Hi all,

I've been thinking about this for a couple days, and since there's another discussion about the alt-right/racism/offensive attitudes, I figured it was a good time to hopefully initiate the discussion even though I myself don't have much to contribute to it.

What I'm asking for is ideas to foster inclusiveness on Tildes. I personally haven't noticed much on Reddit that's bad, but then again, I'm a young (well, sorta) white dude. What I have noticed is that, as a man, I am the "default" gender on Reddit. People are always calling me "man" on there, even when I have not given any clues about my gender.

As for my race, I haven't noticed anything making my whiteness the "default"--people call me "man" all the time, but they don't call me "honky man," after all--but I unfortunately might not notice that. Anyway, I should stop blabbing, because I unfortunately don't have much to add to this discussion.

My question is, though--and I hope other people agree that it's an important topic to discuss--what can Tildes do to encourage inclusiveness? What can Tildes do to make everyone feel welcome, regardless of their sex/gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, and identity in general? If I were a woman and someone called me, "man," I expect that I would feel less welcome.

Edit: I should clarify that I'm looking for systematic ideas for what to do: if Tildes were as big as Reddit, what policies or structures could be implemented to remind people or encourage them to be more open to everyone? Is there anything that's even possible?

I posted this recently during a discussion on reddit on thread locking and wanted to post it here for discussion as well.

There's no room in a decent society for those who advocate for "race realism", deny the holocaust, or believe women are all mindless whores who can't think for themselves. If that's your (general you) idea of a useful contribution, create your own sub and be as hateful as you want, but I have no obligation to provide a platform for hatred on a sub that's dedicated to, for example, gifs of puppies and kittens.

Tildes is intended to be a place for insightful, high quality discussion. Can people who advocate for topics like race realism be part of that conversation?

Note: I am not necessarily suggesting that such topics be banned from tildes, I'd just like to hear opinions on this topic.

Edit: I posted this same topic, lightly revised, on /r/theoryofreddit to see the difference in responses. It's been enlightening.

Personally, I hope it takes over Reddit’s role of being primarily for discussion and a place to congregate interesting content, staying away from the more mainstream-y aspects, like the redesign. What do you expect/hope for?

So far, I haven’t seen too much moderation aside from bans, etc. dealt out by the admins (unless I’m wrong here and a moderation system is currently in place, please correct me if I’m wrong), but how will this work once Tildes is fully released to the public? Will people who show interest in a certain community be reached out to and asked?

Decided to drop down here and quickly ask what is Tildes' policy on piracy. Namely, should we be openly discussing, linking, directing users towards pirated content? Is it something that's strictly forbidden?

Apologies if I'm missing something, but if there isn't a statement on this already then what do you guys think the policy should be?

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.

While reading up on what it takes to run this site, it just occurred to me that the site is hosted on one server with one network connection. Adding a CDN or cloud based DDOS protection would run contrary to the "no third party" thing we've got going on here, so that doesn't seem like an option.

So I got to wondering, what would happen if a malicious actor were to sic a botnet on us? I imagine the outcome would not be good. Do we have any strategies to deal with this?

So I was thinking the other day -- is there any good reason to allow voting from the main ~'s page? For clarity in this discussion, I'm talking about this view.

Some pro's and con's for removing the vote button from the main page:

Pro:

• Discourages "drive-by" voting. We all (mostly?) know that reddit in particular is notorious for having highly up-voted posts that most users read the headline / top-comment and not the article itself. This is particularly noxious for political posts, as often times a vote on a post is an extension of one's own biases / beliefs, rather than an engagement on the topic at hand. This hasn't reared it's head to the same extent on ~'s yet (this post with 15 votes / and only 1 comment would seem to be the closest I can find), but I think it would be a mistake to think that this sort of behavior wouldn't migrate over from reddit. Other reasons for voting on a post without at least getting into the comments are equally bad e.g.: "Oh, I like that band / song / movie / whatever" -- this is a key driver of recycled content on /r/music or movies or tv etc. This reason alone is enough for me to consider removing front-page voting a net-positive

• The user is forced to enter the comments to vote, wherein they may actually read something that sparks their desire to read the thing / interact with the post. The goal on ~'s is to promote substantive discussion, and I think this would be an interesting tool to try to direct users to said discussion.

Cons

• It's more inconvenient, but hey -- so is putting the comment box at the bottom of the page (and I think that's a good idea on net as well)

• UI inconsistency -- this is a bad thing, but we've got a lot of smart computer people on here. We can probably figure out some way to make this work.

• It doesn't actually force the user to read / listen / interact with the submission, just suggests that they do. But hey, let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, eh?

Hanging Questions

• What about voting on ~group pages? My off-the-cuff idea would be that voting on ~music.world.calypso would be a good thing (to promote organic growth of quality posts from small ~groups), but not voting on overarching groups (~music) -- but then the UI issue rears' it's ugly head

• What about comment / submission voting from other places e.g.: user-pages, notifications, inbox replies, etc.

I had this full submission typed out before I accidentally closed the tab, so if this seems a bit rushed I apologize :)

The current problem with ~ is, in my mind, a lack of shared understanding between the "older" and "newer" users, about what the main focus of the site should be. I was lucky enough to join the site fairly early on, and with the exponential growth of the site, I've noticed a few changes.

There seems to be a "struggle" between link/article submissions and discussion posts. While each have their benefits, in ~'s current state, I do not think it's possible for both to work in harmony with the site.

The benefits of discussion posts are that they encourage community, and well, discussion. Discussion posts are great for the generally serious nature of the site as well. One of my main reasons for leaving reddit was the lack of genuine, interesting conversation that didn't dissolve into meta memes within two comments. On tildes, I've commented more than in my past few years on reddit because of this.

Link submissions don't encourage community or discussion, usually. Not always, but in most cases the user will post the article and move on. The same goes for users coming across it, they will just "upvote and move on", which doesn't seem to be very beneficial to ~ or its community.

The second problem with link submissions is the voting system. Right now on ~, you cannot downvote something. This was fine earlier when most posts were discussion based, but downvotes can be useful for link/article submissions. It can help cut out noise or blatantly clickbait/advertising articles.

I think there needs to be a way to distinguish between these two types of posts, or simply decide what the main focus of the site should be, and stick with that. What are your thoughts on this?

Hey all,

There's been a huge amount of response to this post about Hyponotoad's banning that I think merits a lot more consideration than as just a bunch of fractured comment threads.

Some questions that come to mind:

~ What does it mean to have "quality discussion",?

~ How do you distinguish between quality discussion and not quality discussion?

~ What does it mean to act in "bad faith"?

~ How, as a community, do we best achieve tildes' stated goals?

So I've been having a slightly off-topic discussion on a thread here and figured this would be a good subject to have wider input on.

I don't think markdown adds anything to Tildes and I think it actually degrades the experience for new users. Right now we're mostly old experienced reddit users and mods, but that hopefully will change. To me, markdown adds a not insignificant hurdle to formatting. Markdown has very few uses besides reddit and Github, and even then there's a few different types.

I suggest a WYSIWYG text box with a tabbed HTML option for those who want to use code formatting. Let's use something that's standard and encourages users to learn useful code.

Tell me why I'm wrong Tildes!

Edit: I primarily use mobile, so maybe that's part of the disconnect here. But it seems I'm the only person who cares and still thinks markdown is almost useless. I'm fine being in the minority. I still feel it's a good idea to look beyond the bleeding edge to the time when there's 300,000 or 3,000,000 uses.

Have a good day everyone!

One of the common issues that I've run into on reddit as a moderator is that lots of people put in a link and then put a bunch of text into the text area, and then they have a text link with no link.

I realize that you may have built things already in a way that is fundamentally not supportive of this, but I wonder about allowing both to coexist within one post?

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 seen some discussion about whether or not NSFW content should be allowed, but I’d just like to throw my suggestion out there.

Since some of the documentation mentions it, I think that most people are assuming that nsfw will be allowed. If it is allowed I’d like for pornography to be against the rules, while non pornographic NSFW content is allowed.

There’s a few reasons for this, mainly because tildes seems to be very community and discussion focused, and pornographic content doesn’t foster either a community or discussion (usually). Additionally, tildes doesn’t have anything unique to offer in this space, categorized pornography is something you can find in a multitude of places, and the design goals of tildes don’t contribute anything novel in pornography browsing.

General NSFW posts on the other hand I can see fostering some kind of community discussion, take a look at the the /r/sex subreddit as a decent example of a useful and moderated NSFW community (not perfect, but I do think it has a net positive impact on the reddit users who visit).

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