I've been thinking about the way some people use their opportunity to share in places like Tildes.

There are weekly topics what the music the users listen and the books they read. Since the community is small, there are rather few people interacting with those, which has the capacity to create stronger interpersonal connections.

There's also the fact that I see a few names very often, in many different threads. Unlike some other places, though, I don't automatically map them to an idea of a person behind them. It's more Reddit than a small forum: people share their opinions and discuss subjects, but there's little personal interaction. It's a more a space of intellectual, rather than emotional, engagement.

And yet, there are threads here about oneself where the person asks questions or raises subjects that are of importance to them. Some time ago, someone asked what to do with their existential dread. I bet there were similar threads here that I didn't get to see. There was also the "Hey, whatcha working on?" thread a while ago. So it's not that asking personal questions is opposed here: you can, if you want, ask for community support.

So I'm wondering: what's Tildes' attitude towards more personal content? Things like life updates: "So hey, I'm doing okay, am still in a relationship (going great), looking for a job, working on the pet project I mentioned" etc. etc.. Is this something the users and the admins approve of? would enjoy?

Right now I'm not only utterly broke, but also don't have access to international payment methods (you may ask the reasons for this, but I probably won't answer :P). But I wanna give back to Tildes somehow.

I know enough English to communicate and have a general understanding of programming (with a focus on basic Python and very basic C) but never did anything beyond book and class exercises. I'm also familiar with Regex, Vim (including patterns) and Emacs.

I also have some Inkscape skills (not a designer), and wouldn't mind working with documentation and other things actual developers usually find trivial or dull.

I opened Tildes unlogged in an anonymous window and felt the amount of amount of white to be excessive, even for a bright theme. This feels a bit overwhelming. What do you guys think?

EDIT: I changed my theme to Solarized Dark a long time ago, I'm asking because now that an account is not required to view the content a lot of people will get to know Tildes, so maybe the default theme could be improved

I've been meaning to make this post for a while, and it's actually going to wind up being a series of several posts. It's kind of a long meditation on what it means to socialize online and the ways in which the services we use to do that help or hinder us in doing so. Along the way I'm going to be going into some thoughts on how online discourse works, how it should work, and what can be done to drive a more communal, less toxic, and more inclusive of non-traditional (read: non-technical) voices. I'm going to be throwing out a lot of inchoate opinions here, so I'm hoping to pressure test my views and solicit other viewpoints and experiences from the community.

I mentioned in an introduction thread that I'm a policy analyst and my work is focused on how to structure policies and procedures to build a constructive organizational culture. I've been a moderator in some large PHP forums and IRC channels in the old days, and I've developed some really strong and meaningful friendships through the web. So I've always had a soft spot for socializing on the interwebs.

Okay, so that's the introduction out of the way. The main point I want to focus on is the title: Remember the Person. This was the something Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit, suggested in a farewell message as she stepped down from the role in the wake of a community outcry regarding her changes to Reddit's moderation practices. The gist of it was that online communication makes it too easy to see the people you're interacting with in abstract terms rather than as human beings with feelings. It's a bit of a clichéd thought if we're being honest, but I think we still tend not to pay enough attention to how true it is and how deeply it alters the way we interact and behave and how it privileges certain kinds of interaction over others. So let's dig in on how we chat today, how it's different from how we chatted before in discussion forums, and what we're actually looking for when we gather online.

Since this is the first in a series, I want to focus on getting some clarity on terms and jargon that we'll be using going forward. I'd like to start by establishing some typologies for social media platforms. A lot of these will probably overlap with each other, and I'll probably be missing a few, but it's just to get a general sense of categories.

To start with we have the "Content Aggregator" sites. Reddit is the most notable, HackerNews is big but niche, and Tildes is one too. This would also include other sites like old Digg, Fark.com, and possibly even include things like IMGUR or 9Gag. The common thread among all of these is user submitted content, curation and editorial decisions made largely by popular vote, and continued engagement being driven by comment threads associated with the submitted content (e.g. links, images, videos, posts). In any case, the key thing you interact with on these sites is atomized pieces of "content."

Next up are the "Running Feed" services. Twitter and Mastodon are the classic examples as is Facebook's newsfeed. Instagram is an example with a different spin on it. These services are functionally just glorified status updates. Indeed, Twitter was originally pitched as "What if we had a site that was ONLY the status updates from AOL Instant Messager/GChat?" The key thing with how you interact with these services is the "social graph." You need to friend, follow, or subscribe to accounts to actually get anything. And in order to contribute anything, you need people following or subscribing to you. Otherwise you're just talking to yourself (although if we're being honest, that's what most people are doing anyway they just don't know it). This means the key thing you interact with on these sites is an account. You follow accounts get to put content on your feed. Follower counts, consequently, become a sort of "currency" on the site.

Then you've got the "Blogs" of old and their descendants. This one is a bit tricky since it's largely just websites so they can be really heterogenous. As far as platforms go, though, Tumblr is one of the few left and I think LiveJournal is still kicking. Lots of online newspapers and magazines also kind of count. And in the past there were a lot more services, like Xanga and MySpace. The key thing you interact with here is the site. The page itself is the content and they develop a distinct editorial voice. Follower counts are still kind of a thing, but the content itself has more persistence so immediacy is less of an issue than in feed based paradigms where anything older than a day might as well not exist. This one gets even trickier because the blogs tend to have comment sections and those comment sections can have a bunch little social media paradigms of their own. It's like a matroishka doll of social platforms.

The penultimate category is the "Bulletin Board" forum. PHP BB was usually the platform of choice. There are still a few of these kicking around, but once upon a time these were the predominant forms of online discourse. Ars Technica and Something Awful still have somewhat active ones, but I'm not sure where else. These also have user posted content, but there is no content curation or editorial action. As a result, these sites tend to need more empowered and active moderators to thrive. And the critical thing you're interacting with in these platforms is the thread. Threads are discussion topics, but it's a different vibe from the way you interact on a content aggregator. On a site like Reddit or Tildes all discussion under a topic is 1 to 1. Posts come under content. On a bulletin board it works like an actual bulletin board. You're responding under a discussion about a topic rather than making individual statements about an individual post or comment. Another way to put it is on an aggregator site each participant is functionally writing individual notes to each other participant. On a bulletin board each participant is writing an open letter to add to the overall discussion as a whole.

And finally, you've got the "Chat Clients." This is the oldest form besides email newsletters. This began with Usenet and then into IRC. The paradigm lives on today in the form of instant messaging/group texts, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, etc. In this system you're primarily interacting with the room(s) as a whole. There isn't really an organizing framework for the conversation, it's really just a free-flowing conversation between the participants. You might be able to enforce on-topic restrictions, but that's about as structured as it gets.

That about covers the typologies I can think of. Next up I want to delve into the ways in which the UI and design patterns with each of these platforms affects the way users engage with them, what sorts of social dynamics they encourage, and what sorts of interactions they discourage. In the mean time, I'm eager to hear what people think about the way I've divided these up, whether you think I've missed anything, or have any additional thoughts on the ones I put up.

I am wondering if it is planned to provide the user with methods to control the content they see, ie; filtering the topics in a group or comments in a topic based on various criteria including keywords.
I looked around to see if this has been asked, or if there was a roadmap document, but did not find anything. (this is no criticism, I do realize we are early in the dev cycle and I cannot image just one person being able to do all this!)

I do hope so. No matter how high the quality of the topics/comments there will always be things a user may not want to see.

What is our policy about posting original contents (e.g. me submitting a blog post I wrote, which I just did a few minutes ago)?

IMO, if it is a personal blog, it should be okay, and not really different from submitting a text topic here. Especially if the blog is not tracking you.

Are we able to filter things like music and anime by simply adding those keywords to the filter?

I tried adding the tilde in front and that didn’t work either.

Is this operator error or perhaps a good place for me to learn some pyramid and make a PR?

I've seen a number of topics that have had unrelated comments regarding Tildes as a whole and the direction in which we'd like to steer it toward. While I realize much of these sidebar conversations have been occurring naturally and very frequently in well-nested comments, I wonder if it isn't going to become distracting to some going forward.

On one hand, I have enjoyed passively gaining insight into the vision of Tildes. On the other, I can see how we might want to start setting examples on the type of organization and behavior we'd want from users as the site grows. If new users who are joining after Tildes goes public see a regular occurrence of off-topic conversation, they might fall into bad habits and it may take root and grow.

What are your thoughts? Maybe start creating new topics in ~tildes and tag users along with quotes from outside threads so that there's still a reference point to start discussion from?

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.

Hi, I just joined an hour ago or so.
So far so good, site seems a welcome change as opposed to other certain content aggregators.

I'm just wondering what the userbase is like: what's your age group(not too specific if you want), occupation(again, vague is okay), continent of origin and gender? What draws you to this website as opposed to other social media? Do you expect Tildes to gain traction and grow to become a worthy Reddit(or other aggregator) competitor/successor?
Just to get a taste of the crowd and what kind of people we'll find here.

I'm in my 20's, currently studying engineering and living in western Europe. Applied to this website following a comment I saw that described the Tildes system compared to Reddit; seemed like a nice change on the clickbaity and sometimes not as fun-content on that website. Hoping this ends up a good place for discussion / quality content / fun chats, and also hope it can help me detox from social media by purposefully using a less active site(for now, of course).

_{Small note: while the site is closed right now, it might be opened up later, which means this post might be visible to the internet whole. Please keep your personal info in mind and only share what you want others(including crawlers/scrapers) to know.}

I'm using Safari 12.0.2 on macOS 10.14.2 (Mojave). The same issue also occurs on iOS 12.1.2 (using Safari).

When using 1Password to autofill with the browser extension on macOS or the "autofill" feature on iOS an error message pops up: username: String does not match expected pattern.

I have to either use the browser supplied autofill on macOS or manually copy/paste username and password into the corresponding fields. On iOS there's an autofill API which I have set to use 1Password in the browser, also causing the error

Edit: Video of the issue

I don't think Tildes have or should have an official position on that, but I'd like to know what other Tilda Swintons™ think about the subject. Do you think the use of profanity cusswords is in accordance with the implicit behaviors we've established so far? Is there any advantage in trying to "keep it clean" site-wide?

Just a few minutes ago I moved this topic from ~creative to ~music, but almost immediately began second guessing my decision. I'm not exactly sure where that belongs, because it's music, but it is creative/the OP's original song. What do you think? Is ~creative more for crafts, IE woodworking and the likes, or anything creative done by the OP? Similarly, I can think of more examples for this, such as if someone wants to show off their Raspberry Pi project, do they put it in ~comp or ~creative? Where does it belong?

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.

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 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?

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?

This is mostly a question for @Deimos, just out of curiosity: is there are particular reason for the choice of Pyramid as the framework for TIldes? Is it familiarity, or clear advantages over sth. like Django or Flask?

(Edit: actually I'd welcome comparisons favouring one or another from anyone too, related or not to Tildes itself.)

I'm here for a few hours during the day while at my shop (EST), and usually about two more in the evening, around 9:00 pm. Every important thread I read (announcements, site discussion, well-commented threads) seems to be at least 12 hours old, with most being more like 19 hours old. It's hard to get in on the conversation when every thread I reach where I'd like to comment is that aged.

If I look at the last 12 hours, I get a bunch of threads with 0-5 comments. Maybe there's not a great solution, but it's hurting my contributing here because no one really wants to dredge up a conversation that people had yesterday or the day before.

So, what sort are most people using, and does anyone else see this issue, or is it just difficult to create a sort that would assure my seeing threads that get "hot?"

Hi, I looked through JS files and I noticed that all JS and CSS are called with weird parameter. tildes.css?aadf6c54 tildes.js?e6d30b42 third_party.js?4393e99 (I changed the string after ?)

Does anyone know why is it done and what does it mean?

As the title says, I'm wondering if there is any want or need for a Tildes Discord server. I have a few ideas on how it might work, and how to make it a better for discussion than the usual Discord server.

My personal reason for wanting a Tildes Discord server is that right now, Tildes is a slow site. Posts are made once every hour or so, and while I'd much rather have the hourly high-effort and interesting posts than low-quality posts, a Discord server would be able to facilitate more direct and speedy discussion. The problem is that a Discord server is inherently geared towards more low-quality discussion already, so a pretty extensive system might have to be put into place to make it work.

However, I don't want to go through the process of creating only to find out that no one is interested. If there is significant interest, I'll do a write-up of the ideas I have and add them onto this post.

Slightly unrelated, but I'm still getting adjusted to the tag system. If I've done anything wrong there, please let me know.

Edit: Many helpful users have pointed out and shown many problems with the idea, as well as Deimos' stance on them. Right now it just seems to not be worth it, but I'll keep the idea on the backburner for the future perhaps.

I've noticed in the last few days that buttons to post a new topic or comment seem to have disappeared from the site. I have to add /new_topic manually to open a post form and press Ctrl+Enter to post it.

Is it just me?

EDIT: If anyone having the same problem with Firefox, it's probably some rogue uBlock Origin filter. What helped me:

• Go to the uBO settings.
• Go to the "Filter lists" tab.
• Push "Purge all caches" and then "Update now".
• Wait for it to update.
• Delete all caches and reload the page.

Either that, or simply disable cosmetic filtering for the site.

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.

I just joined this website today and I like it quite a bit already. Several of the design choices seem to be really well thought out and the community seems pretty open to discussion, etc. While reading the initial email you receive when signing up, the creator talks about how this place isn't going to be a bastion of free speech and certain types of content (hate speech, etc) won't be tolerated and I understand where he is coming from.

I'm sure many people are aware of Voat and how it was a response to Reddit censoring several subreddits (/r/the_donald, /r/fatpeoplehate, etc) and if you go there now, it's pretty much exactly the type of demographic you would expect to occupy those subreddits originally.

But while I can see where the creator is coming from with his approach, I guess I'm just curious where you guys would draw the line? Because making a place that caters to people that you could say are on the opposite side of the Voat spectrum seems like a great breeding ground for another echo chamber. And I guess I've become a bit disillusioned with the idea that I can get "balanced" opinions on controversial topics on content-aggregate websites. Maybe that's not even possible with this format. Either way, I'm wondering if anyone feels the same.

The Most Votes/Most Comments/Newest are self explanatory, but what does "activity" mean? I looked at the FAQ and Mechanics blog posts and I didn't see anything explaining it. Is it similar to Reddit's "Hot" view? I'm especially curious because it appears to be the default.

Sorry if this has been discussed already, I wasn't sure how to find it. I'm curious if votes on child comments affect the placement of their parent comments. Imagine this scenario:

• Comment 1 (25 votes)
• Comment 2 (2 votes)
  • Comment 3 (150 votes)

In this example, would the popularity of #3 cause #2 to be positioned above #1?

Edit: Oh the nested list formatting looks weird. Comment 3 is meant to be a child of Comment 2, if that wasn't clear.

I've noticed that some people are adding topic tags to identify the domain of an article. For example, if it's from the New York Times, they'll add a "nyt" tag, or if it's from The Guardian, they'll add a "the guardian" tag.

Why? What's the purpose of these tags? Do people really filter in or out topics based on what website they come from? "Show me all articles from the New York Times." "Show me all articles except if they're from The Guardian."

Is this really a thing that people do?

I come from reddit and I'd like to know what is basically different in the way I should post and comment.

• Are there any private jokes or slang I should know to understand everything ? (like reddit's "/s", "FBI open up" or the verb "lurk")
• Are "mods" uncompromising ?
• Every single post I saw is intelligent. Is this required ?
• There's no downvote. Do I need to make a thoughtful comment every time I disagree ?

I have just posted on ~sports the last results of the major European soccer leagues, but it does not show as I'd want to. I read the Formatting help page, but I did not find an aswer to my question, so if someone would like to help I'd appreciate it.

Basically I would like the post to look like this: Imgur link, but in the end it looks like the spaces I put in there do not show as you can see here: Imgur link.

Is there any way to make the post looks like what I want? I read about the Tables section in the Formatting help page, but I do not need a bold header row, which looks like a requirement for a table.

Thanks in advance for the help

I'm starting to see occasional collapsed comments when I open threads. The first time I saw one, I thought I'd accidentally collapsed the comment myself, but this one was definitely already collapsed when I opened the thread.

Is this related to the "tagging" system that Deimos discussed the other day? At the time, he said that "tags" wouldn't have any effect. Are these effects now working? What are the effects? Also, there was no actual decision about what the different tags would be, and what they would mean. As I said in that thread, I decided not to use these tags until: a) they were agreed and defined; b) they actually did something. I thought they were just placeholders for now. I'm confused.

Or is there some other feature operating here? For example, people keep talking about "whisper" comments, and I'm not sure if they're just fantasising about a feature they would like, or if it's something that's actually planned. Are these those "whisper" comments?

I often stumble in to threads with entire comment chains deleted. I assume most people here have faced the same situation as well, either here or on reddit.

I'd like to see a move to locking comments rather than deleting them by default. That would mean no further replies to the comment or any other comment in that chain, no one being able to delete or edit their comments, no one being able to add or remove votes to a comment, etc.

I understand for particularly egregious comments removal is completely necessary (especially when it goes hand-in-hand with banning users), but a lot of times comments are deleted as a means to prevent long argumentative back-and-forth chains that spam and derail topics, as well as antagonize users.

In a lot of cases I feel like deleting the comment only further serves to hide what is unacceptable behaviour (even if that behaviour should be obvious), rather than setting an example for the userbase.

Example post.

Should we add continent tags? We do it with europe and sometimes with asia or south america. But I've never seen north america alongside with usa or canada. When I searched for it, north america tag was used just once, 93 days ago.

Are we using "eu" or "europe" for topics about Europe? I think we need to pick one or the other.

I prefer "europe".

EDIT

The people have spoken, and the vast majority is in favour of "europe" (not "eu") for topics related to continental Europe. Topics related to the European Union itself can be tagged "europe.eu" (as per @nothis' excellent suggestion.

I'm here staring at my inbox for the third time trying to figure out how the hell the sorting in it works. It isn't alphabetically by subject or user, it isn't the recency of the first message (nor is it the recency of the latest message), and it isn't the number of messages. Testing it now, it also isn't the most recent you've opened, so I have no idea how this works or how to look for anything, not that it's big enough to matter much yet.

Am I missing something obvious? I feel so lost.

Is there a way to view all the subgroups in a group? Right now I don't see any way to access them without someone directly linking a subgroup. I think it would be helpful if there was a list of subgroups in each group sidebar, or a link to a page of them.

I just got here, so sorry if this has been covered elsewhere.