Reading about tilde.club and cmccabe's excellent post about public access unix servers has made me want one for tildes.net. I realize that there are several alternatives, like tildes.team and sdf.org, but I think it would be really cool to have one specifically for the people here, and once the API is done, it could even integrate with the site.

I took a break from Tildes for a week and came back to look at things again with a fresh perspective.

One of the things I immediately noticed was how the earliest comments are the ones that get the upvotes to the top of the comment list, and tend to stay there, even when better comments and chains flow below.

I started thinking about why this is so pervasive. Not just on tildes, but everywhere. Reddit and tumblr both suffer this issue to a degree. At the end of the day, going through any comments requires a certain amount of time, and a certain approach to the existing library of commentary. If we lock in the amount of time an average person will examine comments (which...is not much), we’re left with the only thing to address: the approach to going through the existing library.

Plenty of proposals (mostly already done) come to mind. Perhaps you go by most active or most recent comments. Controversial perhaps, or sorting by newest, rather than most popular. Maybe some secret mix of it all (the reddit “hot” formula). What about complete and utter randomness? ...yeah remember that Certain Amount of Time we discussed earlier? It’ll only be a couple posts before the user will switch back to another sort method.

So what should we try? What HASN’T been tried?

What about multiple panes? User-selectable, arrangable, 1-4. Vertical columns of different views, updated dynamically synchronously or asynchronously for the most controversial, new, and active. You could see all the views at once, side by side, so that your time switching between views and waiting for page loads evaporates and 100% of that limited attention span is spent on the comments in each of the sorts.

Having the more rapidly-changing columns (newest, active) update synchronously (every # seconds, configurable) would allow a user to engage those comments in time for the next refresh. The less-rapidly changing columns could be set to be asynchronous- updating as the orders change (top, controversial). This can also be tweaked as the site gets either more or less active as a whole. So what might need to be asynchronous now while things are quiet, can be made synchronous later.

Again, all of this is just a possibility, or perhaps starting point for a way to address the overall issue of the first comments being the most voted on.

To me, they're another case of something nice ruined by the quick adoption of a casual majority. Finding rare wholesome content was nice and it felt genuine. With the rise of the wholesome network, suddenly it started to feel fake and devoid of the original genuiness. Plus, being so common, it's rather annoying, instead of a nice find. It's yet another thing ruined by the masses.

What do you think? What would you like its place to be on Tildes?

Could we have RSS or Atom feeds that correspond to a given view?

There could be two kinds of feeds, one that links to the comments page, and one that follows the link itself. The comments feed for ~comp could be https://tildes.net/~comp?rss=comments, and the link feed could be https://tildes.net/~comp?rss=link, or something like that. Ideally this could apply to tags as well, so if I just wanted to see posts in ~comp tagged web, I could view https://tildes.net/~comp?tag=web&rss=comments.

Several similar sites have this ability, so it's nice to be able to browse them all in one place. (On Reddit you can put .rss at the end of a subreddit for a feed, and on Hacker News and Lobsters it's just /rss).

What do you think?

I just saw this post: NY Times defends hiring of editorial writer after emergence of past racial tweets. Now the article is a whole discussion in itself and just to openly reveal any bias I might have I personally do think the comments that were made are very much racist as they generalise a large group of people based on their skin colour in a negative light. I also consider myself a centrist (That's in UK terms, very much a supporter of the democrats in the US), although this information isn't crucial and not strictly relevant I feel biases should be known and taken into consideration.

My issue with the post wasn't with the article that was good and provided good discussion that I feel suites Tildes perfectly, it's a controversial and divisive subject and generally online this would be a atrocious thing to debate. Yet I view Tildes as a place of openness and willingness to debate that doesn't resort to generalisations and sweeping statements. This is the kind of post that would be great for Tildes as it would allow discussion that wasn't a complete mess, it's a rare place where you are able to talk about such topics that are debates not fights.

11 Hours after the post went live it was locked by Deimos.

This is frankly shameful and appalling. Now I don't blame Deimos. As far as I'm aware he's the only one currently moderating so I can only imagine the difficulty to moderate such a topic, yet I feel rather disappointed, I don't see any justification or reasoning for the post being locked and in future I would like some statement explaining why. In a perfect world I would prefer no post to be locked but I'm aware that's difficult with lack of moderators. No post should ever just be locked with no reason given.

Now, I must confess I am unaware of any comments being removed and I must assume there must of been to lead to the post becoming locked which would help be understand as to why it happened, this is purely speculation and would greatly appreciate a direct statement from Deimos explaining why even just a sentence saying there was lots of hate.

Although I think this is a issue I can understand why this happened in the early days of Tildes, it's still being developed on and I get the vibe he enjoys creating a community and a place for discussion not moderating and removing comments. Later on I do not expect or want this to happen.

My main issue though arises from the users. Looking in the comments there was a specific comment that stood out as being especially un-Tildes like:

I think Ms. Jeong's tweets about white people are hilarious. The fact that she annoys conservatives is reason enough to hire her.

Although the first half I disagree with it's the user expressing their opinion, that's OK. My main issue is the second half "The fact that she annoys conservatives is reason enough to hire her" that one sentence alone infuriates me. It's such a ignorant statement. The comment provides little input into the discussion and just feeds the us vs them mentality of politics which thrives in today's political debates everything is now a black and white issue. I view Tildes as a place that looks past meaningless statements like this, the comment also had 7 votes. Thankfully the response criticising this had 20 votes which does suggest the majority of the community dislike the comment as well.

Although I selected this comment as I felt it best represented the problem but there were a noticeable presence of low input comments which merely just resulted in people passively aggressively arguing with each others comments and very little comments focusing on the actual article itself.

Perhaps this is what people want, but it's the first time on Tildes I have seen a noticeable presence of low effort and poor comments. Admittedly maybe I just have the wrong opinion on Tildes and I'm in the minority but to me it felt very much unlike what Tildes should be. It feels there's a growing minority of Reddit like comments. I must acknowledge that a lot of the comments I disagree with had few votes and perhaps there just wasn't enough comments to drown them out, low effort comments are easier to make and more frequent than good quality comments, and maybe once the user base increases so will the high quality comments.

In summery I think locked posts should be clearly shown why they are locked, perhaps it's time moderation increased to prevent this in the future, this is a whole issue in in itself. More crucially I think we need to keep an eye on users that post low quality comment and call them out on it for being un-tildes like, If nothing is done It's a threat to the quality discussion that tildes is based on.

Something you see frequently on Reddit are subreddits that have developed their own slang, jokes and references. That's part of the reason why Reddit feels like a collection of communities more than one website divided into sections, which is what Tildes look like right now.
The question is, do we want that sort of stuff here?

On Reddit I'm a fairly active user, commenting a lot even it it doesn't really need to be commented, but on Tildes I find that a lot of the time I will not comment if it seems like it isn't needed, and I'll spend time actually reading other comments to see if what I wanted to say has been said before.

To me it feels like Tildes is a more mature(IMO) and better place for discussion instead of just random quips.

It took me a while to find where to post a reply to a post, and it was a little annoying to scroll past all the comments to write my own.

On the other hand, it does encourage reading the other posts before replying, but I feel like that hopefully won't needed on this site.

Partially inspired by @Amarok's comment on culture specific to /r/listentothis and some thoughts I've been having: how can we make sure that each group (and sub-, and sub-sub-groups, etc) each have a sort of identity of their own? In my own experience and opinion having a cohesive identity as a subgroup helps the content quite a bit, as opposed to "just being a subgroup".

And I have a suggestion: If we scrap the front page as is, and we don't show all the subgroups' content mixed through each other, but stick to either a "classic" forum view, or like 4chan's view where you have to click through to a subforum, people would be forced to visit just that subgroup, and do so consciously. Thoughts?

Mockup - see the top item.

I would love to be notified when a comment which I had interacted with has been edited. I have seen it mentioned by others a while back as well. My suggested implementation is a pretty minor UI change.

On https://tildes.net/notifications/unread there would be an additional listing type which begins with "Comment was edited on "

Any comment which the current user has replied to, or has upvoted, and has been edited would appear here.

I am experimenting with a simple survey below using comments, please upvote the one that best reflects your view. Of course, also feel free to discuss anything further in a normal comment, just trying to keep things organized.

Forgive me if this has been posted before, I am still pretty new here.

Coming here having the option to "Gild" was something I kinda just assumed would be a thing.

Obviously it wouldn't need to be call "Gold" or "Gilding", those are just terms from some other site that I know all of us will understand.

I have always liked the idea of users buying made up medals for topics and comments they felt the need to reward. It gives the users a sense of accomplishment/reward and gets the devs little micro donations.

Currently the most valuable material in existence is antimatter, so maybe a little "AM" medal?

EDIT: Something I also meant to mention, but forgot, was the badge system on DeviantART.

dA has always had these little pixel llama badges that I thought were really cool. The basic concept was/is that you can gift someone a little llama if you think they or their art is cool or for any reason you want. These llamas stack on your profile. People can additionally gift gear for existing llamas and the site occasionally gives out rare llamas (and other badges) for milestones, events or promotions.

I think a hybrid of reddit's gilding system and a badge system (like dA's) could be really cool.

Was asked to post here about this:

Is there a plan for migrating sub-tags (or top-level groups too)? The scenario I'm thinking of is that things may either fork, or change their name unanimously.

Let's say a tech product changes its official name from XX to be YY, Would there be a way to migrate
~tech.XX.stuff to ~tech.YY.stuff?

I can't say that this will be a common occurrence, but may affect historical usefulness of the tagging system, as people looking for things in the past won't be able to easily - plus it may divide communities once existing (do they keep posting in the old tag or the new one?).

For now, this isn't too important as @Deimos (from what it seems?) is in charge of creating new topics and presumably modify them too, but for the future (according to this) we may start having user created groups pop-up.

Cheers,

I’m still in awe of what’s happening here and wish I had a crystal ball to see the change this type of community will drive in broader social discourse. If that goal is realized, there will be very sophisticated folks looking to disrupt that progress.

As a security guy (especially in light of Reddit’s recent announcement) I had a few questions!

1.) How open are we to integrating some type of optional 2FA for users? Maybe a simple TOTP integration?
2.) Are the admins of the site implementing the right amount of fundamental controls for the backend? I’m 100% happy to provide thoughts on this if necessary! The decisions you make now, could impact us 5-6 years from now. And they’re oh-so-easy to change this early :-D.

I may be one of the least qualified people here to discuss this topic, but I find two reddit bots pretty useful:

https://www.reddit.com/user/autotldr

https://www.reddit.com/user/alternate-source-bot (this is my recent favorite)

What do you all think features like the two above being integrated into Tildes in some fashion, via bot or otherwise? Are there any other bot behaviors that you like which would have a good impact here, or are bots that produce comments the scourge of Reddit?

^{Sorry if this has been discussed before, if so let me know and I will delete this topic.}

I see there is an issue open to add a saving feature for topics, which is great! I would like to make a suggestion for this feature.

Do you think it would be possible to give users the ability to add their own tags to a saved topic?

A lot of times I search for content related to a project I am working on, and it would be nice if I could tag the topics I find as "project-xyz", as this would allow me find them easily when I come back to reference something. This tag would be useless to anyone else, but having our own personal tags, that only we can see, would be very useful in curating content.

One way this could be done is by having a new section named "Your Tags" that appears under the existing "Tags" one, in the sidebar for a topic. Then on the Saved page, the sidebar could list all your unique tags, and clicking one would filter the topics.

Anyway, just throwing out an idea. I can add a comment to that GitLab issue, if this is a possibility and something people are interested in.

I find posts that are just links or simple questions without any additional input from the poster to be low-effort and don't tend to garner meaningful discussion. I've noticed that there are a fair amount of those posts on this site although they're definitely the minority. There are some subreddits I follow that have implemented mandatory discussion by the OP as a rule and it really did a lot of good for discussion and thread contribution. Even something as simple as writing why you think the link you're sharing is interesting / important / etc would be enough to kick things off and invite discussion, I think.

What are you guys' thoughts on this?

At first I didn't want to post this idea, because its pretty big change, but I think I'll post my idea here, thanks to @kiyoshigawa. Here is my comment that pretty much sums up my idea.

My idea is, that when people read something, and they agree/disagree with it, they want to express their agreement/disagreement (this is covered in this thread). When you want to express disagreement, you have to, because it's no downvote here, comment to disagree with some opinon. But when you want express agreement, and you don't want to comment (or simple 'I agree' wouldn't add anything to the debate), you just hit the upvote button. And that's problem, as the Vote button should serve as "quality content here" indicator, not "popular content" indicator. We've seen it on Reddit, where the effect is even larger because of the downvote button.

So my idea is - Add agree/disagree buttons. These buttons doesn't have to do something - I even think, that it'll be better if they didn't do anything. But they'll help users express themselves, so when someone agrees with me, but doesn't want to simply say "I agree", he can hit the 'I agree' button - and he won't hit the vote button. This way, popularity won't affect the "quality" score of the post.

Edit: As @Kat, @Kijafa, and others said, maybe add only agree button - not the disagree one. I think they might be right, disagree button might have negative effect, as now users have to express disagreement via comments.

Edit 2: Thank you all for discussion. You made me change my mind about disagree buttons, you are right - it'd be used as downvote and would probably suppress discussion. However, I'm still curios about the "I agree" button and if it would decrease of usage Vote button to express agreement.

Even if Tildes is an English-only community, I can see how it been "US keyboard layout"-only might stop other users from using the site. I understand that the character is even in the site's icon and name, and it feels pretty aesthetically and brand-crucial, but I don't think it is related to the main idea of the site/community or its functionality; and being still in alpha is not too late to make a change that could help it expand and get more users (or at the very least, not limite it).

What do you think?

Quotes serve two purposes: 1) Replying to a specific part of someone else's comment, and 2) introducing new information from an external source.

Replying to a specific part

When replying to someone, the current low-contrast black-on-gray style makes sense because it's redundant info.

However, when quoting an external source, my eyes tend to gloss over the quote, which is unfortunate. Current workarounds are: mild editorializing by bolding certain words; or paraphrasing the source, which is often a waste of time or can be misleading if someone misread the original.

In summary, my inner thoughts say:

I suggest we make quotes higher contrast, so that the ones introducing new info can add to the conversation, rather than be ignored due to visual de-emphasis.

Quotes from external sources often imply authority and that their author has given a topic a lot of thought. Therefore they are valuable to include in a conversation and should carry the same weight as text written by any random user.

Edit: Screenshot of this post using light theme: https://i.imgtc.com/wVdoFN6.png

Hey guys,

Deimos gave me a bunch of invites to give out and I have a post on Reddit where I’ve been giving them out.

So far I’m looking at each persons history to make sure they aren’t a troll, and have posted generally positive and insightful content.

What do you guys think we should be vetting?

Since I’m assuming Tildes won’t be Invite-Only forever, is this just delaying the inevitable?

One of the more frustrating things about posts that become popular on reddit, is when you get to them several hours later when they have 1000+ comments. You'd love to give input, but know it'll be lost in all the traffic. No one ever scrolls to the very bottom to see the newer comments.

What if the sidebar displayed a handful of newer comments, with the main comment section remaining as it currently is? Think of it being similar to Amazon reviews, where the newest reviews are displayed on the right. This way you get to see both the most popular and newest comments at the same time.

Hi fellow Tildes Beta users!

I primarily do my browsing on an iPad or my iPhone. Currently I'm using Chrome.

Until an app is made, what do you all find the best way to browse Tildes is? The formatting is a little wonky for me, which is perfectly understandable. It's not exactly a deal breaker, but it would be a lot easier having a more optimized experience.

I doubt I'm alone, so what're y'alls preferences?

I finally signed up on tildes, and just as on the other site, I immediately proceeded to unsubscribe from ~news, ~lgbt and ~food, just because I like to focus on my interests most of the times. However, when I'm hungry for more content, my limited tastes aren't enough. On reddit, /r/all used to provide a wild west, all-you-can-eat-buffet experience, which I don't find here.

I understand the site is in early alpha and community is small (which is the main attraction for me right now), so what do you guys think about something like /r/all for tildes?

I have a question about AMP links in new topics.

I posted this with the AMP link as an experiment. After a few days of life at 2G data speeds I have begun to appreciate the benefits of AMP. Also, fast load times seem to be in line with light and quick philosophy of Tildes.net.

One downside of AMP is that it is a mobile layout which is not ideal layout on desktop with high resolution.

What do you all think of using AMP links in topics?

With so many threads asking about what operating system people use, favorite music, favorite tv-shows, etc, I feel like this is a good subgroup for all of the groups (other than maybe tildes and talk).

Posed this in the weekly thread and it was recommended to pose the question to the broader community.

I am a new user of this wonderful community and certainly plan on being active. It was a bit disappointing to see my preferred name registered and fully inactive (minus an introductory post 60 days ago).

Curious how the community thinks this should be handled, both in Alpha, an on into GA.

I suggest we require decluttering clickbaity titles. The rule can be: if the title leaves you asking "Which X?", include that X in the title; if it asks you "Why X", change it to "X Because Y". It can be a spoiler, but I'd rather have an idea of the content than the suspense, which with this sort of articles is almost never really gratifying. What do you think?

Someone posted comment, I wrote a response (here), but when I wanted to send it, I got this message: Comment not found (or it was deleted). After I refreshed, the comment was gone, not even something like [deleted comment].

Do someone know how the comment removing work?

I have an interest in this type of subjects, and it seems this site doesn't have an appropriate space for these matters. Can we have a dedicated group and if not where should I post about this kind of stuff?

Choose three words to describe the kind of community you want here, and explain why you chose those words.

Diverse

More points of view makes for a more in depth, nuanced conversation that brings viewpoints I may not have considered before. I have plenty of experience as a native woman in Canada, but that isn't the only viewpoint. Much as it pains me to admit, I don't know everything and sometimes I miss layers of conversations that others can point out to me. Those viewpoints are the ones I need to read if I want to continue growing as a person.

Welcoming

I want a community that isn't full of gatekeepers, who don't arbitrarily decide who should or should not belong before they've even had a chance to contribute. I want to see people given a chance to show who they can be on a new platform, and how they can make this a better place. The last thing we need is to chase away people who might otherwise make valid contributions to the community by being dicks.

Interesting

More threads, more topics for discussion, more traffic in general. I want to see dozens of threads I can contribute to or at least read on a daily basis, whatever that topic may be. A new book series, a hobby, a viewpoint on politics. But we're not going to get there without a diverse, welcoming group to keep new people engaged.

Hi all,

I've been thinking about this for a couple days, and since there's another discussion about the alt-right/racism/offensive attitudes, I figured it was a good time to hopefully initiate the discussion even though I myself don't have much to contribute to it.

What I'm asking for is ideas to foster inclusiveness on Tildes. I personally haven't noticed much on Reddit that's bad, but then again, I'm a young (well, sorta) white dude. What I have noticed is that, as a man, I am the "default" gender on Reddit. People are always calling me "man" on there, even when I have not given any clues about my gender.

As for my race, I haven't noticed anything making my whiteness the "default"--people call me "man" all the time, but they don't call me "honky man," after all--but I unfortunately might not notice that. Anyway, I should stop blabbing, because I unfortunately don't have much to add to this discussion.

My question is, though--and I hope other people agree that it's an important topic to discuss--what can Tildes do to encourage inclusiveness? What can Tildes do to make everyone feel welcome, regardless of their sex/gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, and identity in general? If I were a woman and someone called me, "man," I expect that I would feel less welcome.

Edit: I should clarify that I'm looking for systematic ideas for what to do: if Tildes were as big as Reddit, what policies or structures could be implemented to remind people or encourage them to be more open to everyone? Is there anything that's even possible?