Clicking on 'tag' multiple times opens the dialog multiple times
The title and image say enough: Screenshot
The title and image say enough: Screenshot
So it all begun as a [something]monkey script but I decided to give it a try to web extensions after several years of not touching it.
If you don't care about the yada yada, skip right at the bottom now.
So the whole thing revolve around a simple concept: I'd like tildes to remain as lightweight as possible with a simple and clean interface and not too many user settings.
We don't know the full structure of the code yet but, by experience, frontend and backend require quite an effort to be kept in balance so that one or either don't becomes a mess.
From this idea, the next step has been quite obvious. Users that would like a more advanced frontend experience could just download an extension (probably an app for mobile once it becomes possible).
Right now the extension does some simple things. It is basically just a porting of the script I made some time ago so you'll get non-tildes link in a new tab and a button to jump to new comments in a topic you already visited.
The extension don't retain any user data. it doesn't care who you are or what you browse. If you're unsure you can check the source code (below).
The immediate priority is to create a "settings" page so you can customize how the features should behave. As an example, about the links in new tab, letting you decide which kind of links should behave like this: all / comment's / text submission's / etc etc. I'm still thinking which are reasonable use-case
After that, I want to try and implement a user's labelling system and that is the reason for the app already requesting access to storage data on the browser. I've yet to figure it out but the gist of it is that I'll store something like username:tag
duplet in your browser localstorage
and on load of a page, check for usernames match and add the label you choose.
I know the code is dirty. As I said, I didn't touch extensions since... I think more than 6 years ago. Maybe more.
On top of that, I went for jquery and am more of a modern framework JS developer with a strong preference and background as backend developer, so... you know.
I still think I'll stick to jquery because the syntax is quite clear and I want even non-technical people to be able to understand what's going on in the code if they want to double check.
If you want to contribute you're more than welcome but keep in mind that most basic things are still missing. To mention just a couple:
if you have any resource that you used to build something similar (web extension or the like) please share them as I've a goddamn long commute every day and have time to read :)
It should work on any fork of Chrome as well.
I can't assure the same for future development.
Current features:
For the last couple of days I've been visiting the site several times a day and leaving after 10 minutes or so.
It's not that the site is bad or the discussion isn't good, but there's been a big lack of discussion I'm interested in. I don't like to take place in discussion of politics, or religion, or LGBT, or whatever. For me, the forums always were a place to meet new people to talk to, without it being a date or making friends or anything, just a friendly talk. Not that there shouldn't be a place for talking about world problems, but I get much more enjoyment from small issues or just getting to know other people.
Which is why I haven't been very active here for the last couple of days. There is all this LGBT talk and Trump and catastrophes. Even in the ~talk, there are 'Homosexual marriage legal or illegal?', 'Do you think school uniforms should be in all American/Canadian schools?', 'It's a Piece of Cake to Bake a Pretty Cake: LGBT+ Discrimination'. There is a fair share of smaller conversations, but they are mostly things I'm not interested in: 'What's your favorite documentary?, 'Advice- Best Tablets for Interactive Training' ― or things I don't know enough about to discuss, like 'How to gauge the degree of someone's self-awareness?'. This leaves very few posts I'm interested in, and I can hardly engage there because everything I could've said has already been said before I saw it.
Everything above is why I was mostly active in my own posts when I first joined as well. And I wanted to create this post to express this frustration(?) with lack of content, and I'm sure a lot of other lurkers will agree with me on that (whether or not they have different interests) ― I'm writing this post for them, too. I have no idea how you'd fix this problem or if it's even fixable, but I think it's important to state it so more active people can notice and so I have someplace to be active on ~.
Currently the subscribed groups list is only shown in the sidebar of the index page, but given that the sidebar isn't currently used for much else and doesn't take up much vertical space, it would be nice to have the group list persisted across at least the individual groups if not threads themselves, to make navigation easier without having to go back to the top level to check a different group.
So I've been really excited about this page, but lately I keep coming here, glancing at the front page, and then leaving. I think it's in part the minimalist design and the way the colour of the clicked links is very similar to the colour of the unclicked ones, making it unclear at a first glance which threads one has visited already.
Since the pace of debate is moving much slower than on Reddit here (which I think is a good thing), it would be very useful to have some kind of a 'my discussions' page that you could save threads to - either threads you are participating in or just threads you are excited to see the responses to. This would make it much easier for users to return to interesting discussions without having to browse around ~ for ages trying to find that one interesting topic.
As we talked about in the daily discussion yesterday (which was great, thanks for all the feedback), I've got a few changes coming soon that will help people customize what they're seeing.
The first piece of these is out now—changes to the way topic listings are sorted:
I'll be adding the ability to set separate defaults for each group before too much longer as well, and I'll also make a daily discussion post a little later.
I know subgroups are still a very new thing, but this seems (to me at least) like an obvious one, with ~comp currently seeming to act as "~tech, but advanced". The topics are very similar, with ~comp's most active post right now being about machine learning and ~tech's being about open source code, topics that could easily be swapped between the groups and still fit in.
I just thought that it might be useful for a person to see how many posts and comments they have made on ~. As that data is already available for manual collection it might be nice to have it available more easily on that profile.
Does anyone know when the source code is coming out
It's a slight inconvenience to have to scroll past dozens of comments just to reply to the thread. What do you guys think? Does having the ability to quickly jump into the conversation stifle discussion? I can see if some people feel that it should be necessary to read a more posts before posting in the thread, but I also think that a lot of people will just hit the END key or scroll past comments without really paying attention to them (if they just want to quickly reply).
In the daily post yesterday, I mentioned that I was planning to add filtering for topic tags fairly soon. I have this working now, but I'm balking a bit on actually adding it. So before I do, I wanted to take some time today to talk specifically about filtering, and how we can try to make sure that it doesn't get "out of control" and hurt the site in different ways.
"Filter bubbles" can be a real issue, but on the opposite side, I don't think that trying to force people to see content that they don't want to is a good approach either. You can't force that—people will add their own filters with browser extensions, just "mentally filter" the posts, or even leave the site if there's too much that they don't want. Overall, it's one of my goals that people should have control of what they see, and being able to filter some things out is an important part of that.
So there's not really a specific question I want to ask or anything, I'm just looking for a general discussion about filtering and if there's any specific things that you think would work well, or pitfalls we should try to avoid with it. Thanks, I'd appreciate any thoughts.
Having surfed reddit for several years, I've always had the impression that its voting system cannot handle controversial topics well. Although it's an official rule that comments shouldn't be downvoted in disagreement, downvotes are very often used that way. This sometimes leads to less "valuable" content being on top of threads, for example jokes.
I think that it's beneficial for discussions to have good controversial opinions in higher positions as they are now on reddit. But I understand that people want to state their disagreement and don't always want to comment to do so. Also, I think many disliked that the public upvote/downvote counters were removed.
Something that could help with all of that would be a disagree button for each comment together with a counter that shows how many people clicked that button. The button wouldn't have any effect on sort sequence.
What do you all think of this?
Edit: Added clarification that there wouldn't be an effect on sort sequence.
I think having a button to expand media on the main page. I've seen it on Reddit, and think it could be useful instead of clicking on the link to view the entire post. It gives you a way to skim things. The only downside I can think of is it might limit engagement since you won't see the comments.
So one of the things I really liked about the project is point 1 of the privacy section of the Mechanics (Future).
Proactive not reactive; preventative not remedial: When creating new features, think about what data will need to be stored, and consider how harmful it might be if that data was to be leaked in the future. Is it possible to reduce the amount of data being stored to lower the potential harm? Can the data eventually be aggregated or anonymized so that we're only storing recent data instead of a full history?
I think a good first step would be to not have a public comment/submission history. Users should evaluate other users contributions based on the conversation the are having/reading, not past submissions.
This doesn't make you anonymous, but at least it can prevent nosy people from knowing too much. (I get there are valid reasons to want to find other posts by the same user, but I think individual privacy is more important). At least, if not enforced for everyone, this should be an option, making your profile not display your history to others.
Now, one of my biggest problems with reddit is that it doesn't make it easy for you to stay anonymous and also keep your content on the site.
Let me explain. I don't like people being able to see my submission/comment history, because I don't want to give the chance for people to identify me if I don't choose to do so personally. It's not about reddit knowing what I like or do (I mean, I use Google, they know everything I do), it's about individuals, about other users knowing things I'm not happy sharing with them for whatever reason.
There are only two options on reddit: deleting my content (using a script or whatever or going one by one) or deleting my account. This results in me deleting all my comments and submissions on reddit every few weeks.
Now, I would love to be able to leave most of what I post on reddit online, because sometimes I have really interesting conversations and I try to be detailed and clear and other people might find (some of) my posts useful. But I don't want anyone who knows my username or anyone who sees a comment of mine going through my history. There's too many crazy people. Also, I haven't suffered doxxing, but that's just not nice.
There are many reasons why someone could prefer to not be identifiable. Just to give some examples that come to mind: people might have an ideology that other users don't like/respect, people might post pictures of themselves (think fitness groups, for example), people might post in local groups revealing their location, people might look for counsel and talk about their personal problems, etc. Putting all of that together might make it easy to identify someone.
So, what I would like to propose is a way to leave my content online if I wish to and giving other people the option to read it in the future, without it being publicly tied to my username.
How could this be done? Well, I think users should be able to anonymize their participation in a thread individually and throughout the site. There could be an button (on every thread for thread only anonymization and on your profile for full site anonymization) that you tap and your username is replaced all through each thread with a randomly generated username (it'd be great if the username is consistent within the thread, so people reading would know its the same person).
These usernames should be words, ideally, not difficult to parse by humans. Of course this would generate a great number of usernames, but there are some solutions.
One could be using something like Google Docs uses when several anonymous viewers are watching a document. Each gets a name (RedFox, whatever) which is consistently used throughout the thread. The same username (RedFox) can then be reused in another thread for any other anonymous user. (So RedFox wouldn't be referring to the same person in different threads, but to two random, anonymized persons).
I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult to generate these (similarly to how reddit gives you suggestions to new usernames when you open an account).
Also, in order to avoid the admins having to reserve many usernames in advance, these usernames could have a special mark (like *RedFox or °RedFox, or ~RedFox~, for example). This way, a new user can register any available name without interfering with these anonymous usernames. A thread could have some non-anonymized user called RedFox and an anonymized user called °RedFox (or whatever mark is used).
In any case, the user should be able to access all of their submissions and comments on their profile even after anonymizing, being able to edit or delete them if they wish to.
Ok, I think that's it, I hope I was clear. I'm also not gonna be able to log in again until tomorrow. So please, go ahead and discuss and tell me what you think and I'll come back when I can.
EDIT: User karma should not be public either. I can make an argument for it tomorrow if needed or we can discus it on another thread.
As promised yesterday, it's now possible to set different default "views" (order of topics, and time period) for each individual group. Similar to how setting it for the home page works, just go into the group, change the view order/period to the ones you want, and then click the "Set as default" button next to the time period dropdown.
So now when you go into a group, it will choose your default sort by the first one of these that exists:
On that note, any opinions yet about the default switch yesterday to "activity, last 24 hours" instead of "activity, all time"? Or does this question not even matter much since people are setting their own preferred sorts now anyway?
Yesterday we had quite a few topics posted in ~tildes related to "fluff" content and some similar topics. Today I want to talk about a few related things, and some changes that I'm planning to make in the near future.
First, something I obviously haven't done a very good job of making clear (and needs to be added to the FAQ) is that Tildes really isn't intended to be a replacement for reddit. It's not my goal to have most people want to move here away from reddit. The goal is much closer to a complement—reddit is making a lot of choices to prioritize "quick entertainment" content, often at the expense of more in-depth content and discussions.
Reddit wants to prioritize that kind of content because it works better for the business goals they have. "Fluff" content attracts the most users, and supports showing far more ads. You can show a lot of (in-line) ads to someone skimming down through hundreds of cat pictures, but you can't really show any to someone that spends an hour having an in-depth discussion inside a single post. So naturally they're going to prioritize quick content—it brings them more users, and directly makes them a lot more money.
Tildes doesn't have the same incentives, so my goal is to be a better home for that in-depth content that's slowly getting pushed out. Reddit can keep the fluff. It's going to be better at it than Tildes ever will be anyway, due to displaying images and autoplaying gifs in-line, and many other design choices they're making to prioritize that type of content.
That being said, even though we're really not getting image posts or anything similar yet, we have been getting a lot of "what's your favorite?" type threads, which are especially prominent due to the default activity sort. For example, if I look at what a new user on Tildes would see right now, in the first 20 posts we have:
And a few more that are similar as well. None of these are bad topics at all (especially the ones in ~talk where that should be expected), but they're pretty much all just "casual discussion" and not really what I'd consider particularly high-quality content. I don't want to discourage these or start removing them or anything, but I do think we probably need some changes to make them less prominent (or at least easily avoidable if people don't want to see that type of topic right now).
So here's my plans for the short term (all three should happen today, I think):
Let me know what you think of these plans, or if there's anything else you think we should consider doing.
Hacked together a simple markdown live preview, which works for both comments and also new posts submission.
To use, just install the extension and start typing on Tildes, you will see live preview. No settings to configure.
The code is open source and released under MIT. I am not really a JS dev, so any feedback is welcome.
Chrome extension - link
Firefox addon - link
Source code - link
What do you say, pals? I think we need business/startup category.
I know this doesn't happen often, but I've seen it happen a few times and I think it would be useful to have a notifications page for edited comments. When someone replies to me I get a notification, I can reply to it and/or mark it as read, and forget about it. Sometimes the person that replied to me edits the comment to add extra information, but since I've already marked it as read I may never see the added info. I'd like to receive a notification whenever one or more editions are made to a reply I received that I've already marked as read.
I don't know if I'm the only one here but sometimes I want to say something but I don't want it tied to my account, my reasoning being the more details I let slip eg:
I've worked in IT
I've lived in that town
I own a labradoodle
..these things all piece together till you can profile it down to one person, you essentially de-anonymize yourself the more comments you make. Being that this is a public forum anyone can scan this information now or in the future building a profile on users possibly identifying them as a person, this is an unintended side effect as we don't post online comments expecting them to be traceable to our person. Consider the fact that advancing computing power and AI may eventually make it trivial to do such a thing.
Sure you can regularly create new accounts but then you reset the trust system.
My suggestion is having the ability to post a comment but not display your username, you would still be accountable to the trust system it's just that outside Tildes's server you wouldn't be identified. This would still discourage people from being a jerk because they're still affected by the trust system.
I frequently read the hfy subreddit for a specific genre of writing[1]. This community predates reddit and came of of some writing forums on 4chan if I understand correctly. Recently they have been evaluating whether or not they should move again due to reddit ToS changes[2].
Would this community be interested in inviting them to Tildes? They are a well modded community with a long history and it might give a boost here bunch of users from a text based group
[1]www.reddit.com/r/hfy
[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/8nos9v/on_forums_the_community_and_transition/
Hey all,
One thing I always hated about Reddit was that a -20 post could have a +500 response, but the entire comment tree would be placed at the bottom of the thread.
I think it would be very cool if the value of child comments bubbled up through to the parent comment for the purpose of sorting.
Pros:
High quality responses to low quality posts would be more visible
Posts that provoke more discussion would be sorted higher than ones that don't, and posts that provoke high quality discussion would be sorted higher than low quality joke threads
Cons:
High quality posts that didn't provoke a lot of discussion might be pushed down
Probably abusable with coordination between multiple users
I apologize if this has already been planned or suggested before.
Thanks,
Urs
TL;DR: First impressions and suggestions: infinite scrolling; comment box position; collapse comment button too small; comment previews; vote button position; search function; expandable images/videos; remembering collapsed comments; spoiler tags; saving comments/posts; ninja edit; and keyboard hotkeys. Really enjoying my time here! Tildes has been growing on me.
Been browsing the website for a couple of days now and wanted to give my first impressions. To begin with I wanna say I'm enjoying Tildes a lot. At first I thought it was a cool idea, but thought I wouldn't really get into it too much since I'm quite fond of mindlessly browsing Reddit for simple funny content. This being more discussion oriented didn't really fit my usage. Turns out I was wrong lol Of course I had to force myself to use the website initially, but I quickly started browsing Tildes naturally and participating in threads and discussions. While I still browse Reddit, I've been coming over to Tildes whenever I can pay a little bit more attention to what I'm reading. Anyways, without further ado, here are my observations as far as features go:
First thing I noticed was the lack of infinite scrolling (having to click "next" to go to the next page).
As I found my way to the introductions post, I came across the comment box position problem, which has been discussed at length.
Browsing through the comments, I found that the button to collapse comments is too small. I think extending it vertically so that you can click anywhere on the left side of the comment to hide it would be ideal. Many subreddits have done that and it works great. Here's an example from /r/Overwatch (you can click anywhere on the yellow area to hide the first comment).
I also think a comment preview would be really useful and I've seen some other posts about it too.
Here's a potentially controversial one: a more obvious vote button. As I browsed more, I got to read more about the intentions behind Tildes and where its efforts are, so I can see how this would go against the general mindset of not turning this into a high score game. That said, this is a first impressions post and so it deserves mentioning.
Obligatory search function mention. I know everyone is aware of this, I'm just going through my list.
Another controversial one: expandable images/videos. I've read the discussions about it and I'm aware of the Reddit-ifying potential. With that said, I wanna play the devil's advocate here and say that images/videos are not necessarily low quality shitposts (case in point, the image I linked above to illustrate a suggestion). They are bound to be used and linked anywhere on the internet and I think this is a reasonable feature to have. In my mind, it's not the use of silly images that make a community low-effort, but the other way around. With the mindset we have here, I'd argue that images and videos would probably be used "appropriately".
Eventually, when I went back to threads I had already visited, I noticed the comments were all expanded again. Remembering hidden comments is something I consider really important, even more on a discussion focused board where you often go back to old threads to keep the conversation going.
I might have missed this one, but spoiler tags are definitely needed. I tried poking around to see if Markdown had built in spoiler tags, but I didn't find anything. If this already exists and I just overlooked it, I'm sorry.
Another important feature for me is saving posts and comments for future reference.
Pretty minor, but having a "ninja edit" feature would be nice. A grace period after submitting a post/comment where you can edit it without it being tagged as edited. This is useful for correcting typos or when you immediately change your mind about the wording of your post.
Another minor one would be keyboard hotkeys. I use RES hotkeys all the time to browse Reddit. Voting (which might not be particularly desirable here), hiding comments, expanding images (not very relevant unless this gets implemented), saving posts/comments (damn, none of these are relevant with the website as is) are all great to have mapped to the keyboard.
This ended up being a longer post than I expected. To finish things off, I'd like to say I'm really glad someone is willing to put time and effort into this. I like the ideals behind Tildes, the privacy concerns and the non-profit choice. If this takes half as much of my free time as Reddit used to, I'll definitely drop a donation!
Hi! I just joined today and I was a little surprised there's no way for a user to add their own groups, and that the existing list of groups is so small. @Deimos I do trust you have good reasons for everything, but I'm just ignorant: what's the downside to adding a bunch of new groups at once?
Just a quick idea: Seems like the only way to comment right now is to scroll to the bottom, but what if there's a text area box for posting a comment on the right sidebar? Seems like there's space for it underneath the post info, plus I don't think it will slow down the load time in any way. Thoughts?
Basically what the title says. I might like to look into making a third party Android/iOS app.
I browse by activity, like most of us, but every couple days I give a look to the most voted topics to see how the community is shaping the consolidated content because once we are at a more finalized code (trust, tags, etc) I think that the most voted content should reflect the most high quality as well.
I just realize that the default timing is 24h timespan. This means that the list show the most voted, created in the last 24h.
It is my opinion that on tildes we should give content more time to be consumed. We don't need the frenetic feeding of Reddit. Some people could just not open tildes today but maybe tomorrow, and lose good content with this default timespan.
I suppose registered users will be able to customise their home page default filtering but as "soon" we should open for reading without login, we should think about who just come by to read and is not registered (yet).
What's your opinion on this?
I'm joking, but only kinda... I'd be interested in my rate, as well as other peoples'.
I'm sure comment UI is at the bottom of the priority list right now, but I love nitpicking things.
I think there should be a separating line at the bottom of any comment chain.
What it looks like now and what it could look like.
Currently, anytime I see the bottom of a comment it is a bit jarring to not see clear evidence that the comment chain is over. It almost makes me think the CSS is broken whenever I see it.
Also, it would be nice to have alternating light and dark gray header bars for parent and child comments.
Just a minor UI thing - other people's vote count/vote button is on the bottom of their posts, while yours is on top. Just a bit jarring going from one to the other, is there any reason your post's vote count can't be in the same place?
the reason why reddit feels so fractured is because all sides of the political compass are so split. id like to see one single ~politics channel and see how it works out, if everyone can keep it civil.
You know, so we can all keep track of the people we most like to interact with.
I’ve seen some discussion about whether or not NSFW content should be allowed, but I’d just like to throw my suggestion out there.
Since some of the documentation mentions it, I think that most people are assuming that nsfw will be allowed. If it is allowed I’d like for pornography to be against the rules, while non pornographic NSFW content is allowed.
There’s a few reasons for this, mainly because tildes seems to be very community and discussion focused, and pornographic content doesn’t foster either a community or discussion (usually). Additionally, tildes doesn’t have anything unique to offer in this space, categorized pornography is something you can find in a multitude of places, and the design goals of tildes don’t contribute anything novel in pornography browsing.
General NSFW posts on the other hand I can see fostering some kind of community discussion, take a look at the the /r/sex subreddit as a decent example of a useful and moderated NSFW community (not perfect, but I do think it has a net positive impact on the reddit users who visit).
Normally I've been trying to use the Monday post to do a general "what's planned for the week?", but with all the attention and unexpectedly-quick growth last week I didn't get the main thing (open-sourcing) finished anyway, so this one wouldn't be much different.
Instead, I want to ask for input on what are the current missing or broken things that are the most surprising? That is, I don't want to talk about "this would be nice" things here; I want to focus on, "Is this really not there? Am I doing something wrong?"
Here are three examples that will hopefully make it a little more clear:
That's the level of things I want. Let me know what others are out there, I'm sure there are more. And two more quick things while I have your attention:
Thanks!
I'd like to suggest that the default view for topics look something like the image below, with expanded top level replies, and collapsed lower level replies. And have an option under each reply that would expand the next level of replies below it, continuing this behavior on down to the lowest level comments. There could even be an "Expand all below this comment", although I don't show that in this illustration.
That would all readers to quickly read through many or all of the direct responses to the topic before deciding which responses to dig into deeper. It would also help direct responses which aren't listed near the top get more exposure. The site could even be coded to delay loading lower level comments until an expand link is clicked, reducing page sizes and improving load times.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0u6vuopufierijp/TildesDefaultThreadDisplay.png?dl=0
A few updates related to groups today:
First of all, we now have our first actual sub-group with ~tildes.official . I've automatically subscribed everyone to it, and I'm currently the only one that can post in it. So if you'd like to make sure that you're seeing the official announcements and daily discussions but don't want all the suggestions and bug reports and such clogging up your home page, you can subscribe to ~tildes.official and unsubscribe from ~tildes. Subscribing to ~tildes will still give you the posts from both (regardless of whether you subscribe to ~tildes.official or not). I'll be moving the previous announcements and such into ~tildes.official eventually.
Also, as mentioned a few days ago, it's time to add a few more groups. As part of this, I've updated the groups list page a tiny bit to add the Subscribe/Unsubscribe button onto that page, so that you can easily tell which ones you're already subscribed to and change your choices. These are the new groups:
I know that there are a number of other ones that people are clamoring for as well (including sub-groups of existing ones), but I think it's important to go pretty slow with this. At this point I think we already have more groups than reddit did for years (and Digg ever had), but the site's population is lower than even a tiny single subreddit would be. Having things organized more is nice, but we don't want to fragment too quickly into a bunch of inactive groups.
One more thing I could use some help with: the short group descriptions on the groups list are pretty close to placeholders that I wrote very quickly. If anyone wants to suggest some new ones for any of the groups we could use to help make their purpose more clear, I'd love to update them with better ones.
Thanks, let me know what you think.
I'm really enjoying the mobile interface, if there is one improvement I would like to see be made is the ability to quickly swipe through on a touch interface and collapse comment threads that I want to skip. I'm using a larger phone, and have pretty big fingers, so I'm constantly hitting the username and accidentally begin reading their post history. Maybe I just have poor hand eye coordination, but the collapse button is small and really close to the edge of the screen.
This could easily be remedied in a couple ways, by either adding a couple more spaces between the button and username, or by making the button rectangular instead of square.
About 6 hours ago, I posted a thread with the suggestion that "guy" should be turned into a nongendered term. I did this after reading @Deimos' thread about how much of ~talk is "what's your favorite" type posts. So I took something I had noticed a bunch around here -- how the term "guy" gets tossed around a bunch, often to be corrected with "I'm not a guy," and I figured I'd make a post about how there really isn't an adequate word ("person" just sounds too formal to be a replacement for the gendered "guy").
Instead of saying "Hey, what word can we use in this instance," I framed it as a "Let's just use 'guy' for everyone, change my mind" and listed the ways the word "guy" already fit the bill. I did this in an effort to make the thread engage more than just the language nerds. This is where I feel I crossed the line into trolling, and regret having done so in this manner.
I did try to point out the problems with generalizing a male-gendered word, but a few commenters have pointed out that it read euphemistically. It was meant to be upfront about the issues inherent to what I was suggesting, but reading it again now it reads at best like a wink to the people who are already on the side of the argument I was hoping for and at worst it reads like a disingenuous ass-cover.
The thread blew up.
There is some good discussion in there. In fact, most of it seems to be, like most of the discussion on tilde, constructive and respectful. And all of it was genuine, or at least appears to have been so.
I won't try to walk it back and say it was satire, or a social experiment, or even a mistake. Mainly, it was something I felt clever for thinking of (and something I was to curious to see unfold). Sure, the thread got a lot of comments, but it also rustled some jimmies. And I think there was at least some subconscious part of my that recognized that as I was typing it.
I'll edit the OP with the clarity of 6 hours' hindsight, but I wanted to make a separate post apologizing for presenting an argument in an inflammatory manner. I've been a member of this community for a couple of days now and am very fond of it, and do not want to contribute to its degradation.
I keep hearing about it but I'm not sure how it's going to be implemented.
The post about group CSS got me thinking, if the identity of groups are allowed to develop enough it could become like reddit were you can't expect a consistent experience across the site, you'll have to know the etiquette of each group you visit, do they allow jokes here, only links or only text, not going off topic etc.
How far should/will it go?
I haven't logged in for a week or so (~tildes admin can tell me when I last lurked ;p) and it's looking better and better!
Reddits, especially worldnews, are looking more and more stagnant and Hacker News is getting stale too. Whereas tildes is looking nicer and nicer. Keep up the awesome work :D
I'm not very adept with markdown, and it's helpful to see what my comment will look like before I post it with my borked formatting.
A well known issue of reddit (and most of the internet these days) is gifs as a fundamentally more popular way to consume videos. There are good reasons for this in the current makeup of the internet with mobile browsers dominating the online space. Voters are likely to be using mobile browsers and mobile browsers are likely to be the dominant browser. Gifs have no sound which is preferable out-and-about, they also tend to load better than videos, especially if a user doesn't want to switch to a dedicated mobile app that will load that video or popup a "open in" notification. Even many PC users simply don't like the extra time it takes to load videos over a gifv.
This is however not preferable for a high-quality site. It results in content creators not getting views for their work. It results in sources of content not being posted at all on many occasions, even in comments. Many of the game subreddits have people that create gif clips of a video just because it will be more popular, then post the source video that it's from in the comments. It's not ideal.
How can this be solved?
I encourage everyone to answer this question using the wildest of fantasies, even if you think the idea might be unfeasible at a technology level. Let the people working with the code decide if its feasible or not, put forth your wildest idea to solve it.
I'll start: Perform processing of video to gif as a function of the site. Provide users with the ability to choose a preference of gif vs video. Give people the section of the video as a gif clip but also provide the content source with a view of the clipped section (somehow) so the source actually does get a view of that video in that section for its clipped part.
This potentially unfeasible suggestion provides the best of both worlds, providing the user with the type of clip they want (gif/video) which will be better for their browser while also providing the source creator with a view on their video even if the user views the gif. At the same time this also ensures that a majority of gif content (at least for videogames/twitch/youtube, the majority) actually does have the source because it used the site's own clipping tool to set the gif. No need to use anything else if it is site integrated.
Other ideas and thoughts on this topic? Programmable ways to solve it? Preferences? Moderation?
There are already a couple of (great) discussions going on related to comment tags, from different directions:
As I mentioned in a comment in the top one, I've disabled the ability to add/remove comment tags for now. They didn't have any actual, non-cosmetic functionality yet anyway, and they're being misused (not severely, but a bit) for various reasons and in various ways.
Obviously we can have lots of larger discussions about how to revamp the comment-tagging system significantly to make it better (and link it into the trust system and such, once that actually exists), but I'd like to try to talk about something more focused in this thread for the sake of expediency: are there any simple, minimal things that we could do to make comment-tagging "useful enough" to turn back on soon?
For example, maybe it would be enough for now to just drop or add some of the options, or make the comment tags non-anonymous so that we can see who added particular tags. I'm not saying we definitely should do those, because it very well might go wrong in other ways, but those are the types of ideas I'd like to talk about—relatively quick solutions that might address some of the misuse.
On Reddit it's easy -- Redditors. Ending in a vowel, Tildes makes that a bit less straightforward. This obviously is not a super high priority question, but I had the thought a few minutes ago. Are we Tilders? Tilds? ~rs? Anyone have any ideas that are a bit more creative and easier to say?
I think it's cool to see who invited a user on their profile page, but who have I invited? Is there a page I'm missing? I think it'd be cool to just see that stuff.
Some sort of public user tree would be pretty neat too.
Side question- after public release, will the invited by
section on old profiles continue to stay? I think that'd be a pretty cool way to show alpha testers imo.
When something big happens, there are often a lot of different posts, which results in the conversation being scattered all over the place. Is there any policies on users creating megathreads for these big events, or if there will be some kind of megathread system build into ~ in the future?
I think this site is a really neat concept, especially because the quality of discussion on Reddit has really deteriorated (which has happened concurrently with Reddit's shift from discussion and news to "repository of Internet culture"). I like online discussion, and IMO this site's design is better than Hacker News, so I'm probably going to start using this site. Is there anything I should know about this site? This is my first post and I'm not too sure how things work.
I like the design of the site! Looks like it could be a good alternative to Reddit, I look forward to chatting with you all!
As things get going and we start getting more specific branches coming off of the main groups, posts are supposed to bubble up the branches as they get enough votes. So that a post in ~games.boardgames wouldn't initially be visible to someone who is only subscribed to ~games, but would become visible if it gets popular enough.
There is a danger of branches becoming so popular that they overwhelm the main group.
I'm thinking that it might be a good idea to "weight" the branches inversely to the number of subscribers it has. Meaning that a post in branch with 10,000 subscribers would require more votes to bubble up than a post in a branch with 1000 subscribers.
Thoughts?