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  • Showing only topics in ~tildes with the tag "suggestions". Back to normal view / Search all groups
    1. Proposal: For sensitive topics, if a thread is intended for a particular demographic, there needs another thread open for everyone to discuss without having to join the targeted thread

      Sorry everyone for yet another post about the ~life.women post but the second thread about that same topic in ~life.men made me realize we could have used two separate threads from the start....

      Sorry everyone for yet another post about the ~life.women post but the second thread about that same topic in ~life.men made me realize we could have used two separate threads from the start.

      Instead of hoping that all the men instinctively knew to stay quiet and be dissappointed when some inevitably failed to notice, there'd be less friction if the people had two separate discussion spaces, one meant for women as the current default expectation (and be in ~life.women), and another (either in ~life.men or ~life) to provide an outlet for those who have things to say but nevertheless feel uneasy doing so in the same space.

      There need not be any compulsory gatekeeping. The conversations in the two above 2 threads have me believe that if the option was available, and people were made aware, most would be considerate enough to know where to go and respect boundary.

      Women who don't want to having to bother wading through seas of men's opinions regardless of how well-intentioned, could now conveniently hit 'Ignore' on the alternative thread once and be done with it. Or if that thread was in ~life.men and they have already unsubscribed, nothing to be done and the experience would be seamless.

      Some potential concerns:

      There could still be troublemakers (in either threads) who has to be reported.

      Between the two scenarios though, those same few would cause trouble regardless. However with this arrangement, they could not hide behind the plausible deniability of not knowing whether the thread they're in is meant for them.

      For the majority, having an alternative avenue to speak is an easier pill to swallow than not being able to speak at all.

      Especially when a topic involves two groups, it's natural that people from both groups would have opinions.

      It's an unfortunate situation that men outnumbers women, so their comments unavoidably were more numerous and more likely to gather votes, giving the impression of dogpiling. The flip side then men necessarily needs to exercise greater restraint (or be more constricted) even to maintain equal representation, the more imbalance the more that restraint is required, which understandably wasn't sustainable and eventually somebody slipped.

      People can often be oblivious, but most are not malicious. Being caught in the middle of heated arguments can often bring out the worst in us. I believe many who participated in that thread did not set out with the intent to invalidate the others' viewpoints, and most wouldn't mind putting their thoughts in a different thread if there was an option. Maybe allowing for some distance would have been enough to reduce friction.

      Shouldn't people just learn to recognize when a topic is not for them?

      In general I agree, I think exercising self restraint is needed when having to navigate between personal expression and social harmony.

      However, with certain hot-button issues like this, where such appeal has repeatedly failed to stick, perhaps it's time to consider a new approach if we want to move beyond the status quo.

      Is it redundant to have two threads for the same topic?

      Naturally that would be the case. The Tildes community for the most part operate as if a single group.

      If a post is meant for people in a group to see and discuss, then it feels redundant for there to be another post in the same group, since we assume most among the community have already seen the other post.

      On the other hand, if there are two or more separate groups, then it's also natural that a topic posted to one group could also be repeatedly posted in another group. It's reasonable to assume people in the 2nd group aren't aware of the post in the 1st group. From their perspective the 2nd post would be the first time they see it, and the only chance they get to participate in the topic. So it's both expected and justified.

      However, our situation here is a bit special. The post was anticipated to be seen by two groups, yet also expected to be participated only by one of them. This mismatch while not the cause, still exasperated the conflict by muddling disagreement about the topic with that of expected user behavior.

      In abstract, this ambiguity can be resolved in two ways. Either leaning into the one-group status and accept that every threads should be open to everyone, or lean into the two-group status and accept that sometimes the same topic can be duplicatedly posted, since each post are targeted at a different audience.

      Think of this like a non-interference policy between countries. If it's reasonable for a post to cater to a particular subsection within the community, then it should also be reasonable to expect that people from outside that subsection could discuss about the same topic among themselves instead. Because the alternative is to demand that the 'outsider' needs to stay vigilant of the activity of 'insider', and yet they could only be allowed to watch, like some sort of mandatory stalking policy which is a weird situation to be in.

      In practical terms allowing both sides to have their own separate discussions makes it easier for both to ignore what's going on in the other sides, so less chance for conflicts.

      But don't we already have different groups?

      This touches on something @updawg pointed out in the meta thread. Currently, everyone are automatically subscribed to all groups. While people are free to unsubscribe from any groups they're uninterested in, it's well known that users often stick to the default. Knowing that means most people would expect most others are also in every group, even when they themselves have done the curation personally.

      In effect, everyone in the community still interact with each other as if there's only a single shared discussion space, even if it could have been the case that after all this time most people might have already self selected into their own favourite subgroups already, just because of the perception that everyone hasn't.

      Part of the work is to change that perception. So efforts to change our collective behavior needs to be more structural and explicit.

      You may also be worried that this idea could backfire by breeding worse resentment.

      Either by making each group feeling unfairly discriminated, or if both groups ended up spending more energy being passive-agressive agaisnt each other. I had that fear as well, and that remains a real possibility.

      However, I have faith that it has a good chance not turning out that way. The thread in ~life.men showed that people largely remained well-behaved (thank you @winther for taking the leap with that post). In a sense, this same concern could have applied to the existence of both ~life.men and ~life.women as well. Nether group has imploded yet and this is a smaller version of that arrangement.

      This may sounds counterintuitive, but I think keeping participation be voluntary would help to reduce this kind of resentment. As it shows the resulting behavior is what the participants themselves want and not due to being forced by moderators, thus actually reflect the preference of the community as a whole.

      In a more aggresive community this idea may not work but I think people here are conscientious enough that it's worth a try at least once. If arguments still break out like our current single-thread arrangement, then the admin can always still step in. At least it should be no worse than the current dynamic.

      Ideally this setup needs to be done as early as possible from the moment the sensitive post goes public.

      Maybe the poster themselves could create the two threads from the start.

      A mock example:

      ~life.women

      TITLE:
      [Women-only thread] Men in tech # YesAllMen

      BODY:
      Link to the video: https//....

      This is a sensitive topic about men and women.

      To avoid breakout of arguments, this thread is dedicated to giving women their own discussion space without having worry about being overwhelmed by men's opinions on the matter.

      If you're outside the targeted demographic and would like to share your thoughts on the topic please do so in the open thread instead.

      ~life

      TITLE:
      [Open thread] Men in tech # YesAllMen

      BODY:
      Link to the video: https//....

      This is the open thread for all to discuss about the linked video.

      Since the topic is sensitive, another thread dedicated for the vulnerable group in this topic has been created. If you're a women and want to avoid reading about men's opinions, you can hit 'Ignore' on this thread and discuss in the dedicated thread instead.

      If you're outside the targeted demographic, please share your thoughts here and refrain from commenting in the other thread.

      Small thing to note that links can be posted in the body section instead of the dedicated link section to avoid the disclaimer from breaking off into it's own comment, which easily get burried.

      However, I imagine in practice this would not be most common scenarios. The average users are not tuned in to all the potential sources of drama and just post whatever they find interesting first, only realsing when there's blowback after the fact. So the cases when this approach may be needed would also more likely be reactive. (Maybe with a pinned comment, a title change and a 2nd post. Since we cannot do pinned comment, probably have to rely on boost voting to keep it on top).

      The people who are in position to make the judgement of when to create this setup are veteran and highly trusted member of the community. Someone who has been around enough to be able to quickly recognize the common painpoints for the community, able to remain impartial without getting dragged into the conflicts themseves, and know when such intervention is warranted. They're users who people can trust that if they do so, it's not an attempt to control the narrative.

      Normally if I come up with any random ideas, I'd prefer to test it out myself and see the results directly. However, this is the kind that requires buy-in from the whole community, as well as the right people to take the helm. Hence this post. The ultimate aim is maintaining harmony among the community. If you think it's worth a try, you may also choose to nominate who you think is trustworthy enough for this responsibility. Those who may want to step in could benefit from the confidence boost that others trust them.

      This post is motivated by the recent event with the ~life.women post but I hope it's clear the proposal is aimed at being a more general approach to future conflicts of similar nature.

      Edit: Welp, I gave this a shot. See everyone here again in a few months :)

      20 votes
    2. New label suggestion: a removable "One-sided" label that gradually reduces the comment's visibility

      I'm posting this as a new topic because it's long. This idea came out of thinking of a response to @TaylorSwiftsPickles ' suggestion to have a "Misinformation" label. I agree that misinformation...

      I'm posting this as a new topic because it's long. This idea came out of thinking of a response to @TaylorSwiftsPickles ' suggestion to have a "Misinformation" label. I agree that misinformation is a problem on Tildes and that the playing field is often unfairly set for the ones trying to rectify it, due to how the site works.

      On the other hand, like some already said in the comments, such a label could be easily abused because it would be a frictionless way to make someone else do a lot of work. Showing the validity of some piece of information requires digging up sources and those sources can usually be endlessly contested, no matter how good they are.

      sidenote Personally I've sometimes chosen to let things slide rather than give sources because the source would have been in my own language and I've made a decision long ago to not disclose my nationality - this is because it's a small group of people and my job is almost unique among that group.

      Another issue is that most people who spread misinformation, just like @TaylorSwiftsPickles said, are in fact not aware of doing so. They believe they're just teaching others the correct information. If it would be a lot of work on their part to ingest opposing material and then a lot of emotional work to allow their worldview to change (a process that for some people will cause physical pain), there isn't much hope to make real difference, save for some exceptionally adept people who've grown used to this process - but those people are usually not the ones spreding misinformation because they've already checked themselves before hitting "post topic".

      tangent Most of the people I know who are able to do this kind of shifting quickly are underprivileged one way or another. I had to learn to do it because if I hadn't learned to see the world from the oppressors' perspective and adapt my behaviour to it when necessary, my chances of surviving (let alone thriving) would have been considerably weaker.

      Most people who represent the majority and haven't fully grasped their own privilege haven't had to learn to think outside of their own perspective. It's not an easy thing to learn and it's not realistic to expect them to learn it simply because someone pointed out their misinformed idea online. Most will simply say "No, you're wrong because the majority opinion is on my side". That's easy and efficient and doesn't lead to negative payoff for them, so that's what tends to happen (in most cases, not all).

      When a misinformed view happens to be the majority view on Tildes, a label like this will more likely burden the people trying to rectify it than those holding the view. That's unless we expect the admin and moderators to evaulate every case individually and be diligent and objective enough to accurately gauge all or at least most of them. Being that we are all humans, it's a big ask.

      Which brings me to ask what kind of label would enable the misinformed person to proactively perform a sanity check on their own post/comment, without introducing hostility. I believe that failing to consider alternative perspectives is a major factor in adopting and spreading misinformation. I am assuming that most people here on Tildes would agree with the principle that an idea that takes into account diverse opinions and experiences is better considered than one speaking from a single perspective only.

      Therefore I propose a label that could be used to point out when someone's comment is clearly overlooking information that would be readily available if only they cared to consider other people and different points of view. It would then fall on the person who made a one-sided comment to further educate themselves if they so wish. They could perform an online search or ask for more information on Tildes (but no one would be obligated to give it). I think it would be ideal if the label could be later removed, in case sufficient edits were made to the labelled comment.

      Evaluating whether a text is one-sided is usually easier than deciding whether or not it is misinformation, so this label wouldn't be as easy to abuse. People can detect its misuse simply by looking at the text itself, without having to read a bunch of additional material. It's also easier for the person who made the comment to try to broaden their perspective. Not everyone will want to do so, of course, but at least those who are unintentionally appearing obtuse will have a chance to do better.

      Finally, in terms of design, I wouldn't want the label to be eye-catching like the "Exemplary" label. Rather, it could appear as normal text with a normal background, perhaps a tad smaller size and in brackets. If more than one such label was given to the same comment, it could affect the text colour of the whole comment, making it gradually more and more faint. In other words the label would reduce the visual weight of the comment while still keeping it readable.

      25 votes
    3. Is it time to include pronouns?

      I realize this has become something like a political statement to do this for whatever reason. But a 100% wordcel medium where your only avatar is a text string of your username means if I want to...

      I realize this has become something like a political statement to do this for whatever reason. But a 100% wordcel medium where your only avatar is a text string of your username means if I want to talk about someone I have no idea what to call them. I have to use awkward constructions like “that user” or “OP.” This doesn’t sound nice. This disrupts the delicately crafted meter and flow of my sentences.

      Mayhap we could introduce a teeny-tiny configurable logogram next to the username to disambiguate preferred pronouns. Or maybe even a subscript. It’d be small enough and faded so as not to impact the clean visual but visible enough to free me from having to guess.

      24 votes
    4. Half-baked idea for metered inline image allowances

      This is totally a half-baked shower thought of an idea, and not one that even I am personally persuaded by, but I’m curious to gauge what others think of it. Sometimes it might be useful to allow...

      This is totally a half-baked shower thought of an idea, and not one that even I am personally persuaded by, but I’m curious to gauge what others think of it.

      Sometimes it might be useful to allow images to be inlined in topics or comments instead of requiring users to link to them. If that ability were unrestricted, people would probably use it for frivolous reaction GIFs, memes, etc., which are not wanted here on Tildes. But if we restricted how often people could do it, if we made it costly, they’d be less inclined to waste it.

      We already have precedent for metered functionality to discourage abuse: Exemplary labels. That seems to be working pretty well. What if users received one image credit per month? We could allow them to rollover/accrue but maybe cap them so nobody can have more than five(?). That’s certainly scarce enough to make me think twice about wasting them.

      We could make them collapsible so they can be hidden with a click (though I’m not sure if it’s feasible to make per-image collapsed states persistent). We could also have a user setting for people who don’t want to see the images. Maybe call it “Inline Image Display” with these options:

      • Always show
      • Always collapse
      • Always collapse unless in <details> blocks
      • Render as link to image instead

      If we wanted to be really cautious we could default to that last option (basically current behavior) so nobody would be opted-in if they didn’t want it.

      I’m not suggesting Tildes should get into the free image hosting business. This idea assumes that the images being shown are already hosted from a place that permits embedding on third-party domains. We might be able to validate that before running the form submit, to surface a warning when an image is inaccessible so people don’t find out it’s broken until after spending a credit for it.

      We could also allow these images only in new topics, and not in comments where they’re more likely to be used flippantly. Or charge two credits instead of one to do it in a comment. Or in that user setting we could add “Always show in topics and collapse in comments” as an option.

      If we wanted to get fancy we could also allow users to flag whether an image they’re sharing is NSFW, and add a couple additional options to that user setting, to exclude those if desired.

      Of course now that I’m thinking about NSFW images in 2026 I’m reminded that all this age-verification hysteria could be brought to Tildes’ doorstep much faster if we directly displayed user-originated images on the site. Not really a battle I’d chose for us (read: Deimos) to fight so that risk alone might render the idea DOA.

      I’d still be interested to hear what others think though.

      27 votes
    5. New community suggestion: ~tech.electronics

      Every once in awhile I have one of these ideas, but this one I think would be incredibly fun and interesting to have: ~electronics or (~tech.electronics || ~engineering.electronics), , programming...

      Every once in awhile I have one of these ideas, but this one I think would be incredibly fun and interesting to have: ~electronics or (~tech.electronics || ~engineering.electronics), , programming || ~tech.programming. forgot momentarily that ~comp was a thing.

      Not as a community for tech news or product discussions (we have ~tech for that) but for electronics research, electronic hobbies/diy, ideas, Q&A, etc etc. With our seemingly higher than average hard tech professional community on here I think this would be great and really bring a new type of content into our fold that could be interesting and and exciting.

      I've brought up ~hardware before, but I think ~electronics is more widespread, could include anything to do with electronics: PCBs, computers/desktops, sound/audio, lighting, robotics, electrical work, etc.

      While I was writing this I realized, and was quite surprised that we don't have something like ~tech.programming on here either, maybe that should be one as well to consider. ~comp is a thing, I post there.

      19 votes
    6. More thread navigation options?

      Hacker News has a nice feature where comments have links to jump to the "next" and "previous" comment in the same thread at the same level. It's useful for jumping over a long comment thread...

      Hacker News has a nice feature where comments have links to jump to the "next" and "previous" comment in the same thread at the same level. It's useful for jumping over a long comment thread without closing it entirely. Any chance this could be added to Tildes?

      9 votes
    7. ~policy as a community

      Early thoughts, but we have ~society, ~news, and ~enviro, but what if we were to consider ~policy? Legal policy, governmental law, environmental rules, guidelines, terms and conditions,...

      Early thoughts, but we have ~society, ~news, and ~enviro, but what if we were to consider ~policy? Legal policy, governmental law, environmental rules, guidelines, terms and conditions, online/offline community policies, etc.

      Example (current) tag: https://tildes.net/?tag=policy

      Brought on by posting this article as I had to decide between where it would it be better to put this in: in ~tech? in ~society? in ~news?

      14 votes
    8. Can Bearblog links show authors?

      Both Medium and Substack include the author name in the site title (next to the favicon). Bearblog hosted blogs seem to be frequently posted, especially in ~tech, and only showing that it's from...

      Both Medium and Substack include the author name in the site title (next to the favicon). Bearblog hosted blogs seem to be frequently posted, especially in ~tech, and only showing that it's from bearblog doesn't give insight into authorship. (Authors are being added to tags, but this is not immediately visible on mobile clients until clicking into the comments.)

      Is this something that can be updated? If it's a technical limitation of some sort, I respect that. It would just be a "nice to have" feature. :)

      9 votes
    9. Throwaway accounts / anonymous posting / temporary personas

      Edit: whoopsie, already being discussed here: https://tildes.net/%7Etildes.official/2x3 This is tangential to this post here about NSFW/controversial content. Sometimes one needs to make a...

      Edit: whoopsie, already being discussed here: https://tildes.net/%7Etildes.official/2x3


      This is tangential to this post here about NSFW/controversial content. Sometimes one needs to make a confidential post detached from their own identity (say for example about a psychological problem or advice on an event where the OP wants to conceal real identities), and most places one needs a throwaway account. I think it'd be nicer if we allowed people to make posts detached from their main accounts w/o having to create new throwaway accounts. It might be possible via allowing a certain number of "personas" (i.e. a couple names one can allocate and use as nicknames), or via allowing to post anonymously (i.e. hiding the poster's account name, not w/o one), or allowing personas but temporarily and randomly generated names. What's you thoughts?

      6 votes
    10. Feature request: an option to deactivate or delete your account

      Before posting this, I checked my user settings page, the site’s documentation, and GitLab. I also did some site:tildes.net Google searches and used the on-site search for the ~tildes group. I saw...

      Before posting this, I checked my user settings page, the site’s documentation, and GitLab. I also did some site:tildes.net Google searches and used the on-site search for the ~tildes group.

      I saw that on GitLab there is a feature request for account deletion, but not deactivation, that was marked “Accepted” about 5-6 years ago (August 2019).

      I also saw some posts here in the ~tildes group, including one from about 6-7 years ago (June 2018) with a comment that said an option for both account deletion and account "dissociation" was planned. Both of these features sound great.

      In addition to account deletion and account dissociation, I want to also request an option for account deactivation.

      I don’t want to ask for the Moon here, but I envision account deactivation as having the option to remove all your posts and comments from the site (as well as your profile), with the option of restoring them if you reactivate your account. (I don’t know how annoying or how much effort this would be to code. I’m just imagining what I would find ideal from a user perspective.)

      Another wonderful bonus would be the option to set a timer limiting your ability to reactivate your account, e.g. don’t let me reactivate my account for 6 months.

      In the past, I’ve done this on another site through an elaborate system where I:

      1. Set up two-factor authentication.
      2. Saved the two-factor recovery code on an encrypted pastebin in a password-protected paste.
      3. Saved the password for the paste in my password manager.
      4. Used FutureMe.org to send an email with a link to the paste to myself X amount of time in the future.
      5. Deleted the link to the paste from my browser history.
      6. Deleted the entry for the site from my two-factor authentication app so the recovery code is the only way to get in.

      This works, but it’s an elaborate process and if something goes wrong with FutureMe.org or the paste bin site, you could lose your ability to ever reactivate your account. You have to be willing to take that risk!

      I might end up implementing this wacky system again for Tildes. For a site like Tildes, if I permanently lost access to my account (due to FutureMe.org shutting down or suffering data loss, for example) and wanted to re-join the site at some point in the future, I guess the worst consequence would be losing my username. (Also, getting an invite again might be a hassle, I don’t know.) That might be unfortunate depending how much you like your username, but it’s not as bad as a site with follows and followers where you would lose all of those.

      24 votes
    11. Interest in a new Tildes /~group?, ~electronics or perhaps ~makers?

      This is a community I've missed since leaving Reddit, but I didn't expect to find or create such a /~group here given Tildes is a much smaller community (I figured, statistically, there wouldn't...

      This is a community I've missed since leaving Reddit, but I didn't expect to find or create such a /~group here given Tildes is a much smaller community (I figured, statistically, there wouldn't be enough users with overlapping interests in Right to Repair / Electronics / 3D Printing / Makerspace / etc... for such a community to be present or to naturally form here.

      With the recent post asking for advice on a soldering station, and the number of users that participated in that discussion, I've been rethinking those assumptions of 'not enough users / not enough interest'. Then I further reflected on the significant number of people we have here that have fluently discussed other technical areas such as Linux, Programming, servers / Homelab topics and I realize upon reflection that a fair many of our users here are pretty high on tech literacy...

      So, as a prelude to requesting a new group like /~electronics or /~makers or some group name along that philosophical theme, I wanted to ask the community at large first as to how much interest there might be in this.

      Do you, dear reader, have an interest in electronics repair? In a garage workshop or other space at home where you fix or build things? Makerspace topics like 3D printing? Right to Repair law? If you want to know how to replace your cell phone screen, or ask about soldering or Raspberry Pi or Arduino, are you interested in having a place here on Tildes specifically for these things? Please, if you have such interests, let's discuss here.

      Pinging those who participated in the soldering discussion:
      @AugustusFerdinand @PraiseTheSoup @teaearlgraycold @Banazir @chocobean @elight @Plik @lynxy @Akir @TheD00d @pallas @ShroudedScribe @em-dash @luks @Tannhauser @kmcgurty1

      47 votes
    12. Can/should Tildes pull out of search engine results?

      The other thread about potential spam on the site got me thinking, can/should Tildes hide itself from Google and other search engines (aside from just the main page) to avoid the tentacles of SEO...

      The other thread about potential spam on the site got me thinking, can/should Tildes hide itself from Google and other search engines (aside from just the main page) to avoid the tentacles of SEO from infiltrating the site? I'm not sure how feasible that is, but I know reddit has the option to prevent your profile from getting indexed by search engines so perhaps that could be applied to the site as a whole.

      23 votes
    13. Could we get a ~politics.us?

      With the inevitablre result of the US election, for the next four years all media will be totally overwhelmed by one person. It'd be nice to be able to at least on Tildes shove all of that into...

      With the inevitablre result of the US election, for the next four years all media will be totally overwhelmed by one person. It'd be nice to be able to at least on Tildes shove all of that into one corner so it can be hidden.

      While Tildes is quite US focused, there is still a lot of us non-us people here.

      40 votes
    14. An export feature would be nice

      It would be nice to be able to press a button which would create a zipped file for me to download all of my content on Tildes. Just one markdown file for each post or comment I ever wrote on Tildes.

      22 votes
    15. It is time to do away with the empty recurring weekly threads

      It's time to do away with the recurring weekly threads about US politics, about Israel and Palestine and other similar threads that clearly do not need weekly recurring threads. Those who do not...

      It's time to do away with the recurring weekly threads about US politics, about Israel and Palestine and other similar threads that clearly do not need weekly recurring threads.

      Those who do not wish to see topics on those events should unsubscribe from the relevant keywords for their own browsing, as all of us with other interests unsubscribe from those keywords.

      There is no flood of this content that makes gathering things in weekly threads relevant.

      No content is drowning on tildes, as no group has issues with too many posts.

      It's uninviting to folks who are actually contributing submissions to the site to be told they shouldn't be making these, but should rather make them in empty, dead posts. That is not fair to them, nor is it a good look for the site.

      These dead recurring threads should be done away with. They serve no function. The experiment has shown they are not needed, are not used and are simply auto-generated robotic clutter.

      109 votes
    16. Additional length tags?

      Sniffing around in the topic history here, I see a single mention of "medium length/watch", which would fit in with what I have in mind. However, what I'm really angling for here is "very long...

      Sniffing around in the topic history here, I see a single mention of "medium length/watch", which would fit in with what I have in mind. However, what I'm really angling for here is "very long read/watch" tags, as I've seen articles here that are at least twice the length of others with "long read", and anything by, for example, NeverKnowsBest, is going to be an order of magnitude larger than the 30 minute minimum for long watch.

      "Very short read/watch" is probably fine too, but I imagine that anything that would actually fit that label is probably against the posting spirit of Tildes.

      7 votes
    17. Personal blogging

      Hey there everyone, I've been on here since near the start, and spend too much time finding content to post on here, but I just love this place. One thing I've noticed over the years is a severe...

      Hey there everyone,

      I've been on here since near the start, and spend too much time finding content to post on here, but I just love this place. One thing I've noticed over the years is a severe lack of personal articles, blogs, or the similar and I think it's to do with the 'officialness' of a lot of the topics.

      Would it be beneficial to just have a ~blogs section, to post links and thoughts on our personal writings? Even if that includes things like ~tech or ~cooking or whatever? Just to have a central place for our articles.

      I don't mind posting my own in ~tech, but I can imagine the hesitation for everyone else as those areas feel more in-tune with "news" than personal thoughts. We have ~creative, but that feels more for artistic endeavors and projects.

      Any ideas how we might be able to encourage more topics or links to personal (small-web) blogs (either your own, or someone else's) in the culture here? We seem to be becoming more and more a news aggregator, which is great because of the relevance and discussions (best on the web) but we have no real culture for small-web indie blogging.

      48 votes
    18. Put an "ignore" link next to the topic name in topic lists

      It would be convenient not to have to open a topic to click the "ignore" link. Being forced to open a topic to click the "ignore" link isn't going to make me give the topic a second chance. :-)....

      It would be convenient not to have to open a topic to click the "ignore" link.

      Being forced to open a topic to click the "ignore" link isn't going to make me give the topic a second chance. :-).

      Thanks.

      12 votes
    19. Better reply features

      Not too much to say here. It's pretty barebones right now. Dunno if it's a major goal, but given the whole point of tildes was for it to encourage better discussions, it'd probably help if the...

      Not too much to say here. It's pretty barebones right now. Dunno if it's a major goal, but given the whole point of tildes was for it to encourage better discussions, it'd probably help if the reply feature was looked at a bit.

      1. I believe that the formatting help should contain the word "Spoilers" in the header for expandable sections. It's probably the most common reason I find myself going to the help doc of a site, because most other things just follow markdown format these days, and yet that word doesn't exist on that page and I still consistently see people asking how to do it.

      2. I like that you can resize your replies. I hate that it's possible to accidentally resize the box UNDER the sidebar making it impossible to get to the scroll bar or the resize "'grip" on the lower right corner.
        https://imgur.com/a/xDVTigJ

      3. How much of RES can be emulated?
        The normal reply view, with most of the shown buttons pushed:
        https://imgur.com/a/GW5eNeY
        And the large editor mode for more substantial posts:
        https://imgur.com/a/XCdNEfN

      It's a pretty clean interface that does 3 important things in my eyes:

      1. Gives you LIVE previews. Matters more on reddit where it's easier to accidentally screw up your line breaks and get formatting you were not expecting, but for more complex posts it can be annoying clicking back and forth between the preview pane.

      2. Quick buttons for common features. I know the markdown for most things, but buttons are nice, especially for "oh shit i want this whole section to be a quote/codeblock/spoiler" moments.

      3. The "i'm going to write the wheel of time in this window" large mode which can help ensure somewhat decent flow for more complex topics.

      Some of this matters more due to reddits nature as a community resource (games/hobbies/whatever all have large pinned threads, and hell their own mini wikis), but again just wanted to bring this stuff up as it's either kicked me in the teeth or prevented me from making larger posts/topics more than once.

      Edit- and i suppose to make my case I had to edit this because I screwed up my line breaks and forgot how they get handled with numbered lists. If i could just see the preview and make the change i'd use it more, but since it requires just clicking off, scrolling down, checking my work, clicking back, finding my place, and editing, I find it just easier to post and uh...fix it in post.

      23 votes
    20. Tildes as a bug tracker

      I've seriously been thinking about this for.... four years. There might even be a comment somewhere in my long history of using this place about it. But, I think tildes could be a fantastic and...

      I've seriously been thinking about this for.... four years. There might even be a comment somewhere in my long history of using this place about it.

      But, I think tildes could be a fantastic and perfect tool as a bug/feature/discussion/news tracker for both software and hardware projects. The only thing that would need to change is displaying a number index on each post.

      To the developers and tinkers out there, what else do you think would be needed feature-wise? Tags are quite versatile, and if we got the #tag.children visible only search working it would work great for setting priorities, etc.

      Has anyone been able to spin up tildes on their own system? I tried about two or so years ago to work on this very slight modification, but never was able to get it going.

      19 votes
    21. Creating an official politics group?

      So this topic is something that could very easily just be bothering myself, but I figured I’d share before unsubscribing to ~misc. If this is the wrong group, I apologize, please feel free to move...

      So this topic is something that could very easily just be bothering myself, but I figured I’d share before unsubscribing to ~misc. If this is the wrong group, I apologize, please feel free to move it to the correct location. I will also preface this by saying I only really view Tildes occasionally, and am not the most active user, so those two things might be contributing to this.

      I am wondering if creating an official Politics group would be beneficial to Tildes. I’ve noticed that the majority of recent posts in ~misc is mostly regarding politics. I don’t want to necessarily just unsubscribe from ~misc, in case something non-political and interesting to myself ends up getting put there, but if that’s the solution I’m more than happy to do it.

      I just figured that with the amount of activity going on there fairly regularly, either a dedicated ~politics group or a sub group (maybe ~misc.politics or ~news.politics?) would be better? That way other users similar to myself could unsubscribe to that instead of unsubscribing to the much broader ~misc group.

      I personally do enjoy the way that Tildes is setup, and don’t see any bad interactions in those posts. It’s definitely more of a personal thing.

      That said, I don’t want to make people think that I’m telling them how things should be run, merely throwing my two cents out there, no matter how worthless they are.

      Thanks to everyone for posting, and to the mods/admin for keeping everything running smoothly. This really is a solid community!

      19 votes
    22. If we can't block users can we at least filter out topics posted by those users?

      It seems like Tildes is not going to ever get a block user function. But it would be really handy if I could get a filter to auto-ignore any topics started by certain users. Would this be...

      It seems like Tildes is not going to ever get a block user function.

      But it would be really handy if I could get a filter to auto-ignore any topics started by certain users. Would this be something that Tildes would ever implement?

      48 votes
    23. Feature suggestion: Show the "Post a new topic" button on the front page

      Hi everyone, first of all, thank you for creating and maintaining this site - I don't think I've ever seen a more constructive and friendly general-purpose community online. :) In the last few...

      Hi everyone, first of all, thank you for creating and maintaining this site - I don't think I've ever seen a more constructive and friendly general-purpose community online. :)

      In the last few weeks, after getting access to tildes, I stumbled multiple times over an interesting article that I thought that would fit on Tildes. But I didn't see a button to post it on here. I assumed it has to be something related to rating or account age. I was wondering how long it would take. Maybe a month?

      The volume of posts here is pretty low, so I never saw a reason to visit one of the groups - I only visited the front page. Only now I found out, that the button to post something is only visible if the user is currently on the page of a group.

      I don't know if this happened to someone else, but I personally find it really unintuitive that there isn't a button on the front page to post a topic. Reddit, Lemmy, Discourse etc. all have it like that.

      Did anyone have a similar experience? Or was this a concious choice?

      20 votes
    24. Special tag: "Active"

      Based off of a suggestion @lou made about special tags, I wonder if would we could make a tag that is automatically applied when a lot of comments are added all at once and then removed when it...

      Based off of a suggestion @lou made about special tags, I wonder if would we could make a tag that is automatically applied when a lot of comments are added all at once and then removed when it reaches a more normal level of behavior?

      16 votes
    25. Tiny little mobile feature request: dot indicator

      When viewing the desktop version of the website, there is a little orange notification to the left of my name when there are replies to my messages. When viewing the website in mobile, there is no...

      When viewing the desktop version of the website, there is a little orange notification to the left of my name when there are replies to my messages.

      When viewing the website in mobile, there is no such indication, and I have to open up the sidebar to see if I have any new replies.

      Could we get a simple, orange "dot" indicator to the left the Sidebar link in mobile to let us know when we have unread messages?

      I apologize in advance for the imgur link, but it could look something like this: Example

      10 votes
    26. Is there any interest in a video game design subgroup?

      Hey all, I'm a professional game designer with about ten years in the video game industry. I've worked primarily with collectible card games and my most recent project is a mobile first strategy...

      Hey all,

      I'm a professional game designer with about ten years in the video game industry. I've worked primarily with collectible card games and my most recent project is a mobile first strategy card game. I'm interested in talking more about video game design, design theory, and more.

      Most of the design topics I've seen on Tildes are focused more on tabletop / board games and I was wondering if there is a big enough population of people interested in discussing game design more from the professional side of video game design.

      Hope to have some meaningful discussion and I'm available to chat about relevant topics.

      36 votes
    27. "Mirror" tag

      A pretty simple feature. Just seems like it would be handy to apply a tag to posts that provide non-paywalled or archive links for posts that are walled or 404'd. The idea just being that it seems...

      A pretty simple feature. Just seems like it would be handy to apply a tag to posts that provide non-paywalled or archive links for posts that are walled or 404'd. The idea just being that it seems too much to put an "Exemplary" tag on it, but it seems too significant to just get a vote.

      Ideally this would add the free link under the "Link Description" scrape, but that's probably hard to do. I guess you could also promote the tagged comment to the top of the stack, but then it seems like you can game out the sort to promote your commentary rather than just the link.

      16 votes
    28. Is it possible to have support for theme switching according to system?

      I often browse Tildes on my phone, which automatically changes from Light to Dark theme at night and vice-versa in the morning. The issue I'm having is that changing the theme on mobile is more...

      I often browse Tildes on my phone, which automatically changes from Light to Dark theme at night and vice-versa in the morning.

      The issue I'm having is that changing the theme on mobile is more difficult than on desktop, and I'd have to always be doing it manually.

      Other websites can read the theme preference from the browser and automatically adjust. Some even give the users an option to choose which theme to associate with the Light and Dark preferences.

      I'd like to propose automatic theme Change as a feature for consideration, since Tildes already supports themes, and customization of which theme is which for a later date.

      11 votes
    29. Possible solution for the perennial "what app" issue

      So, I think I may have a grand solution to this problem and this also extends to similar forums. There's an app called "Friendly Social Browser" and its purpose is to give you one optimized "app"...

      So, I think I may have a grand solution to this problem and this also extends to similar forums. There's an app called "Friendly Social Browser" and its purpose is to give you one optimized "app" where you can add your sites and social sites you want to keep easily accessible and be able to navigate them conveniently and have everything in one place so you can easily "channel-surf" while maintaining overall context.

      It also improves the rendering and allows you to tweak things to your liking. I would suggest it if you can get used to it since it feels a bit more stable than a random unoptimized browser, but its still true to the actual design of Tildes' web format and doesn't really depart from it in any appreciable way other than augmenting its stabillity.

      Obviously there's Three Cheers and Surfboard (which is beautiful) but Friendly is a surprisingly pleasant and effective lateral answer to this question and I would encourage folks struggling with this topic to investigate it further and give it a try if possible.

      15 votes
    30. Location of votes button on posts

      I've not fully considered the design decision and may be missing important aspects of it, but I wonder if the votes button on posts might be better situated on the left. This would make its...

      I've not fully considered the design decision and may be missing important aspects of it, but I wonder if the votes button on posts might be better situated on the left. This would make its placing more consistent with the comments' vote button location.

      I ask because I notice that I tend to often forget to vote upon a post in a way I don't with comments. I think this is because on a widescreen the button is in a part of the screen where one's focus is not drawn, far from the rest of the relevant content.

      13 votes
    31. Suggestion: Tag raising

      It is currently possible to block unwanted tags on Tildes. It would be great to also have a feature that allows users to raise tags they're more interested in. Posts with raised tags will get a...

      It is currently possible to block unwanted tags on Tildes. It would be great to also have a feature that allows users to raise tags they're more interested in. Posts with raised tags will get a score multiplier for the user that raised them, in the same way as Exemplary comments get a score multiplier.

      An example of a website that implements this really well is https://lesswrong.com, where you can give score multipliers to different tags to raise or lower them on your homepage.

      35 votes
    32. Thoughts on creating a positive ~urbanism group

      This would be a great positive mindset gathering place for folks who want to have more productive and less alienating discussions than what fuckcars etc provided. The urbanism movement talks about...

      This would be a great positive mindset gathering place for folks who want to have more productive and less alienating discussions than what fuckcars etc provided.
      The urbanism movement talks about solutions and work being done at the larger governmental scale, down to the local "tactical" or grassroots scale. These ideas are how to work to improve the housing affordability crisis, pedestrian safety, and generally help make more people friendly municipalities & communities that can become financially more sustainable. There is overlap with permaculture and environmentalism.

      If you're unfamiliar with this movement, some great places to start are books by Jane Jacobs, Strong Towns by Charles L Marohn, Bowling Alone, by Robert D. Putnam, and countless YouTube channels like Not Just Bikes, Oh the Urbanity and many others.

      15 votes
    33. Non-anonymous "thank you" function

      I really like how Tildes encourages meaningful discussions and discourages "useless" noise. But it leads to occasionally awkward situations where for example I ask a clarification question or...

      I really like how Tildes encourages meaningful discussions and discourages "useless" noise.
      But it leads to occasionally awkward situations where for example I ask a clarification question or whatever, get a wonderful reply that answers everything I'd like, but leaves me in a situation where I have nothing meaningful left to add to the conversation, yet still wanting to personally thank the other person for their reply.
      Obviously I place my vote on the reply, but it still feels like i sort of ghost the other person. I'd like them to know that I appreciate their reply.

      My suggestion would be a kind of "Thank you" function or tag that would be available exclusively to replies to ones comments, signifying ones personal gratitude (man, that sounds pretentious, but I can't think of a better way to phrase it. I'll just blame the fact that English isn't my native language...), maybe coupled with an automatic vote.
      The receiver of a "Thank you" could then get a small one-time notification in their inbox.
      The comment in question could theoretically also display the "thank you" status to the author, maybe after the vote count at the beginning like this: "10 votes and a thank you from Landhund"

      What do you think?

      69 votes
    34. Self labeling comments

      Other than Exemplary, it might be useful for the ability to self label a comment. While in some sense it might be desirable for anyone posting a comment that falls under such a category, and is...

      Other than Exemplary, it might be useful for the ability to self label a comment. While in some sense it might be desirable for anyone posting a comment that falls under such a category, and is self aware, to simply refrain from posting, some of the boundaries for labels such as joke and off-topic can be rather fuzzy.

      6 votes
    35. Can we get an ~ai?

      To me, AI is kind of its own thing. It's too creative to fall under ~tech, but it's not quite ~creative either. It's something brand new, and can't be stuffed into any of the already established...

      To me, AI is kind of its own thing. It's too creative to fall under ~tech, but it's not quite ~creative either. It's something brand new, and can't be stuffed into any of the already established categories.

      28 votes
    36. Label for appreciated course corrections

      With Tildes having a distinctive approach to content and comments I found that I was missing an option. Without calling out anyone someone posted a submission today that was simply an image...

      With Tildes having a distinctive approach to content and comments I found that I was missing an option.
      Without calling out anyone someone posted a submission today that was simply an image collection. I did invite them to also post a bit more about as a comment starter, which they did.

      I naturally gave their comment an upvote. But I found myself wanting to reward them a bit more for their recognition. I could go for exemplary as label, in fact I did. But I can't help but feel that I am missing a meta label that is positive but doesn't weigh as heavy.

      How do other people look at this?

      21 votes
    37. Could we get a ~jokes, ~humor or ~funny group on Tildes?

      I read some funny stuff on here and there are plenty of witty responses around, but a community for humorous content may lighten things up a bit and it can start discussions too… after all:...

      I read some funny stuff on here and there are plenty of witty responses around, but a community for humorous content may lighten things up a bit and it can start discussions too… after all:

      “Laughter without a tinge of philosophy is but a sneeze of humor. Genuine humor is replete with wisdom.” -Mark Twain

      69 votes
    38. Viewing all tags

      Hi all. I was wondering if there was a way to see all the tags that have been created on Tildes and their popularity? It would help when working out what tag to use, etc. Maybe even a popularity...

      Hi all.

      I was wondering if there was a way to see all the tags that have been created on Tildes and their popularity? It would help when working out what tag to use, etc.

      Maybe even a popularity break down by group that the tag was posted into would help loads when selecting the correct tag.

      I can see that auto-complete for tags uses the 100 most commonly-used tags, not sure if this is by group or site wide, but even that list would be great to see.

      Many thanks!
      RRR

      14 votes
    39. Feature idea: A 'Best Of Tildes' page that shows the newest Exemplary'd comments

      With the increase in activity, it's now more difficult to read every topic and every bit of discussion. As well, there are some topics that I wouldn't click into naturally, but I would very much...

      With the increase in activity, it's now more difficult to read every topic and every bit of discussion. As well, there are some topics that I wouldn't click into naturally, but I would very much click into if I knew there was a high-quality comment hidden within.

      So, it would nice to have a page that specifically highlights comments that have received an Exemplary label. That way, it would be possible to jump straight to the most insightful/thoughtful/interesting discussions that Tildes has to offer, regardless of the topic.

      I'm imagining that the page would be somewhat off to the side, so that it doesn't incentivize misuse of the label. Something like how Hacker News hides the pool/invited/best/bestcomments pages under the lists page in the footer of the site.

      What do you think?

      74 votes
    40. Should bylines be more prominent in the topic posts?

      I've noticed we've gotten in the habit of using the author.[name] tagging convention on articles and blogs and I think this is a great idea. But to me it just seems more important than having to...

      I've noticed we've gotten in the habit of using the author.[name] tagging convention on articles and blogs and I think this is a great idea. But to me it just seems more important than having to see it as just a tag amidst all the other tags. Right now we put the site name and favicon in a prominent spot whenever we post a link, and I get that this is much easier to extract reliably from just scraping the page than the bylines tend to be. But I wonder if any author.[name] tag could get promoted to a special spot in the "Article: X words" element?

      Of course this does leave the question of what to do about multiple authors, but I think the usual convention in academia is to list the first author who appears on the list as the primary author.

      I assume this has been discussed before, but when I tried searching for it the abundance of topics with "author" tags made it so I couldn't find anything. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

      10 votes
    41. How would you feel about a PC building/tech deals group?

      Yeah that's the question. I was thinking of the possibility of posting deals here. But it might just eat up the other tech content here. That's not my goal, but I'd like to start a PC...

      Yeah that's the question. I was thinking of the possibility of posting deals here. But it might just eat up the other tech content here. That's not my goal, but I'd like to start a PC building\support\tech deals tilde.

      22 votes