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  • Showing only topics in ~tildes with the tag "groups". Back to normal view / Search all groups
    1. Do you think a ~community would be helpful?

      I personally think it could be helpful as a group for us to attempt guiding ourselves to cooperate and do stuff like timasomo. Alternatively it could end up being swallowed by petty drama and be...

      I personally think it could be helpful as a group for us to attempt guiding ourselves to cooperate and do stuff like timasomo. Alternatively it could end up being swallowed by petty drama and be really horrible.

      2 votes
    2. 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
    3. New groups added, more work still happening on rearranging, moving topics, etc.

      Alrighty, after the discussion last week, I've finally added the new groups, and everyone will have been mostly auto-subscribed to all of them. I'm still working on some of the details like adding...

      Alrighty, after the discussion last week, I've finally added the new groups, and everyone will have been mostly auto-subscribed to all of them. I'm still working on some of the details like adding descriptions, and there will be some awkward pieces and interface aspects since we're still in the transition phase before I get those larger changes to subscriptions/etc. in (which I really hope will be soon), but it should mostly be fine.

      If you want to change your subscriptions quickly, use this page: https://tildes.net/groups (linked from a button at the bottom of the home page's sidebar)

      First, here are the new groups:

      New top-level groups (everyone auto-subscribed)

      New sub-groups (auto-subscribed only if you were subscribed to the parent group)

      Some of this will be a little experimental and I'm not totally sure how it's going to work out (splitting ~science into the branches of science especially), but we'll see what happens. The names and such aren't necessarily 100% final either.

      Since we now have some real sub-groups that people other than me can post in, I made a small behavior change to how sub-groups work until those larger changes are ready. Previously, subscribing to a group would automatically include all posts from its sub-groups in your home page as well. That is, if you subscribed to ~tildes, you would also see all posts from ~tildes.official, regardless of whether you subscribed to it or not.

      Now, your home page will only include posts from groups (and sub-groups) that you are specifically subscribed to. So if you want to see topics from ~games but not ~games.tabletop, you should subscribe to ~games and unsubscribe from ~games.tabletop. However, if you visit ~games directly, posts from ~games.tabletop will still be included in the list there, regardless of whether you're subscribed or not. I know this isn't ideal, but it's not permanent and should be fine for now.

      I'm going to get back to working on updating these groups and moving some of the older topics around now, but let me know if you have any questions or thoughts.

      And as usual, I've topped everyone's invites up to 10. You can get your invite links here: https://tildes.net/invite

      51 votes
    4. Potential new groups, and general discussion about the purpose and organization of the group hierarchy

      It's been almost a month since we had proposals for more groups to add. I apologize for taking so long with it—just as a quick explanation for why it's taken so long to get around to: I've been...

      It's been almost a month since we had proposals for more groups to add. I apologize for taking so long with it—just as a quick explanation for why it's taken so long to get around to:

      I've been working on some major background changes related to how groups and the overall abilities of choosing what to see (and not see) on Tildes work, which I was planning to implement at the same time the new groups were added. However, two weeks ago, someone used Tildes's donation page to test over a thousand stolen credit cards. This made a mess in multiple ways, and it's taken a lot of time to clean up and try to make sure it won't happen again (some of it was my fault for not implementing some protections fully/properly). Dealing with that took priority, and it meant that I wasn't able to finish the changes before being (mostly) away over the last week and a bit.

      Anyway, I'm finally getting back on track and am planning to add more groups very soon (and get those larger changes implemented not long after), so let's talk about that as well as some general discussion about the group hierarchy. First, here are the groups I'm currently intending to add and some thoughts and questions about them:

      New groups:

      • ~arts - This is one that I'm a little questionable about. I do think we need a space for these subjects, but there's some strange and confusing crossover with the existing ~creative. I'm not sure if ~arts should replace ~creative, and if we should just have a sub-group or something else for "things created by Tildes users". I'd appreciate input here.
      • ~design - I really like this idea, and think it can cover topics like graphic design as well as physical ones like fashion and architecture.
      • ~finance - This covers some of the other current gaps with existing groups. I'd like to try to fit topics oriented around business in here, as well as ones related more to personal-finance. I'm not certain about the name, but I think it might be the best compared to some of the other comparable options like ~money, ~business, ~commerce, etc.
      • ~games.tabletop - I think this will be a good way to start trying to split up the ~games content a little. For now, I want to just leave video game topics in ~games though, instead of splitting it into its own dedicated sub-group. I know this will probably be somewhat confusing and unintuitive in some ways, but I also think making it so that almost no content goes into ~games itself would be very weird.
      • ~games.game_design - I think this is a useful way to also split out some of the more "theory-based" topics from the other ones in ~games, which tend to be largely more along the lines of news and "ask" discussions. I also want to be able to do some tinkering with a group having multiple sub-groups, and this will make the first instance of that.
      • ~hobbies.automotive - This will be a bit of a test as well. So far, ~hobbies has been quite inactive so it's not truly necessary to split it, but a number of users have expressed interest in it, and I'd like to see if the dedicated sub-group helps motivate more activity about a specific subject.
      • ~science.social - Both the name and being a sub-group are a little questionable here. I'm open to changes, but again, please read below about the hierarchy in general first.
      • ~space - Fairly heavily requested as well, and I feel like it's distinct enough from the existing groups to be worth trying to give a dedicated section.

      Those are all the ones I'm planning to add for now. There are some other groups (and especially some sub-groups) that I think are very good ideas and would work well too, but I want to delay those a little bit to get the structural changes in, since I think that will make a big difference in helping people choose their content too. After these additions we'll have quite a lot of top-level groups (depending exactly what we add, we'll have around 25), and we might want to think about merging some of them before adding even more. On that topic:

      General group hierarchy thoughts:

      I haven't done a good job of defining the purpose of the group hierarchy, or explaining how I think about it. This has caused a fair amount of confusion and debates about the right place for groups/sub-groups, as well as (completely reasonable) questions like why we need groups at all, instead of just using tags.

      I think a lot of the confusion comes from the natural tendency to think about it as a subject-based hierarchy. That is, if subject B is a subset of subject A, it should be a sub-group. However, I think it's going to be more useful to try to treat it as a hierarchy of interest (or disinterest), where the hierarchy is based more around a perspective like "if a user is interested in subject A, they'll probably also be interested in the more-specific subject B".

      I think ~tech and ~comp make a good demonstration. From a subject-based perspective, computers are certainly a subset of technology, so it seems like it should really be ~tech.comp instead of two separate top-level groups. But if you look at it from an interest-based perspective, someone being interested in technology in general definitely doesn't imply that they're also interested in reading technical articles about programming. That's why they're split into separate top-level groups.

      Similarly, ~anime seems to obviously make sense to be a sub-group of ~tv, but I don't think there's nearly enough "interest crossover" to do that. You'd end up with a huge portion of ~tv viewers wanting to exclude ~tv.anime, since it's such a distinct subject.

      Overall, the purpose of the group hierarchy is to help people be able to find and avoid certain types of topics. Using a hierarchy for this will allow us to do things like "I want to see the gaming topics, but not from the League of Legends groups", which are practically impossible to do in a flat structure like reddit has.

      You can also think of the groups as something like "forced" or "implied" tags that are always on all of the topics inside those groups. With a tag-only system, every gaming topic would need to manually be tagged something like "video games" so that people uninterested in them can easily filter them out. The groups system makes this automatic and much more convenient and understandable.

      In the future, I think it will also be very important for the different groups (and some sub-groups) to be able to act as different "spaces" with their own rules, and possibly even different features or design.

      I hope that helps clarify the hierarchy a bit and explain why the organization has been done this way so far (and will likely to continue to be). Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts about the hierarchy and the planned new groups, I'm intending to add them later this week unless something else goes horribly wrong.

      And as usual, I've topped everyone's invites up to 10. You can get your invite links here: https://tildes.net/invite

      68 votes
    5. Proposals for new groups - July 2019

      It's been over a year now since we first talked about adding some more groups to the site (and ended up adding several). I think the current set has mostly worked well since then, but some people...

      It's been over a year now since we first talked about adding some more groups to the site (and ended up adding several). I think the current set has mostly worked well since then, but some people have mentioned being hesitant to post as many topics as they want to on some subjects due to not wanting to flood out the more-general groups, as well as feeling like some subjects also don't fit into the existing ones.

      So let's do another round of suggestions. New groups can be either top-level ones (if that seems to make the most sense) or a sub-group of an existing one (for example, this group, ~tildes.official is a sub-group of ~tildes). The functionality of sub-groups is a little weak right now, but I'll be working on that over the next few days to get it into better shape in case we end up adding some new ones.

      The general process from last time seemed to work fine, so I'm just going to copy that:

      Proposing a group

      If you want to propose an idea for a new group (either a new top-level group or a sub-group of an existing one), make a top-level comment with the following information:

      1. The proposed name for the group, and a short description of its purpose/subject.
      2. 3 examples of topics that would be appropriate to be posted in that group. These can be existing posts already on Tildes, or hypothetical new ones. Just example titles/links is sufficient, it should just give an idea of what sort of posts you're expecting the group to get.
      3. A "failure plan" - if the trial group doesn't work out, what should we do with the posts from it? For example, should they be moved into an existing group or groups, with a particular tag?

      Supporting a proposal

      To express your support for a proposal that someone else made, post a reply to it, saying something like "I would post in this group" (assuming you actually believe you will). I don't want to interpret votes on a proposal as support, and for a group to be successful it really needs people to post to it, so I think it's most important to get at least some indication that there are users that will post in the group if it's created.

      I'll let this topic run for at least 3 days before making any decisions, so don't feel like you need to rush. General questions or thoughts about groups are welcome too, it doesn't need to be entirely proposals. I've also topped given everyone 10 invites again as well. Thanks!

      74 votes
    6. Any chance we can get a ~space group?

      I know that this has been discussed before (I personally participated in some of that), but, to my knowledge, it's been quite a while since it was brought up. Currently, the three groups that seem...

      I know that this has been discussed before (I personally participated in some of that), but, to my knowledge, it's been quite a while since it was brought up.

      Currently, the three groups that seem to make the most sense for space exploration news are ~tech, ~science, and ~misc. Personally, I perceive ~tech as being best suited for general news about what's going on in the tech industry, more or less "hey, Google released this" or "these researchers are working on graphene batteries". Similarly, I understand ~science as a place for discussing scientific discoveries and "meta" discussion about science as a whole. I think that most would agree with me on those characterizations after looking at those groups when sorted by activity or new.

      Space exploration, on the other hand, doesn't really fit in either. It's not exactly ~tech material, and it's also not really the right material for ~science, since much of it isn't about specific new discoveries or studies, etc. If we had an ~engineering, I would say that that would be the correct place for space discussion, but we don't have one.

      If you look at what's been happening over the last few months in the realm of space exploration, I think that it's also pretty easy to see that there's enough going on to generate enough content and discussion for a dedicated group. There've been new launches on a weekly or biweekly basis, interesting moves made by different new entrants to the industry, all of the NASA Artemis news, plenty of things from SpaceX, etc.

      35 votes
    7. Can we have a dedicated ~econ group?

      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...

      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.

      14 votes
    8. Group suggestion: ~socialmedia

      Hereby I suggest that there be a dedicated Tildes group for social media–related topics. Current State The (recent) number of topics tagged social media exceeds the number of topics in several...

      Hereby I suggest that there be a dedicated Tildes group for social media–related topics.

      Current State

      The (recent) number of topics tagged social media exceeds the number of topics in several existing groups:
      https://tildes.net/?tag=social_media
      In addition, there are more topics without the social media tag but with tags related to individual social media, e.g.,
      https://tildes.net/?tag=reddit
      https://tildes.net/?tag=facebook
      https://tildes.net/?tag=twitter

      These topics are quite scattered across the site (many of them are in ~tech, and some were moved to ~tech from places like ~talk and ~misc).

      Why Not Just ~tech?

      The topics are often focused on non-technical aspects of social media, and the mentioned moves from more general groups might suggest that social media are perceived as a general rather than a purely techn(olog)ical phenomenon. In addition, ~tech is already the biggest Tildes group.

      Special Relevance

      Tildes is itself a social medium site, and many of the above topics are thus specifically relevant for Tildes. For this reason, I suggest ~socialmedia as a top-level group rather than a subgroup (of ~tech, apparently).

      6 votes
    9. Merge ~tech and ~comp and create a separate ~privacy

      The whole suggestion is in the title. I find the split between ~tech and ~comp to be very overlapping. Such a vast proportion of the content both places is ~privacy -material anyway. Content...

      The whole suggestion is in the title.

      I find the split between ~tech and ~comp to be very overlapping. Such a vast proportion of the content both places is ~privacy -material anyway. Content tagged privacy is effectively rendering ~tech a semi-privacy board as it is now anyway.

      I think the suggested categorization makes more sense than the current organization based on the content actually submitted to tildes now.


      Here's the ~comp privacy tag overview: comp

      Here's the ~tech privacy tag overview: tech

      9 votes
    10. When will there be a group for photographers?

      Hey everyone! I'm pretty new here, and I'm already enjoying this place, but I was wondering when there will be a group to post photos. I take photos and I'm sure some of you do as well, and I...

      Hey everyone!

      I'm pretty new here, and I'm already enjoying this place, but I was wondering when there will be a group to post photos. I take photos and I'm sure some of you do as well, and I thought it would be cool to be able to share the photos we take and get honest feedback on them like we have honest discussions in the news articles, share tips and tricks, and generally have another way to connect.

      I know generally photos are kind of taboo, as places like instagram have kind of ruined it and turned every single person with a camera on their phone into a photographer, so I get it if you have reservations. I have some myself, but I still want to take the chance.

      Idk, I thought it would be cool. If not, then whatever, I ain't picky about this place I enjoy it very much.

      22 votes
    11. Is filtering working properly?

      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...

      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?

      11 votes
    12. Isn't the number of groups too restrictive?

      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...

      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.

      27 votes
    13. Suggestion: ~wikipedia

      There's one HN custom I really adore, and it's the random, interesting wikipedia articles that are posted and sometimes upvoted to the front page. cf:...

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

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

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

      15 votes
    14. Suggestion: Adding the group list to the sidebar even when you are on a particular group

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

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

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

      12 votes
    15. Suggestion: Create a ~ for the discussion of communities

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

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

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

      8 votes
    16. Would it make sense to make the default activity period be a function of the recent activity on the site, and in each group?

      I am a bit lazy, and I also seem to like the default 3 day filter on the activity feed... but, sometimes a person less lazy than I responds to a topic of mine which is older that 3 days. These are...

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

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

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

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

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

      9 votes
    17. "Discussion threads" for groups

      I'm a big fan of "discussion threads" over on reddit, if you're unfamiliar they're essentially threads a subreddit will pin every day or week where you can post things that don't deserve a full...

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

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

      However, I recognize that there can be some downsides:

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

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

      11 votes
    18. Create a ~worldnews, also another group idea.

      ~news will be populated with mainly U.S news and also mainly U.S politics, ~worldnews could be a group for just world news and events. also there is a sub r/globaltalk which is basically focused...

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

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

      9 votes
    19. A group we are missing, that I would really like to see is ~Culinary. Would anyone else be interested?

      I think ~culinary would be beneficial to see, it could include areas like; ~culinary.news ~culinary.recipes ~culinary.videos ~culinary.photography I am a little biased because of my profession...

      I think ~culinary would be beneficial to see, it could include areas like;

      ~culinary.news

      ~culinary.recipes

      ~culinary.videos

      ~culinary.photography

      I am a little biased because of my profession (Sous Chef), but I do see a lot of Culinary related posts that are spread out over several different groups. It would be nice to have them organized into their own group.

      And if anyone is worried about it being active, I subscribe to several culinary news sites that I rarely post here so It would give me a chance to share some of that stuff. Not to mention giving us a place to share already popular Youtube series and recipes.

      I know this content doesn't lend to discussion as much as others, but it would still be high quality.

      EDIT: Maybe a solution is to have more of those posts end up in ~food instead of being spread out. Although I feel like the ~food heading is a little more restrictive, so maybe rename ~food to ~culinary?

      10 votes
    20. ~esports

      Hi, I wanted to suggest the creation of an esports specific group. The taxonomy would work in a similar way to ~games, however it would home both the business and news side of our industry as well...

      Hi, I wanted to suggest the creation of an esports specific group.

      The taxonomy would work in a similar way to ~games, however it would home both the business and news side of our industry as well as allowing for the competitive communities of various games to have sub groups. ~esports.leagueoflegends, ~esports.dota2, ~esports.overwatch for example.

      Would like to hear other people's thoughts.

      4 votes
    21. A group for finance/markets/investing/trading would be nice

      There is a conspicuous lack of that sort of thing here so far. I get that Tildes might not want to be a repository of "hey what stock do I buy" or "Oh my god MU is still going down" but...

      There is a conspicuous lack of that sort of thing here so far. I get that Tildes might not want to be a repository of "hey what stock do I buy" or "Oh my god MU is still going down" but strategy-oriented discussions around positions in markets and the way changes in the world will effect your financial future seems like high-quality content to me.

      6 votes
    22. How to view subgroups?

      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...

      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.

      4 votes
    23. Does eSports content belong in ~games or ~sports?

      This post is meant to provoke a discussion and possibly find a resolution or at least set an expectation as far as where to post esports content. I don't really have an opinion either way but...

      This post is meant to provoke a discussion and possibly find a resolution or at least set an expectation as far as where to post esports content.

      I don't really have an opinion either way but would like to discuss the topic, because it seems like not setting an expectation might lead to similar content being posted to one or the other of the two communities when all the content would be prefered in one community to make finding things easier.

      19 votes
    24. How will Tildes work with bans?

      Basically, with groups being admin controlled rather than the reddit system of mods, will all bans be site wide or should group bans be possible? Let's say somebody is harassing or being an...

      Basically, with groups being admin controlled rather than the reddit system of mods, will all bans be site wide or should group bans be possible? Let's say somebody is harassing or being an asshole on ~LGBT, should they be banned from ~LGBT or from the website?

      21 votes
    25. Users thoughts on groups?

      As of right now of course, users can not create their own groups, however this may change in the future as is stated here. What do the users think about this? Although tildes is similar to reddit,...

      As of right now of course, users can not create their own groups, however this may change in the future as is stated here.

      What do the users think about this? Although tildes is similar to reddit, it's obviously not got the same goals in mind, and I think it makes sense to keep groups up to the admins.

      13 votes
    26. Migration of sub-tags/communities

      Was asked to post here about this: Is there a plan for migrating sub-tags (or top-level groups too)? The scenario I'm thinking of is that things may either fork, or change their name unanimously....

      Was asked to post here about this:

      Is there a plan for migrating sub-tags (or top-level groups too)? The scenario I'm thinking of is that things may either fork, or change their name unanimously.

      Let's say a tech product changes its official name from XX to be YY, Would there be a way to migrate
      ~tech.XX.stuff to ~tech.YY.stuff?

      I can't say that this will be a common occurrence, but may affect historical usefulness of the tagging system, as people looking for things in the past won't be able to easily - plus it may divide communities once existing (do they keep posting in the old tag or the new one?).

      For now, this isn't too important as @Deimos (from what it seems?) is in charge of creating new topics and presumably modify them too, but for the future (according to this) we may start having user created groups pop-up.

      Cheers,

      3 votes
    27. Four new groups added (and everyone subscribed): ~anime, ~enviro, ~humanities, and ~life

      A couple weeks back, we had a thread for people to propose some new groups, and then I got too involved in open-sourcing and some other tasks to follow up on it properly. Thanks again for all the...

      A couple weeks back, we had a thread for people to propose some new groups, and then I got too involved in open-sourcing and some other tasks to follow up on it properly. Thanks again for all the suggestions and the patience with the long delay - I've finally gotten around to going through the thread now and selected 4 groups from the suggestions to try adding. If I didn't select a group you suggested or were excited about, it doesn't necessarily mean I don't think it was a good idea, I just don't want to add too many groups too quickly, and I think these ones have some interesting possibilities.

      I decided to auto-subscribe everyone to the new groups, but if you're not interested, you can easily unsubscribe from them through the groups page: https://tildes.net/groups

      Here are the new groups:

      • ~anime - this is one that I'm really iffy about from a hierarchy perspective, so I think it'll be interesting to experiment with because of that. It's unusual because it will probably contain posts that technically could have fit into ~tv, ~movies, ~games, and other existing groups, but having the anime subject split across all of those groups doesn't seem great either. There will probably be some interesting possibilities to play with here, like possibly making ~anime.games and ~games.anime basically point to the same "location".
      • ~enviro - we've had a fair number of topics being posted about recycling, alternate energy, and other related topics, so I think this will be a good one to try.
      • ~humanities - this should be able to cover a wide range of the topics that have mostly ended up in ~misc so far (and I'll probably move some previous ones here) - history, ethics, philosophy, etc.
      • ~life - the proposal for this one was named ~personal, but I think that term has some other implications that might be a little off, so I decided to go with ~life. This is intended to be a group for discussing and posting about general life topics - work, school, families/parenting, and those kind of things.

      Let me know what you think, and if any of the names or descriptions of the groups (in the groups page and in their sidebar) are confusing or should be rewritten, I'd appreciate suggestions.

      69 votes
    28. When subgroups come out, each group should have a .ask or .asktildes subgroup.

      With so many threads asking about what operating system people use, favorite music, favorite tv-shows, etc, I feel like this is a good subgroup for all of the groups (other than maybe tildes and...

      With so many threads asking about what operating system people use, favorite music, favorite tv-shows, etc, I feel like this is a good subgroup for all of the groups (other than maybe tildes and talk).

      8 votes
    29. Adding new groups

      I'm certain this has been discussed before, but seeing that A: There's no search function and B: Maybe people who joined since the last discussion would like to talk without necroing anything Is...

      I'm certain this has been discussed before, but seeing that
      A: There's no search function and
      B: Maybe people who joined since the last discussion would like to talk without necroing anything

      Is there a cycle/timeline for adding new groups as interest seems to appear?
      What's the plan for how to choose which new groups get added?

      If not, could we (and the site's staff) discuss possibilities on good ways to do that?

      11 votes
    30. Can we get a ~finance group?

      Please correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no good fit for topics ranging from personal finance, investing, portfolio management, budgeting, running a business, markets, etc. Seems ~finance or...

      Please correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no good fit for topics ranging from personal finance, investing, portfolio management, budgeting, running a business, markets, etc. Seems ~finance or similar could be a catch-all for a massive category of topics that don't have a place currently.

      6 votes
    31. Daily Tildes discussion - new groups added, please subscribe to them if you're interested

      A few updates related to groups today: First of all, we now have our first actual sub-group with ~tildes.official . I've automatically subscribed everyone to it, and I'm currently the only one...

      A few updates related to groups today:

      First of all, we now have our first actual sub-group with ~tildes.official . I've automatically subscribed everyone to it, and I'm currently the only one that can post in it. So if you'd like to make sure that you're seeing the official announcements and daily discussions but don't want all the suggestions and bug reports and such clogging up your home page, you can subscribe to ~tildes.official and unsubscribe from ~tildes. Subscribing to ~tildes will still give you the posts from both (regardless of whether you subscribe to ~tildes.official or not). I'll be moving the previous announcements and such into ~tildes.official eventually.

      Also, as mentioned a few days ago, it's time to add a few more groups. As part of this, I've updated the groups list page a tiny bit to add the Subscribe/Unsubscribe button onto that page, so that you can easily tell which ones you're already subscribed to and change your choices. These are the new groups:

      I know that there are a number of other ones that people are clamoring for as well (including sub-groups of existing ones), but I think it's important to go pretty slow with this. At this point I think we already have more groups than reddit did for years (and Digg ever had), but the site's population is lower than even a tiny single subreddit would be. Having things organized more is nice, but we don't want to fragment too quickly into a bunch of inactive groups.

      One more thing I could use some help with: the short group descriptions on the groups list are pretty close to placeholders that I wrote very quickly. If anyone wants to suggest some new ones for any of the groups we could use to help make their purpose more clear, I'd love to update them with better ones.

      Thanks, let me know what you think.

      102 votes
    32. How far will group identities be allowed to develop?

      The post about group CSS got me thinking, if the identity of groups are allowed to develop enough it could become like reddit were you can't expect a consistent experience across the site, you'll...

      The post about group CSS got me thinking, if the identity of groups are allowed to develop enough it could become like reddit were you can't expect a consistent experience across the site, you'll have to know the etiquette of each group you visit, do they allow jokes here, only links or only text, not going off topic etc.

      How far should/will it go?

      7 votes
    33. Groups page could be clearer on which groups one is subscribed to

      At the moment the groups page shows a full list of groups with a button beside each: either Subscribe or Subscribed. It's not very clear, at a glance, which ones are subscribed as there is no...

      At the moment the groups page shows a full list of groups with a button beside each: either Subscribe or Subscribed. It's not very clear, at a glance, which ones are subscribed as there is no colour difference and the terms differ only by the last letter. I personally think it would be better if it showed 'unsubscribe' for the ones you're already subscribed to, and even better if this were in green.

      6 votes
    34. What groups and subgroups should we allow before there's too much fluff on Tildes?

      I feel like it's been pretty well established that Tildes is supposed to be a place of discussion with maybe occasional fluff here and there that can be filtered out. But there's a large grey area...

      I feel like it's been pretty well established that Tildes is supposed to be a place of discussion with maybe occasional fluff here and there that can be filtered out. But there's a large grey area that I think should be addressed.

      I'll take a few of Reddit's subreddits as an example.

      I think it's pretty clear that a group resembling /r/aww should not be allowed on Tildes since it is pure fluffing and does not really bring a big quality of discussion to the community as a whole.

      But how about a community such as /r/QuitYourBullshit? That could arguably be either unnecessary or a place of good discussion. There's a lot of grey area regarding the quality of that subreddit.

      Now, I know what some people might try to say. We shouldn't try to replicate Reddit, and we should instead let the communities grow organically.

      Yet, if Tildes is going to grow at all from Reddit, people are going to want to replicate the communities they so dearly loved on Reddit, regardless of quality. People who were active on /r/dankmemes are going to want a /r/dankmemes equivalent here. People who were active on /r/todayilearned or /r/JusticeServed are going to want an equivalent here as well. So the question is: how are we going to deal with the large demand for variably fluffy groups while simultaneously keeping the quality of discussion up?

      I think this is a real issue that is going to have to be dealt with before widespread adoption of Tildes can occur.

      7 votes
    35. Suggestion: DAG Groups

      Instead of a tree hierachy, perhaps groups would be better off based on a DAG - a Directed Acyclic Graph. This would allow groups to have multiple parents as well as multiple children. For...

      Instead of a tree hierachy, perhaps groups would be better off based on a DAG - a Directed Acyclic Graph. This would allow groups to have multiple parents as well as multiple children. For example, ~mazda might have ~cars and ~japan as parents, and ~tolkein might have ~fantasy and ~linguistics as parents. I think this could maintain the benefits of the hierachical system while making it easier to find a group that suits the post.

      While potentially complex, a good UI which effectively visualised the DAG to allow a content submitter to hone in on the correct group-node, and potentially create a new one on the fly if none was appropriate, could make this concept reasonably intuitive. This problem has already been tackled by creators of git GUIs, so perhaps some ideas could be adapted from that space.

      One issue is that a node in a DAG is much harder to identify with a text string than a node in a tree-based hierachy. One solution would be that the submitter could choose a 'primary path' which would be displayed to readers, which, upon being clicked, would display the full DAG, including all the potentially numerous paths which would lead to that group-node. For example, I might choose ~linguistics.tolkein.quenya as the primary path, but upon clicking, the reader can discover that ~fantasy.tolkein.quenya and ~linguistics.conlangs.quenya and ~writing.worldbuilding.quenya all lead to the same group-node [edit: ugly illustration]. I feel that this solution could potentially be powerful enough to remove the need for tags entirely. Viewing the homepage of any particular group-node on the DAG would aggregate posts to all child groups, meaning that the effects of community fragmentation are mitigated. Even a post to a really specific group-node, like ~cars.mazda.mx5.na, will still enjoy the same status and priority to the readers of the ~cars homepage as a post made directly to the ~cars group-node.

      28 votes