I know that tildes is still a small community (sub 9k) but I find the number of groups too restrictive. I am mainly a redditor so I am used to subscribing to many subs, most of which are not "main" subs.

For example, shouldn't there be a group for "countries", so one could post in countries.germany or countries.finland in the future? Also, how come there is no videos? I can understand the reasoning that a video is (almost) always about a given subject but where should I post, for example, a video of "ASMR"? Should it go to health? Should chess posts go to "games" or "sports"?

I find this idea of groups a bit too comfusing, perhaps because I am used to subreddits..

Maybe it is not a bad idea to create some kind of map, with an handy link in the site, so one knows in which group one should post a certain something.

Now that user profiles have history, it would also be useful, like Hacker News and Reddit, to have a short plain-text bio blurb that users can optionally fill out.

It'd be great to let users provide some context about themselves.

What do you folks think?

There's one HN custom I really adore, and it's the random, interesting wikipedia articles that are posted and sometimes upvoted to the front page. cf: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org

This curated discovery of some obscure facets of humanity. Picking random articles from that list, for example, on the game Nomic; the Pineapple Express term in meteorology; or the British plan to build an aircraft carrier out of pykrete, which in case you didn't know is a mixture of paper and ice.

I was planning to try to help kickstart this here by posting articles with a special tag but I'd actually like to get people's thoughts on this, and if it's something others are interested in, suggest adding a ~wikipedia tildes to encourage this here more officially.

Currently, we can filter posts based on topic tags, is there any chance we could get the same based upon users? Preferably for comments and topics. There are times when I might be interested in a sub-tilde group, but for one reason or another, not a specific user's content in that group. Is this a bad idea?

Hi, finally got the chance to join tildes. I am loving it so far but there is just one small suggestion.
When I am on mobile and on a particular group, for eg ~music and want to switch to ~books, I have to go back to the main page to access the list from the sidebar.

I know, I know, I could just type in the url but wouldn't it be better if there was some way to access the group list from any page for easier navigation. Perhaps adding it in the existing sidebar or a separate sidebar on the left side.

I am new to Tildes so please forgive me if this has been discussed in the past but it seems to me ~tildes has a fair amount of people interested in the psychological processes and dynamics of communities as it related to feature ideas for Tildes.

Perhaps it would be interesting to have a place to discuss these sort of effects in online communities (social media sites, forums, multiplayer games, social platforms like Seconds Life, IRC,...) and offline communities in a broader context, not just limited to its immediate effects on Tildes itself.

By default, no links are underlined in the Tildes interface, as far as I observed. I suggest that we underline the links that are in topic texts and comments. It is a nice visual clue in prose, and allows to distinguish between two consecutive links. Currently I'm using the following snippet in a userscript to achieve that:

// Underline links in prose.
document.querySelectorAll(".comment-text a, .topic-text-full a").forEach(
  function (elem) { elem.style="text-decoration: underline;"; });

The rest of the links function like buttons, so it's not that important (or even unnecessary) that they be underlined. What do you think?

Just a few hours ago I was thinking about how much I miss parent links from Hacker News, and now I see that they have suddenly appeared on user pages and in topics. Did Deimos just roll out an update, or have I been blind this whole time?

I've been here all of 24 hours, so there may be good reasons for the current design decisions, but as a newbie, two things are making me a little crazy.

1. Times in Days and Hours. When a post is new and active, "4 hours" makes sense. but "187 days, 4 hours?" That just makes it harder (at least for me) to spot "fresh" posts. I suggest dropping the hours on anything older than 1 or 2 days.
2. The dropdown "Activity from" goes from "3 days" to "all time". This seems extreme. Yes, I see (and tried) the custom, but its not intuitive, and its not fast, compared to selecting from a dropdown. I would like to see "week" and "month" as options below 3 days, because good conversations often evolve at a thoughtful pace, but I'm less interested in commenting on something 187 days old vs 1 week old.

This is a nice place, well-designed, and it's great to see troll-free convo's taking place! The lack of Karma hunters is also welcome! I hope it works out!

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.

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.

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!

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 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...

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.

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!"?

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.

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'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.

I wished to set aside some threads to read on my Kindle. I use the Kindle Chrome extension for that, but on Tildes it only captures the main topic, not the comments. I tried saving the page locally but the Kindle app still didn't work. My only option on Chrome seems to be printing to PDF, but that's a subpar solution. I was able to convert the offline page to mobi using Calibre, though, but this is not very practical and the result was not that good.

maybe I should have written conversion friendly, because printing to paper/PDF is working fine

~news will be populated with mainly U.S news and also mainly U.S politics, ~worldnews could be a group for just world news and events.

also there is a sub r/globaltalk which is basically focused around soft-core news events from around the world. An example of this is this post: "Man tries to open plane’s door, thinks it’s way to the loo - Times of India." it is just like interesting news stories that aren't too serious from around the world. Not sure if that would fit here, just a sugesstion

So this might be an unpopular opinion, but I believe Tildes should remain invite only, albeit perhaps with each user having unlimited invites from the start to hand out to anyone.

This approach can allow Tildes to grow but still keep the signal-to-noise ratio as high as possible, keeping a relatively small (compared to reddit at least) community that stays true to how we are now - focused on thoughtful discussion.

Any thoughts on this approach or other ideas to balance user quality with user-base size?

They could be user submitted and the admins/mods could choose a poll to display every week.

I think it would fit well in the sidebar with the percentage of overall votes being shown once your vote is cast.

I think small things like that help build a sense of community and helps keep people engaged. The topic of the polls could be as lighthearted or serious as the mods decide, though i'd personally like a mix of both.

Thanks to whoever fixed the tags, i'm still not entirely sure how to tag topics appropriately.

Whilst I am no fan of reddit's redesign, one of the features I liked about it was the way you could click on a indent line to collapse the child comments at that level. Whilst tildes displays these indent lines, clicking on them does nothing, and you have to scroll up to get to the collapse button. Another possible solution would be to collapse comments under the cursor when a hotkey is pressed, although this could be awkward due to both mouse and keyboard being used.

Tags are tricky-- should they be plural? How granular should they be? How generic should they be?

I think something that could help solve this problem is autocomplete suggestions while typing out tags. As I've been looking at posts and retagging, I've realized a lot are placed in single-post tags. Sure, this is bound to happen, especially on a new site, but autocompleting tags as you type them should help encourage users to tag with the correct one, like academic studies vs academic study.

The main con I can see with such a system would be overtagging. Since tags should actually apply to the topic at hand directly, seeing these tag suggestions could encourage people to use less applicable tags rather than think of them themselves.

Thoughts?

Since activity is the default view when looking at tildes, it seems like bumping a topic all the way to the top after each new comment can get a little abusive after the topic has existed for quite a while.

I'm thinking there should be some sort of restriction that after a topic has been inactive for a certain amount of time, it does one of four things:

1. It closes. New comments cannot be added, but votes can still be added.
2. A warning appears upon clicking the reply or add new comment button, warning the user that this will bump the topic, maybe giving the option of a silent reply. (no bumping)
3. As topics progress in age (think more than a week), new comments bump less and less on the list as the topic becomes less relevant.
4. As a plugin to the trust system, only users with high enough trust can bump topics after a certain date.

https://usefathom.com/
https://github.com/usefathom/fathom

Fathom is a new no nosense analytics platform that is thereby fully GDPR compliant and stores no identifiable user information. It's fully open source, with self-hostable and paid options, and shows great overviews of page views and top referrers.

They have a live demo running the stats for their main site available at https://stats.usefathom.com/#!last-7-days

I've been noticing that people aren't really looking at the group name that a post is sent to. Most notably there's a weekly ~anime post asking what everyone has been watching or reading. Just about every time there's people that post responses that are off topic (not anime or manga).

Here's an example. At the moment half of the posts are not related to anime or manga. It shows that it is something that needs to be considered.

Maybe have a uniquely colored border on the top and sides with the group name in bold perhaps? Also having the same color as the background on posts on the home page?

I'm suggesting a user flair-type option for people to select and display their personal pronouns.

This option would be accessed via a user's settings page. It would say something like "select your pronoun". The user would select their pronoun from a list. The selected pronoun would display discreetly beside their username wherever they post and comment.

The basic minimal version of this option would have three selections:

• him
• her
• them

We don't need to display the longer "he/him", "she/her", "they/them". Most English users know the subjective, objective, and possessive cases for these various pronouns; the important piece of information is the gender itself.

I've chosen pronouns instead of genders because there are many possible genders to include, but only three existing English third-person pronouns.

A slightly more advanced version might show four selections:

• him
• her
• them
• other

The even-more advanced version would include a text box for the user to enter a pronoun:

• him
• her
• them
• other (Please specify: ________)

The user could type something like "zhe" or "hir" in that text box, which would then be displayed beside their username instead of "him"/"her"/"them".

This option would be totally voluntary. Not every user should be required to provide this information, and not every user will want to provide this information. But for those users who want to inform people about their gender, or for those users who want to stop people making assumptions or prevent people having to ask questions about their gender, this would be a handy option.

This all started about 5 minutes ago because I added a link to the EFF story on the post of the Gizmodo article submission about Facebook sharing phone numbers used for 2FA with advertisers, but the more I thought about it in the past 5 minutes since that comment I think it could be more.

There's more information out there and available than ever before. The barrier for for entry on content creation is lower than ever. However this has led to the easy-spread of misinformation. It's not that the right info isn't out there, it's that finding it is harder now.

The idea is to have a site that is essentially a link aggregator. But what makes it different is that if you find a site that talks about the same thing you can tack on the article to the post. Ergo making posts about events, not articles. Bringing sources together and making cross referencing easy.

As a lurker on the somethingawful forums one of my favorite features is a button which will show all the posts a single person has made in a thread. It'd be really handy if someone (like the OP) is answering questions about a topic. It's really nice to have on a more traditional forum website, but I'm not sure how useful it'd be here. Regardless, I thought I would suggest it.

Here is an example: Before and After

Could we have a feature where similar posts can be linked/tagged and showup somewhere obvious, so you can access both posts from each other, linking the two. Something anyone visiting the topic can do.

So there is a link from post A to B but also B to A. You then kind of get a chain of relevant posts, like a further reading list. Maybe only showing topics that are two-three links deep, idk that's just details.

I really like the way r/AskHistorians does it where because of the moderation it's always very easy to find the comment that links previous discussion, but again that solution is not reversible, from the linked topics I can't get to the current topic.

It encourages people to look over previous posts and engage in those discussions, and to participate in a larger discussion across the site. Potentially with one topic link you can get 4-5 other topics.

It should help with answering frequent questions or concerns as it's easy to connect relevant discussion. But also pretty much any other discussion, say nuclear energy is discussed extensively here, and follow the links to the other places people have discussed it, give readers the site context for a topic, and a convenient way to look for further discussion.

I mostly see it being used by a poster who has already answered a question in a previous post and will link the reply in a comment, but this way it's far more accessible to anyone viewing the topic and not lost in the comments. Or maybe someone was interested enough to look further themselves and I've got to believe they would feel generous enough to bother linking the two topics they spent time looking for. Making it just more convenient for everyone.

Take for example this foss topic, I posted basically a follow-up topic about specific foss software.

So a comment can be posted linking the relevant topic but that can easily get lost in the fray and does nothing to link the original topic to the new one. Yeah if someone was really interested they could search the foss tag and easily find it but it's much more convenient with it linked and only one person needs to go through the process of searching.

I kind of like the idea but can see how it's very similar to the tag system and groups. In practice though I just use tags and groups to filter out stuff I don't want to see and sometimes to help with searching.
This would be a feature that focuses to continuing the discussion, and making it more convenient to do so.

I feel like showing the number of votes a comment has gotten will lead to people voting something simply because it's gotten many votes and that must mean it's right. You see it happen all the time on Reddit. Someone will say something that sounds correct, and before someone else can come correct them they'll get a bunch of upvotes. Partly because they sounded correct, and partly because "all these upvotes must mean this is true".

I don't really see any benefit to showing votes on comments.

I realize preventing people without first reading the link or text is impossible, but the least we can do is to not encourage it. By that, I mean the vote counts on the right hand side here shouldn't be clickable if discussions are the priority for Tildes.

What do you think?

EDIT: Just to be clear - I'm not against showing the votes on the front page (though @AllMight below has a fair argument for that).

I've recently gone back to using RSS as a way to keep up with things that I like to follow, and I realized that it could be a good fit for tildes. I'm a developer by trade, so if other people are interested too I could even help with development (though not until I graduate in December, I'm slammed with work and school at the moment).
Any thoughts for or against RSS?