I have to say I love the required little message that comes with the label. It actually gives an idea why it was added. Thing is, I've received a couple of Exemplary tags that either addressed me directly, or where I would have loved to know who wrote the message.

Would making them optionally-anonymous instead of always-anonymous be interesting to anyone? I certainly don't mind if people know who it is when I assign it.

Tildes is currently invite-only. (Thank you redditor u/⎷⎷⎷⎷⎷⎷). Of course, it's in alpha testing, so that makes sense. When do you think tildes will be made public? How will they do it? I don't think it ever really needs to be made public. The reasons are that:
1 - Bans are actual bans. Getting beyond a ban is ridiculously hard compared to on Reddit, where someone just makes a second account. On Tildes, if you're banned, you're banned. That's it. It weeds out a lot of trolls.
2 - Throwaways can't be made. Making a throwaway account on Tildes costs one of your invites, so it's much more annoying to do so.
Hopefully you enjoyed my little rant.

Well, I know that I'm just stating the obvious, but I love Tildes for a few reasons. Right now, however, I'd like to discuss one thing: text posts can become popular. "But Sans, they could on reddit too!" Text-only subs notwithstanding, not really. Find any fandom subreddit or r/games, and you'll find a bunch of memes. They're the only thing anyone likes. Here, however, one can actually ask insightful questions in text posts, and it is visible. People like it. They upvote it. On Reddit, that doesn't happen. Nobody upvotes text posts. Just my two cents.

thank you for coming to my ted talk

I know the trust system is far off. However, I think a really interesting point to include could be the ability to "vouch" for a user via a profile button. Generally, this should be if you know them off-site or you recognize them as a great contributor here.

There shouldn't be any indication to the user that someone has vouched for them-- that makes it easy to manipulate, allowing for more of a tit-for-tat with randos.

There should also be a number of factors involving the invite tree here (user 1 is the person whose profile button was clicked; user 2 is the clicker vouching for the other person here)--

• Did user 2 invite user 1? If so, it's worth a little
• Did user 1 invite user 2? If so, it's not worth much
• Are users 1 and 2 completely unrelated in the tree? That's worth the most.
• Older accounts provide more trust when vouching.

This way, it's harder to manipulate, too.

What do you guys think about this? Obviously it'll be a lower priority than the primary trust system, and will take a while to get the mechanics sorted, but I think it will be a worthwhile addition in the future

e: meant to add that trust given should be directly correlated to the trust of the person vouching; new users shouldn't even have an option to vouch, at least until their trust is x or they've been around for a few weeks.

I'm interested in possibly developing a tildes client. In order to experiment with the currently disabled API, as well as to become more familiar with how Tildes works internally, I've been trying to set up a Tildes development environment on my machine following the instructions on the docs site. I've run into a problem with the 'vagrant up' stage of the setup.

...  
==> default: Running provisioner: salt...  
Copying salt minion config to vm.  
Checking if salt-minion is installed  
salt-minion was not found.  
Checking if salt-call is installed  
salt-call was not found.  
Using Bootstrap Options:  -F -c /tmp  
Bootstrapping Salt... (this may take a while)  
bash: /tmp/bootstrap_salt.sh: /usr/bin/sh: bad interpreter: No such file or directory  
The following SSH command responded with a non-zero exit status.  
Vagrant assumes that this means the command failed!  
  
/tmp/bootstrap_salt.sh  -F -c /tmp  
  
Stdout from the command:  
  
  
  
Stderr from the command:  
  
bash: /tmp/bootstrap_salt.sh: /usr/bin/sh: bad interpreter: No such file or directory  

So the Salt provisioning is failing, and it seems like it just has the wrong path to the shell it needs, but while I could probably just tweak this script, it seems like that goes against the concept of using Vagrant in the first place. I was wondering if anyone else ran into this problem, or if the bug lies between the seat and the keyboard.

I try to tag comments whenever I come across them to help keep the site clean. The problem I'm coming across when doing so is that I'm not entirely sure when to use noise versus joke.

The truth is, I've never come across anything that's just noise-- it's always been a joke that just feels more like noise than a joke to me.

Is there an official definition for these tags? Are different actions performed based on what the tag is?

I have poor vision and I rely heavily on a Firefox plugin called Stylus to make websites readable - in particular the trend for low contrast and small text. That includes Tildes.

I updated it to v1.5.0 and now the styles I set for Tlldes no longer work - most other sites still appear to work but I've not checked them exhaustively.

I immediately tried rolling back a release or two (1.4.23 and 1.4.22) but those versions no longer work for any site. I tried randomly downgrading to even older versions but the same result. I think I'm stuck with the latest version..

I notice in the browser console there are 2 errors reported on Tildes e.g. on this page I see:

Content Security Policy: The page's settings blocked the loading of a resource at inline ("script-src"). new_topic:1:1
Content Security Policy: The page's settings blocked the loading of a resource at inline ("style-src"). new_topic:1:1

Using the Firefox Developer tools Inspector - I see my style settings for Tildes injected by Styuls (after the body) but they do not work any more.

Since only Tildes so far is not working with my Stylus settings I guess there is also a recent change to Tildes that is causing Stylus to fail.

This is a rather serious issue for me as all the colour options in the setting are low contrast and cause eye strain which becomes painful without the Stylus settings.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

One thing (amongst many) that always bothered me in my 6+ years of using Reddit was their lax rules about posting clickbait articles and straight up misinformation. In my opinion this was something that contributed to the rise of radical communities and echochambers in the website.

In this post I'll talk about Clickbait, Unreliable studies, and Misinformation. I'll give examples for each one and suggest a way to deal with it.

Clickbait-

Let's start with the most benign one. These days most big websites use clickbait and hyperbole to gain more traffic. It's something that they have to do in order to survive in today's media climate and I sort of understand. But I think that as a community in Tildes we should raise our standards and avoid posting any article that uses clickbait, instead directly link to the source that the article cites.

An example would be: An article titled "Life on Mars found: Scientists claim that they have found traces of life on the red planet".

But when you read the original source it only states that "Mars rover Curiosity has identified a variety of organic molecules" and that "These results do not give us any evidence of life,".
(This may be a bad/exaggrated example but I think it gets my point across.)

On Reddit the mods give these kinds of posts a "Misleading" tag. But the damage is already done, most of the users won't read the entire article or even the source, and instead will make comments based on the headline.
I personally think that these kinds of posts should be deleted even if they get a discussion going in the comments.

Unreliable studies-

This is a bit more serious than clickbait. It's something that I see the most in subjects of psychology, social science and futurism.
These are basically articles about studies that conclude a very interesting result, but when you dig a bit you find that the methodologies used to conduct the study were flawed and that the results are inconclusive.

An (real) example would be: "A new study finds that cutting your time on social media to 30 minutes a day reduces your risk of depression and loneliness"
Link: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-instagram-snapchat-social-media-well-being-2018-11

At first glance this looks legit, I even agree with the results. But lets see how this study was conducted:

In the study, 143 undergraduate students were tested over the course of two semesters.

After three weeks, the students were asked questions to assess their mental health across seven different areas

Basically, their test group was 143 students, The test was only conducted for 6 months, and the results were self-reported.

Clearly, this is junk. This study doesn't show anything reliable. Yet still, it received a lot of upvotes on Reddit and there was a lot of discussion going. I only spotted 2-3 comments (at the bottom) mentioning that the study is unreliable.

Again, I think that posts with studies like this should be deleted regardless if there is a discussion going in the comments or not.

Misinformation-

This is in my opinion the biggest offender and the most dangerous one. It's something that I see in political subreddits (even the big ones like /r/politics and /r/worldnews). It's when an article straight up spreads misinformation both in the headline and in the content in order to incite outrage or paint a narrative.

Note: I will give an example that bashes a "left-leaning" article that is against Trump. I'm only doing this because I only read left-leaning to neutral articles and don't go near anything that is right-leaning. Because of this I don't have any examples of a right-leaning article spreading misinformation (I'm sure that there are a lot).

An example would be this article: "ADMINISTRATION ADMITS BORDER DEPLOYMENT WAS A $200 MILLION ELECTION STUNT"
Link: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/11/trump-troops-border-caravan-stunt

There are two lies here:

1. Trump administration did not admit to anything. (The article's use of the word 'Admit' is supposedly justified with 'They indirectly admitted to it'. I personally think this is a bad excuse.)
2. Most importantly, the 200 million figure is pure speculation. If you go to the older article that this article cites, the 200m figure comes from a speculation that the operation could cost up to 200m if the number of troops sent to the border is 15,000 and they stay there for more than 2 months.
   In reality the number of troops sent was 8,500 and they stayed for only a few days/weeks.

A few days after this article was published it turned out that the operation costed 70 million. Still a big sum, still ridiculous. But it's almost a third of what the article claimed.

The misinformation in this example is fairly benign. But I've seen countless other articles with even more outrageous claims that force a certain narrative. This is done by both sides of the political spectrum.

Not only do I think that we should delete these kinds of posts in Tildes, in my opinion we should black list websites that are frequent offenders of spreading misinformation.
Examples off the top of my head would be: Vanity Fair, Salon.com, of course far right websites like Fox News, Info Wars and Breitbart.
A good rule in my opinion would be: If three posts from a certain website get deleted for spreading misinformation, that website should be blacklisted from Tildes.

In conclusion:
I think we should set some rules against these problems while our community is still in the early stages. Right now I don't see any of these 3 problems on Tildes. But if we don't enforce rules against them, they will start to pop up the more users we gain.

I'll be happy to know your opinions and suggestions on the matter!

It would be nice to give some context to removed comments so people can see what happened without seeing the offensive comment. I never really liked it on Reddit where when a comment was removed by a mod, you had no idea why. It would be nice for fellow curious people maybe. What are your thoughts?

Crazy Idea™: You know what might be neato, but I have no idea how it could be implemented... if Tildes could have groups where truly anonymous posting was allowed, though it would require authentication. Use cases: ~talk about something embarrassing, or ask questions for which on Reddit you would make a throwaway. Maybe this user permission was only allowed after some threshold was met? If it was truly anonymous in the database, then notifications on replies probably could not work, right?

Would that be useful at all? If so, probably low priority I know, but just a thought.

I've tried using search (both by keyword and by tag) but I couldn't find anything about this. What's Tildes opinion about posting old news that haven't been discussed yet? I'm not talking about your regular news post from a newspaper that is already too late to be discussed about, I'm talking about things such as software releases or old blog posts that have never been posted but would be interesting to discuss about. How would one tag them? Where should we post them if allowed?

Edit: I'm sorry but I won't be here for discussing this tomorrow or during the weekend. I'm not staying at home, but I hope I can come back to some good responses next week.

What's this?

This post contains all entries of the "a layperson's introduction to" series. I will keep this thread up to date and sorted. This means this post is an excellent opportunity to try out the bookmarking feature!

Physics

Quantum Physics

Basics of quantum physics

Material Science

Classical physics

Thermodynamics

Computer Science

Artificial Intelligence

I am a bit lazy, and I also seem to like the default 3 day filter on the activity feed... but, sometimes a person less lazy than I responds to a topic of mine which is older that 3 days. These are usually good responses. These folks clearly played with the time filter. Other users are missing out on these responses.

I agree that a 3 day filter may be the ideal filter at the normal activity level of Tildes at large, at this point. But Tildes is still really fluctuating in activity, as may other sites based on the codebase. This may be an even bigger issue in specific groups.

Would there be any workable and beneficial way to make the default time filter a function of recent activity? This may apply to the main feed, and each group feed. This would help in site/group times of low activity, and might scale to the much higher activity of the future.. does this make any sense at all?

Would it be better to make the default time filter a function of activity, instead of a arbitrary setting which an admin selected?

Edit: the list box label might default to a dynamic “recent”, or similar, and then still have the other options of “last 1 hour, last 12 hours,” etc...

Deimos and I were discussing the use of "ask" topic tags this week, and we agreed it might be a good idea to get a consensus on these.

At the moment, Tilders are using four "ask" tags on topics:

• ask

• ask.survey

• ask.recommendations

• ask.help

(There may be more "ask" tags created in the future, but these four are what we're all using at the moment.)

Anything that's a question gets tagged with "ask". Some specific types of question will then get tagged with "ask.survey" or "ask.recommendations" or "ask.help", depending in the type of question being asked.

• "ask.survey" is for questions about preferences and favourites. "What's your favourite horror movie?" "What's the best place you ever visited?" "What's your favourite type of holiday?" The asker is collecting data about people's likes and dislikes (even if they're not going to publish the results in a report later!).

• "ask.recommendations" is for questions asking for recommendations. "What's a good browser to use?" "What book should I read next?" "Which brand of phone should I buy?" The asker is looking for people to recommend things to them.

However, Deimos and I wondered about "ask.help". One interpretation we came up with was that "ask.help" is for questions looking for a specific answer, where it should generally be possible for people to think "yes, this is the right answer to the question". This would include questions seeking help learning about an academic topic, such as happens in /r/AskScience and /r/AskHistorians over on Reddit. Another interpretation we came up with was that "ask.help" is for questions looking for guidance on doing something, like a "how to" type question. This would be more like the types of questions in /r/Help and like the Help menus in software and the F1 key - helping people get things done.

What do you think about the "ask" tags? In particular, what should the "ask.help" tag be used for? In general, are the existing "ask" tags okay? Do we need more "ask" tags? Do we need different "ask" tags?

I admittedly didn't reread the docs, but a search for "self" showed no results.

EDIT
a search for "self-promotion", and not "self promotion", pointed me to this previous thread:
https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/3i5/daily_tildes_discussion_approaches_to_self_promotion

We have the "Exemplary" label for comments, which identifies comments as particularly good, and even boosts their ranking within threads.

Now that we've had this for a while, I keep finding myself want to do the same for topics. I'll read an article and want to give it an extra boost because it's better than average.

I'm ready for an equivalent to the "Exemplary" label for topics.

Sometimes one may knowingly add a comment that should be tagged as one of those, and sometimes I see people say (me included) things like "BTW this should be tagged <as such>." Maybe allowing a user to tag their own comment proactively with these three tags would be useful?

Edit: My main focus is the offtopic tag because I think that it's not necessarily bad or low-quality. Partially off-topic content can be very interesting and useful. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the use of that tag, was it intended for completely off-topic stuff in the first place?

Edit 2: I've opened an issue on Tildes Gitlab for this.

Should we try to invite more respectful, reasonable conservatives to tildes to foster some decent discussion? I feel like I’m the most conservative person on this site and I’ve voted Democrat in every election up until the most recent one and I voted for Bernie Sanders. How am I the most conservative person here? It’s very much like an echo chamber here and I’d like to see it get better instead of worse. Any thoughts on this?

I've been thinking about my experience on Tildes with news and articles. It's mostly been seeing high quality content and discussion that I'm happy with. However for the sake of this, I want to discuss avoiding something negative.

Lately I've noticed news and articles with headlines that I feel are biasing in nature and potentially inflammatory.

I would guess that we're all pretty familiar with this method in general. At some point when a forum/aggregate becomes large enough it provides an profitable opportunity for third parties to distribute content. Or an individual is pursuing their fulfillment of a personal ideal.

I have a few suggestion to handle the issues productively.

News sources that put a higher priority on traffic versus their reputation tend to do so consistently. It would be valuable for users to be required to tag the parent domain when posting external links to allow users to discern sources case by case using tags.

Blocking something a news source versus <inciting-phrase> has the benefit of allowing higher quality sources mentioning the same topic to have an impact on the user. That's potentially very valuable in encouraging informed perspective.

Linking news and articles for commercial or personally motivated reasons is posted on subs that have a marginal relation. E.g. Posting a story on Mike Pence denouncing all white men working in agriculture in an agriculture sub. The connection can certainly be made but I don't think that's a good way of organizing that information. I think it would be more productive to post that in a news or news/political thread. Having the ability to choose when we see and engage with that type of content is important. It benefits the individual and encourages healthy and engaged communities.

Blocking users ( I wasn't sure if this existed ) Alternatively, a system for linked content reputation per user. But I think that's a bad solution overall.
I meant filtering users content and comments as a preference for users. I'm not talking about site wide.

I'm curious if other Tilde users agree with my issues or suggestions.

When you label a comment, at the moment, you don't get any sort of feedback or indicator that you did so (or at least, I didn't). Maybe after you label a comment, and after Tildes has successfully registered the label, it could display something? Maybe like a little green circle or replacing the word "label" with something like "successfully labeled!"?

Yesterday @talklittle posted the topic Halloween game sales are live. What are your Horror/Halloween-themed recommendations?. There have been some good recommendations and whatnot. If you like horror games and weren't aware of the ongoing sales, go check out the comments for some recommendations.

Being the meta-killjoy that I am, I started this sidebar about the top comment. tl;dr: I don't think this type of content engenders Tildes's discussion forward community.

Fell free to read the whole thread of comments for some civil discussion on the matter, but I do want to open this up to all of Tildes: should this type of comment be policed on Tildes?

Also: do you think this type of comment is good? Do you agree with me that it's retroactive to Tildes's goals? Am I just a big killjoy? Given that the comment I'm calling into question is the top comment of that topic, I'm probably David in this arena but I want to hear it from everyone else.

This seems to happen quite a lot here. Someone will post an article, and then add a comment with an extract from the article, or a summary of the article. Or someone else will come along and summarise the article.

This is pointless clutter.

On a site where we're hoping for high-quality discussion, we should expect people to actually read the articles they're discussing. If the article's so long that it needs a summary, then reading that summary isn't going to give people a good enough insight into the detail of the article before they start discussing it.

It also has the effect of misleading readers. They see an article post, read the article, and then notice that someone has already commented on the article. When they open the thread to join in the discussion, they discover that the existing comment is nothing more than a summary of the article they just read. They opened the thread for nothing.

EDIT: I give up. Lesson learned! I am the odd one out here. It is not normal to read articles beforing opening the comments sections. Summaries are desired, even preferred, here on Tildes.

I shall adjust my behaviour accordingly:

• I will start including summaries & extracts in my article posts.

• I will not waste my time opening posts that have only 1 comment.

I'm not going to reply here any more.

At the moment, there are two types of topics that can be posted on Tildes:

• Link topics, which consist of a title and a URL.

• Text topics, which consist of a title and text.

These two types of topic are supported by having three input fields for new topics: Title; Link; Text.

I propose that we combine these two topic types into just one topic type. The submission page for all topics will include only two fields: a title field and a general all-purpose text box. The submitter will type a title for their post, and then put anything else into the general all-purpose box.

If the submitter is posting off-site content, they can put the link to that content in the all-purpose box. If they want to provide a summary of the off-site content, they can write the summary in the all-purpose box, with the link.

If the submitter is posting their own original content (no link), they can type their text into the all-purpose box.

The single all-purpose box includes everything that is currently split between the Link and Text boxes. When the topic is posted, everything entered in that all-purpose box is displayed in the main body of the post.

At the moment, summaries of off-site content are usually being posted as comments under the main topic, as a result of a change made a few months ago. These comments merely clutter up the thread. If these summaries were in the post itself, that clutter would be reduced.

One topic type, one streamlined submission page, one place for all topic content.

I was reading over tildes' privacy policy and saw that passwords are stored hashed, but are they salted as well?

https://defaultnamehere.tumblr.com/post/163734466355/operation-luigi-how-i-hacked-my-friend-without#fnref:salted

not that tildes is big enough atm to have big public database breaches, but in the future it's a good idea to store passwords with a secure salting system, especially to help users that might have common passwords like "Diane" in the Tumblr post.

I have posted a few topics on tildes so far, and someone edited the tags on it. I looked at that person's profile but couldn't see any indication that they were a mod. I am aware of the coming 'trysf' system, but I think it hasn't been implemented yet. My question: how does one edit tags? Is this a certain account age required?

Hi,

I found an SQRL client on F-Droid, it seems like a pretty good concept, any thoughts on this?

Here are the docs https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm

I also opened a issue on gitlab so it can be commented also there https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/304

I got invited recently and registered my account, but since hearing of it I was curious of where the name comes from. Tildes are dyacritics in Spanish that you put on top of vocals líké thís, and they stress syllables and help with pronunciation. Now, it is a coincidence, isn't it?

I'm a big fan of "discussion threads" over on reddit, if you're unfamiliar they're essentially threads a subreddit will pin every day or week where you can post things that don't deserve a full post or are slightly frivolous or off topic. To give an example, a while back I wanted to make a post with some thoughts on Coleridge's "Ode to Dejection", but after typing it out didn't think there was enough to warrant making a thread over it. I didn't feel like doing a more extensive analysis or trying to artificially broaden the scope (ie, doing something like "what's a poem you like?" as an excuse for sharing my thoughts), so I just trashed it.

I like discussion threads because they help save "small" content like that as well as helping to build a sense of community and are just generally quite comfy.

However, I recognize that there can be some downsides:

• May end up being "low quality" in the minds of certain users. I know this is somewhat contentious, since the site culture is still being established, I personally don't want Tildes to be that serious but I know some people do.

• Normal group activity could drop if people opt to use the discussion thread instead of making a post. This is doubly bad because the site is small.

Edit: What I'm asking below is actually already an option, I guess I'm just bad at reading :-/

As of right now, when you choose a theme, a theme cookie is created which takes a simple string value (white, light, dark or black).

It's straightforward and it works well, but for someone like me who set his browser to delete cookies at the end of his session, it's a little inconvenient to have to go into my settings to set a theme everytime I log on Tildes.

It's a low-priority request, obviously, but maybe you could consider it? I do understand that it makes sense to have it as a cookie since a user may prefer different themes on different devices.

In the meantime I think I'll just write a script to set my theme to black automatically.