I generated markdown with a table of contents which is auto-generated on Emacs. I tested it on https://rentry.co and it works fine. On Tildes the links don't work. Is there a way to make this work? It would be nice to have that for longer posts. Thanks!

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.

The distinction between Hard and Soft paywalls used to be clear:

Hard paywall sites only allowed paying subscribers to view their contents;
Soft paywall sites typically used a metered approach that limited non-subscribers to a certain number of free article views per month.

This made tagging paywalled submission here on Tildes, as either paywall.hard or paywall.soft, pretty easy to do, and doing so provided tangible benefits. They let submitters know when to consider providing a summary of the article, or even mirror/alternative links, so non-subscribers weren't left out. It allowed users to easily avoid or filter-out hard paywall submissions entirely, if they so chose. And also indicated when a paywall was soft, and easier to get around (e.g. by clearing browser cache, or viewing in private-browsing mode), so the article could still be read.

However in recent years the distinction between Hard and Soft paywalls has become increasingly blurry. And with all the new, constantly evolving, often opaque, paywall mechanics now in play, it has become more difficult to identify and keep track of what type of paywall a site has. E.g.

Some sites have begun adding article sharing mechanics as a perk for their subscribers (NYT). Some with hard paywalls now allow certain articles of "public interest" to be viewed by everyone (Financial Times). Some still hard paywall their print articles but allow the rest to be viewed for free (Forbes). Some have hard paywalls for recent articles but older ones are free (Boston Globe). Some decide on a case-by-case basis whether or not to paywall each individual article, based on editorial board decisions and other unspecified metrics (Business Insider). And apparently some now even switch from Soft to Hard paywalls depending on where in the world the traffic is coming from (WaPo?).

And as a result of all this, accurately tagging paywalled articles here has become increasingly difficult too, especially since there is no easy way to update all previously applied tags on older articles when a site's paywall type changes.

So, the question is, what should we do about this?
Should we simply stop trying to distinguish between hard/soft paywalls in the tags?
Should we add another "hybrid" category?
Should we just do away with the paywall tag entirely?
Or is there a better solution to this problem?

p.s. I started a "Hard vs Soft Paywalls" wiki entry to try to keep track of all the paywall types, as well as the various new mechanics I have been able to identify, for the sites commonly submitted to Tildes.

Right now when I click user menu I see this:

User menu
Profile
Your posts
Your bookmarks
Your votes
Your ignored topics

I think it would easier to if we could differentiate between posts we made on other's submissions and our own submissions. Don't know if this is easy to implement, but for me at least, it would make searching through my stuff here way easier.

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

Sometimes I'd like to post comments more frequently than a single comment anywhere on the site once every two hours.

But I can't, because I get the error "Rate limit exceeded".

Is it possible to remove or at least significantly increase the limit site-wide for established users?

The things a bear has to do..

If there is a more appropriate place for this, I would appreciate having it moved there, or a link to the more appropriate area. Thanks!

I am wondering if this could be implemented as a 2FA method on Tildes. Although not super mainstream, I think it is the gold standard for account security. Is there anyone else interested in this option?

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.

Sometimes I write an introduction to an article and add relevant tags, and then discover it is a repost when I hit post. I know I should use the search function, but since there's an automatic anti respost feature already, could it maybe be made available sooner? Maybe others would find this useful as well. Thanks!

So I'm on Tildes less often these days so I'm not keeping up with certain things as much as I used to. In particular, I really like the recurring "What games are you playing" topics but I'm often not noticing them in my skimming of the front page, especially if I haven't checked in in a day or two and it's not near the top.

So what if there was a feature, specifically for recurring topics, to subscribe to them where it gives me a "New Instance of Weekly Topic" notification in the same was as the "New Comment Reply" notification? It's probably not useful since we basically just have one recurring topic right now. But I'd honestly like to see more of these recurring topics, especially a "What are you listening to right now" one and even ones that automatically reoccur for TV shows (Episode 1, Episode 2, etc.) rather than an open thread.

I've noticed some people making a point of editing titles on articles to either impose or undo title case on articles. I dug around a bit and haven't been able to find any style guide suggestions on the matter.

Barring some kind of official stylistic standards being laid down, that I'd like to respectfully request that curator roles refrain from overruling a submitter's formatting choices without good reason.

I was trying to add andré bazin as a tag on an article about the film theorist André Bazin, but the box became red and prevented me from submiting. So I had to use the incorrect andre bazin.

I suppose there's a very rational technical reason for not using accentuation on tags -- even so, I believe it would be useful to suport those characters, since many languages use them.

After using this method to block a user on here I can no longer see the number of votes a comment or a post gets.

I can see it fine when I switch to a browser without uBlockOrigin, but not on FireFox.

Any reason for this?

Edit: I also can't see anyone's username in the comments.

Is there a way to get email alerts when someone responds or votes on your post? I ask because I don't check Tildes each day and last week I posted a question and forgot to return to look at the responses. If I had something like an email alert, it'd be a nice reminder to return.

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.