When something big happens, there are often a lot of different posts, which results in the conversation being scattered all over the place. Is there any policies on users creating megathreads for these big events, or if there will be some kind of megathread system build into ~ in the future?

I think this site is a really neat concept, especially because the quality of discussion on Reddit has really deteriorated (which has happened concurrently with Reddit's shift from discussion and news to "repository of Internet culture"). I like online discussion, and IMO this site's design is better than Hacker News, so I'm probably going to start using this site. Is there anything I should know about this site? This is my first post and I'm not too sure how things work.

As things get going and we start getting more specific branches coming off of the main groups, posts are supposed to bubble up the branches as they get enough votes. So that a post in ~games.boardgames wouldn't initially be visible to someone who is only subscribed to ~games, but would become visible if it gets popular enough.

There is a danger of branches becoming so popular that they overwhelm the main group.

I'm thinking that it might be a good idea to "weight" the branches inversely to the number of subscribers it has. Meaning that a post in branch with 10,000 subscribers would require more votes to bubble up than a post in a branch with 1000 subscribers.

Thoughts?

At the moment the groups page shows a full list of groups with a button beside each: either Subscribe or Subscribed. It's not very clear, at a glance, which ones are subscribed as there is no colour difference and the terms differ only by the last letter. I personally think it would be better if it showed 'unsubscribe' for the ones you're already subscribed to, and even better if this were in green.

I've found that it's difficult to keep track of threads I found interesting but are no longer highly active, especially without a search function. My suggested solution is the ability to subscribe to updates on a topic/thread (whatever you want to call it) and enable easy access to checking up on the thread for updates without having to receive a direct reply to my comment on the topic. If this already exists and I'm just blind, let me know!

For the leaders of Tildes, please remember to grow slowly. Your initial policies will somewhat determine the demographic of your early members, and future policy will determine changes in the demographic until a larger demographic and your growing body of policies are in a tug-of-war for the direction of this undertaking.

This means if you act to appease, say, green martian chess players, the site will eventually attract more and push your growth that way. This applies to gamers, trolls, yammerheads(like me), or any class of people you care to name. I only say this because right now I sense a narrow demographic of current members.

Right now, you the leaders have a great amount of control over direction. My hope is for a wider demographic, while retaining a direction that discourages trolling, pedantry, and general instability. A daunting challenge. I respect your initiative and resolve in making a true non-commercial community, one that I hope points the way out of the advertising driven system of funding. Good luck and thank you again.

End of brown-nosing post. /s

I've been doing some thinking and concluded that in it's current form, tildes design has a fundamental problem that is going to make high-quality discussions nearly impossible.

Assumptions

I'm relying on four assumptions here:

• A discussion's quality is proportional to it's exclusiveness. In other words, the more wide the audience participating in a discussion is, the worse the discussion gets. It's not hard to see this. A discussion about a discovery in cancer reasearch on a news site will be much lower quality than among cancer reasearchers. This has also been shown to be true by reddit's /r/all.
• tildes get more specific, the "deeper" they are in the hierachy. ~sci.biology.cancer is more specific than ~sci. ~sci also a has more subscribers.
• tildes.net wants to use this specialization to foster high-quality and qualified discussions on specific topics.
• tilde submissions "bubble up", as they currently do

The Problem

You might be able to see what I'm getting at. I think these three together are a fundamental problem for the quality of discussion in subgroups:

• Highly upvoted posts from specific subgroups will be exposed to wider audiences, thus lowering the quality of discussion.
• More generic posts have a higher likelihood of receiving upvotes from the more general groups above them, thus lowering the quality of submissions.

A Scenario

Let's simulate a scenario using my above assumptions. This might be unhelpful, since it's very easy to poke holes in such a specific scenario. This is more intended as an overall picture of the incentives the users have.

We have three submissions to ~sci.biology.cancer, about the news of three different discoveries:

• A link to an original scientific paper with it's original title
• A link to an original scientific paper, with a modified title
• A link to a news story in a popular tabloid newspaper, with it's clickbait title

So, how would these fare?

• The first submission would be upvoted by ~sci.biology.cancer subscribers, who understand the paper and topic, but are low in numbers.
• The second submission would be upvoted by ~sci.biology, who are familiar enough to understand the modified title.
• The third submission can be understood by anyone, and would be upvoted by the whole of ~sci, slingshotting to the top.

Let's take at the result in ~sci.biology.cancer:

The highest ranked post is now a clickbait article of no significant interest to anyone actually knowledgeable about the topic, filled with unqualified discussion. The second ranked post is slightly better, but still less useful than the first post, which is being drowned out by other submissions.

Conclusion

As a submitter with the current system, instead of submitting high quality content that interests the subtilde, it is in your interest to submit a post that will appeal to the lowest common denominator, the subtildes above you. This will significantly decrease the quality of specialized subtildes.

Ideas

I believe the bubbling up mechanic must be modified in some way to prevent this unfortunate systemic issue. I don't really have a good solution, but here's some ideas to get the brainstorming going:

• No participation (voting/commenting) for users higher up the chain. This would be very extreme.
• users don't see comments made higher-up the chain. ~sci.biology would not see ~sci comments. This would be extraordinarily confusing and have weird edge cases.
• Votes would be counted separately for each part of the sub-tilde chain. A post might be highly upvoted in ~sci, but only receive a few upvotes in ~sci.biology. I like this idea in general, but it does not solve the problem of the low-quality responses landing in ~sci.biology.cancer too. Maybe that's just an acceptable trade-off, though.

What are your thoughts on this?

I've read the docs and I personally have not seen this topic come up yet.

I've been weary/afraid to post any more of my own content since my very first post here on ~Tildes. Are there currently any unofficial rules for self-promotion? We all know Reddit once had that stupid 10:1 (or was it 5:1?) ratio rule before they chucked it. I don't want to feel like a selfish person or a spammy person if I submit content that I created and/or links to accounts that promote myself as a brand.

This seems like a tricky one to me, as it largely depends on the community as a whole deciding to go with a particular tone.

One example of a site that has an expectation of serious conversation is Hacker News, and this makes it a great place to get thoughtful discussion without snarky comments (but with its own biases and echochamber effects of course).

What I don't want to see Tildes become is the meme-posting, reference-laden, low quality noise of some subreddits, or the content-free fluff of Imzy.

How can we strike this balance?

I was going through the responses to /u/Kat's Tildes Survey Results and it looks like a good bunch of us use Discord, me included. I decided a Tildes discord server might be of use. It's not officially endorsed or anything, but I thought there might be interest. Any suggestions would be great :)

Server Link

We know how it gets on reddit during the summer holidays and I don't think anyone would suggest making an age restriction for the site, but if something is upvoted by 99% kids then it's probably not interesting to me.

So I guess the question I'm posing is:

'How do we filter out stuff that's blatantly outside of my demographics interest'

I'm guessing my suggestion of age filtering is going to run against Tildes ethics about not collecting user data, so perhaps someone will have a better solution in the comments.

While the occasional less serious post can be interesting, I hope ~talk does not devolve into only being silly jokes. It would ruin the atmosphere of ~ as a more serious discussion board. I don't think anything needs to be done at the moment, but if ~talk or another board gets overrun with joke content, is there any plan do deal with it?

I just joined the site less than an hour ago and when I registered I tried to use my normal password that I use on a lot of sites (I know, I know) and it wouldn't let me register because the password has shown up in a data breach. I double checked on https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and sure enough, my password was compromised at some point. So now I know I need to go back and change my password on a hell of a lot of sites.

Anyway, thank you. I've never seen that feature on a site before and it saved my ass before an account of mine was really compromised.

I feel like it's been pretty well established that Tildes is supposed to be a place of discussion with maybe occasional fluff here and there that can be filtered out. But there's a large grey area that I think should be addressed.

I'll take a few of Reddit's subreddits as an example.

I think it's pretty clear that a group resembling /r/aww should not be allowed on Tildes since it is pure fluffing and does not really bring a big quality of discussion to the community as a whole.

But how about a community such as /r/QuitYourBullshit? That could arguably be either unnecessary or a place of good discussion. There's a lot of grey area regarding the quality of that subreddit.

Now, I know what some people might try to say. We shouldn't try to replicate Reddit, and we should instead let the communities grow organically.

Yet, if Tildes is going to grow at all from Reddit, people are going to want to replicate the communities they so dearly loved on Reddit, regardless of quality. People who were active on /r/dankmemes are going to want a /r/dankmemes equivalent here. People who were active on /r/todayilearned or /r/JusticeServed are going to want an equivalent here as well. So the question is: how are we going to deal with the large demand for variably fluffy groups while simultaneously keeping the quality of discussion up?

I think this is a real issue that is going to have to be dealt with before widespread adoption of Tildes can occur.

One of the things I dislike about Reddit is how the username is something very easy to gloss over. Unless a user is super prolific, you don't ever remember a person on Reddit. I feel this is a big part of what makes Reddit so unpleasant - you are just one voice among many, a cog in the machine, so every time you post it's not that different to just posting from a throwaway. Generally, I think this really contributes to the feeling that on Reddit, you are just an opinion, not an actual person with thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Additionally, it protects people who post toxic comments, because it's easy to forget their username and so when you encounter them again, you can't easily tell they are the person from before, unless you check their post history.

On smaller subreddits, this problem is partially solved with flairs. The problem with those is that they do not stay the same across Reddit (which I guess is a matter of personal preference, participating in Reddit as a whole vs a bunch of separate communities), and they often serve as a way to add relevant info about the user, so they are just generic groups that a lot of people share.

I think ~ could really benefit from having some kind of way to tell one user from one another better. Either by making the usernames more prominent somehow, by adding flairs, or possibly even avatars (I know, that's so incredibly retro, but it does help see you the other person as a person and not just as an opinion on the internet).

Probably one of my most useful features from Reddit was opening links in new tabs. This way I could keep my main Tildes tab, and not be worried by having to back out multiple times if I went deep into the link. I feel that it would be a good QOL settings addition.

Example thread: https://tildes.net/~talk/1gd/how_would_you_describe_this_person

At this time, sorting by "newest" has PBuddy's reply to Emerald_Knight (posted 34 minutes ago) listed after my top-level comment (posted 54 minutes ago). I think the "newest" sorting method should place PBuddy's comment (and therefore Emerald_Knight's top-level) above mine.

[Edit: Por que no los dos?]

At some point reddit had plans to implement a federated protocol and let users run their own instances, but that was throw out of the window to satisfy shareholders interests. Does tildes has plans to implement a federate protocol in the future or is something that hasn't been considered?

I just showed up yesterday to this great experiment, and find myself with some fresh-minted drama over politics and bans to ingest. While I wouldn't presume to propose a solution to the issues raised in and by those threads, I found myself looking to the comment tagging system and finding some space to improve conversation.

My intent (as I believe is the intent of this community) is to help foster constructive discussion without outright banning inflammatory topics. I believe that simply ignoring controversial issues because of the problems they raise is at best stifling potentially useful discourse and at worst intellectually dishonest.
Tags I'd like to see:

• "Citation Requested" As a tag, it would be a more constructive way of saying "I don't believe you"
• "Disreputable Source" / "Source Disputed" is a civil way of pointing out issues
• "Reported" would be a tricky implementation, but useful as a way of flagging comments for removal. Should ideally only be applied to eg. doxxing or incitement

There should also be a moderation feature for removing tags that are no longer relevant or incorrectly applied. Alternatively, the display of comment tags could be reliant upon a critical mass of "reputation points" which would allow for, say, 100 people with 1 "troll-tagging rep" to get a comment flagged, or 2 people with 50 troll-tagging rep to do so. This of course is dependent upon the reputation system being fleshed out and has the very real danger of creating power users

EDIT:

@jgb pointed out that this is a lively discussion see these

Tags I missed that came up in other discussions:

• "Insightful" as a positive, almost a super-upvote
• "Solved" for a comment that resolves an issue

And, according to @cfabbro, @deimos is working on a public activity audit that can then be built upon to improve moderation

This occurred to me, for later when things are tagged by different people, will capitalisation matter? I'd suggest better it doesn't, makes it easier to see things that were intended to be tagged the same way.

You could even consider allowing spaces in tags but ignoring them when identifying which tags are equivalent.

I don't really understand this model unless server costs are a concern. Google+ did that years ago and it honestly was a failure.

It's just one more step for registering as they are not like restricting the number of invites. Was just wondering that.

I think having the theme settings be universal as long as you are logged into your account would be nice. For example, if I log in on my browser I have Dark Theme set. However, if I log in on my phone it defaults to light theme.

I assume as more settings are added (e.g - turn off custom group stylesheets if those are added) it woud be nice to not have to go reconfigure settings on various devices.

I've been using ~ on mobile to try it out, and although it's great, there's one major inconvenience.

If I'm reading through a long comment, I want to instintively collapse it so it won't distract me. But on mobile, I have to scroll a long way up to do that. It's even worse with comment chains.

Can we have a collapse button at the bottom as well? Or a swipe, like on the Reddit app? Or do we have to wait for the development of the app before mobile users get good UI?

Usernames can be inflammatory or just distract from discussion in general, and especially considering that humor is not a focal point of Tildes, should they be restricted to something reasonable/appropriate?

We already show who invited us on our profile page, so could we show who we've invited on our invite page? There is no need to hide this information.

This way we could easily get in touch with people we've invited.

Ok, this is less than a half-baked idea, but here goes.

I just got here, but I really feel like you all “are my people.” I know there are possible issues with this, echo chamber, etc.. but darn it, I like this group right now. I may like it even after lots of user growth. But.. what if there was some magical way to use the site in the future as it was in the past.

My initial thought was what if we “forked” the user base at different times. Here is my best thought on how that might be implemented.

What if there was a user setting called Shrinkage, Time Machine, Good Ole Days, or something. It would be a date field that had a minimum value of your tildes birthday, max value of now. You could set it to n whenever you wanted and then you would see the site with only the posts and comments of the users that existed prior to n + 1 day (so your are included.)

I think other folks will have this same “good ole days” feeling even when they sign up years from now, they could always go back to their original community.

OK, I think that this implementation is pretty harmless. Shoot me down. What unintended consequences did I not think of? Do you see any value in this?

edit: missing word

One of the consistent discussion points of why this place is so great is because it's small. Do you all have any mechanics thought up for how communities can limit growth?

I think I saw some discussion about parent/child relationships for the ~tildes groups where it looked like you were using dot notation - is that your mechanic? Endless children? Will ~tildes be able to cap their subscribers? I don't have answers, just questions now. :)

This one is super first world, but it would make the transition from Reddit much easier. The vote button is on the far right of the screen even though the rest of the UI and most people naturally gravitate to the left. I am fine with them keeping the old vote button, but they should put a small one on the left side also.

Posting this here because I'm also wondering about how this will affect moderation policy on Tildes going forward

As a former Reddit Moderator this has been something I've pondered for a long time: how does one define what a toxic user is in such a way that it can be easily understood as a community standard? I'll post the definition I defaulted to below. But I'd be most interested in knowing how other people think about this.

Instead of a tree hierachy, perhaps groups would be better off based on a DAG - a Directed Acyclic Graph. This would allow groups to have multiple parents as well as multiple children. For example, ~mazda might have ~cars and ~japan as parents, and ~tolkein might have ~fantasy and ~linguistics as parents. I think this could maintain the benefits of the hierachical system while making it easier to find a group that suits the post.

While potentially complex, a good UI which effectively visualised the DAG to allow a content submitter to hone in on the correct group-node, and potentially create a new one on the fly if none was appropriate, could make this concept reasonably intuitive. This problem has already been tackled by creators of git GUIs, so perhaps some ideas could be adapted from that space.

One issue is that a node in a DAG is much harder to identify with a text string than a node in a tree-based hierachy. One solution would be that the submitter could choose a 'primary path' which would be displayed to readers, which, upon being clicked, would display the full DAG, including all the potentially numerous paths which would lead to that group-node. For example, I might choose ~linguistics.tolkein.quenya as the primary path, but upon clicking, the reader can discover that ~fantasy.tolkein.quenya and ~linguistics.conlangs.quenya and ~writing.worldbuilding.quenya all lead to the same group-node [edit: ugly illustration]. I feel that this solution could potentially be powerful enough to remove the need for tags entirely. Viewing the homepage of any particular group-node on the DAG would aggregate posts to all child groups, meaning that the effects of community fragmentation are mitigated. Even a post to a really specific group-node, like ~cars.mazda.mx5.na, will still enjoy the same status and priority to the readers of the ~cars homepage as a post made directly to the ~cars group-node.

Now, this is in solarised dark (1 true colourscheme represent), but this specific issue is present in all current schemes - the blue and purple are way too close together. This also impacts visited vs unvisited links.

On this same note, the button style for solarised dark is not colour-shifted between schemes.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong. I see an notification for a new unread reply. I open the unread replies page. I click on 'link' to go to the thread to see the context, and reply if I feel so inclined.

But that notification doesn't go away. The reply that I clicked on and read is still showing as unread. I have to click on "mark as unread" to make the notification go away. However, if I do that before I click through to the thread, the reply disappears and I can't click through to the thread. So I have to go to the thread, read & reply, then go back to my unread replies page to mark the reply as "read".

If I've clicked through to the thread where someone replied to me, then you can safely assume I've read that reply.

It seems like blocking is the basic bit of functionality that is standing out the most for not existing on ~ at the moment, at least for those of us who have ran into a reason to want it. Is this something we can expect soon, if at all? I know just reporting things to @deimos works for now for things that are rule-breaking, but there are plenty of situations where you don't want to continue interacting with a person for reasons that may not even take place on this site (I'm sorry if the person this is in reference to sees this and recognizes me...I don't really have a way of avoiding that...hence this post), and there isn't really a way to take care of that.

Sorry, I know feature requests and suggestions are being piled in really fast, but at least for me and some users I know, this is pretty essential.