I decided to rewrite this from scratch. You can try it out if you're game.

album

I wiped out my profile in Chrome the other day and forgot to back up stylus and some other settings for a few extensions. I found an old post where I listed part of a theme I'd started working on, but had since abandoned.

I couldn't find a copy of the ol' Tiltweaks stylus theme, either, so I decided to bring back that old, unfinished gem to get my theme back to roughly where I had it before... then I added a bunch of other crap in.

Anyway, here's the link to a busy screencap.

The two column layout isn't for everybody, but in the brief time I've spent with it, I'm starting to like it.

Just thought I'd share. I'm about 99.6% certain everybody will see it and say, 'gross' :)

this has happened twice.

Edit: Wow just happened again, when commenting or making a post once it overflows the text area the browser forgets all the information that you have written above. I wrote that this has happened twice, but now it's three times as it happened when I was writing this post. Voting has also sporadically been broken.

Every once in awhile the voting mechanism has a truly long delay or requires a complete refresh of the page.

Browsers: Firefox for Android, Firefox for Ubuntu.

Sorry if this is dumb, I just woke up and had this idea randomly. What would happen if the site had a built-in mechanic for correction spelling mistakes. It could be opt-in (or opt-out?) if you don't want anyone to bother you. This would allow other people that notice them to ping a comment author privately with perhaps a short message explanation.

Not everyone has English as their first language which is why I think it could be valuable. If the feature is not built into the site, correcting someone would be seen as a negative experience (I think) both in public or private messages.

It would be up to the comment author to edit their comment. (Or perhaps a way to accept the changes would be nice?)

Thoughts? Is this a thing anywhere else?

Edit: I put feature request in the title, but this is more of a discussion of the idea in general. I don't expect this to become a thing, but I feel like it's interesting to think about.

So this is a very simple question. There's a free talk thread for everyone to talk about the TV shows they have watched in the preceding week. Every once in a while we use that thread to talk about movies (I did that just now. My justification is that I watched the movies on my television), but the thread asks specifically for TV shows so it feels kinda weird. So maybe we should have a recurring thread for movies? If not, I'd suggest changing the TV thread to make it explicitly welcoming to discussions about movies (in that case, maybe it would be ideal to make the thread appear both in ~tv and in ~movies? I don't think that is technically possible right now, but I leave the suggestion).

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.

When I get comment reply notifications, I normally prefer to read them in context of my own reply, and potentially other replies. However when I do this, the notification doesn't go away on its own, so I have to return to the page to click "mark as read".

I know I can also mark the notification as read by voting on or replying to the reply, but I often don't do that. Yet I always seem to want to view the comment in its context, which requires me to leave the notifications page. In this specific use case there is no convenient way to mark the notification as read without going back.

To avoid the extra page load, I would like the notification being marked as read when the link to it is opened, to be an option. (Actually, I'd like it to be the default behaviour, but since the current default behaviour is to not mark comments as read until an explicit action is taken on them, I suppose I'm in the minority. An option is just fine.)

Malice implies intent to break the rules (or just the general conduct of the community). On one end, sometimes a user gets caught up in the heat of the argument and writes something they know they shouldn't. On the other end, sometimes a comment isn't particularly inflammatory at all but you can feel from the content that its author was in a place of of hurt, or anger. You can either label them as Malice and let the moderators sort out who are the real trouble makers and who just need some help, or you can reply to them in a helpful manner and possibly have a side conversation regarding their wellbeing.

I think it'd be a nice if there's a label to tell the moderators that "I think this user needs some talking to", for usage other than "I think this user needs a warning". More users are probably comfortable with clicking a label than putting themselves out there in a conversation about mental health, some may also not want to derail the discussion. Mental wellbeing and rule enforcement are 2 different skills with 2 different mindsets so having 2 different mod teams for each function probably also help.

This suggestion was partly inspired by, but not limited to, this comment by kfwyre. I feel that most social media's features (Tildes included with the way labels are currently) are designed to be content-centric and not much in the way of taking care of the wellbeing of their members, maybe we can improve.

Sometimes a comment thread is very very toxic/controversial and I would like to avoid getting sucked into it. Just because my decision-making is much better at 2pm than it is at 2am. I understand I can and should exercise self-control, and I'm working on it, I assure you! In the meantime, if at all possible, it would be nice to remove certain comments from my view, along with its children. Thanks!

Sometimes Tildes users give people healthcare advice. Sometimes that advice disagrees with the advice already given by a qualified registered healthcare professional. That might be okay if the tildes advice was compliant with national guidance, but sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it's bad, dangerous, advice.

Should Tildes have rules about this?

Since no one has posted this yet and the day approaches the end (UTC), I decided to post this...

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.

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.