Daily Tildes discussion - time to slow down a bit and figure some things out
It's now been almost exactly a week since Tildes got its first "real" attention on Hacker News, and it's been a great week. We're going to have over 1000 users registered today, which is awesome and incredibly encouraging for me to see so much excitement this quickly. I'm also extremely glad that I decided to start out invite-only, because with the attention Tildes has been getting in various threads on reddit already, I think we could have easily had 20,000 or more users right now, and that would have been far too fast to grow.
On that note, I think it's good to try to slow down for at least a few days at around this size while we get some things sorted out and improved. So at least for now, please don't go out of your way to post about Tildes in any major reddit threads or anything (I'm looking at you, @Vibe, you're too good at finding places to mention it). You don't have to hide it and are still welcome to mention it to friends and such (and send me a message if you need some invite codes), but it would be nice to try to avoid major public attention for a few days so we can catch our breath.
As for what we should figure out while we're trying to pause the growth a bit, here are a few things from my perspective, but please let me know if you have any other suggestions:
- Comment tags - I think I may just disable these entirely for now. They don't really do anything useful for the moment anyway, and I think the system for them needs some work so they're more likely to work as intended.
- More groups - we could probably use a few more groups. A food/drink one has been suggested a few times and I think that's a good idea, any suggestions for the name? Other than that, any other ones you think we need urgently?
- Various minor convenience improvements - there are a lot of little things that need tweaking, that weren't as obviously needed when the site was less active. For example, easier ways to find new comments in large threads, since we're already getting ones with hundreds of comments. I'd like to get some of that kind of stuff in place before it gets even worse as the activity keeps increasing, so please let me know also any specific ones that you think are urgent. Once the code is open-source I expect user contributions to help a lot with this kind of stuff.
Thanks again for being here, it's pretty amazing to already be worrying about growing too quickly.
i think just ~food is fine and drinks can be tagged with
[drink]. Seems like it would naturally fall into~food.drinksFragmentation is a definite problem that happens a lot with new community sites too. People are used to being on reddit or other really large sites and feel like a lot of separate groups are going to be needed immediately, but that doesn't work well while the site is small. There was only a single "subreddit" on reddit for years, we don't need to rush and split things up too quickly.
I've only just joined, but one of the first things I looked for was something like ~food to see what kind of subgroups there were, and I was surprised to see none at all. I know there's some excitement to see groups interact that would normally be in completely separate subreddits/groups, but I'm honestly a little nervous. If I share a recipe and tag it as vegan or vegetarian, do I risk facing the same abuse here that I get on reddit, or do I decide not to contribute just in case?
Discussion is good - that's exactly why I'm here! You're right though, I'm going to hope that the community here will be vastly different than what is found on reddit.
Spoke too soon - someone is already tagging my comments as Flame in this thread.
A bit ironic that it's happening in the thread where I said I thought we might need to disable them for now, hey?
I guess I should actually get around to doing that.
Sorry if you've answered these questions elsewhere, but: is there a way to remove tags added maliciously, and will there be Report and Block functions?
Not currently any way to remove tags (unless I do it). I think tags can address some of the same issues as reports, but I'm sure we'll need a separate function for it as well, if only for the ability to enter free-form reports. As for block, I expect that we'll need something along those lines, but I'm not sure exactly how it will work. If it's something that users need to use often, I think that's indicating that other systems are failing.
As it is, having a whole string of my comments anonymously negatively tagged has left a bad taste in my mouth and makes me hesitant to contribute more, at least for the time being.
I'd say that the big difference we aim here is the we don't want low effort content and replies as well as aggressive behaviour.
I'm not a vegan and neither my wife but there are some dishes that we changed with the vegan version because it wasn't that much of a change in terms of preparation of ingredient's costs and honestly we wouldn't go back.
We don't believe in absolutism but coming from an Italian background we know the value of a balanced diet :)
What bugs me are recipes that are sneakily vegan - like you get 3/4 of the way through the recipe and then it tells you to break out the tofu where you were expecting beef mince and then you realise why you haven't seen any cheese yet.
Nothing wrong with vegan recipes, but definitely tag them so people who aren't into that know to look past it (looking at you gifrecipes).
When do the vegan tags stop, if you want all vegan food tagged? Would we tag every plate of french fries, or is it a lack of cheese or the inclusion of tofu that necessitates a vegan tag? I know a ton of people who aren't vegan that eat tofu, and lactose intolerant folks who don't eat dairy, so those examples wouldn't even be accurate uses of a vegan tag.
Ideally, everything goes into ~food and has [tags] like [vegan] for now. If we notice that 1/3 of the posts in ~food have [vegan] tags, that's a sign it's time to create ~food.vegan, as there are enough people here and interested in it for it to take on a life of its own.
I'm totally into that concept and really looking forward to seeing things like that develop, I was just wondering about their description of "sneakily vegan" recipes and I didn't know at what point they'd consider something "sneakily" vegan that would need a tag.
I think the only reason anyone needs to be 'sneakily vegan' on reddit is because they are either trolling others or trying to avoid being trolled by others. I wouldn't worry about that here. I'm no vegan but only a complete fool would turn their nose up at a recipe just because it's got no meat in it. Plants are delicious, and recipes are easy to tweak to your own personal tastes. I think the value of the [vegan] tag is so that people who know they want vegan foods can find the recipes easily.
If a recipe just happens to be vegan, there's nothing at all wrong with that. It's when a recipe starts life as a lasagna with beef and cheese, gets the soul sucked out of it, then is posted as a lasagna recipe without any warning that it's actually a vegan lasagna.
To be fair, many traditional, regional Italian Lasagnas aren't bolognese (from Bologna) or ragù based. Eggplant, Spinach and even Fish/Shellfish Lasagnas are incredibly common in Southern Italy and Sardinia where there isn't a whole lot of farmland for cows and pigs. But Lasagna without real cheese? Yeah, no thanks.
That seems like a really narrow view of enjoyable food, if you consider anything without meat and cheese to have had the soul sucked out of it.
Your example of french fries was a good one where there is no meat or cheese, but the soul is still intact. That is 'a recipe that happens to be vegan', as opposed to 'a recipe that wasn't vegan but has been bastardised into a vegan recipe'.
Once again, you seem to have a very narrow view of enjoyable food if you think that vegan versions of traditional recipes are "bastardized" or lack "soul."
They strip out the meat and such not to improve the recipe, but because there are people who want to eat it without that ingredient (which is fine). I can eat that ingredient, and don't need to make the recipe worse. That is bastardisation by definition.
You can certainly enjoy food that has had the meat and dairy taken out, but just because a 7/10 is good doesn't mean it isn't sucking the soul out of what could have been a 9/10 meal.
We obviously disagree on whether or not changing an ingredient isn't an improvement, but I will reiterate that you're being extremely close-minded in insisting that making any recipe vegan is making it worse. Just because a dish has meat and dairy in it doesn't mean that's the standard and the only way to have an enjoyable meal.
Edit: Are you really so upset with me for saying that vegan food is good that you're going to go through and tag all of my comments as Flame? Dude, come on.
I never said you have to have meat and dairy to have an enjoyable meal. I'm specifically talking about where dishes do have meat and dairy in them, and it gets taken out not for any reasons of taste/flavour, but solely so that people who don't want to eat meat or dairy can eat it.
For all the vegan dishes out there that didn't start life as 'how can we cook this without meat and/or cheese', like chips, there's no issue. But if I'm looking at a pumpkin soup that doesn't have cream in it, or a Caesar salad without parmesan, or a burger made of beans, then I'm looking at a meal which originally tasted better than it does now. Compare that to something with Indian or Moroccan roots where the whole dish exists to take advantage of beans/chickpeas/lentils and hopefully you'll see what I mean.
In reply to your edit, the flame tagger is not me.
I feel like I can't completely agree on the approach to that. I do think fragmentation is a problem, but IMHO the real problem is how hard it is to maintain a conversation that cross several topics, and how discoverability can be terrible.
Sometimes it's an improvement to be able to put something in its own tiny niche.
Compared to reddit, would subs like /r/netsec and my own sub /r/crypto even be separate groups on tilde? Here they'd probably end up sharing ~comp.sec or something. Yet they have wildly rules and atmosphere on reddit, and still both successful (while still have some overlap in userbase).
I wrote about some of it in an email to you when asking for an invite to this site. I'll try to gather up my thoughts in one place and post it here later.
I totally agree with your sentiment. ~ can grow much more organically than Reddit, and it can also be nice to interact with groups you wouldn't have talked to on Reddit. e.g. r/tea and r/coffee. I'm looking forward to seeing this site grow and adapt.
This seems like it would be the best option. I think it keeps it a lot more streamline this way.
I think a top level group for social issues would be a good addition, especially when sub-groups are a thing. I'm picturing ~soc.lgbt, ~soc.women, ~soc.men, maybe ~soc.sexuality and ~soc.trans, or ~soc.lgbt.sexuality and ~soc.lgbt.trans, or .gender.
As for comment tags, I think they should only be visible if there is a significant number of them per comment, and otherwise lightly hidden behind a neutral tag that can be expanded. The point of this being that a brightly colored tag left by one user can easily overshadow the dozen (and eventually, hundred, thousands) of votes the post has received. There could also be a middle-ground, where, say, a comment has hundreds of votes but a small but not insignificant number of tags, where the tags are shown but only as text in the same color as the votes text.
edit: Noise? I'd love to hear the justification for that.
Some ideas:
~books or ~literature
~aww or ~humor
~photography
~wildlife or ~nature
~history
I think ~books should be the major group with ~literature being a subgroup. ~literature would be a more niche, very literature-focused subgroup (like /r/literature), while ~books would be a more general catch-all, encompassing many other subgroups like ~fantasy.
Odd. I would’ve said the opposite. ~literature would include any written word while ~books have to be, well, books. So scripts, poems, interesting brochures, and webcomics (not to mention web-fiction) could each count as literature without being books.
There has been a lot of discussion on groups like ~aww and ~nature just being fluff. Reddit is already a great source of fluff like that and it seems like a lot of users here want to avoid meaningless content.
I don't want to speak for @Deimos, but I think tildes was originally created to foster discussion and meaningfully separate itself from Reddit. Most of your suggested groups would just bring tildes closer to Reddit.
Edit: Here is the actual discussion
I believe you just linked to this thread. This is the thread I think you intended to link.
You're right, my bad. All of the pages tend to look the same when I'm glancing through them.
I second aww. I need some adorableness in my life!
I bet photography could just go under ~creative for the time being though.
Any updates on open sourcing? We'd love to help! Even if it's just figuring out how the systems works and writing documentation on them.
Working on it! I'm trying not to worry too much about it, I can always do more cleanup and such after it's already open-source, but I do think it's important to make it approachable with good documentation about how to get started so that people that want to contribute don't get discouraged immediately.
Documentation is unbelievably important. I've had far too many headaches trying to figure out things with my current work in the past. The more of that overhead you can offload, the more sanity you and future contributors are going to have (obviously you know this, but I like to state the "obvious" for the less experienced).
Anyway we could help create that documentation? 😅
The static sites (for docs.tildes.net) gitlab is open at least -- I have merge request open there I still need to clean up that summarizes this post
I would guess not at this stage. In order to be able to meaningfully contribute to that sort of documentation, you would need a fairly in-depth knowledge of the code infrastructure and dev environment. That would require asking enough questions that by the time you really understand an area, the documentation will have already been written.
Let's just be patient for now. Odds are that documentation will also be open-source and available to modify if modifications are needed, in which case you can contribute to the improvement of the documentation :)
True, but on the flipside it’s much easier to prioritize documentation when you’re fresh to the project. It’s a lot easier to see the quirks. And you’ve also got a benefit of being able to explain things to a beginner since you’ve already got that perspective.
I totally understand and appreciate that you want to "clean up" before making it open source but consider that at least initially we will know where to find you if something is not clear ;)
What I mean is, yes, clean up stuff but do not nitpick over having everything clean and shiny for us that want to help. We can help clean up and write docs as well :)
That’s part of the problem though. The more incomplete the documentation is to start the more time @deimos has to spend helping new developers get a handle on it rather than focusing on the other things he need to. ;)
That's a good point but consider that it will happens anyway.
I think more important is that the repo have a styleguide reference as I usually try and use the style I find when in join a project (no matter if they are good or bad... Well, unless they are really bad) but in my experience this is not a common thing unfortunately and it makes the code quite a mess after some time.
That part should be quite good here—I'm using multiple code style/quality tools with quite strict settings, and any code that doesn't pass those isn't going to get included. Even outside of the actual tools for it, I'm pretty picky about code style and will probably annoy people in pull requests to make them fix tiny style issues.
Hey, could you quickly add a link to the original comment when you get a reply orangered pls?
So, if you get a reply in your inbox (an orangered), it doesn't seem to have a link to the section of the thread where that comment is referencing to.
On reddit, using RES, you can even expand and see the original comment in your inbox.
These two features are definitely timesavers and really crucial.
There's already a link, it's the
#at the end of the line I believe. That should go to the correct point in the thread.The "#" on the end of the header bar is a link to the comment, that's definitely not very clear though. I think I'll probably need to replace it with an actual word like "link" or find something else to do. I might just also make the "Reply to your comment" text above the notification link to the comment, that seems like a decent option too.
On that topic, I think making the post time clickable as an alternate to the permalink button (which may as well be left for discoverability) would be a good call. Reddit's redesign does this, as well as twitter.
OMG I missed that because that was waaaaaay to the right.
Don't do that.
Keep options together with the other stuffs. For instance, just moving the # to align left so that it aligns to "x minutes ago" into "x minutes ago #" with link looking colors would make it highly suspicious for clicking. All it needs is one click and you're hooked.
TL;DR It's a gateway drug
Yep, same thing happened to me when it was implemented. Everyone was happy about finally having that anchor link and I was here wondering where the hell it was until finally @cfabbro or @Amarok pointed it out to me. It's definitely not a good place especially on wide screens
If you changed it to link (or something a little more clickable) and put it after the time marker it would be way more useful for me personally.
With the (temporary?) disabling of comment tags, do we have a way to handle comments that could be an issue? As we reach 1k users, there isn't really a way to report problematic content, should we DM you?
I mean, the comment tags don't even do anything right now, so they weren't really helping to handle any problematic content either. DMing me should be fine if something's an issue though—I haven't had to intervene on anything at all yet, which has been really nice. Hopefully that keeps up for a while longer.
Yeah, but they provided a possible indicator to the rest of the community in the event that something did go south. Don't get me wrong though, I'm super happy with how the community is behaving so far, it's incredibly refreshing and welcoming.
Agreed, comment tags are a nice way to know what to collapse. My only real issue with them was that at times they drew a bit too much attention but that could be visually solved.
I think we should still have tags, but they should be less attention-grabbing. It would be better if they were at the bottom of a comment and the colors should be less bright.
Putting the comment tags at the bottom makes them pointless, the entire purpose of them is so that you can see that comments are jokes/offtopic/etc. before reading them.
Perhaps having the opacity/loudness of them vary on occurance of tag might be an idea?
That is definitely the most requested one so far. It’s almost guaranteed to be included in the next batch of groups created as a result.
I think in another thread the consensus was that ~literature was a more fitting pick?
Here
Although it sorta seems like I'm misremembering the conclusion, and it wasn't as big a thread as I thought.
I'd like to request a group specifically for self-improvement. Something like /r/DecidingToBeBetter, or in the spirit of the website that subreddit was based upon, http://decidingtobebetter.com
I believe there is a rare opportunity here, if we assume that Tildes will grow to become a very robust and active community (and we should assume as such), to establish a tone that may spread far beyond this site. We're already seeing, imo, the explicit focus on civility is attractive to people who are tired of flame wars. Creating a group that is explicitly oriented toward improving oneself and one's community might be another means to help cement the vision outlined in your blog post and goals doc.
A side benefit is that if users of the group are motivated to help improve their community, and hey they happen to be part of the Tildes community, then that is a potentially invaluable resource to have handy.
I think that is definitely something we could strive towards including eventually, but I just don't think we quite have the user base for it yet. I feel the same way about an upliftingnews community, which I enjoy very much on reddit, but recognize that it may have to wait until there is enough users interested in it to keep it going.
Quite reasonable. I suppose it would make sense for me to post stuff that might fit that into the ~misc group for now.
I think it would also suit ~talk just fine as well although for article submissions they would probably have to be done through self-text posts rather than direct links.
I like your idea, but wouldn't this fit under the suggested ~lifestyle group?
I guess it isn't entirely clear to me what that group would encompass.
I'll keep it under wraps til further notice =p.
Also, put me down as a vote for ~history, ~books, ~food, and ~lifestyle.
You know the meatball wiki? It's a good reference for these things sometimes: http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/LimitGrowth
What a great resource. Thanks for sharing.
Yeah either disabled or at the very least, far less visible.
~consumables? "~victuals" would probably be close to correct, but I doubt that would really jive with most people (I don't really like ~sustenance)
One more to add to the list,
strikethroughmarkdown doesn't play well with ~tildeing (edit: I guess that's not included in the formatting.md MR at the moment anyways, just saw it in a thread earlier)How about ~cuisine? Something like ~cuisine.food and ~cuisine.drink? If the hierarchies are dynamic you could tag for example French wine and cooking and someone subscribed to ~cuisine.french would have everything related to French food/drink.
Yeah, the strikethrough isn't enabled, it's an "extension" (along with tables), and I haven't activated those yet. I think it won't be that bad in combination with writing group names though, in the large majority of cases you're not going to have both, and even when you do it should be pretty clear which one it is (since for strikethrough you'd also have tildes at the end of a word, which isn't something that happens often).
I had trouble with it earlier where it used the second pre-word tilde to mark the first word as a group.
Oh, that's just because there's no strikethrough support yet though. I think it would have worked fine if strikethrough was possible.
That makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.
First off, congrats on the milestone Deimos! That's an awesome accomplishment for such a new platform. Would it be possible to get a user number on your profile? It'd be a fun way to track how many people there are and where you fit into it.
Something else that could be fun for the page is doing some sort of /r/dataisbeautiful page, showing statistics for stuff like posts per day, most used word(s), or other random data points. Idk how intensive that'd be on your end but it'd be a nifty little feature that offers a small look at the community as a whole.
For suggestions on new groups, I'll defer to everyone else. The general topics we have so far are working out.
We need some kind of repeat topic blocker. There are three topics on the first page of ~tildes asking about making their own groups. This is exceptionally ridiculous since the mechanics page answers this very question. Either that or somehow ensure that people read the necessary reading like the docs, the announcement post, and @amarok's repeat question topic.
These all sound like good updates! I'm glad you're looking for more sustainable growth, rather than trying to get as many users as possible straight away.
I would really like to see an ~outdoors, or something outdoors related that encapsulates trail running, hiking, camping etc. There are probably other ~'s more urgent though, and of course I'm biased because those were the subreddits I spent the most time on.
A ~lifestyle could be good as well? Including topics like philosophy, simple living and productivity etc.
Also, is there any plan for adding filters in the future (apologies if it's already been discussed somewhere) using tags and/or keywords?
Uh, ~lifestyle could include lots of stuff, even ~outdoors as subgroup or ~food, etc
Usenet had ~rec for recreational and we could use the same but just artificially narrow the scope to exclude sports and other topics that are already top level. I know @deimos wasn’t a fan of the old rec. hierarchy on Usenet for that very reason. Being so broad a topic the hierarchy required you going way way way too deep before you got to the niche’s.
I think removing tags is a good thing for the time being. As mentioned it doesn't really add much and with no auditing in place for it, there's really nothing to stop those who want to abuse it.
I also think the tags are much more visible than actual votes, so a post with a ton of votes can easily be overshadowed by a few inaccurate tags.
I do like the tag system, personally. I hate the 'downvote for dissent' mentality of Reddit. Not having that downvote button is a great step. At the same time, there needs to be come kind of regulation in effect. I think tags limit the hurt that can be done because they need to have a reason.
Personally, if I find a comment I would normally downvote but doesn't have a clear tag, now I just ignore it. The mindfulness of the tags is very important. I do like that they are visible, because it gives new users some idea of what's going on. I think instead of getting rid of tags, we should get rid of the vote button and change it to a tag like "Good" or "Additive" or something like that.
I don't like the simplicity of the vote button, personally. I think it still leads to problems that exist on Reddit, such as the top comments are all being shitty jokes.
I just posted a comment that was this exact sentiment in another discussion. While it might not do anything programmatically at the moment, it does do things to the user experience. You explained a perfect example of a user journey.
Wouldn't these have both a lot of votes and the joke tag, and thus be easily filtered due to their tag (once everything for that is in place, of course)?
I think voting with tags will do fine in the long run.
What I have experienced so far on tildes is that jokes just get votes. A few times I've found an obvious joke with no tags and a lot of votes.
The reason I don't like the vote button is because it is somewhat mindless. It's supposed to act as a signifier of a comment having contributed to a discussion, but it is just simplified down to a "I like this" button. Which is similar to my point about downvotes meaning "I don't like this."
I feel like something like ~photoshopbattles should be under a possible ~fluff tilde, of which there has been a discussion on already here
I'd probably put it under ~creative, TBH.
~creative.photoshopbattles makes a lot of sense.
~photoshopbattles is a worthy use-case where what seems like fluff content at first glance actually drives quality engagement and growth. It's fun and techie and creative. Really cool to mention to outsiders as well.
Not really technical AFAIK, no... although that is a factor until proper page caching is in place. @deimos has rented one hell of a server package though so the computing and bandwidth shouldn't be that big an issue yet (unless we get a massive spike). We're going slow mostly because we don't have the systems in place yet to reduce the scaling issues (new user influx causing rapid cultural shift, low effort posts/comments overwhelming high quality ones, brigading, etc.) nor the trusted user "moderator" type tools and action auditing we need to hold people accountable for bad-faith behavior.
What tech stack is Tildes made up off? I couldn't find much while looking around (admittedly, I didn't search very hard).
https://docs.tildes.net/technical-goals#use-modern-versions-of-simple-reliable-boring-technology
And there is also this diagram I made a few months ago. It's a bit outdated now (e.g. github despite switching to gitlab, lots of ? for unsure yet, etc.) but I plan on updating it when we get the time so we can include it in the opensource documentation to help people get a handle on the system structure.
Awesome, thanks!
Ohmygod a diagrams of the system's structure? you're already a step ahead of 90% of the tech companies around :P
Heh, thanks. I think it helps @deimos and I are completely different types of learners. He learns best from reading giant spec documents and walls of text, I from audio-visuals like diagrams and video tutorials. So we compliment each other that way and have more bases covered for other people as a result.
Also “I made a few months ago” (image uploaded 8 months ago)... holy crap, has it been that long already? O_o
A bit of both, but the technical side is more "we're missing a lot of things we'll need to handle higher activity" (some sort of search, tag-related things, etc.) than "can't handle the traffic". The traffic alone shouldn't be an issue, the server's barely even had measurable load yet.
The feature that I miss the most from reddit right off the bat is my inbox linking back to a comment in context. After I see my replies in my inbox, there isn't an easy way to get back to my own comment in the thread to see the siblings and other replies to the reply. I don't usually reply from the inbox because someone may have already replied, which isn't in my inbox.
I agree there and that is definitely coming. The current # anchor solution for comments and replies (far right of the comment header) is just a temporary one until we can get a proper comment ?context= type system implemented.
When writing a personal message to someone it's possible to accidentally leave the page without being prompted for confirmation. Being prompted for a confirmation will save us from having our not finished messages deleted.
Added to issue tracker, thanks.
Not sure how many people will share my sentiment but I think we could use an ~anime. The people who enjoy TV and people who enjoy Anime don't necessarily overlap most of the time, and the culture is completely different. I understand if that's maybe not the most pressing one on the list but I think a good chunk of the internet subculture is based on anime and it would be a welcome addition. I'd love to hear what people think as well!
I don't watch current shows but I'd second this.
Another one worth considering IMO is ~cartoons or ~tv.cartoons. I don't know if you'd want a ~tv.liveaction too, probably not. For myself, I like the idea because of the "bubble up" idea that's been discussed – I can read the subgroups for things I watch, but also see popular posts from others. It does highlight the potential need for looking into spoiler tagging, though, because you can't expect users viewing e.g. ~cartoons (or ~tv) to be caught up on every show.
Heh, I bet you would! :P
We're unsure how we're going to handle moderation at this early stage, but honestly... given your history of attempting to hold mods accountable for actions on reddit I certainly wouldn't be opposed to you being a part of the early moderation team of ~politics (if we even add it as a group yet) if we decide to go that route until trust, meta-moderation/mod action consensus, etc can be implemented. However I'm sure you already recognize that certain content will need to be censored here if it violates the site's stated goals of preventing hatespeech and be willing to accept that as a necessary policy here.
Well you certainly gave us a good head start on defining "fluff" so you will get no argument from me that you will likely be able to contribute valuable advice in regards to defining hatespeech too. If you are interested in doing that, you may find Canada's laws and legal definitions of hate speech / hate propaganda a good jumping off point. It is what I was planning on using as a foundation for the definition we use on ~ as well.
Im actually unsure if we’re hosted in Canada (I will ask @deimos, edit: It is hosted in Canada) but we are a Canadian Not-for-profit Corporation so will have to comply with Canadian laws regardless, like the hate propaganda, harassment and discrimination ones. Wether we need to go further than them remains to be seen but for now I suspect not, as they are pretty comprehensive.
Yes please disable tags, and please don't add ~fluff or ~politics. (Maybe ~politics can come around later, but we need a good group and method pre-designated to moderate that). Some of my suggestions are ~advice, ~education, ~books, ~ask, ~fitness, ~health, ~food, and maybe ~crypto.
~ask and ~advice seem like they could be a part of ~talk currently. Maybe even ~politics could be part of ~talk until there are more users. ~education and ~books might be able to be combined, but I wouldn't say for sure they're always the same thing.
~fitness, ~health, and ~food certainly could be combined to avoid heavy segmentation. I don't know much about the crypto communities on Reddit, but I think a lot of ~crypto content might end up just being fluff. Maybe someone could comment on the size of a ~crypto community if having a seperate ~ would even be worth it for that subject.
How about combine them into ~wellness , and then have them split into the other sub groups?
I really like that idea, except it limits food to being healthy food. Although you could have ~wellness cover ~fitness, ~health, healthy food, etc, and maybe have a ~cooking for general recipes as recipes and discussion of recipes is a major part of all online forums/blogs/etc.
Yeah exactly what I'm talking about.
It could break down something like ~Wellness-Fitness or ~Wellness-Health or something. It'd be a nice way to have 'bigger' groups that can have their own 'front page' and then break down into their own sub groups within the bigger topic.
Fair enough. I agree that a lot of the groups could easily be combined once we get subgroups.
In the meanwhile you can use a script I made with some integration from other users, here: https://tildes.net/~tildes/o4/extended_scripts_for_tildes_alpha
I'm not making a fully-fledged plugin for now as I expect this features to be included in the native code of tildes either by deimos or as a pull request by me as soon as the code become available on gitlab :)
Hey there, I just want to bring small attention to a small issue I'm having with staying logged in. Despite checking the Stay Logged In box, every time I close my browser I have to re-login to my account and the box is unchecked. Sometimes I don't even have to close the browser, just stay inactive for 30 minutes or so.
Quite a few people have been reporting this but I'm having trouble tracking it down (and it seems to be inconsistent for other people too). Are you familiar enough with browser tools to be able to look and see when your Tildes session cookie says it's going to expire?
I'm not too computer savvy but I found it:
SRV - "Expires when session ends"
YPF88... - "Sunday, June 3, 2018 at 12:01:24 AM"
Uid - "Saturday, June 23, 2018 at 12:01:26 AM"
I understand that fluffy/noisy posts are dull. But. When someone over in comp corrects my code I'd like to thank them. It will be a non-contributing comment to the conversation, yet it has to be allowed. How can we reach a compromise? Can we add a feature where it's possible for someone to thank a comment?
Someone earlier today suggested something like a "whisper comment", which would still be posted but automatically collapsed, for uses like thanks and spelling corrections. I thought that was an interesting idea.
I really like that idea since I often feel it's only polite to respond to "Thanks" at the end of comments with a "No problem" to acknowledge the thanks having been seen and appreciated but the noise tag makes me hesitate to do so. I also recognize that "no problem" is noise though, since it potentially makes it harder for people to find actually useful comments but taking such comment replies to PMs is awkward... so a whisper reply would be a nice compromise, IMO.
I showed your comment to a friend and he suggested a 'pull request' edit thing where you can offer to do spelling corrections and whatnot like gitlab. This could also be something that your "good faith" empowered users can be responsible for in some way perhaps. They could approve edits in certain boards/sitewide, whereas normal users would only be able to propose an edit.
That would require quite a few goodfaith uses to make it happen regularly.
Whisper replies sounds like a great idea.
That really is interesting. We should explore that option because it's the best of both worlds.
That was my idea, and I hope you'll at least try it out. I'm not sure if it will work as intended, but we're here to experiment, aren't we?
What about moving all the meta-comment info up top, like so: https://i.redd.it/l9dmj3em33011.png
That way it's still there but not as loud. Also, the vote counts too since that was a topic of discussion a few days back.
Yeah, there are definitely other possibilities. I think that's an awful lot of info to put into the bar though, especially when we inevitably add something like user flair that will need to go near the username as well. Even more so on mobile where the screen is thin, it won't be possible to fit all that info in one line.
I think the comments look fine, personally.
The posts on the front page, though could be cleaned up a little in my opinion. I made a mockup of my own:
https://i.imgur.com/GMTy7Kn.png
I went a little overboard with the text preview, but the main things are moving the posting time underneath the vote count, and moving the username underneath the title.
I'm speaking about this already and will like to try and make clear that we should try and allow users to not be identified across the platform for their history. At least not for all the users.
I think one of the point I read somewhere is that users should be "judged" by their contribution to a discussion inside that discussion, by the other users.
If I have had a bad day and yesterday was a dick to lots of users and got my rightful amount of "troll" and "flame" and "noise", it doesn't mean that today I'm to carry the burden of a bad day.
The system (admins, mods, code itself) should be able to see that to understand if a user actually has a pattern of bad behaviour but not everyone.
In real life, if your friend is a dick when talking about gardens because he has different ideas from yours and you often argue about it, it doesn't matter that you won't talk with him about movies, a topic in which he has great taste and knowledge.
A system that summarise my bad behaviour without context is going to paint a picture that is not telling you who am I.
This goes back to my idea to also anonymize the posts and topic older than a certain amount of time as it's the content of the discussion that is important, not much who wrote it. How often you check who wrote a comment on reddit before answering?
Moving "Post a Comment" to the top, addition of markdown, and if it exists already a 'Help' button so I know how to use it c:
@deimos talked about this and why he wants to leave it at the bottom earlier.
My bad!
No worries, there is a lot to absorb on this site already and our documentation still needs a lot of work so it’s understandable people, especially new users, are going to miss stuff. :)
I'd really REALLY like a group for cars/bikes/planes/etc.
Something like ~mechanical or ~vehicles so we can do ~mechanical.cars ~mechanical.motorcycles ~mechanical.planes maybe? I'm not really fussed on the terminology, but cars/bikes go hand in hand with techies in general, being such fascinating machines. There's a lot of good discussion and advice to be shared around cars, modding cars (the electronics, entertainment systems, and efficiency... not so much talking about "fat rims and bodykits" stuff).
(Slightly biased, as I mostly hack/mod on cars and bikes).
Also, could we get @deimos and any other admins highlighted? Makes context clearer when seeing them reply to someone in a discussion.
Just fyi, mentions do not ping the user yet
Is Tildes going to be USA centric? As a non USA-resident I find it confusing when comments or posts imply the poster / the topic is in the USA. Also, Reddit having r/news serving USA-news just seems off, at least for me personally. I hope Tildes will be country-agnostic.
Well @deimos himself is from Canada. As stated in the terms of service, this site is governed by Canadian and Albertan law. So in that sense, it isn't at all USA centric.
The site content being USA centric would only happen if a majority of the userbase is from the USA. So far, we've had a trump topic, an abortion topic centered around Ireland's amendment repeal, a nuclear energy topic (which included both Americans and non-Americans), an obesity topic that included the world, and a USA decline topic, to name some of the most popular ones. I think it's safe to say there's a large variety that won't go away.
Ah. I stand corrected. Thanks.
The way your original question was worded was as just that, a question. I just gave examples to provide an answer. Being corrected implies that you're wrong about something. The only thing I'm correcting is your second comment about initially being wrong about something :P
I know I'm annoying; I'm sorry. Good day. :)
I think that ~world could be a group with sections like .nature, .culture, .tourism, .language and the like. I don't know if those individual topics would need to be a main group or how much importance will be given to subgroups when that feature is added.
Another group might be ~trade, which would include buy/sell/trade of various things. Obviously this would require a much larger userbase first.
I am a little confused about the concept of hierarchical group organization. This would be a tree of knowledge sort of scheme, as determined by somebody?
I am also unsure of the content relationship between Posts and Comments, which is already inherently hierarchical. Is this also to be imported more-or-less intact from similar sites?
Usenet is the inspiration for our original group hierarchy prototype and groups will ideally be organically formed by expressed user interest (so long as the groups conform to community standards and ~ stated goals).
More or less. ~ is meant to be a refinement of other community formats that we know and loved; BBS', Usenet (hierarchy), Forums (Activity "bump" sort), reddit, etc. not a complete overhaul of them.
Hm, okay. I think I agree that it is too much to place all subgroups on a horizontal plane, as reddit does, and I do believe that communities can be taxonimized slightly -- but I am skeptical of this structure too. I think that even a crafted and well-pruned tree structure (like the one in this doc you've linked) implies top-down moderation and domain policing. You've probably thought on this somewhat already and I'm not saying those are, like, sinful, or something, but it feels very limiting and prescriptive to me.
I hoped, somewhat, that the tag feature would have a leveling effect between posts and comments, emulating the way that reddit's permalink utility can be used to promote a comment.
In another vein (I guess I'm just gonna ask questions as they come to me) -- aren't upvotes exactly as arbitrary as downvotes?
We never said there would be otherwise. There will be namespace policing by necessity. From another comment I made in response to a question that is relevent:
There will be moderation of a sort, though not a top-down hierarchy (e.g. on reddit where creator = owner and all invited mods below them are less powerful). We're going to attempt a completely different model for "moderation" based on the trust system and establishing consensus for "moderator-like" actions amongst the trusted users of a community which you can read about in more detail here.
Theoretically; yes. In practice; no. In theory there is no real distinction between upvotes and downvotes since they both effect comment/post visibility. However in practice they are distinct in the intent behind their use and in outcomes, e.g. upvotes being used to express agreement and downvotes disagreement, downvotes being used to suppress controversial ideas/opinions and apply peer pressure to attempt to force others to conform to the prevailing groupthink, etc.
No, yeah, I understood that namespace management is stated as part of the mission, and I agree that it is necessary for many aspects of web community management. My skepticism addresses the structure of the namespace, which in its current form seems like more of a nostalgic return to a previous era, than it does as refinement from the failings of pure horizontality. Since moderator selection and "trust" might be somewhat automatic or dynamic, I am a little confused that the namespace being managed would be static. Or, if not entirely static -- merely revisable, or perhaps petitionable? It seems like an issue.
Amarok's post you linked (and your reply to it) seems great to me -- I appreciate that there is understanding of the dynamics between new and old users of any given sub-segment of a community site.
The hierarchy here is in its infant form... right now there is only top-level groups but we fully intend to explore a bunch of potential options that won't leave it quite so flat as you might assume we intend to have it. E.g. alternative namespaces (~games.leagueoflegends = ~LOL), cross-referenced groups (~news.US = ~world.US.news), etc.
Again though, all of these ideas are merely theoretical at this point and we need to work on them a great deal more before we consider presenting them to the users at large to solicit feedback and even further away from implementation. We also have "bigger fish to fry" at the moment. ;)
And thanks... all of us here at ~ are old hat at theorycrafting being former regulars on /r/theoryofreddit (and I modded /r/ideasfortheadmins) so we have tried to take everything into consideration already. Whether any of it works in practice remains to be seen though. :P
Yeah, go fry some fish.
To be clear, and for reference's sake, my suggestion: promote the tagging system from a method for flagging low-quality posts to a method for experienced users to describe the themes and purposes of a group to less experienced users. Any user can add any string as a tag to any post or comment, and regulars to the group can select from these some subset to display and/or dynamically generate sorts from. This form of tagging retains the function of flagging joke threads and other low-effort content, but could also be used for different things in different groups, e.g. music groups could tag subgenres for easy sorts, or meme groups could tag for simple filtering purposes. They could be indexed site-wide and searched, or displayed as "trending," if that might be desirable for some localities.
This could release a lot of the pressure on a group's main sub-page to reflect the purpose of the group on a day-to-day basis, and reduce the amount of categorization or "flairing" that mods might feel required to do to keep group areas readable.
This is suggested as an alternative to attempting to find a balanced vote weighting scheme for experienced users. I think it is too much to ask of a single axis to meaningfully express votes of different sizes, and instead you should look to diversify the kinds of influence that can be distributed in a community. Another idea in that vein might be to allow moderators to reserve some tags to be given out as indexers or accolades from one user to another, like enshrining "reddit silver" as a thing that established users might give to new users.
We definitely intend to do that... vote weight is merely one potential prong of our attack. ;)
Once we get the basic features in place this is something we also intend to crowdsource for ideas and feedback before we implement as well. So stay tuned, interesting things are in store.
I am tuned.
(Splitting here to avoid needing large quote blocks)
A gulf in the number of votes between two posts is still very expressive. Not using negative numbers doesn't really change that so much as it moves the 0 point on the vote number line to the right. "more agreement" and "less agreement" does not to me seem very different from "agree" and "disagree" when applied to larger scales. I think peer pressure remains intact any time those numbers are exposed, is what I mean.
I agree, but we also plan on experimenting with different comment sorts to account for this issue, amongst others. E.g. Activity sort, where the sort is based on the the vote # + some factor of volume of activity in the threads below the parent comment. Those ideas are only in their nascent stages though and we recognize some potential problems with them (e.g. flamewars having more visibility than well sourced, thoughtful comments) but we hope to be able to overcome them through other mechanisms like group policy, enforcement of standards, etc.
Another thing to consider is that not all votes will be equal on ~. Users with high trust in a community (trust earned through active engagement with and proposing approved mod actions in the community) will have significantly more weight behind their votes within that community than outsiders to that community. We are also playing around with the idea of a "supervote" where each trusted user gets a limited amount per day/week to use when they feel a comment/post has not received the attention it deserves and their supervote will act as a vote multiplier. These weights can also scale when traffic spikes to counteract brigading and also allow new waves of users to get acclimatized to a group's rules and culture before they can have a negative effect on it.
Again, all these ideas are potentially problematic but with our intention to have accountability for actions a fundamental part of the site, we think we can potentially overcome them as well. We shall see. :)
How does tilde intend to solve the mirror communities effect that is now a Reddit staple? Things like /r/myAwesomeSub vs /r/trueMyAwesomeSub vs /r/realMyAwesomeSub where groups of mods/users diverge on their opinions of what myAwesomeSub should contain, or allow?
Because the current admin-created tildes with hierarchy doesn't allow for any recourse if you don't agree with how strict or loose constraints are for a particular group - not that the true-sub splits are anything to aspire to.
I don't think those splits usually go very well, and ideally we won't need them. It's very rare for two (or more) working communities to come out of them, you usually end up with one or the other staying as the "real" subreddit, so it wasn't really a split that was needed - just different moderation.
If the trust system idea works well, we won't really have "ownership" of groups, and it should be a pretty large pool of good/trusted users that have the ability to influence a group's direction, instead of a small set of users having complete control. That should make it much more difficult for things to end up in a state where the group is being run differently from what most of the community actually seems to want.