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, I've started developing syntax highlighting, but I'm unable to connect to Tildes on localhost. It's running, I can connect to Prometheus, but not to Tildes. I use Ubuntu.

I know there are few people here who already contributed to Tildes, how do you connect to Tildes?

• Firefox shows Secure Connection Failed, even after adding exception in about:config for domains localhost, *, 127.0.0.1, both with and without port, I even tried adding https:// before them.
• Qutebrowser displays nothing
• Chromium displays ERR_CONNECTION_RESET (not something like insecure connection)
• Chrome displays ERR_CONNECTION_RESET (not something like insecure connection)
• Curl displays OpenSSL SSL_connect: SSL_ERROR_SYSCALL in connection to localhost:4443
• wget displays Unable to establish SSL connection.
• lynx displays Unable to connect to remote host.

Could someone tell me how to config Firefox / install certificate for Tildes on localhost / move Tildes to http?

Thank you

Edit: I tried setting firefox security exception in a different way and this happened.

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"

Lots of new folks seem to be coming in these past days, so I wanted to make a post that compiles some useful things to know, commonly asked questions, and a general idea of tildes history (short though it may be). Please keep in mind that tildes is still in Alpha, and many features that are usually present such as repost detection haven't been implemented yet.

Settings

First of all, check out the settings page if you haven't yet. It's located in your user profile, on the right sidebar. There are different themes available, the account default is the 'white' theme, which you can change. I recommend setting up account recovery in case you forget your password, and toggle marking new comments to highlight new comments in a thread. There are more features available but you should go look in the settings yourself.

Posting

You can post a topic by navigating to a group and clicking on the button in the right sidebar. Tildes uses markdown, if you are not familiar with it check the text formatting doc page. Please tag your post so it is easier for other people to find, and check out the topic tagging guidelines. Some posts have a topic log in the sidebar that shows what changes were done to the post since it was posted. You can see an example here. Some people have the ability to add tags to posts, edit titles, and move posts to different groups. They were given the ability by Deimos, see this post.

Topic Tags

You can find all posts with the same tag by clicking on a tag on a post, which will take you to an url like https://tildes.net/?tag=ask, where ask is the tag you clicked on. Replace ask with whatever tag you want to search for. You can also filter tags within a group like this: https://tildes.net/~tildes?tag=discussion, and it will only show you posts within that group. Clicking on a tag while you are in a group achieves the same effect.

You can also filter out posts with specific tags by going to your settings and defining topic tag filters.

Comment Tags

Comment tags are a feature that was present in the early days of tildes, but was removed because of abuse. There were five tags you can tag on someone else's comment: joke, noise, offtopic, troll, flame. The tags have no effect on sorting or other systematic features; they were only used to inform the user on the nature of a comment. The tags would show up along with the number of people who applied them, like this: [Troll] x3, [Noise] x5

People used these tags as a downvote against comments they disliked, and because the tags appeared at the top of a comment in bright colors, they often would bias the user before they read the comment. The abuse culminated in the first person banned on the website, and the comment tags were disabled for tweaking.

As of September 07, 2018, the comment tags have been re-enabled and are experimented with. Any account over a week old will have access to this ability. The tagging button is located on the centre bottom of a comment. You cannot tag your own comment. Here are the comment tagging guidelines from the docs.

Currently, the tags are: exemplary, joke, offtopic, noise, malice. The exemplary tag can only be applied once every 8 hours, and requires you to write an anonymous message to the author thanking them for their comment. Similarly, applying the malice tag requires a message explaining why the comment is malicious. The tags have different effects on the comments, which you can read about here, and here.

Search

The search function is fairly primitive right now. It only includes the title and text of posts and their topic tags.

Default sorting

The current default sorting is activity, last 3 days in the main page, activity, all time in individual groups. Activity sort bumps a post up whenever someone replies to it. 'Last 3 days' mean that only posts posted in the past 3 days will be shown. You can change your default sort by choosing a different sort method and/or time period, and clicking the 'set as default' button that will appear on the right.

Bookmarks

You can bookmark posts and comments. The "bookmark" button is on the bottom of posts and comments. Your bookmarked posts can be viewed through the bookmark page in your user profile sidebar. Note: to unbookmark a post, you have to refresh first.

Extensions

@Emerald_Knight has compiled a list of user created extensions and CSS themes here: https://gitlab.com/Emerald_Knight/awesome-tildes

In particular, I found the browser extension Tildes Extended by @crius and @Bauke very useful. It has nifty features like jumping to new comments, markdown preview and user tagging.

Tildes Development

Tildes is open source and if you want to contribute to tildes development, this is what you should read: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

For those who can't code, you might still be interested in the issue boards on Gitlab. It contains known issues, features being worked on, and plans for the future. If you have a feature in mind that you want to suggest, try looking there first to see if others have thought of it already, or are working on it.

Tildes' Design and Mechanics

In other words, how is it going to be different from reddit? Below are some summaries of future mechanics and inspiration for tildes' design. Note: most of the mechanics have not been implemented and are subject to change and debate.

1. Tildes will not have conventional moderators. Instead, the moderation duties will be spread to thousands of users by the trust system. [Trust people, but punish abusers]. More info on how it works and why it is designed that way:

   • Docs on future mechanics
   • Possible levels of trust that users can acquire
   • A long rant
   • Bubble-up mechanics: 1 , 2
   • A group is it's worst own enemy
   • If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault
   • On a technicality
   • This neat game about trust and game theory

2. Instead of subreddits, there are groups, a homage to Usenet. Groups will be organized hierarchically, the first and only subgroup right now is ~tildes.official. Groups will never be created by a single user, instead, they will be created based on group interest ^{[citation needed]}. For example, if a major portion of ~games consists of DnD posts and they are drowning out all the other topics, a ~games.dnd subgroup would be created - either by petition, algorithm, or both^{[citation needed]} - to contain the posts, and those who don't like DnD can unsubscribe from ~games.dnd. There is currently no way to filter out a subgroup from the main group.

3. Tildes is very privacy oriented. See: Haunted by data

Tildes History/Commonly answered questions

I recommend you check out this past introduction post by @Amarok before anything else, it's a bit outdated but contains many interesting discussions and notable events that have happened on tildes. @Bauke also tracks noteworthy events each month on his website https://til.bauke.xyz/. Also see the FAQ in the docs. Other than that, the best way for you to get an idea of how tildes changed over time is to go to ~tildes.official and look at all the past daily discussions.

Below are some scattered links that I found interesting, informative, or important:

• There are 2 announced bans, you can read about them here, and here. There have been more bans since, just unannounced. You can tell if a user is banned from their user page: there will be no private message button. An example. This differs from deleted accounts, which have all content removed and say "This user has deleted their account". An example. Note that when an account is deleted, whether all posts are deleted or not seems to depend on the user's choice. There is no official commentary, but there has been examples of deleted user comments left intact. Example: deleted user, intact post.

• The first group proposal, and the resulting group additions.

• You used to be able to see who invited a user on their profile, but now you can't.

• Past introduction posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

• The very first post on tildes: https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/2/welcome_to_tildes

• The first page of ~tildes.official, if you want to start reading from the beginning (there really should be a chronological sorting option): https://tildes.net/~tildes.official?after=5k

• What should the names of Tildes users be?

• There used to be comment tags, but they were removed because of abuse, and now they are re-enabled again.

• Some tradition that has started to develop:

  • programming challenges

  • music weekly threads

  • black mirror watch thread

  • what are you reading these days?

  • what have you been watching/reading this week? (Anime/Manga)

  • the "layperson's introduction" series

• How do we fund tildes?

• How to handle account deletion

• Anonymous posting

• Demographics survey: year 0 and results, year 0.5 and results

• How should we deal with low effort content?

• Why is the comment box at the bottom?

• How does Tildes feel about bots?

• The Tildes unofficial Minecraft servers: 1 , 2

• The Tildes unofficial wiki (now closed due to inactivity and spambots)

• How will Tildes work with bans?

• Should we have a mascot?

• Scraping Tildes/Statistics

If anyone thinks of a link that should be included here, post a comment with the link and I'll edit it in.

Markdown source for this post: https://pastebin.com/Kbbh7pYU (outdated, and probably will not be updated unless someone explicitly asks for it)

To the rest: have fun!

Do you think it should be a thing or not? Explain your answer. I personally don't think it should be a thing because it indirectly encourages reposts. I also think a thread can always be relevant as long as people are bringing new information to the table.

So I just posted a comment in a month-old topic and it shot to the top of the Activity tab. I'm still new here and forgot that that would happen.

Is there any stance for or against necroposting on Tildes? I looked around for a search feature but didn't find one, so apologies if this has been discussed before.

If it hasn't been discussed before, what do you think? My gut instinct is that it's bad, but only because I've been conditioned to think that way from long ago when forums reigned before social media. Are there any downsides? And if necroposting is allowed, will it indirectly promote a kind of "NO DUPLICATE THREADS!" culture?

Hi there! I do not know how to program anything and I am writing this from my android- has anyone created a night/dark mode with a black screen and light lettering yet? If so, please post the link!

I suffer from chronic migraines- it would likely help more than just me!😄

Just an idea. I feel like the charm of certain sites or products is the charm that they have a certain, identifiable anthropomorphic mascot (e.g. the Android Bugdroid, Reddit Snoo). I wanted to know if people here think it could be a good addition to Tildes, or if it seems unnecessary.

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.

I have a question about the technicalities of tagging, now that this ability is going to be spread around. I don't understand how concatenated tags work. I've seen occasional instances of tags that look like "abc.xyz", and I've seen technical discussions about tags like this, but I've never really been clear about what this does. What does a tag like "abc.xyz" mean? How does it work?

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?

I've been using the Hermit app for Android to make a lite app for Tildes. It's awesome. Just one main problem. Because of some Android limitation shortcuts aren't allowed to be put in the app drawer. I wanted to keep it there to make everything more organized. Does anyone know if it's possible to make an apk (so it can go in the app drawer) that will just link to my Tildes lite app?

As of right now of course, users can not create their own groups, however this may change in the future as is stated here.

What do the users think about this? Although tildes is similar to reddit, it's obviously not got the same goals in mind, and I think it makes sense to keep groups up to the admins.

So there is a basic flair in use for the nsfw and spoiler There was also a recent discussion about using tags to warn about content in posts https://tildes.net/~tildes/50o/trigger_warning_tag_special_flair

Would it help to have buttons for the common "standard" tags next to the Tags entry on the post creation page? So e.g. there could be an nsfw-button and a spoiler-button below the text field

• The buttons could be styled with the same flair as the corresponding tags
• The buttons could simply append the tag to the text in the field.

A few plus points:

• This would help encourage people to use these important tags correctly (they will be reminded visually that the tags exist when creating a post, and clicking the button is easy which will reduce the effort required)
• Also it would avoid typos where e.g. someone types "nfsw" and the flair will not be applied (fyi: I had to re-read that 3 times to be sure I correctly mis-typed the word)

And some potential downsides:

• Might it encourage people to just click the buttons and skip correctly tagging their post?
• If more of these "standard" tags were added it might get cluttered

What do you think?

The only benefit that I can think of is that it gives users a rough idea of how good a post or comment is, which in my opinion, is not a very good thing. It prompts us to judge a post based on how many votes it has, when we should judge the post based on its actual content instead. It doesn't do a very good job as a quality meter either. A post with 12 votes is not that much "better" than a post with 10 votes but seeing those number, it sure does feel like it. On the other hand, is a post at 100k ten times better than a post at 10k? Voting as a way to sort content is fine as the sorting is like a suggestion, the number next to it however makes it feel like a popularity contest.

I know this is a very petty thing to complain about, just want to know if anyone else feels the same way. Personally, I've caught myself getting jealous when my submission "only" have 2 upvotes while also thinking of comments with higher vote count as more trustworthy before actually read them.

By user invites I mean the invites that are given to Tildes' users which they then can give out to their friends. Personally, I think more often than not they're sort of gifted to strangers online without much consideration or deliberance behind the decision. And the user receiving it hasn't done much to “earn” it.

Now, I'm sorry if this sounds like an obnoxious case of gatekeeping. But I think there's a certain beauty to checking the sub daily waiting for the next official round of invites. And that's the kind of user I'd want to interact with, rather than someone who just accidentally stumbled upon r/tildes, opened the sub, found an invite thread active and got one without having even read the docs page.

What do you think?

Often when I go to post, I have to check first what the most commonly used tag is for the thing I want to post. There is quite a bit of tag duplication/proliferation. Granted, this could also be dealt with in part by suggesting tags as the user types, but:

What do you think about having a specific set of tags to choose from, and when there are a handful of posts about a specific topic, new tags are added by administrators? This is essentially the way Lobsters works, and I think it works pretty well.

On one hand, this could reduce tag proliferation, but on the other hand, it could also corral people into only posting about certain topics that are sufficiently similar to existing tags.

I wanted to make another post asking about podcast recommendations. I last asked this 3 months ago, is it worth just reviving discussion on that post, or at this point is it better to just make a new post?

I know Tildes values long-lasting discussion, but when a post is that old, isn't there value in starting over, especially since there are a lot of new people who haven't answered before and might benefit from a bit more visibility on their answers?

Probably most appropriate for the "Activity" tab.

I would love to be able to click some kind of toggle that only showed topics that I've started and topics that I've commented in. Not sure how taxing this would be on the server, but figured I'd throw it out there for consideration. If it's been suggested before, sorry. No search function yet!

~games would seem to be more about gaming rather than development. I can see ~comp being the better option but it seems to be more about programming in general. There's also ~hobbies, which is perhaps the best place when talking about amateur stuff which can include game development, but not necessarily.

I'm mostly curious to see if there is a community of game developers here

This feature already exists to a large extent thanks to Deimos's implementation of discovery by clicking a topic's tag. However, it might also be useful to list all of the topic tags aside from specific topics as a user may not find a topic with their favorite tags very easily. As I understand it, Deimos wants to keep the group list from growing too quickly, and this would allow another way to discover one's micro-interests.

Mockup of the 1 button added in the sidebar.

On click of that button the user would go to a page similar to https://tildes.net/groups - but it would list topic tags. In place of subscribers count, there could be a total count of topics with that tag. In place of subscribe/un-subscribe buttons could be Filter/Un-filter buttons. I think that the list should be sorted by count of related topics, descending.
¹ This new tildes.tld/tags page would likely require pagination, and maybe a text input for a super-simple filter/search that would just change the SQL query where clause.

Once the user clicks the name of the topic tag the user would go to the existing page tildes.tld/?tag=tag-name. example: https://tildes.net/?tag=linux

What do you all think of this? Any other ideas on implementation? Any issues I did not consider?

As in my last post in this group, please vote on the comment which best reflects your views on the feature. Then add any comments as to why you feel that way, or qualifications on your vote in a reply. If you have questions or ideas prior to voting, please make another top-level comment.

^{If you want me to add an Ambivalent vote, let me know, but I thought that it was not that useful of a metric last time.}

edit: added ¹

edit2: Took a while to bring it back home, but:

The impetus for making this feature proposal was this new user's topic. This user was looking for specific content which did exist on Tildes, but it was not obvious to them. It was only organized by tag, and they were looking for it by group. How were they to find it in the current top-level org? Specifically, here is my comment that relates to this feature.

Recently, I remembered reading a thread on Tildes about CCleaner that convinced me to stop using it. I wanted to find the thread to see what the suggested alternatives were. I can't see any search functionality on the site and it seems laborious to browse by tags. I tried doing a site search on Duck Duck Go "ccleaner site: https://tildes.net" with no results.

I don't know if this has been brought up before, I can't find any information. I looked in the Docs to see if its mentioned anywhere but didn't come up with anything. Is there a plan to include search functionality on tildes?

For those of us have our browsers set to clear all cookies upon exit find it annoying to login in the middle of the night only to get our eyes blasted with the white theme. Settings need to dug around with to switch is to something darker every time. This could be avoided by having the server remember the theme preferences of the users.

If this is something that's already discussed previously or planned to be worked on internally, please correct me below. Thank you

I had a thought, which I'm not sure I agree with, but figured it would be a good conversation.

So much of our social discourse, and exploitation of our social platforms, can be associated with anonymity. Given the divisiveness of our times, it feels like it's almost a pre-req for a platform like this (this has already been discussed in other threads).

A slightly different question: Is there ever a place for folks that want to announce their identity, and go through something like a Twitter verification process? This could feed into the future trust/reputation feature.

One rule I really like on askreddit is that you can't out your own answer within the body of your question post. Rather, you're encouraged to answer in a comment. It prevents soap-boxing and "story time", and allows discussion of your answer to be nicely compartmentalised from discussions of everyone else's answers.

While I don't at all think this should be a rule for ask-style posts on Tildes, I think it's a great guideline. I always try to do this myself, and I thought I should put it out there and see if it's something the rest of our community would adopt. Thoughts?

See image for what I mean: https://imgur.com/BGzLKGq

Basically, it can be hard to track new comments made in an old topic. In the recent one about tulpas, I checked in every so often to follow ongoing discussions but had to keep skimming the entire topic every time just to spot the new comments.

If there could be a kind of "recent comments" in the sidebar, it would save a lot of time and make it much easier to stay on top of evolving discussions: just click the comments you haven't seen.

Hi,

for example, on reddit the prefered image hosting is imgur (at least, most of the non reddit hosted images are hosted on imgur).
What is the prefered hosting here?
If not yet, will we have a hosting for tildes(so that users can send images directly to tildes)?

Is there some configuration that will cause links on ~tildes to open new tabs. Is this user configurable (Firefox on Gentoo) or is it server configurable, or account preference configurable? I'd like to be able to click once and have the content open in a new tab so I can return to the main page without having to reload.

This is a bit odd. Recently I've thought typing into tildes input boxes sometimes felt laggy but today I noticed my fan spinning up when I loaded the site (until today it's been so hot my fan was spinning all day). I checked Chrome's task manager and yes, tildes.net is using 100% cpu. If I wait 2-3 minutes, usage will drop back down to the expected 0-1% and remain there. This happens every pageload. If I load a page, wait for the cpu use to drop, then either reload that page or click an in-site link, the cpu ramps up again for 2-3 minutes.

Chrome Version 68.0.3440.106 (Official Build) (64-bit) on Debian testing, which is up to date as of midnight GMT 10/08/18. I even rebooted my machine just to be extra sure. Happens on all tildes pages. No other site that I regularly visit seems to do this.

Posted here rather than to the issue tracker for visibility, to see if this is affecting anyone else before raising an issue about it.

If tildes wants to foster deeper discussions I wonder if there should be some mechanism for linking off to external background knowledge. This could possibly be semi-automatic based on the containing tilde & topic tags.

If we end up with news discussions around topics like say Israel & Palestine in order for anyone to begin to understand wtf is going on (and so reasonably discuss the current news topic) there's a load of relevant history. It seems like it would be nice to have a link so that a topic from poltics.news with the tag Israel could automatically get some further reading links.

Wikipedia has the advantage that it's another user driven org so this could have the added benefit of motivating people to fact check & improve it.

Hi,

It would be nice to have a privacy aware youtube/vimeo/etc video player (by this i mean, not the official one), not sure if this is feasible, but it would be a really good feature (i remember that there was a website that implemented an opensource player, but i don't recall the name)

This would help, but not completely fix, two issues that seem to be inherent in the Tildes design:

\1 Voting is mostly treated as an "I agree" button. You'll see this in pretty much any thread where there's back and forth discussion. When you reply to a comment you're implicitly saying "this comment is worth engaging with," in which case an upvote is warranted.

Same thing for topics: leaving a top-level comment should force an upvote for the topic.

\2 It encourages non-engagement with comments that maybe shouldn't be engaged with. For example, one hot topic of this week has been the calling out of low-effort posts and how the community ought to chill out a bit. By forcing an upvote, it discourages replying to said posts, which makes it more likely that such comments will be ignored and drift to the bottom of a topic.

Edit: Whether this idea is implemented or not, as long as Voting = "I Agree" this site will become an even bigger echo chamber than Reddit because there are no downvotes to balance out the "I support the message of this topic/comment" crowd.

If there’s one thing that kind of makes me annoyed with this site is the non stop navel gazing and iamverysmart style of writing. Like dude don’t you don’t need to write like this is a essay in a English class, just relax and chat.
Most probably won’t understand where I’m coming from but maybe a few will.
Relax and have fun, you aren’t some special unique person that’s better than all redditors.

Would it be possible to have kind of automatic cleaning of submitted URLs? AMP links would be the obvious candidates, but I imagine you can find other cases where URLs contain embedded tracking or other fluff.