8
votes
Be able to make account registered date private
I would like to be able to choose if your registered date is public or private in setting
I would like to be able to choose if your registered date is public or private in setting
First: Why?
But second, I think it's a bad precedent to set. Account registration dates are a fairly important signal on how in tune someone is with a community and its written & unwritten rules. Right now I don't think they're particularly useful, but if Tildes keeps growing, they will be.
What would you know? You've only been here since October 2018! I have 4 months' seniority over you!
/s
Maybe that's why. So that noone can "pull rank" based on how long they've been on Tildes.
Or maybe it's so that "younger" members don't feel intimidated by "older" members. I suspect @Five feels awkward that we can all see they've only been here for 6 months, compared to us oldsters who've been here for ages.
I'd like to see even one single instance of that actually happening before we start preemptively worrying about it. By the time it does happen, the site might look very different.
I agree.
Gotcha. In any event, I don't want @Five to feel awkward for being here for a shorter time.
Quite the opposite! Being a newcomer is great, we get to welcome them :)
At the moment not really a problem on here but a similar website that I won’t mention has a awful thing with bullying people based on their account age, I feel as this is still a relatively new website it’s not to late to stop that.
All bullying is not acceptable here. It doesn't matter why someone bullies you, it's still bad. Account age is just one of many many possible triggers for bullying.
Given that Tildes' philosophy is to "Trust people, but punish abusers", that means that the default position is to allow/enable features, and punish the people who abuse them.
In other words, we assume that people will not bully you based on your account age, but if someone does bully you, you just report them for bullying and they'll be dealt with.
If it becomes a problem, it seems like approximating it with broad ranges would be good enough? The exact date when you registered probably shouldn't matter, but it's useful to know when someone is new.
I personally think showing account age is pointless especially on tildes a website that focuses on high quality discussion and content.
Currently I haven’t seen a problem on here with it, but I think giving users a choice would be a good thing some might choose to keep it public others might hide it
If harassment based on age of profiles is a problem then simply hiding it on an individual level could be seen as shame by the problematic individuals. It either should be all public or all private if such a situation is problematic.
However, I think Tildes' policy of "Trust people, but punish abusers" may imply that it should be public for all and if someone harasses another user based on that then they should be punished.
I don’t think making it all private is a good idea as some like to show it off, but having the opinion to choose I think is a good idea, your point on trust people punish abusers sounds good on paper but in reality not so good for example People do it in a passive aggressive way or if it goes unseen
But then it comes to the idea that hiding it will imply a sense of shame to the people who want to harass.
Well, it's not mine, it's a core philosophy of Tildes. I think the person which is harassed has all the reasons to rightfully report the incident by labelling the comment as malicious.
I wouldn't really mind this. It doesn't feel necessary, but it doesn't seem like a bad idea, either. Something that'd be neat to have for those that want it and that's about it.
I see a bunch of people mentioning the "Trust people, but punish abusers" stance of Tildes, saying that for this reason we should have dates be always-public and address any resultant bullying on a case-by-case basis. That's perfectly fine as well, but Tildes is also highly respecting of privacy, and this is very much a privacy-enabling feature. If someone feels anxious about their join date, why not let them hide it? It won't hurt anything.
It does to me, and yes it will, IMO. Account age is one of the ways in which moderators can most easily identify spammers and their shill accounts. And while that may not be a problem here yet, if Tildes keeps growing, I guarantee you it will be.
I have no problem with tildes admins seeing it I would just like the option to hide from public
On a site this small, relying on admins alone to moderate can work... but as Tildes grows that will not hold true for long and crowdsourced moderation will be required. And IMO allowing people to hide account age neuters a very effective tool for sniffing out spammers/shills that moderators usually have at their disposal.
If what you're worried about is bullying, IMO you needn't be. If you see any here, report it either by labeling the comment as Malice or PMing Deimos directly. And since unlike the admins on reddit Deimos has shown himself willing to actually ban people for such things, bullying shouldn't become a widespread problem here... especially since Tildes is invite only and bans are much much more effective as a result.
It’s just a suggestion like I said in another comment i haven’t seen it happen on here but in the future I do and to me the easiest solution is give users the option. I don’t mind admins/mods seeing it but making private to other users I think could stop something that is happening constantly on other websites getting on here.
IMO the easiest solution is to just ban idiots who bully others, especially for something as trivial and as ultimately meaningless as account age. ;)
Could do something similar to HackerNews and indicate if an account is newer than a week or month, after that, delete the creation date on the server end and just assume they've been here for a reasonable amount of time?
The problem with doing that is that often it's not an account being new that necessarily tips you off it's a potential sparmmer and/or shill, it's witnessing accounts interacting with each other that were created on the same day or very closely together that does. E.g. Seeing a bunch of comments on a suspected spam topic made by other accounts that have the same account creation date as the OP that submitted the potential spam is a good indication that something fishy might be going on. So even doing something similar to what HN does still hampers anti-spam/shill efforts IMO.
p.s. This isn't theoretical BTW... what I describe is a technique I have used countless times on reddit over the years to identify spammers and root out their networks of shill accounts. ;)
I think it's a great idea! I'm all for it. I think the pros presented here far outweigh the cons.
I was starting to think I was the only person here that liked the idea. :)
I will say this because I see this often.
It's not that no one likes the idea, it's people will speak when they disagree. It's much harder to make a worthwhile comment which means more than "I agree" than it is to see flaws in an idea. Perhaps that's a problem in itself with how communication is structured in threads.
Also, seeing the cons of the idea helps make it better more often than not since you can already expect the consequences of such an idea (example as I said earlier, hiding itself could be seen as shame if on an individual level). If we don't take into account the consequences of the feature itself, we risk creating more problems than we fixed by creating it (not to say this is the case here).
It's nothing against you personally though is what I'm getting at.