One thing that hacker news does that I really like is seemingly randomly bumping up certain comments to the top, temporarily. They are likely doing this based on the number of interactions the comment has received. Crucially, it doesn't always happen and you often can't even tell it's happening, since it looks like just another top comment.

This solves a number of problems:

• it brings possibly counter-circlejerk opinions to the top (and makes people actually read them seriously, since they are at the top where they expect a high-rated comment to be)
• it causes less "freezing" of the comment hierarchy over time
• it gives users the chance of making comments that get read and voted on, even if they are late to a thread.
• it raises the long tail of high-quality comments. Usually, there are a few high-rated comments, and a large "swamp" of both good and bad comments with little views after that. This feature would likely increase the number of good comments that get out of the "swamp", while also increasing the number of low-quality comments that get flagged as such.

Not because this is a problem yet, but because it will be.

We're all familiar with the flavour that some usernames have, when someone with the name I_RAPE_CATS invites people and they are entirely unaware of this being on the userpage forever and ever it's going to become something people will want.

My invitees so far have both remarked "Looks like I have you on my userpage forever" which is fine, but for some it won't be.

Currently, I am e.g. subscribed to ~tildes.official and ~tildes. That gives me a number of questions:

• if you subscribe to a tilde, do automatically you see content from sub-tildes?
• if you subscribe to a tilde and a sub-tilde, does it have any effect? Intuitively, I'd expect the subtildes content to be shown more, even if it's not as highly voted.
• What about a reverse-subscription/blacklist?

Just some thoughts, I'm curious what the status quo is and what you people think might make sense.

Other people's profile has join date and invited by on the right : https://i.imgur.com/OBQG9BH.png

You cannot see this on your own profile : https://i.imgur.com/6F8Fj1V.png

Not that important, but probably worth sticking at the bottom of the to-do list.

I'm grateful for being invited and I'm happy to see the community enjoy a smooth ride so far.

I really hope the platform does not follow in the footsteps of Reddit's karma mechanism. I find that this cumulative store of points attached to each user to encourages them to seek more points, regardless if they steal content or repost their own old material for another karma-harvesting run. Instead, if users can be appreciated by the actual number of posts they've submitted much like the bulletin boards of old, it would be more fair in my opinion. It'd be a measure of the effort and contribution made by a user, not only what others think of them.

For example, my profile would say "Eyehigh posted 20,000 posts" instead of "Eyehigh seemed to impress 20,000 people enough for them to leave an upvote, so here's the 20,000 upvotes."

What do you think?

I can't be the only one who looks at discussions about moderation, community norms, etc. and wonders who we are and aren't hearing from. What's the strategy for ensuring we have a breadth of perspectives (not talking US electoral politics, here) while setting early (possibly persistent) standards and structures?

You have to look for the (d) at the end of Subscribe on the Browse The List Of Groups page. Please change the wording to say Unsubscribe, put a dashed box around it, change the color or something.

Edit: Someone in my house mentioned that they are different colors. Please choose a different color as it is not color-blind friendly :)

The absence of geographic or political groups is notable. Is this because of the early stages of development & growth? Is it a deliberate choice?

I'm as keen as anyone for this place to not become yet another den of intolerance. Does not having those groups help in avoiding such a descent or does it risk becoming a feel-good but ultimately uninformative echo chamber?

I'm fairly new to the site as I came in from the hackernews post a fortnight ago. I enjoyed the fact that this site doesn't have downvotes. However, when I am reading through posts I am seeing the noise tag on multiple posts that don't seem to merit it, with examples linked below. The comments aren't literary masterpieces by any stretch, but they are concerning the topic on hand. The noise tag appears to be getting used as a downvote or "I disagree" button.

I know the user that was the first ban also used the noise tag this way, but this seems to be a more wide spread issue than one user. We can't prevent a de facto downvote tag from appearing organically everywhere. Eventually sub communities will form around a tilde and adopt a tag as a downvote, the same way all online communities change the meaning of some word or tool they already have. I don't think that we want this to be a standard tildes wide behavior however.

How should we go about preventing the use of tags as downvotes like this? Stricter moderation? Removing tags with negative connotations? Making tags visible only if they reach a certain threshold?

https://tildes.net/~talk/105/mozilla_to_remove_meritocracy_from_governance_docs_because_its_problematic#comment-6kb
https://tildes.net/~talk/105/mozilla_to_remove_meritocracy_from_governance_docs_because_its_problematic#comment-6mh
https://tildes.net/~misc/10r/furries#comment-6pq

It would be neat if typing '@op' inside a topic resulted in a link to the profile of that topic's poster. So, in this topic, @OP and @elf would be equivalent.

Also sorry @deimos for spamming ~tildes with suggestions (not actually sorry though.)

I think it would be fun to have an ~anon group, with the feature that all topics and replies are shown as being posted by 'anonymous'. It might need more active moderation than other ~groups though, and it would need to develop its own identity so it isn't just an anonymous replica of the rest of ~s.

It's kind of awkward to have to go to the main tildes page then click to one of the ~groups to navigate between groups. Either having the home bar under the group bar on the right, or having a list of other ~groups on the top (possibly customizable, RES style?) would fix this.

I don't think this is super high priority, but it'd be nice to be able to escape the ~ or @ symbols so that something isn't automatically turned into a link to a group/user. For example, I noticed in a comment I made that ~ers gets automatically turned into a link to the non-existent 'ers' group. I think if I write \~ers then it should not be linked. (E.g. ~ers)

I'll keep it short:

1. Comments box on top of the comments section. I realized that it might put more emphasis on reading before commenting, but sometimes reading can be too tedious. Some of the posts here reach 50+ comments, which can be a bit tedious to scroll past. The comments will only increase in number from now on. EDIT: It appear's this is a deliberate design choice for the reason that I guessed. Still hoped we got a choice, though.

2. Hide all child comments (like RES would allow on Reddit)

Thoughts?

Adjacent open tildes tabs are confusing to browse.

The tab for every group is named Topics of ~group instead of just the name of the group.

I've been accused of nitpicking on very minor first world problems. I agree. I really like the site, and it's so well-designed that I have no complaints apart from very few minor pet peeves with the design. I'm just discussing the features and enjoying the conversations that stem from my feedback.

So, new here and looking around but haven't seen this addressed yet (though could be wrong! Happy to be linked if I missed something)

One common failure I've seen in online communities of various sorts is that moderation tools don't get grown in parallel with user tools and abilities, rather they lag behind, and are often in the end built by third parties. This is the case with Reddit, but also in a bunch of other areas (e.g. online gaming, admin tools were often built to basically provide functionality that users realised were needed but makers did not).

I get the impression there are plenty of reddit mods here, so can we discuss what are the key features needed to moderate communities that would be better built in than coming from third party tools (RES, toolbox) . A lot of these aren't needed with 100 users but with a million they become pretty crucial.

My initial thoughts:

• Something not dissimilar to the automod
• Group user tagging (shared tagging visible to all mods, tags can be linked to specific discussions/comments)
• Ability to reply as a 'tilde' not as an individual
• Ability to have canned responses/texts (for removals, for replies to user contacts)
• Some sort of ticket-like system for dealing with user contacts to mods (take inspiration from helpdesk ticket systems)
• (added) space per tilde for storage (tags, notes, bans, canned text etc) of reasonable size.

Plenty more to add I am sure but wanted to open the discussion.

The trust system is something that I'm looking forward to for several reasons. It allows for community moderation that is "decentralized" to a point. It takes pressure off of the admins to police content. The possibility of being able to ensure that quality content remains the core product of this site. There are also negatives like the possibility of creating a "power user" class that is resented by the rest of the user base or the potential for misuse by those with the power. Along with some more complex issues such as disagreements between trusted users about how to interpret and curate content. These are all things that we as a community should iron out before a larger scale rollout of this system.

What I wanna talk about today is something a little bit different tho. From my experience with other sites that have achievable user class "upgrades", there will, almost no matter what the precautions put in place, be users that will game the system to rise up through the ranks as quickly as possible. From my point of view, as long as there is a system, written or not, about what needs to be done to achieve the "Trusted" status, there will be users that will do their best to get their as quickly as possible. There are a few ways that this can be looked at:

• It's fine because while they may not be contributing for the "right" reasons, they are still acting in what is seen as a positive manner in the community.
• Concern that because they are only working towards the status symbol "Trusted" that they are not going to be acting in the best interests of the website, but in the interests of keeping the status.
• Wanting to keep this kind of behavior to an absolute minimum because want everything should be as ideal as possible.

While this discussion is had on a fairly regular basis, the consensus seems to be that it is a necessary evil to endure because it would be both too much work to police/figure out who is acting for the right reasons (even standardizing what the "right reasons" are is hard).

The way this can be combated by having requirements that would be deemed too much work for most of the people who are just in it for the status and not for the site. The issue with this solution is that it can make it very difficult for those who truly care about the site to maintain the position that allows them to curate and keep the site in the condition that we aim for.

In the end I think that the deteriorating system will solve at least a portion of these problems because those who are just in it for the status symbol are often likely to quit trying after they are achieve the goal they want. This leads to periods of inactivity, and therefore, decay.

I wanted to post this to see what the greater community had to think about this.

I've been browsing Tildes a bit today and, overall, am enthusiastic about what I've seen. However, while reading a thread, a thought popped into my head that was evocative of an issues Reddit and other tree-based systems suffer from — thread freshness and activity over time both decay quickly.

While reading the thread, I thought "I would comment, but there already seem to be a lot of comments here. If I reply to a specific tree, then that limits people who might see it and respond. Even a top-level comment probably won't be likely to get much of a response."

On Reddit, this leads to repost after repost of the same content in brand new threads, as the activity level of a thread decays and the thread is lost. It looks like one way you intend to combat this is with different sorting methods (Newest, Activity) over various time periods (all time, last 3 days, etc.). Do users feel that this will be effective enough itself, or do they have other ideas to combat this issue?

The way I generally see it, linear threads often beat out tree threads when it comes to keeping threads alive without users having to read through a lot of crap to figure out what the current topic of discussion is, and where it's taking place. (Linear threading models to think of are phpBB, vBulletin, IP.Board, and their ilk. Tree threading models are sites like Reddit, Slashdot, or Shacknews. There are also hybrids, like Metafilter. Please share other examples and their pros/cons.)

In a tree system, I've often experienced the following sequence:

1. Read all top-level replies
2. Read most sub-level replies
3. Find where in the tree the most recent discussion is occurring
4. Realize it's not coherently taking place in one tree
5. Decide not to reply

While in a linear threading system:

1. Read past 2–3 pages of replies to get caught up
2. Add a reply

Alternatively, the linear threading sequence can also be:

1. Read entire thread to see how it's evolved over time
2. Add a reply

An added benefit that is usually concomitant to a linear threading system is that threads are easy to "reactivate" (AKA gravedig) — simply add a new reply and the thread gets bumped up the stack for all users. This is not an exclusive benefit of a linear system. It could likely be made to work with a tree system too. The Activity sorting method may be related, though it's unclear how this functions.

I am really curious to see how this site grows as time goes on. Is there any way to see the amount of active/total users over the next few months? I like looking at charts lol. Maybe even a personal chart showing how each users invites branch over time also?

I am personally a strong proponent/user of mobile apps, there probably aren't any websites that I frequent on a regular basis that I don't use an app for (other than tildes for now), plus there are some pretty strong advantages to mobile apps.

With that said, I'm just wondering why the official standing is against having a mobile app. Is it a resource thing (non-profit donation supported), small footprint thing (only 350 lines of JS), ideological thing (apps are counter intuitive)? Any ideas?

I had a look at the available themes and being a person who is sometimes inclined to rice, decided to port my colourscheme to tildes using the Stylish firefox extension. Unfortunately,
Content Security Policy: The page's settings blocked the loading of a resource at self ("style-src")

comes up in the debugger on every page. How can I work around this?

It's been an interesting couple of weeks while we all decompress post-reddit and think about the future of democratic online forums. Most of the relevant topics have already been discussed in multiple threads, and rather than having repeats, I'd like to invite everyone to comment on these threads themselves - and to read the comments that are already there. You'll find most of the solutions we've been thinking about explained in some detail, and we do want your feedback on these ideas to help make them better.

I suggest you bookmark this page. This thread is getting a bit lost in the shuffle, and it's really the best nexus of information about tildes we have at the moment. It'll take you quite a while to read all of this, so since we don't have 'save posts' here yet, a bookmark will have to do. We're also updating the links here as new discussions form. If you think a discussion should be added here, please reply to this thread with the link and I'll take care of editing it into the main post. When you see new users asking repeat questions, please link them to this post. Thanks for your patience while we work through all of this. :)

Let's get started.

• A group is its own worst enemy. This will help you think better about online community management. Also, if you haven't yet, play The Game Of Trust.

• Community Moderators? How do we moderate effectively, and fairly? Do we moderate at all? (everyone should read this monster) Also, see round two.

• How do we handle communities that get too big? It's a doozy, the inverse of reddit.

• Do we allow Fluff content? Just how do we select for quality instead of popularity, or even define quality, anyway?

• Do we allow for political content? How do we handle one of the most heated categories of discussion? Also see the followup.

• What do we do about "Fake News?" And you thought politics was hard? :D

• Can we create new ~groups? Will users be able to create them? Yes, eventually... but it's not that simple.

• How do we stop bots from wrecking the place? What about the bots that are useful?

• Why exactly is my comment box at the bottom, rather than the top? We have reasons. ;)

• Anonymous posting? You betcha. Privacy is not just a buzzword.

• Can we think of a better name than votes? Not really, not yet. Got any ideas?

• Funding - how do we pay for all of this? Nothing is free, after all. No ads, no pay to play, but what else could we do?

• Tildes Gold? No, something much better - the exemplary upvote, because you need a limited use vote to highlight the things you think are top quality. If we all use them together, it just might work.

• What changes need to be made to the comment tags before they are re-enabled? It's a tough problem.

• Should we make the site publicly visible? For users without accounts to read.

• Moving the vote count to the vote button. It's the little things.

And, of course, our first ban. In fact we're up to two now.

It's not all serious, though!

• Drop by and introduce yourself. Also see round two and round one.
• Where are you from? Quite the diversity in countries already!
• Our first Trump thread. Went better than expected.
• What about cultural exchanges? Great idea there.
• First impressions? Once you've slogged through all this, tell us what you think about the site. ;)
• Some simple user scripts. It's not RES, but it's a start.

Please do take some time to browse through everything in ~tildes. It's a cross between theoryofreddit, ideasfortheadmins, and announcements. That's where we talk turkey. There's a new discussion there every day.

I also want to make one important contrast about what this site intends to be.

Reddit and Voat: Democratic republic based on popularity. 'Free speech' forums.
Tidles: Democratic meritocracy based on quality. 'Civil speech' forum.

Enjoy yourselves, post some content, make some new friends. This sweet honeymoon phase won't last forever, and it's one of the best parts of a new site. Remember, as long as you're civil here, you are never going to have any problems.

Can we get a "Mark all as read" for notifications? I certainly haven't run into an issue where I need it yet, but I foresee wanting that feature in the future.

Also, so far I'm really loving the platform.

I'm curious to what extent group mods will be able to customize how groups work. One thing I think is very limited about Reddit is its very limited, constrained format. Some communities might be better served with different options. Is there a doc explaining what is planned?

It appears that the visited links do not persist between the homepage and individual groups, for example if I click a topic in ~tildes, then go to the home page page and view said topic, it won't be purple, and vice versa.

So far, Tildes is creating a lot of good discussion, but it's lacking a way to "retrace your steps" and get back to old threads that were worth remembering.

Either a search function, or save function would come in very handy here.

I'd like to see the ability to save comments made a first class feature here, rather than an upgrade as it is on Reddit.

I'm not sure if it's a vanilla reddit feature or if it comes from RES, but I've become reliant upon the preview that shows up under a comment box that renders your response through markdown so you can see the formatting before you post it. This doesn't need to be real-time, since that would likely detract from the "lightweight" technical goal, but I feel like it might be useful

Having a sense of humor can be very positive for a discussion, but how do we go about that without discussions degrading into reddit-esque meme chains?

EDIT: Will users have to tag every single comment in a chain as a joke? Will all comments in a chain be hidden if the first one has a tag and I filter based in it?

One of the biggest things I liked about Kuro5hin was the ability for content to initially be posted in edit mode, which encouraged edits and disallowed voting. In this way, it allowed a contributor to publicly draft out a story prior to the story being judged.

The editable story would go into a separate, opt-in view mode so that people could select whether they wanted to see (and give feedback on) immature stories and then shift (time trigger or manual publish) into the main story feed.

With Tildes' comment-tagging system, we could probably just tag all comments made during edit mode as "edit" and allow them to be merged (or not) with the mainline commentary. I'd suggest (based on experience 20 years ago :) that the edit mode comments be not initially merged into mainline discussion.

I basically wanted a full screen, standalone version of the website on mobile but unfortunately Firefox's homescreen shortcuts simply open a new tab, header and all.

I found Anker on the Play Store which works perfectly. I wasn't able to find anything on F-Droid but I'm sure forking one of those Facebook wrappers would be rather trivial if anyone's up to it.

For the app icon you can get ~'s favicon here.

My apologies if this has been addressed already. I'd like to have spoiler format available for text posts and comments similar to reddit, where the spoiler part is a black box (white in night mode) that you click on to see what it says. Strike-through and underline (which reddit doesn't have) would be really nice to have also.

Hi, first post - be gentle. I don't know whether this has been mentioned but I couldn't find it anywhere else.

I worked on a hierarchical tree before (for customer support scripts) and after a while the wealth of material became increasingly complex. One problem that presented itself was the difficulty of 'multiple points of entry'. There are many ways of approaching the same topic.

In the context of Tildes, I would give a simple example of music (since that was used already). If you have a top level called ~music, your next level may be .folk, then say .Macedonia. This is how you categorise the topic.

However, if I'm in ~Macedonia then I should be able to visit .music and then .folk but arrive at the same discussion group as above.

By default, any two groups with the same set of identifiers, whatever the order, should point to the same location. In fact, there should be an infinite number of ways to get to any group, in theory.

Do we want a group called ~history.Renaissance.artists.Italy.LeonardoDaVinci and also have a different group ~science.engineering.history.LeonardoDaVinci, along with 50 others about the same individual? An ability to merge disparate tildes might be useful.

In addition, I would imagine trying to perfectly map the world of ideas and discussion into a single hierarchy is a Quixotic task, that way madness lies - especially for the nitpicky Reddit crowd. I've seen plenty discussion on this already. If it was a bit looser, we'd get to the discussion quicker, without all the 'meetings to decide on a working group name'.

Just throwing it out there for discussion. Thanks.

Automatically* dammit auto-correct!

I often use the notifications to reply to comments directly, opening the context link in another tab if needed. I after replying I have to explicitly 'Mark as read'. I think it makes sense to automatically mark a notification as read when replying to it.

If this is a common use I will happily create an issue for it on GitLab.

I'm new here, so apologies if this question has already been discussed. I was wondering if there were any plans to accommodate groups that are not English-speaking? I do a decent part of my reditting in french and am wondering if I could eventually move completely to Tildes.