I feel like it's been pretty well established that Tildes is supposed to be a place of discussion with maybe occasional fluff here and there that can be filtered out. But there's a large grey area that I think should be addressed.

I'll take a few of Reddit's subreddits as an example.

I think it's pretty clear that a group resembling /r/aww should not be allowed on Tildes since it is pure fluffing and does not really bring a big quality of discussion to the community as a whole.

But how about a community such as /r/QuitYourBullshit? That could arguably be either unnecessary or a place of good discussion. There's a lot of grey area regarding the quality of that subreddit.

Now, I know what some people might try to say. We shouldn't try to replicate Reddit, and we should instead let the communities grow organically.

Yet, if Tildes is going to grow at all from Reddit, people are going to want to replicate the communities they so dearly loved on Reddit, regardless of quality. People who were active on /r/dankmemes are going to want a /r/dankmemes equivalent here. People who were active on /r/todayilearned or /r/JusticeServed are going to want an equivalent here as well. So the question is: how are we going to deal with the large demand for variably fluffy groups while simultaneously keeping the quality of discussion up?

I think this is a real issue that is going to have to be dealt with before widespread adoption of Tildes can occur.

At some point reddit had plans to implement a federated protocol and let users run their own instances, but that was throw out of the window to satisfy shareholders interests. Does tildes has plans to implement a federate protocol in the future or is something that hasn't been considered?

I'm grateful for being invited and I'm happy to see the community enjoy a smooth ride so far.

I really hope the platform does not follow in the footsteps of Reddit's karma mechanism. I find that this cumulative store of points attached to each user to encourages them to seek more points, regardless if they steal content or repost their own old material for another karma-harvesting run. Instead, if users can be appreciated by the actual number of posts they've submitted much like the bulletin boards of old, it would be more fair in my opinion. It'd be a measure of the effort and contribution made by a user, not only what others think of them.

For example, my profile would say "Eyehigh posted 20,000 posts" instead of "Eyehigh seemed to impress 20,000 people enough for them to leave an upvote, so here's the 20,000 upvotes."

What do you think?

I can't be the only one who looks at discussions about moderation, community norms, etc. and wonders who we are and aren't hearing from. What's the strategy for ensuring we have a breadth of perspectives (not talking US electoral politics, here) while setting early (possibly persistent) standards and structures?

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.

So, one of the things I deal with in my day to day are highly regulated industries (think guns and Legalized MJ), and I wonder where this will fit into Tildes itself.

I did not see much in the ToU in regards to this, so I wonder what governance we would be looking at?

Is it entirely what is legal in Canada? Because something may not be entirely legal in Canada, but the discussion of it would actually be perfectly legal.

I personally am someone looking for a migration from reddit, as it has become an unstable place for functional discussion.

(0) Background

This is coming off a discussion in today's thread on forming new groups around whether or not to add a group for politics. I expressed there that, given my moderator experience on /r/ChangeMyView and /r/NeutralPolitics, I opposed making such a group given how Tildes currently stands.

(1) Political discussion is nearly always garbage.

I don't think anyone needs reminding of this, but political discussion almost uniformly fails to achieve anything positive in almost any social media platform. Your uncle's facebook rants? Garbage. Political sniping on Twitter? Garbage. The endless repetitive point scoring and outrage fest on most political subreddits? Garbage.

So, we have to ask, why is this content garbage?

(2) People want to be heard, but nobody wants to hear.

I do not think political discussion is garbage because of bad faith trolling. That certainly exists and does not help, but usually it's not hard to ID the trolls, and excepting egregious stuff like doxxing or threats, to ignore obvious bad faith absurdity.

The much bigger issue is that what people want to do is to be heard and validated in their political views. This is not merely that they want to proselytize or to win converts, but that they're seeking validation and a sense of rightness or righteousness in their statements.

This desire is toxic to a neutral forum, because invariably on any divisive issue, you will not merely be heard and validated, but will be challenged and denigrated. Indeed, often the challenges and denigrations themselves are the same performance in reverse. Members of each team trying to dunk on the other and earn validation for how hard they owned the other side.

(3) To overcome this, a successful political forum must have a purpose other than mere commentary.

On /r/ChangeMyView and /r/NeutralPolitics, we have been able to build forums which have large amounts of productive and non-hostile political discussion. The key to this is that neither forum allows for being heard, or general discussion, as its reason for being.

On /r/ChangeMyView we limit posts to views people genuinely hold, and are open to changing (CMV rule B). This requires that OPs cannot come to troll or soapbox. It is by far the most frequently used rule of ours in terms of removing submissions, almost always on the soapboxing side.

On /r/NeutralPolitics, we limit posts to neutrally framed questions about political subjects, which can be answered with facts. By doing this, we narrow the scope of discussion away from soliciting feelings (which is an invitation to people posting just to be heard) and towards bringing forth factual information, where people might learn something.

I don't know what purpose a political forum on Tildes might have, but to succeed it must have a clear purpose, and that purpose must be one which excludes people posting merely to be heard.

(4) In addition to a purpose beyond being heard, a political forum must have extreme civility rules.

Both CMV and NP have extremely similar rules in this regard, and they are absolutely crucial to the success of the fora.

In general, any comment or post which in any way denigrates another user should be removed. This is an extremely broad civility rule that is well past what most subreddits do. Calling another user a liar, or accusing them of bad faith posting is banned on both CMV and NP for example, even when such accusations are true.

The prohibition on what even may be seen as justified rudeness is I think the key to a civility rule. It immediately removes from the moderation process any discretion around the substance of the politics, and makes it a neutral rule which can be applied evenly to all parties.

It is also necessary because nothing productive ever happens after bad faith is accused. Almost uniformly, once someone is rude, if there is a response back to them, the response will be rude in kind, usually more severely. People love to try to get the last word in, and a clear, objective rule banning "they started it" spats is also an important component. CMV's wiki has a really good overview of how we enforce this rule there.

(5) Conclusion/TL;DR

I don't know exactly what political content should exist on Tildes. I do know that a general politics group will not work, and that rather a politics channel should be focused on a discrete purpose other than just discussion.

I would almost certainly ban link posts from any politics group, since inherently they're going to act as just headlines for people to pontificate on, without guiding discussion towards a particular goal. I would also obviously enforce civility, and have much stricter moderation of it than I might on a non-politics forum.

Edited for formatting

That silly number on someone's account. One that means nothing but is a weird goal people seek out.

Karma can be used to encourage user participation. Karma can also be bad and can cause someone to post with the intent of collecting karma instead of discussion.

Karma can be earned different way;

• the reddit way, you get karma for how many upvotes you get for things you post
• the gamefaqs way, you get 1 karma point for each day you log in

I'm not sure of any other ways, but I like silly numbers. Perhaps the 'trusted user' thing in the docs can somehow tie into a karma system.

What do you think about karma and how it could/should/would play out here?

One of the most useful things about most internet communities is being able to compile resources on a particular topic and act as a hub for getting into that topic. On Reddit, this is handled through sidebars and wikis containing guides on how to start speedrunning, sewing, [ridiculous third example for humorous effect], etc. On imageboards, you have generals with pastebins and charts that each new version of that thread inherits. Traditional forums have a similar implementation, just slower.

Given that groups on Tildes are not user-managed and the Reddit-style posts don't encourage the kind of infinite repeating and bumping you see on imageboard generals, I don't see how this kind of thing can take root on the site. How is this going to be managed, if there are ideas on the way?

Of course, this is working from the assumption that this is something which the site should have. Personally, I see it as an essential measure for any site of this kind, but maybe yall don't agree.

Problem Summary

• "Vote" might not be the best word for tildes, since it implies choice
• 0 might not be the best number to start votes at

Solution

• Call the score "Score". It feels really natural: This has a score of 5. My submission has a great score.
• Call the act of voting +. It feels mostly natural: I give this +. I + this post. I got a +.
• Start score at 0. Things start at zero.
• When someone submits something, have them auto+ their own post. + is removable, but see next point - user will never see a 0.
• Hide scores until you have voted on something. This is potentially controversial, but I think it makes sense. Just show a big + in a box for the vote.

I think this checks off most of the concerns around things that were brought up in both of those threads (listed below).

Sources

For posterity, here are both the previous links on this topic:

• https://tildes.net/~tildes/b1/suggestion_find_a_new_name_for_vote_button
• https://tildes.net/~tildes/b3/suggestion_default_posts_to_1_vote_since_0_votes_can_be_disheartening