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.

It would be nice if there was an extra box that allows you to add info that is private to the people on tildes. For example I would like to share creds to a game account, but I only want people on tildes to get that info, not the public who aren't users and just visit.

If I add, remove, or change a topic filter, and then press the "Save" button, I get no indication that anything happened. It does work, but it's odd that it doesn't tell you it tried. What if something caused it to fail? (Maybe that case is handled?) I think it should say something like "Changes saved at 3:11:42PM", or something along those lines so you know it actually updated.

I constantly hit the "Enter" key in the middle of writing a comment, usually when moving my hand over to my mouse. To avoid this, I'd love it if there were an option in settings to require a confirmation before any comments are actually submitted. It shouldn't be required, but it would be helpful for me personally.

Compliments are, technically, to be tagged as 'noise' and often also 'offtopic' for usually being only loosely related to the commment or post they're replying to. But the warm fuzzies empathy is pretty important in a community, and I don't remember seeing an unnecessary compliment anywhere so, unsurprisingly, people don't noise compliments. But they still might clutter space for a potential reply giving advice. So do you think the current arrangement is fine? I personally would probably make a label for compliments which would either be neutral or slightly positive, and maybe publically visible so everyone can (but don't have to) see the compliments of the receiver but I haven't thought about this too deeply.

There's been quite a bit of discussion lately about people don't want to see, but not that much about what sort of content we do want to see. What would you like to see more of?

For the official stance, I'll repost the instructions that most of us are probably skipping over by now.

Tildes prioritizes high-quality content and discussion
Please post topics that are interesting, informative, or have the potential to start a good discussion.
Please avoid posting topics that are primarily for entertainment or that don't have discussion value.

This seems vague, and we probably have different ideas of what's high-quality and what counts as good discussion?

I'm also wondering if we should be here more for the links or for the discussion. When I arrived, I was just happy to find a quiet place where I could post links to articles that I found elsewhere and were particularly interesting to me. (But I think I had gotten into a rut for a while after getting obsessed with the pandemic and politics.) Maybe we should try posting more links?

I have some music links I was thinking of posting. However, I didn't want to flood ~music with 10 new links at once. It can make a category look like it has really homogenous content to newcomers when a single poster has posted a bunch of links at once. What I'd like to do is post one per day for the next several days. But I don't want to potentially forget one day because I got a little busy, or whatever. Would it be useful to be able to create a topic but set it to not post until a particular day or time?

I don't think I saw a feature like this in the gitLab, apologies if it's already in the works or been suggested.

The gist of it would be to have an @/help ping so if someone needs an edit to a title or tags or something, they can use that and it'd flag the topic or somehow show those who have the permissions that this thread needs attention. This might be helpful for users (like moi) who might not know the people who CAN do this already off the top of their head, beyond Deimos.

Let me know your thoughts or if this could be a useful feature for anyone else.

Pretty simple bug, documented as per title. The /groups page incorrectly indicates that I am subscribed to ~anime (I shouldn't be), whilst the ~anime group itself, and the subscriptions list on the homepage (along with the topics I see), correctly show me as unsubscribed from ~anime.

I could try toggling this? Which might fix the bug, but would also potentially erase the state of my subscriptions in the database and prevent debugging.

I know we have talked about it to death, and even run experiments on the mechanism, but I think it's worth re-evaluating the idea of voting on comments.

I know that voting provides value to Tildes as a social platform; it acts almost like a social currency; you know that if you have a lot of votes, people appreciate what you have to say. That provides incentive for people to write more comments and participate with the community.

What I and others have come to realize is that votes also have negative effects on our community. Here's a short list of negative effects:

1. Voting is addictive. I'm sure most of us are familiar with the process of clicking on our usernames to see how many votes our last few comments have gathered. We do this because it's a dopamine hit; they act like tiny digital love letters telling us how awesome we are.

2. Voting is a measurement of popularity. Those love letters aren't actually how good you are, they measure how popular your ideas are. In other words, votes encourage group-think and creates an echo chamber that will prevent you from taking competing ideas seriously.

3. Because of number 2, we alienate people with other ideas and reduce the richness and quality of discussion on this platform.

4. Also as a result of number 2, the information that gets put into those popular threads becomes the de facto truth - weather or not it's actually true. This can prevent us from seeing the "bigger picture" or from understanding problems others might have with how we think.

5. The end result of all of these effects is that we will slowly become more and more extreme and insular as time progresses. We essentially become the same as the people stuck in conservative media prisons that we tend to look down on.

Personally speaking, I think that we would be a much more robust community if we had more conservative voices speaking up. After all, the left does not have a monopoly on the objective truth. I know we probably have a few conservatives that are lurking around, but I think that they are largely disincentivized to contribute because they don't get the same kind of votes left-leaning comments do.

With that being said, I would like to hear back from everyone what they think we should do about voting. Should we go back to hiding vote totals again? Should we get rid of them entirely? Or maybe you think things are good as they are? Please let us know your reasoning.

I have an idea for Tildes.
You can give people the option to promote their own posts ,using either real money or cryptocurrency, so their posts can appear on the homepage, they get exposure and they support Tildes whilst doing it! Other people can also tip posts, both Tildes and the OP get a share of the revenue! The money Tildes makes from this will be able to support the site!

Please add this. I don't want annoying Google ads.

Do we have any statistics on how many users have been banned and why they’ve been banned? What information should be or remain public? Some forum sites let you see the banned users post and comment history from prior to their ban; is there any value in that?

Unrelated; how many Tildes-ers are we up to now?

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?

When I click on the "x comments" in the upper right to see responses to my previous posts, it lists out any unread comments to my posts. If I click on the "Parent" link to see my original comment and the reply, I can collapse the reply, but not the parent. This seems like a bug. I can collapse the grandparent, and it all goes away, but I'd expect to be able to collapse the parent as well.

When a comment is collapsed, either through tags or already being read, it shows a one line preview of the comment. This preview skips any quotes in the comment. This works perfectly when quotes are used to reference a part of the comment they are replying to. But if the comment includes only a quote, the preview line is just blank. This makes it look like an error. I think that, if a comment has only a quote, it should do something like this:

Quote

Or

Quote: This is the quote text…

Just noticed that the contents of expandable comments are automatically shown in the one-line summary when comments are collapsed; see here. Considering we often use them for spoiler comments, maybe this warrants changing this behavior? Or at the least it adds to the case for implementing dedicated spoiler tags within comments.

Basically the title. I'm not going to navel-gaze too much here because it's not that much of a complex problem.

Currently, as it stands, if a submission is older than x days (where x may be 3, but I'm not sure), new comments in that submission will no longer cause Tildes to bump the thread to the top of the list in activity view. Additionally, after 2 weeks, a note will be appended to the comment posting view indicating community standards around commenting on older threads.

The scenario I'm seeking to solve is where one submission covers an event of some duration longer than a few days—where Tildes users feel repeated or recurring submissions are not warranted. My example is this thread about a YouTube video series that was released in three parts, but all discussion has been placed in that submission, presumably because no one has felt that duplicating a post for each new part of the series is worthwhile.

Perhaps if a certain proportion of comments occur within a timeframe, after the submission has been aged out of the sliding window where new comments cause a bump in activity, a bump should still be allowed, but should require more than 1 comment to trigger said bump?

There's some fairly good discussion in that thread that feels wholesome enough that it could be exposed again to the wider Tildes community—because right now everyone interested in that thread is operating under the implicit assumption that to read and participate about this topic, they have to remember to go back to thread y.

I made a new bio recently and here been tweaking it for a while and hit the 2000 character cap and messed with some of the formatting and wording for it to fit in.

Thing is, you don't read markdown formatting. My bio has quite a bit of formatting and the text with the formatting is ~1960 characters, but the text you read is only ~885 characters (according to word counter), or less than half that. I feel like that's not how it should work.

The first two image links in the spoilerbox of my Timasomo update don't work (as in aren't clickable or turn the text into a link), but others do.

Bug?

So what I'm talking about is stuff like this 10-video playlist or this 3 video playlist (Emp never actually made it a playlist unfortunately).

So how should we deal with multiple videos from the same person on the same subject?

Should the ability to make 10 link posts and wrap them under a single topic so people can comment on each video individually be a new feature (and if so should we be able to upvote the whole thing or each link individually?)

Should we upload a playlist of all the videos like this?

Should we make a text post with all the video links, like this but with videos instead of chapters?

Or should we do something else?

I've heard many people here like truereddit and the depthhub network and so would probably pop up a lot here but I wonder what other suggestions we might have.

I'd probably like r/imaginarymaps and a lot of related fantasy subreddits. It would probably also be interesting to call more hobby/social/'extravert' subreddits (or, odds are, any subreddit about anything that requires going outside, physical effort/tools or requires multiple people.)

It would probably also be interesting to bring some subreddits for minority/discriminated against groups like r/ainbow, r/TwoXchromosomes or r/transgender.

Lastly, there are namesake subreddits like r/hobbies.

I noticed an odd behavior, and I can't tell if it's an intended feature, or if it's a mistake. I selected some text in a comment. I then scrolled it offscreen as I read more comments. Eventually, I started to reply to a comment further down on the page. When I pressed the "Reply" button, it used the selected text from an entirely different comment as a quote block in the reply.

I think it makes sense to pull selected text into a reply, if the selected text is part of the comment you're replying to. I was surprised to see it happen when replying to a different comment. Is this intentional or a bug?

To simplify the title:

(Formatted text, no space. (Behind the arrows.) While it's expected for quote blocks to not separate with one 'line' between them, it's definitely not expected for the block to be the same size, even w/o text.)

(Formatted text, with a space. Added this one in to contrast with Preformatted w/ space and because it separates the code blocks.)

>
>
>

(Preformatted/Codeblock text, no space. The "quote trigger" arrow in the middle is the bug, since if you look at the "view markdown" option of this post you'll realize that arrow shouldn't be there.)

 >

 >

(Preformatted/Codeblock text, with a space. This is how I personally fix the bug, if it is that. You can also fix it by typing space into the phantom arrow.)

Now with text inside the quote blocks, for comparison. (And because quoteblocks have to quote something.):

qwerty

asdf

(Formatted text, no space. Here the block expands normally for the text.)

qwerty

asdf

(Formatted text, with a space.)

>qwerty
>
>asdf

(Preformatted/Codeblock text, no space. The arrow in the middle I never typed in is still there.)

 >qwerty

 >asdf

(Preformatted/Codeblock text, with a space.)

I've found myself ignoring a lot of posts that are simply lifted and reposted from the front page of HN without any meaningful discussion on them.

I wish there was a magic filter that'd auto-ignore posts for me that are currently trending on HN or Reddit, as I only really come here for the niche topics and discussions.

This got me thinking: what does the rest of the community use the feature for?

In text posts, like this one,, we can see the name of user who created it. But if it is a link post then it shows site name in it's place. To see who created that post we have to open the comments page. Site name can be moved to article details line where the date of publishing and word count is. That way both info can be shown.

Reason. Both information is shown at same place currently 1. which can confuse new users. for example. Notice after four times mentioning site name there is a username. 2. both can't be shown together.

Sometimes I get into a back-and-forth... heated interaction with someone, and it goes on for a while, and then they stop responding. Afterwords, I might wonder if it was worthwhile. Maybe they got tired of arguing with me, or maybe they just thought the conversation reached its natural endpoint? Rarely, the conversation might end with us explicitly agreeing it was a good discussion, but that's kind of formal and not the usual case online.

Just stopping is my habit as well. If I don't want to talk anymore, I upvote the last comment (if I thought it was good) but don't reply.

In the case of repeated interactions like this with the same person, sometimes I wonder if I'm annoying them by replying to their comments too much, particularly if we disagree often. I've never been explicitly told to go away, but people are often reluctant to say things like that, for good reason since you never know how people will react.

It seems to me that upvotes don't tell me this. Upvotes tell you whether your comments make sense to the crowd. They don't tell you whether the person you're talking to liked your reply. Which seems like it would be good to know. It would be valuable feedback if the goal is to be a better conversationalist. That seems like a good goal to aim for?

I guess we could get in the habit of saying "good point" and all that, and sometimes things can be inferred from what people say if you're good at taking hints, but not all of us are. But we are all trained to upvote things we like already, and it seems like it would be nice to take advantage of that.

To the extent that people like to gather internet points, I wonder what sort of conversation would be encouraged if you got them by writing a good reply from the perspective of the person being replied to? But I guess it could be gamed pretty easily if two people cooperate, so we probably shouldn't keep a total.

Also, think about how this looks from the outside: if you are reading a conversation by two other people in a heated back-and-forth, how do you know whether they're having a good time or not? Maybe it seems obvious, but in some cases a heated discussion might look worse to outsiders than participants. If you could see that they liked each other's comments then it would seem friendlier.

Note that Facebook does tell you who upvoted a comment, but since it tells you everyone who upvoted it, it's even more information, maybe too much.

(This is a followup to @NaraVara's previous topic, focusing on a particular aspect of it.)

It is pretty clear there are certain subject areas where the discussion simply never goes well here. This isn't a Tildes thing really. Frankly these topics rarely go well anywhere online but, as we have aspirations 'round these parts of being more sophisticated than the Reddit rabble, I think it's worth digging into.

Overall Tildes is a fairly low-activity site, but if I ever see a topic that even tangentially touches on "identarian" issues get past double-digit comments, there will almost surely be an acrimonious exchange inside. I don't want to pretend I'm above this, I've been sucked into these back-and-forths myself as, I think, has almost every regular poster at one time or another. I've largely disengaged from participating in these at this point and mostly just watch from the sidelines now.

Unlike most of the common complaints with Tildes, I don't think this one will get better as the site grows and diversifies. If anything, I think it's going to end up creating norms and a culture that will bleed over into other controversial topics from tabs/spaces to iOS/Android. To keep that from happening, the community will need to form a consensus on what "high quality discussion" means and what we hope to get out of having conversations on these issues here.
To start, when I say "doesn't go well" I'm thinking of indicators where some combination of the following happen:

1. None of the participants learn anything new about the subject, themselves, or another viewpoint
2. Preponderance of "Malice" and "Noise" tags
3. Heated back-and-forth exchanges (related to the above)
4. Frequent accusations (and evidence) of speaking in bad-faith or mischaracterization of peoples' statements

These threads end in people being angry or frustrated with each other, and it's become pretty clear that members of the community have begun to form cliques and rivalries based on these battle lines. It also seems like the stridency and tone are making people leave out of frustration, either deleting their accounts or just logging off for extended stretches of time, which is also an outcome we don't want. So let's go into what we can do to both change ourselves and how others engage with us so people feel like they're being heard without everything breaking down into arguments.

The "Whys" of this are varied and I'm sure I don't see the whole picture. Obviously people come into any community bringing different background experiences and with different things they're hoping to get out of it. But in my view the root cause comes down to approaching discussions as a win/lose battle rather than a shared opportunity to learn about a subject or perspective. From observing many of these discussions without engaging, there are evident patterns in how they develop. The main thrust seems to be that criticism and pushback pretty quickly evolve from specific and constructive (e.g. "This [statement or behavior] is problematic because [reason]") to general and defamatory (e.g. "[Person] is [bad thing], as evidenced by them doing/making [action/statement]").

This approach very quickly turns a conversation between two people into a symbolic battle about making Tildes/the world safe for [community], defending the wrongfully accused, striking a blow against censorship, or some other broad principle that the actual discussion participants may or may not actually be invested in. Once this happens the participants are no longer trying to listen or learn from each other, they're trying to mine their posts for things they can pick through to make them look bad or invalidate their participation. This has the effect of obliterating nuance and polarizing the participants. Discussions quickly devolve from people speaking candidly to people accusing each other of mischaracterizing what they've said. This makes people defensive, frustrated, and creates a feedback loop of negativity.

The win/lose battle approach permeates political discussion on Tildes (and elsewhere), which is a separate issue, but it gets especially problematic in these threads since the subject matter is intensely personal for many people. As a result, it's important to take care that pushback on specific positions should always endeavor to make people feel heard and accepted despite disagreement. On the flip side, there needs to be a principle of charity in place where one accepts that "no offense/harm intended" actually means no offense intended without dissecting the particulars of word-choice to uncover secret agendas. If a charitable interpretation is available, it isn't constructive to insist or default to the uncharitable one. It may not feel fair if you know that the more negative interpretation is correct, but it is literally impossible to have productive discussion any other way. If you can't imagine that a well informed, intelligent, and decent person might hold a certain view then the only conclusion you can draw is that they're either ignorant, stupid, or evil and every response you make to them is going to sound like you think this of them. That's not a position where minds are going to be changed from. English isn't necessarily a first language for everyone here and, even if it is, not everyone keeps up to date on the fast moving world of shifting norms and connotations in social media. What's more, not all cultures and places approach these issues with the same assumptions and biases you're familiar with.

Now I don't actually believe in appealing to peoples' sense of virtue to keep things going constructively in situations like this. Without very active moderation to reinforce it, it just never works and can't scale. So I think operationalizing these norms is going to take some kind of work. Right now we freeze out comments when they have a lot of back-and-forth, which I think is good. But maybe we should make it a bit more humanistic. What if we rate limited with a note to say "Hey this discussion seems to be pretty heated. Maybe reflect on your state of mind for a second and take a breather if you're upset."

Or, in long threads with lots of my bad indicators, the submit button can send to the post preview rather than immediately posting. It could then flash a banner to be a quick reminder of the ground rules (e.g. Try to assume good faith, Remember the Human, Listen to understand rather than respond, Careful with the snark, It's not about winning/losing, etc.) This would introduce just a touch of friction to the posting process, hopefully just enough to make people think "Maybe I could phrase that better" or "You know, this isn't worth my time" and disengage (Obligatory relevant XKCD)

Alternatively, maybe it is the case that this is honestly just intractable without some sort of third-party mediation mechanic and we freeze out comments under such topics entirely. Like I said before, I worry the frequency with which these discussions turn dispiriting has a chance of acculturating new users or signaling to prospective users that this is an expected way for this community to engage.

This is a long post, and I hope it does not itself turn into another case study in the issues I'm trying to raise. I want to open the floor to anyone who has other ideas about causes and solutions. I also ask that we try to keep any critiques to specific actions and behaviors without trying to put blame on any groups of people. We all contribute to the vibe one way or another so we can all stand to try a little harder on this front.

It seems like there are not that many new topics posted on Tildes, and that we could post a lot more. But I sometimes find myself reluctant to do so. Don't I post too much already?

Recently there was a survey and apparently many people think Tildes is too tech-oriented. I don't think it's all that tech oriented, not like Hacker News or lobste.rs, but that makes me a little more reluctant to post tech links. (Though, really, other people should post more of the kind of links they want to see.)

I suspect it's not just me. Periodic topics sometimes get a lot of comments. Periodic topics have been started specifically to avoid having too many top-level topics on one subject.

But, why are we avoiding this? What's wrong with posting more links? If this were a social bookmarking site, I'd be saving more links. Maybe I'd save a bunch of accordion links, without any regard for whether people are interested?

It seems like we need something like folders. When new links are posted in a folder, they don't get listed individually at top-level. You could drop a bunch of links in a folder if you felt like it, without feeling like you're monopolizing conversation, because people would have to open the folder to see what's there. Or maybe instead of folders it would be something like creating a playlist. You could start a topic that's basically a list of links, and then anyone can add links to it if they want.

It seems like groups don't really do this, somehow? They feel a bit too open and exposed. Everything shows up on the front page regardless of group. (I mean, you can filter or unsubscribe from groups, but many of us don't. Partly because they're too broad. Who's going to unsubscribe from music just because they aren't interested in some music?)

So instead we use topics and post links as comments. It sort of works, but it's given me a lot of practice at writing markdown-formatted links on a mobile keyboard, and they appear differently in search and aren't tagged.

It seems like links posted within a topic and posted top-level should be more similar in the UI. Maybe if there's some conversation about a link within a topic, a moderator could promote it to top-level? Maybe a lot of topics would start that way, and then the site would feel a bit more full.

I was thinking about how much the quantity of election news is likely to increase as we get closer to Nov 3. And more specifically the likelihood that this election will not be clear cut, will be contested, lawsuits filed, etc in the days and weeks after Nov 3.

With that in mind, do we want to proactively put up a weekly (maybe daily for the actual week of) megathread to consolidate some of it?

I know the site is still in its infancy and cross-posting won't be much of an issue at the moment, but I was interested to see what other users thought about cross-posting, whether we should allow it and if so how it should be done?

Personally I am in favour of cross-posting but I think some site mechanic should exist that doesn't allow two separate threads to be created. Instead, the cross-post should link directly to the original thread so that discussion of the topic can be kept in a single location but the topic itself can reach multiple tildes. For example, say an article about music being created artificially by a robot was originally posted in ~music. Someone may want to cross-post this to ~tech, and to do so would only have to click some sort of cross-post button and select the tilde they want to cross-post to. Anyone browsing the ~tech tilde would see the post, but upon clicking it would be taken to the comments page of the post originally made in ~music. Some indication of where the post was originally made could be given as well when viewing the cross-post on another tilde.

Tildes should support Latex using MathJax, or something similar. Having a standard implementation would also act as an easy way to use advanced formatting, while extensions beyond the _sub and ^sup tags are being made. It would greatly increase the ease of using ~math (actually ~science). Though I could be wrong, it doesn't look like $$\LaTeX$$, $$x^2$$ $\int_{x=0}^p e^{-x^2}dx$ is rendering.

Edit: Katex (not my MathJax recommendation) was a good suggestion, using a partial font download and server side html/css generation.

Edit: Also, to be clear, this is not a must-have-now feature (though that would be nice), but I would like to see support for this in the future, as latex is almost universal in the mathematical sciences.

Collect and code, until it is done.

And now it is.

Ladies (the few that we have, I mean holy ^FUCK ), gents and everyone inbetween, welcome to the results of the 2020 Tildes census, which is only 34% less horrifying than 2020 itself. And you better believe I'm going to keep this up for the whole post, because fuck the responses this year, while greater in numbers, were occasionally still [REDACTED].^{thanks, thought police}

In the year of the lord, 2020^{CAN YOU PLEASE END ALREADY}, we got 350 responses in, which is a whopping 100 more than last year. I don't know how many accounts we have in total, no one does, and I'm too lazy to calculate the percentages right now because I'm calculating as we go so from the point of me writing this to clicking Post Topic an hour or two will probably pass.^{Update: I went to bed, so like 10 hours passed} Absolute numbers is all you're going to get here, so fuck me, fuck you and fuck off.^{I need some alcohol}

Anyway, let's go through the census. I let JotForms compile this nice graphical report that is pretty much useless because it completely breaks once either sexuality, gender or the myriad of various operating systems the people on here have get involved. But it's still funny seeing it struggle. Have a link to the PDF. So back to good Excel, my old nemesis.

Aggregated Data

Thankfully, this time around you'll have access to generate all this shit yourself, HERE YOU GO. The thing is in JSON, so easily deserializable, etc etc. I'm sure you people are skilled enough at typing the words into the IDEs to magic the data into your memory.

Important info: Empty answers are usually marked NO ANSWER, in case of numerical values it's usually -1 for age, -2 for the Kinsey scale (-1 is taken) and -69 for the 3 political values from the Sapply test, as these range from -10 to 10. Yes I made the default value -69. It's everyone's favourite number after all. Also, for some absolute FUCKED reason one of the values has 3 more entries than the other ones, I'm sure it has a totally VALID reason that has nothing to do with people entering bullshit. NOTHING.^{FuckingKILLME}

Also I can't be bothered to edit the "wrong" data out, i.e. typos in languages etc, so those are all in, maybe someone with more compassion than me can do that.

Kowalski, Analysis

First of all, I'm going to less graphs this year because it's fucking hard to aggregate things like ethnicity when you get responses ranging from black to a literal link of someone's You23AndMe results. Yes. I mean props to you for that but like, uh, FUCK, what am I going to do now? YOU ARE ALL MAKING THIS WAY TO FUCKING HARD. ლ(ಠ_ಠ ლ)

This propagates to basically all responses and next year I'm probably going to captain a way straighter course with less options, because I can't fucking MAKE FANCY GRAPHS WHEN YOU GIVE ME TOO MANY INDIVIDUAL RESPONSES^{FUCKINGKILLME}

Personal Shit

Geography

Not much has changed, the US still dominates, Canada second, though the British are catching up. I'm sure you'll have your tea party eventually. Though with good ol' Boris in charge I don't know if annexing the yanks is such a good idea. Also, as there are no invidual option here for everyone to FUCK IT UP it's the most sane graph of them all. No fucked colours this year, I promise, it's all scale.

Fancy Graph #1: Geography

Age

Fancy Graph #2: Age by decile For those wanting to repeat this, watch out, as the age by decile and specific age questions were exclusionary. You'll have to combine the results to get the same numbers. I hope. Unless I fucked up. Equal possibility.

Also whoever entered 28.9, because of you I had to make the age field in my code a double instead of an integer. Fuck you.

Gender etc.

I honestly thought this was going to be the wildest answer, but y'all are such a minority that it's fairly sane. The real clusterfuck starts after this question. Also whoever wrote prefer not to say, DID YOU NOT READ THE PART ABOUT THE OPTIONAL ANSWERS, [REDACTED] PLEASE [REDACTED] AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH-

Anyway as I said, fairly standard results.

Fancy Graph #3: Gender

Trans? Value
NO ANSWER 13
no 312
yes 23

Yeah I'm not gonna make a graph for a yes/no question, if that's bigoted you may scream at me in the comments.

Sexuality

I MADE THE SCREENSHOT BUT I FORGOT TO ADD IT FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK

Kinsey

Also forgot about you. Average is 1,37, idk what else to do.

Ethnicity

This was a mistake. 124 wrote white. 23 wrote caucasian. One person wrote causcasion. One person wrote that it's illegal to ask this question in their country. Someone wrote I bleed red white and blue.

THIS WAS A MISTAKE.

Kill me. Safe to say, that Tildes is, as someone put it perfectly: white af. Yes this was also a reply. KILL ME.

Language

Fancy Graph #3,5: Language^{This was added later, and I'm really not updating the others.}

Religion

I'm just gonna let the graph speak for itself, I don't have it in me to keep the anger up.

Fancy Graph #4: Religion

Politics, Education, Work

This is where the fun begins. No, honestly not really.

Politics

If I average out our Sapply values, we get this compass result. Yeah we're all communists. So whoever said in their dislike the alt right people on this platform, I really don't know what you mean. If anything we need more to achieve PEAK CENTRISM. In all honesty, the people saying that this sub is a leftist echo chamber (there were a few), you may have a point.

When we get to the magical field of how everyone identifies themselves politically, well, let's just say^{ah, there's the rage again} I'M NOT GONNA REPEAT THIS NEXT YEAR, GREAT FUCKING IDEA. Whoever entered confused, I FUCKING AGREE. SINCE WHEN IS PINK A FUCKING POLITICAL AFFLIATION? We do have a pirate though.^Nice

You may wade through the rest OF [REDACTED] YOURSELF in the published data.

Education

Tildes is an educated lot, contrary to popular my belief after making this census. A good chunk of people have a Bachelors, Masters, PhD. Still only one MD though, so if you have a medical emergency take it up with... checks notes ^{Ah fuck I can't reveal anything.} ...Take up with them. ^{JK please call your local emergency line when you need help}

Fancy Graph #5: Education

Work

Actually fairly sensible results, except a few, like that one person that entered not STEM, thanks for not giving me any useful information. You have the ability TO NOT ENTER SOMETHING. THIS GOES FOR THE PERSON WHO ENTERED meh AS FUCKING WELL, [REDACTED].

Fancy Graph #6: Work

Technology

Fancy Graph #7: Computer Operating Systems

Fancy Graph #8: Mobile Operating Systems

Basically just like religions. You all have to many options, since we're all communists now according to average, and options are bad, you MAY ONLY USE WINDOWS VISTA FROM THIS POINT ON, OR THE GESTAPO WILL PAY YOU A VISIT ^{fuck, wrong mass murderers}

About Tildes

Have Acc? Value
NO ANSWER 7
yes 312
no 29

For consistency, and it didn't fit into the picture in a nice way.

Fancy Graph #9: Various Tildes Statistics

Most people migrated off reddit, followed by Hackernews. The rest is various random shit, include like 5 different ways of "I don't know", but the one person replying Gab surprised me. Didn't think people would hop on Tildes off Gab, since Gab is basically extreme rightwing Twitter and Tildes is like, the antithesis to that. Leftist userbase, longform discussion.

The long replies

Once again, can't graph the shit outta this, so here's the collection of them. One reply per line. Had to format some replies to fit this format, I know someone did bullet points, apologies.

What do you like about Tildes?

What do you dislike about Tildes?

What would you change about Tildes?

Final notes

To keep my sanity in check, although when I read this post, that probably didn't work out too well, I kept some notes.

1. Someone suggested to ban all Europeans off the platform. You now have the stats, so I'm going to let you guess from where they are. Fucking hilarious.

2. Someone very cordial managed to write an entire blog post into one of the final freeform boxes. I appreciate the feedback and I'm sure Deimos does as well, but why did you have to make so many empty lines? TBH it's more on Jotform for not removing linebreaks when giving you the CSV, it breaks the entire format.

3. We should have a prize for that person who fit a textbook into the box for ethnicity, also amazing, you mad fucking lad (or lass, but statistics are on my side, lol)

In closing, most answers were good and interesting, except for the part where I let you run wild with the politics question, holy fuck, but that's on me. To the people that reduced my IQ by a few points, well I took the piss outta you already, so I hope you have a great day. Everyone else, I hope you [REDACTED] on a few [REDACTED]. Wait, I think I mixed something up here.^{As you may have guessed, don't take this too seriously}

As always, see you all next year, same time?^{Unless I get banned, which seems like a good possibility when I proofread all this, so much angerI need to get laid, or drunkActually how high does this go?}

Cheers, I'm gonna go C͉̠̰͚͚͓ͪ̿̋̏̚O͓̯͕̙͕͎͈̫̦͐̊́Ṅ͕̮̣̺̖̣̖̈ͥͦ͊̽͒͠S̶̵̹̜͔͖͗͂̋̔̈̒͊̚Ú̷͔͍͇̪̥͍ͭͭ̔ͨ̄̇̅̕M̵͈̮͉̹͈͕̻̎̓E̛̯̝̭͉̼̍̎̐̋̑̎ ̷̵̮͔̬̙̠̣̬͉ͭ͒S̨͙̼̟̻̜̈̄͋̄̇ͨ͛́͟͞Ò̡̧͙̩̓̄͂̓͗́M̹̰̲̆̌E̴̡̲̟ͯ ̹͇̲̩͍ͨͨ͒̑͊̌͒͆̕͡F̵͊̊̾ͭ҉̘̲̝͎̥͔̠̺̙O̧̡̱̠̙ͤ͒ͪO̬̯̪͉͙̩̅͂̀̏ͫ̄̓͂D͎͓͍͔͙̰͕̒̒͒̓̃̍͂ͭ̀͢
Grzmot

I've been on Tildes for several months now, but, to this day, I still have trouble discerning from the UI that I've already voted on something. I end up clicking, which makes it unvote, and I have to click to vote again.

This is less of a problem in the feed, because a voted post stands out more, but when you click through to a post page, that context is gone, and the problem is very pronounced.

I don't have any great solutions top of mind, but you could explore colour changes, wording changes, or extra wording.

The CSS selectors that determine whether or not to apply the display: none rule to comment text sections use the pseudo-class rule :not(:target). While this is great for keeping a comment in a non-collapsed state, it's a bit too effective as it prevents user-initiated collapsing of the comment. This can be problematic when you visit a direct link to a comment with an extensive reply tree beneath it and want to collapse it so that you can view the surrounding reply trees. As it stands, you can't do this without needing to either a) collapse the parent (prevents viewing sibling comments), b) collapse the children (requires collapsing potentially multiple child comments), or c) remove the fragment portion of the URL (requires reloading the page and possibly losing your place on the page).

Reproducing should be as simple as clicking Link in a comment's header, then trying to collapse the comment after being redirected.

Based on replies to this comment there seems to be a decent amount of interest around the topic of reworking voting, so I thought I would start a thread to get some more input. We already had similar discussions about a year ago but it looks like some people's opinions may have shifted somewhat? and as was noted in the comment thread, 1 week wasn't really enough to accurately assess the value of something like making vote counts invisible.

Things to consider:

• Do you think how voting works changes your/other's behavior on this site? and if it does, is this change positive or negative?
• Would you support reworking/modifying voting? If so, how?
• How long should we test said modifications if they are made?
• anything else you consider relevant

What do you dislike about tildes?

Overview

I read through the 'what do you dislike about tildes?' responses and attempted to classify them. A link to the excel document containing one row for each comment, a classification, and totals is provided. I figured a deep dive into this question (I am considering doing a deep dive on the other end of the spectrum - what do you like about tildes) may provide some insight on how we, as a community, can strive to be better.

Here's what I found:

Total number of free-text comments: 181
No comment, N/A, "nothing", etc.: 14

Tildes is too small

44% of the user-base indicated that they felt that Tildes was currently too small. There's really not a lot to be said here, other than a large number of those who filled out the survey wanted to express that they felt Tildes should still continue to grow.

I think a major point of discussion here should be around how best to grow. What do you like about tildes is not covered in this post, but some common themes are around enjoying the discussion and the community. Many individuals also seem to like the small community, showing an interesting division between a like and dislike of the size. From my own perspective, I enjoy how I recognize and see many of the same users on this website, but I also don't enjoy how the size leads to a lack of diversity and content.

Diversity, Tech-centric

Both of these topics are hitting on the same fundamental problem, which could be seen as an extension of the size of Tildes, but really refers more to who is using Tildes, rather than how many users. There is a lot of overlap between these two classifications, but sometimes people mention the tech centrism as a problem of content (too many tech/computing discussions) and not a problem of culture. In these cases there's not complete overlap.

Many individuals commented both on the size of the community and the diversity. Overall, roughly 23% of individuals who responded commented in some fashion on the lack of diversity on the website. The general sentiment from people who commented on the need for diversity was that Tildes was white, male, and working in tech. Given that the survey found 86% of us are male, the majority work in STEM and are primarily based in the US, this is not a very surprising finding.

An important point of reflection comes out in some of the longer form comments here and I think is also captured in many people who felt that tildes was "too serious" - discourse is firmly rooted in STEM interests. Several comments discussed a desire to see more artistic/creative discussions. There was also a strong sentiment for more non-US centric discussion. Interestingly (and perhaps described by our rather large LGBTQ+ contingent), diversity mostly focused on the dominance of male opinions (sometimes I wonder how people know what gender is behind a username unless they specifically state so) and the only comment on LGBTQ+ diversity was that there was a "lack of posts about anything other than tech or lgbt+ politics".

Intolerance

Intolerance is the unwillingness to accept views, beliefs, or behavior that differs from one's own. Many comments talked about users 'talking past' each other, getting into long bickering arguments that went nowhere, or targeted harassment of some sort. Several people mentioned specific users or powerusers not operating under good faith, and users which annoy or are hostile towards them.

If a user is being hostile to you, please report their comments.

While only 8.4% of us reported intolerance as being something they actively disliked, it is troublesome to see. I don't have a good frame of reference of what an 'acceptable' level is, because you're bound to have some people who are more emotionally sensitive than others and confrontations that don't always end the way you want them to. I hope we can discuss this in a broader context, however, because I have personally seen what I believe is an increasing number of intolerant posts often masquerading as 'honest discourse'. Whether this is me jumping to conclusions about potential alt-right trolls (which I do not discount) or an actual increase in not-so-good-faith arguments, I don't know, and would like to hear how you all feel.

As an aside, I wonder if I'm included in any of these lists of annoying powerusers, or if I was the one who 'picked a fight' with someone and got their 'comments deleted and that REALLY annoyed me'. If I am, please send me a message. I greatly enjoy most of you but I also know that I'm human and make mistakes and whether I agree with you or not, it's not cool to forget the human on the other side of the computer.

Elitism

Generally speaking any comments around power-users or some users believing their opinion, culture, or viewpoint is more important or more correct landed the comment in the category of elitism. Certain users being 'combative', 'bickering', and 'pedantic' came up several times. With regards to powerusers, they were generally mentioned alongside some form of narcissism or a 'holier-than-thou' attitude. Reddit hivemind or a lack of diversity was also sometimes cited alongside complaints of elitism.

I used to be much worse when it comes to this, and the constant back and forth with people who will not have their viewpoint changed. I believe I've learned to tailor this and cut off conversations sooner, but I know that some individuals can at times get under my skin, particularly when they are being actively harmful to minorities or other groups with limited power, speech, or representation. With that being said, I wonder how best we can provide a culture to teach others to limit their responses when they go nowhere. There was at least one mention of how limiting the response rate between individuals had cut off two users who were always bickering over politics, so perhaps a more aggressive form of this?

But I also wonder what we can't do as a community together to actively recognize and point out when two people are not able to reach an agreement and to jump in and mediate or otherwise help them to stop a pointless argument.

Website Functionality

Several people commented on a lack of a mobile app, a want for embedded images and videos, and the voting system. Other suggestions - comment threading, user blocking, differentiation between reasons why a post was bumped in the activity feed (?), mobile design (easier to click links), a desire for a more robust topic log, and that the website is too minimalist/sterile.

Tildes is too serious

Only a single person complained that tildes was not serious enough (or perhaps not, you decide... they said, "increasing creep of low effort posts"). The majority of posts complaining about tildes being too serious were often also complaints about people bickering. When it wasn't about how users interacted, it was about the form of dicussion available - people often brought up the "meaningful conversation" portion of the tildes documentation and culture, but often had a desire to have memes, shitposts, humor, or some outlet for conversation that isn't as effort based. Perhaps they like the culture and just want to do more with the people here? Perhaps they simply want to get to know their fellow users in a way they can't currently.

From my own perspective, I'd love to see more memes and humor. I tend to shitpost a lot on the unofficial discord. I've seen quite a few of you all on there as well, and would highly recommend it to anyone who feels like they want to get to know other users better.

Politics

More people complained about Tildes being too left than too right, which makes sense given the aggregated political compass from the survey. I think more people complained about there being too much politics than commented on politics whatsoever. I'm leaving this section relatively small because I'm not sure this is something that needs significant discussion at this point. But if you feel strongly, please help to direct a discussion in this thread.

Post-script

I hope you all found this analysis useful and a good starting point for discussions. I really do love this platform and have found it to be quite literally life changing. If you found it useful and want to return the favor, check out my soundcloud

It could look like Wikipedia, where green shows what was added in the bottom section and red shows what was removed in the top section. Maybe orange and blue for coloblind people. Useful for typos or small title tweaks, not so much bigger changes

I can never tell how it is currently without reading through the titles at least twice if it's a typo.

Hi, I'm not sure if this has already been proposed, but I think it could help solidify the labeling system somewhat if there were options in your profile to sort your comments by labels. Right now you can sort by newest or most upvoted, which is fine (although adding an option for oldest wouldn't hurt), but there's no particular way to see which comments of yours have received "exemplary" status etc. without scrolling through the entire list.

Since labels are not really directly correlated with upvotes, lacking such sorting options means that they are still considered a secondary/unimportant feedback process on Tildes. I personally think that one of the best ways that Tildes can distinguish itself from other content aggregators like Reddit is this slightly more complex feedback system, so it should probably be emphasized a little more on profiles as well.

Currently exemplary comments are highlighted with a blue outline, and new comments are highlighted with an orange outline. Is it possible to use a different color, or to interweave the colors when a comment is both new and exemplary?

The reason for this is that it's impossible to check back into a thread that has a dozen new comments and know if the exemplary ones have already been read or not, or it's impossible to see that a new comment is exemplary (not sure which color takes priority).

What I mean by this is:

Sometimes @Deimos posts something related to his mod/admin work, like saying he will be locking a thread or adding something new, but that's not all he does, he makes regular topics and comments about regular things, he doesn't have need to use an alt-account for that. I feel that when he's talking or posting about his mod/admin work and talking about anything else that interests him should be able to be viewed separately.

Thoughts?