The site gives a warning if you intend to repost a link but should we do more like request a reason for reposting (for examples, the post is a year old, the moment is opportune, etc.?)
I noticed that the donation bar disappeared, at least for me. Was there a reason? I think it was quite neat and induced people to work towards a common goal.
The main advantage of this is that updates can be organized and followed daily like on the COVID threads (which is especially useful if you don't live in the US and can't keep track of what's going on) and the main disadvantage is that unlike COVID, we have no idea if this will go on long enough or be dynamic enough to truly merit that. (Although in @dubteedub's COVID post he doesn't discount doing updates every 3 days, which we could do although that conflicts with 7-day weeks)
I've noticed that there are certain topics (specifically political ones) that reoccur frequently on this site, which almost never contribute anything of value. These can derail threads, incite hostility between users, push away new users, etc. IMO it is rare that anything new is said, and even rarer that any opinions are changed. Examples include: socialism vs capitalism; should real leftists vote for Biden?; is Biden a rapist?; are Bernie supporters toxic?; etc. I'm not saying these aren't important things to discuss (I've done so myself), but is it really necessary for us to have the exact same arguments basically every day? I personally feel the site would be nicer to use and less toxic overall if these discussions didn't happen. Would there be any downside to simply banning them, at least temporarily? Perhaps until after the US presidential election?
I love this website can’t think of anything bad about it apart from really not liking that communities are called groups, I feel this is due in part to Facebook using it but also it’s such an over used term on the internet, could we not think of something more unique for tildes to call it’s communities
This question has come up a few times now in the "Unofficial Tildes Chat" Discord server meta/curation channels, but I wanted to open up the discussion to ~tildes at large so we can perhaps finally get a more definitive judgement on it. So here goes:
What are people's thoughts on using the above topic tags in cases where a Tildes user posts something that they themselves have created, have hosted on their own site (or another), and/or could potentially profit from (monetarily or otherwise)?
Should only one of the tags be standardized on, or is there enough of a distinction between some of them for their use to be situational?
Should such tags be required?
Can anyone think of any better tags for such situations than the ones listed?
So someone asked about which themes are used the most, and I went to check this
survey and then realized it was deleted and that no new surveys have been done since.
So are most of us interested in this becoming a formal and regular thing?
My use case:
I watch videos (YouTube) and listen to audio (Podcasts) as a major part of my weekly media intake. I would love some sort of generated Tildes Playlist . IANADev, but it sure would be nice if Tildes was able to parse, scrape, and categorize media posted as topics and in comments. Then present them to me with a date filter, and allow separating audio only and video media. Maybe something like tildes.net/?tag= but at tildes.net/playlist. I guess it would be nice to be able to sort media by tag as well.
Possible other use case:
Accessibility?
I see that some videos are already being tagged "videos." So there already is some organic interest in this special category, right?
What do you all think, is this useful?
From a dev perspective, is getting that correct enough difficult? Does Embedly categorize audio only and video?
edit: in the playlist view, there should of course be a link back to the topic or comment where the media was found. Also, @Deimos, I certainly don't want to take Tildes away from the text-first/only direction of the site, but sometimes I am doing stuff conducive to audio/video media intake like cooking, driving, etc. It would be cool to be able to easily consume it then, and come back to comment later.
We would most likely use a service like archive.org for it but I'm not sure if we should so before making an issue, I thought I'd ask for opinions.
It'd be useful to make sure old topics don't become obsolete but it could also be undesirable behaviour for privacy reasons.
I apologize if this is a topic that has been covered before. I haven't really been able to find anything and I'm not really sure what a good search keyword is. But I noticed this as part of the Hearthstone player ban thread.
On a traditional bulletin board forum it's not really an issue because the conversations unfold chronologically anyway. When you have the atemporality of threaded comment chains that gets disorganized fast.
Basically, it's a "still developing" story where more events and news keep happening that's germane to the discussion. As the news comes up, people who already read the thread might not see the comments being posted about subsequent developments and be able to follow it because each piece of additional news or info. ends up happening in a comment/sub-thread that ends up arranged in fairly arbitrary, rather than chronological order.
The Democratic Debate threads have been similar, where the reactions and consequences of the topics being discussed can keep a discussion going for a long time, but it all happens in sub threads that people are unlikely to see. Many of these developments don't really merit a thread of their own, but after a few days or so it gets hard to actually have a big-picture discussion because the news has overtaken the scope of the discussion thread.
In a thread with an active OP, I've noticed what tends to happen is the OP will steadily edit new developments into the main post to update it. I think this has actually worked pretty well BUT edits don't bump posts as far as I can tell. Also, the people posting the updates aren't necessarily getting as much credit (in terms of votes, exemplary labels, or whatever) and, insofar as that matters to people that's a thing. Do you think this is adequate as things scale or would some novel design or subcomment system be needed?
IMO one of the major issues with online debates, arguments and heated discussions is that they often tend to escalate rather steadily over time, and as each side gets more frustrated with the other they also tend to slowly get more personal as well. I am admittedly guilty of falling into this trap occasionally myself too, which has got me thinking about ways that Tildes (the site and the users here) can potentially help deescalate unproductive arguments and allow people to disengage more effectively from them. To this end I thought it might be a good idea to have a brainstorming session regarding that.
To start things off, here are most of the ideas I could find related to this issue that have previously been proposed and are already on Tildes Gitlab (click ▶ to read the full details):
How deep the block goes is also something that probably needs to be investigated and discussed. E.g. Does blocking a user just prevent PMs? Does it prevent their replies from notifying the user? Does it hide their comments/topics, and if so does it hide all the replies to those hidden comments as well? Etc.
edit: Feature also requested again, but for a slightly different reason (avoiding getting spammed on busy topics)
Feel free to voice your support or criticism regarding the above suggestions, offer up ideas to potentially improve them, or even propose your own brand new ideas related to this issue in the comments here as well.
p.s. Once again, the point here is to open up the conversation and get ideas flowing freely, so let's please try to keep things positive, and keep any criticism purely constructive and friendly so as not to discourage people from participating.
Previous Unofficial Weekly Discussions:
Other relevant links:
Donate to Tildes - Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board - Tildes Official Docs
Despite me still being a little distracted thanks to WoW Classic and somewhat absent from Tildes lately as a result, since it's been a few weeks since the last Unofficial Weekly Discussion topic, I wanted to make sure to get one posted this week. And since it's been a while, I wanted to try something a bit more lighthearted and fun than usual to get things flowing again. So here it is:
What is your most "thinking outside the box", "pie in the sky" and/or "out there" idea for Tildes?
It doesn't matter whether you think it's really a good idea or not, it will work or not, it would ultimately have a net positive or negative effect, or how impossible it might be to implement; Let's just get the creative juices flowing and start throwing out our "craziest" ideas for the site!
p.s. Once again, let's please try to keep things positive, and keep any criticism purely constructive and friendly so as not to discourage people from participating.
Previous Unofficial Weekly Discussions:
Other relevant links:
Donate to Tildes - Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board - Tildes Official Docs
Inspired by @Lawrencium265's suggestion from a few days ago on advanced topic tag filtering:
After the discussion the other day on expanding groups into sub groups I had an idea about topic tags, advanced tag filtering rules. The main argument against sub groups is that it would sequester people away from each other. By allowing more advanced tag rules you could subscribe to topics that you're interested in, but further filter those if they include topics you don't like or allow certain threads that would get filtered out unless they contain a tag you are interested in or are within a certain group. I think this would attract different people to threads that wouldn't normally be and allow more diverse discussion and insight. So instead of having gaming.tabletop you would use the tabletop tag under gaming and those who are not interested in it can filter it out and those who are solely interested in it can subscribe to it, and then if a topic gets tagged in an unrelated group that you otherwise wouldn't be interested inyou will know about. This also has the side benefit if preventing cross posting or duplicates.
I have decided that the topic of this week's unofficial discussion is going to be on the Tildes topic tag system. But rather than make it specifically on topic tag filtering and that idea in particular, I figured we could open the discussion up a bit more and have a community brainstorming session on the topic tag system in general. I.e. Anything related to tag browsing, tag filtering, tag organization/standardization, etc.
Feel free to comment on any of the open "topic tag" related issues on Tildes Gitlab that pique your interest and you would like to discuss more in depth, propose your own new ideas related to topic tags, or even just spitball.
The point here is to open up the conversation and get ideas flowing freely, so with that in mind, let's please try to keep things positive, and keep any criticism purely constructive and friendly so as not to discourage people from participating.
Previous Unofficial Weekly Discussions:
Week - #1
Other relevant links:
Donate to Tildes - Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board - Tildes Official Docs
Since @Deimos has stated he will likely not be restarting the tradition of the Official Daily Tildes Discussions, which is something I and a number of other users greatly enjoyed and miss, I have decided to attempt to take on the responsibility of continuing them unofficially (with his blessing). And since these are not official (so won't be in ~tildes.official, which everyone is subscribed to and probably shouldn't unsubscribe from), I will only be doing them weekly instead of daily, and we now have topic tag filtering (so unofficial weekly discussion can be filtered out), hopefully the people who found the official daily discussions annoying can more easily ignore/hide these unofficial ones.
With the explanation out of the way, on to the topic for this week:
I thought it would be appropriate to have the first one of these be a bit of an open-ended, meta-meta discussion on the future of these topics. And to kick things off:
What would everyone here like to see discussed in these topics in the future? Are there any particular site features (planned, suggested or theoretical), policies (tagging, moderation, etc), or other meta issues/subjects you would like to be the topic in future discussions?
What would you like us to try to achieve with these discussions? Should we have any specific goals in mind, or should they just be fun brainstorming/theory-crafting/naval-gazing sessions?
Does anyone have any suggestions for me with regards to how I should handle these discussions? Is there anyone out there who would like to help me with these in some capacity going forwards?
Does anyone have any concerns regarding these unofficial discussions, and if so, can you think of any ways we can try to address them?
The floor is open, and I am all ears. :)
Tildes Official Docs : Donate to Tildes | Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board
I know that this has been discussed before (I personally participated in some of that), but, to my knowledge, it's been quite a while since it was brought up.
Currently, the three groups that seem to make the most sense for space exploration news are ~tech, ~science, and ~misc. Personally, I perceive ~tech as being best suited for general news about what's going on in the tech industry, more or less "hey, Google released this" or "these researchers are working on graphene batteries". Similarly, I understand ~science as a place for discussing scientific discoveries and "meta" discussion about science as a whole. I think that most would agree with me on those characterizations after looking at those groups when sorted by activity or new.
Space exploration, on the other hand, doesn't really fit in either. It's not exactly ~tech material, and it's also not really the right material for ~science, since much of it isn't about specific new discoveries or studies, etc. If we had an ~engineering, I would say that that would be the correct place for space discussion, but we don't have one.
If you look at what's been happening over the last few months in the realm of space exploration, I think that it's also pretty easy to see that there's enough going on to generate enough content and discussion for a dedicated group. There've been new launches on a weekly or biweekly basis, interesting moves made by different new entrants to the industry, all of the NASA Artemis news, plenty of things from SpaceX, etc.
I wanted to keep the title---and the question, for that matter---generic, but my use case is that I want to make a backup of my posts on Tildes, and I'd fancy automating that with a script that curls up my user page and downloads fresh stuff from there periodically. So for my personal case, the question is that is this allowed / welcome practice?
The generic question is that is it welcome to scrape Tildes' public pages, in general?
https://tild.es/55n has some discussion about this already, and now that this feature is actually implemented, I'd be interested what your opinions on allowing users to edit their own topic titles after posting are.
My main argument is that it would allow fixing typos and providing significant updates — think adding a [Solved] marker in the title for topics related to some problem or reflecting a title update of a linked article — without having to contact other users that have permissions to do that. The topic log allows that to happen transparently already.
One of my favorite YouTube channels, Linus Tech Tips, does this all the time, but I have seen many others doing this as well, and I personally find it rather obnoxious. I understand that it's more effective at getting them views, which they rely on to stay in business... but I see it as just another form of clickbait, and so when I submit LTT videos I tend to remove that capitalization.
However, are there any cases where capitalization for emphasis is appropriate in a headline/title? And if not, should titles be edited to remove them?
p.s. Acronyms and Initialisms are obviously different, so let's ignore those and put them in the "clearly acceptable" category.
What's the opinion on posting non-oc fanart? Is it considered fluff (which seems to currently have a negative stigma attached to it based off of my reading of previous threads)? Would more effort need to be put on the behalf of the poster before it's accepted (theme / several works from the same artist / some sort of comment showing analysis, reflection, or appreciation)?
I wasn’t able to find a discussion on this, though I’m sure there has been, and for that, I apologize.
Is there any kind of timeframe on the release of a mobile app for tildes?
I would guess that on Reddit most of their traffic comes from people accessing the site on their phones at this point, but I could be wrong. In any case, it certainly is a large portion of the users that access the site in this way.
With that in mind, it would be nice to be able to access tildes from a mobile app to do away with the clunkiness that comes with using the site through a mobile browser. I don’t mean to sound like it’s terrible. The site functions well enough through a mobile browser, but it would certainly have me using tildes a lot more if the convenience of a mobile app was available.
I’m sure the developers are very busy, and I don’t want to sound demanding, I’m just curious.
And once again, I apologize if this has been discussed recently.
I've been meaning to make this post for a while, and it's actually going to wind up being a series of several posts. It's kind of a long meditation on what it means to socialize online and the ways in which the services we use to do that help or hinder us in doing so. Along the way I'm going to be going into some thoughts on how online discourse works, how it should work, and what can be done to drive a more communal, less toxic, and more inclusive of non-traditional (read: non-technical) voices. I'm going to be throwing out a lot of inchoate opinions here, so I'm hoping to pressure test my views and solicit other viewpoints and experiences from the community.
I mentioned in an introduction thread that I'm a policy analyst and my work is focused on how to structure policies and procedures to build a constructive organizational culture. I've been a moderator in some large PHP forums and IRC channels in the old days, and I've developed some really strong and meaningful friendships through the web. So I've always had a soft spot for socializing on the interwebs.
Okay, so that's the introduction out of the way. The main point I want to focus on is the title: Remember the Person. This was the something Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit, suggested in a farewell message as she stepped down from the role in the wake of a community outcry regarding her changes to Reddit's moderation practices. The gist of it was that online communication makes it too easy to see the people you're interacting with in abstract terms rather than as human beings with feelings. It's a bit of a clichéd thought if we're being honest, but I think we still tend not to pay enough attention to how true it is and how deeply it alters the way we interact and behave and how it privileges certain kinds of interaction over others. So let's dig in on how we chat today, how it's different from how we chatted before in discussion forums, and what we're actually looking for when we gather online.
Since this is the first in a series, I want to focus on getting some clarity on terms and jargon that we'll be using going forward. I'd like to start by establishing some typologies for social media platforms. A lot of these will probably overlap with each other, and I'll probably be missing a few, but it's just to get a general sense of categories.
To start with we have the "Content Aggregator" sites. Reddit is the most notable, HackerNews is big but niche, and Tildes is one too. This would also include other sites like old Digg, Fark.com, and possibly even include things like IMGUR or 9Gag. The common thread among all of these is user submitted content, curation and editorial decisions made largely by popular vote, and continued engagement being driven by comment threads associated with the submitted content (e.g. links, images, videos, posts). In any case, the key thing you interact with on these sites is atomized pieces of "content."
Next up are the "Running Feed" services. Twitter and Mastodon are the classic examples as is Facebook's newsfeed. Instagram is an example with a different spin on it. These services are functionally just glorified status updates. Indeed, Twitter was originally pitched as "What if we had a site that was ONLY the status updates from AOL Instant Messager/GChat?" The key thing with how you interact with these services is the "social graph." You need to friend, follow, or subscribe to accounts to actually get anything. And in order to contribute anything, you need people following or subscribing to you. Otherwise you're just talking to yourself (although if we're being honest, that's what most people are doing anyway they just don't know it). This means the key thing you interact with on these sites is an account. You follow accounts get to put content on your feed. Follower counts, consequently, become a sort of "currency" on the site.
Then you've got the "Blogs" of old and their descendants. This one is a bit tricky since it's largely just websites so they can be really heterogenous. As far as platforms go, though, Tumblr is one of the few left and I think LiveJournal is still kicking. Lots of online newspapers and magazines also kind of count. And in the past there were a lot more services, like Xanga and MySpace. The key thing you interact with here is the site. The page itself is the content and they develop a distinct editorial voice. Follower counts are still kind of a thing, but the content itself has more persistence so immediacy is less of an issue than in feed based paradigms where anything older than a day might as well not exist. This one gets even trickier because the blogs tend to have comment sections and those comment sections can have a bunch little social media paradigms of their own. It's like a matroishka doll of social platforms.
The penultimate category is the "Bulletin Board" forum. PHP BB was usually the platform of choice. There are still a few of these kicking around, but once upon a time these were the predominant forms of online discourse. Ars Technica and Something Awful still have somewhat active ones, but I'm not sure where else. These also have user posted content, but there is no content curation or editorial action. As a result, these sites tend to need more empowered and active moderators to thrive. And the critical thing you're interacting with in these platforms is the thread. Threads are discussion topics, but it's a different vibe from the way you interact on a content aggregator. On a site like Reddit or Tildes all discussion under a topic is 1 to 1. Posts come under content. On a bulletin board it works like an actual bulletin board. You're responding under a discussion about a topic rather than making individual statements about an individual post or comment. Another way to put it is on an aggregator site each participant is functionally writing individual notes to each other participant. On a bulletin board each participant is writing an open letter to add to the overall discussion as a whole.
And finally, you've got the "Chat Clients." This is the oldest form besides email newsletters. This began with Usenet and then into IRC. The paradigm lives on today in the form of instant messaging/group texts, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, etc. In this system you're primarily interacting with the room(s) as a whole. There isn't really an organizing framework for the conversation, it's really just a free-flowing conversation between the participants. You might be able to enforce on-topic restrictions, but that's about as structured as it gets.
That about covers the typologies I can think of. Next up I want to delve into the ways in which the UI and design patterns with each of these platforms affects the way users engage with them, what sorts of social dynamics they encourage, and what sorts of interactions they discourage. In the mean time, I'm eager to hear what people think about the way I've divided these up, whether you think I've missed anything, or have any additional thoughts on the ones I put up.
My scroll wheel will thank you.
I was reading this thread and the important concept of finding the original source came up. I think two things that a lot of content aggregators run into as they grow is people will often post links from low-quality sources, and when a big newsworthy event happens a lot of similar links from multiple sources appear at once. Obviously not a big problem here now, but it may happen as Tildes grows.
Both of these issues often require significant moderator input, either through deletion of duplicates or banning of unsavory sources. One way we could instead approach this issue could be to allow for "alternate sources" to a story. For example, if a user is unsatisfied with a link to a news article, they could submit an alternate source to the thread that would show up in the discussion. If enough other users prefer that source, it could replace the link in the OP. The original source would still be visible, but all alternate links themselves could be ranked within the thread.
It seems the primary focus of Tildes is to be a discussion board, and so in my mind that means the link that engages the discussion doesn't matter much -- if we are voting on individual links anyway, this could be a way to automatically compile multiple similar threads into a single discussion.
I've seen a number of topics that have had unrelated comments regarding Tildes as a whole and the direction in which we'd like to steer it toward. While I realize much of these sidebar conversations have been occurring naturally and very frequently in well-nested comments, I wonder if it isn't going to become distracting to some going forward.
On one hand, I have enjoyed passively gaining insight into the vision of Tildes. On the other, I can see how we might want to start setting examples on the type of organization and behavior we'd want from users as the site grows. If new users who are joining after Tildes goes public see a regular occurrence of off-topic conversation, they might fall into bad habits and it may take root and grow.
What are your thoughts? Maybe start creating new topics in ~tildes and tag users along with quotes from outside threads so that there's still a reference point to start discussion from?
It's somewhat of an unspoken rule on Reddit that replying to a comment that's more than a day old is a faux pas. The conversation naturally settles within that period – or, less often, within two days. After that, the only appropriate thing is to either reference the conversation, or quote parts of the comments in relation to a similar issue in another post.
On Hubski, conversations could go on for days. It's explicitly stated in the guidelines that it's completely okay to reply to a comment of any age. I've never seen a year-old "revival" do any good, but the fact that it isn't prohibited or frowned upon adds no burden to the user.
How does Tildes handle this? Is there an unwritten rule already? Should there be a written one? What would be the factors?
Today's Feb 13. I've found a post from Feb 2 that was on a subject of interest of mine, where comments were insightful, but I feel like not all questions that need to be asked have been. Surely I won't go about creating another topic just to revive the conversation against only my own commentary to show for it.
There's also the matter of important, (semi)official topics on Tildes. Suppose a new issue arises that concerns an earlier public discussion held, say, half a year ago. It's a minor issue, but one that requires a discussion to settle. Does one comment on the old official topic, or does one create a new topic for this purpose?
It's been a while since we had a topic to generally discuss potential site mechanics, and this is one that I've been thinking about quite a bit lately, so I thought it could make a good discussion.
This recent "Suggestions regarding Clickbait and misinformation" topic originally started me thinking about this, because a lot of the potential ways of dealing with those kind of topics involve modifying link topics in some way—changing their link to point somewhere else, editing the title, adding additional links, etc. However, one thing I've noticed on the (rare) occasions where I've performed those kind of actions is that some people are extremely protective of the posts they submitted, and can get upset about even minor title edits because it's changing their post. Some users have deleted their posts after they were changed, because they didn't like the change.
So... what if we made it so that link topics don't really "belong" to any user in particular? We'd absolutely still want a record of who originally submitted the post to be able to notice behaviors like spamming certain domains, but other than that, if it's a good link/story, does it matter much which user submitted it?
Here are more unorganized, general thoughts about some of the things this might affect and would need to be considered:
Please let me know any thoughts on the overall idea, any of the above questions, and also feel free to point out other aspects of it that I've surely missed.
(And unrelated, but I've bumped everyone back up to having 5 invite codes available, which you can get from the invite page. I'm still working towards making the site publicly-visible fairly soon, and will hopefully post more info about that before long.)
When you're viewing your own user page, there are now two other "tabs" available, one for showing only topics that you've posted, and one for only comments. These pages are paginated, so you can go back through your whole history of topics/comments. I also intend to make the "recent activity" view paginated as well, but that's a tiny bit more complicated, so I left it out for now.
I plan to extend the tabs/pagination to all user pages some time next week, but as I previously promised, I wanted to give people at least a few days to be able to review their own posts and go back and see if there's anything they want to edit/delete before other users can more easily look through their posts.
This leads into a discussion that I want to have about whether we should do anything special to hide user history.
In general, I think that showing user history is good. It's valuable from an accountability perspective and it has a lot of legitimate benefits. If I run across a user that consistently makes good posts, it's nice to be able to look at their history and see some of the other comments they've made. Maybe (once the site is larger, anyway), I'll even learn about some new groups that I'm interested in by seeing where that user hangs out.
However, there are also obvious downsides, and we're seeing some major demonstrations of this in the media lately (mostly applied to Twitter). I don't want to get into the individual cases, but there have been repeated instances of people digging up years-old tweets and using them as ways to attack people. The main problem with this is that a full history (especially when combined with search) makes it very easy to find things to shame people about, especially when they're pulled entirely out of context of how they were written in the first place.
Tildes is still very new, but this is a real possibility as the site goes on. Do we want people to be able to easily dig up old comments a user made 5+ years ago? Do the potential downsides of that ability outweigh the benefits from being able to easily look back through a user's history?
One other thing to keep in mind is that once the site is publicly visible (and especially once there's an API), there will be external databases of everyone's posts. We can make it more difficult/inconvenient for people to be able to search/review user history, but we can't make it impossible. There's just no way to do that with a site where your posts are public.
Let me know your thoughts, it's a really difficult subject and one that I've been thinking about a lot myself as more and more of these "person in spotlight has embarrassing social media history" cases come up.
It would be nice to give some context to removed comments so people can see what happened without seeing the offensive comment. I never really liked it on Reddit where when a comment was removed by a mod, you had no idea why. It would be nice for fellow curious people maybe. What are your thoughts?
an actual picture of a canary would be cute and then if it's removed we know, or just a small line like the non-profit disclaimer is currently.
This seems to happen quite a lot here. Someone will post an article, and then add a comment with an extract from the article, or a summary of the article. Or someone else will come along and summarise the article.
This is pointless clutter.
On a site where we're hoping for high-quality discussion, we should expect people to actually read the articles they're discussing. If the article's so long that it needs a summary, then reading that summary isn't going to give people a good enough insight into the detail of the article before they start discussing it.
It also has the effect of misleading readers. They see an article post, read the article, and then notice that someone has already commented on the article. When they open the thread to join in the discussion, they discover that the existing comment is nothing more than a summary of the article they just read. They opened the thread for nothing.
EDIT: I give up. Lesson learned! I am the odd one out here. It is not normal to read articles beforing opening the comments sections. Summaries are desired, even preferred, here on Tildes.
I shall adjust my behaviour accordingly:
I will start including summaries & extracts in my article posts.
I will not waste my time opening posts that have only 1 comment.
I'm not going to reply here any more.
For live chatting about certain things. We could have different channels for the different groups. Just a thought.
Lately, there's been talk about new priviledges users could gain, either by requesting them (and being judged as fit) or discussing if everyone should gain a new ability like editing titles
The problem with new priviledges is of course that they can be abused by malicious users. One of the overall goals of Tildes is to trust users, but punish abuse, however I don't see this working with a large userbase. Even if this site grows slowly and the community remains mostly small or perhaps invite only, eventually we will reach a tipping point where the mods, if you want to call them that, won't be able to effectively manage the userbase. I feel like if we locked certain abilities (like editing titles, even within a time limit) behind tiers or levels users could achieve with certain actions, we could manage to keep low-effort trolls out and use it a sort of tutorial, where after certain actions for a new user (like writing their first comment or receiving their first vote) a window could pop up, informing them that they now have gained a new ability like voting, simultaniously explaining what the goal with the actual votes is.
I understand that this would gamify the system, but it would stop new users from abusing the system and lock those more dangerous abilities behind things they needed to do, ideally things that require a time investment so they'd feel less inclined to abuse the tools they've been granted (because they'd value their account more due to said time investment). It would also automate some things for the masses, which would make moderating easier.
An example:
A new user joins the site, at first, he can only vote. After casting his first vote, a message pops up, telling him that he can now post comments. Maybe there's a link to the rules and code of conduct there, maybe just a little tidbit about how stuff works on Tildes. Things that require more trust in the user are locked behind more difficult milestones, maybe editing titles is locked behind writing a hundred comments or receiving a hundred votes, maybe both.
What are your thoughts on this?
Hi,
It would be nice for the OP to be able to tag everyone that answered a post to give some solution to some problem that didn't had a solution (something like a post "my computer does not turn on, what can i do?" and no one finds the solution, then the OP finds the solution and tags every one that replied to let them know what the solution was [this is a super dumb example, but you got the point :) ]).
Problem is that this may be abused, maybe limiting use of one/two calls for everyone on one post?
EDIT: added "on one post"
It was a bit of a side topic in the thread last night about giving other people access to some organizational tools for topics, so I wanted to have a more specific discussion about how we should handle title-editing.
Editing titles is definitely a useful ability, both for being able to fix typos/mistakes as well as remove editorialization or misleading phrasing, or even update the title later if the story progresses and the original title is no longer correct. However, it can also be confusing or mis-used—the title is the main way that we (the users on the site) identify a particular topic, and when the title changes it can be difficult to recognize what happened.
So I just want to have a general discussion about how we should handle title-editing, and especially whether we should allow people to edit their own topics' titles, and if there should be any restrictions on that. For example, should a topic's author only be allowed to edit the title in the first 5 minutes? Should they always be able to edit it, like they can always edit the post text itself? Maybe it varies, based on their history/account-age/something-else?
One thing to keep in mind is that this doesn't need to be a system that's immune to abuse. If someone uses the title-editing to change a popular ~music post's title into a Star Wars spoiler or something, we don't just shrug and go, "oh well, they're allowed to edit titles, nothing we can do." We edit the title back, and either take that ability away from them or ban them from the site entirely if it was done maliciously. Trust people, but punish abusers is a good approach in my opinion—we don't need to hobble features constantly to try to make them un-abusable.
Also, whatever we decide to do doesn't necessarily need to be kept forever. We can always try something, and if it obviously isn't working very well, we just change it. Decisions about how the site works don't need to be final, it's very difficult to predict how features will actually be used in practice.
Anyway, let me know what you think. Thanks.
Just got invited here and looking at the content of the front page, Tildes is basically a "poor-man's version" of reddit right now. That's OK: it's a new community and I imagine a big part of users are coming here from reddit so they're doing what they're used to doing on social networks, that's only fair.
However, more than that, looking at the groups, they are set up pretty much similarly to reddit's default subs - if not on a 1:1 basis, at least in the general tone: pretty casual, daily life topics, big focus on entertainment media, etc. Maybe again this is, by design catering to the people who are bound to be incoming from reddit, so they can immediately relate to a similar user experience. Good.
So I think it's fair to say that it's proven that Tildes can be "like reddit". It kinda looks like reddit, it kinda feels like reddit. That part of the deal is covered. Now, what can makes us different? I doubt anyone here has no ambition besides being a soft-fork of reddit.
What topics make you tick? What sort of online discussion makes you go "that's the good stuff"? What subjects are you truly passionate about? I'd like to know what the community here is all about, whether the current ~groups represent their interests and passions or not and, hopefully we could come up with some less generic ideas for new ~groups out of the discussion.
EDIT I realize Tildes has a specific policy of "lesser active groups are better than a billion inactive groups" but at this point in time a good selection of groups would really help define the identity and content, not to mention promote quality discussion that actually aligns with people's interests. Hopefully seeing common trends in the replies would allow us to identify a few potential new groups, perhaps.
Basically, with groups being admin controlled rather than the reddit system of mods, will all bans be site wide or should group bans be possible? Let's say somebody is harassing or being an asshole on ~LGBT, should they be banned from ~LGBT or from the website?
For my fellow Canadians, Happy, uh... Regatta Day / Terry Fox Day / Saskatchewan Day / British Columbia Day / Natal Day / Simcoe Day / New Brunswick Day / Colonel By Day / Heritage Day / Joseph Brant Day / Benjamin Vaughan Day. For everyone else, Happy Monday.
Here are my overall plans for this week, in no particular order:
On Friday, your own user page had topics/comments views added, and has been paginated. Sometime in the next few days, I'm intending to extend this to other users' pages. I haven't finished deciding yet which privacy options (if any) will be available as part of this, so feel free to add your input in that thread if you haven't already.
There are multiple open-source contributions for features in progress, so there should be a few more things coming in shortly from there. I'll make separate changelog posts for anything particularly major, but one that was added over the weekend (contibuted by @what again) was some special appearance/behavior for "nsfw" and "spoiler" tags on topics. They'll stand out more, always be displayed at the start of the tags list, and the "spoiler" tag makes sure that text posts don't have their excerpt displayed in the listing (but can still be clicked to expand).
@cfabbro did a massive rework and update of the Docs site that I want to get applied this week. There's a ton of new information in there that should help a lot as we keep bringing more people into the site.
On that note, there's also a new official invite-request thread in /r/tildes on reddit, so we'll probably have a decent number of new registrations this week as that gets worked through. I've also topped everyone back up to 5 invite codes (available here: https://tildes.net/invite), so please feel free to invite people yourselves as well (and as always, if you need more codes, just send me a message and ask).
I think that should cover the main plans, any extra time I find above that will probably go into various random things on the backlog (and if I have time to work on a major feature, probably basic search).
Thanks for being here, and please let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions.
Something you see frequently on Reddit are subreddits that have developed their own slang, jokes and references. That's part of the reason why Reddit feels like a collection of communities more than one website divided into sections, which is what Tildes look like right now.
The question is, do we want that sort of stuff here?
The current 4chan-like default sorting method doesn't look like it's going to scale with more people and posts coming in, thoughts?
Choose three words to describe the kind of community you want here, and explain why you chose those words.
Diverse
More points of view makes for a more in depth, nuanced conversation that brings viewpoints I may not have considered before. I have plenty of experience as a native woman in Canada, but that isn't the only viewpoint. Much as it pains me to admit, I don't know everything and sometimes I miss layers of conversations that others can point out to me. Those viewpoints are the ones I need to read if I want to continue growing as a person.
Welcoming
I want a community that isn't full of gatekeepers, who don't arbitrarily decide who should or should not belong before they've even had a chance to contribute. I want to see people given a chance to show who they can be on a new platform, and how they can make this a better place. The last thing we need is to chase away people who might otherwise make valid contributions to the community by being dicks.
Interesting
More threads, more topics for discussion, more traffic in general. I want to see dozens of threads I can contribute to or at least read on a daily basis, whatever that topic may be. A new book series, a hobby, a viewpoint on politics. But we're not going to get there without a diverse, welcoming group to keep new people engaged.
Hi all,
I've been thinking about this for a couple days, and since there's another discussion about the alt-right/racism/offensive attitudes, I figured it was a good time to hopefully initiate the discussion even though I myself don't have much to contribute to it.
What I'm asking for is ideas to foster inclusiveness on Tildes. I personally haven't noticed much on Reddit that's bad, but then again, I'm a young (well, sorta) white dude. What I have noticed is that, as a man, I am the "default" gender on Reddit. People are always calling me "man" on there, even when I have not given any clues about my gender.
As for my race, I haven't noticed anything making my whiteness the "default"--people call me "man" all the time, but they don't call me "honky man," after all--but I unfortunately might not notice that. Anyway, I should stop blabbing, because I unfortunately don't have much to add to this discussion.
My question is, though--and I hope other people agree that it's an important topic to discuss--what can Tildes do to encourage inclusiveness? What can Tildes do to make everyone feel welcome, regardless of their sex/gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, and identity in general? If I were a woman and someone called me, "man," I expect that I would feel less welcome.
Edit: I should clarify that I'm looking for systematic ideas for what to do: if Tildes were as big as Reddit, what policies or structures could be implemented to remind people or encourage them to be more open to everyone? Is there anything that's even possible?
I posted this recently during a discussion on reddit on thread locking and wanted to post it here for discussion as well.
There's no room in a decent society for those who advocate for "race realism", deny the holocaust, or believe women are all mindless whores who can't think for themselves. If that's your (general you) idea of a useful contribution, create your own sub and be as hateful as you want, but I have no obligation to provide a platform for hatred on a sub that's dedicated to, for example, gifs of puppies and kittens.
Tildes is intended to be a place for insightful, high quality discussion. Can people who advocate for topics like race realism be part of that conversation?
Note: I am not necessarily suggesting that such topics be banned from tildes, I'd just like to hear opinions on this topic.
Edit: I posted this same topic, lightly revised, on /r/theoryofreddit to see the difference in responses. It's been enlightening.
Personally, I hope it takes over Reddit’s role of being primarily for discussion and a place to congregate interesting content, staying away from the more mainstream-y aspects, like the redesign. What do you expect/hope for?
So far, I haven’t seen too much moderation aside from bans, etc. dealt out by the admins (unless I’m wrong here and a moderation system is currently in place, please correct me if I’m wrong), but how will this work once Tildes is fully released to the public? Will people who show interest in a certain community be reached out to and asked?
Decided to drop down here and quickly ask what is Tildes' policy on piracy. Namely, should we be openly discussing, linking, directing users towards pirated content? Is it something that's strictly forbidden?
Apologies if I'm missing something, but if there isn't a statement on this already then what do you guys think the policy should be?
Aaargh! In a recent post, (Who has quit Reddit etc. to go all-in on Tildes?), the subject of content came up. Just six days ago there was this post
and several discussed tildes as leaning toward discussion versus content. If we want to be one or the other , different or similar to Reddit, ok. But personally I came over to Tildes hoping it could eventually replace Reddit minus all the ads and for profit aspects that are plaguing so many social networking sites.
I get it. We want Tildes to be different. But I'm very interested in content. And content based discussion. My favorite subreddit /books, is based very healthily on both. And I happen to think that Tildes is going to need content to broaden its base. That broadening is a strength of Reddit I'd like to see emulated.
I've been hesitant to post and yes cross-post content from Reddit, but now that some people are seeing that content is needed, I'm getting on that bandwagon. I'll do my best to post good quality news, books, science, offbeat, the occasional humor, and you can moderate it away if you want. I want people to want to come here.
So I'll see you in content posts, discussions and even contribute to meta-talk at times, it's necessary for internal communication. But it's time to get to work.
While reading up on what it takes to run this site, it just occurred to me that the site is hosted on one server with one network connection. Adding a CDN or cloud based DDOS protection would run contrary to the "no third party" thing we've got going on here, so that doesn't seem like an option.
So I got to wondering, what would happen if a malicious actor were to sic a botnet on us? I imagine the outcome would not be good. Do we have any strategies to deal with this?
So I was thinking the other day -- is there any good reason to allow voting from the main ~'s page? For clarity in this discussion, I'm talking about this view.
Some pro's and con's for removing the vote button from the main page:
Pro:
Discourages "drive-by" voting. We all (mostly?) know that reddit in particular is notorious for having highly up-voted posts that most users read the headline / top-comment and not the article itself. This is particularly noxious for political posts, as often times a vote on a post is an extension of one's own biases / beliefs, rather than an engagement on the topic at hand. This hasn't reared it's head to the same extent on ~'s yet (this post with 15 votes / and only 1 comment would seem to be the closest I can find), but I think it would be a mistake to think that this sort of behavior wouldn't migrate over from reddit. Other reasons for voting on a post without at least getting into the comments are equally bad e.g.: "Oh, I like that band / song / movie / whatever" -- this is a key driver of recycled content on /r/music or movies or tv etc. This reason alone is enough for me to consider removing front-page voting a net-positive
The user is forced to enter the comments to vote, wherein they may actually read something that sparks their desire to read the thing / interact with the post. The goal on ~'s is to promote substantive discussion, and I think this would be an interesting tool to try to direct users to said discussion.
Cons
It's more inconvenient, but hey -- so is putting the comment box at the bottom of the page (and I think that's a good idea on net as well)
UI inconsistency -- this is a bad thing, but we've got a lot of smart computer people on here. We can probably figure out some way to make this work.
It doesn't actually force the user to read / listen / interact with the submission, just suggests that they do. But hey, let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, eh?
Hanging Questions
What about voting on ~group pages? My off-the-cuff idea would be that voting on ~music.world.calypso would be a good thing (to promote organic growth of quality posts from small ~groups), but not voting on overarching groups (~music) -- but then the UI issue rears' it's ugly head
What about comment / submission voting from other places e.g.: user-pages, notifications, inbox replies, etc.
I had this full submission typed out before I accidentally closed the tab, so if this seems a bit rushed I apologize :)
The current problem with ~ is, in my mind, a lack of shared understanding between the "older" and "newer" users, about what the main focus of the site should be. I was lucky enough to join the site fairly early on, and with the exponential growth of the site, I've noticed a few changes.
There seems to be a "struggle" between link/article submissions and discussion posts. While each have their benefits, in ~'s current state, I do not think it's possible for both to work in harmony with the site.
The benefits of discussion posts are that they encourage community, and well, discussion. Discussion posts are great for the generally serious nature of the site as well. One of my main reasons for leaving reddit was the lack of genuine, interesting conversation that didn't dissolve into meta memes within two comments. On tildes, I've commented more than in my past few years on reddit because of this.
Link submissions don't encourage community or discussion, usually. Not always, but in most cases the user will post the article and move on. The same goes for users coming across it, they will just "upvote and move on", which doesn't seem to be very beneficial to ~ or its community.
The second problem with link submissions is the voting system. Right now on ~, you cannot downvote something. This was fine earlier when most posts were discussion based, but downvotes can be useful for link/article submissions. It can help cut out noise or blatantly clickbait/advertising articles.
I think there needs to be a way to distinguish between these two types of posts, or simply decide what the main focus of the site should be, and stick with that. What are your thoughts on this?
Hey all,
There's been a huge amount of response to this post about Hyponotoad's banning that I think merits a lot more consideration than as just a bunch of fractured comment threads.
Some questions that come to mind:
~ What does it mean to have "quality discussion",?
~ How do you distinguish between quality discussion and not quality discussion?
~ What does it mean to act in "bad faith"?
~ How, as a community, do we best achieve tildes' stated goals?
