Can we get a tag next to usernames for Tildes staff? Kind of like an admin tag, but might as well just call it staff or whatever you prefer. For example in that donations thread I was unsure if it's an admin posting that or not at first glance. Would apply to comments too.

(Are red titles from staff? But that doesn't apply to comments I guess)

My biggest problem with this format thus far has been with the placement of the "Vote" button. I currently use the Solarized Dark theme (I enjoy the color scheme) and I find I keep unvoting things I've already voted up when checking through older posts. My eyes are left reading the headline, I forget I may have voted for it, and I go to unclick my vote.

I feel the vote button would be better if it was situated closer to where my eyes are for reading headlines. I spend a lot of time micromanaging ui placement in my mmos, so maybe I'm just pickier than others, but I don't like my eyes needing to jump all over the monitor when browsing through things.

Moving these elements closer together would be really helpful. I also wouldn't mind the Solarized Dark themes "Vote" and "Voted" colour having a little more contrast

There were a few things that I was a bit uncomfortable with, so I created a few css styles to improve some aspects of the experience.

Reddit like theme
I'm used to Reddit, so I created a quick theme to make Tildes a bit more like Reddit: https://pastebin.com/1rMhbFMF

Hidden tags
Seeing a [Joke] tag can sometimes ruin a joke, so I created a snippet that hides tags unless you hover over them: https://pastebin.com/Bzvr3Vmp

Moved the submit a comment box
I made a snippet to move the comment box to the top of the page: https://pastebin.com/WCqv3Mr2

This was one of the biggest appeals of reddit. There was a subreddit for everything and you could use your subs for way more than just a group of like-minded individuals.

But yeah. We should be able to make our own groups.

To give you an example list:

• Everyone should be able to add tags to topics, not just OP in creation
  Tags are useful but only if they are correct.
  OP could not get the right tags but the community as a whole could fix it over time. That would help browsing tags that actually reflect the content of the topics.
• I should be able to tag my own comments. Sometimes you know you're posting off-topic or just a joke.

So, after a rather clunky script to open comment's link in a new tab with the left click, I got inspired by the idea of @kalebo and wrote also a script to quickly jump to new comments in a topic.

I thought about writing a dedicated script but felt like it was going to become overly complicated for a user to import different script.

• The script itself is here: https://gist.github.com/theCrius/04dc86bea0ed0f1cbec7e57f1aaff9aa
• I wrote it with tampermonkey in mind: http://tampermonkey.net/
  Please read further as tampermonkey has issues with custom styles.
• And here is a simple tutorial on how to load script in tampermonkey: https://imgur.com/a/pY51wn2

These script are all meant to give the community some QoL while lightening the pressure on @deimos so he can work without too much stress from all the requests. As soon as the feature are implemented you should get rid of those script that in some parts felt like bad hacks to me that I was writing it.

I know the button to scroll to new messages is in a quite bad position (top center of your browser page) but I couldn't bear to deal with tampermonkey issue and its GM_AddStyle meta not working properly so I had to use the basic CSS provided by spectre already loaded in tildes.net.

If someone knows how to figure out that goddamn meta, let me know.

========= UPDATE ============

Edit: So apparently tampermonkey has issues with styles that are not yet fixed and firefox has some issue in general with script that inject stuff in the page (understandably).

For tampermonkey the solution is simple. Use violentmonkey instead. you can just copy the script and it will work.

For Firefox it's a little more dirty unfortunately but I cannot find other solutions. You need to open the internal URL about:config. Then search security.csp.enable and double click to disable it. After this the script will work.
Firefox has a very strict policy and the only real solution would be to write an extension and I don't think it's worth the effort in the current state of development.
For full description of what that policy does, check the official doc from mozilla: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CSP#Threats

Now I know editing titles is a slippery slope, but hear me out.

One of the most annoying things from Reddit is that you make a typo in the title and it's there forever. It would be nice if on Tildes you could edit a certain amount of a title - say 1-2 characters. Then you could fix most typos without opening the doors to people trolling by completely changing titles.

I'm not sure if this is possible, but it would be a nice thing to consider down the road.

Through what I've seen with the tag system, it seems completely superfluous and often detrimental to a post that requires a full read. Sure, it helps identify funny posts and gives warnings and the like, but it seems too powerful a system for sensitive people to abuse. Tagging a joke comment as "Fluff", "Funny", "Joke", or "Troll" devalues a post, as it spoils everything in the post before you read it. A lot of humorous posts rely on punchlines at the end or misdirection via links or lengthy stories, and the punchline is achieved by leading the reader on until the end. The site's preamble states that it doesn't aim to provide a "safe-space" as well as not become completely unmoderated. I feel like we don't need big warning signs going "FUNNY JOKE" on a post because it cheapens the impact and makes the site feel too "safe", in that we have to carefully curate comments and warn others about "dangerous" comments.

On another point, the tags are one word. Posts are often many words, and span many subjects. Placing one word on a comment can make a reader come to a quick conclusion on whether or not they'll enjoy reading a post, and a post might get glossed over very easily due to such an ambiguous descriptor.

Tl;dr, Tags both devalue and cheapen comments by allowing users to gloss them over by looking at a one word descriptor of a possibly long post

Posted about this earlier (I think in the thread about default sort order) and it came up in the ~science thread on what killed Reddit AMAs: https://tildes.net/~science/py/how_reddit_killed_science_amas#comment-3e1

Basically having a "featured" or "promoted" set of links above the usual links that are:

1. limited to a small number of posts
2. use a different sort order than whatever the user has selected
3. filtered by tag

This would make it possible for ~science (as an example) to always have the latest 3 AMAs (posts tagged with AMA) show up above the other set of links and would solve the problem that r/science AMAs had on reddit where they had to compete in the regular list of links.

When posting a comment, the width of the text seems limited. When I removed the max-width from the p and li element, it filled the box as I expected it to. (Source)

To me, the second one looks better. Some padding left and right could be added, but I certainly wouldn't use a fixed maximum width there (A percentage would be fine, I guess).

Edit The seems seems to apply for posts as well.

Instead of fading the replies after clicking on "Mark as Read", it should just remove it immediately. It's really, really time consuming to have to mark 40 something replies as read. I know this can be solved with a "mark all as read" button, but I do actually want to go through and read all of them.

Is it just me, or is the session timeout set very short (or strictly tied to an IP)?

I've had to login 3 times this morning at work, and I couldn't have been idle for more than an hour or so each time.

Chrome 66.0.3359 on Android 7.0

I think the option to save a topic or comment would be a good addition. For example, I have had a ~music topic about music everyone's listening to open for over a day so that I can pick a new group to listen to each time I do homework. Sure, I could write them all somewhere, but I think it's a nice QoL improvement nonetheless.

Edit: I'd like to add to this @Ganymede 's idea of following a topic to get notified of new comments inside it. Maybe this could apply to a specific comment chain, too, since a whole topic will be a lot once the site explodes. ;)

Hello,

https://tildes.net/notifications/unread shows only the unread notifications.

If I have marked all comment replies are read, that link will show me an empty page.

So I thought that visiting https://tildes.net/notifications/ should show me all the past replies to my comments, but that's returning 404.

So, is there a place where I can see all the read notifications/replies?

I suggested already to have a setting in the profile to allow the user to decide if links should open in new tab so you won't lose the content you were being on this website. In the meanwhile I made a very simple script that does that for you using tampermonkey.

The script: https://gist.github.com/theCrius/04dc86bea0ed0f1cbec7e57f1aaff9aa

Tampermonkey: http://tampermonkey.net/ (available for all browsers)

A quick tutorial on how to do it, step by step with images: https://imgur.com/a/pY51wn2

Edit: Updated to open only link in comments in new tab. The rest of the navigation will load in the same tab by default.

Hi,

One thing I really missed on Reddit was that there were only 2 possible ways of posting : self-post (text) or straight link with nothing else. I would often have an intermediate 3rd way: a link, but with an associated short text.

Motivations:

1. Being able to add some context for the link: where does it come from, why did I post it, what did I post it for, what is special about it, what part of it do I intend to discuss, how does it relate to a personal experience, and so on.
2. Adding other links in the text, related to the main link (previous history of the same subject, link in another language / translation, counter opinions, ...).
3. Avoiding misinterpretation; do I endorse the link content (in full, part of it?), do I criticize or condemn it?
4. Doing the previous 1-2-3 points, without giving up the advantages of straight link: being still able for the readers to click and jump to the link straight from the group post list, possible thumbnail/preview/embedded display; and without resorting to a self-comment which will look awkward and get lost in the other comments after a handful of those comments are made.

In fact, if the goal of Tildes is to force a certain quality of post content and discussion, this mode may eventually be set to replace completely the 'straight link only' posting mode; in that case the following extra motivations come into play.

Extra motivations:

1. Mitigate stupid and low effort posts by forcing the poster to explain/describe in at least n character/words his link. If the poster is not able to spend 2 minutes thinking and writing a description, his link is probably not worth the effort of reading.
2. Mitigate trolling and malicious posts by forcing the poster to motivate clearly his posts, and not insidiously disguise his intent behind a fake innocence.

The accompanying context text should have a minimum and maximum length, for it should not replace well-developed 'self-posts'.

What do users and admins think about all that posting mode I sorely missed on Reddit?

Hello,

I appreciate the addition of the comment permalinks. There is just minor usability issue on mobile devices as the "#" is too close to the right edge of the screen and so not quick to click.

Additionally many websites (few that I can think of: Reddit, GitHub, HN) use the time stamp or the "time ago" string to contain the permalinks.

So when I saw that comment permalinks were supported, I instinctively clicked the "time ago" string, and obviously it wasn't linked.

So..

Can the time string be hyperlinked with the permalink instead of adding the extra "#"?

Okay, so I got tired of scrolling through some of the long comment chains looking for that flash of orange that indicates a new post so I slapped together this solution. It's not pretty nor frictionless to use, but it's less annoying for me than scrolling for days just to find the new comments.

Basic usage is to open the javascript console or scratch pad (e.g., Shift+F4 in Firefox) in your browser, paste in the following line from the code block and run it. It scrolls to the first unread comment and marks it as read; on subsequent runs it will do the same thing for the next unread comment and so on. You will need to enable new comment tracking in your Tildes preferences as well if you haven't done so yet.

{var comment = document.getElementsByClassName("is-comment-new")[0]; if (comment != null) {comment.scrollIntoView(); comment.className = "comment"}}

I had hoped that I could make it into a bookmarklet but unfortunately CSP nixes that option. If anyone else knows of a better way to do this let me know.

So, one of the things I deal with in my day to day are highly regulated industries (think guns and Legalized MJ), and I wonder where this will fit into Tildes itself.

I did not see much in the ToU in regards to this, so I wonder what governance we would be looking at?

Is it entirely what is legal in Canada? Because something may not be entirely legal in Canada, but the discussion of it would actually be perfectly legal.

I personally am someone looking for a migration from reddit, as it has become an unstable place for functional discussion.

When I tried to register an invalid username tildes told me that my username "did not match the requested format", but nowhere in that page there is a format specified for usernames. It'd be useful to add near the username box a message like "use only alphanumeric characters".

Hello,

I saw in another thread being mentioned that there is no use for API for real users other than bots. So wanted to voice some real API uses that I would be interested in:

1. When I post a new blog post, if I find it worthy of sharing here, it would be nice to mirror the comments I get here back on my blog post. I can imagine using API to fetch all the comments from a tildes thread, including the hierarchy relationship. The API would return a JSON with Markdown and/or HTML like the XML that Disqus exports (but JSON). When people want to comment on that post, they can come to tildes to do so, or if they don't want to create an account here, or if they don't have an invite, they can comment via other means that I have (Webmentions, Twitter, email).
2. Second use is make something like hnrss possible.

(0) Background

This is coming off a discussion in today's thread on forming new groups around whether or not to add a group for politics. I expressed there that, given my moderator experience on /r/ChangeMyView and /r/NeutralPolitics, I opposed making such a group given how Tildes currently stands.

(1) Political discussion is nearly always garbage.

I don't think anyone needs reminding of this, but political discussion almost uniformly fails to achieve anything positive in almost any social media platform. Your uncle's facebook rants? Garbage. Political sniping on Twitter? Garbage. The endless repetitive point scoring and outrage fest on most political subreddits? Garbage.

So, we have to ask, why is this content garbage?

(2) People want to be heard, but nobody wants to hear.

I do not think political discussion is garbage because of bad faith trolling. That certainly exists and does not help, but usually it's not hard to ID the trolls, and excepting egregious stuff like doxxing or threats, to ignore obvious bad faith absurdity.

The much bigger issue is that what people want to do is to be heard and validated in their political views. This is not merely that they want to proselytize or to win converts, but that they're seeking validation and a sense of rightness or righteousness in their statements.

This desire is toxic to a neutral forum, because invariably on any divisive issue, you will not merely be heard and validated, but will be challenged and denigrated. Indeed, often the challenges and denigrations themselves are the same performance in reverse. Members of each team trying to dunk on the other and earn validation for how hard they owned the other side.

(3) To overcome this, a successful political forum must have a purpose other than mere commentary.

On /r/ChangeMyView and /r/NeutralPolitics, we have been able to build forums which have large amounts of productive and non-hostile political discussion. The key to this is that neither forum allows for being heard, or general discussion, as its reason for being.

On /r/ChangeMyView we limit posts to views people genuinely hold, and are open to changing (CMV rule B). This requires that OPs cannot come to troll or soapbox. It is by far the most frequently used rule of ours in terms of removing submissions, almost always on the soapboxing side.

On /r/NeutralPolitics, we limit posts to neutrally framed questions about political subjects, which can be answered with facts. By doing this, we narrow the scope of discussion away from soliciting feelings (which is an invitation to people posting just to be heard) and towards bringing forth factual information, where people might learn something.

I don't know what purpose a political forum on Tildes might have, but to succeed it must have a clear purpose, and that purpose must be one which excludes people posting merely to be heard.

(4) In addition to a purpose beyond being heard, a political forum must have extreme civility rules.

Both CMV and NP have extremely similar rules in this regard, and they are absolutely crucial to the success of the fora.

In general, any comment or post which in any way denigrates another user should be removed. This is an extremely broad civility rule that is well past what most subreddits do. Calling another user a liar, or accusing them of bad faith posting is banned on both CMV and NP for example, even when such accusations are true.

The prohibition on what even may be seen as justified rudeness is I think the key to a civility rule. It immediately removes from the moderation process any discretion around the substance of the politics, and makes it a neutral rule which can be applied evenly to all parties.

It is also necessary because nothing productive ever happens after bad faith is accused. Almost uniformly, once someone is rude, if there is a response back to them, the response will be rude in kind, usually more severely. People love to try to get the last word in, and a clear, objective rule banning "they started it" spats is also an important component. CMV's wiki has a really good overview of how we enforce this rule there.

(5) Conclusion/TL;DR

I don't know exactly what political content should exist on Tildes. I do know that a general politics group will not work, and that rather a politics channel should be focused on a discrete purpose other than just discussion.

I would almost certainly ban link posts from any politics group, since inherently they're going to act as just headlines for people to pontificate on, without guiding discussion towards a particular goal. I would also obviously enforce civility, and have much stricter moderation of it than I might on a non-politics forum.

Edited for formatting

Original post here

What if subgroups were totally dynamic?
ie:

If I post to ~music with a post tagged [hip-hop] [instrumental], that post could exist in ~music.hip-hop.instrumental, ~music.instrumental.hip-hop, ~music.instrumental, ~music.hip-hop. Is there a benefit in structured hierarchy? Users could sub to the root ~music for everything, if they want, or they could sub to specific hierarchies that they enjoy (ie: i'd sub to ~music.instrumental but not ~music.hip-hop.instrumental.

This would also drop the need for specific moderation teams or support structures for larger subgroups. Additionally, it creates an interesting structure where posts aren't relegated to single groups, allowing for more discover-ability.

I'm wondering because I'm feeling kind of bad for flooding ~music with my fan girl content. I think it's quality content. I realize a lot of it's been heard but I think every sub ~ group (is that correct phrasing?) needs to have a solid base of content to build on. I don't want to be that person spamming content that people might not like, but I am trying to contribute quality stuff I don't see.

I just can't bear aggregators without it any more. (for reddit you can do it with RES, for HN there is also a browser extension ("Hacker News: Mark All Read") )

The only problem: you miss out on some later discussions. For this the HN extension I use has a "follow comments" toggle inside the posts, which excludes those posts from being hidden.

It also totally fixes the problematic of balancing the "freshness" on the frontpage.

The fact that my cursor has to touch the edge of the screen to be able to access the site docs is not only a little awkward to use, but also looks a little cramped when compared to the consistent and compact nature of the rest of the site. I do see that increasing the padding or the general size of the footer would break the consistent design of Tildes, though. Perhaps spacing the footer <p> elements so they occupy the same y-level without changing the current dimensions of the footer could help?

This is a tiny niggle and it likely only affects me, however, so please do swat me down if this is unnecessary.

—Edited as I forgot to escape characters!

If it's too early in development for these questions, let me know.

1. Is the source available yet? If so, where is it hosted? If not, when will it be dropped?
2. Third party API: I know the docs say that the browser should be the client. However, after using tildes for awhile on mobile, it's quite... interesting. The site does really well on mobile, don't get me wrong, but it's missing the system feel that makes the experience pleasant. Honestly, one of the big reasons I was drawn to reddit was the ample support (by the third party) for mobile clients. I'd love to get started on a client for ~.

Tags

I can totally see nsfw.nude work, but do you think tagging will be done much further? It's relatively much work to tag a thing well, maybe some sort of cross-posting is more rewarding to the user. Essentially it might be the same thing, but the act of sharing to another tilde feels more rewarding than adding yet another tag.

Hierarchies in Tags and Tildes

Yes! I love hierarchies for how they scale.
Do you think the one-dimensional nature of such a "taxonomy" will get problematic, or is it merely a corner case? I might have "food > recipes" and "food > restaurants" or I might have "recipes > food" and "recipes > chemistry". Again I feel like cross-posting is essential to solve this duplication issue. Maybe this as another chance to improve on reddit: if cross-posts just reference a single post there would be just one big discussion.
Cfabbro is part of the team? "We were actually considering allowing multiple ways to access the same groups. E.g. ~literature and ~lit going to the same top level group" sounds good.

Comments

I think "most votes" has a strong bias towards early comments. Ideally you'd give a new comment the reason of doubt, and make it more visible until a good rating about is has been established. For this you'd have to track up-votes per "seen".
Sadly it's really hard to track these implicit down-votes ("read but not up-voted") and generally it obfuscates how the site works. I still think it's worth thinking about, especially if you might derive trust/reputation from the up-votes at some point.
Otherwise commenting on rising stories is the an easy way to farm karma (I tried it on HN to see how the down-vote mechanism works, which is unlocked at 200 karma). Here I also agree with you, that this process should not be 100% automatic.

Group-specific trust

If tildes are nested, will reputation (eventually) be inherited up the hierarchy?

Filter-Bubble (found your opinion in some discussion about it):
I agree again, good communities are bubbles. I think the "no-downvotes" will help a bit so controversial stuff can rise.

Links

I also like your decision to not allow text on links. I really like how HN moderators improve link-titles sometimes to get rid of clickbait or inaccuracies.

I will give some UX feedback later, when I got used to tildes a bit.

AFAIK, reddit does not allow duplication of same link. In Tildes, you can repost same link. Is it deliberate choice or its' discussions postponed?

IMO, after a time period (ex. 1 month) same link can be shared. In this way, some of users that missed link, or a new discovery in the link, can be subjected to interested ones.

Also I really like reddit's other contexts feature for the same link.

As can be seen in this post in ~test it is possible to secretly refer to another webpage than the one actually typed. It's not the biggest priority as of now, but it would be nice to see this fixed before Tildes will go live.

In case the ~test post gets deleted, here's an example:
https://innocent.site/

Make it possible to donate in exchange for placing a monocle, sticker or gold star cough on a comment. It's karma and it's an instant way to donate to keep the site afloat.

Also donating could give the donater a special sticker on their username like "supporter" or something.