I've really been enjoying Tildes since I joined. The community are friendly, I've posted similar to how I would post in other unnamed social sites with top/OP being serious and long form, and lower replies being more jovial or jokey. With the higher responses, I also try to keep it more formal and factual, or add a valid opinion/discussion point.

One thing I have noticed recently is that there is a constant hit of people just posting blog or news articles with little or no engagement. It's almost like they just curate news and slap it all over which has me scratching my head and stroking the old grey beard. Why? Short question but expecting long answers here. It's like looking at a RSS feed.

I come to Tildes to ask advice and post items that I believe may be of interest to others. I engage in those topics for the most part as well. Rarely does someone post an article from X blog site and I exclaim out loud and tap away a response to it. If I wanted that, I'd just comment on the blog discussion board for the article, not the linked Tildes post.

Is it just me?

With the constant influx of new users from Reddit, every once in a while I see people complain about some type of content that they find disruptive and annoying. They take their dissatisfaction to the comments, either criticizing the poster or expressing their annoyance.

Those contributions are often disruptive and offtopic themselves, derailing a potentially productive discussion

Tildes has a feature that may come in handy in those cases: filtered tags. It allows the user to prevent content they dislike from being displayed to them.

To add a filtered tag, click on Filtered topic tags right below Browse the list of groups. You will be taken to a page where you can add any tags that you want to filter, one per line.

For example, if you are displeased with the amount of videos on your frontpage, just add videos and save. Now you won't see any video submissions.

If, at any time, you wish to see those posts, you can either click on View unfiltered list at the top of the page or click on the tag Videos in your Filtered topic tags list.

That way, you will never be annoyed by content you don't like :)

If you don't like a type of content, don't complain about it. Filter it!

I don’t know if it’s just me but I feel like there is a lot of people posting news articles and then radio silence and it’s been rubbing me the wrong way. It feels like someone throwing a newspaper through my window and not owning up to it.
Again maybe it’s just me but I feel like you should have to contribute a bit about why you decided to share the link at least. Get the ball rolling on a conversation.
Sharing information and staying informed is important but a more human touch would go a long way to making this site feel less like bots talking to other bots.
All opinions welcome of course.

I've noticed that there are primarily text posts with some links thrown in, and I do like the "real" conversation that it brings, instead of the shitposting that ends up all over Reddit.

I was curious, though, if there were any plans to add a ~pics or something similar. I know the goal of Tildes isn't to be a true Reddit replacement of course, but I wasn't sure whether image boards were planned or were being left out to help encourage actual discussion.

Or at the very least, should there be a requirement to have users take screenshots of Twitter content if they want to link to it? It feels a little backwards to have to make an account for another website in order to consume certain content on this site.

I lurk here at work and don't watch YouTube in general. Often it's annoying to see something of potential interest and it's a YouTube video. Is there a way to filter youtube.com here or an extension enabling that functionality?

Thank you.

While browsing over the past little while I have noticed that I starting to see "text reposts".
I did a quick search and saw that link reposts have been discussed in the past, but I didn't come across something in relation to text posts.

To make it a bit more clear what I mean, a recent example:

• In my feed today: https://tildes.net/~tech/16nj/second_brain_software_of_choice
• A very similar thread last week: https://tildes.net/~creative/1639/what_do_you_use_for_note_taking_writing

Generally speaking I don't mind reposts, certainly with "ask" topics new insights can be gained over time and different people might give different answers. At the same time I do think that the landscape around note taking software hasn't drastically changed in a week.

To be clear, I am not saying that the OP of the most recent topic did anything wrong either. Even if you remember to check if a question has been asked before (I ironically almost forgot myself in this case) you might not find it.

But I am wondering if more could be done to surface previous discussions. Not to specifically prevent these sorts of reposts but also to surface potentially valuable information of previous discussions.

Something that does come to mind is having a mechanism that uses the title someone is typing as (part of) a search query in the same space. Matching topics could then be shown before submission.

Or if we care more about making previous discussions accessible give the OP after submission the option to also link to previous topics around the subject. Interlinked topics is something that would be interesting to explore, basically borrowing from the "other discussions" tab idea but make it "similar discussions".

I'm curious to see what others think about it.

I've recently noticed that some particular users, who post/comment quite often, frequently contribute with high quality content across an impressive spectrum of themes. These posts/comments usually go into great detail, an approach suitable of a "semi-expert", that honestly baffles me.

This lead me to think that Tildes users might be using AI language models to aid in the writing of their posts/comments. This possibility is quite disheartening since I found Tildes to be an extraordinarily engaging community, with a distinct human element that I haven't seen in other bigger forums. The possibility of a significant portion of Tildes content being generated by AI makes this sentiment a mere illusion.

So here are my questions:

1. Is there any reasonable way of determining which posts were written with the aid of AI?
2. Is the Tildes community okay with the content being generated partly, or entirely, by AI?

Please forgive me if I'm being a cynic, I've spent too much time in forums with significantly lower quality content than Tildes.

Edit 1: Just wanted to cite this paper to somehow justify my uneasiness when it comes to writing texts with AI in command. As I've commented below, LLMs might get in the way of learning the person's true idea/opinion.

Edit 2: As I've said in the comments below, I had no intention of accusing any particular user with this post. Clearly, I've failed to convey my intent so I'll try to clarify my original idea a bit more:

Because I'm new to Tildes and haven't got any other forum experience besides Reddit, I was amazed with how much and how fast some users post extremely high quality content, since this was certainly not the norm in Reddit. As with many other online platforms, spammers armed with AI can be a difficult problem to deal with, so I've made this post with the intent of starting a discussion about this matter and to understand the Tildes community stance. My relatively negative view of the use of AI is due in part to my experience with such spammers in the past. Forgive me if I've assumed the worst...

From the little time I've spent in Tildes, I'm quite sure the community grew to know each other and I'm hopeful that my post will not cause undue witch hunts. And I've also learned that because people got to know each user's stylistic voice, it's fairly easy to spot a possible AI spammer.

Thank you for the insightful discussion so far !

Bit of an odd question but one I'm becoming a little self conscious of.

I posted a thread earlier today on ~LGBT asking people to share their experiences of coming out. Because it's a somewhat sensitive topic and sharing your experiences can be a little vulnerable I've been taking part and interacting with everyone who's shared their experience.

Im being sure to try and actually contribute, bring my perspective and continue the conversation, and importantly thank people for being open about something that can be difficult.

My problem is that I worry that this is a habit I'm bringing over from Reddit that's perhaps not suitable for Tildes, but I'm not sure?

I generally see it as a good thing when an OP takes active part in a discussion they started, but maybe it's more of a hindrance here?

I'm not sure how I feel, and I'd like to get the opinions of other regular users on what would be appropriate?

Edit: I should specify and make it clear in my case I'm talking about actively replying to most or all top level comments. Not necessarily replies but still a fair number. I worry about crossing a line into just contributing to noise.

When I learned about filtered tags I thought this is an underated feature I missed on Reddit, and save me so much hassle of screening content I am not interested.

I think filter sites or specific domains would make my homepage so much cleaner, like filtering all BBC and CNN posts, what do you think?.

Hi all, I'm a recent reddit refugee who is very happy with my transition here. I like the spirit of the community a whole lot and am a fan of the admin approach, which is designed to promote engagement and deep content and prevent a shallow (advertiser-friendly) scrolling experience.

A the philosophy page on content says:

In-depth content (primarily text-based) is the most important

and

In general, any changes to the site that will cause "shallower" content to gain an advantage should be considered very carefully.

I agree with this fully. My thoughts, though, are that there are definitely forms of image post that are not just memes or jokes, and do lead to deeper discussion.

For instance, if somebody has created some art and would like to post it for feedback (or just to share), this feels more like a discussion topic than a 'quick scroll' post. I feel that this kind of image post is 'pro community'. Somebody is posting something they care about and want to discuss.

On reddit, a sub I always liked was ImaginaryMonsters, where people post cool pictures of monster art and discuss them (either original art or properly credited). This is for people who want to admire and discuss artwork. Again, I don't think this necessary falls into the category of 'shallow content'.

So, what am I suggesting?

I think it would be good for the site to actively promote the posting of the right kind of image content in the right places.

My angle is, essentially:

• Some image content does promote depth of discussion.
• This type of content may be quite vital for certain wedges of the community, especially moving forwards as the site grows (and making creatives feel more welcome).
• Rules regarding self-promotion already exist in the Code of Conduct.
• Because of how the web works, it would make sense to have limited embedding of certain images in at least thumbnail format (but it needn't show the full image in the feed like other scrollable 'content' sites). .
• Creating certain groups/subgroups specifically for posting certain types of images doesn't need to be seen as a slippery slope, if the rules are clear.
• There is even the possibility of purging image posts that don't have n amount of engagement within a specific time, so as not to end up with clutter.

I should point out two things:

• I am aware that images can already be posted as links on the site, and I applaud the reasoning for the overall tentative approach. Here, I'm talking about some select subgroups of the site that are specifically for certain types of image posting.
• I don't necessarily think I'm right. I am new here and making observations - I'm thinking about things I'd like personally - I know I don't have all the information to understand the full impact of such things here, but I am interested in knowing what other people think.

So, do you have an opinion on this? Thanks for reading!

Edit:

I just wanted to point out a couple of things based on responses.

• When I mention image posts, I'm not talking about image hosting - that's a whole can of worms - the site already allows links. I'm just talking about image links (with maybe some QoL surrounding that).
• I wasn't totally clear above, I'm not suggesting image posts everywhere, or even necessarily a whole new post type. My first thoughts were about one or two specific, limited subgroups with specific purposes.
• Those concerned about moderation, I understand that angle, but I am keeping in mind this recent post by @Deimos, where they talk about expanding moderation, or even handing it off to individual communities, subreddit style:

If the activity stays at this level or keeps increasing, we will probably need to add more moderators soon.

• Those concerned about feeds being overrun by images, there were thoughts about this from Deimos in the same post:

I think we should probably take advantage of this current high activity level to try moving the groups towards being more independent spaces. This would involve switching away from the current "opt-out" approach to an "opt-in" one, and would probably need updates to a few different sections of the site to support it.

• I also think it's worth mentioning my thoughts above do not preclude having some minimum text requirement along with every image. I agree about not encouraging shallow content, and am attempting to focus on exactly where that line lies.
• Finally, I do want to make it clear I'm not coming here as a new person trying saying "nice site, change it like this!" - which I think some people may have taken this as (I had one or two single-sentence responses). I genuinely like what I've seen so far because of what it is, but am also aware things may well be changing in some other ways already (as per the post I linked). Sorry if this seems like 'another reddit user trying turn us into reddit' - this is not my intent whatsoever, I am just interested in specifically how it could be done in a Tildes way. I am glad it started a half-decent discussion though!

I'm guessing that it might just be that Tildes is an English only site, but as an avid language learner, I'd love to have a place to see and post non-English discussions.

Is there a best practice for making a non-English discussion? Is it simply not allowed? Is it allowed but discouraged?

Something you want to follow but don't have the energy to post? Something you want to start but not sure if there's an audience for it? Worry if it'd fit with existing culture? Share your ideas here to gauge interest.

Cold posting can be scary, maybe this thread can help break the ice.

For creating link topics, see Posting on Tildes in the official documentation.

When you don’t see the discussion you want, you can create a new topic. Starting a new Tildes topic is pretty easy. However, It can be done in better or worse ways, so here are some tips:

1. Choosing a group

Don't worry about this too much. Unlike subreddits, Tildes groups mostly don't have their own rules or subcultures. They're folders for organizing topics. If you put a topic in the wrong place, someone will move it. Either ~talk or ~misc are good if you don't know where to put it.

But you do need to click on a group to go to the group's page. Then look in the sidebar on the right side. (If you're on mobile, you will need to open the sidebar.) There's a blurb explaining what the group is about, and a button under it to start a topic.

2. Choosing a good title

For discussion topics, a question often makes a good title.

Tildes has users from all over the world. Asking people to share their own experiences lets anyone participate and you can learn interesting things about people in other places.

• Bad: "What do you think of this terrible weather?"

• Better: "What's the weather like where you are?"

Discussing a specific weather event would also be fine, but you need to say where it is.

A downside to asking a very generic question is that it might get more attention than you're hoping for. (For example, you might get advice that's not relevant where you live.) If you want to narrow things down geographically, be specific about which country or region you're interested in. We probably don't yet have enough users for hyper-local topics to get many responses, but feel free to try.

3. Writing an introduction

For a discussion topic, you skip the link box and write something in the box below it. You can write whatever you like here.

3a. Setting ground rules (optional)

Sometimes you have something specific you're looking for and it helps to make a sort of game out of it by making up some rules. A good example is @kfwyre's AlbumLove topics. If you just ask for music recommendations, people are going to answer in any old way, maybe by making long lists. So instead the game is to review one album.

Tildes users are usually pretty cooperative as long as you make it clear what you're looking for and the game isn't too weird. (And if they get the rules a little wrong, it's usually not a big deal.)

4. Tags (optional)

This is optional because if i you skip it, someone will do it for you, but if you want to help out, there is more about tags in the official docs. You could also look at similar topics in another window to see what tags we use.

5. Seeding the topic (optional)

After posting the topic, you might want to add some top-level comments to get it going. For example, if it's a megathread then you might put a link to a different article in each reply. Or, if you have a lot of questions to ask, you could put each question in a separate comment. This would keep the answers to each question separate.

6. Encouraging discussion (optional)

You will see a notification at the top of any Tildes web pages you visit whenever someone posts a top-level reply in your new topic. Replying and upvoting (if warranted) will help keep conversation going. Conversation encourages more conversation. You can do a lot even without any formal “mod” powers. (Some users also have ability to label replies, which affects sort order.)

Okay, that's it for me. What are some tips you have about starting new topics? One tip per comment, please! <= See what I did there?

Disclaimer: This is just an observation of changing dynamics on Tildes! I don't mean to suggest any sort of way that Tildes should or shouldn't be.

I've noticed over the past few days that the Tildes front page has become filled with Ask posts. My best guess as to why is that these posts are the easiest to create and respond to? They're an easy way to spark discussion, generating lots of bumps back to the front page.

Now, I love seeing folks connect over all these niche topics and experiences. It feels like folks here are finding their people after losing the tight knit communities they had on Reddit, and that's lovely! In fact, it almost feels like these niche ask posts are acting as an impromptu replacement for the niche groups that Tildes currently lacks.

But, one consequence of this is that link posts get quickly pushed off the front page. I had noticed that link posts often struggled to generate discussion, even before the influx of new users. Longread articles and video essays take time to digest, and time to formulate opinions on. But now, I think this effect is compounded by the popularity of Ask threads, with fewer eyes dedicated to these links after they've left the front page.

Some closing questions:

• Have other users noticed this? How do you feel about this shift?
• Is there any merit to having a group dedicated to ask posts? Sort of like /r/AskReddit, but for Tildes? (That way, the posts can be easily filtered if a user wants to only see link posts.) EDIT: Filtering is possible already by filtering out the 'self post' tag, as suggested by @streblo.
• Should the visibility of link posts and ask posts on the front page be artificially balanced in some way?

So if you want to encourage people to post more content, please take time to occasionally check the New sort. If you leave a comment on new topics you are interested in and want to see more discussion on, it will help them thrive. No pressure, and please don't just leave a comment for the sake of commenting, but just a gentle reminder to try your best to look out for the newly submitted content, and the people who submit it.

Happy Tildying everyone. :)

Tildes has a great function that adds the word count of a link or text post to its submission. The suggestion is this: allow the user to sort posts by length. The reason is that sometimes I wanna read something short, and sometimes I wanna read something long. It would be great to be able to easily find articles in the length I'm up for at a given moment.

Works for YouTube too.

Inspired by this post by @kfwyre.

For me, there's many; I don't want to influence responses but I will shout out the monthly mental health threads. Those really got me to (over)share feelings and find some reason. I got through dark times thanks to you all, Tildoes.

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!

Recently, I have blocked both reddit and facebook on my computer and devices in order to combat the utter fatigue that engagement with those sites produces. I've always really enjoyed the atmosphere here at Tildes better than either site and have hoped (though I gather this is not currently the goal) that it would supplant reddit in the future.

In order to get my news/discussion fix, I've begun submitting more content here than I have before. In the mornings, I go through my RSS feed, and pick out articles that I feel are interesting/would spark discussion here. I also try to conduct myself better here than I might on reddit, where JAQing off and bad faith argumentation are much more common.

I don't want to flood Tildes with too much content, so I'm trying to submit fewer than 10 articles per day. What are some other tips for good etiquette here, particularly insofar as it differs from reddit? I know there is an FAQ about Tildes but I'd like to hear what the community thinks, too.

Best,
-gbbb

Would it be possible to limit the number of posts that are shown on the home page pointing to a given domain at one time? There have been a few times I've come to Tildes to see what's new and there are 5 or 10 posts that all link to different pages on the same site. I think this would help increase the amount of variety in the stories that are showing and make the site more interesting to users.

I was thinking about posting this to ~news, but suddenly I've realised that I don't know if the word “fuck”, or any of the Seven Dirty Words, are allowed in titles. Is Tildes adults-only? Should people write something like “f***” in titles instead?

Just got invited here and looking at the content of the front page, Tildes is basically a "poor-man's version" of reddit right now. That's OK: it's a new community and I imagine a big part of users are coming here from reddit so they're doing what they're used to doing on social networks, that's only fair.

However, more than that, looking at the groups, they are set up pretty much similarly to reddit's default subs - if not on a 1:1 basis, at least in the general tone: pretty casual, daily life topics, big focus on entertainment media, etc. Maybe again this is, by design catering to the people who are bound to be incoming from reddit, so they can immediately relate to a similar user experience. Good.

So I think it's fair to say that it's proven that Tildes can be "like reddit". It kinda looks like reddit, it kinda feels like reddit. That part of the deal is covered. Now, what can makes us different? I doubt anyone here has no ambition besides being a soft-fork of reddit.

What topics make you tick? What sort of online discussion makes you go "that's the good stuff"? What subjects are you truly passionate about? I'd like to know what the community here is all about, whether the current ~groups represent their interests and passions or not and, hopefully we could come up with some less generic ideas for new ~groups out of the discussion.

EDIT I realize Tildes has a specific policy of "lesser active groups are better than a billion inactive groups" but at this point in time a good selection of groups would really help define the identity and content, not to mention promote quality discussion that actually aligns with people's interests. Hopefully seeing common trends in the replies would allow us to identify a few potential new groups, perhaps.

Aside from the existing conversations already going on about handling fluff and generally unwanted content, I would like to start (yes, I know, another) discussion on what we want to see on Tildes. Whenever one of these postings come up, there's generally a lot of "what we don't want to see" and not "what we want to see". So keeping that in mind, let's start...

Specifically I want to discuss Every Episode of "The Flash" Ever. The first, and currently top, comment suggests this is not content that belongs here.

I disagree. We're not anti-fun, and the comments in that thread kinda felt that way.

OP (@RamsesThePigeon) created a critic of a comic book based show in a comic book style depicting tropes and other character flaws in a easy-to-consume and humorous fashion. They correctly had it in ~tv.

This is exactly the sort of content Tildes needs.

It is not low-effort, and will still not be even if not directly created by OP (though bonus points there for sure). It had full potential to generate good discussion on the show itself, other similar shows, writing tropes and characters, and so on.

Thoughts?

Aaargh! In a recent post, (Who has quit Reddit etc. to go all-in on Tildes?), the subject of content came up. Just six days ago there was this post

https://tildes.net/~tildes/25n/it_needs_to_become_clearer_what_tildes_is_about_and_how_it_differs_from_reddit_im_part_of_the

and several discussed tildes as leaning toward discussion versus content. If we want to be one or the other , different or similar to Reddit, ok. But personally I came over to Tildes hoping it could eventually replace Reddit minus all the ads and for profit aspects that are plaguing so many social networking sites.

I get it. We want Tildes to be different. But I'm very interested in content. And content based discussion. My favorite subreddit /books, is based very healthily on both. And I happen to think that Tildes is going to need content to broaden its base. That broadening is a strength of Reddit I'd like to see emulated.

I've been hesitant to post and yes cross-post content from Reddit, but now that some people are seeing that content is needed, I'm getting on that bandwagon. I'll do my best to post good quality news, books, science, offbeat, the occasional humor, and you can moderate it away if you want. I want people to want to come here.

So I'll see you in content posts, discussions and even contribute to meta-talk at times, it's necessary for internal communication. But it's time to get to work.

I was reading a discussion about this on here earlier today, and I've already lost it! 😬 Sorry if this is just creating more noise, but we clearly need better ways to find content. The search feature will go a long way, but here are some other ideas:

Tag search. On any topic with tags, the tags should be clickable links to URLs like https://tildes.net/tag/elder+scrolls. This page would show all topics that use that tag, with sort and filter options. There should be a way (maybe built into the search form) to type any tag and jump straight to this page.

Recently viewed topics list. Reddit shows a sidebar listing the last n posts you viewed. It's admittedly a little creepy seeing your history displayed like that, but it's a useful way to jump back into conversations for follow-up later. The old Reddit design had a "clear" button to delete the history, but curiously that is no longer present in the redesign. (Privacy features like that should not be overlooked here.)

Saved topics. Another feature from Reddit. Every post has a "Save" link below it, that adds the post to your personal saved posts list, which can reached from your profile. Saved post lists are only visible to the users that own them.

Repost detection. I really like how Ask MetaFilter helps posters make sure their content is fresh before they publish it. The submit button under the new post form is labeled "Preview" and clicking it shows what the post will look like before publishing it. This gives posters the opportunity to proofread and ensure their text formatting is correct. More importantly, the site scans the content of the post and displays a list of five possible existing posts that match it:

The following previously-posted questions might be related to the question you're asking. Please take a look before posting to see if any of these answer your question.

This flow adds an additional click before you can actually post, but I think it's for the best. The slowdown politely nudges you toward considering the quality and originality of what you're about to say, without being overbearing. The main MetaFilter site also checks all URLs you enter to see if anyone has posted them before. Note that these tools don't prevent anyone from posting, they just empower users to avoid reposting and reinforce good posting behaviors.

Repost flagging. I have a half-baked idea about allowing users to flag topics as reposts, but I haven't seen this implemented before. This would be separate from voting. A user wishing to flag a topic would be asked to provide the URL of an existing topic it duplicates. This wouldn't affect the topic itself, other than to add a small banner to the top of the page: "n users flagged this as a repost of the following topics: [list of links]". Then anyone would have the ability to [agree], [disagree], or append a link to the list. Public consensus would affect the future of the topic... if enough others agree the topic is redundant, it could be auto-deleted or just algorithmically prioritized lower than non-reposts. If enough disagree, the flag could be auto-removed from the topic. The usernames of the flaggers should be public, and there should be a way to view both a user's frequency of flagging and whether consensus agreed with those flags. Accountability would be important for this sort of system.

Ability to subscribe to users. I saw the other feature request for a "friend" mechanic. I agree with the commenters who said it would be too much like a social network. However, I could see a use case for a "Subscribe" button on a user's profile page, just like the ones on group pages. This would cause all topics posted by that user to be included in your main page, even if they are in groups you aren't subscribed to.

I'd be interested to hear your feedback on these suggestions, as well as other ideas specific to increasing content visibility.

For the last couple of days I've been visiting the site several times a day and leaving after 10 minutes or so.

It's not that the site is bad or the discussion isn't good, but there's been a big lack of discussion I'm interested in. I don't like to take place in discussion of politics, or religion, or LGBT, or whatever. For me, the forums always were a place to meet new people to talk to, without it being a date or making friends or anything, just a friendly talk. Not that there shouldn't be a place for talking about world problems, but I get much more enjoyment from small issues or just getting to know other people.

Which is why I haven't been very active here for the last couple of days. There is all this LGBT talk and Trump and catastrophes. Even in the ~talk, there are 'Homosexual marriage legal or illegal?', 'Do you think school uniforms should be in all American/Canadian schools?', 'It's a Piece of Cake to Bake a Pretty Cake: LGBT+ Discrimination'. There is a fair share of smaller conversations, but they are mostly things I'm not interested in: 'What's your favorite documentary?, 'Advice- Best Tablets for Interactive Training' ― or things I don't know enough about to discuss, like 'How to gauge the degree of someone's self-awareness?'. This leaves very few posts I'm interested in, and I can hardly engage there because everything I could've said has already been said before I saw it.

Everything above is why I was mostly active in my own posts when I first joined as well. And I wanted to create this post to express this frustration(?) with lack of content, and I'm sure a lot of other lurkers will agree with me on that (whether or not they have different interests) ― I'm writing this post for them, too. I have no idea how you'd fix this problem or if it's even fixable, but I think it's important to state it so more active people can notice and so I have someplace to be active on ~.

I've been doing some thinking and concluded that in it's current form, tildes design has a fundamental problem that is going to make high-quality discussions nearly impossible.

Assumptions

I'm relying on four assumptions here:

• A discussion's quality is proportional to it's exclusiveness. In other words, the more wide the audience participating in a discussion is, the worse the discussion gets. It's not hard to see this. A discussion about a discovery in cancer reasearch on a news site will be much lower quality than among cancer reasearchers. This has also been shown to be true by reddit's /r/all.
• tildes get more specific, the "deeper" they are in the hierachy. ~sci.biology.cancer is more specific than ~sci. ~sci also a has more subscribers.
• tildes.net wants to use this specialization to foster high-quality and qualified discussions on specific topics.
• tilde submissions "bubble up", as they currently do

The Problem

You might be able to see what I'm getting at. I think these three together are a fundamental problem for the quality of discussion in subgroups:

• Highly upvoted posts from specific subgroups will be exposed to wider audiences, thus lowering the quality of discussion.
• More generic posts have a higher likelihood of receiving upvotes from the more general groups above them, thus lowering the quality of submissions.

A Scenario

Let's simulate a scenario using my above assumptions. This might be unhelpful, since it's very easy to poke holes in such a specific scenario. This is more intended as an overall picture of the incentives the users have.

We have three submissions to ~sci.biology.cancer, about the news of three different discoveries:

• A link to an original scientific paper with it's original title
• A link to an original scientific paper, with a modified title
• A link to a news story in a popular tabloid newspaper, with it's clickbait title

So, how would these fare?

• The first submission would be upvoted by ~sci.biology.cancer subscribers, who understand the paper and topic, but are low in numbers.
• The second submission would be upvoted by ~sci.biology, who are familiar enough to understand the modified title.
• The third submission can be understood by anyone, and would be upvoted by the whole of ~sci, slingshotting to the top.

Let's take at the result in ~sci.biology.cancer:

The highest ranked post is now a clickbait article of no significant interest to anyone actually knowledgeable about the topic, filled with unqualified discussion. The second ranked post is slightly better, but still less useful than the first post, which is being drowned out by other submissions.

Conclusion

As a submitter with the current system, instead of submitting high quality content that interests the subtilde, it is in your interest to submit a post that will appeal to the lowest common denominator, the subtildes above you. This will significantly decrease the quality of specialized subtildes.

Ideas

I believe the bubbling up mechanic must be modified in some way to prevent this unfortunate systemic issue. I don't really have a good solution, but here's some ideas to get the brainstorming going:

• No participation (voting/commenting) for users higher up the chain. This would be very extreme.
• users don't see comments made higher-up the chain. ~sci.biology would not see ~sci comments. This would be extraordinarily confusing and have weird edge cases.
• Votes would be counted separately for each part of the sub-tilde chain. A post might be highly upvoted in ~sci, but only receive a few upvotes in ~sci.biology. I like this idea in general, but it does not solve the problem of the low-quality responses landing in ~sci.biology.cancer too. Maybe that's just an acceptable trade-off, though.

What are your thoughts on this?

It's been an interesting couple of weeks while we all decompress post-reddit and think about the future of democratic online forums. Most of the relevant topics have already been discussed in multiple threads, and rather than having repeats, I'd like to invite everyone to comment on these threads themselves - and to read the comments that are already there. You'll find most of the solutions we've been thinking about explained in some detail, and we do want your feedback on these ideas to help make them better.

I suggest you bookmark this page. This thread is getting a bit lost in the shuffle, and it's really the best nexus of information about tildes we have at the moment. It'll take you quite a while to read all of this, so since we don't have 'save posts' here yet, a bookmark will have to do. We're also updating the links here as new discussions form. If you think a discussion should be added here, please reply to this thread with the link and I'll take care of editing it into the main post. When you see new users asking repeat questions, please link them to this post. Thanks for your patience while we work through all of this. :)

Let's get started.

• A group is its own worst enemy. This will help you think better about online community management. Also, if you haven't yet, play The Game Of Trust.

• Community Moderators? How do we moderate effectively, and fairly? Do we moderate at all? (everyone should read this monster) Also, see round two.

• How do we handle communities that get too big? It's a doozy, the inverse of reddit.

• Do we allow Fluff content? Just how do we select for quality instead of popularity, or even define quality, anyway?

• Do we allow for political content? How do we handle one of the most heated categories of discussion? Also see the followup.

• What do we do about "Fake News?" And you thought politics was hard? :D

• Can we create new ~groups? Will users be able to create them? Yes, eventually... but it's not that simple.

• How do we stop bots from wrecking the place? What about the bots that are useful?

• Why exactly is my comment box at the bottom, rather than the top? We have reasons. ;)

• Anonymous posting? You betcha. Privacy is not just a buzzword.

• Can we think of a better name than votes? Not really, not yet. Got any ideas?

• Funding - how do we pay for all of this? Nothing is free, after all. No ads, no pay to play, but what else could we do?

• Tildes Gold? No, something much better - the exemplary upvote, because you need a limited use vote to highlight the things you think are top quality. If we all use them together, it just might work.

• What changes need to be made to the comment tags before they are re-enabled? It's a tough problem.

• Should we make the site publicly visible? For users without accounts to read.

• Moving the vote count to the vote button. It's the little things.

And, of course, our first ban. In fact we're up to two now.

It's not all serious, though!

• Drop by and introduce yourself. Also see round two and round one.
• Where are you from? Quite the diversity in countries already!
• Our first Trump thread. Went better than expected.
• What about cultural exchanges? Great idea there.
• First impressions? Once you've slogged through all this, tell us what you think about the site. ;)
• Some simple user scripts. It's not RES, but it's a start.

Please do take some time to browse through everything in ~tildes. It's a cross between theoryofreddit, ideasfortheadmins, and announcements. That's where we talk turkey. There's a new discussion there every day.

I also want to make one important contrast about what this site intends to be.

Reddit and Voat: Democratic republic based on popularity. 'Free speech' forums.
Tidles: Democratic meritocracy based on quality. 'Civil speech' forum.

Enjoy yourselves, post some content, make some new friends. This sweet honeymoon phase won't last forever, and it's one of the best parts of a new site. Remember, as long as you're civil here, you are never going to have any problems.

I did some reading about the trust system listed in future goals today. I think that's pretty good for moderation, but one thing that I wanted to open a discussion about is submission gamification within ~, but not specifically with regards to trust/responsibilities, but one that encourages good quality submissions, or at least will isolate bad quality submissions.

With sites like reddit and others, where you have a singular generic Who's Line Is It Anyway style points system or "Karma" the acquisition of "Karma" is a driving factor for submitting content to the site. However, with this system it tends to encourage content that goes viral, hence we see the /u/GallowBoob's of the world producing low-effort content or free-booting other people's content for "karma profit".

I don't particularly think this is a very healthy system for content as a whole, but it does seem to achieve viral attention & interest and a somewhat constant stream of stuff (not necessarily good).

Someone in the Promotion thread had suggest gamifying getting the invites out there which got me thinking (although, not on board with that particular idea).

With comments tags we can categorize the type of comment we're seeing, and hopefully in the future filter the content we're seeing. If the submission incentives were based around tags instead of androgynous points of no meaning, perhaps we could get members actively seeking positive tags, similar to how someone aiming to become part of the moderation apparatus would seek this "trust" goal.

People seeking to be on top of the [Unbiased] or [Thought provoking] tags would (at least on the surface) be generally trying to produce unbiased and thought provoking content (bot voting & bullshit aside).

And people like /r/GallowBoob may become king of [Viral] or [shitpost] but we'd have the ability to filter those tags away and let people that want to meme it up meme it up on their own and not drown quality content.

Obviously this is all idealistic on paper, but with how much effort quality posting takes compared to shit-posting it'd be nice to try and give a little recognition (similar to this trust system) to those who strive for it, and not drawing the ire of unfounded censorship trolls/complaints for other areas.