I noticed when opening my notifications that they are missing a link to the originating thread.
EDIT: just discovered that the # at the end of the header line is a link back to the topic. Maybe making that a bit more obvious then?
Having just joined recently and made my way though the (technical goals documentation)[https://docs.tildes.net/technical-goals], I am interested in the lower-level stuff. How scaling is being considered, off-loading static content to CDNs, fault-tolerance etc... As well as code testing, deployments, etc...
I guess this will be a bit clearer when Tildes goes Open, but I think a discussion on it could also be helpful for roadmapping and growth if possible.
In preformatted text blocks (three back ticks), group syntax with ~ doesn't get rendered as a hyperlink, but it does with inline preformatted text e.g. ~group.
This seems like it would be undesirable and unintended behavior. That being said, I'd rather have this verified before opening an issue on gitlab.
Is this a bug or a feature?
Sorry, I skimmed the sidebar and announcement posts and whatsoever, but didn't find anything where to post.
Found a simple bug, which may also be a feature:p
If you delete a comment, you can't press reply on that same comment again, where you previously deleted your reply from. If I vote that comment after deleting my comment reply is again clickable.
Thanks for your attention. Have a great day. :P
€dit:
I'm using a phone, with webview browser. (Entering into Google search and using that view instead of a browser)
Hello! I am loving this interface, but I am wondering if we can create our own tilde-doms or if that feature is not yet implemented.
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
This is definitely just a stop-gap until I get some time to work on properly paginating it, but quite a few people have asked about a page to view old notifications again after marking them read, so I put a quick one together that's linked in the sidebar of your user page as "Previously read", at https://tildes.net/notifications
For now it doesn't paginate at all and will just show your most recent notifications (up to 100) that were marked read, and doesn't include the unread ones. It's not great in a lot of ways, but hopefully better than not having any way to view the read notifications at all.
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:
Hey everyone, thanks for being here. It's really exciting to see so many people on the site now, and hopefully we can keep the momentum up. I even have about 50 more invite request emails from overnight that I haven't gone through yet.
As I've said before, I think keeping these daily discussions a little less serious on the weekend is a good idea, so I'll stick to that for today. Two main questions/focuses:
Today I want to talk about expanding the information available on the Tildes Docs site. There's some info there, but there should be a lot more. Eventually, I'd like that site to include information about the site's goals, mechanics and so on, as well as things closer to standard "documentation", such as how the post formatting works, details on the tagging systems, etc.
One specific thing that I know I'd like to add before long is kind of a "FAQ for mechanics" that can have answers for the common questions that keep coming up, like "why is the comment box at the bottom instead of the top?".
To help with this, I've now open-sourced the files for both the Tildes Docs site and the Blog here now, so you can contribute to them directly if you'd like to: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes-static-sites/
@flaque has already written a page to help with Markdown formatting that I'll add soon (but I wanted to see if he'd like to do it as a proper merge request so he gets credit as a contributor). Anyone else is welcome to contribute to the Docs as well, and I'd appreciate the help. However, if you're not sure if it's something that I'd want to add it might be best to ask first before you start writing.
Outside of that, I'm open for suggestions about what you think would be good to include, or things that are already there that need work. Thanks!
Would be a nice feature to see a number of people currently viewing a topic to see where the activity is currently at on Tildes
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.
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
As I mentioned in the post on Monday, I've spent some time this week trying to make sure that I should be in good shape for the GDPR (which takes effect tomorrow).
In the end, the change in minimum age for some EU member states seemed to be the only issue, so I've just updated the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use to account for that. You can see the exact changes that I made here, on GitLab.
And on that note, now that the Docs pages are open-source, I added a "view history" link that shows at the top of pages on the Docs/Blog if they've been edited, so that people can click to see the full edit history of the relevant page on GitLab.
Because of these changes, if you're older than 13 but below the minimum age in your country (for example, in Germany and France it's 16), you'll have to stop using Tildes now. At this point, it's unlikely that anyone is affected by this. As a side note, if anyone knows of a comprehensive, updated list of what the minimum age is for different countries, please let me know. I'd love to link to a list so that people can easily check if they don't know what their country's minimum age is, but I wasn't able to find one.
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.
Is there ability to search for existing post either by a link or a title? If not, is it planned?
Every time I visit I have to log in again, even if I've chosen "Keep me logged in"
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
The default sort being "Activity" is great, but it makes the front page feel stale now that we're getting more activity across days. We should swap out to a smaller period such as 24 hours.
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:
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.
As discussed yesterday, since everyone seemed supportive, I've updated the default sorting for topic lists to "activity". I think we'll probably need to reconsider this as the site's traffic and posting volume continues increasing, but I think it's working really well as a default for now.
Hopefully the default will also be customizable on a per-group basis in the future (and/or allow people to set up their own "shortcuts" to certain groups with specific sortings).
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.
We've had a few discussions already related to the voting mechanics (mostly about whether we should change the name, which is still definitely a possibility). Something that came up in one of those that I think is an interesting idea is moving a comment's current "score" to the bottom of the comment instead of the top. I'm a little uncertain about this, so I wanted to see what other people think.
Some thoughts:
Let me know what you think. This is a pretty minor decision overall, but even little things like this can have significant effects, so I'm interested in other opinions about it.
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
As already mentioned, there was a reasonably successful post about Tildes on Hacker News today, so I've got an email inbox full of invite requests and feedback that I'm about to start going through. This means that I'm about to invite a lot more people, so the activity will probably start picking up shortly.
As part of that, I've created two new groups: ~comp and ~creative. A lot of the people coming from HN will definitely be on the more technical end, so ~comp is intended to be a place where we can post articles about programming and so on without filling up ~tech with that kind of stuff. ~creative was a suggestion that meristele made yesterday, and I think it's definitely something that we needed. Let me know if you think there are other groups we need desperately.
Note that while new users will get auto-subscribed to those groups (for now), I did not go back and subscribe all existing users to them. So if you're interested in either of those topics, you'll need to go subscribe on your own.
Outside of that, please be welcoming to all the new users. And to both old and new users - please let me know what you think and if there's particular functionality I should prioritize. I know that there's a lot of things still missing, but if you're coming from HN you're probably pretty used to that. You can post here or feel free to make separate threads in ~tildes if you want to discuss something in more depth.
Thanks! I'll most likely give out some more invite codes to everyone in the next day or two, so that we can try to keep more activity coming in.
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?
My comment on a post here shows an ordered list using numbers, whereas that same comment in my recent comment history here shows that same ordered list using lowercase letters.
First, thanks for the great discussion yesterday about "fluff" content. There's a lot to consider, and a lot of people made great points (and are still making them), so thanks for all your thoughts in there. On a side note, that was the first topic on Tildes to get over 100 comments (and there's now already a second one). That's a pretty neat milestone to be hitting already.
For today, I want to talk a bit about my general plans for this week and see if anyone has any thoughts. Maybe this would be a good thing for me to try to do every Monday?
I'm planning to focus on a few things this week, in no particular order:
Finally, in the interest of trying to keep momentum up, I've also given everyone 3 invite codes, so you can invite some other people to join the site if you'd like. You can get them from the invite page, which is linked from the sidebar on your user page.
Thanks again for being here, it's really exciting to see so many people using the site already.
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:
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:
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:
This is the case at least on mobile, as that's only where I have tried to access Tildes. See the below hyperlinked monospace text.. it looks just like the unhyperlinked one. unhyperlinked hyperlinked
This is more of a stop-gap than a real solution, but it's now at least possible to link to a specific comment. On each comment, on the right side of the header "stripe", there's a # that links to that comment. It just uses an HTML anchor, so you're still linking to the full comments page, but it should scroll to the correct comment at least. You can also click the # on a comment from your notifications page or a user's page to go directly to that comment.
In the future we'll probably want to have a better view that highlights the linked comment more, and allows displaying context (the parent comments), but for now this should help a bit.
(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.
To get things started: Some dogs are more disciplined than others When Teddy is life Some pranks are universal
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.
As promised, I've done a fair amount of updating of the Docs pages now. There were various small tweaks, but the major changes were the addition of the "Future Mechanics" page to explain a bit about plans for the "trust system" (which we also discussed here), as well as mostly rewriting the "Overall Goals" page so that it covers different topics than the announcement post.
I've asked this as a bit of a side question in a few other places already, but haven't really heard much, so I'm going to make it the focus today: where do you think we should try to promote Tildes to get more (good) users?
I think posting on reddit is a given, but I'd like to hear suggestions for which specific subreddits you think would be good places to try.
I tried a post on Hacker News this morning, but it did about as well as my posts there usually do—it had one upvote after an hour, so I deleted it and will try again some other time.
Outside of those, if you think there are any news sites, blogs, etc. that would be interested in the site and its goals, I could send a message to any of those as well. Michael Eades made a post about it on his blog last week which was great to see and has brought in a few people.
Edit: oh also, I've given all the existing users 5 invite codes again, so if there's anyone that you want to invite please feel free. They're available on this page, linked from the sidebar on your user page.
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.