I was typing a comment in a gaming thread and I wanted to say something that may have been a spoiler. As I was looking through the formatting doc, I noticed it had a ton of different things you could do, but I couldn’t find a way to hide something behind a spoiler—I was wondering if there was a way to add a “spoiler” text feature.

Essentially this , but block out the word or phrase (I just wanted a reason to use one of the formatting options, honestly).

Thanks!

This is a place to post your ideas about what to do about Tildes groups and tags. I'm going to write about some problems (as I see them) and save my ideas about solutions for the comments.

The taxonomy problem

We have tags and groups and they are somewhat arbitrary. A tag could be a group someday. A group can be downgraded to a tag if it's not used much.

Topics can have multiple tags, but they can be in only one group (and its ancestor groups).

It's hard to pick the right group. An example: a post about animals could go in ~enviro (for wildlife), ~hobbies (for pets), or ~science (for a scientific study). So where do you put news article about a scientific study of the effects of house cats on wildlife?

Adding ~animals seems like it would be a good thing because now you have an obvious place to find all the posts about animals. Animal lovers rejoice! But from a taxonomy point of view, it makes things worse, because now you have another place where you could logically put an article and another place to go looking for it. More groups means more edges and more edge cases. It's enough to make you wish for crossposts.

The competition problem

Tags are better for taxonomy, so why not just have tags? Because classifying topics isn't the only thing we want to do. As Deimos wrote about, eventually we'd like to have somewhat more independent communities, closer to subreddits but hopefully without their downsides. It would be nice if subreddits that wanted to migrate to Tildes could actually do it. We also want to have a good mix of topics on the front page, while allowing some groups to have a lot more posts than others.

I'll start with an analogy: if a school has only one sport that matters, the people who are good at that sport win socially, and other people don't have as much of a chance. But if you have multiple sports and clubs that people care about, there are more ways to win at something. I don't believe pretending everyone is a winner works all that well, but more ways to win promotes diversity and creates useful social ambiguity.

The front page of Tildes is the most visible and has limited space. That creates an all-against-all competition between topics. We also have groups with their own leaderboards, but they are lesser competitions and it's unclear if they matter yet. (I'm using them more, though.) Meanwhile, each topic has an independent leaderboard for its comments that doesn't conflict with any other game. (Maybe that's why I like megathreads?)

I haven't been thinking of Tildes in terms of leaderboards, but maybe it can explain why old-timers are often reluctant to post topics? We aren't really trying to win, but we have ideas about fair play. When there's only one game anyone cares about, we don't want to drown out other worthy topics by entering too many contestants. We're also a bit reluctant to enter anything that's too specialized into the competition, because it doesn't "deserve" the attention. It's not a worthy contestant and it's just gonna lose.

Also, sometimes this isn't a game you want to win. Entering a controversial topic into a competition can get you unwanted attention, and that's often no prize at all. When a game isn't one you wanted to enter, getting attention is more like losing than winning.

For the front page, I expect this problem will get worse with more people. Entering the competition brings more attention than before.

Note: thinking of a topic listing as a leaderboard for a game is only an analogy and I don't mean to promote competitiveness. They weren't designed to be leaderboards and I think we'd like to see design changes that reduce competitiveness. There are known downsides to competition that we don't want, like "cheating" to win with "unworthy" strategies and the rules-lawyering and jealousy that come with that.

Ideas?

Some rules for this "game": Please post one proposal per comment. If you have multiple independent ideas, you can post them separately, but post them together if they're interrelated.

I'm relatively new here, and excited about the community. My question stems from learning that the usual way communities evolve here is by having specific topic information repeatedly surface in more general category forums. If we do not create a women's community here, comparable to the one that already exists for lgbt, will we be less likely to create topics related to women's issues? Can we predict how it will evolve?

What do you think?

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.