The activity on Tildes has been (mostly) slowly dropping for a while. To be clear up front, it's definitely not doing badly at all and I'm not worried about it—it's still very good for how early this is, the fact that the site is invite-only, and that we haven't had a real "burst" of people for almost a month now.

Just as a point of comparison, saidit.net (a reddit clone that's been trying to get attention and doesn't have restricted registration) has had 9 comments and 3 submissions posted in the last 24 hours. Tildes is far, far better off than that and is already doing better than most community sites ever get to. Here's the last month of stats:

So the numbers are still quite good overall, but there's an obvious downward trend in there. I'd like to talk about what you think is behind this—is it just a bit of a feedback loop, where the activity isn't very high, so people get bored and the activity drops more? Or are there other causes? For those of you that feel like you're drifting away a bit, are there any particular reasons, or anything that would encourage you to participate here more?

We probably also just need another influx of users before much longer—it's been nice for me to have it a little quieter so I can focus on coding things more than community-management lately, but we're obviously not at the point yet where the activity is self-sustaining. On that note, I haven't given out invite codes for a while, so I've given everyone 5 again. You can get them here (and always, if you need more for a particular reason, just send me a message and let me know): https://tildes.net/invite

Let me know what you think. There are still quite a few high-priority things that I'm trying to get done in the near future, but if there are other changes we could make to try to help keep the site active, I think they're definitely worth considering.

This week, I'm trying to focus on the last few pieces needed to finally get the site's code open-sourced (really, I am!). One of those pieces is that we'll need a group on Tildes for discussing development, answering related questions, and so on. The obvious location for this is something like ~tildes.dev, but adding it opens up a few questions related to the group hierarchy in general, so that's what I want to talk about today.

Currently, we only have one subgroup on the site, this one (~tildes.official). The way it works right now, if you visit or subscribe to ~tildes, you will also see the content from ~tildes.official. You also have the option of going to ~tildes.official directly, so that you see only the content from that group without the posts from its parent group. However, there's no way to see only the content from ~tildes without ~tildes.official. This will become more significant when ~tildes.dev is added, because that group will probably only be interesting to a small group of the site's users—people that are involved in (or interested in) the actual code/development behind the site.

So now we have a more interesting case, a subgroup that most people looking at the parent probably won't want to see. How should this work in practice? Some more specific questions that might help thinking through it:

• When someone visits ~tildes, do they see ~tildes.dev posts in there?
• When someone subscribes to ~tildes, are they automatically subscribed (implicitly or not) to both ~tildes.official and ~tildes.dev?
• If someone only wants to see the content from ~tildes and ~tildes.official, what sort of process should they need to go through to make that happen?
• How might these ideas work once the hierarchy gets much larger (for example, imagine a ~games with hundreds of subgroups inside many branches)?

Any input about the topic is appreciated—try not to worry too much about whether a plan is "perfect", we can always adjust it as the hierarchy actually starts becoming more extensive.

I'm continuing to inch closer to finally open-sourcing the site, and one of the aspects of having it open-source is that other people will be able to start contributing fixes/improvements/etc. To keep this process organized, I want to treat the issue tracker as the "definitive source" of what needs to be done, who's working on it, etc. A lot of the existing plans and known issues are already in there, but there are certainly some things missing.

I'm not expecting anyone to register a GitLab account to help with this, but I'd appreciate it if some of you would take a quick look through the issue tracker (which you don't need an account to do), do some quick searches for features/fixes that you know should be planned, and make sure that they seem to be present: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues

If you notice anything missing (or aren't sure if it's there), please just leave a comment here about it, and I can make updates.

Thanks, any help is appreciated (and if you have any other general questions about how the open-sourcing/contributions/etc. are going to work, please feel free to ask as well).

I added topic tag filters a few weeks ago, which should make it so that people can more easily filter out certain types of topics that they're not interested in.

How much further should we consider going with filters? Should we allow filtering out posts from certain domains by default? Posts with certain words or phrases in their titles? Other possibilities?

Is there a point where it's possible to filter out too much, too easily and that starts having negative effects on the site? What do you think?

It's been a couple of weeks since we last did a "general" post, so I think it's about time for another one.

If there's anything you wanted to ask about or give feedback on but didn't want to start a thread about it, feel free. You're always welcome to send me a private message with anything as well, I don't mind at all.

I know things have been a bit slow for updates over the last couple of weeks, but there's a lot happening in the background. Thanks for your patience with everything, and all the input on everything.

This has been requested a number of times, sorry for all the lost comments in the meantime.

The site should now ask you to confirm if you try to leave a page with an "unfinished" topic, comment, or message. This includes starting to write new ones, but also covers the forms for editing a post. It should only trigger if you actually make any changes, so if you click "Edit" on a comment/topic, but don't edit it at all (or do, and then change the text back to what it was originally), you shouldn't get a confirmation when you leave the page.

Please let me know if you notice any issues or strange behaviors with this.

This is a topic that some of us have started to go into a bit in yesterday's daily discussion, but I think it's worth splitting out and continuing more. I think one cause of people being so sensitive about content that they think doesn't belong on Tildes is because the site currently feels like one overall shared space, instead of many individual groups that might have their own different types of acceptable content.

A lot of this is just because the site is so small right now, and will probably gradually change as it grows. Quite a bit probably also comes from the fact that new users are subscribed to all groups automatically, so to them, everything just feels like "part of the site", not really separate groups that they individually opted into.

What I'd like to discuss is if there are any ways we could help make that separation more clear—should we stop auto-subscriptions to everything soon? Could we try to display posts from different groups in a more distinguished way? Any other ideas for ways to make things feel a bit more "separated", even while the site is small and there will probably be common users across most groups?

One of the things I've noticed so far (and there were a couple obvious instances over the weekend) is that we've had a few issues with new users posting content that doesn't really fit some of the ideas behind Tildes (primarily, trying to focus on higher-quality discussions/content). This in itself isn't a bad thing or surprising, it's always going to happen. However, I think we need to try to think about some better ways to deal with it—it's great to have other community members telling people that it's not really the type of content they should be posting, but sometimes it's been done in a pretty hostile way, which isn't very good and makes the community seem unfriendly even though it's still very small.

So I'm mostly just looking for general thoughts about how we could try to improve the situation. Are there mechanics that we could implement? Should we try to get "what types of things should I post?" in front of new users more prominently? Could/should we have a "standard" way of dealing with new users posting things without realizing it might not be particularly welcome here?

Any other ideas or suggestions?

Just a few minor updates to the groups today, mostly as a follow-up to this previous thread:

• I've renamed ~lifestyle to ~health and changed the description, as requested by a number of people. I think the purpose of ~lifestyle was pretty muddled, and I'm going to be moving the non-health-related topics out of there into ~misc or other appropriate groups in a bit.
• I've updated the "short description" of a number of groups, mostly using suggestions that people wrote in the linked thread (thanks again for doing that).
• I made a few small style changes to the list of groups page so that it's more obvious which groups you are and aren't subscribed to, since it was quite difficult to tell apart before.

Discussion-wise, let's just talk a bit more about groups (and feel free to suggest more description updates if you'd like, a lot of them could still use work). Has the switch from ~lifestyle to ~health created new gaps? Are there any topics you've wanted to post about but felt discouraged because there wasn't a group that they fit in?

Maybe not so much a "discussion" today, but this is something I've been meaning to do for a while and I think it would be good to specifically ask for some input/help. When creating new groups, I wrote quick little descriptions of each of them, but they're not very good. You can see all of the groups and their descriptions here: https://tildes.net/groups

I'd like to replace some or all of these descriptions to help clarify what types of content goes into each group, so I'd appreciate any suggested new descriptions, especially from people that have been active in those groups and have a good feeling of what does/doesn't belong in them. Even just thoughts on what needs adjusting if you don't want to write something yourself would be great. A few specific things that I know could use clarification, but I'm sure there are more:

• What's the difference between ~tech and ~comp?
• What is ~lifestyle for?
• What distinguishes ~talk compared to just having discussions in all of the other specific-subject groups?

Thanks, any input (or entirely new descriptions) would be great.

This came up yesterday, and I think it's worth discussing in a little more depth.

There isn't currently an account-deletion feature (though I can do it manually on request), but it's going to be needed in the future. The main thing that probably needs to be decided is what exactly to do with all of the user's posts when they delete their account. If the user was prolific and you wipe out all their posts, it can damage a lot of history. But if you leave their posts up (possibly no longer associated with their username), it means that all of the user's content is now basically "orphaned" and they no longer have control of it even though they posted it.

I won't go into too much detail about my own thoughts, but I'm curious to hear what you all think of how deletions (and the deleted user's content) should be handled.

I've just updated the site's markdown processor a bit to allow a few more HTML tags through, and added a section to the Text Formatting docs page to explain these options. The short form is that the following formatting is available only by using HTML (some of these may be added with markdown syntax eventually):

• strikethrough - <del> tag
• strike replace - <del> and <ins> tags
• ^superscript - <sup> tag
• _subscript - <sub> tag
• Tables - using <table>, <tr>, <th>, and <td>

I think at this point we should probably have almost all of the wanted formatting available, but there may still be a few missing.

It's a bit late on a Friday and I didn't have anything in particular I wanted to bring up today, so let's just use the thread today as a sort of general feedback/questions/discussion area.

If there's anything you wanted to ask about or give feedback on but didn't want to start a thread about it, feel free. You're always welcome to send me a private message with anything as well, I don't mind at all.

As always, thanks for being here, and have a good weekend!

Pretty straightforward topic today, but I think it's worth discussing briefly at least. I'm able to edit users' titles now (and the edit will be logged in the Topic Log in the sidebar). In the future, this ability will probably also be extended to others, both allowing users to edit their own titles, as well as giving others the ability to do it (will probably be tied into the trust system).

So the question is: when should titles be edited? It's nice for me to be able to fix typos or other mistakes, remove spoilers if that comes up, and also remove (or at least reduce) editorialization when that's an issue. Are there any other cases where I should (or shouldn't) edit titles?

Along with all of the other docs that need to be written, maybe a sort of "what makes a good title?" section in the submission guidelines would be good as well, so if you have any thoughts on that please feel free to post them.

Vote seems to imply a choice between two or more things. I like how there are no downvotes, but having one option sounds a bit odd to me to be called a vote. Also, having a unique term may help it stand out from other sites.

Some suggested alternatives:

• Increment
• Boost
• Bump
• Rise
• Hike

Anyone else have any ideas?

I've been thinking a bit about this post about groups that @Kiloku made yesterday, and about how we'll be able to figure out when it's the right time to create a new group.

I had an idea (inspired somewhat by how StackExchange's "Area 51" works), and just want to see if you all think it's worth trying sometime, or if there are reasons that you think it wouldn't work very well.

Every week or two, we could have a thread for "group proposals", where people suggest groups that they think would be good to add and likely to be active enough. If there's enough support from other users (for some meaning of "enough"), we create the group and then give it a while (maybe 2-4 weeks) to see if it actually builds up a reasonable level of activity. If it does, great. If not, we could remove the group and move the posts back into another group with an appropriate tag.

So for example, if someone suggested a group for fantasy novels and a decent number of other users express interest, we could create ~books.fantasy as a trial. A few weeks later, if it doesn't seem to be working out, we move all the posts from it back into ~books with a "fantasy" tag (and can always try it again in the future).

I don't know if we'd want to do this anytime soon, but I thought it would make for an interesting discussion anyway, so let me know what you think of the general idea.

Alright, this is very late today, but I had some other things to get through first.

If you missed it, I locked this topic earlier today (which involved quickly hacking together a lock method because I didn't have one). There was nothing wrong with the subject itself, and some reasonable discussion did happen in it, but overall it was disappointing to see it start devolving into the same old tired arguments, and it was unlikely to go anywhere productive if it had continued. I don't want to focus on that specific post though, and let's (please) try not to turn this thread entirely into a debate about it.

The thing that I'd rather discuss is that I think this marks the first time I've done any sort of "strong" moderation-like action that wasn't also associated with banning a user (and there have still only been a few of those total). This shouldn't be a shocking or surprising event—introducing some moderation was inevitable if we want to have any hope of maintaining quality, and I'm honestly impressed that we managed to make it a month before it was necessary. From this point, I'm probably going to start doing it a little more (especially as we continue growing), and at least for the near future the actions should mostly be restricted to:

• re-tagging topics (and I'll give other people the ability to do this as well)
• editing topic titles
• moving topics between groups
• (hopefully rarely) locking topics, or removing topics/comments

The main thing I'm working on finishing up now is a sort of "topic log" that will show which actions were taken on a topic, and who took them. So for example, once this is deployed, you'll be able to see things like "Deimos added tags x, y, z" or "Deimos changed title to ...".

So what I'd like to talk about in this thread is just general thoughts on moderation—would you like to see a bit stricter moderation to try to set the bar a bit higher to start? How aggressively should I move topics if I think they don't fit? Do you think we need some sort of global log to list topics that are removed? Opinions on those sorts of questions are welcome, so I can take it all into account as I figure out how I want to approach it.

I'm going to cheat a bit today and combine the daily discussion with a changelog post, since I'd like to get input on the changes and talk about what else should be done. I've just updated the "new topic" page in a few ways that we've discussed over the last while:

• There's a note at the top asking people to post informative or interesting content with discussion value, and not to make posts mainly for entertainment.
• You can now fill in both the Link and Text fields, and if you do so, the text will be posted as the first comment on your post. This allows people to make a sort of "submission statement" if they'd like, or give their opinion about the content. I've seen some conflicting opinions about this lately, so I tried to make it clear that adding text is optional. Personally, I don't think mandatory submission statements add much value, since in my experience most of them just end up being "I thought this was an interesting article", or a quote or two taken directly out of the article.
• I added a "Formatting help" link above the Text field that links to the page on the docs site that @flaque was nice enough to write up. This link has also been added above the markdown fields for comments as well.

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm also working on a "tagging guidelines" document which I'm hoping to get into decent shape today, and I'll add a link to that above the Tags field once it's available.

Let me know what you think of the changes, and if you have any other suggestions for things we should do with the submit process. We'll definitely need some group-specific submission info before too long as well, so I may end up adding a sidebar to the submit page that can contain more info (though that doesn't work very well on mobile since it's hidden by default).

This is a topic that's been discussed on and off a fair amount recently. Probably the most significant recent example was this post yesterday about whether people were "fully switching" to Tildes already. I think the really key point that came up in there is that for it to be more feasible, people have to feel like they're not "missing out" by being on Tildes. This is a difficult point to reach for a small site, and it's something that I've tried to advocate myself by doing things like having an entire section of the welcome message to encourage people to post content.

It's definitely going to be a long time before Tildes has anywhere near enough content to satisfy people looking for very specific topics (such as for a particular video game or niche genres of music), but it's important that we keep moving towards that point. The biggest thing that will get people to keep coming back to the site is if they can feel like there will always be more interesting content whenever they do.

You can see this in other sites: Hacker News is a great example. The site has extremely minimal functionality (I think Tildes already has more), and it generally only gets posts about a narrow set of subjects, yet it's quite a successful community overall. That's almost entirely because of the content—people know that there will always be good content and interesting discussions there, so they come back often and spend a lot of time there.

Here's a few of my general thoughts about how we can get there:

• I think people are feeling a bit discouraged from posting a lot of content, for a few reasons. Some users have expressed that they think posting content is "low effort" (which I disagree strongly with), and I also think that people might be worried that they'd be "spamming" too much by posting a lot. I think we need to push past that feeling, so how can we do that? One thought is that maybe we should stop subscribing people to all the groups automatically now. I think submitting feels more "spammy" because you know that your posts will be seen by almost everyone, but if we switch the groups to opt-in that should mostly go away—people shouldn't really complain about seeing posts about games when they chose to subscribe to ~games, and so on.
• When I started /r/Games on reddit, one of the things I did to seed it with content initially was create a bot that would look at every post made to /r/gaming and run it through various criteria to try to figure out if it seemed like it might be a "good post". For example, it would disregard all images, posts from certain sites, ones that weren't getting upvoted, and so on. Anything that made it through the filters would be automatically cross-posted to /r/Games. I didn't end up having to run that bot for very long (only about 3 weeks), but it was pretty useful as a way to initially get some content into the subreddit. Do you think we might want to have a similar sort of thing here?
• As mentioned in a few of the related threads, I think it would be good to try to focus on "meta" discussions a little less. I obviously enjoy them, and I still want to have the daily discussions and so on, but I think (especially for technically-minded people like a lot of us), it's very easy to spend a lot of time focused on "let's work through complicated systems and the flaws they'll have when the site is huge", when a lot of it probably won't be relevant for years. I'm not sure if we should do anything in particular to try to reduce this, but if we do decide to stop subscribing people to all the groups, just having fewer people in ~tildes might do a lot of that on its own.

Let me know what you think about all of that, and if you have any other thoughts or suggestions about how we can improve the quality and quantity of content.

Bit of a non-standard daily discussion again, but today I thought I'd post another inspiration for some of the decisions made for Tildes. I did this a couple of weeks ago with Clay Shirky's "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" as well, if you missed that one.

The one I'm going to post today is a talk by Maciej Ceglowski (who runs the minimal bookmarking service Pinboard). I linked it in a discussion here related to privacy recently, because I think it's a great talk that goes over some of the dangers of tech companies casually collecting so much data on their users:

Maciej Ceglowski - Haunted by Data

That's a link to his slides and a transcript, but a video of him actually doing the talk is also available on YouTube here (20 mins long) if you'd like to watch/listen.

Let me know if you have any thoughts about privacy topics (ones covered in the talk or otherwise), or questions about my approach towards privacy/data-collection on Tildes.