Personally I have a small screen and pressing on [-] button is sometimes hard. Would be much easier if pressing on that whole title bar or even better the whole comment collapsed that chain. What do you guys think?

Edit: On Reddit mobile tapping on next to title collapsed the comments.

Was on my bathroom break and figured might as well try tildes on my phone.
Using iPhone 8+ and tried on firefox for iphone and safari.

Was pleasantly surprised how clean and fast it feels, everything was very responsive. It's well adapted to my phone screen size. The UI is clean and simple, it feels very familiar, gives the same feeling as tildes on desktop while keeping everything on a smaller screen. It's something that reddit never got right, the closest thing we had was reddit compact mode, but it wasn't nearly as good.

As instructed when creating my account, I went through and read the Tildes Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, since the prompt said they were short and plainly worded. I also clicked on the 'Tildes Code of Conduct' that was linked, just to cover all my bases.

Congratulations, you got a genuine audible laugh out of me with those simple, straight to the point, first five words: "Don't act like an asshole"...

Well played.

It seems to me that link topics don't directly engage the user, we're just putting something out there and hoping for a response. And who is the user responding to when they comment on the topic?

Shouldn't the poster have the option (at least) to express something - aside from in the title of course - about the link they are posting be it a statement or a question, to elicit a discussion in response?

I know that when I see a link topic my first thought is usually 'What are you trying to tell me?', so I just pass it by. Whereas if there was a question attached to it that I could respond to, or a statement attached to it that I can engage with, I don't think I would be so quick to dismiss it.

Maybe this has already been talked about but there isn't a search so I can't tell (I know it's being developed when the API goes public) but right now when I get a reply in my inbox the only link I have is to the entire post not the specific comment. Right now the site is small enough that it isn't a huge deal to scroll down and find my comment but it is something that eventually needs to be added

At the bottom of this thread, there is a deleted comment. It appears there is no way to collapse all of its children. So, two suggestions:

1. Allow users to expand/collapse deleted comments children
2. Start deleted comments collapsed

Suggestion 1 seems like either a bug or just not yet implemented. For 2, I can imagine differing opinions on this, any other thoughts?

I may have inadvertently created the first repost in Tildes in ~comp and was wondering if there are plans for a notification on posting a new topic that has already been posted.

I know that this sort of check is easily 'bypassed', but personally, had I know it had been posted already I would have voted & joined the existing discussion.

I think if we could detect the same URL, at least in the same group, maybe even with a time modifier of within the last week, it would help consolidate the discussions.

As this site is being started because of low-quality content overall on the other sites, it's necessary to do something to maintain that quality. Most sites start out good but don't age well, and the userbase too is responsible for that. Many sites offer points on the content that is shared, but there are no points for contributions towards the sites (?). I think it would be really great if the user gets some points say for reporting unrelated, unnecessary, troll, and other such posts or contents that don't maintain the quality. But those points are not awarded to the user immediately. The user will get points after enough reports about the content are reported and the content is made unavailable.

This point system can be separate from the content submission points that user gets, or it can be summed up all in one.

Noticed the ability to generate the three invite codes a few days ago (ed: go to your user page and under Misc. hit “Invite Someone”) and started excitedly going through my mind with who I would add. That came to a crawl and then a pause when I started thinking about a few things:

• Do I want family to know my Tildes handle? I’m not doing anything bad here, and certainly don’t plan to, but I may want to ask a question regarding something happening to the family at one point. Hard to know what the future will bring.
• I have several friends who would certainly join, and probably wouldn’t do anything bad/wrong, but more importantly would they actively contribute?
• What about my “fun” colleagues? Well, again do I want them to know my ~handle or would that be setting things up for something awkward down the line?

Lots to consider. To those of you who have already sent invites, what did you think about? What was the final process that worked for you? Or, alternatively, who thinks I need to stop whining and send out the damn invites already?

Hey everyone,
I've seen a bunch of posts discussing the design of the site, and I was wondering if there are any other designers on here that would be interested in discussing the interface more precisely, and coming up with potential improvements. I wrote up a design audit and gave it to @Deimos last week, and I wanted to share it with everyone and generate some discussion about minutiae such as colors, placement and styles of buttons and links, etc. I feel like these are just as important as larger features that people are asking for (such as a markdown preview), and have the added benefit of being very fast to iterate on.

hey all,

if you're like me, or like most folks nowadays, you'd rather browse the web on your phone over dragging around an entire desk, tower, and monitor everywhere (that's the other alternative right???). but!! tildes doesn't have a mobile app, and probably won't until APIs happen and some kind soul builds a third party one.

tildes, if you haven't noticed, is pretty minimal and runs like greased lightning on mobile browsers. but if you go that route you don't get full screen or home screen shortcuts or any of that stuff!

this is where i tried using Hermit to decent results. it's basically a wrapper for webpages that turns it into more of an app-like experience. if tildes ever adds RSS feeds for comment notifications, it'll support that too. unfortunately it's only on android but i'm sure iOS has something similar.

maybe one day tildes will be a PWA and we won't have to worry about any of that! but for now, I think hermit works nicely. hopefully it helps someone else too!

are you doing something else that works just as well? better? on iOS? please share!

Tipster tags for comments?

I was going to post this on the daily discussion about tag, but I'm not sure it's something "easy" to implement or even worth considering. Some feedback would be appreciated.

I was thinking there could be a special type of tag or report that goes directly to the poster in a private way (like a "whisper" tag, similar to the whisper comments someone suggested).

This could be useful especially in polarizing topics, I believe.

The idea is something like this: a (somewhat) trusted user sees a comment that is worded in a confrontational or maybe aggressive manner or its unsubstantiated and foresees conflict, but instead of tagging it like "flame" for everyone to see, they tag it as "rephrasable" or "sounds confrontational?" or even "citation needed" (I'm sure you guys can come up with better names and ideas, but you get the gist, something that communicates that it could be worded in a softer, more objective way or using a source, etc.), only the OP sees this tag on their own comment and can thus react appropriately (or maybe ignore if it seems unfounded, or discuss -privately?- with the anonymous reporter) by editing their comment (possibly leaving some kind of trace of the change or acknowledging the report).

too long/didn't understand: allow giving the poster a private warning that someone thinks their comment is problematic before things get too heated!

Hello everyone,

Fitness is an important part of living a healthy life, but everyone's body is different. I believe it'd be a good idea to create a fitness or health group for us to share our progress, discuss our goals, and review each other's exercise and nutritional planning. What do you all think?

~ Rain

This is of course already possible with base 64 encoding and some work on the user's side, but adding the ability to encrypt messages as a native feature would better encourage this as a security measure. This is a standard feature on a lot of darknet markets. Tildes could allow users to upload a public GPG key. Then a private key could be held entirely client-side in session storage to be used by JavaScript.

This feature would probably add too much complexity to the site's simplistic front end. But I'd be interested to have a discussion on the pros/cons.

I know we're not trying to copy Reddit, but their system of just clicking anywhere on the inbox message and it marking it as read is really nice and easy. Having to find the exact "Mark as Read" gets pretty tedious to me.

Thoughts?

Hey there! I'm pretty new to this whole website, but I figured I would chip in on suggestions I have as I go along. I will likely be editing to add more suggestions to this as I go.

1. Put the "leave a comment" box at the top of the comment section, not the bottom.

2. Something I noticed as I am writing this, I don't see any sort of formatting guide. While there may not be any sort of formatting yet, like italics (maybe that's italicized?) or bold, if I remember right, markdown is something besides just plain text, right? If I'm just doing a big dumb here, lemme know, haha.

3. When I was automatically logged out from spending some time away, I found that when you log in, you aren't redirected back where you were attempting to go, but rather, back to the tildes homepage. It's be nice to be redirected to your original destination.

Edit: 4. When you reply to a comment in your unread page, it should be marked as read.

I really enjoyed reddit's Place event from April 1st, and the button pressing event was also a rather interesting one. I don't currently have any ideas for what kinds of events could be done (other than another event like the Place) but would definitely like to see some community-driven events in the future.

Anybody have any thoughts on this?

One thing I've been recently thinking about regarding ~'s tags is how much hate "Noise" gets. I realize that it doesn't further the discussion every time, but we also need to look at the context.

I've seen a few posts here tagged as noise when a community member posts something they've made or would like feedback on. In my opinion, when someone says "that's great!" or "I agree" that's completely acceptable. I've heard the "just upvote and move on" argument, but by our own admission, per the posted rules here and on reddit, the vote button does not equal "agree." It only means that the content is of value.

I'd love to tell someone "I really love the way you phrased that" or "I didn't know other people felt that way, too!" for something I agreed with but didn't have a whole lot to add without just being repetitive.

I'm not married to this idea, just something milling about in my head since on ~, it really seems like we're trying to use the vote button not for just "agree/ disagree." I posted on ~talk rather than ~tildes because I'm curious how other people see the issue, and I don't feel the need to lodge a formal suggestion.

Hey folks!

I can only imagine I'm saying something that's been said many times before, but I'm having a bit of an issue with the rendering of the website on desktop Safari.

It seems that everything renders on top of everything else in an ugly way the first time I pull up the site, to the point that I can't read anything. But here's the weird part: if I click any link, then use my back button, everything renders fine. This has to be some kind of wonky JavaScript problem? Maybe? I'm not sure.

Honestly, I just want to know that I'm not the only one seeing this issue. It's very strange, and I'll help to fix it however I can if I can get access to the codebase for the site.

One of the very frustrating things for me on reddit is the way crossposting works, essentially making it a karma whoring feature more than anything else.

Can crossposting be simplified? For example: I just posted a topic in ~tv, however I realize it applies more to ~comp (sorry, I was premature on posting it somewhere - maybe it can be moved?) but could fit in ~tv as it's related, even if being a 3rd cousin from the groups intent. It would be nice to be able to pick the groups I'd like to publish it to, so the discussion is centralized and consistent - if that makes sense?

*Removed a word

I ran a Lighthouse audit for performance and accessibility on a comments page (specifically this one); the results are pretty good on the whole, but there are definitely a couple of things I think ~ could do better.

Performance

IMO the performance of ~ is fine; Chrome thinks that the time to first meaningful paint is a bit high (3.1s on a simulated 3G connection with CPU throttling), but I don't know what you can do about that without doing things like inlining all the CSS, which would make the very first page load faster but hurt every request after that. Maybe minifying the CSS/JS would help? I don't know if the performance benefit would be enough to justify the increase in complexity to handle the minification, and you'd also lose the easy legibility of the source (which I personally really like).

Accessibility

There's some really small text on ~! The Lighthouse audits I ran don't catch it, but the SEO audit does, and it's not hard to see it with your own eyes either. The suggested minimum size for easy reading in that audit is 16px, which is the current size of all post and comment text on desktop, although mobile only gets 14px (I don't know if this is actually a problem, since you probably hold your phone closer to your face than your monitor).

Edit: posting this from my phone - yes, the 14px font on mobile is definitely harder to read than 16px would be. I don't know if that's just me (I have a fairly severe visual impairment), but I would definitely prefer 16px text everywhere, not just on desktop.

There's also a good amount of text that doesn't have a great deal of contrast (even using the default white theme – I'm sure it's much worse with Solarized). This is mostly all the grey text, although Lighthouse also complains about the links when they're on a grey background (especially the "visited" colour, which is much closer to grey than the normal colour).

Some specific examples: The timestamp and "Link" text for each comment is only 10px, which is a bit small for me, especially with the low contrast on "Link". Similarly, the post timestamp is a bit hard to read.

The worst offender by far, though, is the "Comment deleted by author" notice (example). It's tiny and grey and incredibly easy to miss, and is directly relevant to the flow of the conversation, unlike the timestamps. I'd really appreciate it if that could be bumped up to at least as large as usernames are currently displayed.

There are no downvotes (which is a very good idea) and we are sorting by activity anyway. So what if we took the next logical step and got rid of the entire voting system? Please hear me out! :)

(1) Up-voting does not encourage quality postings (see, for instance, https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/data-mining-reveals-how-the-down-vote-leads-to-a-vicious-circle-of-negative-feedback-aad9d49da238 ; yes the article also covers the up-vote).

(2) Anecdotally, up-voting discourages quality postings. I have often been frustrated because well-thought-out comments (by me or by others) got one hundredth of the up-votes of a strategically placed "lol" or something similarly trivial. People upvote things that evoke an emotional response, not things that make them think. (Source lost, unfortunately.)

(3) Up-votes are time-critial. Being the first one to comment often assures getting the most up-votes, which can lead to (2), to "first" posts, and to quick posts instead of well though-out comments.

(4) (Edit!) Up-voting can create an echo-chamber, because quality if measured by popularity.

All in all, voting is just a social media habit without any benefit and with the possibility of a large detrimental effect on posting quality. Old-school Web fora and Usenet worked fine without it and quality was (arguably) superior.

Would you really miss the option to vote? Is it worth the detrimental effects?

Please discuss!

Edit: fixed the link to the article. Thanks!

Some suggestions I think would improve navigation a bit:

1.Comment votes. I think comment votes should appear at the bottom of the comment. The reason for that is is to avoid "copycat voting" (I'm sure there must be another term). I think it's a common effect: you see a comment, you see it has 5 votes while the rest you've been reading have 1 or 2, you start being predisposed to see it as a valuable comment even before reading it, you end up voting it too, etc. Similarly to why the top level reply box is at the end of the thread, I think having comment votes at the end of the comment (or even hidden under an expandable menu, but maybe that's too much) would help users reading comments more open-mindedly. I would even argue that putting the user name at the bottom would be a good idea as well, especially since the user base now is small is easy to adscribe more credibility to some user names than others, which is not bad by itself, but might push a type of "authoritative bias".

2.Top level comments count. If we understand top level comments as the main ideas discussed in a thread, maybe it would make sense to show that in the post. Right now, what we get in the submission listing is the title, username, the ~, the tags and the comment number. I wonder how important is having the total comment number shown here. I guess it's an indicator of activity, but maybe it'd be more interesting having the top level comment number, indicating the ramifications of the topic. Total comment count could be maintained as well, or not, or just when entering the submission, etc. New comments could still be shown in the listing. After all, if we are ordering by activity, we care that there is some activity, and total number of comments is not that relevant.

3.Cascading tags. Not so sure about this one, but I though I'd mention it. When marking a comment Off-topic... I think most usually all comments under that one will also be Off-topic. Maybe it'd make sense that from that point on all comments would be marked as off topic automatically, and possibly collapsed. Right now it seems when there is an off topic comment thread, you just keep seeing off topic tags down the line, which is a bit distracting and probably unnecessary since they are almost surely going to be off topic, so it's probably not necessary for user to try and judge that. Maybe, if it makes sense, this would better be done when the tags are more developed.

4.Parent link for context. Thank you for adding the parent link! Much needed. However, wouldnt it be better if when tapping a parent link, the end page would be the parent comment (obviously) plus the comment where you tapped the link? What I mean is, to provide better context, I think it'd be better to show the parent and the comment I was reading, with all other comments under the parent AND above the origin comment collapsed. I don't know if that's clear...

5. Reply - Tag - Vote. Probably a bit nitpicking here, but I think inverting the current order of the Reply and Vote buttons would be a better fit. Since most people are right handed, and the action of voting is (probably?) more common than replying, having the vote button on the right side might be a minor enhancement in usability.

6.Highlighting OP's comments. Right now, OP's comments are marked by "(OP)" next to the username. I think it'd be better to make the indication more evident. For example, displaying OP's username in a different color or marking the comment with a different color (as with new comments in orange or own comments in purple). I would prefer the username color since it's less invasive while still being easy to spot.

Anyway, just some ideas I've had in the last few days, hopefully not too ridiculous or confusingly worded.

EDIT: Sorry for the generic title, I forgot to edit it before sending...

Hi all. Registered several days ago and this is my first post.

After reading around this group and the blog, I'm very excited for the tildes project. It's not just another reddit-style forum but actually one of its own taste and style. I have some suggestions for the project and would like to share them with the community. They are the result of years of redditing with numerous frustrating experiences and few shower thoughts.

1. Voting power should not be taken for granted. The ability for me to vote must be in some way tied to my contributions to the discussion. This can be implemented in a sort of formula that takes into account the user's 'score' and 'activity' which results in a finite number of votes at the user's disposal. The more you contribute the more voting power you get, and the more quality you provide in your contributions the more votes you get to use.
2. Deleted posts or comments must be reflected in a user's score. One of the bad effects of having a user score is the tendency to 'karma whore' in order to increase that score no matter what. The result is low effort posts and comments. Having a system in place that removes from the user's score if their posts/comments get deleted would act as a constant reminder to the minimum level of quality required.
3. Mods should not have dictator power over their groups. Sure they must have elevated accounts to run their groups, including the power to remove or ban, but they should not be invisible. There has to be an approved system where users can have the collective power to revoke the elevated account powers of a Mod if they reach a certain threshold. Not sure how to implement this exactly, may be through voting by the users of a group who have high scores or reputations. One of the cancerous ailments of reddit is the invincibility of Mods.
4. The availability of formatting tools and embedding in posts. This is 2018 and inserting a photo, video, table in the body of a post should be easily implemented. Constrictions on the use of certain attention-grabbing formats (eg. large fonts, ascii art, emoji) should be also be implemented to deter low effort contributions.

Here's to hoping this project flourishes into a much-needed hub for quality content and discussions on the internet.
Cheers

Edit: Not sure why the first point is indented or how to fix it.
Edit2: Fixed.

I made one for Tildes

Just name it "apple-touch-icon.png" and place it on the root directory of the Tildes website. Then put this in the head tag somewhere:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/apple-touch-icon.png">

This way iOS users can add Tildes to their home screen and get a nice icon.

I spend quite a bit of time on the NASA Spaceflight forums and r/spacex and r/space on Reddit, and I was wondering if anyone would be in favor of creating a ~space group or something similar here.

As things stand now, I feel like ~science would be the most appropriate place for talk about space, space tech, and rocketry, but the general feeling of that group seems to be multidisciplinary science discussion and news, rather than the cross of news, science, engineering (and a bit of nearly-corporate-espionage if it's r/spacex...) that one usually finds in a discussion/forum about space and rocketry.

Would the creation of such a group be something others would like to consider? Do you have other thoughts on the matter?

I use Reddit Comment Collapser -- it's pretty great. I can finish off a thread if I'm done reading even though it keeps going. On Tildes, you can only collapse from the top, which can be annoying when there are many long posts in the thread above and you just want to move onto the next.

If there were layered bars on the left of each comment, from top to bottom, that I could click to collapse, I would be so happy.

Tildes does have bills to pay. The donations are open, but I'd like to go beyond the basic donations for a moment.

Right now, tildes has server costs, and also the lead developer (Deimos) is donating his full time to the project rather than working for someone else. He can't do that forever, so if we want him full time, we need to get him paid by the non-profit. In the future, that cost is probably going to expand to larger server costs, multiple developers, possibly community managers and other staff - though nothing ridiculous like reddit with 300 people doing marketing.

When we talked about funding, we wondered if we could get all users to toss in one dollar a month, and if there were enough users (millions) even reduce that to one dollar a year. Now that we have a lot of new people here, I'd like to ask what everyone thinks of those funding ideas, and if they have any other good ideas on how to raise money to pay for whatever tildes' costs are.

#Edit: OK, I am terribly unaware of the "Mark as Read" option. Thank you to @Spel for pointing this out. I feel so dumb right now, so please accept my apology for being unaware. I just thought that reading the messages would mark them as read, so please forgive me. :( However, the other thing definitely doesn't work for me.

As the title suggests, no matter whether I come back to the site from desktop or mobile, every single time I have to login in again.. even if I had just been on the site five minutes prior. It's not too much of an inconvenience, but it's not working for me.

I don't know how to post my Chrome details, but I am on Win 10 with the latest Chrome build. As for mobile, I am accessing it from Android 7.0 through the latest Chrome on there.. I've already cleared my cache to see if maybe that would fix it, but sadly it did not.

I hope it doesn't come off as me complaining, but I just wanted to let your team know of the issue I've been having.