The results of the 2019 Census
Hello everyone, it's 00:16 my time and I'm finally fucking done making all the data pretty for you after about 4 hours of coding to parse all those juicy CSV files cause guess what, the excel files that JotForms gave me WHERE FUCKING GḀ͒ͬ̓ͦͅRͤ͊̔́B̴̼̫̟͍̅̆A̩̽ͮ̂̏͡G̸̭̜̑͑̃Ȇ͈͙͈̠̖̋́̌ͭ͂ͧhelp me
Anyway :) Let's give y'all a brief rundown of the current Tilde demographics, and some highlights, CAUSE NOW I HAVE ALL YOUR DATA AND THUS INFINITE POWER TO MAKE JOKESdid I mention I've been doing for half the day and I'm really hungry? AND TIRED? Honestly you owe me this moment of insanity considering I'M RUNNING ON GREEN LEAF JUICE AND HOW MUCH DATA I WADED THROUGH AHHHH-.
Also, most of these will be pictures because honestly I can't be asked to not pretty paste these figures into markdown tables or I'll legitimate go insane. Anyway, this post has plenty of sass, don't take this shit too seriously please, gracias.
The 2019 Census
Anyway.
This year we got 249 responses in total, which really annoys me cause 250 is way prettier to look at at. However, one was completely empty and the other two are... Fishy. More on that later.
Personal details
Age
When it comes to age, Tildes is heavily skewed towards people in their 20s to 30s, 45% of the responses came from people between 20 and 30. Overall, late 20s to and early 30s dominate the demographics. (before anyone screams at me about the proper use of graphs, don't worry I also took Statistics at uni, but the histogram in Excel refused to work and honestly go make your own census) There is also some statistical noise, which I'm not sure how it happened. Most likely someone typed too quickly.
Our youngest user is 11! And either very intelligent, cause they also speak 9 languages, or a fraud. If you're not a fraud, I apologize and wish you luck on your future path in life, which will surely be extremely successful, if you really speak that many languages at such an age.Hint, this was one of the fishy responses
Our oldest user is 70! I really don't know what to say, cause that's a pretty high number for an internet user. How was uhh... The cold war?Holy fuck I should stop I need to eat
Geographical... Stuff
Overall, the Tildes demographic hasn't changed much. US and Canada still lead by quite a lot, but we have acquired quite the little diverse userbase.
All I can do is salute my fellow other Austrian user. Can you say Oachkatzalschwoaf though? THAT'S THE SIGN OF A REAL AUSTRIAN.NONE OF THIS STARTING WORLD WARS SHIT
Language
Predictably, a large number of people does not speak a second language besides English, however, due to geographical diversity, a large number of languages is represented, most of them from Europe, which is Tildes' second largest userbase.
Gender & Sexuality
Tildes is heavily male-dominated, probably due to its IT-focused population and the fact that most of us came from Reddit.
Of the 248 responses, 17 people hit marked that they were trans, pretty much all of them MTF (which is apparently the majority of trans people, Wikipedia tells me.) 3 preferred not to say and everyone else is cis.
Now, let's get to the sexy stuff. And by that I mean the point where the numbers rub together in fantastic ways.
The majority of Tildes is really fucking straight, though we have some fun sexualities represented, my personal favourite Still figuring that out. You do you mate, you'll get there eventually. Also, whoever wrote down O-Sexual also wrote X-Treme Wiccan as their religion, and at this point in I'm too afraid to google what any of that is. Clearly, we need more straight people, after all, we're in the 20s.Before anyone yells at me, THIS WAS A FUCKING JOKE For now I've defined that person as Fish numero dos.
Religion
So, here's a doozy. To that one person (probably part of the 9% of <20 year olds), WHO DECIDED TO WRITE THE WONDERFUL ANSWER atheism and angosticism are not religions, can you PLEASE read the question properly next time. FUCK.Honestly that is such a 14 y/o thing to write, by the Ǵ͙͔͔̻͖̜́ͅO̶̱̘͡D͓̞͉̲͓̥S̢̲͙̙̟̯̙͓̱͟
Anyway, religion is probably the thing with the most diverse answers, honestly. There are words in there I have never read in my life before. Like what is Apatheist.1? Is there some sort of ranking? Does it work with natural numbers only? Is there a Apatheist.3,51? It can't be a typo, people take religions way too seriously for that.
Politics
I averaged out the scores of everyone who answered the political questions and got the following answers (remember, these are based on the 8values quiz):
Economy - 7,02
Diplomacy - 6,9
State - 3,8
Society - 7,48
Only economy is really surprising here, though I'd also have expected diplomacy to be a little lower as well. Maybe the leftist skew ia bit of an illusion?
Work, education and really everything else these sections were a terrible idea
When it comes to education, Tildes is pretty university focused. Almost half people replying have a bachelor's, a good bunch are working or have aquired their master's. Also one (maybe soon-to-be) MD and a few PhDs. The Craftsmen and tradeship people barely balance us out, we need some more COMMON FOLK IN HERE.
IT people, rejoice! WE STILL REIGN SUPREMEEveryone else will remember that All jokes aside, shoutout to the stay-at-home dad, proud of ya'. And to the disabled person, I hope life goes as well as it can for you. That goes for the longterm-unemployed person as well. Someday, you'll manage mate, someday.
And to the person who said their job is a waste of time in exchange of money... Mate, you need someone to talk? I'm here. We're all here.
Surprise section about technical shit and Tildes
OS usage is as expected, due to Tildes' heavy skew into IT and the fact that Apple doesn't nearly dominate as much in other countries as in the US, it's to be expected.
Due to said IT dominance Linux has almost caught up with the leader, Windows. Though my personal favourite is Anything cool that comes into existence, like can we make a Linux fork that is called literally that? You'd be the perfect match.
When it comes to Tildes specifically, y'all need to chill out. Most people who answered the census visit Tildes multiple times a day, like the content here doesn't even move that quickly? WHAT ARE YOU ALL DOING? IS THERE SOME SECRET CULT I SHOULD KNOW ABOUT?If it's a LSD cult I'm totes in lads.
As expected, most people who answered the survey have an account, and most likely due to the heavy IT skew most people are visiting from their PC. But I have also seen some people requesting a mobile app in the free form questions, so maybe that would go up if a native app were to be created.
The freeform questions
Well, in all honesty, not much has changed. Most people like the dedicated community, site design, in-depth discussions (though that was sometimes a point on both sides), etc. and dislike the heavy domination of IT topics and US/Europe news & politics. Also, multiple people simply said @Deimos when asked what they like most about Tildes. Get a room, y'all. Though it's well deserved, I think we can all agree on that.
Complete list of positive feedback: https://pastebin.com/KYCYLWP1
Complete list of negative feedback: https://pastebin.com/Eng6jjay
Complete list of ideas for change: https://pastebin.com/eery3mCt
Why am I posting these? Cause in all honesty, freeform feedback like this is hard to analyze and summarize, so I'd rather just post it all so everyone can form their opinion. Also, I'm tired.
Special mentions
Someone was nice enough to add the mention in parantheses that I should add them to the bisexual list instead if no one else marked pansexual. Well lucky you, exactly one other person marked it! You two can go find yourselves a room with lots of sexy pans in it now and have some fun.This is how it works, right? Or just, slide into each other's DMs or something and talk about your love for pans. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I also appreciate the one person who entered their religion in the languages section on accident. That's fact now, you speak Raised Catholic, now spiritual/atheist now, no shh, no talking back, that's your language now.
To that one person that said that Tildes is too serious, this one's for you.
And cheers to Deimos, without whom I couldn't be so silly on this overly serious but fantastic platform.
Anyway, Grzmot out, I need sleep. I'll come back in 8 hours or so to regret the shit I just wrote down at 2 AM. Please don't ban me.
Nice.
Age distribution curve
Age by Decile
Thank you! I wanted to see this. :)
We over-40s are very under-represented. But kudos to the 70-year-old!
I don't get that graphic. What is represented from -1 to 70? But 0 to 18?
I believe -1 corresponds to "no answer"
I see. Thanks.
Thanks very much for all the work that went into this, @Grzmot, especially taking all the feedback about the first attempt and trying to make as many people happy as possible for the second one. That's a really difficult thing to do, and you'll never be able to satisfy everyone.
I especially appreciate all those positive/negative/ideas lists, and will need to spend some time sorting through them.
I appreciate you appreciating me and appreciate you for your work on tildes right back
There were a lot of really good points in the negative feedback section. As someone who's not in the tech sphere, it was nice to see other people concerned with other content. It makes me feel more responsible for that kind of stuff because I'm NOT in the tech sphere. I should be adding more to the community that's under my own field and hobbies so I think I'll be trying to do that.
Also holy hell the male skew here is horrible. Tildes could really do with more users. It's hard for me to get friends to join in part because my friends aren't in tech and it skews so hard that way it's not particularly inviting.
As a final note, some humor would be appreciated. It's a bit dry.
I think the skew has gotten worse over time. I'm pretty sure the percentage of female Tilders was higher in previous censuses.
I believe you're right. I think when Kat did the large census it was something like 20 or 30 percent and now it's only 10 give or take.
Yeah this might be a limitation of the invite-model. People invite people like them, so small initial skews can get magnified over time. We probably need to undertake some kind of conscious effort to start sending invites to communities that are skewed female and have content that will appeal to them when they first check it out.
The sexual orientation percentages are interesting though. Just from eyeballing it, if you combine all the homo, Demi, pan, etc. as "Queer" I suspect this is actually fairly representative of the general population. But it is, evidently, almost entirely queer men.
It's 22% by OP: http://u.cubeupload.com/monarch/gender.pngDerp.
I agree with your point about both the tech stuff and the male skew. I barely ever use Tildes anymore because half the topics (if not more?) are about tech and information technology which really just bores me. It just reads like a tech blog or something which is unfortunate because I like the idea of the site. But it won't attract other users due to them probably getting immediately turned off by the tech stuff. Unless some sort of migration happens (like on Voat, except hopefully it wouldn't be nazis who went here) I don't see the site reaching a diversified crowd - not that I have any qualifications to say that, it's just a thought/opinion.
I think it might happen once the site is no longer invite-only. Until then, it will probably attract more and more tech people.
Male tech people will post articles that appeal to male tech people, so I'm not even sure not being invite-only anymore will necessarily make a big dent in things. I think there might need to be some effort to start putting content outside whatever the "norm" here is to attract different types of people. Maybe even auto-scrape content from sites with more representative demographics somehow?
What types of topics would you like to see more of that aren't tech topics? I generally come to sites like this to escape the 24-hour fear and anger news cycle, so I appreciate not seeing a bunch of articles about politics. So I know what I don't want, but what would you want to see more of? What hobbies are you interested in?
More humanities, anthropology and archeology articles and the like. I'd also like more informative bits on writing and figuring out things to post that pertain to my hobbies like knitting, crocheting, sewing, baking, and art/drawing etc. I think part of it is that some of my hobbies don't necessarily make the larger news circuit so I'd have to be relatively more discerning when considering what sources I'd like to pull from but also with some of them ir the craft stuff, it's a lot of individuals posting and blogging about it in any interesting way. I think it's more my own hesitancy of posting from random sources.
And of the 17 trans people who responded, "pretty much all" are MtF. With just 22 female respondents, cis women are a sub-minority, possibly even outnumbered by non-binary individuals. That was a surprise to me.
And I'm super surprised by the lack of gay people here. Like damn, I knew we were a minority, but I didn't think we were so small to the point that I single handidly represent 8% of Tildes' entire gay community.
It could be a sampling error. I'm gay and didn't participate in the census, so you just may be about 1/3rd of a percentage point less important. :P
In any case, Tildes has 59 queer people (including asexuals and those still questioning). That's a quarter of the community. That's pretty huge.
Another gay checking in, who also didn't participate in the census!
I'm another non-census gay man.
The census didn't capture everyone on Tildes, for various reasons.
There's literally half a dozen of us! Woo!
I didn't participate in the survey though, as I'm not longer an active user of the site. I just like to check in sometimes.
Actually, you don't. Even if we add all the IT people and all the STEM people, that's only 115 people, out of 234 people who answered. That's just under 50%. You're losing ground. :P
La la la I can't hear youuu
Reading the feedback, a lot of people complain about a mild to extreme left-wing bias. I think it's safe to assume they're talking relative to US politics?
I don't want to unfairly dismiss these concerns but Tildes seems really mild compared to subreddits like /r/socialism or even /r/chapotraphouse.
Could some people put forth some examples?
We do skew to the left, and I assume to the majority here (i.e. US users) this is going to seem even more extreme, because the US is just a very conservative country, compared to Tildes' second biggest userbase from Europe. Like I cannot tell you how conservative the US really is, the politics are actually insane. So when a European makes a political statement that would here be considered center to left-wing, to an American it probably would look like some insane progressive statement or something.
To put it into perspective, the Democrats, the left option of the US, with their current talking points, would very much be a right wing party in Europe. Not even center-right wing, like really right-wing.
Markets- 7,02 - Equality (People favour regulation of the free market)
Nation - 6,9 - Globe (People find international relations and globalism better than nations)
Liberty - 3,8 - Authority (This one doesn't surprise me)
Tradition - 7,48 - Progress (This one doesn't either)
As somwone with roots in both the US and Europe (Germany specifically), I strongly disagree. The American Democrats are extremely leftwing compared to much of Europe on several issues, but most notably, on immigration. The Green party in Germany, the most socially left wing mainstream party, is all for immigration of skilled professionals under restricted conditions, and our presidential canodates are talking about decriminalization of crossing the border without a permit. The US took in more refugees during the 90's and 2000's than not only Germany, not only Europe, but the rest of the entire world put together.
And when you look at what the extreme far right in Germany - the AfD and the NPD - actually say, the Democrats don't come anywhere close. Regulated corporations to handle health insurance? A sizeable chunk of Democrats want healthcare to be completely government owned. Christianity being declared the official religion of the state? No Democrat wants that, at least none that I've heard of. Reducing or eliminating the acceptance of refugees, strengethening relations only with countries that "share the same culture", gutting public education - put a typical American Democrat and a German AfD voter together and you're not going to find much common ground.
Didn't all blue presidency candidates drop universal healthcare, except for Sanders, who has been campaigning for this thing for literally his entire career?
The change here was due to the refugee crisis. Which by the way leads me into this point:
Taking events that happened 20 to 30 years ago wenn Europe suffered a massive surge in refugees from the aftermath of the Arab spring like 4 years ago, in which the US did absolutely nothing, is quite misleading in my opinion. I don't know where you're getting your numbers, but a quick lookup didn't confirm your statement, as the countries with most refugees are all around Africa and Asia. Germany was in 8th spot in 2015, the US in the 12th spot. By 2016, only Asian and African countries remained in the top 10.
You're right that the Dems probably don't fit into right wing, but I'd definitely put them center-right, considering not even the entire party agrees on the universal healthcare. Ultimately though, parties are a reflection of the population in some ways, so I don't know how perfectly you can compare parties, as a Democratic party in the Europe would probably have a few different talking points.
My bad, by "refugees", I'm including not only strict short term refugees, but also asylum seekers and long term resettlements of them as well. My data comes from Pew Research, a well regarded polling firm, and it shows that the US has taken in more refugees and asylum seekers than the rest of the world from at least 1982 until just two years ago, in 2017. If anything, I think it's more disingenuous the other way around - to look at the comparatively small number of migrants the EU has taken since the refugee crisis, just a couple years ago, vs the US's decades long track record on being fairly open to conflict victims, to build the case that the EU is more liberal than the US with regards to immigration.
No, they didn't. Current discussion in the Democratic party is focused around a plan called Medicare for All, sometimes abbreviated as M4A, which proposes the elimination of the private healthcare industry and the government taking exclusive control of healthcare. Think the UK's NHS. Other Democrats propose universal healthcare through a cooperation of the private and public sectors, such as an expansion to the ACA (sometimes called Obamacare). This is the exact model used by Germany, Japan, and as far as my 2 minute Wikipedia search tells me, Austria too. Everyone in the Democratic party is for universal healthcare, that's now what the debate is about - it's how to get there that's the question. The US currently has a frankenstein system of all different kinds, so how to tie it all together and guarantee that no one loses coverage isn't an easy problem to tackle.Trump himself figured that out a couple years ago, with the now infamous quote, "Who knew healthcare could be so complicated?"
Excluding the point on universal healthcare, since I already talked about that above, I still don't agree. You can't really compare the Democratic party to just a center right party, since the Democratic party has to cover so many more ideologies on account of being just one of two mainstream parties; but it holds way too many positions that are far to the left. I write this from a German perspective, since that's the EU country I'm most familiar with, and a somewhat dated one on that, but broadly speaking:
The center right in Germany was split on gay marriage until quite recently, generally preferring instead a civil union. The Democratic Party has been united around gay marriage since around 2010 or 2012, and it would be unthinkable to run as a Democrat in most of the US (excluding certain districts in the south that were traditionally Democratic) and be against gay marriage, at most, you could be lukewarm on it.
The center-right in Germany is generally against taking in more refugees, and prefers to talk about immigration of highly skilled or trained workers. The Democratic party seems itself a champion of poor immigrants, and considers immigration to be a core value to the nation. Most of the party is perfectly okay with granting legal citizenship to people who didn't enter the country legally, or through decriminalizing the act of committing it. I personally support the former as a Democrat myself. In Germany, the idea of decriminalizing illegal entry would be seen as a bad faith argument presented by a far right troll, not a legitimate topic of discussion, but here it is. Austria's government last year would be seen as extreme on our immigration scale.
The center-right in Germany has no problem associating with the church and with religion in general, and something like eliminating the 1% tax for religion would be a poison pill policy. While comparatively many far more Democrats are religious, the Democratic party is lukewarm to organized religion as a political entity, and "cultural Christianity" isn't a thing among Democrats. On top of that, the idea of establishing a tax to support any religion is not only extremely illegal according to the American Constitution, but it also extremely unpopular. Proposing to mirror such a policy here would end your political career pretty much instantly.
I don't really like comparing different political parties to each other's spectrums, because it's not a useful comparison to make. While the Democrats today are super anti-religious taxes for example, it's hard for me to confidently state if that's related to our actual ideology, or whether we're that way because it's always been so. But I can absolutely be sure that if you take the US's political spectrum, a center-right party from Germany would absolutely be considered conservative in quite a variety of ways - and to bring us back to the original point of this discussion, there's no way that the Democratic party of the US would be considered a far right party in pretty much any European country. Not only do the actual politics differ vastly, but the underlying philosophy of nationalism and isolationism is almost completely absent from the party. That's rather the Republican party in the US is so overtly nationalistic and isolationist; they need to run on whatever the Democratic party isn't in order to feed the fire, so to speak.
I don't think that's right, I don't know of any plans in the US that would wholesale nationalize healthcare. M4A plans propose the elimination of the private insurance industry, not the healthcare industry as in the NHS. Think of having one insurance plan, paid for by taxes, that covers everyone. More like Australia and Canada than the UK.
I guess so but man does it feel weird reading those comments. Thanks for the explanation of the 8values scores, I wasn't sure what those values entailed anymore.
My take on it is that it's heavily related to the 'IT' bias. A lot of people take their own positions and consider those positions to be moderate, even when they're not. Especially so in this kind of self-reinforcing community. As an actual lefty, Tildes as a whole is not that left leaning at all. I bet if you could break it down a lot of the complaints about left-wing bias would be coming from the IT sphere. For all their complaints about echo chambers, they get really offended when you suggest making diversity a goal in recruitment.
Yeah, Tildes seems quite liberal to me, as a communist. I haven't seen much actual socialism support, much less communism support.
Could you – or anyone else – provide examples of such echo chambers on Tildes? (PMs are probably the better option here.) I'm looking to understand what would be considered such, seeing how I have little real idea.
It does seem that way, but I can tell you Deimos created the ability to lock threads after I made a post suggesting we recruit in a way that valued diversity. On a website where a post is lucky to get 5 comments, this one had almost 200
I don't have comments about your reply specifically so please feel free to noise this. I just want to understand your comment better and know how you classify liberal types: right or left-wing?
I think the issue is they don't like leftiness. When you talk about "mildness" in comparison to places like /r/socialism or Chapo that seems like an issue of tone more than alignment. Like, Fox News vs. the Wall St. Journal editorial page, one is a nasty echo chamber and the other is a polite, civil one. But they're both conservative as all get out.
TECHNICAL DISCUSSION UNDER THIS COMMENT PLEASE.
Let's not annoy everyone else with our nerd talk.
I published the code I used to analyze the CSVs on Github: https://github.com/Spirits-/TildesCensusCSVReader/
In the repo you'll also find the CSV files of the aggregated data, this means it'll be fully anonymized as each question is split into it's own file. There's also the excel file I used to create graphs and tables in there, but it's been created from the CSV files so there's nothing new in there.
SATISFYING MY LONELY CRAVINGS DONT JUDGE ME
The content may not refresh that quickly, but people do comment, and the discussion is what it's all about.
It was disappointing at first, but now I am fine with there not being any new content sometimes. All caught up, done!
That's what I'm loving about small social media (Tildes and other forums). I get stressed when I can't finish something and there's always something I haven't seen. If it's one scroll down the page to see a weeks worth of threads that's a lot less stressful than infinite content. Maybe that's just me though. xx
I actually think the amount of content being posted is fine as it is - it makes Tildes feel like less of a constant feed that I need to compulsively scroll through every 30 minutes and more of a 'community forum'-type environment that I can check at my leisure
It is nicer this way. Quieter, unlike much of the Popular Web™ (Reddit, Facebook etc.).
I was saying that my coming here multiple times a day is not for content itself.
Also because a lot of women feel unwelcome in IT/tech spaces unless they are explicitly welcomed (and Tildes does not explicitly welcome us).
I think it's telling that the count of LGBT people is larger than the count of women. There is zero doubt in my mind that this is because there is a lgbt group, and there isn't a group for women.
Yeah, I still think not creating a ~girltalk (or similar) group, as suggested ages ago by @NaraVara was a mistake, and I think it's pretty telling that now the number of women on the site has seemingly dipped even further since then, and a number of our prominent female users are either gone or considerably less active here now. And I think it should also be noted that the user who so vehemently opposed the idea, and made such a huge stink about it that the group suggestion topic got locked, has now left the site as well.
I wouldn’t put too much weight into that trend there.
The number was already low enough before that big percentage swings are possible without any real causative factors. Plus, the “survey” went out over the holiday so it’s hard to say how much is just statistical noise, how much is response bias from bad timing or other factors, and how much is an actual trend.
Well there are strict regulations on data collecting on people under 13, so technically the ""joke"" is he's made deimos violate the law by using the site and have his data be collected and thus he must be banned and purged from the site's records until he hits 13. (To all the people who said this site has no sense of humor, you're correct and I'm sorry.)
Oh, so it's automatically a "he", huh?
I mean, roughly 10 in 11 odds that he is.
Well, they’re certain not an it 😉
Yeah, fight me /s
What if they're dead? What if the user is emancipated by civil law?
The sentiment seems to favor more diversity among content and the user base. That doesn't imply there should be less of anything, just more of other things.
It seems to me, though, that currently those "other things" will not receive a lot of votes when they are submitted. If they don't align with the interests of the majority of existing users, such submissions will sink to the bottom and fail to gain popularity. Consequently submitters of such content will be discouraged, further content of that nature will not be submitted, and the variety of content on Tildes will remain as it is. Not a problem unless you are hoping to attract a more diverse user base, because visitors outside of the common demographic will not be enticed to stay when they view the content on offer.
I'm just thinking out loud as I reflect on the comments I read, but two things occur to me. First, people who submit less popular content (that is, submissions that receive a low number of votes) may be more valuable to Tildes than most people realize. Second, successful subreddits on reddit often seem to be accompanied by redditors who feel a sense of responsibility for their success; they go above and beyond to drive and organize activity, particularly during the early stages of growth. Tildes may benefit from finding a way to seek out, empower and motivate these personalities to take the ball and run with it, so to speak, so that they may advance Tildes towards the goal of having more varied content.
As I've said before, I think we need to make space for very specialized content. It might just be one person documenting their personal project in a topic, like a blog. You do get a few readers automatically, unlike a new blog started off on its own.
Or maybe have them appear in a little overlay window when you click on them? Like the Wizards of the Coast blog pages have a feature where mousing over the text of any referenced Magic card displays an actual image of the card.
I think the only way to make that work in Tildes, though, would be to give each user their own photo bucket, make them upload whatever images they wanted inline into it, and then associate those photos with links in their posts. That sounds like a whole big undertaking to build. On the other hand, the friction involved in actually having an inline image to a post might make it so people don't bother unless they have a really good reason to do it.
I like this solution. And perhaps we can have a tiny little image icon (not a thumbnail) to indicate it. Though since the suggestion was inline images, perhaps clicking on the icon should expand the image in the comment, and clicking once more will give you an overlay window.
I don't think I'd want to have embedded images. Even just from a technical perspective, it's not very feasible. Almost no image-hosts allow their images to be embedded (e.g. imgur doesn't, so your examples wouldn't work even if the markdown supported it), so the only real way to make it work consistently would be for Tildes to have its own image-hosting, as @NaraVara mentioned.
And I definitely don't want to do image-hosting. It would be expensive and fraught with issues related to copyright, porn, other abuse, etc. It's just not worth all the trouble for the relatively rare good uses for inline images.
What about a collaboration with a smaller service like Cubeupload? Their TOS says nothing about embedded images, but it's run by three guys so something could be talked out, I'm sure, especially if the Tildes folks send some donations their way.
The trouble with embedding images (or even what we used to call “hotlinking”) is that image hosting is expensive and when it’s hosted on another site, you’re not getting any subscription or ad revenue for actually hosting it. So what ends up happening is your hosting service is paying to subsidize the content and value proposition of another site or service and getting nothing out of it. It’s just not economically viable.
To make it economically viable you’d need to develop some sort of revenue sharing model between the host you’re embedding from and the service you’re running. But at that point, you’re basically just contracting out a private image hosting service as an add on to your site. This not only ends up being an external dependency (which becomes a whole big thing whenever you want to make any big changes), but also makes some core functionality of your site reliant on continued good relations between you and the other service. AND it sticks both of you with the additional moderation responsibilities @Deimos mentioned which will end up being a HUGE timesink.
As a personal anecdote, back when I was a mod on a large discussion forum (hundreds of thousands of registered users) one of the worst ways users would troll the forum was by embedding “shock images” all over the site. Even trusted users, pillars of the community, would sometimes “snap” and do this over disagreements with moderators or just getting bored and wanting to go out with a bang. Other times user accounts would get cracked and they would do it to cause mischief. Linking to images still makes this possible, but involves more work and an extra step to make people want to click vs. just dropping an image inline. That lack of immediate visual indicator that you’ve shit on someone’s day seems to take some of the mischievous glee away and I notice sites that don’t have inline images seem to see less of this kind of trolling.
As far as embedding images is concerned, I'm on the side of the Reddit Enhancement Suite solution: default to links, and have an option or an extension that gives you the ability to "open" the link as an embed if it detects an image.
Pretty sure there are more than two Brazilians on Tildes, I've talked to some of them. I suppose they did not participate.
On another note: the calls are open for the first Tildes Brazilian meetup! I have one bag of Cheetos, one bag of popcorn and 2.5 liters of Coca Cola. More than enough to welcome everyone! (plain tickets not included).
Well we can't force people to take the survey ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
E aê meu chapa? I was the only other person who answered :l where's everyone else? Probably left this country by now :/ also GUARANA É MELHOR QUE COCA COLA CARAI
Rapaz, eu sabia que era você! hahaha Não quis dizer para não te abusar.
Também prefiro guaraná, mas Coca Cola é universal né? Se eu escrevesse guaraná os gringos não iam saber o que era.
Se um dia estiver aqui pela Bahia, não tenho como garantir estadia, mas posso desempenhar a função de guia turístico.
Abraço!
Dude, I knew it was you! hahaha I didn't
@mentionedto avoid disturbing you.I also prefer guaraná, but Coca Cola is universal, right? If I wrote guaraná the foreigners wouldn't know what it was.
If one day you come to Bahia, I can not guarantee a stay, but I can play the role of tourist guide.
Cheers!
Damn, I'm the lonely retail guy, huh?aaaaaallllll byyyy myselffffff
Thanks for putting this together!
You're not totally alone. I'm also in retail, but I put down Student since it's the largest single consumer of my time right now.
At least you get the retail hot tub aaaaall for yourself. Everyone else has to chill five feet apart cause we're not gay.
Well, most of us at least.
Don't worry dude, I'm in retail too for the forseeable future.
I think we need to make some efforts to invite people from different demographics. I tried to open an invite thread on some subreddits but they got removed. I guess you have to invite people one by one...
The problem is, if you're actively advertising a platform with an invite online system, you might as well just make a formal application process out of it. Problem with being open is that everyone can get in, which isn't a great for Tildes I think, and the problem with the invite system is that people will usually invite their friends, which often have similar interests.
Thank you for this census! As a long time lurker/rare poster, a lot of this was expected but a lot was also surprising. I admit I've gotten more shy now. I'm in the minority for almost all of my information?! Solo charge.
Still, I enjoy my time here, IT speak and all (as an extremely non-IT person). It's different from the online crowd I'm used to and the change is welcome. The pace is good, and the nuances of forum communication are fun to figure out. I know I should post more to widen the content, but now I think I'll lurk and see. Perhaps i'll invite a few people when the growing pains have settled. I guess its just pretty intimidating.
Sincerely and thankfully, a female, non-american, non-leftist (centrist?) MD
All I can say, try and post more non-IT content. People are attracted to things they like, so if people see non-IT content, maybe they'll feel ok with inviting their friends who aren't into IT stuff. It's just the problem with a small userbase which already has specific interests, the thing might spiral further and actively push out everyone else. And as they stop posting, IT content from dedicated users will dominate more, and thus you'll have entered a downward cycle. At the end Tildes will basically become a well moderated r/technology subreddit.
I thought for a good deal of time about whether I should bother delineating myself as pan instead of bi and opted to just go for the checkbox because it was easier than typing it out, glad to know at least 2 individuals were like 'nah fuck that let's be specific'. You go girls, guys, enbies, or others.
I don't even remember which one I picked because I feel like I go back and forth on which I identify more strongly with lol.
That said, it's interesting to me how Tildes is dominated by straight techy males who are also left leaning. I feel like we've managed to select a very specific demographic here, and I'm surprised there wasn't more LGBT+ representation considering we're left leaning.
@Akir brought this up in another comment, but if you combine all of the LGBT identities into one group, we make up a quarter of the population here on Tildes, which is pretty significant.
One of the things I like about Tildes is that I feel like it regularly passes a queer version of the Bechdel test: I frequently see a queer-identifying person talking to another queer-identifying person about something other than queer issues. I don't feel like we're pigeonholed on the site, nor do I feel any sort of friction from the straight majority. I like that being gay here is simply one facet of me -- not my sole identifier. I like that I'm not called upon to speak for the entirety of the LGBT community as its sole representative, and I like that I'm not treated like I'm on borrowed ground: like this place belongs to a different demographic and I'm just here on a visitor's pass that could be revoked at any time. Those are all feelings I've had on other forums, and they're absent for me here. It's a comfort I hope gets extended to people of other demographics who are currently underrepresented here.
The real standout of the data to me is that there are over three times the number of bi/pan users than there are strictly gay users, which doesn't fit my mental map for Tildes. I feel like I can name a large number of gay users but far fewer bi/pan users. Some of that might be because not everyone is open about their identity, and some of that simply might be my fault for making assumptions and further contributing to bisexual erasure. Some of it also might be an issue of proportionality, as I feel like we have several high-frequency posters (myself included) who identify as gay and who probably skew my mental map in that direction. Regardless of the reason, however, it surprised me.
I filled out the survey form, but I baulked at entering my exact age. I expected an age range. An exact age is personal and intrusive. So I cancelled out.
You could have just rounded to the nearest 5 or 10 years. You were under no obligated to be exact. Or you could have just skipped that part, since it wasn't mandatory IIRC.
Yes, I could have rounded my age. But I felt obliged to provide the data as it was requested. And, seeing as I wasn't willing to do that, I noped out of the survey. There's no point doing a survey if you're going to give it false data.
But you didn't need to enter your age data. None of the fields were mandatory to be handed in.
I wanted to do it properly or not at all.
If it helps, I actually agonised over it for about 5 minutes before finally backing out of the survey.
My forms should not cause agony :c I'm sorry
Not literal agony. "Agonise" just means I thought about it a lot, going backwards and forwards between "no" and "yes".
Noneis a religion? OP must be using Python!It's Java, I posted a link to the git repo in here :F
Atendu, kvin esperanto-parolantoj? Kie vi estas, miaj geuloj?
I'll make it a tradition I think. Everything is very formal, up the point where I announce results, always somewhere at night. Though unless we change the form greatly, I can just reuse the code I wrote yesterday next year. So there'll be less frustration, sadly :D
It appears we may have another sneaky Russian on Tildes. I thought ainar-g and myself were the only ones.
Also, apparently there are 9 people to speak Russian here.
The only Russian I know is "cyka blyat" from too much Dota 2. However, I'm of Czech heritage, so that's probably a good thing, as there's supposed to be bad blood between us. :D
oh no
mortal enemy acquired
Though seriously, I have never had an issue with someone from the Czech Republic. Even my nationalist parents are more of an American- and Ukrainian-hating sort.
I mean how could you, we have the best beer!
3 people put Czech as a language they speak, that's pretty cool!
My father, a beer enthusiast that he is, would probably approve of that message.
If anything, that's the only thing I know about Czechia off the top of my head. :)
That's not bad! You wouldn't pass the language exam with that, but natives would understand you once they get used to the accent.
How come you had Russian in school? Was it an optional class? Were there other language options?
Building vocab is a bitch, isn't it? I have a big issue with that part of learning the language. My German grammar is okay for a newbie, but the lexicon often suffers from Englishism.
Funny enough, Russia has schools like these. As far as I'm aware, they aren't so much uni-prep as they are higher-tier schools.
How peculiar. In Russia, you can go to uni if you'd passed the state exam, regardless of what type of school you went to.
I was born in Moscow but have since lost most of my Russian. I’m working to gain it back now though, it’s cool that I can fool most natives into believing I’m native because I don’t have an accent when I speak, but I have a pathetically small vocabulary.
If you ever wanna practice, let me know. We'll figure something out.
I'm a little bit sad to not being able to participate as I joined in the middle of this year :,(
I never check on tildes on holidays / weekends and not work related times
I may be alone in this case, but I think a census where the participations are open all December might attract responses from much more people.
This might be actually tied to what I said, you might had responses only from the small group of tildes users who checks the site very regularly
The form was open a week, and responses dropped dramatically after the first two days, I'm sorry you didn't see the form though. I'll keep it open for longer next time, but the problem is that when the thread becomes too old, it'll drop off the front page, even if I keep bumping it with comments or something like that. I'd have to ask @Deimos to pin it so that more people would see it. Don't know if pinning is even a thing though, so far I've only seen colour coded threads from ~tildes.official.
Yeah, there's no pinning functionality yet. The ~tildes.official threads have a special "this is an official topic" attribute set that makes them look a little different, but that's it.
Oh yes I didn't thought of that, it would be cool yes, as it touches everyone that use tildes it would make sense to pin them for a longer time, maybe something that could be editable by the poster as some topics would not need a long time of "pinning"
249 responses? Damn, that's really bad. The original survey over a year ago made by MeerKat when Tildes was 6 months old got more responses than this one and had a response rate of 70% from the site, way way higher. I was expecting way more than 249 responses.
The chart envy made shows a clear age range between 15 and 39, so it's 'good' to know that I am literally on the young edge of the bell curve and in fact, literally, alone :/
Must've been pretty MAD. I would have wondered how was the civil rights movement and Vietnam/Korea. Also care to explain why boomers lean Republican?
How did Canada have twice as many responses as the UK despite being just over half the population of the UK? Weird. Also please use a color pallette and don't do this whole thing at 1AM next time, thanks. Also shoutout to all the people outside the US and western Europe (
totally not to pat myself in the back and pretend I belong in some community I just made up)Yeah this is probably the least surprising answer in the survey.
Forget what I just said.
Neat to know. I wonder why?
As a 14 yo that was offensive >:< (see the emoticon from the side, not the bottom)
Still pretty dumb though.
Yeah I was expecting these stats to be more skewed. Maybe it's the people who don't believe the utopia most progressives want is possible. (Which is pretty likely tbh.)
I was expecting otherwise, considering how positive people's opinions on apple are here. But then again, the amount people of have heard share such opinions isn't enough to be certain (and iPhones are expensive)
I'm really surprised at how many people said Linux, can you just switch OS's like that on PC? Do they release their own computers? Sorry, I am not one of those IT people.
I get nearly all my information and discussion from Tildes. Although fandewg's reply might be a more accurate answer.
Anyway there goes half my phone battery and around 3 hours. This took way too long for me to write. A suggestion I have is to add which search engine do you use as a question. Thanks for doing this, and may next time not be as stressful to you.
Any idea why the participation rate was so low this time?
I think a big factor was the timing of this survey - during the holidays and only open for a short period of time.
There's a good chance I put off some people with the first survey that failed. But there's a good chance that either the population declined or that simply people didn't want to.
Don't feel alone. Age is just a number mate, I'm 21 and that time past so fucking quickly. Especially once you get into the final year of whatever school that comes before uni/life, shit just moves so fast suddenly.
That question would probs need a thesis to answer, but to be frank, people simply become more conservative when they age. Also: http://www.nicememe.website/
It's just a very teenager thing to do, I know because I used to do it religiously. Hah.
It involves resetting the PC, completely emptying the hard drive where the OS is installed, but depending on the kind of Linux you're installing (one of the bigger distros like Ubuntu), the process isn't much different. Linux isn't a company that releases anything, it's the name of the kernel of an OS, which is essentially the most vital part of it, the part that talks to all the hardware and stuff like that. It's completely free and publicly available, which means that if you have the skills you can just build your own OS around it. This has lead to a diverse array of different flavours of Linux that all focus on different stuff.
There are companies that sell computers with Linux preinstalled, but there's only a few of them, as Linux has a miniscule marketshare on a global scale.
The timing for the survey was bad I think, even more so the window to respond.
I think quite a lot of people has not checked on tildes for all the Christmas and new year period (myself included) and so you got mostly the ones that check quite regularly the site
I would have loved to have participated :(
When I get home I'll add sources to this. But there is also a huge issue of survivor bias too. The groups that tend to vote the most liberal also tend to have the shortest life expectancy. Also, poverty and age both negatively correlate with ability to vote in places where voter suppression occurs and with common survey methodology (landline calls skew heavily toward elderly which leans Republican bc of above, online surveys often exclude the poor who may not have internet and if they do aren't taking the time to fill out an online survey, etc). As you said, there are multiple theses worth of things to discuss here, but I wanted to quickly touch on a few of the other reasons than "old people become conservative"
TBH, for myself, I just didn't see it. I had unsubscribed to ~tildes general ages ago back when it was all feature requests all day. Nothing you could have done would've made me see it. I only eventually found this because of another thread that referenced it.
I know. (I used to do this when I was 12). Should have made that clearer than by using a somewhat 'dorky' emoticon.
Oh okay. I thought it was a fight for the idealistic utopia firefox-type company. Instead it's a kernel some dude made in 1991 that is now the third choice for OS's in computers and has had 98% of it's code contributed by random people across those 28 years without becoming a buggy mess akin to KSP or Minecraft (until both literally stopped and made an entire update just of bugfixes)? TIL FOSS has a serious Internet community.
All those comments about "tech bros" make me question the status of my "bro-hood". I was thinking that if I never use the word unironically I'm safe, but apparently it's not the case.
I don't think we're tech bros cause that's a very specific term (for me).
We just work in the industry and thus have the same interests.
That's how I view it too, but I think the people that use the term seriously might have a different interpretation.
One perspective I encountered is: "Programming over people! Y/N?"
I always thought of "tech bros" as "programmers who were in a fraternity, or wish they were." Real nerds are uncomfortable at parties. :)
But now there are other toxic demographics, and this is all trafficking in stereotypes anyway.
I got called a tech bro once because I suggested that Nancy Pelosi is too old and it's an institutional failure of the Democratic Party to not do a better job of grooming new leadership and stepping aside. Someone asked me what issues I feel like she doesn't understand due to her oldness and I suggested tech policy. Then someone trawled through my twitter, found an old picture of me with a beard, and decided "AHA! Bearded tech bro! CANCELLED"
So basically it's rapidly approaching one of those words that's so abused and overused, like "hipster," that it's lost all meaning.
An 11 year old speaking 9 languages is extremely unlikely. The thing which makes me unsure is that pretty much the rest of the survey was normal, unlike the other fishy response, which was obviously a joke, I'm not sure about this one. How do you even get to 9 languages at age 11? I'd like an AMA, seriously. Like at that age it basically has to come from your parents, so you'd have to have both parents bilingual each, live in a country where neither of them were born (unlikely already) and both parents would have to decide to teach their child the languages, which would place them at 4, +1 from the country where they live, +1 maybe from school. You're still at 6. Like 9 languages is just an enormous amount. Either that person is claiming they speak 9 languages while only being to say a few sentences at best in most of them, or we have a legitimate genius. Or we have someone who lied on the internet. What do you think is true? I'm not sure, which is why I phrased my sentence in the way that I did. I did not mean to offend, but it's simply an unnaturally high number.
If this is the "9 languages including various African ones" response I saw this isn't at all implausible. By the time I was six I could fluently speak, read, and write in 3 different languages (English, Telugu, Kannada) and I could fully understand but only speak simple commands in 2 others (Hindi, Tamil). It's very normal if you grow up in a highly multi-lingual environment to pick up lots of different languages and float between them. This is even more pronounced in Africa than it is in India. Senegal has 36 officially recognized languages in a country that's barely the size of the UK.
Theory, they may not be actually fluent in 9 languages, maybe just one or two and know a little about the rest. To an 11 year old that might seem like you can speak (or claim to speak) that many languages. If they are somewhere like South Africa that might be realistic.
The person was from Central Europe, 1st world.
That's what I was thinking too. Africa has lots of rare languages only spoken by a relative handful of people, and they may also be counting different dialects as languages.
It was yours, wasn't it? ;)