This is something I've been thinking about for a while.

One of the future mechanics for tildes is the trust system (see https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics-future). People talk about building it but I think we already have a small part of it in place.

Invites are a form of trust.

By allowing inviting the community is trusting you with the ability to add new members. That ability can be taken away or could even result in the banhammer if you persistantly invite assholes. I know that made me cautious with who I've invited to join.

With there being a clear trail of who invited who, bad actors will have to work harder to get a foothold here. I also think that spammers are deterred with having to get an invite for every new account they make.

A simple analogy is that you're having a party and a friend asks if they can bring a friend of theirs you don't know. Your friend says they're cool and you trust your friend due to past experiences with them so along they come. Now if this person ends up kicking your cat, pissing in the fridge, and then trying to burn your house down then the trust you had in your friend is going to diminish. Next time they want to bring a guest the answer is hell no!

We can use the invite system as an initial way to build trust.

So, this is, in part, in response to the alibaba ban.

I think it's bad practice not to know why someone got banned. Firstly, it may lead to excessives from your part ("I will ban anyone and everyone I want and no one will know"). Secondly, it fails to show other posters that X behaviour will get you banned.

When I try to access tildes.net over an IPv6-enabled network, the connection simply times out.

Running ping -4 tildes.net responds but ping -6 tildes.net times out. I've tested this on multiple networks (residential and commercial) but it doesn't work on any.

It looks like tildes.net has an AAAA record but the IP doesn't work.

Can anyone reproduce?

Right now if a post is tagged with 'spoiler', that tag appears in its own color which is good. However, if you are interacting with a user and click through to their profile, there is no indication that some of their comments may have been in these spoiler threads and thus contain spoilers (just happened to me, thankfully for show I don't watch). It might be nice to somehow indicate these potential spoilers on the user page so that they can be skipped over.

Didn't there used to be a setting so we could view posts in whatever order - by default - that we wanted?
Or is there a way to do it and I'm just too stupid to see it?
I personally dislike this "relevance" concept and for the most part, voting.
I just want to see posts chronologically, either oldest first or newest. And I know I can do it, but for every thread? Please tell me there is an option I am missing.

It would be nice if one had the option of adding the spoiler tag to all comments containing X.

For example, I haven't watched endgame yet. I would feel safer if I knew that all posts containing the word "endgame" were hidden behind a spoiler-tag.

On Reddit, it's possible to view all the comments in a subreddit by going to the subreddit comments url. For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/tildes/comments/

As a separate request, would it be possible to add a new comment sorting method. Perhaps an option to disable comment nesting and sort by new. It would make it easier to see new comments that are added to a post.

I personally think a friend mechanic which allows you to follow what other people say on the site would be quite nice.

Right now the only way you could do this is by checking their profile every now and then which is... tiring at best.

I don't think there's necessarily room for abuse but I'm interested to see what you all think of this.

Edit : I've made a top-level comment to clarify certain things

Pretty much the title. What do you think is missing on tildes? What is something that you'd like to see on tildes that is currently lacking? It could be discussion wise, a feature, or anything else really.

I wanted to keep the title---and the question, for that matter---generic, but my use case is that I want to make a backup of my posts on Tildes, and I'd fancy automating that with a script that curls up my user page and downloads fresh stuff from there periodically. So for my personal case, the question is that is this allowed / welcome practice?

The generic question is that is it welcome to scrape Tildes' public pages, in general?

It would be nice to have an optional feature that filters out posts that a) you have read and b) don't have any new unread comments. When a post gets new comments it should reappear. That way we could see more unread content on the page, but still keep long running topics going. Have it not affect search, so people can still find posts for reference.

The recent implementation of automatic tag suggestion has inspired another idea for me.

What if Tildes could suggest related tags to the one(s) you've already chosen? You select a tag for your topic, and then Tildes suggests other tags to add to your topic, sourced from tags which have been commonly used in association with that tag you've selected.

For example:

• You tag a topic with "facebook", and Tildes suggests "social media" and "privacy" to add.

• You tag a topic with "world war ii", and Tildes suggests "history", "nazis", and "military" to add.

• You tag a topic with "avengers", and Tildes suggests "marvel" and "superheroes" to add.

The data could be obtained by monitoring the frequency of associations between various tags: if tag B is frequently used in association with tag A, then tag B would be suggested as an additional option whenever tag A is used.

I was thinking about posting this to ~news, but suddenly I've realised that I don't know if the word “fuck”, or any of the Seven Dirty Words, are allowed in titles. Is Tildes adults-only? Should people write something like “f***” in titles instead?

Right now, the search function only works by searching the titles of posts made.

I'd like to be able to search through my comments on an occasion where I'd like to link someone to it to further the information provided. If I'd already written on the subject somewhere, I'd like to be able to provide the source, and add commentary more pertaining to the subject matter if necessary.

Lacking that, is there a way to use Tildes' API to perform automated search myself?

Should offtopic comments bump up topics? IMO, offtopic discussion is not “real” discussion. Seeing a topic at top with 7 new comments only to discover that all of it is offtopic, meta discussion, is annoying and disappointing.

As an example, there is one topic on the front page (don’t want to link it), that was bumped by the biggest offtopic discussion I’ve seen on Tildes so far. The discussion itself is not wrong, and is quite interesting, but it’s not about the post. The comment chain should IMO either be in it’s own topic, or not bump the topic up.

I just came across this field of 13 admin-removed comments and frankly it left me feeling rather unsettled. That's a lot of content to just nuke all at once. Contextually, the thread up to that point was genial and non-controversial, so it seems especially odd that there's just this black hole there. What struck me mostly was how opaque the moderation was. There is no indication of what kind of content was removed, why it was removed, or specifically who did the removal or when it happened.

Then I scrolled down and at the very bottom I found what I guess is meant to address these concerns, a comment from Deimos:

Sigh, I saw this thread was active and thought it was going to have an actual on-topic discussion in it. Let's (mostly) start this over.

It's not always clear online so I want to say that I'm not rage-posting or bellyaching about censorship or any of the usual drama that tends to crop up on sites like Tildes from time to time. I trust Deimos' moderation and give this the benefit of the doubt. What I'm actually doing, I guess, is making a feature request about better annotation for removed comments.

Would it make sense to show a note (like Deimos' comment) in-thread at the position of the deleted content? Instead of down at the bottom of the page or unattached to anything relevant? In my opinion some kind of "reason" message should always be provided with any moderation activity as a matter of course. Even if it's just boilerplate text chosen from a dropdown menu.

Also, would a single bulk-annotation for all of the related removals make for better UX than 13 separate ones? I think that would be both easier to read, and easier for Deimos to generate on the backend.

I feel like we may have had this conversation previously, but I couldn't find it. Apologies if I'm beating a dead horse.

My title sucks, couldn't word it better.

So, I hate having to use the tilde char. Doing tildes.net~tildes is much harder for me than tildes.net/t/tildes. It would be cool if tildes also supported using "/t/". I am not suggesting to remove the "~", but make one redirect to the other.

I suggest that if a user other than the topic submitter makes a change to the topic that is reflected in the Topic Log (e.g., tag/title/group change), then the topic submitter receives a notification.

This may or may not apply to topic deletion and/or topic locking—to be discussed.

The internet slang is full of acronyms. Some are harmless and well known, such as "lol" or "IMHO", but others not so much. Tildes is explicit by design, with a preference for clear text labels instead of icons. In my opinion, that's a great design choice, and maybe we should take inspiration from that in our communications. On Reddit, it's common to find obscure acronyms. Some subs require glossaries to understand their particular lingo. Sometimes this is necessary, but, in excess, acronyms can be annoying and even excluding, especially for non-native speakers. Because there are situations in which the use of acronyms is required, I don't think there should be a rule on the matter. That's merely a suggestion. What you lovely Tilda Swintons™ think about it?

I've noticed a small typographical detail. When you look at messages at one's user page, second level headers (aka <h2>) are shown with a smaller font. I really appreciate that. Don't see rules for other header levels, but as is the feature is pretty cool.

https://tild.es/55n has some discussion about this already, and now that this feature is actually implemented, I'd be interested what your opinions on allowing users to edit their own topic titles after posting are.

My main argument is that it would allow fixing typos and providing significant updates — think adding a [Solved] marker in the title for topics related to some problem or reflecting a title update of a linked article — without having to contact other users that have permissions to do that. The topic log allows that to happen transparently already.

One of my favorite YouTube channels, Linus Tech Tips, does this all the time, but I have seen many others doing this as well, and I personally find it rather obnoxious. I understand that it's more effective at getting them views, which they rely on to stay in business... but I see it as just another form of clickbait, and so when I submit LTT videos I tend to remove that capitalization.

However, are there any cases where capitalization for emphasis is appropriate in a headline/title? And if not, should titles be edited to remove them?

p.s. Acronyms and Initialisms are obviously different, so let's ignore those and put them in the "clearly acceptable" category.

Hi, I'm new here. I use an extension for Firefox called Vim Vixen that allows the user to navigate webpages pretty effectively via the keyboard. One of its features allows the user to press the f key to bring up an overlay of keybindings over all links on the page, and pressing the keys associated with a link causes the browser to follow the link. I'm not intimately familiar with how the extension works, but with some basic Inspect Element-fu, I'm reasonably sure this feature is implemented with an iframe that is injected over the entire page.

On Tildes, the iframe is visible in the top left corner and shifts all the actual content over accordingly. Normally, it is invisible. This is the only time I've ever had a problem with the extension, which is why I'm posting here first rather than reporting an issue with the extension. If someone more knowledgeable is interested in creating a fresh Firefox profile and comparing how the extension works on Wikipedia and on Tildes, I'd appreciate it. The code for the iframe appears to be identical on both sites, and it's at the end of the page body.

https://tildes.net/~hobbies/bzx/what_are_your_hobbies_and_how_do_you_get_into_them#comment-2z4f

See for yourself. Text is squished to the left side of the page, one or two words per line. No idea if anyone else can see this but since it happens every time l visit that link l thought it was worth asking.

Going to poke @Deimos on this one l suppose.

Edit: Issue created.

Issue is occurring on iPhone 7 using Firefox mobile browser v15.1 but has occurred on previous versions of Firefox.

When I try to click the link to view comments, the post grows in size seemingly indefinitely (eventually either the link works and redirects or I get frustrated and scroll to the next post). This has happened a few times. As far as I can tell it is seemingly random.

https://m.imgur.com/8HHIvtl
https://m.imgur.com/rhiA30y

Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this. Still trying to get use to the proper place to put things. If you need any more details let me know.

Quick thought. Is there currently a purely visual way of distinguishing the rationale for why a comment is collapsed? It seems to me at the moment there's three distinct ways a comment can take on a collapsed property:

• The user actively collapsed the comment while scrolling through the topic. This type of collapse is transient, and is neither persisted on the Tildes server, or in the browser, after the users leaves the page.

• The comment was collapsed via the "negative weighting" heuristic as the community applied noise/joke tags to the comment. This is permanent, until presumably the comment gains enough votes to exceed any negative weighting causing its collapse.

• Thirdly, the comment can be collapsed because the user has enabled "collapse old comments" in https://tildes.net/settings/comment_visits. Once a user visits a thread, any comments that existed at the last visit to the thread will be collapsed on any subsequent visits to the thread.

Is there any visual way of distinguishing a user-collapsed comment from a community-collapsed comment currently? And if not, should there be one? Perhaps by making the collapsed text slightly more translucent? I'm actually looking to contribute to the Tildes source code in some small way, so this would potentially be an interesting shoehorn for that.

A recent thread has had its title changed due to the title being sensationalized. I'm not sure that this is the correct move, as the title in question was also the title of the submitted article. I think this does a disservice to the community as a whole, as it makes it appear as though we want to editorialize the content submitted here which seems to go against the ideal of fostering quality discussion.

"But wait!", I hear you say, "We have a topic log!" That will be ignored, easily, especially by those seeking to equate the community with something else. While we're busy misrepresenting content (because that's what changing a title does, it misrepresents), others will point at us and shout about how we're misrepresenting the content being posted. I cannot agree with this, and I think its detrimental to the community and the idea of Tildes as a whole. Note: Text-only posts obviously are excluded from this, I'm concerned with titles on submitted links that have their own title.

Now, what happens when the title of an article is already sensationalist and editorialized? The authors, editor, and publisher obviously have biases and platforms they want to support. It currently seems as though we are changing titles to something different than what the title of the article is, and I find this extremely off-putting. I can understand wanting to avoid bringing that bias over to Tildes, but I cannot understand a reason to deliberately misrepresent that bias by changing an article's title. I think this is going to be detrimental to the community and the mission of Tildes to generate high-quality discussion.

Where articles with sensationalized headlines are posted, I propose that we must retain those titles. The system of tagging is sufficient to indicate that a title is too strongly sensationalized. Deviating from this norm is antithetical with Tildes' mission to generate and foster quality content and discussion.

There are too many responses to really get into things individually, but I must say I feel as though there has been a breach of trust. I had no idea that altering the titles of submissions would go so far, and it has destroyed the image I had of the site. Maybe the site will evolve more as the experiment continues, who knows. In the meantime, I've been accused of making arguments in bad faith multiple times in this thread. I'm deeply offended by this, as I've tried to present my thoughts and feelings as clearly as I could. This is deeply troubling to me, especially since those accusations have been given strong support by other users.

unless we stopped editing titles

This is a misrepresentation, I only ask that titles match the article they're from. Edit away if the title doesn't match the article, or is a user's text post. Maybe I wasn't clear, but there it is spelled out.

Also, there was never an ultimatum, but Deimos and other users would smear me with such claims. Being unsure of whether or not a community is a good fit for yourself is not nearly the same thing as an ultimatum.

Not sure if this is intentional or not, but I've noticed today that the first time I click on the new messages link at the top right, I cannot vote on any messages I read. I need to reload my inbox in order for the vote to stick.

Anyone else encountering this?

Looking at the development setup page, the suggested setup is to use vagrant to create and provision a VM. Out of curiosity, is there a reason for this preference over setting up a Tildes Docker image inside the repo? Tildes seems like a pretty simple and straightforward web app, it shouldn't be difficult to create. Is it just a developer preference of Deimos/Tildes devs? Or is there a logistical reason?

I'm curious about joining mastodon but I spent a while looking through the LGBTQ and developer sections and I don't really see a server that appeals to me. Do a lot of people here use it, any suggestions for getting started?

One of the main issues with news on social media is the spread of fake or false news. This happens on every platform that allows sharing news. If Tildes continues to gain popularity, this will likely happen on Tildes. I had an Idea: what if tildes had a group of fact checkers that check to see if the news is truthful, and block posts that link to untrustworthy new sites? could be like a 3 strikes thing, where if a new source has 3 articles posted that have misinformation, they would be blocked (the post also removed).

This is just an idea, feel free to highlight any issues with it.

I think it'd be useful to merge duplicate threads when there's two topics that are very close to each other. I don't want the stackExchange style "closed as duplicate of x," but I think it would be worthwhile to simply have the comments moved to the oldest thread and transfer any votes that are different users on each topic.

This way, we aren't losing discussion by flat-out deleting topics that are dupes, and we're also able to take some sort of action on threads that are dupes.

Just a thought.

People are regularly using regional tags like "south america", "europe", "asia", and "africa" on posts... but almost never "north america". If we're going to use tags based on continents, should we be consistent and include North America as one of those tags?

On the other hand, are continental tags even relevant? Should we just drop them, and use only country-specific tags?

(previous discussion)

There are a lot of "eu" tags being used, which leads to ambiguity about whether it's "europe" or "european union".

I think we should stop using "eu" entirely, and use only the longer, more informative, tags.

(previous discussion)

EDIT: Typo.

Hi, simple request here, can we have a dedicated channel group for the economy & related financial topics? It is an important enough field of topics that deserves to be on its own and not just labeled via tags, IMO. Especially with interesting developments and happenings which may be driving political and other news, it would be nice to have them easily in one place.

Now that I look again, ~politics probably deserves its own too, although I can see how that might turn into the most raucous part of the Tildes community. Economics is usually a bit more dry though--it's nicknamed the "dismal" science after all--so hopefully that would be less of an issue.

Thanks.

Right now, there are 10,000 subscribers to ~tildes.official, meaning that Tildes as a whole must have more than 10,000 users.

We've passed a milestone!

Congratulations to @Deimos for making this happen.