With the inevitablre result of the US election, for the next four years all media will be totally overwhelmed by one person. It'd be nice to be able to at least on Tildes shove all of that into one corner so it can be hidden.

While Tildes is quite US focused, there is still a lot of us non-us people here.

It seems like the last real discussion about the subject was about 6 years ago

I am mostly wondering what the thoughts now are on crossposting something in different tildes groups. This was inspired by a few things. Last week I was unsure where to post something and ended up posting it in the most topical tildes group even though previous posts that took off were posted in a different group. Meaning that people that are subscribed to ~comp but not ~life might have missed the post even though they might be interested.

Then there is this post. I was about to post the same link before realizing it was already posted. The post in question is posted in ~games, I would have posted it in ~tech. I feel like the overlap between ~games and ~tech subscribers likely is a bit bigger, but also here I feel like people might potentially be missing out.

I realize this might not be the biggest issue, the majority of people on tildes seem to be subscribed to all groups. But it still, it tickled something in my brain and this is the second time in a short period that I find myself thinking about this.

Ideally, in my mind, this would be solved on a technical level where you can post something in two groups with a consolidated comment section. However, I don't see this happening in the sort term.

Tags sort of cover this, but given they can be anything and quite numerous, browsing through them is not something I personally would ever use or actually address this.

The second-best solution, and the one I'd like to discuss, is to simply cross post and in one of the posts leave a comment linking to the other post to consolidate discussion a bit.

Am I overthinking the issue? Probably. :) But overall, what are peoples thoughts on allowing cross posts between groups? Any real downsides besides double entries in the listing?

So this topic is something that could very easily just be bothering myself, but I figured I’d share before unsubscribing to ~misc. If this is the wrong group, I apologize, please feel free to move it to the correct location. I will also preface this by saying I only really view Tildes occasionally, and am not the most active user, so those two things might be contributing to this.

I am wondering if creating an official Politics group would be beneficial to Tildes. I’ve noticed that the majority of recent posts in ~misc is mostly regarding politics. I don’t want to necessarily just unsubscribe from ~misc, in case something non-political and interesting to myself ends up getting put there, but if that’s the solution I’m more than happy to do it.

I just figured that with the amount of activity going on there fairly regularly, either a dedicated ~politics group or a sub group (maybe ~misc.politics or ~news.politics?) would be better? That way other users similar to myself could unsubscribe to that instead of unsubscribing to the much broader ~misc group.

I personally do enjoy the way that Tildes is setup, and don’t see any bad interactions in those posts. It’s definitely more of a personal thing.

That said, I don’t want to make people think that I’m telling them how things should be run, merely throwing my two cents out there, no matter how worthless they are.

Thanks to everyone for posting, and to the mods/admin for keeping everything running smoothly. This really is a solid community!

Hey all,

I'm a professional game designer with about ten years in the video game industry. I've worked primarily with collectible card games and my most recent project is a mobile first strategy card game. I'm interested in talking more about video game design, design theory, and more.

Most of the design topics I've seen on Tildes are focused more on tabletop / board games and I was wondering if there is a big enough population of people interested in discussing game design more from the professional side of video game design.

Hope to have some meaningful discussion and I'm available to chat about relevant topics.

The sidebar description of ~news says

All the world's current events, including politics as well as analysis or opinion pieces.

But most politics articles are moved to ~misc. I've even seen people say that ~news is not for politics. So what determines if news stories aren't good enough for ~news? I get that an article about the estimated 20,000 deaths from a flood in Libya is news. But what's the line for politics and other similar categories? And why not have ~news.politics? I'm sure that must have been discussed before, but I'm not sure if it has been discussed in the context of the sidebar.

Basically, we need to either change how articles get categorized or change that sidebar description.

This would be a great positive mindset gathering place for folks who want to have more productive and less alienating discussions than what fuckcars etc provided.
The urbanism movement talks about solutions and work being done at the larger governmental scale, down to the local "tactical" or grassroots scale. These ideas are how to work to improve the housing affordability crisis, pedestrian safety, and generally help make more people friendly municipalities & communities that can become financially more sustainable. There is overlap with permaculture and environmentalism.

If you're unfamiliar with this movement, some great places to start are books by Jane Jacobs, Strong Towns by Charles L Marohn, Bowling Alone, by Robert D. Putnam, and countless YouTube channels like Not Just Bikes, Oh the Urbanity and many others.

To me, AI is kind of its own thing. It's too creative to fall under ~tech, but it's not quite ~creative either. It's something brand new, and can't be stuffed into any of the already established categories.

Hello! Tildes newbie here. I wasn't sure if this is a bug or if it's working as intended, so I wanted to ask.

I unsubscribed from https://tildes.net/~sports but noticed that I still saw a post from ~sports.hockey in my home feed. It took me a while to figure out that I also had to go to each of the ~sports subgroups and unsubscribe from all of them too. Am I doing this correctly or did I miss a button somewhere that would let me unsubscribe from a parent group + all its subgroups in one go?

Thank you!

--- EDIT ---
Thanks to everyone for the replies! Confirmed that it's working as intended. And there is now a new post by cfabbro on Gitlab suggesting that "unsubscribe from all subgroups" be added as a new function.
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/802

Unless I'm missing something, it seems if I subscribe to parent group but not its subgroups, the topics from subgroups still show anyway. Back when they were just tags at least I can use filter but that doesn't work anymore. Is it just me or isn't that the opposite effect we'd expect from subgroups?

Edit: Everyone explained that it's a bug. I'll just need to be patient then.

See this image.

Which groups are unsubscribed? All of the ~sports.X groups are unsubscribed, but american_football, basketball, football, and motorsports have been visited.

The link-visited colour set by a.link-group:visited is taking precedence over the default colour otherwise set by .group-list-item-not-subscribed a.link-group, hiding the colour change associated with -not-subscribed. This is particularly troublesome when unsubscribing from a group, since one must go to the group's page – visiting the link – in order to unsubscribe.

I read some funny stuff on here and there are plenty of witty responses around, but a community for humorous content may lighten things up a bit and it can start discussions too… after all:

“Laughter without a tinge of philosophy is but a sneeze of humor. Genuine humor is replete with wisdom.” -Mark Twain

Yeah that's the question. I was thinking of the possibility of posting deals here. But it might just eat up the other tech content here. That's not my goal, but I'd like to start a PC building\support\tech deals tilde.

For many they are considered ~hobbies so ~hobbies.cars and ~hobbies.motorcycles would be a logical place. I don't know if ~transport would be a suitable main category for this since then trucks, tractors, trains and boats could also go there without bloating hobbies' sub-groups too much.

I'd like to hear your input on this, cheers.

This is a place to post your ideas about what to do about Tildes groups and tags. I'm going to write about some problems (as I see them) and save my ideas about solutions for the comments.

The taxonomy problem

We have tags and groups and they are somewhat arbitrary. A tag could be a group someday. A group can be downgraded to a tag if it's not used much.

Topics can have multiple tags, but they can be in only one group (and its ancestor groups).

It's hard to pick the right group. An example: a post about animals could go in ~enviro (for wildlife), ~hobbies (for pets), or ~science (for a scientific study). So where do you put news article about a scientific study of the effects of house cats on wildlife?

Adding ~animals seems like it would be a good thing because now you have an obvious place to find all the posts about animals. Animal lovers rejoice! But from a taxonomy point of view, it makes things worse, because now you have another place where you could logically put an article and another place to go looking for it. More groups means more edges and more edge cases. It's enough to make you wish for crossposts.

The competition problem

Tags are better for taxonomy, so why not just have tags? Because classifying topics isn't the only thing we want to do. As Deimos wrote about, eventually we'd like to have somewhat more independent communities, closer to subreddits but hopefully without their downsides. It would be nice if subreddits that wanted to migrate to Tildes could actually do it. We also want to have a good mix of topics on the front page, while allowing some groups to have a lot more posts than others.

I'll start with an analogy: if a school has only one sport that matters, the people who are good at that sport win socially, and other people don't have as much of a chance. But if you have multiple sports and clubs that people care about, there are more ways to win at something. I don't believe pretending everyone is a winner works all that well, but more ways to win promotes diversity and creates useful social ambiguity.

The front page of Tildes is the most visible and has limited space. That creates an all-against-all competition between topics. We also have groups with their own leaderboards, but they are lesser competitions and it's unclear if they matter yet. (I'm using them more, though.) Meanwhile, each topic has an independent leaderboard for its comments that doesn't conflict with any other game. (Maybe that's why I like megathreads?)

I haven't been thinking of Tildes in terms of leaderboards, but maybe it can explain why old-timers are often reluctant to post topics? We aren't really trying to win, but we have ideas about fair play. When there's only one game anyone cares about, we don't want to drown out other worthy topics by entering too many contestants. We're also a bit reluctant to enter anything that's too specialized into the competition, because it doesn't "deserve" the attention. It's not a worthy contestant and it's just gonna lose.

Also, sometimes this isn't a game you want to win. Entering a controversial topic into a competition can get you unwanted attention, and that's often no prize at all. When a game isn't one you wanted to enter, getting attention is more like losing than winning.

For the front page, I expect this problem will get worse with more people. Entering the competition brings more attention than before.

Note: thinking of a topic listing as a leaderboard for a game is only an analogy and I don't mean to promote competitiveness. They weren't designed to be leaderboards and I think we'd like to see design changes that reduce competitiveness. There are known downsides to competition that we don't want, like "cheating" to win with "unworthy" strategies and the rules-lawyering and jealousy that come with that.

Ideas?

Some rules for this "game": Please post one proposal per comment. If you have multiple independent ideas, you can post them separately, but post them together if they're interrelated.

I'm relatively new here, and excited about the community. My question stems from learning that the usual way communities evolve here is by having specific topic information repeatedly surface in more general category forums. If we do not create a women's community here, comparable to the one that already exists for lgbt, will we be less likely to create topics related to women's issues? Can we predict how it will evolve?

What do you think?

A short story

Last night, I posted an article about fraud related to COVID funding in the United States.

I debated about where to put it. Was it ~news since it was an investigative report that was just released? ~finance because it was about money? ~health because it was about COVID?

In reading through other comments here, especially related to our current group structure I’ve noticed other people expressing similar sentiments about submitting things.

The same goes for tagging your topic. What are the right tags? What if I use the wrong one? There’s a non-negligible amount of anxiety regarding submitting things to the site.

If you go to the article I posted, and then click Topic Log on the sidebar, you can see what got changed. I realized I forgot to add the tag usa. You can then see that another user changed the capitalization on my title, moved my post from ~news to ~health, and added additional tags.

The betrayal(?)

Someone moved my post? Someone changed my title? Without telling me?! 😡

Yes, they did, and I’m here to tell you that I couldn’t be happier about that. It’s not a betrayal; it’s a collaboration. 🥰

Submissions on Tildes aren’t like other places. You won’t get your hand slapped here for not following the right protocol, especially because there’s not a fully clear protocol in the first place. Topic placement, tagging, and titling are all things that often require judgment calls. It’s not uncommon for the titles we see on Tildes to actually differ from published titles to make them less clickbaity or clearer, for example.

Furthermore, Tildes isn’t a place where people are competing to post content. There’s no karma to be harvested or influencers to influence. On other sites, big news items will often get dozens or hundreds of duplicate posts because, on other sites, who posted the content matters a whole lot. People will post and repost things because it’s important that they, individually, get “credit” for that.

Tildes works a bit differently, with submissions being owned more by the community at large rather than individual posters. It doesn’t mean we don’t have our own content (and it definitely doesn’t mean someone can or will edit the actual body of a post, like what I’m writing here), but more that the content’s place and appearance in the community is something we work together on. If you want to discuss something and you see someone already posted it here, that’s not a bummer — it’s a great thing! It saves you some work, plus you know at least one other person is on the same page as you and wants to discuss the same thing.

Which group should this go to? Which tags should I use?

Don’t worry too much about those things! We’ll collaborate on them. There are several users here who are librarians of Tildes, dutifully organizing submissions behind the scenes.

When I first started posting, I was nervous about getting my tags and title exactly right. I’d occasionally post a title with a typo and cringe, hard, wondering if I needed to delete the post entirely.

Now, when I post, I’m happy that if I don’t know what to do exactly or I make a mistake, someone else will come along and help me out with it. No more anxiety!

I hope all our new users can feel that way too. Having your submissions reorganized is not combative; it’s collaborative. Don’t stress about posting anything perfectly. Someone will help you out if need be.

I think it would, that's something that interests a vast number of users. Things like construction, bridges, buildings, city planning, trains, etc. Right now they can go to ~misc or ~design which doesn't seem appropriate.

I have a nice video about butterflies to post. It's not really ~enviro material because although there is a little bit of mention of climate crisis I want to post it mostly because "aren't butterflies awesome look at these awesome butterflies and how cool they are"

Sure it could go in ~misc but it seems odd there's a group for ~space and not one for down here on ~earth. I prefer ~earth to ~nature because I think there's human earth stuff which is cool too (I know, I know, humans are part of nature but you know what I mean). Also because it balances with ~space.

Anyway, was just a thought. Not going to lose sleep over it.

Additionally, in the sidebar, putting group descriptions in the title attribute might be useful - so I don't have to click into each group to see what it's criteria is when I'm trying to find where to post something non-obvious.

On https://tildes.net/groups it looks like at least on Firefox 88 the normal link color:

a.link-user:visited, a.link-group:visited

is overriding the unsubscribed color:

.group-list-item-not-subscribed a.link-group

This is an idea I've had for awhile, I wanted to have it written down somewhere for future reference. This would likely be a substantial undertaking, but I haven't seen much discussion on the concept.

What if Tildes was able to have internal tildes? We would be able to 'start a tildes group' and have all~group.tag discussions under it. You could invite members to your ~group, and only those members could vote/comment/see on the internal group that they are part of.

This would make it so we can grow tildes, keep it small, and have personal obsessions and ideas. For example, I run a few discords that are part of nascent old/antique ideologies and philosophies, and we have been looking to move off of Discord (horrible for conversations and debates). I realize we could start our own forum or Tildes server, but the idea of tilde branches would be interesting to see play out in practice. I'm sure this has already been brought up, and will likely never happen, but I would love thoughts on the matter if you have them. This would likely be a large undertaking and I haven't really peeked at Tildes source since launch, so I'm not sure how the structure is these days.

As a new member I am really hesitant to post this but I recently posted an article to ~news that was related to lgbt issues and it was moved to ~lgbt. I fully support a sub section devoted to lgbt but news should be news regardless.

Just because it has an lgbt angle does not mean it should be moved. I'm not even lgbt myself but I find it sort of hurtful that a news article was pushed off ~news. So I ask this, and once again not trying to make waves. But why?

Edit: I would love to be a member of this community as I am personally seeking a less asshole filled reddit alternative. But pushing a news article to another ~ just because it relates a bit more to them shouldn't be a thing. If you are tolerant it relates to us all. And yes I know I posted it in ~news because I was trying to participate and I'm a news junky.

Sorry.

Edit 2: This was a sad sorry way to come in to this community. I apologize.

Clicking a tag provides the search results for that tag in the local group. Since some topics appear across groups, I think it'd be useful to view site-wide results as well, optionally. Does that already exist?

Perhaps the post was posted in the wrong place and can be moved or deleted. But it's not entirely clear.

There is a page: https://tildes.net/groups

Where is it written:

Group name colors: subscribed / not subscribed. You can change your subscription status to a group in its sidebar when you are viewing it directly.

I decided to experiment and unsubscribe from some groups. However, there are no changes on this page. Perhaps it’s just me or I’m doing something wrong.

The last group request thread was last year. With all the meta-chat lately it might be time for a new one, and maybe expand a bit more in terms of site organization in general.

I mainly want to take this opportunity to make the recent meta feedback a bit more actionable: Which current problems can be solved via site mechanics? Will leave some thoughts in the comments.

I know chat about cryptocurrency hasn't been extremely popular here in the past, but I am curious if there is enough interest now to make a group for it. I am looking for a place to discuss it from an enthusiast's perspective because Reddit is just getting a little too crazy for me.

When you click in a tag in a tildes group, you see the topics that have been posted in that group with that tag according to your filters. There's also a link to go back to normal viewing. I think an option to see that tag in all groups would be a neat addition, even if not particularly important. Thoughts?

364 days specifically, and it's 11 PM again, so admittedly it's kinda late to ask this question.

Usually I would pull-up the concerns over no user growth meaning more groups is just more division for less content but this Deimos reply implies otherwise?

I've been playing Destiny 2 and I have so many questions. I thought about reaching out to people who actually know what they are doing. Since I'm moving away from Reddit and other sites like that I thought about creating a D2 group here on Tildes. However, If it requires "work" as a moderator or something like that I would honestly pass.

So my questions are: can anyone create a group? As a creator do you have to do any "work" on that group?

Thanks

The longer I use Tildes, the more I question the effectiveness of ~news.

/r/news made sense on reddit, where they didn't have a robust cross-group tagging and filtering system. I think Tildes be better served by eliminating ~news entirely and replacing it with a news tag with a date property, which would allow for nice chronological filtering for catching up on news stories, especially if the article date could be scraped somehow. Miss a week of news? Search the tag with a date range, get all news stories for last week, perhaps with a minimum comment threshold to see what sparked discussion.

I think ~gov (or politics) would be needed as a replacement, as it's a major driver of most news stories, but there's so much more to politics than just news, and those discussions don't exactly fit anywhere nicely at the moment, esp if it's a random blog post relating to recent events in the news. Almost every other group serves as a nice catch-all for most other common news categories.

The only issue I would see would be when ~gov would overlap with the other categories, which would likely happen a lot..but that happens with the current ~news too. I think that could be further mitigated by having a sort of x-post system blurring the lines of tags and groups even more, where ~gov would take precedence but posts would then also appear in the tagged groups for users not following governance otherwise.

That's actually a foundation of my more insane idea of completely eliminating traditional groups by letting people build their own groups in the form of prioritized tags, but that's another post for another time.

I understand we have ~life but I think something more ~personal would be more beneficial, life could pertain to a lot of different things but personal would be far more effective.

We could also have ~personal.blogs for us to submit our personal blog posts that don't really have a place anywhere else.

Would open and connect the community a lot more, allow for advice, general questions, and more.

Why is it that there is ~tildes and ~tildes.official? Why not just ~tildes and ~announcements? Why not just ~health and ~coronavirus? Why not just ~games and ~game_design?

I understand the appeal of hierarchical tags. However, if posts in subgroups don't collect into their parent groups, then why even have them at all?

https://tildes.net/~tildes/pia/can_someone_explain_subgroups_to_me#comment-55ml

Say I wanted to create a thread about running. Running is a sport and hobby. Sports is often seen more as the professional side of things (say, Olympic running). Then again, many runners take their hobby quite seriously and definitely exercise it as a sport. How do I know which one of those two groups is the more appropriate?

I remember there being subscribe/unsubscribe buttons on https://tildes.net/groups

By default new accounts are subscribed to every group, earlier I could just goto that page and unsubscribe from groups I'm uninterested in. Looks like now you have to goto each group page and unsubscribe there.

I love this website can’t think of anything bad about it apart from really not liking that communities are called groups, I feel this is due in part to Facebook using it but also it’s such an over used term on the internet, could we not think of something more unique for tildes to call it’s communities