The trust system is something that I'm looking forward to for several reasons. It allows for community moderation that is "decentralized" to a point. It takes pressure off of the admins to police content. The possibility of being able to ensure that quality content remains the core product of this site. There are also negatives like the possibility of creating a "power user" class that is resented by the rest of the user base or the potential for misuse by those with the power. Along with some more complex issues such as disagreements between trusted users about how to interpret and curate content. These are all things that we as a community should iron out before a larger scale rollout of this system.

What I wanna talk about today is something a little bit different tho. From my experience with other sites that have achievable user class "upgrades", there will, almost no matter what the precautions put in place, be users that will game the system to rise up through the ranks as quickly as possible. From my point of view, as long as there is a system, written or not, about what needs to be done to achieve the "Trusted" status, there will be users that will do their best to get their as quickly as possible. There are a few ways that this can be looked at:

• It's fine because while they may not be contributing for the "right" reasons, they are still acting in what is seen as a positive manner in the community.
• Concern that because they are only working towards the status symbol "Trusted" that they are not going to be acting in the best interests of the website, but in the interests of keeping the status.
• Wanting to keep this kind of behavior to an absolute minimum because want everything should be as ideal as possible.

While this discussion is had on a fairly regular basis, the consensus seems to be that it is a necessary evil to endure because it would be both too much work to police/figure out who is acting for the right reasons (even standardizing what the "right reasons" are is hard).

The way this can be combated by having requirements that would be deemed too much work for most of the people who are just in it for the status and not for the site. The issue with this solution is that it can make it very difficult for those who truly care about the site to maintain the position that allows them to curate and keep the site in the condition that we aim for.

In the end I think that the deteriorating system will solve at least a portion of these problems because those who are just in it for the status symbol are often likely to quit trying after they are achieve the goal they want. This leads to periods of inactivity, and therefore, decay.

I wanted to post this to see what the greater community had to think about this.

I've been browsing Tildes a bit today and, overall, am enthusiastic about what I've seen. However, while reading a thread, a thought popped into my head that was evocative of an issues Reddit and other tree-based systems suffer from — thread freshness and activity over time both decay quickly.

While reading the thread, I thought "I would comment, but there already seem to be a lot of comments here. If I reply to a specific tree, then that limits people who might see it and respond. Even a top-level comment probably won't be likely to get much of a response."

On Reddit, this leads to repost after repost of the same content in brand new threads, as the activity level of a thread decays and the thread is lost. It looks like one way you intend to combat this is with different sorting methods (Newest, Activity) over various time periods (all time, last 3 days, etc.). Do users feel that this will be effective enough itself, or do they have other ideas to combat this issue?

The way I generally see it, linear threads often beat out tree threads when it comes to keeping threads alive without users having to read through a lot of crap to figure out what the current topic of discussion is, and where it's taking place. (Linear threading models to think of are phpBB, vBulletin, IP.Board, and their ilk. Tree threading models are sites like Reddit, Slashdot, or Shacknews. There are also hybrids, like Metafilter. Please share other examples and their pros/cons.)

In a tree system, I've often experienced the following sequence:

1. Read all top-level replies
2. Read most sub-level replies
3. Find where in the tree the most recent discussion is occurring
4. Realize it's not coherently taking place in one tree
5. Decide not to reply

While in a linear threading system:

1. Read past 2–3 pages of replies to get caught up
2. Add a reply

Alternatively, the linear threading sequence can also be:

1. Read entire thread to see how it's evolved over time
2. Add a reply

An added benefit that is usually concomitant to a linear threading system is that threads are easy to "reactivate" (AKA gravedig) — simply add a new reply and the thread gets bumped up the stack for all users. This is not an exclusive benefit of a linear system. It could likely be made to work with a tree system too. The Activity sorting method may be related, though it's unclear how this functions.

I am really curious to see how this site grows as time goes on. Is there any way to see the amount of active/total users over the next few months? I like looking at charts lol. Maybe even a personal chart showing how each users invites branch over time also?

I am personally a strong proponent/user of mobile apps, there probably aren't any websites that I frequent on a regular basis that I don't use an app for (other than tildes for now), plus there are some pretty strong advantages to mobile apps.

With that said, I'm just wondering why the official standing is against having a mobile app. Is it a resource thing (non-profit donation supported), small footprint thing (only 350 lines of JS), ideological thing (apps are counter intuitive)? Any ideas?

I had a look at the available themes and being a person who is sometimes inclined to rice, decided to port my colourscheme to tildes using the Stylish firefox extension. Unfortunately,
Content Security Policy: The page's settings blocked the loading of a resource at self ("style-src")

comes up in the debugger on every page. How can I work around this?

It's been an interesting couple of weeks while we all decompress post-reddit and think about the future of democratic online forums. Most of the relevant topics have already been discussed in multiple threads, and rather than having repeats, I'd like to invite everyone to comment on these threads themselves - and to read the comments that are already there. You'll find most of the solutions we've been thinking about explained in some detail, and we do want your feedback on these ideas to help make them better.

I suggest you bookmark this page. This thread is getting a bit lost in the shuffle, and it's really the best nexus of information about tildes we have at the moment. It'll take you quite a while to read all of this, so since we don't have 'save posts' here yet, a bookmark will have to do. We're also updating the links here as new discussions form. If you think a discussion should be added here, please reply to this thread with the link and I'll take care of editing it into the main post. When you see new users asking repeat questions, please link them to this post. Thanks for your patience while we work through all of this. :)

Let's get started.

• A group is its own worst enemy. This will help you think better about online community management. Also, if you haven't yet, play The Game Of Trust.

• Community Moderators? How do we moderate effectively, and fairly? Do we moderate at all? (everyone should read this monster) Also, see round two.

• How do we handle communities that get too big? It's a doozy, the inverse of reddit.

• Do we allow Fluff content? Just how do we select for quality instead of popularity, or even define quality, anyway?

• Do we allow for political content? How do we handle one of the most heated categories of discussion? Also see the followup.

• What do we do about "Fake News?" And you thought politics was hard? :D

• Can we create new ~groups? Will users be able to create them? Yes, eventually... but it's not that simple.

• How do we stop bots from wrecking the place? What about the bots that are useful?

• Why exactly is my comment box at the bottom, rather than the top? We have reasons. ;)

• Anonymous posting? You betcha. Privacy is not just a buzzword.

• Can we think of a better name than votes? Not really, not yet. Got any ideas?

• Funding - how do we pay for all of this? Nothing is free, after all. No ads, no pay to play, but what else could we do?

• Tildes Gold? No, something much better - the exemplary upvote, because you need a limited use vote to highlight the things you think are top quality. If we all use them together, it just might work.

• What changes need to be made to the comment tags before they are re-enabled? It's a tough problem.

• Should we make the site publicly visible? For users without accounts to read.

• Moving the vote count to the vote button. It's the little things.

And, of course, our first ban. In fact we're up to two now.

It's not all serious, though!

• Drop by and introduce yourself. Also see round two and round one.
• Where are you from? Quite the diversity in countries already!
• Our first Trump thread. Went better than expected.
• What about cultural exchanges? Great idea there.
• First impressions? Once you've slogged through all this, tell us what you think about the site. ;)
• Some simple user scripts. It's not RES, but it's a start.

Please do take some time to browse through everything in ~tildes. It's a cross between theoryofreddit, ideasfortheadmins, and announcements. That's where we talk turkey. There's a new discussion there every day.

I also want to make one important contrast about what this site intends to be.

Reddit and Voat: Democratic republic based on popularity. 'Free speech' forums.
Tidles: Democratic meritocracy based on quality. 'Civil speech' forum.

Enjoy yourselves, post some content, make some new friends. This sweet honeymoon phase won't last forever, and it's one of the best parts of a new site. Remember, as long as you're civil here, you are never going to have any problems.

Can we get a "Mark all as read" for notifications? I certainly haven't run into an issue where I need it yet, but I foresee wanting that feature in the future.

Also, so far I'm really loving the platform.

I'm curious to what extent group mods will be able to customize how groups work. One thing I think is very limited about Reddit is its very limited, constrained format. Some communities might be better served with different options. Is there a doc explaining what is planned?

It appears that the visited links do not persist between the homepage and individual groups, for example if I click a topic in ~tildes, then go to the home page page and view said topic, it won't be purple, and vice versa.

So far, Tildes is creating a lot of good discussion, but it's lacking a way to "retrace your steps" and get back to old threads that were worth remembering.

Either a search function, or save function would come in very handy here.

I'd like to see the ability to save comments made a first class feature here, rather than an upgrade as it is on Reddit.

I'm not sure if it's a vanilla reddit feature or if it comes from RES, but I've become reliant upon the preview that shows up under a comment box that renders your response through markdown so you can see the formatting before you post it. This doesn't need to be real-time, since that would likely detract from the "lightweight" technical goal, but I feel like it might be useful

Having a sense of humor can be very positive for a discussion, but how do we go about that without discussions degrading into reddit-esque meme chains?

EDIT: Will users have to tag every single comment in a chain as a joke? Will all comments in a chain be hidden if the first one has a tag and I filter based in it?

One of the biggest things I liked about Kuro5hin was the ability for content to initially be posted in edit mode, which encouraged edits and disallowed voting. In this way, it allowed a contributor to publicly draft out a story prior to the story being judged.

The editable story would go into a separate, opt-in view mode so that people could select whether they wanted to see (and give feedback on) immature stories and then shift (time trigger or manual publish) into the main story feed.

With Tildes' comment-tagging system, we could probably just tag all comments made during edit mode as "edit" and allow them to be merged (or not) with the mainline commentary. I'd suggest (based on experience 20 years ago :) that the edit mode comments be not initially merged into mainline discussion.

I basically wanted a full screen, standalone version of the website on mobile but unfortunately Firefox's homescreen shortcuts simply open a new tab, header and all.

I found Anker on the Play Store which works perfectly. I wasn't able to find anything on F-Droid but I'm sure forking one of those Facebook wrappers would be rather trivial if anyone's up to it.

For the app icon you can get ~'s favicon here.

My apologies if this has been addressed already. I'd like to have spoiler format available for text posts and comments similar to reddit, where the spoiler part is a black box (white in night mode) that you click on to see what it says. Strike-through and underline (which reddit doesn't have) would be really nice to have also.

Hi, first post - be gentle. I don't know whether this has been mentioned but I couldn't find it anywhere else.

I worked on a hierarchical tree before (for customer support scripts) and after a while the wealth of material became increasingly complex. One problem that presented itself was the difficulty of 'multiple points of entry'. There are many ways of approaching the same topic.

In the context of Tildes, I would give a simple example of music (since that was used already). If you have a top level called ~music, your next level may be .folk, then say .Macedonia. This is how you categorise the topic.

However, if I'm in ~Macedonia then I should be able to visit .music and then .folk but arrive at the same discussion group as above.

By default, any two groups with the same set of identifiers, whatever the order, should point to the same location. In fact, there should be an infinite number of ways to get to any group, in theory.

Do we want a group called ~history.Renaissance.artists.Italy.LeonardoDaVinci and also have a different group ~science.engineering.history.LeonardoDaVinci, along with 50 others about the same individual? An ability to merge disparate tildes might be useful.

In addition, I would imagine trying to perfectly map the world of ideas and discussion into a single hierarchy is a Quixotic task, that way madness lies - especially for the nitpicky Reddit crowd. I've seen plenty discussion on this already. If it was a bit looser, we'd get to the discussion quicker, without all the 'meetings to decide on a working group name'.

Just throwing it out there for discussion. Thanks.

Automatically* dammit auto-correct!

I often use the notifications to reply to comments directly, opening the context link in another tab if needed. I after replying I have to explicitly 'Mark as read'. I think it makes sense to automatically mark a notification as read when replying to it.

If this is a common use I will happily create an issue for it on GitLab.

I'm new here, so apologies if this question has already been discussed. I was wondering if there were any plans to accommodate groups that are not English-speaking? I do a decent part of my reditting in french and am wondering if I could eventually move completely to Tildes.

So this is based on experience from Reddit. I see there is ~talk , which is great, but talk is distinct from advice I think, which is more focussed and potentially a bit more serious. You could consider ~talk.advice but i think you might have a culture/trust clash between them a bit. I think having them distinct allows for ~advice to be given in a safer space while ~talk stays more open and flexible.

I suspect, from my experience, that you would have different behavioural patterns, conventions and broad rules in the two trees of tildes.

I know similar topics have been discussed, but I'd like to talk about removing the vote count OR, having the count appear after you've voted. To be clear, I'd like to keep the voting mechanism as-is, just reduce the visibility of the actual number of votes.

It's not foolproof, but it might reduce the "bandwagon" voting we're trying to avoid. I realize that vote count could still be guessed based on sorting by "most votes," but I think this is a worthwhile discussion to have.

*Edit 2: Removed the joke I made about spamming as I think it detracts from the conversation.

Personally I have a small screen and pressing on [-] button is sometimes hard. Would be much easier if pressing on that whole title bar or even better the whole comment collapsed that chain. What do you guys think?

Edit: On Reddit mobile tapping on next to title collapsed the comments.

Was on my bathroom break and figured might as well try tildes on my phone.
Using iPhone 8+ and tried on firefox for iphone and safari.

Was pleasantly surprised how clean and fast it feels, everything was very responsive. It's well adapted to my phone screen size. The UI is clean and simple, it feels very familiar, gives the same feeling as tildes on desktop while keeping everything on a smaller screen. It's something that reddit never got right, the closest thing we had was reddit compact mode, but it wasn't nearly as good.

As instructed when creating my account, I went through and read the Tildes Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, since the prompt said they were short and plainly worded. I also clicked on the 'Tildes Code of Conduct' that was linked, just to cover all my bases.

Congratulations, you got a genuine audible laugh out of me with those simple, straight to the point, first five words: "Don't act like an asshole"...

Well played.

It seems to me that link topics don't directly engage the user, we're just putting something out there and hoping for a response. And who is the user responding to when they comment on the topic?

Shouldn't the poster have the option (at least) to express something - aside from in the title of course - about the link they are posting be it a statement or a question, to elicit a discussion in response?

I know that when I see a link topic my first thought is usually 'What are you trying to tell me?', so I just pass it by. Whereas if there was a question attached to it that I could respond to, or a statement attached to it that I can engage with, I don't think I would be so quick to dismiss it.

Maybe this has already been talked about but there isn't a search so I can't tell (I know it's being developed when the API goes public) but right now when I get a reply in my inbox the only link I have is to the entire post not the specific comment. Right now the site is small enough that it isn't a huge deal to scroll down and find my comment but it is something that eventually needs to be added

At the bottom of this thread, there is a deleted comment. It appears there is no way to collapse all of its children. So, two suggestions:

1. Allow users to expand/collapse deleted comments children
2. Start deleted comments collapsed

Suggestion 1 seems like either a bug or just not yet implemented. For 2, I can imagine differing opinions on this, any other thoughts?

I may have inadvertently created the first repost in Tildes in ~comp and was wondering if there are plans for a notification on posting a new topic that has already been posted.

I know that this sort of check is easily 'bypassed', but personally, had I know it had been posted already I would have voted & joined the existing discussion.

I think if we could detect the same URL, at least in the same group, maybe even with a time modifier of within the last week, it would help consolidate the discussions.

As this site is being started because of low-quality content overall on the other sites, it's necessary to do something to maintain that quality. Most sites start out good but don't age well, and the userbase too is responsible for that. Many sites offer points on the content that is shared, but there are no points for contributions towards the sites (?). I think it would be really great if the user gets some points say for reporting unrelated, unnecessary, troll, and other such posts or contents that don't maintain the quality. But those points are not awarded to the user immediately. The user will get points after enough reports about the content are reported and the content is made unavailable.

This point system can be separate from the content submission points that user gets, or it can be summed up all in one.

Noticed the ability to generate the three invite codes a few days ago (ed: go to your user page and under Misc. hit “Invite Someone”) and started excitedly going through my mind with who I would add. That came to a crawl and then a pause when I started thinking about a few things:

• Do I want family to know my Tildes handle? I’m not doing anything bad here, and certainly don’t plan to, but I may want to ask a question regarding something happening to the family at one point. Hard to know what the future will bring.
• I have several friends who would certainly join, and probably wouldn’t do anything bad/wrong, but more importantly would they actively contribute?
• What about my “fun” colleagues? Well, again do I want them to know my ~handle or would that be setting things up for something awkward down the line?

Lots to consider. To those of you who have already sent invites, what did you think about? What was the final process that worked for you? Or, alternatively, who thinks I need to stop whining and send out the damn invites already?

Hey everyone,
I've seen a bunch of posts discussing the design of the site, and I was wondering if there are any other designers on here that would be interested in discussing the interface more precisely, and coming up with potential improvements. I wrote up a design audit and gave it to @Deimos last week, and I wanted to share it with everyone and generate some discussion about minutiae such as colors, placement and styles of buttons and links, etc. I feel like these are just as important as larger features that people are asking for (such as a markdown preview), and have the added benefit of being very fast to iterate on.

hey all,

if you're like me, or like most folks nowadays, you'd rather browse the web on your phone over dragging around an entire desk, tower, and monitor everywhere (that's the other alternative right???). but!! tildes doesn't have a mobile app, and probably won't until APIs happen and some kind soul builds a third party one.

tildes, if you haven't noticed, is pretty minimal and runs like greased lightning on mobile browsers. but if you go that route you don't get full screen or home screen shortcuts or any of that stuff!

this is where i tried using Hermit to decent results. it's basically a wrapper for webpages that turns it into more of an app-like experience. if tildes ever adds RSS feeds for comment notifications, it'll support that too. unfortunately it's only on android but i'm sure iOS has something similar.

maybe one day tildes will be a PWA and we won't have to worry about any of that! but for now, I think hermit works nicely. hopefully it helps someone else too!

are you doing something else that works just as well? better? on iOS? please share!