EDIT: Post-locked topic

I didn't get the chance to reply or explain myself, ironically, as I posted this topic last night and then woke up this morning to 42 comments this topic being locked.

In short, I didn't want to block swearing from Tildes, I just wanted to find out if there was a NSFW filter, as I had my first one pop up in the feed yesterday. Reddit and other sites allow you to block NSFW content from the get-go. And yes, it is the minority by far on Tildes.

As for the swearing, I don't know why I assumed that the NSFW would remove that, I must have been tired when posting this topic. (And yes, I know that this is the internet and it's filled with non-friendly content, so it is naive to expect otherwise, sadly.)

I guess it would just be nice to have a place where you can have both great quality posts (such as on Tildes), as well as the comments be free of some unnecessary, low-quality words. I think Twitter and others allow you to block some words or topics.

I apologise for @Deimos that he had to step in to bring the peace, I didn't mean for this to happen. And apologies to the community for bringing any unrest. This was never my intention.

Hi everyone, only been on Tildes for a few weeks now.

First off, I love the quality of the content and the community's camraderie.

The only question is whether there is a way to filter NSFW, adult or profane comments. There is such great content on here, with amazing contributors, but sometimes you just get the people who like to use profane language like it's an adjective, and it has no place in the topic or discussion. I know we can't block people, but is there a way of filtering out such content, comments, or users?

Hello!

Some of you may know that I have been developing an iOS client for Tildes.

I’ve seen other devs like @wababa and @talklittle also working on awesome apps, and have seen some discussion there around collaborating on some of the core parts (scraping the website, etc.).

I’ve also been in touch with @efraimbart, who is working on the awesome Everything protocol project.

I’m sure there are other devs out there that I haven’t seen, and this post is a call-out for all of you.

Until an API is available, any similar project will face the same initial blocker: needing to scrape the website for data.

Is there any interest from the community on collaborating on that part? For example, developing a public library that encapsulates all of the interactions with Tildes and any client can talk to with a consistent API. Or, even better, collaborating on an official API for Tildes (which is, of course, itself an open-source project).

To that end, I’ve released some of the code I use to accomplish this in Surfboard. Maybe it can help someone build an iOS client, or inspire some of us to build a more generic solution :D. It’s far from perfect or complete, and isn’t even an actual package you can just import and use at this time, but at the very least it documents many of the endpoints and interactions.

Have a great weekend :)

The legal discussion is not exactly the same as US politics. I would imagine that we have people who would like to follow it and people who prefer strongly to avoid it.

For example, today we had these two events and I didn't even look hard.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/barricades-go-up-around-fulton-county-courthouse-as-trump-indictment-looms

Superceding indictment filed in Florida documents case
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.85.0_1.pdf

I’ve just heard of the new BBS style forum for Gemini space and wondered if the properties of Tildes could adequately translate to Gemini space. In other words; could Tildes become accessible in Gemini space?

gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/

I’m also curious if there are other Gemini users here but that might be better off as a separate post on a different section of the site.

Sorry for seeming like a total idiot but I cannot find the process to change my text color when I type a message.
I checked this site and did some online research with the Markdown system itself which is new to me.
It appears that there is some kind of code insertion but it's unclear how to format.
So many of you are advanced computer users and I am just your traditional semi-fluent poster.
Any help would be appreciated.

Hello! Tildes newbie here. I wasn't sure if this is a bug or if it's working as intended, so I wanted to ask.

I unsubscribed from https://tildes.net/~sports but noticed that I still saw a post from ~sports.hockey in my home feed. It took me a while to figure out that I also had to go to each of the ~sports subgroups and unsubscribe from all of them too. Am I doing this correctly or did I miss a button somewhere that would let me unsubscribe from a parent group + all its subgroups in one go?

Thank you!

--- EDIT ---
Thanks to everyone for the replies! Confirmed that it's working as intended. And there is now a new post by cfabbro on Gitlab suggesting that "unsubscribe from all subgroups" be added as a new function.
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/802

I thought I could get away from "what [general topic or icebreaker that 99.9% of people have an opinion on]?" questions by filtering out ask.survey, but that seems not to be the case. There are still quite a few that are being considered just "Ask" questions, and not "surveys". Are these not being categorized very strictly, or is my notion of an ask.survey question mismatching that of the moderators of Tildes? Or is the ask/ask.survey distinction up to the poster, and not moderators?

I come to Tildes for articles on specific subjects, not ocean-wide-open questions that generate maximum participation froth. I might have to start filtering out ask as well (as ask.survey), but I'd rather not have to do that. If people ask "what [specific problem or specific topic]" questions, I'd be interested to read them.

I think we all know how redditors can be negative nancies looking for the next user to argue with, so I'm curious to know from the peeps that were here before the redditors: has the quality of conversation and sense of community changed (either positively or negatively) since us redditors showed up?

This thread is officially retired. Please see the new version to ask any new questions.

We have a lot of new users joining the site. Welcome to Tildes!

This thread is for you to ask any question you have about the site, from “what is the moderation philosophy?”to “what does that blue line next to some comments mean?” to “what is the general vibe like here?” Tildes has a lot of documentation, history, and embedded social norms that can be daunting or opaque at first glance, so here’s your opportunity to get help with anything you need.

Questions about anything and everything are fair game. Follow-up questions are encouraged! No question is too simple.

Also, a quick note: the only person who can speak in any official capacity on Tildes is our admin @Deimos. Everyone answering who is NOT him is just a helpful community member!

EDIT: To be clear, is perfectly okay to ask any question — even if you think it’s been asked before, or even if you didn’t search for an answer beforehand. There are an overwhelming number of comments here to sift through, so don’t worry about trying to read all of them. Just ask away, and someone will answer you!

I've noticed that there are primarily text posts with some links thrown in, and I do like the "real" conversation that it brings, instead of the shitposting that ends up all over Reddit.

I was curious, though, if there were any plans to add a ~pics or something similar. I know the goal of Tildes isn't to be a true Reddit replacement of course, but I wasn't sure whether image boards were planned or were being left out to help encourage actual discussion.

The Reddit company is screwing up and upsetting a lot of their "power users" and mods. A lot of people are fed up with Reddit, and are possibly ready to move on to a new platform.

Is Tildes that platform? I've lurked here for most of Tildes' life, and from that, my impression is that Tildes does not especially want to replace Reddit. A lot of people here like the small, intimate atmosphere. I've even noticed a bit of derision toward Reddit's lowbrow appeal.

The reason I ask is because there are communities on Reddit that I don't want to see die. /r/Permaculture and /r/composting are some of my favorite places. I've gotten to know quite a few people who also frequent those places and I've come to enjoy the tone of conversations there.

But this seems like an important question for Tildes to answer not just for my sake. Reddit is full of niche communities like this. If they have to go somewhere suddenly (and I realize that this is a big "if"), where do they go? I know that they technically can't come here suddenly--slowing growth is one of Tildes' features. But if Reddit's niche communities decided to move here, would you welcome them? I'm interested in what you, personally, think, as well as how you think Tildes as a whole would handle this.

P.S. I'm also sorta asking for permission to invite /r/Permaculture and /r/composting over here. I like this website, but I'm just a lurker, and don't feel like I'm part of the Tildes community. It feels super presumptuous to invite my friends over here without asking. But I think the wider question is more important. Do you, and does Tildes, want Reddit's 'refugee' niche interest communities?

Edit: Thank you all for the excellent responses! I don't have time now to respond individually, but I really appreciate the thought so many of you have put into your replies. This will help a lot in considering how to proceed over on Reddit.

I understand there are no plans to develop an official app, which is understandable to me as that would require a lot of time and resources for a project like this.

But it's clear that there are lots of devs eager to chime in and create an app by themselves, just like they did for Reddit. There's even one iOS app already in progress, although it relies on HTML parsing to retrieve the data obviously.

So is there any official stance on this? Why not publish the API and let the community do its magic? Any thoughts?

Unless I'm missing something, it seems if I subscribe to parent group but not its subgroups, the topics from subgroups still show anyway. Back when they were just tags at least I can use filter but that doesn't work anymore. Is it just me or isn't that the opposite effect we'd expect from subgroups?

Edit: Everyone explained that it's a bug. I'll just need to be patient then.

See this image.

Which groups are unsubscribed? All of the ~sports.X groups are unsubscribed, but american_football, basketball, football, and motorsports have been visited.

The link-visited colour set by a.link-group:visited is taking precedence over the default colour otherwise set by .group-list-item-not-subscribed a.link-group, hiding the colour change associated with -not-subscribed. This is particularly troublesome when unsubscribing from a group, since one must go to the group's page – visiting the link – in order to unsubscribe.

With the introduction of the new groups, I now, for the first time, have unsubscribed from some groups here on Tildes. I've been subscribed to the fire hose feed in my feed reader, but I'd love to get a feed that is personalized with only my subscriptions. Does this exist? If not, could it?

Apologies if this isn’t the right place to put bug reports.

I’ve noticed an issue where comments which are bookmarked don’t display as such in my notifications.

For example:

A bookmarked comment displaying as Unbookmarked in my notifications.

Is anyone else seeing the same ?

I'm sorry if this was already answered in the docs somewhere but similarly to the question "What happens to my Steam games when Valve goes out of business?" I was wondering what happens to Tildes if Deimos can't sustain it anymore for whatever reason (e.g. death, prison, going off the grid and starting from scratch in Ecuador...)?

Is there some kind of backup plan in place?

What do you long term users want to share about the culture?

What about growth plans? The erudite discussion with (presumably) real people is what I love most, but I miss the really niche subs. That needs more people.

I just want to make sure this isn't "eternal July".

Hey gang, I’m a rather novice / hedonist tildes user and have just been posting links to uploaded images by hosting them on ibb and then sharing

https://ibb.co/PF5nFf9
https://ibb.co/10pV1wB
https://ibb.co/1GgyWCT

Is there a better place to host and better way to post images?

Thanks in advance. Sorry for any eye rolls I may have caused!

Hi, I was wondering if the current duration before voting gets locked on a post is still 30 days? I tried to find the answer in the docs but didn’t see it (apologies if I missed it) and all I turned up in a search of the site was a topic from 3 years ago mentioning the 30 days, so I wanted to see if that’s still accurate.

Thanks !

I just noticed that when I sent an invite to family member over SMS it never arrived. After experimenting it looks like if text contains "tildes.net" it is filered. This also happens with another family member's phone. It is weird why would those companies want to filter it.

I also checked and the message didn't show up in spam & blocked. Does anyone else observe the same thing?

I lurk here at work and don't watch YouTube in general. Often it's annoying to see something of potential interest and it's a YouTube video. Is there a way to filter youtube.com here or an extension enabling that functionality?

Thank you.

I never noticed this before today, but I don't seem to be able to search for comments. Is that supposed to be doable on Tildes?

It took me way too long to figure out that the links at the top of the search results page are sort options; I had been clicking "Comments" hoping to see comment search results, and I was a bit confused why only full topics were still being listed. I guess comment search doesn't currently exist?

Looking at the current top thread in ~talk, it seems many of us were forged in the fires of Mount Digg, and now suffer again through the great Reddit diaspora. Perhaps it is here our journey ends?

I am not from the US of A, but one thing I have always found fascinating about that country is the concept of the constitution. I believe it was so incredibly well conceived, the three legged stool, with all the thought that went into how it might be attacked and edge cases, that the founding fathers would have made excellent software testers. The fact American democracy has stood this long is some feat.

Which brings me to my question. Should Tildes create some form of constitution? A set of principles that binds and guides it? I believe something like that would make questions like this easier to answer. A founding set of ideals from which everything else should derive.

We have something akin to this at my company, where the founding principle is the customer is always our main priority. This has served our business well for decades; is everything we do in service of the customer and their needs. You would honestly be amazed at the loyalty and trust this builds over time.

Anyway just some food for thought. I think I will be calling this my new home for now - it feels very much like the Reddit of old right now, a feeling I haven't felt for a great age.

So like many others, I'm a refugee from the Rexxit, and the collaborative, positive enthusiasm here is infectious.

I've had an odd observation about my brief time here - when I think I can contribute to a thread, I find myself trying to step up my posting game - doing a bit of extra research, making sure I add links, and double checking my grammar (as best as I can!). I want my thoughts to have value or be meaningful here, moreso than anywhere I've contributed to in the past.

Do others feel the same way?

I adore the available themes and it makes browsing quite pleasing to do. Currently I'm in a fight between Solarized Dark and Dracula. I'm curious though if there's a clearly preferred theme here or if people are using all kinds of stuff.

Some previous threads on themes (some are about themes in general and aren't Tildes specific):

• https://tildes.net/~comp/iyy/what_is_your_favourite_light_theme
• https://tildes.net/~comp/j14/what_are_your_favourite_low_contrast_themes
• https://tildes.net/~tech/cfq/light_themes_or_dark_themes
• https://tildes.net/~tildes/1yd/the_thing_i_want_most_atm_is_a_dark_theme
• https://tildes.net/~tildes/19c/why_so_much_blue_for_the_dark_themes

Maybe it's just because I've lost my bookmarks so many times, one way or another. I now avoid using website-specific bookmarks, you never know when the website could shut down or you could lose the bookmarks some other way. not saying Tildes will shut down; I'm sure it won't be any time soon, but I still can't get myself to use it even though it's so convenient ☹️ does anyone else feel the same way ?

Apologies if this is the wrong place to ask this question, but is there a way to search which would list comments made on any topic in chronological order regardless of how old the original post was made? Meaning, even if a post was one of the first on Tilde, if someone commented within it in the last few minutes, it would be displayed before a newly created post that hadn't had a comment in several hours.

I tried all of the sorting options and didn't seem to find one that performed this function. Any assistance would be appreciated.

If I have a quick Tildes dev question, where should I ask it?

Hi all. On my Pixel phone I have the accessibility option for font size and display size turned up a notch or two but noticed that not all of the text in Tildes adheres to this. Some front page topic text is bigger, some of them remain small.

Is this something that can be quickly tested and fixed if it's a bug? It might drive poor sighted people away from the site.

I'm assuming it's not me, as my Pixel 7 is quite new .... but I am on the Android beta program.

Can anyone else try and see if it's a localised issue or more global?

I can post screen shots of needed but not sure what image sharing sites you prefer to use in here!

Edit:

Fixed with a chrome flag....

the text-scaling is being replaced by the "Accessibility Page Zoom" feature (currently hidden behind the feature flag in chrome://flags)

I have the "collapse old comments when I return to a topic" setting turned on, but I can't quite figure out how it works. For example, when open a new topic for the first time and scroll through the comments, the next time I open the topic, they're all still open.

Does anyone have more details about how this feature works or how I should be using it?

Thank you!

For many they are considered ~hobbies so ~hobbies.cars and ~hobbies.motorcycles would be a logical place. I don't know if ~transport would be a suitable main category for this since then trucks, tractors, trains and boats could also go there without bloating hobbies' sub-groups too much.

I'd like to hear your input on this, cheers.

When talking about adding new features to tildes, many people talk about adding more ways to customize your profile, since right now we only have the username and the user bio. The most common way other sites do this is by having profile pictures, but considering tildes is text based that wouldn't work out well.
Another way of doing this would be signatures. Not only would that distinguish tildes from reddit and HN, but it would be text based and look ok on the tildes layout. But what do you guys think? Would it be neccessary?

Edit: u/TooFewColours said this and i think it seems good. I've also heard about allowing your username to be a certain font:

I'd be opposed to profile pictures, but maybe simply being able to choose a single colour that decorates your profile page in a simple way would be a cute addition. Given the colours in the logo, I think it would be on-brand.

I've recently noticed that some particular users, who post/comment quite often, frequently contribute with high quality content across an impressive spectrum of themes. These posts/comments usually go into great detail, an approach suitable of a "semi-expert", that honestly baffles me.

This lead me to think that Tildes users might be using AI language models to aid in the writing of their posts/comments. This possibility is quite disheartening since I found Tildes to be an extraordinarily engaging community, with a distinct human element that I haven't seen in other bigger forums. The possibility of a significant portion of Tildes content being generated by AI makes this sentiment a mere illusion.

So here are my questions:

1. Is there any reasonable way of determining which posts were written with the aid of AI?
2. Is the Tildes community okay with the content being generated partly, or entirely, by AI?

Please forgive me if I'm being a cynic, I've spent too much time in forums with significantly lower quality content than Tildes.

Edit 1: Just wanted to cite this paper to somehow justify my uneasiness when it comes to writing texts with AI in command. As I've commented below, LLMs might get in the way of learning the person's true idea/opinion.

Edit 2: As I've said in the comments below, I had no intention of accusing any particular user with this post. Clearly, I've failed to convey my intent so I'll try to clarify my original idea a bit more:

Because I'm new to Tildes and haven't got any other forum experience besides Reddit, I was amazed with how much and how fast some users post extremely high quality content, since this was certainly not the norm in Reddit. As with many other online platforms, spammers armed with AI can be a difficult problem to deal with, so I've made this post with the intent of starting a discussion about this matter and to understand the Tildes community stance. My relatively negative view of the use of AI is due in part to my experience with such spammers in the past. Forgive me if I've assumed the worst...

From the little time I've spent in Tildes, I'm quite sure the community grew to know each other and I'm hopeful that my post will not cause undue witch hunts. And I've also learned that because people got to know each user's stylistic voice, it's fairly easy to spot a possible AI spammer.

Thank you for the insightful discussion so far !

I tried to register here the other day with my preferred username, which was taken, so I replaced an S with a 5 as I've done in the past. Now I realize that might have been a bit deceptive - someone reading my comment might think it's coming from the other user or vice-versa, and I don't want to be that guy. What's the vibe here about that? Should I invite myself under a new name once I'm approved for invitations, or keep this username? I'd just DM the other user if that was an option on tildes.

edit: Thanks, all! I'll keep it until/unless the other user feels strongly about it.

Bit of an odd question but one I'm becoming a little self conscious of.

I posted a thread earlier today on ~LGBT asking people to share their experiences of coming out. Because it's a somewhat sensitive topic and sharing your experiences can be a little vulnerable I've been taking part and interacting with everyone who's shared their experience.

Im being sure to try and actually contribute, bring my perspective and continue the conversation, and importantly thank people for being open about something that can be difficult.

My problem is that I worry that this is a habit I'm bringing over from Reddit that's perhaps not suitable for Tildes, but I'm not sure?

I generally see it as a good thing when an OP takes active part in a discussion they started, but maybe it's more of a hindrance here?

I'm not sure how I feel, and I'd like to get the opinions of other regular users on what would be appropriate?

Edit: I should specify and make it clear in my case I'm talking about actively replying to most or all top level comments. Not necessarily replies but still a fair number. I worry about crossing a line into just contributing to noise.

Edit — thanks to all who replied and educated me on this. I thought I'd do this rather than pollute the thread with single thank you posts while I learn the ropes here.

Hi,

I'm brand new here so this could well be answered and I'm just being stupid. Very probable tbh!

I'm on a macbook and iphone and one thing I noticed was it's a bit of a trek scrolling down to comment. Not that I've done that much.

Now I love, really love, the lightweight and speedy nature of this site (and incidentally looking forward to brushing up on my Markdown) and am hoping that with the influx feature bloat doesn't happen but would a small anchor text link somewhere up top be in order to quickly get to the comment field?

Let me know how idiotic I am and why or.. if I'm lucky.. how much of a genius I am!

Thanks,

Rodney

Hi All,

As yet another reddit transplant (YART) I've been watching the drama on that other platform and reflecting on what the most important aspects of successful online discussions are for me.

One of the things that I value(d) most about reddit was the ability to use the keyword reddit in DuckDuckGo or Google searches to help me find more relevant and helpful content about a variety of niche subjects. So far, it seems to me like Tildes has some potential to fill this role based on its emphasis of thoughtful text content. Also, these types of searches add credibility to a site when random internet browsers stumble across a thread discussing their exact question.

One thought that I had along these lines was that people who care about this type of thing could make a concerted effort to transport content from reddit and other sites to be shared here. I don't think it would be appropriate to just copy and paste text without adding at least a bit of original thoughts or context. However, I often find myself researching niche products or ideas to such an extent that I could write up a nice summary of all my findings. A post like that could be a nice crash course to others or a fun way to introduce people to ideas they didn't know about.

Would people here be interested in consciously doing this type of thing? We could all make nice amalgamations of information we think is important as we independently research topics and post them here to boost discussion and boost Tildes threads in web search results.

Some of you may have noticed that the threads under some topics include a comment which consists only of some paragraphs quoted from the article posted in the topic, posted by the same user who posted the topic. (I’m choosing not to link to any examples, because I don’t want to single anyone out for special attention, in case they feel persecuted by this.)

@cfabbro and I were discussing this in a quiet corner of an old thread, and we came to the conclusion that this was a topic which should be discussed by more than just us two, in the hope of finding a Tildes-wide consensus about a consistent way to treat those quote-only orphan comments.

The Context

These quote-only comments are a side-effect of a deliberate feature of Tildes. When you create a topic there are three fields to be completed. The combination of fields you complete determine the type of topic you’re making.

• Title All topics must have a title. This is compulsory.

• Link A field for a URL linking to an article or video or other off-site content. This is optional.

• Text A field for adding text to your post. This is optional.

If you complete:

• Link but not Text - this creates a simple link topic: the topic consists only of an off-site link.

• Text but not Link - this creates a simple text topic: the topic consists only of user-provided text.

• Link and Text - this produces a complex link topic: the topic consists of an off-site link plus user-provided text. However, the user-provided text is not incorporated into the actual topic, but is split off into a stand-alone comment.

Some people who post links also like to include a relevant quote to summarise the article they’re posting, to let readers know what the article is about before they click the off-site link. But, as above, this quote gets split off as a stand-alone comment. It is no longer part of the post. It becomes an orphaned comment consisting only of the quote.

The Question

Given that these quote-only orphan comments exist, the question arises: how should we treat them?

It has been observed that there are two diametrically opposed approaches to this:

• Some people vote on them, seeing them as useful summaries of the posted article, providing some context for the discussion.

• Some people label them as ‘Noise’, seeing them as pointless extracts from the article, cluttering up the discussion thread.

In one recent extreme case, a quote-only orphan comment had both 16 votes and was collapsed due to ‘Noise’ labels.

This is creating some confusion among newcomers to Tildes (as well as some of the old-timers). How are they supposed to vote/label these comments? Well, there’s no clear precedent for them to follow.

@cfabbro and I decided to put it to all of you. Maybe by discussing this, we can come up with a consistent treatment for these comments.

So what do you think about these quote-only orphan comments? Are they useful context or noisy clutter? Should we be giving them votes or labelling them as noise?

While browsing over the past little while I have noticed that I starting to see "text reposts".
I did a quick search and saw that link reposts have been discussed in the past, but I didn't come across something in relation to text posts.

To make it a bit more clear what I mean, a recent example:

• In my feed today: https://tildes.net/~tech/16nj/second_brain_software_of_choice
• A very similar thread last week: https://tildes.net/~creative/1639/what_do_you_use_for_note_taking_writing

Generally speaking I don't mind reposts, certainly with "ask" topics new insights can be gained over time and different people might give different answers. At the same time I do think that the landscape around note taking software hasn't drastically changed in a week.

To be clear, I am not saying that the OP of the most recent topic did anything wrong either. Even if you remember to check if a question has been asked before (I ironically almost forgot myself in this case) you might not find it.

But I am wondering if more could be done to surface previous discussions. Not to specifically prevent these sorts of reposts but also to surface potentially valuable information of previous discussions.

Something that does come to mind is having a mechanism that uses the title someone is typing as (part of) a search query in the same space. Matching topics could then be shown before submission.

Or if we care more about making previous discussions accessible give the OP after submission the option to also link to previous topics around the subject. Interlinked topics is something that would be interesting to explore, basically borrowing from the "other discussions" tab idea but make it "similar discussions".

I'm curious to see what others think about it.