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    1. I'm planning to enable the "mark new comments" feature for everyone - any major concerns?

      Something that's come up in discussions a few times recently is how important it is to have good default settings. Even users who are quite technical and involved don't always explore which...

      Something that's come up in discussions a few times recently is how important it is to have good default settings. Even users who are quite technical and involved don't always explore which settings are available, and that's totally fine—they shouldn't need to. The default setup should be as good as possible, with changing settings mostly for specialized cases.

      One particular place on Tildes where this isn't currently being done well is for the "mark new comments" feature, which has always been disabled by default. I think it's one of the best features on the site and makes it much easier to follow ongoing discussions here than on other sites with similar comment systems, but overall, not many users have enabled it.

      For example, Tildes got some attention on Hacker News again yesterday, and about 80 new users have registered so far from that. Only 9 of them enabled "mark new comments", even though the welcome message strongly encourages it. Looking at longer periods of time, this seems typical: only about 10% of users ever enable it.

      As it says on the settings page for the feature, my reason for disabling it by default was out of privacy concerns. However, I've been doing some review of the data that Tildes stores lately and realized that this was kind of misleading and inaccurate. Because I have HTTP request server logs and some other related data (which is all only kept for 30 days), I effectively have topic visit records from the last 30 days for all users anyway, whether they have the feature enabled or not. The data is more convenient to access for users with the feature enabled, but it's available either way.

      Because of that, and because the data will be very useful to combine with some of the upcoming changes I mentioned in the last ~tildes.official post, I'm planning to enable this feature for everyone. Here are the general plans:

      • Data about which topics' comments pages a user visits will be stored (for 30 days), along with when and how many comments were there at the time. This enables displaying which topics have new comments since your last visit, and marking those new comments.
      • There will no longer be a setting to disable this, but you can still choose whether previously-seen comments are collapsed when you return - the same as the existing checkbox on that page for "Collapse old comments when I return to a topic".
      • I will probably implement some sort of "stop informing me of new comments in this topic" feature (separate from the new Ignore one) to stop having the info about new comments in a topic showing up for you.

      Please let me know if you have any thoughts or concerns about this. If nothing major comes up, I intend to make this change later this week.

      82 votes
    2. Tagging: "poem" or "poems"?

      Simple question. For people's original poems posted in ~creative, should they be tagged "poem" or "poems"? "poetry" is the broader category, and includes discussions about poets and poetry in...

      Simple question. For people's original poems posted in ~creative, should they be tagged "poem" or "poems"?

      "poetry" is the broader category, and includes discussions about poets and poetry in general. However, when someone posts their poem, should that be tagged "poem" or "poems"?

      The tagging guidelines say (or used to say - since I re-organised the Docs pages, I can't find this reference any more) that tags should be plural. That indicates that "poems" is the better tag. But the post contains a single poem, which makes "poem" the better tag.

      Opinions?


      EDIT: In the end, I went with the popular choice. When I looked at the tags used in ~creative, I found over a hundred topics tagged "poem" and only four topics tagged "poems". It seems that most people naturally choose "poem" when posting a poem, so I standardised the few differently tagged topics to use "poem".

      5 votes
    3. Limit the number of posts from a particular site?

      Would it be possible to limit the number of posts that are shown on the home page pointing to a given domain at one time? There have been a few times I've come to Tildes to see what's new and...

      Would it be possible to limit the number of posts that are shown on the home page pointing to a given domain at one time? There have been a few times I've come to Tildes to see what's new and there are 5 or 10 posts that all link to different pages on the same site. I think this would help increase the amount of variety in the stories that are showing and make the site more interesting to users.

      9 votes
    4. You can now ignore individual topics, which will stop showing them in listings for you

      It's been quiet from my end lately—I mentioned in a comment last week that I had been taking some time off, but now it's time to get things moving again. As I said in that comment, the next major...

      It's been quiet from my end lately—I mentioned in a comment last week that I had been taking some time off, but now it's time to get things moving again.

      As I said in that comment, the next major steps for Tildes are going to be bringing in more people, along with more (and more varied) content. To help with that, I'm going to be working on some structural and functionality changes to make it easier for people to see the types of content they want, as well as avoid content they're not interested in.

      So, I've just deployed the first piece of that: you can now ignore individual topics when you don't want to keep seeing them in your listings. Thanks yet again to repeated open-source contributor @what, who got this started a long time ago in a merge request that I was able to finish up and add a little more on top of.

      Currently, the only thing that ignoring topics does is hide them from your listings, but I'm still thinking about some of the details and possible other effects and wanted to ask for input first:

      • If you ignore a topic that you posted a comment in, should you no longer receive notifications about new replies to you in that topic? What about username mentions?
      • Should users be able to ignore their own topics?
      • Should ignored topics be hidden everywhere, or should there be exceptions? For example, if you do a search that matches ignored topics, should they show up in the results? If you're looking at the poster's user page, should ignored topics be shown?
      • Is there anything else that ignoring a topic should (or should not) affect?

      A listing of only topics you've ignored is also available through the sidebar on your user page as "Your ignored topics", in case you need to check on any of them or unignore one of them.

      One other piece of this is that there's now an "Actions" dropdown available on every topic in a listing, underneath the vote button. This dropdown allows you to bookmark or ignore topics without having to go into their comments page first. I'm not totally certain about this yet, and will probably make some more adjustments related to it. In particular, it's pretty far off to the right on a wide desktop monitor, so I might try some other options after seeing how it feels to use on the live site.

      Let me know if you have any feedback about these changes, or notice any issues. Hopefully there should be multiple more updates coming up over the next week or two.

      And as usual, I've given everyone 10 invites, accessible on the invite page.

      65 votes
    5. Any custom themes using Stylus?

      I switched to the light theme the other day. I'm typically all-in with dark themes for everything, but there was some convincing research. I started working on a light theme, but it's fairly...

      I switched to the light theme the other day. I'm typically all-in with dark themes for everything, but there was some convincing research.

      I started working on a light theme, but it's fairly basic.

      I was digging through the old thread and found a few gems, but I'm wondering what everybody has been up to since. Time for some show and tell!

      10 votes
    6. An active user count

      I would like a current active user Count for the whole site. I find them very useful for knowing when people are on I’m not a fan of group specific ones but one that said how many people where...

      I would like a current active user Count for the whole site. I find them very useful for knowing when people are on I’m not a fan of group specific ones but one that said how many people where currently on I would like

      19 votes
    7. Is there any progress on tag synonyms?

      I know there's a task for grouping synonymous tags together, like "humor" and "humour". How high a priority is this? I ask because poor @mycketforvirrad shouldn't have to feel like he needs to add...

      I know there's a task for grouping synonymous tags together, like "humor" and "humour". How high a priority is this?

      I ask because poor @mycketforvirrad shouldn't have to feel like he needs to add a tag for "wildfires" every time someone posts a topic about the Australia bushfires (and tags it "bushfires").

      14 votes
    8. Username search?

      Nearly every time most of us want to mention someone, we need to find a post they commented in or posted, which will get increasingly harder over time, and especially so for less active users.

      12 votes
    9. Can there be a 'new comments only' sort for people who toggled 'mark new comments' on?

      As someone comes to this site a lot and has toggled this feature on, a sort that shows only the threads where new comments have been posted since I last left would be great so I don't need to...

      As someone comes to this site a lot and has toggled this feature on, a sort that shows only the threads where new comments have been posted since I last left would be great so I don't need to scroll down the homepage anxiously looking for new comments on the topics I like.

      8 votes
    10. Who moved my cheese?

      Prologue: Feeling cranky, trying to be civil. I posted a link to an article, in the ~news, about two of the top US dairy producers declaring bankruptcy ... and Someone moved it to ~food. Harumpf....

      Prologue: Feeling cranky, trying to be civil.

      I posted a link to an article, in the ~news, about two of the top US dairy producers declaring bankruptcy ... and Someone moved it to ~food.

      Harumpf.

      ~food is "check out this new latte recipe" or "how to survive the vegetarian keto diet" (yes, that's a thing; I'm on it. May be why I'm cranky).

      My post was ~news, about the US economy, shifting societal norms, potentially about climate change.

      But forget about this specific categorization issue. This is the first time I've bumped into Tildes' moderation methodology.

      I don't subscribe to ~food, so for me, my post just vanished, w/o notification or explanation. Took me a few minutes to find it. I don't see any way to ID who moved it (may well have been @Deimos, for all I know), nor any way to challenge the move.

      Have I overlooked some 'moderation dispute' button, or some such? Or is moderation here beyond dispute?


      ETA: For anyone visiting this post down the line, here's the official/original statement on this ...

      https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/53r/users_can_now_be_manually_granted_permissions_to_re_tag_topics_move_them_between_groups_and_edit

      20 votes
    11. The results of the 2019 Census

      Hello everyone, it's 00:16 my time and I'm finally fucking done making all the data pretty for you after about 4 hours of coding to parse all those juicy CSV files cause guess what, the excel...

      Hello everyone, it's 00:16 my time and I'm finally fucking done making all the data pretty for you after about 4 hours of coding to parse all those juicy CSV files cause guess what, the excel files that JotForms gave me WHERE FUCKING GḀ͒ͬ̓ͦͅRͤ͊̔́B̴̼̫̟͍̅̆A̩̽ͮ̂̏͡G̸̭̜̑͑̃Ȇ͈͙͈̠̖̋́̌ͭ͂ͧhelp me

      Anyway :) Let's give y'all a brief rundown of the current Tilde demographics, and some highlights, CAUSE NOW I HAVE ALL YOUR DATA AND THUS INFINITE POWER TO MAKE JOKESdid I mention I've been doing for half the day and I'm really hungry? AND TIRED? Honestly you owe me this moment of insanity considering I'M RUNNING ON GREEN LEAF JUICE AND HOW MUCH DATA I WADED THROUGH AHHHH-.

      Also, most of these will be pictures because honestly I can't be asked to not pretty paste these figures into markdown tables or I'll legitimate go insane. Anyway, this post has plenty of sass, don't take this shit too seriously please, gracias.

      The 2019 Census

      Anyway.

      This year we got 249 responses in total, which really annoys me cause 250 is way prettier to look at at. However, one was completely empty and the other two are... Fishy. More on that later.

      Personal details

      Age

      When it comes to age, Tildes is heavily skewed towards people in their 20s to 30s, 45% of the responses came from people between 20 and 30. Overall, late 20s to and early 30s dominate the demographics. (before anyone screams at me about the proper use of graphs, don't worry I also took Statistics at uni, but the histogram in Excel refused to work and honestly go make your own census) There is also some statistical noise, which I'm not sure how it happened. Most likely someone typed too quickly.

      Our youngest user is 11! And either very intelligent, cause they also speak 9 languages, or a fraud. If you're not a fraud, I apologize and wish you luck on your future path in life, which will surely be extremely successful, if you really speak that many languages at such an age.Hint, this was one of the fishy responses

      Our oldest user is 70! I really don't know what to say, cause that's a pretty high number for an internet user. How was uhh... The cold war?Holy fuck I should stop I need to eat

      Geographical... Stuff

      Overall, the Tildes demographic hasn't changed much. US and Canada still lead by quite a lot, but we have acquired quite the little diverse userbase.

      All I can do is salute my fellow other Austrian user. Can you say Oachkatzalschwoaf though? THAT'S THE SIGN OF A REAL AUSTRIAN.NONE OF THIS STARTING WORLD WARS SHIT

      Language

      Predictably, a large number of people does not speak a second language besides English, however, due to geographical diversity, a large number of languages is represented, most of them from Europe, which is Tildes' second largest userbase.

      Gender & Sexuality

      Tildes is heavily male-dominated, probably due to its IT-focused population and the fact that most of us came from Reddit.

      Of the 248 responses, 17 people hit marked that they were trans, pretty much all of them MTF (which is apparently the majority of trans people, Wikipedia tells me.) 3 preferred not to say and everyone else is cis.

      Now, let's get to the sexy stuff. And by that I mean the point where the numbers rub together in fantastic ways.

      The majority of Tildes is really fucking straight, though we have some fun sexualities represented, my personal favourite Still figuring that out. You do you mate, you'll get there eventually. Also, whoever wrote down O-Sexual also wrote X-Treme Wiccan as their religion, and at this point in I'm too afraid to google what any of that is. Clearly, we need more straight people, after all, we're in the 20s.Before anyone yells at me, THIS WAS A FUCKING JOKE For now I've defined that person as Fish numero dos.

      Religion

      So, here's a doozy. To that one person (probably part of the 9% of <20 year olds), WHO DECIDED TO WRITE THE WONDERFUL ANSWER atheism and angosticism are not religions, can you PLEASE read the question properly next time. FUCK.Honestly that is such a 14 y/o thing to write, by the Ǵ͙͔͔̻͖̜́ͅO̶̱̘͡D͓̞͉̲͓̥S̢̲͙̙̟̯̙͓̱͟

      Anyway, religion is probably the thing with the most diverse answers, honestly. There are words in there I have never read in my life before. Like what is Apatheist.1? Is there some sort of ranking? Does it work with natural numbers only? Is there a Apatheist.3,51? It can't be a typo, people take religions way too seriously for that.

      Politics

      I averaged out the scores of everyone who answered the political questions and got the following answers (remember, these are based on the 8values quiz):

      Economy - 7,02
      Diplomacy - 6,9
      State - 3,8
      Society - 7,48

      Only economy is really surprising here, though I'd also have expected diplomacy to be a little lower as well. Maybe the leftist skew ia bit of an illusion?

      Work, education and really everything else these sections were a terrible idea

      When it comes to education, Tildes is pretty university focused. Almost half people replying have a bachelor's, a good bunch are working or have aquired their master's. Also one (maybe soon-to-be) MD and a few PhDs. The Craftsmen and tradeship people barely balance us out, we need some more COMMON FOLK IN HERE.

      IT people, rejoice! WE STILL REIGN SUPREMEEveryone else will remember that All jokes aside, shoutout to the stay-at-home dad, proud of ya'. And to the disabled person, I hope life goes as well as it can for you. That goes for the longterm-unemployed person as well. Someday, you'll manage mate, someday.

      And to the person who said their job is a waste of time in exchange of money... Mate, you need someone to talk? I'm here. We're all here.

      Surprise section about technical shit and Tildes

      OS usage is as expected, due to Tildes' heavy skew into IT and the fact that Apple doesn't nearly dominate as much in other countries as in the US, it's to be expected.

      Due to said IT dominance Linux has almost caught up with the leader, Windows. Though my personal favourite is Anything cool that comes into existence, like can we make a Linux fork that is called literally that? You'd be the perfect match.

      When it comes to Tildes specifically, y'all need to chill out. Most people who answered the census visit Tildes multiple times a day, like the content here doesn't even move that quickly? WHAT ARE YOU ALL DOING? IS THERE SOME SECRET CULT I SHOULD KNOW ABOUT?If it's a LSD cult I'm totes in lads.

      As expected, most people who answered the survey have an account, and most likely due to the heavy IT skew most people are visiting from their PC. But I have also seen some people requesting a mobile app in the free form questions, so maybe that would go up if a native app were to be created.

      The freeform questions

      Well, in all honesty, not much has changed. Most people like the dedicated community, site design, in-depth discussions (though that was sometimes a point on both sides), etc. and dislike the heavy domination of IT topics and US/Europe news & politics. Also, multiple people simply said @Deimos when asked what they like most about Tildes. Get a room, y'all. Though it's well deserved, I think we can all agree on that.

      Complete list of positive feedback: https://pastebin.com/KYCYLWP1

      Complete list of negative feedback: https://pastebin.com/Eng6jjay

      Complete list of ideas for change: https://pastebin.com/eery3mCt

      Why am I posting these? Cause in all honesty, freeform feedback like this is hard to analyze and summarize, so I'd rather just post it all so everyone can form their opinion. Also, I'm tired.

      Special mentions

      Someone was nice enough to add the mention in parantheses that I should add them to the bisexual list instead if no one else marked pansexual. Well lucky you, exactly one other person marked it! You two can go find yourselves a room with lots of sexy pans in it now and have some fun.This is how it works, right? Or just, slide into each other's DMs or something and talk about your love for pans. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

      I also appreciate the one person who entered their religion in the languages section on accident. That's fact now, you speak Raised Catholic, now spiritual/atheist now, no shh, no talking back, that's your language now.

      To that one person that said that Tildes is too serious, this one's for you.

      And cheers to Deimos, without whom I couldn't be so silly on this overly serious but fantastic platform.

      Anyway, Grzmot out, I need sleep. I'll come back in 8 hours or so to regret the shit I just wrote down at 2 AM. Please don't ban me.

      83 votes
    12. Why are some of the tags on title page displayed on 2nd row (next to Article), but some of them on the 3rd row (the old tag list)?

      How does this work, why are some tags on separate line? Example: How big are the fires burning in eastern Australia? Interactive map ~news australia · Article: 207 words natural disasters...

      How does this work, why are some tags on separate line?

      Example:


      How big are the fires burning in eastern Australia? Interactive map

      ~news australia · Article: 207 words
      natural disasters bushfires


      The australia tag is next to ~news, not in the tag list below.

      4 votes
    13. Ability to hide posts that link to specific websites

      I'd be interested in a feature where I can have a list of top-level domains that I want to ignore content from. For example, I'm never in a position to watch a video when I'm browsing tildes. So...

      I'd be interested in a feature where I can have a list of top-level domains that I want to ignore content from. For example, I'm never in a position to watch a video when I'm browsing tildes. So I'd like the option to just not see any link to youtube.com or vimeo.com. Maybe I think all content posted to example.com is inflammatory click-bait, so I just want to ignore those links, too.

      Would that be possible?

      11 votes
    14. Some level of autotagging?

      (Emphasis on Some.) Could there be a rudimentary auto-tagging system for automatically scraped stats? (Auto-tagging video content as videos, music artists by their names, long...

      (Emphasis on Some.)

      Could there be a rudimentary auto-tagging system for automatically scraped stats? (Auto-tagging video content as videos, music artists by their names, long reads/watches,individual blogs and YouTube channels?) It could serve as a QoL feature and save some taggers and forgetful posters some time (I almost always forget to tag my videos accordingly and they're only tagged because someone remembers to, which is way too menial a tag to still need be added by humans.)

      11 votes
    15. Preparation for the 2019ish Tildes Census 2: Electric Boogaloo

      Hello everyone, it's me again, that guy who can't create online forms reliably. As some people might've noticed, the last attempt backfired on me in two ways: The form itself was... Lacking, as...

      Hello everyone, it's me again, that guy who can't create online forms reliably.

      As some people might've noticed, the last attempt backfired on me in two ways:

      1. The form itself was... Lacking, as numerous comments told me
      2. The wonderful, privacy conscious form creating site I used physically broke after about 70 responses, meaning I lost the entirety of the data collected thus far and any future response. As I couldn't view the responses individually either, this means that the previous attempt was a complete failure.Please hurl your insults at me in the PMs to not clutter these comments.

      This has lead me to create a new form on a new site: JotForms. As this is commercial site, it shouldn't break after a handful of replies and also is still privacy conscious. They do not save any data as the recipient of the data (me) is declared as the controller. Be assured that I will use all collected data solely for the census (i.e creating fancy graphs and analysing it).

      The only positive aspect here is that at least I got to address valuable feedback you guys gave me. I've updated the political section and expanded the work and education section. I'm sure it can still be improved though.

      The currently only problem I have is that on the free tier of JotForms, you're limited to 100 submissions, which we'll surely exceed based on the numbers of the last census. Buying the premium for one month (actually subscribing and then cancelling it) would cost me USD 19. That's not the world to me, but would you guys be fine with me appending a paypal link to send some voluntary donations my way if you think I'm doing a good job? I don't want to make a profit, I'd just like to recoup the cost.

      Currently, the form is still in editing, you can view a picture of it's current form here. Nothing is set in stone, and I'm open to all suggestions.

      44 votes
    16. Feature request: Just like with votes, disable labels after vote retention period expires

      I think that if we aren't allowed to vote on old topics, we shouldn't be allowed to label them either. Not out of any privacy standpoint, but rather from the fact that this way, people can affect...

      I think that if we aren't allowed to vote on old topics, we shouldn't be allowed to label them either. Not out of any privacy standpoint, but rather from the fact that this way, people can affect ordering of comments even in old topics, which isn't something one would expect to happen. This is potentially confusing, as newcomers to a topic can affect comments even years after.

      16 votes
    17. Which Tildes Theme are you using?

      Personally I'm partial to solarized dark since I also use that in my IDE's usually. Dark but not too harsh, since tildes supports a bunch of themes by default. I'm wondering which one are you...

      Personally I'm partial to solarized dark since I also use that in my IDE's usually.
      Dark but not too harsh, since tildes supports a bunch of themes by default.
      I'm wondering which one are you using and why?

      29 votes
    18. More about scheduled topics, some group rearranging, and input needed on "content types"

      A few pretty quick things to talk about today, with some input wanted on each: Scheduled/recurring topics As announced last week, the site now has native scheduled topics (which need to be...

      A few pretty quick things to talk about today, with some input wanted on each:

      Scheduled/recurring topics

      As announced last week, the site now has native scheduled topics (which need to be configured by me). There have been a couple of these posted now, with the most recent one being today's "What are you reading these days?" topic in ~books.

      Here's the schedule that I have set up right now. Times are in UTC (Pacific time is UTC-7 and Eastern is UTC-4).

      Topic Timing (UTC)
      ~talk - What are you doing this week? Monday, 15:00
      ~games - What have you been playing? Monday, 16:00
      ~tv - What have you been watching? Tuesday, 16:00
      ~anime - What have you been watching/reading this week? (Anime/Manga) Wednesday, 16:00
      ~books - What have you been reading lately? Every second Thursday, 16:00
      ~creative - What creative projects have you been working on? Every second Thursday (alternating with ~books), 16:00
      ~talk - What are you doing this weekend? Friday, 15:00
      ~music - What have you been listening to this week? Friday, 16:00

      These were all pre-existing topics that had been getting posted consistently. The timings are a bit arbitrary, but somewhere around 16:00 is usually the time the site starts getting more active each day, and I went with every 2 weeks for ~creative and ~books since I think people don't change through those as quickly.

      There are a few other topics I think would be good too, let me know what you think or if this is starting to be too many:

      One other question I wanted to ask, since I'm doing some work related to it: Is there any reason for people to still be able to post new top-level comments in old recurring threads? I'll definitely still allow posting replies to existing comments so conversations can continue, but I can't really think of a reason why anyone would need to post a new top-level comment in any thread except the newest, and may just disallow that to keep people from inadvertently posting in the old ones.

      Group rearrangements

      I deleted the three ~science subgroups (~science.formal, ~science.natural, ~science.social) and moved all the topics back into ~science. These were confusing (I had to keep checking which branch certain subjects were in), and the activity level across the science groups really isn't high enough to need 4 groups.

      I also deleted ~hobbies.automotive and moved the (very few) topics from it back into ~hobbies with an automotive tag. The group was getting less than one topic posted a week, and doesn't seem necessary yet.

      One other change I want to make but haven't yet, because I want input first: I think I'd like to move ~creative into a sub-group of ~arts. What do you think of calling it ~arts.original? Any other possible names that would work better as "content created by the poster?"

      Content types

      Finally, I've also just deployed a change that starts showing a "content type" on each topic. Currently it doesn't do anything other than get displayed in the listings, but the plan is to be able to use this for searching, filtering, and similar purposes. This will be able to cover the common requests like "I'd like a way to see only videos", and will also make some other things easier to customize (for example, there's no need to show word count on Ask topics).

      Here's the list of content types that are shown right now, but I'm fairly sure that I'm forgetting about some others:

      1. Article
      2. Ask topic
      3. Image
      4. PDF
      5. Text topic
      6. Tweet
      7. Video

      Update on Oct 11: if a type for a link topic isn't detected, it will display "Link"

      What other types of content get posted to Tildes that aren't covered in there?

      33 votes
    19. Suppose we make Tildes topics a bit more like little blogs by adding support for "updates?"

      I've previously written about long-running topics and I've asked about software for blogging. But I keep coming back to doing some simple blogging on Tildes. I don't think Tildes should try to...

      I've previously written about long-running topics and I've asked about software for blogging. But I keep coming back to doing some simple blogging on Tildes. I don't think Tildes should try to compete with real blogging software, but maybe Tildes can support a minimal version of it, enough to make it worth doing it here when starting an independent blog isn't worth the effort? An example would be a project diary (like for my accordion synthesizer project). We could encourage people to start a topic for each of their creative projects that they want to talk about and to post updates as they make progress. Or, perhaps this would be a way to cover some ongoing story that they want to live-blog?

      I've refined my ideas a bit about how it might work: Suppose a Tildes topic contains a list of zero or more updates in chronological order? Only the original author can post an update, but anyone can write comments responding to any update. When you post an update to one of your topics, the comment tree for each previous update gets collapsed, encouraging people to comment on the latest update.

      When a topic gets an update, it reappears in the topic list with a separate set of votes, showing both the original topic's title and the update's title concatenated. Any old listing is removed, so we don't show the same topic twice. However, maybe the topic heading shows the last three updates or so if the topic is getting multiple updates in a short period of time, as might happen when live-blogging.

      12 votes
    20. Should we have some sort of 'Tildes census' in a regular fashion?

      So someone asked about which themes are used the most, and I went to check this survey and then realized it was deleted and that no new surveys have been done since. So are most of us interested...

      So someone asked about which themes are used the most, and I went to check this
      survey
      and then realized it was deleted and that no new surveys have been done since.

      So are most of us interested in this becoming a formal and regular thing?

      26 votes
    21. Tildes and multi-dimensional weighted votes

      hello, I've been wondering a little bit about what a well-designed voting system on a website like reddit or Tildes would look like, and as I do not have a definitive answer, I do have a...

      hello,

      I've been wondering a little bit about what a well-designed voting system on a website like reddit or Tildes would look like, and as I do not have a definitive answer, I do have a suggestion to make. I've originally posted this on another website, but I thought that it could also be fruitful to discuss this here, seeing that efforts have already been made in that direction (similar features have even already been implemented).

      Looking forward to reading you!

      I was wondering whether Aether should support downvotes or not, seeing that they are often misused on other discussion platforms to suppress content that is disliked rather than non-contributory or low-quality. People may then not view content that was heavily downvoted, even though it may have been high-quality.

      Should we rather use some other mechanism to serve that function? If so, what would it be?

      Personally, I'd suggest that we experiment with two-dimensional weighted voting.

      In a word, it would allow users to express both whether they agree or disagree with (alternatively, like or dislike) a piece of content (and how strongly so) and whether they think that that piece of content is high-quality or low-quality (and how strongly so).

      In practice, it could look like this (for users): upon clicking on the voting icon, a square with two scaled axes would appear. One for the quality of content, the other for the level of (dis)agreeance. A user, who had for instance found a piece of content to be very high-quality, but who somewhat disagreed with it, could then express that opinion by click and dragging right to the top of the square, but somewhat left of its center.

      That simple mechanism would therefore allow us to distinguish between those two criteria and better capture the intention behind a vote, and help alleviate the issue of seeing deeply unpopular content being buried despite its high quality. It would also allow users to express how strongly they feel about a piece of content by letting them adjust the weight of their vote. Plus, it wouldn't be too cumbersome to use (in my opinion).

      (Voting strongly should be slightly inconvenient or cumbersome to do, so as to deter users from voting strongly every time, thereby rendering strong votes meaningless. In practice, that could mean having to move one's mouse only a little for a soft vote, but more and more as the vote gains more weight.
      Axes should also be sticky, so as to make it easy to vote with respect to one criterion only (we shouldn't need to try and aim precisely).)

      We could also put in place some additional mechanism to let users rate content with regard to other criteria (how informative it is, or impressive, exciting, funny, etc.). I do not expect users to rate all the content they read, but allowing them to do so could still be useful. They may still bother to do it for content they find especially informative, impressive, etc., and that would then allow other users to sort content with regard to one or several of these criteria and find content tailored to their interests.

      (We could then also display for any piece of content a chart (that could look like this) showing how it was rated with regard to all these criteria. That's not really important, but I find that cool.

      We could also plot the number of votes as a function of vote strength, find the average vote strength and so on... That would also be cool, and interesting.)

      What do you think?

      24 votes
    22. Is there any way to combine content from both tildes and reddit into one place?

      I'd like an app or preferably a website that I can use that will combine both discussion from reddit and tildes into one place. I actually haven't used tildes since April 2019 and the reason is...

      I'd like an app or preferably a website that I can use that will combine both discussion from reddit and tildes into one place. I actually haven't used tildes since April 2019 and the reason is because I just straight up forgot about tildes. There just isn't enough content on tildes for me so I find myself spending more of my time on reddit which means I end up forgetting about tildes.

      10 votes
    23. How is work on Tildes API progressing?

      As a user of the Reddit Terminal Viewer (client for the command-line), I'm interested in doing something like that for Tildes (and maybe even an Emacs major-mode) in the future. I understand doing...

      As a user of the Reddit Terminal Viewer (client for the command-line), I'm interested in doing something like that for Tildes (and maybe even an Emacs major-mode) in the future.

      I understand doing this kind of thing would be extremely hard without an API, so I'm curious: how are things progressing on that front?

      Thanks!

      14 votes
    24. Tag formatting inconsistencies

      I've been noticing a couple of weird formatting issues with tags on topics. For some posts, the first tag is shown before the metadata, then the rest of the tags are on a new line below. This...

      I've been noticing a couple of weird formatting issues with tags on topics. For some posts, the first tag is shown before the metadata, then the rest of the tags are on a new line below. This isn't always the case, and so far I can't find any rhyme or reason for whether it does or not. It's not like some CSS float issue or anything, it's actually creating two <ul>'s. — example

      The second issue I've noticed is sometimes the dangling part of a letter like lowercase "g" will be cut off by the footer. It seems like this is caused by .label {line-height: 1.2;}, but it's also inconsistent, and I haven't figured out why. In this example the "g" in "climate change" is not affected.

      Maybe it's just me, I dunno. Firefox 70 on linux. I'd create a gitlab issue, except I am very lazy.

      7 votes
    25. A page has been added to view the posts you've voted on (up to 30 days old)

      It was offhandedly mentioned in last week's post about voting data, but thanks to an open-source contribution by ajbt200128 (whose Tildes username I don't know) there's now a page available for...

      It was offhandedly mentioned in last week's post about voting data, but thanks to an open-source contribution by ajbt200128 (whose Tildes username I don't know) there's now a page available for you to review posts you voted on recently. It's linked as "Your votes" in the sidebar menu when you're on your user page.

      There's a warning at the top of the page about it, but please don't try to use that page to keep track of posts overall. Because the voting data is being deleted now, you won't be able to keep track of any posts older than 30 days through it. Use "Bookmark" for that—there's a link just above "Your votes" for "Your bookmarks" where bookmarked posts will stay forever.

      I've also just noticed that these pages aren't paginated yet and everything's in one big list, so if you vote often, be warned that they might be quite large. I should probably work on fixing that now. Let me know if you notice any other issues with it.

      And as usual, I've given everyone 10 invites, accessible on the invite page.

      49 votes
    26. Notify people who replied to a post/comment when it's edited?

      Some people only include footnotes on their text after they finish it, or realize that their interpretation of something might not be the same as others interpretation (like what is social media)...

      Some people only include footnotes on their text after they finish it, or realize that their interpretation of something might not be the same as others interpretation (like what is social media) or source their claims, or detail it after finishing the main body. Admittedly we might want to let the user choose whether their edit is worth notifying to all who replied for the sake of stuff like typos though.

      9 votes
    27. Better support for long-running topics?

      I feel like with our weekly recurring topics, comments are getting posted all over the place. For example, if you want to read about what people think of a particular game, it's going to be spread...

      I feel like with our weekly recurring topics, comments are getting posted all over the place. For example, if you want to read about what people think of a particular game, it's going to be spread out among a lot of different topics.

      It seems like it might be nicer if in the games group, there were one topic for each game? Similarly for movies or books, or creative projects. This is how we did things on the Well, though there was also a "movies that didn't get their own topic" topic. But it seems like that was a limitation of a system that didn't deal well with having lots of topics in a group.

      To support this well, we'd need to make coming back to long-running topics more pleasant to read somehow. With a linear conversation the software can start you off wherever you left off. I'm not sure what's best for threaded conversation?

      In short, maybe there should be a way to do things more like forum software and less like Hacker News or Reddit? Or should we just try it out without changing the software?

      11 votes
    28. The voting on topics and comments now ends when they're 30 days old and all individual vote records are deleted, retaining only the count

      This is a privacy-related update that I've always intended to implement on Tildes, and I finally spent some time on it this week. Keeping eternal records of everything that every user ever voted...

      This is a privacy-related update that I've always intended to implement on Tildes, and I finally spent some time on it this week.

      Keeping eternal records of everything that every user ever voted on is some of the most sensitive data that sites with a voting system have. Your voting history says a huge amount about you, your interests and opinions, and can even serve as a decent proxy for showing what times you were active on the site, what posts you were reading, and how long you spent reading the comments on each of them. In exchange for these major privacy implications, you get the tiny benefit of being able to tell which old posts you voted on (if you even go back to old posts).

      So now, to match up with Tildes's general approach of deleting as much sensitive data as possible after 30 days, the voting on posts closes when they're 30 days old. After a post's voting is closed, the records of which individual users voted on that post are deleted, but the count of how many votes there were is kept. So old posts will continue showing their same "scores" exactly the same as before, but there will be no record of which individual users cast those votes.

      However, this isn't a purely positive update: the main downside is that the voting does need to be closed (otherwise there would be no way to prevent people from voting again after their first vote is deleted), which prevents the occasionally useful ability to vote on old topics or comments. Overall though, voting on older posts is extremely rare, with less than 1% of the votes on Tildes ever made on something that was over 30 days old at the time of voting.

      When the "delete old sensitive data" job runs for the first time after this update later today, 97% of the voting data in the database will be deleted. That's a massive decrease in the amount of sensitive data the site is retaining, and something that most sites would never consider doing, because of the value of that data for behavior analysis and ad-targeting.

      121 votes
    29. Feature Idea: Tildes Playlist - Would it be useful to have some sort of automated, easy to use, media categorization?

      My use case: I watch videos (YouTube) and listen to audio (Podcasts) as a major part of my weekly media intake. I would love some sort of generated Tildes Playlist . IANADev, but it sure would be...

      My use case:
      I watch videos (YouTube) and listen to audio (Podcasts) as a major part of my weekly media intake. I would love some sort of generated Tildes Playlist . IANADev, but it sure would be nice if Tildes was able to parse, scrape, and categorize media posted as topics and in comments. Then present them to me with a date filter, and allow separating audio only and video media. Maybe something like tildes.net/?tag= but at tildes.net/playlist. I guess it would be nice to be able to sort media by tag as well.

      Possible other use case:
      Accessibility?

      I see that some videos are already being tagged "videos." So there already is some organic interest in this special category, right?

      What do you all think, is this useful?

      From a dev perspective, is getting that correct enough difficult? Does Embedly categorize audio only and video?

      edit: in the playlist view, there should of course be a link back to the topic or comment where the media was found. Also, @Deimos, I certainly don't want to take Tildes away from the text-first/only direction of the site, but sometimes I am doing stuff conducive to audio/video media intake like cooking, driving, etc. It would be cool to be able to easily consume it then, and come back to comment later.

      13 votes
    30. The donation goal for November has been (more than) reached! Let's talk a bit about how to handle "extra" donations

      As noticed yesterday, the donation goal meter in the sidebar made a huge jump upwards yesterday due to an extremely generous (and anonymous) donation of 0.3 BTC. Again, if that person is reading,...

      As noticed yesterday, the donation goal meter in the sidebar made a huge jump upwards yesterday due to an extremely generous (and anonymous) donation of 0.3 BTC. Again, if that person is reading, thank you!

      When I added the goal and Financials page about a week and a half ago, I explained that I thought it was probably too high to reach yet, but it was intended to show the progress we're making towards the point where the site is truly fully sustainable (and that progress is already great for the site's size).

      But now thanks to that generous donation, we've already surpassed the first monthly goal, which honestly wasn't something I was expecting to happen for a while. Because of that, I want to talk a bit about how we can handle the "surplus" in cases like this.

      My general feeling is that when it reaches the next month, any amount above the goal should probably "roll over" to the next month, starting us out at a higher point than the normal baseline from monthly recurring donations. For example, as of right now we're about $574.10 above this month's goal, so December will start out with that much in addition to the monthly contributions. This feels the most fair to me in terms of keeping the impact of larger donations and ones made after already reaching 100%, so that people don't feel like some of their donation is "wasted" or that they should wait until next month to donate so they can help with a goal.

      There are definitely some edge cases with this that might get weird, but they mostly only come up with extremely large one-time donations or constantly surpassing the goal, and those are both problems I'd be happy to have.

      I'm also probably going to tinker with the design of the goal bar a little over the next couple days to be able to show progress beyond 100%, since just having an unchanging full green bar there for the rest of the month would be boring.

      Let me know if you have any thoughts about this overall—it's a pretty minor concern overall, but I thought it would be good to have a thread about it anyway, partially as a celebration of hitting the first official goal ever set so quickly.

      As always, thank you very much to everyone that contributes to Tildes through donations as well as all the other ways (being active on the site, promoting it to others, helping with the open-source code/repo, etc.). It's hugely encouraging to me to have so many people helping support the site already.

      79 votes
    31. Today and Tomorrow, I will Match Donations to Tildes up to $500 total, and will match recurring donations 3X.

      I’m feeling generous and want Tildes to succeed and think this is a good opportunity to try to hit the November goal. If you donate and DM me or comment here with proof, I will match your...

      I’m feeling generous and want Tildes to succeed and think this is a good opportunity to try to hit the November goal.

      If you donate and DM me or comment here with proof, I will match your donation. If you set up a NEW recurring donation, and DM me or comment here with proof, I will match that donation triple on a one-time basis (so, you set up 5 dollars recurring = 15 dollars from me this month).

      Services we enjoy need revenue to succeed. If we want those services to exist, we need to fund them. Please consider donating to Tildes.

      The overall donation page is here: https://docs.tildes.net/donate

      You can DM me here for proof, or comment in this thread, or on reddit as /u/umbrae if you prefer for some reason (maybe you browse logged out).

      55 votes
    32. How should I go about requesting a topic move or retag?

      Occasionally, especially for newer users, I'll see a post in a section of the site where it doesn't belong, sometimes without (proper) tags. What's the best way to bring this to the attention of...

      Occasionally, especially for newer users, I'll see a post in a section of the site where it doesn't belong, sometimes without (proper) tags. What's the best way to bring this to the attention of folks who can fix it? Leaving comments is messy and distracts from the discussion, but right now it's the only method I know of to bring up the issue.

      4 votes
    33. Profile customisation

      So I was wondering if there was any plans for adding more profile customisation in the future maybe being able to add a profile picture and adding a follow option or a colour option ?

      14 votes
    34. I've been accepted into GitHub Sponsors - if you have a Patreon pledge or other recurring donation to Tildes, I'd really appreciate it if you could move it over

      When GitHub Sponsors was announced back in May, I applied immediately, and have just recently been accepted. This is now, by far, the best way available to make a recurring donation to Tildes:...

      When GitHub Sponsors was announced back in May, I applied immediately, and have just recently been accepted.

      This is now, by far, the best way available to make a recurring donation to Tildes:

      • They aren't currently charging any fees, even for payment processing.
      • They're matching up to $5000 in contributions for the first year.

      On Patreon, about 10% of every donation is taken between processing fees, Patreon's own fees, and PayPal (for transferring the money out to the bank). Even without the matching, donating through GitHub instead means that 10% more of your money (all of what you're donating) will come to Tildes, and until we exhaust the matching it's more like 2.2x. For example, a $5/month donation on Patreon results in Tildes receiving about $4.50, but through GitHub it will be $10.

      So if you have an existing recurring donation (or would like to start donating), I'd really appreciate if you could do it through GitHub Sponsors. Tildes is a non-profit, and its only source of income is user donations—there's no advertising, no investors, and I'm not selling your data or anything else (and none of those will ever change). Donations are what makes it possible for me to keep working on the site. For some more info, please see the Donate page on the Docs site (which I'll update soon with info about GitHub Sponsors).

      The page is here: https://github.com/sponsors/Deimos

      A few quick notes:

      • I believe you'll need a GitHub account to sponsor through here, but it's quick to create one.
      • You have the choice of making your sponsorship private or public.
      • You have to choose one of the pre-defined "tiers", but I tried to create ones that match the most common donations. If you need a different amount that isn't available, let me know and I can probably add it. I still have a couple of slots left for more tiers.
      • If you're currently donating through Patreon, please remember to cancel your pledge through there if you move it over to GitHub. The next Patreon payment will happen on November 1.

      I'm also working on a couple things to make the amount that's currently being donated to Tildes public, and I hope to have that available later this week (and hopefully with a much higher number because of the GitHub matching!).

      Thanks very much, and if there's anything confusing about the process or if you have any questions, please let me know.

      114 votes
    35. Beyond headlines?

      Tildes is much like Hacker News and Reddit in that article previews are limited to just headlines. (Well, there are tags, but they're de-emphasized since they're hidden by default.) While they are...

      Tildes is much like Hacker News and Reddit in that article previews are limited to just headlines. (Well, there are tags, but they're de-emphasized since they're hidden by default.)

      While they are very concise, a problem with headlines is that we rely on them too much. Even good ones don't really tell you what the article is about. In cases where it's hard to read the article (because it's paywalled or whatever) the conversation can be based mostly on the headline rather than the substance of the article. On Hacker News there are often mini-disputes about whether the headline is clickbait or not, and what's a better headline. "Headline is misleading" is a pretty common complaint.

      I'm wondering if we could add a bit more information? One possibility would be a "Subtitle" field. Lots of articles have subtitles that are somewhat more informative, and doing a copy-paste is pretty easy.

      Another would be to have a "pull quote" field. This requires a bit of editorial judgement by the submitter about what's the best pull quote, but I think that's okay. It's still copy-paste so at least they don't have to summarize anything in their own words.

      For the last few days I've been posting a pull quote as the first comment whenever I post an article, and I think it works fairly well, except that the summary says "1 comment" when actually nobody commented - it's just the pull quote. Also, having an explicit field for the pull quote might allow better UI possibilities, like you could put them under the headline in the topic list.

      18 votes
    36. Further split up ~tildes?

      admittedly I should have asked for an invite sooner and posted this on the group request thread instead of here but here we are. ~tildes is the most active sub by far, so it only makes sense it...

      admittedly I should have asked for an invite sooner and posted this on the group request thread instead of here but here we are.

      ~tildes is the most active sub by far, so it only makes sense it should be split up further.

      Maybe split it up to ~tildes.site (for the look of the site.), ~tildes.syntax (for the markdown used in tildes.) and ~tildes.community (for self-awareness, talking about how we could improve this community, what it needs and where it's headed.)

      Any opinions?

      1 vote
    37. Proposal: show link metadata on the post's page itself

      If you look at a given ~--say, ~misc--you'll see wordcount next to article links, and runtime next to video links. But if you go to a specific post--like this one, that information is gone....

      If you look at a given ~--say, ~misc--you'll see wordcount next to article links, and runtime next to video links. But if you go to a specific post--like this one, that information is gone. Generally, the way I use tildes or other link aggregators is to click on a bunch of links and then cycle through them; by the time I got to that particular post, the index page I got it from was long gone and I'd forgotten how long it was. Can we show those metadata on the post itself?

      11 votes
    38. Tildes app ?

      Any plans for a tildes app?. I’m often on mobile and an app would probably run better than the website on browser

      19 votes
    39. New search capabilities available: phrases, excluding terms, alternatives ("or")

      On Sunday, I took the site down for a short downtime to upgrade the database from PostgreSQL version 10 to 12. One of the main reasons I wanted to do that upgrade was to get access to a new search...

      On Sunday, I took the site down for a short downtime to upgrade the database from PostgreSQL version 10 to 12. One of the main reasons I wanted to do that upgrade was to get access to a new search function, and I've updated to using it now, so we have multiple nice new search capabilities available.

      These should all be pretty familiar since a lot of other search systems and search engines have similar capabilities with the same syntax:

      • As before, by default, searching for multiple words will be treated as "all of these terms". So if you search ~games for steam play, you'll get all topics that have both "steam" and "play" in them.
      • Phrases can now be searched for by putting double quotes around them. Searching ~games for "steam play" in quotes will only find topics that specifically have "steam play".
      • Excluding terms can be done by putting a minus sign in front of it. For example, if you wanted to try to find ~games posts about Blizzard and exclude the recent China controversy, you could search for blizzard -china.
      • Alternatives can be searched for by using "or". This changes to "any of these terms" instead of "all of these terms". For example, searching for overwatch or diablo will find any topic with either of those terms, instead of both.
      • These capabilities can be combined, so you can exclude phrases, use "or" with phrases, and so on. For example: blizzard -"hong kong" or diablo.

      This all works both through the main site topic search (at the top of the sidebar) as well as the new search for your own topics/comments.

      I'm going to write a page for the Docs with info about these capabilities, but I think I want to try to find a full specification of what's supported first to make sure I cover it properly. The PostgreSQL docs are pretty vague about it, so I'll probably need to take a look in the actual code.

      Please let me know if you notice any issues with it, or if anything's confusing that I should make sure to document.

      And as usual, I've given everyone 10 invites, accessible on the invite page.

      52 votes
    40. Should Tildes archive links submitted to it?

      We would most likely use a service like archive.org for it but I'm not sure if we should so before making an issue, I thought I'd ask for opinions. It'd be useful to make sure old topics don't...

      We would most likely use a service like archive.org for it but I'm not sure if we should so before making an issue, I thought I'd ask for opinions.

      It'd be useful to make sure old topics don't become obsolete but it could also be undesirable behaviour for privacy reasons.

      16 votes
    41. Is there a reason I cannot have a tag people.doing.something

      I usually don't mind my tags getting erased and someone putting a more appropriate tag, but I want to know what is wrong with people.doing.something, or someone doing something, or...

      I usually don't mind my tags getting erased and someone putting a more appropriate tag, but I want to know what is wrong with people.doing.something, or someone doing something, or someone.doing.something. I tried various ways today, and each one got removed, and I would like to know why.

      5 votes
    42. Group suggestion: tech support

      Right now ~comp and ~tech are getting these kinds of posts, but I personally feel a ~tech_support ~tech.support (or ~tech_help? ~tech.help) group would be a better alternative. People who love to...

      Right now ~comp and ~tech are getting these kinds of posts, but I personally feel a ~tech_support ~tech.support (or ~tech_help? ~tech.help) group would be a better alternative.

      People who love to help would flock to the group, and people who need it would feel safer to ask for help without receiving straight up LMGTFY (Let Me Google That For You) kind of answers.

      There could be also a ~help group, wich a much broader scope (probably about Tildes itself).

      What you think?

      14 votes
    43. You can now search your own topics and comments, and a theme preview page is available

      Two updates today: Theme Preview page This is another contribution from @deing, who's been working on this one for a while. It ended up being more complicated than it originally seemed and still...

      Two updates today:

      Theme Preview page

      This is another contribution from @deing, who's been working on this one for a while. It ended up being more complicated than it originally seemed and still has a few minor oddities, but I think it ended up coming out quite well.

      When you're on the Settings page, there's now a "View theme previews" link just below the theme-selection dropdown near the top. That will take you to this new Theme Preview page. The blocks with the theme names at the top give you a quick idea of each theme's color scheme, and you can click them to change the whole page's theme and see what it looks like on the example topics and comments below.

      I should also mention that Gruvbox themes (with Light and Dark variants) were added about a month ago by @lugubris. I don't think I ever announced those being added, but you can easily check them out here now.

      Search your own posts

      @mrbig's recent post with multiple suggestions reminded me to work on this one. You know the drill: it's minimal, the interface is a little weird, etc. but you can now search your own topics and comments (separately).

      To use it, go to your own user page and click into either "Topics" or "Comments" from the top, you can't still be on the default "All posts" view. When you go into either of the individual post types, there will be a search box at the top, and you can use that to search your own posts.

      Just like the overall site search, the search always works as "look for all of these words", so only include multiple words if you want to find posts that contain all of them. I'm hoping to upgrade the PostgreSQL version that I'm using fairly soon, which should make for some easy enhancements to search, so hopefully soon we'll have some more capabilities there.

      Let me know if you notice any strangeness with the search results.

      And as usual, I've given everyone 10 invites, accessible on the invite page

      40 votes
    44. My Thoughts and Ideas For Tildes

      I have lots of thoughts about Tildes that I end up forgetting. This post is my attempt to put them to good use. Some of those were already stated elsewhere. Introduction Just to make it very...

      I have lots of thoughts about Tildes that I end up forgetting. This post is my attempt to put them to good use. Some of those were already stated elsewhere.

      Introduction

      Just to make it very clear: I am extremely happy with the way things are going on Tildes. If that was not the case, instead of drawing criticism I would simply not be here. So, please, let's be civil and avoid taking things personally ;)

      I'm also a regular user, so please be gentle with my ignorance regarding the technical reasons why some things are either impossible or unpractical.

      1. An Answer To A Common Objection

      Some of these suggestions may encounter the following answer: "this should be an extension, not a core feature". To which I might respond:

      1. Extensions impact performance and it's good practice to keep them at a minimum
      2. Not everyone uses the same browser.
      3. Features implemented by the actual developers will probably be of a better quality

      2. Golden Rule

      Unless explicit or clearly unpractical, all suggestions should be interpreted as to be as optional (and preferably opt-in) as possible for the user. I'll also make frequent use of the imperative mood: please understand that those are still suggestions. The imperative mood is just more practical. Also, notice that this is not my first language.

      3. Suggestions

      3.1 Keyboard Shortcuts

      The majority of Tildes users would probably welcome a good set of keyboard shortcuts. I apologize if such keyboard shortcuts already exist: if they do, there should be a page listing them all.

      3.1.1 Vim-like and Emacs-like keybindings

      There should be Vim-like and Emacs-like (you could choose which one!) keys all around. Even with things like Vimium, not everyone uses them, and a well-thought-out set of keybindings would be extremely beneficial.

      This also applies to text fields.

      4. Open Calls For Moderators

      Right now, I'm not sure what criteria are being used to give someone moderator powers. I think being a developer or contributor is the main criterion, which makes a lot of sense. But other participants might be up to the task, and giving them a chance could be beneficial.

      5. Moderation Action Should Always Present Reason

      This may seem obvious and even unfair, but I think when a moderator is in no condition to dedicate the time to justify their moderation action (such as locking threads, removing contents or banning users), then the moderator should wait until this condition is met in order to take action.

      6. Heated Discussions Should Be Allowed in More Circumstances

      I understand Tildes is, and should always be, a place for politeness, even affectionate discussion, but sometimes heated language, including irony and sarcasm, are necessary to stress a point and take the discussion forward. I understand that's a fine line, and that is usually better err on the side of caution, but I also feel the need to caution my fellow Tilders and Tildes administration against excessive moderation, which could stifle the discussion of sensitive subjects

      7. There Should Be a Page Explaining How to Collaborate

      This page should be short and to the point, with lots of links. I, for instance, wanna collaborate in the documentation, but the information telling how to do so was in a comment I cannot find anymore.

      8. Table of Contents

      Tildes markdown should support the automated creation of a simple table of contents, which would be very useful for longer posts. Preferably, there should be a limited set of options, such as:

      • title of the table of contents ("TOC", "Table of Contents", "Contents" etc)
      • numbered vs unnumbered
      • depth of the numbering

      9. Search own content

      I find very hard to search my own content. Sometimes I must reference something I said earlier, or adapt a previous response to a question I already answered. On these occasions, I have to manually Ctrl+f page after page of my user page, which is tedious and inefficient.

      10. Sort my own content

      I wish I could sort my own content in the same manner I can with other pages. This would help with item 9, and also help answer faster to comments that were recently made.

      11. Notifications

      I wish it was possible to op-in desktop notifications for Tildes to show me whenever I get an answer to a thread, a comment or a private message.

      Correction: I'm not referring to Email notifications, but desktop notifications. The ones that appear occasionally on your browser or screen.

      12. There Should Be Space for Comedy

      I'm not saying Tildes should become a place for lazy memes and endless puns, but comedy is valuable content and I don't like the idea of Tildes being a more conversational version of Stack Overflow. I fully agree with @deimos vision for a website for meaningful interactions with a focus on privacy. I just don't think comedy is necessarily a menace to this and all the other Tildes' stated goals. Right now, we're a very serious bunch of folks. There should be a place for humor in Tildes. How would that work? IDK. I leave this open for discussion.

      13. Link to Excerpt

      It would be awesome being able to link not just to a particular comment, but to a selection of that particular comment. After linking to the excerpt, I would go to the full comment, but the excerpt would be highlighted.

      Conclusion

      This is more of a collection of thoughts than an article, therefore I cannot offer a proper conclusion. But I'd like to kindly ask my fellow Tilders to give some considerations to my ideas. And please understand that they are not complaints. It's just may to contribute to this great community.

      Cheers ;)

      18 votes