I'm used to browsing places like reddit, mastodon, kbin.social and midnight.pub. If I'm lucky I can find something lighthearted, witty or interesting. But there's a lot of outrageous posts as well as personal ramblings that make the effort feel like a slog.

I was slow to get into Tildes because I didn't find much "quick hit" posts, such as a good topical quip. I also wasn't as sure how to navigate to places I might want to post. But I did find it very easy to engage with existing posts.

It's in these existing posts that the transformative stuff happened for me. On other sites, long-form posts were often not in my interest or self-indulgent. But I found myself taking my time here, perhaps guided by the thoughtful comments that I saw already beneath the posts. Looking back, it's like a tone was set that I respected and didn't want to diminish.

The result is that I find the other sites under-stimulating, in spite of their design. Tildes has been really good for helping me reform my internet habits. I don't have that regret of excessive internet use as much now. Thanks to deimos and everyone on the site that makes it what it is.

If I miss one thing, it's using my native language. But at the same time, my gut says that things are good just as they are.

You might ask yourself “monthly mystery commenters”? Well, let me attempt to explain. I have noticed that on a semi frequent basis, someone will reply to me in a comment. The sort of comment that does invite a reply and isn't a stand-alone comment. Yet, in the case of these comments, whenever someone replies they never do reply in turn.

Of course, it is entirely possible for people to decide to not reply and still reply elsewhere on tildes. In this case, however, I noticed that there is a group of people who only ever leave single replies and never respond to any follow-ups. More often than not, I have noticed these are people who only leave a comment once per month or every few weeks. Hence, the title referring to the practice of monthly hit-and-run comments.

It is a bit of a curious pattern, isn't it? To me, this doesn't make a lot of sense. Like, I get that people sometimes don't want to continue a conversation. But to structurally leave comments to never follow up on replies is entirely alien to me. Even more so for comments that really are replies to other people, not stand-alone comments.

This whole thing has got me scratching my head just enough to make this post. Are they dropping these comments with the best of intentions to return, only to get swept up in other aspects of life? Or is it more about leaving a mark, however brief, to say, “I was here” without the commitment to a full-on conversation? Maybe it's something completely different I haven't even considered.

So, hit-and-runners, what drives you? I am genuinely curious about this and looking forward to any replies.

Edit

This already did get a lot more responses than I ever thought it would get. One observation so far is that a lot of people that replied seem to identify with the title. Yet, so far, for all people I checked they don't fit the type of commenter as I describe in the post itself. It is possible my description just sucks, maybe there is room for a future discussion about commenting based on titles alone. ;)

It's still interesting to read all the different perspectives people have about commenting!

Tiny edit: because of the subject, I almost feel obligated to respond to most people. I really shot myself in the food there :D As that is an impossible task, sorry to the folks I don't end up replying to.

I was just reminded of that again when going back and looking at some of my old posts on reddit which is openly selling online data. Prompted me to use Redact which erases and overwrites comments before deleting them. But that got me wondering if the same is true of Tildes? And how would we know?

I've noticed that Tildes generally has a way more levelheaded and even friendly caliber of responses compared to many other social media sites that I've seen. I'm genuinely curious as to why this is. I regularly see the same article posted here that I also saw on say Lemmy, but over there the comments tend to be more hostile and explosive. Meanwhile, disagreements on Tildes rarely get THAT heated (at least as far as I have seen), even on posts involving very intense and personal subjects like politics or war. Even the disagreements and arguments I see on Tildes tend to be more respectful and level-headed, so much so that it's jarring to me to see the comments on some other site where someone's response to a user they disagree with is just straight name-calling.

Is it the invite-only nature of it? The lack of downvotes? The moderation? Confirmation bias? The demographics of the people here? Pure luck? Something else entirely?

This is specifically about voting on comments, and not articles. I think voting for topics is clear and intuitive.

I've noticed that, while reading users' comments on topics, I have a tendency to think "This is right, so I will vote it up," or "I agree with this, so I will vote it up." I'm not sure I should be doing this, or rather, I'm not sure that's the best use of my ability to vote on comments. I always worry that sites I frequent will morph into echo chambers, and I want to avoid that for this site. I want to encourage expressing alternate viewpoints, because exposure to alternate views helps me grow a human. The vote button is a low-effort means of accomplishing that, and I intend to use it as such.

I think the vote button should be used on comments that enhance the discussion, and help engage people, and not necessarily only on comments that make me feel happy, good or righteous. So, lately, I've been trying to explicitly vote up comments which have replies, especially ones which have several replies, but aren't voted as highly as their children or peers. If someone's comment can engage several people to reply and contribute positively to a conversation, then that comment is worthy of being seen and so I vote it up. I do this regardless of whether or not I agree with the substance of the message.

I've noticed a trend where there will be a low-voted comment with many replies. These aren't trolling comments, because if they were, then they would be removed. These are comments which are engaging people and furthering the conversation, but it seems like the community doesn't value these comments due to their low vote count. This leads me to suspect that the number of votes on a comment might be merely a tally of the number of people who agreed with it.

So, I'm curious. Do you vote on comments?

How do you decide to vote on a comment?

How should we collectively be using the vote for comments?

(As an aside, I also wonder how the psychology of reading comments would change if vote tallies on comments were hidden.)

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?

And I don’t mean that in a good way. In just a few years, Reddit has devolved from a place to find relevant and quirky information, to basically a platform pushing outrage porn, political divisiveness, and mindless memes, with occasional humor sprinkled in.

The outrage porn is the worst, just exhausting and tiresome. The voting mechanics are mostly to blame for this. Since outrage draws the most engagement, the more people who interact with the site, then the more this type of material will surface and thrive.

The political divisiveness germinates similarly, with the added impetus of state actors throwing fuel on the flames.

The memes are seemingly harmless, but are no substitutes for actual dialogue.

I would just like to see a platform that places a premium on meaningful social dialogue for the future betterment of all involved.

I am a reddit refugee and I was drawn to this network by its mission, its decisive rebuff of chasing capital at all costs, and the overall vibe.

I lurked for a while before I was invited to join, but shortly after joining I noticed something. While a good discussion from opposing viewpoints can help everyone broaden their horizons a bit, it felt like white supremacists were testing the waters. While I can't directly cite any threads, there were a couple instances where I felt one side was seeing just how close they could get without being obvious. But it felt like some of the subtler dog whistles were there.

It felt very similar to how QAnon got a lot of people with the disinformative statistic about child abductions. After all, who's going to be on the other side "child abductions are bad?"

After seeing a few threads and getting the same vibe, I stopped visiting the site for the last couple months. Life getting pretty busy also helped.

I haven't been back long enough to determine for myself whether I'm in a "Nazi bar" or not. I would be happy to admit that it was all in my head. But it is a major concern for any up-and-coming social network. And that's an opposing viewpoint no one needs to take seriously. Was it in my head? Was I reading too much into things? Did all the nazis just go to X? More generally, how has moderation been with the influx of new users? The same, but more? A couple extra reminders doing the trick? Uptick in bans? Is this information already somewhere and I'm a bad user for not having seen it?

About this one: https://tildes.net/~news/19bm/regional_news_thread

First of all I want to thank everyone who participated and gave it a shot despite the weird setup, and apologize for ghosting the meta-discussion about it. Y'all have many suggestions which convinced me that my original idea was flawed.

For one, I agree with Algernon_Asimov that splitting into a separate 'US-local news' and 'non-US global news' would have made more sense. If there's a next round, I think I'd focus on US states first, then non-US countries in another thread. But before that I want to get some feedback to make sure.

Do you think general news threads like that are necessary?

Algernon_Asimov said that news should just be posted directly to the frontpage to be more visible.

spit-evil-olive-tips made a point about the distinction between local news of general interests vs. local news of local interests, and the latter could benefit from having dedicated threads.

For me, I believe megathreads are fine as long as they're optional. In my experience, people do sometimes prefer to post in comments instead of as full topics. As long as people are free to choose either way (which is different than on Reddit where if there's a megathread then posts outside it got removed), overall we should end up with more activity not less.

Does the comment-to-comment format make sense?

In my head I imagine that to be a natural way to generate location-based grouping, but I could see the convoluted setup might be confusing and unenforceable. One the one hand, if each location only has 1 post then the extra step is unnecessary. On the other hand, if there are multiple locations, each with multiple posts then trying to find your regions of interest would be a pain.

Is the scope of the thread too broad?

This was a point made by skybrian here, which was in the context of the original thread being both US and non-US. But even if we divided them into separate US and non-US, are they still too broad?

Having one thread for each location is probably the most natural way, I fear that currently that would ended up being too niche. This was touched on by merry-cherry here as well. I could imagine that would work for a US state (which ever has the most people here) but since no one tried it yet, it's hard to know which states are most likely to succeed. And we probably shouldn't just make one each for all them (which would fill the entire frontpage with nothing but state names).

Should these threads be news-focused?

While that was my original goal, maybe megathreads could be more useful if they fills the needs of the people posting in it rather than just the one starting it. Usually that requires guesswork by the poster but since I'm already asking, might as well.

For the US-local thread, if the goal is to serve as testing grounds to see whether there's enough activity to make the case for local groups, maybe news is not necessarily the most popular when it comes to local content? If anyone support this direction, please share some examples of what types of content you'd like the most when visiting local groups. If you do, please also rank them in order of importance. That way the scope of the thread could be made to focus on the most needed activity as starter.

For the non-US global thread, do you still want dedicated global news? If so how should we set it apart from just regular posting? boxer_dogs_dance mentioned r/anime_titties being quite high quality for global news, any lessons we can adopt from them?

Digging around and I found this post asking about how to do cultural exchange on Tildes, maybe shifting the focus from global news to this might be more fruitful? (people are probably more willing to share nice things about their country than drama). Each subthread can be something like this Turkey Information Thread, or something else maybe.

Should they be recurring?

News probably make sense as recurring, others depend. Since this is still in trial whatever arrangement we agree on, I'll probably just make one and see from there.

Anything else you want to let me know (like maybe don't do this anymore haha), shoot away. Also it's not like I'm an official thread maker or anything, if any of y'all have your own take, go for it! The more people trying out stuff the better.

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 think we all know how redditors can be negative nancies looking for the next user to argue with, so I'm curious to know from the peeps that were here before the redditors: has the quality of conversation and sense of community changed (either positively or negatively) since us redditors showed up?

The Reddit company is screwing up and upsetting a lot of their "power users" and mods. A lot of people are fed up with Reddit, and are possibly ready to move on to a new platform.

Is Tildes that platform? I've lurked here for most of Tildes' life, and from that, my impression is that Tildes does not especially want to replace Reddit. A lot of people here like the small, intimate atmosphere. I've even noticed a bit of derision toward Reddit's lowbrow appeal.

The reason I ask is because there are communities on Reddit that I don't want to see die. /r/Permaculture and /r/composting are some of my favorite places. I've gotten to know quite a few people who also frequent those places and I've come to enjoy the tone of conversations there.

But this seems like an important question for Tildes to answer not just for my sake. Reddit is full of niche communities like this. If they have to go somewhere suddenly (and I realize that this is a big "if"), where do they go? I know that they technically can't come here suddenly--slowing growth is one of Tildes' features. But if Reddit's niche communities decided to move here, would you welcome them? I'm interested in what you, personally, think, as well as how you think Tildes as a whole would handle this.

P.S. I'm also sorta asking for permission to invite /r/Permaculture and /r/composting over here. I like this website, but I'm just a lurker, and don't feel like I'm part of the Tildes community. It feels super presumptuous to invite my friends over here without asking. But I think the wider question is more important. Do you, and does Tildes, want Reddit's 'refugee' niche interest communities?

Edit: Thank you all for the excellent responses! I don't have time now to respond individually, but I really appreciate the thought so many of you have put into your replies. This will help a lot in considering how to proceed over on Reddit.

I'm sorry if this was already answered in the docs somewhere but similarly to the question "What happens to my Steam games when Valve goes out of business?" I was wondering what happens to Tildes if Deimos can't sustain it anymore for whatever reason (e.g. death, prison, going off the grid and starting from scratch in Ecuador...)?

Is there some kind of backup plan in place?

Looking at the current top thread in ~talk, it seems many of us were forged in the fires of Mount Digg, and now suffer again through the great Reddit diaspora. Perhaps it is here our journey ends?

I am not from the US of A, but one thing I have always found fascinating about that country is the concept of the constitution. I believe it was so incredibly well conceived, the three legged stool, with all the thought that went into how it might be attacked and edge cases, that the founding fathers would have made excellent software testers. The fact American democracy has stood this long is some feat.

Which brings me to my question. Should Tildes create some form of constitution? A set of principles that binds and guides it? I believe something like that would make questions like this easier to answer. A founding set of ideals from which everything else should derive.

We have something akin to this at my company, where the founding principle is the customer is always our main priority. This has served our business well for decades; is everything we do in service of the customer and their needs. You would honestly be amazed at the loyalty and trust this builds over time.

Anyway just some food for thought. I think I will be calling this my new home for now - it feels very much like the Reddit of old right now, a feeling I haven't felt for a great age.

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.

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.

Hi All,

As yet another reddit transplant (YART) I've been watching the drama on that other platform and reflecting on what the most important aspects of successful online discussions are for me.

One of the things that I value(d) most about reddit was the ability to use the keyword reddit in DuckDuckGo or Google searches to help me find more relevant and helpful content about a variety of niche subjects. So far, it seems to me like Tildes has some potential to fill this role based on its emphasis of thoughtful text content. Also, these types of searches add credibility to a site when random internet browsers stumble across a thread discussing their exact question.

One thought that I had along these lines was that people who care about this type of thing could make a concerted effort to transport content from reddit and other sites to be shared here. I don't think it would be appropriate to just copy and paste text without adding at least a bit of original thoughts or context. However, I often find myself researching niche products or ideas to such an extent that I could write up a nice summary of all my findings. A post like that could be a nice crash course to others or a fun way to introduce people to ideas they didn't know about.

Would people here be interested in consciously doing this type of thing? We could all make nice amalgamations of information we think is important as we independently research topics and post them here to boost discussion and boost Tildes threads in web search results.

This is a place to post your ideas about what to do about Tildes groups and tags. I'm going to write about some problems (as I see them) and save my ideas about solutions for the comments.

The taxonomy problem

We have tags and groups and they are somewhat arbitrary. A tag could be a group someday. A group can be downgraded to a tag if it's not used much.

Topics can have multiple tags, but they can be in only one group (and its ancestor groups).

It's hard to pick the right group. An example: a post about animals could go in ~enviro (for wildlife), ~hobbies (for pets), or ~science (for a scientific study). So where do you put news article about a scientific study of the effects of house cats on wildlife?

Adding ~animals seems like it would be a good thing because now you have an obvious place to find all the posts about animals. Animal lovers rejoice! But from a taxonomy point of view, it makes things worse, because now you have another place where you could logically put an article and another place to go looking for it. More groups means more edges and more edge cases. It's enough to make you wish for crossposts.

The competition problem

Tags are better for taxonomy, so why not just have tags? Because classifying topics isn't the only thing we want to do. As Deimos wrote about, eventually we'd like to have somewhat more independent communities, closer to subreddits but hopefully without their downsides. It would be nice if subreddits that wanted to migrate to Tildes could actually do it. We also want to have a good mix of topics on the front page, while allowing some groups to have a lot more posts than others.

I'll start with an analogy: if a school has only one sport that matters, the people who are good at that sport win socially, and other people don't have as much of a chance. But if you have multiple sports and clubs that people care about, there are more ways to win at something. I don't believe pretending everyone is a winner works all that well, but more ways to win promotes diversity and creates useful social ambiguity.

The front page of Tildes is the most visible and has limited space. That creates an all-against-all competition between topics. We also have groups with their own leaderboards, but they are lesser competitions and it's unclear if they matter yet. (I'm using them more, though.) Meanwhile, each topic has an independent leaderboard for its comments that doesn't conflict with any other game. (Maybe that's why I like megathreads?)

I haven't been thinking of Tildes in terms of leaderboards, but maybe it can explain why old-timers are often reluctant to post topics? We aren't really trying to win, but we have ideas about fair play. When there's only one game anyone cares about, we don't want to drown out other worthy topics by entering too many contestants. We're also a bit reluctant to enter anything that's too specialized into the competition, because it doesn't "deserve" the attention. It's not a worthy contestant and it's just gonna lose.

Also, sometimes this isn't a game you want to win. Entering a controversial topic into a competition can get you unwanted attention, and that's often no prize at all. When a game isn't one you wanted to enter, getting attention is more like losing than winning.

For the front page, I expect this problem will get worse with more people. Entering the competition brings more attention than before.

Note: thinking of a topic listing as a leaderboard for a game is only an analogy and I don't mean to promote competitiveness. They weren't designed to be leaderboards and I think we'd like to see design changes that reduce competitiveness. There are known downsides to competition that we don't want, like "cheating" to win with "unworthy" strategies and the rules-lawyering and jealousy that come with that.

Ideas?

Some rules for this "game": Please post one proposal per comment. If you have multiple independent ideas, you can post them separately, but post them together if they're interrelated.

I'm relatively new here, and excited about the community. My question stems from learning that the usual way communities evolve here is by having specific topic information repeatedly surface in more general category forums. If we do not create a women's community here, comparable to the one that already exists for lgbt, will we be less likely to create topics related to women's issues? Can we predict how it will evolve?

What do you think?

I've noticed that tildes is somewhat different than other social networks in that it doesn't display a user's karma, neither on profile page or on the handle. On other networks, you'll always see something like pyeri [100] at almost every place where pyeri posts.

Is there any thought process behind this design decision? Do you think judging users by their social score might lead to "class conflicts" of sorts which might erupt in flame wars or something? Or do you think high karma will reach their heads and make them more narcissistic while a lower score will make them prone to imposter syndrome!

But on the flip side, this karma score acts as a kind of street cred indicator. What the community thinks about a particular user is public and known to the community in the natural and organic course of content creation which is quite desirable.

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!

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?

As a new Tildes user, one of the biggest cultural differences I've noticed between Tildes and Reddit is the lack of identity-driven argumentative discussion. Instead, discussion is driven by interests, knowledge seeking, and personal expression.

Identity politics is an umbrella term
that encompasses identity groups both laudable and vitriolic. For example, it includes civil rights, gay rights, disability activism, fat acceptance, white supremacy, and nationalism. (wiki)

It's my opinion that you can't have a rational, cooperative discussion until you set aside identity groups, and I like this aspect of the Tildes culture. I don't want to jinx it, but I believe the lack of identity politics is what people mean when they say they enjoy the high quality, non-divisive discourse here.

It's worth noting my subs of choice on Reddit were /r/samharris and /r/stupidpol. The former encouraged objective, rational discussion. The latter had lots of news that cut though the identity politics of the mainstream (though with a Marxist bent).

I would love to hear the thoughts of the older Tildes users before the most recent Reddit exodus (from where I come).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As a new member I am really hesitant to post this but I recently posted an article to ~news that was related to lgbt issues and it was moved to ~lgbt. I fully support a sub section devoted to lgbt but news should be news regardless.

Just because it has an lgbt angle does not mean it should be moved. I'm not even lgbt myself but I find it sort of hurtful that a news article was pushed off ~news. So I ask this, and once again not trying to make waves. But why?

Edit: I would love to be a member of this community as I am personally seeking a less asshole filled reddit alternative. But pushing a news article to another ~ just because it relates a bit more to them shouldn't be a thing. If you are tolerant it relates to us all. And yes I know I posted it in ~news because I was trying to participate and I'm a news junky.

Sorry.

Edit 2: This was a sad sorry way to come in to this community. I apologize.

So what I'm talking about is stuff like this 10-video playlist or this 3 video playlist (Emp never actually made it a playlist unfortunately).

So how should we deal with multiple videos from the same person on the same subject?

Should the ability to make 10 link posts and wrap them under a single topic so people can comment on each video individually be a new feature (and if so should we be able to upvote the whole thing or each link individually?)

Should we upload a playlist of all the videos like this?

Should we make a text post with all the video links, like this but with videos instead of chapters?

Or should we do something else?

It is pretty clear there are certain subject areas where the discussion simply never goes well here. This isn't a Tildes thing really. Frankly these topics rarely go well anywhere online but, as we have aspirations 'round these parts of being more sophisticated than the Reddit rabble, I think it's worth digging into.

Overall Tildes is a fairly low-activity site, but if I ever see a topic that even tangentially touches on "identarian" issues get past double-digit comments, there will almost surely be an acrimonious exchange inside. I don't want to pretend I'm above this, I've been sucked into these back-and-forths myself as, I think, has almost every regular poster at one time or another. I've largely disengaged from participating in these at this point and mostly just watch from the sidelines now.

Unlike most of the common complaints with Tildes, I don't think this one will get better as the site grows and diversifies. If anything, I think it's going to end up creating norms and a culture that will bleed over into other controversial topics from tabs/spaces to iOS/Android. To keep that from happening, the community will need to form a consensus on what "high quality discussion" means and what we hope to get out of having conversations on these issues here.
To start, when I say "doesn't go well" I'm thinking of indicators where some combination of the following happen:

1. None of the participants learn anything new about the subject, themselves, or another viewpoint
2. Preponderance of "Malice" and "Noise" tags
3. Heated back-and-forth exchanges (related to the above)
4. Frequent accusations (and evidence) of speaking in bad-faith or mischaracterization of peoples' statements

These threads end in people being angry or frustrated with each other, and it's become pretty clear that members of the community have begun to form cliques and rivalries based on these battle lines. It also seems like the stridency and tone are making people leave out of frustration, either deleting their accounts or just logging off for extended stretches of time, which is also an outcome we don't want. So let's go into what we can do to both change ourselves and how others engage with us so people feel like they're being heard without everything breaking down into arguments.

The "Whys" of this are varied and I'm sure I don't see the whole picture. Obviously people come into any community bringing different background experiences and with different things they're hoping to get out of it. But in my view the root cause comes down to approaching discussions as a win/lose battle rather than a shared opportunity to learn about a subject or perspective. From observing many of these discussions without engaging, there are evident patterns in how they develop. The main thrust seems to be that criticism and pushback pretty quickly evolve from specific and constructive (e.g. "This [statement or behavior] is problematic because [reason]") to general and defamatory (e.g. "[Person] is [bad thing], as evidenced by them doing/making [action/statement]").

This approach very quickly turns a conversation between two people into a symbolic battle about making Tildes/the world safe for [community], defending the wrongfully accused, striking a blow against censorship, or some other broad principle that the actual discussion participants may or may not actually be invested in. Once this happens the participants are no longer trying to listen or learn from each other, they're trying to mine their posts for things they can pick through to make them look bad or invalidate their participation. This has the effect of obliterating nuance and polarizing the participants. Discussions quickly devolve from people speaking candidly to people accusing each other of mischaracterizing what they've said. This makes people defensive, frustrated, and creates a feedback loop of negativity.

The win/lose battle approach permeates political discussion on Tildes (and elsewhere), which is a separate issue, but it gets especially problematic in these threads since the subject matter is intensely personal for many people. As a result, it's important to take care that pushback on specific positions should always endeavor to make people feel heard and accepted despite disagreement. On the flip side, there needs to be a principle of charity in place where one accepts that "no offense/harm intended" actually means no offense intended without dissecting the particulars of word-choice to uncover secret agendas. If a charitable interpretation is available, it isn't constructive to insist or default to the uncharitable one. It may not feel fair if you know that the more negative interpretation is correct, but it is literally impossible to have productive discussion any other way. If you can't imagine that a well informed, intelligent, and decent person might hold a certain view then the only conclusion you can draw is that they're either ignorant, stupid, or evil and every response you make to them is going to sound like you think this of them. That's not a position where minds are going to be changed from. English isn't necessarily a first language for everyone here and, even if it is, not everyone keeps up to date on the fast moving world of shifting norms and connotations in social media. What's more, not all cultures and places approach these issues with the same assumptions and biases you're familiar with.

Now I don't actually believe in appealing to peoples' sense of virtue to keep things going constructively in situations like this. Without very active moderation to reinforce it, it just never works and can't scale. So I think operationalizing these norms is going to take some kind of work. Right now we freeze out comments when they have a lot of back-and-forth, which I think is good. But maybe we should make it a bit more humanistic. What if we rate limited with a note to say "Hey this discussion seems to be pretty heated. Maybe reflect on your state of mind for a second and take a breather if you're upset."

Or, in long threads with lots of my bad indicators, the submit button can send to the post preview rather than immediately posting. It could then flash a banner to be a quick reminder of the ground rules (e.g. Try to assume good faith, Remember the Human, Listen to understand rather than respond, Careful with the snark, It's not about winning/losing, etc.) This would introduce just a touch of friction to the posting process, hopefully just enough to make people think "Maybe I could phrase that better" or "You know, this isn't worth my time" and disengage (Obligatory relevant XKCD)

Alternatively, maybe it is the case that this is honestly just intractable without some sort of third-party mediation mechanic and we freeze out comments under such topics entirely. Like I said before, I worry the frequency with which these discussions turn dispiriting has a chance of acculturating new users or signaling to prospective users that this is an expected way for this community to engage.

This is a long post, and I hope it does not itself turn into another case study in the issues I'm trying to raise. I want to open the floor to anyone who has other ideas about causes and solutions. I also ask that we try to keep any critiques to specific actions and behaviors without trying to put blame on any groups of people. We all contribute to the vibe one way or another so we can all stand to try a little harder on this front.

Sometimes I get into a back-and-forth... heated interaction with someone, and it goes on for a while, and then they stop responding. Afterwords, I might wonder if it was worthwhile. Maybe they got tired of arguing with me, or maybe they just thought the conversation reached its natural endpoint? Rarely, the conversation might end with us explicitly agreeing it was a good discussion, but that's kind of formal and not the usual case online.

Just stopping is my habit as well. If I don't want to talk anymore, I upvote the last comment (if I thought it was good) but don't reply.

In the case of repeated interactions like this with the same person, sometimes I wonder if I'm annoying them by replying to their comments too much, particularly if we disagree often. I've never been explicitly told to go away, but people are often reluctant to say things like that, for good reason since you never know how people will react.

It seems to me that upvotes don't tell me this. Upvotes tell you whether your comments make sense to the crowd. They don't tell you whether the person you're talking to liked your reply. Which seems like it would be good to know. It would be valuable feedback if the goal is to be a better conversationalist. That seems like a good goal to aim for?

I guess we could get in the habit of saying "good point" and all that, and sometimes things can be inferred from what people say if you're good at taking hints, but not all of us are. But we are all trained to upvote things we like already, and it seems like it would be nice to take advantage of that.

To the extent that people like to gather internet points, I wonder what sort of conversation would be encouraged if you got them by writing a good reply from the perspective of the person being replied to? But I guess it could be gamed pretty easily if two people cooperate, so we probably shouldn't keep a total.

Also, think about how this looks from the outside: if you are reading a conversation by two other people in a heated back-and-forth, how do you know whether they're having a good time or not? Maybe it seems obvious, but in some cases a heated discussion might look worse to outsiders than participants. If you could see that they liked each other's comments then it would seem friendlier.

Note that Facebook does tell you who upvoted a comment, but since it tells you everyone who upvoted it, it's even more information, maybe too much.

(This is a followup to @NaraVara's previous topic, focusing on a particular aspect of it.)

Based on replies to this comment there seems to be a decent amount of interest around the topic of reworking voting, so I thought I would start a thread to get some more input. We already had similar discussions about a year ago but it looks like some people's opinions may have shifted somewhat? and as was noted in the comment thread, 1 week wasn't really enough to accurately assess the value of something like making vote counts invisible.

Things to consider:

• Do you think how voting works changes your/other's behavior on this site? and if it does, is this change positive or negative?
• Would you support reworking/modifying voting? If so, how?
• How long should we test said modifications if they are made?
• anything else you consider relevant

TL;DR: I did not know each individual group had wikis and I find them pretty great (the LGBT and tech ones in particular). Do they get updated regularly, are they searchable via the site-wide search, and who can contribute to them exactly?

I was looking through the "note-taking" and "productivity" tags for recommendations on a new note-taking app when I came across the extension resources wiki article in "Tech". It hasn't been updated recently but it made me realize one of the reasons why I find places like reddit useful is that the "Pinned FAQs", "Beginner Guides to <Hobby>", and "Megaposts" on reddit are an excellent source of (for lack of a better term) "peer-reviewed" recommendations and are often the catalyst for fun discussions.

I have, through my time here on tildes, discovered so many excellent recommendations even by just using the search bar and browsing threads - to the point that if say, a reddit and tildes post give me conflicting recommendations, I would trust the tildes post 9 out of 10 times. The climate of posts here are less inflammatory and the discussion on pros/cons are more calm, friendly, and thought through. I admit they have impacted my views on a bunch of things (not least of which is trying firefox as my main browser).

Are resource dumps like that something that the community here find viable in general? Are there plans for updating their implementation to be more easily accessible or is it too far removed from the discussion-based fluidity of the site? I understand that there are other places online to find information, but rarely do I find it at this level of transparency of bias and (on average) free of any bloat.

I guess I'll end this little thought stream with a thank you for all the people who post here and a curiosity for the future discussions to come. I've lurked a lot and learned a lot.

364 days specifically, and it's 11 PM again, so admittedly it's kinda late to ask this question.

Usually I would pull-up the concerns over no user growth meaning more groups is just more division for less content but this Deimos reply implies otherwise?

These days I was thinking about making UPDATE posts for things I wrote about my personal life. So I typed "update" on the search bar and did not see anything of the sort. Are those discouraged? Was the question simply never asked before? Should I just add more information to the existing post, (without notifying any of the original commenters)?

(I'm tagging as ask.advice and ask.discussion because while my motivation to make this comes from my comments I'm not the only one who this could apply to and deleting coments is very much a general topic.)

So basically, I wrote this comment, noone agrees with it and the contrary takes all are upvoted, so should I delete it? If noone agreed with what I had to say and upvoted contrary answers, then what I said wasn't valuable to anyone, and so I should delete it, right?

This also applies to quite a few comments I have written that have 0 votes like this, this this and this.

In the other hand, measuring a comment's value by how many people voted on it isn't that great and leaving clarifications and tecnical/minor details and if someone replied, even if only to point out your comment as wrong or not so unlikely, so other than the third comment, you can argue they aren't entirely bad. (And leaving someone's answer without a question is pretty bad if someone comes later since they wouldn't know why that answer was there.) So where does one draw the line?

So, let's say I wrote something on my blog[1] and want people to check it out. Since I don't have any proper "audience" (and I don't expect one given I rarely post something), I don't really see any way other than sharing my own posts on places like Tildes, relevant subreddits, etc.

But doing this feels bad. I feel like I'm using these places just as a dumping ground for my own posts, trying to boost my own site or whatever, even though I don't earn anything from it.

If I check my Tildes history, 3 of the 4 topics I submitted are self-promotion in some way. On my comments the ratio of promotion vs "natural" comments look lower, but even just saying that makes me feel like I'm trying to lie about something.

One thing about my small number of topics are that I don't really think about sharing links I come across, since I feel like none of them would fit the site, and most of them are already shared here.

I don't know if the self-promotion is frowned upon, if I should continue, how I'd "diversify" my posting habits, and all that. What do you all think?

[1]: Doesn't have to be a blog post, it could be anything.

The main advantage of this is that updates can be organized and followed daily like on the COVID threads (which is especially useful if you don't live in the US and can't keep track of what's going on) and the main disadvantage is that unlike COVID, we have no idea if this will go on long enough or be dynamic enough to truly merit that. (Although in @dubteedub's COVID post he doesn't discount doing updates every 3 days, which we could do although that conflicts with 7-day weeks)

I've noticed that there are certain topics (specifically political ones) that reoccur frequently on this site, which almost never contribute anything of value. These can derail threads, incite hostility between users, push away new users, etc. IMO it is rare that anything new is said, and even rarer that any opinions are changed. Examples include: socialism vs capitalism; should real leftists vote for Biden?; is Biden a rapist?; are Bernie supporters toxic?; etc. I'm not saying these aren't important things to discuss (I've done so myself), but is it really necessary for us to have the exact same arguments basically every day? I personally feel the site would be nicer to use and less toxic overall if these discussions didn't happen. Would there be any downside to simply banning them, at least temporarily? Perhaps until after the US presidential election?

I posted an article. Between the site headline ("Scrutiny of Social Distancing Policing as 35 of 40 Arrested Are Black") and the actual HTML <title> ("The NYPD Arrested 40 People on Social Distancing Violations. 35 Were Black.") I thought the title was more descriptive, so I used that.

And then when I reloaded the main page, the topic I had just submitted looked a bit off. It was missing the trailing period. I had typed the headline in, instead of copying & pasting it, so I assumed I'd just left that off. I went to edit the title (since that's possible for a few minutes after submission), added the period, clicked save, and...it was still not there.

It seems like there's logic built in to the site that will automatically strip the trailing periods off? That's understandable, I can see the desire to have a uniform journalistic style for news-type headlines (@Deimos has mentioned before, for example, wanting to standardize on "Apollo astronauts land on moon" sentence case over "Apollo Astronauts Land on Moon" title case)

But, to the extent we have such a 'style guide' enforced, I think the usability could use a bit of improvement. Editing something, even if it's just to add a trailing period, and seeing my edit not get saved at all, is really weird. Maybe a pop-up telling me what's changed, or a entry in the topic log, or something? Right now that little "no periods at the end of headlines" rule seems baked in to Tildes in a way that's not at all transparent or discoverable.

I love this website can’t think of anything bad about it apart from really not liking that communities are called groups, I feel this is due in part to Facebook using it but also it’s such an over used term on the internet, could we not think of something more unique for tildes to call it’s communities