A lot of the time I'll see a discussion I don't have the chance to participate in the moment I see it. It would be nice to be able to "save" it so I could revisit later without having to hunt. Similarly, being able to do the same for comments would be handy for when someone links to something I want to follow-up on or fully explore when I have more time at hand.

Even if only implemented in localStorage per client, I feel it would be a useful addition.

Could we get new post ordering: something like reddit Hot system?

Now, the ordering by activity is great, but the big issue with it is, that when you go to less-active ~, you only see two or three topics. Even on front page, there are just 15 or 20 topics. I know, it's because I limit threads to only several days, but there is problem when I set limit up to week, or two: there are very old threads on the front page right at the top.

So could we get something like reddit has? Display posts according to upvotes/time (comments?), but do not limit them to few days and show them at least +- chronologically - so no two weeks old posts at the top of front page.

Maybe this could be achieved just by tweaking the current activity order by boosting young threads more and vice versa.

In governance, sortition (also known as allotment or demarchy) is the selection of political officials as a random sample from a larger pool of candidates. The logic behind the sortition process originates from the idea that “power corrupts.” For that reason, when the time came to choose individuals to be assigned to empowering positions, the ancient Athenians resorted to choosing by lot. In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was therefore the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials, and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of true democracy.

Today, sortition is commonly used to select prospective jurors in common law-based legal systems and is sometimes used in forming citizen groups with political advisory power (citizens' juries or citizens' assemblies).

The mechanics would be something like this: users report a post/comment, when there's enough reports the systems randomly selects 3/5/7/... currently active users and ask them to determine if the reported post contravene to the rules. The decision is then automatically taken with a majority rule.

Why ?

1. It's the only system that scales (to my knowledge). More users mean more content to moderate, but since the users are also moderators the system works at any scale. Systems that don't scale lead to all kind of problems when the number of users become large.
2. It's very robust to manipulation. As moderators are chosen randomly it's very hard to coordinate or try to influence the decisions.
3. It promotes a participatory attitude and a sense of responsibility in the users. There's no "them against us" (the bad mods against the users).

I would like the ability to save threads or comments, especially if they have links. Something within the platform that would allow me to go back later and watch a linked video or re-read someone's long synopsis would be super useful.

I'm sure as tildes gets bigger, security will continue to be a matter of discussion.

The dev GodEmperors of tildes have (quite awesomely) taken a big position on security already by disallowing breached passwords from being used.

I'm not much of a hacker myself, but it's an armchair interest and I'm sure others more skilled would love to be able to give back to Tildes and help keep the site as secure as possible.

What's the policy on bug hunting, and searching for exploits?

Thanks!

I think it would be sensible to have an option to tell a user if a link was already submitted to a particular group recently. I don't think they should be stopped from posting it, but these reminders would be helpful to avoid needless duplication.

Example of what happens without this. u/cfabbro said this was planned for the future but I can't find it in the docs.

Thoughts?

Not sure if this has already been suggested, but can we get an ability to add ourselves to a post as a "listener" so that we get notifications similar to "N new reply"? For cases where we're interested in following the discussion, but may not have anything to add, or just interested in someone else's thread in the discussion.

I'm wondering if others are seeing as many "broken" thumbnail(favicon) images to the left of externally linked posts? I'm not sure if it's simply because my browser needs to have visited a site before it will show me the website's default favicon or something else? For example please see below:

Favicon missing

Apologies if this has already been asked/addressed.

Edit: I just tested visiting the site linked and then reloading Tildes and it doesn't update so I assume it's probably on the external site's "end".

I've been noticing a lot of initial comments nitpicking titles lately. I'm not sure how to improve this, but I believe these posts are generally low effort and negative. Of course if a title is outright incorrect or misleading, it should be pointed out. But where's the line?

Anyone else notice this? Thoughts? Suggestions?

The subscribe button is very attractive, but it's a little hard to tell the difference between "Subscribe" and "Subscribed"

Options:

1. Use more dissimilar colors
2. Change text for subscribed users to say "Unsubscribe" like another site does. Alternatively, change text for unsubbed users to say "Not subscribed".

I'm certain this has been discussed before, but seeing that
A: There's no search function and
B: Maybe people who joined since the last discussion would like to talk without necroing anything

Is there a cycle/timeline for adding new groups as interest seems to appear?
What's the plan for how to choose which new groups get added?

If not, could we (and the site's staff) discuss possibilities on good ways to do that?

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

https://tildes.net/~tildes/25n/it_needs_to_become_clearer_what_tildes_is_about_and_how_it_differs_from_reddit_im_part_of_the

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.

Since the website has a username and hundreds we were presented with an opportunity to pick a really nice or cool username on a site that I believe will rival reddit.

I just picked my favourite character. I wanted to pick my first name (which I am 100% sure is not taken) but kind of decided to go towards more anonymity. I decided not to use my reddit username because no one else literally uses it so I will always have an option to make a new account with reddit username

Did you think on that too or just used your reddit username?

EDIT: I have actually changed my username from "ironman" to "metal" since i made this post. Now im like super happy and excited about my "identity" here

A lot of the newer websites and services now offer 2FA so I was wondering if Tildes has any plans to do that? No idea how hard it would be to implement but I feel like that would be a welcome addition for many people.

I'd also be happy to hear people's thoughts on this an if you guys think the website actually needs this. In my mind more security is always better than less security.

I was reading a discussion about this on here earlier today, and I've already lost it! 😬 Sorry if this is just creating more noise, but we clearly need better ways to find content. The search feature will go a long way, but here are some other ideas:

Tag search. On any topic with tags, the tags should be clickable links to URLs like https://tildes.net/tag/elder+scrolls. This page would show all topics that use that tag, with sort and filter options. There should be a way (maybe built into the search form) to type any tag and jump straight to this page.

Recently viewed topics list. Reddit shows a sidebar listing the last n posts you viewed. It's admittedly a little creepy seeing your history displayed like that, but it's a useful way to jump back into conversations for follow-up later. The old Reddit design had a "clear" button to delete the history, but curiously that is no longer present in the redesign. (Privacy features like that should not be overlooked here.)

Saved topics. Another feature from Reddit. Every post has a "Save" link below it, that adds the post to your personal saved posts list, which can reached from your profile. Saved post lists are only visible to the users that own them.

Repost detection. I really like how Ask MetaFilter helps posters make sure their content is fresh before they publish it. The submit button under the new post form is labeled "Preview" and clicking it shows what the post will look like before publishing it. This gives posters the opportunity to proofread and ensure their text formatting is correct. More importantly, the site scans the content of the post and displays a list of five possible existing posts that match it:

The following previously-posted questions might be related to the question you're asking. Please take a look before posting to see if any of these answer your question.

This flow adds an additional click before you can actually post, but I think it's for the best. The slowdown politely nudges you toward considering the quality and originality of what you're about to say, without being overbearing. The main MetaFilter site also checks all URLs you enter to see if anyone has posted them before. Note that these tools don't prevent anyone from posting, they just empower users to avoid reposting and reinforce good posting behaviors.

Repost flagging. I have a half-baked idea about allowing users to flag topics as reposts, but I haven't seen this implemented before. This would be separate from voting. A user wishing to flag a topic would be asked to provide the URL of an existing topic it duplicates. This wouldn't affect the topic itself, other than to add a small banner to the top of the page: "n users flagged this as a repost of the following topics: [list of links]". Then anyone would have the ability to [agree], [disagree], or append a link to the list. Public consensus would affect the future of the topic... if enough others agree the topic is redundant, it could be auto-deleted or just algorithmically prioritized lower than non-reposts. If enough disagree, the flag could be auto-removed from the topic. The usernames of the flaggers should be public, and there should be a way to view both a user's frequency of flagging and whether consensus agreed with those flags. Accountability would be important for this sort of system.

Ability to subscribe to users. I saw the other feature request for a "friend" mechanic. I agree with the commenters who said it would be too much like a social network. However, I could see a use case for a "Subscribe" button on a user's profile page, just like the ones on group pages. This would cause all topics posted by that user to be included in your main page, even if they are in groups you aren't subscribed to.

I'd be interested to hear your feedback on these suggestions, as well as other ideas specific to increasing content visibility.

When I joined, I was excited by a site that aims to be something different to reddit. However, it seems like there's a large influx of people who seem to either want a reddit 2.0, or are influenced by reddit culture enough that it carries over here.

Maybe limit the invites from reddit for a bit until the current set of members have some time to settle in?

Right now there's a lot of discussion ongoing about community culture, building Tildes' attitudes as a community into something that is solid enough to withstand waves of new users without being disrupted too heavily by newcomers that have yet to learn the culture.

But what of mod culture?

This topic isn't only for those that have mod experience, there are plenty of users with experience talking to mods that have their own negative stories. Over on reddit the actions of one mod team affect the brand-image of all modteams on the entirety of reddit. One bad action by a mod that occurs in a default subreddit backed up by the other mods in that subreddit becomes (in the eyes of users) the behaviour of all "reddit moderators".

Often I see mods making things far far worse by being one of the most combative and hostile in-groups on the site. Talking to users in a manner that is best described as the way the worst teacher in school talked to teenagers as if they were 4 year olds, not listening to anything a user is actually saying and dismissing them outright because they're the user and they're the moderator. I understand some of it comes from difficult interactions with genuinely toxic individuals that waste enormous quantities of time better put towards better things. However what I see are moderators approaching every interaction with every user with criticism as if they are almost certainly the same-old toxic user. This is not the case.

This is exceptionally important here on Tildes because it won't be a mistake to take the actions of one moderator and have it colour your image of other moderators on the site. When the site holds responsibility for moderator actions due to oversight and control then the actions of all moderators are going to be considered the actions of the site and the rest of the mods.

So, how do we want our mods to talk to users? How do we want them to interact with users? What controls can be put in place to appreciate quality moderation? What can stop quippy mods that shut down valid discussion with 1 line reductive answers? Etc etc.

What is good moderation and what is a good moderator?

Personally what I try to apply to my own behaviour is to actually LISTEN to people and act as an equal, or at least present the appearance of listening. The thing that bothers people most feeling like something they care about is dismissed.

What are the many issues that you've see in moderator behaviour (in front and behind the scenes) and in what ways can Tildes go about things differently to stop them?

I'm sure this thread exists somewhere already but in my searching I couldn't find it. My hope is that we can brainstorm some good ideas in addition to what deimos has already proposed.

The recent discussion about lobste.rs reminded me of the fact that they use an invite system to limit the effectiveness of spammers and manage an invite tree to see the relationship of user accounts. A modified invite tree system would go a long way to help the trust system be more effective while not being stifling.

While it (unmodified strict invite system) would definitely make it more difficult for people to join the site the benefits of such a system cannot be overlook. Even a naive system where we would limit new accounts to require current users to "vouch" for new ones would have noticable benefits later on down the line. The main benefit of this is that users who are a source of consistently inviting troublesome accounts could be held responsible. The added benefit is that you would be a little more conscientious of the people you invite as it would affect your reputation as well.

The naive approach to this system would be a strict invite tree-based site. The only way you could get an new account on tildes is to get an invite from a current user of tildes. Like lobste.rs this woud be a very good deterrent but also (possibly unnecessarily) stifle growth. Such a system is a good starting point but I believe since a lot of effort will be put into making the trust system effective, we can do better if we put in some creative brainpower and work.

Possible ideas/tweaks for an invite tree-based system :
Parent account = person who invited user
Child account = person who was invited

• Users could create new accounts without an invite but would be severly limited in the rate they could post content (1 post a day), make comments (5 comments a day), etc. At any point they could be "vouched" for by a parent account with reputation (become child account) and those limitations would be lifted as though they had an invite from the beginning.
• User reputation would be impacted by child accounts (invite more, more likely to be punished as a result of children's bad behavior) to discourage individuals from becoming invite mills without repercussions.
• If a parent account is banned all child accounts would be demoted to "uninvited" status, child accounts would be encouraged to build up reputation to lose child status and become an independent (reputation-wise) parent account. Accounts would still be historically linked to parent accounts to pinpoint bad behavior down the line if it occurs.

Obviously a lot of effort has already been made by people a lot smarter than me to make such systems work and I think we can draw on that for tildes as well. I tried to look for some peer-reviewed papers and graduate level work about creating such a system but didn't come up with anything useful, perhaps you'll have better luck.

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?

I'm using an Android phone with Chrome 65.0.3325.109 installed.

There's an option in this browser to add a page to the home screen. This creates a shortcut on my home screen. When I tap on that shortcut, it opens the saved page in Chrome.

I had done this with Tildes. However, I deleted the shortcut and made it again. The behaviour has now changed.

Previously, this shortcut opened Tildes as a tab within Chrome. Now, it opens Tildes as its own separate "application". It's not in Chrome. That means I don't get the functionality that comes with Chrome, such as opening a link in a new Chrome tab. In this pseudo-application version, I'm stuck with only one window. I can't open other tabs. I can't simply copy links from one Chrome tab (news website) to another Chrome tab (Tildes).

Did you change something in the past week or so? Can you please change it back? I want a shortcut to a web page to open something that behaves like a web page, not a stand-alone application.

Edit: This is on Android. Just noticed that using the option from the dropdown menu works fine, clicking the dedicated button on the toolbar is the one that doesn't. (The house icon with the + in it)

https://s22.postimg.cc/s6q0jpskv/Screenshot_20180619-141729.jpg

https://s22.postimg.cc/y7npgths1/Screenshot_20180619-141735.jpg

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.

That's all.

The default "white" scheme is a little harsh on the eyes. I know a lot of other people like dark night themes as an alternative, but I dislike them strongly: seeing bright text on a dark background just doesn't work for me.

However, the Solarized Light theme is a nice compromise for me. The beige-y background takes the edge off the brightness. It also resembles a parchment look, which makes the place seem little bit classy.

I think it's good that there are a few theme choices built into the website, to give people options without having to install third-party extensions - and I like the 'Solarized Light' theme.

In ~comp, there's a post about optimizing a string parser, and one of the tags is "optimisation" instead of "optimization". This makes me curious, what's the official policy for regional spelling differences in tags? Will people be encouraged to use exclusively American or British spellings, or will the search feature (when it arrives) automatically link results for both if you search for either?

So I noticed the entire front page getting clogged with "question" type posts, ranging from "what are your favorite..." to "pls help me choose..." type posts. This might be mainly due to "activity" sorting (sorting by votes is a little better), but that's still the default and doesn't change the general dominance. I took this screenshot earlier and I did not see a non-question post without scrolling. None of them were from ~talk, either.

I know people have different views on this, but I remember from my brief time moderating that it's generally a good idea to restrict these types of posts, for the simple reason that people love to dump their "favorite" lists, which makes these types of threads dominate the frontpage, while they tend to produce always the same responses (intuition might suggest they produce great discussion but that's usually not the case). They're best pushed into specific subreddits (subgroups?).

I think this is a rather small and specific issue, but it might be a taste of future difficulties with voting/moderation. Banning content for being disruptive/abusive is one thing, but the best places I know for discussion also ban via more subtle rule sets. They take measures into account (often at the cost of facing a ton of backlash from users seeing their posts removed for "unfair" reasons) that keep one type of post from taking over the frontpage, potentially drowning out more interesting ones. I'm still trying to picture how this would translate from Reddit's moderation model to Tildes'.

One way would be to open up a subgroup for any sufficiently large category of posts and give moderation the option to move posts to a subgroup that people can opt-out from. Another is very diligent tagging and filtering. My concern is that neither could produce the complex, fine-grain type of moderation that distinguishes really good subreddits (yea, they exist!) from spammy ones. "Hide all posts tagged 'question'" could hide "what's your favorite...?" type posts but also posts that ask a really deep and interesting question. So would you filter "question && favorite"? That turns filtering into almost a scripting job. It doesn't seem reasonable to expect users to put this much effort into content filtering and it wouldn't help "shape" discussion culture, as the default (no filters?) would keep most users jumping from one "favorite game/band/movie/programming language" post to the next.

So far, it seems rules are set site-wide based on mostly removing blatantly off-topic, bad faith or trolling content. As the groups grow, however, I believe it's absolutely vital to also allow more subtle policies (think "only original sources for news articles" or "only direct links to movie trailers", etc). As groups branch off into further subgroups, it might suddenly also be reasonable to have very specific rules like "no more individual posts about hype topic X, keep discussion in the hub thread until Friday".

The only way I can see this work out (and maybe I lack imagination) is via a "meta" section for each group that allows whoever is decided to be part of the moderator group to decide upon and clearly formulate rules specific to it. It could be a wiki-like thing, it could involve voting on changes, maybe automation via "default tag filters", etc. Other users could see the policies mods have decided upon and maybe even "opt out" from moderation actions being considered in filtering, to have no reason to be paranoid about "censored" content.

Am I too pessimistic about tagging/voting solving this on its own? Am I too stuck on doing it "the reddit way" (albeit with hopefully better tools)? I just really believe it's subtle moderation like this that might make or break Tildes in the long run.

TL;DR: How would more subtle or group-specific moderation policies be decided? Just tags+votes? Should there be a "meta" sections for each group where mods can agree upon specific rules?

I have 5 of those in my sidebar, but I don't know anybody who might want to join Tildes.
Assuming invite codes are finite tickets into the platform, is there a way to put them back in the invite codes pool?

Is there a way to do it without the invitations being linked to my profile, considering that I won't be the one choosing the recipients of the invite codes? Or do I just ignore the codes?