For example, many people in ~tech would not care about ~tech.apple and most people who care about Apple wouldn't care about ~tech.apple.jailbreak.
After we discussed this the other day, I've now changed it so that you can no longer see who a user was invited by. While some people did like it being public, I think the benefits of keeping it public were pretty minor, and there were legitimate concerns about privacy on the opposite side.
So now it's still stored internally and I'll be able to use it to see if someone is repeatedly inviting users that cause problems, but it won't be shown on the site any more. This means that invites are now effectively anonymous—neither the inviter or the invitee will know the other's username if they don't want to reveal it themselves, and other users won't be able to see any relationship between them either.
Hopefully this will help make some people feel less hesitant about inviting others, and as I mentioned earlier in the daily discussion post, you've all been topped back up to 5 invite codes again.
~ takes privacy pretty seriously, which I’m a big fan of. Can’t say I’ve seen any other sites where even your email is hashed, but I like it.
What I’m curious about are the invite codes. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Deimos is going to do anything nefarious, but I did use one of my personal (albeit secondary) emails to request my invite code. Thus, would it be possible to trace the invite code used to create my account back to that email in any way? Or is the code not stored anywhere once it’s used?
Edit: yes, I realize this account uses my real name, and I’ve linked to my personal gitlab before. For the time being in a community this small, I don’t mind. I may end up creating a new account when the website opens the floodgates, but that’s neither here nor there.
Some sort of "friends" feature would be a welcome addition. I've had some great conversations with folks and would like to be able to keep track of them so 1) I can remember that I like them and 2) so I can keep up with their interesting posts.
Thanks for considering!
EDIT grammar
This is a topic I wanted to talk about late last week, since there were a few posts related to it coming up at the time. For example: "Idea: requiring submission statements for link‐based topics, at least in certain groups". This is interesting to me, so I wanted to turn it into a bit more of an official discussion.
I think there's a bit of a conflict here, where people have different ideas of what purpose they're coming to the site for. There are some people in that thread (and some other similar ones) with an opinion that external links are a bit inherently "lazy", or even unnecessary if they can't trigger a discussion. I disagree pretty strongly with that - good discussion is definitely one of the things I want Tildes to have, but it's not a requirement for every single post. If people want to share songs on ~music, trailers on ~movies, interesting articles on ~news and so on, that should be a good thing.
As a specific example of what I mean, I submitted this article from Wired earlier today. It's an interesting, well-researched article that goes into depth on the story, and I enjoyed reading it. The reason I'm submitting it is because I think other people would enjoy reading it too, not because I want to start a discussion on it. If a discussion happens, that's great, but it's not the actual purpose of why I'm submitting.
I want Tildes to be able to cover both of these: help bring good content to people's attention, and also foster good discussions (whether those are attached to external content or not). I think right now it's a bit tilted towards the discussion side (the "Activity" sort as default is probably a big factor), so I guess I'm looking for general thoughts about how we can try to balance this and serve both purposes.
The ability to set different default sorts for individual groups probably helps some, and I think topic filtering based on tags will help a lot as well for people that are more interested in one side or the other. What else should we consider?
Inspired by this thread in ~talk from this morning, I think it would be good to start thinking about how to define some more formal guidelines for what sort of behavior we do (and don't) want to see in the discussions on Tildes. I'd like to put something together that can be on the Docs site and linked to fairly prominently, and used as a reference to help people understand what's expected here.
As an example, Hacker News has some pretty good ones (the bottom half, under "In Comments"). We should be able to do something quite similar to that, so let me know if you think any of theirs are particularly good or if there are other ones that you'd like to see covered. I know many of you are involved in other online communities too, so I'd also be curious to see links to other sites' guidelines you think are done really well.
Please focus on comments only for now, and we can have another discussion soon about guidelines related to topics/submissions (there will be some crossover, I'm sure). Thanks, input is appreciated as always.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no good fit for topics ranging from personal finance, investing, portfolio management, budgeting, running a business, markets, etc. Seems ~finance or similar could be a catch-all for a massive category of topics that don't have a place currently.
One of the unfortunate realities of open source efforts is that these efforts are often fragmented and scattered all over the place, making things difficult to find. With that in mind, I've started a new GitLab project here consisting of a simple README file that we can use to start tracking the client-side themes and extensions that the community here has been hard at work developing.
The list, at the time of posting this, is empty. The README is sparse and the entire thing is subject to change by the community itself. I will only be reviewing changes to ensure that changes are acceptable before a merge is allowed through (we don't want e.g. malicious links thrown in or perfectly good projects removed by someone acting in bad faith). You can change contribution notes/guidelines, existing language, layout, categories, and whatever else you can think of. If there's something else that you think the repository could use aside from the README, then you're free to issue a merge request to have it reviewed as well.
I'm hoping that this will help us keep track of everything and aid future users in discovering the various tools and themes provided by the community.
Please feel free to discuss guidelines here. Is there anything that shouldn't be allowed on the list? Is there anything that should be taken care of immediately? Are there any immediate concerns? Is there anything else on your mind?
I know there's ~news, but I'm talking a place that specifically focuses on long, insightful articles rather than recent events. Since tildes wants to emphasize depth, I think it would be a good fit.
I see there aren't a whole lot of groups at the moment, so perhaps this would be something to consider further down the line.
Bots can be fun, helpful, entertaining etc. but they also contribute, directly or indirectly, to low quality content. Once the API is ready, should/will bots be allowed?
I'm glad we got that extra highlight for OP comments on a post. However, sometimes when scrolling down a post, and looking for OP's comments, I will stop thinking I've found one when actually it's just a quote inside someone else's comment, which is highlighted with the same color.
Maybe we could get rid of the quote highlight and just use the indentation and lighter background? Or use another color for either of the two? Or do you think it's fine like it is now?
NOTE: I always browse of mobile and use the solarized dark theme, not sure if this is the same with other settings.
But was just really generous with giving out invite codes to its users, even host invite request threads where anonymous (non-registered) users can request an invite or something?
I think this could work and would help with the whole tree aspect tildes is holding on. Everything leads back to a tree. Groups, users, tags even mods and admins. Perhaps even keep the tree visible to only people in said tree and mods/admins, depending on user privacy settings.
What would the benefits of remaining invite only and cons?
What is the reason for displaying vote count? Could we bring even more focus to the content of a post/comment by not displaying the vote count? What would we lose if vote count is removed?
Edit: It is more transparent if the vote count is displayed. Either way I believe it requires some trust from the user that the site mechanics as vote count and sorting system is working as claimed.
Hi! This is a minor suggestion, but when you're browsing Tilde, the vote button for comments is located at the bottom left, underneath posts. Makes sense right? Well unfortunately, this doesn't apply to your own comments, where the vote counter appears in the top left, at the beginning of the post. For consistency's sake, I was wondering if it would be a good idea to move vote counts on individual comments down to where the vote button normally is, so vote counts are always displayed in the same location?
I posted about it three days ago but in these last three days I really worked my ass off to include lots of functionalities and feel like the community is missing a lot of topics...
So, sorry, I won't spam this for the next days every three days but I felt like it deserved to be "bumped" in the activity feed at least once now that the default is just 24h.
As of today, the features are:
I'll just link to the original topic so you can have some context if you want, otherwise these are just the links to download it:
I need feedback to know what else you'd like to see implemented or what have bugs or could be done in a different/better way!
Hey all,
There's been a huge amount of response to this post about Hyponotoad's banning that I think merits a lot more consideration than as just a bunch of fractured comment threads.
Some questions that come to mind:
~ What does it mean to have "quality discussion",?
~ How do you distinguish between quality discussion and not quality discussion?
~ What does it mean to act in "bad faith"?
~ How, as a community, do we best achieve tildes' stated goals?
Tsirist suggested this earlier today, and I think it's a pretty good topic, so let's just do it today.
Currently, on each user's page you can see who they were invited by. However, that's the full extent of what's shown about invites right now. The opposite relation isn't easily public (that is, there's no way to see a list of all users that were invited by someone), and you can't even currently see a list of which users you've invited yourself.
Some people think that these invite relationships should be more public, and some people think it should be even less than it already currently is. For example, some people want to be able to invite others without those people knowing their username, which is currently impossible.
I think that at least tracking the "invite tree" is important overall during the invite-only phase, but it doesn't necessarily need to be public information to serve this purpose. What do you think? Should we show more information about invites? Less? Leave it exactly how it is?
Actually I didn't at first. But getting involved in more contentious discussions I've come to realize the downvote was merely used as a weapon for groupthink. It was used to facilitate echochambers by killing off dissenting voices so that they don't even show up. Taking Reddit for example, it happens across subreddits of all political ideologies - left and right - and even subs like /r/Android for criticizing things like the Pixel haha.
But I am guilty of this too, don't get me wrong. When I see a comment I dislike I itch to whack that downvote button and sometimes even do. Here, though, not having it forces me and others to actually engage the commentor they disagree with and get a good conversation out of it. I think this is so important if we want to be a site that facilitates good discussion and not easy to follow groupthink. Because I've noticed a large difference in even my own actions by how I am forced to respond to things without it.
Older comments have an unfair advantage on Tildes if you sort by votes: they have had more time to collect votes.
What's interesting is that Reddit is less affected by this problem: since the default sort is "best", which sorts by expected (in a statistical sense) upvote/downvote ratio, newer comments with a good ratio can quickly move to the top.
I don't see a straightforward way to extend this to Tildes, since we don't have downvotes. Any ideas? Of course you can sort by newest first, but then you lose the benefit of votes entirely.
Maybe we could compute the expected final number of votes, based on age, current score, and a model of how comments gather votes as they age? Is there a way to download tildes data somewhere? I could try to investigate.
I think this idea strongly aligns with Tildes philosophy of promoting "quality content", what is more quality than knowing a poster is qualified to make their claims. It separates the pseudo-science from the science.
I understand it is perhaps a cumbersome process to verify qualifications but the reward in return for having verified experts validated is hard to overstate.
I propose the flair be global and not restricted to within a group(as opposed to reddit) because if we're certain the individual has credentials that still remains in effect when they comment across disciplines. It also removes redundancy and allows the individual more freedom to branch to other communities.
The idea being if someone has a PhD in math they can flair their name with something like "PhD: Math" per post if they wish. As this is a voluntary addition (not collection) of user-data I don't think it goes against Tildes philosophy.
So I've been having a slightly off-topic discussion on a thread here and figured this would be a good subject to have wider input on.
I don't think markdown adds anything to Tildes and I think it actually degrades the experience for new users. Right now we're mostly old experienced reddit users and mods, but that hopefully will change. To me, markdown adds a not insignificant hurdle to formatting. Markdown has very few uses besides reddit and Github, and even then there's a few different types.
I suggest a WYSIWYG text box with a tabbed HTML option for those who want to use code formatting. Let's use something that's standard and encourages users to learn useful code.
Tell me why I'm wrong Tildes!
Edit: I primarily use mobile, so maybe that's part of the disconnect here. But it seems I'm the only person who cares and still thinks markdown is almost useless. I'm fine being in the minority. I still feel it's a good idea to look beyond the bleeding edge to the time when there's 300,000 or 3,000,000 uses.
Have a good day everyone!
I think it would be rather cool and suited to tildes style of conversation to have some sort of referencing system built into markdown that is similar to Wikipedia's. Users can format a link so that it appears as a superscript number in the main bulk of the text and then also appears at the bottom of the post automatically after being posted in the classic number referencing style. It could look something like this, where the webpage title would be given as well next to the page and cutoff after a certain amount of characters (please excuse my terrible paint skills). This is clearly not a necessity as we could still just use standard square and normal brackets to insert links, but I think it would be rather nifty to have a built in system that automatically creates a mini list of references, especially if the user writes a rather long, well thought out argument that might require more than a few citations.
There. I said it. when discussions get bigger as the site grows I will probably want some tools to manage that but I really like the very unsubtle poke towards reading over writing.
One of the features that I use on Reddit is the 'save' button. I like to be able to return to a post a day (or two) later and see where the discussion went after I first looked at the comments section. Is this functionality going to be implemented into Tildes as well?
Save button: https://i.imgur.com/eVBA839.png
Haven't been on much for a few days, so this may have been discussed, but I think it would be really nice to have the ability to have multiple subscription groups per user (I'd be happy to work on this once the code is open-sourced if people are interested).
The reason I suggest this is that I was realizing earlier that sometimes when I log in I'm just looking for computing, tech, and science stuff while at other times I'm looking to engage in some longer conversation about current events. I think it would be very nice to be able to have multiple subscription groups so that, depending on what I'm looking for during a given visit to the site, I could focus on that but still change it to something else easily next time I come online.
The title says it all. As of now we have no bug reporting function besides e-mail. Maybe we could use another subgroup of tildes for that.
I'd like to suggest site search as a Tildes feature. It would be useful to know if a topic has already been discussed by people on the site. For instance I don't know if a search feature has already been discussed.
Or perhaps I noticed a topic I wanted to follow up on later that I can't find now. Or I there was a reply that said something interesting I wanted reference, etc...
Right now it seems like a pretty happy and active alpha community.
But even if you set aside all the Russian-bought advertising during the last US election, all social media sites currently have a problem with propaganda. You can call it by other names: hail corporate, shills, AstroTurf, bot armies, sockpuppets, etc. But it eats quality discourse, kills genuine community, and at the most extreme can serve to radicalize the young and marginalized.
What pieces of Tildes are currently in place or planned fight this scourge of digital communication? What are the pitfalls and what are the successes you've seen? Because I believe if we ignore this eventuality, something really special will die.
Sorry this is so late today, I had to go out and do some things, and didn't get back until much later than I was expecting. Since it's so late, I'm just going to do a simple one, and save my original planned topic for tomorrow or Monday:
What other topics do you think would be good to discuss in these daily posts? Are there particular mechanics, plans, concerns that you'd like to see covered?
Can we get an Edit history on posts (also potentially comments).
This is sparked by a post a few days ago in which a poster asked a question about people's standpoints on gay marriage and then published their standpoint as well, heavily against gay marriage.
I made my comment here questioning them on their standpoint and they edited their post without any evidence, making it look like I was jumping to conclusions.
Post history would prevent this kind of thing and would also equip commenters with the ability to see what OP has changed.
Please let me know if you agree or disagree for whatever reason, I am interested to hear other people's thoughts.
Edit: The poster in my comment link was banned shortly after that post. Linked by @Jedi here.
There is a user I do not wish to mention to prevent a witch Hunt or if I am wrong. In the past two days I have seen them post two topics with fairly contentious topics, but nothing was wrong with the topic itself. The user however, has a flame bait sentence in each of these posts, ex. "I am against homosexual marriage". He then waits for a few heated responses and then edits out the flame bait sentence.
This makes it look like an innocuous post is suddently full of hot heads immediately starting fights based off their assumptions and not what the user posted.
How do we deal with what seems like a troll that operates like this? I won't be posting on his posts anymore as you shouldn't feed the troll, but he definitely got me the first time and it's unreasonable to expect everyone to always be on the lookout for this.
Edit: to everyone saying I am jumping the gun by accusing him of being a troll. That may very well be, which is why I declined to name the user. Even if it's not intentional, it's causing problems if we want this to be a place for high quality discussion. Messaging @deimos has been suggested as an option and is probably the best choice for now but will not scale. What should be our solution to this issue going forward that scales?
There's now a new checkbox available on your settings page for "Automatically mark all notifications read when you view the Unread Notifications page". It's off by default so that I wasn't surprising anyone by changing the current behavior.
I figured this would be a quick one to add, and it's a little simpler than a "mark all as read" button (since it doesn't have to worry about new notifications that came in after loading the page but before clicking the button).
Currently on the home page I have the list of my subscription in the sidebar, but if I click on ~tildes for example, they're all gone. I think it would make sense to see ~tildes.official in there, to make navigation easier.
New user here, just got invited and started poking around the site, and the thing that most stands out to me is the bright white theme of the site.
Its a big trend that most sites seem to not be catching onto, users want a dark theme at least as an option, because the blinding white webpages at this point almost seem dated, and if you're browsing at night/in a not very well lit room, they come off as harsh, sometimes almost blinding. You can see the demand for this being fulfilled with plugins on most sites, as the websites themselves seem to be slow to act. YouTube for instance is terrible with its default white scheme, but pretty nice if you do the "secret" dark theme. Slack too, although I use a plugin for that, same with Reddit and using RES to turn on a dark theme.
So while I know the list of things to do is probably a mile long, a dark theme would go a long way to making the site more appealing I think, and give it an edge as a more "modern" website.
When you’re universally beloved (or just posting a lot of open-ended discussion threads, one of the two), you can get a lot of replies in your inbox, and it can be a pain to mark them as read one by one. It’d be nice just to be able to zap them all.
Or, if there’s a way to do this already, please let me know.
I get that it doesn't spark conversation but couldn't someone who doesn't want that just not click on it?
I'm curious what people think of lobste.rs. There seems to be a lot of overlap in goals, although lobste.rs is explicitly technology focused.
One of the common issues that I've run into on reddit as a moderator is that lots of people put in a link and then put a bunch of text into the text area, and then they have a text link with no link.
I realize that you may have built things already in a way that is fundamentally not supportive of this, but I wonder about allowing both to coexist within one post?
Sorry for the lateness on this one today - this is a topic that's been very important on reddit lately, since the redesign is taking away a lot of customization from subreddits by taking away their ability to use full CSS and moving towards more limited tools. I wanted to get some thoughts from the people here so far about whether allowing similar levels of customization on Tildes seems like a good idea.
This probably wouldn't happen in the near future anyway, so don't worry too much about the "how" of it. I know that if we support it here it would have to be a fair amount different because there aren't really "owners" of particular groups or anything like that. For now, let's just talk about whether it seems like a good idea at all.
I don't want to bias the discussion about it too much, but just a few general thoughts about it from my end:
It's a pretty vague topic, but I'm curious what people's general opinions about it are, so let me know what you think.
I'm currently using 24 hour sort, and it's great, minus one thing - threads older than 24 hours just disappear. Perhaps a better implementation would be to keep the threads showing up underneath the <24 hour ones, but prevent them from being bumped up by new posts.
Example - if I go to ~comp right now, there are only 5 posts. Older ones, imo, should still be visible, just no longer bumping.
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.
