One of the things I dislike about Reddit is how the username is something very easy to gloss over. Unless a user is super prolific, you don't ever remember a person on Reddit. I feel this is a big part of what makes Reddit so unpleasant - you are just one voice among many, a cog in the machine, so every time you post it's not that different to just posting from a throwaway. Generally, I think this really contributes to the feeling that on Reddit, you are just an opinion, not an actual person with thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Additionally, it protects people who post toxic comments, because it's easy to forget their username and so when you encounter them again, you can't easily tell they are the person from before, unless you check their post history.

On smaller subreddits, this problem is partially solved with flairs. The problem with those is that they do not stay the same across Reddit (which I guess is a matter of personal preference, participating in Reddit as a whole vs a bunch of separate communities), and they often serve as a way to add relevant info about the user, so they are just generic groups that a lot of people share.

I think ~ could really benefit from having some kind of way to tell one user from one another better. Either by making the usernames more prominent somehow, by adding flairs, or possibly even avatars (I know, that's so incredibly retro, but it does help see you the other person as a person and not just as an opinion on the internet).

Probably one of my most useful features from Reddit was opening links in new tabs. This way I could keep my main Tildes tab, and not be worried by having to back out multiple times if I went deep into the link. I feel that it would be a good QOL settings addition.

Example thread: https://tildes.net/~talk/1gd/how_would_you_describe_this_person

At this time, sorting by "newest" has PBuddy's reply to Emerald_Knight (posted 34 minutes ago) listed after my top-level comment (posted 54 minutes ago). I think the "newest" sorting method should place PBuddy's comment (and therefore Emerald_Knight's top-level) above mine.

[Edit: Por que no los dos?]

At some point reddit had plans to implement a federated protocol and let users run their own instances, but that was throw out of the window to satisfy shareholders interests. Does tildes has plans to implement a federate protocol in the future or is something that hasn't been considered?

I just showed up yesterday to this great experiment, and find myself with some fresh-minted drama over politics and bans to ingest. While I wouldn't presume to propose a solution to the issues raised in and by those threads, I found myself looking to the comment tagging system and finding some space to improve conversation.

My intent (as I believe is the intent of this community) is to help foster constructive discussion without outright banning inflammatory topics. I believe that simply ignoring controversial issues because of the problems they raise is at best stifling potentially useful discourse and at worst intellectually dishonest.
Tags I'd like to see:

• "Citation Requested" As a tag, it would be a more constructive way of saying "I don't believe you"
• "Disreputable Source" / "Source Disputed" is a civil way of pointing out issues
• "Reported" would be a tricky implementation, but useful as a way of flagging comments for removal. Should ideally only be applied to eg. doxxing or incitement

There should also be a moderation feature for removing tags that are no longer relevant or incorrectly applied. Alternatively, the display of comment tags could be reliant upon a critical mass of "reputation points" which would allow for, say, 100 people with 1 "troll-tagging rep" to get a comment flagged, or 2 people with 50 troll-tagging rep to do so. This of course is dependent upon the reputation system being fleshed out and has the very real danger of creating power users

EDIT:

@jgb pointed out that this is a lively discussion see these

Tags I missed that came up in other discussions:

• "Insightful" as a positive, almost a super-upvote
• "Solved" for a comment that resolves an issue

And, according to @cfabbro, @deimos is working on a public activity audit that can then be built upon to improve moderation

This occurred to me, for later when things are tagged by different people, will capitalisation matter? I'd suggest better it doesn't, makes it easier to see things that were intended to be tagged the same way.

You could even consider allowing spaces in tags but ignoring them when identifying which tags are equivalent.

I don't really understand this model unless server costs are a concern. Google+ did that years ago and it honestly was a failure.

It's just one more step for registering as they are not like restricting the number of invites. Was just wondering that.

I think having the theme settings be universal as long as you are logged into your account would be nice. For example, if I log in on my browser I have Dark Theme set. However, if I log in on my phone it defaults to light theme.

I assume as more settings are added (e.g - turn off custom group stylesheets if those are added) it woud be nice to not have to go reconfigure settings on various devices.

I've been using ~ on mobile to try it out, and although it's great, there's one major inconvenience.

If I'm reading through a long comment, I want to instintively collapse it so it won't distract me. But on mobile, I have to scroll a long way up to do that. It's even worse with comment chains.

Can we have a collapse button at the bottom as well? Or a swipe, like on the Reddit app? Or do we have to wait for the development of the app before mobile users get good UI?

Usernames can be inflammatory or just distract from discussion in general, and especially considering that humor is not a focal point of Tildes, should they be restricted to something reasonable/appropriate?

We already show who invited us on our profile page, so could we show who we've invited on our invite page? There is no need to hide this information.

This way we could easily get in touch with people we've invited.

Ok, this is less than a half-baked idea, but here goes.

I just got here, but I really feel like you all “are my people.” I know there are possible issues with this, echo chamber, etc.. but darn it, I like this group right now. I may like it even after lots of user growth. But.. what if there was some magical way to use the site in the future as it was in the past.

My initial thought was what if we “forked” the user base at different times. Here is my best thought on how that might be implemented.

What if there was a user setting called Shrinkage, Time Machine, Good Ole Days, or something. It would be a date field that had a minimum value of your tildes birthday, max value of now. You could set it to n whenever you wanted and then you would see the site with only the posts and comments of the users that existed prior to n + 1 day (so your are included.)

I think other folks will have this same “good ole days” feeling even when they sign up years from now, they could always go back to their original community.

OK, I think that this implementation is pretty harmless. Shoot me down. What unintended consequences did I not think of? Do you see any value in this?

edit: missing word

One of the consistent discussion points of why this place is so great is because it's small. Do you all have any mechanics thought up for how communities can limit growth?

I think I saw some discussion about parent/child relationships for the ~tildes groups where it looked like you were using dot notation - is that your mechanic? Endless children? Will ~tildes be able to cap their subscribers? I don't have answers, just questions now. :)

This one is super first world, but it would make the transition from Reddit much easier. The vote button is on the far right of the screen even though the rest of the UI and most people naturally gravitate to the left. I am fine with them keeping the old vote button, but they should put a small one on the left side also.

Posting this here because I'm also wondering about how this will affect moderation policy on Tildes going forward

As a former Reddit Moderator this has been something I've pondered for a long time: how does one define what a toxic user is in such a way that it can be easily understood as a community standard? I'll post the definition I defaulted to below. But I'd be most interested in knowing how other people think about this.

Instead of a tree hierachy, perhaps groups would be better off based on a DAG - a Directed Acyclic Graph. This would allow groups to have multiple parents as well as multiple children. For example, ~mazda might have ~cars and ~japan as parents, and ~tolkein might have ~fantasy and ~linguistics as parents. I think this could maintain the benefits of the hierachical system while making it easier to find a group that suits the post.

While potentially complex, a good UI which effectively visualised the DAG to allow a content submitter to hone in on the correct group-node, and potentially create a new one on the fly if none was appropriate, could make this concept reasonably intuitive. This problem has already been tackled by creators of git GUIs, so perhaps some ideas could be adapted from that space.

One issue is that a node in a DAG is much harder to identify with a text string than a node in a tree-based hierachy. One solution would be that the submitter could choose a 'primary path' which would be displayed to readers, which, upon being clicked, would display the full DAG, including all the potentially numerous paths which would lead to that group-node. For example, I might choose ~linguistics.tolkein.quenya as the primary path, but upon clicking, the reader can discover that ~fantasy.tolkein.quenya and ~linguistics.conlangs.quenya and ~writing.worldbuilding.quenya all lead to the same group-node [edit: ugly illustration]. I feel that this solution could potentially be powerful enough to remove the need for tags entirely. Viewing the homepage of any particular group-node on the DAG would aggregate posts to all child groups, meaning that the effects of community fragmentation are mitigated. Even a post to a really specific group-node, like ~cars.mazda.mx5.na, will still enjoy the same status and priority to the readers of the ~cars homepage as a post made directly to the ~cars group-node.

Now, this is in solarised dark (1 true colourscheme represent), but this specific issue is present in all current schemes - the blue and purple are way too close together. This also impacts visited vs unvisited links.

On this same note, the button style for solarised dark is not colour-shifted between schemes.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong. I see an notification for a new unread reply. I open the unread replies page. I click on 'link' to go to the thread to see the context, and reply if I feel so inclined.

But that notification doesn't go away. The reply that I clicked on and read is still showing as unread. I have to click on "mark as unread" to make the notification go away. However, if I do that before I click through to the thread, the reply disappears and I can't click through to the thread. So I have to go to the thread, read & reply, then go back to my unread replies page to mark the reply as "read".

If I've clicked through to the thread where someone replied to me, then you can safely assume I've read that reply.

It seems like blocking is the basic bit of functionality that is standing out the most for not existing on ~ at the moment, at least for those of us who have ran into a reason to want it. Is this something we can expect soon, if at all? I know just reporting things to @deimos works for now for things that are rule-breaking, but there are plenty of situations where you don't want to continue interacting with a person for reasons that may not even take place on this site (I'm sorry if the person this is in reference to sees this and recognizes me...I don't really have a way of avoiding that...hence this post), and there isn't really a way to take care of that.

Sorry, I know feature requests and suggestions are being piled in really fast, but at least for me and some users I know, this is pretty essential.

Mild shitpost, but I'd be interested to see what my 'user ID' is if such a thing exists. I remember seeing that around 50 people were subscribed to the defaults when I joined, but it'd be kinda neat to have an exact number. I'm hoping this is an utterly trivial question for the admins to answer, but if not, please don't feel obliged to waste any time on this :)

One thing that hacker news does that I really like is seemingly randomly bumping up certain comments to the top, temporarily. They are likely doing this based on the number of interactions the comment has received. Crucially, it doesn't always happen and you often can't even tell it's happening, since it looks like just another top comment.

This solves a number of problems:

• it brings possibly counter-circlejerk opinions to the top (and makes people actually read them seriously, since they are at the top where they expect a high-rated comment to be)
• it causes less "freezing" of the comment hierarchy over time
• it gives users the chance of making comments that get read and voted on, even if they are late to a thread.
• it raises the long tail of high-quality comments. Usually, there are a few high-rated comments, and a large "swamp" of both good and bad comments with little views after that. This feature would likely increase the number of good comments that get out of the "swamp", while also increasing the number of low-quality comments that get flagged as such.

Not because this is a problem yet, but because it will be.

We're all familiar with the flavour that some usernames have, when someone with the name I_RAPE_CATS invites people and they are entirely unaware of this being on the userpage forever and ever it's going to become something people will want.

My invitees so far have both remarked "Looks like I have you on my userpage forever" which is fine, but for some it won't be.

Currently, I am e.g. subscribed to ~tildes.official and ~tildes. That gives me a number of questions:

• if you subscribe to a tilde, do automatically you see content from sub-tildes?
• if you subscribe to a tilde and a sub-tilde, does it have any effect? Intuitively, I'd expect the subtildes content to be shown more, even if it's not as highly voted.
• What about a reverse-subscription/blacklist?

Just some thoughts, I'm curious what the status quo is and what you people think might make sense.

Other people's profile has join date and invited by on the right : https://i.imgur.com/OBQG9BH.png

You cannot see this on your own profile : https://i.imgur.com/6F8Fj1V.png

Not that important, but probably worth sticking at the bottom of the to-do list.

I'm grateful for being invited and I'm happy to see the community enjoy a smooth ride so far.

I really hope the platform does not follow in the footsteps of Reddit's karma mechanism. I find that this cumulative store of points attached to each user to encourages them to seek more points, regardless if they steal content or repost their own old material for another karma-harvesting run. Instead, if users can be appreciated by the actual number of posts they've submitted much like the bulletin boards of old, it would be more fair in my opinion. It'd be a measure of the effort and contribution made by a user, not only what others think of them.

For example, my profile would say "Eyehigh posted 20,000 posts" instead of "Eyehigh seemed to impress 20,000 people enough for them to leave an upvote, so here's the 20,000 upvotes."

What do you think?

I can't be the only one who looks at discussions about moderation, community norms, etc. and wonders who we are and aren't hearing from. What's the strategy for ensuring we have a breadth of perspectives (not talking US electoral politics, here) while setting early (possibly persistent) standards and structures?

You have to look for the (d) at the end of Subscribe on the Browse The List Of Groups page. Please change the wording to say Unsubscribe, put a dashed box around it, change the color or something.

Edit: Someone in my house mentioned that they are different colors. Please choose a different color as it is not color-blind friendly :)

The absence of geographic or political groups is notable. Is this because of the early stages of development & growth? Is it a deliberate choice?

I'm as keen as anyone for this place to not become yet another den of intolerance. Does not having those groups help in avoiding such a descent or does it risk becoming a feel-good but ultimately uninformative echo chamber?

I'm fairly new to the site as I came in from the hackernews post a fortnight ago. I enjoyed the fact that this site doesn't have downvotes. However, when I am reading through posts I am seeing the noise tag on multiple posts that don't seem to merit it, with examples linked below. The comments aren't literary masterpieces by any stretch, but they are concerning the topic on hand. The noise tag appears to be getting used as a downvote or "I disagree" button.

I know the user that was the first ban also used the noise tag this way, but this seems to be a more wide spread issue than one user. We can't prevent a de facto downvote tag from appearing organically everywhere. Eventually sub communities will form around a tilde and adopt a tag as a downvote, the same way all online communities change the meaning of some word or tool they already have. I don't think that we want this to be a standard tildes wide behavior however.

How should we go about preventing the use of tags as downvotes like this? Stricter moderation? Removing tags with negative connotations? Making tags visible only if they reach a certain threshold?

https://tildes.net/~talk/105/mozilla_to_remove_meritocracy_from_governance_docs_because_its_problematic#comment-6kb
https://tildes.net/~talk/105/mozilla_to_remove_meritocracy_from_governance_docs_because_its_problematic#comment-6mh
https://tildes.net/~misc/10r/furries#comment-6pq

It would be neat if typing '@op' inside a topic resulted in a link to the profile of that topic's poster. So, in this topic, @OP and @elf would be equivalent.

Also sorry @deimos for spamming ~tildes with suggestions (not actually sorry though.)

I think it would be fun to have an ~anon group, with the feature that all topics and replies are shown as being posted by 'anonymous'. It might need more active moderation than other ~groups though, and it would need to develop its own identity so it isn't just an anonymous replica of the rest of ~s.

It's kind of awkward to have to go to the main tildes page then click to one of the ~groups to navigate between groups. Either having the home bar under the group bar on the right, or having a list of other ~groups on the top (possibly customizable, RES style?) would fix this.

I don't think this is super high priority, but it'd be nice to be able to escape the ~ or @ symbols so that something isn't automatically turned into a link to a group/user. For example, I noticed in a comment I made that ~ers gets automatically turned into a link to the non-existent 'ers' group. I think if I write \~ers then it should not be linked. (E.g. ~ers)

I'll keep it short:

1. Comments box on top of the comments section. I realized that it might put more emphasis on reading before commenting, but sometimes reading can be too tedious. Some of the posts here reach 50+ comments, which can be a bit tedious to scroll past. The comments will only increase in number from now on. EDIT: It appear's this is a deliberate design choice for the reason that I guessed. Still hoped we got a choice, though.

2. Hide all child comments (like RES would allow on Reddit)

Thoughts?

Adjacent open tildes tabs are confusing to browse.

The tab for every group is named Topics of ~group instead of just the name of the group.

I've been accused of nitpicking on very minor first world problems. I agree. I really like the site, and it's so well-designed that I have no complaints apart from very few minor pet peeves with the design. I'm just discussing the features and enjoying the conversations that stem from my feedback.