add "computer science" and "software engineering" to description of ~comp
I keep getting confused where to post computer science things, ~comp or ~tech ? :P
I keep getting confused where to post computer science things, ~comp or ~tech ? :P
I'm starting to see occasional collapsed comments when I open threads. The first time I saw one, I thought I'd accidentally collapsed the comment myself, but this one was definitely already collapsed when I opened the thread.
Is this related to the "tagging" system that Deimos discussed the other day? At the time, he said that "tags" wouldn't have any effect. Are these effects now working? What are the effects? Also, there was no actual decision about what the different tags would be, and what they would mean. As I said in that thread, I decided not to use these tags until: a) they were agreed and defined; b) they actually did something. I thought they were just placeholders for now. I'm confused.
Or is there some other feature operating here? For example, people keep talking about "whisper" comments, and I'm not sure if they're just fantasising about a feature they would like, or if it's something that's actually planned. Are these those "whisper" comments?
And which do you use most?
The new comment-flagging feature is in place and is starting to operate: some comments are being hidden based on tags applied by users.
The irony is that everyone knows a comment is hidden except the person who posted the comment. If someone's own comment is being hidden, they should know that. I assume that part of the motive behind these tags is to teach Tildeans what is and isn't acceptable here. If someone doesn't know their comments are being flagged and hidden, they'll just keep on doing what they're doing.
There should be some mechanism to advise a user that their comment is hidden - like happens when their comment is removed by the admin.
EDIT: It's not just about educating people not to post more shallow comments in future. It's also just letting them know their comment has been hidden, as a courtesy.
I just edited a short comment into a significantly larger one, adding a lot more and different content than before. This did not bump the post the comment belonged to. Should it?
This is very minor so far, but I think it's good to have a topic devoted to it so that people have somewhere to discuss it, instead of having it come up randomly in topics that it applies to.
I've recently started scraping some data about the destination of link topics using Embedly's "Extract" API (Embedly was kind enough to give me a reasonable amount of free usage since Tildes is a non-profit). You can put in the url of an article/video/etc. on that page to get an idea of what sort of data I can get from it, if you'd like to see for yourself.
I've only just started tinkering with it, and so far the data is only being used in two small ways:
Tweets now display the entire text of the tweet on the topic listing page, similar to the "excerpt" from text topics. You can see an example here.
On topic listings, the date that an article was published will be shown (after the domain name) if the publication date was at least 3 days before it was submitted. There are a few examples in the recent posts in ~misc
I'll probably adjust this threshold, but I'd like it to be an amount of time where the age of the content might feel "significant". It would also be possible to just show this info all the time, but I think the topic listings are already fairly cluttered so it's probably best to hide it when it's not interesting/significant.
As I said, these are very tiny changes so far, but there are lots of other possibilities that I hope to start using before long. I've mentioned this before, but something I'd really like to do overall is try to bring in more data about the links where it's possible to be able to show things like the lengths of videos and so on.
Let me know if you have any thoughts about it or notice any issues, thanks.
Hi, I wanted to suggest the creation of an esports specific group.
The taxonomy would work in a similar way to ~games, however it would home both the business and news side of our industry as well as allowing for the competitive communities of various games to have sub groups. ~esports.leagueoflegends, ~esports.dota2, ~esports.overwatch for example.
Would like to hear other people's thoughts.
Edit: As @Bauke pointed out, apparently this feature already exists via tapping outside of the sidebar. I never even thought to try that.
I'm not sure if this is in the gitlab issues or not, but a cursory search suggested it's not. On mobile, if you tap the link to the most recent comment from the sidebar, you navigate directly to that comment just as on the desktop site, but the sidebar remains open and can't be closed without scrolling all the way back up to the top of the page. This is incredibly cumbersome and inconvenient.
Ideally there would either be a method of closing the sidebar from anywhere, or for the sidebar to close on clicking the link. I would imagine that the latter would be simplest.
I read the FAQ when I signed up and was honestly kind of dismayed to see lack of support for user-created groups (UCGs from here on). I understand the reasoning, but wonder if there isn't some way to allow group creation without cluttering.
Some ideas:
I'm not sure how any of that would work, logistically, so I'm curious what ideas the community here has to offer.
Hi, The idea: When submitting a link, if youtube is detected on the link give a checkbox or something similar to switch to a more privacy aware youtube client
Repro steps:
Currently the group you're submitting to is the only thing you can't change from that page. The workaround is that you have to open ~bar in a new tab, click "post a new topic" there, and then cut & paste all the fields you already filled in.
Hi,
I used to browse reddit with the J/K scroll up down the feed or comments keyboard shortcut. Coupled with X for opening media or link and C to get to comments, it was a much more efficient way of navigating the website. As do all vim-like controls like Vimium etc..
There are a lots of more useful keyboard navigation possibilities but i think these are the more needed ones for now.
In keeping with Tildes' general philosophy of supporting budding technologies that have the potential to reform large domains of the internet for the better, I think you should look into Flattr (www.flattr.com).
A Flattr subscriber reserves any set amount of money per month which will then get automatically distributed to content creators on the web, in proportion to an algorithmic estimate of how much the user has used that particular site or resource.
First-tier support for Tildes on Flattr would be as simple as registering an account and connecting the tildes.net domain to it. From then on, a percentage of the reserved amount would automatically get transferred to Tildes' account for every Flattr user who uses the site (I myself have generated 64 "Flattrs" on this site as of this moment, which would lead to a significant portion of my reserved $5 to be transfered to Tildes for this month).
For sites that host content creators, like Twitch and YouTube, Flattr offers a deeper support, where Flattrs go toward individual content creators as well as the host site in itself. An intuitive way to connect Tildes to this feature would be to have each upvote of a Tildes post generate a Flattr for the poster. I believe the money would then be divided between the user who was upvoted (if they have a Flattr account) and Tildes' own Flattr account, but I am unsure about the exact fraction that would get routed to the individual poster as opposed to Tildes itself. I'm sure Flattr's tech support can answer this in detail, though. Flattr is currently owned and maintained by the company behind AdBlock.
What do other users think? Is Flattr's model good? Are there other sites or providers that offer a similar service? A notable difference between for example Patreon and Flattr is that Flattr is indirectly based on a "pay what you want" model, which marks a pretty significant shift in economic control from producers to consumers. This will obviously have both advantages and drawbacks. Personally, I think the model has a lot of potential on an arena like the internet, where the sheer number of potential consumers can make microtransaction-based models like Flattr really powerful.
Downvotes are so cheap and I'm happy Tildes doesn't have them. It's like totally spitting on your post in a very passive aggressive way. Downvotes ideally are meant to be used as a kind of "this doesn't contribute/this is a troll post" thing. But the amount of "I don't like this opinion, downvote" is maddening. Do people not realize how ridiculous it is that they're doing that? Terrible phenomenon.
There is a conspicuous lack of that sort of thing here so far. I get that Tildes might not want to be a repository of "hey what stock do I buy" or "Oh my god MU is still going down" but strategy-oriented discussions around positions in markets and the way changes in the world will effect your financial future seems like high-quality content to me.
I often stumble in to threads with entire comment chains deleted. I assume most people here have faced the same situation as well, either here or on reddit.
I'd like to see a move to locking comments rather than deleting them by default. That would mean no further replies to the comment or any other comment in that chain, no one being able to delete or edit their comments, no one being able to add or remove votes to a comment, etc.
I understand for particularly egregious comments removal is completely necessary (especially when it goes hand-in-hand with banning users), but a lot of times comments are deleted as a means to prevent long argumentative back-and-forth chains that spam and derail topics, as well as antagonize users.
In a lot of cases I feel like deleting the comment only further serves to hide what is unacceptable behaviour (even if that behaviour should be obvious), rather than setting an example for the userbase.
It's been quite a while now since we had a general feedback thread. So if there's anything you want to discuss, ask about, suggest, etc. but didn't feel like starting a dedicated thread for it, feel free to do that here.
Also, speaking of things that I haven't done in a while, I've topped everyone back up to 5 invite codes. Please don't feel obligated to find ways to use them, but if there are people you want to invite, that would be great. You can get the codes here: https://tildes.net/invite
Disclaimer: this post/information will probably only be interesting to more technical people
It's long overdue, but Tildes is now open-sourced: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes
There's still a ton to do in terms of writing more documentation, filling out the issue tracker with known issues/plans and so on, but it should be ready enough to get started.
I'm planning to make a post on the Tildes blog tomorrow or Thursday announcing this more formally, but I'd like to keep it a bit quiet until then, in case there are any issues or major gaps in the docs discovered when some of you start looking at it. I'd especially appreciate it if any of you would like to try setting up a local development version and let me know how it goes, and if the instructions all make sense.
There are two new pages on the docs site as part of this as well:
I'd appreciate any feedback about the documents, code, etc. As mentioned, I'd be especially grateful if some of you want to try setting up a local development version by following my instructions, and give feedback about if any parts of the process are unclear, incomplete, or otherwise need more work. Please feel free to ask any questions you have as well.
Proposal:
Create a new page where all users can view all moderation actions. This would make transparency a core part of the platform, hopefully avoiding any misunderstandings about mod actions.
A new page, maybe called tildes.net/moderation, is available to all registered users. I am not sure where the link to should appear on the site, maybe on the user's profile sidebar?
This page contains a table of all possible moderation actions. The actions may include: deleted topics, deleted comments, tag modification, moved topics, edited topic titles, banned user, locked topics. (this begs the question, what are the possible mod actions, and that they must be codified.)
Very roughly, the table columns might include: Date, User(being mod'ed), Mod Action(a list of possible mod actions), Mod Action Reason (either a text field, or a list of possible reasons for this action), Link (null if action is a deleted topic.)
I think that the user who did the moderating should not be publicly listed for now, to avoid drama?
Could we have a stickied list of all bans with reasons included?
Daily Tildes discussion - our first ban
Please vote for the comment which best reflects your position on this proposal.
As a bonus question, please make a top-level comment if you have general comment about my format of voting on comments. Would you prefer a straw poll on a 3rd party platform? Is there a cleaner way to do this?
Edit: added "banned user" to actions list, I probably missed others, let me know. Also added the obvious locked topics.
Should we add continent tags? We do it with europe and sometimes with asia or south america. But I've never seen north america alongside with usa or canada. When I searched for it, north america tag was used just once, 93 days ago.
Are we using "eu" or "europe" for topics about Europe? I think we need to pick one or the other.
I prefer "europe".
EDIT
The people have spoken, and the vast majority is in favour of "europe" (not "eu") for topics related to continental Europe. Topics related to the European Union itself can be tagged "europe.eu" (as per @nothis' excellent suggestion.
I'm here staring at my inbox for the third time trying to figure out how the hell the sorting in it works. It isn't alphabetically by subject or user, it isn't the recency of the first message (nor is it the recency of the latest message), and it isn't the number of messages. Testing it now, it also isn't the most recent you've opened, so I have no idea how this works or how to look for anything, not that it's big enough to matter much yet.
Am I missing something obvious? I feel so lost.
The "mark new comments" feature (which isn't enabled by default) has two main functions:
These are both extremely useful (and you should probably enable it if you don't already have it on), but it was still a bit hard to find the new comments in larger threads, even with them marked. You had to just scroll around and look for the orange stripes.
I've deployed a new update now that makes it so that when you go back to a thread that has new comments, all the old comments will be collapsed, except for the direct parents of the new ones. I've also updated the appearance of collapsed comments so that you can see the first part of the text of the collapsed comments.
No behavior will change if you're not using the "mark new comments" feature, and if visit a thread for the first time or go back to a thread with no new comments, all comments will be expanded as normal. Remember that you can also use the new "expand all comments" button added last week to quickly uncollapse all comments if you want to.
Edit: And if you really don't like it, you can disable it now with the second checkbox at the bottom of the settings page: https://tildes.net/settings/comment_visits
Let me know what you think, and if you notice any issues. This should make navigating large threads a lot easier, and there are also some other interesting possibilities with the "individually collapsed" comments that I'm going to be working on soon. One thing I definitely want to do is add an indication of how many comments are in a particular collapsed chain, since right now you can't distinguish a single collapsed comment from one with (potentially many) replies.
Is there a way to view all the subgroups in a group? Right now I don't see any way to access them without someone directly linking a subgroup. I think it would be helpful if there was a list of subgroups in each group sidebar, or a link to a page of them.
I just got here, so sorry if this has been covered elsewhere.
I've seen some discussion of what voting should be used for here on tildes.
Here are the things I try to follow when voting on comment:
Here are the things I try to follow when voting on a post:
I try to make sure it takes more than one of these for me to vote on a comment or page but that certainly isn't always the case. The one thing I try to stay away from is from voting just because I liked the title or because I agreed with an easy 1-3 sentence opinion unless I think that opinion is really important.
So there are many, many Matrix clients but the most popular one seems to be Riot which is available on iOS, Android (F-Droid, Play Store), and as a web app which you can join by clicking the link above.
It's similar to Discord in the features it offers, but being open source I thought it might be more in the spirit of Tildes than some of the proprietary alternatives.
That being said I'll be the first to admit Riot is a bit rough around the edges and Matrix seems to be under both heavy load and development. If there's demand for it I should be able to get a dedicated server up since it's an optionally federated service.
Oh, and as a bonus the Matrix chat links with the Tildes IRC channels (#tildes and ##tildes) on freenode, so there's that. (Thanks @tyil)
Don't forget to visit @Kat's wonderful ~tech wiki for links to other options such as Discord and Telegram if them's more your fancy.
Happy wordsing!
My question: Is there a ~maths or ~physics on Tildes ? I'm new on this plateform.
After reaching a nice milestone yesterday of over 1000 users registered, we've followed it up with a slightly less nice one—I've now banned someone for the first time. This almost certainly won't happen with every ban, but I'm going to be quite transparent with this one since it was the first one, and it gives a good starting point for a discussion today.
Trying to be transparent about this one is actually a bit funny, because the user I banned was named "Redacted" (really, I promise!). I had removed his comments from the thread, but I've un-removed them for now so that you can see exactly what I banned for: https://tildes.net/user/Redacted
There were two reasons that I decided to ban him:
So that's a pretty clear case of being an asshole, in my opinion. Let me know what you think—I'm not sure that there's any particular focus for the discussion today, so we can just talk about this specific case as well as banning/removing in general since this is the first time I've had to do anything (and I was just saying how nice it had been).
God I hope it’s Tilders
I spend far too much time looking for a reply button before I realise I have to scroll to the bottom.
Also, it'd be a lot less work in big threads, where you might be scrolling for a while to get to the reply box.
Yes, I'm that lazy.
I noticed that sometimes I don't engage if it's a big thread because of this, if the topic being discussed is only of passing interest for example.
There's been some discussion around tags since users were given tag-editing privileges, such as Tag Use and Article Tags
I've noticed a few things about tags and rather than make a topic for each one I thought I'd make a few top level comments instead, hopefully with others doing the same for anything tag related they'd like to see discussed.
Much like HN, a web link that searches the title in google to get around paywalls. Outline is great, but it does have a habit of dropping content.
I've found that the red (X new) indicator next to a thread's comment count on the main page keeps me coming back to the discussion to see the latest messages. This is a good thing, but the UX for actually navigating through those messages leaves something to be desired.
There are two relevant existing features I'd like to discuss:
I use the most recent comment link in threads that I know only have one new comment. The link takes me right to it. But in threads with more than one new comment, it's a lot less foolproof. My only method for seeing them all is to scroll down the page and stop when I see a flash of that red stripe. This is tedious in busy discussions which both update frequently with new comments to read, and take a long time to scroll through every time I check them. It's also easy to miss something this way, and since comments are considered "read" after you load the page, there's no second chance to see whatever I missed.
I'd like to propose a method for iterating through all unread comments on a page, either in chronological order (oldest first) or in order of appearance on the page. Or if @Deimos wants to get really fancy, some kind of hybrid sort that keeps nested comment chains grouped together for contextual continuity when navigating.
This would require two controls: "Jump to next unread comment" and "Jump to previous unread comment." These could be "sticky" clickable icons on the page, or just some sort of keystroke (like ,
and .
for previous and next, respectively) without a UI at all.
An important secondary feature of this would be a count indicating both how many unread comments are on the page and how many within that set you have jumped to with this mechanism so far:
Viewing 2 of 7 unread comments
This could remain visible or only appear briefly when jumping to the next/previous unread, then fade away. It could also be shortened to something more minimal:
2/7
That on-screen feedback would help prevent getting lost in busy threads with high unread counts, particular if the sequence is not determined by order of comment appearance on the page.
Edit: Whoops, fixed my formatting error I didn't notice after posting.
Tildes code of conduct says
Do not post anyone's sensitive personal information (related to either their real world or online identity) with malicious intent.
Can you change that to just say don't post personal info? Even if it's not done with malicious intent it should still be removed to protect people's privacy.
Also while it does say to not post spam on tildes terms of service I think It should say that on the code of conduct.
Edit: I mean posting personal info without consent and not public information.
Telling someone how to contact a company would be fine but not posting someone's address.
In the interest of transparency (and a little bit in statistics) it would be really cool to have a master banlist or at least a thread with links to all ban-worthy posts. This would help new users understand what isn't acceptable in the community and allow for community discussion on what could be considered an unjustified ban or a weird influx of bad behavior. This wouldn't be super viable when the site goes public, but would be a neat implementation in Tildes' alpha state.
I don't want to get too high in the clouds with moderating philosophy. Instead I want to talk about action steps that can be taken in the very near term to improve moderating. Especially so long as Deimos is the only one with most of the moderating tools at their disposal, I think it's crucial to make sure it's as painless as possible.
So far it looks like Deimos has these moderating tools available to him:
Am I missing anything?
The three next tools I would hope are coming next are:
Now I'll talk about why. First, the reporting mechanism. While it's still possible to keep up with everything that gets posted, I don't necessarily think it's the best use of Deimos' time to read literally everything, especially as the site expands its userbase and presumably activity level and depth. The reporting system at first should probably just be a button, maybe eventually with a pop-up field allowing the user a brief description why their reporting, and a queue that gets populated with comments and threads that get reported.
Coinciding with a report queue/option should probably be an easy, rudimentary system for providing feedback to those whose reports led to moderating action. At first, an automated message saying something like "thank you for reporting recently. Action has been taken on one of your recent reports" without any relevant links would do fine, and we can leave the particulars of how much detail to add for later discussions.
The last thing I think should help things considerably in the immediate term is a time-limited user tracking tool for the moderator-type person. As things scale, it isn't always going to be feasible to use mental bandwidth remembering each username and the relevant history associated with their behavior. A good note-taking tool with an auto-timed expiration date on notes would be a good way to address what can easily become a hugely mentally taxing role at almost any scale. This tool should let Deimos take a discrete note for himself (and other moderators at that permission level and higher) connected to a user regarding any questionable threads or comments that were yellow/red flags, or any other moderator action taken against a user within the last X days/months (the particulars don't matter to me as much as that there is an expiration date to these notes). This should let the moderator type person focus on the broader history of the users they're looking at before making a decision, without having to go searching for every relevant comment from the past 30 days. Fewer problematic users at scale should fall through the cracks and more users that might just be having a bad day can be let off with comment removals and/or warnings.
Are these priorities fair? Are there design elements you would want to see in the immediate term that would help reduce the burden of moderating? Are there problems with these tools I'm suggesting that you would want to see addressed?
A problem I've noticed on Reddit (and here sometimes) is that a thread will have a good subject and a good amount of replies, but less than half the upvotes/votes than there are replies, even though people are clearly enjoying the discussion. So, I was wondering if we'd be able to implement a feature that automatically votes for a post if you comment on it. Or, instead of forcing it, have a checkbox near the post form specifying whether or not you'd like to vote the post up upon completion of the comment. That might give good discussion posts some visibility instead of just posts that are a shitshow in the comments section
EDIT: I don't know what I'm talking about move along please
Thanks
Digg->Diggers Reddit->Redditors Tildes->Tildoes? Tillies? Tilbros? Just curious if there was a consensus on it in some previous discussions?
I don't know if it seems too pedantic but I feel like it would be much more convenient to tag any posts linked to articles as such, so that people could focus in on or filter out articles at their convenience. Personally, I never read articles people post unless the subject matter greatly intrigues me, and in that case, I've read it because of reasons beyond it being an article. I think it'd be a pretty easily enforceable thing, as we have tagmods now and tagging articles (if anybody forgets) would be simple and quick.
Another open-source contribution, this time from Jeff Kayser.
There are now two buttons at the top of the comments section, next to the header that says "X comments". The minus button will collapse all the reply comments, leaving only the top-level comments expanded, and the plus button will uncollapse any comments that have been collapsed.
This lets you browse the comments in kind of the "opposite" way of normal—instead of collapsing the conversations you don't want to read, you start out with only the top-level comments visible, and can un-collapse responses if you want to read more.
There will probably be some more work done along these lines in the future. A user setting would probably be nice so that reply comments are always collapsed by default, if that's what you prefer. And I'd also like to see the collapsed comments say how many comments there are in that chain, since right now there's not really any way to tell how large of a discussion you might be un-collapsing.
It would be very nice to have an option for multiple choice polls in topics so that the comments remain in-depth while giving people the chance to give their input on simple questions.
This post is meant to provoke a discussion and possibly find a resolution or at least set an expectation as far as where to post esports content.
I don't really have an opinion either way but would like to discuss the topic, because it seems like not setting an expectation might lead to similar content being posted to one or the other of the two communities when all the content would be prefered in one community to make finding things easier.
For live chatting about certain things. We could have different channels for the different groups. Just a thought.
I've found that I prefer to see comments sorted by order posted, rather than having the most upvoted as the first item. I'd rather read through the thread before deciding the relative merits of any post, and find that "most upvoted" often isn't necessarily the most insightful, especially on long discussions.
It's not a huge effort to change the view, but I don't want to encourage my own lazy habit of looking at the first post and saying "good enough".
May I request that a setting for default sort method be added?
Reddit has the snoo, we need to have a cute mascot that can represent us. Any suggestions? What do you think @Deimos? Edit: maybe we should organize a drawing contest for someone to make the mascot
Sometimes I comment and I'm low effort and jokey or a thread develops that ends up unnecessary... And now we have a whole in joke (sorry Kat, I started it & you earned it!).
Anyway, perhaps it would be nice to add an option to set your own posts to default collapsed? We might also want an option to hide all collapsed in topic? Or do these features just encourage low effort fluff and I should just learn better self control?
Edit> OK This obviously isn't clear:
I was suggesting an option to set one of your comments & it's chain to collapsed for all other users by default.
Okay, okay. We really needed some sort of search, so I decided to just get an extremely basic version out today. It's very limited, but it should work for now and can be improved as we go forward.
Details/limitations:
It's a start though, and certainly better than not having any search at all. There will probably be a lot of minor issues, but let me know if you notice anything especially broken with it.
Let's talk about what tags we should be using and how they should be used. For those of you who haven't yet read it here is the doc page on tags.
Here's what I'm looking at so far:
Talk: I removed the talk
, discussion
, and conversation
tags from the topics in ~talk in accordance with "Don't add a tag that's the same or very similar to the group that you're posting in." If you're in ~talk of course you're having a discussion or conversation. (There are exceptions that are about conversation such as "How do you discuss open minded topics with close minded people?"). I tagged some "How was your weekend" type topics with casual conversation
.
What do you think about talk
and/or discussion
tags in other groups?
Question: As I understand it, question
should be ask
Update: done
Meta: I would define meta
as topics about the site or ~ the topic is posted in. Since ~tildes is entirely meta, meta
is redundant here. Most of the meta
topics elsewhere are about the ~ they are in. As an example of something I think is mistagged, I wouldn't tag the ~lgbt introduction topic meta
since it isn't about the ~ . Update: removed meta
from ~tildes topics.
I wanted to get some feedback before I continue so I don't make a mistake unilaterally retagging something that I shouldn't.
What are your thoughts on these tags? What other tags do we need to talk about? What strategies are you using for tagging and retagging?
The idea is to help combat the echo-chamber effect, if a group goes toxic then rational people are likely to leave, further concentrating the negative users left in the conversation.
So the idea is that if there's a large exodus of people unsubscribing then that's valuable information if we can determine the cause. Hence if there's an option to explain why you're leaving it can help flag a group as in trouble, first to the moderators and then to the admins that "are these moderators doing their job".
Now the parties leaving could show their protest in comments or threads, but if they're already leaving then they've already forgone that option. I know on reddit I'm not going to try help a dieing subreddit, I'm just going to leave.