Hi all, I'm a recent reddit refugee who is very happy with my transition here. I like the spirit of the community a whole lot and am a fan of the admin approach, which is designed to promote engagement and deep content and prevent a shallow (advertiser-friendly) scrolling experience.

A the philosophy page on content says:

In-depth content (primarily text-based) is the most important

and

In general, any changes to the site that will cause "shallower" content to gain an advantage should be considered very carefully.

I agree with this fully. My thoughts, though, are that there are definitely forms of image post that are not just memes or jokes, and do lead to deeper discussion.

For instance, if somebody has created some art and would like to post it for feedback (or just to share), this feels more like a discussion topic than a 'quick scroll' post. I feel that this kind of image post is 'pro community'. Somebody is posting something they care about and want to discuss.

On reddit, a sub I always liked was ImaginaryMonsters, where people post cool pictures of monster art and discuss them (either original art or properly credited). This is for people who want to admire and discuss artwork. Again, I don't think this necessary falls into the category of 'shallow content'.

So, what am I suggesting?

I think it would be good for the site to actively promote the posting of the right kind of image content in the right places.

My angle is, essentially:

• Some image content does promote depth of discussion.
• This type of content may be quite vital for certain wedges of the community, especially moving forwards as the site grows (and making creatives feel more welcome).
• Rules regarding self-promotion already exist in the Code of Conduct.
• Because of how the web works, it would make sense to have limited embedding of certain images in at least thumbnail format (but it needn't show the full image in the feed like other scrollable 'content' sites). .
• Creating certain groups/subgroups specifically for posting certain types of images doesn't need to be seen as a slippery slope, if the rules are clear.
• There is even the possibility of purging image posts that don't have n amount of engagement within a specific time, so as not to end up with clutter.

I should point out two things:

• I am aware that images can already be posted as links on the site, and I applaud the reasoning for the overall tentative approach. Here, I'm talking about some select subgroups of the site that are specifically for certain types of image posting.
• I don't necessarily think I'm right. I am new here and making observations - I'm thinking about things I'd like personally - I know I don't have all the information to understand the full impact of such things here, but I am interested in knowing what other people think.

So, do you have an opinion on this? Thanks for reading!

Edit:

I just wanted to point out a couple of things based on responses.

• When I mention image posts, I'm not talking about image hosting - that's a whole can of worms - the site already allows links. I'm just talking about image links (with maybe some QoL surrounding that).
• I wasn't totally clear above, I'm not suggesting image posts everywhere, or even necessarily a whole new post type. My first thoughts were about one or two specific, limited subgroups with specific purposes.
• Those concerned about moderation, I understand that angle, but I am keeping in mind this recent post by @Deimos, where they talk about expanding moderation, or even handing it off to individual communities, subreddit style:

If the activity stays at this level or keeps increasing, we will probably need to add more moderators soon.

• Those concerned about feeds being overrun by images, there were thoughts about this from Deimos in the same post:

I think we should probably take advantage of this current high activity level to try moving the groups towards being more independent spaces. This would involve switching away from the current "opt-out" approach to an "opt-in" one, and would probably need updates to a few different sections of the site to support it.

• I also think it's worth mentioning my thoughts above do not preclude having some minimum text requirement along with every image. I agree about not encouraging shallow content, and am attempting to focus on exactly where that line lies.
• Finally, I do want to make it clear I'm not coming here as a new person trying saying "nice site, change it like this!" - which I think some people may have taken this as (I had one or two single-sentence responses). I genuinely like what I've seen so far because of what it is, but am also aware things may well be changing in some other ways already (as per the post I linked). Sorry if this seems like 'another reddit user trying turn us into reddit' - this is not my intent whatsoever, I am just interested in specifically how it could be done in a Tildes way. I am glad it started a half-decent discussion though!

I have a small suggestion for a change to Tilde's mobile design and I'm apprehensive about posting a whole new thread here since it's relatively insignificant. This makes me wonder in general what the best way is for me and others to submit ideas or issues without creating the clutter of a lot of threads.

Would it be appropriate to create somewhat specific feedback threads? E.g. one for design issues and suggestions, one for feature suggestions, one for general bug reports, etc.? At the end of the day, I just want to let someone know about my suggestion without creating noise.

Do we have a list of recurring discussions and their schedules anywhere? I know they're generally weekly, but I often find myself having to do a quick search for when the last one was and determine whether or not I should hold onto my contribution to that thread until the next one occurs. eg if the new discussion is created tomorrow, I may as well just post my comments tomorrow rather than today. Admittedly a very minor inconvenience.

Having a list somewhere easy to see could also help prevent folks from unintentionally creating duplicate discussions during the period between one week's discussion going quiet and the next week's starting.

And maybe eventually it could be something like we subscribe to a recurring discussion and then it shows up in the sidebar somewhere in a list of upcoming discussions? Just spitballing here.

Any thoughts?

I found myself wishing the website had a sticky navbar on desktop, so I made a Tampermonkey script to do just that. Sharing this in case anyone else was looking for something similar.

To use, just open this link with Tampermonkey installed, and you should be prompted to install it.
https://ewp.fyi/tilde-tweaks/sticky-navbar.user.js

Not sure if this is already a feature, but I think in keeping with Tildes's philosophy of letting the platform grow (to whatever extent that it may) sustainably, there should be a waiting period of a couple days to a couple weeks between when a new user joins and when they can generate invite codes. This to me seems like an effective way of preventing viral growth and allowing the community to recalibrate or "get a grip on itself" after any new influx of users.

Just popped in my head, with the massive influx of users, there's been a lot more meta discussion happening in regular threads.

Perhaps it might be useful to have that as a label on comments. I'd almost go so far as to have the label highlighted like Exemplary for new users to help highlight when discussion function and culture of the site.

Roughly knowing how many times each tag has been used would provide users actionable information if they would like to search or filter by tags.

It might improve UX when applying tags, but might have undesirable side effects in user behavior.

I can think of three places this might be implemented, and I don't know which, if any, we want:

When filtering topics by tags:

• informs users how large or small their scope is
• this view should probably be kept somewhat up to date

When looking at a topic's tags:

• informs users where to start searching/filtering
• passively builds a frame of reference for how tags are used?
• this view could be allowed to become outdated and stale without issue

When applying tags

• a more common tag might be less accurate, but it might be more helpful?
• in the auto fill issue weight by frequency was proposed, which is somewhat similar but more opaque
• this should probably use pretty recent counts as well

Tildes has a lot of threads that are not time dependant, be they asks, surveys, recommendations and hypotheticals. Should we make an effort to give these posts an evergreen tag, and maybe even auto bump them back into circulation after a few years?

Tildes has a great function that adds the word count of a link or text post to its submission. The suggestion is this: allow the user to sort posts by length. The reason is that sometimes I wanna read something short, and sometimes I wanna read something long. It would be great to be able to easily find articles in the length I'm up for at a given moment.

Works for YouTube too.

I think it would, that's something that interests a vast number of users. Things like construction, bridges, buildings, city planning, trains, etc. Right now they can go to ~misc or ~design which doesn't seem appropriate.

Sometimes you want to reply to a comment with a remark that may not be of interest to the wider Tildes audience, but posting that reply is going to bump the post up in the recent changes list anyway. It would be nice if a reply-to-a-reply had a checkbox allowing you to mark it as a non-bumping comment, like the “minor edit” feature on Wikipedia. The drawback is that it might enable more clutter in the form of off topic chatting. The advantage would be that it keeps the top of the recent changes list free of uninteresting updates.

One implementation detail regards the question of a non-bumping checkbox on replies to an already non-bumping comment. My sense is that once a comment has been marked “non-bumping”, all subsequent replies to it should be non-bumping as well.