A lot of the time I'll see a discussion I don't have the chance to participate in the moment I see it. It would be nice to be able to "save" it so I could revisit later without having to hunt. Similarly, being able to do the same for comments would be handy for when someone links to something I want to follow-up on or fully explore when I have more time at hand.

Even if only implemented in localStorage per client, I feel it would be a useful addition.

In governance, sortition (also known as allotment or demarchy) is the selection of political officials as a random sample from a larger pool of candidates. The logic behind the sortition process originates from the idea that “power corrupts.” For that reason, when the time came to choose individuals to be assigned to empowering positions, the ancient Athenians resorted to choosing by lot. In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was therefore the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials, and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of true democracy.

Today, sortition is commonly used to select prospective jurors in common law-based legal systems and is sometimes used in forming citizen groups with political advisory power (citizens' juries or citizens' assemblies).

The mechanics would be something like this: users report a post/comment, when there's enough reports the systems randomly selects 3/5/7/... currently active users and ask them to determine if the reported post contravene to the rules. The decision is then automatically taken with a majority rule.

Why ?

1. It's the only system that scales (to my knowledge). More users mean more content to moderate, but since the users are also moderators the system works at any scale. Systems that don't scale lead to all kind of problems when the number of users become large.
2. It's very robust to manipulation. As moderators are chosen randomly it's very hard to coordinate or try to influence the decisions.
3. It promotes a participatory attitude and a sense of responsibility in the users. There's no "them against us" (the bad mods against the users).

Not sure if this has already been suggested, but can we get an ability to add ourselves to a post as a "listener" so that we get notifications similar to "N new reply"? For cases where we're interested in following the discussion, but may not have anything to add, or just interested in someone else's thread in the discussion.

The subscribe button is very attractive, but it's a little hard to tell the difference between "Subscribe" and "Subscribed"

Options:

1. Use more dissimilar colors
2. Change text for subscribed users to say "Unsubscribe" like another site does. Alternatively, change text for unsubbed users to say "Not subscribed".

A lot of the newer websites and services now offer 2FA so I was wondering if Tildes has any plans to do that? No idea how hard it would be to implement but I feel like that would be a welcome addition for many people.

I'd also be happy to hear people's thoughts on this an if you guys think the website actually needs this. In my mind more security is always better than less security.

I was reading a discussion about this on here earlier today, and I've already lost it! 😬 Sorry if this is just creating more noise, but we clearly need better ways to find content. The search feature will go a long way, but here are some other ideas:

Tag search. On any topic with tags, the tags should be clickable links to URLs like https://tildes.net/tag/elder+scrolls. This page would show all topics that use that tag, with sort and filter options. There should be a way (maybe built into the search form) to type any tag and jump straight to this page.

Recently viewed topics list. Reddit shows a sidebar listing the last n posts you viewed. It's admittedly a little creepy seeing your history displayed like that, but it's a useful way to jump back into conversations for follow-up later. The old Reddit design had a "clear" button to delete the history, but curiously that is no longer present in the redesign. (Privacy features like that should not be overlooked here.)

Saved topics. Another feature from Reddit. Every post has a "Save" link below it, that adds the post to your personal saved posts list, which can reached from your profile. Saved post lists are only visible to the users that own them.

Repost detection. I really like how Ask MetaFilter helps posters make sure their content is fresh before they publish it. The submit button under the new post form is labeled "Preview" and clicking it shows what the post will look like before publishing it. This gives posters the opportunity to proofread and ensure their text formatting is correct. More importantly, the site scans the content of the post and displays a list of five possible existing posts that match it:

The following previously-posted questions might be related to the question you're asking. Please take a look before posting to see if any of these answer your question.

This flow adds an additional click before you can actually post, but I think it's for the best. The slowdown politely nudges you toward considering the quality and originality of what you're about to say, without being overbearing. The main MetaFilter site also checks all URLs you enter to see if anyone has posted them before. Note that these tools don't prevent anyone from posting, they just empower users to avoid reposting and reinforce good posting behaviors.

Repost flagging. I have a half-baked idea about allowing users to flag topics as reposts, but I haven't seen this implemented before. This would be separate from voting. A user wishing to flag a topic would be asked to provide the URL of an existing topic it duplicates. This wouldn't affect the topic itself, other than to add a small banner to the top of the page: "n users flagged this as a repost of the following topics: [list of links]". Then anyone would have the ability to [agree], [disagree], or append a link to the list. Public consensus would affect the future of the topic... if enough others agree the topic is redundant, it could be auto-deleted or just algorithmically prioritized lower than non-reposts. If enough disagree, the flag could be auto-removed from the topic. The usernames of the flaggers should be public, and there should be a way to view both a user's frequency of flagging and whether consensus agreed with those flags. Accountability would be important for this sort of system.

Ability to subscribe to users. I saw the other feature request for a "friend" mechanic. I agree with the commenters who said it would be too much like a social network. However, I could see a use case for a "Subscribe" button on a user's profile page, just like the ones on group pages. This would cause all topics posted by that user to be included in your main page, even if they are in groups you aren't subscribed to.

I'd be interested to hear your feedback on these suggestions, as well as other ideas specific to increasing content visibility.

I am an occasional lynx/elinks user and I only have a single complaint about Tildes that prevents me from reading it using those browsers. Threaded comments don't display properly, since the CSS support of these browsers is non existent (lynx) or poor (elinks), the only way to make threaded comments display nice is by rendering them as ul lists. Is it possible to wrap the current article elements inside ul/li elements to make them display nice in text-only browsers?

For comparison, I can get them to display nice on reddit using the old mobile interface. In Tildes threads look flat (those comments are supposed to be nested, link to original thread) and it is difficult to know who is replying to who.

There have been many, many, many threads over the past few weeks in which users (some new, some with a few posts under their belts) ask questions or make suggestions about items that are explicitly discussed in the documentation. Additionally, the documentation contains a lot of thoughtful items discussing the goals of the site and the mechanics for achieving those goals. The documentation is an integral part of this community, yet many people don't seem to be reading it.

How can the community help ensure that users read and understand the documentation prior to becoming a member of the community? A potential solution could be to have a short quiz based on the documentation, which would ensure that users at least skim it.

Any other ideas?

One thing I ended up realizing is that for e.g. code challenges in ~comp, there could be threads with a lot of code blocks that could easily take up a ton of screen real-estate. Something like the following isn't so bad:

/*
    This is a short multi-line example that doesn't
    take up much screen real-estate at all.
*/

But, what if the average comment for a particular topic has several of these with 100 lines or more? This could make navigating the comments really cumbersome as the number of comments grows. In the case of code challenges, lengthy code snippets could be very common, and collapsing the comment threads may not be the desirable course of action--in collapsing the thread for navigational convenience, you lose the ability to view and contribute to discussions. Hosting the code elsewhere risks links expiring or becoming lost or broken, and it feels like a clunky workaround to try to avoid inconveniencing other users.

With that in mind, what are your thoughts on having these code blocks display in a collapsed state by default with only a preview of the code block showing? Is there any support for this idea? If so, should this be implemented as part of Tildes itself or as a client-side extension of some sort? Are there any concerns about this?

(If there's general support for the idea, but opposition toward adding it to the Tildes code base, I may get off my lazy ass and try to hack something together.)

Over on ~creative, the idea of a regular photo challenge came up, which I think is a great idea and I'm looking forward to having a go at. But I'm notoriously bad at remembering to keep track of stuff like that.

What might be useful to help solve that problem would be the ability to subscribe with notifications. So I can get a notification - perhaps in 'unread', perhaps in a separate area - when a post is made with the tag creative.photochallenge.annouce or in the group ~creative.photochallenge, meaning I don't forget about that week's challenge announcement.

This could be useful for other things you want to keep track of: music.newreleases or hobbies.geocaching or whatever particular thing you're slightly more interested in than just being subscribed to it.

I was wanting to look into how to make one for this website because I'd like to browse on my phone. We got a lot of tech people here. What do you think?

Edit: I know it's not likely now, but I mean in the future. Is this something we could do when this turns open-source?

Ok so I have been really interested in Tildes and yesterday I was looking at the /r/Tildes subreddit and low and behold I was in time to comment in the invite thread and get one. This was great I have been really excited to see what it was like.

So I hope on and get familiar with the layout, look at some posts and some comments. Really digging it, I want to say it has a minimal vibe but that is only because I'm used to so many sites having a gajillion buttons, notifications, chats, garbage, ect. It's clean for lack of a better word.

I decided I should contribute to the community and see what posting is like. I remembered a simple joke which gave me a chuckle the other day:

'I like my Women like I like my golf scores. In the 80's with a slight handicap.'

With the hectics of the real world, I didn't have much longer to look around any longer and had to go.

When I checked back later people seemed against the posts, after reading the comments I was conflicted. It seemed like such a tame joke and people were saying they didn't want to see jokes on Tilde. I had a bit of a think and realised the problem, of course, that one post by itself is relatively harmless and ok but if you allow posts along those lines it becomes very spammy which is exactly why I don't like reddit as much anymore.

Jokes are a relatively low effort post, you could come up with several poor ones in a minute, that's what twitter is for. However, if people come and see that jokes are the norm it will likely encourage them to post them as well, and it resorts to a huge unbalance in quality posts.

I am in favour of removing all kinds of jokes that come in the form of a standalone post (if they are in the comments I feel they should remain ok). Some were saying they were ok with a dedicated ~jokes however I thought about it and feel this would be a poor decision, it still leads to people like me who can easily make low effort posts. The problem is that the number of good jokes will be rare in comparison to bad jokes it would be a net loss in terms of quality, sure you could moderate out the poor jokes but humour is subjective and that leads to all sorts of opinion based complications that are best left alone.

While I myself agree with this sentiment I still posted a dumb joke. Why? Because I didn't know. Admittedly only 4 people voted on the post and the comments aginst the post were much higher than the post itself it is still essentially spam on the feed. (The only reson for not deleting it is so others can see its negative response). Now I have posted this im very aware not to do this. However I still made this mistake while Tildes is a closed invite system, when it is no longer closed off it could be very easy for low effort posts to take over. The community needs to make sure we inform these people who make these posts and don't vote on them, or we should inform the users much better about what tildes stands for.

Just my thoughts, interested to know what the community thinks.
My original dumb joke post

Tags [noise, troll, flame, off-topic] got abused and used as an "I disagree" function. What if Tildes requires an explaination/argument for why the comment/post is either noise, off-topic, trolling/flaming. This way we can hold taggers responsible and accountable for the tags and to some degree see if the tag is reasonable or misused. All the reasons for the tags can be gathered on a "discussion" page for the thread, a bit like Wikipedia's talk pages for each entry.

If you've made it this far I'd love to hear your thoughs, reactions and critiques.
And for those who've made it this far: Enjoy this photogenic cat

One thing that's always annoyed me about reddit is that sorting a thread by "new" isn't as useful as scrolling down to the end of a discussion on traditional forum software like phpbb. I propose two ways of sorting threads:

• Breadth-first: Exactly the same as the current sort on reddit and tildes. Each nesting level is sorted independently.
  This sort makes it easy to find the oldest discussion of a thread, as well as new top-level comments.
• Depth-first: Newer replies 'bump' threads. The timestamp of the latest reply of any depth determines the sorting of all of the parents.
  This sort makes it easy to find the newest discussion.

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.

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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?

At the moment the groups page shows a full list of groups with a button beside each: either Subscribe or Subscribed. It's not very clear, at a glance, which ones are subscribed as there is no colour difference and the terms differ only by the last letter. I personally think it would be better if it showed 'unsubscribe' for the ones you're already subscribed to, and even better if this were in green.

I've found that it's difficult to keep track of threads I found interesting but are no longer highly active, especially without a search function. My suggested solution is the ability to subscribe to updates on a topic/thread (whatever you want to call it) and enable easy access to checking up on the thread for updates without having to receive a direct reply to my comment on the topic. If this already exists and I'm just blind, let me know!

We know how it gets on reddit during the summer holidays and I don't think anyone would suggest making an age restriction for the site, but if something is upvoted by 99% kids then it's probably not interesting to me.

So I guess the question I'm posing is:

'How do we filter out stuff that's blatantly outside of my demographics interest'

I'm guessing my suggestion of age filtering is going to run against Tildes ethics about not collecting user data, so perhaps someone will have a better solution in the comments.

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).

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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)