What's the difference between ~comp and ~tech?
They seem very similar
They seem very similar
Bit of a non-standard daily discussion again, but today I thought I'd post another inspiration for some of the decisions made for Tildes. I did this a couple of weeks ago with Clay Shirky's "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" as well, if you missed that one.
The one I'm going to post today is a talk by Maciej Ceglowski (who runs the minimal bookmarking service Pinboard). I linked it in a discussion here related to privacy recently, because I think it's a great talk that goes over some of the dangers of tech companies casually collecting so much data on their users:
That's a link to his slides and a transcript, but a video of him actually doing the talk is also available on YouTube here (20 mins long) if you'd like to watch/listen.
Let me know if you have any thoughts about privacy topics (ones covered in the talk or otherwise), or questions about my approach towards privacy/data-collection on Tildes.
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.
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.
Users can upload gpg public keys for DMs and Clear Sign comment bodies. Honestly, a very very low priority feature request, but what is the initial feeling on something like this?
I happened to take a look at Metafilter today, and noticed that they were linking to this post from last week in their header: State of the Site: Metafilter financial update and future directions.
It's an interesting post, even as someone that only has vague knowledge about Metafilter. There's a lot there, including a ton of comments that I haven't even started reading. So I thought it would make an interesting topic for today, since Metafilter has quite a few things in common with Tildes: it's unapologetically very minimal/old-school (it's almost 20 years old), is fairly small and closed (and isn't trying to be huge), gets a lot of its income from its users, and so on.
So for those of you that do have experience with Metafilter, are there particular things that you think Tildes should learn from Metafilter or try to do differently? For people with less knowledge, is there anything in that post or the discussion that stands out to you as good things to keep in mind?
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?
Given the role such threads have played in Reddit's community engagement and publicity, what will fill a similar role here?
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
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.
This is great for me since websites where the background is white usually strain my eyes! It sucks having to use a browser extension to try to change colours
As I mentioned in a couple recent posts (about standardizing tags as well as starting some more moderation), I'm going to start re-tagging and making some other changes to posts now.
So that you can see when changes are made (either by me, the post's author, or someone else), topics now have a "Topic Log" that's only shown in the sidebar when changes have been made. It's collapsed by default, and you'll see a title like "Topic Log (3)" that you can click on to see the log of changes. I've added and removed a tag in this post so you can see what it looks like.
For now, this only shows tag changes and lock/unlock, but I'll add title changes and moving between groups shortly. Edit: This does not include edits to the post, you can already see when a post was last edited (if it was), but I don't intend to add more detail or a log for that.
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
I had a look at r/tildes and there was nothing, don't think there is a search option here either. Any estimations for beta, going public? marketing?
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.
I can reply to a comment but I can't find a way to add a top level comment.
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?
Should the site show how many registered users there are, how many unique visitors there are, and how many people are subscribed to the different branches?
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?
It's another busy day - Tildes is getting a fair amount of attention in /r/TrueReddit, so I've been trying to reply to questions in there (and have also ended up inviting quite a few more people as well). We've also already got multiple good discussions going on in ~tildes on a whole bunch of topics, so for the "official" daily discussion today I'm going to try doing something a little different.
I read a lot about online communities—there are all sorts of articles, books, talks, research, etc. that I've read that have helped me figure out what the major issues were, and how we could try to do things differently with Tildes. So instead of writing something myself today, I'm going to try linking to one of these, and encourage people to talk about the topics that it covers. If this works out well, this might be an interesting thing to do once a week or so: I'll post a link to something that's influenced the plans for Tildes and see what you all think of it.
I'll start it off today with what I would probably consider my single favorite talk about online communities of all time. It's worth noting that this is from 2003, which is before almost all of the major platforms we have today were even started:
I know that this is in an alpha stage so we can't really expect anytime soon, but is there any app which could, for the time being help everyone out regarding this
Am I the only one who isn’t noticing much of a difference between reddit and tildes at the moment? The random alt right talking points popping up in the most innocuous of places is skeeving me the fuck out.
I am an occasional lynx/elinks user and I only have a single complaint about Tildes that prevents me from reading it using those browsers. Threaded comments don't display properly, since the CSS support of these browsers is non existent (lynx) or poor (elinks), the only way to make threaded comments display nice is by rendering them as ul lists. Is it possible to wrap the current article elements inside ul/li elements to make them display nice in text-only browsers?
For comparison, I can get them to display nice on reddit using the old mobile interface. In Tildes threads look flat (those comments are supposed to be nested, link to original thread) and it is difficult to know who is replying to who.
There have been many, many, many threads over the past few weeks in which users (some new, some with a few posts under their belts) ask questions or make suggestions about items that are explicitly discussed in the documentation. Additionally, the documentation contains a lot of thoughtful items discussing the goals of the site and the mechanics for achieving those goals. The documentation is an integral part of this community, yet many people don't seem to be reading it.
How can the community help ensure that users read and understand the documentation prior to becoming a member of the community? A potential solution could be to have a short quiz based on the documentation, which would ensure that users at least skim it.
Any other ideas?
Came here from /r , where anyone as far as I know can create their own group (sub). I am curious about how this will be done with tildes.
Follow-up: an idea occurs to me that many groups (~lifestyle or ~comp for example) may need to encompass several sub-groups (mobile, linux, gaming, etc). It would be really cool if you went to ~comp, saw summary of all subgroups, then say, got more specific and went to ~comp~linux, then to ~comp~linux~distros... i.e. nested sub-groups. I think if we did this, we could essentially eliminate creation of new "groups" and instead, just create new sub-groups of existing groups. That would maintain the basic structure of the site while allowing expansion.
Thoughts?
One thing I ended up realizing is that for e.g. code challenges in ~comp, there could be threads with a lot of code blocks that could easily take up a ton of screen real-estate. Something like the following isn't so bad:
/*
This is a short multi-line example that doesn't
take up much screen real-estate at all.
*/
But, what if the average comment for a particular topic has several of these with 100 lines or more? This could make navigating the comments really cumbersome as the number of comments grows. In the case of code challenges, lengthy code snippets could be very common, and collapsing the comment threads may not be the desirable course of action--in collapsing the thread for navigational convenience, you lose the ability to view and contribute to discussions. Hosting the code elsewhere risks links expiring or becoming lost or broken, and it feels like a clunky workaround to try to avoid inconveniencing other users.
With that in mind, what are your thoughts on having these code blocks display in a collapsed state by default with only a preview of the code block showing? Is there any support for this idea? If so, should this be implemented as part of Tildes itself or as a client-side extension of some sort? Are there any concerns about this?
(If there's general support for the idea, but opposition toward adding it to the Tildes code base, I may get off my lazy ass and try to hack something together.)
Over on ~creative, the idea of a regular photo challenge came up, which I think is a great idea and I'm looking forward to having a go at. But I'm notoriously bad at remembering to keep track of stuff like that.
What might be useful to help solve that problem would be the ability to subscribe with notifications. So I can get a notification - perhaps in 'unread', perhaps in a separate area - when a post is made with the tag creative.photochallenge.annouce or in the group ~creative.photochallenge, meaning I don't forget about that week's challenge announcement.
This could be useful for other things you want to keep track of: music.newreleases or hobbies.geocaching or whatever particular thing you're slightly more interested in than just being subscribed to it.
I'm sure occasional self promoted content is actually fine (asking for feedback on music, games, etc), but I've been a part of several subreddits that had to implement rules where you had to split 50/50 linking to your own content and participating in the community (non link comments). This was to curb people from ONLY posting links to their own youtube videos and nothing else. Content itself was fine, usually, but as you can probably tell, smaller subreddits didn't like being treated as ad spaces for youtubers that didn't contribute anything else. It's not a big deal for larger communities, but a real one for niche ones.
How does tildes expect to deal with this? Is it even an issue? Was this discussed (couldn't find any threads by skimming)?
I like the idea of the site being entirely dependent on text with not a single graphic downloaded. I do like the little logo in the top left, but I think it would be even cooler if it was literally just the plain-text symbol ~.
This would also apply to the small little icons next a link post, as the site to which the post takes you can simply be read below the post itself.
I know the website already loads super fast which I am very grateful for, but I think a purely text-based site would promote the overall discussion focused goal of tildes as there would be no graphics in the way. I may be biased towards this style of website, but I think it's worth seeing if other users would like the site to become text-only. This is one main reasons I disliked the new Reddit design, the old site was nice because the graphics were kept to a minimum and therefore more of the screen could be used to show the content.
I'm falling behind on a few things (open-sourcing, multiple updates/fixes, replying to emails/messages/etc.), so I'm going to be a bit lazy with the next few daily discussions. There are various interesting discussions going on in ~tildes as well, so I think there's plenty even without an in-depth daily post for a bit.
This is a very simple one: feel free to give any general feedback or ask questions, especially things that you feel are minor and probably not really worth starting a new topic about.
I appreciate any thoughts as always, and thanks for all your patience on the things I'm behind on.
This is the first of several updates coming soon to make the topic-tagging system more functional, since it's been only informational up until this point.
You can now filter a topic listing down to showing only posts with a particular tag by clicking on that tag in the listing. It will affect the current listing you're on, whether that's your home page or inside a group. So for example, clicking a "facebook" tag on your home page will take you to this page - a list of all topics with the tag "facebook" in your subscriptions. Doing it from inside ~tech would go to this page instead, which is "facebook"-tagged topics inside only ~tech.
One thing to note is that (as mentioned in the mechanics page), tags can be hierarchical and this filtering supports that. For example, filtering to "rock" in ~music will also show a post I made yesterday tagged "rock.progressive".
Let me know if you notice any oddities with it or have any feedback about how it works.
TL:DR: I can't log in to Tildes from Links browser. Other websites are fine.
I'm not the most computer-literate person (especially when it comes to the Internet). I've been getting into Linux and Arch lately, so I'm a little bit better at it now. So I've been trying to learn text browsers (my choice is Links), and although it's been going fine, I can't log in to Tildes. Other websites like Google or Reddit I can log in, but not Tildes for some reason. I enter my username, password, but then it just takes me to the 'we're invite only' page. When I press 'register', it doesn't even lead to register page, it puts me to the 'we're invite only' page again.
I know there's some developers here, do you know what could be the problem?
After adding the ability to filter to a single tag yesterday, the next piece is active now: you can set up filters that will make it so that topics with specific tags aren't shown in your lists by default (but it's easy to toggle the filters off and see them). The filters are in the sidebar, hidden by default, but you can click the "Filtered topic tags" label to show the list and access the button that will take you to the settings page to change your filtered list.
A few notes:
I think that should mostly cover it, let me know what you think. I know this isn't super useful yet because tags aren't very consistent overall, but the next step (today or tomorrow) will be to make it so that other users can edit tags to fix incorrect/improper tagging. I'll start a daily discussion in a bit related to that topic as well.
Now that we've got viewing specific tags and filtering out tags, to make these most useful we need to start making tagging more consistent. So today I want to talk about some general tagging approaches and figuring out some standards.
Are there particular tags that we should try to keep consistent across all groups? One example: I think it would be good to have one like ask
or survey
that goes on all topics that are "what's your favorite [something]?" or "what are you playing/watching/reading this week?", etc. That way those types of topics can easily be filtered (or focused on) across all groups. Are there any other ones that will probably be used in multiple groups that we should try to standardize?
Other than that, any other suggestions or thoughts about how we should generally try to organize tagging would be useful. Links to other sites that do tagging well (and/or have good defined guidelines somewhere) would be great as well.
I think it's great and a very worthy goal that Tildes wants to be a place for good discussion and not let asshole communities form and fester. I think part of the way to reach this goal is making an effort to include minority voices here, so that we don't fall into the same straight white middle class male echo chamber trap.
Some ideas are posting on subreddits like TwoX, LGBT, and subreddits for specific minority communities.
Getting a diverse group of folks involved now - while we are in the crucial community building phase - will pay off big dividends down the road.
I was wanting to look into how to make one for this website because I'd like to browse on my phone. We got a lot of tech people here. What do you think?
Edit: I know it's not likely now, but I mean in the future. Is this something we could do when this turns open-source?
Ok so I have been really interested in Tildes and yesterday I was looking at the /r/Tildes subreddit and low and behold I was in time to comment in the invite thread and get one. This was great I have been really excited to see what it was like.
So I hope on and get familiar with the layout, look at some posts and some comments. Really digging it, I want to say it has a minimal vibe but that is only because I'm used to so many sites having a gajillion buttons, notifications, chats, garbage, ect. It's clean for lack of a better word.
I decided I should contribute to the community and see what posting is like. I remembered a simple joke which gave me a chuckle the other day:
'I like my Women like I like my golf scores. In the 80's with a slight handicap.'
With the hectics of the real world, I didn't have much longer to look around any longer and had to go.
When I checked back later people seemed against the posts, after reading the comments I was conflicted. It seemed like such a tame joke and people were saying they didn't want to see jokes on Tilde. I had a bit of a think and realised the problem, of course, that one post by itself is relatively harmless and ok but if you allow posts along those lines it becomes very spammy which is exactly why I don't like reddit as much anymore.
Jokes are a relatively low effort post, you could come up with several poor ones in a minute, that's what twitter is for. However, if people come and see that jokes are the norm it will likely encourage them to post them as well, and it resorts to a huge unbalance in quality posts.
I am in favour of removing all kinds of jokes that come in the form of a standalone post (if they are in the comments I feel they should remain ok). Some were saying they were ok with a dedicated ~jokes however I thought about it and feel this would be a poor decision, it still leads to people like me who can easily make low effort posts. The problem is that the number of good jokes will be rare in comparison to bad jokes it would be a net loss in terms of quality, sure you could moderate out the poor jokes but humour is subjective and that leads to all sorts of opinion based complications that are best left alone.
While I myself agree with this sentiment I still posted a dumb joke. Why? Because I didn't know. Admittedly only 4 people voted on the post and the comments aginst the post were much higher than the post itself it is still essentially spam on the feed. (The only reson for not deleting it is so others can see its negative response). Now I have posted this im very aware not to do this. However I still made this mistake while Tildes is a closed invite system, when it is no longer closed off it could be very easy for low effort posts to take over. The community needs to make sure we inform these people who make these posts and don't vote on them, or we should inform the users much better about what tildes stands for.
Just my thoughts, interested to know what the community thinks.
My original dumb joke post
I enjoy having a consistent colorscheme for all the applications I use and right now I'm using solarized dark since it seems to be one of the most widely available. I was happy to see that it's one of the official colorschemes for Tildes and I like how nicely it fits with my Qutebrowser colors: https://i.imgur.com/bXzTjtT.png
Hi there. The account recovery page mentions that password resets are performed by emailing a specific Tildes address from your own specified recovery address. But as far as I can see, that Tildes reset address that's supposed to be sent to.. is unlisted anywhere on the website. I could be mistaken, of course, but in any case it's not easily visible. Also unlisted is what string should be placed in the Subject field, alongside any body content this sent email should contain.
As to the reason for the inquiry:
So when I registered for Tildes, I generated a password and stored it in my KeePass database like a responsible person. Except... like an idiot, I restarted my computer at some point without remembering to actually save my KP database (I promise this is only like the second time this has happened in 2 years or so), so I'm in the curious position of still being logged in but not actually being able to change my password. Naturally, I explored account recovery options, and registered my email address with the recovery page, but as I described above, I can't seem to find the address I'm supposed to send an email to in order to reset my password as part of the recovery process.
While I also appreciate the ability to read things without marking them as read, it took me a minute to figure out how to mark things as read and now I find it more of a burden than anything. Would it be possible to implement functionality to mark things as read if you click on the message in your inbox?
Sometimes I even reply out of my inbox and it keeps it unread. While I sometimes keep emails I've replied to as unread at work, I can't see any reason I'd want to do that on a social media website. Maybe that's another functionality that could be implemented?
We've had a few topics related to recruiting new users come up over the last few days. I won't link to them specifically (and at least one has been deleted as well), but they've included ones that recommend relying less on reddit, seeking out more people of different demographics, and a few other recommendations related to how and where we should be looking for more users.
So for this topic, I wanted to ask to see if people have specific recommendations for reaching other potential users. Reddit is definitely the simplest from my perspective, because I have a fair amount of name-recognition there and also a lot of connections with mods and users. I'd love to reach out to other groups of people as well, but that often comes off as pretty spammy from someone that doesn't have a pre-existing relation, so I'm not sure how it could be done well.
So any recommendations are appreciated, and I've also given all existing users 5 invite codes again, so feel free to invite some people if there's anyone you think would be a good fit. You can get them here (and as always, feel free to message me if you want more): https://tildes.net/invite
Also, I haven't done it yet, but after this discussion the other day, I think I'm going to stop showing info about who users were invited by. Multiple people are saying that the current situation is preventing them from inviting others, and I don't think that's a good thing. I'll make another post in ~tildes.official once I've done that (should be today).
Tags [noise, troll, flame, off-topic] got abused and used as an "I disagree" function. What if Tildes requires an explaination/argument for why the comment/post is either noise, off-topic, trolling/flaming. This way we can hold taggers responsible and accountable for the tags and to some degree see if the tag is reasonable or misused. All the reasons for the tags can be gathered on a "discussion" page for the thread, a bit like Wikipedia's talk pages for each entry.
If you've made it this far I'd love to hear your thoughs, reactions and critiques.
And for those who've made it this far: Enjoy this photogenic cat
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?