes a difference.
Alternatively, some sort of bookmarklet or browser extension like @NaraVara is suggesting.
Do we really need big software improvements? The software is better than many online forums already. So, if development moves slowly I think that's okay?
For comparison, Hacker News moves very slowly in making software changes.
Yes, fair enough. I would just caution against false urgency putting too many expectations on the maintainers. It's easy for someone filing an issue to say that it's very important and for the issue tracker to fill up with feature requests, while meanwhile most users are satisfied.
The trust system sounds neat and it would be good to have it before seeing high growth, though we don't know when that will be. But it will be hard to design without feedback from having an active problem to solve.
Thanks for the heads up about Patreon. Have kicked in a few bucks every month.
Activity. More more topics, more comments, more votes.
Also, probably a shameful confession, but I often re-post something I saw on Hacker News to Tildes, and I would like it to go the other way as well.
What's shameful about that? Right now HN is much bigger than Tildes, it's no wonder that you will find more content there.
Well, it's not an original submission. And it's basically a cross-site repost, and I am not a big fan of reposts in general. I can imagine some people being annoyed when they come to Tildes from HN and see all the same topics here.
I agree with the sentiment, but I think it's still a good way to bootstrap tildes until we get enough original content.
I think a good way to find original content for tildes is to follow good Twitter accounts in your area of expertise and submit links that you think are interesting for a wider audience.
I think it's fine as long as they're just the links you find most interesting. Sometimes they get lost in the noise over there.
The links you post need to come from somewhere else you actually read. Most of the time this isn't going to be terribly original, and that's ok.
I'm the same—HN remains my primary source for news in that particular culture space. It's like the water chiller of the tech/intellectual community in my view. That being said we're not the only two people opening up HN first thing in the morning when we get to work!
I'd love for Tildes to become my primary source with a wider scope of topics.
I think Tildes' problem is that it isnt the primary source for any topic. Like bbforums of yesteryear you used to go for a certain topic (cars, health and fitness, crocheting, TV, whatever.) and then spend as much time in the non-topic sections because of the community. Tildes has no focus other than "people tired of Reddits toxicity" which massively divides what content people come here for and leads to a struggling community.
RE: new users; I feel like Tildes isn't as active as it was when I joined about 6 months ago(I think). Could be just me, but in any case I think it should be easier to get in here.
Maybe make some kind of "tutorial island" easy-to-join place that's separate from the rest where people can go into a trial period and be accepted later on if they're up to spec. I realize that likely requires a lot of moderation but I'm sure people here would be up for it.
If we wanted more content, we could have a list of RSS feeds we could aggregate for and have Tildes auto post for each new entry. I'm not sure if it brings in the sort of discourse we want to bring in, sets an odd tone, or just makes us an unofficial comment section, but it is something to consider for popular media series.
Automated posting seems like it might end up flooding the site with uninteresting stuff. I think part of the point is some level of human curation on the article level.
A bookmarklet or browser extension to quickly share an article might be useful though.
Yeah, I don't post every Tom Scott, SmarterEveryDay, etc video because not all of them are worth posting IMO. But the ones that are particularly interesting, I do post. And if posting outside links was automated all it would do is greatly increase the noise and reduce the signal on Tildes.
And honestly, I don't feel like it's topics that we are lacking anyways, it's comments (and commenters), which flooding the site with even more (likely lower quality) topics would actually just make worse.
Perhaps automated content gathering wouldn't necessarily need to lead to automatic posting. Instead, the system could ask users to curate the content that it gathers and act as gate-keepers. I actually wrote some thoughts about this some time ago.
Yes, I wouldn't want to see automatically posted links. Posting a link indicates that someone found it interesting enough that they felt they had to share it.
I think it's okay if things are quiet sometimes, as long as the links are interesting.
People