Instead of fading the replies after clicking on "Mark as Read", it should just remove it immediately. It's really, really time consuming to have to mark 40 something replies as read. I know this can be solved with a "mark all as read" button, but I do actually want to go through and read all of them.

Is it just me, or is the session timeout set very short (or strictly tied to an IP)?

I've had to login 3 times this morning at work, and I couldn't have been idle for more than an hour or so each time.

Chrome 66.0.3359 on Android 7.0

I think the option to save a topic or comment would be a good addition. For example, I have had a ~music topic about music everyone's listening to open for over a day so that I can pick a new group to listen to each time I do homework. Sure, I could write them all somewhere, but I think it's a nice QoL improvement nonetheless.

Edit: I'd like to add to this @Ganymede 's idea of following a topic to get notified of new comments inside it. Maybe this could apply to a specific comment chain, too, since a whole topic will be a lot once the site explodes. ;)

Hello,

https://tildes.net/notifications/unread shows only the unread notifications.

If I have marked all comment replies are read, that link will show me an empty page.

So I thought that visiting https://tildes.net/notifications/ should show me all the past replies to my comments, but that's returning 404.

So, is there a place where I can see all the read notifications/replies?

I suggested already to have a setting in the profile to allow the user to decide if links should open in new tab so you won't lose the content you were being on this website. In the meanwhile I made a very simple script that does that for you using tampermonkey.

The script: https://gist.github.com/theCrius/04dc86bea0ed0f1cbec7e57f1aaff9aa

Tampermonkey: http://tampermonkey.net/ (available for all browsers)

A quick tutorial on how to do it, step by step with images: https://imgur.com/a/pY51wn2

Edit: Updated to open only link in comments in new tab. The rest of the navigation will load in the same tab by default.

Hi,

One thing I really missed on Reddit was that there were only 2 possible ways of posting : self-post (text) or straight link with nothing else. I would often have an intermediate 3rd way: a link, but with an associated short text.

Motivations:

1. Being able to add some context for the link: where does it come from, why did I post it, what did I post it for, what is special about it, what part of it do I intend to discuss, how does it relate to a personal experience, and so on.
2. Adding other links in the text, related to the main link (previous history of the same subject, link in another language / translation, counter opinions, ...).
3. Avoiding misinterpretation; do I endorse the link content (in full, part of it?), do I criticize or condemn it?
4. Doing the previous 1-2-3 points, without giving up the advantages of straight link: being still able for the readers to click and jump to the link straight from the group post list, possible thumbnail/preview/embedded display; and without resorting to a self-comment which will look awkward and get lost in the other comments after a handful of those comments are made.

In fact, if the goal of Tildes is to force a certain quality of post content and discussion, this mode may eventually be set to replace completely the 'straight link only' posting mode; in that case the following extra motivations come into play.

Extra motivations:

1. Mitigate stupid and low effort posts by forcing the poster to explain/describe in at least n character/words his link. If the poster is not able to spend 2 minutes thinking and writing a description, his link is probably not worth the effort of reading.
2. Mitigate trolling and malicious posts by forcing the poster to motivate clearly his posts, and not insidiously disguise his intent behind a fake innocence.

The accompanying context text should have a minimum and maximum length, for it should not replace well-developed 'self-posts'.

What do users and admins think about all that posting mode I sorely missed on Reddit?

Hello,

I appreciate the addition of the comment permalinks. There is just minor usability issue on mobile devices as the "#" is too close to the right edge of the screen and so not quick to click.

Additionally many websites (few that I can think of: Reddit, GitHub, HN) use the time stamp or the "time ago" string to contain the permalinks.

So when I saw that comment permalinks were supported, I instinctively clicked the "time ago" string, and obviously it wasn't linked.

So..

Can the time string be hyperlinked with the permalink instead of adding the extra "#"?

Okay, so I got tired of scrolling through some of the long comment chains looking for that flash of orange that indicates a new post so I slapped together this solution. It's not pretty nor frictionless to use, but it's less annoying for me than scrolling for days just to find the new comments.

Basic usage is to open the javascript console or scratch pad (e.g., Shift+F4 in Firefox) in your browser, paste in the following line from the code block and run it. It scrolls to the first unread comment and marks it as read; on subsequent runs it will do the same thing for the next unread comment and so on. You will need to enable new comment tracking in your Tildes preferences as well if you haven't done so yet.

{var comment = document.getElementsByClassName("is-comment-new")[0]; if (comment != null) {comment.scrollIntoView(); comment.className = "comment"}}

I had hoped that I could make it into a bookmarklet but unfortunately CSP nixes that option. If anyone else knows of a better way to do this let me know.

So, one of the things I deal with in my day to day are highly regulated industries (think guns and Legalized MJ), and I wonder where this will fit into Tildes itself.

I did not see much in the ToU in regards to this, so I wonder what governance we would be looking at?

Is it entirely what is legal in Canada? Because something may not be entirely legal in Canada, but the discussion of it would actually be perfectly legal.

I personally am someone looking for a migration from reddit, as it has become an unstable place for functional discussion.

When I tried to register an invalid username tildes told me that my username "did not match the requested format", but nowhere in that page there is a format specified for usernames. It'd be useful to add near the username box a message like "use only alphanumeric characters".

Hello,

I saw in another thread being mentioned that there is no use for API for real users other than bots. So wanted to voice some real API uses that I would be interested in:

1. When I post a new blog post, if I find it worthy of sharing here, it would be nice to mirror the comments I get here back on my blog post. I can imagine using API to fetch all the comments from a tildes thread, including the hierarchy relationship. The API would return a JSON with Markdown and/or HTML like the XML that Disqus exports (but JSON). When people want to comment on that post, they can come to tildes to do so, or if they don't want to create an account here, or if they don't have an invite, they can comment via other means that I have (Webmentions, Twitter, email).
2. Second use is make something like hnrss possible.

(0) Background

This is coming off a discussion in today's thread on forming new groups around whether or not to add a group for politics. I expressed there that, given my moderator experience on /r/ChangeMyView and /r/NeutralPolitics, I opposed making such a group given how Tildes currently stands.

(1) Political discussion is nearly always garbage.

I don't think anyone needs reminding of this, but political discussion almost uniformly fails to achieve anything positive in almost any social media platform. Your uncle's facebook rants? Garbage. Political sniping on Twitter? Garbage. The endless repetitive point scoring and outrage fest on most political subreddits? Garbage.

So, we have to ask, why is this content garbage?

(2) People want to be heard, but nobody wants to hear.

I do not think political discussion is garbage because of bad faith trolling. That certainly exists and does not help, but usually it's not hard to ID the trolls, and excepting egregious stuff like doxxing or threats, to ignore obvious bad faith absurdity.

The much bigger issue is that what people want to do is to be heard and validated in their political views. This is not merely that they want to proselytize or to win converts, but that they're seeking validation and a sense of rightness or righteousness in their statements.

This desire is toxic to a neutral forum, because invariably on any divisive issue, you will not merely be heard and validated, but will be challenged and denigrated. Indeed, often the challenges and denigrations themselves are the same performance in reverse. Members of each team trying to dunk on the other and earn validation for how hard they owned the other side.

(3) To overcome this, a successful political forum must have a purpose other than mere commentary.

On /r/ChangeMyView and /r/NeutralPolitics, we have been able to build forums which have large amounts of productive and non-hostile political discussion. The key to this is that neither forum allows for being heard, or general discussion, as its reason for being.

On /r/ChangeMyView we limit posts to views people genuinely hold, and are open to changing (CMV rule B). This requires that OPs cannot come to troll or soapbox. It is by far the most frequently used rule of ours in terms of removing submissions, almost always on the soapboxing side.

On /r/NeutralPolitics, we limit posts to neutrally framed questions about political subjects, which can be answered with facts. By doing this, we narrow the scope of discussion away from soliciting feelings (which is an invitation to people posting just to be heard) and towards bringing forth factual information, where people might learn something.

I don't know what purpose a political forum on Tildes might have, but to succeed it must have a clear purpose, and that purpose must be one which excludes people posting merely to be heard.

(4) In addition to a purpose beyond being heard, a political forum must have extreme civility rules.

Both CMV and NP have extremely similar rules in this regard, and they are absolutely crucial to the success of the fora.

In general, any comment or post which in any way denigrates another user should be removed. This is an extremely broad civility rule that is well past what most subreddits do. Calling another user a liar, or accusing them of bad faith posting is banned on both CMV and NP for example, even when such accusations are true.

The prohibition on what even may be seen as justified rudeness is I think the key to a civility rule. It immediately removes from the moderation process any discretion around the substance of the politics, and makes it a neutral rule which can be applied evenly to all parties.

It is also necessary because nothing productive ever happens after bad faith is accused. Almost uniformly, once someone is rude, if there is a response back to them, the response will be rude in kind, usually more severely. People love to try to get the last word in, and a clear, objective rule banning "they started it" spats is also an important component. CMV's wiki has a really good overview of how we enforce this rule there.

(5) Conclusion/TL;DR

I don't know exactly what political content should exist on Tildes. I do know that a general politics group will not work, and that rather a politics channel should be focused on a discrete purpose other than just discussion.

I would almost certainly ban link posts from any politics group, since inherently they're going to act as just headlines for people to pontificate on, without guiding discussion towards a particular goal. I would also obviously enforce civility, and have much stricter moderation of it than I might on a non-politics forum.

Edited for formatting

Original post here

What if subgroups were totally dynamic?
ie:

If I post to ~music with a post tagged [hip-hop] [instrumental], that post could exist in ~music.hip-hop.instrumental, ~music.instrumental.hip-hop, ~music.instrumental, ~music.hip-hop. Is there a benefit in structured hierarchy? Users could sub to the root ~music for everything, if they want, or they could sub to specific hierarchies that they enjoy (ie: i'd sub to ~music.instrumental but not ~music.hip-hop.instrumental.

This would also drop the need for specific moderation teams or support structures for larger subgroups. Additionally, it creates an interesting structure where posts aren't relegated to single groups, allowing for more discover-ability.

I'm wondering because I'm feeling kind of bad for flooding ~music with my fan girl content. I think it's quality content. I realize a lot of it's been heard but I think every sub ~ group (is that correct phrasing?) needs to have a solid base of content to build on. I don't want to be that person spamming content that people might not like, but I am trying to contribute quality stuff I don't see.

I just can't bear aggregators without it any more. (for reddit you can do it with RES, for HN there is also a browser extension ("Hacker News: Mark All Read") )

The only problem: you miss out on some later discussions. For this the HN extension I use has a "follow comments" toggle inside the posts, which excludes those posts from being hidden.

It also totally fixes the problematic of balancing the "freshness" on the frontpage.

The fact that my cursor has to touch the edge of the screen to be able to access the site docs is not only a little awkward to use, but also looks a little cramped when compared to the consistent and compact nature of the rest of the site. I do see that increasing the padding or the general size of the footer would break the consistent design of Tildes, though. Perhaps spacing the footer <p> elements so they occupy the same y-level without changing the current dimensions of the footer could help?

This is a tiny niggle and it likely only affects me, however, so please do swat me down if this is unnecessary.

—Edited as I forgot to escape characters!

If it's too early in development for these questions, let me know.

1. Is the source available yet? If so, where is it hosted? If not, when will it be dropped?
2. Third party API: I know the docs say that the browser should be the client. However, after using tildes for awhile on mobile, it's quite... interesting. The site does really well on mobile, don't get me wrong, but it's missing the system feel that makes the experience pleasant. Honestly, one of the big reasons I was drawn to reddit was the ample support (by the third party) for mobile clients. I'd love to get started on a client for ~.

Tags

I can totally see nsfw.nude work, but do you think tagging will be done much further? It's relatively much work to tag a thing well, maybe some sort of cross-posting is more rewarding to the user. Essentially it might be the same thing, but the act of sharing to another tilde feels more rewarding than adding yet another tag.

Hierarchies in Tags and Tildes

Yes! I love hierarchies for how they scale.
Do you think the one-dimensional nature of such a "taxonomy" will get problematic, or is it merely a corner case? I might have "food > recipes" and "food > restaurants" or I might have "recipes > food" and "recipes > chemistry". Again I feel like cross-posting is essential to solve this duplication issue. Maybe this as another chance to improve on reddit: if cross-posts just reference a single post there would be just one big discussion.
Cfabbro is part of the team? "We were actually considering allowing multiple ways to access the same groups. E.g. ~literature and ~lit going to the same top level group" sounds good.

Comments

I think "most votes" has a strong bias towards early comments. Ideally you'd give a new comment the reason of doubt, and make it more visible until a good rating about is has been established. For this you'd have to track up-votes per "seen".
Sadly it's really hard to track these implicit down-votes ("read but not up-voted") and generally it obfuscates how the site works. I still think it's worth thinking about, especially if you might derive trust/reputation from the up-votes at some point.
Otherwise commenting on rising stories is the an easy way to farm karma (I tried it on HN to see how the down-vote mechanism works, which is unlocked at 200 karma). Here I also agree with you, that this process should not be 100% automatic.

Group-specific trust

If tildes are nested, will reputation (eventually) be inherited up the hierarchy?

Filter-Bubble (found your opinion in some discussion about it):
I agree again, good communities are bubbles. I think the "no-downvotes" will help a bit so controversial stuff can rise.

Links

I also like your decision to not allow text on links. I really like how HN moderators improve link-titles sometimes to get rid of clickbait or inaccuracies.

I will give some UX feedback later, when I got used to tildes a bit.

AFAIK, reddit does not allow duplication of same link. In Tildes, you can repost same link. Is it deliberate choice or its' discussions postponed?

IMO, after a time period (ex. 1 month) same link can be shared. In this way, some of users that missed link, or a new discovery in the link, can be subjected to interested ones.

Also I really like reddit's other contexts feature for the same link.

As can be seen in this post in ~test it is possible to secretly refer to another webpage than the one actually typed. It's not the biggest priority as of now, but it would be nice to see this fixed before Tildes will go live.

In case the ~test post gets deleted, here's an example:
https://innocent.site/

Make it possible to donate in exchange for placing a monocle, sticker or gold star cough on a comment. It's karma and it's an instant way to donate to keep the site afloat.

Also donating could give the donater a special sticker on their username like "supporter" or something.

That silly number on someone's account. One that means nothing but is a weird goal people seek out.

Karma can be used to encourage user participation. Karma can also be bad and can cause someone to post with the intent of collecting karma instead of discussion.

Karma can be earned different way;

• the reddit way, you get karma for how many upvotes you get for things you post
• the gamefaqs way, you get 1 karma point for each day you log in

I'm not sure of any other ways, but I like silly numbers. Perhaps the 'trusted user' thing in the docs can somehow tie into a karma system.

What do you think about karma and how it could/should/would play out here?

The "Black" theme looks pretty OK, but monochrome white/grey-on-black would be fantastic! Nothing against a few colored spots, as long as the text has a high contrast! All the vision-impaired users will thank you!

Hi there!

First things first, I just want to say thank you for the invite, but more importantly, thank you for taking the time to create this platform. I, as I imagine most people on here, have a love-hate relationship with reddit. Clearly the site has had a tremendous impact, in many ways positive, but with many things structurally and fundamentally holding it back. I've been a subscriber to /r/RedditAlternatives/ for a while, and there have been very few sites that have compelled me to learn more and actively take part in them, and yours is of course one of them. I just got done reading all of the articles on your docs page and was very pleased - "finally", I thought, someone who's taken into account all of the articles on the internet that have been written about designing and building communities, from both a social and technical perspective, and put it into practice. You've addressed many issues that are often ignored by the platforms themselves and done it in a brilliant way so as to ensure that our voices are heard first and foremost, and I think that's just awesome.

Okay, now that all the praise is out of the way... :P

I did notice something that was not addressed in the docs pages, so I'll be blunt and simply ask: how do you plan to address the filter bubble, or rather, do you plan to address it at all? Maximizing user freedom regarding which communities you want to see content from seems obvious, but that inevitably ends up with users being stuck in their own bubble. reddit already has an infamous reputation of being an echo chamber, and gives users tools to make it an even bigger echo chamber. A long time ago, there was a commonly held belief that the internet would bring us closer together because it would force us to expand our worldviews and interact with people as people, not knowing where they're from or who they are (the "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" saying about anonymity). As reddit moves more and more toward becoming a social network like Facebook and less like the pseudonymous and anonymous internet discussion forums of old, this problem has only gotten worse, to the point of having real-world political and social consequences (especially with the increasing deluge of so-called "fake news"). I'd really like to hear your take on it.

I do have other concerns, namely: scalability, and the stance on free speech. The donation model has worked well for Wikipedia, but, well, they're Wikipedia. They're an incredibly important resource and people have clearly valued their resource so as to have sustained their model, mass donation drives with Jimbo Wales' face plastered all over the site notwithstanding. If tildes becomes the Wikipedia of internet discussion platforms, I am sure many people will find it valuable enough to donate to, though I am still not sold on how sustainable it really is.

The stance on free speech in the announcement blog post also has me concerned. As you mentioned, it is a difficult topic; that much is clear. I am mostly just curious as to where the lines are drawn in regards to how "threats, harassment, and hate speech" are defined. With an absolutist position like "we are 100% pro-free speech", things are very clear and simple, whereas any other position, I believe, comes down to the whim of the moderators/admins. Certainly most people will generally follow the golden rule and abide by basic common sense and decency (i.e. "don't be a dick"), but when discussions get heated I think it's important to not have a reasonable fear that you're going to get permabanned because you hurt someone's feelings (just as an example).

All these issues aside, I am very excited about the development of tildes and hope you & the community can come up with excellent technical and social solutions to these difficult problems.

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

(p.s. apologies for not posting this in the daily discussion topic, thought it warranted its own topic)

edit: formatting

When I upvote a post, it just goes form dotted border to solid border and a very slight change in color which makes recognizing if you already upvoted a post a little hard.

Maybe inverting the color of the box would be more suitable?

Hi!

This isn't a topic I know a ton about (beyond basics like the need for image descriptions for screen readers), but @nil's layout bug stemming from a very large font got me thinking about accessibility.

Has accessibility been discussed and worked on so far?

(If not, I'd like to suggest taking a look at online accessibility guidelines to see what would apply to tildes in particular. It's one of those things that's easiest to add towards the beginning of projects, and it takes making a conscious decision to include it.)

It's probably just me, because I have to use a really big font, but the text in the group summary and in the topics overlaps and is very hard to read! I'll send a screenshot to Deimos.

Also, the sidebar is at the bottom of the screen in my configuration.

It's probably just a personal preference, but I really enjoy that HN or reddit only use two lines per topic, which makes browsing much more efficient. I'd actually prefer one line per topic! Just give me a list of topics and let me decide whether or not I want to bite. ;)

What do you think?

One of the biggest limitations of Reddit is that if you want to post a link, and comment on it yourself, you have to go make a comment on your own post after you've made it.

It would be really useful to be able to fill in both the Link and the Text box, and have your text displayed under the link while you are viewing the comments.

(Also, we should be able to edit posts after making them.)

Currently you can only do one or the other, but I feel that this results in low efforts posts where a user simply post a link and walks away. If we can post text along with a link to, say, a news article, the OP could then start some sort of discussion around that article without having to go into the comments and post whatever they were going to say.

On Reddit, I can chose between two options - to be subscribed to a sub, or to not be subscribed. Right now, the situation is the same with Tildes. I would like to have more fine-grained control over which posts show up on my homepage. For example, right now, a signficant proportion of my homepage is music. I don't know if that will continue to be the case as the site grows, but it serves as a good example for now. I like music, and want to see music related posts on my homepage, but ideally I would like to be able to use a slider or selector of some form to dampen the precedence of ~music, so that I only see the very best posts. Other tildes, like ~comp, I want to have higher precedence / weighting, so that their posts make their way onto my homepage with more ease - because it's the topic I care most about.

I understand that this might be simply infeasible for server-load reasons, and I also could understand if it is felt that this would clash with the clean and simple mechanics of the site. However, I think this feature would be really useful, and moreover could serve as a good USP to attract users from other news aggregators who care about curated, high-quality content.

Other people can tag my posts as jokes, but I can't. Is there a good reason for this to be the case? Obviously I'm not going to tag my posts as Noise, Troll, or Flame, but Joke and Offtopic aren't necessarily negative.

I am absolutely loving Tildes so far! I have been using HackerNews for a long time and I think a couple of things that sites like those lack is 2-Factor Authentication and a dedicated on-site search functionality. Even though this is not a priority, nor does this site require any personal data, I think adding a 2FA would allow users to strengthen (?) their account at one point. I also think a site-wide search would be a good feature to have. HN does not have a native search and you need to use 3rd party services through HN API, which I think isn't really intuitive.

Neither of these are a priority, but I think having these features early on would actually be a good thing to do.

Hi,

I got a CSRF error on the registration page, probably a timeout because I read the terms and privacy policy before going on with the registration. :)

That's a bad first impression for users and should be avoided.

Chris