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How does Tildes enable you to express yourself in contrast to reddit/other?
Tildes uses different systems than reddit. How has that enabled you to comment and share things that you wouldn't have otherwise?
I'm interested mostly to contrast my own experience with others.
I just got around to actually using my invite a couple minutes ago, the Tildes philosophy was an interesting read.
I requested an invite because I feel strongly about creating social networks that improve communication instead of exploiting it...anyways, I trend towards lurking but your comment got me psyched up to contribute as well
Less crowd is where everything gathers for me.
Less crowd means:
Its funny, that lower traffic encourages me to participate more, but I've always been a weird one. And long term goals are also aligned more with quality than quantity, so I'm more likely to stick around.
On every other social network, the sheer volume of information is so overloading for my measly cognitive budget that I get tired, and leave. Tildes feels more like a family thanksgiving dinner while other social media sites are more akin to Macy's day parade.
Same here. I don't think there is anything radically different between here and early reddit (other than the site being nicer to use). The main difference is the size of the community and recognizing people's usernames. This allows me to feel more comfortable commenting, speaking up, even sharing my personal life which I never do outside of Facebook.
Same for me. Tildes feels more intimate than most online communities - it's a dive bar, not a huge nightclub.
Tilderinos are generally curious and smart. That means I can share things with the “general population” that might only fit on a relatively smaller, specialized subreddit, such as philosophy articles.
The atmosphere here is laid back and positive, and I share more personal anecdotes as a result. Redditors are generally more aggressive in their responses. I don’t mind criticism, but that’s no excuse for being an asshole.
I've been away for a few months. What's a Tilderino? Sounds like a fundamental subatomic particle.
A Tilderino is a Tildes user. I’m not sure if that’s the most popular way to call us, though.
The proper Tildes demonym is a very open question :) I’ve seen Tilderino the most frequently I think.
Lol I’m actually a big fan of “squiggle”.
I'm down with squiggle as well!
I remember a long time ago seeing "tildenizen". I'm a big fan of that one myself :)
I love that one!
Very early in day there was also Swintons :p
Interesting, thank you!
It's not so different for me, as I've followed subreddits for things I'm interested in solely for about eight years. I like that Tildes has more in the way of pure conversations, people asking questions for answers, but not in some sort of memefied circle-jerk sort of way a lot of the bigger subreddits have, for example (DAE/TIL/Showerthoughts). It's just people talking about stuff.
The biggest thing is I can say what I want, and feel more comfortable with the vastly diminished risk of somebody jumping down my throat if I say something heinous. However, even on Reddit, because of where I go, I don't typically have issues with people, and anything egregious tends to be talked out.
I don't behave fundamentally different, or express myself differently, but I can be more broad. On Reddit you have to follow a sub for everything, here you have a section for a broad concept.
When I first started using Tildes and I would see the notification in the corner of my screen for new responses on my comments, I instinctively flinched. It was a reflex that I carried over from reddit, where I outright expected responses to be hostile and was pleasantly surprised when they weren't. Tildes has broken that conditioning for me, and I now welcome the notification.
As for expressing myself, I'm wordy. Like, really wordy. Seemingly everywhere else online, writing something like that would make me subject to ridicule or scorn. Some people would scoff and drop tl;drs in response, while others would use my efforts and earnestness against me, convicting me of the internet crime of taking something seriously. Others would take issue with my writing style or wording, levying accusations of pretentiousness or elitism.
I promise anyone who's ever read anything by me, that's not my intention at all. This is simply how I write. As a teacher I am aware (and quite good) at modifying my messaging to meet the needs of my target audience, but it gets tiring having to adjust constantly. Tildes represents a space where I don't have to do that by default and can speak in my most "authentic" and least "tailored" voice. It's a break from the demands of my job, where all of my expressive language exists under a corresponding metacognition about how best to communicate something. But here, I can get into my flow state and just write. My longer pieces here are the result of that process.
Not once on Tildes have my comments been met with derision. Not once has anyone made fun of me for speaking in earnest. No one has ever taken issue with "how I sound". If we consider Tildes an image, I feel it's less defined by what's in the frame than by the negative space around it. It's everything that's missing from Tildes that makes it what it is. I realize this sounds a bit like a slight but I mean it in the best possible way: Tildes does not have so much of the shit that makes other places online awful places to be.
I don't have to witness hate speech. I don't have to worry about obnoxious users, trolls, people acting in bad faith, etc. I don't have to wade through low-effort content, junk memes, and outrage bait. I don't have to block ads on the platform. I don't have to worry that the site is secretly tracking my every mouse movement. I don't have to worry about an algorithm trying to suss out my interests in hopes of patronizingly feeding them back to me. I never feel like my posts are just fodder content for a glorified ad-platform or behavioral inputs for data-hungry companies.
It's the absence of all of these things that makes Tildes such a great place to be. I like it here because Tildes lets me be down-to-earth without having to wade in the mud.
I can't speak for anyone else on this platform, but I have repeatedly found myself both mesmerized and in awe of some of your comments. I believe the length of your prose is necessary for the reader to truly capture the depth of emotions you convey and to be brought along on the journey of knowledge you provide. Some of what you have provided has been meaningful beyond my expressive capability and I cannot thank you or Tildes enough for it.
Wow. Damn. I'm genuinely speechless.
Thank you for making my month.
And I can mirror your sentiments. I'm very happy you're here. You speak with a conviction I wish I had, and you are willing to tackle difficult and complex topics in interesting, novel, and insightful ways.
I see we've been to the same places.
Bless you for verbalizing that.
I'm happy that our like minds have ended up here, together! :)
It's not so much a different system, as different people that encourages a different result.
That said, the best way to ensure a site succeeds is simply to post high quality content.
I think the content is a good start, but more than anything it's the smaller community with a shared value: civility.
The biggest death knell for Tildes would be rapid expansion which causes the community aspect to fall apart.
Long story short: I get to post a lot more long, insightful comments here, and I feel like I'm being appreciated more for it.
On Reddit, what long, insightful comments I make are countered indirectly by the amount of vitriol and ill-faith comments I receive for the rest of 'em. The shitty communication practices on Reddit make me less likely to seek out interesting topics and talk about them.
Tildes is smaller and more engaged, which makes me want to give more. Granted, there's still ill faith in the comments sometimes – particularly when someone can't separate themselves from the issue and take the comment personally – but the ratio is significantly different.
Mastery and expertise are important to me, but it's knowing I'm appreciated for them that make me comment more. I get put off by the bad stuff. I come back because I'm consistently offered more good stuff.
Most of the commenting is not worth it for me anymore – in part because of the infrequent negative engagement, but mostly 'cause I'm not looking to connect with people using that medium much anymore – so when I do comment, it's either conversational or "I have something to say about this, hear me out".
I post as much as I do and with as much effort as I do because Tildes is small enough that I recognize a lot of people, there's no eternal September which means the same conversations aren't repeated over and over, and people care about what I say. I feel like I'm making a difference by posting here and as a result I try to be as honest as I can be.
While I think most users here are making a difference by posting here, I wanted to convey my own thankfulness for your presence and your contributions. 💜
Thank you ♥ I really appreciate it
Ditto! I'm happy you're here, @moonbathers.
I'm glad to hear it ♥ I really appreciate your perspective on education as someone who cares a lot about it but has never been a teacher.
It's nice being in a place where posts don't get immediately shitcanned because they don't promote 'intellectual curiosity' or are too controversial/political. Yes I'm talking about HN. Virtually every post now which isn't about tech gets hidden from the front page and effectively killed.
While it's probably the case that HN is a little more strict than necessary, the moderation and fairly narrow scope are a huge part of the sites value to me. I appreciate the fact that I'm not going to see other stuff there unless it's hugely important or directly related to tech policy (or startups/VC, this being YC).
Maybe a little more general science/research content would be nice, but in general if I want to engage with political discussions, I like that there's other, separate, places for that.
I think there are two reasons why I don't like the moderation on HN: vague/contradictory guidelines, and preemption.
Here are the HN guidelines:
'Hacker' is not a well-defined class. 'Intellectual curiosity' includes literally everything that anyone has discussed since the birth of the universe, since it does not specify who's curiosity has to be piqued. And there is plenty of interesting stuff that is covered by mainstream news outlets which is relevant to the HN audience and which the community would benefit from hearing their analysis of.
Currently popular submissions include an article about the oldest Korean cookbook, an article about Mark Twain's experiments with psychic telegraphy, and an article about anarchism, so the site is not well-scoped around tech or startups. The latter article on anarchism seems to be doing quite well so far and I'm interested to see if it gets flagged down.
By preemption, I mean when an article gets flagged down because it could be controversial, when nothing or very little has happened yet. I've seen numerous posts on HN in the past which were getting upvotes and where people started having civil and interesting discussions, and then within the hour the post was flagged, not because it had turned into a crapshoot, but because it might get too hot. Whenever I see a potentially controversial thread getting flagged down, I feel bad because maybe there could have been a really interesting and civil exchange which would have brought a little more understanding into the universe, but instead, because a mod or enough users have decided that the thread will get too hot or is off-topic, it gets flagged and so that discussion can never happen.
Contrast that with this thread on Tildes. Sure the article was crap, but it generated some great discussion from @moonbathers and others, which @Deimos cited as "one of the main reasons [for] hesitating to remove [the post]". The comments are now locked but @Deimos included a link to another higher-quality post where a similar discussion can take place. Some of the discussion on that post got a little hot, but it was definitely high-quality and I never thought it was uncivil.
I have no experience moderating a community or managing a community in any way. I understand there is a need to keep a space appealing to promote people talking about stuff, so there is a balance between allowing super-heated discussions and making the place approachable and retaining high-quality contributors. I have no idea what the correct balance is or what tools are needed to achieve it, but I don't think the balance is there with HN, and I question that preemptive approach to moderation.
I agree with you overall that the way HN decides which content is "acceptable" or not is strange, but I think it's worth distinguishing that when posts are flagged, that's (ostensibly) something that's being done by regular users, not the actual site moderators. So it's HN-the-community that's making that decision, not HN-the-site.
It seems like when a post hits a certain threshold of flags, it starts getting pushed down the rankings very quickly, or even disappears entirely if there are enough. This means flags act like a "super-downvote", and allow a small group of users to override the voting on the post. Hypothetically it's possible that the mods are adding their own especially-strong flags to a post if they want to kill it, but we'd never be able to tell from the outside whether that's happening or not.
I don't like this system very much because, like you said, it seems to be done preemptively very often by users who just don't like the general subject of the post, and I don't think HN is doing any significant oversight/fixing of it if when posts are flagged undeservedly. I think this—especially combined with the extremely vague guidelines you mentioned—lets the actual mods avoid responsibility for actually having to make decisions about what content they do or don't want on the site. They can just shrug and say, "Users flagged it, oh well. I guess it doesn't belong here".
I like that I can comment in ignorance with the hope that someone helps me understand. In general I get thoughtful responses that help shape my opinions. On reddit you’ll get blasted for not being completely in sync with the hive mind. It’s so sad that it takes someone else standing up for the person asking a question to get any reversal in the collective reaction.
I am still very much trying to get out my lurker mentality when it comes to online forums, and so Tildes really helps me feel comfortable posting and commenting more.
I have not posted much, but when I have the responses I have received have been very kind and informative. I kind of feel like Tildes is kind of like a community coffee shop or small bookstore where you can sit down and chat or browse and strike up an open, civil conversation with someone as you are wandering around.
This is so true. Reddit's downvoting makes people afraid to say anything that goes against the hive mind.
Admittedly this will often switch from differences in the site in general to differences for me, which is what was asked. Also not everything (that much?) here will be unique to me.
I think the largest differences are:
Community
People take you and eachother a lot more seriously here. Here there aren't many snide/sarcastic/hyperbolic statements and they're generally frowned upon. This makes the discussion a lot more serious and often sincere between people. If you say something wacky or extreme because you think it's funny or "because why not" you're not gonna get a bunch of people replying "based" or "lmao", you're gonna get a bunch of people replying "this is absurd" or "wtf?", but a thousand words long, which helps keep the discussion as is now.
For me, this means I often have to change stuff to be less dismissive or meme-y before posting and when I didn't it was seized on, or I can ask lot more questions or for clarification on stuff without getting a meme for an answer and I really enjoy that.
The site userbase is too small for you to cut off a large number of groups and you're subscribed to all of them by default, and thus "echo chambers" can't form (but you also can't really customize your experience). In reddit, you can pick your interest very specifically and perhaps shelter yourself from anything else that might be relevant or in other social media platforms, algorithms can do that for you and your perception of normal can be skewed, perhaps very badly.
This means I (we, probably) often see, hear and post about stuff in wouldn't hear about because I didn't subscribe to their subreddit. In reddit I dont post a lot and only about a few issues while here I have posted about most things that aren't minority related, social/philosophic or too overtly mathematic or technological. This also means we can't really get too specific with the stuff were asking for or talking about or else there will be noone to talk with you however :/
The community is so small that individuals or small groups of people to speak for entire fields, industries, social groups, etc. @Loire speaks for oil workers, @kfwyre for teachers, half a dozen old people I know of (defined as "over 45" or "adult for 2+decades" because that's the only definition that has a userbase that I know of here), a similar number of parents, a few people for quite a few countries, etc. While often 1 oil worker in a site of 300 people has more of a voice here than all the oil workers of reddit put together ever will, it often leaves everything about any given area to a few people or just one person, which is always bad. This ties in with the point above.
The community is small enough so you can't really do the feed-scrolling you do in other social media platforms. This means I (we) can't sit back and enjoy the conversation and topics, I have to participate in it and add to it if I can.
This often, if usually happens over many days instead of the first ~-15 minutes of a yet to be highly upvoted r/askreddit post.
Site
The labels add some level of nuance to your opinion, which while limited is far better than anything on reddit.
Exemplary-ing a comment here is like gilding a comment on reddit, but far less susceptible to group behavior/thinking and explicitly denoted to mean "good comment" rather than whatever you think is/deserves "gold". And since it's free but also limited to 3 times a day, everyone can do it but has to save it for good comments.
I can actually check how the markdown will turn out with the preview button, which is great.
The weekly/recurring threads are really neat for people to tell about their recent experiences. It's neat to see what other have been up to recently, especially when you have been up to little.
The homepage activity and all activity sorts encourage us to post in old threads, and we do.
I like this place. While the posts are of a generally higher quality, it also doesn't seem to suffer from an elitism problem. There are joke or memey posts, but again they're of a higher quality, and there aren't trails of them because award and karma farming isn't something that exists here. I look forward to getting replies instead of dreading them. This all makes me care more about my own posts, more willing to share personal experiences, and willing to put more effort into the forum as a poster. And as someone who's still a bit guilty of constantly re-opening sites I've just closed less than a minute ago to check for updates, the slower pace of things here really helps take a mental load off.
Please don't have this the wrong way, and that is why this comment is separate from my previous one, and a day later than original post.
This is the exact kind of post that I moved away from reddit for. It is too generic, appeals to everyone and enforces their experiences and beliefs and is easy comment and post farm.
Luckily, Tildes is still small, and there is no karma, and vote data isn't persisted. I would also like to be aware that such posts are not common here and every once in a while it can be good change of pace. But this post and the comments under have pretty much confirmed what @Deimosz and most other members already knew. As such, the contribution of this thread is minimal.
As always, opposing views and further discussion is welcome.
That is good suggestion, and I have a small list of filters as such. But, Tildes is where I can trust to have transparent discussion instead of flamewar and @geungegun has held their end so far, kudos to them.
It could be argued that my comment was also low effort, and I'll try to be more thoughtful about such in future. Cheers!
It is low effort, but it's designed to try and get other people to contribute and comment in their own right. My own 'area or expertise' in which I would be able to post high quality information are topological quantum chemistry, meta programming, and group theory. Unfortunately, Tildes is too small to appeal to the more specific types of posts you reference, so the only posts possible are generic ones. I could start posting more involved things, but I believe that it would be a waste of time.
This thread, while it may not have been as useful for you was useful for me. I believe that most of the responses about Tildes that I read confirm my worry that Tildes is basically reddit when it was small. However, because you assert the contribution is minimal, and I wasn't aware of any previous post with my particular question, Tildes seems to have the same problem as reddit: because posts are slowly lost to time through the hot/new algorithm, new users will not have access to the same data as older users, so they make redundant and derivative contributions. I enjoy it while it's small, but I believe Tildes will either eventually die out, or become the same size as reddit, with roughly similar problems. StackOverflow, despite being rather less friendly, does try to guarantee that new posts are unique, which is one way to get around this problem.
The reason I was asking this was to see if there were any differences between reddit and tildes that were ui/ux/software based, instead of being based on ephemeral things like - it's smaller, people are more friendly, etc.
As always, opposing views and further discussion is welcome.
(Btw I accidentally posted this early :p)
While that's not wrong, that's not everything. There are:
(previously mentioned)
The Labels, which lend us some level of nuance when it comes to expressing our opinions in a post. They don't change how we 'express ourselves', more so how that expression can be received by others. Labeling a comment exemplary can be similar to gilding a comment on reddit, but since the labels are clearly named, they are far less susceptible to group behavior/thinking.
Exemplary is explicitly denoted to mean "good, high-quality comment".
Joke is pretty clearly denoted for jokes.
Off-topic is clearly for off-topic, not related to the initial subject.
Noise is pretty clearly for small remarks that don't add up
Malice is pretty clearly the report button by a different name.
While this isn't perfect (people have been asking for a middle ground between "dumb reaction" and "I'm gonna need to report this" for a while now), it's better than "silver, gold, platinum, argentium, ternion and a bunch of reaction images and for-profit gimmicks"
The reccuring threads allow us to express ourselves about our personal lives if we so please.
The main differences aren't so much about expressing ourselves, more so how things are gonna be organized and kept tidy.
Centralized, vaguely hierarchical groups
You can't make a new group as you please like in reddit and the groups will be vaguely hierarchical. They are currently decided by Deimos, but the plan is to have some of way to do this democratically or with some reviewing process.
The effect of this is that group names aren't gonna be as subjective as subreddits like r/trees. This doesn't mean we're going to be as opposite of them as possible, just not as bad, and groups will increase slowly.
Tagging our posts with many tags basically as we see fit
In reddit where you can maybe flair your post and that's it.
The effect of this is that posts can be grouped by any common subject so long as they are tagged as such. If you don't want to search for for reddit related stuff you can just look at the tag for decently similar results.
If you don't do that, someone will come along and likely do that for you. Here, people can change the tags, title and link of your post without being mods/admins. This power is currently given to people by PMing Deimos, although we have vague plans to change that.
Anyway, seizing on your issue:
They're not, and there isn't really a 'hot' sort on Tildes. The activity and all activity sorts can be set to all time and you can post in old threads and they will be bumped to the top. That's what happened to this post here. This comment bumped this 2-month-old thread to the top for many people 3 days ago and now most of the commentary there is a result of that comment. If you want an older example, this thread being bumped for about 2 years. People tag reposts (duplicate posts) here.
Thanks for the informative response!
Your efforts are much appreciated.
Similarities between Tildes and Reddit are valid. Many many Tilderinos (?) are former redditors, afterall. But no matter what happens, whether Tildes withers out or dies a slow big death, I'll still have enjoyed this time, and that's still line to cherish forever! Nobody can take those beautiful couple of years I enjoyed reddit before anybody I knew knew about it. I take the same will happen with Tildes.
Yes, but I also ask: is there a way to negate reddit's flaws?
The primary suggestion I've seen is to keep a lock on the user-base, which would admittedly work, but I think we could do better. Maybe make a search engine the primary way to access posts?
I enjoyed Neil Postman's works on online communication, but he was a pessimist about it. I think, given how small Tildes is, that makes it possible for @Deimos to experiment with the website, while still holding the goodwill of the userbase.
For example, a more amenable area that I would be able to post is exhaustive (old) board game reviews, I love them. I'm nervous about throwing a lot of effort on my end into a vacuum, which could after a few weeks (in reddit, it takes a few hours) flush it down the drain, never to be seen again.
Proper social engineering gives people the ability to show their better selves. Is there a way to do that with Tildes? Maybe try and add an option to sort by posts with the 'deepest' comment stack. I'm guessing around, but I like this site, and want it to succeed.
I'd definitely love to try to find better ways to support "evergreen" content that's worth reading/discussing over longer time periods. I think one of the major downsides of this style of site (and almost all modern social-media-ish platforms) is how fleeting and timing-centric everything feels.
I'm not sure about specific things we could do differently, but I think it would be great to try to find some ideas.
I don't know. I personally value continued exchanges a lot. High quality content usually means that each post individually provides a lot of effort. However, there is also high quality discussion, in which each individual post may not be as interesting on it's own, but each party comes back to respond. That type of discussion is hard to encourage, since with the internet either party can drop the debate immediately, but I personally like 'deep' comment chains.
Good point on wasted effort part. I used to think about this, and had a weird realisation.
One of the merits of karma system is that a high effort comment (ideally) nets you a lot of karma and thus reflects positively on your account going forward, much like real life.
But karma is weighed the same with upvotes, for both low effort but high appeal comment and high effort but niche by sheer capacity limit for most people. And so, much like real life, former propspers at the cost of latter.
What I'm trying to say, is this is fundamental human nature, a people problem. And people problems, as proven time and time again, don't have technological solution.
There are very few big subreddits or sites where signal to noise ratio hasn't completely gone down the toilette. Only common threads I've found among them are
For a website like Tildes, we have 2 covered, and thus it reflects in quality. 1 is not yet needed, because filters and limiting group subscriptions are still sufficient to cope with low volume.
But if Tildes ever reaches high volume status, it means somehow 2 was defeated, and 1 becomes so challenging to perform for single person that bias sneaks in, and then we are back to tyranny of mods.
My conclusion, it is not possible to go mainstream and keep the high SNR. Niche content had small audience, and even though aggregated volume is high, average individual interaction remains small, and there's little difference between segregated subreddits with small audience or separate forums altogether.
There's a recent post here which reflects what you're talking about (You've probably seen it, something about good moderation not scaling.) I think it can, it's just hard to figure that type of problem out.
I am a very social person, so I shitpost a lot in a lot of places about a lot of different things. But I shitpost less on tildes. I know that when I come here I'm going to see quality discussions about a variety of topics. In particular, I've come to really enjoy some of the deep insights I see from specific users (since we're still very small this group of users expands very slowly and I recognize them all by name).
Lately, as this place has continued to slowly expand, I've unfortunately seen an expansion of some viewpoints that I do not think mesh well with tildes. These get corrected, but the speed at which they get corrected has seemed to slow down. Perhaps this is because the users who are intelligent enough and versed enough to point out when new trolls emerge have always had roughly the same amount of activity, or perhaps it is because some of them have become worn out or disengaged. I'm not sure, but I would like to remind everyone to keep fighting the good fight and point out when other people are arguing in bad faith, dogwhistling, posting bigoted opinions disguised as honest discussion, and other nefarious deeds.
One other note - I've come to really respect the LGBTQ+ community here. It is like nothing else I've ever experienced online and they've taught me SO MUCH and I don't think I can ever be thankful enough for the solace, respite, insight, love, and knowledge they have provided. Thank you all so so much. 💜
Honestly, I really like that I see the same names here and there and I feel like I’ve kind of gotten to know other users and their posting styles. It reminds me a lot of old forums, where things were slower and it felt much more like a community.
It feels more like I’m posting for a group of acquaintances rather than a random crowd, so I post more.
My comments are made i public, rather than private subreddits or message-exchanges.
That's basically the only difference.
It's not about the functionality of the website, but people here are generally nicer.
I find Reddit to be much more of an echo chamber. There can be great conversation, but also lots of useless fluff. I gave up on Twitter and Facebook years ago.