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    1. Error when logging in using a password manager

      I'm using Safari 12.0.2 on macOS 10.14.2 (Mojave). The same issue also occurs on iOS 12.1.2 (using Safari). When using 1Password to autofill with the browser extension on macOS or the "autofill"...

      I'm using Safari 12.0.2 on macOS 10.14.2 (Mojave). The same issue also occurs on iOS 12.1.2 (using Safari).

      When using 1Password to autofill with the browser extension on macOS or the "autofill" feature on iOS an error message pops up: username: String does not match expected pattern.

      I have to either use the browser supplied autofill on macOS or manually copy/paste username and password into the corresponding fields. On iOS there's an autofill API which I have set to use 1Password in the browser, also causing the error

      Edit: Video of the issue

      9 votes
    2. Minimum password issue

      My password is shorter than 8 characters. When I attempt to log in, I get a validation error telling me so. Luckily, I'm signed in already on this browser. However, when I go to the change...

      My password is shorter than 8 characters. When I attempt to log in, I get a validation error telling me so.

      Luckily, I'm signed in already on this browser. However, when I go to the change password page and attempt to make my password longer, I get a validation error telling me my old password is shorter than 8 characters, and it prevents submitting the form.

      8 votes
    3. What are your views on the use of profanity on Tildes?

      I don't think Tildes have or should have an official position on that, but I'd like to know what other Tilda Swintons™ think about the subject. Do you think the use of profanity cusswords is in...

      I don't think Tildes have or should have an official position on that, but I'd like to know what other Tilda Swintons™ think about the subject. Do you think the use of profanity cusswords is in accordance with the implicit behaviors we've established so far? Is there any advantage in trying to "keep it clean" site-wide?

      21 votes
    4. Suggestion: ~wikipedia

      There's one HN custom I really adore, and it's the random, interesting wikipedia articles that are posted and sometimes upvoted to the front page. cf:...

      There's one HN custom I really adore, and it's the random, interesting wikipedia articles that are posted and sometimes upvoted to the front page. cf: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org

      This curated discovery of some obscure facets of humanity. Picking random articles from that list, for example, on the game Nomic; the Pineapple Express term in meteorology; or the British plan to build an aircraft carrier out of pykrete, which in case you didn't know is a mixture of paper and ice.

      I was planning to try to help kickstart this here by posting articles with a special tag but I'd actually like to get people's thoughts on this, and if it's something others are interested in, suggest adding a ~wikipedia tildes to encourage this here more officially.

      15 votes
    5. Filtering specific users

      Currently, we can filter posts based on topic tags, is there any chance we could get the same based upon users? Preferably for comments and topics. There are times when I might be interested in a...

      Currently, we can filter posts based on topic tags, is there any chance we could get the same based upon users? Preferably for comments and topics. There are times when I might be interested in a sub-tilde group, but for one reason or another, not a specific user's content in that group. Is this a bad idea?

      16 votes
    6. Your own "main" user page (both topics and comments) is now paginated - this will be extended to everyone soon, so last warning to do any history cleanup

      Things have been really quiet for the past few weeks. I've been pretty deep into server-admin-type work trying to get the site ready to be publicly visible, and while I have a decent understanding...

      Things have been really quiet for the past few weeks. I've been pretty deep into server-admin-type work trying to get the site ready to be publicly visible, and while I have a decent understanding of that side of things I'm definitely not an expert, so I've been doing a lot of reading and experimenting that hasn't really looked like much happening from the outside.

      I'm pretty happy with the state of everything now though, and I'm intending to make the site publicly visible (but still requiring an invite to register/participate) sometime next week. Part of that will be making some changes that have been overdue for a while, and catching up on merge requests and other things that have been getting backlogged while I've been in server-admin mode (and I apologize to all the people that have submitted those that I've been neglecting).

      So this change is one that I've said is coming for a long time: your "main" user page is now paginated, and you no longer need to select "Topics" or "Comments" to be able to look back through older posts. For the moment, this is still restricted to only your own page, but on Monday, I will be enabling pagination on all user pages. So this is the final warning that if there's anything in your history you'd like to edit or delete before people can easily look back through your history, you should do it in the next few days.

      I'm still considering whether to add any options for restricting the visibility of your user history, but I think it's really important to stress that anything like that will always be a false sense of privacy. I know for a fact that at least one person has already fully scraped all the comment threads on the site, and probably already has the ability to look through everyone's posting history if they want to (and they could easily make that data available to others). Once the site is publicly visible, scraping everything will be even more common, and it simply can't be prevented. If you post things, it will always be possible for someone to find them.

      That being said, one thing that I am considering is making it so that logged-out users won't have access to pagination on user pages (similar to how it is for everyone else's user pages right now). It's still a false sense of privacy, but it at least lowers the convenience a little and means that someone will have to get an invite to be able to dig through anyone's history easily (though there's still the possibility that someone scrapes all the data and makes it browseable/searchable on an external site). Anyone have any opinions on whether it's worth doing that, or should I just let everyone look through user pages, whether they're logged in or out?

      And since I haven't done it in a while, I've topped everyone up to 10 invites again, so please feel free to invite anyone else you want before we get into the public-visibility phase.

      Thanks - please let me know if you have any thoughts about user histories or if you notice any issues with paginating through your "mixed" history (since it was a bit weird to implement and I'm not 100% sure it's correct).

      80 votes
    7. Old topics with new comments don't show "(X new)"

      I have the "mark new comments" option enabled. Most of the time, it works, displaying "(X new)" under any topics which have had new comments posted since I last looked at it. However, if the topic...

      I have the "mark new comments" option enabled. Most of the time, it works, displaying "(X new)" under any topics which have had new comments posted since I last looked at it.

      However, if the topic is old enough, this "(X new)" notification does not display. The topic is sorted to the top of my feed, because I'm using activity from all-time as my default sort. But it doesn't show "(X new)". I know it has new comments, or it wouldn't jump to the top of my feed, but I'm not seeing that notification.

      I don't know how old is "old enough" but it's definitely longer than a month. The topics this is happening to are 3 or 6 months old, but it doesn't seem to happen for topics which are only a few weeks old.

      5 votes
    8. Suggestion: Adding the group list to the sidebar even when you are on a particular group

      Hi, finally got the chance to join tildes. I am loving it so far but there is just one small suggestion. When I am on mobile and on a particular group, for eg ~music and want to switch to ~books,...

      Hi, finally got the chance to join tildes. I am loving it so far but there is just one small suggestion.
      When I am on mobile and on a particular group, for eg ~music and want to switch to ~books, I have to go back to the main page to access the list from the sidebar.

      I know, I know, I could just type in the url but wouldn't it be better if there was some way to access the group list from any page for easier navigation. Perhaps adding it in the existing sidebar or a separate sidebar on the left side.

      12 votes
    9. Suggestion: increase timeout for being logged out

      Firstly - thanks for the invite, looks like a good place! I signed up and read some posts, alt tabbed to other sites, came back and went to post a reply but got an error...

      Firstly - thanks for the invite, looks like a good place!

      I signed up and read some posts, alt tabbed to other sites, came back and went to post a reply but got an error https://i.imgur.com/Fz1MXtd.png

      I opened a new tab and logged in and could post ok, but it didnt feel like that long from when I logged in to when it timed out on me.

      6 votes
    10. Could someone proficient with CSS make a userstyle that moves the vote buttons on posts to the left?

      I'm left handed and having to reach the right side of the screen is pretty annoying when browsing one handed on mobile. I know this seems like a silly issue(and it very much is) but I'd be very...

      I'm left handed and having to reach the right side of the screen is pretty annoying when browsing one handed on mobile. I know this seems like a silly issue(and it very much is) but I'd be very grateful if someone could help

      18 votes
    11. What exactly belongs in ~creative?

      Just a few minutes ago I moved this topic from ~creative to ~music, but almost immediately began second guessing my decision. I'm not exactly sure where that belongs, because it's music, but it is...

      Just a few minutes ago I moved this topic from ~creative to ~music, but almost immediately began second guessing my decision. I'm not exactly sure where that belongs, because it's music, but it is creative/the OP's original song. What do you think? Is ~creative more for crafts, IE woodworking and the likes, or anything creative done by the OP? Similarly, I can think of more examples for this, such as if someone wants to show off their Raspberry Pi project, do they put it in ~comp or ~creative? Where does it belong?

      13 votes
    12. Suggestion: Create a ~ for the discussion of communities

      I am new to Tildes so please forgive me if this has been discussed in the past but it seems to me ~tildes has a fair amount of people interested in the psychological processes and dynamics of...

      I am new to Tildes so please forgive me if this has been discussed in the past but it seems to me ~tildes has a fair amount of people interested in the psychological processes and dynamics of communities as it related to feature ideas for Tildes.

      Perhaps it would be interesting to have a place to discuss these sort of effects in online communities (social media sites, forums, multiplayer games, social platforms like Seconds Life, IRC,...) and offline communities in a broader context, not just limited to its immediate effects on Tildes itself.

      8 votes
    13. On underlining links in prose

      By default, no links are underlined in the Tildes interface, as far as I observed. I suggest that we underline the links that are in topic texts and comments. It is a nice visual clue in prose,...

      By default, no links are underlined in the Tildes interface, as far as I observed. I suggest that we underline the links that are in topic texts and comments. It is a nice visual clue in prose, and allows to distinguish between two consecutive links. Currently I'm using the following snippet in a userscript to achieve that:

      // Underline links in prose.
      document.querySelectorAll(".comment-text a, .topic-text-full a").forEach(
        function (elem) { elem.style="text-decoration: underline;"; });
      

      The rest of the links function like buttons, so it's not that important (or even unnecessary) that they be underlined. What do you think?

      8 votes
    14. Parent links?

      Just a few hours ago I was thinking about how much I miss parent links from Hacker News, and now I see that they have suddenly appeared on user pages and in topics. Did Deimos just roll out an...

      Just a few hours ago I was thinking about how much I miss parent links from Hacker News, and now I see that they have suddenly appeared on user pages and in topics. Did Deimos just roll out an update, or have I been blind this whole time?

      4 votes
    15. Tags aren't clickable?

      Disclaimer: I'm not sure if I'm just now noticing something that has always been that way, or if something has actually changed. Post tags aren't clickable on the main page, or on any group page....

      Disclaimer: I'm not sure if I'm just now noticing something that has always been that way, or if something has actually changed.

      Post tags aren't clickable on the main page, or on any group page. I can click on tags inside a topic, but I can't click on tags on the main page.

      I feel like I used to be able to do this. I'm pretty sure I must have been able to do this, because I've done some work in the past making tags consistent, and that's how I obtained lists of posts with certain tags.

      Has something changed? Or am I imagining things?

      10 votes
    16. Two Timespan suggestions

      I've been here all of 24 hours, so there may be good reasons for the current design decisions, but as a newbie, two things are making me a little crazy. Times in Days and Hours. When a post is new...

      I've been here all of 24 hours, so there may be good reasons for the current design decisions, but as a newbie, two things are making me a little crazy.

      1. Times in Days and Hours. When a post is new and active, "4 hours" makes sense. but "187 days, 4 hours?" That just makes it harder (at least for me) to spot "fresh" posts. I suggest dropping the hours on anything older than 1 or 2 days.
      2. The dropdown "Activity from" goes from "3 days" to "all time". This seems extreme. Yes, I see (and tried) the custom, but its not intuitive, and its not fast, compared to selecting from a dropdown. I would like to see "week" and "month" as options below 3 days, because good conversations often evolve at a thoughtful pace, but I'm less interested in commenting on something 187 days old vs 1 week old.

      This is a nice place, well-designed, and it's great to see troll-free convo's taking place! The lack of Karma hunters is also welcome! I hope it works out!

      24 votes
    17. Exemplary tags and anonymity

      I have to say I love the required little message that comes with the label. It actually gives an idea why it was added. Thing is, I've received a couple of Exemplary tags that either addressed me...

      I have to say I love the required little message that comes with the label. It actually gives an idea why it was added. Thing is, I've received a couple of Exemplary tags that either addressed me directly, or where I would have loved to know who wrote the message.

      Would making them optionally-anonymous instead of always-anonymous be interesting to anyone? I certainly don't mind if people know who it is when I assign it.

      17 votes
    18. Short links for topics and groups are now available via the tild.es domain

      This isn't a very exciting change, and probably won't even be particularly useful until the site is publicly-visible, but I've now set up the https://tild.es domain to handle shortened links to...

      This isn't a very exciting change, and probably won't even be particularly useful until the site is publicly-visible, but I've now set up the https://tild.es domain to handle shortened links to topics and groups.

      The short link for each topic is available at the top of its sidebar. For example, this topic's is: https://tild.es/9au
      It also supports linking to groups, like https://tild.es/~games (not actually being used anywhere on the site yet)

      I'll probably also add support for linking to comments and users eventually (maybe via tild.es/c/ and tild.es/u/ respectively?). Please let me know if you have any other ideas of what might be good to do with it, or if you notice any issues.

      54 votes
    19. What if we eliminated "ownership" of link topics?

      It's been a while since we had a topic to generally discuss potential site mechanics, and this is one that I've been thinking about quite a bit lately, so I thought it could make a good...

      It's been a while since we had a topic to generally discuss potential site mechanics, and this is one that I've been thinking about quite a bit lately, so I thought it could make a good discussion.

      This recent "Suggestions regarding Clickbait and misinformation" topic originally started me thinking about this, because a lot of the potential ways of dealing with those kind of topics involve modifying link topics in some way—changing their link to point somewhere else, editing the title, adding additional links, etc. However, one thing I've noticed on the (rare) occasions where I've performed those kind of actions is that some people are extremely protective of the posts they submitted, and can get upset about even minor title edits because it's changing their post. Some users have deleted their posts after they were changed, because they didn't like the change.

      So... what if we made it so that link topics don't really "belong" to any user in particular? We'd absolutely still want a record of who originally submitted the post to be able to notice behaviors like spamming certain domains, but other than that, if it's a good link/story, does it matter much which user submitted it?

      Here are more unorganized, general thoughts about some of the things this might affect and would need to be considered:

      • Text posts would remain as-is, since in that case the submitter is also the author/source of the post.
      • On that note, it could be a bit weird to lose the connection in cases like a user submitting their own content (such as a blog post that they wrote). Maybe we'd need some way to indicate that, through a standardized tag or something (or even a checkbox when submitting)?
      • Are there other cases where the submitter is important and associated with the content?
      • We could use the space in topic listings where the submitter's username is currently displayed to show different, more relevant data instead. For example, maybe the domain could move into that space instead of being after the title in parentheses, or it could display other info like the name of the actual author of the linked content, the channel name for YouTube videos, etc.
      • If the submitter no longer owns the post, they'd probably no longer have control of deleting it. When could that be an issue?
      • How would this affect user pages? Should links that the user originally submitted still be visible there, even if they're no longer considered posts that the user "owns"?

      Please let me know any thoughts on the overall idea, any of the above questions, and also feel free to point out other aspects of it that I've surely missed.

      (And unrelated, but I've bumped everyone back up to having 5 invite codes available, which you can get from the invite page. I'm still working towards making the site publicly-visible fairly soon, and will hopefully post more info about that before long.)

      79 votes
    20. Why Tildes doesn't need to be fully public

      Tildes is currently invite-only. (Thank you redditor u/⎷⎷⎷⎷⎷⎷). Of course, it's in alpha testing, so that makes sense. When do you think tildes will be made public? How will they do it? I don't...

      Tildes is currently invite-only. (Thank you redditor u/⎷⎷⎷⎷⎷⎷). Of course, it's in alpha testing, so that makes sense. When do you think tildes will be made public? How will they do it? I don't think it ever really needs to be made public. The reasons are that:
      1 - Bans are actual bans. Getting beyond a ban is ridiculously hard compared to on Reddit, where someone just makes a second account. On Tildes, if you're banned, you're banned. That's it. It weeds out a lot of trolls.
      2 - Throwaways can't be made. Making a throwaway account on Tildes costs one of your invites, so it's much more annoying to do so.
      Hopefully you enjoyed my little rant.

      29 votes
    21. General Tildes feedback/questions, primarily around becoming publicly-visible soon (but still invite-only)

      Things have been pretty quiet and steady for the last few weeks. This is mostly deliberate on my end—I'm going to be away for about a week around the end of the month, so I didn't want to make any...

      Things have been pretty quiet and steady for the last few weeks. This is mostly deliberate on my end—I'm going to be away for about a week around the end of the month, so I didn't want to make any major changes or push for a big burst of new users when I might not be very available to deal with any issues. Most of my time lately has been working on stuff in the background, including doing some cleanup, finally getting around to various things I've been putting off for a while, and so on.

      However, in early December I'm planning to move forward into the next "phase" for Tildes, which will be making it publicly-visible so that people are able to visit and read the content here even if they don't have an account. Registration will remain invite-only, but I'll probably try to make the process a little easier or automated in some way so that it doesn't require so much effort from people like me and @cfabbro (who's been diligently running invite-request threads on reddit for months).

      Overall, I think that being publicly visible should help a lot, both to increase interest for the site as well as addressing a few common misconceptions about it (which are mostly because people can't see anything for themselves). Right now we're effectively "wasting" a lot of invites by forcing people to get an invite and register before they can even see if Tildes has anything they're interested in, so opening it up for everyone to be able to view should make invites a lot more efficient when they're only requested by people that want to participate.

      One thing I should mention is that I'm not intending to have a "default front page" for logged-out users. They'll need to choose specific groups to view, and I've been playing around with a few ways to try to make this convenient (that will probably end up being available to logged-in users as well).

      It's also been a while since I gave everyone more invite codes, so I've given everyone 10 now. If there's anyone else you want to invite before we get into the publicly-visible stage of things, you can get your codes through the Invite page (linked in your user page's sidebar).

      Please let me know if any of you have any thoughts, questions or concerns about becoming publicly-visible, so I can see if there's anything else I'll need to make sure to address before being able to open it up. For example, are there any features that might have a privacy concern when public? Should we consider making any changes to the current set of groups? General feedback and questions unrelated to the public visibility are fine too (and always are—you can always feel free to message me or post in ~tildes).

      102 votes
    22. Why I Love Tildes: Quality

      Well, I know that I'm just stating the obvious, but I love Tildes for a few reasons. Right now, however, I'd like to discuss one thing: text posts can become popular. "But Sans, they could on...

      Well, I know that I'm just stating the obvious, but I love Tildes for a few reasons. Right now, however, I'd like to discuss one thing: text posts can become popular. "But Sans, they could on reddit too!" Text-only subs notwithstanding, not really. Find any fandom subreddit or r/games, and you'll find a bunch of memes. They're the only thing anyone likes. Here, however, one can actually ask insightful questions in text posts, and it is visible. People like it. They upvote it. On Reddit, that doesn't happen. Nobody upvotes text posts. Just my two cents.

      thank you for coming to my ted talk

      51 votes
    23. Topics and comments can now be bookmarked (aka "saved")

      As mentioned last week, I've now deployed the bookmarking functionality that was primarily implemented as an open-source contribution by @what. There's not much to say about it, it should be...

      As mentioned last week, I've now deployed the bookmarking functionality that was primarily implemented as an open-source contribution by @what.

      There's not much to say about it, it should be pretty straightforward: there are "Bookmark" buttons on both comments and topics, and you can view your bookmarked posts through the Bookmarks page, which is linked through your user page's sidebar. I'm planning to add the ability to search your bookmarks eventually, but I don't think that'll be urgent for a while until people start building up a pretty large list of bookmarked items.

      Please let me know if you notice any issues with it, and thanks again to @what for the contribution!

      85 votes
    24. What if we could "vouch" for users?

      I know the trust system is far off. However, I think a really interesting point to include could be the ability to "vouch" for a user via a profile button. Generally, this should be if you know...

      I know the trust system is far off. However, I think a really interesting point to include could be the ability to "vouch" for a user via a profile button. Generally, this should be if you know them off-site or you recognize them as a great contributor here.

      There shouldn't be any indication to the user that someone has vouched for them-- that makes it easy to manipulate, allowing for more of a tit-for-tat with randos.

      There should also be a number of factors involving the invite tree here (user 1 is the person whose profile button was clicked; user 2 is the clicker vouching for the other person here)--

      • Did user 2 invite user 1? If so, it's worth a little
      • Did user 1 invite user 2? If so, it's not worth much
      • Are users 1 and 2 completely unrelated in the tree? That's worth the most.
      • Older accounts provide more trust when vouching.

      This way, it's harder to manipulate, too.

      What do you guys think about this? Obviously it'll be a lower priority than the primary trust system, and will take a while to get the mechanics sorted, but I think it will be a worthwhile addition in the future

      e: meant to add that trust given should be directly correlated to the trust of the person vouching; new users shouldn't even have an option to vouch, at least until their trust is x or they've been around for a few weeks.

      13 votes
    25. Struggle setting up Tildes development environment

      I'm interested in possibly developing a tildes client. In order to experiment with the currently disabled API, as well as to become more familiar with how Tildes works internally, I've been trying...

      I'm interested in possibly developing a tildes client. In order to experiment with the currently disabled API, as well as to become more familiar with how Tildes works internally, I've been trying to set up a Tildes development environment on my machine following the instructions on the docs site. I've run into a problem with the 'vagrant up' stage of the setup.

      ...  
      ==> default: Running provisioner: salt...  
      Copying salt minion config to vm.  
      Checking if salt-minion is installed  
      salt-minion was not found.  
      Checking if salt-call is installed  
      salt-call was not found.  
      Using Bootstrap Options:  -F -c /tmp  
      Bootstrapping Salt... (this may take a while)  
      bash: /tmp/bootstrap_salt.sh: /usr/bin/sh: bad interpreter: No such file or directory  
      The following SSH command responded with a non-zero exit status.  
      Vagrant assumes that this means the command failed!  
        
      /tmp/bootstrap_salt.sh  -F -c /tmp  
        
      Stdout from the command:  
        
        
        
      Stderr from the command:  
        
      bash: /tmp/bootstrap_salt.sh: /usr/bin/sh: bad interpreter: No such file or directory  
      

      So the Salt provisioning is failing, and it seems like it just has the wrong path to the shell it needs, but while I could probably just tweak this script, it seems like that goes against the concept of using Vagrant in the first place. I was wondering if anyone else ran into this problem, or if the bug lies between the seat and the keyboard.

      15 votes
    26. What's the real difference between noise and joke?

      I try to tag comments whenever I come across them to help keep the site clean. The problem I'm coming across when doing so is that I'm not entirely sure when to use noise versus joke. The truth...

      I try to tag comments whenever I come across them to help keep the site clean. The problem I'm coming across when doing so is that I'm not entirely sure when to use noise versus joke.

      The truth is, I've never come across anything that's just noise-- it's always been a joke that just feels more like noise than a joke to me.

      Is there an official definition for these tags? Are different actions performed based on what the tag is?

      21 votes
    27. Firefox plugin Stylus no longer working on Tildes

      I have poor vision and I rely heavily on a Firefox plugin called Stylus to make websites readable - in particular the trend for low contrast and small text. That includes Tildes. I updated it to...

      I have poor vision and I rely heavily on a Firefox plugin called Stylus to make websites readable - in particular the trend for low contrast and small text. That includes Tildes.

      I updated it to v1.5.0 and now the styles I set for Tlldes no longer work - most other sites still appear to work but I've not checked them exhaustively.

      I immediately tried rolling back a release or two (1.4.23 and 1.4.22) but those versions no longer work for any site. I tried randomly downgrading to even older versions but the same result. I think I'm stuck with the latest version..

      I notice in the browser console there are 2 errors reported on Tildes e.g. on this page I see:

      Content Security Policy: The page's settings blocked the loading of a resource at inline ("script-src"). new_topic:1:1
      Content Security Policy: The page's settings blocked the loading of a resource at inline ("style-src"). new_topic:1:1

      Using the Firefox Developer tools Inspector - I see my style settings for Tildes injected by Styuls (after the body) but they do not work any more.

      Since only Tildes so far is not working with my Stylus settings I guess there is also a recent change to Tildes that is causing Stylus to fail.

      This is a rather serious issue for me as all the colour options in the setting are low contrast and cause eye strain which becomes painful without the Stylus settings.

      Thanks for any help you can offer.

      17 votes
    28. Suggestions regarding clickbait and misinformation

      One thing (amongst many) that always bothered me in my 6+ years of using Reddit was their lax rules about posting clickbait articles and straight up misinformation. In my opinion this was...

      One thing (amongst many) that always bothered me in my 6+ years of using Reddit was their lax rules about posting clickbait articles and straight up misinformation. In my opinion this was something that contributed to the rise of radical communities and echochambers in the website.

      In this post I'll talk about Clickbait, Unreliable studies, and Misinformation. I'll give examples for each one and suggest a way to deal with it.

      Clickbait-

      Let's start with the most benign one. These days most big websites use clickbait and hyperbole to gain more traffic. It's something that they have to do in order to survive in today's media climate and I sort of understand. But I think that as a community in Tildes we should raise our standards and avoid posting any article that uses clickbait, instead directly link to the source that the article cites.

      An example would be: An article titled "Life on Mars found: Scientists claim that they have found traces of life on the red planet".

      But when you read the original source it only states that "Mars rover Curiosity has identified a variety of organic molecules" and that "These results do not give us any evidence of life,".
      (This may be a bad/exaggrated example but I think it gets my point across.)

      On Reddit the mods give these kinds of posts a "Misleading" tag. But the damage is already done, most of the users won't read the entire article or even the source, and instead will make comments based on the headline.
      I personally think that these kinds of posts should be deleted even if they get a discussion going in the comments.

      Unreliable studies-

      This is a bit more serious than clickbait. It's something that I see the most in subjects of psychology, social science and futurism.
      These are basically articles about studies that conclude a very interesting result, but when you dig a bit you find that the methodologies used to conduct the study were flawed and that the results are inconclusive.

      An (real) example would be: "A new study finds that cutting your time on social media to 30 minutes a day reduces your risk of depression and loneliness"
      Link: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-instagram-snapchat-social-media-well-being-2018-11

      At first glance this looks legit, I even agree with the results. But lets see how this study was conducted:

      In the study, 143 undergraduate students were tested over the course of two semesters.

      After three weeks, the students were asked questions to assess their mental health across seven different areas

      Basically, their test group was 143 students, The test was only conducted for 6 months, and the results were self-reported.

      Clearly, this is junk. This study doesn't show anything reliable. Yet still, it received a lot of upvotes on Reddit and there was a lot of discussion going. I only spotted 2-3 comments (at the bottom) mentioning that the study is unreliable.

      Again, I think that posts with studies like this should be deleted regardless if there is a discussion going in the comments or not.

      Misinformation-

      This is in my opinion the biggest offender and the most dangerous one. It's something that I see in political subreddits (even the big ones like /r/politics and /r/worldnews). It's when an article straight up spreads misinformation both in the headline and in the content in order to incite outrage or paint a narrative.

      Note: I will give an example that bashes a "left-leaning" article that is against Trump. I'm only doing this because I only read left-leaning to neutral articles and don't go near anything that is right-leaning. Because of this I don't have any examples of a right-leaning article spreading misinformation (I'm sure that there are a lot).

      An example would be this article: "ADMINISTRATION ADMITS BORDER DEPLOYMENT WAS A $200 MILLION ELECTION STUNT"
      Link: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/11/trump-troops-border-caravan-stunt

      There are two lies here:

      1. Trump administration did not admit to anything. (The article's use of the word 'Admit' is supposedly justified with 'They indirectly admitted to it'. I personally think this is a bad excuse.)
      2. Most importantly, the 200 million figure is pure speculation. If you go to the older article that this article cites, the 200m figure comes from a speculation that the operation could cost up to 200m if the number of troops sent to the border is 15,000 and they stay there for more than 2 months.
        In reality the number of troops sent was 8,500 and they stayed for only a few days/weeks.

      A few days after this article was published it turned out that the operation costed 70 million. Still a big sum, still ridiculous. But it's almost a third of what the article claimed.

      The misinformation in this example is fairly benign. But I've seen countless other articles with even more outrageous claims that force a certain narrative. This is done by both sides of the political spectrum.

      Not only do I think that we should delete these kinds of posts in Tildes, in my opinion we should black list websites that are frequent offenders of spreading misinformation.
      Examples off the top of my head would be: Vanity Fair, Salon.com, of course far right websites like Fox News, Info Wars and Breitbart.
      A good rule in my opinion would be: If three posts from a certain website get deleted for spreading misinformation, that website should be blacklisted from Tildes.

      In conclusion:
      I think we should set some rules against these problems while our community is still in the early stages. Right now I don't see any of these 3 problems on Tildes. But if we don't enforce rules against them, they will start to pop up the more users we gain.

      I'll be happy to know your opinions and suggestions on the matter!

      32 votes
    29. Your own user page now has paginated Topics and Comments views - let's talk about user history visibility

      When you're viewing your own user page, there are now two other "tabs" available, one for showing only topics that you've posted, and one for only comments. These pages are paginated, so you can...

      When you're viewing your own user page, there are now two other "tabs" available, one for showing only topics that you've posted, and one for only comments. These pages are paginated, so you can go back through your whole history of topics/comments. I also intend to make the "recent activity" view paginated as well, but that's a tiny bit more complicated, so I left it out for now.

      I plan to extend the tabs/pagination to all user pages some time next week, but as I previously promised, I wanted to give people at least a few days to be able to review their own posts and go back and see if there's anything they want to edit/delete before other users can more easily look through their posts.

      This leads into a discussion that I want to have about whether we should do anything special to hide user history.

      In general, I think that showing user history is good. It's valuable from an accountability perspective and it has a lot of legitimate benefits. If I run across a user that consistently makes good posts, it's nice to be able to look at their history and see some of the other comments they've made. Maybe (once the site is larger, anyway), I'll even learn about some new groups that I'm interested in by seeing where that user hangs out.

      However, there are also obvious downsides, and we're seeing some major demonstrations of this in the media lately (mostly applied to Twitter). I don't want to get into the individual cases, but there have been repeated instances of people digging up years-old tweets and using them as ways to attack people. The main problem with this is that a full history (especially when combined with search) makes it very easy to find things to shame people about, especially when they're pulled entirely out of context of how they were written in the first place.

      Tildes is still very new, but this is a real possibility as the site goes on. Do we want people to be able to easily dig up old comments a user made 5+ years ago? Do the potential downsides of that ability outweigh the benefits from being able to easily look back through a user's history?

      One other thing to keep in mind is that once the site is publicly visible (and especially once there's an API), there will be external databases of everyone's posts. We can make it more difficult/inconvenient for people to be able to search/review user history, but we can't make it impossible. There's just no way to do that with a site where your posts are public.

      Let me know your thoughts, it's a really difficult subject and one that I've been thinking about a lot myself as more and more of these "person in spotlight has embarrassing social media history" cases come up.

      79 votes
    30. Should we have a small description for why a removed comment was removed?

      It would be nice to give some context to removed comments so people can see what happened without seeing the offensive comment. I never really liked it on Reddit where when a comment was removed...

      It would be nice to give some context to removed comments so people can see what happened without seeing the offensive comment. I never really liked it on Reddit where when a comment was removed by a mod, you had no idea why. It would be nice for fellow curious people maybe. What are your thoughts?

      37 votes
    31. Allow anonymous posting in some groups?

      Crazy Idea™: You know what might be neato, but I have no idea how it could be implemented... if Tildes could have groups where truly anonymous posting was allowed, though it would require...

      Crazy Idea™: You know what might be neato, but I have no idea how it could be implemented... if Tildes could have groups where truly anonymous posting was allowed, though it would require authentication. Use cases: ~talk about something embarrassing, or ask questions for which on Reddit you would make a throwaway. Maybe this user permission was only allowed after some threshold was met? If it was truly anonymous in the database, then notifications on replies probably could not work, right?

      Would that be useful at all? If so, probably low priority I know, but just a thought.

      10 votes
    32. Posting old news

      I've tried using search (both by keyword and by tag) but I couldn't find anything about this. What's Tildes opinion about posting old news that haven't been discussed yet? I'm not talking about...

      I've tried using search (both by keyword and by tag) but I couldn't find anything about this. What's Tildes opinion about posting old news that haven't been discussed yet? I'm not talking about your regular news post from a newspaper that is already too late to be discussed about, I'm talking about things such as software releases or old blog posts that have never been posted but would be interesting to discuss about. How would one tag them? Where should we post them if allowed?

      Edit: I'm sorry but I won't be here for discussing this tomorrow or during the weekend. I'm not staying at home, but I hope I can come back to some good responses next week.

      9 votes
    33. Meta-post for the "a layperson's introduction to..." series

      What's this? This post contains all entries of the "a layperson's introduction to" series. I will keep this thread up to date and sorted. This means this post is an excellent opportunity to try...

      What's this?

      This post contains all entries of the "a layperson's introduction to" series. I will keep this thread up to date and sorted. This means this post is an excellent opportunity to try out the bookmarking feature!

      Physics

      Quantum Physics

      Basics of quantum physics

      Topic Date Subtopics Author
      Spin and quantisation part 1 01 Nov 2018 spin, quantisation @wanda-seldon
      Spin and quantisation part 2 03 Nov 2018 superposition, observing, collapse @wanda-seldon
      The nature of light and matter part 1 16 Nov 2018 light, matter, wave-particle duality, photoelectric effect, double-slit experiment @wanda-seldon

      Material Science

      Topic Date Subtopics Author
      Spintronics 18 Jul 2018 spintronics, electronics, transistors @wanda-seldon
      Quantum Oscillations 28 Oct 2018 quantum oscillations @wanda-seldon
      LEDs 10 Nov 2018 leds, electronics, diodes, semiconductors @wanda-seldon
      Spintronics Memory 22 Jun 2019 spintronics @wanda-seldon

      Classical physics

      Thermodynamics

      Topic Date Subtopics Author
      Thermodynamics part 1 07 Nov 2018 energy, work, heat, systems @ducks
      Thermodynamics part 2 13 Nov 2018 equilibrium, phase changes, ideal gas @ducks
      Thermodynamics part 3 24 Nov 2018 @ducks

      Computer Science

      Artificial Intelligence

      Topic Date Subtopics Author
      Genetic Algorithms 18 Jun 2019 algorithm, genetic algorithm Soptik
      41 votes
    34. Would it make sense to make the default activity period be a function of the recent activity on the site, and in each group?

      I am a bit lazy, and I also seem to like the default 3 day filter on the activity feed... but, sometimes a person less lazy than I responds to a topic of mine which is older that 3 days. These are...

      I am a bit lazy, and I also seem to like the default 3 day filter on the activity feed... but, sometimes a person less lazy than I responds to a topic of mine which is older that 3 days. These are usually good responses. These folks clearly played with the time filter. Other users are missing out on these responses.

      I agree that a 3 day filter may be the ideal filter at the normal activity level of Tildes at large, at this point. But Tildes is still really fluctuating in activity, as may other sites based on the codebase. This may be an even bigger issue in specific groups.

      Would there be any workable and beneficial way to make the default time filter a function of recent activity? This may apply to the main feed, and each group feed. This would help in site/group times of low activity, and might scale to the much higher activity of the future.. does this make any sense at all?

      Would it be better to make the default time filter a function of activity, instead of a arbitrary setting which an admin selected?

      Edit: the list box label might default to a dynamic “recent”, or similar, and then still have the other options of “last 1 hour, last 12 hours,” etc...

      9 votes
    35. Defining and using "ask" tags

      Deimos and I were discussing the use of "ask" topic tags this week, and we agreed it might be a good idea to get a consensus on these. At the moment, Tilders are using four "ask" tags on topics:...

      Deimos and I were discussing the use of "ask" topic tags this week, and we agreed it might be a good idea to get a consensus on these.

      At the moment, Tilders are using four "ask" tags on topics:

      • ask

      • ask.survey

      • ask.recommendations

      • ask.help

      (There may be more "ask" tags created in the future, but these four are what we're all using at the moment.)

      Anything that's a question gets tagged with "ask". Some specific types of question will then get tagged with "ask.survey" or "ask.recommendations" or "ask.help", depending in the type of question being asked.

      • "ask.survey" is for questions about preferences and favourites. "What's your favourite horror movie?" "What's the best place you ever visited?" "What's your favourite type of holiday?" The asker is collecting data about people's likes and dislikes (even if they're not going to publish the results in a report later!).

      • "ask.recommendations" is for questions asking for recommendations. "What's a good browser to use?" "What book should I read next?" "Which brand of phone should I buy?" The asker is looking for people to recommend things to them.

      However, Deimos and I wondered about "ask.help". One interpretation we came up with was that "ask.help" is for questions looking for a specific answer, where it should generally be possible for people to think "yes, this is the right answer to the question". This would include questions seeking help learning about an academic topic, such as happens in /r/AskScience and /r/AskHistorians over on Reddit. Another interpretation we came up with was that "ask.help" is for questions looking for guidance on doing something, like a "how to" type question. This would be more like the types of questions in /r/Help and like the Help menus in software and the F1 key - helping people get things done.

      What do you think about the "ask" tags? In particular, what should the "ask.help" tag be used for? In general, are the existing "ask" tags okay? Do we need more "ask" tags? Do we need different "ask" tags?

      18 votes
    36. Is the syntax highlighting broken?

      Most examples in the announcement post are grey to me. So are most of my tests. I remember it working just fine, but today I've noticed that it's all grey.

      8 votes
    37. What are the rules on self-promotion? Can I share links to my own blog posts?

      I admittedly didn't reread the docs, but a search for "self" showed no results. EDIT a search for "self-promotion", and not "self promotion", pointed me to this previous thread:...

      I admittedly didn't reread the docs, but a search for "self" showed no results.

      EDIT
      a search for "self-promotion", and not "self promotion", pointed me to this previous thread:
      https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/3i5/daily_tildes_discussion_approaches_to_self_promotion

      25 votes
    38. Suggestion: a way to identify extra-good topics

      We have the "Exemplary" label for comments, which identifies comments as particularly good, and even boosts their ranking within threads. Now that we've had this for a while, I keep finding myself...

      We have the "Exemplary" label for comments, which identifies comments as particularly good, and even boosts their ranking within threads.

      Now that we've had this for a while, I keep finding myself want to do the same for topics. I'll read an article and want to give it an extra boost because it's better than average.

      I'm ready for an equivalent to the "Exemplary" label for topics.

      30 votes