Yesterday we had quite a few topics posted in ~tildes related to "fluff" content and some similar topics. Today I want to talk about a few related things, and some changes that I'm planning to make in the near future.

Not a reddit replacement

First, something I obviously haven't done a very good job of making clear (and needs to be added to the FAQ) is that Tildes really isn't intended to be a replacement for reddit. It's not my goal to have most people want to move here away from reddit. The goal is much closer to a complement—reddit is making a lot of choices to prioritize "quick entertainment" content, often at the expense of more in-depth content and discussions.

Reddit wants to prioritize that kind of content because it works better for the business goals they have. "Fluff" content attracts the most users, and supports showing far more ads. You can show a lot of (in-line) ads to someone skimming down through hundreds of cat pictures, but you can't really show any to someone that spends an hour having an in-depth discussion inside a single post. So naturally they're going to prioritize quick content—it brings them more users, and directly makes them a lot more money.

Tildes doesn't have the same incentives, so my goal is to be a better home for that in-depth content that's slowly getting pushed out. Reddit can keep the fluff. It's going to be better at it than Tildes ever will be anyway, due to displaying images and autoplaying gifs in-line, and many other design choices they're making to prioritize that type of content.

Concerns about current quality, and some changes

That being said, even though we're really not getting image posts or anything similar yet, we have been getting a lot of "what's your favorite?" type threads, which are especially prominent due to the default activity sort. For example, if I look at what a new user on Tildes would see right now, in the first 20 posts we have:

• Favorite desktop environment for Arch?
• Name the online accomplishment you are most proud of
• What upcoming video games are you looking forward to?
• What are some TV shows you find yourself constant rewatching?
• Here's an idea. Comment something really unique (in a good or a bad way) and relatively unknown about a place you're living in or lived in.
• Name a cool, mostly unknown feature of your OS of choice
• What are the most influential books to you?
• What's everyone's favorite movie?
• So, what have you been working on?

And a few more that are similar as well. None of these are bad topics at all (especially the ones in ~talk where that should be expected), but they're pretty much all just "casual discussion" and not really what I'd consider particularly high-quality content. I don't want to discourage these or start removing them or anything, but I do think we probably need some changes to make them less prominent (or at least easily avoidable if people don't want to see that type of topic right now).

So here's my plans for the short term (all three should happen today, I think):

1. Implement filtering for topic tags - I have a basic version of this almost done now, which will allow people to set up a (global) list of tags, where any posts with any of those tags will be filtered out of their view. There's a "show unfiltered" toggle as well that allows you to easily see everything.
2. I'll start editing tags on other people's posts and/or giving other users the ability to do this. Primarily, all "what's your favorite?" type topics should have a common tag so that they can all be filtered easily. I'm thinking "ask" or "survey" or something similar, suggestions are welcome.
3. Allow users to set their default sorting method for the home page and individual groups, and then probably change the default away from "activity".

Let me know what you think of these plans, or if there's anything else you think we should consider doing.

First, thanks for the great discussion yesterday about "fluff" content. There's a lot to consider, and a lot of people made great points (and are still making them), so thanks for all your thoughts in there. On a side note, that was the first topic on Tildes to get over 100 comments (and there's now already a second one). That's a pretty neat milestone to be hitting already.

For today, I want to talk a bit about my general plans for this week and see if anyone has any thoughts. Maybe this would be a good thing for me to try to do every Monday?

I'm planning to focus on a few things this week, in no particular order:

• The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect this Friday. A lot of sites and people are panicking too much about it, and I think Tildes should generally be fine, but it's still best for me to try to make sure I'm doing things properly before it comes into effect. I've definitely missed at least one thing, and want to spend some time seeing if there are any other updates I should be making in advance.
• Since you've all certainly read the Tildes Privacy Policy, I'm sure you all know that it says Tildes will delete various types of data after 30 days. Even though the site only started opening up more over the last week or so, I did originally set the server up on April 26 and that's when the earliest data is from. So this week I'll need to do some work to make sure that all of the relevant data is actually going to be getting cleaned up when it reaches 30 days old. A decent amount of this is already done, but I need to verify and finish building some other cleanup code.
• The next big priority is to try to get the site's code open-sourced. I've had a ton of offers from people to help with development, so I'd really like to start making it possible for people to contribute very soon. This shouldn't be too much work overall, a lot of it is just writing up information that will make it easier for people to get involved.
• Outside of that, I'll probably also just be doing some general fixing and tweaking of different issues that people have pointed out. Thanks for all the feedback, bug reports, and suggestions so far. If I have time, I'll try to work on some larger features that are already becoming more important with the activity increasing—things like basic search.

Finally, in the interest of trying to keep momentum up, I've also given everyone 3 invite codes, so you can invite some other people to join the site if you'd like. You can get them from the invite page, which is linked from the sidebar on your user page.

Thanks again for being here, it's really exciting to see so many people using the site already.

Alright, unfortunately I'm going to have to be a grumpy old guy, but it looks like we're going to need to make this decision already. There have been a few "cute animal" images posted over the last couple of days, and yesterday we had a request for a devoted group for it.

So today, I think we need to decide if we want a devoted group, or if we should just disallow this type of content entirely. My personal inclination is that it shouldn't be allowed at all, but I'm open to discussing it. Unfortunately I need to go out for a while shortly so I can't write up too much right now, but here are some quick thoughts on why I feel like we shouldn't allow it:

• One of the main objectives of Tildes was to prioritize high-quality content. By the very nature of this, it means we're going to have to take a stand against some things that don't represent what we want the site to become.
• Cute animal content is pretty much the definition of "lowest common denominator". Almost everybody enjoys seeing a cute photo/gif, and that's why it tends to dominate almost every platform it's on. It appeals to a very wide range of people, so it attracts more votes/attention. This is also why we can't really trust "a lot of people want fluff content"—of course they do. We need to make the decision based on whether allowing it is good for Tildes overall, not whether it has wide appeal.
• It has practically zero discussion value. About the only comments people can make on those sorts of posts are "aww cute", or "lol, goofy dog". Yes, there's a very, very slim possibility that you might get something like "this type of bird has an interesting migration pattern", but if that's the case, a better original post would have been that information in the first place.
• Being harsh about what we want to allow is probably most important while the site is in this sort of small/invite-only phase. One of the main important aspects of this phase is that we need to build up a strong base culture. That way, when the site starts to grow, people will be coming into a place with an established culture and norms, not a complete free-for-all. So if we want to have a high-quality site, I think it's important to establish that very early.
• If we're not certain what the right answer is, it's much better to disallow it now and eventually relent later, than to allow it now and have to ban established communities in the future.

Let me know what you think, but I think it's important that we decide this very soon so we can be more clear about how we're going forward with this and similar types of content.